Digital Marketing Tips, SEO Tricks - E-Marketing Guide Blog » Search Engine Optimization

White Hat Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Ankush Kohli — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 08:08:53 +0000

The practice of White Hat Search Engine Optimization, also known as Ethical SEO. The White Hat Techniques are ethical whereas Black Hat Techniques are not. It aims to make it easier for the search engines to tell when your site’s content is relevant to a query. In most cases, we do this by building a site genuinely more useful to its human visitors, so that they will recommend it to others by linking it from their own websites.

The business of search engine optimization is infected with scammers, swindlers, spammers and fraud artists as well. They are the Bad Guys of the Internet, and so like, we say they wear Black Hats.

The White Hat approach to SEO focuses on using clean code and verified optimization techniques, while avoiding all issues that could result in a penalty from a search engine. Most penalties result in reduced rank positions for a site. Penalties for violations may result in the banning of a site, which is the complete removal of a site from a search engine’s database. If your Web site is banned from a major search engine like Google, or the traffic to your site from Google and affiliated search engines such as Bing and Yahoo.

To improve a Web page’s position in a SERP, you have to know how search engines work. Search engines categorize Web pages based on keywords — important terms that are relevant to the content of the page.

Which are the Most Effective SEO Techniques?

Meta tags provide information about Web pages to computer programs but aren’t visible to humans visiting the page. You can create a Meta tag that lists keywords for your site.
Your pages are well structured (with headers and sub headers etc.).
One place you should definitely include keywords is in the title of your Web page and that you build many keyword rich inbound links.
Use descriptive page titles and other page text. Another good place to use keywords is in headers. If your page has several sections, consider using header tags and include important keywords in them. And your pages are indexed.
If you use a keyword too many times, some search engine spiders will flag your page as spam. That’s because of a black hat technique called keyword stuffing, but more on that later.

The Black hat approach, on the other hand, is fraught with risk because of its intentional or unintentional disregard for the rules as set forth by the major search engines. There aren’t many risks associated with White Hat SEO techniques, because the White Hat approach seeks to follow the rules to avoid penalty situations.

Basics of White Hat SEO:

Create targeted content
Build relationships
Target anchor text based on keywords
Links drive Google’s algorithm

Keywords aren’t the only important factor search engines take into account when generating SERP’s. Just because a site uses keywords well doesn’t mean it’s one of the best resources on the Web. To determine the quality of a Web page, most automated search engines use link analysis. Link analysis means the search engine looks to see how many other Web pages link to the page in question.

Is Search Engine Optimization Ethical?

The achievement of a search engine depends importantly on delivering search results that are as relevant as possible to each query and useful and interesting to the searcher. Whenever a Black Hat succeeds by capturing a search engine’s traffic, their visitors soon figure out they have been had and instead try their search on a different search engine. There is no ticket to easy street.

Success on the web, lasting success, takes long hard work. A search for “search engine optimization” at any of the search engines yields page after page of both result listings and advertisements claiming top ten placement and quick results.

Results are never guaranteed.
Results are never quick.

One can use SEO to push whatever ideas they like though. Search engine optimization is just a means to help distribute your message. Calling search engine optimization unethical is similar to calling creating a website or printing a newspaper unethical. SEO itself should not generally be fixed to any ethics guideline.

It is in fact quite possible to make a great deal of quick, easy money by spamming the search engines. Unsolicited email messages are spam because they shift the marketing time and cost from the marketer to the person opening their email.

Google’s guidelines are quite clear on things like hidden text and hidden links to duplicate content. People should have a dubious reaction when someone comes trying to buy links to spam/duplicate pages. Once a site is well-established in the search engines, referrals to new content can show up in less than a week. But it takes time before the search engines learn your site is worth treating well, time for your visitors to learn about your site and for some to link it from their sites, and time for the search engines to learn that your site is so highly regarded by others.

If you succeed with your unethical website optimization well enough to become a high-traffic site, you could fare even worse, as you might get caught. From time to time, each search engine improves their search algorithms in ways that tend to defeat search engine spammers and promote rightful websites.

