Webmasters’ Blog @ sid.hedir.com

OK! So, after witnessing those PageRank Update I have come to the conclusion that we need to focus more and more on content quality rather than that of the quantity. More frequent updates will help you getting better position in search engine if you can keep a sharp vigil on quality as well! However, each of us need to brush up our SEO skills as well.

SEO is really a very dynamic subject to say the least. You need to upgrade your knowledge level and keep the learning processes going on each day. But you can hardly deny the importance of putting some effort to learn SEO skills as it will help you to earn some free traffic through Search Engines.

As a part of my learning process, I found this story interesting. In short, what it suggests is that you need a keyword rich domain name to boost your search engine rank. I think the significance of keywords in domain name may not be denied, but it must not be taken as the sole decisive factor. The example site ’seobook.com’ is available at number#1 position of Google SERP for the key phrase ‘SEO Book’! The site is linked well from outside with anchor text ’seo book’, it has some high quality content with regular update as we all know with SEO friendly contents. So Google has reason to display that site at #1 position! Obviously, my studies suggest that having keywords in domain name alone does not improve your search engine ranks. Rather, you need quality in bound links given editorially and some fresh, unique and updated content to get high search engine ranks. Obviously, keywords in domain name, or even in urls, somehow improve your ranks.
Just for a small check, simply google for ‘Web hosting’! - and you will get www.webhostingbluebook.com (containing keywords in TLD) at #1 position . Though more specific match should be webhosting.com - but it is not in the top ten position!

So to conclude we can say that having keywords in domain name or urls may improve your search engine ranks if your website is otherwise fit!

And finally, do not forget to check the nice video with that post!

HI All! Wish you a very happy moment and you must have some reaction to the latest PR Updates depending upon ups or downs you have witnessed with your websites’ PR. A high PR website or blog has always been a good source of revenue if you would wish to put some foreign advertisements in your web pages. Many bloggers and webmasters were actually earning decent revenues by selling text link advertisements in their high PR websites.

I must appreciate hard work that is required to earn such a high respect from Google. You need to ensure quality inbound links from relevant high PR sites to widen up the green bar. For getting quality IBLs, you must be making some incredible efforts to add values to your websites - fresh, updated and unique content! Only poor Webmasters/Bloggers can appreciate how much painstaking such efforts are! You need to read every available resources for new information, keep your mind and sense organs always-in-alert state, and finally making a new entry as frequently as you can. Oh! However, finally when you find that Green bar widens up a little more, it must be giving you much satisfaction to say the least as now you would expect some returns! Selling Ads space in High PR sites are comparatively easier in this highly Competitive advertising world.

But after recent PR Update and analyzing the trend it has so far reflected, it is obvious that things like ’selling text link ads’ are no more safe so far as PageRank is concerned. You may get into trouble for selling ads and may witness a gradually diminishing PR or worst even, that Bar may be grayed out.

So, will it be fair enough to conclude that significance of High PageRank is declining rapidly keeping in mind the fact that it (PR) has already been marked as one of the least influential factors in Google Search Engine Results! Probably, SEO experts would continue their efforts to earn high PRs excavating new avenues to exhibit their professional expertise, but for most of the others - PR, I’m sorry to say, may not have much thing to do - both in terms of traffic and revenues!

I was getting rather impatient as it took more than four months to see a change in that Green bar, and once again, this PageRank update has offered me much reason for satisfaction. Let’s try to analyze it starting with my blog.
I have spent good enough time to add values to my blog; to the best of my knowledge I have made attempts to update contents based on latest happenings in the web world, which are particularly useful for webmasters; and Google did not seem to do any injustice by updating PR from pale gray (most probably as an offshoot of my childish act before last PR Update) to gorgeous green. It is now PR3, and I suppose fair enough!

One thing must I share with you regarding latest moves of Google in appraising a web page in terms of its PR. There is no need to make extraordinary efforts to earn in bound links. I did not make a blatant attempt to win a PR hike at least with this blog. Rather, I focused on the basics - content, quality content for my readers, and it did the trick.

The green bar is also hanging over hostingnote.com, but considering the amount of efforts I made to get inbound links by submitting that site in over hundreds of free directories, the result in just not rewarding, which shows Google does not count the quantity anymore, and it is the quality of inbound links that should be given top priority. Anyway, anything is better than that gray-bar, which simply absorbs your every inspiration.

