SEO Value Pyramid & Time Line

SEO Value Pyramid & Time Line

Doodling to explain the SEO Value Process to a new batch of SEO students, and we came up with the following SEO Pyramid. I thought of sharing this as it will be a useful “Guide” for SEO enthusiasts to better understand the SEO process, SEO value and SEO timelines.

SEO Expert Services - Week 1

1. Keyword Discovery and Analysis. This is the foundation of any successful SEO campaign, so it’s important to get the “winning” keywords for your business, services and products in the beginning itself. This process generally takes 4 to 5 days, and there are many useful free and paid tools to help you do that. Keep in mind; finding the right keywords is all about researching statistical, analytical and forecast data for keyword usage, history and competition over time, in specific geographies.
2. On-page Optimization. The KISS (Keep it Simple ……) concept works great here. Keep in mind that each well optimized page can be a source of traffic and conversions for your website. I would suggest focusing each page on 1 to 2 related keywords only, with modifiers like location, industry, long tails and mis-spellings, included in Meta tags and the content of that page. If you have a CMS driven site, then ensure your CMS allows facility of giving unique title, description and keyword tag for each page, and that your dynamic URL’s are short and SEO friendly.
3. Google local, Maps, and Yahoo local. This not only helps the search engine identify the location (for geo targeting) of your business, it also puts your business on the local map for anyone searching for products and services you could offer. Local listings are displayed on the top of the SERP (search engine result pages), and many people want to do business with someone who is close by (types of businesses where service and personal contact is crucial) can reach your website almost immediately.
4. Corporate Blog. This is going to become your most valuable asset to power up your keywords/ website and share valuable content with your visitors. You will be using the blog to post new articles, How To’s, testimonials, reviews, press releases, case studies, videos, photographs, PPT presentations and more. Both WordPress and Blogger offer free hosting platform - so get cracking.
5. Analytics and Webmaster Tools. These tools will help you monitor the visitors to your site, visitor trends and demographics, entry/ exit pages, traffic sources, track conversions, performance of keywords, submit site maps, check on links and broken/bad links and a lot more.

SEO Expert Services - Week 2

1. Web Directory Submissions. These are the easiest links you can acquire, and there are many relevant, regional and niche web directories where you could submit your listing. Avoid directories that are not relevant to your business, products and services, though global directories should be included in the category your business fits under. There are many paid directories as well (Yahoo Dir, Business.com etc) which are great links to have, but I would be selective not to use up the clients budget in this activity, as it can be well spent in other places.
2. Social Bookmarking. Great way to promote your content across user communities like Digg, Mixx, Stumble Upon etc . The trick is to get other users (or your network) to up vote, thumbs up, review or comment on your content. This makes the link you are building permanent, and leads to more traffic as users generally opt to check links (and vote up links) that already has many votes. They key to social enlightenment is participation!
3. Press Release. Getting back good links to your website from the press releases syndications, a journalist may chance upon you story and make a National release out of it. Though ensure you have a worthy story first!
4. Power up pages. This is an easy way to power up the existing pages of your website. Take each page link and post across relevant social bookmarking sites, and get a few users to up vote, thumbs up, review, or comment on your content. Don’t try and bookmark all your pages in one day, but rather just 3 to 4 links a week. You don’t want the social sites to blacklist you for spamming. Tip: Don’t use social bookmarking sites for just link building purposes. Get involved in the community, make friends, help them, and ask them to help you.

SEO Expert Services - Week 3

1. Weekly Content Strategy. Each week you can create unique and useful content focused around the keywords you are targeting for that month. The types of content can vary - like articles, how to’s, FAQ’s, case studies, pictures, videos, testimonials, PPT presentations, press releases etc. This content can be posted on your corporate blog. Both your visitors and search engines will love you for this effort.
2. Weekly Syndication & Promotion Strategy. Each week you take the content from the blog and syndicate to select article sites, and promote across select social bookmarking sites. Get other users to participate by voting your content. Each type of content can be syndicated and promoted across relevant syndication channels.A video can be syndicated to video submission sites. A How to article, can be syndicated to “How to” sites.
3. Social Media. Sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc. Keep in mind social networking is about building a network of contacts (potential business) and enhancing brand communication and recall.

