All of us love to see our websites in the top 10 positions of the search results in all the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. We also like to get fast results but search engines often seem to test our patience. In our desperation, some of us use black hat tricks to get quick traffic to our website or approve our SEO company to use such methods. At times, we may not be aware that a certain method is not approved by search engines and this too can be equally dangerous. When search engines penalize your website for using black hat tricks, you will not have a chance to explain yourself so it is important to make sure that you are not using any such methods for your website promotion.
Some of the old black hat tricks that are still being used include adding a certain portion of the text in the same color of the page color so that visitors will not be able to see the text but search engines can still read this text. Often pages are stuffed with keywords in this fashion to increase the keyword density. Some websites will try to hijack its visitors to a page, which the visitor really intends to visit. Sending out spam mails is another common black hat trick, which never seems to die out. Thousands of emails are sent to random email addresses hoping that some of the random email addresses would be actual user email addresses. At times, you will also find websites imitating or copying the entire content and the keyword tags of top ranking websites to imitate their performance in the search engines. All these efforts can get your website banned.
Though all these efforts initially seem to work and produce dramatic results, it will take you to the road of no return. Once your site is banned, you will lose a lot of time in repairing the damage caused. You will also gain bad reputation online and this is certainly not the way to promote your website. These efforts will only work against your website. Therefore, even though you happen to get slow results by using methods that are approved by search engines, it is safer to stick to the right SEO methods.
Whether you employ black hat tricks or your SEO company employs black hat tricks, the result is the same. Ultimately, it is your website that is going to be affected. So when you select your SEO company you must make sure that it is a reputed group. Any oversights or mistakes in this area will cost your website dearly. Undoing the mistakes committed will be even more time consuming. Today hundreds of new SEO strategies have come in to the industry and these new strategies help the websites get the desired traffic in a relatively shorter period of time so there should be no need for employing black hat tricks. However, your SEO company should have experience in using all the latest strategies.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Website Promotion through Article Submissions
One of the website promotion strategies that is considered to be highly effective by SEO professionals today is article submissions. By submitting articles to article directories, you will be able to get quality back links for your website which in turn will boost your ranking in search engines. When you want to select your service provider for article submission, you must take into consideration the following factors so that you will be able to get positive results for the investments that you make.
You should find a company that has good copywriting skills. Your articles will get traffic only when the articles that you submit are interesting. Moreover, the content writers should be familiar with SEO copywriting because SEO copywriting is very different from writing articles for print media. It has a very specific purpose. They should be able to take into consideration your keyword density requirements. The articles should be interesting and at the same time keyword rich.
Secondly, the articles that are written for promoting your websites should be 100% because search engines hate duplicate content. You will not be able to any positive results if your articles are not written from scratch but compiled by copying and pasting from various sources. The articles should pass Copyscape test to ensure that they are not plagiarized.
The article submission company that you hire for your website marketing should be able to work with you and ready to send the articles to you review and make modifications to the article if you should require some changes.
The next important part of the article submission service is the submission of the articles to the directories. You will be able to see the results only when your articles are successfully submitted and accepted by the directories. Therefore it is just not the submission that matters but the directories should accept your article to appear online. Each article directory will have their own set of guidelines for submission of the articles and only when those guidelines are followed your articles will be accepted. So when your article submission service provider sends you a report you must make sure to pay attention to the number of sites that have accepted your article and not just the number of submissions because what counts is the number of articles that are published and not the submission count.
The quality of the article directories too matter for getting good results. Your articles should be submitted to websites with good Pagerank. Moreover, the sites that are submitted are not blacklisted by search engines.
Above all, the cost for the article submission service should be affordable without compromising on the quality of the service. When you take into consideration all the above factors you will be able to get the desired results for your efforts.
Submitting articles to directories is certainly one of the best methods to promote your website online. However, it is important that you make use of the right service provider to leverage maximum benefit.
You should find a company that has good copywriting skills. Your articles will get traffic only when the articles that you submit are interesting. Moreover, the content writers should be familiar with SEO copywriting because SEO copywriting is very different from writing articles for print media. It has a very specific purpose. They should be able to take into consideration your keyword density requirements. The articles should be interesting and at the same time keyword rich.
Secondly, the articles that are written for promoting your websites should be 100% because search engines hate duplicate content. You will not be able to any positive results if your articles are not written from scratch but compiled by copying and pasting from various sources. The articles should pass Copyscape test to ensure that they are not plagiarized.
