New SEO best practices 2011

Search Engine Optimization is an art which continues to evolve and improve and if you want to be serious about keeping your site top notch you must ensure that you keep up to date with the most recent SEO practices. The following is a list of modern practices compiled by SEOmoz.

-> Title Tag Format
Recommended Practice:

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keywords | Brand
Or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keywords

When you are trying to rank highly for a particular keyword / phrase, it is best to include it in the beginning of the title

-> The Usefulness of H1 Tags
H1s are important for users but not necessarily for search engines anymore.

They are very important for establishing information hierarchy and helping with algorithmically determined semantics, but they seem to be less important for search engine optimization.

-> The Usefulness of Nofollow
We recommend using rel= for thwarting would be spammers of user generated content. You can also use it as an incentive for creating active users.

-> The Usefulness of the Canonical Tag
The canonical tag is still young and is only useful as a hint to the search engines to prevent duplicate content. It is not the silver bullet that webmasters are looking for.

-> The Use of Alt text with Images
We recommend including alt text for all images on all publicly accessible pages. We also suggest adding images with good alt text to pages targeting competitive rankings. This is an essential thing which you should be doing anyway.

-> The Use of the Meta Keywords tag
If it is not a problem to let your competitors know your keywords and you are trying to rank highly in, the Meta Keywords tag can be useful. Note: This is different from what we have recommend in the past.

-> The Use of Parameter Driven URLs (I.E. www.example.com/index.php?option=com_conent§iondid=0)
We don’t recommend using them. Mask parameters by creating Search Engine Friendly URLS

-> The Usefulness of Footer Links
Use footer links sparingly. We recommend no more than 25 relevant internal navigational links.
We have seen many examples of Google penalties tied directly to abusive footer links (that "magically" lifted upon removal of the keyword anchor text stuffed footers). Manipulative links in footers are easily detected algorithmically, and appear to have automated penalties applied to them by Google.

-> The Use of Javascript and Flash on Websites
Do not use Javascript or Flash for any navigation important to search engines. Use pure CSS menus!

-> The Use of 301 Redirects
Use 301 redirects as the best way to redirect webpages but warn that they do have disadvantages.

-> Blocking pages from Search Engines
The Meta Robots tag (noindex, follow) is generally a better option than robots.txt. Robots.txt files are useful but should be used sparingly and only if a meta robots tag is not an option.

-> Google Search Wiki's Affect on Rankings
We don’t recommend spending any time or resources on search wiki.

-> The Affect of Negative Links from “Bad Link Neighborhoods”
Link neighborhoods are a real thing but the affect of links from bad neighborhoods on good neighborhoods is minimal if the links are not reciprocal.

-> The Importance of Traffic on Rankings
The metric of visitors to a given site is not used to help determine rankings.

All above are new SEO techniques which are very useful for search marketing work .. it is to give you some great ideas to your mind with latest SEO strategies ..

Ram Babu SEO Professional
Thanks

10 Tips to Avoid Google get your website Banned

Let's first define what is "ban"? There are two things usually called ban out there:

* When your site has dropped from Google index and does not show anymore for its target keywords.
* When your IP has been blocked and you cannot use Google search for some time.

Both issues are rather unwanted. The first one is applied to your site when it doesn't suit Google webmaster guidelines. The second one is applied to your IP address when you perform agressive amount of queries to Google at a time. Fortunately, you can easily avoid both types of Google ban following the below rules. Let's first deal with website ban:

1. Make your site available. Always use reliable hosting service with good uptime (no less than 99.5%) and fast response time. If Googlebot comes to your site and cannot access it, your site may drop.

2. Provide unique and relevant content. Fill your website with fresh unique content that is relevant to your website theme and is interesting to your visitors. Write your content for humans, not for search engine bots. If you post a duplicate content on your site, Google may exclude it from its index.

3. Don't use spam methods to promote your website. Never use doorways, hidden text, auto-generated keyword-filled pages, cloaking or any other spam techniques. Remember, we all use Google for search. Don't dump a trash at Google's index.

4. Carefully build links. Not every inbound link is good. Take care of websites linking to you. Don't participate in link farms. Try to get links from relevant or close theme websites. Do not ever spam forums, guest books or comments with your links! Outbound links are important too. Pay a close attention on what sites do you link from your website. Do not link to sites that use spam techniques, because this may result in your site ban.

5. Make your site crawlable. Provide a way for Googlebot to index the whole your site. Create sitemap, if you use JavaScript or Flash links - duplicate them with plain text ones. Make sure your server correctly handles errors, like 403, 404, redirects and so on. Check for broken links and HTML errors with some HTML validator tool.

6. Avoid using domains with bad history. Do not use previously black listed domains for your site.

How to avoid IP ban?

