Suggestions while working with SEO Company

Thing to consider while working with SEO firm

Based on my experience in executing SEO projects for over half a decade, I am posting a blog entry which deals with the suggestions for a client working with any SEO professional or SEO firm for optimizing his website.

• Have complete faith in SEO professional: Once you finalize SEO professional or SEO Company, trust their skills. Also you need to trust their knowledge and experience. Do give them freehand to work on their methodology and indulge yourself in learning basics about their methodology and approach. You can discuss the blueprints they prepare for your website, in detail with them. This will help your SEO professional in gaining your confidence and also will help you in reaching a comfort level with your SEO professional.

• Have reasonable / realistic expectations about your SEO project: SEO can’t work miracles irrespective of their experience and past track record. Especially if the site is new, it may take months to really see traffic building up because of SEO work. So its quite unfair on your part to expect your website appearing in top 10 search results within a month of SEO work done. This is the reason why a good SEO professional DO NOT guarantees any results for the SEO job.

• Be patient with the results and be realistic: SEO is not a fuse wire which can trigger a chain reaction and your site will be bombarded with huge traffic in a matter of time. You need to be patient with SEO. It takes time to implement SEO as it’s a scientific approach and can be implemented after taking a series of steps, each requiring thorough analysis. The approach implemented by a SEO professional may take time to get indexed properly and it may take a little while to get appreciation by search engines in terms of rankings.

• Work in detail with SEO and treat him as a partner: You need to detail SEO about every minute thing related to functionality of your business so that he can come up with a decent research on keywords. Talk to him about the nature of business, customer behavior, product range, your competitors, target group / area. Based on the information provided by you, SEO can pick right sets of keywords and can boost your website rankings and get the right traffic.

• Be ready to pay for quality work: Chose a SEO professional / SEO company based on the track record. Once zero in on any professional based on the capabilities, then be ready to pay for the quality work which you expect from him. “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. There are plenty of people who are ready to do SEO in a couple of hundred dollars. Their job is just to stuff keywords and create metas and they are done. So my advise is be cautious while picking SEO and be ready to pay for quality work as it is something which is going to bring in more MOOLAH to your business and your growth depends on this.

• Do not hesitate taking an elementary class from SEO professional about SEO approaches and methodologies: Learn the basics of SEO from SEO professional working on your project. It takes little efforts but the reward is quite satisfying. You will not be in dark about the SEO progress and you will attain a comfort level with your SEO professional.

• SEO is not a one time effort: SEO is not doing a one time job and then sit and wait for the results. You can equate it with the regular marketing and sales efforts. You need to keep refining the approach based on the results which you get crawl after crawl. You need to measure finite parameters and make changes in your website / content / visuals accordingly so that you get better and better visibility. After the work is done, its about putting in time & efforts to sustain rankings and continue taking actions for improve rankings.

• The success of your business does not depend entirely on SEO: This is one of the most important points. Do not rely on SEO for generating more revenues and increasing your business reach among the potential buyers. A SEO can drive targeted traffic to your website, however he can not force visitors to buy from you whether its service or any product. The actual SALE entirely depends on your product line, service levels you offer, after sales service, product / service pricing and many other factors. So its unfair to hold SEO professional responsible if you are not getting desired jump in sales even after increase in traffic to your website.

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

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

Black Hat Practices and SEO

There are certain practices which are quite aggressive in nature and which uses methods to manipulate the search engine rankings. These practices are known as black hat practices.

Black hat practices comes under UNEHICAL search engine practices. The technical background of Black Hat practice is that search engine crawlers are robots. They don’t have brains like human beings hence they can not think beyond a point. Few search engine marketers use this to their advantage, making search engine crawlers to stay more on their website and rank their website higher. This results in higher rank and in turn higher traffic. However search engines in principle advocate to stay away from these practices.

Flip side:

Professional practicing black hat practices see this as a quick money making opportunity as it can get heavy organic traffic on the website in a short span of time.

• Quick money can be made by seo professional
• Heavy organic traffic can be generated to boost sales
• Good short term strategy to generate sales

Downside:

• Not ethical (Again ethical is a relative word)
• Black hat campaign can result in banning your website domain from search engines
• Any black hat campaign can not be a part of long term strategy as once you are identified you will be out of indexing process.
• It is bound to boomerang you, resulting in loss of traffic

To sum up

Its better to avoid these practices as they are not good for a long term strategy planning. Any good online business grows on ethical practices and a good marketing strategy and a black hat practice can not be a part of any good marketing strategy.


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

Smart Tips for Managing PPC Programs

Pay per click programs are highly effective way to get instant traffic on your website. This is a good tool to attract quality and highly targeted traffic. The bids normally start from .05 cents which is quite good as you can get a good number of visitors by spending a little amount. Even if bid is .10 cents, you can get 10 visitors by paying $1

Smart Tips for Managing PPC programs

• Identify the set of keywords which clearly defines the services / products you offer. This clearly means that you need to remove unnecessary keywords which might be related to your category but can not generate quality traffic to your website.
  
• Focus on product/service which you wish to sell. Remember, its selling service and you have to be specific in PPC approach. You can not have your whole catalogue on your single campaign.
  
• Take bottom up approach for bid management. Start with a certain minimum value and the scale up the campaigns on a day to day basis till you arrive at an optimum level where your goals are met. ( an optimal combination of your budget / CPA / Bid / position)
  
• Come up with a precise ad copy. Include text in the campaign which clearly states about the service / product you are promoting in the ad campaign. If possible, try to include pricing in the ad copy if you are selling any product. This will increase the CTR if your pricing is competitive.
  
