5 things you never knew about SEO/SEM

1. Your success in SEO is directly proportional to language skills of your optimization expert. When building links: negotiating your anchor texts, text surrounding your link and the position of your link on another web site are aspects that define how much value (or link juice) its going to bring in for your website. A well defined and well negotiated link can be manifold more effective than "just any text linking to your site from anywhere".

2. Your rankings are only as high as the number of man hours put into your search engine marketing and optimization, under of course good management. A well optimized web site that ranks in top 10 on Google for highly competitive keywords has very uniform:

a. Incoming links from industry related websites - These links are generated by expert SEOs because of their connections in the industry and secondly because of their research, which leads them to websites that your competitors are linked from.

b. Incoming links from general authoritative websites like ezinearticles.com, bbc.com, wikipedia.org, associatedcontent.com etc. This obviously constitutes of writing hundreds of thousands of very high quality articles and submitting them to these highly authoritative sites. A point to note here is: If you start writing articles for a new website, you won't get as many views as a writer who has previously submitted hundreds of articles and one who holds an expert author status with these websites. So get hold of a company that has a good reputation of authoritative content building and start off asap. This is where your competitors are usually not looking.

c. Internal optimisation which includes keyword density, meta tags, title tags etc of your website's various pages. This again requires studying in dept whats working in your industry in which search engine and whats not. For example - Google doesn't give much importance to meta tags at all, whereas Yahoo or MSN do.

So you see, there's a lot of time that needs to be spent on your site's SEO. Imagine recruiting a person in UK or US to do this. He/she will probably do the same thing as an expert Indian optimiser, only costing you 3 times as much. Therefore you should know clearly what part of your SEO to outsource and what not.

3. The greatest web design on the planet is nothing without "calls to action". Guess why facebook.com is now the #1 website for social networking? Its because as soon as you login, the site tells you what your friends or connections have been doing. This makes you curious and you click on their profiles to know more. Then you come back to your homepage and you're given more interesting trivia. These are called "calls to action", that prompt you to explore more and stay on that website, thus making the site successful.

Believe it or not, your site is constantly tracked by Google with respect to industry benchmarks. You may have noticed the same industry benchmarking on Google Analytics. If your site is not able to retain users (which needs you to give appropriate calls to action), you're going down the rankings gradually.

4. When you let your users write the content for you, you rank higher on Search Engines. Wikipedia - Who is it written by? The owner? No, its written by the users and today it is one of the world's most used websites.

We performed an experiment to see whats more important - Incoming links or a site's content. Guess what we found? It was the site's content which was most important. One of our experimental sites called "delhi-university.in" today gets over 2000 uniques a day, ranks #2 for keyphrase "delhi university" worldwide and all it does it, posts new user content on the homepage, which because of its popularity is now every few seconds. Google crawlers visit frequently and the site gets over a thousand visits from broad tail keywords. It started with just one incoming link from our homepage. Beat that!

5. Every link is valuable. Most webmasters think NO FOLLOW links aren't valuable. Well get this - the site mentioned in the above paragraph was only linked to by Wikipedia with, as we all know - a "no follow" anchor, but from a highly relevant page. It still appeared on Google.co.in at #8 for that key phrase. In fact if your take any competitive market and analyse the incoming links of the top rankers, you'll see their participation on hundreds of forums with relevant anchor text and no follow links. Do they not count at all? They do and a massive deal at that.

Overview

Search engine marketing (SEM) and Search engine optimisation (SEO) are expensive processes, but the benefit of your site ranking on top of Google is potentially millions of users.

1. Get your site up there.

2. Mind your pocket while you do that. Outsource!

3. Once there, make sure your users help you stay there. Get them writing and discussing on your site.

4. Be viral. Get your users to help you get more users!

Modulus Systems in India is on top of SEO/SEM with over 100 clients from the UK and US. Why do you think they chose this company? Only because its worth outsourcing your link building and authoritative content writing to India. You pay one third the price and never sacrifice on the quality of SEO consultants.

Have an experience with outsourcing? Comment below.

Reset CSS - Thats how you create browser independent web design

If you're a web designer, you probably know what browser compatibility testing means. With Mozilla Firefox, Opera and other browsers holding a 14% share of the web browser market (and increasing), creating designs just for Microsoft Internet Explorer is not enough. Well, even if you did, which version of IE are we talking about? Exactly!

Once in a blue moon we come across sites that look amazing on IE, but very misaligned on Opera or Firefox and vice versa.

Anybody heard of Reset Stylesheets?

Reset stylesheets are normal .css files that can be used on html pages to neutralise the browser's rendering of tags. The default styling of HTML tags is removed and you literally start from scratch. A normal .css file is then used to re-define all HTML elements that you want to use on the web page.

Note: tags like input, a, textarea etc still work as normal. In other words, it doesn't change the function of tags. So on a page thats been reset using reset css, you won't see any difference between H1 and H2 text, but an A tag will continue to link.

Yahoo have created and adopted what they call YUI base CSS. Its supported by all A grade browsers covering 96% of their users.

How to use Reset style sheets?

To use, you link it in the page's header like any other stylesheet. Then, when you create your stylesheet, you can choose how each element should look. For example, you can switch the BOLD on and define what the padding, spacing, size etc will be.

If you want to try out a Reset stylesheet, I'd recommend you go and try Yahoo's YUI base CSS.

There are however, advantages and disadvantages of using Reset CSS.

