Recently Digg has released new feature called DiggBar. It’s nothing special, just inserting a frame in your website with some features if your visitors are referred by Digg. I’m not a fan of it.
The Problem
With a URL frame around content, there is no SEO benefit from promoting Digg. If you see carefully, the URL address is still pointing to digg.com instead of your website URL. Generally it also increases their traffic and reduces your traffic. I heard that they’re planning to have an ad tracker in the toolbar so they’re clearly planning on adding advertisements to your blog and website in the future.
The Solution
Don’t worry, there is a solution for this. You can simple add the following code to your website in the <head> section.
<script type="text/javascript">
if (top !== self) top.location.href = self.location.href;
</script>If you’re using WordPress blog, then you no need touch the code. You can simply download the plugin written by me and activate it. The plugin is called Frame Free.
Sandbox filter is a filter created by Google some years ago to fight against spam in the search results. Usually sandbox is applied to new domains which are less than 2 years. Under the sandbox effect, no matter how well you optimize the website, it just doesn’t rank high on Google. On average, the sandbox effect is 6 months, but it can vary from less than a month to over 8 months.
If you have made major changes to your website and you found that your rankings have dropped off 30 to several hundreds positions, then it’s likely you’re in Google sandbox. You might think that it’s unfair. According to Google, the delay of inclusion of brand new websites is to encourage webmasters to build content instead of building mini-networks.
The Google sandbox is something beyond your control and you cannot avoid it. You cannot fight the sandbox. The only thing you can do is to adapt to it and patiently wait for time to pass and sandbox effect will be slowly disappeared. But there are a few steps you can apply to minimize the damage for new websites and new domains.
#1 Create Good And Relevant Content Actively
As time passes by, relevant and fresh content will take you to the top of search engine. Relevant content will make your website becomes authority in the industry. Not only that, fresh content will keep your readers coming back.
#2 Gather Quality Inbound Links
When getting inbound links, keep in mind that they need to be from trusted sources such as DMOZ, CNN or other reputable places. In addition, links coming from .edu and .gov domains might help because these domains are usually exempt from the sandbox filter. Build the links slowly and steadily instead of getting 100 links a day as it will kill your website completely without releasing from sandbox.
#3 Buy Old Or Expired Domains
Sandbox effect is more serious for new sites on new domains. If you’re buying old or expired domains and launch your new sites there, you’ll likely to experience less problems.
#4 Host On A Well Established Domain
Another solution is to host your new site on a subdomain of a well established domain such as wordpress.com and blogger.com. The sandbox effect is not so severe for new subdomains unless the domain itself is blacklisted. However subdomains on free hosts are generally not a good idea in terms of branding.
#5 Concentrate On Less Popular Keywords
The fact that your site is sandboxed doesn’t mean that it’s not indexed by Google at all. You website can still be on the top ranking of search engine results if you’re targeting less popular and competitive keywords. I’m always advice to target long tail keywords first for newly established websites while waiting to get to the top for the most lucrative keywords. This is the technique I have been using for this blog.
Conclusion
Although Google doesn’t confirm the existence of sandbox but many people have experience its effect. It’s often reminded that Google is not the only search engine or traffic generation source. We should create multiple stream of traffic to minimize the damage of Google sandbox. If you’re planning your SEO efforts, try to include other search engines. This will help to minimize the damages of the sandbox effect in addition to the 5 points mentioned above.
Please share with us what is your thought and your approach in minimizing the sandbox effect.
Related Posts:
- 4 Effective Tips To Compete With Established Domains And Websites
- How Do You Get A Domain Indexed In Google?
The biggest mistake many new entrepreneur make when starting a new business is to create a product or service based on something they enjoy and interested. Creating product or service based on your interest isn’t bad. But is there any demand and market for the product after several months working hard creating it?
This is the major problem many new entrepreneurs are facing. They have no idea where to find people buying their products. They are spending many sleepless night just to create fantastic products but finally realize that nobody wants to buy their greatest products.
If you do an analysis carefully, you will notice that those people are creating product before they find the market that wants the product. In the real world, what entrepreneur should be doing is finding the market first before they start to create their own products and services. This will give you a better chance to success.
How can we find and research the market? In this article, I’ll be showing you one very good way to find a profitable market by applying killer keyword strategy.
Looking For High Keywords Searches
Let’s start with keyword research. We need to find what are the words people are searching and how many times they are searching. The more times someone searches for a word, the more popular and more demand the word is. So it make sense to look for those keywords with high searches.
There are many tools available to find out how many times people are searching a keyword per month. One of the free and recommended tool is Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Personally I use this tool very often.
Assume you are in dog training niche. So we can start by searching “dog training” in Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
From the diagram, you can see that the 2nd column is the number of searches per month. You should look for those monthly searches of at least 10,000. The higher the better. It might not worth your effort to create a product for those searches with just 1,000 or 2,000. And you might not be able to grow your business in the future.