SEO Expert Services - Week 4

1. Website Review. Getting links from relevant blog sites will go a long way in your SEO strategy. Of course you will have to figure out that no blogger will review and link to your site because they love you. An additional tip here is to power up the external blog review pages by promoting across select social bookmarking sites and getting vote ups. Powering important external pages that link to you will in turn power your keyword pages.
2. Links from Relevant Websites. Get links from sites that are relevant to your business, products and services back to your important keyword pages. These industry links are “relevant” links and are highly valued by search engines. Tips: Avoid reciprocal linking unless it’s with very few select partners and not just for the purposes of link building. Another option, three-way link building is often tedious and filled with rejection. I would focus on “value” based link building.
3. Blog Commenting & Forums Posting. Find a few blogs and forums related to your industry. Spend time each week posting useful comments on blogs, and post/ answer queries on forums. If you cannot create value to the discussion by blogger/ forums users, then its best to avoid this strategy. Also if you plan to place links in the comments and forum posts, then make sure those links add major value to what’s being discussed, otherwise your comments, posts will not be accepted.
4. Monthly Campaigns. Each month choose one social bookmarking site from the ones you are participating in, and choose one story/article from the previous articles you have bookmarked. The objective in the campaign strategy is to get 15 or more users to vote up your content. This accomplishes two things. A chance that your story gets “hot” and as the author of the content you gain popularity.
5. Monitoring, Tracking and Reporting. Prepare weekly/monthly reports to track the links you are building. Prepare a report from Analytics each month showing progression over various metrics of conversion.

Great blogging services

A professional can fudge his personal blogs but on the other hand, layman need to think twice about the tools, services and the way to have their own blogs.Many technology consultants earns heavily for providing technical consultancy of "dos and don’t".In different purpose a blog site feeding different interesting topics with unique frequently posts can make a blog site popular in short time.

On this post, we are trying to enlist some great blogging service, which is giving for free. While rendering this web we’ve tested maximum blogging service and found lots of website giving free blogging service without better service quality, we left those web companies.So top most services are listed as follows:

1. WordPress

   
   

   

   Without any knowledge of web server, websites, bloging service or any previous experiences of blogging system anyone can signup for an free account for blogging. They are giving 3 GB free space and unlimited bandwidth and as well user can connect his/her domain with them.

2. Edublogs

   
   

   

   World’s largest blogging service where only educators are gathering. A teacher and a student connect with each others with faster way and they can share, exchange their knowledge and rich self expertise.

3. Blogsome

   
   

   

   WordPress MU platform based blogging platform and a fastest growing company which giving free sub domains. They says, it’s easy to signup, easy to manage and easy to get a free blog site.

4. Blogetery

   
   

   Free wordpress hosting service giving to their user. You can connect your domain with them and it’s really awesome.

5. Blogger

   
   

   

   Top one blogging service on internet. Blogger is great for customization but wordpress is smarter then blogger’s content management system. Blogger was acquired by Google Inc. Blogger giving 1 GB free space plus unlimited bandwidth for free.

6. Tumblr

   
   

   

   A simple, slick, rich and smooth blogging service. A newbie can start his first blogging experiences with tumblr.com and they are giving free access, domain connection, theme customization features too.

7. Weebly

   
   

   What to get a free site? Weebly giving free blog site opening service, free hosting, design choosing and so on features. All things are given by free of cost and as well it’s looks so professional and advertisement free.

8. Vox

   
   

   

   This blogging service which is part of sixapart and you can create your personal blogging platform for free.

9. Xanga

   
   

   

   By socially you can start your blogging and you can get a sub-domain for free of cost.As well you can grow your social networks under xanga’s service.

10. LiveJournal

    
    

    

    If you’re keeping every day’s experiences on internet by blogging, Livejournal is a great place to express your life style. They are giving blogging space and easily to create your blog page, within a few you can get one account, as well they supporting open id access.

11. Multiply

    
    

    

    Social networking and blogging service both are merged by them. When you’re opening social networks, automatically you can get blogging service beneath same user account. You can upload photos and make your own photo galleries and as well grow your networks. It has drawback that It’s showing advertisement on your networks or blog site.

12. Windows Live Spaces

    

    
    

    Microsoft has blogging service, known as Windows Live Spaces. They are giving free of cost but need an email account and lots of limitations it has and as well normally it’s showing advertisement to your blog site and management system is so poor.

    
    

5 Reasons Not To Use Flash

Despite the documented problems over the years, businesses and web development firms are continuing to use a flash base in site design, without regard of the challenges an all flash site poses for search engine rankings and SEO (not to mention usability).

Sure, some hybrids of flash and text work well, with the mutual understanding that flash is embedded within a site.. and not the site itself. But as a whole, this concept seems to be falling on deaf ears.

Building Flash-powered websites is wrong. Storing your content in Flash movies is wrong. Implementing site navigation in Flash is wrong.

