Search engine optimization is one of the most sought after internet marketing services worldwide. There are several different techniques used by SEO’s around the globe. Some of these techniques have become stale while some of these techniques have expired way back in 2005-2006. A website which is ranking higher in search engine result gets more visitors than those which are not listed on the top pages of search results. Over the years several webmasters and SEO optimizers have been inventing techniques to score higher rankings on various search engines including Google, Yahoo and some other. Some of these techniques like submitting unique articles could really help your website to score higher rankings. On the other hand, several techniques like link exchanges could put your website in trouble (if done unscrupulously ).

There are some basic guidelines which everyone should follow while optimizing their website. The first and the most important one are Google webmaster guidelines. Google is regularly updating its ranking algorithm. Each day you will come across some update in the ranking algorithm OR you can say that Google is applying patches to its existing algorithm. One must ensure that you adhere to the guidelines laid by Google if you are planning to score higher rankings on Google.

Read Google Webmaster Guideline : Click Here

Let’s now start with the techniques which should be avoided while optimizing website on search engines.

A) On-Page Optimization

1. Hidden Text – Hidden text could get your website penalized on search engines. Google and other search engines are not yet fully equipped to detect and penalize websites using hidden text. However hidden text could be reported by your competitor, which could hit your website like a boomerang. If your website is detected by search engine crawler or is manually detected by Google team, then you have less chances of retaining your website rankings. SEO Tip: Avoid hidden text at every cost. In case your website has been penalized, then try to remove every single instance of hidden text from your web pages.
2. Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing should be avoided at every single cost. Over the past few years, search engines have shifted their focus from on-page optimization towards off-page optimization. Nowadays, search engines are giving preference to websites which maintain a balance between their off-page and on-page optimization techniques. Keyword stuffing can be easily detected by search engines including Google and Yahoo. Once detected, it will ultimately squeeze your rankings for your targeted keyword (or artificially stuffed keyword). Most of these websites get labeled as “Spammy websites” by search engines.SEO Tip : Make sure that your keyword density is natural. There are several websites which will put figures around ideal keyword density (ie 5-7% of the overall text). However, you should try to keep your website natural in terms of content and keyword density.
3. Cloaking – Cloaking is the technique to display different content to search engine spiders (based on their I.P addresses). This content is different from the normal format and content of your website as viewed by human visitor.Cloaking was widely used during 2005-2006, but in the past few years search engines have upgraded their algorithms. They are smart enough to detect any suspicious activities like Cloaking. If you are using cloaking technique, then you are preparing your website for a hara-kiri which your website will perform automatically. If you dislike your website too much, then it is the perfect way of getting rid of your rankings and search engine traffic ;). If you really want to get rid of your website rankings, then try adding some duplicate content.
4. Duplicate Content – Duplicate content is one of the most serious SEO offences. There are several webmasters who argue that duplicate content simply puts your website in supplement index. However if your website rankings are shifted from page 1 to page 500 then it cannot be termed as a shift towards supplement index. Duplicate penalty is one of the most serious penalties which can suck your website’s ranking power. Further, duplicate penalty will lower the Page Rank as well as Trust Rank of your website.
5. Doorway Pages – Doorway pages are artificial pages with artificial content. The sole purpose of having a doorway page is to gain higher rankings for a specific set of targeted keywords. These pages are specifically designed and kept outside the main navigation menu or links. These pages rely heavily on a particular set of targeted keywords. SEO Tip : If you really want to target a particular set of keyword, then try adding a blog section and add some useful content which is helpful for your visitors as well as search engines. Make sure you do not copy-paste articles from various ezine websites.
6. HTML/Programming errors - Webmasters should ensure that their website is error-free. This will help search engines to easily crawl your website. If your website designer forgets to close the <H1> tag, then it could make your website look spammy. However most of the HTML errors are accidental, and should it avoided. There are several websites which get penalized due to some serious errors in their HTML coding.There are several webmasters who use external redirection without waiting for a gap of 5 seconds. There are several websites, which get penalized due to this redirection issue. SEO Tip : You should create a Google webmaster account which will help you detect any serious HTML errors. Most of the errors get listed under your website profile and should be removed quickly. Further, you can try to make your website W3C validated, which will help to ensure that your html coding is 100% error free.

B) Off-Page Optimization

1. Buying Links – Buying links was widely popular in 2005, where some websites used to purchase links in tune of 10,000-50,000. However this started to jeopardize the real objective of search engines i.e to give preference to natural websites with best content and information. This is the reason why search engines have started to nullify back links which are purchased from high PR websites. The page rank (Google PR) of any website has no connection with the actual rankings of your website on Google, but still there are several hundred “ignorant” webmasters who simply want back links from PR3-4 websites alone. This could easily trigger sandbox on your website. If you are purchasing links in bulk, then it can be detected by search engines as well.Moreover purchasing bulk of back links with same anchor text is more like performing Hara-Kiri (suicide) on your own website. If you have made your mind to purchase back links from particular websites, then you should make it look natural. Try using wide variety of anchor text, but at the same time you must ensure that you are not going overboard in purchasing links. A website which is only concentrating on purchased links will suffer the consequences. You should try not to entangle yourself in the “Page Rank Matrix”. If Google or Yahoo launches a new directory, I am sure it will remain Page Rank 0, for a period of 3-4 months. Till that time, several “ignorant webmasters” will reject this free directory due to its PR0, but the smart ones will know why they must submit their link to this PR 0 website.
2. Link Exchanges – Link exchange technique was widely popular in 2005-2006. However in the past 1-2 years, search engines have started to give less significance to websites relying on link exchange techniques. Link exchange techniques were widely used in 2005-2006 where website owners used to create link directory on their website and exchanged links with several hundred or even thousand of websites. In the past few years, search engines have started to clamp down on websites which rely heavily on link exchange techniques. Link exchange can still be used, but you need to be more careful and vigilant. However, you must completely avoid automated link exchanges in any form. They will ultimately result in SEO penalty.You will find several emails landing in your inbox with text “Hey ! I got PR blah blah , do you want to exchange with my blah blah website”. It is disheartening to see that so many webmasters and SEO’s have entangled themselves within the boundaries of Google Page Rank. People are willing to exchange links with websites having higher PR, but they never give a thought about Trust Rank of the website with whom they are exchanging links.SEO Tip: Try to exchange links with websites which are related to your business theme. A web design related website can easily exchange link with another flash design website. However you should make sure not to exchange links with websites which are outside your business niche.

