This should explain the little surprise news that I had promised earlier. I’ve decided to co-run OrganicApex with Ashwin. And this little card with the Digg button explains what we are going to do. We are probably the best guys in India who can handle SEO and SMM together delivering a ’single umbrella’ online marketing strategy.

Meanwhile, Barcamp was awesome. Met some cool chaps with some brilliant ideas. Also, met some blog readers like Ankit Arora, Ranjan Varma, and some other very cheerful people. Thanks all for grabbing me out of the crowd and chatting hope you all have my cards with you.Drop a line when you think it’s necessary. Hope you liked the Digg thing on the card.

If you'd like to stay updated with SEO, grab the RSS feed now !What's this?

Keyword density is the measurement in percentage, the number of times a keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words in a page.

That’s the wikipedia’s definition of keyword density. The total number of times a particular keyword repeats in the whole copy.
Let’s pick an example.

SEO India is a keyword that many people think is getting lot of traffic on the search engines. As a matter of fact, the keyword SEO India is not a high traffic keyword. Also, keywords like Indian SEOs or SEO consultant India and even SEO firm India are ot high volume traffic keywords.
Interestingly, if you’d check the Google trends graph, you’ll see that the term SEO India is being repeatedly searched from India the most. So I’m under the impression that more than the clients who are likely to search for this keyword, it’s probably the SEOs in India who are searching it themselves.

Do you get an idea there?

In this example, out of the almost 100 words used, the keyword SEO India is being repeated 7 times and in it’s variants. So theoretically, the keyword density is 7%.

According to old school SEO, a keyword density of 6-8% is pretty healthy. This can change according to the competition on that keyword.
Having said that it doesn’t suggest you that as you increase your keyword density, the more the chances to rank. No. Beyond a healthy level, the keyword density would be assumed to be spam.

Now, the 6-7% keyword density is the old school SEO. It’s no longer valid or you just can’t depend on it.

Come web 2.0 and a lot has changed on the web. The way pages are created, the way content is sourced and displayed and the way people find information. I’m going to give you an idea of the basic keyword concepts one should follow, while developing dynamic or web 2.0 content on their websites.

1. Keyword authority sculpting
   Keyword authority sculpting is nothing but making sure that the entire copy looks natural to search engines (and humans) by evenly placing keywords at the most important places or nodes in the whole copy text, enabling the webmaster to help the search engines determine their importance and authority.
   For example, your keyword is “red flowers”. First the webmaster have to identify the nodes in the whole copy text, to determine their importance and relevance. This could be elements like H1 tags or STRONG tags. Based on their importance, relevance and priority, place the keywords maintaining individual keyword densities at the nodes. Take a look at the screen shot.Here, you can see that the keyword (Atlanta real estate and it’s variants) is being populated in the whole ad copy in a very high ratio. In fact, the competition for this keyword is really high which is why the keyword density is too high.
   Now, it’s easy for the search engines to make out whether this is spam or not. But where this copy wins is, in the fact that, the keyword is being sprinkled evenly utilizing the importance of other elements on the page. Therefore, the keyword using all it’s variants is being sculpted deliberately to generate an authority to itself which is being passed on to google.
2. Keyword combat
   Earlier you were taught about keyword research - remember ? In order to get maximum traffic to a site, first you need to find out what are the keywords and it’s synonyms that are being searched on the engines by real humans. Pick them up and make copies on it. Simple right?
   But, things have moved on from there. Today, you need to do a bit more research. Research on the types of keywords that are being optimized by competition. How do they rank? What are your scopes of intruding into that territory?
   It’s easier than it sounds like believe me. Many a times, you can get your set of keywords by analyzing the first few competition itself
   Essentially, get the set of keywords that are worth your time, study the patterns on the competitor’s website, see the opportunities and than bang ! Make sure that it does not end with just finding that one “traffic generating keyword”.
3. Keyword variation
   Imagine if your keyword was XXXX and you kept repeating that word every single line to maintain a good keyword density?
   In fact, many “SEO gurus” are doing it. And that’s only what they can do - nothing beyond
   My advice is to find the variations of your primary keyword, find the best combinations with other synonyms as the most searched related keywords of it and make a formula that will work for you.
4. Keyword channels
   Keyword optimization does not end with keyword density checks on a single page or a set of pages. On the older sites, it used to work but not anymore. Search engines know that you’d place the keywords deliberately in your copy and optimize for them. So they look for other options.
   Another way to let know the search engines of your keywords and it’s relevance is by following a pattern in your site structure. Sounds weird? Glad it did.
   Different pages on your website have different authority and importance (Not just Page Rank). As a webmaster, you’ll need to find out as to which are the ones that’s up on the priority list and which are down. Then, doing a keyword study on each page would reveal you as to where are the places you have left untouched and where have you placed the wrong keywords. Find it, and work towards channelizing the keyword importance. Decide for yourself creating a combination of the most important keywords and authority pages. The right mix will give you the best results.
5. Keyword neighborhoods
   The idea about keyword neighborhoods is that while selecting keywords for your website, it’s easy for you to just go about selecting the most traffic generating keywords with the help of a keyword selection tool. True. But what you’ve got to notice here is that, the same keywords that were shown to you might have been taken (or is being researched on) by another webmaster. You don’t want to waste your time optimizing on that keyword. Meanwhile, smart work would be to research on the keywords that are already being optimized, find out as to what the theme of those sites are. How do they relate to your primary keyword. An are those sites in the “bad neighborhood” or not?
   If they are, you might want to skip that keyword and move to another fresh one. (Real smart guys would find an opportunity here too.) This point may not help you to really help you move up the SERPs but, it will help you stay out of bad company and not waste your efforts.

