While Google has been criticized recently for being slow to update their UI, Search Engine Land reports that there are some changes planned for 2010. Google vice president of search product and user experience Marissa Mayer outlined several changes that are being planned to the UI, including adding a permanent left-hand column for search options, allowing the user to switch between All Results, Images, News and more.
Mayer said the changes are being instituted to bring more consistency to how and where search results appear. She compared the current way they are presented to free-form jazz music.
"I don't like jazz, because you never know what's going to happen next," Mayer said, continuing on to apply the musical style to Google's search results. "I've been calling this problem 'user interface jazz.' This result looks this way, and that result looks that way [something much different], and it really does slow you down."
Google is also moving to a three-pane design similar to the one pioneered by Ask.com. This would include leaving the search options window open permanently, with the results in the middle and ads on the right.
Mayer said that between one to three percent of Google users will see the changes soon as part of a six-week series of tests, with a full site rollout pending the feedback of the selected focus group.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Friday, November 27, 2009
7 steps to a perfect pay per click campaign
7 steps to a perfect pay per click campaign
by Rachelle Money, 3 September 2008
Pay Per Click can be a little daunting, especially for small businesses who don't know the tactics to use in this type of advertising campaign. Wordtracker's very own PPC expert, Ian Howie, takes us through the seven stages of Pay Per Click, including how to use keyword research to refine your strategy.
What is Pay Per Click?
Pay Per Click (PPC) is an online marketing and advertising formula, where the advertiser does not pay a fee to place an advert, but rather pays a certain amount of money each time someone clicks on their ad and is taken to their website.
In PPC you can choose the keywords or phrases you want your website to be associated with when a search is performed. This means you have to decide how much you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on the search result - but the upshot is that you are advertising to people who are already interested in you.
PPC expert
Ian Howie is a leading expert in Google AdWords and PPC. For 12 years he has worked in web creation and online marketing. He now works for 1UpSearch in London, helping businesses large and small create new marketing opportunities online.
Seven steps
So - you know your customer, you know what your approach is going to be, you know what you want to promote and you have a clear marketing message - now Howie is going to reveal the seven step strategy he applies to all his PPC campaigns.
1. Identify the product you are selling
Let's say you are selling iPod cases. Look at your range and decide which ones you want to promote. Look at what you're offering in terms of price, and how competitive you are in terms of price, customer service and delivery. Do some searches on Google to see which ads come up, and which offers your competitors are focusing on.
2. Keyword research and PPC
Use Wordtracker for keyword research, and you'll find it's particularly good for finding negative keywords. SEOs are mainly concerned with keywords they can include in their copy, but in PPC you have different match types - broad, phrase and exact.
If this is your first PPC campaign you can use broad matches to try and see what the market is doing and what people are typing in. Use exact match when you are sure they are the best keywords to go for. Another very popular technique is to use broad and phrase matches with a lot of negative keywords.
For example, if we entered 'iPod nano' with a broad match, the results would include ‘MP3 nano’ or even ‘iPod classic’. To prevent this we can add negative keywords into our campaign to stop ‘MP3’ or ‘classic’ coming in: this will eliminate a lot of wastage. It's hard to believe that people don't use negative keywords.
3. Build your PPC campaign piece by piece
Let’s say your iPod cases site has sections for Nano accessories, classic accessories, and one each for iTouch and iPhone etc. Each one of these sections is a campaign and each has its own ad group - so you will have many ad groups, and each ad group is really just a collection of keywords and adverts. Each type of Nano accessory would have its own AdGroup - furthermore, the AdGroups for iPod Nano cases can be broken down by color and by style.
A good PPC campaign should start with at least 10 AdGroups, and ideally (if you have time) 50 or more. For iPod Nano Accessories you may have over 20 to 30 groups just on Nano cases. The more relevant the keywords and the ads in each AdGroup, the better the Click Through Ratio (CTR). CTR is the ratio of clicks to impressions – it is the measurement of response. The better the CTR (ideally 1% or above) – the more likely you are of getting rewarded by Google by lowering the amount you pay for a click and increasing your ads position on the page.
If a customer is looking for a Black iPod Nano case specifically and they see an advert for a Black iPod Nano case, they are more likely to click on this one, rather than on a generic iPod Nano case advert with no mention of color. It's one of the most common mistakes people make - building generic ads doesn't mean you are targeting the widest possible range of people. The opposite is true - what you should do is dig into the long tail keywords - and the way we do that is by breaking down the ad groups into tightly themed groups of keywords and ads.
4. Build specific landing pages
Each of your products should have their own page, with a very clear 'buy button' and a nice description. Amazon do this very well. Link the ad straight to that page – the keyword should mirror the ad, which should mirror the landing page. It only takes people three to four seconds to make their decision so you have to make sure the page is quick to load.
5. Ad variation
PPC campaigns allow you to have different ad variations, so you can have text ads which can increase your CTR. By producing different kinds of ad you can monitor any patterns showing which ad is being clicked, and which aren't.
6. Report and analytics
Use Google Analytics or Yahoo Index Tools to help you look at your SEO and PPC keywords. Pay attention to your bounce rates because that is a very important indicator in PPC. If you are getting a high bounce rate of over 50%, but a high CTR rate (ie 3% or more), then you need to work on your landing pages.
Questions to ask – does your copy match the PPC ad? Is your copy above the fold? Is it clear what the user should do next? If you are getting both a high bounce rate and a low CTR rate – then you need to look at your PPC campaign. Look at your Ad text and ask yourself - does it match the Keyword Query? You may need more negative keywords so that you can get more relevant traffic.
7. Refine Your Campaign
Keep looking at your campaign, keep studying it, learn from it and keep refining it wherever possible. We apply the 80/20 rule. Out of all the keywords, only 20% to 40% may give you real value - ie sales. So never be afraid to pause Keywords or AdGroups that are not delivering a positive ROI.
It's a very interactive process with the end-users – use PPC to get people into your Landing Page and use Analytics to learn what they do after they get there.
Following this step will really help you make the most out of your PPC campaigns. And the great thing is that all the lessons you learn from PPC can be taken into your SEO campaigns.
For more help on PPC, have a look at Ian Howie's Trinity of PPC Success.
by Rachelle Money, 3 September 2008
Pay Per Click can be a little daunting, especially for small businesses who don't know the tactics to use in this type of advertising campaign. Wordtracker's very own PPC expert, Ian Howie, takes us through the seven stages of Pay Per Click, including how to use keyword research to refine your strategy.
What is Pay Per Click?
Pay Per Click (PPC) is an online marketing and advertising formula, where the advertiser does not pay a fee to place an advert, but rather pays a certain amount of money each time someone clicks on their ad and is taken to their website.
In PPC you can choose the keywords or phrases you want your website to be associated with when a search is performed. This means you have to decide how much you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on the search result - but the upshot is that you are advertising to people who are already interested in you.
PPC expert
Ian Howie is a leading expert in Google AdWords and PPC. For 12 years he has worked in web creation and online marketing. He now works for 1UpSearch in London, helping businesses large and small create new marketing opportunities online.
Seven steps
So - you know your customer, you know what your approach is going to be, you know what you want to promote and you have a clear marketing message - now Howie is going to reveal the seven step strategy he applies to all his PPC campaigns.
1. Identify the product you are selling
Let's say you are selling iPod cases. Look at your range and decide which ones you want to promote. Look at what you're offering in terms of price, and how competitive you are in terms of price, customer service and delivery. Do some searches on Google to see which ads come up, and which offers your competitors are focusing on.
2. Keyword research and PPC
Use Wordtracker for keyword research, and you'll find it's particularly good for finding negative keywords. SEOs are mainly concerned with keywords they can include in their copy, but in PPC you have different match types - broad, phrase and exact.
If this is your first PPC campaign you can use broad matches to try and see what the market is doing and what people are typing in. Use exact match when you are sure they are the best keywords to go for. Another very popular technique is to use broad and phrase matches with a lot of negative keywords.
