Top 40 SEO Myths You Should Know About – Part 2

The whole point of SEO is to gain traffic and get people to stay on your site so they can be entertained or buy your products and services. As such, SEO very much goes hand in hand with usability, because this is what will make a difference in whether or not someone stays on your site for long. If your site is hard to use or navigate, it is very easy for people to go to the next search result. Also, the search engines themselves will look at layout and usability. If your site is hard to navigate for your viewers, it will be hard for the crawler as well, and having bad usability can definitely affect your rankings.

Myth #16: The .edu and .gov Backlinks are the Best

It is true that most .edu and .gov sites are well ranked and have a high authority, because typically they are official sites that are well maintained and contain no spam. However, if you have a backlink from one of these sites, it will only be as good as the authority that site has. You gain nothing by the fact that it is an educational or government site. Having a backlink on an obscure .edu site will not help you any more than posting it on an obscure blog.

Myth #17: SEO is based on the Quantity of Links a Site Has

Believing that the success of a SEO campaign is based on having as many backlinks as possible is misunderstanding how ranking works. Any ranking algorithm, whether it is Google’s, Bing’s, Facebook’s, etc. will rank sites based on many different factors. To do successful SEO, you have to address all of these factors, and having a lot of links is just one small piece of the puzzle. Also, each link has its own quality value. Often, a single link from a popular news site talking about your product will be much more valuable than spamming hundreds of links to unknown blog sites.

Myth #18: Backlinks are More Important than Content

SEO usually costs time and money, and as such it is unrealistic to think you can do everything possible in every facet of online marketing. So often you have to make choices, and some may be tempted to focus on link building instead of content. However, the goal of SEO is to bring good traffic to your site. Quality is very important, not just quantity. Not having good content means your site has no value to anyone, and as such it will quickly lose any benefit that the extra links gave you. In fact, the most useful backlinks are usually not those you have direct access to. They are reviews from celebrities in your niche, news sites, and anyone who already is an authority talking about your product. By having good content, those links can actually come by themselves, simply through PR or word of mouth. But a bunch of backlinks on low authority blogs will not help you much at all, and the ranking you may get from them will not last long as those sites clean up those links. Instead, focus on your audience and try to know who you are writing for. By producing good content you are helping your site more over the long run.

Myth #19: Paid Links will get You Banned from Google

There are a number of ways to get links and some include some type of payment. Not all paid links are bad. It depends on how that payment occurs. For example, many sites, including Google, offer advertising services. You can buy an ad on Adwords, you could go to another ad network, and many sites offer their own ad services. While some of them will not give you any ranking, others might, and those are completely legitimate. Paying a site that focuses on your niche to have a link in a strategic location will likely not get you banned. However, you have to remember that there are methods that will. Buying low quality links in bulk is one of the best ways to get your site removed from Google’s index.

Myth #20: Good Content is All You Need

Just like building an army of links will not help you keep traffic for very long, having good content and nothing else is also not enough. Most people agree that good content is the cornerstone of having a successful site. By having engaging, useful posts for your visitors, you can ensure that they will want to visit your site and stay there for a long time. However, simply building it does not make it known. Even a very good site has to do some SEO in order to bring traffic. Branding is incredibly important for any site and getting your brand out there through SEO is the only way you will get those eyes onto that content. Your articles and posts have to be paired with good incoming signals, and that includes doing a lot of the typical SEO methods which can get you ranked in search engines so that people can find your content.

Myth #21: Google actively Penalizes Certain Sites

Anyone who has done some work in SEO has been puzzled at some point when seeing strange drops in ranking. It may seem as if you did nothing wrong. You increased all of your marketing efforts, yet somehow Google decided to rank you lower. It may be easy to think that your site was penalized in some way, but most often that is not the case. Google clearly states that they only penalize sites that break their terms of use by actively going after black hat methods like spamming users. In most cases, the problem is elsewhere. One potential cause may be things that other sites have done, and not you. For example, maybe your competitor received a large influx of links because they appeared on a popular TV show. Another reason might be that Google changed some part of their internal algorithm, which happens fairly often and can be disastrous for some sites. Many people remember the Panda update which changed the ranking of millions of sites. Unfortunately in these cases it can be very hard to find the root cause and fix it, and you may have to simply work harder at SEO in order to gain your ranking back. Resist the temptation to go to black hat methods or to blame Google for it.

