In some of our previous post we had discussed about several on page elements which influence the rankings of the webpage in the search engines.

If you are new here you can read the posts about on page optimization here at:  On Page SEO elements Part 1, On Page SEO elements Part 2 and On Page SEO elements Part 3.

In these posts I have pointed some very crucial points which must be taken care of for proper optimization of a webpage.

Some webmasters say that on page optimization accounts for 20% and off page 80% of overall optimization process, but in my opinion on page accounts for 60% of the overall optimization process and I am saying this from my experience. I have tested many of my websites, which ranked highly only by doing on page optimization in very competitive niches. Opinions may differ on this topic, but the heart of the matter is both factors must be taken care of and done wisely.

In coming posts we will discuss several topics related to off page optimization and traffic generation and if you follow each step there is no reason, you do not achieve higher rankings in search engines.

Achieving higher rankings takes time and work. So just follow the main points below and over time you will see good rankings of your website.

What is off page optimization?

First of all let us take a look on off page optimization. All those work done excluding website is known as off page optimization work. Commonly it is taken as link building through different sources and increasing web visibility.

Links can be made through different sources like directory submissions, articles etc. Below given some very common ways to build links for your website, use these in your off page optimization campaigns and you will get good return on your investment, in form of good rankings and traffic.

Submitting to Directories: Directory submission is one of the most common ways to build links to websites. Directories are of basically three types, free, reciprocal and paid.

Free Directories: Free directories or Free for All (FFA) directories are those which accept all kind of links and do not need any reciprocal link. You do not need to pay any fee for being accepted in it. The submission in these directories is easy and can be done in bulk, but the quality of links is of poor quality (save some exceptions). So shall we submit to these directories?, the answer is YES. Although the quality is poor but they help a lot in increasing the web visibility of your website.

There are some exceptions, like DMOZ.ORG, Dmoz is the largest open directory project on the web and the best part is, it’s free. But it is very hard to get listed in this directory. So while submitting to this directory please follow each and every instruction of submission.

Paid Directories: These directories either take one time fee for inclusion or an annual fee for being listed. The quality of the links from these directories are high. The reason behind the quality factor is the manual review of the links submitted to them. The search engines give good weightage to these links. If you have some budget you must go for these. The best of the paid directories is Yahoo Directory. Look Smart, Ezilion and Best of the Web to name a few.

Reciprocal Directories: These types of directories need reciprocal links from the websites which are submitted to them. That means you need to link back to them from your website. These links are also good in quality. But always choose good reciprocal directories to submit.

Free directories get expired as the owners do not renew their domains and hosting( because either they fail to make money from these ventures or they are too busy to maintain them) . So in the case of reciprocal links, always keep check on the links and make sure you are not linking to any expired domain.

List of Directories:

Free and Reciprocal Directories:

1. Directory Critic
2. VM Options
3. One Way Text Link
4. VileSilencer
5. Web Directories
6. Links Admin
7.Dmegs

Paid Directories:

1. Paid Directory List
2. Web Directories
3.Best Web Directories
4.Paid Directories
5. Directory Critic
6. Cheap Paid Directory List
7. Paid Directories

More posts on off page optimization coming soon

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Article marketing is a great tool for promoting products and attracting traffic to your website and every internet marketer know the importance of article marketing (commonly known as BUM marketing).

There are few points, if taken care, can maximize the benefit of article marketing.

Purpose of Article Submissions: There are mainly two purpose of article marketing, one is one way backlinks and second is traffic. If your intention is just to get some one way backlinks pointing to your website, you can write article on any keyword related to your website. But if you want backlinks and traffic both then choose your keywords wisely.

Common Mistakes: The most common mistake is writing articles without keeping in mind the goals. Newbie article marketers generally choose broad keywords for writing articles. They get backlinks but not traffic.

Choose long tail keywords for your articles, with low competition, which will rank in the search engines sending good amount of traffic to your website. For an example instead of using “Yoga Mats” use “How to choose best yoga mats” as your keyword. The broad phrase keywords have lot of searches but in turn they also have very stiff competition. So choose your keywords (long tails) wisely to scale your article marketing campaigns.

Using Ezine Articles for scaling your campaigns: Subscribe to the ezinearticles.com newsletter. It sends it on monthly basis about the performance of your articles. It also includes the keywords with which the articles were found. Use those keywords to write more articles and you can bring lot more traffic to your website simultaneously with one way backlinks.

