Inbound links & SEO

Importance of Inbound Links in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Inbound links are the links which are pointing to your webpage/website from any other source apart from your own website. Inbound links are an important source of increasing your Search Engine Rankings. If you wish to appear in top search engine results for your category, you need to give emphasis on the quality and nature of inbound links. In a nutshell, the effect of 1 quality inbound link is far better than 10 irrelevant inbound links to your website, so you need to be extra careful regarding the quality of inbound links to your website.

There are certain points which you can keep in mind while designing a campaign for generating inbound links to your webpage/ website.

• Relevance: The source of inbound link should be relevant to the category of your website/webpage. For example, if you have a website selling electronic gadgets, then its good to have inbound links from the directories displaying latest gadgets rather than having a directory listing road construction contractors of your town.

• Effective use of anchor text in inbound link: The anchor text should be used effectively to include the keyword which your webs page is focusing. This will enhance the relevance of your web page for the keyword you are targeting, and hence the Search engine rankings will be high.

• Page Selection: Carefully select pages and use them as landing pages for various inbound links. Make sure that you use proper distribution and target right kind of page in order boost your search engine rankings.

• Links from .ORG, .EDU, .Gov, etc carries special weight age. Try to get more links from these websites and you will see improved search engine rankings for your website.

• Constant periodic review: Over a period, review the quality of inbound links, the anchor text, and the landing pages for inbound links. This will help you in fine-tuning and getting improved results over time.

• Avoid inbound links from NO-Follow instructions home page. No follow instructions are given by web pages, not to follow a particular links to the search engine crawlers. For example, wikepedia.org is an open encyclopedia project where anyone can post/edit/delete articles along with web links. The links provided there have No follow instructions thus there is no importance given to the links posted there by anyone.

Design and work on a systematic approach for inbound link creation campaign and you can see tangible result in medium and long term in term of enhanced sales/ leads and conversions.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Importance of HTML Sitemap

Sitemap and your Website

If you visit any website, you will find a fine print usually at the bottom which says “sitemap”. This link takes you to a page where the website’s organizational structure (page wise listing) will be there. One can call it as hierarchical listing of a website structure.

A sitemap has got important presence and role in overall website structure.

• It gives an easy navigation option to the website visitors. A visitor can jump to various sections of the website looking at the sitemap without getting lost in the website. Navigational menus can be confusing, so sitemap is used to aid visitor navigation.

• It organizes various sections, themes of a website in proper way. Thus a visitor can get a feel of the website and also a broad structure of the website. Thus, it helps in giving visitor an idea about the website theme and scope.

• Now, sitemap also plays an important role with respect to SEO. Implementation wise, a sitemap is a single page, which has links to all the pages of the website. When a search engine crawler comes to a sitemap, it gets all the links of the pages of a website. Thus, a sitemap helps search engine crawlers in crawling all the links and indexing all the pages of a website.

The key aspect is to create a sitemap and place it strategically on the home page so that when search engine crawler comes to the home page, it gets the link to the sitemap and it can crawl all the links specified in the HTML sitemap. Creating sitemap is bit tedious job but the benefit it provides far exceeds the efforts spent in creating it.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Anchor Text and SEO

Importance of Anchor Text in SEO

What is an Anchor Text?

An Anchor text is the text which is the visible pat of a hyperlink. For example, "SEO services Bangalore". The hyperlink is pointing towards http://www.himshilp.com/ but the text is “SEO services Bangalore”. This text is known as anchor text.

Anchor Text is used to describe the summary of the target page. In above example, the page http://www.himshilp.com/ gives details about the SEO Services and various other services provided by the firm Himshilp which is a Bangalore based firm, so the anchor text “SEO Services Bangalore” is justified.

Anchor Text gives an idea to the visitor of a particular page that what is in store for him if he clicks a particular link on that and move to another page. Thus anchor text indicates the nature and type of content on the target page. This increases the importance of the page and enhances the relevance of the target page.

A brief on the importance of the Anchor Text

• Use of keywords in the anchor text increases the possibility of target page getting higher position in search engine rankings. Reason: Anchor Text increases the relevance of the target page.
  
• Anchor Text is liked by the search engines as they can give weight age to the target page based on the text used in the anchor text.
  
• A good interlinking of pages within a website using Anchor Text increases the changes of the website in attaining high search engine rankings.
  
• While doing link building, ensure that the Anchor Text you are using are relevant to the target pages of your website. Use keywords intelligently to increase relevance and weight age of your website pages.

To sum up, you must use Anchor Text Optimization as a part of your SEO strategy effectively. Search engines love them so you must use Anchor Text to benefit your website.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Organic SEO Vs PPC

PPC and SEO

Pay Per click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are two of the main techniques to generate visits on your website.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is the approach where you bid for the position in search results which are sponsored.

1. higher the bid, higher the position
2. higher the competition, higher the bid

In principal, it is very straight forward. You pay for the position you wish to be and you have a greater control in terms of spending etc.

Organic SEO: Here you try to optimize your web pages around a set of keywords which you feel are suitable to your category. Once search engine crawlers indexes your website and all the pages then your ranking / listing starts appearing in the organic search results for the keywords you have targeted.

