New SEO Strategies after Google Panda Update

Google Panda Update is the strategy of Google for showing only quality websites in the search results and getting rid of low quality websites.  A reduction in the number of audiences has been seen by many bloggers after Google panda update. At the same time many bloggers got advantage of this Google update. When this update was first broadcasted, 12 % of total websites affected. So due to this update, the quality of the website or blog is mandatory. Your website could only be shown in the search results if the quality is up to the standard set by Google. There are also some blogs which are not fully recovered from damages until now. So here we are going to discuss new SEO strategies to overcome the traffic loss to your blog caused by Panda update.

SEO Strategies:-

The reason behind this update was to increase the quality as well as to reduce spam. Low quality websites having thin content, websites which are just dependent on quantity of the content, those which have slow loading time and websites which are covered fully with the advertisements got affected due to Google panda update.

Before Panda update, Google showed web pages depending upon their sole quality but after this update, only one poor webpage could affect the ranking of the website.

1) Good Quality Content:

 

It is discussed many times earlier that Google will not further compromise on bad quality content. For good quality content, your material must be free from any type of grammar and spelling mistakes. Your material must contain above 500 words. Paragraphs, headings, sub headings must be used wisely. You can also post images and videos related to your material.

2) Ads free Web Pages: 

 

Lots of advertisements on your blog will create problems for you. So after checking the quality of the content, try spending some time in looking the advertisements and remove those which you think are not advantageous. 2 to 3 ads are enough for your blog so don’t make a rush of ads to your blogs.

3) Social Media: 

 

+1 button is introduced by Google and more you have +1s on your material, the more Google will like you. This is not only about Google +1, keeping yourself active on other social media also is the requirement. If the traffic is coming from different social media then Google will like it very much.

4) Poor Quality Links: 

 

The guest posts mostly include the links of their websites. Most of the guests do not work on the quality of the content present on their websites, they just post on your blog and it will affect your blog.

5) Basic SEO:

 

It is very necessary that you have to learn basic SEO. Over-optimization is not allowed so don’t try to do this.

6) Avoid Excessive Keywords:

Using excessive keywords is acknowledged as a black-hat SEO strategy. When Google see the excessive keywords it will consider it as spam.

Google Panda 3.9 Update on July 24th, 2012

Few weeks ago there were some rumors going around about Google Panda 3.9 Algorithm update which was denied by Google officials. For that reason, lots of Bloggers and webmasters were blissed because they thought that, they have survived a complete month without noticing any change in the Algorithm. On the other hand, Google has just updated their algorithm and named it to “Panda 3.9 Update” which affected 1% search queries. If we compare the previous Google Panda 3.8 update with the correct 3.9 Algorithm change the difference are quite clear that the current update is not threatening. To learn more about Google Panda 3.9 check the following information.

This time according to the Google “Panda started to roll out tonight, 1% changes noticed in the search terms”, which is not devastating then the First ever Panda Update launched in early February 2011 which affected 11.3% Search terms. The update is neither a minor one nor that much threatening it is pretty much even-steven. 

If your niche is not blogging, then you may have not noticed any change in your Traffic because Publishers are concentrating more on their content instead of wasting their time in Black Hat or uneventful stuff. This is the reason why we are not witnessing a large modification in the updates, if we check the recent 3 Panda and Penguin updates both are not even more then 2%.

• Panda 3.9 on July 24^th affected 1% Search Terms (Current).
• Panda 3.8 on June 25^th affected 1% Search Terms.
• Panda 3.7 on June 9^th affected 1% queries in United States while less than 1% worldwide.
• Panda 3.6 on April 27^th
• Panda 3.5 on April 19^th
• Panda 3.4 on March 23^rd
• Panda 3.3 on about February 26^th
• Panda 3.2 on about January 15^th
• Panda 3.1 on November 18^th
• Panda 2.5.3 on October 19/20^th
• Panda 2.5.2 on October 13^th
• Panda 2.5.1 on October 9^th
• Panda 2.5 on September 28^th
• Panda 2.4 in August
• Panda 2.3 on around July 22^nd
• Panda 2.2 on June 18^th
• Panda 2.1 on May 9th
• Panda 2.0 on April 11th
• Panda 1.0 on February 24th

12 Truth About Writing Online To Earn Money

I believe both you and me have heard people boosting earning minimum 4-figures pay check every month just by blogging. So, is this true or just another scam to lure people to the web? I have seen people earning 3-figures pay monthly simply by writing online. Therefore, I do believe nothing in this world is impossible.

