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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The Indian blogging arena is on a high these days.In about an year there have been huge increase in the number of technology related bloggers in India. There are students, professionals and learners actively blogging on their respective fields of interest. Many of them also make decent amount of money online. I thought, with the new PR update happening, it’s time we rank some of the popular ones based on some common metrics like traffic. I hope you find it interesting.
According to traffic rankings, here are the top ten super stars.
Professional bloggers like Amit Agarwal have set example to many young bloggers in India, and as I understand from talks with these bloggers, a good amount of them have been inspired from Amit. So he deserves a special applause.
I’m back from Searchcamp and missing it badly.
I’d like to give my hugs to Kiruba and The Knowledge Foundation team, for their efforts in making this happen.
It was indeed a pleasure to meet many professionals and entrepreneurs under one roof. Many faces, young and vibrant, their every word.. wisdom to me.
I’ll have to name a few here for..I don’t know why.. but I have to.( In no particular order )
I still have some very clear faces that I’ll recognize ..but unfortunately I’m not very good in remembering names. So please let me know if I’ve missed you off the list..you know sometimes you need to remind your friends that you are one. Please feel free to do that.
Everyones carrying a digital camera these days. And everyone’s clicking lot of pics too. Where do you store these files?
If you prefer your PC that means you are going to run out of space sooner or later. You would be using flickr or picasa otherwise..but there’s storage limit for free users at these services too. Have you tried making good use of these photos other than storing it online and sharing it with your friends? May be printing your friends picture on to a tea cup and sending him on his birthday? Cool isn’t it?
Picsquare is an online portal that helps you to do just that. And if you are in India it’s damn cheap too (I wouldn’t be promoting it otherwise). To print your photo on a tea-cup, it costs only Rs 299 and to print on a T-shirt it costs only Rs 399/-. That’s cheaper than you thought I bet!
Picsquare accepts credit cards, but I’ve had a few glitches the first time i tried to order a coffee-cup. But they were quick to sort it on intimating about it on email. I think this is a very good application and an excellent idea for Indian startup , when there are a lot of NRIs who would want to gift personalized gifts to their folks in India.
The site is neatly designed, even though from the SEO perspective, like all Indian startups, it does not perform well. There is unwanted clutter of script on the landing page and keywords(if at all any) are not highlighted.
But a cool service, you must try.