Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

Cue Blocks is hiring!

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

CueBlocks is expanding and we are excited to have new team members join us soon. Currently we have 12 job openings in the following areas:

  • Web Developers: PHP/ MySQL, Magento, Ruby on Rails,  OsCommerce (Open Positions – 4)
  • Iphone/ Android Developers (Open Positions – 2)
  • Copywriters (Open Positions – 2)
  • Social Media Marketers (Open Positions – 2)
  • PPC & Analytics (Open Positions – 2)

For more information about the latest career job openings, visit http://www.cueblocks.com/careers.php

If you are interested to be part of CueBlocks and have a passion for any of the above areas, please send your latest CV and Motivation/Cover letter to careers@cueblocks.com

Please make sure that the email accompanying the CV and cover letter should clearly highlight which position you are interested in applying.

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Long Tail keywords: The Long and Short of It!

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

In the world of Internet, hits and misses drive business and the long & short of it is decided by  keywords. What SEO does for businesses, long-tail keywords do for conversions.

Long-tail keywords are more specific, catering to definitive searches, as opposed to generic keywords. For example, if you are looking for a track, it’s like mentioning the exact track lyrics rather than browsing the whole oeuvre of an artist by mentioning his name.

Starting with a new business and relying on high-search volume keywords is a risk proposition as reaching a rank amongst top-notch competitors is not an easy task.(Find out more on this here: http://www.seobook.com/why-it-makes-sense-target-longtail-keywords-first). It’s like getting lost in the traffic where zillions are already endeavoring to maintain their hard-earned positions.

Long Tailed Keywords – Far from the Generic Crowd

Long-tail keywords, although get you minimum traffic but certainly assure you a ranking. As mentioned by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief, Wired magazine, “If the 20th- century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses”.

The long-tail keyword Internet marketing strategy is all about those missed misses which aren’t tapped by the established high-ranking websites. Long-tails drive the traffic seeking a definitive search (Read: http://www.searchengineguide.com/matt-bailey/keyword-strategies-the-long-tail.php).


 As Internet specifically denotes abundance, long-tail keywords denote the scarcity that can be maneuvered toward conversions. This is just in accordance with the 80-20 rule (The Pareto Principle, the law of the vital few) which states that, “for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes”.

Conclusively, you climb the ladder with misses and chart the success route with less sought-after keywords but definitive conversions.

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Canonicalization – “A basic SEO tenet”

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

(Canoni-cali-zation) – Matt Cutts refers to it as the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages.

We come across websites with both www and non www versions of its URLS.

  • www.yourwebsite.com
  • yourwebsite.com/
  • www.yourwebsite.com/index.html
  • yourwebsite.com/home.asp

Most people would consider these the same URL but technically, all of these are different.  Matt, in his post on SEO advice: URL canonicalization, explains that a web server could return completely different content for all the URLs listed above.

If you have duplicate content on multiple webpages of your site, this can cause problems for search engines – specifically in determining which URL should be shown in the  search results. Canonical URL comes to rescue in such a scenario:

•    Canonicalization becomes helpful as it takes the duplicate pages and uses a 301 re-direct to point all versions to a single, “canonical” version of the content or web page.

•    Google recommends that you pick a “canonical URL”as the preferred version of the page. You can indicate your preference to Google in a number of ways. Google recommends them all (if you don’t indicate a canonical URL, Google will identify what it thinks is the best version).

What to do to make sure Google picks up the URL that you want it to pick:

•    You can choose a preferred URL and use it consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/. Instead, pick the URL you prefer and always use that format for your internal links. If your site has duplicate content on multiple pages, there is a high possibility this could affect your search engine ranking results. For example – the link information could get diluted in a case where few incoming links may point to one version of the URL and few links to another.

•    Matt further adds that if you want your default URL to be http://www.example.com/. You can make your webserver in a way so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/. Doing this will help Google know which URL you prefer to be canonical. If you have a site that changes often, for example you have dynamic content on site, a blog, etc. then adding a 301 redirect can be very useful.

Using the URL removal tool to remove domain.com –

If you remove one of the www vs. non-www hostnames, you can end up removing your whole domain for six months. You need to do a reinclusion request if URL removal tool removes your entire domain when you actually only wanted to remove the www or non-www version of your domain. A reinclusion request refers to mentioning that you removed your entire domain by accident using the URL removal tool and that you’d like it reincluded.

For more information on 301 re-directs see http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-URL-canonicalization/

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Bring on the Bing!!