Free Online Marketing Tips for All Web Based Businesses

Ankush Kohli — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 09:23:56 +0000

Selling products through the internet has become so prolific nowadays with so many individuals and big corporations seeking for trade opportunities on a global scale. This is attributed to the many conveniences and savings the World Wide Web brings along.

With so many companies in this form of trading competition is rife and thus everyone involved will do with some online marketing tips to help direct more traffic to their websites. At the same time, unless one is proficient in IT, implementing these techniques is next to impossible and thus outsourcing one or so many online marketing services is required.

Top on the online marketing tips is search engine optimization. SEO is regarded as internet marketing in some quarters but from its definition it’s just a form of it. SEO is a process of refining the pages of a website to enable it rank high among search engine results. This can be achieved through a bunch of techniques including redesigning the website, optimizing the Meta data, title tags, html source code and so forth.

Article marketing as part of online marketing services is also considered as part of SEO. This marketing gimmick involves creating articles which talk about the services or products that your website deals in. The articles have to be rich in keywords related to your business and also have some links that will lead readers to your website. These articles are then submitted to top article directories websites. By customers learning more about a product from these articles, they are able to make more informed purchasing decisions.

A more common form of online marketing services is pay per click adverts. These adverts have phrases related to your business and you get to pay the search engine every time that advert is clicked. Such adverts reach a great deal of potential customers without them necessarily clicking on the advert. It is therefore regarded as the most cost effective online marketing strategy yet. Alongside this strategy is email marketing. This is where you send emails to potential customers informing them about your products in a nice and attractive manner.

The latest of online marketing services is the use of social networking websites. Facebook and Twitter are the main websites in consideration but there are plenty of others too. These platforms have opened up several diverse free channels where businesses can be advertised. All that is needed is to identify an area of specialty and then start a series of bookmarking advertisements with high quality content about the product you are promoting.

An online marketing tip that is also a virtue is patience; results don’t come overnight so each marketing strategy should be given ample time to realize return on investments.

Google Sitelinks Tips and Best Practices

Ankush Kohli — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 11:20:52 +0000

Hello Everyone and Happy New Year once again. Recently, I saw my new year gift from Google and that is: “One Line Sitelinks for eMarketinGuide.com.” Have a look on below mentioned snapshot, how it’s looking:

Here are some of the basic and advance but important tips to bring sitelinks for your site:

SEO is Important: Your blog / site should have optimized title, description and keywords Meta tags. If you own a WordPress blog, you can try All-in-one-SEO-pack but basis search engine optimization is required for every site.
Remove Broken Links: Make your website error free by removing the 404 / error links.
Number of WebPages: Unless your website / blog have some articles it is impossible to get sitelinks. Your blog should have at-least 20-25 WebPages.
Internal Linking: The best way to bring sitelnks is interlinking. Interlink your important WebPages from different other WebPages (which you want to think in sitelinks). It also helps from users and usability perspective to increase page views and users stay time.
Good and Simple Navigation: Your blog should have good and simple navigation system. Try to have a
- list of links at the top for your blog. Put the navigation links in these tags. They also consider title tags of the pages.
- Search Engines Traffic: If you get lot of traffic from search engines your blog will surely get familiar and it will be easy for getting sitelinks. Your blog should have High click through rates.
- Searches and Clicks: The number of searches and the no. of clicks that your blog gets for a certain keyword will also be considered for sitelinks. Your blog should also get many clicks for the searched keyword.
- Flow of Traffic: Your WebPages should have a consistent flow of traffic to get Google Sitelinks. If the traffic sources are from Search Engines, you should be more than happy.
- Blog’s Age: It was time when you need to wait for a year or so to get one or multi-line sitelinks. Now-a-days, Google can assign sitelinks to your site within 4-5 months, those WebPages should be high relevant to their users.
- Quality Content: Content is the king and it’ll provide you the targeted traffic so update your blog with quality content on a regular basis.
- Link Bait: If you write a quality article copy, then you’ll get the advantage of link bait.
- Sitemap: Create an error free sitemap, include all the links in the sitemap. Make sure to submit the sitemap in Google webmaster tool.
- Reconsider Your Site: If you didn’t get sitelinks even after applying above mentioned tips, then you should request Google to reconsider your site. You have this option in Google Webmaster Tools.

