WEBMYNE SYSTEMS Complete Internet Marketing & SEO Training Guide [2014]

SEO Training Guide - 2014

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

 Introduction to SEO #

INTRODUCTION TO INTERNET MARKETING # BASICS # SEO REQUIREMENTS #

 Types of SEO #

ON-PAGE SEO # OFF-PAGE SEO #

 Off-page SEO Overview #

WHAT IS ? # IMPORTANCE OF OFF-PAGE SEO OR LINK BUILDING # QUALITY LINK BUILDING/LINK DEVELOPMENT WAYS #

 Link Popularity in Practice #

DIRECTORY SUBMISSION SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION / BOOKMARKING ARTICLE SUBMISSION BLOG CREATION / SUBMISSION / MARKETING NEWS / PR / RELEASES FORUM POSTING CLASSIFIEDS COMMENTING (BLOGS / ARTICLES / FORUMS) LINK EXCHANGE EMAIL MARKETING BUSINESS DIRECTORY SUBMISSION GROUPS / COMMUNITY PROFILES CREATION SOCIAL NETWORKING RSS / ATOM / OPML / XML PINGING VIDEO SUBMISSION / PODCASTING / AUDIO SUBMISSION SOFTWARE SUBMISSION SLIDE SHARE / DOCUMENT / PDF SHARING

 On Page SEO Overview #

KEYWORD RESEARCH # META TAGS AND TITLE OPTIMIZATION # CANONICAL TAG, META ROBOTS AND REL=NOFOLLOW TAGS # CONTENT OPTIMIZATION # URL OPTIMIZATION # IMPORTANCE OF ROBOTS.TXT AND HTACCESS #

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 Site Architecture #

WHAT IS SITE ARCHITECTURE? # SEO FRIENDLY SITE STRUCTURE #

Algorithms and Updates #

WHAT ARE GOOGLE/SEARCH ENGINE ALGORITHMS? # EXPLAINING PANDA, PENGUIN AND HUMMINGBIRD UPDATES #

 Social Media Optimization & Social Networking #

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION? # PARTICIPATING IN FACEBOOK, TWITTER, LINKEDIN, PINTEREST # EFFECTIVE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING TACTICS #

 Site Monitoring and Rank Checking #

SITE ANALYSIS USING # MONITORING THROUGH GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOL # RANK CHECKING #

 Dynamic Site Optimization #

 SEO Friendly Design Structure #

IMAGE OPTIMIZATION # DROP DOWN MENU (DYNAMIC MENUS) # SITE ACCESSIBILITY # JAVA SCRIPTS # CSS OPTIMIZATION # FRAME STRUCTURE # FLASH #

 HTML OVERVIEW [PRACTICAL] #

 EMAIL MARKETING #

CREATING EMAIL MESSAGE # WORKING WITH MAILING LIST # RUNNING CAMPAIGN – TIPS, CTR KNOWLEDGE ETC. #

 PAY-PER-CLICK MARKETING #

CREATING ADWORDS ACCOUNT # CREATING AND MANAGING CAMPAIGNS # RUNNING CAMPAIGN – CLICKS, AD OPTIMIZATION ETC. #

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SEO Training Tutorial

 Introduction to SEO

 Introduction to Internet Marketing Internet marketing, or online marketing, refers to advertising and marketing efforts that use the Web and email to drive direct sales via electronic commerce, in addition to sales leads from Web sites or emails. Internet marketing and online advertising efforts are typically used in conjunction with traditional types of advertising like radio, television, newspapers and magazines.  Specialized Areas of Internet Marketing: Internet marketing can also be broken down into more specialized areas such as Web marketing, email marketing and social media marketing:  Web marketing: includes e-commerce Web sites, affiliate marketing Web sites, promotional or informative Web sites, online advertising on search engines, and organic search engine results via search engine optimization (SEO).  Email marketing involves both advertising and promotional marketing efforts via e-mail to current and prospective Facebook customers.  Social media marketing involves both advertising and marketing (including viral marketing) efforts via social networking sites like, Twitter, YouTube and Digg.

 Search Engine Basics: There are many different search engines available today the most famous of which is Google. Other examples include Bing from Microsoft and Yahoo. It is important that if you are promoting a you make sure that each individual search engine is aware of your particular website. Search engines use automated software called robots, bots, spiders or crawlers to search through on the web and then indexes the results in giant . The search engines will also search for pages that have been updated and modified since the last time they were crawled by the search engines.  A very basic search engine includes a number of processing phases: o Crawling: to discover the new or updated web pages on the internet o Indexing: to build an index [store the web page] to facilitate query processing o Query Processing: Extract the most relevant page based on user's query terms o Ranking: Order the result based on relevancy

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Must Read: How Search Works - http://www.google.ca/intl/en/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/ How Search Engine Works - http://java.dzone.com/articles/search-engine-basics

 Crawling: Crawler's job is to collect web pages on the internet, it is typically done by a farm of crawlers, who do the following:

 Start from a set of seed , repeat following…  Pick the URL that has the highest traversal priority.  Download the page content from the URLs to the content repository (which can be a distributed file system, or DHT), as well as update the entry in the doc index  Discover new URL links from the download pages. Add the link relationship into the link index and add these links to the traversal candidates  Prioritize the traversal candidates  Indexer:  The Indexer's job is to build the inverted index for the query processor to serve the online search requests.  First the indexer will build the "forward index" 1. The indexer will parse the documents from the content repository into a token stream. 2. Build up a "hit list" which describe each occurrence of the token within the document (e.g. position in the doc, font size, is it a title, anchor text ... etc.). 3. Apply various "filters" to the token stream (like stop word filters to remove words like "a", "the", or a stemming filter to normalize words "happy", "happily", "happier" into "happy") 4. Compute the term frequency within the document.

 From the forward index, the indexer will proceed to build a reverse index (typically through a Map/Reduce mechanism). The result will be keyed by word and stored in a DHT.

 Ranker: Ranker's job is to compute the rank of a document, based on how many in- links pointing to the document as well as the rank of the referrers (hence a recursive definition). Two popular ranking algorithms including the "Page Rank" and "HITs".

 Query Processor: When user input a search query (containing multiple words), the query will be treated as a "query document". Relevancy is computed and combined with the rank of the document and return an ordered list of result.

There are many ways to compute the relevancy. We can consider only the documents that contains all the terms specified in the query. In this model, we search for each term (with the query) a list of document id and then do an intersection with them. If

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we order the document list by the document id, the intersection can be computed pretty efficiently.

Must Read: SE Operators - http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/1004/seoperators.html

 SEO Requirement: Top 3 SEO Requirement: To make your website focused to an international audience, there are three key elements that must be implemented in order for your efforts to be worthwhile. o Technical Search Requirements: First and foremost, getting your technical elements set up correctly is one of the most critical basics for a SEO campaign to be valuable and successful. Starting a SEO campaign is like building a sound foundation for a house: working from the ground up to test issues for crawling and indexation, creating accurate XML , and correctly using Webmaster Tools to target a specific country are some of the first steps to creating an operational site for an international audience. Before moving on to making the frame of the house you must define the hierarchal structure of the site for internal linking purposes. These first steps for technical SEO will provide sound groundwork to move on to the next key elements of International SEO.

o Inbound Links: Inbound links is a vital pillar to holding the roof for the International SEO requirements infrastructure. Creating a website that will not only produces results in country –specific searches but also coordinates with achieving results in a locally based campaign is tricky. A marketing plan for the site must include content creation that is not only useful to a local audience but is easily accessible and a valid peek of interest globally. Remember you aren’t just targeting a local audience anymore. Keep user experience and your target audience in check to identify higher quality links that are relevant to a user’s industry for better rankings and higher traffic.

o Locally Relevant Content with Indicators: Lastly and most importantly is optimizing content. Placing a roof on the SEO infrastructure may be the most difficult part. Unlike normal sites when publishing a site targeted for an international audience the content needs to be translated to something a native speaker of that language can understand, which may not be an easy task. Need some tips?  Try creating content that isn’t limited to just translation instead optimized after translation.  Don’t go the easy route and just optimize in English. Make sure to look at popular keywords that are country-specific when optimizing content.

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 And, if at all possible having a native speaker correct your generated content always helps for review.

Most of these handy –dandy key elements are also in conjunction with the best practices for SEO and by no means explains every aspect to International SEO. However, if you cater your SEO efforts to an international audience these may be truly helpful to get you on the right track.

 Types of SEO

 On Page SEO: On page SEO or search engine optimisation is making sure that your website is as search engine friendly as possible. If your website is not optimised then you have less chance of getting good results in the search engines, here is a quick guide towards good on page SEO:  Keywords Research: Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the "right" keywords can make or break your website. Through the detective work of puzzling out your market's keyword demand, you not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole.

 Make sure that all of your web pages can be indexed by search engines - make sure that they all have at least one link from somewhere on your site.

 Make sure that you have unique content on every single page.

 Make sure that your meta-tags are arranged correctly - your page title tags and description tags should describe the content of your different web pages. The page title tags should be less than 68 characters and the description tags more detailed but less than 148 characters.

 Make sure you label the different headers on your web pages using H tags.

 Make sure that your web page URLs are SEO friendly, use mod re-write for Linux and Apahche hosting or use IIS redirect for Windows. Ideally make it so that the URLs describe your content i.e. use domain.com/blue-widgets.php as opposed to having something like domain.com/product.php?cat=146. Use hyphens or to separate words in the URLs.

 Make sure that the links within your site are complete i.e. if you are linking to the blue widgets page link to domain.com/blue-widgets.php as opposed to just blue- widgets.php.

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 Make sure that you use descriptive URLs for your images i.e. use blue-widget.jpg as apposed a bunch of numbers and or letters .jpg.

 Make sure that you label all of your images with descriptive alt attributes.

 Make sure that you make good use of anchor text links within your content - if you have a page about blue widgets, use the phrase blue widgets in the text that links to it.

 Make sure that there is only one version of your site - 301 redirect all non www. URLs to the www. Ones or vice versa.  Make sure that there is only one version of your homepage - 301 redirect the index or default page back to domain.com.

 Use the rel="nofollow" tag in the links to websites that you do not trust, you think maybe using spamming techniques or you do not want to help in the search engines.

 Make sure that your code is valid, in some instances bad code can lead to search engines not being able to properly read a page. Use the W3C validator to check your mark-up.

 Robot.txt: The robots.txt file is a file that you can add to your web root directory to tell search engines about and directories that you do not want them to index. Well-behaved search engines check this file before crawling your site. For all the juicy details, check out the robots.txt site.

o Two important rules to remember: . Always keep your robots.txt file in your domain's top-level directory: http://www.example.com/robots.txt . Inside the file, you never list the full URL of a resource, except for the sitemap, which we’ll get to in a moment; other items should only use the address that comes after the domain name, including the slash. For example, if you're referring to http://www.example.com/page.html, you would use: /page.html

 Off Page SEO: Off page SEO or search engine optimisation is doing things off site to improve your sites search engine rankings. The only thing you can do off site to increase your rankings is build up more links. More links will generally lead to better Google PageRank and better search engine rankings. When you are trying to get more links you need to think about quality, not all links are created equal and links from low quality sites will have little or no impact on your rankings. The best types of links that you can get are from trusted sources such as universities, newspapers and even some of the top notch directories such as dmoz and Yahoo.

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 It is sometimes difficult to spot the good links; here are a few questions you should ask yourself when you are looking at sites or pages to get links from:  Is this site or page relevant to what I do?  Is this site linking out to any low quality off topic sites?  Is this site or page going to send the right sort of traffic?  Is this site or page ranking well in the search engines?  Does this site have a lot of links from other websites?

 Another important factor is the way that the sites link to you, sites that use the rel=nofollow tag to link to you or sites that use a redirect which will not help you, also the search engines look at the text that links to you, if you are trying to rank for the phrase blue widgets and you can get a site to link to you including that phrase in the text or alt tag of the link then that is going to help you to rank higher for that particular phrase.

 Take these things into consideration, then check out our link building articles and you are on your way towards good off page SEO and good rankings in the search engines.

 Off-page SEO Overview

 What is Link Building? Link building is the word that refers to off-page SEO in the best manner. They are one and the same and can take up a website ranks in search engine results. Link building or link development or link popularity means to build links back to your web page from other blogs or websites. Search engines are deeply interested in the number and quality of links over the internet that point back to your web page.

 Importance of Off-Page SEO or Link Building Google and other search engines crawl the internet to find the number of links pointing back to your web page and index them. Their algorithm then decides on how to position different web pages.

It can be explained better in this way – say you have 100 links back to your web page on “How To Lose Weight” from 100 authority sites in fitness niche. So when Google visits these websites it’ll know that if these websites are linking back to your web page then there must be some very useful content present there. And hence your web page may end up higher in the search results. It’s much like 100 people voting you as an authority person.

Google loves a web page if most of the to it is natural and created by people who really liked the content as this is what acts as a real vote for your web page other than the artificial links created by you. And getting natural links is not at all easy, not everyone will link back to your web page even though the content is great. So when building links yourself you should try to keep them as natural looking as possible so that Google can trust it as a

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vote. There are a lot of things that you have to take care of when building natural looking and quality backlinks.

