Google launches its own Sitemap Generator (Beta)!

Posted by admin | SEO Reseller | Tuesday 28 April 2009 10:56 pm
Open source XML sitemap generator tool announced by Google. Google had built its own sitemap generator with more controls and its search engine friendly. It performs the same thing as the some other software’s do that are available in the market, the only difference is that it’s free and Google has developed it.
 
Google described it as:
Google Sitemap Generator is a tool installed on your web server to generate the Sitemaps automatically. Unlike many other third party Sitemap generation tools, Google Sitemap Generator takes a different approach: it will monitor your web server traffic, and detect updates to your website automatically.
According to me everyone needs a sitemap generating tool, and since it is developed by Google I will definitely try it. I will try it and post my feedback later.
 
You can download its copy from here
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White Hat Vs Black Hat

Posted by admin | SEO Reseller | Sunday 26 April 2009 11:57 pm
As with any other business practice, Search Engine Optimization can be performed within or without the boundaries of accepted business ethics. White hat SEO is optimization that follows the guidelines set forth by search engines. Black hat SEO intentionally undermines these guidelines.
For those who haven’t heard, for the past year or two some have labeled different forms of search engine optimization by different hat colors. Those who practice what some refer to as “ethical” SEO are the White Hats (like the good guys in the movies), and those who some refer to as “spammers” are the Black Hats (like the bad guys in the movies). Those who are not quite as pure as the driven snow but who aren’t quite as… umm… aggressive as a full-fledged “search engine spammer” are sometimes referred to as Gray Hats.
 
There are various new shades added to the list:
* Dark Inky Black Hat SEO: So evil he’s a typo squatter installing spyware. Plain illegal, too.
* Charcoal Hat SEO: Optimizes really unrelated pages for all kinds of queries, but within the bounds of legality.
* Dark Gray Hat SEO: This SEO is e.g. a splogger stealing content from other sites. (What, that’s better than charcoal?)
* Slate Gray Hat SEO: An SEO creating link farms and such.
* Gray Hat SEO: An SEO who actually reads the search engine’s webmaster guidelines, but then tries as much “evil” as she can get away with.
* Light Gray Hat SEO: This SEO creates original content (lots of it), but the content is still only aimed at search engines.
* Off-White Hat SEO: This guy not only ensures the site is indexable – he’ll also make sure to get lots of backlinks from friends.
* White Hat SEO: This person puts up the content that people are actually searching for, and prepares the site to make it very accessible. White Hat SEOs only optimize those of their pages they deem worthy to be ranking top in search engines.
* Luminescent Pearly White Hat SEO: Not only does this SEO do everything the White Hat SEO does, the LPW Hat SEO also makes sure pages will not show up for irrelevant queries.
But are these labels helping anyone, and do they really mean anything? Certainly, the SEO methods I use would put me into the White Hat category. Does this make me better than those in the Black Hat category? I guess the question would be, better at what? It doesn’t make me a better person, nor does it necessarily make me a better SEO. It might make me better at not getting a site banned from the search engines, but then again, most Black Hats know that their sites will eventually get banned and have figured that into their business model. So it’s not really a question of good or bad, like the hats seem to imply.
 
White hat SEO includes:
* Increasing keyword density within text in a relatively natural manner
* Designing keyword friendly Titles, Meta Tags, Meta Descriptions, Headers, and Alt text for your site
* Natural linking between your site and similar sites
* Developing new, link-friendly content for your site
 
