Google Analytics for Facebook Fan Pages

With all Facebook pages only Facebook Insights program is available to page administrators. Facebook Insights shows demographic details and interactions on your pages BUT limited to show information of fans only. It is far less sophisticated and comprehensive when compared to the free Google Analytics. One of the limitations of Facebook Fan pages is that you can only run limited Javascript on it and Google Analytics needs Javascript code included to correctly track visitors. We have successfully managed to get ALL functions of Google Analytics working on our Facebook fan page (including visitor statistics, traffic sources, visitor country, keyword searches with all other powerful reporting & maps overlays etc).

How to setup Google Analytics on your Facebook fan pages

The workaround we use in our code is to include Google Analytics as an image instead of setting the standard Javascript. This method tracks every visitor to the custom facebook pages on Google Analytics. It required a combination of server side cookie management and an additional tag to the bottom of the facebook fan page. Here are the steps to get Google Analytics working on your facebook fan page.

1) Setup Google Analytics account. If you already have one, create a new website profile. You can name it facebook.com or facebook.com/your_page_name. You will finally get your tracking code which looks like this UA-3123123-2
2) Create your custom img tag for each of your pages you like to track. EG: contact form, services, products etc.  

Social Media Profiles for Online Reputation Management

Your reputation, online or offline is vital extremely important. Recently, a friend of mine owned a travel business. After hiring an employee with a light criminal background and having thousands of dollars embezzled from him, he started to pursue legal action against this individual. This person decided to get revenge by badmouthing the owner and business through Rip Off Report and other online platforms. Now, anytime you Google his name or business some very offensive things are displayed as a #1 result. Consequently, his business has suffered tremendously.

This situation is the perfect example of the need for reputation management. One of the most powerful (and easiest) methods to begin to control your reputation in the search engine result pages (SERPs) is to create social profiles on major social media websites. Since domains like Twitter or MySpace have such high authority it takes a lot less effort to rank, than creating your own site, by creating a profile that will outrank and push down undesired search results. Also, these search results gives you the added benefit of having control over your brand and being accessible and available on multiple platforms strengthens your overall branding efforts.

Which social profiles should I have?

Once you understand that you should be monitoring and repairing your reputation, you will need to figure out how to do it. As a rule of thumb the Big 4 social media sites are a great place to start. Generally your goal would be to obtain user profiles that are an exact match as the keyword you are trying to manage. In most cases this is a branded term such as your company name. Additioanly branded usernames are generally available on social media websites. Many sites, particularly niche sites, can be useful to your company and your specific ORM situation. But the 4 you must have are:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• MySpace

If you want to check across 120 different social sites to see which keywords or names are taken you can do so very easily with one of the best social media monitoring tools out there called KnowEm.com. Just type the desired username and click “Check Username”. Additionally, they offer a service that will register you on all those different social media sites as well for .50 cents per social media site.

Steps to Take

Once you have your accounts setup, you will need to do a few things before your campaign can be effective.

1. Create a complete profile
Simply obtaining the name twitter.com/companyname, isn’t enough. You need a complete and full profile to have a legitimate working account, this includes bios, avatars etc. As much information that you can fill in and feed to search engine spiders, the better.

2. Engage and Interact
Participating in the community strengthens your profile and gives your account credibility. An account that has your name but nothing else looks like a spam account.

Also, you gain the added benefit of internal links from these social sites. If you just create a profile and let it sit then it doesn’t gain internal link equity it needs, for high SERP rankings, from other profile pages, group pages, etc.
Interacting (e.g. returning messages, commenting, voting) is vital to the strength of your profile. For an example, check out the hat tip to Steve Espinosa for showing how to get DoFollowed links on YouTube here.

3. Monitor
When a company engages in social media they are opening themselves up for a lot of commentary regarding their brand. Be prepared to monitor the sentiment to measure if it’s positive or negative. Have a contingency plan for when you come across negative sentiment. I’ll spare the lesson on monitoring and handling sentiment and direct you to The Online Reputation Management Guide by Outspoken Media.

Read More>> 

503 Status Code (Service Unavailable)

Are you familiar with 503 status code?

If not, this post can help you to know about 503 status code. Search engines like 503 status code if your site is down for maintenance.

In a thread at Google Groups, Googler JohnMu told that Google prefer to use 503 status code if your site is down for maintenance. With the help of 503 status code search engine determines that the site is temporary down for maintenance.

If you are not using 503 status code and your site is in maintenance mode that means you are offering 200 status code, which means everything is OK and still no content. It can harm your presence and ranking on search engine. So the best way is use 503 (services unavailable) status code to prevent the search engine from indexing the error pages.