You should make sure that your optimization process is both natural and healthy. You should make sure not to use any hidden SEO Techniques ( especially on-page) which could result in lower rankings of your website. If your website is not adhering to on-page guidelines, then it could result in serious penalties as compared to off-page guidelines. There will be several instances where some unknown website will start linking to your website. These external links do not necessarily lead to penalty. There are several black hat techniques revolving around both on-page and off-page optimization, but you must always ensure that your website is following a natural pattern in SEO optimization process.

Google has been one of the most popular search engine, and its popularity is increasing day by day. Several webmasters are working day and night in order to score higher rankings. Bing.com is another popular search engine launched by Microsoft and there are plenty of users who have started to throng towards Bing. I truly love the look and feel of Bing as compared to Google.

Let us now watch video by Microsoft Dudes on some of the great features of Bing.com

Whatever may be going on in the search engine industy, but there are some few basic rules which have remained constant over the last few years. It doesn’t matter whether you are optimizing for Google, Bing, MSN, Yahoo or any other. There are some basic rules which you need to keep in mind, and rest will automatically start to fall into place.

There have been several significant changes in search engine algorithms due to which several legitimate SEO techniques have entered the “No Entry Zone” of Search engines.
During 2005-2006, article promotion was quite popular, and was used to score higher rankings on search engines. Several webmasters used to write informative article and then they tried submitting their articles to several hundred websites. Article promotion was widely accepted and a popular technique which was used to score higher rankings on search engines. However, it has started to suffer consequences of duplicate penalty . If your same article is submitted to 100 different websites, then search engines will only consider 1-2 back links from the article website where your article was submitted/crawled first time. Most of the article websites have suffered duplicate penalty due to duplicate articles which were copy-pasted from other article websites. If you are serious about Google, then you should abstain from submitting same article to several hundred article websites. If you can manage to submit 100 different/unique articles to 100 different article websites, then it will help to improve search engine rankings of your website significantly.

On the other hand link exchange technique was widely popular during 2005-2006, but since 2007, search engines have started to nullify the effectiveness of link exchange programs. However, you can still try to exchange links with niche websites. You should ensure that your link exchange partner is related to the business theme of your website.

All these changes in the past 1-2 years have started to bring out some real issues in SEO including Sandbox, Duplicate Content Issues, and some others.

Search engines are working hard to secure their ranking algorithms in order to make more profits through PPC. On the other hand SEO individuals are working day and night to understand search engines and their ranking pattern.

If you search online, you will stumble upon several hundred or even thousands of forums and blogs discussing Page Rank and other issues. However the truth is that your page rank has no relationship with the actual rankings of your website. The only benefit which page rank can give you is to help your website appear on the top positions of various web directories (which organize their links according to PR). There is even a formula on how to calculate your future Google Page Rank .

Search engines rely on a hidden parameter known as “Trust Rank”. This parameter is used to gauge the real ranking strength of any website. A website with Page Rank 2 can easily overshadow website with page rank 5 due to its hidden but higher Trust Rank. You need to concentrate on whether you need a higher page rank OR more clicks and higher search engine rankings for potential keywords (i.e your website’s actual SERPS). If you are concentrating on the latter part, then do not entangle your SEO activities geared only towards increasing page rank.

Therefore one should try to concentrate on building a naturally popular website with quality content. If your content is good enough, you will automatically gain back links which will result in higher rankings.

Search engine optimization is a constantly evolving technology, and you should always abstain from artificial techniques in order to score higher rankings. Search engines are working hard to secure their ranking algorithm. They do not want anybody to abuse the effectiveness of their search engine algorithm which is programmed to present the most relevant content pertaining to any searched keyword by its search users.

‘
Search Engine Optimization is evolving at a fast pace. Several new changes have been incorporated to make search engines more efficient in terms of presenting useful information to their users.\r\nPage Rank (Google PR) and Trust Rank are the two main issues which are discussed frequently on various SEO forums. Although, both these terms are related to SEO, they have different relationship with the actual rankings of your website. Your actual rankings are known as SERPs in the SEO world which stands for the Search Engine Ranking Positions of your website/webpages on Google/Yahoo. Let us first begin with Page Rank.

a) Page Rank – Page Rank is the numerical value, weighting 1-10 for any single website or webpage. Page Rank represents the PR (Page Rank) strength of any given website. However, Page Rank should not be confused with the actual ranking strength of any website (i.e. your actual SERPs ). If you have installed Google Toolbar, you would be able to see page rank of several different websites .

Page rank is generally calculated by search engines by analyzing and calculating various back links pointing towards a particular website. Google Page rank algorithm uses its own complex algorithmic formulas to calculate Page Rank of any given website or webpage.

So far so good, but the real question comes up “Whether Page Rank has any relationship with the actual rankings of your website?” The answer is a big NO.

There are several hundred webmasters discussing increase/decrease in Page Rank on various forums, but none of them realize the importance of their actual SERPs as compared to Page Rank.

There are several hundred websites with low PR (1 or 2), and several of these websites genuinely overshadow other high ranking competitor websites with higher Page Ranks (generally 4-5 or even higher than that).

There is a wrong misconception among several webmasters that higher the page rank, higher will be their rankings on search engines. The truth is that your increase or decrease in page rank has no relationship with the actual rankings of your website.

