Someone said, “You’re not a true SEO until you’ve been banned at least once!” Of course, I do not intend to say that every SEO guy should get banned. I know it sucks. But sometimes it helps to understand the finer lines when your site is banned.

Search engine penalties and banning are not the topics that are discussed frequently by webmasters, except those who are proud to call themselves blackhat. But many times, I have seen people getting confused with low SERP rankings and banning. Just because your site is not ranking in Google for a certain keyword(s), which was a traffic puller earlier, does not necessarily mean that your site has been banned.

Remember, Google is CRAZY! It is extremely choosy about the quality (and quantity) of your links. You can try an exercise to believe this. Try searching for your backlinks using Yahoo Site Explorer and the link:http://sitename.com command in Google. What do you see? I am sure you got my point now.

Sometimes, it is very difficult to determine, whether a site has been banned, penalized or sandboxed (in case of Google). Let’s see them in detail.

When does Google ban a site?

1. You don’t follow their guidelines.
2. You get involved in link farms.
3. Your site is screwed up. This happens when you neglect the code to content ratio and keep adding a number of scripts to your site.
4. You have a huge number of affiliate links / paid links on your site.

When does Google penalize a site?

1. You really mess with some of their serious guidelines.
2. You keep using the same anchor text for linking to a particular page.
3. The keyword density for certain keyword(s) remains on a higher end for all the pages of your website.

When does Google sandbox a site?

Though webmasters have different opinions about the existence of Google Sandbox Effect, but assuming that it exists, here are a few things why Google will sandbox a site.

1. You caught their attention due to your black/grey hat SEO techniques.
2. Your site is new but yet attracting huge number of inbound links.
3. The links to your site are from a bad neighborhood.

It is very important to know whether you have been banned, penalized or sandboxed by Google. If you are banned, you can opt for a reinclusion request or just move on and forget the site. If your site is being penalized, then you are being monitored by Google and every action of your’s either helps in rectifying the penalty or pushes you deeper into the banned zone. But if your site is sandboxed, then the best option for you is to keep your site in good shape. Be careful with the content of your site and avoid any black/grey SEO techniques. Within a short span of time, your site will be out of the sandbox if you keep it clean.

Conclusion: Don’t jump to conclusions by merely touching waters from the surface. Go deeper and find the root cause and work towards it. This will not only focus your efforts in the right direction but will also help in giving your web site ranking.

You might have heard about optimizing a website or a blog for search engines so that they give you quality traffic for relevant keywords. Often referred as Search Engine Optimization or SEO, this is a very demanding process for any web-entity today. The importance of search engines and their role in promoting your brand cannot be denied.

But just like you optimize your website or blog which consists of some code, it is also very necessary to optimize the images on your site. Whether you use specific images, say like logo(s) of your products or use generic images to denote your operational industry, all of them need optimization.

Why do Images need SEO?

For various reasons, like:

• Search engine crawlers cannot understand anything other than text, so it is important to tell them what an image denotes by using an ALT tag.
• When the crawlers see the ALT tag, they are better able to derive intelligence from the content of your site, giving you a better chance to achieve  Search Engine rankings.
• Many times people use the image search to find images, and with proper optimization of your images, you stand a good chance to appear in the image search results.
• Decreases the Code to Content ratio and guarantees a good standing for relevant keywords.

How do I optimize images for Search Engines?

Actually, its very simple. With a little knowledge of HTML, you can easily optimize the images of your site. Place this inside the image tag:

<img src=”image.gif” alt=”The text that you wish to use” />

You can add relevant image location and text in the alt field so that the text is assigned to that image. This will tell the search engines what that image refers to.

If you are using WordPress for your site/blog, SEO Friendly Images Plugin may prove to be very helpful.

Once you have optimized all the images of your site, bookmark them using the relevant social bookmarking site(s). Its not necessary to bookmark your images in each and every bookmarking site. Its better to use only such bookmarking sites which are relevant to your images or which comprises of many people in your network/group. This will surely help as your site will keep getting consistent traffic and other people will tag your images, providing more visibility and that extra push towards higher rankings.

Chris Brogan recently announced that he had taken down the Rockstars page from his blog. The Rockstars page had a collection of websites/blogs that were submitted by Chris’s readers. Chris explains,

The intent was to have a big huge page of links featuring all of you, because I truly believe the blog is about you and our interactions together. The thing is, it’s just a lot of work to manage, and I don’t see hardly ANY clicks to it any month. No one really looks in there for anything.

His intention to highlight the people belonging to his community did catch fire when he had announced the Rockstars campaign. It was a nice inbound marketing campaign wherein people were asked (not forced) to add the Rockstar badges to their blogs after their inclusion. The badges were attractive and easy to use. It was a kind of link exchange strategy to gather inbound links. But it somehow failed.

I am thinking of writing a post about failed inbound marketing campaigns. Please share examples of such campaigns, if you know them.

I have been a fan of Copyblogger since quite some time now and love the way Brian creates great content. One of Brian’s recent post discusses whether blogs are a part of the social media or not. While reading his post, a new thought triggered my brain. The thought was, whether lifestreaming has killed blogging?”

I remember, around 12 months ago, people were crazy about getting a free blog from Blogger or WordPress. Blogging allowed them to express themselves and gave them great satisfaction, since they were sharing their feelings with the world. But with time things change. While some bloggers remained active, others dropped out, simply because they did not generate enough readership to keep the comments and conversation rolling. The resulting frustration was enough for them to never look back at their blog, again.