Happy New Year – eMarketinGuide

Ankush Kohli — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 10:47:53 +0000

Happy New Year to all my and eMarketinGuide friends & fans. I hope you like my posts and try to implement my suggested online marketing tactics.

I’m sure, the upcoming year will be full happenings, innovation and lots of new suggestions and marketing tactics but be sure to apply below mentioned tactics to get more results:

At the end, once again, happy new year to all my friends. I wish a superb and wonderful year ahead.

Best Link Building Tactics for 2011

Ankush Kohli — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 14:00:39 +0000

My last post was about “upcoming digital advertising trends” in the next year 2011. Digital marketing advertisements are one of the most creative strategies used to promote the websites but what about the other traditional ways like: SEO and specially the power of SEO i.e. Link Building. Google is trying very hard to differentiate between quality and non-quality links and that’s why the toughest job of SEO is to select the best links.

Here are the quick notes as best links building practices for your site in 2011:

Social Media – Create your profile, generate a good list of followers & engage with them. This is one of the best way to attract natural links and sometime traffic as well.
Google Local – Configure your website on Google Local before someone else steal it and take the benefit of reservation as-well-as the back-links.
Use brand name in anchor. Many other SEO’s also preferring these days to use the company or brand name as anchor instead of using keywords in links. Keyword stuffing or using the same keywords as anchor in link building is always a unrecommended tact.
Attract deep links. Deep links are useful.
Quality Quality Quality… Always focus on quality of site & the links.
Priority to authority – Try to choose less but only important links. It’ll be good if you keep less emphasis on PageRank

I hope, 2011 will be a year of new technology, algorithms and new hacks to rank your website in top results of search engines.

Why Local Search Marketing is Getting More Importance

Ankush Kohli — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 13:41:18 +0000

From last few months, I was experimenting on local search marketing and finally after a lot of research and education, I believe the power of it and I’m sure you’ll also believe it. Here, I’m sharing my experience with you.

What is Local Search Marketing – Local search is one of the most potential and least understood digital marketing strategy, even though it’s one of the most cost effective and upcoming digital marketing trend.

The above search result page is showing total 12 results on Google’s 1st page:

First 7 results are the local search results
Rest 5 are the general web results

I hope, above snapshot shows the power of local search. Sixteen billion search queries a month are conducted on the Internet in the U.S. in the month of July (source: searchenginewatch) and one fifth of those searches were local searches. More importantly, ideally, conversion rate is high on these Geo-specific searches as customers keen to buy a product or service from local vendor.

How it’s different than usual Google Search Results:
In usual SERP’s, Google shows you the universal results, which are not location based but when you search any Geo-specific search, it shows the city specific results and if not then your nearby location based results. You’ll see blended results, which includes:

Google Local (Google Places)
Yahoo Local
Bing Local
Other Popular Local Sites Results from:
- CitySearch
- InsiderPages
- Yelp
- Yellow Pages
- SuperPages
- MerchantCircle
- And results from location based many other sites

As these search results will be location basis so if a website is not related to your location, it wouldn’t come up in your search results.

This is my first general post about local search marketing. Now, I’ll post my practical experience in few another posts so keep reading and contact me for your local search marketing campaign.

Mobile Website SEO Tips & Guide

Ankush Kohli — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 06:20:36 +0000

Mobile SEO is brilliant in terms of local businesses as people can call on this information in an emergency and find a local business so solve their problem. Finding a local car mechanics when your car has broken down, for example, must be easy to find on the mobile phone as people will need a quick fix. Mobile SEO can use localized SEO techniques, such as using Google Maps and other local SEO techniques to get up the rankings on Google. This will generate some very quick conversions as people need these sorts of services. Ecommerce solutions can also benefit from Mobile SEO with many people wanting to purchase things, such as theatre tickets, while they are out and about.

