If a site links to another site from every page, those links are called site-wide links. If you are buying links, it may look as a good option to receive hundreds of incoming backlinks for the price of one link, however, most search engines would count only the most powerful link which is relevant. Site-wide links also make your link profile to look artificial, as you’d have hundreds of incoming links with the sama anchor text. Many SEO forums have reported that side-wide links can actually hurt your ranking in search engines like Google, especially when site-wide links constitute a large percentage of the incoming links.

If most of your link popularity comes from purchased site-wide links, Google will eventually find and eliminate the value of these links. So it is advisable to buy few single links that would fly under the radar.

However, it makes me wonder how Google treats blogroll links. Most blogroll links, by default, are site-wide links - Going by the logic of anchor text, it would mean that it is better not to receive blogroll links from huge blogs having hundreds of pages.

Technorati Tags: site-wide links, backlinks, SEO, ranking, Google, link popularity, Google

• 0 Comments

We often hear the SEO advice that ‘Content is the King’, and search engines like Google favor good quality content. Many people confuse it with creating more pages, and they often end up in buying software like spam site generators, automated content generators and scrapping tools. Many others buy cheap articles and stuff their websites with copies of the articles. However, search engines are not lookinig for such useless garbage which hardly offers any value to the site visitors.

Quality content in short is link-worthy content which is original, conceptually unique and serves as a useful resource for information. And, it refers to the text part of your website. Though keywords matter in your page copy, your page should not look like a keyword stuffed page for search engine robots; you should write for your site visitors focusing on readability and usefulness.

Good quality content has other rewards, too. If people find your content useful and spreading information, they will naturally want to link to your site, and give referrals. Thus, useful pages meant for people can attract links which are very valuable for your ranking in the search engines.

If your pages are copies of pages on other sites, search engines like Google will perceive your site to be of poor quality offering no value. You should therefore create content which people will find useful in your niche. It is better to have few pages with quality content than having thousands of pages filled with garbage. Good content will attract referrals and citations to your site and boost your ranking naturally.

Technorati Tags: SEO, content, search engine

• 2 Comments

Many webmasters give importance to inbound links, but are reluctant to link out to other sites - trying to hoard the pagerank. However, many search engines including Google grade your pages based on the sites you link to, apart from the content and inbound links.

Linking out if done properly can improve your ranking in many search engines. If you link out to other related sites, search engines may start perceiving your site as an authority site in your niche. When you link out to other sites - especially blogs, the other bloggers may reciprocate by linking back to content on your site. Also, if you provide good information to your site visitors through outbound links, it will enhance the usability and user experience; and you may end up in getting valuable referrals and citations to your site from these users. Thus, outbound links to other related sites can boost your search engine rankings.

You should, however, be careful of who you link to. Bad outbound links can drastically affect your website authority and rankings. The ideal rule to follow is - Do not link to any site which you would not like to associate with. If your site has many random links which are not related to your niche, search engines may start perceiving your site as a link farm or spam site. Some search engines may penalize your site by scoring it low on the perceived authority. Your outbound links may lose their value and may not be able to pass any pagerank juice to the linked sites.

Technorati Tags: pagerank, Google, Linking

• 1 Comment

A Common SEO mistake made by many webmasters is that they are not consistent when it comes to linking to their URLs across their site.

If some of your links go to the URL http://yoursite.com, and the rest go to http://www.yoursite.com/, your link popularity gets divided among these two URLs - thus affecting the pagerank as well as the ranking for that URL. So, it is better to pick the URL that you want and use it consistently across your entire website, as well as for your incoming links. One cannot, however, control how other sites would link to his website. So you have to inform Google which URL you prefer to be canonical. Google calls Canonicalization as the process for picking the best URL when there are many alternatives.

‘Google Sitemaps’ offers an option to select a canonical URL for your site. Another way to achieve canonicalization is by adding a 301 redirect (permanent redirect). So, if you want your default URL to be the www version, then you can 301 redirect your non-www version to the www version. Having a single, canonical version of every URL on your site will improve your site rankings as well as the pagerank.