The article submission company that you hire for your website marketing should be able to work with you and ready to send the articles to you review and make modifications to the article if you should require some changes.
The next important part of the article submission service is the submission of the articles to the directories. You will be able to see the results only when your articles are successfully submitted and accepted by the directories. Therefore it is just not the submission that matters but the directories should accept your article to appear online. Each article directory will have their own set of guidelines for submission of the articles and only when those guidelines are followed your articles will be accepted. So when your article submission service provider sends you a report you must make sure to pay attention to the number of sites that have accepted your article and not just the number of submissions because what counts is the number of articles that are published and not the submission count.
The quality of the article directories too matter for getting good results. Your articles should be submitted to websites with good Pagerank. Moreover, the sites that are submitted are not blacklisted by search engines.
Above all, the cost for the article submission service should be affordable without compromising on the quality of the service. When you take into consideration all the above factors you will be able to get the desired results for your efforts.
Submitting articles to directories is certainly one of the best methods to promote your website online. However, it is important that you make use of the right service provider to leverage maximum benefit.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Importance of Making Your Website Search Engine Friendly
No website can survive the competition if it is not backed up by strategic website promotion and search engine marketing. There are two aspects to search engine optimization, the first aspect is on-page optimization and the second aspect is off-page optimization. Only when these two aspects are satisfactorily handled we will be able to see the success of our website.
On-page optimization tries to make our website search engine friendly so that we will be able to get better search engine rankings. Only when your website is search engine friendly, search engine spiders will be able to crawl your site fully. While optimizing the website for multiple keywords, each page will be optimized for a different set of keywords. So only when all the pages of your website are crawled and indexed, your website will feature in the search results for all the important keywords.
One of the factors that make a website unfriendly to search engines is to have a lot of graphics and very little content. Search engines like plenty of content in your websites and only based on the relevant content in the web pages, websites are listed in the search results. So if your website design has used excessive images and graphic elements giving very little room for text that can be crawled by the search engines, then by adding more content to your web pages will make them search engine friendly. Spiders cannot read the text within the images.
Moreover, if your website is built using Flash, then it can make your website unfriendly to the search engines. Search engine spiders cannot crawl flash content. Therefore, HTML pages are friendlier to search engines when compared to heavy flash elements.
Besides these, there are other areas, which require attention to make your website search engine friendly. It is important that each page of your website has unique page titles. The URL of the pages too should be search engine friendly. One of the problems with many of the latest websites is that they are dynamically generated pages and they have too many special characters in the URL. Web pages created using Content Management Tools that do not allow you to specify your URL too can be problematic. As part of the Search Engine Optimization, all the URLs too have to be made search engine friendly so that search engine spiders will be able to visit all the pages of your website.
Lot of thinking should go into your website’s navigation and internal linking. This will make it easy for the website users and at the same time search engines too will love your website. When the navigation is not done with care, deep crawling of the pages may not take place.
As you can see your website, design should go hand in hand with the SEO requirements of your website. If your website design is not constructed based on sound SEO principles, then all your website promotion efforts will go in vain.
On-page optimization tries to make our website search engine friendly so that we will be able to get better search engine rankings. Only when your website is search engine friendly, search engine spiders will be able to crawl your site fully. While optimizing the website for multiple keywords, each page will be optimized for a different set of keywords. So only when all the pages of your website are crawled and indexed, your website will feature in the search results for all the important keywords.
One of the factors that make a website unfriendly to search engines is to have a lot of graphics and very little content. Search engines like plenty of content in your websites and only based on the relevant content in the web pages, websites are listed in the search results. So if your website design has used excessive images and graphic elements giving very little room for text that can be crawled by the search engines, then by adding more content to your web pages will make them search engine friendly. Spiders cannot read the text within the images.
Moreover, if your website is built using Flash, then it can make your website unfriendly to the search engines. Search engine spiders cannot crawl flash content. Therefore, HTML pages are friendlier to search engines when compared to heavy flash elements.
Besides these, there are other areas, which require attention to make your website search engine friendly. It is important that each page of your website has unique page titles. The URL of the pages too should be search engine friendly. One of the problems with many of the latest websites is that they are dynamically generated pages and they have too many special characters in the URL. Web pages created using Content Management Tools that do not allow you to specify your URL too can be problematic. As part of the Search Engine Optimization, all the URLs too have to be made search engine friendly so that search engine spiders will be able to visit all the pages of your website.
