This is no exaggeration. A true story I’d like to share with you, probably you’ll have something to take back home.

I had launched a new website this April 12, related to the IPL chennai super kings. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a cricket team in the Indian Premier League and I support them. I had started this website just because I had to support them and the official website was scrap. I had no intentions of monetizing it, as a matter of fact I wanted to have a better site for the fans, that’s about it. But things have gone totally out of hand now (for the good that is.). Let me tell you in detail.

This is how the whole thing began.

- April 12
Started the blog, put up a good theme from WP Designer, and put a few content as well.
- The next few days, I kept adding more content and used the social media to promote it. Well, that’s submitting content to all those guys out there.
- Placed a banner ad on DailySEOblog.(Check out the right hand panel)
Traffic - Nil

- April 13-15
- Site indexed on Google, picked up a few positions on the SERPs for terms such as “chennai super kings pics” and “chennai super kings wallpaper”.
Traffic - Around 50-100 uniques a day

- April 15-18
Added more unique content, wallpapers, pics, siggies (You know the boys stuff! )
Traffic - Around 50-200 uniques a day

- April 18 - 22
Nothing at all as I was attending the Bangalore Barcamp, and took a days leave further
When I left on 18th to bangalore the traffic was around 300-400 uniques a day. And when I came back, the traffic was around 500 uniques a day.
That got me exciting, as I saw the traffic trickling down, decided to do some “home work” on it.
Though on a tight schedule, decided to spend some time on it, since I saw that on Google Trends, the search frequency for IPL related terms were increasing.

Okay, so I went about doing a quick SEO campaign for the site, the next few days.

1. Went about using all the powers on my social media network and promoted some unique content that was there on the site.
2. Targeted some regional networks, like the star brand amassadors fan sites and networks, and gave them some exclusive viral content to feed on.
3. Link building, link building. No, not the typical directory submission for page rank, but the “new kind” that helps the content travel places and keeps the bots busy on the site. This worked and articles were now getting indexed within 30 minutes.
4. Used Google Trends to fish out the IPL related keywords
5. Wrote excellent SE optimized content targeting the keywords and their combinations.
6. Traffic just multiplied by 100 times (see the stats) in just two days.

Looks very simple eh? It is indeed. Simple strategies but doing the right thing at the right time really matters.
If you look at what I achieved in numbers, check the stats.

Current Stats

VISITS

Total 17,236
Average Per Day 2,097 (It was in 200-300 range 5 days earlier)
Average Visit Length 1:29
Last Hour 175
Today 1,159
This Week 14,677

PAGE VIEWS

Total 34,471
Average Per Day 3,863
Average Per Visit 1.8
Last Hour 345
Today 2,192
This Week 27,044

Traffic Stats over the last 7 days

I think for the little effort from my side, the results are very interesting.

Some crucial things that made me achieve the results are -

i) Putting up a banner ad on DailySEOblog. (If you want one, do let me know)
ii) Promoting the site genuinely on the social media (Mind you, this isn’t just about digging and thumbs ups)
iii) Some careful and timely Keyword research
iv) Some clever onsite SE optimization
v) Getting control over the bots as to when and how should they crawl

Now, that the traffic is there, I’ve put up AdSense ( bad choice huh?) and some banner ads, if at all they make some money, why not try them?

Sitelinks are more common these days. Popular blogs and websites have been awarded Google sitelinks recently. Google’s explanation is that this is a completely automated phenomena and there’s nothing one can do do help the sitelinks appear for his/her site on the Googel SERPs.
Daily SEO blog has a sitelink and there are some random links on it. See screenshot.

Now, what appears on the sitelinks is completely up to to the Google bots to decide. I can’t see a definite pattern on the links appearing on the sitelinks but yes one of the factors that decides it is the “Popular searches”.

I’ve found from my referral codes and content popularity checks on Google that the pages to which Google has placed the sitelinks are the most popular pages on searches from Google.

Example, Upcoming tech bloggers in India is a post whose content has traveled lot in the blogsphere, and was visited most through search engines and other sources (IM, Email etc). It has some backlinks too (acquired quicker and naturally).