I am a fan of ezinearticles.com because of the linking structure of the article pages. If you view an article on this article directory, just scroll down and you will see a section of related articles. Just imagine on how many pages your article link would be there, giving extra boost to your article rankings, so choose your keywords wisely while submitting to ezinearticles.

Article Directories you must include in your BUM marketing campaigns:

1. Searchwarp.com
2. Ezinearticles.com
3. Articlesbase.com
4. Goarticles.com
5. Amazines.com

For reading more about article marketing, read my previous post here at: Maximizing Benefits of Article Submissions

I hope these tips will improve your article marketing campaigns, if you need any help on this or you haven’t got any point please post in the comment section.

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I got a very informative article about how Google crawl and index pages and how it serves results for a user query. In this article you can get insight of the basics of the mechanism of search engine and can find hints to optimize your WebPages better. Hope you all will find it useful.

When you sit down at your computer and do a Google search, you’re almost instantly presented with a list of results from all over the web. How does Google find web pages matching your query, and determine the order of search results?

In the simplest terms, you could think of searching the web as looking in a very large book with an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned (”served”) to you.

The three key processes in delivering search results to you are:

Crawling

Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.

We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or “crawl”) billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

Google’s crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service.

Indexing

Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

Serving results

When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Our Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site’s ranking.

Google’s Related Searches, Spelling Suggestions, and Google Suggest features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and popular queries. Like our google.com search results, the keywords used by these features are automatically generated by our web crawlers and search algorithms. We display these suggestions only when we think they might save the user time. If a site ranks well for a keyword, it’s because we’ve algorithmically determined that its content is more relevant to the user’s query.

You Can Visit Source Here at Google Webmaster Support

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Article marketing commonly known as bum marketing is a very effective and common way for marketing and search engine optimization campaigns. It is a very good tool to bring loads of traffic to your website. Actually the visitors coming on your website after reading your articles are more targeted and more likely in the mood of doing purchase or any other action because your article has already done preselling on your niche topic.

Below are some points applying which you can make your article marketing campaign more effective.

Unique Content: Unique content is the key for a good article. Spun content is of no use, first it will be very hard to be accepted by article directories, second the page views and in turn the click through rate (CTR) will be next to zero. So always use unique content for your articles. Try to keep your article around 300 to 325 words as these articles get high CTR. Articles more than this word limit become boring and the reader loose the interest, second thing internet users do not have patience to read an article of 600 words. So keep it sweet and short.

Catchy Title: Make your title catchy; add some spice to the title of your article. Long title having how to, x ways to, do not, exposed, scam have better click through rate. Treat the title as an ad published in a news paper or magazine. Think yourself “will you read any article having old dull title” the answer is “no”, so try to generate curiosity by your title.

Working on Summary: keep the same points in mind while writing your summary and try to give a glimpse to your readers about the content of the article.

Flow of the article: The flow of the content must be natural. There is an old rule of writing article. In starting of an article “tell them what you are going to tell them”, in body “tell them” and in last paragraph “tell them, what you have told them”. Always keep in mind you are not there just to provide information, instead you are trying to presell them. So give some information in the article and try to generate curiosity, so that they click and visit your website.

Spicing your author’s bio box: The author’s bio box is the most important element from writer’s perspective, because they can put links to their website in it. Use call to action words, try to use “emotional words” which will attract visitors to click and visit your website. Instead of writing “click here to visit weight loss website” write something like “click here to lose weight starting today without the pain of exercising”. Giving emotional touch to the author’s resource box will help you to improve your CTR.

Using ezinearticles.com: This is one of the best article directories over the internet; you can get one way back links to your website. Many webmasters publish your content on their websites from ezine articles, thus giving more links to your website. Along with back links you get a good amount of traffic from this article directory.

Submit your article to ezinearticles.com, once it is published, rewrite it and submit to articlesbase.com and goarticles.com for maximizing results

Hope these points will help you in your article marketing campaign for getting better results.

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This is the third part of the post about important elements of search engine optimization; you can read the first and second post here at: On Page SEO Elements Part 1 and On Page SEO Elements Part 2

Images alt and title tags: Alt tags are used in images, so that in any case, (such as low connection speed or images disabled in browser) if image is not displayed, the user can know about the image. In addition some people turn off JavaScript and images in their browsers, in such cases the alt tag act as an alternative of the image. Also use title tag in images to show about the title of the image. There is one more plus point about using title tags in images, browsers like mozilla firefox does not shows alt tags when you hover mouse over an image, instead it shows title tags.

