SEO in 2016, things changed from when I started my career back in 2004

Its been 12 years working in SEO Marketing industry and things has changed a lot since then. Initial 6-7 years were very easy (in terms of getting a website ranked in search engines), those where the years when I was open for any SEO challenge and have achieved first pages (sometimes number 1) rankings for many keywords that today a SEO guy might not even think of ranking in the dreams. During those time good on-page SEO, content and some quick links from any kinds of website would help. Also there were very few SEO companies around that time so that was also main reason why ranking a website was easier. In 2004 there were around 2-3 good SEO companies in Chandigarh and today you can see there are a couple of SEO companies in every sector and if I take SEO freelancers, work from home SEO guys, then this number could easily rist to around 300 or more.

SEO was fund those times, and it gave immense pleasure checking website rankings those times. Here are few of the keywords that I achieved top ranking during those times:

1. GED
2. GED Online
3. Football
4. UK football
5. Viagra
6. Buy Viagra
7. Weight Loss Pills
8. Logo Creator
9. PDF converter
10. Web Design Company
11. Paid Surveys
12. There were lot more but these are what I can recall at this moment. Will need to take a look at my resume to update more keywords here :)

 In the current year of 2016, when I think on SEO industry, it has changed a lot. Thanks to the spammer who  would do anything to get a website ranked and the google search spam team headed by Matt Cutts. The google search algorithm is more and more focused on quality of results and hitting hard on the spam websites. Anyone who violates copyrights, participates in link schemes or used a thin quality content is least likely to rank in the search engines results and chances of a penalty are there as well.

So what a webmaster can do to rank a website in search engines these days.

Here is the list that what a webmaster can do really in 2016 to achieve top rankings in search engines:

• Build a great website of value to user
• Add great quality content
• Wait
• Wait
• Wait 
• A grade on-page SEO work for all the pages
• Improve page load speed
• No copyright violations
• Wait 
• Wait
• Wait
• Keep a close eye on google and bing webmaster tools reports
• Get citation links
• NAP mentions
• Active presence at social networks
• Listing at google maps 
• Listing at top local listing websites and sponsored listing if possible
• Wait 
• Wait
• Wait
• PPC marketing campaign when business is in peak 
• Video Promotions
• Blog Promotions
• Get articles published in local newspapers, most newspapers are on web also so good exposure. 
• No hanky panky with paid or low quality links
• Get reviews, testimonials

Most corrupt political party in the world - Another Goolge Bombing Example

One of my friend at facebook shared a post over facebook asking people to Search for "most corrupt political party in the world". In the post he have also attached the screenshot of Google search results that highlights the Wikipedia page of Indian National Congress. Indian National Congress is one the main national parties in India along with BJP (Bhartiya Janta Party).  Now that guy is a supported of Narendar Modi, PM candidate from BJP for 2014 elections to be help in India.

Now reason I believe this phrase "Most corrupt political party in the world" can be another classic example of Google Bombing after "miserable failure" is because the guy who share the link over facebook is a SEO guy himself and chances are there that he might be trying to the get the INC wikipedia page to the number one spot when searched for "Most corrupt political party in the world".

Wikipedia pages are the best pages to get ranked in search results, tou can easily tweak the content and some off-page SEO can easily do the trick here.

If you take a look at the results, the other results are about corrupt countries and what people think about political parties. No other page for any other political party of India or any other country. Perhaps there is something fishy here.

More about google bombing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
http://searchengineland.com/google-kills-bushs-miserable-failure-search-other-google-bombs-10363

Search Engine Marketing Quote of the day

Hi All,

Jusrt few minutes back I was reading a very nice article at the URL http://moz.com/rand/11-tips-i-gave-to-marketers-this-morning/. This article came in the Moz top 10 newsletter which I've subscribed from a long time and I find their article very interesting and helpful.

In the article author has written very interestig quote about SEO and dating. The full quote is as follows:

Link building is a lot like dating. If you make links/sex the primary focus, it doesn’t work. Those have to be side effects of a great experience and a great match.

I've posted some similar quotes about SEO in the past and you can read all all those SEO quotes here.

I hope you like the quotes, please feel free to share these quotes, post your feedback. In case you've some interesting quotes about SEO to share please mention those and I'd feel happy to publish those with due credit to the author.