7. Do not use unauthorized software to check web ranking. Google restricts usage of software that send automated search queries to Google. Actually, to be 100% sure your IP won't be banned - do not check your web rankings at all.

8. Use Google API. If you really need to check the rank of your site in Google, try to use software and tools that can work via Google Web API. Google API is the only legitimate way to perform automated queries to Google.

9. Limit the amount of searches. If the accuracy of Google API search results is not enough for your purposes and using the natural search is crucial for you, try to limit the amount searches with some reasonable number. If you check web rankings, don't check first 1000 results, reduce the search to first 30-50 results. This will give you an adequate picture of your current standings and won't stress Google much as well.

10. Use Google for its main purpose. Use Google for search only and you never get your IP banned.

Source Google.

10 SEO elements every websites should have

As I’m on holiday this week, tripping around Europe, I’ve little time to be writing blog articles. But fear not! Jerry Low has kindly stepped in to supply his top 10 SEO elements that all websites should have. Enjoy!

Seriously, you don’t need an expert to optimize your website for better search engine rankings. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), after all, is not rocket science. It is something you can learn and do it yourself – all it takes is some serious readings and hard work.

However, there is something we need to know before we start any real SEO work – the direction of our entire SEO campaign – What we are trying to achieve? What are our targeted keywords? Who are our competitors? That led us to the most important preparation work before any SEO campaign get started - keyword research.

Keyword research is crucial as it acts like a compass for your website or blog. A proper keyword research reveals the supply and demand trends in your industries thus giving general idea on which keyword you should focus on.

In brief, here is how you can do a keyword research:

* Get a list of related keywords using Google Keyword Tool
* Search each keyword to check how many websites turned out on the search engine result page (SERP) – this fits in as the number of supplies.
* Websites topping the SERP are your major competitors, study them well.
* To learn what are the demands, check number of searches for each keyword using keyword tools.
* Tool suggestion for keyword research: Word Tracker and Keyword Discovery – these two are my favourites.

Well, now you have a rough idea on your competition. The smart approach is to be a big fish in a small/average pond – for starters, you should focus your work on keywords with moderate demands and low competition.

Besides supply and demand, keyword research also offers valuable information for your web designs. Take example that you are selling shoes online, I am sure you’ll have questions like: What are the popular brands searched online? How shoes should be categorized – based on brand, occasion, or sizes?

All these can be answered as you run down the keyword research work. You’ll see searches come in based on brands, like ‘DC shoes’, ‘jordan shoes’, ‘nike shoes’; in the same time, searchers are also looking for shoes for different activities or occasions, like ‘ballet shoes’, ‘safety shoes’, ‘bowling shoes’, ‘prom shoes’, and so on.

By the end of your research work, you should be able to generate a list of target keywords. And now it’s the time to focus your SEO work on them. To get started, here are the 10 key elements that will improve your blog or website’s SEO quality immediately. 10 key elements that improve your website SEO quality immediately:

1. Index-able and Keyword-rich URL
The power of a keyword rich URL is often overlooked by bloggers and webmasters. In case you have yet to registered your domain name, try include your primary keywords in your domain; while for those who are already running a website, a keyword rich URL (example: abc.com/keyword) still helps a lot. One might complains that domain name with keywords faces branding problems and hard to be remembered; but that’s the dilemma every webmaster/blogger has to face.

Also, a good SEO practice is to avoid complicated dynamic URL that is hard to be indexed. Try limit your URL to 2 – 3 variables, excessive usage of ?, $, &, +, % characters as well as cgi-bin redirect will only do you harm.

2. A reliable web hosting
Website with poor uptime will never rank high on search engines. Let’s imagine that you are the search engine, how would ranking a down website on top of your search result page looks like? Awfully bad, don’t you think? Hence, hosting your website on a reliable web hosts - dedicated or shared, is very crucial.

To pick up the right web host, you can always hang around reputable hosting forums like WebHostingTalk.com or you can read my personal hosting reviews here.

3. Keyword-rich title and heading tags
A keyword-rich page title is as crucial as a keyword-rich URL for a few reasons.

One, a keyword-rich title tells the search engine bots what the page is about thus grouping your webpage into the right category; second, most search engines will bold your keywords in title whenever that particular keyword is searched. Common sense, the bolding effect will definitely draw extra attention from the searchers and thus, brings more clicks into your website/blog.

Heading tags (example

) is hard to be missed in old times. Not now anymore. As more and more websites are built solely on blogging software like Typepad and WordPress, heading tags are often put in the wrong use.

Take Wordpress (WP) templates for example, WP themes designers often use heading tags for sidebar titles without relevant keywords (example: Achieve, Categories) which bring no SEO value at all. To make sure your blog is well SEO-ed, one top thing to do is to remove or modify these headings into keyword-rich headings.

