SMO Helps In Alexa Ranking

Seo Vs Smo

There are many who are still thinking to create an online presence and if possible achieve such online recognition that can influence online visitors and work out as a successful conversion. The desire is almost the same for every online business that exist, but the essential fact to consider is the part, What makes this happens?

It is SEO or SMO, What are these?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): is a process, technique, tool, strategy, tactic to optimize a website in such a way that search engines understand, rank, read and index it appropriately.In SEO the optimization process helps websites to achieve favorable search engine rankings and increase traffic flow to their online presence.

SMO (Social Media Optimization): SMO is a method that considers social media networking in such a way that it attracts online users and promotes your business presence with help of enormous traffic. Some good examples would be of business networking websites, online communities and blogs.

Therefore, it is SEO and SMO that focus on to provide traffic for an online presence and this is where it is important to understand both methods that conclude to promote your online business and provide you the maximum benefits of Internet Marketing. Consider the following key points to make out the most from given options.

1)SEO is practiced widely to impress search engines whereas SMO is practiced to target and attract human beings. Thus the content written for SEO should be rich with keywords and quality shall be perfect to get noticed by search engines but in SMO we write content to attract the social media.

2)In SEO we consider an important aspect to be Meta headers, titles and keyword identification so the online presence is optimized according to the search engines, whereas in SMO the stress is upon social networking websites that enables us to work on various ways to get noticed and spread our online presence.

3)SEO works on to promote your online presence through search engines ranking and is in practice from quite some time now whereas SMO is a new method which is growing rapidly through social networks and the popular the social networking site the more chances you are to prosper in addressing your online existence.

4)SEO process involves several aspects within, each process having its own importance and results make it more long lasting and authentic source of achieving online recognition which requires help of a professional whereas SMO can be practiced by anyone who have little information and internet exposure.

5)SEO carefully considers each and every aspect of a website to its very basics to the content, its headings, tiles, keywords, structure of the sitemap and other aspects that it is created upon and thereon ranking is achieved but SMO does not consider any of this in its process.

This is where you should be aware of the fact that SMO cost you nothing or very less to perform and acquire results but SEO is something that comes of experience and the more you get the precise practice it will become for you to venture the very online presence.

SMO Helps In Alexa Ranking

SEO and SEM

SEO and SEM: Two Names for the Same Thing?

By most people's standards, the internet is still very young. New technologies and developments in existing technologies are appearing at an extraordinary rate. As technologies change, so does the terminology used to describe them.

I worked for two years as a search engine optimizer. Ask a dozen people to define that term, and you'll get a lot of different answers. A webmaster may be the leader of a large team, including developers, writers, marketers, designers, usability experts, technical support people, and yes, search engine optimizers. Or s/he may perform all or some of those duties alone.

The same is true for search engine optimization. For many people, the term is a new one, and they have no idea what it is an SEO does. To others, SEO is synonymous with SEM -- search engine marketing. In my opinion, there is a big difference between the two.

Search Engine Marketing

I see SEM as a rather broad term. It's everything that can be done to utilize the technology of search engines with the goal of promoting a web site and increasing its traffic, its "stickiness," and, in the case of sites that promote a business (or are a business), increase profits. SEO, therefore, would be a subset of SEM.

Aspects of search engine marketing which I would consider to be outside the realm of search engine optimization include the following:

Paid Inclusion

This is simply the practice of paying a search engine or a directory to add a site to its database immediately, rather than setting up that site so that it will be found by the search engine spiders on its own. In the case of some search engines and directories, paid inclusion is the only way to get listed. For others, it's presented as an option. If you're willing to pay, your site will be listed sooner. It's also a useful practice if you wish to make frequent changes to your content, because your site will be spidered more often and you will be able to test how changes affect your ranking.

