Listing in Directories is one way of building links and can bring value to the site provided we make sure that the directories are credible and have authority in the eyes of the Search Engines. Google is said to prefer Directories that are human edited and that have very specific categories for listings ( e.g.Yahoo Directory).

Here are some points to keep in mind:

1. Does the Directory have a good Page Rank?
If the Directory has a low PageRank, it probably does hold much authority with Google.

2. Are Category Pages Indexed? To be more specific, is the category page you wish to be listed in indexed in Google?
If the category page that you wish to be listed in is not indexed in Google, then the page has no power to improve your site’s link popularity, because Google does not know about it, it cannot recognize that it is linking to you.

3. How Many Sites Are You Sharing the Link Juice Wealth With?
In most cases, an interior directory category page will contain ten listings – maybe twenty at the most.If the directory has too many listings on the same page, it may not be worth getting listed on there unless it is a proven source of traffic.

4. Does the Directory Add the NOFOLLOW Attribute To Its Listings?
If you are submitting to a directory to help improve your site’s link popularity and they are adding the nofollow attribute to outgoing links, it is not going to help you. Unless you are expecting to get some traffic from the directory, avoid it.

5. Will the Directory Send You Any Traffic?
It is worthwhile to keep a track of the traffice being received from a directory to decide whether it is reliable source of traffic for your website.

It is estimated that more people will be accessing Internet information via a mobile device than a personal computer by the year 2013 (that’s not very far away, folks). As we know, most standard websites do not render well on a smartphone screen due to the smaller screen size, or use of incompatible plug-ins (such as flash). As many businesses opt for a mobile website to complement their standard website, one wonders what this means for keyword optimization and search trends? Do smartphone users search the same way desktop searchers do?

Interestingly enough, mobile search is used and rendered very different from a desktop search. Here are my Top 5 reasons why this is so:

• Mobile search is highly geared toward local information. Statistically 9 out of 10 smartphone searches result in an action. Chances are, if you are looking for for something on your phone’s browser (like a food, a museum, or a bike repair shop) it is because you want to purchase, find, or visit the searched item. Desktop searches tend to be less action oriented overall and more information oriented in nature. Because of this pages like Google Local Listings are positioned to rank higher than pages that are not locally oriented. Domains with geo-targeted keywords will also rank well in this system.
• Google has 97% of the mobile search market share, and their algorithm is different for mobile devices than desktops.
• Smartphone screen size is much smaller than a PC’s screen size, so it will be even more important to snag the top few spots on a mobile search in order to be on the first page.
• Site loading speed becomes critical in a mobile search. A site that takes too long to load when on-the-go information is needed quickly, will lead to higher bounce rates than a standard desktop site search.
• Android users are always logged in to Google on their mobile system.  This means that Android users will always be served personalized results more often than folks searching on a PC who may not have logged in. This will obviously change as more and more people begin to use Google+ or who search when logged into their Google accounts.  Most users aren’t aware if they are logged in or not, and personalized results definitely have an impact on what you will see in your search results.

These are key points to keep in mind when conducting a search on either platform, and even more important to keep in mind when positioning yourself and your business for the future, whether or not you have a mobile website. Keeping a claimed and optimized local listing has always been an important piece in your overall SEO strategy. But now, it seems as if listings such as Google Places and Bing Local could have even more impact on your search results in the future.

Do domains with keywords included help with getting better results?

Generally Keywords in the domain can help get better results, it has been seen that the ones that seem to be the best are those with an exact match to the targeted keyterm. Also, more often than not, .com domains seem to have an advantage over other domains.

However search engines are reported to be laying less and less emphasis on keywords in domain names as this has been misused by spammers registering hundreds of “long-tail” domains to rank them for exact match and also because it’s now nearly impossible to obtain any “exact match” domains that wouldn’t be too long or irrelevant.

Howver, if it is possible, getting an exact match domain or a domain with relevant keywords in it is definitely helpful.

I had my domain for many years, but I purchased a better one recently.Should I start optimizing the website for the new domain?

If your domain has been around for a while, it will surely have gained equity in the eyes of the Search Engines. This is very valuable as it is a slow process to get the SEsto recognize your site as authoritative and credible.