For example, if we entered 'iPod nano' with a broad match, the results would include ‘MP3 nano’ or even ‘iPod classic’. To prevent this we can add negative keywords into our campaign to stop ‘MP3’ or ‘classic’ coming in: this will eliminate a lot of wastage. It's hard to believe that people don't use negative keywords.
3. Build your PPC campaign piece by piece
Let’s say your iPod cases site has sections for Nano accessories, classic accessories, and one each for iTouch and iPhone etc. Each one of these sections is a campaign and each has its own ad group - so you will have many ad groups, and each ad group is really just a collection of keywords and adverts. Each type of Nano accessory would have its own AdGroup - furthermore, the AdGroups for iPod Nano cases can be broken down by color and by style.
A good PPC campaign should start with at least 10 AdGroups, and ideally (if you have time) 50 or more. For iPod Nano Accessories you may have over 20 to 30 groups just on Nano cases. The more relevant the keywords and the ads in each AdGroup, the better the Click Through Ratio (CTR). CTR is the ratio of clicks to impressions – it is the measurement of response. The better the CTR (ideally 1% or above) – the more likely you are of getting rewarded by Google by lowering the amount you pay for a click and increasing your ads position on the page.
If a customer is looking for a Black iPod Nano case specifically and they see an advert for a Black iPod Nano case, they are more likely to click on this one, rather than on a generic iPod Nano case advert with no mention of color. It's one of the most common mistakes people make - building generic ads doesn't mean you are targeting the widest possible range of people. The opposite is true - what you should do is dig into the long tail keywords - and the way we do that is by breaking down the ad groups into tightly themed groups of keywords and ads.
4. Build specific landing pages
Each of your products should have their own page, with a very clear 'buy button' and a nice description. Amazon do this very well. Link the ad straight to that page – the keyword should mirror the ad, which should mirror the landing page. It only takes people three to four seconds to make their decision so you have to make sure the page is quick to load.
5. Ad variation
PPC campaigns allow you to have different ad variations, so you can have text ads which can increase your CTR. By producing different kinds of ad you can monitor any patterns showing which ad is being clicked, and which aren't.
6. Report and analytics
Use Google Analytics or Yahoo Index Tools to help you look at your SEO and PPC keywords. Pay attention to your bounce rates because that is a very important indicator in PPC. If you are getting a high bounce rate of over 50%, but a high CTR rate (ie 3% or more), then you need to work on your landing pages.
Questions to ask – does your copy match the PPC ad? Is your copy above the fold? Is it clear what the user should do next? If you are getting both a high bounce rate and a low CTR rate – then you need to look at your PPC campaign. Look at your Ad text and ask yourself - does it match the Keyword Query? You may need more negative keywords so that you can get more relevant traffic.
7. Refine Your Campaign
Keep looking at your campaign, keep studying it, learn from it and keep refining it wherever possible. We apply the 80/20 rule. Out of all the keywords, only 20% to 40% may give you real value - ie sales. So never be afraid to pause Keywords or AdGroups that are not delivering a positive ROI.
It's a very interactive process with the end-users – use PPC to get people into your Landing Page and use Analytics to learn what they do after they get there.
Following this step will really help you make the most out of your PPC campaigns. And the great thing is that all the lessons you learn from PPC can be taken into your SEO campaigns.
For more help on PPC, have a look at Ian Howie's Trinity of PPC Success.
10 SEO Tips
The Top 10 SEO Tips contained in this tutorial were created after years of experimentation with a half a dozen websites, mostly those of our clients who insisted they should be on the first page of the search engine results pages. We hope you find these SEO tips valuable. For an in-depth study of everything we know about search engine optimization, please read our eBook.
SEO Tip #1: Find the Best Keywords
It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore you should invest some energy into finding the best keywords. There are several SEO tools available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords. Tip: Don't be deceived by organizations that require you to register first. The two most popular resources are WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery.com.
Below is a screenshot from WT that shows the results you'll get when doing a query for "putter". Notice that "golf putters" has the highest search volume with 100 searches in the last 24 hours, yet there are over 100,000 websites to compete against. Using the tool's Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), you'll be able to see that "custom putter" would have a better chance at higher ranking, since there are only 2,640 competing.
Here's a key part of the top 10 SEO tips: When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous like we did in the example above for "putters". The results will always return suggestions, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of.
You can get less comprehensive results by using DigitalPoint's Keyword Suggestion Tool. This SEO tool will give you a summary of information without the KEI. Personally, I like to know how many people are competing before I design a web page.
SEO Tip #2: Discover Your Competitors
It's a fact and one of my top 10 SEO tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.
My tool of choice is SEO Elite, which digs through the major search engines by keyword to not only tell you who your competitors are, but also provides you with an in-depth analysis of each competitor. The analysis includes these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:
• Competitor rank in the Search Engines
• Number of incoming links
• What keywords are in the title of linking page
• % of links containing keywords in the link text
• The PageRank of linking pages
• The Alexa traffic ranking information
Here is a screenshot of their SEO software that shows the search results and the module that has the email functionality:
Stats, such as the above, play a critical part in determining what tools your website will need to compete in the Internet marketing competition. SEO Elite also offers you the ability to see who the website owner is and even send emails to all websites discovered to have quality link potential.
SEO Tip #3: Optimize Your Title
The Title and META tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. Us SEO Expert's have experimented with these two pieces of code to help us reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them. Don't click off this site until you've read the top 10 SEO tips below to see what I've discovered works best for search engine optimization.
SEO Tip #3: Optimizing Your Website Title
There are different theories about how long your Title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), my Top 10 SEO Tips for the title would be to keep it under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some may argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion.
Bar none the most important of the top 10 SEO tips involves your keywords. If you wish to be on the first page of the search results, you must include your keywords in your Title tag. Preferably before all other words in the Title. No need to repeat your keywords in the Title, that's interpreted as spam by the search engines. Here is an example of good Title:
This one excercise could make or break your SEO campaign. Click-Through Rate (CTR) plays an instrumental role in how relevant Google thinks your website is. By compelling users to click with clear call-to-actions (buy, order, download, beat, fix, etc) and by using value propositions (guaranteed, on sale now, etc), one can improve their CTR and search engine ranking. Oh, don't forget to squeeze your keywords in there as well.
SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your META Tags
META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about, and despite some SEO controversy, they still play an instrumental role in meta-based search engines. The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are:
1. description
2. keywords
Sequencing of these tags may be extremely important. I say "may" because SEO is mostly hypothesis due to the changing algorithms of the search engines. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, I've noticed a significant difference when I have the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come before the META description.
The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. See the OC Internet Advertising example above. There's also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. I've seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so I don't think the number of characters here plays any kind of role with the search engines.
However, if you want the listing to look clear and to the point, my Top 10 SEO Tips for this META tag would be to keep it under 150 characters and to not repeat your keywords more than 3 times. It may be a coincidence, but I've also noticed ranking improvements when I put my keywords at the beginning of the description. Here's the syntax:
e.g.
The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google's search engine algorithm. Along with being valuable to this top 10 SEO tips list, this tag is still important to many other search engines and should not be ignored. Based on my experience with this tag, you can have approximately 800 characters in this tag (including spaces).
SEO Tip: if you repeat your keywords more than 3 times it can be a pretty good indication to the search engine that you are trying to spam their search results. Also, don't waste your time including keywords that aren't used in the BODY section of your website, that could be seen as another spam technique. Here's the syntax used on this Top 10 SEO Tips page:
SEO Tip #5: Use Headings
In college and some high schools, essays are written using a standard guideline created by the Modern Language Association (MLA). These guidelines included how to write you cover page, title, paragraphs, how to cite references, etc. On the Web, we follow the W3C's guidelines as well as commonly accepted "best practices" for organizing a web page.
Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least H1-H3 when assembling your page. Using cascading style Sheets (CSS), I was able to make my h1 at the top of this page more appealing. Here's a piece of code you can pop into your heading:
Since a page full of headings would look just plain silly, my SEO tip would be to fill in the blank space with paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, images, and other content. Try to get at least 400+ words on each page.
SEO Tip #6: Use Title and ALT Attributes
More often then not, web addresses (URL's) do not contain the topic of the page. For example, the URL www.myspace.com says nothing about being a place to make friends. Where a site like www.placetomakefriends.com would tell Google right away that the site being pointed to is about making friends. So to be more specific about where we are pointing to in our links we add a title attribute and include our keywords.
Using the Title Attribute is an direct method of telling the search engines about the relevance of the link. It's also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to disabled people. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads Title and ALT attributes. The syntax is:
SEO Software
The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the Title Attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually disabled. Here's how you would use ALT in an IMG tag:
SEO Tip #7: Nomenclatures
Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "golf putters" you'll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It's not confirmed, but many SEO's have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media.
More important is your web page's filename, since many search engines now allow users to query using "inurl:" searches. Your filename for the golf putters page could be golf-putters.html or golf_putters.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename (as well as a Title or ALT attribute).
SEO Tip #8: Create a Site Map Page
PageRank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique voting system created by Google. I could spend two days trying to explain how PageRank works, but what it comes down to is having efficient navigation throughout your site. That where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked to the sitemap, it allows webcrawlers (and users) to quickly and easily find content. This SEO tip is one of my favorite of top 10 SEO tips.
It use to take 4 clicks to get to a product page at www.questinc.com. By creating a site map, users and search engines can now access any page on the site with only two clicks. The PageRank from these deep pages went from 0 to 2 in about 3 months and the ranking went from virtually not existent to #1 almost across the board for nearly 2,000 pages on their site.
Feel free to search Google for any of the terms on this catalog page, such as MITSUBISHI Monitor Repair. See how powerful a site map can truly be.
SEO Tip #9: Include a robots.txt File
By far the easiest top 10 SEO tips you will ever do as it relates to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type "User-agent: *". Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to "please feel free to crawl every page of my website".
Here's one of my best top 10 SEO tips: Because the search engine analyzes everything it indexes to determine what your website is all about, it might be a good idea to block folders and files that have nothing to do with the content we want to be analyzed. You can disallow unrelated files to be read by adding "Disallow: /folder_name/" or "Disallow: /filename.html". Here is an example of the robots.txt file on this site:
SEO Tip #10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google
Though you may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google's search engine result page, believe it or not that isn't Google's intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they've even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you'll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website.
For Google, these two pieces in the top 10 SEO tips would be to read the tutorial entitled How Do I Create a Sitemap File and to create your own. To view the one on this page, website simply right-click this SEO Tips Sitemap.xml file and save it to your desktop. Open the file with a text editor such as Notepad.
Effective 11/06, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will be using one standard for sitemaps. Below is a snippet of the standard code as listed at Sitemaps.org. Optional fields are lastmod, changefreq, and priority.
http://www.example.com/
2005-01-01
monthly
0.8
The equivilant to the sitemap.xml file is the urllist.txt for Yahoo!. Technically you can call the file whatever you want, but all it really contains is a list of every page on your website. Here's a screenshot of my urllist.txt:
SEO BONUS Tip: Validate Your Code
There are several ways to validate the accuracy of your website's source code. The four most important, in my opinion, are validating your search engine optimization, HTML, CSS and insuring that you have no broken links or images.
Start by analyzing broken links. One of the W3C's top 10 SEO tips would be for you to use their tool to validate links. If you have a lot of links on your website, this could take awhile.
Next, revisit the W3C to analyze HTML and CSS. Here is a link to the W3C's HTML Validation Tool and to their CSS Validation Tool.
The final step in the last of my Top 10 SEO Tips is to validate your search engine optimization. Without having to purchase software, the best online tool I've used is ScrubTheWeb's Analyze Your HTML tool. STW has built an extremely extensive online application that you'll wonder how you've lived with out.
One of my favorite features of STW's SEO Tool is their attempt to mimic a search engine. In other words, the results of the analysis will show you (theoretically) how search engine spiders may see the website.
Other SEO Tips
If you liked the SEO tips above, you're going to love my popular SEO eBook, entitled: The Four Layers of the SEO Model, How to Rank Higher in the Search Engines. It's packed full of more tips and tutorials, was well as some great ideas for developing incoming links.
Resource from http://www.top10seotips.com/
SEO Tip #1: Find the Best Keywords
It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore you should invest some energy into finding the best keywords. There are several SEO tools available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords. Tip: Don't be deceived by organizations that require you to register first. The two most popular resources are WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery.com.
Below is a screenshot from WT that shows the results you'll get when doing a query for "putter". Notice that "golf putters" has the highest search volume with 100 searches in the last 24 hours, yet there are over 100,000 websites to compete against. Using the tool's Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), you'll be able to see that "custom putter" would have a better chance at higher ranking, since there are only 2,640 competing.
Here's a key part of the top 10 SEO tips: When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous like we did in the example above for "putters". The results will always return suggestions, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of.
You can get less comprehensive results by using DigitalPoint's Keyword Suggestion Tool. This SEO tool will give you a summary of information without the KEI. Personally, I like to know how many people are competing before I design a web page.
SEO Tip #2: Discover Your Competitors
It's a fact and one of my top 10 SEO tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.
My tool of choice is SEO Elite, which digs through the major search engines by keyword to not only tell you who your competitors are, but also provides you with an in-depth analysis of each competitor. The analysis includes these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:
• Competitor rank in the Search Engines
• Number of incoming links
• What keywords are in the title of linking page
• % of links containing keywords in the link text
• The PageRank of linking pages
• The Alexa traffic ranking information
Here is a screenshot of their SEO software that shows the search results and the module that has the email functionality:
Stats, such as the above, play a critical part in determining what tools your website will need to compete in the Internet marketing competition. SEO Elite also offers you the ability to see who the website owner is and even send emails to all websites discovered to have quality link potential.
SEO Tip #3: Optimize Your Title
The Title and META tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. Us SEO Expert's have experimented with these two pieces of code to help us reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them. Don't click off this site until you've read the top 10 SEO tips below to see what I've discovered works best for search engine optimization.
SEO Tip #3: Optimizing Your Website Title
There are different theories about how long your Title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), my Top 10 SEO Tips for the title would be to keep it under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some may argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion.
Bar none the most important of the top 10 SEO tips involves your keywords. If you wish to be on the first page of the search results, you must include your keywords in your Title tag. Preferably before all other words in the Title. No need to repeat your keywords in the Title, that's interpreted as spam by the search engines. Here is an example of good Title:
This one excercise could make or break your SEO campaign. Click-Through Rate (CTR) plays an instrumental role in how relevant Google thinks your website is. By compelling users to click with clear call-to-actions (buy, order, download, beat, fix, etc) and by using value propositions (guaranteed, on sale now, etc), one can improve their CTR and search engine ranking. Oh, don't forget to squeeze your keywords in there as well.
SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your META Tags
META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about, and despite some SEO controversy, they still play an instrumental role in meta-based search engines. The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are:
1. description
2. keywords
Sequencing of these tags may be extremely important. I say "may" because SEO is mostly hypothesis due to the changing algorithms of the search engines. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, I've noticed a significant difference when I have the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come before the META description.
The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. See the OC Internet Advertising example above. There's also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. I've seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so I don't think the number of characters here plays any kind of role with the search engines.
However, if you want the listing to look clear and to the point, my Top 10 SEO Tips for this META tag would be to keep it under 150 characters and to not repeat your keywords more than 3 times. It may be a coincidence, but I've also noticed ranking improvements when I put my keywords at the beginning of the description. Here's the syntax:
e.g.