5 Tips for Creating a Successful Social Media Contest

One of the best ways to drive engagement and build word of mouth traffic about your brand is to run a contest via social media channels. Not only does it engage consumers with your brand in a fun and exciting way, it results in a treasure-trove of customer information, preferences, and feedback you can then mine to improve your business. And, best of all, launching an online contest can be very inexpensive.

However, there is a subtle art to social contests. Your brand needs to appear neither too “cheesy” nor too “salesy,” and you must deliver a prize that people really want. This can be a standard product or gift card, or a “notoriety” prize, such as publishing a winner’s video. What’s more, the contest itself has to be fun and easy to participate in. Few prizes are worth doing something extremely boring, monotonous, or complicated.

Here are five specific strategies you can follow to launch and manage a social contest, and leverage it to deliver real business value:

1.Define the marketing goal:
 Every contest you launch should meet a specific marketing goal. Do you want to drive awareness of a new product or service? Collect a list of customers interested in a specific product segment? Encourage new participants to use your company’s social networking channels? There are many valid reasons to launch a contest, but it’s important to know ahead of time what you’re trying to accomplish.

2.Get Creative:

Here’s the fun part: Creating your contest. The sky’s the limit when it comes to the type of contests you can launch. Here are a few ideas:

- A video contest inviting users to create a new commercial for one of your products

- A user-generated content contest that awards the best ‘personal experience stories’

- A photo contest related to your product or service

- A product invention contest with a large cash prize.

3.Leverage  Social Channels: 
The best part about online contests is how easy it is to take them viral, encourage participation, and link them into your social marketing activities. Promote your contest via Facebook, Twitter, your company blog, and all other social channels, as well as via traditional marketing channels such as print, e-mail, and in-store signage.

Just search the word contest on Twitter to see hundreds of contests going on right now. The best contests are intensely social by nature, because people like to play games and contests together, and most people love to share the chance to win a cool prize with friends and family. Ensure your contest is easily sharable by embedding “share this” links on the contest site, on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (YouTube), and everywhere else people will come across it.

4.Finish the Contest: 
Everyone loves a winner, so make sure you don’t let your contest drag on too long. A typical social contest runs about four weeks –- longer.hen the winner is chosen, do a PR push to publicize their win. Of course, use Facebook and Twitter to promote the winner like mad. Go back to your social media tracking software and find out which people and social sites are talking most about the winner, then post comments on those networks to drive even more interest in the winner.

5.Measure the Contest: 
Of course launching a contest wasn’t just for fun, it was to achieve a specific marketing goal. So after the contest is done, you need to measure the impact it had on brand engagement, clickthrough to your site, conversion, and bottom-line sales. Again, you can use your social media tracking tool to measure all of these success metrics. Find out whether your contest drove as much traffic to your site as you had hoped, and whether this traffic resulted in conversion.

Sorce: Mashable

How to Add Facebook’s Like Button & Social Plugins to Your Web Pages & WordPress Posts

Facebook’s new Open Graph protocol is now official, having been announced and launched this past Wednesday at the Facebook f8 Conference. It is the successor to Facebook Connect which will be slowly phased out, and it is a big improvement, making it much easier to “socialize” your Web pages into Facebook’s hyper-expanding social network.

I must admit it was hard to sit still at the f8 conference after Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement in his keynote address and I attended a couple sessions that delved deeper into the Social Plugins and the Open Graph protocol. As soon as possible, which happens to be today, I decided to start experimenting by adding some social plugins to my WordPress blog.

I decided I could save others a lot of time if I wrote up a tutorial. So here it is….

Adding the Facebook Social Plugins to your Web Page or Blog — XFBML or iFrame?

Facebook offers two methods to add their social plugins to your Web page or blog posts:

   1. A simple iframe which can be easily dropped into the Web page code;
   2. The XFBML tag, which requires that your page/post make a call to the JavaScript SDK and that your page be set up as a Facebook application (quite easy).

I decided to go the XFBML route which, although a bit more complicated, is more feature rich than the iframe method. For example, after clicking on your Like/Recommend button, the user can add a comment to the profile post on the user's personal profile.
If you’d be happy with the simpler iframe method, there are several WordPress plugins to add the Like button.


Create an Application – Tell Facebook Your Website, Web Page or Post is an Application

The Web page or blog post to which you will add Facebook’s social plugins or other features that interact with Facebook’s Graph API will be viewed by Facebook as an “application,” which allows the page or post to use the JavaScript SDK.

