Monthly Archives: May 2012
Things to be Considered While Designing Business Website
Whenever you want to do something, you surely might be devising a checklist that would help you do the things right and make sure you don’t miss out on anything. If you apply the same principle to designing a business website, you would have the perfect business website within no time. Before you get on with a business website, remember that the website would serve as an image of your company on the World Wide Web. How to you garner the target audience and what kind of audience you attract will be a decisive factor in how you fare in your online business.
Domain: Search engines like Google do not list websites based on domain name. Your domain name will not get you featured on the SERPs, but the keywords you use in the meta tag information or the content on your website will. This also includes the Header or Heading tags that help search engines to rank your website. Make sure you include only your most relevant keyword in the tag as you don’t have much character space for all of them.
Images: Search engines do not recognise images but they surely recognize the Alt text that comes along with it. So, whenever you insert any image in your website you can make it search engine friendly by adding some relevant, descriptive content that would not only make the image comprehensible but also enable the search engine to spot the relevant image whenever a search is carried out.
SEO in 2012: The Best of Times or the Worst of Times?
By SCOTT COWLEY at Search Engine Journal
I don’t like trying to package everything that’s happening in our industry into a neat little box, because it’s like trying to describe the cause of the Civil War in two sentences. I’m likely to leave some things out, overstate some factors, and unintentionally offend some people. But I do think that an individual perspective can add flavor and context to an interesting narrative that’s still unfolding right in front of us.
Whether you think all of the upheaval is great or terrible for the industry (or whether you believe there is no upheaval at all), you have to admit that 2012 has been a strange year for search engine optimization so far. It has left me reflecting on who must be loving SEO right now and who must be hating it.
Panda Ripples
Nearly every site was impacted by the original Panda update, which just had its year anniversary. This year, Google has rolled out a series of lesser updates to effectively tackle webspam, all under the Panda umbrella, beginning with version 3.2 and a tweak designed to target ad-heavy page layouts. While Google has been unusually public about this string of updates, it doesn’t change the fact that most SEOs say they haven’t recovered from the effects of the original sweeping update.
When one site gets devalued by an algorithm change, another site is positioned to gain rankings, but most of the sites benefiting from Panda have been big brands (no surprise since Google inherently stands to benefit from larger PPC budgets at these companies and hasn’t been shy of pushing the benefits of SEO + PPC through its own PR machine scientific studies).
Ways To Recover & Negative SEO : Google Talks Penguin Update
By Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land
It’s been about two weeks since Google launched its Penguin Update. Google’s happy the new spam-fighting algorithm is improving things as intended. But some hurt by it are still wondering how to recover, and there remain concerns about “negative SEO” as a threat. I caught up with Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, on these and some related questions.
Penguin: “A Success”
The goal of any algorithm update is to improve search results. So how’s Penguin been for Google?
“It’s been a success from our standpoint,” Cutts said.
Getting Better At Keywords : Avoid keyword stuffing, but do keywords right
By Chris Crum at WebProNews
Last week, Google unleashed its Penguin update upon webmasters. The update, as you may know, was designed to decrease the rankings of sites engaging in black hat SEO tactics and webspam. One of the classic black hat tactics is keywords stuffing, so if you’ve been doing this and getting away with it in the past, there’s a good chance the update took you down a notch.
Specifically, Google’s Matt Cutts said the update “will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. Avoiding keyword stuffing has long been one of these guidelines. The guideline says, “Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.”
Google has a page about this in its help center, where it elaborates a little more. Here’s what Google says, verbatim, about keyword stuffing there:
“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