For those who love reading quotes on various topics I'd like to suggest to please visit my blog on luv quotes.

Online Reputation Management & SEO - Are they same?

This question was asked recently by one of ex-colleague. He told me that his company got their first ORM (Online reputation management) project and while the discussion was going on he made the statement that there is no difference and he can handle this project smoothly like the other SEO projects.  I just replied that I'll love to hear his statement once this new project is over and wished him good luck. After few days that friend called me and asked about tips on how to fix the negative results and he said he was wrong, it’s not like regular SEO.

So what is the difference between SEO and ORM?

Before I tell you the difference let me tell you that both SEO and ORM complement each other. A good SEO professional will definitely achieve success with ORM as well but for that he will need to be proactive in his approach and just think ahead of on-page and off-page SEO.

How ORM is different can be analyzed from the fact that in SEO you work on achieving page 2 rankings for a set of keywords. All you need to do is get all or few of those in page one and your client is happy. If the increase in rankings brings a significant increase in traffic and leads then chances are there that you'll get some good incentives/bonus from the clients as well. However ORM is a totally different ball game. In ORM you need to work on page basis you are committed to remove negative/unwanted results from a set number of search pages of Google or other search engines. Your client can be happy to see movement of negative results but the biggest challenge lies in getting the negative results out of the first page of search results. 

Definitely the strategies for ORM and SEO needs to be different like SEO is all about focusing on a single site, making it search engine compliance. Once you make that site search engine compliance you focus gets shifted to getting links to that site. However when it comes to online reputation management your focus is on creating new identities and promote lots of positive sites for the same keyword or a couple of keywords that are related (brand name or people name).

This is all about search engine optimization and online reputation management services relation to each other. I'll share some tips about ORM soon in my later posts. Keep visiting and share this post over social networks etc if you like it.

Good Day!

Perry Belcher we need SEO in 2013 post

Before I tell you who is Perry Belcher and why I need SEO in 2013 post from you, I'd request you to take a look at his post about SEO in 2012. Here is the link for the post  http://perrybelcher.com/seo-in-2012/. I have been following Perry Belcher from  along time and it was waley interesting to read his interview, articles and watch video of him. He is among the top internet marketere who have earned billions of dollars online by selling stuff, books, course and giving trainign etc.  His approach is very simple and proven.

His simple approach and giving examples from real life rather than some webiste etc makes it interesting to learn and easy to implement later. By the time he wrote about SEO in 2012 SEO wasn't that comples. Penguin and Panda updates have made things very much comples now a days and thats the reason I am asking Perry to make a post abour SEO in 2013 so that it can be bit easier  for the SEO professional.

Learn more about Perry Belcher at:

http://www.perrybelcher.com
http://linkedin.com/in/perrybelcher
http://youtube.com/user/perrybelcher
http://twitter.com/perrybelcher
http://belcherbutton.com
http://perrybelcher.net
http://facebook.com/theperrybelcher

Thanks! Also I'd like to update you that we are soon goinf to launch new and excting portals in 2013. Will keep you updated about the progress.



 

Top Blogs Every SEO profession should subscribe to

Every SEO professional has their own way to keep themselves updated about latest algorithmic updates and the SEO techniques that comes into existence after the algorithmic updates. Since internet is nowadays full of lots of content farms many SEO companies nowadays post articles, blogs and press releases about Panda and penguin updates just to get some quick links and to give an impression that they offer penguin and panda proof SEO services.  I started my SEO career way back in 2003 and at that time newsletters were the good source of SEO information for me. Main newsletter I’d subscribed at that time were the sitepronews, digitalpoint to name a few however nowadays there is overdose of information at the newsletters and it’s hard to rely just on newsletters for latest updates. Also I’d got lots more busier in SEO project now so  I don’t have time to subscribe to a couple of newsletters and scan 10-20 emails every day just to find some average kind of stuff in every email.

Best thing that worked for me these days is follow some credible blogs that provide the most relevant and most trusted information about SEO, algorithmic updates and most importantly and idea about what SEO changes might take place in future. I personally believe that SEO is not what works for getting top rankings now but SEO is rather what would work in the future.  Any SEO professional who can provide a futuristic SEO technique that works will definitely get lots of bonuses from his client and various new leads as well. 