How important do you think are the page titles on your blog ?

There is a new school of thought in SEO who thinks that they are not important as they were once. And there are people who are not keen on placing their prodcut name or sitename on the title.

I beg to differ. I insist that the sitename/product name/service has to be present on the page title.

Now, the argument from the other side is that, you are being spammy when you put in the blog name or the product name on your page title. Well, actually it is spammy if you want it to be. Otherwise it’s not.

I say spamming is something like this.

“SEO India, Indian SEO, SEO from India, BEst SEO in India, The SEO consultant India”

While, anything along the lines of “Visit Vishnu’s SEO blog - SEO consulting service, India” is perfectly normal.

The idea is like this. If you had an offline business, wouldn’t you put a board outside, so that passers by can know what business you are running from the first look at it?
You’d also place a tag line/name on the board that describes your business in minimum words like - “Vishnu’s Grocery Store”.

Here again, by the title tag we mean to provide maximum information to Google about what you are, what’s your name and what have you got to offer to people passing by so that the interested can come in.

So essentially, title tags and page titles should not be spammy but should take care of the basic intentions of it.

- Let people know what you are selling/what your blog is all about.
- Give them a name or brand to associate with.
- Give them an idea about what they can expect or how will they benefit.

Having said that, it’s easy to compile certain keywords and make it look spammy by repeating them more than once. Please avoid it, try to make it as minimal as possible with the maximum information being displayed.

Here are the best and the top traffic generating keywords tracked for the last month on DailySEOblog.

Many of them are long tail keywords while some are good volume searches and is constantly generating traffic.

All of them are picked form my referral stats. I normally believe in SEOing your site to live searches on Google rather than working towards a fancy keyword like “SEO India” which is easily mistaken for traffic. With these keywords, I get a good amount of traffic each day (see the competition number for each keyword), and I’m happy with it.

As you might already know, titles and title tags are often seen carrying more weight than any other on site optimization factors be it on blogs or static webpages. And I bet, that it’s the one thing all of us tweak mostly to try and reposition yourself on the SERPs.

Well, the liking to the title tag may be due to various reasons.

• It is one of the most easily spotted onsite optimization factor.
• It is easy to tweak it.
• Lots of options are available, which makes it fun.
• It has almost a direct and immediate effect on the Google SERPs.

Apart from all these options, it is also true that it’s difficult to get the right combination of keywords, that will give you the maximum results on the SERPs. So the challenge for an SEO would be to find this right combination and the perfect title tag.

Before going into the perfect title tag, let’s see what are the “don’t do’s” with title tags?

Well, one word would be enough to explain it all - Spam. With all it’s flexibility and weightage, it’s very easy for SEO’s to get high with it and screw it all up. We’ve seen lot of examples in the near future that were “study materials” on how not to write a title. Just go Google down “SEO India” and you will find some really interesting ones.