Traditional Ads

This involves placing paid advertising on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Normally, these ads appear based on the keywords entered into the search engines, and one is charged based on the number of impressions, i.e. appearances, of the ad. In other words, you pay whether the ad sends anyone to your web site or not.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC ads are simple enough to look at. They're text-only. PPC ad campaigns are completely controlled by the advertiser. You decide which keywords should bring up your ads, you write the copy, and you decide how much you want to pay. And, as the name indicates, you only pay for an ad when someone clicks it and is brought to your site. There are two main networks of PPC ads, run by Google and Overture, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages, but in both cases, one should be prepared to spend a great deal of time (and money) monitoring and adjusting such a campaign.

The Advantages of These Practices

In contrast to pure SEO, these SEM practices offer the advantage of immediacy. If you need to increase your traffic and your visibility right away, and you don't have a problem with spending a lot of money, this may be the way to go.

The Disadvantages

You knew this was coming, didn't you? Think about it this way: you've spent your time and money to bring people to your web site. What will they see when they get there? You've convinced them, at least for the moment, that your site is worth visiting, so they're expecting to find exactly the information they were seeking. Is it easy to find? Is it there at all? You only have a few seconds to convince them that your site can deliver what they want. Will your visitors, failing to find what they're looking for, click their browser's back button and try another site?

Your site has to be ready for your visitors. It needs to be written, structured, and coded in such a way that the information is clearly laid out and easy to find. If it isn't, your site will either be immediately forgotten by visitors, or worse, it will be remembered as one that fails to deliver.

SEO First

No SEM campaign is complete without SEO. Moreover, since the purpose of SEO is to make the site better for both search engines and users, you may find that it will suffice on its own. In any case, the advantages of SEO over the other aspects of SEM make it clear that, even if you are going to spend additional money on advertising and paid placement, SEO must be your first step in promoting your site.

Optimizing For Long Tail Keywords

Why this should be an important part of your SEO campaign?

When talking about the long tail keyword, many people dismiss optimizing your site for these phrases. The most commonly cited reason is that they simply don't have enough search volume.

Well, it's time to rethink that, and we're going to tell you why.

Recently we attended a niche SEO seminar, and one statistic really caught my attention. When looking at keywords in general, there are typically your "core" keywords, then the long tail keywords. The "core" keywords are your ultra competitive keywords and phrases. Additionally, these are the high volume keywords.

For the average niche, only 20% of all search volume comes from the top 10 "core" keywords, the other 80% of the traffic comes from the long tail keywords. That's the bulk of the available traffic, 80%. Why aren't we capturing that huge amount of traffic? Because we are overlooking the long tail keywords.

For many businesses and individuals, there is a budget for advertising, and for every business, there are other, bigger fish out there with a larger budget. Those budgets are invariably going after the top ten or "core" keywords in that particular niche. Everyone in your niche wants to rank well for the same keywords, making those core phrases ultra competitive. The more competitive your niche, the more work you will need to do, and the more money you will need to spend to rank well for these core terms.

Now I'm not saying you should abandon your high volume "core" keywords, but think about this. 75% of internet searchers do not leave the first page of the search results. So if you are not on the first page of Google for your term, 75% of searchers will never have a chance to see your site. If you're not on the second page, that 75% grows.

Instead of spending all of your efforts focusing on the large keyword phrases, spend some time going after the long tail phrases. These are phrases with less search volume, but also less competition. Ranking at the top of the search engines for "weather resistant red widget" will be much less time consuming than ranking for "widget".

Additionally, the modifiers that make these phrases "long tail" phrases actually will increase your conversion rates. If you are selling weather resistant red widgets, you may only get 20 people to your site for that term, as opposed to the higher volume you would get if you ranked well for "widget", but those 20 people will be highly qualified leads, and will convert at higher levels.

The sum of these long tail keyword phrases is massive, and ranking well very quickly is a huge benefit of going after this traffic. If you have not been going after the long tail keyword traffic, give it a try. Your conversions will likely be better, you will rank more quickly, and over time, you can drive a lot of traffic with this technique.

Keep an eye out for more helpful hints, tips and ideas to generate traffic and rank better in the search engines. As always, feel free to contact us with any questions or comments.