 Quality Link Building/Link Development Ways A quality has the following properties and is considered good in the eyes of search engines and has the maximum effect on your off-page SEO.

 From High PageRank Web Page PageRank (PR) is a ranking given to a web page (from 0 to 10) by Google algorithm which tells about its authority. Always try to get backlinks from web pages with high PR, preferably higher than the PR of your own website. Backlinks from higher PR web pages means quality votes for your web page. You can check the PR of a web page using the Firefox Plugin – WebRank Toolbar or if you don’t use Firefox you can use this online tool PR Checker.

 Use different anchor texts Having the same exact keyword stuffed anchor text for all your backlinks is bad for your web page’s SEO. It does not look natural to Google as it’s not practically possible for all your backlinks to have same anchor text. So try to use different anchor text for your backlinks.

I personally use this model of anchor text to build backlinks to my blogs – 30% exact matching keyword, 30% phrase match keywords, 30% generic words like click here, know more, read more etc and 10% of the webpage.

Say you have a web page http://your-website.com/rain-boots/ that you want to rank for the keyword “rain boots” then try to have about 30% of the backlinks with exact keyword match anchor text “rain boots”, 30% with phrase match anchor texts like “cheap rain boots”, “good rain boots”, “rain boots review” etc. 30% generic words like “click here”, “click here to know more”, “this blog”, “great site” etc. and the remaining 10% with anchor text as “http://your- website.com/rain-boots/”.

 Nofollow or Dofollow Links The attribute rel=”nofollow” when added to a link tells the search engines to not pass the reputation of that web page to the linked web page. When this attribute is not present it means that the link is dofollow and that web page passes its reputation (or what it is called as the PageRank juice) to your linked web page.

The nofollow attribute is used by webmasters to stop the flow of their build authority to other sites. And hence these links are not much useful for off-page SEO also. You should always try to get dofollow links back to your web pages for getting the link juice and also increasing the chances of getting ranked higher.

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A lot of search engines do not regard rel=”nofollow” attribute for ranking your web page but a lot of them do. There has been battling on whether you should build nofollow links or not with no logical conclusions so far. So to be on the safe side split links into 70/30 parts -that’s 70% dofollow links and 30% nofollow links. It’s not been bad so far.

 From Similar Niche Blog and Website Try to get links from niche blogs or websites similar to your web page as these are the real natural links. A car blog will never link to a fitness blog so you should keep this mind when building your backlinks and only try to get links from blogs or websites relevant to your niche. You can search blogs in your niche using Google to put your links on.

 Don’t do Black Hat SEO Black hat SEO is a process of getting thousands of links back to your web page in a very short period of time. This used to work earlier but not now. Getting thousands of links to your web page overnight is a sure shot way of suicide for your blog/website.

You may find a lot of schemes out there that claim to provide thousands of links for just a couple of dollars and they do too. But the quality of backlinks is very poor and it will not do any good for your web page. Search engines are smart enough to know which backlinks are natural and which are not.

These backlinks are mostly low quality and from PR-0 spammy websites. These sudden backlinks spikes can even lead of deindexing of your web pages from Google’s . Also avoid link farms (sites with 100+ outbound links per page).

 Link Popularity in Practice

 Directory Submission: Directory submission refers to the process of adding your website to a web directory. The directory submission process involves submitting your website URL along with other details of your website to the most appropriate category.

In the SEO world, directory submission is the basic step taken by marketers to improve link popularity of a website. This can be done by the webmaster himself or he can outsource it to somebody who is good at this.

 Article Submission: There are hundreds of article submission sites which are free and host tons of articles on virtually any topic. Use these free article sites to promote your website and yourself. Write some short articles related to your niche and publish them in article directories. Submit only in those articles directories which have high Google Page

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Rank. Article submission is a great and powerful off Page Seo technique that gives long term benefits. Famous article submission directories are ezine articles, ehow, buzzle.

 Social Media / Social Bookmarking: Sites like Delicious, Faves, StumbleUpon, BlogMarks and Diigo allow you to find and bookmark sites and information of interest. You can save your bookmarks online and access them from anywhere or share them with others. Make use of the tags effectively and keeping in line with the bookmarks you have chosen. Since bookmarks have fresh content to offer, search engines crawl to them and if you are there, you are sure to improve your ranking.

 What is Social Media? : Social media essentially is a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online. Most social media services encourage discussion, feedback, voting, comments, and sharing of information from all interested parties.

 It's more of a two-way conversation, rather than a one-way broadcast like traditional media. Another unique aspect of social media is the idea of staying connected or linked to other sites, resources, and people.

 Kinds of Social Media: Many social media sites come in the form of a blog, microblog, podcast, videocast, forum, wiki, or some kind of content community. To help you understand social media better, let's break them down into basic forms or groups.

. Social news: Sites like Digg, Sphinn, Newsvine, and BallHype let you read about news topics and then vote and/or comment on the articles. Articles with more votes get promoted to a more prominent position. . Social sharing: Sites like Flickr, Snapfish, YouTube, and Jumpcut let you create, upload, and share videos or photos with others. . Social networks: Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter allow you to find and link to other people. Once linked or connected, you can keep up to date with that person's contact info, interests, posts, etc. Many people are connecting to friends and business associates with whom they had fallen out of touch. It's bringing the world together like nothing else has. This is just a sampling of social media sites. More are added daily. Breaking them down into these categories or groups will help you understand their focus and to consider which avenue is right for your approach to social media marketing.

 Blog Creation / submission / marketing: The best way to represent your website and establish your online presence is through blogging. You have a great website and you have wonderful images of your products to tempt the visitors into accepting the deal. You have in depth knowledge about your products, which is evident from the content in your website. If you believe that with awesome website and quality content, you can afford to sit back looking for results to come in, then you have missed a point there. You need someone to

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popularize your website and make prospective customers learn about your site and its offers. Blogging does this for you in style. It represents your site. The advantage of setting up a blog is that you can add contents to your blog regularly and use it as a medium to promote whatever offers you plan to launch. You have limitations where website is concerned, as website content is static. Blogs give you the freedom to , and if your followers love your posts, he or she will share via social media or blogs and this will also create a link back to your website.  Steps to Create a Blog on .com: Google owns Blogger and has set it up for ease of use. Your blog will be extremely easy to set up and maintain, and you'll have Google's traffic management tools at your disposal. You can purchase a custom domain name for US$10 per year or you can get a free BlogSpot domain name such as yourblog.blogspot.com. If you already own another domain name, you can use it for no cost.

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 Steps to Create a Blog on Wordpress.com: With WordPress, getting started will take more time. However, you'll find that WordPress has a wide variety of more sophisticated tools for enhancing and promoting your blog. You can purchase a custom domain name on WordPress for $18 per year or map an existing domain name to WordPress for $13 per year. If you want a free domain, you can use something like yourblog.wordpress.com.[2] It is also important to note that there is a difference between WordPress.com (free) and WordPress.org (self-hosted). The former restricts bloggers from making an income and while the latter does require set up on your own host, it then allows full access to your blog's backend, full suite of features and improved SEO performance.

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 News/Press Releases/PR: This is one of the convenient modes of off-page optimization for a business. One can create and submit press releases to top PR sites (paid and free) related to the happenings at their firm. There are some of the PR sites that have good Google PageRank and Alexa rankings like – SBwire, PRwire, Open PR etc.

 Forum Posting: Members can publish their questions as well as discuss their opinions with other users. Based on the rules, members can anonymous or need to sign up to participate and then sign in to make threads and comments. Generally you don’t need to register to see threads. The concept regarding forum posting is like an online discussion place but we realize that you wish to promote your services or products by means of making replying to questions and asking a question with a few links to your own or client’s website in the signature. With respect to the rules, postings from a new user may require approving by the administrator or the moderator prior to it gets visible to other users.

 Choosing Forums: In order to obtain the most, your signature links needs to be on niche relevant forums. You’ll find your website’s niche relevant forums by writing “forum + niche” into Google. But first of all, you must examine that the forum should be SEO friendly as several forums allow “nofollow” links in signatures or no index Meta tag in profiles. Also check the Page Rank as it should not be less than 2 or unranked.  Profile Information: After selecting appropriate forums, you have to register and it is very important that you fill out your profile information completely. Use your real name and never use any kind of promotional name or the name of your website as

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such names always make a sense of spam. Add your profile links of the social networking websites whenever you find options to include.  Commenting on Threads: Ensure to present useful knowledge and also comment strongly related to the subject of the topic because the majority of forums possess strict rules with regards to spam and can get you banned. If a member made a thread about some latest tips of SEO in which he missed out important points, then you can comment those tips. In this manner your comment can get a lot more consideration among the comments of other people.  Avoid Direct Promotion: Don’t use advertising language of your services or products directly on your comments. When responding to other member’s queries, it’s best not to make use of any kind of word that can advertise your own products and also avoid referring to your signature links for details as some moderators can mind on your comments. Just make a proper answer to the query and allow other members determine whether or not to check out your site by clicking on the signature links.  Signature Links: The majority of forums allow adding links in signature, where members are permitted to add their own or client’s website link. However, you need to be very careful while adding links. Your links must be related to the forum else you will neither get SEO benefits nor traffic. Do not include an excessive amount of back links in the signature, first read the allowed number of links that can be added in the signature. Whenever you publish a topic or comment, the signature will be added instantly at the bottom. A lot of forums will demand you to have a specific amount of posts until you can include a back link. It will be valuable in the future when you reach that amount. But some of them also permit links in the signature instantly. Therefore forums generate one way back links easily in a huge amount, the more you make informative comments and threads, the more one way links your websites will get.  Posting Content: Make a habit to add a unique content. Making a post that will contain such a content that is already published or duplicate content is purely restricted and can lead to a permanent ban or warning depending upon the rules. Also take good care with your language. Never make use of unpleasant language.  Avoid Posting Unnecessarily: Only respond to such questions you know. Many members start bombarding by responding to every question regardless of whether they know the answer of those questions or not. It is best to answer to those questions you’re knowledgeable about.

 Classifieds: Classified Ads are basically online ads which are placed on Classified Resources. It works the same way as you give advertisement in any other media like: Newspapers, Magazines, Radio, and Television etc.

These are very useful to promote the website as they get posted immediately and can generate sales queries in a couple of hours. Classified Ads are posted on Resources which already have traffic and have a lot of people refer them for quality products and services.

Classified sites are really good Source to reach our Target Audience. Many Classifieds sites are great money saver. We can save money by using free classifieds websites and now we

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can buy and sell almost anything on classified sites. Classifieds helps to search products or services on our fingertip. Eg: Craigslist, Backpage, Yelp etc.

 Commenting (Blogs / Articles / Forums): You need to find your niche and then start with post on which you have enough knowledge to draw a conclusion. The comment could be a positive one or a negative (don’t be harsh) but that should add some value to the post. For Example; - Say you have a blog about SEO, then you go to the most trusted website in your niche like SEJ, SearchEngineLand, SEroundtable etc. and read the post and then comment what you think about it.

In fact, there is nothing wrong with making a list of sites related to your niche or subscribing to the newsletter so that you get to know when any blogger publish the new content. If implemented properly Blog Commenting gives a boost to your SEO campaign and most importantly helps in creating a relationship with the author and grow your blogger network.

Must Read: Effective SEO Commenting: http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/02/21/an-advanced- guide-to-an-effective-seo-commenting-strategy/

 Link Exchange: The practice of exchanging links with other websites. You place another site's link on your site, usually on a links page, and in return, the other site places a link on their site back to you.

Must Read: Link Exchange: http://www.interpriseo.com/resources/general_info_articles/Link%20Exchange.pdf

 Email Marketing: Electronic or email marketing is sending a commercial message to a group of people (usually your client database) using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. Email marketing covers ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, brand awareness and increase sales, push products and services. Email marketing is usually sent to current customer databases but bought lists can also be used. Broadly, the term is usually used to refer to:

 Sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.  Sending email messages with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately.

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 Adding advertisements to email messages sent by other companies to their customers.

 Business Directory Submission  Groups / Community  Profiles Creation  Social Networking: A social networking service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on facilitating the building of social networks or social relations among people who, for example, share interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections. A social network service consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web-based and provide means for users to interact over the Internet.

Online community services are sometimes considered as a social network service, though in a broader sense, social network service usually means an individual-centred service whereas online community services are group-centred. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks. Top social networking sites used for by millions of users are Facebook.com, Twitter.com, Google plus, Linkedin.com, Pinterest.com and Youtube.com.

Must Read: Social Media: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media

 RSS/Atom/XML/Feed: RSS feeds enable publishers to syndicate data automatically. A standard XML file format ensures compatibility with many different machines/programs. RSS feeds also benefit users who want to receive timely updates from favourite websites or to aggregate data from many sites.

Subscribing to a website RSS removes the need for ssthe user to manually check the web site for new content. Instead, their browser constantly monitors the site and informs the user of any updates. The browser can also be commanded to automatically download the new data for the user.