With another website which is still under test-bed, I did not get any good news for the home page, but an internal page dedicated to celebrate a very special occasion with some useful content has gained PR (Getting some good Google traffic as well), which shows the perfection of Google’s PR evaluation Algorithm.

This moment must be very disappointing for those who have been experiencing PR drops, particularly for the Newbie webmasters. But just do not get disheartened, neither get hot. My humble advice would be to spend more time in adding values to your website content (Wish I could have done that for hostingnote.com as well, atleast some more informative articles would help), there is no need to go on for hunting IBLs ( poor quality IBL may rather damage your overall PR), and be sure to witness a wider green bar after the next PR Update.

Let’s try to stay cool, please!

Hold on to watch out the after effect of another Google PR Update. PageRank of some of the most renowned blogs or websites with blog have dropped. StatCounter.com (From 8 to 6 ), Engadget.com (From 7 to 5), Problogger.net (From 6 to 4) - the list, so far been prepared by different sources (Crenk.com , Dailyblogtips.com, News.com) clearly indicates a pattern - either the websites selling text link Ads or associated with big blog network have selectively been placed at the gun-point.

First of all, it does not look like an overall PR Update but a filter applied on existing PR Algorithm.

Secondly, it was rather inevitable for sites selling text link ads as nearly one month ago Google Officially declared to penalize sites displaying ‘Text Link Ads’.

Thirdly, Blogging is one of the over used method exercised nowadays to get inbound links and thereby increasing PR. Participation in blog network has been obviously helping a lot to get much sought-after inbound links over the past few years.
Let’s take a look at Google Webmaster Guideline:

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.

So it appears that Google is once again moving towards the right direction by applying this new filter. However, since high PR has somehow helped some bloggers, or websites to sell paid links, therefore, it will be once again a tough challenge for many of them to survive.

I do not see much reason for people with big Advertisement budgets to learn SEO; either they can spend money for launching paid advertising campaign or, hiring a reputed SEO farm to do the task on their behalf. But the life is not that much simple for people with low or no marketing budget and despite being over criticized as a ‘Good Business Strategy’ - there seems to be no alternative but to SEOing a website for supplying saline water to a deserted website. As like everything else in this world, SEO is not that easy as it needs a thorough understanding of the subject, keen observation, logical analysis of SERPs and finally developing and implementing a successful SEO strategy to drink traffic juice happily and the entire process is not very easy. It consumes lots of energy, effort and patience before winning the great battle for a highly competitive keyword.

But I’ll share with you few simple SEO tips with which you can start getting some traffic from search engines.

SEO begins with keyword research. So spend as much time as you can afford to locate a keyword that is less competitive and at the same time that has a reasonable popularity. It is much easier to optimize an entire website for few keywords rather than a wide variety of keywords. Thus primarily your new website must focus on a niche. Do not just get overwhelmed with the search volume associated with a popular keyword as you are bound to face tough competition with such phrases; and you may only end up in frustration for not being able to get search engine traffic at all.

Once you are satisfied with your keyword, try focusing on your website content. No way to deny that both the quality of content as well as the way contents are organised in a website plays an important role in SEO. So follow a decent hierarchical structure to organize the contents of your new website. Links to content pages should preferably be not more than 3-4 levels deep. Try to use SEO friendly urls for those deep links, i.e. urls containing readable words(Keywords!), as it may also help in improving your search engine ranking a little bit.
Now while writing content, spread your keywords in the body of the content evenly with particular importance to TITLE META TAG, ALT and H1 tags. These are the places where Search Engine bots usually look for keywords. So, do not just ignore embracing keywords within those tags.

The second part of the SEO is to try and get some inbound links containing your preferred keywords and pointing to your web pages. Although it is not that easy to get IBLs, still forum signatures, free directories, social bookmarking sites or social networking sites may help you to get few links initially. As search engines, in particular Google, are presently focusing more on the quality of inbound links and not its quantity, so you are free to spend more time updating your website and at the same time make some effort to develop links as well.

One final reminder for the newbies. With the advent of more advanced web-crawlers, indexing in major search engines does not take a long time but it is only the quality of content that can ensure long term traffic benefits through search engines.

So my final five goes here!
1. Find your niche keywords

2. Organize your website - Both content and structure

3. Try to use SEO friendly URLs

4. Write SEO friendly articles (Again TITLE META TAG, ALT, H1 Tag with evenly distributed keywords)

5. Get few quality links.

Now you are ready to win some search engine traffic if you continue to update your website regularly focusing on your niche.