Myth #22: Google AdWords will give You Preferential Treatment

Adwords is a very useful program by Google where you can place an ad on other sites to advertise your own. It should be part of any online marketing campaign. However, AdWords by itself does not help boost your rankings. Some think that because a company pays Google, Google will give them preferential treatment in organic search, but that is not the case. On any typical search page, you can easily see that organic results are separated from paid advertisements. A PPC ad campaign will give you a ranking in the sense that it will allow you to be seen on the ads side of the page, but it does not affect your ranking on the organic side in any way.

Myth #23: SEO is Something Done Once Only

A lot of sites make this mistake. When a site is new, the owners will invest in doing some SEO, and then think that everything is done. But just like marketing in the real world, SEO is not something you can do once and then forget. Instead, it is a continual process which has to be done over a long period of time, often the entire life of the site. This is because the web is not a written encyclopedia. It is a medium that changes constantly. New competitors appear, search engines change their algorithms, new opportunities for marketing appear, and links that used to be good can become stale and not that important anymore. By constantly keeping an eye on your SEO efforts you ensure that your ranking does not drop, and you can keep focusing on new techniques that may prove to work better.

Myth #24: SEO Companies can get Guaranteed Results

This is a very common yet completely bogus claim which some marketing firms like to use. They claim that by using their methods, your results will be guaranteed. But the truth is that no one can claim a certain method is foolproof for the same reason that SEO is not something you do once then forget. Everything changes online and you never know when something that used to work well will stop working. Some tactics are clearly better than others, but none is guaranteed. Also, if there was a magical way to get a high ranking, you can be sure that it would leak out at some point, and then everyone would be using that same tactic, making it worthless.

Myth #25: Placing too Many Links Per Page can Penalize You

Some people have been told that a certain number of links on a page can be bad for your rankings. For example, placing more than a hundred links on your landing page will be bad for Google and you will get penalized in some way. While it is true that spamming links on a page is something you should not do, and the Google bot has ways to detect when a page is link bait, you should not be afraid to create pages with lots of links. As long as they are relevant and part of the normal navigation of your site, then there will be no penalty. The worse that could happen in these cases is that Google may decide to ignore links past a hundred, but that’s all.

Myth #26: Internal Links don’t Matter for SEO

Many people think of linking only in terms of backlinks, and only focus on having other sites link to their own pages. But internal linking is also important, just like your site layout is important, because search crawlers try to act as much like a normal web viewer as possible. If your site has bad internal navigation, Google will be able to detect that, and this could penalize you. Take the time needed to create good internal links and an easy to use navigation system for your site. This is something that is easy to do and should not be overlooked.

Myth #27: Facebook Likes or Tweets are the Number One Factor in SEO

Social media has taken a central role in how people find information on the web today, and the signals sent by these sites are fed into search engines in real time. No modern business should ignore social media, simply because of the amount of time people spend on Facebook or Twitter. However, no one social site is the holy grail of SEO. Even if getting Facebook likes is important, it is not any more so than the many other techniques that can be used. Also, there are arguments that point to the fact that while many people spend a lot of time on social networking sites, they do so to talk to friends, not to buy products, so the benefit of a like is still not as understood as the benefit of ranking well on Google. You should not ignore traditional SEO to focus solely on social media.

