Role Of a SEO consultant

There are so many posts out there to discuss what a SEO consultant should do, but this post will talk about what a SEO consultant must not be doing. A common myth that revolves around the developers is that,” SEO is another form of QA, SEO is just a quality checking process”.  But it is not, what SEO is. One main reason for this myth is, India doesn’t have a great  talent pool for SEO and it is not off shored as extensively as other areas, the reason sound valid, SEO is more of marketing and trust building which is very much GEO specific, unless and until you have the feel of that market you cannot do wonders. Sitting from India, it is not that easy to know how things works in European Real estate market. It need a lot of homework, it doesn’t only stop with Site optimization, it stretches beyond.

Developer’s  point of view:
From a Developer’s point of view, it still remains as another quality process, they dont know where a SEO comes in the SDLC. SEO is something, which directly involves a stake holder and a SEO guy, it doesn’t have anything to do with other roles in the Project management. And a SEO process should start from the day one of development, if not done, it is double the work for development. Just make one thing clear, before starting the development, Create sites for users, Search Engines will be attracted; if not, your site can never rise up the ladder. Search Engines, are not GODS, they are just a third party agent, who fetches you what you want. Have that in mind and create the code, make it clean and clear, that is all we need to do, SE is not expecting art out of you. In a real development environment, the first phase of SEO should be done by the developer itself, On-Site SEO must be a responsibility of a Developer. If this is carried out well, then there is no special effort need in the SEO cycle for this. Dont expect a SEO guy to instruct you for this phase, it is mandatory that you should follow these rules while development.

If SEO doesnt start in parallel with development, then it is gona be a re-work. There are some key areas where the development should be clear.

1. SEO guy will not clean the code, it should be done by the development(this whole confusion arises because of the fact that SEO is not carried out along with the development) . SEO guy will identify the areas to be improved, but he cant sit and implement that.
2. Both dev and SEO team should work hands to identify how best the SEO can be implemented for a particular project. SEO guys might not be aware of the technical feasibilities of a particular implementation, it is dev team’s work to figure that out. Say for example, lets take a site that is developed with Drupal, technically speaking, there are so many SEO friendly modules that are available in SEO which makes implementation very easy, like path module, both SEO guy and the dev team should be aware of this, how far we can utilize the path module must be known to the dev team and how effectively it can be used must be known to SEO guy. This parallel working will yield great results

Plan your SEO process, plan how this can go hands on with development. If this is done, then SEO will really work out.

Google Analytics – next big leap

Brett Crosby announced several Google Analytics features that is oncoming at the eMetrics Summit. The new update has amazing features which will be very helpful for SEO work.

Some of them include

1. Site Search Activity: This will provide a lot of information about the searches that are performed by the users in your site, with which we can actually draw a lot of info about key word and content seeked.
2.  Even Tracking : Using the new ga.js, we can explore event activities happening in your site and which will help us to know how are site is navigated and also how the components in our sites are accessed. and how well the user is utilizing our site. This is will help us to make our site more customized.
3. UI improvements on reports which will enhance the user friendly nature of the GA.

Suggestion:
Practically we face some difficulties when we practice SEO using Google Analytics(GA). I have a few suggestions, with which GA can reach masses. One of the main difficulty which we face is in the Traffic monitoring, at present thou we have good system by GA, it is manual, some one needs to sit with it and even automated E-mail delivery is not that effective. Why it is not effective is one, some one needs to assimilate and track the daily status thou they receive reports automatically and two as GA gives a dashboard, most of it turns Graphical. If i want to use these details as inputs somewhere, it is very difficult. Why cant Google provide these reports as a web service or may be in a RSS with which i can directly use them where ever i want.

We had one client, whose requirement is to get the data from GA or any other similar tools and publish that in his site in a specific style/standard. If GA provides a Web Service, this would have been an easy task for us, but since we get only email reports, some process needs to be done with that email, may be a script or a mail reader, which is not an advisable go. If GA comes up with some kind of Web Service it will ease our life.