Question that rises here is that with so much going around in SEO industry how one can focus about future SEO techniques and depict the techniques would work for sure. Now this is what makes you different from average SEO companies and professionals. I never liked the idea of content spinning and never used any kind of content spinning even at the time when many people were doing that profitably rather I found that rather than getting tons of content copies why not get 5 unique copies written and get those published. And the result was that none of my client or my websites got affected due to panda updates.  Another example I’d share is that at the time Google release its Google videos website I recommended one of my client who offered piano lessons online to promote videos at YouTube, dailymotion and Google videos with a little different approach. Previously the client was adding same title, description and tags at all the three websites but I suggest that we must us different title etc. Sooner YouTube was acquired and client has his site, YouTube and daily motion videos appearing in first page for nearly 100+ queries.

Lest cut it short and explain the benefit that subscribing to top blogs his helping me. The blogs that I follow are the ones that post information about the update as they happen and then the world follows those and many times they post interview from people about SEO changes that might happen etc. Here is the list of blogs that might be helpful to you as well.

1. Official Google Blog
2. Inside AdWords
3. Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
4.  Inside AdSense Blog
5. Aaron wall Blog
6. Danny Sullivan Blog
7. SEOMoz
8. Matt cutts blog
9. HubSpot Internet Marketing Blog
10.  

In case there is some interesting and useful blog that you recommend adding to the list, please post a comment and I’d happily update the list here. Thanks and have good time with your SEO projects.

Sites that didn't go popular like google

There were some search engines in the world wide web before google
launches some 10-12 years back. Google not only outdid all the
existing search engines from the search market but also become synonym
for search engine. The term googling was added to the Oxford dictionary
that means searching something on google.com

Given the success of google many companies tried to replicate the
success of google and though they were unable to replace google but
some site really were as good as google if not better. In this post
I'll share the ideas of some very good sites that didn't become
popular like google.

1) Grotal.com - Grotal comes at number one in the list. This local
search engine works on a very basic funda that it lists business that
don't have a website. This is a great thing in my opinion. But the
drawback is that sometimes phone number and address mentioned at
Grotal are incorrect or not working. An interesting thing to share
about Grotal is that it was launched by the name of Moogle with the
URL www.moogle.in but they got a notification from google and then
shift to the name of grotal. This site currently got a alexa rank of
7000 which means site is really getting some good amount of traffic.
However majority of the traffic is from Google this means that grotal
is totally dependent on Google and will die if sites disappears from
the google search results. Anyhow a nice concept and they have other
modules like education, tolet, PG and video etc. Let see how this site
will progress in a year or two.

2) Live: When Microsoft launched Live as a search engine replacing the
exisitng MSN, it was speculated that Live will give a tough
competition to Google and Yahoo. However Live didn't get as popular as
expected and soon Micrisoft launched bing which now partners with
Yahoo ad provides search results to Yahoo. Bing though is performing
better as comapred to live.

3) Guruji: When a groupd of IIT students launched this Indian search
engines, it created a buzz. Lots of marketing, viral news but guruji
never beacame the search engine that the founders might have expected
to.

Citation links - New link building strategy in SEO

Citation links - New link building strategy in SEO

Do you know citations for your business can help improve your business rankings. Citations links or just citation of your business not necessarily a clickable links i.e. mention of you business address or telephone number etc in a credible community or yellowpage website etc can dramatically improve website rankings in search engines. Citation links are very much important in local SEO listing rankings.

Rankings in Google rely very much on citations i.e mentions of a business around the web so that the address and business name and phone can be validated. More citation and validated citation a business have means, more the business is trusted by Google to appear in the local or maps results. I hope now you must have a clue that despite being listed in Google local and adding of keywords, title etc why you site still doesn't apprear in search results in the maps or
local listings. This means you need some catations, reviews and validation to improve the rankings.

One thing you can do before starting to build citation links for your business is to see if there are some citation links already or not. This can be done by searching your business name in google local or maps and then in your business listing page click on the "Web pages" tab, if it shows some site then its great otherwise you need to starting getting citation links.