For our illustration purpose, I’ll choose “dog training classes” and “puppy dog training” with total monthly searches 14,800 for both. I believe you can analyze more keywords and find the perfect keyword for you.
Just to explain a bit more why I choose “dog training classes” and “puppy dog training”. With “dog training classes”, you can actually create some kind of online membership site which people can subscribe to dog training class learning how to train a dog. For “puppy dog training” keyword, you can easily create an ebook teaching people how to train puppy dog.
Checking Keyword Competition
Next, we need to check how much competition in the search engines for each of these keywords. The competition here means how many other websites or web pages are promoting related product or service.
It is an important factor because if the competition is very tough, then it is difficult for you to acquire customer.
Let’s go to Google and enter the keywords “dog training classes” and “puppy dog training” separately. The number of competiting web pages are 18,200,000 and 872,000 respectively. It is very clear that “dog training classes” is much more competitive than “puppy dog training”.
But wait, there is a little trick that you should do to really understand who are your actual competitors. If a website does mention the keyword in their content but doesn’t have the keyword in their title, chances are they probably aren’t promoting the product.
By using the following command, we’ll be able to get a much better list of our competitors. This command will eliminate those web pages that are not mentioning our keyword in the title tag.
allintitle: dog training classes
allintitle: puppy dog training
Now the results look a bit different from the above without using “allintitle” command. “Dog training classes” is less competitive with 8,360 competing web pages. Given that there are only 8,360 competiting web pages for “dog training classes” keyword, it makes your chances of ranking well much easier.
Results/Searches Ratio (R/S Ratio)
This is the most important step – data analysis. Here are the data collected.
Keywords: dog training classes vs puppy dog training
Number of Searches: 14,800 vs 14,800
Number of Competing Web Pages: 8,360 vs 44,000
Let’s do some calculation based on the data we’ve collected. It is called R/S ratio (results/searches ratio). Results mean the number of competing web pages. It can be used to determine how much demand there is for a product/keyword.
The keyword “dog training classes” is searched 14,800 times and number of competitors is 8,360, so R/S is:
8,360/14,800 = 0.56
Let’s look at another keyword “puppy dog training”. It is searched 14,800 times and number of competing web pages is 44,000, so R/S is:
44,000/14,800 = 2.97
Typically we’ll look for R/S ratio which is less than 2. The lower the R/S ratio, the more profitable the keyword will be for you. So the winner is “dog training classes”.
Conclusion
When we’re trying to build an online business, it’s important to find the market before creating your product. In the market finding process, killer keyword strategy should be applied to find those keywords with low results/searches ratio (R/S ratio). It will help you to build a more profitable business no matter which industry you’re in.
Related Posts:
- SEO Strategy: Targeting Longtail Keywords
- Will Your Keywords Result In Sales?
- Keyword Stuffing Can Kill Your Website
If you want your web pages to rank high in search engine result pages, then you should make sure your URL is properly optimized. This is one of the important on-page optimization technique.
Why We Need To Optimize URL?
First reason to optimize URL structure is to increase search engine rankings which will bring us free natural traffic. Secondly human readable URL structure can increase your clickthrough rate. People click more on readable URLs as they give us idea about the actual content on the web page.
Here are top 8 tips that you can employed in every single web page URL you have in your website.
#1 Convert Dynamic URL To Static URL
You should avoid using dynamic URL and stick with static URL. There are a few reasons for this.
Here is the example of dynamic URL:
http://www.example.com/product.php?category=media&title=twitterFrom the example above, you can tell that a dynamic URL is having characters such as “=”, “&” and “?” in the URL. In general, dynamic URL content gets indexed very slowly and some search engines might have problem indexing it. Besides, dynamic URL is not readable and it will lower the clickthrough rate in search engine results.
So the above mentioned dynamic URL can be converted to static URL as follows:
http://www.example.com/product/media/twitter/#2 Separate Multiple Keywords In URL Using Hyphens (Dashes)
Separating multiple keywords in URL using hyphens will make it easier for search engines to understand your URL structure and exactly when it starts and when it ends for each keyword.
http://www.example.com/duplicate-content/#3 Limit The Number Of Words In Your URL
Search engines limit the crawling if the page URL contains too many keywords. Generally keywords not beyond 10 in your web page URL is the best. Search engines always prefer short and descritive URLs.
#4 Keep Your URL Structure Unchanged
You should keep in mind that once your should keep your URL stable and remained unchanged once it is created. It means you should take care of URL structure optimization when you setup your website or blog at the beginning.
If you would like to alter the URL structure at the middle, then the best idea is to redirect your old URL to new URL. This will ensure that Google and other search engines are able to transfer your link juice and PageRank from old URL to new URL without hurting your site.