Lot of thinking should go into your website’s navigation and internal linking. This will make it easy for the website users and at the same time search engines too will love your website. When the navigation is not done with care, deep crawling of the pages may not take place.
As you can see your website, design should go hand in hand with the SEO requirements of your website. If your website design is not constructed based on sound SEO principles, then all your website promotion efforts will go in vain.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Do We Really Need SEO for Websites?
It is rather surprising to note that there are still a considerable number of website owners who are not fully convinced about the importance of SEO. They set aside a huge budget for developing a massive site with captivating graphic interface and robust programming. When it comes to SEO spending, they try to cutback on their expenses. They consider that spending money on SEO is more of a gamble because they think that results cannot be guaranteed through SEO. If you are one of those people, then it is time to revisit your point of view regarding SEO.
All the most successful websites online get a major portion of their visitor traffic through organic searches. They also use other approaches including pay per click and affiliate programs to generate traffic to their website. Those who consider that SEO is not successful try to attract all their website traffic only through pay per click programs and affiliate programs.
We will be able to boost your visitor traffic through search engine optimization. When the visitor traffic to your website increases, your sales level will also increase. Your website promotion will be more cost effective if you go for SEO. When pay per click campaigns are not effectively handled, you will only be losing money on the clicks but with no proportionate sales conversion. As a result, your online advertising cost will continue to increase in an effort to increase your sales. On the other hand, if you perform SEO for your website, the initial investment might be a little high but on the long run, you will stand to profit out of the investment that you make.
PPC campaigns should only be used as a springboard to give your brand new website a head start while you are waiting for the results of your SEO. When you blend both paid traffic and organic traffic for your website, you will be able to see better results. SEO should be used as long-term strategy and paid traffic should be used as and when required to boost the sales during certain seasons of the year. So the importance of SEO for the success of any website online cannot be emphasized enough.
When you do want to go for search engine marketing and SEO, make sure to find a company that understands your niche industry well. When you hire inexperienced SEO companies to work on your website, the efforts will turn out to be futile. Services offered by such companies will be very limited and you would do well without their services. So, pay attention while choosing your service provider. SEO is not just about adding the SEO tags to your web pages and submitting your website to the search engines. There is much more to SEO and today new SEO strategies are evolving constantly with many creative SEO experts in the industry. Unless your SEO company is up to date with all the latest strategies, you will not be able to beat your online competition.
All the most successful websites online get a major portion of their visitor traffic through organic searches. They also use other approaches including pay per click and affiliate programs to generate traffic to their website. Those who consider that SEO is not successful try to attract all their website traffic only through pay per click programs and affiliate programs.
We will be able to boost your visitor traffic through search engine optimization. When the visitor traffic to your website increases, your sales level will also increase. Your website promotion will be more cost effective if you go for SEO. When pay per click campaigns are not effectively handled, you will only be losing money on the clicks but with no proportionate sales conversion. As a result, your online advertising cost will continue to increase in an effort to increase your sales. On the other hand, if you perform SEO for your website, the initial investment might be a little high but on the long run, you will stand to profit out of the investment that you make.
PPC campaigns should only be used as a springboard to give your brand new website a head start while you are waiting for the results of your SEO. When you blend both paid traffic and organic traffic for your website, you will be able to see better results. SEO should be used as long-term strategy and paid traffic should be used as and when required to boost the sales during certain seasons of the year. So the importance of SEO for the success of any website online cannot be emphasized enough.
When you do want to go for search engine marketing and SEO, make sure to find a company that understands your niche industry well. When you hire inexperienced SEO companies to work on your website, the efforts will turn out to be futile. Services offered by such companies will be very limited and you would do well without their services. So, pay attention while choosing your service provider. SEO is not just about adding the SEO tags to your web pages and submitting your website to the search engines. There is much more to SEO and today new SEO strategies are evolving constantly with many creative SEO experts in the industry. Unless your SEO company is up to date with all the latest strategies, you will not be able to beat your online competition.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Handling Increasing Online Competition!
Every entrepreneur regardless of the size of the business he or she owns has to grapple with one common challenge and that is online competition. Whether a person owns a home based business or a multinational organization, every niche industry today is saturated with competition and business owners have to come up with innovative ways of promoting their businesses to stay on top of the competition.
A couple of decades ago, not as many businesses were online as we have today. In those times, business owners thought having a website or taking their business online would give them an advantageous edge over their competitors. Today, launching a business website has become an integral part of starting any new business. Therefore, we see not only the arrival of the websites of existing businesses but also the arrival of the websites of all new businesses. As we can expect, such an abundance of websites online is pushing every business niche to saturation.
This has led to relentless competition online. Just having a business website online does not give you the advantageous edge over your competition anymore. Gaining online visibility is the key to success of any website online. If your website is not featured in the top online sources and in search results, then your website is virtually non-existent to the online users who are searching for your services and products.
You need to have strong web marketing strategies in place to fight this competition. It is better to get help from experts in this industry because timing is highly crucial for any business online. You can master the dynamics of website promotion and search engine marketing but it will consume a lot of your time, which you can utilize for refining and enhancing your core business strategies. Moreover, the learning curve itself will be a long one. The more the time your website business is online, the greater the competition you need to fight. Every day counts and you cannot afford to delay your website marketing efforts for weeks, months, or years.
When you want to entrust your website marketing efforts to a third party, you must make sure that you entrust it to a reliable and experienced company because the entire success and failure of your online presence is with the search engine marketing company. You might have a million dollar website but if your search engine marketing company does not deliver results, then you cannot expect to generate any revenue through your business website. Therefore, every step you take should be taken with caution. Both money and the time you spend on your website promotion should bring the desired results. As you might know, SEO takes its own time to bring about the expected results. So until then you will not know whether your SEO firm has performed well or not; by the time you realize that your SEO firm has failed you, you would have wasted a lot of time.
Make the right choices the first time. Bugon.com can help you with reliable search engine marketing services that you can count on.
A couple of decades ago, not as many businesses were online as we have today. In those times, business owners thought having a website or taking their business online would give them an advantageous edge over their competitors. Today, launching a business website has become an integral part of starting any new business. Therefore, we see not only the arrival of the websites of existing businesses but also the arrival of the websites of all new businesses. As we can expect, such an abundance of websites online is pushing every business niche to saturation.
This has led to relentless competition online. Just having a business website online does not give you the advantageous edge over your competition anymore. Gaining online visibility is the key to success of any website online. If your website is not featured in the top online sources and in search results, then your website is virtually non-existent to the online users who are searching for your services and products.
You need to have strong web marketing strategies in place to fight this competition. It is better to get help from experts in this industry because timing is highly crucial for any business online. You can master the dynamics of website promotion and search engine marketing but it will consume a lot of your time, which you can utilize for refining and enhancing your core business strategies. Moreover, the learning curve itself will be a long one. The more the time your website business is online, the greater the competition you need to fight. Every day counts and you cannot afford to delay your website marketing efforts for weeks, months, or years.
When you want to entrust your website marketing efforts to a third party, you must make sure that you entrust it to a reliable and experienced company because the entire success and failure of your online presence is with the search engine marketing company. You might have a million dollar website but if your search engine marketing company does not deliver results, then you cannot expect to generate any revenue through your business website. Therefore, every step you take should be taken with caution. Both money and the time you spend on your website promotion should bring the desired results. As you might know, SEO takes its own time to bring about the expected results. So until then you will not know whether your SEO firm has performed well or not; by the time you realize that your SEO firm has failed you, you would have wasted a lot of time.
Make the right choices the first time. Bugon.com can help you with reliable search engine marketing services that you can count on.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Questionable Paypal Actions on Fraudulent Payments
The last thing I like to do as a business is to put down a business like Paypal as they are a remarkable company with one of the best reputations as an online payment processor aside from Google Checkout. However, in October 2008, we received over $1000.00 in questionable payments over a VERY short period of time from what appeared to be unique buyers. However, there were inconsistencies I noticed right away in the fact that the payments appearing to come from different sources were made to promote and market two websites. So, why would our company receive payments from 19 unique sources for only two websites? Right away, this threw a red flag to me as the owner of Bugon Website Services and I decided I needed to take action. I have included the spur of payments we received in a short period of time below to show what appeared to be legit payments. Keep in mind that all FAKE NAMES used have been blacked out to insure the privacy of other people.
With this in mind, I decided there were not many options that really made sense except to contact Paypal directly and make their Security Team aware of the problem right away. They are solely responsible for handling security issues and illegit payments and I would not want to refund payments back to a fraudulent person who had taken over another person's paypal account!