It also depends on the age of the domain you have recently purchased, if it is an established domain with an exact match to your target terms, then it would be beneficial to work on getting this domain to be the main one. If not, then it might be better to let the new domain gain credibility with Google and the other SEs .

Google has always claimed that they want to maximize transparency around the flow of information related to their services.  I always took this statement with a grain of salt, as I would from any large corporation trying to explain how transparent and open they were with the public. However, a recent update by Google has done a great job revealing information about government intervention and online content.

Recently, Google has updated their Transparency Report to include more details about information requested from governments around the world. This report has been used to provide data about the number of government inquiries concerning specific users or accounts, as well as requests to remove specific content.

According to this post on their blog, Google has “highlighted some significant changes in the data and provided context about why those changes may have occurred during this reporting period.” They have updated the format of the report so that anyone can see user data requests on a country-by country basis.

The Transparency Report is now very detailed. Using Government Requests, Google is disclosing whether they were asked for user data or for content removal, the reasons why they’ve been asked to remove content (such as hate speech, defamation, copyright, etc…), even the percentage of requests that Google complied with.

For those that are curious, the United States ranks third overall in the amount of content removal requests, and first overall in user data requests (by a huge gap).

Some requests for removing content in the last six months (January to June 2011) included everything from violation of AdWords policies (China) and defamation cases (France) to the removal of YouTube videos displaying protests (India), police brutality (USA) and details about the private lives of political officials (Turkey). For more details, see the Map of requests.

It’s really quite amazing what you can learn about how the web is shaped by government influence and other regulations. In my opinion, Google is providing a great (and interesting) service by publishing this data.

Some reasons to re-optimize your website :

Your site has enjoyed great rankings for several years but you’ve now lost your top or first page listings.

Your website statistics show a big drop in the number of people visiting your site.

Your site was optimized a long time ago, the keywords you originally used to gain high rankings no longer work.

Your site has undergone a redesign or moved to a different platform.

Your competitors seem to be achieving top rankings, you need to market your site to improve rankings.

Your business has changed it’s focus and the priority Keyterms have changed.

Your location has changed or you have new offices and you need to update your optimization accordingly.

Strategies to keep in mind while re-optimizing your Website to Increase Rankings and Traffic

1.Look at the keywords generating the most visits. Are they currently included in your Title tags and content? Use keyword research tools to find related keywords that can be added to your web pages. Create extra web pages that target high priority keywords.

2.Do searches for your top priority keywords and find the competing sites that are showing up at the top of the first page. Analyze these competitor websites for title tags, web copy plus the quantity and quality of their backlnks.

3. Find related keywords and include these within your web pages to increase web traffic.

5. Incoming links to your website help your web page rankings increase. Link building is a task that must be done regularly to stay ahead of your competitors. Boost the number of backlinks across your webpages so they can achieve better rankings.

6. Look for high quality local directories and review sites where you can register your website and increase visibilty for your business.

7. Optimize and verify your Google Places and Bing and Yahoo Local listings.

According to a new study, your #1 ranking in organic search accounts for an 18.2% click through rate on Google, and a 9.66% click through rate on Bing.  For the combined click through rate of the top 10 results (page 1 on the SERPs) you get 52% for Google and 26% for Bing. This is a dramatic decrease when compared to similar studies done not too long ago that showed the top ten organic search results would garner anywhere from 63% to almost 90% of the click throughs. Overall, the data suggests trend has been on the decline, but why? Read the rest of this entry »

Is it better to get a lot of incoming links at the beginning of my SEO and give it a jump start, or add them over the course of time?

While launching a brand new website or a redesigned site,  optimizers can work towards getting a  a reasonable number of incoming  links by listing the site on relevant directories, this will help boost  rankings and also  propel the site higher in the search results. As a rule,  however,  it is better to add links steadily over a course of time, this helps keep the site interesting to the search engines and shows that it is a relevant, credible site.

 I heard linking to other websites doesn’t help at all with help my SEO results.  Is that true?

While incoming links are more valuable towards link-building,  linking to other topical and related sites also brings value to the site. Out-bound link building should be done very sparingly and only when linking to the external site brings information and value to the viewer. It is also preferable to link so that the other site opens up in new window, this way the viewer is not led away from your site but can take in the information and return to your site easily.

What is a link farm?