 How to Use RSS or Feeds? Aggregators are the most common use of feeds, and there are several types. Web aggregators (sometimes called portals) make this view available in a Web page; my Yahoo is a well-known example of this. Aggregators have also been integrated into e-mail clients, users’ desktops, or standalone, dedicated software.

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Aggregators can offer a variety of special features, including combining several related feeds into a single view, hiding entries that the viewer has already seen, and categorizing feeds and entries.

Other uses of feeds include site tracking by search engines and other software; because the feed is machine-readable, the search software doesn’t have to figure out which parts of the site are important and which parts are just the navigation and presentation. You may also choose to allow people to republish your feeds on their Web sites, giving them the ability to represent your content as they require.

Must Read: RSS Information: http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/

 Pinging  Video Submission / Podcasting / Audio Submission  Software submission  Slide share / Document / PDF Sharing

 On Page SEO Overview

 Keyword Research: We are discussing everything in Web context so in web terminology a keyword is a term that a person enters into a search engine to find specific information. Most people enter search phrases that consists of between two and five words. Such phrases may be called search phrases, keyword phrases, query phrases, or just keywords. Good keyword phrases are specific and descriptive. There are many different ways to find keywords for your website. Some good keyword ideas are:

 Words people would search for to find your product or service.  Problems your prospective customers may be trying to solve with your product or service.  Keyword tags on competitors websites.  Visible page copy on competitors’ websites.  Related search suggestions on top search engines.  By using an online tools like: Google Keyword Tool  By analysing your website carefully and finding out proper keywords. This task can be done by expert SEO Copywriters.  Pay attention to stemming for your keywords - Particularly to what the root word is and what Google considers to be a match for that word when optimizing pages over time.  You can do brainstorming to identify correct keywords for your site.

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 Meta Tags and Title Optimization: Meta Tags: There are two important Meta Tags and they are the meta description and meta keyword tags. Some search engines may display the meta description as part of the search results, but the meta keywords tags should not appear in search results. The general consensus among SEO experts is that meta tags are dead. Even so, many of these same experts continue to use meta tags in their own sites. For Google adding the Keyword Meta Tag won't result in a boost in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but the description might be used for the description for your SERP listings in Google. Yahoo says they use the Keyword Meta Tag when it ranks a page. So it makes sense to add one for Yahoo and any other minor search engines that still use.

 Meta Description Tag Tips: There are few important tips for good meta description tags:  Use keywords in your meta description tag.  Try not to repeat the words overly often, but try to use multiple syntaxes of your key words.  There should not be more than 165 characters [including spaces] in a description meta tag of a single web page.

Title Tag: Hope you understand the meaning of HTML TITLE tag which is put inside head tag. The page title (not to be confused with the heading for a page) is what is displayed in the title bar of your browser window. This is the one place on a web page where your keywords MUST be present. Correct use of keywords in the title of every page of your website is extremely important to Google - particularly for the home page. The title shouldn't consist of much more than about 65 characters [including spaces], with your keywords used at the very beginning of the title. Since Google is looking for relevant keywords in the title, this means you should NOT include your company name in the title unless your company name is very well known. Improper or non-existent use of titles in web pages will keep more websites out of top rankings on Google than any other factor except perhaps for a lack of relevant content on a page or a lack of quality links from other websites that point to your site.

 Best Practices for Creating Titles:  Here are some best practices you should follow for creating titles on pages:  Each page should have a unique title.  If practical, try to include your Primary Keyword Phrase in every title of every page.  Begin the title of your home page with your Primary Keyword Phrase, followed by your best Secondary Keyword Phrases.  Use more specific variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase on your specific product, service, or content pages.  If you must include your company name, put it at the end of the title.  Use the best form, plural or singular, for your keywords based on what