There are several webmasters who will argue that if any website sees a steep decline in their Page Rank, then it could be an indication of drop in their actual SERPs. If your website is having some major SEO issue related to content or links on your website, then your actual rankings (SERPs) will drop first. Once you observe a drop in SERPs, your Page Rank will eventually drop after a period of 2-3 months. Till the next update in Page Rank, the Google Toolbar will keep pulling PR Data from its stored database.

Your SERPs relies on the current status of your website whereas PR relies on the stored database which gets updated only once in every 2-3 or 3-4 months.

Case Study: Take for example, Google and Yahoo launches a free web directory for webmasters around the globe. Now this directory will show PR 0 for period of 3-4 months. Does this imply that this directory is useless in terms of its importance? I am sure you won’t need explanation since the answer is NO.

After 3 months this directory will score a page rank of 6. This does not imply that this directory was worthless on a day before the page rank update took place. The PR for this directory was calculated somewhere in between 2-3 months, but only got officially displayed after 3 months in Google Toolbar.

These issues shift our focus from Page Rank towards another important hidden factor known as Trust Rank. This is the real factor which heavily influences your SERPs on various search engines including Google and Yahoo.

b) Trust Rank – The Google/Yahoo Trust Rank is one of the most important factors in determining actual rankings of your website i.e. your SERPs. Trust Rank is the Trust levels granted to any single website on the net. This Trust Rank helps certain websites to score higher rankings on search engines.

Let us try to anticipate some of the hidden factors which could influence Trust Rank of your website.

a) Age/History of your domain – The age of your domain is an important factor which can increase your Page Rank as well. There are several domains which are 5-6 years old and have higher rankings as compared to any other website within the same business category. Search Engines also rely on the history of your domain to detect any SPAM activity.

You can change everything in SEO, but you cannot change Age/History of any domain. Therefore search engines could rely on this factor to grant Trust status to certain websites.

b) Quality of your back links – Now quality of your back links doesn’t necessarily mean higher Page Rank links. In most of the cases it is observed that a website with Page Rank 2 is far much beneficial than getting a back link from a similar Page Rank 4 website. Search engines can easily detect any unnatural pattern in the back links of your website. If you purchase 50 back links with PR 3-4, then surely Google can detect it easily. The worst part is that your Page Rank is not related with Trust Rank, but these activities will lower your Page Rank as well as your Trust Rank. This paid link activity will increase your Page Rank, but it will lower you Trust Rank which ultimately decides ranking of your website.

c) Content on your website – There are several article websites which have observed steep decline in their traffic on both Google and Yahoo. The reason behind this decline is the duplicate articles which are submitted to several hundred websites by various webmasters and SEO. Several of these article websites have suffered consequences of duplicate penalty. Although there are several SEO’s who will argue that duplicate penalty is just a myth. There are some who will say that duplicate penalty does exist, but it is more like having your duplicate content in supplement index. However, the truth is that if your content goes into supplement index, then obviously it will lower your Trust Rank.

One should concentrate on producing high quality content, rather than having bulk of content. If your content is good and informative, other webmasters will automatically start linking to your website.

d) Optimization History of your domain – It could be possible that search engines store the optimization history of any single domain to determine their Trust Rank. If your website purchased 50,000 back links in 2006, then surely Google will keep an account of that activity to determine your Trust Rank.

Let us watch Dr.Matt Cutts live in action explaining and hiding ;) Trust Rank at the same time. The video gives good information, but surely something is too secret about Trust Rank.

On the other hand there are certain SEO techniques which could lower your Trust Rank. You should avoid these SEO techniques which will ultimately affect your actual search engine rankings or SERPs. Read about these SEO activities at : http://www.seohawk.com/blog/avoid-these-seo-techniques/

All these factors can help to determine the Trust Rank of your website. There is no tool to detect Trust Rank as compared to Page Rank. However, one should try to follow a natural pattern in search engine optimization. This will help you gain higher Trust Rank which will ultimately decide the actual rankings of your website. Trust Rank is the hidden factor used by both Google and Yahoo while determining actual rankings of any website. Page Rank algorithm is completely different from Trust Rank Algorithm. Trust Rank affects your actual rankings, whereas your Page Rank effects your PR within Google Toolbar. Page Rank can never be considered as a parameter to gauge ranking strength of any given website. A website with extremely low Trust Rank could show a high Page Rank, whereas a website with low Page Rank could have a high Trust Rank. This is the reason why there are several websites ranking above other high Page Rank websites. It is extremely important to understand the difference between these two aspects of Search Engine Optimization.\r\nTechnorati Profile
seo
Search Engine Marketing

Google Adwords is one of the most effective mediums of promoting your business on search engines. If you are focussing your efforts on search engine optimization, then it can easily consume around 6-8 Months ( even higher than that) to get your website optimized on top pages of Google, Yahoo and several other search engines.

Yahoo on the other hand provides similar feature which is bit more advance than Google. However, the popularity factor of Google is higher than Yahoo, but Yahoo’s Sponsored search provides you more flexibility in terms of selecting text, link, and ads. Similar to Google, Yahoo will also advertise your website on popular websites.

Watch This useful video which will help you optimize your Adwords campaigns

Following are some the tips offered by the internal team of Adwords optimizers which will help you generate more ROI from your existing adwords campaigns.

1. Focus your ads on low prices and savings.
2. Use value-related keywords.
3. Make sure your ad groups are targeted and relevant.
4. Don’t waste money on irrelevant clicks.
5. Make it easy for customers to buy.
6. Focus your money on your high-performers.

Let us watch another useful video on how to optimize your Adword ads.

You can read more about each of these tips including examples and instructions at http://www.google.com/adwords/tactics and you can also view these tactics in a pdf format at http://www.google.com/adwords/tactics/top_tactics.pdf. We hope these tactics will help you continue to see good returns from your AdWords investment.