Some of the citations sites that you can consider include:

- Yellowpages (with business validation and reviews)
- Review sites
- Donations to some charity
- Sponsorship of some event or cause
- Discussion forums (not just every forum but the one that are authoritative)
- Patent application
- Research content
- Interview at some expert site
- Classifieds of business directories
- Directories
- Local search glossaries

Hope now you have some idea of how citation can help your local SEO campaign. Please feel free to get in touch for building citation links, visit http://www.theseomarketing.com

Do SEO and Blogs complement each other?

Hi All,

Hope you all the doing fine. Please accept my sincere apologies for not posting at this blog from a long time. My last post about Google Account Logout Malware warning was published in November 2011 and since then it’s a long holiday for me considering this SEO Marketing Blog. It’s not that the holidays were intentional, the reason for this long absence can be credited to the holiday’s season initially and after that I’ve been kept busy by new assignments and some important functions that I need to attend.

Today a step from Google prompted me to post at this blog. Google yesterday implemented country top level domain specific redirection to all the blogger domains this means if you are residing in India then this SEO Marketing blog will open as .blogspot.in in place of blogspot.com. This step is taken by google in response to some conflicts over hosted content at Google with the Indian Government. (I think Indian government must be more concerned about the country’s development, handle corruption and improve the standard of living in India rather than to go after the company which is known as the best company to work). According to google they are taking complete care so that the new changes will not cause any loss of traffic on harm to search engine optimization of the blogs.

Now let’s talk about SEO and blogging. I hope most of you will agree that search engine optimization and blogs complement each other. From the evolution of the blogs and the rise of blogs as a strong marketing tool, many SEO marketing companies have been using blogs as to promote the business of many clients.

How to blogs help in SEO?

Blogs are free, easy to setup, easy to maintain and very much SEO friendly. Thus you can use blogs not only for getting free links but also as a strong interaction tool to the visitors to your site. Thus blogs serves multiple purposes like:

• Provide free one way links
• Improve search engine saturation of the site
• Provide valuable stuff to the site visitors
• Release company news, product demos, new product announcement
• You can also use blogs to disperse company discount coupons
• Cost effective marketing tool
• Helps in social networking (SMO)
• Improved traffic and sales
• Can generate additional revenue stream if you plan to host third party ads or implementation of banners ads etc.

Thus you can see what you are missing if you are not blogging for your company or business. Start blogging now and enjoy the benefits of blogging. Please feel free to send your queries or suggestions; I’d be happy to respond.

Google Account Logout Malware warning

I think there is something wrong with my anti virus or my computer. From last few days I am getting malware warnings every time I try to logout from my Google account be it gmail, google analytics, gplus or any other Google service I am using.

Is there anyone else out there who face the similar issues with Google account log out URL.

You can also take a look at the screenshot below.

Video promotion Tips - youtube video marketing

Almost every business have their video channel at youtube nowadays and I am sure your business also got one. However few questions to ask here are:

• Are you generating referral traffic, sales from youtube videos?
• Are people watching the videos?
• Is there increase in video views, likes or comments?
• How many times video is embedded by others?
• Is there increase in channel view, subscribers?

If you are unsure about answers of the above questions, then you must read the next post that I'll make most probably in next few days. That post will cover all the aspects of video marketing and how it can help a business grow.

Do visit the blog for video marketing tips.

Related posts:

• Video is the new king in SEO
• Download videos - Convert Videos form any URL
• Video promotion
  

Video is the new king in SEO

Content has always been an important thing in SEO. Content is said to be king from a long time. But one thing I've observed in recent past that Video is slowly and slowly replacing content as the king. Now content that has images and videos embedded in the the pages is getting more value than only simple content no matter it is quality content, longer and free from any grammar or spelling mistakes. Of course I need not to mention that content is plagiarism passed. In some cases a video page with well written titles etc is enough to get the pages ranked higher. Also video pages gets ranked quickly as compared to other pages. Create a youtube channel and you can get thousand of referral hits to your site from youtube.

But there are some tips and tricks that can help in getting more benefits from video marketing as compared to your competitors. I'll post a article on tips and tricks of youtube or video marketing later. In case you have any query, comment or feedback feel free to share it.