• So how do you actually start up and make the first move?
• Is there anything you have to consider before deciding to write to earn money?
• Is there you should know about online writing?

Yes answer is yes! You have a lot to learn and I have listed down 12 facts about writing online for money. This is a must to read for all in order to achieve excellence in both writing and earning money!

Fact #1: Writing is a tedious task

Welcome to the real world, ladies and gentlemen. If you think earning just by writing is just a walk in the park, I am sorry to tell you that you will not last long in this industry. The fact is you will gain very less money just by blogging or writing online. Most people only get their first sight of money after 9 months or more. Unless you are going to spend whole day at home writing quality articles, you could just slide it through in 6 months time.

Fact #2: Quality not quantity
 

Before you do this mistake, let me remind you that readers around the world love to read quality articles instead of just pointless and lack-of-fact ones. If you think you could write 20 articles a day and the numbers will increase your earnings, you are dead wrong. Simply by creating quality articles, you will create followers and slowly but surely, you will gain popularity and people will tend to recognize your work.

Fact #3: Get your facts right
 

When you are writing an article, always remember to write the truth and the facts must be right. Do researches and check if your facts are correct. Misleading facts or wrong information will not only lead to angry readers, your article will be marked down. I always believe that when we write, either we write the truth or write nothing at all. There is no such thing as in between facts.

Fact #4: Rushing will lead to terrible article 
 

Let me share my experience with you. I used to rush and target myself one article per day and each day, I will make sure I finish the article within 1 hour and 30 minutes. As time passes by, I felt my article and content is getting worst and my traffic proofed it to me. My readers tend to go off and I am finally left with one or no readers a day for that particular article. Take your time to get it done and recheck it. I usually type it using Microsoft Words, save it either in a pen drive or my draft email and continue it later when I am free. Patience is a virtue here.

Fact #5: Language and grammar mistakes
 

Okay, we are all human and no one is perfect. We tend to do error now and then. To solve this, simple use the spell checker first and followed by reading it again before sending it to publish. I normally ask my fiancée to read it before I publish it at websites and even my blogs. Small errors will show we are careless and it might indicate that we do not recheck on our work.

Fact #6: Building traffic
 

Traffic is a term to describe number of visitors or readers who read our blogs or articles. You must keep in mind that traffic does not build overnight. It takes time to build a steady traffic towards our art work. Building traffic is indeed one of the hardest parts since we have to think the shoes of the readers on what they like to read or what the current trend is. Besides that, to build traffic, it takes a lot of practice and even guide on it. You can check out the below books for a more detailed explanation and step by step guidance on building traffic.

Fact #7: Promoting or backlinking
 

Promoting has everything to do with building traffics. In order to make our work popular (and even yourself as an author), you got to spend time just on promoting our work. I myself spend roughly 15 minutes on each article daily to promote them at various sites to keep the traffic coming. Backlinking is extremely important as it will try to keep the readers to read more on your articles. The main goal is to keep the readers reading on your articles and come back for more. You can check out this hub I wrote about backlinking.

Fact #8: Comments
 

Devote some of your time to replying comments left on your work. Simply by replying, we are showing we care and we listen to feedbacks. If the feedbacks are negative, learn from it. If the feedbacks are good, we must keep it up and find ways to improve even more. At the same time, we have to make the hub more lively by creating a better communication from the readers. By replying a comment, we will know what they want and what they are looking for. We can easily use it for our improvement.

Fact #9: Write more articles
 

Never stop writing. Keep writing as the sky is your limit. I have seen people writing 3 to 5 articles and sit back hoping to earn 3-figures pay check at the end of the month. Sorry guys but this is not how writing works. Keep those new ideas coming and you will see the potential growth in your readers and also income. I couldn't stress it more but it takes time to achieve a good income from writing. Write more quality articles and create a stable traffic to your articles.