How to stop Google Analytics from tracking your own visits

If you use Google Analytics to track visitors to your websites, it’s important to have Analytics filter out and exclude your own visits to your sites in order to get a true picture of your sites’ visitor count and demographic. You might be visiting a dozen pages on your site everyday and all these visits and page views can grossly inflate the visitor data of your sites. Unlike tracking services like Statcounter and Sitemeter, Google Analytics does not have an easy way of excluding your visits, particularly if you are on a dynamic IP.

If your net connection has a static IP, you can filter out that IP from being tracked. But if you are on a dynamic IP, like most of us are, you will need a different solution.

The solution is this: we will set a cookie on our browser and then use Analytics’ filter to ignore visits from all machines that has this cookie set. In order to create this cookie, create a page on your website with the following code on it.

If you use the old urchin tracker

If you use the new Ga.js tracker

Replace ignore_cookie_name with any name of your choice. The name should be unique because if any other visitor has a cookie of the same name, his visits will be ignored too. Throw in some random numbers to nullify any chance of somebody coincidentally naming their cookie the same.

The next step is the create a filter on Google Analytics. To do this, follow these steps:

1.Click ‘Analytics Settings’ and then click on ‘Filter Manager’ at the bottom of the page.
2.Click ‘Add Filter’
3.On the Create New Filter page, create a new filter with the following settings:

Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: ignore_cookie_name (replace with actual name)
Case Sensitive: No

4.Under the ‘Apply Filter to Website Profiles’ section, select the website you want to apply this filter to.


The final step is to set this cookie on your browser. For this, simply visit the page having the JavaScript code. Make sure no visitors to your site has access to this page, otherwise the cookie will be set on their machines too.

To verify this is working correctly, place Analytics tracking code on this page and visit it a couple of times each day. Then try to find data about this page on Analytics report. If you can’t find any, it means that the ignore cookie is working.

SEO Interview Questions & Answers

1.How many words should my pages be?
A. There is no specific number of words a page should be for SEO purposes.

2.How quickly will Google re-index my pages after I've SEO'd them?
A. how popular your site is, how often Google's spiders typically come around, how deep in the site the changes have been made, and more.It depends upon the proper choose keywords phrases and how popular your web site is and it also depend upon your SEO activities.

3.Which of the following statements about RSS are correct?
► a. It is a form of XML
► b. It stands for Real-time streamlined syndication
► c. It is a good way of displaying static information
► d. It is a Microsoft technology

a. It is a form of XML

4. All major search engines are case sensitive.
► a. True
► b. False

b. False

5. What is Keyword Density?
► a. The number of times the keyword is used / (DIVIDED BY) the total word count on page - (MINUS) the total words in HTML on the page
► b. Combination of the number of times a keyword or a keyword phrase, in proportion with other words, appears on a Web page
► c. The number of times the keyword is used in the page description
► d. The number of times the keyword is used in the page title
► e. The number of times the keyword is used / (DIVIDED BY) the total word count on the page

b. Combination of the number of times a keyword or a keyword phrase, in proportion with other words, appears on a Web page

6. What is the name of the search engine technology due to which a query for the word actor will also show search results for related words such as actress, acting or act?

► a. Spreading
► b. Dilating
► c. RSD (real-time synonym detection)
► d. Stemming
► e. Branching

d. Stemming

7. What will the following robots.txt file do?

User-agent:Googlebot

Disallow:/*?

User-agent:Scooter

Disallow:

► a. It will allow Google to crawl any of the dynamically generated pages. It will also allow the AltaVista scooter bot to access every page
► b. It will disallow Google from crawling any of the dynamically generated pages. It will also disallow the AltaVista scooter bot from accessing any page
► c. It will disallow Google from crawling any of the dynamically generated pages. It will allow the AltaVista scooter bot to access every page
► d. None of the above

c. It will disallow Google from crawling any of the dynamically generated pages. It will allow the AltaVista scooter bot to access every page

8.Are RSS/Atom feeds returned in Googles search results?
► a. Yes
► b. No

b. No

9.How does SEOmoz typically get clients - how do you market yourselves?
A.Actually, we get most of our clients through calls and emails to us. A typical week after the Newsweek piece came out had between 15-30 inquirie. Now, that's down to between 5-10. Mostly, people know about us through finding the SEOmoz website and the articles/blog. We've also got a good conference presence that makes a big difference. Maybe in a future post I can go into detail on how I'd market a new SEO company.

