When we started the optimization we found out that we were seriously lacking in these keywords. After following those steps I can see my rankings improving. Currently for the keyword “gimp tutorial” I am ranking 8^th in Google and for the keyword “gimp tutorials” I am ranking 11^th rank. My ultimate goal is to teach in the top 5 for these keywords, but again as I told with search engine lots of patience is required so I am just waiting.

What did I do to come into the first page. Since my niche is gimp tutorials, the best thing to do for me was to contact the gimp.org webmaster and ask him for an link inclusion. It does require some luck here as getting linked by those websites are not easy. But considering the quality and the service to them they gave a link back. This was a big boost to my SEO campaign form ghuj. I have also contacted other webmasters of other similar websites to link back to me. Just waiting for there reply, if they do. I also did a directory submission service for my site ghuj.com, submitted my site to over 1000 directories. It will take some time for Google to index those pages. I am excited for the next Google Page rank update, I am expecting at least a pr 5 or may be a 6, anything above that would be great.

What is important to consider in this post is:

• Ask famous/successful websites in your niche to link back to you.
• Submit your website to directories. It is very important to do it in properly i.e. under right category etc. ( You can contact me for this at info (@) idigitalcore.com)
• Have patience, search engines take time to update itself as it has to update millions and zillions of website, so you are in queue.

What’s next ?

It is time to take next step in to search engine optimization. It is a well known fact that Google loves blogs. So now I am considering maintaining a blog at ghuj.com where I will regularly post latest happening in GIMP. This will help me generate new pages and keep my site active. Once the website start generating some traffic I may consider starting a forum. Untill then happy optimization.

]]> http://www.jeba.in/posts/seo-for-beginners-the-results/feed/ 0 http://www.jeba.in/posts/building-a-sitemap-for-wordpress/ http://www.jeba.in/posts/building-a-sitemap-for-wordpress/#comments Sun, 09 Sep 2007 04:54:45 +0000 Allwin Samuel Jeba http://www.jeba.in/posts/building-a-sitemap-for-wordpress/

In a previous post regarding SEO,one of my blog reader Ravikant had pointed out that I missed sitemaps. Sitemaps are very essential part of your website. Sitemaps are nothing but a page that links to all the contents/sections of your website.

Why sitemaps ?

Usually when it comes SEO we need to establish a balance both the visitors and the search engine bots. So, sometimes we compromise on design to make it search engine friendly or sometimes we need such designs for our users to make them comfortable on the website at the cost of search engine. So a perfect balance must be maintained as both search engine and visitors matters to us the most. But fortunately with sitemap it serves both i.e. the visitors and search engine perfectly.

• It helps the user to understand your website navigation structure.If he gets lost,he can follow the sitemap to browse through the website.
• It helps the search engine by listing all the links on a single page, this way it becomes easier for the search engine to index our pages by visiting these links.

After having a sitemap on your blog you will find out that users are staying on your blog for a longer duration by reading more contents. The chances of your website being bookmarked increases, because when he see’s the sitemap he finds many new articles and contents which he never knew existed. Not many of the visitors will explore through your monthly archive. Sitemap provides a shorter and a quicker way to explore the site contents.

With search engine you will give it an opportunity to explorer and index the pages which it could not index for some reason, simple reason being it never found it. The ultimate goal of SEO is to get maximum pages of your website indexed by the search engine.

Installing sitemaps

I found this really interesting wordpress plugin that automatically generates the sitemap as your keep on updating your blog. You can find this plugin here. You can see my site’s sitemap here.

This is from there website

This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Upload the plugin to your wordpress plugin directory and activate the plugin in your admin panel. Once that is done go to options>sitemap plugin and set your preferences. If you are using permalink enter the text as sitemap.

Go to create new page select code and insert <!– ddsitemapgen –> into the page and give the page title as sitemap and save the page. You can find more insturctions on installation of this plugin at authors website.

This is what Google has to say:

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Link exchange and reciprocal links schemes (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest. In addition, submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

My Comments:

As a webmaster of a website we should learn to look beyond Google. Google does mean a lot of thing but it is not everything. Apart from the alteration of Pagerank ,I recommend you to read why Google is against paid links which I blogged sometimes back. Google expects us to submit our websites to Yahoo! Directory which costs us $300 and to DMOZ (you will grow old and die by the time (if) they approve you). So I recommend do not be bother about Google, if it strictly starts implementing this policy many non link selling website will be affected and there will be major changes in the search engine results.

Anyways lets get back to our SEO for website promotion, since Google says it may penalize websites we will try to avoid link building process and try alternatives to generate traffic for our websites.