4. Alt tag on images
In term of SEO, putting descriptive alt attributes with your image places additional relevant text to your source code. Search engines like this and the more relevant text you have the better chances you get to rank higher.

As an additional benefit, a descriptive image alt tag helps users to understand your image when it fails to load.

5. Proper structured internal linking
Search engines pay a lot of attention to links – both internal and external. As internal links are those that can be controlled by you, make sure your website internal linking is proper structured and filled with relevant descriptive keywords. A plain anchor text like ‘click here’ and ‘read more’ are not clever; ‘click here for more Jordan shoes’ and ‘read more about ballet shoes’ are.

For website owners, make sure there are plenty enough of internal links pointing to your primary pages; for bloggers, mentioned and linked to your previous blogpost whenever it’s appropriate, this give extra link juice to your previous blogpost (hence better rankings) plus it enables your readers to catch up what they missed.

6. Inbound links
Link development is an inevitable process if you want your website to rank high. The keypoint, however, is not to obtain links blindly from spammy websites and directories. Always emphasize quality on top of quantity when you’re building links.

There are wide options for your link building campaign: from submitting your sites to reputable directories to asking for a link exchange; from buying text link ads to writing guest blog post in your industries – some of these methods can be risky (of search engine’s filter and bans) and some are not. What you need to do is to pick a series of method you feel comfortable with and pour some sweat in the link building campaign.

7. XML sitemap
XML sitemaps is used for search engine bots indexing. It runs as a list of all pages and posts along with related information like priority of each page and the date of creation. These elements help search engine bots to crawl your websites/blogs as well as learning the importance level of each page.

While XML sitemap is not a must for a website to rank high, it is however good practice for web and blog owners to have it on site.

8. WWW/non-WWW Canonical Issue
Originally, all websites built can be viewed in two versions: the WWW and the non-WWW version. In normal cases, the search engines should be able to recognize the issue and rank the websites accordingly but occasionally it fails. This led to serious problem where websites are penalized (especially on Google) due to content duplication. Even if there’s no penalty imposed, the web page indexed twice will have hard time to rank high as the back links are (PR/anchor text) shared over two web pages.

The solution of this problem is simple. One, you can login to Google Webmaster Tools and tell them which version (WWW or non-WWW) of the website is preferred. Alternatively, a simple 301 redirect code in your .htaccess file is sufficient to solve the problem.

Example code:

To have your website in WWW version

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com $
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

To have your website in non-WWW version

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^ example\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http:// example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

9. Robots.txt
Robots.txt simply tells search engine bots what to crawl and what not to. It might not help that much in website rankings but it prevents irrelevant objects to be related to your website – which is good for your website to look focus (in search engine eyes) and professional.

10. Content is king
Users do not search for fun, they search for information and solution to a problem. If your website or blog does not offer what the users really want, they will move away. As what had been widely covered by Nathan’s post about increasing and maitaining blog traffics, you should know attracting traffics via SEO is just the beginning; the key point of having a successful website is always having an informative website that solves human’s needs.

About the author
Jerry Low is the guy behind Web Hosting Secret Revealed. He offers unbiased hosting reviews to help make your decision easier. In case you are looking for a web host, why not start reading his recommendations – Hostgator now?
Source by Jerry Low

Search Engine Ranking Factors

Most important factors are:
1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Overall Popularity of Site – “Trust” & “Authority”
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Age of Site
5. Internal Link Structure
6. Keyword Use in Page Content
7. Outbound Links to Quality/Relevant Sites
8. Age of Page
9. Keyword Use in Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3)
10. Age of Link

Master OFFpage SEO Presentation 2009 1233862507910620 3

SEO tips from experts

One good thing about SMO techniques are 'backlinks,' which is a major ranking factor for top searchengines . The backlinks gotten from a site with high PR is more valued by searchengines in deciding the rank of the website. Creating an account with following socialbookmarking sites can get us free placement
in high PR sites.
a. Digg
b. Technorati
c. Del.icio.us
d. NowPublic
e. StumbleUpon
f. BlinkList
g. Spurl
h. Furl
i. Slashdot
j. Simpy
To raise the rank in major search engines for top keywords Social Media Searches are highly effective. The top keywords should be included as anchor text in social media engines. Inclusion of keywords in the anchor text will improve the website ranking in search engines. Podcasting sites and Vlogs are important techniques involved in Social Media optimisation.