Now, watching those sites rank high for a particular keyword using the so called “title spam” and “title keyword stemming”, would naturally throw this question across to you - “Why can’t I do a keyword spam on the title tag, when it will deliver the results? After all, that’s what my client is keen on.”

Very honest question and a dangerous one at the same time. My answer to that question would be another one?

“How long do you want your site to appear number one-ten on the SERPs ? ”

Choice 1 - A few months

Choice 2 - As long as the site exists

If it’s choice two…..yep you got it right man…you better not spam.

A spammy title tag would look something like “SEO India, SEO services India, SEO Indian, Indian SEO, The SEO India, SEO Indias”.

I must appreciate this webmasters English creative writing skills but seriously this is no better than a high school guy.

“I read it at Aaron’s E-book that you should include your keywords in the title tag so there you have it, all the ten versions of the keyword! ”

Rather than doing good, this kind of practice will give you bad reputation (if not immediately) in the long run.

So what is a good title tag? How does it look like?

A good title tag is

- A healthy one.
- A short and sweet one.
- Both visually and technically appealing.

Now, this is old school isn’t it? We all know that good title tags are supposed to be the short and sweet, non spammy and all that but, when our competition is tough (and they are spamming) how can I make sure that I reap my profits ?

Well, that’s the catch my friend. That’s what makes you unique.

1. Use your keywords “wisely” on the title.
   Just because you heard that you got to fix your keywords on the title, you don’t have to repeat it and make it look like spam.
   Let’s see it like this. Only you know what your keywords are, not your readers. Draft a title so that your readers can’t make out what your keyword are. It should be a carefully drafted copy that “includes” the keywords in a natural way.
   Ex: SEO India, SEO India Services,SEO India outsourcing, SEO from India - NOT good. It shows that your keyword is SEO India.
   Good Ex:- SEO outsourced services in India from - your company name -.
2. Use your competition to your advantage.
   Analyze all your competitors. See if they follow a pattern. If they’re all spammers, you have an opportunity to beat them. See what’s a better copy for you to break into all of their positions. *Food for thought*
3. Makes sure the title makes sense to a reader.
   Read out your title tag to your colleague or friend. See how he responds to it. Don’t just think of all that you can and plug it in.
4. Let there not be just keywords, but synonyms too.
   Synonyms are a great way to build traffic. Repeating the same keywords in combination with other words may get you the spam tag, but adding it with synonyms is a better alternative.
5. Special characters on the title tags.
   Let there not be any complicated characters in your title. I’ve seen people place funny symbols like tilde and ambersand to create a visual impact. In fact it does but reader’s  probably might like you to use, even that much space for some more information. .::[ So use it ]::.

Essentially, titles are like your visiting cards to a site. You can create and print them in whatever ways you like it. But if you really want a information seeker to read/access you, you better give them the information they are looking for and let that be in good, simple and understandable language.

Wondering what’s it?

Well, at DailySEOblog, I’ve tried my best to keep away from personal stuff. Simply because, I never wanted to disturb my readers and clients. So this idea of starting a new personal blog clicked! For a writer, getting an opportunity to write is like getting high on hashish. And that’s why all of us like blogging isn’t it? We can create platforms of our own.

So I have a personal blog now. It’s Manikarthik.com, and you’ll see a lighter side of me there.

I’ll be sharing jokes, travelogues, places and basically all the interesting stuff. If you’ve been bored listening to my SEO, SMM, marketing bhashans, come over to my personal space (well, not really personal right?). It’s like inviting you all to a Saturday night get-together at a favorite food joint.

And don’t forget to subscribe to the feed.

OK, So what about the money..Mani ?

I’m giving away $250 this season, and there’s a competition you can win. It goes like this.

It’s going to test your SEO link building and offsite optimization skills. So only the best-hardcore SEO’s who think they are really game for a battle need to take part.

The subject would be my personal blog, (which is brand new).

What you have to do

1 - Pick a keyword of your choice that is suitable for the website. It could be something like Mani Karthik, SEO India, Best SEO India, well, it’s your choice to select what you are comfortable with. You can use SEO tools to pick the keyword but make sure it’s relevant to the site.