I proceeded by contacting Paypal support on October 3rd, 2008 to let them know what had occurred and they assurred me that they would take action and notify the possible people who were involved with these issues. I spent about 30-45 minutes on the phone with them letting them know that I was positive that these payments were illegit and that their security team could obviously look into all of these payments and clearly see that another IP address had hacked into these accounts and changed all the contact information.
At this point, the paypal representative told me to let Paypal take care of this and that they would handle this issue in an ethical manner and take all security actions necessary to resolve potential issues.
The result: We are still having people calling our business asking us about fraudulent payments they have had on their paypal account. Our business has received a slew of chargebacks since the initial incident as Paypal obviously did not take any action despite me taking the time to let their security team know. Look below and you will see the details of chargebacks over time.
This blog post again is not meant to be a blatant post putting down Paypal but I think it is absolutely imperative that everyone knows that you need to check your credit card statement and bank account statement and keep a constant eye on your paypal account for potential fraud issues. If someone hacks into your paypal account, they can put charges on your credit card, take money from your bank account via paying for online products or services, and much more.
I surely hope that Paypal will be more proactive in the future in fighting fraud and especially when they are contacted directly by a business owner stating a concern. I know others have had similar instances occur to them and I am not so concerned about getting over $1000 in chargebacks as I was with helping people protect their privacy and credit! This was clear and blatant fraud by someone different than the account holder with a different ip address than usual hacking into the account!
With this in mind, I decided there were not many options that really made sense except to contact Paypal directly and make their Security Team aware of the problem right away. They are solely responsible for handling security issues and illegit payments and I would not want to refund payments back to a fraudulent person who had taken over another person's paypal account!
I proceeded by contacting Paypal support on October 3rd, 2008 to let them know what had occurred and they assurred me that they would take action and notify the possible people who were involved with these issues. I spent about 30-45 minutes on the phone with them letting them know that I was positive that these payments were illegit and that their security team could obviously look into all of these payments and clearly see that another IP address had hacked into these accounts and changed all the contact information.
At this point, the paypal representative told me to let Paypal take care of this and that they would handle this issue in an ethical manner and take all security actions necessary to resolve potential issues.
The result: We are still having people calling our business asking us about fraudulent payments they have had on their paypal account. Our business has received a slew of chargebacks since the initial incident as Paypal obviously did not take any action despite me taking the time to let their security team know. Look below and you will see the details of chargebacks over time.
This blog post again is not meant to be a blatant post putting down Paypal but I think it is absolutely imperative that everyone knows that you need to check your credit card statement and bank account statement and keep a constant eye on your paypal account for potential fraud issues. If someone hacks into your paypal account, they can put charges on your credit card, take money from your bank account via paying for online products or services, and much more.
I surely hope that Paypal will be more proactive in the future in fighting fraud and especially when they are contacted directly by a business owner stating a concern. I know others have had similar instances occur to them and I am not so concerned about getting over $1000 in chargebacks as I was with helping people protect their privacy and credit! This was clear and blatant fraud by someone different than the account holder with a different ip address than usual hacking into the account!
Friday, December 26, 2008
Banned From Being Indexed in Google?
If you go about marketing and promoting your website in the wrong way and fail to follow Google's quality guidelines, you run the risk of getting your website banned from Google's search engine! This means that the majority of people doing a search on Google have absolutely no chance of finding your website in the search results. Additionally, all the search sites that use Google to feed their results will not show your website in the results as well.
There are steps you can take to submit your website for reconsideration into Google's search engine and according to their website, it can take several weeks for them to review your request. The first step you want to take is to review Google's quality guidelines and make sure your website complies with their quality guidelines and fix your website in every way it does not according to your best ability. The next step is to go to google's area of their website where you can request reconsideration.
It is unfortunate for your website to get removed from Google's search engine but the least you can do is everything in your power to get your website relisted. Hope this helps those of you who are looking for a potential solution to what seems to be an unresolveable problem!
There are steps you can take to submit your website for reconsideration into Google's search engine and according to their website, it can take several weeks for them to review your request. The first step you want to take is to review Google's quality guidelines and make sure your website complies with their quality guidelines and fix your website in every way it does not according to your best ability. The next step is to go to google's area of their website where you can request reconsideration.
It is unfortunate for your website to get removed from Google's search engine but the least you can do is everything in your power to get your website relisted. Hope this helps those of you who are looking for a potential solution to what seems to be an unresolveable problem!
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