Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

While the best way to get photos for your website is to simply take them yourself, eliminating any copyright issues, sometimes you need images that you just can’t supply yourself.  Fortunately, there are dozens of places online you can find good photos at – they just aren’t always on the front pages of the SERPs.

Royalty free is the way you want to go if at all possible. http://www.morguefile.com/ is a great place for photos; they call it the place built for creatives by creatives, and have the best reuse policies out there.

iStock is fabulous if you don’t mind paying a little – they have a great selection of one time pay, one time use photos that are very high quality.

Dreamstime is another pay per use photo site – their prices range from $1 to $10, and you can alter their vector images if desired.

EveryStockPhoto describes itself as a search engine for free photos. These come from many sources and are license-specific. Membership is free, without advertising.

Stockvault is another popular site, similar to iStock. You can download for commercial use for a small charge. StockXchng (SXC) is another with a great selection.

Flickr is the darling of many webmasters – they allow most usage from the Creative Commons section with a simple link back to give credit.

Whatever you do, follow the rules! No fun getting in trouble over a copyrighted image when there are so many free use ones out there!

All along, you have been working on your website’s SEO and round the year you have been struggling hard to drive organic traffic to your website like millions of other webmasters out their. Now it is time to shift gears and take on to a different plain to meet the holiday season.
With the holiday season round the corner, you need to start looking at additional ways of boosting your website’s traffic. Round the year, we have been complaining about the dropping sales levels as an aftermath of global recession. However, looking at last years sales trends we can say that despite recession, sales levels are bound to go up. If you want to make up for all the sales profit that you have lost round the year, this is the time to do it. Its time to drive some paid traffic to your website to garner the benefits of the holiday season. Do not wait till the last moment to launch your PPC campaigns because you need time to test your campaigns to test its success rates. If you launch your PPC campaigns in the last moment, you may not be able to leverage the maximum benefit out of it.

Online or search engine marketing is complex and you cannot take extremists views on any of the approach. Ultimately, your aim should be to win the race and taking extremist views on your website promotion and sticking only to organic traffic or only to paid traffic will not help you. You should learn to blend your efforts to gain maximum advantage of all the resources available to you.
If implemented well, with PPC you can supplement your website traffic with additional traffic and make yourself more visible to the internet community that is looking for your products. Start thinking about catchy holiday titles for your PPC campaigns. Have several ad text versions ready. When you implement PPC don’t try to drive traffic just to the home page, link your campaigns to specific service pages so that you will not lose a lot of visitors during website navigation. Get professional help on setting up your PPC campaigns if you are in experienced in this area. Time is of importance here and you cannot afford to waste any of it here.

If primary keywords for your website has very high level of competition, have your secondary list as well ready because you will be able to drive equally good amount of traffic through secondary keywords. So do yourself a favor and start working on your holiday traffic generation strategies. You will certainly not regret starting early. You will have to make extra serious efforts because this year you can expect a very high level of competition in all niches because all the business owners will be making vigorous marketing efforts.

As the holiday season is approaching, many websites will try to promote their businesses with attractive offers and discounts. Many companies are busy in getting their splash pages designed to announce their customers regarding their fabulous discounts and new products. Splash pages help websites protect the integrity of the website and at the same time it allows them to announce to their customers and visitors about the good things they have to offer. Though this is one of the best ways of promoting your holiday sales, you need to implement it very carefully so that it does not affect your website in any negative way.
If you are not careful with your splash page design, you can make your website unfriendly to the search engines. Splash pages are often developed using Flash and we know it already that Flash takes a long time to load and search though sophisticated they are look at flash pages with contempt. All along you may have used highly optimized pages for fast loading and when you suddenly through a heavy splash page, it is going to throw the search engine bots off balance.
You would certainly want your announcement page/splash page to be impressive but you can easily frustrate the holiday shopper if you don’t pay attention. Heavy splash pages not only will make your website unfriendly to search engines, they also become less user friendly. Holiday shoppers are impatient and they don’t have the time for your fancy splash page that is heavily laden with Flash content to load. So make it light, let it be something simple but at the same time attention grabbing. Never compromise on the usability of your website as this can affect your sales level. The last thing you would want is drop in the sales during holiday season. You can also lose your existing ranking because of the slow loading page that you have introduced with the intention of promoting your sales. This will not only affect your holiday sales but also your long terms sales chart. So think twice and review several times before you add your splash page to the website because you would certainly not want to make the search engines and the visitors unhappy during the holiday season when you are expecting the highest sales.
If your website and product are brand new, then it is best not to use splash pages, because you need a lot of retention power that normally comes with brand familiarity. So your splash page efforts may work against your own goals. Always take into consideration long term repercussions of your efforts because if something goes wrong, it will take a long time to bounce to your original status. It is best to discuss with your SEO company before you make your holiday promotion plans.