Friday, June 19th, 2009

Microsoft Bing – The decision Engine

Bing is a greatly packaged replacement for the Live Search! It has a fancy and (indeed) a searcher friendly interface. The Bing team says that it lets you overcome information overload and helps you make decision faster and easier. Bing’s new features help the searcher save time and make an informed decision.

Microsoft recently published a PDF about Search Engine Optimization called Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters. The PDF primarily describes the user interface changes launched with Bing, and how those might impact site owners, but also touches on search engine optimization. Numerous researches carried out on how searchers read and use the search engine result pages have demonstrated a constant pattern.

The pattern has been defined as the “Golden Triangle pattern”. The Golden triangle pattern suggest that in a SERP containing a single threaded results for a query, the searchers generally scan the length of the first result and then they scan lesser amount of information for the second result and follow this ever decreasing pattern for seeking information until they mostly stop at the result # 5.

Studies also suggest that over 50% the searchers refine their search query by going back to the SERP, from a non-helpful SE result. In most cases they opt abandoning the result altogether!
The Bing interface design comes to the rescue! With categorized result pages and organized explore pane – quick tabs, related searches, search history contents of the explore pane, make it highly dynamic.

Result Type Improvements - Bing brings to you the standard “blue ink” exposing deep links within a website. When possible Bing also represents related information about the result such as, with books or movies, user ratings and links to reviews directly in the caption.

Best Match – top ranking result for any query is listed under the best match result.  A searcher can easily find related information in forms of deep links without having to go to the website and look for the information that he requires.

Instant Answers – These now offer more comprehensive information and richer results than the traditional result.

Caption improvements in Bing:

Document Preview – Document preview allows searchers to instantly preview the content from the deep link without having to go to the website.  All the searchers need to do is move the mouse pointer over the caption and they can preview a sample of the actual content on the page of the website instantly and make an informed decision about visiting the website or otherwise.

They say this helps increase qualified traffic, but some webmasters might  not want to expose the content present on the page and would like to have the visitors visit their site and get all the information that they are looking for. For them, Microsoft provides a way to opt-out of the feature.

Just add the following to the <head> section of each page:
<meta name=“msnbot”, content=“nopreview”>

Or generically for all robots:

<meta name=“robots”, content=“nopreview”>

If you don’t want this feature used on any page of the site, it might be easier to return the directive in the server HTTP header as follows:
x-robots-tag: nopreview

Flash Extraction – Microsoft says that Flash-based sites are responsible for 21% of all empty descriptions in their index. They say that Bing has implemented new technologies that can perform “limited data extraction” and has now been able to generate descriptions for one-third of those formerly empty tagged, flash based websites. Skip Flash introduction link in result feature on applicable flash based websites help the searcher get right to the content of the website.

Local Listings – It is the new Bing feature for local business searches.

With all these features that Bing offers its searchers, they say that a well done SEO expands opportunities with Bing!!

Download Bing–New Features For Webmasters.pdf and read more if you wanna Bing!

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Link Building Basics

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

What Is Link Building?

Link building is the process of creating inbound links to our own website. This can be done by reciprocal links, being listed in directories, yellow pages, etc. Link building is one of the important methods to make your site popular.

Link building (also known as link popularity building) plays a vital role in the field of Internet Marketing. The link building method for promoting websites is not only beneficial for search engine rankings, but more importantly, it is required for getting good quality traffic to the website. As far as SEO is concerned, link building is an important off-page optimization factor that affects organic rankings in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

It gets good results if it’s done in a professional manner and by interacting with good quality websites.

Types of Link building:

There are 3 basic link building methods:

1. One-Way Link Building – It is the process of receiving links from a website of similar interest. This is a one way link because of absence of any link connecting you back to the website.

2. Reciprocal Link Building – This is a two-way linking process where the two sites of similar neighborhood connect to each other by exchanging links. usually, reciprocal links are a result of an agreement between parties to share traffic and improve link popularity.

3. Three Way Link Building – It’s a form of link exchange which involves three websites.

Building Links: Why submit website to directories?

There are many advantages for a web site if it is linked from Web Directories:

- Your site will get good quality traffic.
- Search engines index your website quickly.
- Your website will get higher rankings on search engines if the directories or yellow pages are quality sites and are themselves linked with authoritative sites.

Merits of Link Building

Links for your site is one of the things that Google looks for to decide how important your site is, and its ranking. Not all links have equal value. What determines the value of the link is its relevancy to the page it is linked to.

1) Link Popularity Increases Your Pagerank (PR). Link Exchange is really helpful in increasing the page rank of our page. Page rank is something that is mainly based on a site’s link popularity.