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 Word Tracker says is searched on more often.  Don't overdo it - don't repeat your keywords more than 2 - 3 times in the title Make sure the tag is the first element in the <head> section of your page - this makes it easier to find by Google. </p><p> Basics of SEO Content Optimization:  To say that “keyword placement” is more important than “keyword density” is more of a relative than an absolute statement. However, I believe it is much easier to “streamline” your SEO process by ensuring that the chosen primary key phrase for a page is utilized in all of the key areas of the meta data AND in the content and anchor text for a page.  Keyword Frequency/Density: Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. You don't want to go overboard with frequency, however, since on some engines if you repeat a word too many times, you'll be penalized for "spamming" or keyword stuffing. In general keyword density should be around 3% to keep the content genuine.  Keyword Proximity: This refers to the placement of keywords on a Web page in relation to each other or, in some cases, in relation to other words with a similar meaning as the queried keyword. </p><p> 9 Steps for Creating SEO-Friendly Content: 1. Start with Search Intent. The first step to optimizing content is to know your target audience and what they’re looking for. Simply posting paragraphs of information will not drive traffic to your webpage. Create content with purpose. SEOmoz identifies three types of search intent: transactional searches, navigational searches, and informational searches. Think about which category your business falls. What is your customer looking for? Let this question guide your content creation. </p><p>2. Pick Your Keywords. Know your keywords before you start writing. Keywords are, uh well key. A slight change in keyword can be the difference between page one on Google and page 100. Not to mention attract the wrong kind of visitor. That’s why it is “easier to create content with a keyword in mind,” says the Content Marketing Institute’s Kevin Caine. To find the right keywords, do some research? Google’s Keyword Tool is a great place to start. Type in a word or phrase and see suggested keywords and estimated search volume. </p><p>3. Add Your Keywords. It’s not enough to pick the right keywords. Where you place them in your content is equally important. On the page, your selected keyword should appear in the title, first sentence, content heading, and throughout the piece. Be sure to include the keyword two or three times in your first 200 hundred words. Also beware: keyword-rich content doesn’t mean keyword-only content; </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 25 </p><p> shoot for a keyword density of one to three percent, says Content Marketing Institute. Off the page, your keyword should appear in the URL, image filename, and Meta description. </p><p>4. Stick to the Topic. Specific, hyper-relevant content translates to quality, high- ranking pages according to SEOmoz. Focus on one purpose when crafting content and mention keywords often. Aim to offer consumers in-depth answers to their questions. </p><p>5. Don’t be a Copy Cat. Search engines love unique content. The worst thing you can do is rip another website’s page. If you copy and paste, you can say all your website’s SEO value goodbye. </p><p>6. Mix it up. The written word is a powerful thing, but in the internet age, pictures are worth a thousand words--or clicks! Incorporate multimedia elements-- images, video, and infographics - into your content. “This content will help build engagement with consumers as well as index able content for search engines,” said Chris Keating, VP of Performers to Heidi Cohen. </p><p>7. Sprinkle in Some Links. Search engines value links--as long as they make sense. Be sure the link’s anchor text is relevant to the source page. Google values internal links because they make the site easier to navigate and outbound links because they connect the user with valuable information. </p><p>8. Consistency is Important. Establish a regular editorial calendar and stick to it! Consistently producing unique content is crucial to maintaining (or improving!) your rank on Google. Search engine crawlers return regularly to index your site’s content, says Hub Spot’s Rebecca Chart. Give them, and your readers of course, something new to read. </p><p>9. Share generously. Google tracks social sharing and this can seriously boost your site's value. Plus social channels are highly effective engagement tools. So go ahead! Don’t be stingy. Post your content on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn etc. After you’ve done all this work creating quality content, it is a sure to get some social love and drive valuable traffic to your page. </p><p>These nine steps are all you need to get moving with your content creation strategy. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 26 </p><p> Improve SEO with Internal Anchor Text Links: Most anchor text SEO advice focuses on a link building strategy of generating more backlinks from external sites to yours. But, there are ways you can strongly improve your link love by using internal anchor text links within your site. In plain language, this means that you link from one page of your site to another, or to a specific section on one of your pages. Following are a few ways to improve your link quality and gain favour with both search engines and readers. </p><p> Improve Your Links: When Google indexes a page (or post) on your site, it also indexes all of the links on that page. The quality of those links count. Here is the anatomy of a well-formatted link that is rich in keywords: </p><p><a href=”http://yoursite.com/keyword.html”>Keyword Anchor Text</a> </p><p>The portion in red is the URL of the link. The text in green are the words that will appear as a link. Google picks up on the keyword in the URL, and then the same keyword in the text. This is link candy to Google while still being highly enticing and descriptive to your readers. </p><p> How Not to Make a Link: One of the worst things you can do for SEO is to use “click here” or some other non-descriptive phrase as the text you intend to link. It’s also not a good to use too long a phrase in the link. A good rule of thumb is to use only the text in the sentence that best describes the link, not the whole sentence.  Here’s a good example of concise link text: Visit the WordPress Training page for info on money-saving class packages. </p><p>Notice that only the page title is linked because it is rich in keywords and it gives the reader a clear indication of exactly what page they are visiting. (In fact, to increase SEO and reader ease, a title attribute was also used on this link. Hover your mouse over it and a little pop-up box appears with the page title too.) </p><p> o Link to Page Sections: One of the most overlooked features of internal anchor links is using them to direct readers to specific sections of a page on your site. For example, if you visit Blog Aid’s Resources page, you’ll see a few Quick Links at the top. </p><p>When a reader clicks one of these links, they are instantly taken to that section of the page. This is especially helpful for redirecting a viewer from a blog post to a specific place on a static page. For instance, if I write a post on ways retailers can engage their clients, I may want to redirect the reader to Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s Your Blog, Your Business as a great resource of practical tips with examples. If you click this link, you’ll notice that it takes you directly to the section on the Resources page that has Carolyn’s books. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 27 </p><p> URL Optimization  What is a URL? Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is part of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that is a reference to the location of a webpage or a resource on the web. Alternatively, we call it as ‘webpage addresses or ‘website addresses. URI also specifies the way to retrieve that <a href="/tags/Web_resource/" rel="tag">web resource</a>. Most of the times, the terms ‘URI’ and ‘URL’ are used alternatively. . Example of URL: http://www.google.com/analytics/ </p><p> SEO Opportunities In The URL: Yes, even URL structure holds a key value in the ranking authority of a website. Many URL properties are put into measure by search engines before they deliver the search results to the end users. </p><p> URL Factors taken in consideration are: . Structure and format of the URL . Dynamic or Static nature of URL . Use of Keywords and brand name in the URL . Length of the URL . Optimal Format of URL (SEO Friendly URLs) The optimal format of an SEO friendly URL should: 1. Begin with a domain name, and its categories must be named in such a way that they become keywords. 2. Have targeted keywords embedded into the webpage. </p><p>URL Optimization Best Practices: </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 28 </p><p>Mention related keywords in URL – The URL should contain related keywords. For URL SEO, the URL should have keywords that are important in that webpage. Keyword in the domain name has a fair priority but keyword stuffing in it is not a good practice. Structure of keyword stuffed domain name: www.keyword1keyword2keyword3.com Use hyphens to separate the words in URL – Google advices to use hyphens to separate the keywords in the URL, instead of using other symbols such as underscores. Suppose you use ‘dslr_camera‘ in the URL, Google will not recognize them as separate words. It will appear to the bots as a single keyword, so you can rank only for that single keyword. Alternatively, if you use ‘dslr-camera‘, search engines will instantly recognize them as two separate words and you can rank three separate for keywords ‘dslr‘, ‘camera‘ as well as ‘dslr camera‘. </p><p>According to Google: “We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs. “ Avoid using long URLs – Using descriptive URLs is advisable but be mindful of the URL length. Lengthy URLs work against SEO practices. You should use 4-7 words in the webpage name so that it is descriptive, precise, as well as short. Google thinks that over lengthy URLs are usually keyword stuffed. Example of lengthy keyword stuffed URL: http://gadgetguy.com.au/computing-computer-laptop-notebook-software-windows-mac- desktop-antivirus-storage-printer-channel-7-sunrise-australia-7.html Maintain a shallow URL structure – Try to maintain the webpages structures as flat as possible, which will give short URLs as well as reduces navigation problems. Long URL structure that uses many categories can cause navigation problems for users and bots. This problem results in a possibility where some of your webpages might not be crawled by the bots. Static URL is better than Dynamic URL – As per Google, dynamic URLs creates the problems of junk URLs, which may not be reachable by users. Many product-based and e-commerce websites use Session IDs, Timestamps, and sorting mechanisms to navigate their visitors by using dynamic URL mechanisms. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 29 </p><p>Using static URL structure is the best way to ensure good SEO opportunities, but it is sometimes unavoidable to use dynamic URLs. You can still use all those sorting and tracking features even maintaining the static type of URL by using cookies. If you cannot abolish the use of dynamic elements in URLs, Google has a good solution for this problem. You can manually ask Google to avoid those dynamic elements while crawling the webpages. Google’s Webmaster Tools can filter out those dynamic URLs using the ‘adjust parameter‘option in the settings. You can add the terms, which you use for dynamic URL such as ‘SessID’ or ‘SortBy’ in it and set it to ‘Ignore‘, then Google will start ignoring those parameters while crawling. Bing’s Webmaster Tools also provides ‘URL Normalization’ option, similar to Google. This option exists under the ‘Crawl Settings‘tab. Block dynamic URLs through Robots.txt – Some of the dynamic webpages such as search results page can create huge number of dynamic webpages .You can block some dynamic pages using Robots.txt. For more information, refer to ‘Robots.txt Tutorial‘. URLs are case sensitive – Unlike domain names, URLs are case sensitive so you have to be very careful while internal or external link building. Always type the whole URL starting with ‘http’ and be mindful of the case sensitive nature of URLs. Using these tips, you can optimize the URLs in your website which will hopefully enhance the whole SEO value. In addition, you can follow our blog for in-depth knowledge on other specific topics in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 30 </p><p> Importance of Robots.txt and HTAccess </p><p> What is Robots.txt? Robots.txt file is a special text file that is always located in your Web server's root directory. Robots.txt file contains restrictions for Web Spiders, telling them where they have permission to search. A Robots.txt is like defining rules for search engine spiders (robots) what to follow and what not to. It should be noted that Web Robots are not required to respect Robots.txt files, but most well written Web Spiders follow the rules you define. </p><p> File Structure The typical structure of a robots.txt file is something like: </p><p>User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml </p><p>The above example means that any bot can access anything on the site and the sitemap is located at http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. The wildcard (*) means that the rule applies to all robots. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 31 </p><p> How does it work? Before a search engine crawls your site, it will look at your robots.txt file in order to find out where you want them to look. However, malware robots scanning the web for security flaws will not care about your instructions, and any pages listed on your robots.txt file are publicly visible if someone were to view your robots.txt in the way highlighted above. </p><p> Robots.txt files are useful:  If you want search engines to ignore any duplicate pages on your website.  If you don’t want search engines to index your internal search results pages.  If you want to tell search engines where your sitemap is. </p><p> What is .HTACCESS File? Htaccess is short for Hypertext Access, and is a configuration file used by Apache- based web servers that controls the directory that it "lives" in--as well as all the subdirectories underneath that directory. Htaccess--it begins with a period, and ends with "htaccess." If you edit it, you need to make sure that it stays that way, and doesn't end up with a .txt or .html extension. </p><p> What is the HTACCES file used for? Htaccess file communicate with your server and give it instructions as to what you want it to do when someone visits a page on your website. </p><p> Blocking Users: htaccess file can be used to allow and block users by domain or IP address. You would want to do such a thing because there are several online tools which people use to get the keywords that their competitors are using. This will then allow them to target your keywords and potentially push you down the search rankings. For example, one such tool is SpyFu. They literally allow you to spy on your competitors. If you want stop such tools from being used on your website by your competitors, then simply structure your .htaccess file like the example at the bottom of this article. </p><p> Redirecting URLs: If you did a search on Google and looked through the search results, you will find that some websites are indexed with www. in front of them and others without it. If you searched a bit deeper, you will probably find some websites indexed twice, once with the www. in front of them and others without it. Why is this the case? This is due to backlinks being built to both the www. and the non-www. but the search engine treats them as separate websites. This means that you are creating links to 2 separate websites instead of just one. As a result, any SEO benefit is getting divided up between 2 websites when they could helping just one and getting much better results. If you want to avoid such a problem, all you need to do is </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 32 </p><p> redirect one URL to the other. It is best to redirect the URL with the least amount of backlinks to the one with the most amount of backlinks. </p><p> Solving The Canonical Website Address: The below code works if you want to redirect your visitors to the www. version of your website, the code also redirects the index.html pages to the correct canonical address: </p><p>RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsite\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] </p><p>RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.html RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html$ http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] </p><p> 301 Redirect: The htaccess 301 redirect is very useful if you have to change the name of a URL. This bit of code will redirect the old page to the new page: </p><p>RewriteEngine On Redirect 301 /old-webpage http://www.yoursite.com/new-webpage </p><p>(You may have to add the extension if your not using a clean URL.) </p><p> Site Architecture </p><p> What is site architecture? Great site architecture is all about improving how users and search engines find their way around your site. It’s about getting the best, most relevant content in front of users and reducing the number of times they have to click to find it. The same applies to search engines, by flattening your site architecture; you can make potential gains in indexation metrics such as the number of pages generating search engine traffic and the number of pages in a search engine index.  What does a not so good site architecture look like? The below diagram describes a very simple site layout. To get all the way to the bottom (the very deepest layer of content) search engines and users are expected to embark on a 6 click descent. That’s a lot of clicks! That level of depth certainly isn’t </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 33 </p><p> ideal; you might expect pages that are deeply buried in the architecture to have fewer internal links and be less visible in search engine results, even for very long tail queries. </p><p> Creating a flatter site architecture Most SEOs argue that pages buried very deeply in the architecture might not receive enough link juice to be visible in search engine rankings. Certainly it remains true that by promoting content “up” the architecture, you can improve its overall rank. This process is called “flattening”. Here, we've increased the number of links on each page and reduced the number of clicks to the very deepest level of content, effectively flattening the site architecture. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 34 </p><p> Importance of Sitemap in Site Architecture Way back in the "good old days" of SEO, many "SEO firms" made a pretty good living "submitting your website to thousands of search engines." While that has never been a sound tactic/method of achieving SEO nirvana, today's SEO provides us with opportunities to ensure that we get our content – in all shapes, sizes, and forms – indexed in the search engines, to the best of our ability. </p><p> When it comes to the crawling phase of SEO and bot visibility, we often first check what we hold from search engines via robots.txt and meta tag usage. But equally important is the content/URLs that we feed search engines. </p><p> Long ago, the best practice was to create an HTML sitemap of at least all your higher-level pages and link this HTML sitemap from the footer of all site pages. This allowed search engines the ability to have a buffet of site URLs from any one page on your site. </p><p> Then along came XML sitemaps. Extensible Markup Language is the preferred means of data digestion by search engines. </p><p> With this tool at our disposal, a site administrator has the ability to tell/feed search engines data on the pages of a site they want crawled as well as the priority or hierarchy of site content alongside information on when the page was last updated. </p><p> Using Sitemap Once the standard XML sitemap is built, you need to upload the file to your site. This file should reside directly off the root, with a relevant page naming convention such as /sitemap.xml. Below is an anatomy of a standard XML sitemap URL entry. </p><p><url> <loc>http://www.example.com/mypage </loc> <lastmod>2013-10-10 </lastmod> <changefreq>monthly </changefreq> <priority>1 </priority> </url> </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 35 </p><p> Google Algorithms and Updates </p><p> What is Algorithm? Algorithms are computer programs that look for clues to give you back exactly what you want. For a typical search query, there are thousands, if not millions, of webpages with helpful information. Algorithms are the computer processes and formulas that take your questions and turn them into answers. Today Google’s algorithms rely on more than 200 unique signals or “clues” that make it possible to guess what you might really be looking for. These signals include things like the terms on websites, the freshness of content, your region and PageRank.  Algorithm update: Typically yields changes in the search results on the larger end of the spectrum. Algorithms can change at any time, but noticeable changes tend to be less frequent.  Data refresh: When data is refreshed within an existing algorithm. Changes are typically toward the less-impactful end of the spectrum, and are often so small that people don’t even notice. One of the smallest types of data refreshes is an index update.  Index update: When new indexing data is pushed out to data centers. From the summer of 2000 to the summer of 2003, index updates tended to happen about once a month. The resulting changes were called the Google Dance. The Google Dance occurred over the course of 6-8 days because each data centres in turn had to be taken out of rotation and loaded with an entirely new web index, and that took time. In the summer of 2003 (the Google Dance called “Update Fritz”), Google switched to an index that was incrementally updated every day (or faster). Instead of a monolithic monthly event, the Google would refresh some of its index pretty much every day, which generated much smaller day-to-day changes that some people called everflux.  Over the years, Google’s indexing has been streamlined, to the point where most regular people don’t even notice the index updating. As a result, the terms “everflux,” “Google Dance,” and “index update” are hardly ever used anymore (or they’re used incorrectly). Instead, most SEOs talk about algorithm updates or data updates/refreshes. Most data refreshes are index updates, although occasionally a data refresh will happen outside of the day-to-day index updates.  Any business must constantly roll out new product updates in order to retain its competitive edge. Apple produces a new iPhone every year because it is constantly updating its technology to meet consumer demands.  Since 2011 Google has named its algorithm updates as Panda & Penguin. They are nothing more than updates to improve Google’s product, the search results, for a better customer experience.  Unless you live under a rock, you understand that there are businesses out there who attempt to ‘game’ the search results in order achieve a higher ranking. Google’s Penguin & Panda updates are rolled out periodically to penalize or even completely remove websites who ‘game’ the search engine results and/or provide a terrible user experience; but, at the same time improve the search results of sites who follow </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 36 </p><p>Google’s Guidelines and provide a positive customer experience. If Google did not perform these updates on a regular basis their search results would be full of nothing but spam and you would stop using Google. </p><p> What is <a href="/tags/Google_Panda/" rel="tag">Google Panda</a> Update? Google’s Panda Update is a filter introduced in February 2011 meant to stop sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results. Panda is updated from time-to-time. When this happens, sites previously hit may escape, if they’ve made the right changes. Panda may also catch sites that escaped before. A refresh also means “false positives” might get released. </p><p>Over the years you might have performed a search and clicked on a website that was nothing but pop-ups and ads. It was a terrible experience and you just wanted to leave the site. </p><p>Panda updates are focused on penalizing the ranking of sites with a poor user experience (like the one mentioned above) and improves the ranking of sites with a positive user experience. </p><p>The process that Google developed to respond to this “shallow content” it had suddenly become aware of was not simple. They selected a core group of Websites, handed those sites to “quality raters”, who then reviewed the Websites. </p><p> Why does Google do this: because one wants to find a website that provides an answer to what you are looking for, not a website with a bunch of popups and ads. And if one could not find what they were looking for on Google they would no longer use Google. </p><p> What is Google Pengiun? It is commonly known that the more links back (backlinks) to your website the better search engine ranking you will have. The problem is getting links back to your website is not an easy thing to do. When things are difficult, people cheat. Penguin is designed to penalize those who cheat buy purchasing links from ‘link farms’ or ‘link exchanges’ back to their website. </p><p>So what is a ‘link farm’ or ‘link exchange’? Websites that are designed to create links back to other websites for a fee in order to achieve a higher search engine ranking. If you are not involved in a ‘paid link’ scheme or intentionally trying to manipulate search results via links, then Penguin is nothing to worry about. </p><p>The Penguin updates focused on a different issue. The problem that was being addressed here was unnatural, manipulative inbound link profiles. What makes a bad link profile? Google focused on links that were: </p><p> Coming from poor quality sites </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 37 </p><p> On sites that aren't topically relevant to your niche or business  Paid links  Keyword rich links  Links where the anchor text is overly optimized (i.e., exact-match anchor text) </p><p> What is <a href="/tags/Google_Hummingbird/" rel="tag">Google Hummingbird</a> Update? Google has a new search algorithm, the system it uses to sort through all the information it has when you search and come back with answers. It’s called “Hummingbird” and below, what we know about it so far. As Google told the name come from being “precise and fast.” </p><p> What type of “new” search activity does Hummingbird help? “Conversational search” is one of the biggest examples Google gave. People, when speaking searches, may find it more useful to have a conversation. </p><p>“What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?” A traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for words — finding a page that says “buy” and “iPhone 5s,” for example. </p><p>Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that “iPhone 5s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words. </p><p>In particular, Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words. </p><p> Recover if Your Website is Affected by Google Panda and Penguin </p><p> Steps to Recover from Google Panda Update When it comes to creating a panda recovery plan, here’s a pretty extensive list of technical factors which you’ll want to assess as a part of your panda audit.  Duplicate Content (internal)  Duplicate Content (external)  Thin Content  Page Speed  Clean Design  Canonical Redirects  Grammar & Spelling </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 38 </p><p> Unique Meta Data  Clear Site Architecture  Cross-browser compatibility  Broken Links  Title Tag Over-Optimisation  Rich Snippet Implementation  Ad-content ratio </p><p>Must Read: http://www.ventureharbour.com/panda-recovery-a-guide-to-recovering-<a href="/tags/Google/" rel="tag">googles</a>-panda- update/ </p><p> Steps to Recover from Google Penguin Update Its recommend to monitor organic search engine traffic for at least two weeks after a Penguin update. If website traffic dramatically drops during this time, it’s likely due to a Penguin update. I recommend Google Analytics for monitoring your organic search engine traffic. </p><p>Also, be sure to check your Google Webmaster Tools notifications to see if you have any manual penalties applied to your website. Follow bellow steps to recover your website.  Identify the offending backlinks  Remove as many of the offending links as possible  Disavow the remaining links  File a reconsideration request  Execute a quality, strategic content marketing campaign </p><p> Social Media Optimization & Social Networking </p><p> What is Social Media Optimization? 1. Social Media Optimization or SMO is the process of generating publicity to raise the awareness of your brand, service or product by using social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Social Media Optimization is similar to SEO in that the objective is to generate traffic for a website. On the whole, SMO refers to optimizing a site & its content in terms of sharing across networking and social media sites. SMO is becoming increasingly relevant for SEO, as search engines are more and more utilizing the users’ recommendations of social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube to rank pages in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). The connotation is that when a user shares or likes a webpage on a networking site, it is counted as a vote for the quality of that webpage. Hence, search engines utilize such votes to properly rank sites in their SERPs. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 39 </p><p>At present, search engine giant Google applies much more importance to networking sites, so it is significant to make your business communicate effectively to appeal both audiences and Google. </p><p>Must Read: Social Media: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media </p><p> Benefits of Social Media Optimization </p><p> Social SEO - More shared links depicts you as an authority to search engines and improves SEO. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all feature top shared content as "Top News", "Top Tweet", and "Top Headlines" providing more opportunities to drive traffic.  User Generated Content (UGC) - Content created and curated by users carries greater influence and travels faster than doing it on your own. Voice of the customer (VoC) feedback, questions, testimonials, and insights surface through social interaction, discussion, and sharing.  Social Proof - Lots of comments or shares proves that content is read- and share-worthy. Featuring these counts can increase social follows, article click-through rates, shared links, and inbound links.  Social User Experience - Users appreciate the opportunity to participate in discussions and are generally willing to share or discuss content they like or [dramatically] dislike. Open discussion builds a community around the topic. Empowering users to more easily speak out about your content helps build "brand ambassadors."  Social Metrics - Comments, subscribes, and shares are all useful metrics for measuring the quality of blog content and the success of social media tactics. Tip: Tools like PostRank and Collective Intellect can be used for measuring social engagement for your blog and competitors. </p><p> Facebook for SEO It’s not important to follow the same SEO rules we do on our own website for Facebook. (For instance, it doesn’t matter at all what the name of the file is when you upload a photo to Facebook unlike on your own website)  Facebook Fan Page Name  This is going to act as the “Title” of your Facebook Page in the search results (that blue hyperlinked part). </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 40 </p><p> Avoid keyword stuffing as that’s just going to come off as spammy and hurt your organic growth on Facebook when real users are turned off by the spammy name of your page.  Brand name. Facebook is a great tool for owning your brand name in the search results. Including your company/brand name in your Facebook page name is an excellent idea.  But really, what about keywords? If your company name doesn’t accurately describe what you do, feel free to include a few words in a natural way that might better describe your company in the Facebook page name.  For example, the name of my page is “Liz Lockard Marketing Consulting” as opposed to just “Liz Lockard.” I’m still striving for owning my own name in the search results, but the addition of “marketing consulting” helps as I interact as my page around Facebook — other people viewing the name of my page have a better idea of what I do. </p><p> Other Elements  About: Some people have said the about section of your Facebook page served as a meta description for your page in the search results (meaning it would be that little text blurb under your blue <a href="/tags/Hyperlink/" rel="tag">hyperlink</a>) – recently, I’ve actually seen Google serve a recent comment on your page by someone else as the description (as seen in the above screenshot).  Individual Facebook Posts: Although unclear how often these individual Facebook posts would actually show up on the first page of search results, the first 160 characters or so of your post does show as a meta description. Even more important – the first 18 show up as your title. However, I don’t foresee most individual Facebook posts ranking very high in general.  Local: One thing that does have an impact on your ability to rank locally is adding a phone number and location to your Facebook page — IF your business has a physical location. Local search unfortunately favors those with a physical location at the moment – however, feel free to fill your location data out anyway as Google’s algorithm may get smarter with local and start recognizing things like that a plumber doesn’t necessarily need a physical office to be the best closest solution for someone searching for a local plumber. </p><p>Must Read: http://www.lynda.com/Facebook-tutorials/Facebook-Business/124081-2.html </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 41 </p><p> Twitter for SEO  Twitter Name This is your URL for your Twitter account. You have 15 characters at your disposal. Follow the same advice as you did for Facebook – try to capture your brand name, if possible, in those 15 characters. This step will help you dominate the search results for your brand/company name. (Mine is https://twitter.com/lizlockard ) The good news is you can change your username at any time – without losing any followers. </p><p> Twitter Bio Besides the fact that Twitter recently created a public directory of users, your Twitter bio will serve as the meta description for your Twitter profile in the search results. Another reason to use relevant keywords that describe what you do/who you are is that a number of people looking to grow relationships via Twitter are using Twitter’s search function or tools like Followerwonk to find relevant partners. Using relevant words over cutesy descriptions ups your ability to be found. </p><p> Getting More Tweets There’s no magic pill for getting more Tweets on Twitter. But what CAN you do to help yourself?  Using the platform to build relationships and use it well. Don’t know where to start or struggling to get a real following? Check out Alicia Cowan’s Twitter Brilliance program (affiliate link). </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 42 </p><p> Remember to actually SHARE your blog posts on Twitter. And more than just one tweet. Don’t spam your followers, but using a tool like Followerwonk can let you know when people are online – and show you how just one tweet of your blog post can easily get lost in the Twitter stream. Tweet it more than once.  Make it EASY for people to share your website/blog. Add a Tweet button or other social sharing plugins.  Have a networking crew or mastermind group? Ask them to Tweet for you on posts you’re *really* trying to get traction on. </p><p>Must Read: http://www.lynda.com/Twitter-tutorials/Twitter-Business/108969-2.html </p><p> Google+ For SEO Google very obviously gives preference to its own social network in its search results and if your content isn’t being shared on that network, you’re missing out. </p><p> Claim your Google+ profile if you haven’t already. (These steps might help)  Build up your following. Easy ways to do that? Ask your existing mailing list, Facebook fans, and Twitter followers to join you. Every few weeks, ask again.  Overwhelmed by needing to post on so many networks? Your bare minimum should be to use a tool like Hootsuite to schedule the same posts you’d be sharing on Twitter or Facebook on to Google+ as well. </p><p> Google Authorship  One MAJOR impact Google+ has on search results is the ability to add your profile picture next to the search results for ANY article you write around the web. Yep, ANY. If you don’t have a profile, you can’t have your picture added to the search result. </p><p> Does this affect SEO? Not in rankings per se, but click-throughs? You bet (by upwards of 150%)  Don’t have Google Authorship set up for your site yet? Check out this step- by-step guide for creating Google Authorship http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/04/27/want-a-150-boost-in-traffic-then- use-this-idiot-proof-guide-to-google-authorship-markup/ </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 43 </p><p>Must Read: http://www.lynda.com/Google-tutorials/Google-Business/101459-2.html </p><p> Pinterest Optimization Pinterest follows the same rules as the rest of the social networks – nofollowed links. However, Pinterest pins and boards very easily show up at the top of search results. If your pin or board is dominating the search results, it increases the chances someone may click through to your site via Pinterest. </p><p> How can you up your chances of your pinning appearing at the top of the search results? A few simple ways:  Avoid cutesy board names. Use actual keyword names. Keep it non-spammy and put the keyword you’re targeting closer to the beginning of the board name. Example? My Google Analytics Tips board: http://pinterest.com/thelizlockard/google-analytics-tips/  Always add a description to your pin.  Always add a link to your pins – doesn’t affect SEO but does affect the number of click-throughs possible for your site. </p><p> LinkedIn Optimization LinkedIn is another nofollow example. You’re not going to get your own website higher in the search results from optimizing your LinkedIn profile, but you may just dominate the LinkedIn results and get more click-throughs there </p><p> Your URL Your “title tag” for your LinkedIn result is simply your name, which you don’t really want to alter and doesn’t require any specific action. However, you can and should claim your URL.  