Wish you more traffic!

SEO | Google | Search Engine Optimization

It is now a over exposed secret that you need to get quality IBLs in order to get steady search engine rankings for highly competitive keywords. I admit there is a lot of doubt/debate about the role Google PR plays in ranking as you can see Low PR sites ranking higher for a specific search term that its High PR counterpart but nobody has denied the significance of PR. PR actually measures the overall importance of a web page and not its relevance with respect to a specific search term and for highly competitive keywords - it seems to be still a good yardstick.

Earlier attempts were made to get more IBLs by exchanging links, trading links or even paying for a link to be included in paid directories or other sites offering paid link inclusion services. This would help you getting huge quantity of IBLs overnight. But such strategy may not see any more success because of some changes in Google Algo. Now all you need is to get few quality inbound links from relevant sites (better high PR) and you are definitely going to see a PR hike. So, quantity no more matters, it is the quality you have to focus on. Thus, as Google has suggested -’You need to look for editorially given link’.

It is not that easy to get links editorially awarded unless you have a website with unique, high quality content providing useful information. So the latest strategy would be to:

• Spend more time with your website or blog - update it with quality content frequently.
• If you want to spend money for IBLs, pay that to professional authors instead who have the capability to write great contents.
• Announce your site in forums, social networking sites and social book marking sites to get the attention of more people.
• Take part in forums - your keyword juicy forum signature will act as a good guide for Google BOT.
• Do not waste your time submitting sites to directories, who ask for a reciprocal link in return.
• Do not waste much time to submit links to different directories. If you are just getting crazy to submit links, submit only to high PR directories.
• Articles are still a great weapon both in terms of traffic and IBLs. So write and submit articles to different article submission directories as frequently as you can. If you spend few hours to create a page with real value for the visitors of your website, spend some more time to write an abstract of the page and submit that to different article directories.
• Submit your newly added pages to social bookmarking sites without spamming.
• You can also start your own blog with keyword rich links pointing to your website. But just do not make it a clone of your website or vice-versa. Both of them must have uniqueness and individual significance.
• Create you profiles to as many social networking sites as possible that allow adding feeds to your blog/website.
• Spend some time visiting other relevant blogs/websites and take part in discussions.
• Consider posting comments in relevant blogs - you will get some traffic as well as PR, if there is no ‘no follow’ attribute set.
• Submit sites to classified directories of high repute, not too many there though.

So the latest Google updates are definitely offering an incentive for webmasters who spend more time, devotion and commitment to develop high quality website and it is heading towards the right direction. You need not be a spammer under compulsion to such links.

Just going out to attend my day job, if I find some more methods, I’ll update it in the evening.

Good day.

I returned home late today, got really involved with some digital printing work with my friend. Blogging was the first thing in my evening schedule. So, I logged on to WP Admin Control Panel and again it was loaded with comments awaiting moderation. If you look at them casually you can hardly detect these are the comments posted by my dear spam bots, rather you will be confused looking at the relevance of the comments with the actual post - Adsense related topics get Adsense related comments, affiliate program related topics contain comments in that subject and some of them are just crazy - “I can’t understand some part of it but…”; i do not waste much time before sending them to the comments-bin! This is the love story of the spam bots with my blog here at hedir. Driven by spam attacks, I’ve made it compulsory for all visitors(?) to sign up. I know this must be a great drawback for my blog’s popularity but no way. I am a lonely poor dude - how long can I wish to fight spams? And I suppose spammers love my blog like nothing else in this internet world.
Next comes in the line is my profile at mySpace and the story is no different. I get comments, messages and never has done much delay to comment back or to give replies; but only to see a big RED CROSS with the notice “Profile Deleted” after someday. MySpace team really does some good work to control spams. And that crazy Captcha is a good sentry(for me - it is simply discouraging with crazy characters you can hardly decipher!) protecting comments/messages from spams; still spammers( Bot?) find entry without ticket to mySpace as well. At times I wonder if I’m interacting only with bots in mySpace. Rarely I receive comments from genuine human saying a simple ‘Hi! Hello!’.