Both White Hat and Black Hat SEOs have their place. Lots of people are indeed looking for the types of products and services that Black Hatters specialize in. There is a huge demand for their black magic. As much as I hate lousy search results, as long as the Black Hats are doing their thing to the types of sites that I wouldn’t be seeking out anyway, then it really doesn’t bother me; it’s the search engines’ problem to get rid of it.
The important thing to note, however, is that most sites don’t need to resort to Black Hat SEO.
There are definite advantages to cutting corners and utilizing black hat SEO, mainly that your page will increase dramatically in Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rank within a relatively brief amount of time. However, search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.) are constantly updating their algorithms to detect and penalize black hat SEO.
Formerly, it was common practice in black hat SEO to create hidden text within web pages. This text increased keyword density without creating phony sounding text. For instance, if I wanted to increase my keyword density for copywriting I could simply insert the following line at the bottom of my text:
Then I could change the text font color to white and “presto” the text disappears — my keyword density for copywriting increases but my visible text remains the same.
It all depends on what the Website owner’s goal is. Do they want quick fixes and throwaway domains for the chance of a temporary big payoff, or do they want a stable business that takes a lot of time and energy, but which pays off handsomely over time? Neither one is necessarily right or wrong — just different. It’s just like the stock market or gambling in many ways. If you’re willing to be extremely aggressive, there’s a chance you’ll make a ton of money. However, there’s usually even more of a chance that you’ll lose a ton also. It really comes down to how much of a gambler you are.
Fortunately, this basic black hat practice is no longer viable, as search engines have developed methods to detect ‘keyword spam’ and same-color text. Websites with such black hat tactics are not only recognized by the search engines as black hat sites, but are penalized and often completely removed from SERPs. If this happens to your page, it can take months or years to regain your ranking.
 
Most current black hat SEO takes place on the design or programming side of website development. These tactics include:
* Cloaking — Showing a different page to search engines than to site visitors
* Duplicating content — creating numerous copies of web pages in order to increase page rank
* Link Farming — Buying into ‘link farms’, sites with no other intention than to increase your links unnaturally
* Page jacking — Copying and pasting text from other websites and using it as your own
 
fIs Black Hat SEO worth the Risk? In my mind, no. You may get away with it and it will be very lucrative for you to quickly climb the SERPs. However, keep in mind that competitors and Search Engines are extremely suspicious of quick-climbing websites. If your site is found to have black hat SEO, it will be severely penalized by if not completely removed from the search engine.
For a company looking for long-term success, there is absolutely no reason to gamble with their site. But seriously, even though it may take more lead-time, the White Hat method is a lot less stressful, and quite frankly a whole lot easier.
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Top Tips for Web Design

Posted by admin | Website Design | Saturday 25 April 2009 12:47 am
Content is King. The most important thing to remember about popular web sites is that they are always rich in content.
Stick to your subject. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Keep your goal in mind. Creating a web site is challenging and fun. The temptation to put as many bells and whistles as you can on a page is almost overwhelming. But unless your site is involved with bells and whistles, don’t do it! The purpose of designing a site carefully is not to make it look cool, or win awards. It’s to accomplish the intended goal of the site. It’s a good idea to write down the goal of your the site before starting any design work. It will help you make design designs for the site as a whole.
First impressions count! Think about the message you are sending to your customer. The first page of your web site should be a concise description of the website. Don’t make this page too busy – entice visitors to dig deeper into your site through the use of inviting text and interesting graphics. If you are serious about your business, buy your own domain name and don’t use a “free” hosting service.
Design sites, not pages. Your primary concern should be the site’s overall design. When starting to design a new site from scratch, you should try to create a design that will make sense to users, has a consistent look and feel, and is not to difficult to extend in the future. The consistency of design of a site is one of the factors that differentiates amateur sites from professional ones.
Make it easy to get around your site. Your customer should be able to easily navigate to any page in your web from any page in your page. It’s important to link in a consistent, well thought out manner that users can learn to navigate. Have clear links to your pages and, if are selling a product, make it easy for people to buy it! Show your business name, address, phone number and E-mail address on each an every page. Invite customers to contact you with their questions or comments. Add links to other sites only when necessary, or on a special links page at the end of your site. You want visitors to go through your site before surfing off to another!
View your site through the eyes of a stranger. Once you have completed you site outline, view it in other browsers. Does it look like you wanted it to look?
Don’t forget to tell the world about your new site. Make sure that your URL is on all your company business cards, letter heads, brochures, phone systems, etc. Swap links with other related web sites and consider banner advertising. List your site with the major search engines, but read their rules of submission first!
Keep your site current. Come up with a reason for people to visit and revisit your pages and recommend them to their friends. This could be a series of articles giving tips, a daily cartoon, or other attention catching event. The words most likely to attract visitors are: Free and Special. Be sure you offer something of value if you uses these words!
Survey says… Ask users about your site. Create a survey and give a reward for responding. Ask friends to check out the site, then grill them on what they thought about it. This can be valuable input on what improvements are needed. Often, users can be thrown by things a designer might never see as a problem. Don’t ever stop looking for ways to improve your website. Subscribe to professional E-zines, and keep surfing the web doing market research. What are your competitors doing better? Ask for feedback from your friends, relatives and customers. They will often see things with fresh eyes.
 