Your Headline, Description and Resume Here’s where you’re mostly optimizing to be found via LinkedIn’s search function. Keywords in your headline, followed by your description and the rest of your resume are going to have the biggest impact. </p><p>Must Read: http://www.lynda.com/LinkedIn-tutorials/Up-Running-LinkedIn/110884-2.html </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 44 </p><p> Site Monitoring and Rank Checking </p><p> What is Website Monitoring and Analysis? Whether you built a personal site from the ground up or oversee digital strategy for a huge corporation, many of us are managing a web presence these days. There are millions of websites out there, and tracking how people are getting to your site and what's performing well is a must for being competitive in the online market. With increasing need of online presence it has become viable to keep update of how your websites are performing in search engines as well to check and monitor site’s health. This is where different website analysing and monitoring tools come into picture. Google has made it simple to do in-depth analytics and improve traffic to websites by introducing Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. And most importantly they are free for all. </p><p>Google Analytics makes it easy for anyone managing a site to track and analyse this data. It's a powerful, free tool that can answer a variety of questions for a wide range of users. Wondering which keywords resonate with visitors? Need insight on what design elements might be turning people away? You can get answers to all such questions with Google analytics. </p><p>Google's Webmaster Tools are essential for any strong SEO effort. Its role is for webmasters: it helps you see your website as Google sees it. The toolset gives you insights into what pages have been indexed on your site, what links are pointing to it, your most popular keywords, and much more. </p><p> Site Analysis Using Google Analytics? Whether you want to boost sales, find more visitors or improve your mobile app, Google Analytics has the answers and insights you need to improve your business.  Why use Google Analytics? Google Analytics provides powerful digital analytics for anyone with a web presence, large or small. It's one of the most powerful digital analytics solutions available - and it's free for anyone to use. Discover how your website is performing:  Accurate website traffic patterns/trends  What search terms (keywords) people use to find the site  Which keywords resonate with prospects and lead to conversions  Which pages retain visitors the longest  Which customer and customer segments are most valuable  Where visitors come from and what do they do on the site  How can the website convert more visitors into customers  Which online ad or creative is the most effective  Where people leave the site  Which marketing initiatives are most effective </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 45 </p><p>Must Read: http://www.lynda.com/Analytics-tutorials/Google-Analytics-Tips-Tricks- Tutorials/135364-2.html https://support.google.com/analytics/?hl=en#topic=3544906 </p><p> Website Monitoring with Google Webmaster Tools? Webmaster Tools is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site's presence in <a href="/tags/Google_Search/" rel="tag">Google Search</a> results. You don't have to sign up for Webmaster Tools for your site to be included in Google's search results, but doing so can help you understand how Google views with your site and optimize its performance in search results. </p><p> Why use Webmaster Tools? Monitor your site's performance in Google Search results:  Make sure that Google can access your content  Submit new content for crawling and remove content you don't want shown in search results  Create and monitor content that delivers visually engaging search results  Maintain your site with minimal disruption to search performance  Monitor and resolve malware or spam issues so your site stays clean </p><p>Discover how Google Search—and the world—sees your site:  Which queries caused your site to appear in search results?  Did some queries result in more traffic to your site than others?  Are your product prices, company contact info, or events highlighted in rich search results?  Which sites are linking to your website?  Is your mobile site performing well for visitors searching on mobile? </p><p>Must Read: https://support.google.com/webmasters/?hl=en#topic=3309469 http://www.wphub.com/guide-google-webmaster-tools/ </p><p> Checking Website rankings in search engine. Checking website rankings is one of the most important SEO tasks. You need to know which of your web promotion efforts have brought you good results so you can decide whether to continue with them or not. Checking rankings for each of your selected keywords for the targeted/promotional pages is important to keep track of your website performance in search engine. Most importantly down fall in rankings can be a major symptom of your website affected by algorithm updates like Google Panda, Penguin or something new. But if there are minor changes in rankings then not to worry they might be due to index updates or data refreshes done by search engines. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 46 </p><p> Dynamic Site Optimization </p><p> What is a Dynamic Web Site? A dynamic web site can be defined as a site that is using a database to pull content and provide it to users. Many times, databases of this nature may include articles, products, services, events. As a result, the webmasters of these sites have to find a way to convince Google and other major engines to index anywhere from a dozen pages to literally tens of thousands of pages. </p><p>Example of dynamic webpage http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi- bin/search/results.pl?q=%22dynamic+websites%22&tab=news&go=homepage </p><p> Dynamic Webpages and Search Engine Dynamic URLs are less friendly to search engines – It is fact that search engines do not like dynamic URLs. If we try to understand the URL structure of dynamic and static URLs, then we may have a clarity on the reasons thereof: let us take an example of a dynamic website, which may look something like this: </p><p> http://www.exampledynamicsite.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=date </p><p>If at all dynamic URLs like above get indexed, they do not get indexed as quickly as their static counterpart. The search engine prefers to index pages which are unique. Search engines handle such URL issues by truncating after a specified number of variables [for example a question mark (?) or and (&)]. The phenomenon can be understood with the below example: </p><p> http://www.exampledynamicsite.com /forums/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=date http://www.exampledynamicsite.com /forums/thread.php?threadid=67890&sort=date http://www.exampledynamicsite.com /forums/thread.php?threadid=13579&sort=date </p><p>All the URLs point towards three different pages. What the search engine does is that it purges the URL the moment it encounters the first offending character; in our case the question mark (?). The resultant is as under: </p><p> http://www.exampledynamicsite.com /forums/thread.php http://www.exampledynamicsite.com /forums/thread.php http://www.exampledynamicsite.com /forums/thread.php </p><p>All the different pages are truncated to the same URL. This now cannot be indexed. There are well known example of dynamic URLs which are at risk of losing search engine positions due to their dynamic types. For example, websites for e-commerce stores, forums, content management, blogs etc. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 47 </p><p> Optimising Dynamic URLs/Webpages </p><p>1. Using URL Rewriting Tools or Software: There are some URL Rewriting Tools and software available on the web that converts a dynamic URL to Static URLs. So it is better to use these tools to convert a dynamic URL of your site to Static URL. </p><p>For an example- Exception Digital Enterprise Solutions offers software that helps to change the dynamic URLs to static ones. In this way, changing a dynamic URL to static one helps it to get easily indexed by search engines. </p><p>2. Using CGI/Perl Scripts: Using CGI/Perl scripts is one of the easiest ways to get your dynamic sites indexed by search engines. Path_Info or Script_Name is a variable in a dynamic application that contains the complete URL address. </p><p>In order to correct this problem, it is needed to write a script that will pull all the information before the query string and set the rest of the information equal to a variable. </p><p>When you are using CGI/Perl scripts, the query part of the dynamic URL is assigned a variable. So, in the above example "?id=586" is assigned a variable, say "X". </p><p>The dynamic URL - www.xyz.com/abcproduct.asp?id=586 Will change to - www.xyz.com/productname/A </p><p>Through CGI/Perl scripts that can be easily indexed by the search engines. </p><p>3. Managing Web Servers:  Apache Server - Apache has a rewrite module that enables you to turn URLs containing query strings into URLs that search engines can index. This module however, isn't installed with Apache software by default, so you need to check with your web hosting company for installation. </p><p> ColdFusion - It is needed to reconfigure ColdFusion on your server so that the "?" in a query string is replaced with a '/' and pass the value to the URL. </p><p>4. Static Page linked dynamic Pages - Creating a Static Page that linked to an array of dynamic Pages becomes very effective especially in case you are the owner of a small online store. Initially just create a static page linking to all your dynamic pages. And optimize this static page for search engine rankings. </p><p>Make sure to include a link title for all the product categories, place appropriate "alt" tag for the product images along with product description containing highly popular keywords relevant to your business. Submit this static page to various major search </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 48 </p><p> engines including all the dynamic pages as per the guidelines for search engine submission. </p><p> SEO Friendly Design Structure </p><p> Image optimization Optimizing images is becoming more and more important in SEO. The ALT attribute is a critical step that is often overlooked. This can be a lost opportunity for better rankings. In Google’s webmaster guidelines, they advise the use of alternative text for the images on your web site: Use the alt attribute to provide descriptive text. In addition, we recommend using a human-readable caption and descriptive text around the image. </p><p>Search engines have the same problem as blind users. They cannot see the images and will rank your pages better if they know the images in the page are relevant to the content. You should of course be writing good titles and alt tags for each and every image. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. </p><p> Drop Down Menu (Dynamic menus) If you are using proper drop down menu than there should be no issue related to the search engine point of view. As long as the search engine can find the anchors all should be well but some scripted drop-downs can be tricky for even the search engine robot to decode so it is usually wise to offer an alternative linking choice; such as the standard type of textual anchors to the important webpages within the website. This can be placed in either the web page Header or Footer, or within the actual content. Doing so will ensure two things: the search engine will unquestionably find the important links and for accessibility reasons such as when a browser has scripts disabled the Internet visitor will be able to find the important links regardless. </p><p>Search engines can process CSS dropdown links. Javascript dropdown links and flash dropdowns are great if you want to hide links from search engines. It is best to make it as easy as possible for the search engines so stick with CSS and avoid javascript. </p><p>Google is very good at identifying and devaluing navigations links and other run of site (ros) links. For a link to get full value it should be embedded within your content. By placing much more value on links that are embedded within content and much less value on ros links google is able to avoid having your privacy policy rank #1 for your site. </p><p> Site Accessibility Many web designers view search-engine optimization (SEO) as a “dirty trick,” and with good reason: search engine optimizers often pollute search engine results with spam, making it harder to find relevant information when searching. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 49 </p><p>But in fact, there is more than one type of search-engine optimization. In common usage, “black-hat” SEO seeks to achieve high rankings in search engines by any means possible, whereas “white-hat” SEO seeks to code web pages in a way that is friendly to search engines. In Using XHTML/CSS for an Effective SEO Campaign many web design best practices overlap with those of white-hat SEO. The reason is simple: such practices as separating style from content, minimizing obtrusive JavaScript, and streamlining code allow search engines to more easily spider, index, and rank web pages. </p><p> Accessibility for all users, even search engines On further reflection, this overlap makes sense. The goal of accessibility is to make web content accessible to as many people as possible, including those who experience that content under technical, physical, or other constraints. It may be useful to think of search engines as users with substantial constraints: they can’t read text in images, can’t interpret JavaScript or applets, and can’t “view” many other kinds of multimedia content. These are the types of problems that accessibility is supposed to solve in the first place. </p><p> Walking through a few checkpoints  Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., via “alt”, “longdesc”, or in element content): Not only are search engines unable to understand image and movie files, they also cannot interpret any textual content that is based on vision (such as ASCII art). alt and longdesc attributes will, therefore, help them understand the subject of any such content. Search engines are also “deaf” in reference to audio files. Again, providing textual descriptions to these files allows search engines to better interpret and rank the content that they cannot “hear.” </p><p> Provide redundant text links for each active region of a server-side image map: Text links are very important to search engines, since anchor text often succinctly labels the content of a link’s target page. In fact, many search engine optimizers consider anchor text to be the single most important factor in modern search algorithms. If a website uses an image map rather than a text-based menu as the primary navigational method, a redundant text-only menu elsewhere on the page will give search engines additional information about the content of each target page. </p><p> Java Scripts Java Script brings some smooth, beautifying features and functions to a website that enhance the total user experience, it’s not really beneficial for improving your visibility or elevating your rankings in Google. It doesn’t necessarily ruin your SEO efforts, but you need to decide if taking the time to create the code is worth it for you.  What JavaScript Does  Attracts attention  Makes a site less boring </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 50 </p><p> Adds pop-ups, images and animations  Takes you to another page for further info  Enables web developers to manage/ maintain website  What JavaScript Doesn’t  Help rankings in search engines  Get picked up by Web crawlers </p><p> Impact of JavaScript on SEO JavaScript alone isn’t necessarily good or bad for SEO, as the search engines pretty much ignore it. You could argue, however, that while it can help make a website more pleasant to visit, the difficulty spiders have following JavaScript has a negative impact on your rankings. Thus, the basic thing you need to remember is that the search engine spiders don’t crawl JavaScript, so at the very least you should avoid using it as the only location for your keywords. Site Search isn’t able to index content. Another important SEO consideration is that JavaScript tends to slow down page loading time, which might have an impact on your rankings. Luckily, you can get around this by externalizing this function calling on it only when required by the client. Think about this, too – an issue that Google in particular has with JavaScript is that it tends to assume that the site is serving up different content and navigation to the user than to the search engines. This is a tactic commonly used by adult and gambling sites, so it’s not always great for a site’s reputation. </p><p> CSS Optimization  Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and SEO "You can write semantically meaningful, clean, light-weight HTML code that is physically organized in the best possible way for crawling and indexing by a search engine. At the same time, you can apply all the styling and visual layout you want to attain your web design goals. This is a powerful combination of benefits, indeed."  Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are widely recognized for their contributions to building fast-loading, standards-compliant, easily modifiable web pages. In addition to these well-known capabilities, CSS can provide some compelling SEO/SEM benefits.  These include:  Moving important content - especially the unique text that you want the page to rank for, along with any related links - to the top of the HTML file. This is probably the single most important reason for using CSS from an SEO perspective, and can have a significant impact on rankings.  Making pages "lighter" in weight, and decreasing the code-to-content ratio. Done properly, this can make your entire site easier and more efficient to crawl, leading to more and better indexing of your site's content.  Using standard HTML tags, such as <h1>, which search engines recognize as indicators of important content, instead of fancy <font> tags  Using standard HTML tags, such as <ul> and <a> to construct menus that contain standard HTML links to other important areas of your site. This makes </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 51 </p><p> these links easily discoverable by search engines, helping ensure more efficient and deeper crawling of your site.  In addition to this direct impact, CSS can also provide these benefits in your ongoing search engine optimization and search engine marketing efforts: By separating content and presentation, you can very easily experiment with different copy and presentation (for example font, background color, etc.) and test what converts best </p><p> Arranging Content with CSS Using CSS, you can move the most important elements (from the search engine's perspective) to the top of the HTML file. Moving your unique content, as well as your most important links, to the top of the file helps the search engine find that information quickly and easily. Search engines place more importance on text found at the top of the source file than they do on text found at the end of a long file. Think about it this way: if you have a web page with 2000 lines of code in it, and your unique text shows up at line 1400, what are you saying about how important that text is to you? The search engines rely on us (the webmasters of the world) to provide them with as many clues as possible about what we think is important. If we bury it, so will they. The basic technique we'll use is to break the HTML source into logical sections that can be independently located and styled in the rendered page. The HTML element most commonly used for this is the <div> tag. </p><p> Styling Content with CSS By using CSS, you can mark up your content in a way that is semantically meaningful (i.e., the tags indicate the meaning and importance of the various sections of text), but apply whatever visual styles you want to use from a design perspective. </p><p> Putting Your Pages on a Diet With CSS Pages that use linked external CSS style sheets, rather than embedding a lot of style in the HTML, are lighter weight. These lighter files are faster to download for users who are browsing your site, as well as for search engine spiders. In addition to downloading smaller HTML files, CSS files are typically shared by multiple pages and cached by the user-agent (i.e., the web browser for human viewers, or the spider program for the search engine). So each time a new page is loaded and the browser or crawler sees the <link> statement including the stylesheet, it does not reload it since it already knows about it. Lighter pages help you "spend your crawl budget" more efficiently. There's evidence that search engine spiders pre-allocate a certain amount of resources (time, bandwidth, etc.) to crawling a site. It follows that if the average page is "lighter" and simpler, then fewer problems will be encountered, and more pages can be crawled with the same amount of resources. More pages crawled means more pages in the search engine's index, and more pages showing up in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 52 </p><p> Some CSS Tricks to Avoid There are a variety of "tricks" you can play with CSS, and no shortage of information on how to use them. Like other "grey hat" or even "black hat" techniques, these come with big red warning signs on them. Most of these examples come down to different ways of using CSS to hide text.  