2 - Let me know what keyword you’ve selected through comments here, so that everyone knows about it. (Don’t email please). You might want to pick keywords first so that there is no duplication. Each contestant will be assigned a single unique keyword. Incase there are more than one contestants for a keyword, variations of the keyword will be assigned to you by me.

3 - You have a time of maximum, 60 days. Ending March 29, 2008 you have to submit your results as to what is the position the site have achieved, because of your efforts, for the particular keyword that was assigned to you.
Of course, the progress of the competition will be monitored through out the schedule.

Points to note.

- Based on which keyword ranks me higher, the winner will be announced. For example, if the keyword, “Mani’s blog” ranks higher than any other keyword, it would be announced the winner.
- Incase there are more than one keyword that ranks number one, for instance both the keywords “Mani Karthik” and “Mani’s blog” ranks number one, the winner will be decided on the quality of the keyword.
- If it’s confusing still, it will be open to readers to select which is the best keyword.
- Keyword selection is totally up to you, but it should be related to the site and should be approved by me prior to the start of the competition (in comments).
- The results will be checked on Google.com and not any regional domains.
- Prize money will be sent through paypal ids only.
- There will be no control over the onsite optimization factors for the contestants. I’ll be making regular posts on the blog during the competition time.
- You can adopt any white hat strategy you like like reviews, link building etc. As long as it’s not black hat, it will be approved.
- Contestant should provide details of link sources on demand, though it may not be necessary.

So, there you go.

Time to prove you SEO skills and test out what you’ve learned over the years form DailySEOblog. This is going to be a litmus test for all of you SEO’s/SEO wannabes out there. I’m sure only the best would win, and if I find your work really worth it, you’d even get into a contract with me. So make sure you win the contest at any price!

The current stats of the blog are as follows.

- Not indexed on Google.
- No incoming links.

So what are you waiting for? Get set…go !

This is an interesting case study for everyone.I hope my readers from outside India give me their sincere opinion on this and not dodge the question. Here goes.

Recently, at a conference I remember the CEO of a popular Indian SEO company proclaim that their company ranks high on Google for the term “SEO India”. And this should show others how good they are and what great deal of business they do.

Honestly, this seemed like a baseless statement to me because, for any SEO company, ranking high for a particular term cannot (underline) bring them real business. I’m talking about real good, genuine, healthy business. From my experience, I’ve learned that good business always come from referrals. And for referrals, there needs to be an incredible amount of credibility towards the company. By just ranking high for the term SEO India, can give you probably one time clients, but if you lack in quality, that’s the end of it. For it’s a service not a product we sell.

And I’ve enough reasons to think that company’s that boasts of ranking high for the term SEO India are bogus themselves! First off, the term SEO India, as suggested by the CEO gentleman itself is not a popular word among clients (US and UK predominantly). Because of the poor quality of services offered by many SEO companies in India, there is a widespread belief that all SEO’s in India are weak, which is not true.Yes, there are weak ones, but not all are.

Out of all my clients that I deal with today, almost everyone (this is shameful) has had a bad experience with an Indian SEO. The common issues raised are that, the so called “professional SEO’s” does not reveal to the clients what they do with their site. They don’t tell them where they are sourcing the incoming links from, they don’t tell them why they are using a particular keyword on the meta tags, they don’t even tell them what they should do with their duplicate content on the site.

I’ve heard this issue with many clients and I think they have all good reasons to complain that Indian SEOs are poor quality. Now, if we further investigate into this problem, we can find some interesting equations.

Normally when a client wants to outsource their SEO work to India, they’d normally go googling. And they are likely to go ahead with the first few companies that they find on Google ranks. The problem arises here. Out of the top rankers for the term SEO India, on Google, many so called “professional” companies use keyword stuffing and hidden text to make it to the top.

Why that frown on your face? Check it out yourself. I don’t want to take names but it is disappointing to see that even in the top results, many of them use the words SEO India, SEM India, SEO company India and many similar keywords either extensively on the top header, in the ALT tags, in the title, more like spam often repeated and in lines with black hat methods.

One simple question here -

If these companies will do such kind of unethical SEO practices to get better ranks themselves, would not they do similar unethical strategies to the clients?

