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What is a unique Class C website?

An IP address is a digital address assigned to every website by the web hosting company. Normally, if someone has multiple domains, the person usually buys one hosting package to host all the 10 sites. Which means the IP address given to each website will be on the same network, like 195.183.40.1, 195.183.40.2, 195.183.40.3 and so on till 195.183.40.10. If the first 3 sub-sets of the IP match for different domains (in the example it is 195.183.40), it shows that the domains are on the same network.

Search engines check the IP address of every website linking to another site. If the first 3 sub-sets of both sites match, it means that the sites are on the same network and could be of the same owner. Therefore, they are not given so much importance.

Search engines started recording IP addresses of different websites and consider it a factor in checking the credibility of a website because links from different sites are important for a website. Webmasters started exploiting this by buying hundreds of domains at cheap rates, hosting them on the same server and linking all of them to 1 main site from all the other domains. So to avoid this, the search engines changed their policy from unique domain name to Unique Class C IP Address. Therefore, links from same Class C IP addresses should be avoided, and interlinking websites in a network of sites should also be avoided. If you do link your sites together, those links will not have a great impact on the rankings of the site and will not be considered as high quality links.

What is SEO, SEM, SEA, SMO, SMM, SERP and SERM?

If you are new to website marketing, it may be difficult for you to keep track of the abbreviations used by marketing professionals. This post helps you understand these terms so you can use them when needed.

SEO, SEM, SEA, SMO, SMM, SERP, SERM

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO or Search Engine Optimization helps in getting the website or a web page on the top ranking in search engines. By increasing the visibility of a website in the ranking of major search engines, more and more internet users visit the website resulting in an increase in business. SEO is a great way of getting more traffic to a website. It can be done by two techniques, white hat or black hat.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is a powerful advertising channel.It is a technique of diverting more traffic towards the website by increasing the rank of the website on popular search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is also called as Search Marketing. It can be done by two ways; by getting traffic to the website with the help of SEO and by getting traffic with the help of paid advertising (SEA).

SEA (Search Engine Advertising)

SEA or Search Engine Advertising is a technique of gaining traffic to a website through paid advertising like Google Adwords or PPC (Pay Per Click advertising). It is one of the basic areas of Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

SMO (Social Media Optimization)

Social Media Optimization or SMO is the technique of increasing a websites awareness with the use of social media communities. These social media websites include social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google Plus+, Orkut and more. SMO also helps in increasing the positioning of a website on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). SMO generates publicity of a website, its products and services on social networks, resulting in increased website traffic. Social News sites, particularly Slashdot, Delicious, Digg and Social Bookmarking sites, particularly Reddit, Pinterest and StumbleUpon are also included in social media.

SMM (Social Media Marketing)

SMM or Social Media Marketing is a way of promoting a website and getting traffic to it through social media sites. The main purpose of SMM is to generate awareness of a website, the products and services that are offered through it. The process of SMM is to create attractive content to grab the attention of the social networking site users and to encourage them to share it with their friends or social networks.

SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

SERP or Search Engine Results Page is the list of websites which are shown by the Search engines as a result when any keyword or a set of keywords is entered into the search bar. The list shown is relevant to the keyword(s) that is searched. With the help of the list given by the Search Engine, one can optimize his/her website or a web page to get better ranking. Search Engine Optimization is done to increase the ranking of a website for specific keywords.

SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management)

SERM or Search Engine Reputation Management enhances and controls the website reputation, generates positive publicity online and destroys search engine spam. It controls the appearing of negative comments about the website before the positive ones to prevent the reputation of the website from being destroyed.

Simple SEO Steps you can take to Improve your Website Today

As a website owner or business owner you’ve likely heard of search engine optimization before, but you probably have never signed up for SEO services with a firm or taken the time to make changes to your site that would help it rank higher in search results. Search engines are the new yellow pages, they’re the place that over 80% of consumers turn to before making a purchasing decision. That’s why it’s critical to have your business or website show up on the first page of results and ideally as close to the number 1 spot as possible.

If you’re in a competitive niche or a large market, you’re likely going to need to sign up for an SEO package to get your website on top, but if you’re in a small niche or small local market then there are a few things you can do yourself to try and get your website on page one of search results:

(1) Do some Spring Cleaning on your Website

If you’re slightly technically inclined, you can go into your website and make some small changes to the coding and content. When it comes to coding, you want to make sure you have optimized title tags, meta information, and anchor text. That means using your keywords that you want to rank for strategically in these locations to tell search engines what your website is all about.

On top of this, you also want to have quality, original content on your website. That means adding content when needed and making sure that you update this content regularly. The best way to add content is through regular blog posts on your website. This will help keep your site fresh, which search engines love, and it will help generate natural links to your website from 3rd party sites.