The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google's search engine algorithm. Along with being valuable to this top 10 SEO tips list, this tag is still important to many other search engines and should not be ignored. Based on my experience with this tag, you can have approximately 800 characters in this tag (including spaces).
SEO Tip: if you repeat your keywords more than 3 times it can be a pretty good indication to the search engine that you are trying to spam their search results. Also, don't waste your time including keywords that aren't used in the BODY section of your website, that could be seen as another spam technique. Here's the syntax used on this Top 10 SEO Tips page:
SEO Tip #5: Use Headings
In college and some high schools, essays are written using a standard guideline created by the Modern Language Association (MLA). These guidelines included how to write you cover page, title, paragraphs, how to cite references, etc. On the Web, we follow the W3C's guidelines as well as commonly accepted "best practices" for organizing a web page.
Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least H1-H3 when assembling your page. Using cascading style Sheets (CSS), I was able to make my h1 at the top of this page more appealing. Here's a piece of code you can pop into your heading:
Since a page full of headings would look just plain silly, my SEO tip would be to fill in the blank space with paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, images, and other content. Try to get at least 400+ words on each page.
SEO Tip #6: Use Title and ALT Attributes
More often then not, web addresses (URL's) do not contain the topic of the page. For example, the URL www.myspace.com says nothing about being a place to make friends. Where a site like www.placetomakefriends.com would tell Google right away that the site being pointed to is about making friends. So to be more specific about where we are pointing to in our links we add a title attribute and include our keywords.
Using the Title Attribute is an direct method of telling the search engines about the relevance of the link. It's also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to disabled people. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads Title and ALT attributes. The syntax is:
SEO Software
The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the Title Attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually disabled. Here's how you would use ALT in an IMG tag:
SEO Tip #7: Nomenclatures
Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "golf putters" you'll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It's not confirmed, but many SEO's have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media.
More important is your web page's filename, since many search engines now allow users to query using "inurl:" searches. Your filename for the golf putters page could be golf-putters.html or golf_putters.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename (as well as a Title or ALT attribute).
SEO Tip #8: Create a Site Map Page
PageRank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique voting system created by Google. I could spend two days trying to explain how PageRank works, but what it comes down to is having efficient navigation throughout your site. That where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked to the sitemap, it allows webcrawlers (and users) to quickly and easily find content. This SEO tip is one of my favorite of top 10 SEO tips.
It use to take 4 clicks to get to a product page at www.questinc.com. By creating a site map, users and search engines can now access any page on the site with only two clicks. The PageRank from these deep pages went from 0 to 2 in about 3 months and the ranking went from virtually not existent to #1 almost across the board for nearly 2,000 pages on their site.
Feel free to search Google for any of the terms on this catalog page, such as MITSUBISHI Monitor Repair. See how powerful a site map can truly be.
SEO Tip #9: Include a robots.txt File
By far the easiest top 10 SEO tips you will ever do as it relates to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type "User-agent: *". Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to "please feel free to crawl every page of my website".
Here's one of my best top 10 SEO tips: Because the search engine analyzes everything it indexes to determine what your website is all about, it might be a good idea to block folders and files that have nothing to do with the content we want to be analyzed. You can disallow unrelated files to be read by adding "Disallow: /folder_name/" or "Disallow: /filename.html". Here is an example of the robots.txt file on this site:
SEO Tip #10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google
Though you may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google's search engine result page, believe it or not that isn't Google's intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they've even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you'll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website.
For Google, these two pieces in the top 10 SEO tips would be to read the tutorial entitled How Do I Create a Sitemap File and to create your own. To view the one on this page, website simply right-click this SEO Tips Sitemap.xml file and save it to your desktop. Open the file with a text editor such as Notepad.
Effective 11/06, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will be using one standard for sitemaps. Below is a snippet of the standard code as listed at Sitemaps.org. Optional fields are lastmod, changefreq, and priority.
The equivilant to the sitemap.xml file is the urllist.txt for Yahoo!. Technically you can call the file whatever you want, but all it really contains is a list of every page on your website. Here's a screenshot of my urllist.txt:
SEO BONUS Tip: Validate Your Code
There are several ways to validate the accuracy of your website's source code. The four most important, in my opinion, are validating your search engine optimization, HTML, CSS and insuring that you have no broken links or images.
Start by analyzing broken links. One of the W3C's top 10 SEO tips would be for you to use their tool to validate links. If you have a lot of links on your website, this could take awhile.
Next, revisit the W3C to analyze HTML and CSS. Here is a link to the W3C's HTML Validation Tool and to their CSS Validation Tool.
The final step in the last of my Top 10 SEO Tips is to validate your search engine optimization. Without having to purchase software, the best online tool I've used is ScrubTheWeb's Analyze Your HTML tool. STW has built an extremely extensive online application that you'll wonder how you've lived with out.
One of my favorite features of STW's SEO Tool is their attempt to mimic a search engine. In other words, the results of the analysis will show you (theoretically) how search engine spiders may see the website.
Other SEO Tips
If you liked the SEO tips above, you're going to love my popular SEO eBook, entitled: The Four Layers of the SEO Model, How to Rank Higher in the Search Engines. It's packed full of more tips and tutorials, was well as some great ideas for developing incoming links.
Resource from http://www.top10seotips.com/
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Social Media Optimization vs. Search Engine Optimization
SMO is not a paradigm shift away from the Search Engine Optimization process, but rather a method making a site more easily linked to, increasing it's visibility in social media searches on custom search engines, and more commonly included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs. A basic SMO approach is to add buttons to bookmark pages at 'del.icio.us' or 'furl', to 'digg this article', to share on 'Facebook', etc.
But it's not as easy as it sounds. Users, unlike web crawlers, can be easily put off with shameless self promotion. So finding the right balance when it comes to adding links is essential to building brand recognition and improving overall site visibility. SMO can be considered an advanced form of word to word and viral marketing using social networks. SMO is tricky because there is no general course of action, since current trends and fads, new concepts as well as user's fickleness factors into the process.
How it works
The ever-growing SMO components list provides you with the option of focusing the optimization process on one or on a combination of components.
• Blogging
• Social Bookmarking
• Rating Systems • Podcasting
• Social Networking
• User Reviews • Video Sharing
• Collaborative Ranking
• Wikis
SMO always demands quality, uniqueness and user oriented content similar to SEO, but with the advantage that distribution of your content always increases your credibility. This credibility is the result of linking on one hand and users' trust on other. Bookmarking and tagging, especially social bookmarking can play a crucial role in helping your content to travel round the Internet.
Advantages of Social Media Optimization
The importance of SMO is visible in the almost immediate benefits it awards both the individual and institution. The low cost high return advantage is the biggest plus point of SMO. Also, perceived commercial overtones are less, giving your content a natural feel. The online communities can promote and sustain a substantial traffic increase to your website. Finally, SMO is non-offensive to SEO and will not disrupt other traffic to your website.
Clearly, Social Media Optimization offers advantages which complement Search Engine Optimization and help direct more traffic thereby increasing revenue and visibility.
But it's not as easy as it sounds. Users, unlike web crawlers, can be easily put off with shameless self promotion. So finding the right balance when it comes to adding links is essential to building brand recognition and improving overall site visibility. SMO can be considered an advanced form of word to word and viral marketing using social networks. SMO is tricky because there is no general course of action, since current trends and fads, new concepts as well as user's fickleness factors into the process.
How it works
The ever-growing SMO components list provides you with the option of focusing the optimization process on one or on a combination of components.
• Blogging
• Social Bookmarking
• Rating Systems • Podcasting
• Social Networking
• User Reviews • Video Sharing
• Collaborative Ranking
• Wikis
SMO always demands quality, uniqueness and user oriented content similar to SEO, but with the advantage that distribution of your content always increases your credibility. This credibility is the result of linking on one hand and users' trust on other. Bookmarking and tagging, especially social bookmarking can play a crucial role in helping your content to travel round the Internet.