Indeed they will. Now, that explains it all. Doesn’t it ?

Okay, coming back to my readers outside India, I’m just curious to know, what keywords will you use to search for an outsourced SEO firm?

Google Trends shows that nobody outside India uses the search term “SEO India” on Google. Absolutely none. My opinion is that it is the SEO firms in India that are competing among themselves to rank for this term (See the number of ad results on Google), and not any genuine potential client. He might be searching for other keywords but definitely not SEO India. In order to test this out, I’ve changed my title tags and metas to feature the keyword SEO India, I’m just curious to see how much traffic this change is going to bring?

I must admit that I agree it’s a professioanl SEO who should do all the work on optimizing a  site, but it’s also true that many of them can be done by the site owner itself. Irrespective of whether he’s a techie or not. Agree or disagree?

So you’ve heard all those Jazz and Jargons on SEO, keywords, meta tags, links, H1 tags, density, anchor text and what not? Phew, quite an overload for a newbie or a non-tech site owner.

This goes out to all the non SEO educated people who wants to do that 5-10 things that will make their site SEO’d for Google. Just do them and sit back, you don’t want to mess with it anymore.

Here goes.

1. Selecting a keyword
   Selecting a keyword is the first and foremost step to SEO. If you don’t have a keyword ready, you are doing SEO like searching for something in dark. Your keyword forms the vital part of your structure, they are the building blocks, so you got to decide what they are.
   One important thing to note here is that when selecting a keyword, you got to see how much competition you’ve got already. For a keyword like “Weight loss”, there is already immense competition, so unless you have the time and money to fight them, it’s better you dodge them and select a new keyword of your own.
   For example, if your site is on outsourced jobs, you probably have to narrow it down to “Outsourced jobs India” or to your locale, so that you create a niche of your own.
   Makes sense right?

   Ok, now you have one or two keywords ready, and you are sure what search terms on Google do you want your site to rank high for. So let’s move ahead.

2. URL Structure
   If you are on Wordpress or not, your URL structure should be SEO friendly. When I say SEO friendly, I mean they should be in a presentable form to the Google spiders. Let’s take an example.
   Non SEO friendly URL - yourdomain.co.uk/82u83nbdfbdfhcat?12hhre
   SEO friendly URL - yourdomain.co.uk/88e-free-dvd-rentals?12uk

   As you might have noticed, the second URL carries more information about your website than the first one, which is a more machine friendly one.
   In wordpress, this is pretty easy to do. While, if your site is on a CMS/coded, like Joomla,Mambo, or PHPbb, V Bulletin etc things can get tricky. There is a solution to each and there is no one rule that goes for all of them.

3. Onsite content
   Honestly speaking there is quite a lot that goes in here, and it would be difficult for a non-techie to comprehend, hence I’ll talk only about the bare essentials.

   The textual content on your website (select All, CTRL+A) should be able to give the spiders some information about your site and the products. This is vital. If you can’t do this, then there is a lot you are compromising.

   So tweak the landing pages textual content so that your keywords are sprinkled evenly. Don’t over do it. A text to keyword ratio of 5-6% is just fine.

   You can repeat this on all the pages at your site, and make the textual content in them optimize for the keyword. This will help in the overall worthiness of your site. Remember…don’t over do. It may lead to trouble.

4. Others onsite factors
   I’ve put all the other onsite factors to one category because each of them are not significant on their own but makes an impression when combined with other factors. These are -
   Image ALT tags - Not really worth, but may help sometimes.
   Change all the ALT names, descriptions and Titles of your images to a sentence that related to the keyword and the content. You may be easily tempted to stuff all your keywords into them, but that is not good at all. It can harm you if you over do it.
   H1 Tags
   Make sure that there are H1 tags in your code, and ensure that your keywords and related clauses are embedded in H1 tags. Spiders pick up content from the H1 tags, and consider them relevant to your site. Again, don’t over do it.
   STRONG
   Make sure that you don’t use BOLD element in your HTML instead, either replace them with STRONG or find a work around. BOLD is only visual while keywords in STRONG are absorbed by the spiders.
   So if you can combine H1 tags and STRONG tags, that is great. If you run into trouble by highlighting unwanted words, use CSS to tweak it and clear the junk out.(Bonus tip )
   Footer Text
   Utilize the footer text, it carries some level of importance on some search engines, because that’s the last thing they see on your site. Make sure that instead of that boring copyright text it’s something related to your keyword that you write. Makes more sense.
5. Off site factors - Incoming Links
   All of you know that incoming links help much in building your authority. Also I often see lot of wrong ideas floating around regarding link building.