<img title=”image title here” src=”your-image-location-here (relative or absolute)” alt=”image alt tag here” />

If you want to keep a single image on your webpage, use title and alt tags related to your topic. Suppose you have an article about Dog Training, you can make your title and alt tags as follows:

Alt tag    – (breed of the dog in the picture, ex- Doberman) pic
Title        – Doberman training

Keep it simple and do not try to stuff keywords in these tags.

Using Keyword Synonyms and Related Keywords: Use synonyms and keywords related to your main keywords in your body copy. You can get benefit of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI, more on this topic in coming posts), keep it natural.

Suppose you are writing about “vegetarianism Benefits”, try to use synonyms and related keywords related to this keyword.

Keyword density: In these days keyword density is of less importance. But I my experience for maximum benefit keep it around 3 to 5 %, use your main keyword in the first two or three lines of text, and use it in middle and last of the article. Do not use keywords for the sake of just using it, try to be natural and frame your keyword in the sentence, so that it makes sense

Always follow the rule of thumb. Prepare your content for humans and not for search engine bots. If your visitors will like it, the bots would like it for sure.

Sitemap: Always use sitemaps on your website, preferably two, html and xml versions. HTML version will help your visitors to find out the information they are looking for and the xml version will help the search engine bots to easily find out and crawl your webpages.

Always keep in mind a happy visitor will return to your site frequently (the same applies for bots also) giving you more popularity, which in turn will help you earn more bucks

Privacy Policy, Disclaimer, Contact us: Always keep your privacy policy updated, which type of data you collect from your users, how you use that data, what measures you take to protect the privacy of your visitors, if you collect some type of data whether you share it with third parties or not, all this points should be clearly mentioned. Update your disclaimer about earnings, trademarks, logos or any other information you use. If users find any difficulty using your website or they need more information, there must be a contact us form.

These measures will increase your trust in the eyes of your visitors as well as search engines. It also authenticates your online presence. (I haven’t updated it yet )

HTML validation: Validate your website through http://validator.w3.org/, keep in mind to remove all the errors detected by validator. You may leave warnings. This step will increase your authority and help you to better search engine rankings, especially in Yahoo.

Flow of content: your content must be arranged in a logical manner, so it becomes easy to understand and follow. Use good fonts and colors for background, text and navigation for easy visibility.

Navigation Structure: The website navigation must be easy and logical so that the visitors find it easy to navigate to the information pages. Avoid using links embedded in JavaScript, search engines find it difficult to read the links in JavaScript and if you do not have any other HTML link for the page, it might become an orphan page and its content may never be cached. Many internet users turn off JavaScript in their browsers and will not able to see your links which are made through JavaScript.

One solution of this problem is using <noscript> tag. This will show your links to both the user who turned their JavaScript and search engines.

Internal linking: when linking internal pages, use proper anchor text for the link to the page you are linking. In this way you will help link juice to propagate to your pages which in turn rank them better in the search engines and help them gain page rank

Outbound Links and Using No follow: Keep minimum outgoing links on a page and only link to authority websites which has quality content related to your topic and which would be of interest of your visitors. Keep outbound links on a page, around 40 to 50, maximum. If you are not sure about the content or authority of the website you are linking, always use “nofollow”. This will prevent your link juice to flow out and help you to rank better. Never link to any link farms or website which are involved in selling links and if you have to link them (for whatsoever reason) use “nofollow”. Always be sure that there is no broken link on your webpage.

Use your Keyword in the first link on your page: The first link on your webpage which the search engine bots read is the most important link. By default the anchor text is set to “home” for the first link. Instead of using home as an anchor text, use your main keyword of your website for the first link. (I am not following this point, please don’t ask me why   )

Webpage Weight and loading time: if your webpage is too heavy( the webpage file is large) to load in a moderate time, you may loose most of your visitors, because 99% of the internet users do not have patience to wait more than 10 seconds for a webpage to open. For keeping your webpage weight light keep the size small, avoid using big images, if it is necessary to use big images, slice it in smaller ones. Shockwave (flash content) files make size large, so use it rarely.

Some points might slipped from my mind, if I find any I will post it in coming days, hope you all would have enjoyed this article and got some insights for better on page optimization.

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