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Beginners Guide

Posted by admin | SEO Reseller | Wednesday 22 April 2009 3:58 am
Search Engine Optimisation is the buzzword around at the moment. It is the art of getting a website to appear higher up in the “natural” results pages of Search engines like “Google”. Although I highly recommended SEO for any business wanting to push online sales or increase website visibility it does have a few limitations:
Time frame:
Due to the nature of how search engines operate and the vast size of the Internet it may take several months before you “see the fruits of your labour” with SEO.
 
Cost:
SEO is a very specialised field and this is reflected in the cost of hiring a professional seo company.
 
Black Hat techniques:
There are still many people selling SEO services that use “black hat” techniques in order to gain high rankings in the search engines. By “black hat” techniques I mean unethical techniques that cheat the search engines, for example “cloaking” or “doorway” pages. These techniques may cause a temporary rise in rankings for a website but you run the risk of being banned by the search engines.
 
Keywords:
It is very difficult to optimise a website for many keywords. You may be able to rank top for some of your keywords but if you sell thousands of individual products then that is only a small fraction of your market.
Another option available to businesses wishing to promote their website on Google is to use their Pay Per Click Advertising programme- Google Ad words.Google Ad Words allows a website to instantly appear on the first pages of Google for any keywords related to your product or service.
Your listing appears on the right hand side of the “natural” results as a “sponsored link”. The beauty of this advertising method is that it is highly targeted. What I mean by this is that your website is put in front of people who are as far into the buying cycle as possible, they are searching to buy a particular product or service. Compare this to more traditional advertising like listings in the press. Lets say you place an advert in a local newspaper on page Twelve. The newspaper has 100 000 readers weekly. So 90 000 read page twelve. 20 000 readers noticed your ad and of those readers 500 chose to remember your company name for future reference. Of these 500 readers 50 actually think of you next time they require your product or service. So from 100 000 readers you have gained 50 new customers. Now with Google Ad Words your advert only appears when someone types in a keyword related to your product or service. Its like everybody reading the newspaper seeing your advert plus you only pay when they visit your website.
There is no minimum budget for Google Ad Words. If you wanted to spend one pound a day then that’s fine. You bid on your keywords and set the price you are willing to pay for each visitor to your website. Average price per click is approximately £0.05 to £1.00 but it completely depends on the competitiveness of the market.
Where you are positioned in the “sponsored links” depends on two things- your bid price for your keywords and your click through rate (the number of times your listing has been shown divided by the number of times your advert is clicked.) The higher the click through rate the more “relevant” Google deems your advert and you are rewarded with being higher up in the listings.
Google Ad Words is used by millions of people every day promoting their websites and increasing traffic and sales. It is relatively straightforward to set up and operate so what are you waiting for……
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Link Popularity

Posted by admin | SEO Reseller | Saturday 18 April 2009 5:11 am

There is a term used in the optimisation industry- “content is king”. This is very true. SE’s (Search engines) love content, especially regularly updated content. With this in mind, you must remember that “links are queen”. Having inbound links to your website is a very important factor of the SE’ s algorithms, if you want to increase your visibility on SE’s then you must increase the amount and quality of the links that point to your website. For many small to medium companies the cost of paying for a full time link building campaign is far too expensive.

