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SEO strategies for 2012!

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Betrand

Categories: Google, SEO

2011 is the year of “Panda”, more than 10 updates happened and many of the large and small websites got hit by Panda effect. Google rolled out Panda to get rid of content farms who produce content at cheap cost and push to internet where no one is interested in reading those articles. Lot of start-ups mushroomed in last 2 years who just want to acquire content and push it to search engines and do some SEO to get their pages rank well, the days are gone now panda is a progressive algorithm and getting better and better everyday.

What is Panda?
Panda is ranking factor introduced by Google to get rid of junk websites from their index. It will not directly effect pagerank but will send out signals to Google’s master algorithm about the websites performance, quality and user behavior. It is something like out of 10 points if your website scores more than 6 or 7 points it indicates that the content in your website is not useful for the readers and the score will be calculated based on many factors like Manual reviews, user behavior, bounce rate, quality of the content, Social Media and speed of the website.

Here are some of the strategies recommended to be adopted in 2012 to avoid Panda effect:

Speed of the website:
Website loading speed will become the major factor in 2012 to rank better in search engine results, user’s have more choices on every topic/product nowadays and can’t wait more than 4 seconds to load the website which leads to huge bounce rate and automatically it effects your website rankings. Google introduced PageSpeed last year and given access for developers as well to develop products on top of it, it will give you recommendations for your website on how to load your website faster. Apart from PageSpeed you may also look at Pingdom load time analysis tool.

IBEE Solutions recommendations for increasing the speed of your website:

Host your website in India, Now IBEE Hosting is hosting all its customers websites in India, contact sales at 040-44254242 for more details.
Use CDN for hosting images and JS files or use public APIs for hosting JS files
leverage browser caching using .htaccess
Hire an experienced website designer / developer to audit your website

Website Design and Coding:
You may have multiple options or sources to get your website designed or developed but getting your website designed with professional web developer matters to Google, it is now not tolerating poor coding sites and bad navigation websites, this will lead to more bounce rate even though your website is related to those keywords. Having more bounce rate will indicate Google that your website visitors are not satisfied with the content on your website.

Social Media Strategy:
By just having a fan page in Facebook and twitter account you can’t get your website ranked well in Google, you need to engage more frequently with your Facebook page fans Google now started indexing Fan pages and its comments, the same applies for twitter as well. The more signals Google receive from Social Media the more your chance to increase your webpage authority.

Quality of the content:
Gone are the old days to hire a content writer and write some 250 words per article and push it to search engines with basic SEO efforts. Now Google is analyzing pages on the basis of how descriptive and narrative the content is published. An image or video describing the event/article will be plus to rank your article in search engines now. Panda somehow become very strong in identifying websites that grabs content and automate it, it banned many websites in last one year it is not advisable to use any plugins or custom to grab the content and push to search engines, it also identifies rewritten content as well so better be out of these old techniques and start producing genuine content with useful information.

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DKIM and SPF records means?

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Betrand

Categories: Security

Recently there is high growth in cyber attacks, companies like Sony, Samsung and TCS and even USA Government are the major victims. Here is an attempt to give you basic information about how to secure your outgoing emails from phishing and spoofing using simple techniques like creating DKIM and SPF records.

What is an DKIM record?

Google Apps facilitates you to include a digital signature in header of the mails which are being sent from your domain, this will allow the receivers of your mail to confirm whether the message has been truly sent from your domain without any modifications in between after verifying the domain signature.

This Google Apps digital signature complies to all the standards set by DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), before adding this signature to any outgoing mail it is essential that you generate a domain key which will be utilized by Google Apps to produce encrypted mail headers which are distinctive to your domain. Further, the mail recipients can also check on the source of mails by extracting the public key which has been updated by you in the DNS records for your domain.

If your domain already has a DMIK domain key, then another key has to be produced to use with Google Apps and the domain key for Google apps can be differentiated from other keys through selector prefix.

To enable the facility of adding DKIM signature to any outgoing mail:
1) Generate your domain key
2) Include public domain in DNS records of your domain
3) Turn on the validation

If there are number of domains related to your Google Apps accounts, each of the above specified steps have to used for each and every domain.

There are certain mail gateways like Postini which often modifies the mail by including a footer, which cancels the DKIM signature, you have to take care to stop the gateway server from changing the messages or switching off the DKIM authentication.

What does SPF record mean?

It is highly recommended to have SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record for your domain, which is a type of DNS record that categorizes the mail servers which are allowed to send mail in the interest of your domain.

The main idea of SPF record for your domain is to prevent the spammers from sending mails with fake from addresses on the domains. For the recipients to know if the message which is claiming to be from your domain through legal mail server, they simply have to refer to these SPF records.

If you create an SPF record for your domain where certain mail servers is given as authorized mail server for your domain. The recipient after receiving the mail from your domain, can verify with your domain SPF record to see if the message is valid which will be true only if the message is sent from a server that has been authorized mail server for your domain and if the mail is from any other server it will be immediately rejected considering it spam by the recipient’s mail server.

