URL Re-Writing and 301 Redirection

If you have a website that is facing different types of URL errors and having low crawling rate then you will have to visit the portion of website heath in the Google webmasters central tools where it identifies the URL errors like 404 errors, 500 errors etc.

Having (–) Dash in the URLs is better

URLs that open with – and _ make the search engines results spammy. Search engines rate these URLs as duplicate version when opens with and can be penalized as per Google Panda Update recommendation.

Here is an example:

http://www.abc.com/seo-services

http://www.abc.com/seo_services

URL Re-writing & 301 Redirect

It’s better to put 301 redirect on the URLs when re-writing the URLs.

URLs with Canonical Issue

When a website or website homepage opens with different URLs like

http://www.abc.com/

http://www.abc.com/index.html

http://abc.com/index.html

http://abc.com/

Then, it is recommended to put 301 redirect to make live one URL only.

Reason to change Dynamic URLS into Static URLs

• Search engines easily crawl static URLs.
• Static URLs are cleaner and descriptive that makes these URLs users friendly.
• Targeting anchor text in the URL helps to get the ranked for that specific anchor text.
• Dynamic URLs look spammy and also open one page with different URLs.
• Static URLs are also one of the ranking factors.
• Static URLs have high rate of CTR.
• Static URLs help to understand the page subject.
• Static URLs have the high popularity rate when it comes to SERPs.
• Dynamic URLs often cause for URL errors (404 Error, 500 Error and indexing error) rather than the static URLs.

Having Small Letters URLs

Having short length URLs are as important as the static URLs. Same problems happen with long length URLs like it is not user friendly as well as search engines. Short length URLs has much better popularity rate than the long length URLs.

Google Exact Match Domain Update Factors

Exact match domain (EMD) is all about to target your business niche in domain through putting keywords in it. This update was announced on 28^th September 2012 by Matt Cutts and has affected only 0.6% US English traffic.

Google is basically targeting low quality sites while taking EMD update on account. Websites that are ranked due to just exact match and have not produced any branding value for their website through optimization will get penalized.

In other words, it can be said that it is part of Penguin update because of the mentioned reasons to get penalized. There are many other factors that are also involved in EMD update is that Google is also watching the on page and off page factors like how many times any domain has used its domain keyword in the on site content , internal linking and aggressive anchor texting.

Difference between EMD & PMD

EMD stands for exact match domain and PMD stands for Partial match domain. Partial domain means you just try to put branding value in your domain while purchasing and optimizing website. In PMD, you don’t just target the keywords but try to put some other words to make your domain best rest of the world like SearchEngineLead.com. In this domain, you can say that putting Search Engine keyword into domain was his target as per industry but not the word lead. So, you need to follow these steps while purchasing any domain name.

As far as building links (internal & external bound links) are concerned, there should be some variation in anchor texting like if you are optimizing a website for the keyword of search engine optimization then you have following variations for link building.

• Search Engine Optimization
• SEO Optimization
• Search Engine SEO
• Naked URL
• Search Engine Lead SEO

Good EMD Domains

It can be defined in two ways

• Having short length domain.
• Have a domain with maximum one dash.

Bad EMD Domains

Webmasters who have purchased the domains just to cover the keywords putting (- -) dashes in between them when it is making no sense domain. There is no perfect way to define a bad EMD domain until you consider one or two dashes in the domain name and domain length is more than 10 characters and also Google penguin update, it means you are doing spamming. Having much lengthy domain with dashes in them is all about spamming clearly. It is just like keyword suffing which is also spamming that means putting too many keywords in the title and metas.

Conclusion for EMD Penalization

There are two possible ways to be saved from the Google EMD penalization.

One is to follow the example i mentioned above for purchasing domain as Google is focusing on branding. Try to have a domain with less dash or dashes in it and less characters. Having less dash or dashes and characters in the domain, you are putting branding value in your domain.

While optimizing the website, try to make your SEO campaign as natural as you can through making diversified anchor texting. Either these links are internal or external but you need to follow the rule.

Factors to launch Google Penguin Update

Google is aimed to launch this penguin update to remove those rankings from their search that were violating their quality guidelines through aggressive web marketing tactics. In other words, we can say that this step was taken to encourage more those high quality websites that are providing better and useful user experience.

Google named it with penguin after two days of its launch. Otherwise, it was being called the Over Optimization Update.

Aggressive Anchor Texting

One of the biggest factors that became the reason to launch this update is the aggressive anchor texting. Aggressive anchor texting means building all the links for a website or any website page with same or exact anchor exact. Supposedly, we have built all the links for a website or website’s any page with just “SEO” keyword rather than targeting different keywords for that page. This is what called aggressive anchor texting. But now, it is recommended to use the different anchor texts for building links for any page of the website.

Do-follow & No-follow Links Percentage

Having unnatural SEO campaign was also the factor that has been hit.  One of my clients’ sites had hit badly due to the complete do-follow or same type of backlinking. So, it means that you now have to be very careful in this regard.

Google and other search engines also strongly recommend making the campaigns natural.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is all about internal structure of the website. Internal structure of the website that does not make any sense’ has also hit. Internal linking gives the real sense to website and make it more user friendly.

Branding Reputation

When we talk about penguin update then building reputation of the websites on the search engines comes in mind at first. Your website will not be safe if don’t build the branding reputation for it.

Spammy Outbound Links

Spammy links were also on the top for launching penguin update. Like, if your website is getting links from the un-reputed or bad neighborhood websites then its firm that you are going to be penalized from Google.

Poor Link Building Tactics

It is also important factor to note that you are getting the all types of links or not or just getting one, two or three types of links only.

In this regard, Link Detective is a tool that can be used to check the percentage of the links that are pointing towards your website. Through this tool, you can check the percentage of all types of links to analyze your campaign. Like, if you are getting more percentage of links from blog commenting and forum commenting then it does not seems that it is a natural campaign.

Short Metas

Putting too many keywords in page title, meta description, meta keywords has been identified as one of the reasons to penalize websites that had done this.

Excessive Footer Links

Normally, paid links are placed in the footer or sometimes in blogroll. Google has also hit those websites who had many other websites’ links in the footer because it clearly tells the story of the links.

Link Schemes

Link schemes were also the factor to penalize any website in penguin update.

Here are the examples for link schemes that Google target in this penguin update:

Exchanging links to get or pass good page rank.

Make partner pages within the website to place the paid links on that page.

Link to those websites that are not related to your niche but just to get or pass page rank.

Low quality directory and social bookmarking links.

What are Keywords & How to do Semantic Research

Keywords are the search queries that we use to search anything on search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo. Best queries or keywords are those that best describes the searcher purpose to search anything that they were looking for. Keywords are divided in two categories:

•         Short Tail Keywords
•         Long Tail Keywords

These short tail and long tail keywords or queries are used to make the web available against those keywords or search queries that were chosed targeting the niche. There are tools and methods that are used to find those search queries through your website could be searched on the search engines.

As far as keywords research tools are concerned. Google Adwords, Trends, Insight, word tracker and many more are used to find the relevant and conversation generated keywords to make web more and better searchable.

Advanced or Semantic Keywords Research

Almost a year  or two back, marketers used to conduct general keywords research by employing simple techniques like search volume, competition and also competitors analysis to choose the best targeted keywords but those techniques have not produced effective results or targeted the relevant users. Somehow, this technique used to provide higher traffic but not conversion. Bounce rate of the website tells the story of the website reputation that he gets from the visitors. Although, there are many factors that cause for the higher bounce rate but it is one of them.

Semantic keywords research help to indicate the intent, reason and meaning the query that user use. Basically these keywords are used in the website content to make the website more better user experience. This method gives better edge over competitor and your web will provide far better experience or services relating to niche from your side.

To find the best targeted and high conversion generated keywords, Google instant and Google search page related results are the ways. In meanwhile, when user type query in the search box, it discovers many options regarding that query as per Google Search index. On the other hand, when user completely type its query in the box and press enter then Google and other search engines show there are related search options in the bottom of the page and also button of related searches. Through it, many ideas can be conceived for better keyword optimization.

In semantic keywords research, you find those keywords that tell the clear reason to be searched. Long tail Keywords are also the example of semantic keywords research .Keywords like

• What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Why SEO (Search Engine Optimization) necessary for a website
• Define SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Categorization of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

However, these queries may have less search volume and may also have less competition but would definitely generate higher conversions and also less bounce rate. These signs are good to build the healthy online reputation of your product or services.

Core Keywords and Supporting Keywords

Core keywords are those that just describe the business nature not the intent of the user. “SEO services” keyword is a core keyword but “SEO services in Lahore” or “top SEO services Lahore” are supporting keywords. As Google has made the search results more personalized and location wise that somehow affected the keywords. So, you see many people saying that their keywords are not delivering as much as they should. It is all because of personalized and location wise search results. When you analyze the analytics, you see different cities have provided much more users than others. It means now we need to search while seeing country wise and city wise search volume before selecting a keyword.

Lesser Bounce Rate & Better Conversions & High CTR

When analyze the user experience from the Google Analytics, you see the search queries that user used to visit your website that are long tail more often. So, it tells the importance of the long tail keywords those they are searched for lesser time but generates higher conversions.

Through Google Webmasters Tools, it may get to know into your notice that semantic type or long tail keywords have higher CTR than the short tail keywords.

Advanced On Page Optimization Factors

On page optimization is all about to make the web page more user friendly and search engine friendly that it could generate good conversions while ranking higher on the SERP. There are lots of factors are involved to make the website more user friendly and search engine friendly like

Title Tag

Title tag should be short and described briefly. Long titles minimize the SEO effort and also confuse the user what it is exactly about. Although, there is a limit of the characters that different search engine shows that is 64 characters long.

SEO Services | SEM Services | SMM Services

SEO Consultancy Services

In long title, the keywords we used confuse the users what exactly the page is about. On the other hand, short title describes clearly about the page.

Meta Description

Meta Description provides the whole summary of the page like about services or products criteria. It has 155 characters limit that Google and other search engine shows in the SERP.

Site Speed

More than 50% of the visitors leave the website at once when website takes more than 2-3 seconds to browse.

Domain Rich Keyword

Keyword rich domain is one of the factors that give benefit to get ranked website as early as possible. Normally core keyword or keywords are targeted in the domain that it could benefit to all long tail or semantic based search quries.

Identify Landing Pages

Every website has its own landing pages depending upon the nature of the business services. Normally category, product and services pages are real landing pages that generate revenue. In ecommerce websites, product pages perform better than others.

Internal Linking / Site Architecture

Internal linking means that every page of the website linked to each other.

The way internal linking should be done:

·         A page should be linked with different anchor texts.

·         Pages should be linked targeting relevancy as it is transferring link juice to the other page.

·         As many times a page is linked as it gets more exposure.

High CTR Pages & Keywords

It is not necessary that high competitive keywords provide more traffic as well as conversions. As per advanced research, long tail or semantic (sense based) type keyword queries provide more traffic and conversions although these have quiet low traffic volume than short tail keywords.

Content on the Pages

There should be at least one paragraph on each of the website that search engine recommends. Optimizing content with the passage of time increases the crawls rate of the website so the popularity in the eyes of search engines. Custom crawl rate can be set through webmasters central.

Goal Setting & Funneling

Goal Setting and Funneling is the way through which we can measure the ROI. It helps the clear view that which keywords or page are performing better in terms of.