HTML elements to Boost page Ranks

In order to tap into the power of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) elements, you first need to know what they are. In HTML, elements are bits of markup that tell a web browser to display or format parts of web pages. For example, <p> means paragraph, and <b> means bold – there are plenty more. These elements are used constantly when writing web pages. You should basically think of your HTML elements as the organizational and visual formatting of your HTML document.

By learning HTML, you can tap into the power of HTML elements and create a more interesting website as well as tipping off search engines as to what the most important information on your web page is. Many people starting out on the web just use ‘easy editors’ (also known as WYSIWYG for what you see is what you get) that show the page as it will appear, without ever looking at the code that the page is actually made from. This is fine if you intend to distribute and are only interested in the look of the page. Visually artistic people are often drawn to using WYSIWYG (pronounced wise-ee-wig) editors when creating their web pages because it allows them to see exactly what they are doing and frees them from the time consuming task of learning HTML.

Value of Links

As a part of sequel post, now i would like to share the value of links.

The Value of Good Link Partners.

As you already know, good link partners are vital to the growth of your website. Without good link partners you won’t be ranked highly in the search engines, and you won’t receive the traffic you need to gain new customers and make new sales. Building high-quality links to your website helps it to succeed.

Websites that maintain good incoming links will get many targeted visitors from their link partners. These link partners are also a good source of information and can offer value for the visitors that come to your website more often. The idea behind link partners is to find web sites with complementary content so that you enhance your web site. For example, if you sell computers, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to link to a site that sells printers.

Linking to your competitors is much more dangerous. The fact of the matter is that when you link to your competitors you are handing them your business. They may be handing some of theirs back to you, but the trade off simply isn’t worth it. If you are in a situation where it is your product or theirs, do not link to them. Aside from the obvious issue of losing business to their site, you may even lose the returning link if you don’t keep an eye on it.

When dealing with link partners, there’s virtually no point unless you get reciprocal links. These links make your website look good, as well as getting you targeted traffic from users clicking on the links. When you are optimizing your site for key words, however, it is important to link to sites that provide more information regarding the content that you have provided. In cases like this, the link is already helping you. If you get a returning link in addition it’s like killing two birds with one stone.

With good-quality incoming links, you will benefit greatly from the increased traffic to your site. Most major search engines’ rankings are at least partly based on the number of quality links pointing to your website. Google, HotBot, AltaVista, MSN, Inktomi and more all use link popularity in their formula for calculating rankings.

SEO tutorials:How to Evaluate Your Own Site’s SEO Profile.

Before you can evaluate your site’s SEO profile, you need to understand what an SEO profile is and how it works. An SEO profile for a website is just like a marketing plan or a business plan – basically, it’s a strategy document, putting your decisions into words. This is best performed on a computer program such as Microsoft Word as these programs do provide the best bang for your buck. All else aside, Microsoft does put out some excellent business oriented software so take advantage of it!

Writing your SEO profile should consist of the following:

An introduction – This should include a BRIEF description of your company as well as a purpose statement of some kind. If you can describe your company in a neat, tight format, you will be one step ahead of most in the SEO game.

Goals relating to your Search Engine Status – What do you want your page rank to be? Where do you want to be listed under specific key words? top 50? 25? 10? How many pages of your site do you want search engines to index? Do you want to pay for listings? These questions will get you started, but you must go more in-depth into your SEO goals. Also include the search engines and directories that you feel are necessities such as Google, DMOZ, Yahoo!, and MSN.

Information regarding SEO actions and achievements – This one is pretty self-explanatory. List everything that you do regarding Search Engine Optimization as well as any successes caused by these actions.

SEO tutorials: How Search Engine Works

I think this will be the best thing to start with, before going deep into the concepts of SEO, first one must understand how a search engine works?

How Search Engines Work.

Many people wonder how search engines really work. Although the details are complex, this article aims to give you some insight into the process without getting too technical. Read on…

Most search engines have three parts: a crawler, an index, and a search interface. Let’s look at each part individually, to get a better understanding of them. Each part has its own role to play in the process, with all the parts working together to make searches possible.

The Crawler.