Fact #10: One site is never enough 
 

We are living in the information technology and there are various sites we can post our articles. However, the biggest mistake people make is thinking they will earn money by posting only at one site. Write different things (or subjects) at various sites and do a little survey. For example, some sites are best with parenting articles while others might be on technology articles.

Fact #11: Giving up 
 

I have seen many people (even those who are potential) giving up too fast. They expect to earn money within a short period. The fact is writing is not a get-rich-scheme. It is a hobby and it could well turn out to be a good career for you...if you have the patience. If you can't imagine yourself writing for the next 10 months at least, then you can just forget about writing.

Facts #12: Getting started right now 
 

The fact is, if you don't get started, you will never start. Writing is all about you and you got to make the first (and every step after that). No one can force you to write. Writing is all about passion and always remember it is never too late to start writing. You do not need to have skills for writing as anyone on Earth can write and enjoy it regardless if you write for a living or for a hobby!

Get Top Rank On Google By Simple SEO In 2 Days

Believe in that, it’s easy to put on a very great position on the search engines in two Days. There could be a wide range of SEO methods around, but here's the one that performs best for me.

Most people that work online must have know about Alexa. Alexa is usually a web-site by which you'll find out the traffic ranks of any site in a snapshot. Basically, this allows you a good measure of simply how much traffic a site is getting. Now, which websites will allow you to get your pages to rank high in Google in two days?

There are numerous article websites online (articlebiz, ezinearticles etc). You can get articles from there, which are ranking, simply by searching for article on Google. You can do it by simply entering your search keywords (articles sites, article submission etc.) in the Google search bar and clicks enter. Have a good look at the search engine results that appear when you enter your keyword or phrase. The articles that came on the front page are vital; probably beating countless other results for that keyword. Now modify these articles to make it unique but avoid changing the keywords, if possible add some more relevant keywords or phrases.


Okay, now submit your articles to high ranking article sites and provide links to your web-pages, will likely have a very good chance of getting near the first page of Google. For those who have doubts about website traffic rank, use Alexa. There are many other factors that play a role here, but this is one helpful hint to how you can get a better chance of ranking high on Google fast and easy.

Here is a brief description, what I use to do.

1) Open Google Adwords Keyword Tool
2) Enter the keywords which are relevant to your subject
3) Find out the keyword that has very low competition
4) Those keywords should be used as the article title(this is very important). Likewise incorporate those keywords in the article post a few times (this is also essential).
5) Now go to Alexa or Google and search article sites. Once you realize which sites rank the top on Google, join those article sites and submit your articles sticking with the same keywords in your title, and the same keywords in your article a few times
6) Submit your article.

After 2 or 3 days, go to the Google and type in those keywords you used. Scroll down the search results to see your article in the first 1-3 pages.

Please note the fact that this method works according to which keywords you use.
All the best!

Frequently Asked SEO Question 2012

MOST ASKED SEO INTERVIEW QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 2012

1. Tell me something about yourself?

You should brief your interviewer about your family, your educational background and your work experience.

2. What was your exact job profile in your previous company?

Provide a suitable explanation about your job profile which would include your job responsibilities and the amount of work you have handled so far.

3. What all verticals have you handled so far?

Verticals means on what themes of websites have you worked so far- this may include education, real estate, IT, travel, Shopping, jobs etc.

4. What is the difference between on-page seo and off-page seo?

On page seo means optimizing your website and making changes on title, meta tags, site structure, site content, solving canonicalization problem, managing robots.txt etc.

Off page optimization means optimizing your web presence which involves backlink building and social media promotion.

5. How will you solve canonicalization issue or what is .htacess file?

.htacess file is used to solve the canonicalization issue of a website. It may happen that the home page of the site may take several urls like http://www.example.com or http://www.example.com/index.html or http://example.com . The search engines might treat these url as different and may divide the link juice gained by having various backlinks made with any of these 3 urls. The link juice gets divided between these three urls equally. .htacess file is created to have a single url of the home page so that the link juice is passed onto single url.