Advantages of Social Media Optimization
The importance of SMO is visible in the almost immediate benefits it awards both the individual and institution. The low cost high return advantage is the biggest plus point of SMO. Also, perceived commercial overtones are less, giving your content a natural feel. The online communities can promote and sustain a substantial traffic increase to your website. Finally, SMO is non-offensive to SEO and will not disrupt other traffic to your website.
Clearly, Social Media Optimization offers advantages which complement Search Engine Optimization and help direct more traffic thereby increasing revenue and visibility.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Many people are overwhelmed with abbreviations and new media terms. Below follows an explanation of a number of popular and often-used terms related to search engine marketing. This list is constantly being updated.
Registration: (Zie Submission)
Algorithm: A combination of rules that a search engine uses to position a website in its result lists when a search is performed. No search engine reveals to the outside world exactly how its algorithms work. This protects them from their competition and prevents spam indexing.
Backlinks: All the links to a specific web page. Also called "inbound links".
Banning: WWeb pages that are removed from the index of a search engine due to spam indexing and/or because these web pages do not satisfy the guidelines.
Cloaking: In search engine marketing terms, this is the action that ensures that search engines take up the content of a URL that is different from that which the surfer sees displayed. This can be done using different techniques. Different search engines have clear rules against prohibited cloaking. Those who violate these rules run the risk of their web pages being punished and in the worst case of being banned from the index of the search engines. Allowable cloaking usually occurs when these search engines also offer PPC. All who offer cloaking services should be able to present their permitted method to access the search engines. If not, one must be able to explain what the risks of prohibited cloaking are.
Content: The content of a website.
Conversion: The relationship between the visitors of a website and the actions undertaken is considered a conversion. This includes sales made or a request for more information, and is often expressed as a percentage. If a website has 50 visitors and 10 of them take action, the site has a 20% conversion.
CPC/Cost Per Click: The system in which advertisers pay an agreed amount for each click that someone makes on a link that takes them to their website.
CPM: : The system in which advertisers pay an agreed amount for the number of times their advertisement is seen by a consumer, regardless of the further action taken by the consumer. It is intensively used in the case of printed material, sending information and direct marketing, as well as in the online sales of banner advertisements. CPM stands for "cost per thousand", since the advertisements are often sold in blocks of 1,000.
Crawler: A search engine component that collects lists by automatically "crawling" or searching through the web. A search engine crawler (also called a "spider" or "robot"), follows the links to web pages. It makes copies of the web pages found and stores these in the search engine index.
Delisting:This is when pages are removed from a search engine index. This can happen when they are banned or for another reason, such as a fault in the search engine system.
Directories: A type of search engine in which the lists are gathered by human effort instead of via automatic "crawlers". In directories, the websites are checked, summarised in approximately 25 words and placed in a given category.
GetawayPage / Doorway Page: A web page made with the hope of scoring well in the free search engine lists for a specific period of time, but one that in itself does not provide much information to the visitor. Instead, visitors often will only see something enticing on the page that leads them to other pages (i.e. click here to enter), or they are automatically quickly taken past the page. In the case of cloaking, the visitor will not even see the page. Several search engines have rules against "doorway" pages, while in general they are allowed by paid programmes. They are also called "bridge" pages, "gateway" pages and "jump" pages.
Graphical Search Inventory: Banners and other types of advertising units that can be synchronised with keywords. These consist of pop-ups, browser toolbars and rich media.
Index: The collection of information a search engine has that searchers can query against. With crawler-based search engines, the index typically consists of copies of all the web pages they have found from crawling the web. With human-powered directories, the index contains the summaries of all web sites that have been categorised.
Landing Page: The specific web page that a visitor ultimately reaches after clicking a search engine listing. Marketers attempt to improve conversion rates by creatively testing various landing pages. This encompasses the entire user experience including navigation, layout and copy. Source: Did-It.com.
Link Popularity: A raw count of how "popular" a page is based on the number of backlinks it has. It does not factor in link context or link quality, which are also important elements in how search engines make use of links to impact rankings.
Link Text: The text that is included in a link. Example: search engine is a link that contains the text "search engine".
Listings: The information that appears in a search engine as the result of a search.
Meta Search Engine: A search engine that uses the lists of two or more different search engines instead of conducting its own search.
Meta Tags: : Information placed on a web page that is not intended to be seen by the visitor but rather to send information to search engines, browser software and other applications.
Meta Description Tag: Gives the authors of a web page the ability to define how their pages must be described in the search engine lists. Not all search engines use this tag.
Meta Keywords Tag: Gives the authors of a web page the ability to add text to their pages in order to score better in the search engine lists. Not all search engines use this tag.
Meta Robots Tag: Gives the authors of a web page the ability to suppress the indexing of their web pages by search engines, which is especially useful for those that cannot create robots.txt files. The Robots Exclusion page provides official details.
Optimisation: Making a website search-engine-friendly, so that each search engine finds the website, assesses it positively and places it at the top of the results when a search is made.
Organic Listings: : Listings that search engines do not sell (unlike paid listings). Instead, sites appear solely because a search engine has deemed it editorially important for them to be included, regardless of payment. Paid inclusion content is also often considered "organic" even though it is paid for. This is because that content usually appears intermixed with unpaid organic results.
Outbound Links: : links on a given web page that lead to other web pages, regardless of whether they remain linked to the same website or lead to other websites.
PPC/Pay Per Click: Stands for "pay-per-click" and means the same as "cost-per-click".
Paid Inclusion: An advertising program in which, for the payment of a fee, pages are guaranteed inclusion in the index of the search engines. This paid addition, however, provides no guarantee concerning the organic ranking. For example, Looksmart is a directory that indexes pages and sites based not on position but on relevance. Sellers pay to be included in the directory on a CPC (Cost per Click) or Cost-per-URL basis, without being guaranteed a specific ranking.
Paid Listings: The lists that search engines sell to advertisers, usually by paid placement or paid inclusion programmes. These are the opposite of organic scores, which are not sold.
Pay-for-Performance: A name popularised by a number of search engines as a synonym for pay-per-click. Advertisers pay only for the advertisements that generate clicks and traffic. This is in contrast to CPM-based advertisements in which the advertisements themselves cost money, even if they produce no clicks.
Query: See search term.
Ranking/Positie: : The ranking a specific web page or website has in a search engine. For example, a web page about apples can be high on the lists as the result of a search on the word "apples". Nevertheless, the "rank" indicates its precise position, whether on the first page of the results, the second page or perhaps the 200th page. As alternative, one could also say to be first among all the results, or be ranked 12th or generally 111th. All things considered, the fact that a page is mentioned only means that it can be found within a search engine as the result of a search, not that it automatically scores well for this search. This is also called positioning.
Reciprocal Link: An exchange of links between two websites.
Registration: See submission.
Results Page: The page that is displayed after a user enters a "search" is called the "results page". It is sometimes also called the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
Robot: See crawler.
Robots.txt: A file used to prevent the indexing of web pages by the search engines.
ROI: Abbreviation for "Return on investment" and refers to the percentage of profit or revenue resulting from a specific activity. For example, one can measure the ROI of a paid campaign by comparing the total amount allocated to the campaign (€ 200) to the amount of revenue produced (€ 1.000). In this case the ROI is 500%.
Top positions: sites located at the top of the result lists when a search is executed.
Spam:Regardless of the search engines, a marketing method that search engines consider as harmful and thus as unable to provide relevant, qualitative results. Some search engines have written guidelines concerning what they consider to be spamming. In the end, any activity can be considered by a given search engine to be harmful and as spam, regardless of whether there are published guidelines. An example of spam is nonsensical doorway pages that are designed to satisfy algorithmsin an unethical way. This is only one example. Determining what is and is not spam is not always easy due to the fact that different search engines have different standards. A specific search engine can have different standards concerning what is allowed depending on whether the content is gathered in an organic way or via paid inclusion. Spam is also called spamdexing.
