NtierSolutions

Link Building - Why It’s Gotten Harder

2010-03-10T15:02:00.004+05:30

In a previous post of mine I stated that “organic link building is making more and more sense“. A statement I definitely believe but a statement with lots of things going on behind it. Nowadays if you look at your own link building campaign efforts and compare it to the amount of effort you needed to get quality links it the past to boost page rank you will see that it is becoming harder and harder to get good links. The reasons?

* Changing/improving search engine algorithms - Search engines are getting better and better with determining the quality and relevancy of links. As an example, if you’ve read my previous post on the Domain Age Factor in Links you already know that MSN Live Search factors in not just the domain age of your own page but the domain age of the pages linking to you as well. What this means is that even amassing a large amount of links is no longer enough if search engines deem those links are low quality links.
* Blogging Politics - In an excellent albeit pretty cynical post by Michael Arrington he discussed how the “salad days” of bloggers constantly linking to each other “in a state of brotherly or sisterly love” is now over. Simply put the good days of getting organic links easily are gone. This is because as he says the politics of blogging has shifted so that the blogging politically savvy never link out just for the sake of it. Links are seen as a very important commodity so that links are only given out by bloggers if they’ll benefit from it. Other blogs, even those maintained by people you admire, now becomes a threat and are seen as sources of competition. Sounds really sad huh? You should note though that this game of blogging politics are really played only by bloggers who want to make the most out of the money floating out there and in the end Arrington points out that this thing is disruptive to the blogosphere. Whether you agree to this thing or not though the sad truth is that there ARE bloggers playing this game and these are the very same bloggers that have great enough blogs to be sources of excellent link juice. With them staying away from sharing link love it makes organic link building all the more harder. So if you can not rely on organic link building alone (which is understandable for those who need to grow their links faster) then by all means go around fishing for links, however, you should try to find the blogs that seem to still link out for the sake of it or you’ll be wasting your time on some blogs where you won’t have much hope of getting any link unless you have something to offer in return.

So now that organic link building is harder why do I still say that it makes more sense to go organic? The reason is simple…because it is even harder to get results the non-organic way. By non-organic I mean buying links and spamming. Though there are bloggers out there not willing to share link love any more there are still lots that link to other bloggers for the mere reason that they liked an entry or admire someone.

As Matan pointed out though, you would want those that link to you to include keywords in the anchor text. In the case of organic link building though since you really do not know when a blog/website will link to you what you should do is keep track of inbound links and check out the anchor text by those linking to you. If you see really vague terms used like “read this” or “this link” then you have the option of contacting the blogger and suggesting a few keywords. For the most part, especially if the blog is a tech blog, the blogger will easily understand your concern. Of course all this should be done with tact. Be pushy and haughty and the link might even be removed. In the end the harder part is to get the links than to ensure that keywords included in the anchor text.

Grading Google's Marketing Practices Based On Google's Standards?

2010-02-16T11:38:00.001+05:30

The Google Buzz team has had quite a week. Their new product quickly lived up to its name, though mostly for the wrong reasons, generating buzz about its own privacy issues. Calling the original Google Buzz privacy settings lax would be a gross understatement. It created a storm of complaints, best put in perspective by Harriet Jacobs in her F*ck You, Google piece.

In short, when you logged into your Gmail account Google simply took all of your frequent contacts and mashed them up into an active social network without much input from people they were connecting. If you exchanged a lot of emails with your editor and your under-cover sources from the same Gmail account, now they were connected through your public profile if you didn't happen to catch the Buzz opt-out checkbox. Or what about using the same Gmail account for emailing your husband and your boyfriend? Well now they're introduced - you're welcome.

Yes, sounds like a pretty naïve and reckless way to implement a major feature but Google protested that they just wanted to help and meant no evil. After all, their CEO Eric Schmidt had an interesting take on expectations for privacy online: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place". That was said nary two months before Google Buzz launched - I guess people like Harriet Jacobs and her abusive ex-husband just didn't listen.
Oops, Our Bad: Thanks For All the Users...

Since the launch, Google has done an amazingly quick about-face and pledged to do better. The latest set of changes make signing up for Buzz a tangibly more transparent experience, probably what it should have been at launch time. The press has mostly applauded their quick response and patted Google on the back for their responsiveness and keen focus on Gmail user experience.