Google also took initiative into mobile industry when they allow you to start a Adowrds campaign on mobile devices. In this regard, it also launched “Mobile Keyword Tool” as well.

Google published “We are happy to let you know that the Keyword Tool now offers keyword suggestions for Mobile campaigns. Just access the Keyword Tool from within any mobile-only ad group and you’ll get shorter, mobile-device specific results. (Note that, at this time, mobile suggestions are not available in the standalone version of the tool so you’ll need to be logged into an account directly.)”

Factors that need to be care in Mobile Website SEO:

1. Apply general on-site optimization techniques: No doubt that SEO for mobile website is different than a general website but you can apply few basic techniques to your site. Use all the SEO “on-page optimization” practices that you know:

Title tag optimization
Metas Optimization
Uses of heading tags
URL optimization Anchor Optimization
Etc.

2. Ensure you key content is placed in the top part of the page as the users and bots will find it easy.

3. Your website should be crawl-able by Mobile search engines. Here’s the list of mobile search engines:

Google XHTML http://www.google.com/xhtml
Google Mobile http://www.google.com/mobile/
Yahoo Mobile http://mobile.yahoo.com/search
MSN/Bing http://home.mobile.live.com/Home.mvc
AOL Mobile http://mobile.aolsearch.com
ABPHONE http://www.abphone.com

4. Also you can submit your website to Yahoo Site Explorer Mobile Submit page. Here it’s:

5. See how your website is opening in mobile browser: http://ready.mobi/launch.jsp?locale=en_EN

6. CSS Tips:

Websites using tables for layout will not render well on mobile handsets. The site must use CSS for layout.
Use Valid XHTML Coding. WML is the specific language for mobile users however the more usable is XHTML so here are the tips for XHTML. Mobile search engines have more trouble in parsing the webpage if it’s having invalid code. So you can reduce the risk of not opening the website by validate the webpage. You can validate through W3C Validator.
Character encoding should be UTF-8
The most important information of your site must be right at the top of the page as it can be very time-consuming for browsers to read through.
You have very limited screen real estate. About 2×3 inches or so consider the size in mind.
if you are a more robust e-commerce site, consider creating an m-commerce site (mobile site) with:
- Mobile galleries
- Product catalogs and shopping basket
- Billing management
- Ease of use/login
- All images should be striped out, unless they are must.
- Remove all advertising as you already have limited screen space.
- If you don’t need it, hide it. Remove any Google Friend Connect, Facebook Fan Box or other third party services. Focus on your content.
- Remove Flash, Java and any plug-in content unless absolutely necessary.
- All in all, simplify.

7. Maximum total page size recommended is 20 kilobytes.

8. Accessibility: In order for a site to work on a wireless handset, it must adhere strictly to website accessibility guidelines, as set out by the W3C http://www.w3.org/WAI/

9. Keep on Top of Mobile Technologies - The technology continues to improve and get better. Avoid using intensive presentation methods such as Flash and Ajax. Again keep the design simple. While we expect technologies to improve, you want to ensure that your mobile site will load fast and provide an output that is useful to the user.

10. Optimize for Local Search – ensuring that your site is well optimized for local search, will mean that people should be able to find you when they are looking for local resources. Update your profile and include links to your mobile site (if you have one) and make it easy for users to find your business and more importantly “reach out and touch your business”. It is not just about the Yellow Pages anymore.

Resources List:

1. Mobile Website Design Resources:

Mobile Awesomeness – www.mobileawesomeness.com
MobiSite Galore – www.mobisitegalore.com
Accuracast – http://mobile.accuracast.com

2. Some of the popular Mobile Analytics:

Amethon
Bango Analytics
GetMobile Analytics by Quattro Wireless
Mobilytics

3. W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 = http://www.w3.org/TR/mobileOK-basic10-tests/

4. WordPress Mobile Plugin: A tool that addresses issues with any type of handset: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-pack/

iPhone & Android phones face less troubles in displaying the non-SEO WebPage.

Digital Marketing Tips, SEO Tricks - E-Marketing Guide Blog » Search Engine Optimization

White Hat Search Engine Optimization Techniques

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