The internet has made this world a free interactive zone, where people use various sites to stay in touch with their peers. While some sites are entirely community sites like Facebook, others serve a specific purpose like YouTube. But all of these sites attract millions of views from around the world.

But the search engines are the only web entities which attract even more views than the social media or Web 2.0 sites. That is because they cater to everyone and provide solutions for every problem. And that provides a great platform for advertisers to market their products or services.

When it comes to internet marketing, there are two major options – Search Engine Optimization aka SEO and Search Engine Marketing aka SEM. Both of these are helpful in achieving good business by leveraging the power of internet. But I have seen many people with a common question, as to which method is better.

SEO refers to the process of increasing the chances of a website to appear in the organic results of the search engine. It requires certain tweaks in the website which increases the relevancy of the theme of the website and that helps in better ranking. However, SEO is a time consuming process. It requires consistent work and takes time to show the results, depending upon the competition for the targeted keywords

SEM on the other hand is a simple marketing concept, wherein you pay the search engines and they start displaying your advertisements. This method is highly recommended for those who are unable to appear in the top organic results due to severe competition. With SEM, your site can easily come and sit on the first page of the search results, of course considering the keyword competition and other factors.

So what’s best for you? Your decision will entirely depend upon your business objective and your online marketing budget. If you want fast results and are ready to spend money, SEM will be best for you. But if you wish to generate quality traffic to your site and patient enough to wait for at least 3 months, SEO is the best strategy for you.

But in either case, I would first suggest that you consult a SEO consultant The reason for this being he will provide you an accurate and effective strategy and also guide you through the entire process, if you are alien to these internet marketing techniques. So even you will get to learn new things while driving traffic to your site and earn a good ROI from online marketing.

SEO aka Search Engine Optimization has become the most demanding service for everyone who is in the internet business. Be it a small or medium sized company or a Forbes 500 company. Do you want your site to rank in Google for major keywords.

That’s fine. Perfect. Not a big deal. But the companies (read cheap service providers) who claim to be the masters of website optimization actually make the whole concept lose its charm. There’s nothing wrong in tweaking your website for gaining visibility in the search engines, but there are people who do nothing other than making false claims.

Recently one of our potential client rejected us because he thought we were just too expensive. Well, he might have been right, considering his point of view and budget. But then quality never comes cheap. One has to pay / invest a good amount of money for achieving quality, which helps in the long run.

There are lot of people who claim that they can get any website in any industry (irrespective of competition) on the first page of Google within 4 weeks. Whoa! That’s quite a statement. But to tell you frankly, all this is bullshit. The search engines are very smart and its very difficult to fool them with inappropriate techniques. I have seen black-hat optimization techniques deliver unbelievable results, only to end up facing severe penalties from Google.

Usually, these so called self-trumpeters only utilize other people’s lack of knowledge and ignorance to their benefit. They make tall claims, convince about something that is not practical and cannot be achieved, get the money and run away with it. There’s no professionalism, no customer satisfaction and most importantly no search engine optimization.

I do not intend to say that all SEO professionals are fictitious or lack knowledge about the process. In fact, there are some of them who just like to work by staying under the covers and deliver the best results. These are the ones who can actually help you in getting your website optimized

Basically, its you who has to take the final call. Whether you want to settle with mediocre results because they are cheap or invest fair amount of time and money to achieve long lasting results. Remember, Rome was not built in one day. Same is the case with SEO – nobody can achieve higher search engine rankings or higher PR in just a few weeks. Therefore be very careful while choosing your SEO Company.

There are so many blogs being created daily on the internet Blogging. CMS platforms like Blogger and WordPress have made it really easy for anyone to start a blog. While some are hosted on separate domain names, others prefer to use the free service (like example.wordpress.com). Every individual or company tries to cater to a niche and blogs about it. But the internet is such a platform that even a niche becomes a marketplace, full of people talking about the same stuff; and the niche no longer niche.

So how do you distinguish yourself from others blog and share similar interests?

Use favicons!

Favorite icon (favicon) is an excellent free branding tool for webmasters and blog owners. It helps you to create brand awareness by displaying a little icon in the title bar of your blog.

Also, favicons attract more traffic to your blog by standing out against others who don’t sport a favicon themselves. Increased traffic means more readers, more subscribers and this gives you an opportunity to have more repeat readers. No matter, what subject or topic you blog about, you must use a favicon be recognized for your work.

Some other benefits of sporting a favicon are:

Tabbed browsing becomes easy:

When multiple sites are open in a browser, it becomes difficult to switch between the relevant sites. But with a favicon, you add another level of usability to your blog which helps the visitors to find your blog quickly before other blogs.

Site bookmarks are easy to find.

Usually we either bookmark our favorite sites in the browser or social bookmarking sites. Having a favicon for your blog helps in differentiating and browsing through the complete list of your bookmarks.

Maximum visibility in RSS readers.

While we all subscribe to various blogs to stay in touch with the latest updates, sometimes it makes our RSS reader look crowded. With a favicon, it becomes easy for the reader to read updates from your blog before others. And if you have an interesting story to tell, chances are that the reader will land up on your blog.