Using CSS to Hide Text This technique comes back to some of the earliest and most widely abused "optimization" techniques, namely stuffing your HTML document full of keywords that were hidden from the casual user, but very visible to the search engine. In the "old days", the common technique was to use, say, white text on a white background. The CSS equivalent of that, and just as much a no-no, is to use the {display: none} rule. Another variation of this technique is to render the keyword stuffing at some coordinate that puts it off the visible page, e.g., at horizontal position -4000. Search engines can detect these things easily, and algorithmically, so it's best that you stay away from these techniques. </p><p> Using CSS to Replace Images There may be several legitimate reasons for using image replacement, and a couple of examples will demonstrate those reasons, as well as illuminating the technique itself. One common example is the desire to use some sort of graphic image, perhaps containing a company's logo and a key marketing tag line, as a banner on a web page. Obviously, the company name and the tag line are important content, but they remain invisible, locked up in the image. </p><p> Summary While CSS has been widely adopted for purposes of making web pages faster to load, easier to modify, and compliant with standards, this technology also offers some key benefits for Search Engine Optimization. These benefits come from the clean separation between content and style that CSS affords. Because of this separation, you can write semantically meaningful, clean, light-weight HTML code that is physically organized in the best possible way for crawling and indexing by a search engine. At the same time, you can apply all the styling and visual layout you want to attain your web design goals. This is a powerful combination of benefits, indeed. </p><p> Frame Structure  Why are Frame based Templates bad for SEO? The disadvantages of having your website in HTML frames are abundant and very problematic. Your HTML Source Describes HTML Frames as "HTML Frames disrupt the entire fundamental concept for the web. This seems to be pretty much a consensus, as the advantages are far outweighed by the disadvantages. </p><p> Reasons Not to Have HTML Frames in Your Website:  Search engines have a difficult time differentiating one page from the next.  It is difficult to code a site in frames due to browser compatibility. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 53 </p><p> Printing from a website in frames is a difficult task at times.  Users trying to bookmark a specific inner page find when they access it the home page loads.  It goes against the fundamental concept of the <a href="/tags/World_Wide_Web/" rel="tag">World Wide Web</a>. </p><p>Search engines typically index a site by taking a snapshot of any given page on that particular site. This is difficult with a HTML framed site because there is only actually one URL connected by hypertext. This usually leads to a site that only consists of one page in the search engines eyes. Often, the usability of the site is sacrificed for the designers needs which as far as the search engines are concerned is the exact opposite way a site should be constructed. Google™ has the standpoint of designing your website for the end user in mind. </p><p>The World Wide Web has accepted practices and measures. They can be viewed here: www.w3.org. By they way, if you were wondering who created the World Wide Web (not <a href="/tags/Al_Gore/" rel="tag">Al Gore</a>), it was W3C. They say that any web page should be created using concrete structure e.g. <a href="/tags/Tables_(Google)/" rel="tag">Tables</a> and Style Sheets, as opposed to floating menus and virtual pages. When Google™ wants to know what a good site they check W3C. It’s the only site besides Google™ that I can find with a Page Rank of 10. </p><p> Using Flash Flash content is fundamentally different from HTML on webpage URLs, and being able to parse links in the Flash code and text snippets does not make Flash search-engine friendly. It's great that Google's digging deeper into Flash, but still don't believe web developers should be any less wary than they've been in the past about Flash-based websites or Flash- embedded content. </p><p>Must Read: How to Use Flash - http://www.hochmanconsultants.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml </p><p>Some reasons why include: </p><p> Different Content is NOT on Different URLs This is the same problem you encounter with AJAX-based pages. You could have unique frames, movies within movies, etc. that appear to be completely unique portions of the Flash site, yet there's no way to link to these individual elements (unless the Flash developer is specifically building for this scenario - and even then, there's almost always some portions that are missed).  The Breakdown of Text Google can index the output files in the SWF to see words and phrases, but in Flash, a lot of your text isn't in nice clean <h1> or <p> tags, it's jumbled up into half phrases </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 54 </p><p> for graphical effects and will often be outputted in the incorrect order. Worse still are text effects that often require "breaking" words apart into individual letters to animate them - I'm guessing search engines aren't yet smart enough to play Scrabble with Flash output.  Flash Gets Embedded A lot of Flash content is only linked-to by other Flash content wrapped inside shell Flash pages. This line of links, where no other internal or external URLs are referencing the interior content, means some very low PageRank/link juice documents. Even if they manage to stay in the main index, they probably won't rank for anything.  Testing Crawlability with Hope That's what you're doing with Flash content for SEO - hoping. Google's Flash-crawling technology is proprietary, and while we all know and can test what search engines see from a content and link perspective in HTML, there's no "test my site's Flash file crawlability" feature that I'm aware of, leaving us very much in the dark about exactly how the engine's going to parse your material.  Flash Doesn't Earn External Links Like HTML For whatever reason, etiquette on the web simply doesn't lend itself to Flash media earning link love. An all-Flash site might get a large number of links to the homepage, but interior pages almost always suffer. For embeddable Flash content, it's the HTML host page earning those links when they do come. As a simple example, imagine a blog post or news article in HTML - those who enjoy it might copy and paste a few quotes into their own pages and link over, yet this rarely ever happens with Flash text (which can be hard to copy and paste unless the designer builds it properly).  SEO Basics Are Often Missing Anchor text, headlines, bold/strong text, img alt tags, and even title tags are not simple elements to properly include in Flash, and 9 times out of 10, the designer won't build them in properly. Developing Flash with SEO in mind is not just more difficult than doing it in HTML, it's not part of the cultural lexicon of the Flash- development world.  A Lot of Flash Isn't Even Crawlable Google said they don't execute external javascript calls (which many Flash-based sites use) or index the content from external files called by Flash (which, again, a lot of Flash sites rely on). These limitations could severely impact what a visitor can see vs. what <a href="/tags/Googlebot/" rel="tag">Googlebot</a> can index. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 55 </p><p> Email Marketing </p><p> What is Email Marketing Email marketing is a way to reach consumers directly via electronic mail. Unlike spam, direct email marketing reaches those interested in your business’ area of expertise. Email marketing also provides an easy way to track how effective it is. By keeping track of how many hits your website gets after a mass mailing. Email marketing is a popular way for businesses to reach customers. According to the Direct Marketing Association, research firms spent over $400 million in 2006 on direct email marketing. Email marketing occurs when a company sends a commercial message to a group of people by use of electronic email. Most commonly through advertisements, requests for business, or sales or donation solicitation, any email communication is considered email marketing if it helps to build customer loyalty, trust in a product or company or brand recognition. Email marketing is an efficient way to stay connected with your clients while also promoting your business. </p><p> Email newsletters: Email newsletters are an effective means of keeping your client base informed about the products and services your company offers. The email newsletter can be in the form of a press release, or it can include graphics and information about purchasing a product. Some email newsletters feature a coupon to entice customers to come back or take advantage of a special offer. It can be a regular way for your business to stay in contact with customers.  Email Surveys: An email survey is material sent to your clients or potential clients asking for their feedback. It’s a great way to test a new product, service or idea. It’s also a great way to show the customer that you care about their opinions and are willing to work with them. </p><p> Email Marketing Terminology  Autoresponder: Automated email message-sending capability, such as a welcome message sent to all new subscribers the minute they join a list. May be triggered by joins, unsubscribes, all email sent to a particular mailbox. May be more than a single message — can be a series of date or event-triggered emails.  B-to-B: Business-to-business (also B2B).  B-to-C: Business-to-consumer (also B2C).  Blacklist: A list developed by anyone receiving email, or processing email on its way to the recipient, or interested third-parties that includes domains or IP addresses of any emailers suspected of sending spam. Many companies use blacklists to reject inbound email, either at the server level or before it reaches the recipient’s in-box. Also Blocklist and Blackhole list.  Bounce: A message that doesn’t get delivered promptly is said to have bounced. Emails can bounce for more than 30 reasons: the email address is incorrect or has been closed; the recipient’s mailbox is full, the mail server is down, or the system detects spam or offensive content. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 56 </p><p> Bounce rate: Also return rate: Number of hard/soft bounces divided by the number of emails sent. This is an inexact number because some systems do not report back to the sender clearly or accurately.  Broadcast: The process of sending the same email message to multiple recipients.  Call to action: In an email message, the link or body copy that tellst the recipient what action to take.  CAN-SPAM: Popular name for the U.S. law regulating commercial email (Full name: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003)  Clickthrough rate: Total number of clicks on email link(s) divided by the number of emails sent. Includes multiple clicks by a unique user. Some email broadcast vendors or tracking programs define CTR differently.  Commercial email: Email whose purpose, as a whole or in part, is to sell or advertise a product or service or if its purpose is to persuade users to perform an act, such as to purchase a product or click to a Web site whose contents are designed to sell, advertise or promote.  CPA: Cost per Action (also can be Acquisition). A method of paying for advertising, or calculating results from non-CPA marketing.  CPC: Cost per Click. A method of paying for advertising. Different from CPA because all you pay for is the click, regardless of what that click does when it gets to your site or landing page.  CPM: Cost per Thousand.  Dedicated Server: An email server used by only one sender. A dedicated server often costs more to use because the expense can't be spread among many users, but it performs better than a shared server. Email usually goes out faster, the server is more secure, and you eliminate the possibility that another sender could get the server blacklisted for spamming.  Deliverability: The number of emails that are sent minus those that bounce equals deliverability. See more under "Inbox Deliverability Rate." Note that there is often a difference between deliverability and inbox deliverability. What matters more is the latter—the number of emails that reach the intended recipients' inboxes.  Email client: The software recipients use to read email, such as Outlook Express or Lotus Notes.  Email filter: A software tool that categorizes, sorts or blocks incoming email, based either on the sender, the email header or message content. Filters may be applied at the recipient's level, at the email client, the ISP or a combination.  Email newsletter: Content distributed to subscribers by email, on a regular schedule. Content is seen as valued editorial in and of itself rather than primarily a commercial message with a sales offer. See ezine.  Email vendor: Another name for an email broadcast service provider, a company that sends bulk (volume) email on behalf of their clients. Also email service provider (ESP).  HTML message: Email message which contains any type of formatting other than text. This may be as simple as programming that sets the text in a specific font (bold, italics, Courier 10 point, etc.). It also includes any graphic images, logos and colors. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 57 </p><p> Header: Routing and program data at the start of an email message, including the sender's name and email address, originating email server IP address, recipient IP address and any transfers in the process.  List: The list of email addresses to which you send your message. Can be either your house list or a third-party list that sends your message on your behalf.  Mailing list: A list of email addresses that receive mailings or discussion-group messages.  Multi-part MIME: Also known (confusingly) as an "email sniffer." Message format which includes both an HTML and a text-only version in the same message. Most (but not all) email clients receiving messages in this format will automatically display the version the user’s system is set to show. Systems that can’t show HTML should show the text version instead. This doesn’t always work — in particular for many Lotus Notes users. Also, no data, except HTML open rates and possibly link click tracking, is transmitted back to the sender regarding which version a recipient wound up viewing.  Open rate: The number of HTML message recipients who opened your email, usually as a percentage of the total number of emails sent. The open rate is considered a key metric for judging an email campaign's success, but it has several problems. The rate indicates only the number of emails opened from the total amount sent, not just those that were actually delivered. Opens also can't be calculated on text emails. Also, some email clients also users to scan message content without actually opening the message, which is falsely calculated as an open. See preview pane.  Open relay: An SMTP email server that allows outsiders to relay email messages that are neither for nor from local users. Often exploited by spammers and hackers.  Opt-in: A specific, pro-active, request by an individual email recipient to have their own email address placed on a specific mailing list. Many list renters and buyers now require list owners to provide proof of opt-in, including the actual email or IP address date and time the request was received.  Opt-out: A specific request to remove an email address from a specific list, or from all lists operated by a single owner. Also, the process of adding an email addresses to lists without the name's pre-approval, forcing names who don't want to be on your list to actively unsubscribe.  POP: Post Office Protocol, which an email client uses to send to or receive messages from an email server.  Permission-based email marketing: Asking for, and obtaining, permission to email subscribers is the basis of permission marketing. Most often, subscribers will check a box to give you consent (permission) to send them emails. Though not necessarily required by the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, permission-based email marketing is often a requirement of ESPs.  SMTP: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, the most common protocol for sending email messages between email servers.  Spam: The popular name for unsolicited commercial email. However, some email recipients define spam as any email they no longer want to receive, even if it comes from a mailing list they joined voluntarily. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 58 </p><p> Subject line: Copy that identifies what an email message is about, often designed to entice the recipient into opening the message. The subject line appears first in the recipient's inbox, often next to the sender's name or email address. It is repeated in the email message's header information inside the message.  Spoofing: The practice of changing the sender's name in an email message so that it looks as if it came from another address.  Subscribe: The process of joining a mailing list, either through an email command, by filling out a Web form, or offline by filling out a form or requesting to be added verbally. (If you accept verbal subscriptions, you should safeguard yourself by recording it and storing recordings along with time and date, in a retrievable format.)  Whitelist: Advance-authorized list of email addresses, held by an ISP, subscriber or other email service provider, which allows email messages to be delivered regardless of spam filters. See also enhanced white list. </p><p>Must Read: http://www.whatcounts.com/downloads/WhatCounts_Beginners-Guide-to-Email- Marketing.pdf http://www.mediawizardz.com/blog/the-one-stop-guide-to-email-marketing-for-beginners </p><p> Email Marketing Procedure The procedure includes building a quality list of subscribers and maintaining a company's brand and reputation by complying with spam laws, creating valuable email content, and ensuring emails are branded consistently. It also covers crafting marketing emails—from format and design to content - and analysing the effectiveness of email campaigns. Topics include:  Building an email list  Collecting email addresses  Offering incentives to increase signups  Deciding on a format for emails  Including links  Sending valuable offers  Creating effective From address and subject lines  Combing email with social media and mobile devices  Managing bounced and blocked email  Evaluating email click-through data  Automating email marketing </p><p> Building an Email List You can't legally send emails to total strangers and even if you could, you wouldn't make very many people happy by sending those emails they didn't ask for. Therefore, an email list without permission isn't very valuable. However, when an email list </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 59 </p><p> includes the email addresses of prospects and customers who have explicitly asked your business to send them emails to stay informed, you have a very valuable asset for your marketing strategy. There are total 3 types of permission levels.  