How to add DKIM and SPF records in DNS settings?

To generate domain key:

1) Login to the control panel of Google Apps Administrator

2) Click on “Advanced Tools” from the menu on top of the page

3) Select “Set up email authentication (DKIM)” from the Authenticate email section

4) Choose the domain name from drop down list for which the domain key has to be generated.

5) Select “Generate new record”

6) Fill in the text that has to be used as DKIM selector prefix which is google by default that can be modified based on the user’s choice.

7) Click Generate

Information will be displayed in the text box that will be useful to create DNS records to allow the recipients extract public domain key.

Adding Domain Key generated to DNS records for your domain:

1) Login to the administrator console which is given by your domain provider

2) Find the page from which DNS records can be updated

3) Use the name and value from Google apps control panel to create TXT record ,the information can be found in the authenticate email page from control panel of Google Apps.

4) Save the changes.

Creating SPF record for domain:

1) Login to your domain’s administrative console

2) Search for the page from where the DNS records can be updated for which you will need to allow advanced settings.

3) Use this text: v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all to create a .txt record

SPF record which use –all instead of ~all may give problems related to mail delivery.

4) Save the changes

For all the changes done to DNS records may take at least 48 hours to circulate through the internet.

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Why a website don’t get visitors even if it appears in search results?

Posted on April 17, 2011 by Betrand

Categories: Google, SEO

Tags: Golden Triangle, SEO, SEO services

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Most of the SEO professionals and companies who hire them think, that they have done a good job when their website appears in top ten search results for desired keywords but the truth is, even if your website appears in top ten search results there is no guarantee that you get more visitors for your website, this is because of the user click through behavior and how user’s eye scan the search results page.

According to the studies conducted by various UX statistical companies, the key location for the users eye on the Google search results page is like a triangle from the top left first result. This area is also referred as “Golden Triangle” in this area for most of the search queries you will see the results of top sponsored results, top organic results and for sometimes news results, shopping results, Google Places results for long tail keywords with location name in it.

Here is how the visibility reach for the top ten Google search results according to a survey conducted by Eye Tools:

Rank 1 – 100%
Rank 2 – 100%
Rank 3 – 100%
Rank 4 – 85%
Rank 5 – 60%
Rank 6 – 50%
Rank 7 – 50%
Rank 8 – 30%
Rank 9 – 30%
Rank 10 – 20%

If you observe the above rankings, top 3 positions have 100% click through rate (CTR) and for rank 3 and rank 6 the difference is almost 50%, so from this stats, you can understand that how users are accessing Google search results. If you see the image of Golden Triangle, you can observe that the Ads appearing on the right hand side having less impact, only the top one AD is getting more clicks, the difference between top sponsored ad and bottom is almost 90%, so it is better to be in first three places in sponsored listing as well to get more attention.

So instead of just being in top ten rankings, try to be in top three rankings for your desired keywords to achieve better results. For SEO Services contact us at +91-40-44254242 or mail to info@ibeesolutions.com

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What is pubsubhubbub?

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Betrand

Categories: Google, SEO

Tags: Plagiarism, pubsubhubbub

For me “pubsubhubbub” is a weired name to hear but Google want to name this tool like this to help publishers to fight against plagiarism and ping Google bots whenever you update your blog. First let me explain technically about this new tool from Google, pubsubhubbub is a simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS.

This tool is useful for both publishers and subscribers who subscribe to any blog or website through RSS or Atom. Publishers upon configuring this tool in their blog or website, whenever they add new content it will be updated to Google bots and the important benefit is when the publisher updates the content, it will update Google bots and RSS/Atom feeds, and with this functionality feed subscribers will be updated immediately after the blog post is updated along with time and date.

Using this tool Publishers can fight against plagiarism, for example if website A is generating unique and quality content regularly and if website B copies and post it in his website and tweak the date and time to the time before website A posts the content. When the Google bot crawls, it identifies website B’s content as unique and punish website A who is the original owner of the content over the time. By using this tool a publisher like website A can update Google bots on real time and avoid plagiarism. Additionally when you create a post if you update into social media, there is a chance of someone who can share it and Google will also consider it as one of the factor and recheck the originality of the content.

For SEO Services and Social Media Marketing call us at +91-40-44254242 or mail to info@ibeehosting.com

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What is Google’s +1 Button?

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Betrand

Categories: General News, Google, SEO

Tags: +1 Button, Google +1

Google took a great decision to compete with Social Media giants like Facebook and Twitter. Google introducing +1 Button which is something in the similar lines of Facebook “Like” button. +1 Button will soon appear beside to search results and Google Adwords Advertisements. By clicking on this button, you can see how many of your friends liked this website/content/page, it will also inform to your friends if you share a link online.