Myth #28: Keywords are no Longer Relevant

Sites used to be created with a paragraph at the bottom filled with keywords in order to attract more traffic using something called keyword stuffing. In recent years, knowledgable marketers have realized that this is no longer needed. In fact, it is a practice that is heavily discouraged by search engines. However, this does not mean that keywords are not still very important. While you should not do keyword stuffing on a page, getting a good percentage of your keywords in your actual text is still crucial. When someone looks for a specific term on Google, the number of times a keyword comes up on your page still weighs heavily in the search results.
resource:http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/05/06/top-40-seo-myths-you-should-know-about-part-2/

Optimizing Your Website for SEO in 2013

Google algorithms have always been something of a mystery, but for many webmasters they have become a nightmare. Over the last year, keyword searches have become erratic, understanding how to improve page rank is more confusing than ever and the search engine giant is penalizing online businesses for all sorts of ungamely reasons.
Two recent surveys conducted independently of each other have shed some light on how Google algorithms measure the performance of a website and rank it accordingly. For the most part, the results told us many things we already know, but also revealed a shift in factors that produce the best results.
The first study conducted by BusinessBolts.com analyzed 100 randomly selected keywords and assessed them against the top five websites that appeared in Google for each search. A second survey conducted by Dr. Peter J Meyers took 10,000 B2B keywords and split them across 20 categories. Although the search results were predictably erratic, significant patterns were found in respect of keywords, word count, title tags, back links and local searches.

Title Tags, Keywords and Word Count

It seemed at one point that Google was ignoring title tags and some SEO specialists still discredit the need for updating your meta-fields. The latest surveys suggest your choice of keywords in your title tags is one of the most important aspects of your website architecture. Given these tags are used by search engines to index your site, increase visibility and encourage web users to click it stands to reason that they are needed.
The overall use of keywords on the other hand is not as important as it used to be. At one time search engines invested substantial trust in keywords and specified they should be placed in strategic positions on a webpage so the page could be correctly classified. The latest tests revealed that the significance of keywords has been reduced to the main heading and one or two of the sub-headings depending on the length of your content.
Speaking of content, Google seem to favor a word count of around 900 words. This figure fits into standard copy writing philosophy that long copy proves to be more successful than short copy. Therefore your Homepage, services and product pages will fair better with both search engines and prospects if they are longer.

Backlinks

Link building is perhaps the most troublesome SEO tactic at present. We know that inbound links carry a lot of weight with Google and the results published in the respective surveys confirm this – the problem is, knowing which inbound links will be accepted as legitimate.
Search engine algorithms do not allow inbound links that manipulate the page results and have limited link building exercises to genuine referrals from third party web owners, social media users or contributing to reputable industry magazines. There is a question mark over whether links embedded into articles from third party blogs will continue to hold any sway moving into 2013. For the time being, it’s probably best to forget that idea.
What was significant, although not entirely unexpected, was the importance of likes, shares and +1′s on various social media networks. It is apparent that Google discounts any links posted in the linked account of the business owner’s account, but does weigh up the number of people sharing the link or clicking the “Like” in Facebook.
Another aspect that is given preference in Google search is locality. We have known for some time now that local searches are given priority in search engine listings when a specific area is typed in as part of the search term, but it is surprising how many web owners have not updated their contact details or included their locality on the Homepage to take advantage of this.

Author Rank

It didn’t surface in the latest round of search tests, but you can add rel=author to the list of SEO tactics you should be employing in 2013. Author rank was launched last June and is expected to give websites with a recognized author a better page rank than sites that do not have a verified author.
In his book, “The New Digital Age,” Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt writes: “…information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification… The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”
The Author Rank is a strategy Google hopes to develop to ensure the content of a website has the quality they intend to deliver to the end user. Rather than trusting backlinks that can be easily manipulated, the search engine giant will rely on websites that use writers with a rank authority. Websites that are set up with a ranking author are clearly identified in search engine results by a photograph of the writer next to the search result.
It may take Google a while to collect enough data on authors before they can determine the level of ranking authority they have, but the earlier you set your site up with Author Rank status, the better position you will hold once the rel=author stats kick-in. Matt Cutts, chief spokesman for Google, says: “…over time, as we start to learn more about who the high quality authors are, you could imagine that starting to affect rankings.”