Google SEO Adwords Guide : View (pdf)



Conversion Tracking Google Guide : View (pdf)

Achieving top 10 search engine rankings on popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo is a dream of every single business owner. Search Engines like to spider and rank websites which have quality content and are popular. This is the main challenge posed by search engine developers to give higher SEO rankings to quality websites and to filter out websites which do not deserve to be on the top search engine pages (Pages 1-2-3 etc) of Google, Yahoo, MSN and several others.

It is not too difficult to improve your website’s organic search engine rankings. However, there are some basic rules and guidelines which you need to follow. Search Engine Optimization is the process which is used in order to achieve top SEO rankings on various search engines. This process is mainly divided into two phases: a) On-Page Optimization and b) Off-Page Optimization. On-Page Optimization deals with anything and everything within the coding part of your website/webpage including your content. Off-page optimization deals with SEO techniques which are not related to the coding/content part of your website.

Let us examine some of the SEO ranking factors which can help your website to score better rankings on search engines. These basic factors can help your website to achieve top rankings on search engines.

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+ (Positive SEO Scoring)	You will receive these positive SEO points if you use these techniques wisely (or following search engine guidelines).
- (Negative SEO Scoring)	You will receive negative SEO points if you don’t use them wisely.(trying to manipulate search engine results)

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1) KEYWORDS IN THE TITLE TAG
TITLE tag is one of the most important aspect of On-Page Optimization. Your website’s TITLE is the main entry point for all major search engines across the globe. The text or keywords which you use in your TITLE helps search engines to locate your webpage and to help your site achieve better search engine rankings for its targeted keywords/business services or products. The TITLE tags appear in bold text within the search engine results.	+ 9.5/10
	-7/10
SEO Hawk Advice: Choose TITLE tag wisely, and do not overload or overstuff your TITLE tag with unnecessary keywords. Only focus on main keywords.
2) KEYWORDS IN THE CONTENT OR BODY TEXT
If your website TITLE has text related Popcorn services and your page has content related to Pizza Services (+ Free Home Delivery) then your chances of scoring top rankings for popcorn related keywords are dim . Therefore, make sure that your content is reflecting what is mentioned in your TITLE tag. However, using semantically related terms can help you gain higher rankings for different variations of the same keyword. For example, search engine marketing services and search engine positioning company can be considered as semantically related keywords. They both share a common keyword “search engine” between them.	+ 8/10
	-5 to -10/10
SEO Hawk Advice:Don’t indulge into Body text keyword stuffing. It will only lower your rankings. If your content is related to whats mentioned in the TITLE tag then you will have natural keyword density (ie 2-5 % of your content). There are no fixed rules, but keep your content natural and it should resemble what text you have in your TITLE tag.
Your overall negative score will be calculated on several factors such as authority of your website, and domain trust.
3) KEYWORDS IN TAGS H1, H2, H3, H4 Strong, Bold, Italic, etc
These tags used to help websites to achieve higher rankings (Before 2006). However in the last few years, search engines have started to nullify their SEO effect. These tags can help if used in a natural fashion. If you have stuffed your page with unnecessarily with bold, H1, H2 tags then search engines will deliver “EXTREMELY LOW” rankings.	+ 3-4/10
	-8 to -10/10
4) KEYWORDS IN DOMAIN NAME (ie www. Keyword-service .com)
TITLE tag is one of the most important aspect of On-Page Optimization. Your website’s TITLE is the main entry point for all major search engines across the globe. The text or keywords which you use in your TITLE helps search engines to locate your webpage and to help your site achieve better search engine rankings for its targeted keywords/business services or products. The TITLE tags appear in bold text within the search engine results. If your domain name is “www.search-engine-optimization-ranking-seo-services-company .com” then you will receive negative points in the initial phase. Once your website establishes its authority, it could be possible that you score high rankings, but chances are dim.	+ 8-9/10
	-10/10
SEO Hawk Advice: You could receive positive score for using (1-2-3 or 4 (MAX) Keywords in the domain). If you use more than 4-5 keywords then it will could result in negative score.You should always use less number of keywords for best results.
5) KEYWORDS IN WEBPAGE URL (ABC .com /marketing-services-company)
Including keywords in the url will help your website to achieve better search engine rankings. It will also give benefits from users who link to your url directly (without using anchor text). You can use hyphens or underscore between different keywords for your webpage url..	+ (3-4/10)
	(-4 to -5/10)
SEO Hawk Advice:Both Google and Yahoo used to give preference to this particular aspect, but currently you can expect more benefits from Google as compared to Yahoo. Most of the companies use this technique to gain higher SEO rankings.
6) KEYWORDS IN IMAGE TITLES/ALT TEXT
The keywords within Image Titles and Alt text are useful for image search rankings. If you are having jewelry related website, then it is possible that several users will your image search to find jewelry related products.	(Image Search)+ 8/10
	(Web Search): -4/10
7) META DESCRIPTION TAG
Meta Description tag is important from SEO viewpoint. It can help you gain higher rankings on search engines. Using a good description text will also help in improving CTR (Click through Rates) on search engines. The text from this particular tag is also displayed within the SERPS pages.	+ 5-6/10
8) META KEYWORDS TAG
This particular tag has become redundant in the last 1-2 years. Search engines are almost ignoring this tag.	+ 1/10
	(-5 to -6/10)
SEO Hawk Advice: This tag has been exploited in the past. This is the reason why search engines have made this tag redundant.
9) INTERNAL LINK POPULARITY
If your website has a higher SEO authority then it will surely help. If you have recently launched your website, then it won’t help you. A popular and a high authority site can achieve top rankings for several pages using internal linking techniques.	+ 3-4/10
	-1 to 0/10
SEO Hawk Advice: Make sure your website’s link structure is easy to crawl to ensure that the entire website gets crawled. Using proper link structure will help your website to achieve higher SEO rankings.
10) AGE OF YOUR DOCUMENT/WEBPAGE
It is perceived as important by search engines. Most of the webpages which are old and have quality content will rank higher. However, in the past few months search engines are showing more inclination towards Fresh pages with quality content rather than old pages. Search engines, particularly Google give more preference to fresh pages as compared to old ones. Yahoo on the other hand gives preference to old groggy pages. However, you cannot make your page look older , and therefore 0 penalty for having a new webpage.	+ 2-5/10
	0
11) QUALITY OF YOUR WEBSITE CONTENT
There is an old saying in SEO industry that “Content is king” . If your content is good, then you will automatically gain links. Once you gain links your content becomes king and scores higher rankings on search engines. However, if your website has an SEO authority then your quality content will rank higher on search engines (irrespective of whether you have links pointing back to your webpage or not).	+ 8-9/10
	(-8 to -10/10)
SEO Hawk Advice: Use original and good quality content, otherwise you could receive severe SEO penalty for having duplicate or spammy content. If your company website has good quality content, then it could help you gain higher SEO rankings.
12) FREQUENCY OF CHANGE TO YOUR CONTENT
If your website’s content gets updated regularly ( ie addition of new content), then you can expect some Bonus points from search engines. Search engines give more preference to pages which are fresh in content.	+ 2-3/10
	None
SEO Hawk Advice: If you are not able to update your content on regular basis then you wont receive any penalties.
14) W3C VALIDATION
W3C validation is not an SEO standard. It is just a way of making your website 100% error-free. If your website has 0 html errors and appears consistently across all major web browsers then it will surely help your visitors. It is more related to the visitors of your website rather than search engine crawlers.	+ 1/10
	None
SEO Hawk Advice: If your website is conforming to SEO guidelines then you dont need to worry about W3C Validation. Sometimes website owners receive penalties due to unknown programming and html errors on the site. Having a W3C validated site will help to ensure that your website is 100% error free. If you leave your <H1> tag unclosed, then it could be mistaken as a SPAM attempt by search engines. Therefore having a W3C only ensures that you wont receive any penalties related to operational aspect of your website.