Technorati Tags: SEO, link popularity, pagerank, ranking, Google, Canonicalization

• 0 Comments

Most of my clients in Japan have multi-lingual websites targeted at Japan as well as other foreign countries. So, I always keep looking for techniques which can help to rank well in different local search engines. Recently, I came across a software which claims to improve rankings in Google and other search engines in different languages. Essentially the software creates automatically translated pages of your website in 8 languages. I tested the software and found the automatic translation to be of horrible quality. By merely creating more pages, you can not create quality content. By using such software, you will not only lose your money, but you’ll also lose your prospective customers.

In my experience, it is very difficult to rank a multi-lingual website to rank high across different local search engines. If you really want to target different countries/languages, it is better to have a separate site for each language, and have its content translated by a native speaker of that language. Also, your site will rank better in local search engines if you have domain extension for that country (e.g. .jp for Japan) and you have your site hosted in that country. And, of course, you have to register your site in local search engines. It also makes sense to get links from sites from that country/language.

The additional cost in terms of time, effort and money will definitely bring tons of traffic that converts your prospects well.

Technorati Tags: Google, content, search engines

• 1 Comment

Google is harder to manipulate compared to other search engines because of various filters it incorporates in its algorithm to prevent spam. Minus 30 penalty is one such filter for handling spam in Google algorithm.

So, what is this minus 30 penalty? If your site was previously ranking high in Google search results, and suddenly its ranking drops by 30 positions, there is a chance that the minus 30 penalty is applied to your site. Normally, if you do a search on your domain name, you would expect to see your site at the first position; but if you see your site at 31st position, it is very likely that the minus 30 penalty is in force.

Most likely candidates to experience this penalty are affiliate sites which do not add much value for the site visitors. However, many non-affiliate sites also have reported this penalty. Though there is no proven theory which can identify sites which are likely to face this penalty, sites with excessive low quality inbound or outbound links and lots of non-unique content may have a minus 30 ranking penalty applied.

The only solution to avoid this penalty is to have unique content on your site, to get links from well trusted sites and to link to high quality sites. For detailed information, please refer to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Technorati Tags: Google, spam, ranking

• 0 Comments

In the last post, we saw that the product/service you plan to sell on the internet should target a niche market. You may have seen that many internet marketing gurus are selling digital products like e-books and software on auto-pilot. So many times novice internet marketers try to emulate them, but fail miserably. I would say one should think out of the box to arrive at ideas for his products or services.

Even in a saturated market, you can find an unexploited niche market. To cite an example, online dating is an over-saturated market; however, one of my clients targeted a specific niche of Japanese people interested in dating foreigners in Japan. He backed up his site by providing additional service where people can actually meet each other in informal international parties. This site has become very successful now.

Normally, one won’t think of selling heavy items on the web due to high shipping costs. However, a French wine dealer has a successful website where he sells rare French wines which are difficult to obtain in other parts of the world.

Last year, I completed a project for an Indian restaurant in Tokyo. It had a unique idea of selling Indian lunch/dinner sets on the web which are delivered all over Japan by third party cool delivery service. Small cities and towns in Japan do not have Indian restaurants, and this site became successful in no time - bringing in more revenue than their revenue from the restaurant.

Technorati Tags: internet, marketing

• 1 Comment

SEO alone can not help in making an internet based business successful. Though there are many successful internet millionaires, most web-based businesses fail. Here are some proven tips for building and growing an internet based business.

1. Target a unique niche
If you are creative enough, you can virtually sell anything on the internet. However, you should apply the basic principles of marketing before you decide what product or service you plan to sell on the web. It is better to go for niche segments which do not have many players in the field. If you go for a product for which the market is saturated, it would be difficult and expensive to rank your site high in search engines. You should be able to differentiate your product/services in such a way that the web community would get interested in your site and send you referrals too.