So I think for a link to appear on sitelinks (or sitelinks to appear for that matter) the factors Google would consider are,

1. Popularity of the article/page
   Popularity is considered as the number of times the article has been accessed from the site. Obviously the sitelinks are the ones that are the most popular on that website.
2. Natural link bait or not
   Link bait might be the wrong term for it. But yes, it’s something similar. For an article to get featured on the sitelinks, it might need to be linked most from other websites, at a quicker pace and naturally.
3. Search friendliness
   Another criteria believed to be taken into consideration for a page to be included in the sitelinks is the measure of it’s search engine friendliness/ likeability.
   It can be measured as the number of times the particular article was “searched and clicked on” through the search engines.

Now, what is some page crawled up the sitelinks which you does not want to appear on the sitelinks? What can you do to control the links that appear on the sitelinks?

Here’s what you do.

1. Register at Google Webmaster Central - It’s a shame if you have’t already. Do it now.
   
2. Goto Dashboard > Links > Sitelinks
3. If you have a sitelink, Google will show the existing links for the sitelink and the “block” option
4. Click “block” for those link you think are unnecessary.

That’s it. So even though you don’t have the access to decide what links appear on the sitelinks, you have the access to decide as to whether they should appear or not.

Related reading on Sitelinks at DailySEOblog Article 1,Article 2,Article 3

Free SEO tools are always popular. Just like Aaron who manages an array of free SEo tools on this domain, there are new guys coming up as well.

When Aaron is dabbling between Keyword analysis tools and meta tag descriptions, which are basic old school seo, there’s this brand new link analysis tool that’s come up. In fact, there could be better and powerful tools around, but this one is packaged well. Take a look here.

What it does.

- It checks for a sites total number of backlinks.
- Also checks the total unique anchor texts and
- Total text
- The pages in your site sorted by Google Juice strength.
- A chart showing the types of links (follow, nofollow etc)

- Most popular anchor texts in your incoming links.

The backlinks are arranged by their Page Rank, the Anchor text used, the number of incoming links to that site , whether the site is good or not and the strength of the link.

I’m not really sure how the last two metrics work. “Link strength” and “Linktype”. Probably link strength checks whether the link is a weak one like the one placed in a sidebar with no contextual text around it or not.

Anyhow it’s a really poerful tool with lot of data assorted in to one single digestible capsule form. The only problem is that it may take a while to crawl and assort your links especially if you have many incoming links. But it’s worth the wait.

Thanks Praveen.

But why?

Indexing frequency can be explained as the count or the number of times Google or the other search engines, visit your website to index your content.

And, the higher the frequency, the better you chances for a better rank or your importance in the SERPs.

Can’t believe? Neither did I, once upon a time.

Well, do you know that the best and the top blogs on the internet gets the best indexing frequencies? That is the content published on them gets indexed quicker that anyone else and gets more importance on the SERPs. Examples are TechCrunch.com and Problogger.net.

Content published on TechCrunch and Problogger gets indexed in minutes. The closest we have measured is like around 8 minutes or so. Yeah that’s right, when a content is published on Problogger, it is very likely that the next moment it is on the SERP’s.

At DailySEOblog, I’ve seen content indexed in 30 minutes or so, which is good.

Now the point here is that, if you are writing the same content as the above blogs, like for say example a movie review or so, it is highly likely that even if you have better content, TechCrunch like blogs are likely to get higher on the SERPs.

So they clearly have an edge of having the crawlers index them faster.

Now, how can you get this edge? How can you make crawlers index your content quicker as well?

Several factors.

1. Rapidly changing content.

2. A good sitemap structure.

3. Good pinging tools.

4. Good meta tags that tell the crawlers to visit more often.

5. Easy navigation structure.

Well, so many other factors as well. But these are the best of them I’d say.

Essentially, if you have rapidly changing content, that is made available to the crawlers through a well maintained and updated sitemap, that itself should take care of the problem.

For maintaining the sitemap, of course you’d be using the AllinOne SEO plugin right? That’s a good one.

Also, make sure that you have a regularity in posting. If the crawlers find that your content is being updated on a regular basis, like daily or  hourly, then they will set their crawl frequency(if not manipulated by META tags) to hourly or daily basis, however it is followed on your site.

This is exactly the same reason why blogs have an edge over static websites. It is easy for crawlers to find a pattern in your posts and hence they find it easy to follow the pattern.

You can find more information about this concept over here and here.

What is a landing page?

When a visitor or a crawler first access your URL, the first page/file that is seen/served to the visitor/crawler is called the landing page. (No, we are not going to talk SEM here at all. In SEM landing page is one where the visitor is first “brought” to.)

Generally, the landing page is often an HTML or a static page in used websites. Earlier when there was no definition of what a landing page was, there were many versions of landing pages. Some websites used animations, some used funnel marketing techniques, some greeted people with funny and interesting welcome messages, some people used disclaimers and some even used redirection pages.

So all of that was used in the olden days. Come web 2.0, Google and the search engine optimization gurus, landing page optimization has gained importance as never before and it has helped the user in one way because many of the landing pages are now standardized.

These days web designers are aware of the importance a landing page and know how it would help them in beating competition on the serps.

Now, there are two types of landing pages. They’re based on your purpose. A marketeer who wants to market his product in a one page funnel system, is talking about a landing page that will help him convert a potential interested person to a client/customer. You might have seen such pages for E-books and other product marketing pages.

In such pages, the intention of the ,marketeer is to make you convince to buy the product asap, driving you to take an action (often that target) through a carefully drafted copy. Well, for this kind of landing pages, you’d need a good copyrighter and some cash. You don’t really need SEO the way other sites do.

So please make clear that we are not talking about one page, funnel system marketing page that gives you the “Ultimate secret what every SEO hides from you” strategy here, but purely SE optimizing your normal landing pages.

How important is a landing page and it’s optimization?

OK, so we have all sorts of CMS’s today. So a landing page optimization would make sense for a static page guy who is trying to market an ebook but how does it help a wordpress or Joomla guy?

Let’s talk about static webpages first.

A landing page is “supposed” to contain more vital information about what the site is/what the product is than any other page on the website.
Scanning a landing page will be the surest way to find out what product you are selling and who you are. Hence, search engines, give a decent weightage to them.

How to design an effective landing page?

Designing a layout that will help the crawler to pick up only the vital information we need it to, is the key in landing page optimization. In static webpages (HTML or other), it is easy to design a layout as we want it since you have all the flexibilities. So what are the things that you should keep in mind.

- First things first.
As a thumbrule, place the most vital information about the product/service in a very recognizeable format in an evident manner on the landing page. This applies for both search engines and humans.
Place them before any thing else in the BODY tag. Let the most important one appear first and others follow.

- Give the most importance to the most important.
Use H1 tags to highlight the main content on the page. Also use STRONG tag to highlight the cream of your content.

- Follow a SEO friendly layout. Place the content to be crawled in the first block and not in the last one.

- Use the space wisely, instead of large image headings you might want to use a much crawlable textual content that describes the product/service.

- Keep a clean and thin code. Use standardized code structure to minimize the erros and invalid entries. Follow a strict code that validates to ensure that the page collects the value factor.

- Use a spider simulator to test simulate the page and make sure that the content is ready for the crawlers in a palatable format.

- Get maximum incoming links to the first landing page with it’s file name (like www.yourname.com/index.html) with the appropriate anchor text you need.

- Maintain a healthy keyword ratio on the landing page.

- Use a nice footer text to make sure you’ve lost nothing.

Having said all this, it is easy for anyone to just overdo things and get the whole thing screwed. So here are somethings that you should take care of.

Things to keep in mind.

Flash / Ajax

Use no flash/ajax on the landing page please. It is only good for the user and not the search engines. If at all you are keen on using such content, make sure you leave room for textual content and let it appear first with more importance than the flash. It can be pushed to a side.

Frames

No frames please. Frames are so old stuff, people have many numerous ways to get over frames but produce the same effect of calling different frames to a single page. So never use frames because they simply dissolve your SEO quotient. If you are keen on frames use a two frame model where the frames are split into two and you should select one over the other for SEO and deply the tactis there. It wouldn’t give you the same result as of using a single page, but yes, it is not very far.

Popups

Many might already know this, as AdSense doesn’t allow it. It has less effect on SEo but yes, on the whole if you look at the quality factor there is a grey shade for using the popup. So keep away from them on the landing apge.

Don’t dump links

OK so you have your homepage, so why don’t I dump all the category pages and other links that I have on the landing page. After all, it can’t escape the users eyes. true - but more than the UA side, too many links on the homepage dissolves your SEO quotient. Keep them toa minimum. Use only the link that will take you to the most important pages on the site. And use the proper anchor text there, let it be keywords combined with categories so that you hit two birds in one shot.

Javascript

Oh! Did i not mention javascript? You knew it anyway! Never use them.(If possible, on the inside pages too.)

How about in Wordpress/ Joomla?

In wordpress, you should do pretty much all the basic SEO that you do, and also take special attention to ward off duplicate content. Ex:- Archives, Featured post etc

Tips and tricks

• Use a map or street address in the homepage. It will help you to get featured on the SERPS with your location. This is not a guarantee and mostly works only for US clients. But if you have decent traffic and the map/address placed well on the landing page, you’ll get some extra space on the SERPs with your location etc.
• Use all the H1..H2..H3 tags to categorize your text content into most important(H1)..less important (H2)..etc.
• Use a three column layout. Enough said.
• Avoid content duplication.

Today let’s review this theme from Headset Options, which is supposed to be a SEO friendly, AdSense ready wordpress theme.

Like all other AdSense ready themes, this one too focuses on text and space compatibility for AdSense. The main reasons for it’s compatibility for AdSense is that the text of the articles are in type and size similar to that of AdSense text ads. It is spaced in such a away that if an AdSense ad is placed amidst the post, it would sit in perfect camouflage in the article.

When you place the AdSense code, just make sure that the title links of the ads have the same colour as the links in the theme, and that’s light blue (#6699CC).

How SEO friendly is this Wordpress theme?

Considering the SEO factors that decide how it forms an SEO friendly theme, what stands out is the fact that it has a SEO friendly layout . If you take a look at the screenshot you’ll see that the layout of the theme is designed in such a way that the crawlers will have no trouble finding out what is the content on the site.

The titles of the posts are included in the H1 tags, and there is the proper use of other HTML tags as well making it standards compliant.

During crawling, the site layout is designed in such a way that, the heading is crawled first, then the pages, then the content with proper markup, and then the sidebar content. This in fact is a good strategy to deliver the content by importance to the search engines. Many other wordpress themes, which claim to be SEO friendly, miss this very basic feature.

One factor however, that I find missing is the <strong> attribute. If the strong attribute was CSS styled to not stand out bolded from the text, readers will not find it awkward, when you <strong> out the keywords. As of now, when you manually “strong” out the keywords, they stand apart as bolded text, so there is a limit to using keywords.

The same problem goes with the heading and titles. Wish the strong attribute was also included with the titles. It looks very plain and flimsy as of now. But this is something you can easily add by tweaking with the CSS styling.

But overall, it’s a very light weight, search engine friendly theme, that is put on steroids when using AdSense text ads. It’s so seo friendly that the only problem I see with it is that it misses the frills to impress the human eye. But if you want a theme to use for your website that is focused on making money from AdSense, targeting the search engine traffic, giving less importance to the human eye, then this is the theme for you.

Rating scores
AdSense compatibility - 8/10
Search Engine Friendliness - 8/10

Download the wordpress theme here .

I’ve heard this question over and over again from many friends. How do I control the appearance of my site info on Google SERPS. Many think that it is not possible to, but in fact it is very simple, provided you understand how Google sees it. Matt Cutts recently posted a video on this. So let’s take a deeper look at it.

1. The Page Title
In the above figure, marked 1 is the page title. As you may have guessed already the page title is the data that is pulled from your title information in the head section of your page.This is the data given in the <title></title> tags.

2. The description or the text seen right below the title (Snippets)
This information (numbered 2 in the figure) is normally seen as a text in around 25 words. This information is taken from three sources.
(i) The meta description <meta name=”description” content”what you want to appear beneath the page title in SERPS”>

(ii)The DMOZ open directory - If the site is listed in DMOZ, the description is picked from there.
(iii)When the information is not available from the above two places, google searches for contextual content from your sites copy and picks up relevant information from either a single paragraph or one or more sentences from all over the page.
One thing to note here is the it is approximately 160 characters long, so if you would like to write an attractive meta description that would prove as an ad-copy and more visitors would be prompted to click on your URL. Make it attractive as well as relevant.

3.URL
Of course, this is taken from the sites web url. It also takes into consideration your preference settings in the webmasters account. If you had preferred it as http://yourdomain without the www, it would show that way in the SERPs.This is the page Google will take you to when clicked.

4.Page size
Just next to the URL there is a tiny text showing the file size of the document you will be directed to when clicked.

5.Cache
Right next to the page size,a blue link is shown that will take you to the cached version of the website. The cached version is simply the copy of the webpage google saved when it last visited your website. If it had visited your site last week, then you’ll have the page from last week.

6.Similar pages
This link will take you to other similar pages to the one that is listed above.

7.Note this
This link will help you to use the Google notebook tool. You can save off the current link for reference later on the notebook. Just a quick one for noting down things.

8. Plus box and Stock info
If the website or the comany is listed at the stock exchange, google will display it’s shortcode, and if you click on it a small menu will be displayed showing the graph of how the company did at the stock exchange for the last few months.

9.Sitelinks
The site links are very interesting. Many people wonder why only a few sites(popular ones) have the site links shown while others does not. I know for a fact that Google does not take money from webmasters for displaying it. Because the company that I’m working for right now has sitelinks but we did not pay Google to show it, it happened automatically. I’ve discussed about sitelinks here, you may want to check out.

10.More results
This link will take you to more pages from the site. In the example, it will show the next few inside pages from the starbucks website, apart form the ones those are shown in the sitelinks.

Bonus

A few things worth mentioning here. Google sometimes shows maps of the office location etc of the company in it’s search results. This is triggered when the companies physical address is given in a very evident place in the page. Again like the sitelinks this is triggered only for  websites with great traffic and user interaction.

Sometimes, near the cache link Google will show when they crawled the website last. Ex: 12 hours earlier. This happens only for fresh results. I believe there is a threshold value for the time so any searches made within that time will be shown the freshness of the Google crawl.

So that basically rounds up the basic anatomy of a Google search result and how we can SEO details on our website to control how the information appears on Google SERPs. Hope you enjoyed it.

Google has announced officially that it has now tweaked it’s settings that if you have more content updates, the crawlers will absorb your data more frequently.

The quicker the content update, the quicker the crawling. This is with respect to the data from your verified blog in the Google Webmaster’s dashboard.
I’m assuming that this might have some effect on the data collected by the Google search bot too. Anyways, the more the content update, the better - Thumbrule!

When robots (like the Googlebot) crawl your site, they begin by requesting http://example.com/robots.txt and checking it for special instructions. Use this plugin to create and edit your robots.txt file from within Wordpress (using Options -> Robots.txt).

We have already seen how to control robots crawling your website using optimised robots.txt useage and..Avoiding duplicate content using robots.txt already.

Whenever a user (or a robot, more likely) appends “robots.txt” to your blog URL (e.g. http://blog.example.com/robots.txt), this plugin will serve up the robots.txt file that you created in the Wordpress admin menu.

Indeed a great plugin for novices, who are unfamiliar with the robots file and how to manipulate it. Install this plugin for wordpress and you will have an easy control over what the robots should see in your blog and what they should not.

This wonderful plugin is from Adam Brown and you can download the plugin here or here

If you don’t know nothing about robots.txt and controlling robots through Meta tags -and don’t want to take the pain of editing the txt file in your root folder and disallowing each search engine crawler manually - worry not! There is an easy way to get this done in Wordpress.

Goto Dashboard> Options> Privacy settings.

You will find two options here.

1 - I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines
2 - I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors

Now, it’s obvious that the first option is what you need.Ensure that the second option is not selected.

What happens when you select the first(Correction - Second) option?
It causes the - meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow’ to appear automatically into the page head section of every page. Thus it will not allow Google or any other search engine to crawl the site at all.

It also creates a robots.txt file in the root folder(Only if the WP installation is in the root folder, and there is no existing robots.txt file), in which the command for disallowing all crawlers into the entire directory.

Ensure that you select the first(I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines) radio button. Be a smart SEO.