6. What is keyword stemming?

It is the process of finding out the root word from the search query. A query having the word “ playful” would be broken down to the word “play” with the help of stemming algorithm. The search results returned would be having the word ” play” in it.

7. What is LSI?

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It is a data retrieval technique which finds connection between words and the use of synonyms while fetching data from the index.


8- What are the limitations of title and description tags?

Title tag can be between 66-70 characters and meta description tag can be between 160-170 characters.

9. Does Google uses keyword tags?

No, Google does not make use of keyword tags.

10.   What is 301 redirect?

It is a method of redirecting user from the old page url to the new page url.

11.   What was the recent update which Google had and what changes would you suggest for it?

Google recently had the Penguin update which was a measure to control web spam. Penguin update had penalized websites which had a spammy backlinking profile and returned more semantic results. Semantic results were based on the relationship between words present on the search query. Penguin trusted sites that had original content, fresh content, good social media presence and quality organic links.

12.  What do you understand by Cloaking?

Cloaking involves using deceptive techniques which presents the user with a different version of the webpage than that presented to the search engines.

13.   What tools do you use for doing seo?

I use Google webmaster tools, Google Analytics, Open site explorer, Alexa, Website grader etc.

14.   What are your good qualities?

You will have to answer here about your good qualities like- I am hardworking, sincere, punctual, love to accept challenges etc.

15.  What is the difference between Seo and Sem?

Seo stands for Search Engine Optimization while Sem stands for Search Engine Marketing. Seo provides organic traffic to a website with the help of search engines while Sem involves the use of Google adwords and other paid channels of advertising.

16.   What is PPC?

PPC stands for Pay Per Click. It is a form of advertising methodology in which the advertiser pays for every click on their ads. Google uses this form of advertising in its channel of advertising called Adwords.

17.   Which is better Robots.txt or Meta Robots Tag?

Meta Robots tag is much better as it helps in forcing the search engine crawlers not to index and display the hidden pages in your server.

18.  Do you use separate Seo strategies for Google,Yahoo and Bing?

More backlinks are required for Google .It pays more attention to backlinks and site authority while Yahoo and Bing pays more attention to title and Meta tags. Hence, a site takes time to rank on Google as compared to Yahoo and Bing.

19.   How will you increase the Pagerank of a page?

By building more backlinks from authority sites and high page rank webpages.

20.  How will you check the number of backlinks of your competitors site?

With the help of the link operator on Google and by using various external tools like Alexa, Backlink Watch , Open Site Explorer etc.

21.  Which is more important- Building backlinks to a website or building great content?

Both are important. Building great content is necessary as it is your first step towards ranking ;and building backlinks helps to build authority to your website and is an important metric for ranking well. Hence both should go parallel and both are equally important.

22.   Who is Matt Cutts?

Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s web spam team.

23.   If a website has a search engine saturation of 40% , what does that mean?

It means 40% of web pages from that particular website are indexed by the search engine.

24.   What do you mean by anchor text?

Clickable text written on an hyperlink is known as anchor text. It is of great value to the search engines and is used for evaluating the relevance of web pages with respect to search queries.

Blog Optimisation Tips

Everyone out there nowadays has a blog, including animals, however many people aren’t taking full advantage of their blogs when it comes to search engine optimisation. Blogs can be used for many different purposes, whether it be business related or you ranting about the service you received in a restaurant. No matter what you are talking about, ensuring you have carried out SEO correctly for both your readers and search engines is a number one priority. If you think you may be under this category and need help with the optimisation of your blog there is no need to worry as this post will be able to help you.

Say No To Bad Colour Schemes

Although having every colour of the rainbow may look okay to you it may not suit other people, always keep your readers in mind when you are choosing the colours that will be used on your blog. For example, if you are running a blog on a mens designed shoe shop having a bright yellow background may not go down very well and black would probably be a much better option. It is important that you experiment with colours until you get the right scheme that feels right. Keep your users and their expectations in mind.

Offer Your Post via Email Or Other Ways

Cater to your customers needs by offering your blog posts via email or RSS. RSS can be difficult to some people out their so if you are just starting off offering via email may be your best option. However if you know how to use RSS it is recommended that you use that instead and be sure to place the RSS where everyone can see it.