1) GLOBAL LINK POPULARITY OF YOUR WEBSITE/WEBPAGE
Global Link popularity of your webpage is an important SEO ranking factor. If your webpage/website receives several backlinks from quality websites/forums/blogs/directories, then you will score top rankings on search engines. On the other hand, if you have automated your back linking process using some link building software, then it will hit your website back like a boomerang. Any popular webpage or website has several thousand links pointing to it. Therefore search engines can easily pick up content which has natural link popularity. You should also get back links from websites which are related to your business theme. For example, internet marketing services are somewhat related to website marketing services. Similarly a web design specialist, web development and promotion, flash design expert, and web programming companies fall into same SEO category. However, a charity and a gambling site are not related to each other. If you have a website dedicated to children’s book and are receiving back links from gambling sites then search engines will ignore your back links. This could also result in lowering SEO Trust Rank of your website. Other factors such as Anchor Text of inbound links (+ SEO Score : 8-9/10), Age of inbound links (+ 4-5/10), and text surrounding the link (+ 6-7/10) have their own importance in improving search engine rankings of your website. Read more about Page Rank at: http://blog.seohawk.com/page-rank-vs-trust-rank/	+ 8-9/10
	- 3 to -4/10
SEO Hawk Advice: Building back links from unrelated/poor/spammy/link-farms won’t help your website in any way.
Special Note: There is one great misconception among webmasters that getting back links from a higher page rank (PR) webpage will help you in the SEO process. The truth is that, your page rank has no relationship with the actual rankings of your website. Further, page rank from another website can only help to improve your page rank, but it cannot help to improve your SERPS.
2) AGE OF YOUR WEBSITE DOMAIN
The age of your domain plays a crucial role in the SEO process. However, if you have stuffed your website with duplicate content and expecting to see miracles after 4-5 years, then you are mistaken.On the other hand a website which has quality content and was launched 2-3 years back will rank higher as compared to new websites. However, there are no fixed rules. There is no way to increase the age of your website domain. Therefore you wont receive any penalties here for having a new website.	+ 8-9/10
	- None
3)RATE OF ACQUIRING NEW INBOUND LINKSs
If your website is acquiring new inbound links from quality sites on regular basis then it will boost your SEO rankings. If your website is receiving new back links then it proves to search engines that your website has quality content and is helpful to the visitors. Remember “Content is King”, but quality Inbound Links can also make your “Content Appear as King” on search engines.	+ 5-6/10
	- None
4) POPULARITY/TRAFFIC OF THE WEBSITE
This is one of the new techniques which are used by search engines to identify popular websites and non-popular ones. For example, there are evidences that Google might be using parameters such as Bounce Rates, Direct Visits, and some other to grant authority status to your website. Read more about Bounce rates and SEO at: http://www.seohawk.com/blog/google-bounce-rate-and-seo-rankings/ (Google can easily collect this data from Google Toolbar, Clicks in SERPS etc )	+ 8-9/10
	- None
Special Note : Clicking on your site a Million times wont help. So sit back and enjoy your beer. .
5) WEBSITE LISTING IN DMOZ
DMOZ stands for Directory Mozilla or Open Directory Project, but each time you hear this name, it will sound more like something related to Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs as we all know were quite big in size and ruled the earth for several million years before they became extinct. Similarly DMOZ ruled the SEO industry, but it hasn’t became extinct yet. To get your website listed under DMOZ was the first priority of SEO optimizers way back in 2004-2005. However, DMOZ has become the last priority of SEO optimizers in 2008-2009. Some of the reasons why DMOZ lost its importance (similar to the extinction of Dinasaurs) are as given below:- a) Sleepy Editors who wake up once in every 2 years and then go to sleep again. b) Outdated links within important categories. Several links are outdated and it hardly get updated. c) A website’s SEO fate can never depend on whether your site is listed in DMOZ or not. However, having a DMOZ listing within a specific region does help a lot. Take for example, you provide travel services within a specific region (New York), and your website is listed under Travel > New York category then it will give boost to your rankings within New York region. However, the approval of your website listing depends upon the sleeping cycle of the editors. If an editor hasn’t gone to sleep then you can expect to see some miracles ( in 4-6 months ). Before you submit your link to DMOZ, make sure to follow their guidelines.The data from DMOZ is syndicated across several directories including Google directory http://directory.google.com/ , but Google might launch its own independent directory (similar to Yahoo directory: http://dir.yahoo.com/) in the near future..	+4-5/10
	- None
6) TRUST RANK GRANTED BY SEARCH ENGINES
Trust rank is the manual authority/weight which is given to any website and it does matter a lot in deciding SEO rankings of your website. Read more at http://blog.seohawk.com/page-rank-vs-trust-rank/	+ 9-10/10
	- None
7) TLD EXTENSION OF YOUR DOMAIN( ie edu, gov, us, ca, com, etc)
TLD extension of your domain can help you gain quick rankings on search engines. However, it is not possible to purchase an edu domain or .gov domain. If you have a .ca (Canada) TLD extension, then your domain will rank higher on Google.ca as compared to Google.com. Similarly other domains such as .com.au (Australia), .co.uk (United Kingdom, UK), domain.fr (France) will help your site to score quick rankings on their respective country specific search engines.	5-6/10 (on country specific search engines)
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NEGATIVE SEO RANKING FACTORS