2) Link Popularity Leads To Traffic. With high quality incoming links, your site will be seen as a valuable resource and through links, you’ll attract more eyes to your website.

3) Link Popularity creates trust between your site & the visitor. When a visitor comes across text links of your site on many different webpages, he or she is bound to think that you are a trusted name in your industry.

4) Link Building provides lot of financial assistance to you. In most cases, Link exchange leads to conversions i.e., buying the products you are selling, downloading your stuff, reading your content or clicking on the ads that you have on your site.

Still have questions? Feel free to contact us!

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Why Search Engines Give So Much Importance to Incoming Links?

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Link building acts as the backbone of SEO operations that helps in bringing quality web traffic to any website. In today’s competitive market with millions of websites trying to get ranked high in search engines, link building is not just an indulgence for a website, it’s an absolute necessity.

Search Engines learn about websites through incoming links. An incoming link from a very busy website might bring dozens or hundreds of visitors in a day. When a website receives links from related websites (websites of similar interests), it also brings traffic.

There are three factors of incoming links that search engines consider for ranking calculations:

● Quantity
● Relevance
● strength

Let’s take a quick look at each of these 3 factors.

Quantity: Too many links too fast with not enough variety. We can get it out of the way quickly. We are simply talking about the overall number of incoming links pointing to a particular website. This is sometimes known as the Link Popularity of a website.

Relevance: Relevance relates to how much the search engine thinks a particular website linking to yours is somehow similar to, or on the same theme as your own. For example, a website about “Insurance” would not be very relevant to a website about “Construction”, so a link from the “Insurance” website to the “Construction” website would score very poorly for relevance. On the other hand, a general website about “Architecture” would be considered relevant, and consequently a link from that website to “Construction” website would score very well on the relevance scale.

Strength: The Strength of an incoming link basically depends on the relevance and quantity of links pointing to the website providing that incoming link. In Google’s case, the overall strength of a webpage is known as its PageRank. That is a special Google term.

Search engines give more importance to incoming links when deciding what pages their automated robots will visit. If you don’t have any incoming links, a search engine will assume that it is a page with little or no value and you are not going to rank well anyway .

So, more incoming links = more traffic, and quicker and better search engine rankings. The more incoming links pointing to your website, the more your link popularity increases considering the quantity, relevance and strength of incoming links.

Of course, the more relevant an incoming link, the more credible your website appears.

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SEO Content Creation: Don’t forget the Users

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

When writing a copy for a website, most content writers emphasize on search engine parameters and conveniently forget the users, who would eventually read the copy, if it ranks well. Moreover, it will not leave your website much credibility and authenticity if you neglect the user or the experience that your copy may provide him or her.

A business is successful only if there is consistency in performance, specifically in terms of conversion rates, which depend on the user. Content creation for websites is a two-fold process, the result of which has to serve SEO as well as the users. In doing so, a copywriter should never forget the human aspect; the users. Users are potential customers that are to be reached through a copy and keywords are only mediators to reach them more effectively.

Communicability equals Usability
Copies created for SEO is usually optimized by infusing relevant keywords in it. However, when a write-up is stuffed with keywords, it loses its essence and meaning which in turn takes a very heavy toll on efficient communication with the user.

More keywords does not necessarily mean higher rankings. The course of business on Internet is determined by many factors of which content creation is one. These factors such as usability, link-ability and content creation are interdependent. One cannot depend on them in isolation.  Keywords provide a necessary channel for communication, which the write-up will induct and consequently will lead to links and conversions. So, do not make the mistake of forsaking content quality for keyword inclusion.

Content that is short, direct, precise and offers readily available information along with judicious  use of keywords, is perfect for both SEO as well as users.

Remember that keyword tools will only make you aware of the general thought process of your prospects. It is up to the content developer to appropriate them in the write-up so that clarity and quality of any write-up is not compromised.

Another significant point to remember is the position of the keywords. Having a keyword in the title and the subheading, gives out a very assuring message to the reader. It also enables your copy to stand out from the barrage of information available online.

The primary goal of SEO content creation is improving SEO results, which can be achieved by accommodating both the SEO and users’ perspective.

A brief but vital overview of the above information is mentioned below:

  • Do not Neglect users and user experience
  • Do not Stuff write-ups with keywords
  • Do not Compromise on the quality of content for keyword inclusion
  • Put the keywords in title and subheadings
  • For improved SEO results, cater to both search engine as well as user specific needs

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