   Some wrong ideas about link building that I found popular are.

   - Link exchanges give you authority - NO they don’t. It’s a worthless exercise.
   - Google Page Rank decides your rank on Google results - NO it doesn’t. I can rank a PR1 website over a PR 5 with less effort for a selected keyword.
   - If some porn site (bad neighborhood) links to you, you are in trouble - NO it does not. It will not help you and it will not harm you either.
   - If you get anyone linking to you, it’s good - NO, you should be selective as to who links to you (if at all you decide who links to you).
   - The more the links the merrier - NO, It’s not the numbers but the quality of the links that matters.
   More link building tips here.

6. Sitemap
   Now, assuming that all the above steps are taken and optimized without overdoing it, you are ready to submit your site to Google. For this create a sitemap.

   Remember, this is the final step, so you want to go back and make sure that you haven’t done anything wrong like overdoing keyword stuffing.

7. Promoting your site
   Now that everything is in place, you can start letting the world know that you have a great website. Two simple strategies I’d recommend here are - 1) Submitting to Directories and 2) Submitting to Social bookmarking sites.
   When submitting to social bookmarking sites, make sure that a powerful user notices your site. And don’t immediately sign up for an ID and submit your site. It doesn’t work that way.
   I can help you submit your sites, provided they have quality content if you can add me as a friend at my social networks (see right hand panel top). My recommendation is Stumble Upon, it gives you great traffic.
   I’m not allowed to add any more friends on SU myself, as I’ve reached the 200 limit, but you sure can add me.

So there you have it, the simple 7 steps involved in making your site successful, right from basic SEO to promoting it. If you are comfortable with it, start with Step 1 today and put your site on steroids. Make sure that things are natural and steady any rush can lead to disappointment. If you have any doubts meanwhile, feel free to ask me or hire me if you wish.

Gokul Rajaram, was the Product Manager at Google handling a number of it’s advertising products. At this role, Mr. Rajaram’s duties included defining new features and enhancements to Google’s advertising programs and working with engineering on implementation. So, many of the features you see on the Google AdSense is the result of this man’s brainwork.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Rajaram was a Technical Lead at Juno Online, an early internet service provider that is now part of United Online, the second largest ISP in the US. At Juno, he was part of the team that developed Juno’s online advertising platform. Mr. Rajaram has also worked as a Software Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and as a Product Manager at Onetta, a telecom hardware company.

Mr. Rajaram earned his M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management, his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and his B.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian institute of Technology, Kanpur, where he was awarded the President of India’s Gold Medal for being class valedictorian.

He is believed to be one of the “Godfather’s of AdSense”, one of the most successful products at Google.

Now the sad news is that Gokul is leaving Google (he has already) to be on his own. He has not revealed what his future plans are but it’s believed that he’s going to start on his own. Would that be a competitor to Google’s AdSense? No idea.But to us bloggers, that would be music to ears, wouldn’t it ?

It is a trend now that many Googlers are leaving company either to start up companies of their own or to join smaller but upcoming and fast growing companies like Facebook. 

Resources: 1, 2, 3, 4 Photo Courtesy: Webguild

PicSquare, which provides “photo based gifts” services in India, has come up with a new feature for their users. A photo blog, where users can upload and store pictures like albums or blogs - a photo blog as they would call it.

Manish says -

To continue our effort to provide best value in online photography to Indian users we are launching a new feature at Picsquare (http://mysite.picsquare.com). The new feature – Personal Photo Site, will allow users to create their own photo website and could be described as blogs for photographs.

Some of the main features of the photo blog are:

- Personalized domain name like http://manish.picsquare.com

- Theme selection, variety of theme option available like weddings, vacation, birthday, family etc.

- Customized home page

- Permission control, user can make his site accessible to anyone or decide who can get access

Hope this tool will help users to share more and order more .

Picsquare had completed 1 million images last week.