SEA: Search Engine Advertising
SEM: Search Engine Marketing
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
SERPS: See result page
Shopping Search: Shopping with shopping search engines allows customers to search for products and prices in a search environment. Shopping sites can pay to be present on a number of "shopping" search engines.
Spider: See crawler
Submission: The transaction that includes a URL in the index of a search engines. Unless done by paid registration, in general this addition means nothing. Moreover, the addition of the URL does not help your scores in a crawler-based search engine unless specific SEO efforts were made. This registration can be done manually (i.e. you fill in an online form to accomplish the addition) or it can be automated via a software application. (See alsoRegistration).
Usability: : A measurement of how easy it is to use something. This can be a piece of software, hardware or a website. In general this is defined in terms of the needs of the user. Often graphics designers as well as technical people must take account of usability. Usability describes the complete spectrum of that which affects the success of a website.
XML Feeds: A form of paid registration in which a search engine is fed information on pages via XML, rather than collecting this information by crawling through actual pages. Sellers can pay to have their pages added to a spider-based search index, or do so yearly per URL or on a CPC (Cost Per Click) basis that is based on an XML document that represents each page on the client site. New media types are being introduced for paid inclusion, including graphics, video, audio, and rich media.
Search Engines: : Each Internet service designed to provide Internet users/surfers the ability to find information on the Internet via this database.
Search Terms: : (search) words entered by someone into a search engine to obtain sites as a result.
Registration: (Zie Submission)
Algorithm: A combination of rules that a search engine uses to position a website in its result lists when a search is performed. No search engine reveals to the outside world exactly how its algorithms work. This protects them from their competition and prevents spam indexing.
Backlinks: All the links to a specific web page. Also called "inbound links".
Banning: WWeb pages that are removed from the index of a search engine due to spam indexing and/or because these web pages do not satisfy the guidelines.
Cloaking: In search engine marketing terms, this is the action that ensures that search engines take up the content of a URL that is different from that which the surfer sees displayed. This can be done using different techniques. Different search engines have clear rules against prohibited cloaking. Those who violate these rules run the risk of their web pages being punished and in the worst case of being banned from the index of the search engines. Allowable cloaking usually occurs when these search engines also offer PPC. All who offer cloaking services should be able to present their permitted method to access the search engines. If not, one must be able to explain what the risks of prohibited cloaking are.
Content: The content of a website.
Conversion: The relationship between the visitors of a website and the actions undertaken is considered a conversion. This includes sales made or a request for more information, and is often expressed as a percentage. If a website has 50 visitors and 10 of them take action, the site has a 20% conversion.
CPC/Cost Per Click: The system in which advertisers pay an agreed amount for each click that someone makes on a link that takes them to their website.
CPM: : The system in which advertisers pay an agreed amount for the number of times their advertisement is seen by a consumer, regardless of the further action taken by the consumer. It is intensively used in the case of printed material, sending information and direct marketing, as well as in the online sales of banner advertisements. CPM stands for "cost per thousand", since the advertisements are often sold in blocks of 1,000.
Crawler: A search engine component that collects lists by automatically "crawling" or searching through the web. A search engine crawler (also called a "spider" or "robot"), follows the links to web pages. It makes copies of the web pages found and stores these in the search engine index.
Delisting:This is when pages are removed from a search engine index. This can happen when they are banned or for another reason, such as a fault in the search engine system.
Directories: A type of search engine in which the lists are gathered by human effort instead of via automatic "crawlers". In directories, the websites are checked, summarised in approximately 25 words and placed in a given category.
GetawayPage / Doorway Page: A web page made with the hope of scoring well in the free search engine lists for a specific period of time, but one that in itself does not provide much information to the visitor. Instead, visitors often will only see something enticing on the page that leads them to other pages (i.e. click here to enter), or they are automatically quickly taken past the page. In the case of cloaking, the visitor will not even see the page. Several search engines have rules against "doorway" pages, while in general they are allowed by paid programmes. They are also called "bridge" pages, "gateway" pages and "jump" pages.
Graphical Search Inventory: Banners and other types of advertising units that can be synchronised with keywords. These consist of pop-ups, browser toolbars and rich media.
Index: The collection of information a search engine has that searchers can query against. With crawler-based search engines, the index typically consists of copies of all the web pages they have found from crawling the web. With human-powered directories, the index contains the summaries of all web sites that have been categorised.
Landing Page: The specific web page that a visitor ultimately reaches after clicking a search engine listing. Marketers attempt to improve conversion rates by creatively testing various landing pages. This encompasses the entire user experience including navigation, layout and copy. Source: Did-It.com.
Link Popularity: A raw count of how "popular" a page is based on the number of backlinks it has. It does not factor in link context or link quality, which are also important elements in how search engines make use of links to impact rankings.
Link Text: The text that is included in a link. Example: search engine is a link that contains the text "search engine".
Listings: The information that appears in a search engine as the result of a search.
Meta Search Engine: A search engine that uses the lists of two or more different search engines instead of conducting its own search.
Meta Tags: : Information placed on a web page that is not intended to be seen by the visitor but rather to send information to search engines, browser software and other applications.
Meta Description Tag: Gives the authors of a web page the ability to define how their pages must be described in the search engine lists. Not all search engines use this tag.
Meta Keywords Tag: Gives the authors of a web page the ability to add text to their pages in order to score better in the search engine lists. Not all search engines use this tag.
Meta Robots Tag: Gives the authors of a web page the ability to suppress the indexing of their web pages by search engines, which is especially useful for those that cannot create robots.txt files. The Robots Exclusion page provides official details.
Optimisation: Making a website search-engine-friendly, so that each search engine finds the website, assesses it positively and places it at the top of the results when a search is made.
Organic Listings: : Listings that search engines do not sell (unlike paid listings). Instead, sites appear solely because a search engine has deemed it editorially important for them to be included, regardless of payment. Paid inclusion content is also often considered "organic" even though it is paid for. This is because that content usually appears intermixed with unpaid organic results.
Outbound Links: : links on a given web page that lead to other web pages, regardless of whether they remain linked to the same website or lead to other websites.
PPC/Pay Per Click: Stands for "pay-per-click" and means the same as "cost-per-click".
Paid Inclusion: An advertising program in which, for the payment of a fee, pages are guaranteed inclusion in the index of the search engines. This paid addition, however, provides no guarantee concerning the organic ranking. For example, Looksmart is a directory that indexes pages and sites based not on position but on relevance. Sellers pay to be included in the directory on a CPC (Cost per Click) or Cost-per-URL basis, without being guaranteed a specific ranking.
Paid Listings: The lists that search engines sell to advertisers, usually by paid placement or paid inclusion programmes. These are the opposite of organic scores, which are not sold.
Pay-for-Performance: A name popularised by a number of search engines as a synonym for pay-per-click. Advertisers pay only for the advertisements that generate clicks and traffic. This is in contrast to CPM-based advertisements in which the advertisements themselves cost money, even if they produce no clicks.
Query: See search term.
Ranking/Positie: : The ranking a specific web page or website has in a search engine. For example, a web page about apples can be high on the lists as the result of a search on the word "apples". Nevertheless, the "rank" indicates its precise position, whether on the first page of the results, the second page or perhaps the 200th page. As alternative, one could also say to be first among all the results, or be ranked 12th or generally 111th. All things considered, the fact that a page is mentioned only means that it can be found within a search engine as the result of a search, not that it automatically scores well for this search. This is also called positioning.
Reciprocal Link: An exchange of links between two websites.
Registration: See submission.
Results Page: The page that is displayed after a user enters a "search" is called the "results page". It is sometimes also called the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
Robot: See crawler.
Robots.txt: A file used to prevent the indexing of web pages by the search engines.