Google Sitelinks Dilemma – Unexpected Alien Link in Google Site links

I am getting strange and alien link being displayed as sitelinks in Google search results. In these cases mostly webmaster would suggest that in http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifthe Google webmaster central submit a remove from site links request and link will be removed from site links for at least 45 days before it may appear again at sole discretion of Google.

However my problem is even bigger than this and here is the full story. I recently searched my love quotes blog URL i.e. luvquotes.blogspot.com so as to see if any site-links are being displayed by Google.
Like any other I was happy to see Google displaying the links when I search for the blog URL however I was shocked to see UTL of another Blog which is not owned by me.

Please check the attached screen shot and share any thoughts you have on this.

Duplicate Content Checker Tools - Free Online Plagiarism Checker

In the past couple of algorithm updates Google and other search engines are giving more and more emphasize on the quality of web-page content. If you’d heard about recent panda update, then content quality was one of the main focus areas of the update. Lower value content sites, content farms, sites with duplicate content has been axed by Google and on the other hand sites with good user values content were the one who got the benefit of being in the top 10 Google rankings.

One main thing here for any webmaster becomes to check quality of the content and also make sure that the content you are going to publish on your website or anywhere else online must not be duplicate i.e. published anywhere else already. Now how can one make sure the content is not published on in other word how to find Plagiarism in the content? One way is to search few lines of the content randomly by using exact search tool (searching the content using “”).

However searching manually is only feasible for checking plagiarism for one or two pieces of content. It becomes time consuming and may not be effective sometimes if not used properly. The best and the proven way to check duplicate content is to use online plagiarism checker. Many online plagiarism Checker tools are available for free. Below is the list of plagiarism checking tools that you can use for better content publishing:

• http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/ - Copy the content or upload the word document to check the copied content immediately
• http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/ - You can even create alerts here
• http://plagiarisma.net/ - One with multiple options checks via URL, upload doc or copy content directly.

I hope you liked this post and the tools, please feel free to share this.

Related post:
Duplicate Content Penalty & Recovering from the penalization

Search engine optimization tips for beginners

Getting a website in top is a thing that every webmaster would love to achieve. Achieving top rankings for your favorable keywords is not a very difficult task but its hard to decide from where to start with and it may land you it totally different part of the globe if you doesn’t follow the webmaster guidelines set by major search engines for webmasters and search engines optimization experts or companies. In this article I am posting few search engine optimization tips for beginners but these tips are equally beneficial for any SEO professional.

1. Don’t purchase new domains: If you are trying to get your website ranked in engines and so far you don’t have any substantial success, then don’t try to go and try your luck in new domain. Reason here is that search engine give value to the age of the domain and hence it’s recommended to try figuring out things that may be hurting your website’s reputation over search engines. However there may be circumstances when you may need to start new domain under such situation using permanent redirect to your new domain is recommended to minimize the loss of traffic from search engines.

2. Do extensive keyword research: Spend good amount of time in keyword research and go in as much detail as you can while researching keywords. Don’t select keywords that can bring traffic but brainstorm keywords that can bring you sales. Over years of experience in search engine marketing I have seen that lots of keywords bring you traffic but there are couple of keywords that can bring business, revenue for you. Thus analyze your website traffic to shortlist the keywords that bring you business. Ranking at the top of search engines for these keywords make the actual difference.

3. Use different title and meta tags: Each page of your website needs to have unique title and meta description tags. Your title tag should contain important keywords included in the content of your web pages. One more important point to be taken care is that it’s the title tag of a webpage that will prompt any visitors to click your website at search engine result pages.

4. Don’t over optimize: Never optimize your website rather optimize for your targeted audience. This is one of the common instructions by all major search engines for webmasters.

5. Write Search engine friendly code: Make you website code search engine friendly by preventing excessive use of images, flash, java script menus or links. Use alt and title attributes and images and links. Validate your website HTML, XML and CSS.

6. Use webmaster tools: Evaluate your SEO campaign by using tools like google analytics, webmaster central, yahoo site explorer etc. These tools are very much helpful for webmasters in their SEO campaigns.