Advertisement:

To promote your website the most important thing to consider is your budget. It is better if you have good budget, but if you are tight on your budget I consider you should get some free advertisement.

Social Bookmarking Websites:

You have to be exceptionally well if you want to make it to the front page of website for eg.Digg. But people can actually buy there way up. It is not the right way to do it, but it is a good alternative to get lots of traffic to your website.

Web directories:

Web directories are also a good way to build your links. There are thousands of directories out there where you can submit your links. Previously I wrote a post for directory owners, on how they can earn money from directory. As a webmaster you can buy these featured links to be placed above the rest of the websites in the category, it will help you get some traffic to your website. But directories can generate a lot of link backs, which seems ok to Google. Currently I am offering web directory submission service myself. You can contact me on [info [at] idigitalcore.com] for more info.

Packages Available:

Starters pack:

• 50 Directory Submission – $3

Directory Submissions without Excel Report Sheet

• 100 Directory Submissions – $5
• 200 Directory Submissions – $9
• 300 Directory Submissions – $14
• 400 Directory Submissions – $19
• 500 Directory Submissions – $24
• 1000 Directory Submissions – $49

Directory Submissions with Excel Report Sheet ( Consists of the Directory List sorted by Page Rank)

• 100 Directory Submissions – $9
• 200 Directory Submissions – $14
• 300 Directory Submissions – $19
• 400 Directory Submissions – $24
• 500 Directory Submissions +50 Directories Free = 550 Directories – $29
• 1000 Directory Submissions + 100 Directories Free (WOW) = 1100 – $54

Directory Submissions with Screen shot and Excel Reports Sheet ( Consists of the Directory List sorted by Page Rank)

• 100 Directory Submissions – $19
• 200 Directory Submissions – $29
• 300 Directory Submissions – $39
• 400 Directory Submissions – $49
• 500 Directory Submissions +50 Directories Free = 550 Directories-$ 59
• 1000 Directory Submissions + 100 Directories Free (WOW) = 1100 – $79

Article Submission:

You can also write articles regarding your website and submit it across various Article directories. You can find the list of free article directory at Directory critic.

For my website ghuj.com I have bought around 700 article submissions across various blogs and currently doing link building using directory submission. I am going to submit Ghuj.com to all the directories I have in my list.

META Tag:

It is time to observe the code. I opened the code and found that GHUJ.COM doesn’t have the meta tag. Meta tags are considered important in SEO because they tell the search engine about the website. In Meta we have two important fields the Meta keyword and the Meta Description.
Meta Description: Describe in brief about your website, keep it under 30 words.
Meta Keywords: Keep around 10 keywords.
Here is the TAG that I chose for GHUJ.COM

<META name=”description” content=”The Gimp tutorials for newbie’s and advanced users. “>
<meta name=’keywords’ content=’the gimp, tutorial, tutorials, gimp tutorials, gimp download, gimp windows, gimp brushes, gimp mac’>

Check out your competitor’s website for this description, do not copy the exact code instead you can modify it to suit your website.
TITLE Tag:

Titles are very important in SEO, Google searches for keywords in titles. So we must carefully write a page title for our webpage. Do not include more than 3 keywords in the title, else Google may consider it as spamming. Make sure you use the title depending upon the content of the page. Do not use the same title for all the pages.
Keep you code clean
If you have Javascripts in your header I recommend moving them into separate files. When Google bot visits your site and starts the process of indexing it may enter an infinite loop because of some JavaScript so after sometimes it times out and doesn’t index the file it may even blackmark the page so it may not waste it’s time again in the same page. So moving your JavaScripts to a external .js file is a good practice. Validate your pages at http://validator.w3.org/
IMG TAG (Image Tag):

In a previous post I have mentioned how to optimize your images for search engines. I recommend you do a quick read before we proceed.

HEADING TAGS:

Make proper use of the <H> tag, Mark your headings with <H1> Tags . Instead of the <b> tag use <strong>. Use the <p> tag to split up the contents into new paragraphs. To say it straight, if you have used a WYSIWYG editor go through the code all over again and make necessary changes.

Write Quality/Unique Contents:

This is the most important step in SEO, quality/unique contents gets natural links and perform better in search engines. The key is to write more and more pages, the more pages you write the more they are indexed and the more is your chances of being found. Never stop writing articles related to your niche as this keeps the site updated and Google likes fresh contents. This is why SEO experts recommend to start a blog for your website.

Let me summarize all the steps :

• Include a proper Meta Tag.
• Rework on your Title Tag.
• Clean up your code/validate your code.
• Rework on your Image Tags.
• Update your site regularly.