But let's see what Google's naiveté about privacy issues meant for Google Buzz:

* 9 million posts and comments
* 300,000 mobile check-ins per day
* Buzz already rivals Twitter for sheer network size

Those are some pretty impressive numbers for any online launch, but to achieve this in under three days is just unheard of. Actually, there are businesses that do generate this level of interests from their prospects in that short of a time-frame and Gmail deals with them on a daily basis: spammers.
The '9 Million-Post' Question

The question is did Google simply make a "mistake" and not consider these fairly serious privacy issues, or did the massive amount of spam Gmail churns through each day actually demonstrate effectiveness of a new business model?

The former is hard to believe when you consider the army of privacy lawyers Google has and their job to review privacy considerations in revenue-generating AdSense programs. This is especially critical in Gmail, where you are shown ads based on emails you exchange. Gmail achieves this by reading through all your email and matching you up with advertisers interested in addressing your daily struggles. After the initial outrage over this concept a few years ago most users have resigned to trust Google that they have their best interests in mind.
Your Trust, Google's Toilet Paper

Google Buzz violates this trust in a serious way. In light of Google's experience in this field, it is hard not to take Google's mea culpa with a huge dose of skepticism. After all, if Google had made Buzz an opt-in service - something that users had to enable rather than be tricked into joining - they would be just another social network trying to compete with Facebook and Twitter.

Leveraging millions of Gmail users was a shortcut simply too tempting to avoid. The fact that Google decided to revise Google Buzz activation process over the weekend is simply a red herring: they only needed a few days to convert some of the hundred million plus Gmail users into millions of Buzz users, and become the de-facto Twitter competitor over a single long weekend.

Google "fixing" this privacy snafu a few days later is equivalent to spammers adding an "Unsubscribe" link to an email that's already done its damage.

The strong impression from the last few days is that Gmail users were a pawn in a very cynical game: Google trying desperately to become a player in the social networking space, after the Orkut launch and their acquisition of a handful of other companies in this space failed to produce results.
We're Not Evil

This is a tough act to pull off when your motto is Don't Be Evil. It's been said that eventually Google's shareholders will push it to make product moves and decisions that end up hurting its brand in a quest for monetization. It will be interesting to see if Google comes out of this with their motto intact.

10 Common SEO Mistakes that can Destroy Your Website [Part I]

2009-12-20T18:47:00.002+05:30

For many reasons, the last decade has been both very difficult to me and also very kind to me in a variety of conflicting ways. I’ve had personal tragedies in my life that have brought me to my knees, while at the same time (and in some cases because of those tragedies) I’ve stumbled upon one opportunity after another. One of those opportunities was entering the Search Engine Optimization industry almost half a decade ago.

I initially stumbled upon the industry while I was struggling to win contract bids at freelance project bidding sites in order to earn extra income for my family. I took on a very underpaid role with the owner of a small interior design business who wanted to use a blog attached to his business website in order to draw in potential customers. He wanted what just about every blog owner out there today wants – highly optimized content that would draw in crowds from the search engines.

The SEO Learning Process

Here’s the first thing that I learned the moment I jumped into the SEO pool – the industry is full of sharks and “gurus.” Often, I would find advice from someone who seemed to know what they were talking about, but it turned out the advice was 1990’s-era SEO, filled with common SEO mistakes and no longer an effective technique in today’s Web 2.0 world. And the sharks, – there are some SEO experts so fed up with the bad advice and the SEO scam artists that there are now entire blogs devoted to exposing bad SEO and revealing those common SEO mistakes.

I pity the folks that make the hit list of a blog like that! With that said, blogs like this serve an important purpose – they educate businesses and blog owners about the serious dangers of hiring an SEO “expert” who either (a) doesn’t really know what they’re doing, and/or (b) makes use of “black hat SEO” techniques that can gather significant immediate traffic, but will ultimately destroy your long term ranking with Google.