Implicit Permission: The lowest permission level is implied permission. For example, when someone hands you a business card and says let's stay in touch, you could assume that means sending a few emails. But be extra careful with implied permission, because people may be unpleasantly surprised if you start sending marketing emails without first confirming the content and the frequency of those emails. It's a good idea in the case of implied permission to send an email confirming your decision to add someone to your email list and include a link for opting out if your new implied subscriber doesn't want to be on your marketing email list.  Explicit permission: For example, when someone fills out an online form to join your email list, that person has given you explicit permission to send the emails your email sign-up form specifies. Explicit permission is the industry standard for email marketing and the recommended level of permission for most email marketing providers.  Double opt-in (Confirmed Permission): Confirmed permission works like this: when someone explicitly opts in to your email list, you send an email asking the new subscriber to confirm their decision to join the list. Usually this happens by clicking a link or replying to the confirmation email with a specific message. Confirmed permission ensures that your email list subscribers are highly interested in receiving your emails and confirming permission generally improves your delivery rates too </p><p>Now, when it comes to actually collecting emails, there are five basic ways to ask people to join your email list:  The first way to collect email addresses is by providing an online sign-up form to your website visitors. You should put the sign-up form or a link to the sign- up form on every page of your website, not just the homepage, because you never know when someone will enter your website or exit your website.  The second way to collect email addresses is to collect email addresses from people in person. When someone calls your business on the phone, ask if he or she would like to join the email list to receive information about the topic of the call.  Thirdly, all printed marketing materials should describe a way to join your email list.  Fourth way is that you can provide a sign-up form by asking people to write their information directly on the form, and you can use printed advertising to promote other methods of joining.  The fifth way to collect email addresses is through social media networks. Place sign-up links to your email sign- up form on all social media sites you own and promote your email list in your social posts. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 60 </p><p> Deciding Email Format It's important to use a variety of email formats in your strategy for two reasons. First, people respond to different formats in different ways. Many people wait to read an email that looks like a newsletter, while an email that looks like an urgent announcement is more likely to get immediate attention. While getting immediate attention from every email might sound like a good strategy, the reality is that urgency wears off if you use the same email formats for all your communications. Which brings me to the second reason to use a variety of formats. You need as many formats as you have reasons to communicate. Types of Email formats are: Newsletters: Email newsletters are typically focused on information rather than promotion. Newsletters can have columns to give them the appearance of a paper newsletter and are great for sending loosely related information in a single email. Newsletters also should have a periodic frequency, such as weekly or monthly, rather than an event or date driven frequency. No more than 20% of your email newsletter content should contain promotions. Promotional Emails: If you need to promote, use a promotional email format. Promotional emails are usually date driven or they are triggered by specific actions, such as a recent purchase or an inquiry. Event invitations: Event invitations can focus on one event or a series of events. Events are highly date driven and usually require a series of emails in similar formats to get a good overall response. Email announcement: An email announcement is a format that's sent when no specific response is expected on the part of the recipient. Examples include greetings, thank you messages, press releases, and order confirmations. Send these email formats when you want to focus on relationship building as opposed to generating immediate sales or leads. Sometimes it's nice to receive an email that doesn't ask you to do anything. </p><p> Email Layout Laying out your content in an email usually requires building tables in HTML and using Cascading Style Sheets or CSS to tell your recipient's computer how to display your content. If you're not interested in programming your own layouts, you can use pre- designed email templates that are ready to receive your text, images, links, and other content. Content that draws the eye to a specific section of your email are called visual anchors, because the content acts like an anchor that causes the eyes to stop on that content while scanning through the email. Visual anchors include the following types of content: images, headlines, links, icons, divider lines, background colors, and borders. When laying out your content, the most important content should reside in the upper-left quadrant of your email, because most people start scanning an email in the upper-left. There are three basic choices for laying out columns effectively in your email. You can use columns of equal width to avoid emphasizing the content in one column over the other. You can put a narrow column on the left side of your email to emphasize the content and a larger column to the right. You can also put a narrow column on </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 61 </p><p> the right side of your email to emphasize the content in a larger column to the left. If you feel like you have so much content in a single email that you need to organize your content into more than two columns, you may want to consider breaking up your content into multiple shorter emails and sending with a higher frequency. </p><p> Creating valuable information and Call-to-action in Email A good test of an effective marketing email is whether or not the email generates immediate sales or moves people closer to a purchase decision. In short, your email should invite action and decision making. Actions in emails usually involve clicking on links, which may include text links, images, buttons, and other graphics. Email links come in two varieties, external web links and internal navigation links. External links open up a browser window so the person who clicks on the link is directed to a webpage. </p><p>You can also create links to files stored on a server and links can open up an email program installed on your subscriber's computer. Emails received on a mobile device could also interpret a phone number or an address as a link. Phone numbers in the text of your email dial the phone number when touched and addresses can automatically link to an online map or a map application. There is no need to program these types of links. Mobile devices can detect them automatically. Internal links, also known as anchor links, point to content within the email. </p><p>Information about products, services, or your company can be valuable, especially for new prospects or people who are interested in learning about new products or the latest trends. Tips and advice can be valuable if buying your products and services involve research, expertise, or sound reasoning. Tips and advice can come from you or your employees or you can feature tips and advice from your satisfied customers or product suppliers. Instructions and directions can tell your customers how to get the most out of your products or services before a sale and after a sale. If you decide to use content from other sources in your emails, always ask for written permission so you don't violate any copyright laws. </p><p>A call to action is a statement that prompts your audience to take one or more specific actions in favour of your objectives. Calling for action isn't as simple as including a phone number in your emails or giving people lots of links to click on, you need to give people a few hints so they know exactly what you want them to do. Contrary to what you see in a lot of emails, "click here" is not the best way to call for action in an email. Instead of click here, begin your call to action with a word that describes the action. Examples include visit, call, download, read, or print. You can turn your call to action statements into links or combined them with phone numbers or specific instructions to make the next steps as clear as possible. Sometimes the main reason to call for action is to ask for an immediate purchase, but there are lots of other reasons to include a call to action in your email. For example, you can use a </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 62 </p><p> call to action to ask people to read your email, by beginning your email with a statement like "Read this email before you buy online." You can also use a call to action to highlight a specific portion of your email as in the statement "scroll down for a valuable coupon." Sometimes it's appropriate to ask people to save your email for later instead of deleting it if they aren't ready to take advantage of an offer in your email. </p><p> Writing effective subject lines Your subject line is the part of your email that prompts your recipients to hopefully open your email and start reading immediately. Subject lines get cut off after about 40 or 50 characters, so the best way to utilize the subject line in an email is to describe the immediate benefit of opening your email with the fewest words possible. Subject lines such as July newsletter or News from ABC Company may be too generic and they're not strong enough to prompt an immediate open. Instead of generic words, choose value words for your subject lines. Remember also to avoid subject lines that look like spam. Using all capital letters, excessive punctuation, or extreme urgency can be off-putting and cause spam complaints. Take a few minutes to periodically check your own junk or spam folder to see what the spammers are using in their subject lines and then avoid copying their techniques. Examples of subject line based on type of email are: </p><p>“Compare the Competition in Under Two Minutes” “Smart Shopper Weekly” “5-Minute Sales Tips” </p><p> Maximizing Your Email Campaign Results Email isn't delivered a 100% of the time, but undelivered email isn't necessarily void of opportunity. Know how to deal with bounced and blocked email so you can turn as many negative results into future positives. Bounced and blocked emails are returned to the email sender's email address with code that tells you why the email was blocked or bounced. Of course, email servers don't exactly have a way with words, so I recommend using an email service provider that can categorize your bounced and blocked emails into reports that are easier for humans to interpret. Emails that are permanently undeliverable are called hard bounces. A hard bounce means that the email address does not exist, so it's either misspelled, the email address has been changed, or it's been abandoned by the owner. When you see a hard bounce on your bounce report, you should either contact your subscribers via another method to obtain a new email address or simply delete them from your database. Soft bounces may be temporary or permanent, so check your bounce report to see how often a particular email is bouncing. If you notice three or more </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 63 </p><p> consecutive soft bounces for an email address, you should treat it just like a hard bounce. </p><p> Checking Spam Filters To steer clear of as many automatic spam filters as possible, you should first check your email content for anything that shares the characteristics of a typical spam email. Examples include subject lines with all capital letters, attachments, and profanity, or certain words that are common in spam emails. Spam emails and legitimate emails often share similar characteristics, so I recommend using an email service provider with a spam check feature that scans the content of your email for spam-like content. Avoiding spam like content is an important part of avoiding filters, but it's even more important to make sure you establish a good sender reputation with email companies like Yahoo!, <a href="/tags/Gmail/" rel="tag">Gmail</a>, Hotmail, and AOL. Your sender reputation is made up of three things: the length of time you've been sending email from a particular server, the number of emails you've sent from a particular server, and the number of spam complaints you've received from your subscribers. One of the best ways to make sure your sender reputation is well-established is by sending high volumes of emails to permission-based lists or use well-established email service provider to send your emails on your behalf. </p><p> Evaluating Click-Through-Rates Email marketing doesn't end when your email gets delivered. In fact, that's when things really start to get interesting. In this section of the course I explain how to know who is opening and clicking on your emails and how to use the data to improve your email marketing results. Email tracking requires some serious HTML programming, or you can just use an email marketing provider with built-in tracking and reporting to show you who is opening and clicking on your emails. Once you have tracking capabilities in your emails, you need to understand what it means when your reports show opens and clicks. An opened email, according to an email tracking report, means that the person who received the email enabled the images in the email to display or clicked a link in the email. No images? No open counted on the tracking report. This is important to understand, because a lot of people read emails without enabling the images or clicking on any links. When it comes to your click report, things are a lot more straightforward. Your click report shows who clicked on which links and how many people clicked on each link. Your click report gives you two great insights. First, clicks are indications of interest on the part of your email subscribers. For example, if 20 people click on a link to watch a video about dogs and 20 people click a link to watch a video about cats, you can determine which people are interested in dogs and which are interested in cats. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 64 </p><p> Pay-Per-Click Marketing </p><p> What is PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Marketing/Advertising? Pay-per-click advertising is a method of advertising in which advertisers pay for each ad clicked, usually via an advertising platform such as Google AdWords. Pay per click advertisers bid on specific keywords in order to have their ads appear, and is hence it can also be referred to as keyword advertising. Search engines like Google and Bing allow businesses and individuals to buy listings in their search results. These listings appear along with the natural, non-paid search results. Pay-per-click advertising can only succeed if you’re bidding on the right keywords. PPC advertising can be extremely profitable if done correctly, but in order to succeed, you need to know which keywords will bring you the best results. If someone clicks on your PPC listing, they arrive at your website, and you are charged the amount you bid. So, if you bid $0.15 per click on ‘widgets’, and that’s the highest bid, you’ll probably show up first in line. If 100 people click on your PPC listing, then the search engine or PPC service will charge you $15.00. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 65 </p><p>There are countless pay per click management services out there competing with each other but, without question, the heavyweights in PPC advertising are: </p><p> Google Adwords  Microsoft adCenter </p><p>Google AdWords can be broken down into the seven stages shown in the following image: </p><p> Procedure for PPC through Google Adwords Here is a step-by-step guide for setting up your Google AdWords account and managing as well as optimising PPC campaigns. Going through the genuine Google AdWords Guide. </p><p>Must Read: Google Adwords Procedure: https://support.google.com/adwords/# </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 66 </p><p>. Introduction to PPC Planning . Google Analytics . Prepare for Using Adwords Installation Guide </p><p>. Adwords Overview . Adwords Account Structure . Adwords Optimisation Tips: Account Structure </p><p>. How to Calculate . Maximize Keyword Research . Using Keyword Matching Your Max Bid Price . Build Basic Keyword List Options . Create a PPC Keyword List . Improving Exact Match and . Priceless Keyword Research Phrase Match </p><p>. How to Research Negative Keywords </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 67 </p><p>DO NO COMPLETE YOUR BILLING INFORMATION AT THIS . Sign Up Now STAGE. YOU WILL COME BACK TO THAT LATER. </p><p>. Select Campaign Settings </p><p>Inside AdWords, Create a new campaign. . </p><p>. Ad Writing Tips . New AdGroup or New . Enter Ad Group Details . Writing Killer AdWords Ads Campaign? . . Treating your Ads like a Mini Landing Page . </p><p>. To Deep-Link or Not to Deep-Link? . </p><p>Go to the Tool & Analysis tab in Go to My Account tab & select AdWords & select "Preferences" from the drop- "Conversions" from the drop- down menu. Under "Tracking" . Linking Analytics and down menu & follow the set up "Auto-Tagging" of your AdWords Accounts instructions on that page. destination URLs. . Working with Cost Data . </p><p>Go to the Billing tab and selecting "Billing Preference" from the drop-down menu. Complete the information required. </p><p>YOUR ACCOUNT IS NOW LIVE. You can pause your campaigns whenever you like. </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 68 </p><p>. Unraveling Google's New . Landing pages for PPC Quality Score . Build Landing Pages that . Advanced Search Query Work Mining . The Ultimate Guide to . Identify Poor Landing Pages </p><p>Quality Score . 6 Essential Landing Page Optimisations </p><p>. Why You Must Use Ad Extensions . How to Increase your PPC . How to Lower your </p><p>Click Through Rate Minimum Bid . Social Signals for </p><p>AdWords </p><p>. 8 PPC Spring Cleaning Necessities . Google Insights for PPC . The Definitive Guide to . Intelligent Adwords AdWords Display Management Targeting . 5 Common Optimisation Mistakes . </p><p>Webmyne, SEO Training Guide 69 </p> </div> </article> </div> </div> </div> <script type="text/javascript" async crossorigin="anonymous" src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-8519364510543070"></script> <script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.6.1/jquery.min.js" crossorigin="anonymous" referrerpolicy="no-referrer"></script> <script> var docId = '1ab677a5bb6538f19c5b060bf7d7b359'; var endPage = 1; var totalPage = 70; var pfLoading = false; window.addEventListener('scroll', function () { if (pfLoading) return; var $now = $('.article-imgview .pf').eq(endPage - 1); if (document.documentElement.scrollTop + $(window).height() > $now.offset().top) { pfLoading = true; endPage++; if (endPage > totalPage) return; var imgEle = new Image(); var imgsrc = "//data.docslib.org/img/1ab677a5bb6538f19c5b060bf7d7b359-" + endPage + (endPage > 3 ? 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