4 Ways to Solve If WordPress Plugins Broken Your WordPress Blog

Most WordPress users had this experience at least once. You find a cool plugin around the web, rush to upload it to your server, activate it, and then when you check the blog to see if its working, bang! The blog crashes and you can’t even load the homepage….

Obviously this is not WordPress’ fault. The crash usually comes from bad code that was used in the plugin itself, or from a conflict that is coming from another plugin already installed on the blog.

Either way it is a frustrating experience, and here is what you can do to get out of it.

1. Try to de-activate the plugin

The first thing you should try is to de-activate the plugin. Simply try to login into the admin area. If that is working, go the list of plugins and de-active the one you just installed.

2. Rename the plugin via FTP

Many times the crash will affect the WordPress admin area as well, so you won’t be able to de-activate it. In those situations you should try to rename the plugin file or folder via FTP.

3. Delete the plugin via FTP

If simply renaming the plugin was not enough, try to delete it completely. This will try to stop your WordPress install from loading the buggy code.

4. De-activate all the plugins via PHPMyAdmin

Some plugins will alter tables in your WordPress database when you activate them. As a result your blog might keep crashing even after you delete the plugins via FTP.
If that is the case, you will need to log into cPanel, and open the PHPMyAdmin interface. Then select the WordPress database, and browse inside the “wp-options” table. Look for the “active_plugins” column, and edit it. Inside the “options_value” field you will find something like this:

a:31:{i:0;s:13:"AddMySite.php";i:1;s:19:"akismet/akismet.php";
i:2;s:23:"all_in_one_seo_pack.php";i:3;s:16:"authenticate.php";
i:4;s:28:"breadcrumb-navigation-xt.php";i:5;s:18:
"codeautoescape.php";i:6;s:37:

These lines represent the active plugins in your blog (you can read more on this issue here). Delete them all and save. This should automatically de-activate every plugin. Now check if your blog is live again, and if the admin area is working. They should be.
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SEO tips for Video Distribution

Now SEO has become very vast. So many SEO tips and SEO Strategies are available for promotion of your site. It depends on you what you want to select and from where you want to start SEO.

One most important SEO tip is video distribution. It is the best SEO Strategies in all the SEO process for getting traffic. Search some video sites which except video submissions. Create your site video, your video must related to your site theme. You may include any type of video. Your video timing depends on your own, but it is good if you make the video of two or three minutes. All video sites accept less time duration video but some sites do not accept more than three minute time duration. Select the title of your video related to your site theme. You must include your first keyword in the title. Description is also available here in this channel. You must create a good description which shows all the services of your site. Some video sites accept keywords also, you may include all the keywords here of your site. The video link promote through social networking.

So many SEO tips are available for your site promotion; it depends on you which you want to select. Start video distribution and promote your website.

List of Free Blogging Platforms

Blogger.com – Google’s blogger.com is (perhaps) the most widely used free blogging platform around the blogsphere and very easy to use.


WordPress.com – Not only can you install WordPress on your own sites, you can use the same software on their site and save yourself all of the technical work.

LiveJournal.com – One of the most well known of the blogging hosts, offers various type of blog hosting services (free and paid).

Blogetery.com – Offers multiple templates, anti-spam, free sub-domain and more.

BlogRox.com – Runs on WordPress and offers 50MB of free online space.

Blogsome.com – Based out of Ireland, powered by WordPress, large choice of themes.

Edublogs.com – WordPress powered blogging for educators.

GreatestJournal.com – Based on the same software as LiveJournal, offers free voice posts, 1GB of photo hosting, and space for up to 2,000 user icons.

InsaneJournal.com – Another site based on the Danga software that runs LiveJournal, offers free and paid accounts, paid benefits are only enhancements.

JorunalFen.net – Runs on the Danga platform, very much directed towards various “fandoms” (i.e. Harry Potterharry potter , various Television shows) and is meant for users 18 and older.

Blog.com – Offers both free and paid blog hosting.

Blog Ladder.com – All blog entries show up on the main ladder as well as inside your own blog.

Blogr.com – Blogr is a web service that allows you to blog, host photos & videos, and podcasts.

BlogSpirit.com – European based blogging site, offers 30-day trial and subscription thereafter, but offers quite a bit of storage.

Freevlog.org - Freevlog.org is designed for video blogging and their service is completely free.

Blogster.com – Offers free image hosting in addition to free blogs.

BlogYx.com – Blogging site with extras such as chat boxes so you can interact with your readers.

Bloki.com – Lets you build a blog site and even open it up for collaboration.

Bravenet.com – Free blog hosting with RSS feeds and more.

ClearBlogs.com – Free blog hosting and offers templates, friends only posts, IP-Banning and more.