#5 Keep Only Keywords In Your URL
We should keep only keywords in URL. And remove all numbers and words such as “the”, “of”, “in”, “your” and etc. If we keep those redundant words in the URl, it will dilute your keyword density in the URL and possibly make our URL exceed the length of 10 words.
#6 Use One Version Of URL To Access Your Web Page
Multiple version of URL for the same web page is considered as duplicate content in the eye of search engines. Search engines treat each URL uniquely. Each URL is an independent content even if the URL is just single character different from another URL. For example:
http://example.com
http://www.example.comAlthough these 2 URLs are pointing to the same home page, search engines treat them differently. So only use one version of the URL and stick to it.
You can use 301 permanent redirect to forward your home page URL to a preferred domain. For example, you can forward example.com to www.example.com. Or simple use Google Webmaster Tool to set the preferences for www or non-www URL version.
#7 Keep The Number Of Subfolders In Your URL To A Small Number
Always keep the number of subfolders in your URL to a small number.
http://www.example.com/blog/wordpress/plugins/twitter/twitter-tools/The above URL is using 5 subfolders and this is really a bad idea of URL structure. Keep your content up to 2 or 3 subfolders deep in URL and separate multiple keywords with dashes.
#8 Keep Your Primary Keyword Near To The Starting Point Of Your URL
You should put your primary keywords near to the starting point of your URL. Search engines think that words at the left hand side of the URL are the most important keywords. Look at the example below:
http://www.example.com/duplicate-content-hurts-website/Conclusion
In conclusion, be careful while setting up new domain or URL structure of each blog post. Dont’ underestimate the power of URL structure. Optimized URL structure will give you an edge in the search engine rankings.
Please share with us if you have any other URL optimization tip.
Related Posts:
- WordPress SEO: Optimal Permalink Structure
- 5 Tips To Optimize Your Web Page Content
- XML Sitemaps Improve Site’s Visibility In Search Engines
Broken links are bad for visitors because they give the impression that your site is not well maintained. Not only that, they’re also bad for SEO because search engine bots will stop from crawling all your pages if they meet a broken link.
A link is considered as broken link if the web server response with a 404 status which is a common error defined by the industry standard. Search engines have changed a lot these few years. One of the changes is it will consider user experience during the evaluation of the web page ranking in the result page. Link validity is included as one of the important factor in user experience design.
Google specifically advises webmasters to check for broken links in its web design guidelines. In particular Google has been very vocal about wanting to provide quality pages to its end users. A broken link is equivalent to a dead end. One or two of these issues is not going to drop you off the first page of the search results. However, long term publishing of broken links can degrade the overall quality of your web page and reduce search engine rankings both in your visitors eyes and the search engines.
Furthermore, broken links can reduce the chances of getting listed in the DMOZ directory and Yahoo! Directory and will likely discourage other webmasters from linking to you. Both of these will affect your search engine rankings as well.
2 Types of Broken Links
In general, I have categorized broken links into 2 types, external broken links and internal broken links.
External Broken Links
It’s nearly impossible not to have external links pointing from your website to other websites. It’s a good practice to refer your visitors to resources outside your website. Since those resources are out of your control, it is very likely that other webmasters remove the web page you are linking to. In this case, I categorize it as external broken link because the destination page you are linking to is no longer exist.
The solution for external broken links is easy. You can either remove the entire link from your web page or find a link to replace existing broken link.
Internal Broken Links
Internal broken links are referring to those non-working links reside in your web pages pointing to other web pages within your website. This can happen if you’re changing the name of a web page which is equivalent to changing URL. You can create a 301 redirect to guide the visitors or search engines to a new URL if they reach your web page using old URL.
Another scenario is you delete an web page permanently from your website due to various reasons. In this case, you need to remove all the linkings pointing to the deleted web page. If you don’t do it, search engines will think that you’re linking to a non-existence web page which is a bad experience for readers.
Check Broken Links Automatically
When you site is continuously growing or you already has a big site, then it’s nearly impossible to check all the links manually. If you’re using WordPress, then you’re lucky because you can simply install Broken Links Checker.
Broken Links Checker will scan through your whole WordPress blog to look for broken link. If there is a broken link, it will display the link in your dashboard which you can view it easily and take appropriate action.
Provide 301 Redirect To New URL
I would like to share with you another useful plugin for WordPress which is Redirection. It provides an easy feature for you to redirect from an old URL to new URL without touching any server configuration files.
Conclusion
Broken links are bad for readers as they break the user experience. Not only that, they also stop the search engines bots from crawling your web page and eventually it will affect your search engine rankings. To prevent such issue to happen, you can check for broken link in your website periodically.
Related Posts:
- 5 Inbound Link Tips For High Search Engine Rankings
- How Your Competitors Can Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings
- One Way Links vs Reciprocal Links vs Three Way Links
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