Setting Up Author Rank

To set up Author Rank you will need a Google+ Account. In the About section of your profile, there is a space titled “Contributor to” which needs to be updated with the URL of your website or any other site you have contributed content for. You then need to send your profile code – which looks like this – to the owner of the website you contribute to and ask him to paste it in the relevant plug-in of their content management system.
It may be the case that Google algorithms change continuously over the next couple of years until the search engine giant figures out the strategies to achieve its ultimate objective – delivering quality content to its ends users. Google is not out to penalize small businesses and promote large corporations like many people believe, but they do expect online business owners to maintain their websites and prove they can deliver the quality end-users want.
resource:http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/04/04/optimizing-your-website-for-seo-in-2013/

Do You Really Understand How To Make the Most Of Social Media?

Much has been written about how to use social media to get the most out of it for your business, yet it seems many people still do not understand what social media is all about.
There are many definitions of what social media is — my favorites include: SEO Zodiac’s description, which says “social media is simply people having conversations online” and Health Social’s take on it: “social media is the meeting place between people and technology.”
In other words, social media is not a one-way street, where you talk at your audience.  Rather, it is a way for you to communicate with them, to help them and to listen to them.
Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube are the most popular websites on the Internet because they allow people to connect on a very personal level, whether it be through posts, pictures or videos.
With so many people working from home, we have become somewhat isolated and crave the human interaction we’ve lost.  As much as the Internet and Smartphones make connecting to others easier, these tools have also made us hide behind our monitors.
If you take nothing else from this article, the main point you need to remember is, if you want to succeed through social media, you need to touch people’s hearts.  Find out what is important to them, what problems they are facing, what makes them laugh, what upsets them.  Then interact with them in a way that makes it easy for them to relate to you.  Don’t talk at them. Don’t try to sell them anything. Have a conversation with them — be interested in their problems and guide them to solutions.
I recently had the privilege of being part of a social media campaign run by the Australian Capital Territory Tourism, called ‘The Human Brochure.’  It is a brilliant strategy put together by one of Sydney’s great creative agencies, The Works.
The concept was to show both Australians and the rest of the world what Canberra (Australia’s capital city) is all about through the eyes of people who visit it.  ACT Tourism hosted 500 people from all walks of life for a weekend of fun and discovery on two different occasions.  There were four different streams to accommodate every type of traveller: Adventure, family fun, food and wine and arts and culture.
As we visited each venue, whether it was Questacon Science Museum, the Australian War Memorial or local restaurants, we got to share our adventures by posting photos, comments and videos on our social networks.  Family members, friends, colleagues, business partners and acquaintances then also saw all the exciting places there are in Canberra through our experiences.  And, since trust is such a big part of what social media is about, the added bonus to ACT Tourism was that we reached people on a very personal level and often with a humorous twist.
The human brochure is a social media campaign on a grand scale and not possible for every business to execute.  However, there are many other ways you can use the concept of human interaction, which demonstrate how the little things are really the big things.
One of the “big” stories circulating around while we were travelling through Canberra was that of a little girl who was part of the family fun group.  The child had left her bunny behind at one of the stops and couldn’t remember where.  So the search for bunny began … the bus drivers were alerted, as was the hotel staff.  To her parents’ relief the bunny was found in the hotel, so all ended well.  As a bonus the hotel staff member had left a cupcake for the bunny to enjoy until the little girl returned.
People talked and wrote about it and you can imagine what a great credibility booster this was for the hotel involved.  The simple gesture of leaving a cupcake for a bunny who meant so much to a little girl, cost the hotel $1, but will remain with those of us who have children for a very long time.
You can find out more about The Human Brochure here.

On a smaller scale, I saw a local ice creamery use social media to boost their sales.  The Chill Bar partnered up with Schibello coffee and Sydney Football club and organized an afternoon, during which members of the soccer club would serve ice cream and coffee to those who stopped by.
As a bonus, if you took a photo holding the coffee and posted it on Facebook, you got a chance to play a friendly game with the popular football players.
Needless to say lots of parents gladly brought their budding soccer players to meet their heroes, get their autograph, enjoy great coffee and gelato and, as a bonus, play a game with Sydney’s great soccer players.
Both the Human Brochure and Chill Bar demonstrated their understanding of what social media is about — taking what is important to people, making it fun and encouraging them to share it.  Not once did I hear a sales pitch — both campaigns were geared toward people enjoying what they were doing and giving them opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have.
resource:http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/04/03/do-you-really-understand-how-to-make-the-most-of-social-media/