Etribes.com – allow you to share videos, photos, and writings via blogs and image gallery.

Multiply.com – Provides blogging and social networking, with photo galleries and more.

Netcipia.com – Free blog and wiki for private or public display with 2GB of storage.

OpenDiary.com – Offers unlimited storage and posts, low cost subscription rates for advanced features.

ShoutPost.com – Free blog platform with a focus on generating traffic.

Friendster.com - is more about social networking but they do offer free blogging services to their users.

SoulCast.com – Have something you want to talk about, but want to say it anonymously? This may be the blogging site for you.

Squarespace.com – Lets you build your blog with numerous themes, also allows you to add other site features.

Terapad.com – Offers blogs as well as features such as an integrated store.

Tooum.com – Fully integrated blog and forum which allows for seamless discussion between the two.

Tumblr.comTumblr.com – A blog platform with a focus on allowing media-rich posts.

Weebly.com – Allows you to create a site and blog, free hosting and change designs on the fly.

Windows Live Spaces – Free blogging with your MSN account, only drawback is readers have to have an account also.

Vox.com – Part of the SixApart family of blogging sites, very much geared towards the personal journal types of blogs.

Xanga.com – Provides part of social network, part blogging, all free.

Yahoo 360 – Part of your Yahoo account and features easy publishing.

Zoomshare.com – Free blog hosting with 250MB of free storage.

Blogabond.com – A site dedicated to travel blogs with map integration and more.

BlogCheese.com – A video blogging website.

BusyThumbs.com – A blog site specifically for your text messages and camera phone images.

Freevlog – Designed for video blogging and completely free.

Trippert.com – Create and share blogs of your travels.

Ufem.com – Blogging site specifically geared towards women. Offers multiple themes and plugins.

Word Count Journal.com – A new blogging format that is also part challenge. Write one word on the first day, two words on the second day and so on, at the end of the year you’ll have written 66,795 words.

Xanco.com – Another moblogging site for you to share all your mobile communications with friends and family.

Top SEO Tips for Web Designers

Today most web designers do more than just design the look and feel of a web site. They often play a major part in writing the front end code. This means that a big part of the SEO or Search Engine Optimization responsibilities should fall on the designer. However, there is a large number of web designers that don’t understand this subject well enough to create a site that is fully optimized for search engines.

In this article, I want to share some quick and easy SEO tips for all designers should be using in their layouts.

Tip 1: Employ SEO techniques right from the start of web design and development.
Tip 2: When building the front end of your site, make sure to use semantic code. By using descriptive tags to structure your pages, search engines will be able to read and have a better understanding of your content. This will also make the process of styling your site much easier and cleaner.
Tip 3: Don’t forget the basics including title tags, Meta tags, Meta descriptions, Header tags etc.
Tip 4: Don’t forget to optimize your website images using alt tags. Also make sure to optimize the image size and loading time to the minimum.
Tip 5: Search engines simply adore text and content, particularly the unique one. So make sure your pages have relevant content to boost your search rankings. Try not to overload your web design with so many graphic, but have appropriate text too.
Tip 6: Flash is cool and interactive feature to engage users, but it doesn’t work with flash. If you really want to put some flash on your website, use flash banners and slideshows, and keep alternative text versions for websites in full flash.
Tip 7: Competitive analysis is also crucial to know your competitor’s status. This way you can not only improve your own rankings, but also defeat them in areas where they are showing poor results.
Tip 8: Optimize your website URL’S with your relevant keywords. Assign a different title name to each page, and don’t repeat the same title throughout the entire site. Moreover, the page title must not exceed 65 characters.
Tip 9: Replace JavaScript sin navigation menu with CSS based navigation. Using JavaScript can make your menu less search engine friendly but you can use some of its features in a CSS menu and retain the fanciness of the navigational menu and over all website design.
Tip 10: Use a SEO friendly design that does not block or hamper the indexing of important areas on your site. Also, to ensure both search engine and user friendliness keep your keyword rich content above the fold.
 Tip 11: Search engines place a high importance on links. So when linking to relevant content, be sure to use a word that describes the content. For example, if you were giving your reader a link to learn more about Photosop, use something like “Learn more about Photoshop” as opposed to just “Learn More”.

When to Outsource SEO and When to Keep it in House ?

SEO is important business these days. All too often, there is little supply to meet the current demand. With increases in the costs associated with other forms of web marketing, it has become almost a necessity for businesses to incorporate SEO in to their marketing plan.