As you would have realized by now, favicons are essential to be recognized on the internet. Sporting a cool and relevant favicon will not only get more visitors to your blog, but will make those visitors look for it whenever and wherever they can. And that will indicate that you are someone special and standout from the rest of the blogger.

Every site that I have been visiting lately shows me more links in the footer than in the sidebar or the top navigation bar. Without giving any importance to the usability guidelines or relevance, certain sites just spread the links to boost their internal link structure and optimize the anchor text.

Usually, depending upon the navigation of the website, the most important links are placed such that visitors are easily able to locate them. The unimportant links (for a user) like Privacy Statement, Terms of Use, etc. make way in the footer region. This is so because hardly any user would ever look at the footer if his needs are satisfied by clicking the links elsewhere.

Until a few years ago, I remember web designers used to drop a link to their site for every site designed/developed by them. There’s nothing wrong with that. After all, it only promotes your brand and helps you in getting more inquiries. But with search engines getting smarter, the anchor text plays a big role on every link you have on your site. And if you use irrelevant anchor text, your site will probably lie deeper in the search results.

In an attempt to trick the search engines and generate lot of links to their site, webmasters get involved in link farms, placing numerous links on their site. And the best place for them to place the links is the footer section because that’s the least expected region to be visited by the user. But if these links are not relevant and uses incorrect anchor text, the SEO efforts would be a complete waste.

What did you see? Lot of irrelevant links to various other sites, right. And did you pay attention to the anchor text being used there? Its just the domain name that is being used as anchor text to improve its ranking. Now what do you expect the main site (Sai Info Soft) to rank for?

The intention of highlighting this example is to show how certain webmasters are exploiting the footer region of the websites for better search rankings; only to fall flatly on their face.

The website and its various sections are meant to help the visitor get a complete hang of the site and its offerings. Its very important to keep the user in mind when dealing with the footer links as major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have already indicated that they de-value the footer links. So there’s hardly any chance that excessive links in footer would help in the search rankings.

I feel that its more important to keep the footer clean or include minimal links so that the user doesn’t get confused. Whats your take? Have you ever benefited by including lot of links in the footer? I would like to hear from you.

Every website consists of multiple pages that provide different set of information. Depending upon the business and marketing objectives, one may have a 10 page website or even a 200 page website. It is very difficult to believe that every human visitor will scan through all the pages of your site. But the search engine crawlers will.

And if you are performing search engine optimization for your site, then there is high probability that you always want the crawlers to visit your site on a regular basis. But have you ever wondered what would happen if the crawlers who visit your site return empty handed?

Of course, your site will lie on the back pages of the search results for any keyword(s) related to your business. And the main reason for this would be broken links in your site.

What are broken links?

In simple terms, broken links are the inaccessible links that exist in your website. When the search engine crawlers encounter any inaccessible links in your site, they report broken links and this prevents them from indexing your website completely. When the indexing is done in a partial way, it becomes difficult for the search engine to ascertain the quality and relevance of your website for a particular keyword term/phrase. And this spells the doom for you as your site will lie in the back pages of the search results, attracting meager traffic and lower search engine rankings.

Are broken links spam?

Many people ask me whether search engines treat broken links as spam; and my answer is NO. Broken links are a result of poor website architecture and maintenance. Often webmasters link to certain promotional pages in the website and after a few days delete those pages. But they forget to clean up the links to those pages from the website or/and the Sitemap and that results in the generation of broken links.

Check whether your website has any broken links by using this tool.

Remember that the search engine crawlers are automated programs and cannot find a way through if they can’t see one. Humans can definitely do some trial and error to get to their desired page, but crawlers can’t. The crawlers can only navigate your site via links (internal and inbound) as it allows them to jump from one page to another.

A site that consists of broken links can never dominate the search results, no matter how well it is optimized. It is imperative to remove all the broken links from a site to give it some standing. Also, a neat and structured site architecture provides a better navigation experience to your users and contributes to successful Search Engine Optimization. For more information visit Golden Street Media.

Twitter – the cool application that has been used by everybody today is a great resource for building links to your site or blog. Backlinks have always been very useful in determining the ranking of a site in the search engines. Though the overall process is termed as SEO, but building quality backlinks is a major step in achieving higher search engine rankings.

There are tons of articles on the web that describe the best link building techniques, which you can refer to. In this post, I will discuss on how you can use Twitter to build quality dofollow backlinks which will not only increase traffic to your site but also pass on quality link juice.

Twitter offers three opportunities to pass links from your profile. One through the status messages, second through your Twitter Bio and third through the application(s) you use for tweeting. Twitter had nofollowed the links that we pass on in the status messages since a long time. They had kept the links in the Bio field dofollow, until Matt Cutts made the Twitter Bio links nofollow. And I bet, you never thought about the third option as a means to pass links.

Bob ArdKor has written a great article on achieving dofollow links from Twitter. Though his original post is written in French, but you can find the Google Translated version of the same in English.