Advantages of using Reset CSS

1. Helps designers create designs that look same or very similar on all browsers.

2. The designer is in control of exactly how everything should look. You can customise every aspect of HTML elements.

3. Helps professional designers save time. No need to re-write CSS for every new design. Once you've recreated HTML elements the way you like them, adding advanced CSS functions and re-creating perfect HTML pages becomes easier for all your new designs.

In brief: Your HTML page becomes a clean slate and you can do whatever you want with it.

Disadvantages of using Reset Stylesheets

1. The complete removal of all HTML tags produces a lot of work to start with. Every element needs to be defined in your new CSS. This may take some getting used to.

2. The imperfect solution: As Yahoo puts it: "It works for 96% of our users". So this still isn't the 100% solution. Using Reset CSS will definitely help your site look very stable and uniform across most browsers, but you still might have to carry out cross browser testing afterall.

Our overall point of view

There are people who love Reset CSS and there are those who don't. I don't recommend this for beginners, but if a job calls for it, we use Reset css here at Modulus Systems.

Most of the time, you'll be okay using normal css and get away with a little bit of cross-browser testing. If you do plan to create a site that actively uses ajax, javascript or any other form of on-screen processing, Reset css might be a good idea.

Ajax/ AJAX – An Introduction

Ajax/ AJAX is the acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is a Web 2.0 technique employed in developing interactive web applications. Web pages that have been developed using Ajax exchange data with the server behind the scene. Consequently, every time a user makes changes, they are incorporated without reloading of the whole web page.

Asynchronous: XML data loading and normal HTML and JavaScript web page loading are asynchronous. In other words, they do not interfere with each other.

JavaScript: JavaScript is a programming language. Ajax function calls are created using JavaScript.

XML: Data exchange in Ajax takes place in XML format.

Advantages of Ajax

1. A web page developed on Ajax has higher:

o Speed

o Interactivity

o Functionality

2. The HTML of a web page can be accessed/ produced in the browser itself. Thus, Ajax effectively decreases the bandwidth consumption.

3. With a jumble of techniques and languages, Ajax gives programmers the freedom to adopt and adapt features as per their requirement.

4. Ajax enables a programmer to have a neat separation among different elements of a web page.

o Data/ content to be uploaded: XML format

o Structure/ Format of a web page: HTML/ XHTML made available in the DOM

o Style (images, fonts, etc.): CSS

o Functionality: JavaScript/ HTTP/ XMLHttp

A few things to be kept in mind while using Ajax

1. The request-response interval should be minimal, with clear feedback to the user.
2. Back button and bookmarking are issues that have to be taken into account for dynamic web pages to be developed on Ajax.
3. Data that has to be indexed needs to be provided in a search engine friendly format. This is because search engines often skip JavaScript coded content that in turn is a main element of Ajax-based web sites.

Also read on MS blog:

Web 2.0 - The Latest Buzz in Internet Technology

Web 2.0 - An Effective Business Tool

Web 2.0 - The Modern Success Mantra

What are Google Bombs?

When a group of people use a specific anchor text to link to a particular web page in order to shoot up its Google ranking, the phenomenon is known as ‘Google Bomb’ or ‘Googlebomb’.

The first known Google Bomb in the history of the web world was the one used to raise the Microsoft homepage through the keywords “more evil than Satan himself”!

Why is this done?

Googlebombing is done:

• as an underhand Search Engine Optimization technique done for fun.

• in order to promote some ulterior motives against a person or an organization.

• as a political manoeuvre.

The logic utilized behind Googlebombing:

Google search engine algorithm gives a higher rank to a page which has consistent anchor text in its backlinks.

Googlebomb Watch:

Googlebomb Watch is Google’s answer to Google bombs. It keeps an eye on old and new Googlebombs.

Google checks the anchor text of all the incoming links to a web site. In case the text is not on the web site, then that particular link is downgraded or ignored.

Modulus Systems’ Journey to the top of Google – Part I(iv)

Incoming Links and Miscellaneous Related Factors

This is the last article in Part-I which constitutes our portmanteau before getting on with our journey to the top of Google. In the previous articles, we have covered in detail the Keyword Analysis and Meta Tag Analysis of Modulus Systems' website.

In this article, we’ll have an overview of backlinks and anchor text analysis.

Backlinks or incoming links are links scattered around the web that are directed towards your website. The number and quality of backlinks plays a major role in determining the relevancy and hence popularity of your website on search engines. Moreover, the anchor text is also a critical entity wherein the more relevant keywords are used as anchor text, the better the chance of search engines crawlers indexing your website. In fact, Google takes account of anchor text in the incoming links to ascertain the Page Rank of a web page.

Backlink Anchor Text Report of Modulus Systems Website:

We checked the anchor text of incoming links to our website through an Anchor Text Analysis Tool. 55 percent links have the anchor text “web design India”, whereas 49.6 percent of the backlinks have “modulus systems” as anchor text. The remaining few incoming links have a number of permutations and combinations of keywords such as “web design”, “website design”, “website designing”, “website designers”, etc.

Incoming Link Related Data:

The Challenge:

• To improve the number of quality links to the website.

• To diversify the keywords used as anchor text.

• To improve the Page Rank of the website.

A Must Read:

• Introduction to the research

• Meta Tag Analysis of Modulus Systems website

• Keyword Analysis of Modulus Systems website

Conclusion to Part-I

We have specified our challenges with respect to every aspect of the web site. Now, we are all set to take them up one by one. In the coming months, be on the lookout for amazing facts on our blog that unveil the strategies of getting a better rank on Google.

Bon Voyage!