Unfortunately many companies know very little about SEO and assume it will be cheaper for them in the long run to hire someone "in-house". In some cases, it may very well be. For most, however, overlooking the benefits of outsourcing SEO can be costly.

Why is it better to outsource?

SEO is an ever changing business. One has to know when and how to find new information. An SEO firm is more likely to be aware of changes to search engine optimization protocols than an in-house individual. An individual will likely spend the majority of his or her time developing and implementing your SEO strategies. Outsourced SEO professionals must perform these same functions while constantly studying the industry, staying current with changing trends and familiarizing themselves with the latest SEO techniques. This is a simple necessity SEO companies that wish to survive.

There are few individuals who will be able to successfully perform the many functions associated with SEO well. An SEO firm likely has several individuals on payroll that specialize in one particular function, be it link building, writing , optimizing etc. These individuals are able to perfect their craft and are usually more adept at their position than a single person wearing many hats.

Time is another concern with in-house SEO. Will one individual be able to optimize multiple pages, write content, tags, build links, run reports and perform other SEO tasks in a timely fashion? One person can only do so much. In the online business world, time is money. Most companies can do in a matter of days what might take an individual weeks to do. Many companies who use in-house SEO personnel spend more than necessary to get the same amount of work done in a longer amount of time.

What about cost? Surely the cost of hiring an individual is substantially less than the cost of hiring a company, right? As I stated in the last paragraph, time concerns and individual expertise will make outsourcing cheaper. Having one individual do the job of five is rarely a good idea. You wouldnt ask your auto mechanic to take a look at your broken television, would you?

In any case, is outsourcing the right move for you or your company? Whether you choose to outsource or not, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Do your research by performing a simple cost/benefit analysis on what outsourcing versus in-house SEO will cost. In some cases, in-house SEO maybe a better option, especially if you require little in the way of SEO and would be hiring an individual who canperform other tasks.

A resume can say a lot and mean nothing. A resume talking about rankings is meaningless unless you have all the information. Top rankings for phrases no one is searching for means little, and shouldnt be used as a guage of someones abilities.

Whether you hire a SEO company or individual...what is their contribution to the SEO society? Do they share their knowledge? Set trends? It is better to do business with someone that shares their ideas and insights than one who simply learns from others. Innovative techniques are only developed by innovative individuals or companies.

What do others say about the company or individual? Ask for references and check them.

For small companies, in-house SEO can be the best option. The company has time to grow into their SEO. They can see how it works for them and then branch out. Large companies, on the other hand, can lose a lot of ground using an individual over a company. Choosing a competant firm would suit them best.

To know more, visit - http://mrseonewz.blogspot.com

Top Search Engine Optimization Plugins For WordPress

Here I want to describe few SEO plugins for WordPress users to optimize their Blog:

1. All in One SEO Pack – One of the best and the most popular plugin in wordpress is All in One SEO Pack, the plugin does it all for you. If you are tired with writing HTML meta descriptions, keywords etc, The plugin makes it smooth to add meta tags, meta description, keywords and robots description. It helps by choosing the best keywords and avoiding duplicate descriptions.

2. Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO linking tools allows you to set the word phrase for automatic linking and can be set to “nofollow” to avoid duplicate links. Forget to put manual links just choose a word and give it a link. This plugin is user friendly and increases the navigation. The plugin also removes the back links, and thus increase your overall SEO score.

3. Google XML Sitemaps - The XML sitemap generator builds the sitemap for website, so that website links can easily be submitted to search engines. You don’t have to summit single URLs or wait for Google to index your pages. The XML site map does it all. It is the best tool for search engine Optimization. Build your site maps easily and you can exclude the URLs you don’t want to index. The tool is easy to use without any hazels.

4. HeadSpace2 – HeadSpace2 is the meta data manager, it does many SEO tasks. With it you can tag posts and can create custom title and description to increase your search engine ranking. It perform’s various operations like Meta-data nesting, Dynamic data extraction and a feature of mass editing. Besides it can be page specific and theme specific. It should be used to increase your SEO SCORE.

5. Simple Tags – The plugin is extremely easy to use. It helps blogger’s to add tags from automated generated tags, auto-completion of tags as you type, mass tag editing. IT has an Ajax Admin Interface, which is handy to use. The tool is for dummies to increase their SEO score.

6. Meta Robots WordPress plugin – The plugin add robot meta data to pages so that search engines get to know which page to follow and which to nofollow. Prevent authors, data based archives and search results to get indexed and give irrelevant search results. To configure it, the tool needs pro skills. If you are not sure about what are robots and what does they do, do get information before using it.