Latest SEO techniques include Onpage optimisation techniques and Offpage
optimisation techniques. A synopsis of Onpage optimisation techniques is listed below:-
1. Title
2.Meta keyword ( Include it, Just keep 10 keywords, Something is better than nothing:-))
3.Meta description (Sprinkle your key words in description, meta description should be
precise and clear, this will be stated beneath your title in SERP,
Users will decide whether to enter to site or not by reading this description, so craft this
carefully)
4.Place your keywords in Header tags(H1,H2, H3,H4)
5.Put keywords in the initial sentence
6)Place your keywords in the file name
7)Include Keywords in the file name of images
8)Add keywords to Alt tags of images
9)Add keywords to tilte attributes
10)Keywords in the anchor text to internal pages
11)Link keywords in the artciles to another article of the same website using Anchor text.
12)Keywords in the internal link can go the home page.
13)Offload your javascript
14)Include the keywords in the javascript file in HTML comment tags
15)Code to text ratio(minimise the code and maximise the content)
16)Reduce the loading time of your webpage
17)Keep the keyword density between 3 and 7 percentage
18)Check your website for W3C compliancy
19)Don't copy content from other website, u might be caught and... banned

thanks for visiting!

15 Top SEO Websites Where to take right knowledge for web marketing | by February 2010

Here are the 15 Largest Search Engine Optimization Websites ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast. Although no traffic metrics are completely accurate we do believe the data below to be useful for gauging relative audience size.

1 | SearchEngineLand.com
660,527 - Inbound Links | 528,639 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 134,600 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 3,292 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7


 2 | seobook.com
586,295 - Inbound Links | 1,133,293 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 5,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 1,418 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6
eBizMBA
 3 | seomoz.org
1,757,791 - Inbound Links | 684,767 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 19,100 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 1,759 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6


 4 | SearchEngineWatch.com
1,146,625 - Inbound Links | 567,074 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 116,500 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 4,730 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 8


 5 | SEOChat.com
554,233 - Inbound Links | 353,891 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 56,400 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 3,848 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 4


 6 | seroundtable.com
285,403 - Inbound Links | 316,109 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 26,600 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 9,242 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 4


 7 | SearchEngineJournal.com
360,161 - Inbound Links | 412,445 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 13,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 7,675 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6


 8 | MattCutts.com
478,023 - Inbound Links | 395,222 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 17,300 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 6,972 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7


 9 | SubmitExpress.com
941,104 - Inbound Links | 153,709 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 51,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 7,844 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7


 10 | HighRankings.com
56,114 - Inbound Links | 114,119 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 7,900 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 23,570 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 6


 11 | BattelleMedia.com
756,397 - Inbound Links | 113,574 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 22,400 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 50,608 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 7


 12 | SelfSEO.com
63,315 - Inbound Links | 91,522 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 7,700 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 20,857 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 3


 13 | SEOBlackHat.com
54,973 - Inbound Links | 84,631 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 2,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 26,870 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 5


 14 | searchnewz.com
65,068 - Inbound Links | 39,193 - Compete Monthly Visitors | NA - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 50,842 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 4


 15 | SearchMarketingStandard.com
19,622 - Inbound Links | 31,489 - Compete Monthly Visitors | NA - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 74,758 - Alexa Ranking. | Page Rank: 3



Who are on the top in the industry, have a look at this !

What is LSI and how it works in terms of SEO ?

Okay, I am here to let you know all about LSI and its uses in terms of Search Engine Optimization.
LSI keywords start off being complicated because of their name. LSI means Latent Semantic Index. Now, that's an intimidating name. It one of those names that computer geeks love to lay on things so normal people think they (the geeks) are really, really smart.


Is it that complicated?


According to Wikipedia, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is an indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text. LSI is based on the principle that words that are used in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings.


Wow! That's even worse!


OK, that's all the big words I'm going to use here. Unless you're involved in developing search engine technologies, you don't need to understand SVD. You just need to know what LSI keywords are and how to use them. LSI keywords are just words that relate to your main keyword.


In search engine optimization (SEO), you want to use the keywords you are targeting on your page so that the search engine will rank your page highly when a searcher enters those keywords in their search. That's fine, and easy enough, except that if you use the keywords too much, the search engine will penalize the page as being spammy and move it down in the listings.


That's where LSI keywords come in...


You can put LSI keywords in your content instead of overusing the main keywords and it will be like putting in lots of the main keywords with out the problem of overdoing it. They can also be worked into the content in a manner that doesn't hurt the readability of the page for humans.


So where can I find LSI keywords?


The easiest place is The Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Just do a search for "Google AdWords Keyword Tool". Be sure that Descriptive words or phrases is selected, then enter your keyword(s) in the text box. Put in the captcha and press the "Get keyword ideas" button.


You'll get a list of keywords that are related to the main keyword. Scroll down until you come to "Additional keywords to consider". These are LSI keywords that you can use in your content to safely add to the strength of the main keyword.


The bottom line...


LSI keywords are just keywords that relate to the main keyword. Use them to safely increase your search engine ranking. source: Ezinearticles.com