7. Get quality links: All of us know off-page optimization is very crucial part of any SEO campaign however only quality links count and contribute to your website’s PR and search engine rankings. Any off-page activity, be it link building, social media marketing, directory submission etc. take care of quality always.

Linked In Marketing Tips & Promotion services

In one of the older post we discussed about How to promote your business and website using LinkedIn. In the post I will share some Linkedin marketing tips to help in online promotion and brand building. Linkedin is no doubt the most popular and faster growing network of professionals; you can currently find a huge percent of business professionals at Linkedin. The best part is that these users are all the countries in the world and not just one or few geographic locations. The basic step of linkedin marketing begins with creating a profile, community and adding contacts. After that you need to establish your business as a brand and more importantly get some leads. Below are some tips on Linkedin Marketing:

• Get recommendation – Ask them people in you contacts to recommend you. Getting the write message is important part of the recommendations, so take care of it.
• Export your connection – Linkedin provides a functionality to export your contacts to your address book, use this more often say after every 3 or 6 months. Make it a habit; this will be helpful when you are sending some promotional email or seasonal greetings with some business information.
• Use answers and questions – Use this feature creatively and you can establish yourself as a king in your niche.
• Connect with as much people you can to increase your reach. Add new contact on weekly basis.
• Update daily – Make sure to login and update profile like adding message, integrate with other social networks like twitter, facebook, buzz etc.
• Participate in groups – This is the great way to get business. Target the groups related to your business, services or products.
• Get specialist services: In case you are busy with business meeting etc hiring the services of a professional linkedin marketing professional is advised. In fact its better you get some SMO services. Most SMO optimization packages include Linkedin promotion as well.

Informenter - A Must have adon for SEO professionals

Though I don't prefer using many tools and I seldom use any tools or adons (I am a 100% believer in mannual SEO work). However informenter is an adon I'd strongly recommend to every SEO professional. As a SEO you may need to sign up at verious sites be is an Article directory, blog, PR or forum site. After registeration you may require submit various forms say for example article or directory submission.

Making these process fully automatic will cause quality issues like changing or anchors, using different combinations of fields etc. All such things can be done by using of semi automatic tool called informenter. Informenter comes as an adon for firefox and is minimises the typing work upto 90%. you will definitely love this adon. Go explore it more to know more features.

SEO tip of the day for Adsense publishers

Many adsense publishers make a mistake of posting copied artciles at their website and blogs. Some may also go to the extent of using software to automatically post copied content. Doing this you will not get the CTR value as good as compared to CTR of ads with unique content. Also you must know that copied contnet even don't help in organic SEO rankings as well. Thus is will be wastateg of you time and efforts.

Can social bookmarking and SEO complement each other?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns and social bookmarking may not initially seem like strategies which can work together, but one expert suggests that combining the two can hold a range of benefits.

Writing a guest post for Search Engine Land, BlueGlass's Jordan Kasteler comments that "combining real-time social sharing with search engine optimisation tactics can give websites the indexing or popularity boost that it needs".

SEO strategies, he notes, should be kept simple. He recommends sticking to best practice guidelines for writing, as well as using locally-relevant keywords to boost search engine rankings.

Highlighting that organic rankings will last longer than popular stories on Digg, he suggests that by creating content that ticks both boxes, businesses can enjoy the best of both worlds.

And succeeding to get content on social networking platforms could also help to boost the site's exposure, thereby potentially increasing future rankings.

Meanwhile, quality content is an essential building block of successful SEO, according to a recent Search Engine Watch post from KoMarketing Associates's Derek Edmond.

Source: DirectNews

Easy SEO Job Interview - Crack SEO interview

Carreer counsellors say the bring you relevant experience to guarantee your success in a job interview. In case you don't have any job experience then you must have a Masters degree for grabbing the job.


But how to gurrantee success in a job interview in case you don't have any experience and a masters degree. here is the answer:






Jokes apart here are some other option also fro cracking any SEO job interview:

• Read the SEO interview questions.
• Learn Search Engine Optimisation step by step
• Get yourself familar with top SEO tools used by the experts.
• Learn SEO tips for the beginners, these are sufficient for a fresher level SEO interview.
• Follow Matt Cutts and be a active memmber of some SEO forum.
• You can also subscribe to some SEO newsletters or google alerts.