7. Redirection – For may reasons you may need Redirection tool. This tool allows you to redirect URLs from one page to another. If you change the post heading the permalink gets changed, now search engines need time to re-index your new URL, So Just redirect the older one’s to new ones. This simply optimize your SEO score.

8. SEO Post Link – The SEO Post Link plugin checks the URL of your posts and if it is too long search engines won’t give a liking towards it. It make the links to more search engine friendly, that is limiting it to a no of words, cut unnecessary words and much more.

9. SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – The plugin allows you to search the duplicate content on your blog for whatsoever the reason may be. It sets to “nofollow” the content and helps from search engine penalties.

10. SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Tags, all know what’s their power is, if you give tags for your content it will be read by the search engines and it drives traffic to the website. Tags are the keywords for your content. No tags less relevancy but good and enough tags get a flow of traffic.

Difference between 301 and 302 Redirects

Many people don't know the different between a 301 and 302 redirect. You might think that Google and the other search engines would just follow the redirects, but that's where things get complicated. A 301 redirect means that the page has moved to a new location, permanently. A 302 redirect means, that the move is temporary. Search engines need to figure out whether to keep the old page, or replace it with the one found at the new location. Use the wrong type of redirects, and the search engines' view of your web site can get screwed up, badly.

Why does this matter? If you are moving a web page or an entire web site to a new location, for instance if you change your domain name, you want visitors to be able to find your site. A redirect causes the user's browser to automatically forward from the old location to the new one. You might think that Google and the other search engines would just follow the redirects, but that's where things get complicated. When a site moves, that can trigger the Google aging delay. Usually the site drops out of the search rankings for several months, sometimes even a year. We'll come back to this later.

There aren't too many situations where a 302 is appropriate. How often have you temporarily moved a page? It's much more common to move pages permanently. Nevertheless, it seems easier to create 302 redirects than 301s. You can use Javascript or a meta tag to create a 302. Creating a 301 redirect requires special commands in your .htaccess file if you use an Apache server. With Windows servers, creating 301 takes even more time and trouble. That's why there's a tendency for people to mistakenly use 302 instead of 301.

Google recognizes that many people use 302 when they really mean 301. Fortunately, Google isn't bound by any law to take people literally. For the sake of producing the best possible search results, Google can and should look at 302s and figure out if the webmaster really means 302, or if it's run-of-the-mill confusion and they really mean 301.

Whether Google actually handles 302s properly is an open question. If you use a 302 when you should be using a 301, there's a chance Google or some other search engines might keep your old URL in the index, and then filter out your new URL as a duplicate. You might end up with link popularity divided between the two domains, hurting your search rankings. The search engines might figure out how to handle your 302, or they might not. 

Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer

Back in 2001, Eric asked for a brainstorm of a few "splashy" ideas in search. A designer and product manager at the time, I made a few mockups -- one of which was for 'universal search.' It was a sample search results page for Britney Spears that, in addition to web results, also had news, images, and groups results right on the same page. Even then, we could see that people could easily become overwhelmed with the number of different search tools available on Google -- let alone those that would be created over the next few years. This proliferation of tools, while useful, has outgrown the old model of search. We want to help you find the very best answer, even if you don't know where to look.

That mockup and early observations were the motivation behind the universal search effort we announced earlier today. And while that Britney Spears mockup was the start of Google's universal search vision, it was instantly obvious that this would be one of the biggest architectural, ranking, and interface challenges we would face at Google. Over several years, with the help of more than 100 people, we've built the infrastructure, search algorithms, and presentation mechanisms to provide what we see as just the first step in the evolution toward universal search. Today, we're making that first step available on google.com by launching the new architecture and using it to blend content from Images, Maps, Books, Video, and News into our web results.

With universal search, we're attempting to break down the walls that traditionally separated our various search properties and integrate the vast amounts of information available into one simple set of search results. Read more ...

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Difference between SEO and SEM

As you know Search engine optimization purely based in organic way or in simple terms in a free manner .SEO(Search Engine Optimization) is a part of SEM.SEM stands for Search engine Marketing ,it can be explained as acquiring traffic from search engines and other websites by means of payment. Like Google adwords, Yahoo marketing, MSN adCenter.

We know that SEO is a long term process ,so generally website owner wont wait for that long time they will pay for their website traffic driven by search engines and other websites.

Paid inclusions in search engines and directories
Pay per click advertising
Traditional advertising i.e placing ads in search engines

For example if you need 1000 visitors per day you can pay an amount for each visitor and buy them from the popular means like google adwords, MSN adcenter, yahoo sponsor, Miva and many of other search engines .This is traffic driven from search engine advertising whereas another famous one contextual advertising is you can place your website ads on other websites which can drive you traffic .