The Top Ten Most Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid

In the process studying SEO techniques over the years, I learned that many of the older techniques and myths from the 1990’s are not only ineffective anymore, but in some cases they can seriously hurt your website or blog search engine ranking. So I would like to share a few of those SEO mistakes and help you avoid driving your blog or website straight off of the information superhighway and into the ditch.

SEO Mistake #1: Packing Meta-Tags Full Of Keywords Will NOT Optimize Your Page

During the 90’s, the extent of “SEO optimizing” for many webmasters was simply to insert relevant keyword phrases into the meta-tags for a page. Here’s an example of a site that’s heavily focused on the meta-keywords:

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with adding keywords into this field that represents valid information on the page itself, but placing a long list of similar phrases with duplicate words (reaching 10 or 12 phrases) is a major SEO faux pas.

And as of this year, September 2009 to be exact, due to many years of webmasters constantly using meta-keywords to spam keywords, Google no longer even looks at the meta-keywords in order to rank your website. This doesn’t mean the meta-keywords are not useful for aligning the page with particular valuable search phrases – but it certainly is nowhere near as valuable as it used to be, and overusing it can put your site at risk for a lower ranking.

SEO Mistake #2 & #3: Using The Keywords In Your Title & Permalinks

When you visit MakeUseOf, you’ll notice that not only are the titles descriptive and relevant to what the article is actually about, but the URL link (otherwise known as the permalink) is as well. Every SEO guru worth his salt knows that the two most effective areas of a webpage that you can get the most bang for your efforts is the title and permalink.

They don’t always necessarily have to the be same, but they do need to focus on the a primary keyword phrase that you’re trying to target with your article. If you don’t target that phrase in your title and permalink, you’re wasting your time and you’ll only reach a small fraction of your intended online audience. In Wordpress, you can set up your permalink to be descriptive like this.

As you can see, I’ve set up my blog TopSecretWriters to use the month/name and post title. Never set it up to use some nonsense numbering system.

SEO Mistake #4 & #5: Using Javascript Or Using Only Flash/AJAX

I would never suggest that a web designer shouldn’t make use of the latest and greatest website scripting languages that offer a more interactive online experience, but to use scripting to serve up all or a majority of your website content is SEO suicide.

The fact is that SEO optimizing should begin from the moment you lay down the first stone of your website’s foundation. That’s not to say that an existing site can’t be “fixed,” but you’ll see far more success if you get your website off on the right foot from day one. The tips above focus on how your website is built, and the elements that identify each web page to the world. In part two, I’ll discuss the actual content of your page and how you can optimize your site without ruining the quality of your content.

Google Maps Navigation now for Android 1.6

2009-11-25T15:45:00.001+05:30

Last month, we reported that Google launched Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0. The free application provides turn-by-turn directions using a smartphone’s embedded GPS and Internet connection. Since the app connects to the Internet, there is no need to purchase map updates and there are no monthly fees.

Really, the only drawback when the app was launched was that early adopters of the Android platform were left out. Google has now corrected that by announcing that Google Maps Navigation is now available for Android 1.6 which includes the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and G1. The application is available from the Android Market for download.

Ouch–Google really took out a knife and stuck it in the chest of other navigational apps and subscriptions. Map updates and a monthly fees are the heart of revenue for many location-based companies. What is even scarier is that Google’s solution is in many ways better than the paid solutions.

For more interest visit Regularly: http://ntiersolutions.blogspot.com

Implementing Six Sigma methodology for SEO

2009-11-21T17:14:00.003+05:30

Implementing Six Sigma Methodology for SEO

In this second part of a three-part series, you will learn how to start using Six Sigma methodology as part of your search engine optimization strategy. Introduced here are the tools, templates and detailed guidelines that are required for a complete and successful implementation.

Note: Bear in mind that in every step or phase of the project implementation, everything should be "documented." This means printing out and keeping a copy of the minutes of the meeting, and all data should be kept and stored as well as the results of the implementation. Everything can be compiled into a single document, which can act as a reference for future Six Sigma projects.