Pay Attention To How You Are Writing

When you are writing a blog post it is important that you keep your readers in mind as writing a long detailed paragraph with no punctuation is generally a bad idea. This can cause people to lose where they are when reading your blog and as a result they will stop reading your blogs and you will lose traffic.

Your Spelling Counts

Spelling can a big thing when you are reading through a blog (this comes from a personal experience). Ensure that you add a spell checker to your browser when you are writing a blog post as it will allow you to spot any spelling mistake. Although every word may not be perfect it will be near enough to perfection. However having constant typos in your blog post is never a good idea as it can lead people to get frustrated and unsubscribe from your blog.

Font’s Also Count

When you are writing a blog you also have to ensure that the font you are using is easy to read. Although some bloggers out there may think having fancy fonts is trendy it is in fact far from it and it will lose you customers. Along with this some people out there may not have these weird and wild fonts so sticking to the basic fonts is often the best idea.

Don’t Forget About Navigation

If your blog is part of a website whether for a small or a large company, it is important that don’t just link to your home page and instead link to other pages around your website, this is better for seo.

Is Your Host Reliable

When you are reading a blog it is important that the blog loads up in a fast time and not half a day. ensure you do not lose readers simply because your hosting company thinks that 30 seconds to load a page is perfectly fine.

Ensure Your Title Gets Straight To The Point

When you are writing a blog it is vital that your title gets straight to the point is that can very often decide whether the reader will read on or not. By having a title that is too long it can end up being truncated and leave the reader wondering what your blog post is actually about. Ensuring your title is the right length and is straight to the point is one of the first steps of blog optimisation.

Post As Often As Possible

The more that you post the better it can be for you as people tend to like it when a blog is updated on a daily basis, along with this the Googlebots are much more likely to stop by and crawl where as if you post every other month expect it to take a while before a Googlebot crawls your blog. Google loves fresh content that are updated frequently.

Link Around

When you are Blogging it is important that you link externally as well as internally, however ensure these links are good ones and are not just random websites. By linking out not only are you boosting your seo but you are also increasing the chances that other people out there will see your blog and read your future posts.

Stop The Spam

When you are writing a blog it is important that you stop people from spamming on your site this can be done with a wide variety of plugins, however I personally prefer to use askimet. Having a large amount of spammy links coming into your site can never be good for anyone.

Use A Good URL Structure

When you are writing a blog ensure that you do not use “permalinks” like “www.yourblogsite.com/?p=123″ instead use something like this:”www.yourblogsite.com/2007/01/01/blog_entry_title_here”. Most blog platforms out there will allow you to change the URL structure to a more search engine friendly one.

 

Were You Hit by Negative SEO ?

Since Google’s “Penguin” update, hysteria over negative SEO has exploded, with people blaming it for every problem from falling rankings to their hands turning orange (Pro Tip: Check to see if you just ate a bag of Cheetos). I feel roughly the same way about post-Penguin negative SEO as I do about aliens. I’ve created the following graphic to illustrate my beliefs:

Ok, maybe that sounded a little harsh, but here’s the point – while I believe negative SEO is possible – and I’ve seen a handful of cases where I’m pretty sure it was effective – it’s usually not the root cause of a ranking drop. In other words: most people who think they’ve been hit by negative SEO haven’t been. This post is an attempt to ease your fears and help you find out if you’re one of the 0.1% who really saw that UFO.

What Is Negative SEO?

Broadly defined, “negative SEO” can mean anything malicious someone does to harm your site’s rankings. Rand’s recent video on negative SEO covers many examples and is a great recap. Within the context of the Penguin update, though, negative SEO really only means one thing – that someone has launched an organized effort to make your link profile look bad. This usually means that they’ve hit you with a ton of low-quality or clearly black-hat links across a large number of domains.