1) 1) WEB SERVER NOT ACCESSIBLE
If your web site is not accessible or server is down on most of the occasions then you are gaining negative rankings.Other issues such as slow server response times can have negative impact on your rankings. Search engines have to crawl content within fraction of few seconds, and they cannot afford to wait 5-10 minutes if your web server responds slowly.	+ None
	-7 to -8/10
SEO Hawk Advice: Use a reliable Web Hosting provider
2) DUPLICATE CONTENT
Search Engines hate duplicate content, and if most of your website content is filtered out as duplicate then it will prove detrimental to SEO health of your website	+ None
	-9 to -10/10
SEO Hawk Advice: Dont use duplicate content. If you have inadvertently copied content which you found useful, then dont forget to add a link pointing back to the original document url.
3) EXTERNAL LINKS TO BAD NEIGHBOURS/ SPAMMY SITES
If your website has external links which are pointing to low quality websites/spammy websites/ or websites with duplicate content, then you are heading at DEAD-END	+ None
	-9 to -10/10
Special Note:On the other hand having quality external links helps to improve SEO rankings.
4) DUPLICATE TITLE/META TAGS ON SEVERAL PAGES
If your website has several pages with duplicate meta/title tags then it will lower your search engine rankings. Therefore your must ensure that most of your pages have unique TITLE / META tags.	+ None
	-3 to -10/10
SEO Hawk Advice: Also avoid internally duplicated content as well as duplicate meta tags
5) KEYWORD STUFFING
Artificial Keyword Stuffing is used in order to inflate keyword density for a particular set of targeted keywords. In reality it results in lower SEO rankings. Therefore keep your keyword density natural and abstain from artificial keyword stuffing aimed at particular set of keywords.	+ None
	-8 to -10/10
SEO Hawk Advice: Search Engines can easily detect artificial keyword stuffing aimed at particular competitive keywords.
6) LINK EXCHANGES
Search engines do not entertain websites which indulge heavily in link exchanges. However, if you do link exchange carefully with related business websites then it can help. However, most of the websites should avoid link exchanges.	+ None
	-8 to -10/10
Special Note:: Avoid Link Exchanges unless the other website owner is your business buddy
7) Inbound links from SPAM sites
Inbound links from SPAM websites could have negative impact on your TRUST RANK. However, there are cases where certain black hat SEO’s start indulging in FREE SPAM PROMOTION for their competitors. If there is no previous history of SPAM on your website, then search engines will simply ignore the negative spam link building. On the other hand, if certain elements of spam are included/visible on your website, and you have back links from spammy sites, then it could result in a penalty. Thumb Rule to avoid being penalized Case 1 : If your website has nothing to do with external links from SPAM Sites, then search engines will simply ignore them. If you can bring down rankings of genuine websites then every new spammy business website would have brought down rankings of existing websites within their business niche. Case 2: If your website has elements of SPAM present within the website and has a previous history of being associated with SPAMMY sites then you should put R.I.P banner on the homepage of your website.	+ None
	-8 to -10/10
Special Note: - There are some unfortunate webmasters s who think that having a back link from low page rank (PR 0) webpage is equivalent to having a back link from SPAM site. Your website’s Page Rank (Google Page Rank) has no relationship with the actual SEO rankings of your website. ( Refer to: http://www.seohawk.com/blog/page-rank-trust-rank-seo/)

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We do hope that this article will helped you in understanding search engines better. Following these basic rules you can help your website to achieve higher search engine rankings on Google, Yahoo and several other search engines

SEO Hawk provides affordable SEO services to help your site achieve better rankings on search engines. View some of our economical SEO ranking plans at: http://www.seohawk.com/seo_plans . Our SEO Optimization Services will help your business to achieve higher search engine rankings on Google/Yahoo and several other search engines.

Thanks for your stay
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Google has recently launched a new feature called SearchWiki. However, this feature gives an impression of a Bookmarking Site rather than a Search Engine. We recently observed a new feature while making a search on Google. This feature could be in the Beta testing phase and Google might roll-out this feature on Google worldwide soon.

Check out this following video and you will get to see SearchWiki feature of Google

Every single search result will show you listings with 3 image buttons as shown below:-

You will have the choice to move the search listing UP or DOWN. You will also get a chance to completely remove the listing from your search results. It will also allow you to add comments like whether you liked the result or not?.

This is quite similar to what we have been observing on Social Bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg and several others.

SEO Connection of SearchWiki
There are indications that Google might be using data such as Bounce Rates and Traffic logs of your website to decide actual rankings of your website. However, if this SearchWiki feature is used by Google to manually update search results then it will only open new doors for Black Hat SEO’s.