10. A Hallway Page is used to:
A. ► A. Attract visitors from the search engines straight onto the Hallway Page
► B Organizes the Doorway Pages
► C Helps people navigate to different Doorway Pages
► D. Enables search engine bots to index the Doorway Pages

D. Enables search engine bots to index the Doorway Pages

Keyword Selection as an Internet Strategy

If you are starting your site from scratch, selecting keywords at this stage is a time and money saver. If you are redesigning your website, this is the time to outdo your previous mistakes.
Zeroing On the Right Keywords
If you are wondering what keyword has to do with website design think again. It determines whether your website architecture will have a folder or linear structure. If it is a folder structure then how many levels?

Let's take a hypothetical example. Suppose you are a company selling confections. You are designing an e-commerce website. You may have two or more options for website architecture.
Option 1: confectionary company displaying products by type e.g. cakes, candies, cookies, chocolates etc.
Option 2: confectionary company displaying products by occasions e.g. birthdays, weddings, thanksgiving, baby showers etc.
Option 3: This option is a tad expensive because it involves more complex programming at the database level. You can let the visitor decide how he or she wants to view the website product wise or occasion wise.

Which structure will be more appropriate?
Before deciding we need to find the online search behavior of our future customers. Using a keyword tool we find out that the search phrases customers use to find the ' cakes' are for specific types of cakes like wedding cakes, birthday cakes, diaper cakes and so on. Same stand true for candy.
Naturally the second option is a better website architecture structure. It can grow both laterally and longitudinally. It's more suitable for search patterns hence later it will be easier to optimize.

The best way to do a keyword search is to write down the phrases that describe your website's purpose. Start with:
5 one-word phrases
10 two-word phrases
5 three-word phrases
Run them in a keyword tool. You will be amazed at the results.
Save them in a spreadsheet.

Selecting the Right Keywords:

Your spreadsheet probably has a thousand keywords. It's best to have a base keyword in mind around which your site will evolve. Keep these in mind before you start selection.

One word phrases are the hardest to rank for because they require a high number of backlinks which is difficult for a new site.

Their conversions are also the worst because people are not searching for that product or information. They realize it as soon as they type it and see 44 million websites for 'cakes'.

Two phrase keywords are good to optimize for as they have more searches and hence more conversions. But they are difficult to do so especially for a new website.
Three phrase keywords may be few but are relatively easy to optimize for. It's best to start with three word keywords.

Select the 3 word phrases most suitable for your site. Make them top priority for now...But do not ignore the 2 phrase or single word keywords. With time you will be able to drive traffic to your website using these keywords too and they most probably will have more search traffic.

The other factors that matter are:

The number of competing sites
The strength of those competing sites
Select a long string for 3 word phrases whose searches rank more than 5 per day. This is the starting list for keywords for your site. Repeat the same procedure for two word phrases.

At this stage it may be suitable for you to leave out 1 word phrases not in the website design but in the optimization process..

Integrating the Keywords in your Website Design
All efforts at selection are useless if keywords are not properly integrated in design.

2 tips before starting:

Do not optimize for more than 3 keywords on one page
Preferably optimize for related keywords Example:
Virtual Offices in Irvine Orange County (keyword)
-Virtual Offices
-Virtual Offices Irvine
-Virtual Offices Orange County

Get your website designer to use these search phrases in the page in Title tags, Keyword tags, Header tags and Alt tags. While writing the content for the page make sure you use the phrase at least twice in 350 words of content. Use synonyms of the keywords.