Joomla undoubtedly offers an excellent CMS solution. It is by far the most powerful CMS we have and it is very flexible in terms of getting it do what you exactly want and also in terms of getting the perfect design appeal. However, there is one common complaint that comes from Joomla users. Joomla has content duplication issues and is not search engine friendly.

What do we mean here? It simply means that the same content can be accessed through multiple URLs and for search engine bots; these are multiple versions of the same page. You will be able to see this clearly by making the following search in Google: “site:yourdomainname.com” you should replace yourdomainname.com with your website name. This will list the pages that are already in Google’s index and you will be able to see that the number of pages indexed by Google is much higher than the actual number of pages in your website. This is a clear indicator of duplicate pages in Google’s index.

You can over come this problem by taking a few simple precautions. Joomla comes with a number of built in tools and modules and we don’t need a number of built in features such as PDF button, print button, etc for a standard website. What Joomla does is to create a new page whenever you click the print button with the same content. This will not only be accessed by the users but also by search engine bots. You can conveniently remove the print button on your website and the same applies to the PDF button as well.

There are few other features that you can turn off in Joomla safely without affecting the functionality of your website and at the same time, work with the duplicate content issue. Few such options include, read more, linkable title, intro text, linkable section, linkable category all these things simply duplicates your content in multiple ways. This is not controlled by the SEF feature. When you choose the SEF feature, it just makes your URLs more reader friendly and search engine friendly. This feature alone does not make your website search engine friendly. There many other factors those contribute for the search engine friendliness of your website and one of them is avoiding duplicate content.

If you really need to have “Read more” button, create two pages with different URLs and link manually at the bottom of the page where you want to take your readers to more information. These finer aspects of Joomla optimization are often forgotten and websites get into hot waters unnecessarily. If used prudently, you can get the most out of your Joomla website.

Google doesn’t like it when you pay for links. It doesn’t matter if you are paying cold hard cash, trading favors or promising services – it’s all the same to them, and it’s all taboo – the rule is NO using paid links to give your rankings a boost!

This doesn’t mean you can’t buy links. Just make sure you no-follow such them, or use other methods to make sure  Google disregards them. Paid links in the right places can be valuable for driving traffic as long as Google doesn’t think you are trying to pull a fast one, and convince them to use this type of link to determine your site’s value.

However, there still is one area where inbound links can look a little gray hat. Links from blogs and social sites are increasingly valuable, so what is kosher? If people addicted to Digg see your information being Dugg all over and decide to link to you, that is their choice – no grey area at all. But what if you paid a consultant to do a review and post it to Digg?>

Matt Cutts says ‘Whenever you pay money to a social media consultant to try to show up on Digg, you are not paying for links. You are funding some creativity; you are sponsoring your page for some creativity.’

Well, Google might not mind, but Digg doesn’t like content submitted by such ‘media consultants’. Bad example perhaps – but this could still be relevant to other sites – people are paying media ‘gurus’ to run everything from Facebook to Twitter campaigns these days.

A noteworthy concern addresses the outright paying for a review on a social site or blog. Suppose I ask a blog owner to do a rockin’ review of my product or service. Well, I should no-follow any link the blog owner uses in his review, because I did pay for that one, but what about the (hopefully) hundreds of people who read the blog, check out my site and decide to link because of the superlative quality I have to offer?

I didn’t pay them.  Those links are as natural, and I don’t have to no-follow them; these people really truly are linking to me because they think I have something of value to offer. The fact that they found me through the blog review doesn’t count against me – it’s creative marketing.

So – nofollow any links you directly pay, barter, or bribe people for, but anything outside that or resulting from such activity is fair play.

Happy Linking!

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