A link farm  is a website set up with the sole purpose of increasing the link popularity of other sites by increasing the number of incoming links to those sites. Most of these links will not be relevant links, the linking is solely done to try and spam the Search Engines into raising rankings but appearing to bring credibility to the linked sites. Link Farms are frowned  upon by the Search Engines,  link farms will be removed from their directories when they find them and many also penalize other sites that link to them.

If you have a website, chances are you are being contacted by Webmasters asking you to exchange links with them. You know that you should choose only Relevant Links as far as possible, but what are relevant links and how do you pick them?

Here are some questions and tips that may be helpful:

1.Do I want to associate my business with this particular site? Is it a credible site with good authority?
It is a simple question to answer and this should form the basis of your decision making process. If you think you will be dealing with a good quality website then the chances are others will feel the same and possibly the search engines too.

2. Is the site focused on a topic that is relevant to the information on your site?
A link from a relevant website to your site is the preferred choice as it can help reinforce your website theme and potentially send some useful traffic your way.

3. How many existing links does the page have?
When your link is being placed on another website, you ideally want that page to contain as few outbound links as possible, if there are a high number of links on a page, the value of each link out is weakened. However if you are working with a ‘ high authority website’ ( sites that are typically non-profit like .edu, .gov, news sites and other resource based sites) an exchange can still be worthwhile.

4. What is the Page Rank of the site on Google?
Typically the higher the page rank, the more important a site is perceived to be. A link from a Pr 5 page is often seen as a more powerful link than one from a Pr1 page. However, Google’s Page Rank is only meant to be a rough guide and should not be the only criterion.

5. Is the links page being read by search engines?
It is important that the page your link is on can be found and read by search engines. The page should be no more than 2-3 clicks away from the homepage. you should check to see that the site is not broken and that it is being regularly crawled and indexed by the Search Engine spiders.

With the recent release of Google +1, there has obviously been much discussion about how the new social media sharing button may affect a site’s rankings and overall optimization. Given the nature of social media sharing, there obviously will be some weight given to sites that are +1’d (thanks for the new verb, Google) frequently or consistently enough. Facebook Likes and Shares, Tweets and other social media sharing techniques have consistently proven to help improve rankings and positioning for given topics, and Google and Bing have even flat out said that “social signals” are used in determining ranking.

I’m not here to argue whether Google’s +1 will have an impact on a site’s SEO. It’s hard to imagine that the world’s biggest search engine would create a social media presence that wouldn’t “help” them in their ranking algorithm. Google says that “+1’s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query.” And then they follow with the old adage of “This is just one of many signals….” blah blah blah. But the important part is that it IS a signal in their algorithm. Also, in the manner that Google is showing +1’s in the SERPs, whether they are from those in your inner Circles or a total sum of +1’s from all Google Plus users, the +1 button can definitely affect click through rates and goal conversions.

But let’s not focus on that right now. Let’ discuss the ways that you may track these signals and determine for yourself what impact +1 had on your own site and within your competitive industry. The following are a few ideas that may help you along the way; however please share additional tracking methods in the comments below if you know of other techniques or ideas.

Google Webmaster Tools

Once you have verified your site within Webmaster Tools, you will be able to access a new section called “+1 Metrics” from the Dashboard. This includes tabs titled “Search Impact,” “Activity” and “Audience.”

The Search Impact data allows you to compare click through rate, total impressions and total clicks from before and after you added the +1 button to your site.  This can be measured for each individual page as well. This is pretty accommodating; however as with any data, you will need to have enough impressions both with and without the +1 button to make a meaningful comparison.

The Activity tab will show the total number of +1’s received by pages within your site, and the Audience tab will display a plethora of information about users that have +1’d your pages, including total unique users, their location, age and gender. (Makes me think twice before +1ing everything on the web, huh?). Read more about the Google +1 Analytics from the post by search engine land.

Google Analytics Event Tracking

You can also record a +1 and track it as an event in Google Analytics. Using the Advanced Options in Google’s +1 button creation tool, add callback=”plusone_vote” and then edit the script tag you used to add the +1 counter to your site. Visit the timely and awesome post from Joost de Valk of Yoast to see how to directly edit the script tag to record the +1’s as events in Analytics.

These are simply a few techniques that we have come across. Has anyone had any luck with either option, or alternative tracking methods? Let us know about the accuracy of your data and anything else you may have noticed since the implementation of Google +1.