Organic SEO Blog

Please read about SearchCamp here

A few photos…

The Founders of UptrendHits, Ren & Ezhil

Myself with the Search Twins from Bangalore

HOT Panel Discussion on Deliverables & Expectations

A view from the stage…

I’ve been so busy throughout the day, and couldn’t blog anything about SearchCamp. However, you can access about it here, Thanks a lot to Chetan

Around 200 participants attended the event to make this as the largest gathering in India for an event related to Search. I would like to thank Durga Smitha and Praveen of Sulekha.com for burning the midnight oil and making this event a grand success.

Looking forward to Day2

A funny SEO guy from New York says

If you want paraphrased, stolen content; spammy, outdated linkbuilding methods or cookie cutter solutions to your site’s unique problems, you’re probably better off with an SEO firm from India.

It seems that he’s a bit jealous about SEO work being outsourced from U.S to India, and was over-reacting to pandia.com’s article on ebrandz unnecessarily, and seems to be generalizing here at netmagellan.com.

I now throw up an open challenge to him… and wish to share the stage with him for a debate on any seo topic, just to prove that I’m better in Search than him. Lets see if he’s ready for it.

This question “How Much to Pay for SEO?” comes up often in many SEO Forums. Many website owners have been ripped-off by SEO Services, but many have also been rewarded by SEO.

Most SEO service providers are on the up and up who want nothing more than to do professional business and provide quality SEO services. Identifying every shady SEO service may not be possible, but I have some recommended advice which should help anyone get a fair and quality rate for SEO services. For example, xyz.com can be optimized for a monthly commitment of $300 or $1000 or even $5000. Those offering SEO for $300 have a certain set of deliverables and work on some specific strategies, which differ from those companies that charge $5000.

Some site owners expect results too early and may feel ripped-off, even though the SEO provider works hard on their site. No matter who you hire, always ask for references (and check them) and other information you would normally check before hiring a company, whether it’s an SEO firm or not. Also, consider the following while short listing from a list of SEO companies from whom you have got quotes.

- Set yourself a “realistic” marketing budget and goal
- Shop around
- Don’t buy until you feel comfortable
- Remember “cheap does not always mean better”
- Ask for statistical growth and progress report

Thanks to www.antonaf.com

Seochat members are experimenting to see if user behavior is making a difference to the Google Search Result Page. It targets a keyword ‘dAifAfee foArd liAncAoln – merAcurAy’ (Leave the “A” out) for which a site currently ranks around #10 in Google.

It requires the user to visit at least one other page on the website before leaving the site. The user enters the site by typing the above specified keyword, and this step is to be repeated often over the next month or so. This test is to see if clicking on this website from multiple locations around the world and the increase in traffic results in the website climbing higher in Google’s SERP.

Supplemental Results cause a downfall in referrals from Google; For example, this command lets you find out the pages in Supplemental Index; www.google.com/search?&q=site:www.organicseo.in+***+-jjjj 

While lurking through a few SEO Forums, I came across a few good solutions that can prevent pages from getting Supplemental in Google.

What’s a “supplemental result?” http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34473
A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

If 30% of a site’s pages become Supplemental; then the site loses 30% traffic from Google. Thus, it is better to avoid from getting into supplemental results through the following.

1. Unique contents on-page can prevent pages from getting into Supplemental Index.

2. Unique title and meta tags can help in avoiding supplemental results.

3. Over optimization and Excessive internal linking should be avoided.

4. A link from the home page can being a page back into Google’s prime index.

5. Removing unnecessary commented tags within page’s source code can prevent Supplemental Index.

Online Marketing constitutes over $2 trillion in annual sales of th U.S economy, and two-thirds of American households now contain a computer with Internet access. Businesses try to get a competitive edge with their Web sites and some of the Online Marketing tactics run afoul of traditional notions of trademark infringement and unfair competition.

Google Adwrods apparently allows competitors to bid on trademarked terms, including competitors business names.

AdWords Trademark Complaint Procedure

When we receive a complaint from a trademark owner, we only investigate the use of the trademark in ad text. If the advertiser is using the trademark in ad text, we will require the advertiser to remove the trademark and prevent them from using it in ad text in the future. Please note that we will not disable keywords in response to a trademark complaint. In addition, please note that any such investigation will only affect ads served on or by Google.

Search engines organic results are based on how search engine robots read metatags written into the Web site code, which further describe the nature of the site. Some site operators include the trademarked words of competitors in the metatags. For instance, a Hewlett-Packard personal computer retailer might create metatext so that a person typing into a search engine the term “Apple Computer” might end up finding the Hewlett-Packard personal computer retailer.

This phenomenon, defined as “initial interest confusion,” can cause an inquiring buyer mistakenly to visit a Web site which sells something he needs, but is of a different brand; and Trademarks and Brand names as of now aren’t protected on the Internet.

Using the Backlink Building Tools and Link baiting effectively, one can build a good number of back links and can position any website in all major search engines, and drive more and more traffic.

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. Building Quality backlinks is one of the most important factors in Search Engine Optimization. It is not enough just to have a lot of backlinks, it is the Quality of backlinks along with the Quantity that help you rank better in Search Engines.

Webconfs.com offers a cool tool to build backlinks, which searches websites of the theme you specify that contain keyphrases like “Add link”, “Add site”, “Add URL”, “Add URL”, “Submit URL”, “Add Article” etc. Most of the results could be quality potential backlinks.

There are several tools available for building backlinks. But still nothing to beat the links that are taken by other webmasters simply because of usefulness of content. Link baiting is the latest buzz word in the SEO world and has come to be the preferred way to natural link building. It means to create something that naturally attract backlinks for your web page by getting people to talk about it, discussing it on forums, blogging about i, posting it on del.icio.us/Furl/Digg/Shoutwire and linking to it from their sites. It also attracts a lot of visitors.

PPC Campaigns can drive quicker results, but if your budget is not properly managed, it can even throw you out of business. Whereas, in getting your site optimized for Organic rankings, you’ll have to wait for the results with patience, and there is a risk that your competitor could snatch a few potential clients while you were waiting for rankings. Thus, it is always better to do both PPC and SEO within certain limits.

In general, smaller companies in markets with heavy PPC competition would probably see more of a return on their investment by using those resources for an organic SEO campaign combined with some targeted website advertising, like buying sponsored listing on appropriate portals and niche directories.

SEO can also work cumulatively depending on the campaign specifics. Meaning you’d see some great results after the first year, then more results the next year and the traffic would continue to go up and up as your online presence increased. Even if you stopped paying for SEO services the traffic and value they created for your site would not go away.