I don’t want to downplay attacks on your site. If you’ve had a security breach, such as a DDoS that is taking down your site or an SQL-injection attack that has modified your content or added outbound links, take it seriously and handle it quickly. With link-based “attacks,” though, the situation can get a lot trickier, and the cures can sometimes be worse than the disease. If you just start hacking at links or throw all of your time and money into fighting a perceived threat that’s not the root cause of your problem, you could set back your SEO efforts months.

What Are The Signs?

Let’s say you wake up one morning to find that your cat’s gone missing and your rankings have dropped. Does that mean that your competitors are up to no good? It’s possible, but I think it’s critical in 2012 SEO to step back and assess the problem. Solving the wrong problem can be catastrophic – at best, it’s just a waste of time and energy.

Even if your competitors are trying to cause trouble, that doesn’t mean that what they’ve done has caused your problems. I’ve seen people do ridiculously ineffective “negative SEO” – one client’s competitor hired a low-rent firm to create a copy of the client’s site. That copy sat on a staging server in India with no links and all but the home-page blocked in Robots.txt. Was it malicious? Sure, but malicious idiots are still idiots. It wasn’t worth an international incident to take that one rogue site down. Real negative SEO takes a concerted effort and a fair amount of know-how.

When someone is really attacking your link profile, and if that attack is going to be effective, you’ll typically see unexplained, low-quality links from a variety of root domains. Just slapping your link in the footer of one bad site isn’t going to bring you down – low-quality links happen in the wild all the time. You need to see a large-scale pattern. Typically, you’ll also see a sudden spike in these links. An aggressive attempt at negative SEO isn’t going to happen over years – it’s going to be done in weeks. When you see massive, unexplained growth in low-quality links, then you may have a problem.

I’m not going to dive deep into the tools, but there are multiple good ones for getting different views of your link profile (and using more than one is generally a good idea):

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Open Site Explorer
• Majestic SEO
• Bing Webmaster Tools

The new Bing Link Explorer replaces Yahoo! Link Explorer and seems promising, but you’ll need to sign up for their webmaster tools. Both our paid campaign management tools here on SEOmoz and Majestic's tools will track historical data about your links. Keep in mind, though, that link counts can spike for a lot of reasons. You’re not just looking for a jump in the numbers – you’re looking for a clear pattern of malicious links.

Even if you do see a spike in malicious links, the impact of an attack is often temporary. Many times, people use methods that get quickly removed or discounted (such as injecting links on other sites). When the links go away, the problem often goes away. It’s not of much comfort in the short-term, I realize, but it’s easy to be so aggressive that Google spots the attack and devalues the links. Getting the balance just right isn’t easy – many attempts at negative SEO fail.

Are Aliens Among Us?

About 70-80% of the time someone comes to me having just spotted a bunch of unexplained low-quality links to their site, a little digging turns up that it was the result of bad SEO by either their own team or someone they hired. If it’s your own team, that’s good news (even if it doesn’t feel that way) – you might be able to undo those links more easily or even have a record of them. If you hire an outside link-building firm, make sure you get a record of what they’ve done. Once you realize they’ve trashed your link profile, it may be too late. Monitor new link builders closely and insist that they track links. If they refuse, fire them. It’s that simple.

Can You Prevent It?

If someone really is out to get you and wants to spend the time and money, there’s no doubt they can do a lot of damage. In most cases, though, it’s just not cost effective, and building up a wall of defenses and monitoring your links every hour isn’t cost effective for you, either. So, what can you do to prevent the most common forms of attack?

Probably your best defense is to have a clean, authoritative link profile. Google is looking at your entire pattern and history of links, and if your site is strong with generally high-quality links, it’s a lot harder to do you damage with a short-term attack. The most vulnerable sites are new sites or sites that already have engaged in too much low-quality link-building. If 80% of your links are junk, it’s not going to take that much for a competitor to push you over the edge.

At the risk of oversimplifying: do good SEO. I’m not trying to downplay the possibility of negative SEO – it does exist and it can do real damage. I’m trying to drive home the point that it’s still very rare, and most people are spending far too much time and money on tinfoil hats. In 99% of cases, the SEO problems of websites in 2012, even after Penguin, are self-inflicted. Start with what you control, and build a better mousetrap – it’s still your best protection from anything the competition can throw at you.