2. Skills and Passion
You should have special skills for the product/service you plan to sell, and have a functional business model to support your internet business. You and the people around you should have passion for the job. So, if you plan to sell used cars on the web, you need to know everything about used cars, and have the right people who can help you in fulfilling the orders. Many internet businesses fail because people do not have the passion for the products/services they sell.

3. Building Trust
Testimonials and referrals play an important role in making your website trustworthy. If you can write a blog on your site where you can show off your work and make efforts to make your business transparent, it could build a feeling of instant trust with the site visitors. Making your site useful with an array of features not available elsewhere also makes a good first impression.

4. Prevent duplication
Though it is very easy to duplicate content, if you can offer features which are difficult to duplicate, it will give you a definite competitive advantage.

5. Control Costs
To keep your internet business profitable, you need to cut costs ruthlessly. Working from home, outsourcing, part-time staff can help you control costs especially in the beginning.

Technorati Tags: SEO, internet, business, search engines

• 2 Comments

Search Engines like Google and Yahoo have become intelligent in the past 4-5 years. It is very difficult to game search engines nowadays by manipulating tags and keyword stuffing. For a new site it may take 6 to 9 months to achieve competitive rankings at Google. From SEO point of view, I recommend the following steps for launching a new website.

i) Registering a domain name
Pick a domain name which either has keywords associated with your product/service or your brand name. It is better to go for short domain names which are easy to remember. If your target market is global, go for a .com domain. If you are targeting a particular country or language, it is better to register a domain name in TLD of that country. For example, go for a .jp or .co.jp domain, if you are targeting Japan. I recommend you to register the domain for at least 2 years; more the better to gain the trust of search engines.

ii) Domain Hosting
Host your site with a reliable hosting company. Stay away from companies which allow hosting of pharmacy, gambling and adult sites, or have a history of serving spam. If you are targeting a particular country/language, it is advised to host your site in that country to boost your rankings in the local search engines for that country/language.

iii) Registering with Search Engines
Since search engines give important to domain aging and can track parameters like the registration date & first crawled date, you better register your site with search engines as early as possible. Even if your site is not fully ready, it is better to make a temporary one-two page site and register with the search engines at the earliest. Getting indexed in MSN may take only 3-4 days, whereas it may take 2-3 months to get indexed in Google and Yahoo. To speed up this process, you should build incoming links from authority websites. More the links a site receives, the less it is ignored by the search engines. It also reduces the Google sandboxing time for new sites. Submitting your sitemap to Google Webmaster Central also ensures that your site would get crawled and indexed regularly.

iv) Build trust with Search Engines
To build trust with the search engines, you should build your incoming links and content at a regular pace. Keep your content unique and relevant to your products/services. Building links from relevant websites will boost your rankings.

Technorati Tags: Search Engines, Google, Yahoo, SEO

• 1 Comment

Google Inc. recently announced their offering to run the search engines of small web sites starting from $100 per year. This service is targeted at the million of Web sites that either wish to have search engine capability on their site or are not satisfied with the quality of their current search results.

The price for Google’s ‘Custom Search Business Edition’ will start at $100 per year to comb through upto 5,000 Web pages. Larger websites upto 50,000 pages will have to pay $500 annually to avail of this service. That’s a substantial discount from the fees that Google has been charging for the scaled-down versions of its leading search engine “Google Mini” which was introduced two years ago has a base price of $1,995.

Google has been offering a free version of custom search engine since last October to Web sites willing to show relevant sponsored ads by Google. However, Web sites that use the new business edition will be able to block Google’s ads. Also, the search results will be displayed on the customer’s own Web site.

This move by Google is the company’s latest attempt to make money by licensing its search technology to millions of potential users. However, software licensing currently accounts for just one percent of $22 billion in revenue since its IPO. It would be interesting to see how Google develops new sources of revenue in time to come.

Technorati Tags: Google, search engine, search results, Google Mini, free

• 1 Comment