ROI: Abbreviation for "Return on investment" and refers to the percentage of profit or revenue resulting from a specific activity. For example, one can measure the ROI of a paid campaign by comparing the total amount allocated to the campaign (€ 200) to the amount of revenue produced (€ 1.000). In this case the ROI is 500%.
Top positions: sites located at the top of the result lists when a search is executed.
Spam:Regardless of the search engines, a marketing method that search engines consider as harmful and thus as unable to provide relevant, qualitative results. Some search engines have written guidelines concerning what they consider to be spamming. In the end, any activity can be considered by a given search engine to be harmful and as spam, regardless of whether there are published guidelines. An example of spam is nonsensical doorway pages that are designed to satisfy algorithmsin an unethical way. This is only one example. Determining what is and is not spam is not always easy due to the fact that different search engines have different standards. A specific search engine can have different standards concerning what is allowed depending on whether the content is gathered in an organic way or via paid inclusion. Spam is also called spamdexing.
SEA: Search Engine Advertising
SEM: Search Engine Marketing
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
SERPS: See result page
Shopping Search: Shopping with shopping search engines allows customers to search for products and prices in a search environment. Shopping sites can pay to be present on a number of "shopping" search engines.
Spider: See crawler
Submission: The transaction that includes a URL in the index of a search engines. Unless done by paid registration, in general this addition means nothing. Moreover, the addition of the URL does not help your scores in a crawler-based search engine unless specific SEO efforts were made. This registration can be done manually (i.e. you fill in an online form to accomplish the addition) or it can be automated via a software application. (See alsoRegistration).
Usability: : A measurement of how easy it is to use something. This can be a piece of software, hardware or a website. In general this is defined in terms of the needs of the user. Often graphics designers as well as technical people must take account of usability. Usability describes the complete spectrum of that which affects the success of a website.
XML Feeds: A form of paid registration in which a search engine is fed information on pages via XML, rather than collecting this information by crawling through actual pages. Sellers can pay to have their pages added to a spider-based search index, or do so yearly per URL or on a CPC (Cost Per Click) basis that is based on an XML document that represents each page on the client site. New media types are being introduced for paid inclusion, including graphics, video, audio, and rich media.
Search Engines: : Each Internet service designed to provide Internet users/surfers the ability to find information on the Internet via this database.
Search Terms: : (search) words entered by someone into a search engine to obtain sites as a result.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Manipur, the land of jewels, gateway to east India, bordered on the north, west and south by the hill tracts of Nagaland, Assam and Mizoram is identified by some historians as the setting for episodes of the Mahabharata epic. The land of misty mornings, mountains and plains that lies just next to Burma was formed, according to legend, when Lord Shiva touched the point of his trident to the earth and created a lake which formed the background for his dance with his consort, Panthoibi. Legend also has it that Manipur was the land where Arjuna, the unerring marksman and the most courageous of the five Pandava brothers in the epic, fell in love with Chitrangada, the daughter of a local king and married her. Manipur's association with dance goes back to the gandharvas and the apsaras (celestial beings) as well as Arjuna, Balarama and Narada (epic heroes).The land is also the birthplace of many folk and community dances as well as the youngest but the most distinctive form of classical dance in the country - the Ras Lila. The origin of the Rasa dances were rooted in a dream of Rajasthani Bhagya Chandra Maharaj (1763-1798) where he saw Lord Krishna in dance and merriment with his love, Radha, and the other gopikas (milkmaids). Even today the raiment worn in the Ras Lila, the stiff under skirt and the short upper one reaching up to the knees, are attributed to King Bhagya Chandra Maharaja's dream.
The Ras Lila dances though in appearance a folk community dance form, reveal highly stylized and honed characteristics. The basic theme of the Ras Lila is the love of Radha and Lord Krishna and their differences and tiffs and making-up and the final joyous celebration of eternal togetherness. They are portrayed as the ideal couple, the ideal lovers. Though the theme itself and the strong vein of classicism evident in the Ras Lila seem to suggest an earlier origin, it was really in the 18th century that the Ras Lila flowered and blossomed into a fine classical dance form. What today goes by the term 'classical Manipuri dance' is based on a foundation laid by King Chandra Kirti (1850-56).
The five Rasas of the finely sculptured Manipuri Rasa tradition each have a specific occasion and season at which to be performed. The six main phases of the dance form are generally composed of an initial stage where Lord Krishna appears and translates his emotions into natya (dance) and abhinaya (expression). Radhya follows and they dance in unison. This forms the Ras Lila proper and is followed by bhangi or argument during which one or the other piqued lover refuses to participate in the general merriment. The lover then proceeds to appease the dejected one and persuades him or her to forgive and join in the dancing again. Milan or reunion of the lovers is then celebrated along with the gopis and gopikas. The final stage is one of prayer where both Radha and the gopis pledge never-ending devotion and trust.In each of the Rasas, however, the sequence of the stages may differ. Maha Rasa, the most elaborate of the Rasas is performed during kartika (November) during the full moon. It depicts the parting of the lovers. Radha threatens suicide in a desperate attempt to impress upon Krishna the depth and intensity of her love. Krishna returns.
Basant Rasa is performed in spring (March-April). The focus in this Rasa is a serious quarrel between Radha and Krishna when he reneges an agreement with his love. a painful separation follows. Latter, a contrite Krishna returns to plead with her. In the Kunj Rasa, joy at togetherness even in the seemingly trivial occupations of daily life is the main theme. Nitya Rasa can be performed on any day of the year. Diva Rasa has to be performed only during the day. The Ashta Gopi/Ashta Shyam Rasa is performed during spring and depicts eight gopis in joyous celebration with eight forms of Lord Krishna. In the Natha Rasa eight gopis sport with Krishna in a magnificent show of colour, mime and facial expression. The poetry of the Rasa dancers is based on the Bhagavat Purana and the verses of poet Jayadeva in the Gita Govinda written in the 12th century. Occasionally women singers take over the singing of the verses allowing the dancers to concentrate purely on the movements and the mime. During the most popular festival of Lai Haroba, the rituals enact the formation of cosmos, the creation and destruction, very symbolically, by placing leaves (the male and the female principle) in the lake at the culmination of a ritual procession. The Jatras (a form of ballet) are usually held during the three major seasons in the annual cycle. The Jhula jatra is performed in autumn and during the monsoon; the Dhol Jatra in winter and the Rath jatra in spring. Men and women sing and dance hand in hand. Among the other popular dances of Manipur is the Pung Cholam where performers dance with the pung or mridanga (king of drum) to amazingly agile and synchronized movements. There is also the Thabal Chongba performed in moonlight in March. But the Manipuri Rasa tradition of classical dance remains the most distinctive and alluring among the classical Indian dance forms in its raiments, its expressions, its music and its very character.
I just saw the picture of the wedding dress from Manipur called Poloi. I have to say it's really amazing. I mean how can someone walk in that? or even sit down? I searched around and found out that they also wear it when they play out Ras Leela. It also said that the dress is sewn on the body. I still can't see how it can be comfortable at all.
The Ras Lila dances though in appearance a folk community dance form, reveal highly stylized and honed characteristics. The basic theme of the Ras Lila is the love of Radha and Lord Krishna and their differences and tiffs and making-up and the final joyous celebration of eternal togetherness. They are portrayed as the ideal couple, the ideal lovers. Though the theme itself and the strong vein of classicism evident in the Ras Lila seem to suggest an earlier origin, it was really in the 18th century that the Ras Lila flowered and blossomed into a fine classical dance form. What today goes by the term 'classical Manipuri dance' is based on a foundation laid by King Chandra Kirti (1850-56).