This new feature is expected to be online in couple of months. Webmasters and publishers can add this button to their websites to promote their content/website socially same like Facebook Like option, The same feature is also available for advertisers on Google using Google Adwords program. Google informed that the data they gather using this feature will not influence the search results but they said that they will add this into search ranking factors in future. After the issue with Buzz privacy policies, Google is cautious in releasing its social media tools.

Click here to sign for +1 Button

Here is the video explaining how this +1Button works:

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Automatically changing Page’s title into local language is considered as Cloaking?

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Betrand

Categories: Google, SEO

Tags: Cloaking, SEO

Cloaking is one of the search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content displayed to the user varies from the one showed to search engine or googlebot. Google uses geolocation, where it displays the target audience with the content related to their location that is assessed of the user based on the IP address of the user or through the cookies that have been stored.

It can be said that geolocation is not similar to cloaking if it does not provide special services to googlebot. Googlebot is Google software which crawls through various web documents to gather its own index for the search engine. For now, Googlebot only goes through US based IP address where the US visitor will search for the page and the content will be similar to that displayed for Googlebot.

Geolocation is fine until it only displays the content based on the physical location of the visitor, but it will be a matter of concern if the program has some coding where some special services are offered for Googlebot based on the user agent or IP address. If this is not the case then there is nothing to worry since geolocation will treat all the visitors with equal importance and show the same content to everyone without any discrimination.

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How Important is HTML validation in SEO Ranking?

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Betrand

Categories: SEO

Currently, there are numerous websites which have invalid code but still work fine thankfully due to the latest browsers that automatically correct most of the minor errors in the bad code. It can be said that it is not compulsory for the code to be perfect however it should also not have grammatical errors which will damage the original functioning of the website.

Therefore it still makes sense in having a list of websites with bad code which can be rectified by the browsers that have started recognizing the latest html version though not entirely but fair amount enough to correct specific tiny things in the code. These minute flaws in the code can be mostly because of the different html editors used by the users and also the hand coding done by them.

If there are serious things which lead to drastic errors in the functioning of a website, then Google would be sure to detect it and point to the users. If Google really considers even the minor code errors then it can be said that there would be lot of websites which can be left out. Only because the search engine understands what the page is all about hence it does not consider the grammatical errors.

Google is capable of understanding and dealing with the pages that are grammatically correct even though there are small errors in the page, it also can different between casual pages and useful ones which is the main reason that there are still a large list of web pages displayed by the search engine even if their code has minor flaws.

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Is it necessary to have Keywords in the domain name?

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Betrand

Categories: Domain-Names, SEO

There are some of the factors that can help people to come to a decision on suitable domain name and will be helpful for individuals who are confused about keyword based domain names and domains names without keywords. These will be useful to people who are getting registered for a new domain name and trying to find a name to compete with other names existing which are listed in top results of the search engines.

There are a couple of strategies that can help an individual which are given below:

The first method would be to choose domain names with branded words which can be easily remembered without having any keyword in the name.
The second method would be to choose domain names strictly using the keywords

There is always a conflict between the choices of domain names with keywords or branded domain names because of the misconception that it is impossible to see success if the domain names do not have keywords, however breaking this myth there are several domain names like zynga, facebook, twitter and others which have reached the heights of success without having any keywords in their domain names.

The advantage of branded domain names is that they can be easily recalled whenever needed and the benefit of keyword based domain names is that there is every possibility that there might be a similarity between the keyword in domain name and business names. The most important factor which plays significant role in the domain names is that it is entirely up to the interest of the domain owner to decide on domain names and also the goals they plan to achieve through their website.

One disadvantage of having keywords in domain names is that there is every possibility that there might be n number of domain names with same keywords, hence it might be suggested to go with unique branded domain names. There are often complaints from the domain names registrars that keywords in domain names are giving more priority than branded names which might at times be a cause of trouble for individuals who desire to have unique domain names.

Hence measures are being taken to modify the algorithm creating equilibrium between branded domain names and keywords based domain names, also making efforts to nullify the rule specifying that the domain names need to have keywords for sure.

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Is article marketing suggestible as an SEO Strategy?

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Betrand

Categories: SEO

Tags: Article Marketing, SEO, SEO Strategy

The general method followed in article marketing is that a content writer will write an article with a link provided at the bottom of the article with the expectation that there are other people out there who will duplicate their original content of the article which will result in the flow of links to their website.

However, the first that has to be noticed when it comes to republishing these articles is that only the sites which are not of better quality will choose to do so. Even if there are some better sites opting to go with rewriting of the original content, the quality of rewritten article will be degraded since there will be a limit on the number of words to be used while writing the article. This restriction on the article content will force the duplicator to limit their innovativeness and only duplicate the existing content instead of writing the original content or even at times the anchor text might be copied.

When someone looks for best quality of the business for their website, they would prefer to go with unique content that has natural links and social media marketing rather than article marketing which includes the person to go in search of article banks which readily provide huge collection of articles which can be rewritten and used as per the choice of the person.

Considering the search engines choices and general public demands it might come into notice that people do not greatly choose to go with article marketing as one of the best SEO strategy.

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