Companies, webmasters and web site owners should be constantly trying to improve link popularity (inbound links to their website), an increase in inbound links will cause an increase in visibility on the SERP’s (search engine results pages).

The times of “a link is a link” have however passed. Reciprocal links should only be arranged with websites that are about the same topic or share similar content. Websites that reciprocate links with websites that are not similar are deemed as artificially trying to increase link popularity by the SE’s. One way inbound links are more valuable than reciprocals, and remember that it is the quality of links that also bears more weight. One link from an authoritative site with high PR (Page Rank) is worth many links from that friend of yours that just built his personal website!

Anchor text- This is the word or words that are used to link to your website. e.g. “seo consultant ” is anchor text that actually points to my home page www.netztrack.com. This is often called the links “title”. Use the keywords that you would like a high ranking for as the anchor text.

For instance Smith LTD sell widgets of all shapes and sizes. They would like to rank well for the term “plastic widgets”. They start submitting their website for inclusion in free web directories. When asked for the anchor text or links title during submission it would be far more beneficial to use the text “plastic widgets” rather than Smith LTD.

With all this in mind you should start your link building campaign as soon as possible? Google will spider links to your website several times before accepting their importance, this process is known as “waiting for the links to mature”. This can often take several months.

So, here are my top 10 ways to get inbound links to your website.

1) Submit your website to free web directories. (Make sure you submit to the right category).

One of the most important free web directories to submit to is www.dmoz.org (the open directory) DMOZ is used by Google for all of the contents of their Web Directory. Many SE’s and directories also use DMOZ results for their directories. Google also gives a link to your site from DMOZ a lot of credit. Beware DMOZ is edited by humans and getting listed can take anywhere from 1-18 months, so the sooner you do it the better!

2) Submit your website to premium & paid web directories. (Make sure you submit to the right category).

3) Request website visitors link to your site.

Visitors to your website are there because they are interested in the content/products/services of your site. Ask them to link to your website, webpage. You can even supply the HTML code for them to link to your website. E.g. if you would like to link to this page please use the following code:

4) Write and distribute articles.

Write articles about your product & related services then submit them to article distribution websites. This is a very effective way of getting inbound links. The idea is you place a link to your website at the bottom of each article, then when webmasters use your article as free content for their website they must include the link at the bottom of the article.

5) Exchange links with other similar websites (reciprocal linking).

6) Contribute in forums.

Many forums allow you to place a signature at the bottom of every post. Place a link to your website with the use of anchor text and gain a link for every post you make. Also you may post links to your website in the main topic part of the forum. Do not spam though- Only post links when it is appropriate. It is better to be a good contributor to a forum than spam the forum with un relevant links.

7) Create a blog.

Create an informative blog about your product or services. “Bloggers” are linking fanatics. Get other “bloggers” to link/reciprocal link to your blog and then place links from the blog to your website.

8) Answer questions in Q+A websites.

It is easy to answer questions in places like Yahoo! Answers or Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources. (e g your website!)

9)Paid Links.

Some websites allow you to buy links from their website for a specific length of time.

Generally this is done from websites with high PR (Page Rank). And the purpose of it

is to increase a websites Page Rank.

10) Develop an easy to link to, informative site.

This goes back to “content is king”. If your website is of high quality, good information with no grammatical or spelling errors then web site owners will naturally link to your site.

Increasing results through Geo-Targeted SEO

All the factors now encompassed in the world of search engine optimisation are both varied and simple, however time and time again website owners fail to see some of the most recent ‘common sense principles’ behind an effective and successful SEO strategy. This article aims to bring to light the most recent change in SEO, GEO-Targeting.