Some of the negative aspects of this feature are as given below:-

a) It could be used by Black Hat’s to pull down rankings of your competitor.
b) It could be used by your Black Hat’s SEO competitor to push you out of search result page for keywords.
d) It shows that Google is relying on a combination of automated algorithm and other data such as Bounce rates of your website, traffic analysis, and data from SearchWiki as well.

Further, this feature gives an impression of Google Social Bookmarking site rather than Google as a search engine. The problem of click fraud has been evident on Google for quite a long. There have been instances where black hat SEO’s exhaust daily PPC budget of their competitor’s website by clicking on their paid ads.

In a similar fashion, this feature can get exploited by Black Hat SEO’s in order to manipulate search engine results for their targeted keywords.

If Google is planning to use data from SearchWiki to decide future rankings of your site, then it will only create whole lot of complex issues related to Black Hat SEO in the near future.

I think this feature should be renamed as Googlicous rather than SearchWiki

google
marketing
Search Wiki

There are approximately 3 Billion mobile handsets worldwide and Google is trying its best to provide wide array of new features to help mobilephone users. If your mobile has GPS capabilities, then you can avail several useful services like Urbanspoon (for iPhone) and Google App.

Urbanspoon (similar to Google App) on the iPhone is part Magic 8 Ball, part slot machine. You shake your phone and it finds a good nearby restaurant for you. Keep shaking it until it comes back with something you want to try.

Check out Urbanspoon search demo on iPhone.

Therefore, in the next 1-2 years, Google will consistently focus on providing wide array of search data pertaining to any single location to mobile users. Say for example, if you are located in Bronx, New York you can simply use Google mobile search to locate a good nearby restaurant.

Google is also focusing on Hyperlocal search. The consumer who is makes a search for a particular keyword like “Museum”(without specifying location), should be able to access various museums located nearby and not countrywide or worldwide.

Google search results will get segregate for the mobile users searching for anything using their mobile handsets. The key focus will be local data or Hyperlocal data which will enable several offline businesses (pizza, fast-food joints, restaurants) to make their presence felt on mobile online search. It will also help mobile users to access useful services directly through their mobile search.

Let us see a live demo of Google mobile search on Blackberry

Google has recently launched Google App for iphone, which has a built in voice search capability. It is quite similar to Urbanspoon shake, but it has advance capabilities of making google search using your voice. You can directly speak your queries to Google Mobile App without even pushing any buttons. Further, you can do local searches without even specifying your location.

Therefore, local restaurants, small shop owners will try to ensure that their services show up on the top shake or on the top voice query of Google App.

Check out live demo of Google app below:-

Therefore Google is providing useful local search capabilities to mobile users and thus empowering mobile users to make local search directly through their mobile phones. The mobile search community can easily overshadow internet search community (those searching on Google.com, Yahoo.com etc) in the next few years. More and more mobiles are available with latest technologies like GPS. Therefore, it can open new doors of marketing for your business or locating your potential clients on mobile search.

Now, let us watch Matt Cutts while he discusses the past, present and future of Google Technologies. Some of the things which were discussed are as given below:-

- a quick story about his own interview at Google in 1999
- The scope of Mobile vs personal computers
- Hyperlocal data
- cloud storage servers and storing your data in the cloud

google
marketing

Subdomains and subfolders have their own individual benefits from business viewpoint. However, these day’s website owners and webmasters are more inclined towards SEO viewpoint rather than business viewpoint.

Whether I should use Subfolder or Subdomain for my Blog promotion?

If you are going for a blog, then using a sub-folder will yield better results. Search engines will distribute ranking power among other pages on the blog including home page. If your blog is popular and receives plenty of links, then your main domain will benefit from the activities on your blog.

When should I use Subdomain?

Subdomain can turn out as a powerful technique to host a blog or a different sub-site with a completely different business theme.

If your main site is about gaming, then you can create a Subdomain for educational purposes.

You can select Subdomains if you wish to start a new site (completely unrelated to your existing site), and you dont wish to purchase separate hosting or use some other domain name. If your main site is gaming.yoursite.com then you can create a completely different Subdomain as education.yoursite.com OR charity.yoursite.com.

If your Business Theme (for 2 different sections) is different then it is best to choose a Subdomain.

What are the Technical advantages (not related to SEO) of using Subdomain over subfolder?

One of the important things to note is that, if you use cookies/sessions in your site, they only work within one domain. Your subdomain cannot share your mainsite cookies or sessions (* just an example).

For security and privacy purposes, browsers will not transmit cookies to any site in a different domain from the one that set the cookie. They can be shared across subdomains and hosts within a domain, but not from one domain to another.

Subfolder or Subdomain: Which one is better from SEO perspective?

Subdomains have been exploited in the past. There have been several instances where one main site was hosting 1000 different Subdomains. Each of these Subdomains were specifically created in order to score higher rankings for any single targeted keyword.

Therefore, search engines have started to tighten their noose around Subdomains hosted within the main website hosting server. More or less, search engines are treating them just like a subfolder. Google has specifically tweaked its ranking algorithms so that pages from multiple subdomains have lower priority as compared to subfolders (for an existing high ranking parent website).

However, there are no fixed rules here. If you manage to make your Subdomain popular in terms of content and back links, then your Subdomain will score higher rankings. Take for example, Google uses Subdomains for different set of services, for example maps.google.com news.google.com and blogsearch.google.com. Each of these Subdomains have their own content and focus on different services.

If you have 100 Subdomains hosted on the main site, and each one of these Subdomains are informative and useful (i.e. unique content, no spamming, good back links etc) then you can score higher rankings for each one of these 100 Subdomains for their respective targeted keywords.

SEO Definition for Subdomain – Subdomain is treated as a separate website, which is “TECHNICALLY connected” with the main site (Google considers technical connection). However, you cannot pass link juice from Subdomain towards Mainsite or vice versa. If you intend to do so, then you have to interlink your Subdomain with your main website.