Bob says,

On twitter, users post their tweet from customers for I-phone as Twitterfon, Nambu … others use Firefox extensions TwitterFox to post their message on Twitter, others pass by scripts that use the API and Of course, others go directly from Twitter.

When you post from these applications, as appears tweet posted a statement containing the date of publication of the tweet and at what support you have posted the message with a link to the site of application.

This link is dofollow and followed by search engines.

Bob has explained the method of customizing those links for leveraging the link juice. It’s a great find by Bob who has implemented this strategy in his Twitter profile and seems to benefit from the same. But with Twitter becoming a threat to Google with the ability to search real time updates, it’s a matter of time when they will make those links nofollow as well. Therefore, start using this method right from today and give a boost to your SEO efforts.

PS: I have not tried this method yet, but it seems to be effective. Please note, this method is not black hat; after all you are just customizing the look and feel of your Twitter profile.

When Bing was launched, it was considered a threat to Google. Though Bing is yet to compete with Google in terms of user loyalty and trust; it seems it has a long way to go before it even challenges Google.

The mere fact that it disobeys the webmaster’s instructions is enough for webmasters to dump Bing. And once webmasters overlook a search engine, the users too, don’t stick with that search engine. Currently, Bing is disappointing webmasters because of its loophole in treating the content within

noindex and nofollow tags.

Ideally, any content that is marked noindex or nofollow, either through robots.txt file or via meta robots tag should not be indexed by the search engines. Major search engines are following this practice and allow the webmasters to hide certain pages from the public. But Bing is out rightly disobeying this practice.

Recently, a conversation on Bing Forum highlighted this issue. Here’s how the conversation went:

Webmaster:

I have a site containing pages that I don’t want their content being indexed by search engines so all of those pages have
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” />
in their header and it has been like this for a while now.

Both Google and Yahoo respected the tag and those pages are not being indexed by them but today I checked and found all those pages even recent ones are indexed and cached on Bing.

Program Manager, Bing Webmaster Center:

This is a known issue we are working quickly to resolve.  If you have pages you would like permanently removed from our index, please send me a mail to bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and “MSNBot ignoring robots tags” in the subject line. Please also include the URLs in the body of the message. You may use an * wildcard for any directories such as:

http:example.com/ wrongdirectory/*

Normally, I would request that you fill out a content removal request, however, since this is a problem on our side, I’ll do the leg work for you.

So why does Bing disobey noindex / nofollow?

As evident from what the Bing representative said, “it’s a known issue in Bing.” Microsoft does say that it’s working to fix this problem but when? Having signed a search deal with Yahoo, is Microsoft waiting for Yahoo to fix their search engine bugs? Common MS, that way you will never be able to challenge Google’s search monopoly.

Has anybody experienced similar problems, with Bing indexing your noindex / nofollow content?

SEO is not easy. It takes lot of efforts for achieving high search engine rankings and maintaining them. We at Golden Street Media, get many inquiries from our clients as to why search engines do not display their site’s one line links (read sitelinks). Well, it sounds a bit funny at times. Because after helping their sites dominate the first page of major search engines, they still aspire for more search engine visibility.

Now the SEOs / webmasters will know that with consistent efforts a site can achieve top rankings. But unfortunately, that’s not the case with sitelinks. Webmasters have absolutely no control when it comes to displaying the sitelinks.

Regular Google Sitelinks

Though Yahoo and Bing too offer sitelinks, but of course the inventor of the concept of sitelinks is Google. It introduced sitelinks to help users navigate a site so that it saves users time and allows them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

How to get sitelinks on Google?

I wish I could give you a simple solution for this. But that’s because you can’t force Google to show the desired links of your site as sitelinks. Google explains, “We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.”

Okay so as always, Google speaks from its own perspective with no help to the webmasters. But based on my observations for achieving sitelinks, here are a few tips that I can pass on:

1. Submit your site to all major search engines. Don’t wait for their crawlers to find you.
2. Monitor which pages of your site are Good. Normally, these pages would be the best candidates for being featured as sitelinks.
3. Keep working on your most viewed pages, i.e. optimize them. Put more focus on keyword density, content relevance and optimization.
4. Follow proper page naming conventions and keep a simple navigation structure for your site. I have seen that the sitelinks are mostly a copy of the links in the site’s navigation structure.
5. Cleverly follow cross linking strategy from your most viewed pages. This will ensure that other relevant pages also appear in the sitelinks for a single query.

Now a days, Google displays one-line sitelinks. These are not different from the regular sitelinks, except that they are displayed in only one column and allow a maximum of four links to be displayed.

Google One-line sitelinks

Even though, Google says its process for generating sitelinks is completely automated, you can surely help Google locate the most relevant pages of your site so that they appear as sitelinks. Use your SEO skills along with the tips mentioned above and see what happens.

Just in case, you think that Google is displaying inappropriate or incorrect sitelinks, you can block them so that they no longer appear. But for this, you will have to have your site registered with the Google Webmaster Central Tools.