The Five Worst Copywriting Mistakes on the Web

Turn on the TV around 3 a.m., and you’re sure to see some cheesy infomercial with a sales pitch that makes you cringe.  The cheese-factor isn’t limited to late-night TV, though.  Thanks to a variety of copywriting mistakes, the World Wide Web has turned into a 24/7 cheese-fest.
So, what kinds of mistakes are Web copywriters making these days?  And, more importantly, has your sales copy fallen victim to any of them?

1.  Too much hype

This gets the No. 1 spot on the list because hype has spread through Web copy like some kind of flesh-eating virus. That’s because most of the copywriters out there mistake hype for excitement.  Instead of big, bold, red text and a million exclamation points, your sales copy should get readers excited about the product itself.
Unfortunately, lots of the Web sales copy you see is designed to create a giant diversion away from the product.  Instead of having a reasonable discussion about the product — and creating excitement about what it can actually do — copywriters try to stick a giant elephant in the middle of the page.  In the end, the sales copy is what people remember, instead of the product itself.

2.  Ridiculous promises

Yes, this is a type of hype, but it’s such a big mistake that it deserves its own spot on the list.
Here’s what you need to remember the next time you sit down to write some sales copy (or approve what someone else has written for you) — your target audience is full of intelligent people who are going to see right through ridiculous promises.  If you make these promises with the hopes that people will believe them, you’re treating your audience like it’s stupid.  That’s a great way to make people dislike you.  And if they don’t like you, they’ll never buy from you.
What kinds of ridiculous promises are floating around out there?

• How about the trading program that promises to make you rich after just 10 minutes of work per week?  (Is there really anything that can make you rich in 10 minutes per week short of driving to the nearest gas station and buying a lottery ticket?)
• Then, there’s the SEO Company that promises to give you a Top 5 Google ranking for any keyword, in less than three months.  (If you know anything about how Google operates these days, you know that’s an impossible promise to keep.)
• And then, there’s my personal favorite — the cookies that promise to give you a bigger bust. (Anyone who has even a little bit of common sense knows that this is absolutely ridiculous!)

3.  Not enough emotion

Most people are going to buy your product because of how it makes them feel.  Good sales copy will either show people how much easier life will be once they’ve got your product, or it will show them how scary life will be if they don’t buy your product.
If your Web copy doesn’t create one of these two emotions, the odds of you making any sales are slim.  After all, most people are looking for reasons not to spend money.  If you take emotion out of the equation, they’ll be able to talk themselves right out of making a purchase.
Think of it in terms of trying to give ice cream to someone on a diet.  If you offer them boring vanilla, they’re going to turn it down.  But if you offer them exciting rocky road, they’re going to ignore their diet, just this once.

4.  Giant paragraphs

Web readers are notorious scanners, and they’re especially scan-happy when you plunk some sales copy down in front of them. Give them paragraphs that could dwarf the State of the Union Address, and you’ll see their eyes glaze over — and your profits will go out the window.
Instead, make sure your Web copy is easy to scan.  That means coming up with bullet-point lists and bite-sized paragraphs that won’t look intimidating to someone who’s trying to get the facts in a hurry.

5.  Leaving unanswered questions

Even though you’re not writing a news story, you still need to attack your Web copy like a journalist would — by making sure you give the “who, what, where, when, why, and how” details.  Remember, people are looking for reasons to keep their credit cards in their wallets.  Not knowing all of the facts or feeling fuzzy on the details is the perfect excuse.
Bottom line — the more questions people have when they get to the end of your copy, the lower your chances of making any sales.
resource:http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/03/29/the-five-worst-copywriting-mistakes-on-the-web/