And today, with tools like Twitter, Friendfeed, Posterous, etc. lifestreaming has appealed to masses. People prefer to use these services because it takes less time to express yourself. It also allows them to track real time updates and helps in establishing a connection easily. Sometimes, there are things which one cannot express on a blog regularly, say like what I had for lunch or at what time do I exercise, etc. But with lifestreaming, all these things are possible as you can pass on the crappiest of your act to the bunch of people who have nothing better to do than admire your updates.

Don’t get me wrong but I have lived both blogging and lifestreaming. And somehow blogging makes me more happy as I can target my posts in such a way that they benefit my readers.

I was very surprised when Steve Rubel quit blogging to embrace lifestreaming. I somehow just fail to understand how someone can get his message through just 140 characters. Maybe that’s one of the tricks that I need to master to increase my twitter following!

Chris Brogan’s explains this scenario by drawing an analogy between the two by saying – “There’s a difference between making a meal and grabbing a snack. Eating only snacks can lead to us getting flabby.”

Lifestreaming does provide more speed and action to a conversation than blogging but sometimes this can go offtrack. Its like somebody starts discussing about a football match, praises the team coach, digs his personal history and the discussion moves on. As you can see in this case, the conversation about the match lost its importance, maybe because the history of the coach was more attractive. With blogging this condition will never arise as it contains a targeted message.

To conclude, I would re-iterate that I prefer to blog than lifestream. What about you?

Adding the relevant meta data to your site has been one of the early SEO practice followed till date. Adding proper meta tags, especially title and description does help in ranking your page higher in search engines. People have also been using Geotagging, i.e. adding meta geo tags in addition to their meta data to rank higher in specific location, something related to local SEO, you may say.

What is Geotagging?

Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification meta data to various media such as photographs, video, websites, or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial meta data. These data usually consist of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, accuracy data, and place names.

As I said earlier, search engines did give benefit to geotagging, but recently Matt Cutts clarified Google’s view of geotagging. While answering whether meta geo tags influence Google search results, Matt said that Google does not look at meta geo tags at all. He says they do look at:

• IP Address
• gTLD
• ccTLD

He also mentioned that one of the unique features of Google’s Webmaster Tools allows them to decide that a site pertains to a specific country even though it’s a dot com. I have neither heard nor experienced such a feature in Google webmaster tools, ever before. Have you used the Webmaster Tool feature that Matt is referring? Is it really worth a try? Share your experiences or thoughts below.

There has been already lot of talking and discussion about Google Chrome OS, since Google announced a new OS. The fact that Google is now venturing into a field that it once considered untouchable is very surprising. Though Google reasons that today we don’t merely access websites; we use web applications and therefore need more stronger and lighter OS, I have a hunch that they want to finish Microsoft once and for all.

I remember the Google guys once saying that they would not consider entering the operating systems business as it was limited to the offline (desktop) medium. But now Google plans to launch an OS that will be online, free, secure and most importantly open source. This will allow the users to customize the OS as per their needs and requirements, which sounds very cool.

Google announced that it is working on an operating system based on Google Chrome (their browser). The OS-in-progress is simply called Google Chrome OS;  it is open source, and it will initially be aimed at netbooks and available in the second half of 2010. Now this move by the search engine giants will definitely impact Microsoft, who has been dominating the operating systems space since the last decade or so.

Google says the key aspects of Chrome OS (that distinguishes it from other OS) are:

• Speed
• Simplicity
• Security

Even if Chrome OS releases in 2010, its pretty clear that Google won’t be sitting and waiting to get reviews of their OS to start their next phase. They have already started to talk to hardware companies so that the OS can be shipped with the desktop systems as well.

A post on the Google Chrome Blog says that the Google Chrome OS team is working with an impressive list of computer products corporations including Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba. Though the post doesn’t mention Intel, but Dan Nystedt says that Intel is secretly working with Google on Chrome OS.

One thing is evident that Google has decided to go after Microsoft’s core business after MS tried to go after Google’s. If Google makes good on its promise of allowing users to get right to the web in seconds, the OS will likely be appealing to a lot of consumers who are used to Windows. And given the popularity of the Google brand, Microsoft will be forced to get into action to save its business.

What do you think?

With so many Web 2.0 applications and social media sites on the web, communication and collaboration with social media sites has become very easy. Individuals prefer connecting through Facebook, Twitter, etc. But what about businesses? How do businesses leverage the social power of  web to market their offerings?

While finding answers to these questions, I came across a good guide (see below) to social marketing that may interest you. It’s called “Social Marketing Playbook,” and developed by the guys at 360i. This document points to some really efficient strategies which if used properly can make your brand extremely popular. The guest write-ups by Pete Cashmore and Jeremiah Owyang surely make a good read.

In the last 5 years or so, we have seen many websites turning into successful businesses. Be it Google, Digg, Facebook or TechCrunch. Of course its an incredible moment for the founders of these sites, but sometimes the popularity just bigger and bigger.

Twitter is one such website that has become a household name now. Today, even a kid knows the significance of a tweet or RT or @ (reply). The fact that people use the word twitter as a verb or noun shows its popularity and global appeal. And considering such a massive attractive appeal, Twitter has added another feather to its cap by finding a place in the dictionary.

The Collins English Dictionary has decided to include the word ‘twitter‘ in its 30th anniversary edition to be published later this year. Here’s how twitter would be defined:

As a Noun: “a website where people can post short messages about their current activities”

As a Verb: “to write short messages on the Twitter website”.

About 3 years ago ‘google‘ was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. Though twitter is a pure word and google is a revised version of googol, but the fact that the names of websites/businesses are making their way to dictionaries is self explanatory about their popularity.

If this trend continues, then we might see businesses being set up on existing words (duh. its already happening) and becoming popular enough to replace the original definition of the word with that of the business in dictionaries. Irrespective of its effect on the businesses, such a phenomenon will surely screw our English. What do you think?