Now our website is ready for the search engine. The next step is to promote our website, which I will be covering tomorrow. Until then happy optimizing.

1. gimp tutorial
2. gimp download
3. the gimp
4. gimp windows
5. gimp brushes
6. gimp mac

Now I compared these top 5 keywords to choose one main keyword. Rest of the keyword will be supporting keywords. To compare these keywords I used Google Trends. It gives you the comparisons depending upon search volumes across various countries and sorted by month, year. I chose the region to be across the word and year to be 2007. You see the live comparisons here.
Here is the screenshot.

• Gimp Tutorials – 17th Rank
• Gimp Download – Not in top 50
• The Gimp – Not in top 50
• Gimp Windows – Not in top 50
• Gimp Brushes – Not in top 50
• Gimp Mac – Not in top 50

We can now see we are not performing well in the search engine for our niche. Tomorrow I will do onsite optimization to include these keywords and concentrate to make our page more Search Engine friendly.

Finding the Right Keywords:

Find the right keywords requires you to have a good knowledge of your niche. Experience in your niche can help you sort out premium keywords. If you are new to niche do not fear, we have tools that do the work for us. We will use both Google and Yahoo to find the keywords. After all we are optimizing our websites for these two major search engines.

• http://www.ovtd.com (Overture Keyword Suggestion) – Yahoo
• https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal (Google Adwords) – Google

Using the Found Keywords:

After we have done searching our keyword, it is time to implement these keywords to rank better in search engines. To implement these keywords you need to re write your website content, since the keywords are not in proper English we need to carefully write our content to fit these keywords. It is important not to overstuff the keywords else it may back fire you. Spread your keywords across paragraphs with a maximum of 2-3 keywords per paragraph.

After writing the content it is time to interlink these keywords by anchor. Use the keyword as anchor text. If you have chosen 3 keywords write 3 pages of related article to that keyword. It is very important to keep these contents in human readable form. Consider the Search Engine spider as just another human visitor.

Next step is to get external websites to link your website. This is the toughest part and there is a complete business running with this very concept. There are different ways to get link to your websites they are

• Write quality articles/contents/tools and get genuine links.
• Buy links from websites related to your niche.
• Getting links by doing link exchange, you scratch there back and they scratch yours.
• Submitting to Web Directories and article Submission websites.

To do SEO it requires lots of your time and patience. Tomorrow I will take my site www.ghuj.com and optimize it to move up the rankings in search engines.

1. Google Toolbar

Google Toolbar is a neat tool from Google that helps you search Google with a single click of the button. Firefox already has Google Search built in by default so why we need to download the toolbar seperately, it is because the toolbar lets us check the PageRank, Backward Links etc. You can also access all Google products with a click of a button in the toolbar.

Download

2. Alexa Toolbar

Alexa Toolbar helps us to judge the traffic of a website. Many marketing company judge a websites quality using the Alexa rating. Alexa is a very rude way to judge a websites traffic. Alexa shows the ranking based on the toolbar installed by there users. But the whole webmaster community judges your website by Alexa so this is a must have toolbar.

3. SEO for Firefox

SEO for FF is a very handy extension. As you search in Google it will displays many important information regarding the website. Find out what it offers in the feature list below. Pulls useful market research data right into Google’s and Yahoo!’s search results.

• PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority.
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
• Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
• .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
• .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
• .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
• Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
• Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
• Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
• dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
• WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

4. Web Developer

Web Developer extension adds a menu and a Toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. Using this extension you can quickly access the sites css, forms, images etc. of any website. Very handly tool for webmasters, a must have.

5. Rank Quest

RankQuest helps you to carry out your daily SEO right from the browser. It has almost all the features a SEO analyst can ask for. It has Page validation, Content Tool, Meta Tool, SEO tool, SEM tools and more. This has to be my personal favorite tool.

Wikipedia defines it as:

Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes.

The concept of “Web 2.0″ began with a conference session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. To a general user, web 2.0 is a highly interactive, very attractive, user friendly web application. In the initial period of Web 2.0 it was defined with the help of following example.

In todays date web 2.0 means much more than that. Web 2.0 has changed the way websites are designed, most of the web 2.0 websites are completely built on css and they host some really crispy, shiny vector images.

Recently SEOmoz arranged a review all the web 2.0 websites and chose the best among them. Here are the websites were best in there category.

Blog Guides

Bookmarking

Books

Business

Communication

You can visit SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 Awards for the complete list. One thing to notice here is Google leads with maximum gold, followed by Yahoo! . Couldn’t find Microsoft anywhere lol. The list of web 2.0 websites are only increasing daily. One of my fellow blogger blogs regarding the latest web 2.0 happening.