Then why are there so many Flash sites? They look pretty with all those neat vector graphics, gradients, animations and cool sound effects. Flash is the favorite toy of big designer studios and numerous amateur graphic artists alike. Flash is visually attractive, and in general attractive websites are more successful than the ugly ones (notable exceptions: craigslist.org and plentyoffish.com). But this is not the case of Flash websites. All the benefits of the nice outlook are overridden by the disadvantages in terms of SEO and usability.

Flash requires bandwidth
Despite of the DSL Internet access being available almost everywhere, there are still lots of people surfing the Net via dialup or other limited bandwidth connection. Flash files, especially those using sound effects, embedded movies or bitmap images, can take a while to load.

Disabled back button
Some Flash designers use meta refreshes or other tricks to disable browser’s Back button. As the famous usability expert Jacob Nielsen says, ‘Back button is the second most important navigation element after hyperlinks’. People not able to use Back button will click the third most important navigation element – that X button in the top right. Besides, if you are going to promote a Flash site via PPC, you should know that Google AdWords doesn’t approve pages with disabled back button.

Flash ignores users needs
Whereas the ground rules of marketing emphasize the concentration on the users’ needs, Flash websites ignore them. Take the infamous site intros and splash screens that are as much annoying as the 45 minutes of advertising and previews in cinemas. Or another example: the sound effects – they are can be especially inappropriate and harmful when you are browsing the Net from a cubicle in a quiet office or from home in the late hours.

Problems with third-party Flash developers
Unless you do Flash yourself, you might face some serious troubles with developers. Some of them code their project to prevent them from editing, thus making you to hire them over and over again as you need to do even the smallest modifications. Aaron Wall in his SEOBook (a highly recommended SEO reading) describes a case of a Flash developer who disabled the back button and then asked $4000 from his client to re-enable it, although the problem was caused by his own incompetence.

Search engines do not like Flash
And perhaps the most important: not every search engine is able to crawl and index the content of Flash movies. Even those that can often do it with errors. This is in particular the case of a website fully implemented in Flash as a single file. Search engines just wouldn’t be able to direct visitors to the proper page within that file.

What is Flash really good for? Banners and ads – it provides far more useful features then the traditional gif animation. Online games – remember the ‘Yeti Sports’? Flash technology – the Flash videos – for video blogs.

SEO Tips for Flash

SEO Tips for Flash

Creating accessible flash content for search engines is odd for you to preserve your online presence and drive traffic to your site. Follow these Flash Optimization Tips to get most out of the major search engines.

Adding SWF content to your HTML source

An iron-clad way to guarantee that a SWF’s content is picked up and ranked by search engines is to extract the content and place it into the page’s HTML source. Tools such as Dreamweaver use SWF Object to embed Flash. The code view in Dreamweaver displays comments where you should add your alternative HTML content.

Keep your URL unique

If your site is just one big lump of Flash in an HTML template, your page is never going to refresh. Consider having a different URL for each page of your site’s Flash content. Each page would have its own HTML source title, “H1″ and body copy containing the keyword you want to rank.

Use source content dumping

A one-page HTML rich internet application (RIA) will not be SEO enhanced simply by adding the content for each section of the Flash application into the HTML source for this page. Doing this doesn’t establish any prominence of content, as there are too many competing terms. Keep extracted Flash content relevant to the page it’s on.

Keep an eye on new initiatives

Adobe has been working with Google and Yahoo! to make the Flash file format (SWF) search engine friendly. This will enable the engines to see what’s inside a SWF’s content and index it. However, the use of Flash Player technology by search engines is still developing and so can’t be relied on as the only step towards optimizing your project for SEO.

Add text to your Flash applications

A simple Flash SEO enhancement is to use Flash-generated text in your creative when displaying or animating type. You can do this instead of using text that’s a flattened bitmap. Flash text can contain keyword-based messages, which help increase traffic. Include this text in the HTML source of the page as well.

Remember that search engine spiders hate pop-ups

We’ve all visited sites that urge us to click to launch Flash content into a new window. This removes any chance of the site’s content being picked up and indexed by search engines. In addition to search spiders not being able to see them, pop-ups suffer from being blocked by many browsers.

Get robotic help

Robots.txt is a plain text file found at the root of a server. This tells search bots which content needs to be allowed or disallowed when it visits their website. If your Flash text content is the same as your HTML version, you could set the Robots.txt file to ignore the SWF content and push only the HTML content to the search bots.

Embed Flash content with SWF Object

SWF Object is a search engine-friendly way to embed Flash content. Alternative (non-Flash) content is produced first, and then snippets of JavaScript are used to swap out the alternative content with the Flash movies. This ensures that the content is indexed by search engines. Users without Flash will still see a working HTML page.