So which one of the two is better?

Organic SEO

• ROI from organic SEO is substantially better than PPC
• Organic SEO pays good in long run
• The top positions of search engine results are not for sale. You can get there through organic SEO only
• The CTR of organic listings are higher usually
• The conversion of organic listing is also higher (lead / sales)
• Organic SEO does not require regular maintenance once SEO is done perfectly and is refined for few iterations
• There is no recurring cost associated with SEO
• There is nothing like “click fraud” as you are not paying per click in organic SEO
  

PPC

• PPC gives you instant traffic
• PPC gives you targeted traffic as you can define a set of keywords for which you need traffic
• Results can be measured in PPC programs
• Marketing strategies can be formulated based on PPC as a tangible forecast of clicks is
  available over a period of time
• PPC requires professional management once you attain a certain level of spend as maintaining
• ROI is very important. An inefficiently managed PPC program can make you loose hundreds of dollars in one night !!
• PPC usually is second most cost effective form of web marketing (After organic SEO)
• PPC campaigns requires recurring / ongoing management
• There are chances of loosing money due to click fraud but most of the major search engines have placed mechanisms to check this.

Final Take: For any website an optimum balance and mix of PPC campaigns and organic SEO is must as they can generate quality traffic if managed properly. PPC gives instant traffic and can be a good source to generate traffic in long run too.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

SEO and Heading Tags

Importance of Heading Tags in SEO

Heading tags: These are the tags in HTML which are used to show that a particular text is important by making them bold. As the name suggests, these tags are used to display headings for a webpage or for a portion of text in the webpage.

The text appearing under these tags is made BOLD, thus separating it from the other text on the web page.

Search engines searches relevant and important text on the web page. If you are using heading tags, then crawlers assume that they (heading tags) represent something important on the web page. Thus they give certain weight age to the heading tags.

This is H1 Tag

This is H2 Tag

This is H3 Tag

The size and importance decreases from h1 to h3, that is h1 tag will have the largest font size and its importance is highest.

H1 tag can be used for showing the heading of the page, and ideally it should contain a mix and match of the content of the website with one or two keywords stuffed in between which should justify the text in h1 and the text in the web page content.

By using heading tags, you are making search engine’s job easy as the engine now has the summary of the web page, it knows now what the heading of the web page content is.

Remember, only heading tags can not help you to attain good rankings. You will need to follow other search engine optimization practices sincerely and ethically so that your web page can be crawled and indexed properly.


Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

SEO and Alt Text Tags

SEO and Alt Tags

Like Meta tags, Alt Text tags were also an important part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) till few years ago. Now days the importance of Alt tags have been diminished.

Alt Text tags are meant for providing alternate text to the images, for visually impaired surfers. Stuffing keywords does not help them as they will be stuck in reading the same thing again and again, if keywords ate stuffed in all the alt tags on the page. For them, it will be keyword spamming. Probably this is the reason why all major search engines have started ignoring Alt Tags.

What does this mean?

Alt Text tags should be used for the purpose of representation of image. This was the purpose
of their creation so they should be used for the same. Never try to SPAM through alt tags, in fact you can use 2-3 instances of your primary keywords in Alt Text tags but try to avoid using more than that. Even W3C highly recommends the usage of ALT Tags to describe images. Do not use the text which is irrelevant to the image. If you are trying to fool search engine by excessive usage of keywords in Alt tags, then you are into “Black Hat” practice. Better to avoid this scenario as this will adversely affect your rankings if it backfires.

Final word

Rankings are determined by many factors and Alt Text is just one of them. Focus on this but do not try to use it excessively, instead use a combination of all other factors which will definitely increase your rankings.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization services

Search engine optimization is the process of analyzing a web site and modifying it to enable search engines to read, understand, and index it correctly. This dramatically increases the traffic to the web site. Many web sites are expensive to build and are technologically advanced but they cannot be ranked by the search engines because they were never optimized.

The objective of search engine optimization is to increase web visitor counts by ranking very high in the results of searches using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site.

It is not enough to simply add META tags and do submission of your site to the available search engine indexes and directories.

The initial step is to build a great content-rich website. The last step is the proper submission of your great site to the search engine or directory.

There are no search engine optimization secrets - just ranking and promotion methodologies to follow in order to beat your competition in obtaining a high ranking for desired search keywords

What I suggest is to carefully , by using your instincts and Internet experience, do the following

• Identify your competition
• locate potential back links to your URL
• Identify the relevant keywords (its far better to have ranks for more than one keyword or phrase than to be at the top for only one keyword)

Avoid these

• Repetition of keywords
• Use of irrelevant keywords
• Use of colored text on same-color background
• Duplication of pages with different URLs
• Use of different pages that bridge to the same URL

After keywords identification, follow these

• Add keywords in content
• Submission of website to major search engines
• Recheck search engine registration (it will take few weeks to get your site listed in engines and directories)
• Check the search engine placement (please keep on checking the results as you have to feed this input to your further optimization process)

Repeat all the steps mentioned above periodically to keep your listing improving

Search engine optimization has become a necessity for companies that are serious about increasing Internet business and achieving prominent rankings in the major search engines.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp