How to Use Blogs for Search Engine Optimization and Backlink Building

It's no secret that blogging can boost your search engine rankings and drive traffic to your website. Blogs promote the exchange of ideas in a format that the Internet users have fully endorsed. When search engine spiders find an active blog, they tend to crawl it more frequently and more often. Incorporating a blog into your website will help you get quality backlinks and improve your credibility.
Many business owners are not aware of what the search engine optimization benefits of blogging are. A recent study conducted on a group of SEO practitioners has shown that over 87 percent of those who have used blogging for SEO have obtained measurable results. Backlinks were cited as the most important SEO benefit from blogging. Starting a blog can also help you establish authority in the marketplace, interact with your customers, and promote your products more effectively.
Most blogging platforms offer uncomplicated URL structure, making it easy for search engines to find and crawl your content. An active blog creates the kinds of signals from other websites that search engine spiders tend to reward in the rankings. A blog that is updated frequently attracts both human visitors and search engines.
The better you write, the more people will link back to your site. In addition, there are many plugins and widgets that make it easy to share your articles and posts, thus encouraging links. You can also use blogging to constantly add fresh, relevant articles to your website. No one can give an exact answer on how often you should blog. Most experts say that whether you update your blog once a day or once a week, it really doesn't matter, just as long as it is relevant and consistent.
Not many webmasters and business owners who start blogs have the patience to create quality content. If you want people to find your blog and click back to your pages, you need to write compelling posts and use relevant keywords. No matter how many SEO techniques you use, there simply is no substitute for creating quality content.
Conduct backlink analysis on competing blogs and take the time to look at articles that already rank well in search results. While the main objective of a blog should be to get your message out, don't forget to do proper research and optimize your content for search engines. Get listed on other people's blogrolls and include your blog URL in profiles on social media sites.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7005198

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Relationship Building Through Social Media

Relationships are at the heart of social media success for your business. Your online strategy must include the concept in some form and you should keep track of how much return on investment those relationships are bringing to your business.
To some people, establishing relationships with others may not be an easy thing to do. It is extremely important to understand, if you are going to get anywhere with increasing your business’ revenue, you need to establish solid, substantial, mutually-beneficial relationships. There are several principles you should follow so you can enrich your business relationships.
Authenticity
As you are probably aware, authenticity will never be overrated. People know when you are being authentic and they know when you are not being authentic. Authenticity is spoken about a great deal – many people are using it as the latest buzz term when speaking about social media marketing. If you are truly authentic, you will see positive results and people will respond to what you are offering.
If you are authentic, that means you also are transparent. If you are transparent, you won’t withhold negative feedback you might receive about your business. In fact, you should bear in mind you stand to learn a great deal from whatever negative feedback you receive. People will respect you a great deal if you can take negative feedback, learn from the situation and improve upon what you are offering based on that feedback. In every business, there will be some negative feedback. It is not about the presence of the information; it is about what you do with it and how you learn from it.
Build Trust With Others
When it comes to doing business online, you need to establish relationships with others and you need to build trust on both sides. If people don’t trust you, they won’t interact with you and they won’t buy anything from you. Not only do you want to build relationships that are solid and will stand the test of time, you also want to turn your business connections into loyal clients. This takes time.
Loyal clients are not built in a day. If you manage to acquire loyal clients, another benefit is they will most likely tell their friends and colleagues about you and your business.
A great deal of your business’ success will come from word-of-mouth and that sort of loyalty will go a very long way. If you are going to succeed at developing that sort of relationship with your clients, you must be sure to communicate clearly at all times and always be sincere and transparent.
Be Good to Your People
Because the success of social media depends on relationships succeeding, you need all of the advocates who you can get a hold of. People who are willing to share your information are very powerful people for your business. You should do everything possible to make sure they continue to be advocates.
Behave Humanly
You should always treat other people the way you would like to be treated. Always recognize and acknowledge the value that other people with whom you interact professionally have for you. There are so many different ways in which you can deepen your relationship with other people. For example, if you have attended an event with one of the people with whom you share a professional connection, it is a good idea to follow up with that person after the event. You shouldn’t wait for the other person to initiate a meeting. You already have common ground – all you need to do is expand upon it. You have a wealth of connections. You just need to tap into it and start connecting.
Conclusion
Relationships are at the heart of social media – that’s why it works. The more solid relationships you are able to build and the more loyal clients you acquire, the better it will be for your business. When it comes to someone needing what you are offering, you want to be in the forefront of his or her mind. You want to position yourself as a subject matter expert and the way to do that is by developing as many top-quality relationships as possible. You want the relationships you have to be substantial. Just because they are established online doesn’t mean they aren’t significant. It is important to give the proper attention to your relationships and devote as much time as you need to make them stronger and stronger.
Resource:http://www.seo-news.com/relationship-building-through-social-media/

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SEO Simplified – What You Need to Know

When you first hear about SEO, taking in all the information can be quite overwhelming, especially when it seems much of the advice you are given is contradictory.
I am going to simplify the SEO process by giving you a rundown from beginning to end – that way, in the future, you will know when you are being given good or bad advice.

To be able to understand how SEO works and how to go about it you need two things.
• Common sense – never do what an SEO expert recommends without asking why they are doing it. Question their actions and come up with your own reasoning.
• Knowledge of what a search engine is and how it works.
Understanding what a search engine is and what it’s primary objective is…
In the beginning, the Internet was rather small – it contained maybe 1,000 or 2,000 websites.
There was no such thing as a search engine, and you would most likely find out about a website through word-of-mouth.
However, as the Internet grew, there was soon a demand for some kind of directory – kind of like a yellow pages for all the websites on the Internet. This would make it easier to find information you were interested in.
If you wanted to find plumbers, you’d go to the plumbers section and hopefully find some plumbers websites.
This was a good solution for a while, but a directory is only as good as the quality and quantity of the websites it has. As the Internet grew even bigger it was very difficult for the people running the directories to continually add and categorize each website.
What was really needed was an automated solution – some kind of robot that could do the job of human editors but a million times faster, it would have to find websites and sort thousands of them into categories everyday.
The search engine was born!
But let’s take a minute or two to think about that. A human can sort websites into categories pretty easily. A human just looks at a websites, reads a few paragraphs and knows instantly what the website is about.
But how about a machine? How can a computer, with no brain, work out what a website is about?
A computer may not be able to use intuition, but what it can do is count.
Let’s take this article you are reading now as an example. Using your intuition, under which category should it be slated:
• Home and Garden
• Kitchens
• SEO

Straight away, you said: “It’s SEO.”
Let’s look at how counting can bring the same conclusion. If you count how many times the word “SEO” appears on this page, you’ll find there are 14 occurrences, quite a lot in relation to all the other words that appear.
So just by counting, a computer can come up with a conclusion similar to that of a human.
All was good in search engine land. You could head over to a search engine; type in “dog” and it would give you a list of all the sites related to dogs.
But there was a problem; the listings weren’t always that useful. You would get a list of all the websites to do with “dog”, but they weren’t in any particular order, so you might have to scroll right to the 1,000th website before you found a website that had the information you needed.

So, how could this problem be solved?
The immediate solution is human intervention – to have a human revaluate the listings and put the better websites near the top of the listings. The trouble was, by this time, there were literally billions of websites and sorting them by hand would be an almost impossible task.
So we really needed the task to be automated, but how? How can a computer possibly work out which websites are better than others? How can a computer even develop an opinion?
This was a major headache until 1996 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with an ingenious method.
They hypothesized that websites that had lots of other websites linking to them were probably the more useful resources.
Think about it, if you made a website would you link to any old website?
It’s not likely. But I bet you would definitely link to a really good website that would be beneficial to your visitors.
So, it becomes a counting game again. A search engine just counts how many websites are linking to another to determine where to rank it.
You now can see what the true purpose of a search engine is. To serve up listings that are helpful to the searcher – this is how Google intended it to be, and very importantly, this is how they want it to remain.
The other thing you should now understand is that a search engine is essentially a machine, it has no intuition – the best it can do is count. It outputs results that are dependent on what it counts.
The near downfall of search engines
Google was the first search engine to count the number of links and it has worked extremely well. The better websites usually appeared at the top.
As such, Google became the most popular search engine.
But Google’s success brought with it another problem. Because, so many people use Google, there is a great desire for website owners to be at the top of the listings. A top listing for an e-commerce store means loads of visitors, loads of sales and loads of money.
Soon SEO firms started popping up offering website owners a chance to get to the top of the search results.
But how could anyone offer this?
It was simple, they took advantage of the fact that search engines count. If you want to get top ranking for the keyword “dog” you would just repeat the word dog all over your website and create lots of false websites linking back to your website.
From Google’s point of view, this was terrible because it worked. It meant that search results could be manipulated and could end up ruining the quality of the listings. It meant that useless websites could be at the top quite easily.
Google had to find a way to stop it, before all search results became useless. It had to make changes to its algorithms so it could detect when results were being manipulated.
What they used were indictors of manipulation. Here’s just a few.
• If a websites suddenly gets a lot of links in a short space of time, this indicates some sort of manipulation, because it’s very difficult to get that many links so quickly.
• If a website gets links from lots of unrelated sites, this could indicate manipulation. Why would a chess website link to a custard website? It looks suspicious.
• Does a website contain a word too many times in proportion to other words? If there is a saturation of one word, this could look like someone has tried to manipulate results.
Google has lots of detection methods and when too many “manipulation flags” are scored, a website is punished with either a -30 in ranks, a -350 in ranks, a -950 in ranks or a permanent delisting.
So what is the job of an SEO expert now?
The same as it always was, to manipulate results for their clients.
A good SEO firm is always up-to-date on which methods work best.
Google obviously doesn’t disclose how they rank sites, otherwise everyone could manipulate results again.
But an SEO performs experiments, analyses results and comes up with conclusions as to how Google works.
So what do you need to know?
Essentially your SEO expert is your guide – he or she can show you how to improve your site so that it is worthy of links. He or she can also use manipulation tactics and try to do it under Google’s radar.
What you need to decide is how much risk you are willing to take. Every technique needs to be questioned. You need to ask if there is a good chance, a technique will pass through Google’s detection system or if it is likely to be detected by Google, which, in turn, will punish your website.
If you want to do things the safe way, you have two options:
Create a website that is very useful, one that is better than those offered by others in your field, then tell people about it and get many natural links from people who are linking to you for your content.
Or, use AdWords and pay Google to list your adverts alongside their regular listing.
Above all, use your common sense. Google is clever. If a technique is easy for a human to detect, then perhaps Google could find a way to detect it too. This does not mean you should disregard most manipulation techniques; they will almost certainly be required to get top ranks. What it does mean is that you must stay informed and always ask why an SEO expert has suggested a method before moving ahead with it, ask him or her if he/she has had any previous experience with a method and what he/she thinks the risk factor is.
Read More:http://www.seo-news.com

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Four Essential SEO Factors to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vital part of website design and marketing. A properly optimized website will allow web crawlers to properly index your website for search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and Bing) so that your site appears prominently in the search engine results pages, or SERPs. Four of the primary areas of consideration for SEO are:
1. The Appearance and Usability of Your Website for Visitors
Search engines can track how many visitors your site has, how long they stay on your site before clicking elsewhere, and how often they return. All of these play a role in how well your website performs in search results.
Considering this, it is essential that your site be optimized not only for search engine web crawlers but also for human visitors. If your visitors find that your site is easy to navigate, contains useful content, and can provide value on an ongoing basis, that will be reflected positively in the SERPs.
This also means that you must keep your site active. If a search engine discovers that your website is neglected for long periods of time and grows stale – especially in comparison to other sites offering similar content – visitors will stop returning and your site will sink in the SERPs. Regularly updating your site with new content, on the other hand, can enable your site to ascend the rankings.
2. The Quality of the Content Contained on Your Website
More and more, search engines are attempting to direct searchers to websites that contain quality content. Providing good content optimized with the keywords and phrases that searchers might use can boost your site’s performance in the SERPs and draw more visitors. If your site is filled with advertising or riddled with spelling or grammatical errors, however, it will negatively impact your site’s performance.
The uniqueness of your content is also an important factor. This is true now more than ever, and continues to grow in importance with every update to search engine search results ranking algorithms. If your site is found to contain duplicate, near-duplicate, or spun content when compared to other websites, it will lessen your site’s value, at least in the judgment of the dominant search engines. Whether you create your own original content or hire others to do it for you, it is a SEO necessity that your site be unique.
Additionally, considering the problem of content scrapers (which will steal your content to use it on other sites), it is recommended that you regularly post new content. You should also take precautions to limit those who might steal your content. For example, you can limit the amount of content contained in your RSS feed. You can also file a DMCA complaint whenever you discover a content thief.
3. The Traffic Your Website Attracts and Maintains
A well optimized website will entice visitors to revisit your site periodically. This can be a signal to search engines that your site has been deemed useful by its users. If these users add links to your site from their own websites, that will also add weight to your site’s importance.
You can increase your website’s traffic and the number of links to it in a variety of ways:
• First, you can include your URL in any comments you make on blogs. If the blog applies a “no follow” tag to its comments, however, it will not be counted as a link to your site.
• Second, you can submit articles as an “expert” to be posted on another reputable website. Typically, sites will permit you to include a short bio containing a link to your site.
• Third, you can submit your URL for inclusion in relevant online directories.
Beware, however, of unethical link exchanges or purchases, as these will harm your ranking, possibly even resulting in a ban from selected search engines.
4. The Technical Elements of Your Website
In contrast to the early days of SEO, search engines today want to see sites that are designed more for the user than for web crawlers. Thus, the usability and quality of your site are of primary importance. There are, however, some SEO elements that remain a bit more technical. While these elements do contain value for visitors, they are generally intended more for the benefit of web crawlers. These elements include:
• An XML Sitemap and robots.txt file. These can each assist web crawlers as they index your site.
• Page titles containing keywords. These are the titles that are inserted into the HTML code and appear in the bar or tab at the top of your Internet browser.
• Effective text formatting that incorporates heading tags. The formatting you use, which can also enhance your user’s experience, can emphasize your keywords to search engines.
• Alternate descriptions for images and videos. Though many users will never even notice your alternate descriptions contained within your HTML code, they can reap rewards in terms of SEO.
• URLs containing recognizable and relevant words for searchers. Using real words rather than codes or non-descriptive terms will make your URLs more memorable and can also be another way to incorporate keywords.
• A custom 404 “page not found” error page. This will show that you are concerned about your visitors experience with your website. The 404 page should be consistent with the rest of your site and can provide a link to your root page, an HTML Sitemap, and other important sections of your site.
Invest the time and effort to apply SEO to your website. It can make the difference between your site’s success and failure. Though there are no guarantees, an optimized site has the potential to climb the SERPs and achieve a prominent position at or near the top. This greater visibility typically translates into a greater number of visitors, which in turn enables you to market your product, promote your message, and share your opinions more effectively.
resource:http://www.seo-news.com/four-essential-seo-factors-to-optimize-your-website-for-search-engines/

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Welcome to 404 Error Pages,See error details

Overview

The Error 404 "Page not found" is the error page displayed whenever someone asks for a page that’s simply not available on your site. The reason for this is that there may be a link on your site that was wrong or the page might have been recently removed from the site. As there is no web page to display, the web server sends a page that simply says "404 Page not found".
The 404 error message is an HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) standard status code. This "Not Found" response code indicates that although the client could communicate to the server, the server could not find what was requested or it was configured not to fulfill the request.
The 404 "Not Found" error is not the same as the "Server Not Found" error which you see whenever a connection to the destination server could not be established at all.
The default 404 error page as shown on Internet Explorer is given below.

HTTP Status Code

Whenever you visit a web page, your computer will request data from a server through HTTP. Even before the requested page is displayed in your browser, the web server will send the HTTP header that has the status code. The status code provides information about the status of the request. A normal web page gets the status code as 200. But we do not see this as the server proceeds to send the contents of the page. It’s only when there is an error, we see the status code 404 Not Found.

Origin of Status Codes

As a part of the HTTP 0.9 specifications, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) established HTTP status codes in 1992. Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web and the first web browser in 1990, defined the status codes.

List of Status Codes

A brief overview of HTTP status codes is given below.

Code	Meaning	Description
100	Continue	Confirms the client about the arrival of the first part of the request and informs to continue with the rest of the request or ignore if the request has been fulfilled
101	Switching Protocols	Informs the client about the server switching the protocols to that specified in the Upgrade message header field during the current connection.
200	OK	Standard response for successful requests
201	Created	Request fulfilled and new resource created
202	Accepted	Request accepted, but not yet processed
203	Non-Authoritative Information	Returned meta information was not the definitive set from the origin server.
204	No Content	Request succeeded without requiring the return of an entity-body
205	Reset Content	Request succeeded but require resetting of the document view that caused the request
206	Partial Content	Partial GET request was successful
300	Multiple Choices	Requested resource has multiple choices at different locations.
301	Moved Permanently	Resource permanently moved to a different URL.
302	Found	Requested resource was found under a different URL but the client should continue to use the original URL.
303	See Other	Requested response is at a different URL and can be accessed only through a GET command.
304	Not Modified	Resource not modified since the last request.
305	Use Proxy	Requested resource should be accessed through the proxy specified in the location field.
306	No Longer Used	Reserved for future use
307	Temporary Redirect	Resource has been moved temporarily to a different URL.
400	Bad Request	Syntax of the request not understood by the server.
401	Not Authorized	Request requires user authentication
402	Payment Required	Reserved for future use.
403	Forbidden	Server refuses to fulfill the request.
404	Not Found	Document or file requested by the client was not found.
405	Method Not Allowed	Method specified in the Request-Line was not allowed for the specified resource.
406	Not Acceptable	Resource requested generates response entities that has content characteristics not specified in the accept headers.
407	Proxy Authentication Required	Request requires the authentication with the proxy.
408	Request Timeout	Client fails to send a request in the time allowed by the server.
409	Conflict	Request was unsuccessful due to a conflict in the state of the resource.
410	Gone	Resource requested is no longer available with no forwarding address
411	Length Required	Server doesn’t accept the request without a valid Content-Length header field.
412	Precondition Failed	Precondition specified in the Request-Header field returns false.
413	Request Entity Too Large	Request unsuccessful as the request entity is larger than that allowed by the server
414	Request URL Too Long	Request unsuccessful as the URL specified is longer than the one, the server is willing to process.
415	Unsupported Media Type	Request unsuccessful as the entity of the request is in a format not supported by the requested resource
416	Requested Range Not Satisfiable	Request included a Range request-header field without any range-specifier value
417	Expectation Failed	Expectation given in the Expect request-header was not fulfilled by the server.
422	Unprocessable Entity	Request well-formed but unable to process because of semantic errors
423	Locked	Resource accessed was locked
424	Failed Dependency	Request failed because of the failure of a previous request
426	Upgrade Required	Client should switch to Transport Layer Security
500	Internal Server Error	Request unsuccessful because of an unexpected condition encountered by the server.
501	Not Implemented	Request unsuccessful as the server could not support the functionality needed to fulfill the request.
502	Bad Gateway	Server received an invalid response from the upstream server while trying to fulfill the request.
503	Service Unavailable	Request unsuccessful to the server being down or overloaded.
504	Gateway Timeout	Upstream server failed to send a request in the time allowed by the server.
505	HTTP Version Not Supported	Server does not support the HTTP version specified in the request.

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Google Panda Update vs. Google Penguin Updates

The SEO community has been a buzz this past week with the latest update from Google, named Penguin. Penguin came down the pipeline last week, right on the tail of the latest Panda update. Since most of the big updates in the past year have been focused on Panda, many site owners are left wondering what the real differences between Panda and Penguin are. Here is a breakdown:

Google Panda Update Overview:

According to Google’s official blog post when Panda launched,
This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.
Basically, Panda updates are designed to target pages that aren’t necessarily spam but aren’t great quality. This was the first ever penalty that went after “thin content,” and the sites that were hit hardest by the first Panda update were content farms (hence why it was originally called the Farmer update), where users could publish dozens of low-quality, keyword stuffed articles that offered little to no real value for the reader. Many publishers would submit the same article to a bunch of these content farms just to get extra links.

Panda is a site wide penalty, which means that if “enough” (no specific number) pages of your site were flagged for having thin content, your entire site could be penalized. Panda was also intended to stop scrappers (sites that would republish other company’s content) from outranking the original author’s content.
Here is a breakdown of all the Panda updates and their release dates. If your site’s traffic took a major hit around one of these times there is a good chance it was flagged by Panda
1. Panda 1.0 (aka the Farmer Update) on February 24^th 2011
2. Panda 2.0 on April 11th 2011. (Panda impacts all English speaking countries)
3. Panda 2.1 on May 9th 2011 or so
4. Panda 2.2 on June 18th 2011 or so.
5. Panda 2.3 on around July 22nd 2011.
6. Panda 2.4 in August 2011(Panda goes international)
7. Panda 2.5 on September 28^th 2011
8. Panda 2.5.1 on October 9^{th 2011}
9. Panda 2.5.2 on October 13^{th 2011}
10. Panda 2.5.3 on October 19/20th 2011
11. Panda 3.1 on November 18^{th 2011}
12. Panda 3.2 on about January 15th 2012
13. Panda 3.3 on about February 26th 2012
14. Panda 3.4 on March 23rd 2012
15. Panda 3.5 on April 19th 2012

Search Engine Land recently created this great Google Panda update infographic to help walk site owners through the many versions of the Google Panda updates.
Many site owners complained that even after they made changes to their sites in order to be more “Panda friendly,” their sites didn’t automatically recover. Panda updates do not happen at regular intervals, and Google doesn’t re-index every site each time, so some site owners were forced to deal with low traffic for several months until Google got around to re-crawling their website and taking note of any positive changes.

Google Penguin Update Overview:

The Google Penguin Update launched on April 24. According to the Google blog, Penguin is an “important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.” Google mentions that typical black hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing (long considered webspam) would get a site in trouble, but less obvious tactics (link incorporating irrelevant outgoing links into a page of content) would also cause Penguin to flag your site. Says Google,
Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.
Site owners should be sure to check their Google Webmaster accounts for any messages from Google warning about your past spam activity and a potential penalty. Google says that Penguin has impacted about 3.1% of queries (compared to Panda 1.0’s 12%). If you saw major traffic losses between April 24th and April 25th, chances are Penguin is the culprit, even though Panda 3.5 came out around the same time.
Unfortunately, Google has yet to outline exactly what signals Penguin is picking up on, so many site owners that were negatively impacted are in the dark as to where they want wrong with their onsite SEO. Many in the SEO community have speculated that some contributing factors to Penguin might be things like:
1. Aggressive exact-match anchor text
2. Overuse of exact-match domains
3. Low-quality article marketing & blog spam
4. Keyword stuffing in internal/outbound links
It’s important to remember that Panda is an algorithm update, not a manual penalty. A reconsideration request to Google won’t make much a difference–you’ll have to repair your site and wait for a refresh before your site will recover.  As always do not panic if you are seeing a down turn in traffic, in the past when there is a major Google update like this things often rebound.  If you do think you have some sort of SEO penalty as a result of either the Google Panda or Google Penguin updates, please contact your SEO service provider to help or start trouble shooting.
resource: http://www.brickmarketing.com/blog/panda-penguin-updates.htm

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