Advantages:
People needs to switch over the paid marketing because it produces a definite and quick result ,
You can test your product reach and performance in daily basis
If your product is worthy you can convert it in to money
You can target your visitors to the perfect landing pages of your website which can express more about your product
SEO may lead a general traffic but paid traffic leads category related traffic
For example
If you have a music related website which sells CD/DVD or products
SEO may generate traffic even for free mp3 musics but you can sell your product to a viewer who is expecting something free where as in SEM you can generate the perfect traffic for your product.

Disadvantages:
If you cant convince your visitor both your time and money gets failed.
It can make you profitable suddenly at the same time it drives to a great loss.
SEM cannot be fulfilled without SEO ,well trained SEO can perform SEM better.
I have just explained you the basic and differences between SEO and sem .There is lot do with SEM we will discus in coming days .Hope you can understand the difference.

Top 10 On-Page SEO Tips

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important ingredients for getting large amounts of traffic to your website besides high-quality content. Because once your articles are a few weeks old, the majority of the traffic to those articles will come from search engines. That's why it's important to rank high in search engines.

In this article I'm going to describe the 10 basic SEO tips that you should keep in mind when writing a new article or developing a new website to make sure your blog ranks high in the search engines.

1. Place Your Keywords In the Title Tag

The title tag is one of the most important things for ranking high for particular keywords. That's why it's very important to think of a title that contains important keywords and grabs the attention of people. Because when people search on search engines like Google, the title of your page will be displayed in the results and people will click on links that are the most attractive to them first. Remember that it's also very important and rewarding to have a unique title, so before you use the title, Google it and see if the title already appears in the top 10 results.

Please keep in mind that Google only displays the first 70 characters(about 8 words) of your page's title. Google does not even index the keywords in your page's title after the 12th or so word. Yahoo and MSN don't even index pages that have a page title that's too long. Source: Google – How Many Words In A Page Title Tag?

Note: WordPress users should use the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. This plugin gives you the ability to easily place the title of your post in the beginning of your title tag.

2. Optimize Your Robots.txt

Having an optimized robots.txt is important because this file can control which pages of your websites get crawled by the search engine spiders. For those of you who use WordPress, I recommend preventing search engine spiders from crawling wp-admin and plugin folders.

Here are some more resources about the robots.txt file:

3. Proper Use of ALT Tags

The tag should be used to describe an image, not to spammed with keywords that have nothing to do with the image.
Why? Because while it's true that search engine spiders cannot read images, they can however read tags, and having it spammed with keywords that are totally irrelevant to the image will make Google aware of what to derank you for.

Here's some more information about alt tags:

4. Anchor Text of Links

The anchor text is the text inside your tags that links to other pages. Wether they're incoming or outgoing links, it's important for the anchor text to contain a description of where the link is taking the visitor. This is even more important for search engines because it tells its crawlers where the link is going.

So avoid using words like "Click Here" as an anchor text as it can hurt both your website and the website you're linking to. One more thing to keep in mind is to keep the characters in your anchor text under 55.

5. Quality of Inbound and Outbound Links

While most web developers know that having many web sites link to your can boost your rankings, a lot of them don't know that the quality of the websites linking to your websites plays a vital role in your website's page rank. Getting links for random dofollow blogs has a way smaller impact than if a website with a high pagerank links to your website in an article.

Who you link to matters, as Google warned webmasters that they can be penalized if they link to spam websites. Linking to really bad websites (malware injecting websites etc.) can easily get your site removed from Google's search engine results pages(SERPs). One thing to keep in mind is that Google's spiders might not follow all of your links if you have over 100 unique outbound links on a single page.

More articles about linking:

6. Proper Use of Header Tags

,

tags etc. should be used when appropriate. Don't be using

tags as a paragraph or using
class="title"
to display the title of your page or something.

Here's a few things to keep in mind when using header tags:

  • only use one

    tag per page

  • you can use as many

    -

    tags as you like in your pages
  • search engine crawlers only read basic html(no css what-so-ever)

More articles about header tags:

7. Importance of the First Paragraph

Your first paragraph is the most important paragraph in your page. This is because it's the first paragraph search engines scan and they assume that it's somewhat of a summary of the page/article. That's why it's essential to have the most important keywords of your page in the first sentence or two.

If you're using the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress, the plugin will automatically take the content from your first paragraph and place it in the meta description, which is the text that search engines display under the title of your page.

8. Ensure Your Site is Accessible

An accessible website should ensure that its content can be successfully delivered as often as possible. The functionality of pages, the uptime of the server, validity of HTML elements are all parts of site accessibility. If these points are either ignored or faulty, both your visitors and search engines will select other websites to visit.