Also known as a ‘spider’ or ‘bot’, this part of the search engine wanders the web, following links and picking up information for its database. Crawlers do most of their work at times of the day when search engines are less busy, but they typically visit frequently updated pages more often. This is something to keep in mind when you’re working on your pages. As you may want to perform updates locally and update them when they have been finished rather than updating bits and pieces and hoping that the search engine runs into the correct version.

Also, crawlers ignore some things: your site’s code, for example. Your site’s title and text – your ‘content’ – is the most important thing to a crawler. The fastest way to raise your site’s search engine ranking for specific key words is to implement them into your title and your content.

The Index.

Once the crawler has collected all that text, it is then stored and indexed. This allows people searching for keywords and phrases to get results relating to what they were searching for – their search results. Most sites will incorporate rating systems such as Google Page Ranks or Alexa rankings in positioning your site. These ratings are used to attempt to ensure that sites that are important receive more traffic than unimportant sites.

To see this in action, go to a search engine and type in a word. You’ll see some text on the page saying something like “results 1-10 of 345,000”. This means that the search engine’s index contains 345,000 pages it believes are related to the word you typed. If you wanted to, you could look through all these pages to find the information you’re looking for.

In order to understand rating systems more thoroughly consider your own site. When you place links on your site you generally due so in order to increase your users understanding of the content of your site. If every site in a particular field links to a particular site, this site is probably very important to that field and should, therefore, be listed highly in the lists of search engine results. Thus the basic ideology of Google Page Ranks.

SEO tutorials: Ins and outs

I would like bring up artilces in sequence, right now I am going through a program with Chris Taylor and Anam cara, I want to share few tips and techniques here. The materials are copy righted, and violating is unlawful. This shouldnt be used for commercial purpose.

Vita SEO factors

This is for people who are novice to SEO,Things which are consider as major factors determining the SE rankings are ( order of highest importance)

1. Key words (Key Factor)
2. Meta Tags
3. Incoming links
4. URL pattern
5. Design

What is Unethical SEO?

Unethical search engine optimization techniques can be unlawful, unscrupulous, or just in bad taste. You’d be surprised how many people use these methods. A lot of what is now called unethical SEO used to be accepted, until people went overboard and it started to have a negative affect on the web as a whole.

Keyword stuffing is when your site consists of long lists of keywords and nothing else. Don’t do it. There are ways to put keywords and phrases on your site without running the risk of getting banned.

You may have seen ‘invisible text’ if you’ve been selecting the text on a page and found words that are the same color as the background. This text is often lists of keywords put there in the hope of fooling search engine spiders while hiding the words from visitors. This is considered unethical, and you shouldn’t do it.

A doorway page is a page that isn’t designed for real people to see – it’s purely for the search engines and spiders, in an attempt to trick them into indexing the website in a higher position. This is a big no-no and should be avoided.

Even though unethical SEO is tempting, and does work, you shouldn’t do it – not only is it annoying to users, but it’s likely to get you banned from the search engines sooner or later. You sites’ search engine rankings just aren’t worth the risk. Use efficient SEO techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like unethical SEO.

SEO is a set of techniques used in order to attract visitors or prospective customers to your website, and the goal of a search engine is to provide high quality content to the users of the Internet. These two objectives are not in opposition, if you do SEO the way it should be done.

Google LSI

Getting traffic from organic search (free search engine listings) takes time, knowledge, and skill.

Just when you think you got it down, Wham! A new algorithm change and its back to square one.

This is the cycle that many online business people face. This is also the reason that the SEO business is growing at a phenomenal rate. The bottom line is there is only two ways to get traffic. They are to pay for it, or to pay for it!

No that is not a miss print. One way or another you will be paying to bring traffic to your website, either through the time you invest to do your own search engine optimization, or by paying someone else to do it for you.

The latest shakeup in the world of optimizing a website for better rankings is LSI.

LSI this of course is an acronym for Latent Semantic Indexing.

Yes it does sound a bit scary but take heart LSI may be the best thing to happen to search engine optimization for the average webmaster so far.