Step 1: Formation of the Six Sigma Team

Before going through the DMAIC Six Sigma methods, a team is needed. Ideally, this should be a cross-functional team consisting of the following members and job descriptions:

SEO expert/specialist/team leader: This person is the overall team leader of the Six Sigma project. His responsibility includes keeping the project schedule on track and coordinating with members to get the project's tasks done. His main contribution to the team is expertise in SEO, formulating SEO strategies and getting ranked in major search engines by optimizing both the content and the offsite factors (e.g. back links). It is recommended that he/she be extremely good at mathematics/statistics; if not, then a statistician is needed (not required) as part of the team for the data analysis phase.

Web Developer: This person implements the corrective action pertaining to changes that must be made to the website. This includes coding work, changes in website template, adding content, etc. His/her main contribution to the team is expertise in the area of the website's server and software, in addition to the server side scripting language used by the website. This will ensure that corrective actions are realistic and can be implemented.

Website business/Ecommerce manager: Usually this is the website owner/representative that is actually investing the money to run the business, and is a non-technical person. However, the ecommerce manager/business manager can provide current financial figures and sets financial objectives that are to be reviewed by the overall team members to see if they are realistic or not. Other roles include approving the budget needed for the implementation of the Six Sigma project.

Marketing Head: This person is in charge of the overall website marketing work and works closely with the SEO in charge. Promotions can be offline or online. The marketing head's contribution to the team is to ensure that the marketing strategies formulated as part of the corrective action are within the scope of their existing marketing work, as well as to suggest or confirm whether the strategy is indeed valid or realistic.

Statistician: This person's main job is to analyze the data and provide meaningful observations with the help of the other team members. Members of the team can rely on the statistician's expertise to analyze difficult data that is beyond the skill of the other team members. Usually this job can be done by an SEO expert; however, a statistician is helpful if any of the team members admits that they lack expertise in this area.

Step 2: First team meeting, schedule generation

The team leader will initiate the meeting; the following should be the agenda:

* Reviewing and confirming the commitment of each team member.
* Formulation of the Six Sigma main project schedule.
* Agreement to the periodic meeting schedule.

Now that the first team meeting has been completed, it is time to proceed to the first phase of the Six Sigma project. This is the definition phase, when the second team meeting will be held.

Step 3: Definition phase

The website business manager will be the one to quantify the problem, because they have the data and sources. The rest of the team will support and help the website business manager to come up with an objective and quantitative definition of the problem.

There can be many problems faced by the website, but Six Sigma particularly deals with ONE MAIN PROBLEM and ONE PROJECT at a time. This will ensure that the team will divert all resources (time, money, knowledge) to solving the most important problem and will not be distracted or lose track trying to sort through several unimportant issues at once.

Of course the website business manager knows which problems cost the business a lot, so before presenting any data in the definition phase, it is highly recommended that this person do research in advance to prioritize the main problems first. It is highly recommended that the first project start solving the biggest problem of the website.

The main objective of this meeting is to define the problem in one clear statement.

Below is the checklist for the definition phase:

* Does the problem contain a certain financial performance indicator affecting the website? Is it quantified? This is the single factor that dictates the financial success of the website. Examples of financial indicators include the average website profit per month, average sales per month, monthly advertising revenue of the website, or Google AdSense monthly revenue.
* Does it imply a problem and is it supported by other non-financial related indicators? A problem will result if the financial indicator is well below expectations; however, it is not enough to say, "The website is earning $100 per month in sales." It should imply that this is indeed a problem, so this is a more objective and complete definition: "The website is earning $100 per month in sales, with the conversion rate of 0.2% and monthly unique visitors of 10,000. The conversion rate is poor, affecting the monthly sales."
* Does it include a project objective? This is the target which the team needs to set very carefully; it can take time. This needs overall team coordination and should be done on the white board with other members attending. A realistic objective is important, as this measures the success of the project.

Below is the screenshot of the Project Definition phase (also showing the members of the team and its role):

Google News suggestions

2009-11-14T17:07:00.005+05:30

Now you can take advantage of google suggestions on Google news. Google started suggestion service on google news search. It is same as the Google default search suggestions and work exactly same as the default feature. Here is what it looks like:

You will get this feature at English, French, Italian, German and Spanish editions of Google News.

This feature will be greatly helpful in formulating queries, correcting spelling mistakes, saving keystrokes and expanding the query scope that you might not have thought.

Go get you to the articles you’re looking for as quickly as possible….