What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing a website or web page to increase its visibility in search engines like Google or Yahoo, therefore to increase visitor’s traffic. SEO basically aims at improving web page’s search engine ranking, so that when someone enters a relevant key word search pertaining to what product or service your company offers, your website appears in first few pages of the search engine result.

Most common SEO mistakes to avoid:

Not pay enough attention to SEO guidelines –These are offered free and full of detailed information regarding SEO. If you fail to follow the ground rules provided by search engines then no matter how much of effort you put in optimizing the website, all your work would go in vein.

How to avoid this SEO mistake:
- Read the entire guideline thoroughly
- Make sure you follow the tips and rules to make your website approved by the search engine.

Using inappropriate keywords –One important thing to remember is keyword is actually a term that captures essence of the textual content. But it often happens that, people tend to use keyword which they think can describe their website but in reality average users don’t search for them.

How to avoid this SEO mistake:
- Know your target user’s profile
- Identify the range of possible customer inquiries relevant to your product
- Observe competitor website contents
- Ask the staffs work in customer service and sales section for phrases most used by the customers

Poor content quality – Content is the key. Lower quality of content can put your website in the back burner of search engine ranking.

How to avoid this SEO mistake:
- Be cautious about grammatical error, spelling mistakes, lacking in use of correct keywords
- Make sure to update your webpage at regular intervals by including necessary changes in content and format
- Don’t cram information in the webpage. Make it interesting and easy to understand by the reader

Overuse of flash or JavaScript – It should be remembered while making a webpage, that search engine can’t read Flash or Java. But if you can’t avoid using them in your content then you should be careful about few things.

How to avoid this SEO mistake:
- If you have to use flash then make sure to provide an html version
- If you have to use JavaScript for navigation then build a sitemap to make your links crawl able.

“Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast,” says Cutts. “It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.”

“I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’” he says.

If you’re serious about wanting your site to perform better in search engines, and you haven’t given much thought to load times and such, it’s time to readjust your way of thinking.

From WebProNews

The new feature is especially helpful to identify which URLs may have been hacked.

For example, if you start noticing your site appearing in search results for terms totally unrelated to your website (for example, “Viagra” or “casino”), you can use this feature to find those keywords and identify the pages that contain them. This will enable you to eliminate any hacked content quickly.

I tested with this new feature and found unexpectedly keyword “flag” shows high significance in my site (ranked 4th by significance).

Then I clicked on the keyword “flag” and did a quick drilldown analysis. It immediately shows keyword “flag” has occured 690 through my entire site

and also listed 10 URLs that contains the keyword.

I clicked on the URL and it directed me to the web page. Then I started viewing the page source and locating the keyword “flag” with search function. I carefully checked the source code with the keyword “flag” and understood that it is because my wordpress translator plugin, and the keyword mainly occurs in the image alt tag. Although it is not hacking but still worries me, cuz it will make Google mistake our site is somehow related to “Flag”.

Enjoy the new feature.

But he did assure that full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays. “I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays. Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over.”

Source: Matt Cutts

Some of the TrakkBoard’s features include:

• Trakkboard enables the compilation of reports of different websites without logging in at Google Analytics.
• You can compare data of different accounts, websites and profiles without permanently changing sites at Google Analytics
• You have the opportunity to compile individually and from different portals and websites all the key performance indicators which are of a certain importance for you on just one dashboard.
• By means of tabs, you can create as many dashboards as you want and you can arrange the data individually
• You can follow current developments on your desktop or you can lock certain data from changes to have them available at all times
• With just one click, you can switch between the display formats, change time spans or rearrange data.

Learn more about TrakkBoard, you can visit http://www.trakkboard.com/en

The pending deal between Microsoft and Yahoo that would see Microsoft become the exclusive provider of search technology on Yahoo’s Web sites will require regulatory approval to move forward, because the government tends to take a closer look at any deal that involves two of three major players in a given industry joining forces. Some have argued that the high barriers of entry in the search market might lead the DOJ to consider restrictions on the deal, such as the sale of Yahoo’s search technology to a third party.

American Association of Advertising Agencies President and CEO Nancy Hill posted the open letter Monday, which was also signed by Maurice Levy, chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe; Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP; Michael I. Roth, chairman and CEO of Interpublic Group of Companies; and John Wren, president and CEO of Omnicom Group. “We believe that Yahoo and Microsoft’s proposal to combine their technologies and search platforms is good for advertisers, marketing services agencies, website publishers and consumers,” they said in the letter.

News Source: Cnet

Susan Moskwa from the Google Webmaster Central team explained it was removed because Google keeps telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much.” They felt it was “silly” to keep telling webmasters that, and at the same time show it in Webmaster Tools. So Google removed it from Webmaster Tools.

Google has asserted that PageRank is not the most important factor when it comes to SEO. What’s on you mind?