The five Rasas of the finely sculptured Manipuri Rasa tradition each have a specific occasion and season at which to be performed. The six main phases of the dance form are generally composed of an initial stage where Lord Krishna appears and translates his emotions into natya (dance) and abhinaya (expression). Radhya follows and they dance in unison. This forms the Ras Lila proper and is followed by bhangi or argument during which one or the other piqued lover refuses to participate in the general merriment. The lover then proceeds to appease the dejected one and persuades him or her to forgive and join in the dancing again. Milan or reunion of the lovers is then celebrated along with the gopis and gopikas. The final stage is one of prayer where both Radha and the gopis pledge never-ending devotion and trust.In each of the Rasas, however, the sequence of the stages may differ. Maha Rasa, the most elaborate of the Rasas is performed during kartika (November) during the full moon. It depicts the parting of the lovers. Radha threatens suicide in a desperate attempt to impress upon Krishna the depth and intensity of her love. Krishna returns.
Basant Rasa is performed in spring (March-April). The focus in this Rasa is a serious quarrel between Radha and Krishna when he reneges an agreement with his love. a painful separation follows. Latter, a contrite Krishna returns to plead with her. In the Kunj Rasa, joy at togetherness even in the seemingly trivial occupations of daily life is the main theme. Nitya Rasa can be performed on any day of the year. Diva Rasa has to be performed only during the day. The Ashta Gopi/Ashta Shyam Rasa is performed during spring and depicts eight gopis in joyous celebration with eight forms of Lord Krishna. In the Natha Rasa eight gopis sport with Krishna in a magnificent show of colour, mime and facial expression. The poetry of the Rasa dancers is based on the Bhagavat Purana and the verses of poet Jayadeva in the Gita Govinda written in the 12th century. Occasionally women singers take over the singing of the verses allowing the dancers to concentrate purely on the movements and the mime. During the most popular festival of Lai Haroba, the rituals enact the formation of cosmos, the creation and destruction, very symbolically, by placing leaves (the male and the female principle) in the lake at the culmination of a ritual procession. The Jatras (a form of ballet) are usually held during the three major seasons in the annual cycle. The Jhula jatra is performed in autumn and during the monsoon; the Dhol Jatra in winter and the Rath jatra in spring. Men and women sing and dance hand in hand. Among the other popular dances of Manipur is the Pung Cholam where performers dance with the pung or mridanga (king of drum) to amazingly agile and synchronized movements. There is also the Thabal Chongba performed in moonlight in March. But the Manipuri Rasa tradition of classical dance remains the most distinctive and alluring among the classical Indian dance forms in its raiments, its expressions, its music and its very character.
I just saw the picture of the wedding dress from Manipur called Poloi. I have to say it's really amazing. I mean how can someone walk in that? or even sit down? I searched around and found out that they also wear it when they play out Ras Leela. It also said that the dress is sewn on the body. I still can't see how it can be comfortable at all.
Friday, December 19, 2008
MY STATE. MANIPUR
Manipur is situated in the eastern-most part of India situated in between 24°49′01″N and 93°57′00″E and is bounded by Myanmar to its east. After the independence of India, a democratic form of government was formed in the region with the Maharaja as the executive head and a legislature was established. Manipur became a Part “C” state from 26th January 1950 and it was in 1957 a territorial council of 32 members was set up. In 1963, a legislative assembly was established and Manipur finally achieved full statehood on January 21, 1972.Manipur is a thinly populated state and presently the state is composed of only 9 districts.
Manipur was rightly called “The jewel of India” by Jawaharlal Nehru .The state is mostly mountainous and the valleys are dotted with lakes and is a paradise for nature lovers. This state has many places of natural scenic beauty unknown to most of the people of India. There are many places of tourist interest in state. The capital of the state Imphal is a centre of culture and commercial activity. The other places of tourists’ interest are Bishnu temple at Bishnupur, Loktak Lake, the biggest fresh water lake of eastern India, the Orchid yard at Khongampat. Keibul Lamjao the only floating National Park in the world is also located here in the state. There is one university-Manipur University, Imphal and one agricultural university in Central Agricultural University; Imphal , in the state.
The people of Manipur are grouped into three main ethnic communities: the Meiteis, majority of the people those inhabiting the valley, and the other two main ethno-denominations are, namely Nagas and Kuki-Chins .Besides Marwaris, Bengalis, Nepalis and people of other Indian communities also live here in the state. Agriculture has been the main occupation of the people of Manipur. Paddy is the main crop while maize is also cultivated. Handloom has been the biggest industry of the state where almost 3 lakh of the total population are dependent on it. Manipuri handicrafts are world famous and a major portion of the handicraft products are exported The are almost 10,000 small scale industries in the state. The state has been the first ever to introduce Oak Tasar industry where almost 30 million Tasar cocoons are produced each year.
There have been many social conflicts in the recent past, resulting in tensions between the Meiteis (the valley people) and the so called Naga people residing in Manipur for ages. Manipur is also involved in a border dispute with Nagaland .Manipur is considered a sensitive border state where the foreigners entering Manipur must possess a Restricted Area Permit which can be obtained from the Foreigners’ Regional Registration Office in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata or certain other state government offices. Permits are valid for only 10 days, and visitors must travel only on tours arranged by any authorized travel agents, in groups of four only. Moreover, they have to come to Imphal only by air and will not be permitted to travel outside the capital city. Although amazing but it is true that the game polo originated in Manipur from a similar game called Sagol Kangjei and the British soldiers and planters took it back to England, modified the rules and made it popular around the world .
Manipur is one of the least developed states of India with lack of economic as well as educational infrastructure. Although the GDP is growing at a good rate but heavy industrialization is negligible here. The state is naturally very beautiful with so many varieties of endangered species of animals and birds living here. The state has a long way to go in the field of industrial as well as economic development to stand up face to face with other developed states of the nation.
Manipur was rightly called “The jewel of India” by Jawaharlal Nehru .The state is mostly mountainous and the valleys are dotted with lakes and is a paradise for nature lovers. This state has many places of natural scenic beauty unknown to most of the people of India. There are many places of tourist interest in state. The capital of the state Imphal is a centre of culture and commercial activity. The other places of tourists’ interest are Bishnu temple at Bishnupur, Loktak Lake, the biggest fresh water lake of eastern India, the Orchid yard at Khongampat. Keibul Lamjao the only floating National Park in the world is also located here in the state. There is one university-Manipur University, Imphal and one agricultural university in Central Agricultural University; Imphal , in the state.
The people of Manipur are grouped into three main ethnic communities: the Meiteis, majority of the people those inhabiting the valley, and the other two main ethno-denominations are, namely Nagas and Kuki-Chins .Besides Marwaris, Bengalis, Nepalis and people of other Indian communities also live here in the state. Agriculture has been the main occupation of the people of Manipur. Paddy is the main crop while maize is also cultivated. Handloom has been the biggest industry of the state where almost 3 lakh of the total population are dependent on it. Manipuri handicrafts are world famous and a major portion of the handicraft products are exported The are almost 10,000 small scale industries in the state. The state has been the first ever to introduce Oak Tasar industry where almost 30 million Tasar cocoons are produced each year.
There have been many social conflicts in the recent past, resulting in tensions between the Meiteis (the valley people) and the so called Naga people residing in Manipur for ages. Manipur is also involved in a border dispute with Nagaland .Manipur is considered a sensitive border state where the foreigners entering Manipur must possess a Restricted Area Permit which can be obtained from the Foreigners’ Regional Registration Office in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata or certain other state government offices. Permits are valid for only 10 days, and visitors must travel only on tours arranged by any authorized travel agents, in groups of four only. Moreover, they have to come to Imphal only by air and will not be permitted to travel outside the capital city. Although amazing but it is true that the game polo originated in Manipur from a similar game called Sagol Kangjei and the British soldiers and planters took it back to England, modified the rules and made it popular around the world .
Manipur is one of the least developed states of India with lack of economic as well as educational infrastructure. Although the GDP is growing at a good rate but heavy industrialization is negligible here. The state is naturally very beautiful with so many varieties of endangered species of animals and birds living here. The state has a long way to go in the field of industrial as well as economic development to stand up face to face with other developed states of the nation.
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