There are a countless number of directories, information portals, articles, FAQ’s, Top 10 listings, and other resources that repeat each other about the most important factors of SEO and it’s benefits. Many of them however fail to explain some of the more recent changes in the ‘formula’ of successful optimisation.

It has long been the case that users will open a search engine, search for a product or service e.g. “Office Furniture” and make use of that company to make their purchase or gain information.

Over the past few years’ consumers and businesses have started to make many more purchases directly online, as the general attitude towards online transactions has changed quite significantly.

A change in trends

As the consumers and businesses have begun to accept making a purchase online as a normal course of action, the places that they look for these products and services has started to come under consideration.

If a company wants to purchase some office furniture they will no long simply search for “Office Furniture”. Why? Because the term is too broad, brings up many irrelevant results and often the companies listed are not in the same geographic region as the company looking for the furniture.

When searching for products that are going to be purchased online, the customer ideally wants to be dealing with a ‘local’ company or business. This helps them feel more ‘secure’ in making the purchase as they know that the supplier is covered by the same laws, easier (and sometimes cheaper) to communicate with, and other factors such as delivery costs and language barriers are far more manageable, making the entire purchasing experience more streamlined.

What is Geo-Targeting?

It is during these searches that geo-targeting comes in as a factor of the search. If a customer is looking to buy office furniture and they are located in the USA, it is very common for them to append ‘USA’ to their search, so instead of looking simply for “office furniture” they will search for “office furniture USA” or a similar variation on this.

The effect of this is that the search engine results returned with be mostly UK based as ‘UK’ is a term used within the sites on their contact details, delivery information pages, legal disclaimer, and often company description pages.

Geo-targeted searching is the act of refining your search by including the name of a location within the search term. Examples would be “office furniture UK”, “jewellers in Berkshire”, “UK Office Supplies” etc.

Why use geo-targeting in SEO?

As explained earlier, users are changing the way that they search for information to find results close to their location. Many sites that are currently indexed do not really have a large amount of information to help search engines deem them ‘relevant’ to the appended location term, often because they simply don’t have their intended geographic area for marketing mentioned on their site enough.

By including the intended geographic market in the keywords used with an SEO campaign and the optimisation performed on a site, it is possible to have a dramatic and successful increase in both top results, traffic to your website, and indeed potential customers finding your products.

It is very simple to include geo-targeted terms and phrases within the normal action of search engine optimisation and will go a long way to increasing the revenue a website can generate for it’s owner.

There must be something bad about doing this?

Alienation of potential customers is always possible. If a user in the US is searching for simply “Office Furniture” and your website happened to show up with “UK Office Furniture” in it’s title, it is more than likely that the searcher will skip visiting the website because it states that it is targeting the UK.

This can be seen as a positive in the sense that it actually has had the effect of qualifying your traffic even more. It just successfully stopped a user visiting your website that would have found out that your products are UK specific and that they could not purchase their requirements from your website anyway.

Of course this could also be a negative. If you ‘mainly’ target the UK but indeed sell to overseas clients this may have just lost a potential sale.

Should geo-targeting be used?

This brings us to an important decision. Should geo-targeting be used in an SEO campaign? The answer depends solely on the target audience or geographic region of the products and services provided.

Should your product be for a specific area or country, or you tend to only deal with local businesses then yes, you should certainly look to be geo-targeting your optimisation to increase your sales.

The second situation is that some of your products or services are available to many areas while others are not. In this instance simply use selective geo-targeted optimisation within each of the products or services sections.

Lastly, if your target market is not constrained by geographic regions and is available anywhere, such as online services or products that have worldwide delivery, then more than likely geo targeted optimisation is not an option. Of course, it could be that producing several “global market” sites that are tailored for your most prominent geographic regions could help improve sales as each of these additional sites can be optimised with geo-targeting separately.

The key is that geo-targeting an SEO campaign can make a tremendous difference to all factors of a websites success. It is simply a case of deciding if it is a viable option for the products and services the website provides.
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