• Setup the campaign and bid on maximum relevant keywords possible. This will increase the possibility of clicks.
  
• Track you campaign: This is the most important step. You need to place tracking to track the ROI. You need to restrict your CPA (cost per acquisition). Big programs like adwords/overture can generate huge volumes and your money can vanish in a day. So you need to track your returns, and this is the only way by which you can know whether its working out for you or not.
  
• Keep tweaking the campaigns in terms if bids and ad copy by looking at the reports. An attractive ad copy can increase the chances of getting clicks.
  
• Do not rush for position #1. Settle for positions 4/5/6 as bids will be lower and visibility will also be OK. This will lower your CPA and increase ROI.
  

If you try the above points, you can expect improvements in your ROI and in the long run, constant bid management can get you sustained success in managing PPC programs.

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

SEO and Content of a Website

Website Content and SEO

One of the most important and widely accepted areas in SEO is WEBSITE CONTENT. IF a website doesn’t have appropriate content to justify its site structure then irrespective of your SEO efforts, it will not figure in top search results. Search engines will simply ignore the website. Thus, one of the most important areas to concentrate is website content.

During creation of a website, more emphasis is given on how a website looks or how it functions. Tools like flash are used to create beautiful screens to explain the functionality. Animated images are created to give a neat look to the website. While doing this, people completely neglect the fact that website content is one of the most important things and it should get more importance over the design aspect.

The content of a website should actually be the first thing when you are optimizing the website. One need to convey search engines that the website is full of information and worthy to be listed in top search results for the category to which it belongs. Every page of the website should honestly speak about the services, products which it is offering. Kindly avoid irrelevant content, content which is not related to the nature of the web page completely from the webpage. Be honest with the content and you can see miracles in due course. Not to mention there need to be a balance in the content so that the sales pitch of the content part also gets its fair share else the content targeted towards search engine crawlers will attract crawlers but keep the genuine visitors away from your website.


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

Importance of TITLE TAG in SEO

Importance of title tag in SEO

Title tag makes up the text which appears in the title of a web browser.
It is very important while considering SEO exercise. There are few tips you need to keep in mind while writing Title tag for your web page.

• Must include keywords for the webpage in the Title tag: Title tag is the tag which gives information about the webpage. You can take analogy of a bus number and route display on any metro route. The route is displayed prominently on the bus and that is the identification of the bus. Similar is the Title tag. A search engine crawler would like if you display the title clearly. It takes the title and then matches with the content and links on the web page. If all are in sync, the search engine will love it and assign a certain weight age to it. So, try to stuff your primary keywords for the web page in the title tag of the page
  
• Ordering keywords / phrases in the title tag: If you are using keywords in the title tag, then make sure that the primary keywords are given priority in the position. Ideally you can start your title tag with the primary keyword for that page. This gives strong signal to the search engine about how important you feel the keyword is.
  
• Make your title readable: The text you write in the title should be pleasing to eye, in short readable. Avoid using ALL CAPS. If you use it intelligently, it will make people to click the link while searching through search engines as the title tag appears with a hyperlink in the search results thrown by the search engines
  
• Have unique title tag for each page of your website: Try to keep title tag uniquie for each page of your website. This will help in proper crawling and proper indexing of all your web pages within a website.

Points to keep in mind:

1. Never leave Title tag BLANK or UNTITLED.
2. Write only relevant text in the title tag
3. Do not spam keywords in your title tag.

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

What is Link Popularity and how it helps in Search Engine Optmization?

Importance of link popularity in Search Engine Optimization

What is link popularity?
Link popularity is the measure of the popularity of a website in terms of the incoming links it has got. This is the measure of how many domains / websites have a LINK reference for a particular website.

Most of the major search engines now have crawler based mechanism to assign rankings to any website in search results for keywords. Therefore link popularity has become an important concept as it plays a vital role in getting higher ranks in search results. Crawler based search engines love to hear from others. They do not have much interest in what you are boasting of yourself. This concept makes Link Popularity, an important aspect in Organic Search Engine Optimization. More the other websites refer you; more popular are you in the eyes of search engines.

I will quote a simple example here.

If you wish to advertise about your retail shop, the more effective way is to put up 100 banners at establishments throughout the town rather than placing all 100 at your retail shop. In first case, the other establishments are referring you so your importance increases and your visibility / credibility will also increase thus giving you advantage. Similar is Link popularity for a website.

Link popularity always pays in long run. If you are serious about search engine optimization, branding of your website then link popularity has to be given a good weight age as this over a period of time pushes your website in rankings amazingly.

Conceptually there are 4 types of links which are considered for increasing link popularity. Each type has its own weight age and importance in search engine optimization.

Internal Links: This refers to the internal links of your own website pointing to various pages within the website. These need to be properly structures in order to contribute for link popularity.

Free links: There are many website which provide free links to other websites to make their content look rich and to attract more traffic.

Link exchange: Link exchange is an agreement where two websites place links to each other. This technique was useful till a couple of years ago but due to its misuse search engines do not give much importance to it.

Paid links: Some directories, websites charge to place the other website links. The charge can be one time or recurring.


Link popularity is a tool, if used effectively can improve your search rankings drastically across the major search engines. The quality and relevance of the links coming to your website is important and has to be kept in mind while carrying this exercise.

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