Web directories are a listing of websites which are submitted by the webmasters. A directory are mainly categorised into two types A general directory and a niche directory. A general directory has lots of sections and subsections where all the indexed websites are categorized. A niche based directory is a directory which is based on a special category for eg. Travel, Food, etc.

Free directory or Paid directory

Free directories are good if you are planning to index a lots of website and earn via advertisements. But in a paid directory you can charge webmasters for listing there websites. A directory is considered successful if it manages to sell paid listings. Making webmasters to pay up for listing is tough, but if your directory is worth it will rain money for you.

Set up a Web Directory

To set up a directory we must choose the best directory software which suits our need. The market leader in directory software is PHP Link Directory (phpld). The current available version of phpld is 3.2 (paid version) the older version PHPLD2 is available for free download. To install this software you need a php server with mysql for database. Installing is straight forward. In the cpanel create a new user, new database and make the user use the database. Upload all the files in the archive to the / (root) of the server if you want to install it on the domain or you can install it under a folder like www.something.com/directory/ . Once uploaded point the browser to /install and the installation will begin input the required details and your directory is up and running. You can also choose a variety of themes to match your taste. You can find many phpLD themes here.

Once your directory is up and running you can add new categories and sub categories from the administrator panel of the web directory. Now your directory is ready. It is now time to promote your web directory.

Promoting a Web Directory

This part is the most essential part as it will determine the success or failure of your directory.

• Announce the directory in all major webmaster forums ( Digital Point, Sitepoint,V7N , Directory Owners).
• Buy paid links at other popular paid link directory.
• Buy ad links on other directories.
• Keep your directory links as your signature in forums.
• Do link exchange with other web directories.
• Submit your directory to other directories, directories of directories.
• Submit your directory to DMOZ.org
• Enable SEO friendly urls for your directory.

Managing a Web Directory
This is probably the most important thing to be considered, ” People buy link only if it is worth “. It doesn’t matter if you have the best looking directory on the web. Over a period of time you will find out that lots of useless, MFA (Made For Adsense), porn, drugs, SPAM, illegal websites being submitted. Under no condition you must accept them even if they are PAID. No webmaster wants to see there website listed next to an illegal website.

Another important thing to notice is over a period of time your directory should get stronger in terms of number of incoming links and quality of website indexed. This will help you get higher search engine ranking and a good PR (Page Rank). Most of the time it is on the basis of Page Rank a directory is compared. Higher PR directory get more paid listings.

Setting the Price

It is very important to set up the right pricing for the featured listings. If it is too high you are over priced and if it is too less you are not worth it. In the beginning price it around $4.95 for one year. Keep the free links open. Once you get a PR 4 raise it to $10. As you reach PR6 you can charge around $25-$30. Again the price depend on how brand your directory. By default phpLD accepts Paypal. Paypal also happens to be the most preferred way for making payment in the webmasters world. I recommend you to have a paypal account as it will be useful to you at some point of time even if you are not using ebay. Sign up for Paypal.

Conclusion

Running a successful directory takes lots of commitment, time, dedication and patience. If you planning to get rich over night running a directory then surely it is not for you. Take your time, give directory its time. Brand the directory, make your directory heard in webmaster forums (don’t over do it, else you get banned for spamming).

Other articles in Making money online Series

• Show me the money – Graphic / Web Designing
• Making money from Social Networking (Orkut)

Search Engine Optimization is very important after we are finished with our website. SEO helps our website to be better indexed by the search engine. Most of the time we concentrate on the content of the website for optimization and completely ignore Images which are also an important part. In this article we learn how to optimize a website for Image Search Engines like Google Image Search.

Let’s see how to do it. Selecting a good filename for the image is a good SEO practice. Select a name that suits the content of the website. For eg never choose a filename for the image like image1.gif, image2.gif etc instead use the name as (image-seo.gif) site-content.gif . This makes the image make more sense for the search engine bots. Donot use white space inbetween the two words of file name i.e. image seo.gif as this converts as image%20seo.gif.

Using the alt attribute tag is also very important. Alt attribute was originally developed to display alternate to the image i.e if the image doesn’t load on the browser the alt text loads explaining what image was supposed to be there. We can use the alt attribute for our advantage as we use it for our seo. The Alt attribute is the best place to hide your typos. (Typos are nothing but spelling mistake of the words that usually people make while searching). You also put some keywords into the alt attribute. Again never overstuff your keywords as it may do more harm.

That is it we are done. There are just two steps in this article that can give amazing results.