10 Tips for a Spider Friendly Site

SEO Company India
What exactly is a spider? Electronic spiders, also known as bots or crawlers, are how the search engines find your site. These spiders are sent out on a mission to find information on the millions of websites that exist. They crawl through the Web making lists of words found on websites. These words are the key to people finding the information for which they search.
The spiders will begin crawling through the most popular of websites. They will then begin building their list of keywords and will extend their search by following every link on each site. If there is a link to your site anywhere on the Web, the spiders will find it.
Each search engine will have its own rules and standards but the process is basically the same. The spiders, however, can only read textual content and cannot click buttons or use drop down menus. They have limited power and capabilities.
Once the spiders retrieve the information, it is collected in a database which is how the search engines determine your ranking. This information is what people find when they use keywords to search for websites.
So with this in mind, you want your site to be spider-friendly so they visit you often. There are things you can do to invite the spiders to visit your site.
What the Spiders Like:
1. Robots.txt File – The first thing the spiders will do is look for a robots.txt file. This file will let them know which pages of your site they need not bother with. All sites should have this file even if it is blank because it is the first thing the spiders look for. Not only does the robots.txt file let the spiders know what not to look for, it is like an invitation for them to come into your site.
2. Head Section - Once the spiders find the robots.txt file, they will move onto the head section of your website. Here they will look at your title, meta tags, and keywords. Be sure your title includes descriptive keywords and is not too long. If you want your entire title read keep it at 60 to 70 characters. Your meta tag description will let the spiders know what your site is about. Make it clear, descriptive and keyword rich. This is what will usually show up in the search engines when people do a search. When listing keywords, be sure that these words will also be in your site content. Do your keyword research to find out the best words to use for your site subject.
3. Website Content – Next on the spiders journey is your website content. Be sure to add fresh content to your site regularly. Several times a week would help encourage the spiders to visit often. Within your content, you need to have the keywords that are listed in your head section. This is what the spiders will be looking for. They will also look for and follow links within your content.
4. Site Map - Having a site map on your site will enable the spiders to easily navigate through your site and index more of your pages. Your site map should contain only text links to all your pages.
5. Backlinks – Backlinks or inbound links are very important because they elevate the importance of your site in the eyes of the spiders. The number of quality backlinks to your site is greatly considered when ranking your site. You want backlinks from sites that are relevant to your site and have good rankings as well. If you participate in reciprocal linking where you place a website’s link on your site so they place your link on their site, be careful to only link to quality, relevant sites. Linking to sites just to get more inbound links can hurt your rankings more than help.
What the Spiders Do Not Like:
1. Javascript Navigation – Javascript might be a great idea for the design of your website but unfortunately it is invisible to the spiders. If your links are invisible to the spiders, they will be unable to crawl your site and index your pages thus hurting your ranking. To remedy this, either do not use the javascript navigation or add text links somewhere on your page.
2. Doorway Pages – Doorway pages are standalone web pages visible only to the search engine spiders. Doorway pages are useless and irrelevant to human visitors. Because of this, the search engines consider them to be manipulative and could get your site penalized or banned.
3. Frames – I am with the spiders on this one and will immediately leave any site that is built with frames. They are hard to navigate and hard to read for both humans and spiders. The spiders will only be able to navigate your homepage and will not be able to properly index your site. There are ways around this but the best thing, if possible, is to not use frames at all.
4. Images – Images are very important on a website but unfortunately the spiders cannot read images or the text within the image. Not using images could be very damaging to our sites so when you do use images, be sure to add ALT tags. ALT tags are a way of adding text to an image so the spiders can read what the images are about.
5. Flash – Flash can make a website very dynamic and innovative but again the spiders cannot read or understand it so your site will not be indexed as it needs to be. Using some flash on your otherwise html-based site could be considered ok but if your entire site is built using flash, don’t count on any traffic from the search engines.
See your site as the spiders see it by using a free search engine spider simulator. Just enter your URL and see what the spiders see. You, of course, want to make your site pleasing and easy to use for your visitors, but remember it is also important to make the spiders happy which in the long run will increase your ranking and make you happy.
resource:http://www.seo-news.com/10-tips-for-a-spider-friendly-site/#more-2566