Use tools like:

To know if your site contains broken links or when your site is down.

9. Use SEO Friendly URLs

The URL of a page should be descriptive so both the users and search engines have an idea what the page they're being linked to consists of. SEO Friendly URLs also have the benefit of serving as their own anchor text when copy pasted to forums etc. due to URL having the keywords of the page in its URL. These type of URLs usually rank higher in search engines than pages with a URL like example.com/p=981489894.

Furthermore, when using Dynamic URLs try to keep your dynamic parameters under 2 or else the chance is high than it might not get crawled by search engine spiders unless they're perceived as very important(ie. have a large amount of inbound links).

More articles about SEO Friendly URLs:

10. Site Usability

If your website is cluttered with ads and has a terrible layout, accessibility, navigation and low quality of content, chances are that you'll get less people linking back to your site than one that has better usability than yours, thus resulting in lower page ranking.
If your website was designed in the 90s you seriously need consider hiring a web designer to redesign your website.

How to use Keywords to improve Search Engine Rank

Those who are trying to get their website on a search engine should realize that while popularity is a part of the equation, there are many other factors to how search engines rank web sites for the search results. While each search engine will have it’s own way as to how it filters results, there are four things that every search engine relies heavy on for its results.


Keyword Frequency

The main thing that search engines are looking for is the page (or pages) that offer the most information on the topic. This is determined by the frequency of the key words available on the actual website. If someone searches for “SEO tips”, the search engine will look for the websites that have the best frequency of “SEO tips” available; too little will garner no results, and too high of a frequency may have an adverse effect. 


Keyword Location

Another thing that search engines are looking for is the actual location of those specific keywords. The search engines want to know how soon the web page is actually getting into the information that the person is search for. If the keywords appear toward the top of the page, the website will rank higher. If the keywords do not show up until later in the page, they will rank low, or will not even rank on the search engine results at all.


Spamming

Many people take the idea of the keyword and over-do it. They try to place the keyword on the webpage as much as possible. To protect results against this, search engines will actually cut out results that are deemed to have too many keywords. They feel that the web page is attempting to “spam” the search engine by simply featuring multiple keywords excessive amounts of time without actually having information about the specific keyword. 


Popularity

Search engine results do take popularity into account when ranking the websites for keywords. Those web pages that rank high on results but are not often clicked on will find that they are dropped on the results page. This is something that is not controllable, as it simply relies on how often your link is chosen when shown on a search engine results page.


Summary: 

Trying to get a website to show up on the top results of a search engine’s results can be difficult and confusing for many. While getting the results wanted may be easy for certain topics, it may be incredibly difficult for others. Taking all of the aspects of how search engines rank web sites can help you to understand exactly what needs to be done to rank as high as physically possible on search engine result pages.

Role of Link Baiting

Link Baiting is an important part of SEO and can spell the difference in the effectiveness of an SEO strategy. While some people consider it a somewhat underhanded practice, it is simply a creative method of building links.

To the uninitiated, link bait is any content or feature within a web site that is designed to lure viewers to place links to it from other web sites. Link baits can come in many forms. They could be free tools, an article, an image, a puzzle, an invitation to join a contest – there really is no limit to what you can use.

Link baiting drives SEO results as this is a speedy and easy method of building links. It gets your website the attention it needs as more and more people learn about what you have to offer. If your link bait is very good, people will continue referring your links to others and this is really akin to having other people do your work for you at no cost! Of course, an increase in traffic volume may potentially lead to higher profits.

Link baiting is also one of the factors that can increase your search engine rankings. The number of backlinks attributed to your site increases your chances of appearing in the top results page of a search engine. Now if your links are picked up by well-established websites, that will do even more wonders for your reputation.

The potential of earning long term results through link baiting is also a significant advantage of this technique. If your content is compelling enough, people will keep referring to your site for years and years to come. When you actively use link baits, you are building up an image, a reputation for providing useful data to the public. Even if you use link baits for special or seasonal events only, this doesn’t necessarily mean traffic generation ends once the event has concluded. A well thought out link baiting scheme leads to sustainable traffic, not just one time visits that won’t be duplicated once the curiosity has worn off.

For link baiting to contribute considerably to your SEO strategy, remember that your website must have a strong backbone and that backbone comes in the form of superior quality content.

Unless your website has something truly useful or relevant to offer, no amount of backlinking will boost your rank or maintain traffic over time. Link baiting sounds very easy but it requires strategic planning for it to be effective.
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