SEO Definition for Subfolder – Subfolder can be used as a Subdomain catering to different related topics. Subfolder is very much “SEO connected” to the main site and any activity (good or bad) on the subfolder can have positive or negative impact on your main site’s SEO rankings. If you are pasting duplicate content on your subfolders, then it will lower the search engine rankings of the main site. Therefore you need to be careful while using subfolders for different sections.

Whether I should choose Subdomain or Subfolder for a multiple language website?

This is one of the most important SEO issues. There are several websites which intend to create multiple language sites hosted on the same web hosting server. We would not delve into details, but we will go through a live SEO example to see whether search engines prefer subfolder or Subdomain when it comes to Multilanguage sites.

a) Log into Google.fr (FRANCE) and search for keyword “Microsoft’. You will stumble upon http://www.microsoft.com/fr/fr/
b) Similarly, log into Google.de (GERMANY) and search for same keyword “Microsoft”. You will come across http://www.microsoft.com/germany/ on the top #1 place.
c) Log into google.jp ( JAPAN) and search for keyword “Microsoft”. This time you will spot http://www.microsoft.com/JAPAN/.

Therefore you can clearly observe that search engines (both GOOGLE and YAHOO) can easily perceive your subfolders as separate sections catering to any particular language. A user searching from France, will find France subfolder on the top #1 position, whereas user searching from Germany for the same keyword will spot “Germany” subfolder on the top #1 position of Google or Yahoo search results.

Conclusion of the above exercise: You can easily choose subfolders for SEO and there are no negative impacts. Search engines can clearly distinguish between different language sections on the main website and can grant them separate rankings.

If you have some specific business preferences of using Subdomains for Multilanguage site, then you can host your content on different domains. For example yoursite.de for germany and yoursite.jp for Japan.

You can also create Subdomains for different language sites, for example de.yoursite.com or jp.yoursite.com

Therefore, choosing Subdomain is more inclined towards business preferences and personal preferences rather than SEO. You have to decide yourself, whether you should choose Subdomain or Subfolder. If you are concerned with technical issues of “cookies” and “sessions” then you have to see whether Subdomain or Subfolder will perform better. If you are concerned with SEO issues then choosing Subfolder will save your time. However, any activity (good or bad) on your subfolder can have positive or negative impacts on your search engine rankings. Therefore you must analyze different issues before selecting Subdomain or Subfolder.

I do hope you liked this article. . If you have any comments or questions, then do post them below.

seo

1) Keyword Density – You need to have targeted keyword appear somewhere on your website. Meta Title and the Meta Description are two most important html SEO tags. If you place your targeted keywords in these two tags, then it can help you improve your visibility. ( Meta Keywords tag is often ignored by Google and Yahoo.)

(Watch Useful Video by Matt.Cutts )



In case you are not able to place your keyword in these two html tags, then you can include your keyword within the content itself. However, make sure that your web page is related to the targeted keyword. Any attempts to score rankings for a non-related keyword will not help to improve your visibility on search engines.


Meta Description is a small summary of your entire webpage. The text within meta description tag is also shown to the users whenever they search on Google or Yahoo. If you manage to include your important keyword or keyphrase in the description tag, then it will help your potential visitors to locate your site directly through search engine results. Once your potential clients sees their targeted keyword within the meta title or description tag, then your chances of receiving potential click will be higher.


Your ideal keyword density should be ideally in between 3%-5%. There are no fixed rules here but search engines are looking for a natural pattern. Search engines like natural content and unique content. However, on certain occasions it is observed that users almost forget to include important keyphrases within their content. This makes it difficult for search engines to rank your site anywhere near the top pages of Google, Yahoo or MSN.


2) Back Links – The best way to gain back link is to produce useful content. If you are an active webmaster then you can simply start with a blog and add useful content on regular basis. You can further submit your blog to various bookmarking sites. This will help users to locate your site and they will come back to your site again and again.


Keyword density and back links are the two basic models of any search engine whether Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Google looks at various parameters like quality of your back links, rate at which you acquired back links, natural or artificial pattern in back linking, and several others. Whatever you do, just make sure that there are no artificial patterns in your optimization efforts. If you are submitting 1 article to 100 sites, Google will only count them as 1 or 2 (Max) and not 100.

Lots of people have misconceptions regarding search engines, especially Google.

Some of them are as given below:-

a) You need to manually submit your new website to Google – The best way is to let Google find your site through related websites. If you are still not satisfied with the results, then you can go and submit url to Google or Yahoo manually. In 99% cases, Google will automatically crawl new websites.
b) Adsense can help to improve visibility of your website – Adsense is just a piece of javascript which Google can clearly distinguish from other sections of the website. Therefore, adsense cannot influence your rankings in any way.

google

Check out some cool new features offered by Google adwords. These features will help you improve your PPC Marketing campaigns, and will give you a better control over your target audience.

1) Build your Adsense ads in just few minutes - Nov 2008

Google adwords is offering new display ad builder allows you to create professional-looking display ads in AdWords (Adsense) without needing to hire a designer or start from scratch. If you were planning to expand beyond your text ad campaigns, or if you’ve been looking for an easier way to build display ads, this tool can help.

This new feature will help you create customized display ads with your own text, images, and logo. You can also select your own colors and backgrounds. The tool can create ads to be displayed on all possible placements across the Google content network (Adsense), including video and game placements.

Read more : http://www.google.com/adwords/displayadbuilder/

2) Improved views for search and content network statistics - Sep 2008

This feature allows you to check your search and content network statistics on the summary pages of your account. Use the new Statistics drop-down to see separate search and content rows for each of your campaigns and ad groups, or you can filter your display to view only the statistics for the network you choose.

Learn more : https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93322

3) Demographic bidding available on selected sites in the Google content network - Sep 2008

Demographic bidding enables you to display your ads to specific gender and age segments on targeted websites in the Google content network or Google Adsense. This gives you a better control over who your audience is and greater insight into how your ads perform with those audiences.

google