With such a negative impression in my mind about social networking sites (Spammers paradise!) I tried ORKUT, and voila! there was fair amount of spam as well but in the form of human probably! I got some great offers to interact and chat with college girls(!!!) - not bad! and was careful enough not to get flooded. The check for spambots in ORKUT is much simple - characters are not that much crazy going (Unlike Google Bot!). At least they do not discourage you from scrapping or posting in forums. Firm, modest, gentle and green characters often representing some meaningful words (not always, I guess) add just more fun to ORKUT and Blogger as well. Well done Google!
If fine, if you ask me to compare my Blog (this one), mySpace profile and ORKUT - i must say - my blog is leading in terms of inviting spam bots for its shear lack of spam filters. I get over hundreds of spam comments if i do not care to visit my comments moderation tab for more than twenty-four hours; then comes mySpace - probably, my early loose settings gave them entry pass; and finally ORKUT where i’ve been able to ward off spams and able to interact with more human hopefully.

That’s my simple story about fighting against spams! And what else to do?

No updates from Google - neither PR nor ALGO! Internet, without a Googly-wave looks dull! and i get more time to spend with spams (bots?).

I visited Matt’s blog after quite sometime and got this fantastic entry. Google now offers a better date search. You can easily set the intervals by using as_qdr;

For example:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=seo&btnG=Google+Search&as_qdr=d1

Will return all the new urls Google found in the past 24 hours for the search term ’seo’;

as_qdr can accept different values as time interval:

d[Number] = No of past few days; Example: as_qdr=d1 will indicate number of urls containing the specific search terms with past 24 hours;

w[Week] = No of past few weeks; Example: as_qdr=w1 will give results for the past week;

m[Month] = No of past few months; Example: as_qdr=m1 will give results for the past month;

y[year] = No of past few years; Example: as_qdr=y1 will give results for the past year

So, the next time you need to check if your new web page is there in the index, you can add this url parameter to conduct more date specific search.

You might have the habit of reading reviews about products, services, eBooks or programs. Some of the reviews are really great to read. But not all of those great reviews are unbiased. OK, let me list one after another.

1. Positive Reviews made by the business owner himself using a duplicate identity.

2. Negative Reviews made by the business owner to show-down his competitor

3. Positive Reviews made by Site Owner inspired by Affiliate Commission.

4. Negative Reviews made by the Site Owners to highlight Affiliated programs

5. Positive Reviews made by customers/users driven by an appeal/request.

6. Negative Reviews made by a customer/user driven by instant reaction to some incidents.

7. Positive Reviews made by writers in Paid-to-Post Blogs, Forums, Shopping Sites, or Social Networking Sites against Payments.

8. Negative reviews made by writers to highlight some other programs, or products.

How often do users verify the authenticity of reviews they trust so blindly?

I guess, not too many.

Well designing your own website/blog has never been easy. You have to think both in terms of the visitors as well as Search Engine Bots; Often it turns out to be a tough trade-off. You pay enough attention in choosing the most attractive layouts, adding some decent colors, or using a JPEG/GIF/PNG art-work to give your site a distinctive look. Me, although not a great fond of flash, still some websites continue to use it. Also I think there is no harm in adding a flash-intro if it is reasonably brief and with a skip-intro option.

But while designing website, how often do we consider adding the best-fit font-size? But to optimise your conversion rate, and to get visitors sticking to your web pages - font size is extremely important. Specification of font size is done in pixel, point or a more generic em unit; and it is extremely difficult to set any standards for font size as it depends a lot on the type of visitors you are targeting as well as theme, layout and overall design of a website.

Based on your own standards of smallest font size, you can set your font size to at most three to four different levels: Tiny, Medium, Large and Largest; Now you need to use them carefully to help visitors reading your content without much difficulty.

Now here I want to mention a minimum font-size guideline:

Microsoft: 11px Tahoma
Apple: 11px Lucida Grande Regular

Also, setting your body font-size to 70% will help you to set the font size of your web pages in terms of em.

But this is just the minimum font size using which you can write your text. Depending upon your website layout or design - it may sometimes look dull and some other time professional. It all depends entirely on the content type.

I just make a quick check at eBay and Amazon, and it was not surprising that both of these websites use rather a medium font size targeting a more general class of audience. You can also check sites like rackspace.com to get an idea of how tiny fonts help sites looking professional. And do not forget effective use of big fonts in some single page promotional web sites - that too works fine for the TG, believe me or not.

And before conclusion, i must say that it is always better to set font size in terms of ems and not in terms of px, or pt, and always use CSS to set font-size.

And one final note: setting the right font-size will definitely improve your site traffic as well as ensure better cross-browser compatibility.

A must read guideline by Adobe