(2) Have a Properly Coded and Structured Website

So many small businesses hire a friend, neighbor, or kid down the block to build their website, and they end up with low quality websites that aren’t properly coded. This means websites that are made in flash, websites that are missing title tags, and websites that don’t convert well. Before you can market your website, make sure it is worth marketing and represents your business well. Your website is the first impression people will have, so make sure it’s a good one.

(3) Build some Inbound Links to your Website

Link building is a critical part of search engine optimization, so don’t be afraid to build some links on your own. You can do guest blog posts, submit articles, or try to get mentioned on a local news website. All these links will count as a vote for your website and tell search engines that your site is important and deserves to rank higher.

Again these three steps won’t rank a site in a highly competitive niche, but they certainly can rank a site in a small local market or less competitive niche. It’s a great place to start and if you find that you don’t have the time or expertise to rank your site on your own, there’s always companies out there who will take the online marketing burden off your shoulders.

This is a guest post by Brendan Egan, who is the owner of Simple SEO Group, an online marketing, web design, and SEO firm that helps small businesses improve their web presence. Brendan can be reached by visiting SimpleSEOGroup.com

Tips to Optimize a Multilingual Website

When it comes to internet marketing, being creative is a prerequisite. Sticking to the conventional marketing ideas can be detrimental in the long run as it may limit the potential of your business. One of the techniques that you can use to maximize the potential of your website is to make it a multilingual one, where people from different countries can comfortably search for the information that they want. SEO services are therefore very crucial when it comes to multilingual website optimization. There are over two hundred languages in the world and targeting most of them as a site optimization strategy can really put you ahead of the pack.

Firstly, one of the most trusted strategies for optimizing a multilingual website is through geo targeting. In layman’s language this involves creating micro sites that specifically target particular visitors from another country. To make your sites friendly for your users, the micro sites should offer the prices of the goods or services that you are offering in the currency of that particular region, along with the relevant language. Chances of your main website overshadowing the micro site will therefore be minimized. You would want to do this as the main site is usually the most optimized. However, achieving this is not a mean feat and an experienced SEO services provider is required to make this strategy a success.

Mostly, website optimization, even for a multilingual one, cannot achieve its target if there is no appropriate and adequate use of the relevant keywords. For a multilingual website you need to select and use the keywords of the target language appropriately. Do not make a mistake of merely picking keywords from your main website and translating them in to other languages; this will not work. The meaning of words and phrases change depending on the context and this can mostly happen when translation is being done from one language to another. Context and language-specific use of keywords is very crucial for a multilingual website.

Apart from making micro sites which use the target regions language and currency, along with the relevant keywords searched highly in the regional search engines for that region, you should ensure that your website has attracted inbound links that are local. Regional links are the ones that are usually behind SEO success. The main idea here is to create content that is localized with an aim to attract traffic from your target country or region.

An SEO service provider should use the inbound links of their clients’ sites to create an advantage, even if they have no control over where these may be coming from. Sticking to the basics of inbound marketing can also be very crucial. However, you still need to stick to the rules of thumb in as far as optimizing a multilingual website is concerned.

The importance of Search Engine Friendly Website Design

Some people think that the design of a website has nothing to do with the SEO or Search Engine Optimization of a website. However, this is a completely wrong assumption. Search Engine Optimization is affected by a number of factors, which include both on-page optimization as well as off-site or off-page optimization techniques.

Title Tags, Meta Keywords and Meta Description Tags, along with the website content and keywords used in the body content all contribute towards the on-site or on-page factors. What webmasters sometimes ignore is that the design and development of a website is also another factor which affects Search Engine Rankings.

A website can be designed with a table layout or it can be made div-based. The DIV based design uses CSS styling to control the layout of the entire page. Since most of the design is controlled through the CSS Style Sheets, the HTML code of the web pages itself decreases considerably, hence improving the Text to HTML ratio of every page of the website. This improvement helps in on-page optimization and hence, can lead to improved Search Engine Rankings.

Having a Search Engine Friendly website is important for improved Search Engine Rankings. Some webmasters focus on making their websites W3C compliant. However, it should be taken into consideration that W3C standards are over-hyped and making websites compliant is not extremely necessary.

Other factors which contribute to having a Search Engine Friendly website include the following:

  • Text based navigation
  • Good Internal Linking of the web pages
  • Website Sitemap

Other things to avoid are the following:

  • Flash navigation
  • JavaScript drop down navigations
  • Use of Frames
  • Flash based website

So when you design and develop your website, make sure you follow the above listed points to make it as Search Engine Friendly as possible. Stay tuned for more tips on making search engine friendly websites.

SEOContest2008 making Google go crazy!

I just checked my rankings on Google a few hours back, and I was near the end of page 6 on the SERPs. Luckily, I checked again after a few minutes and my SEOContest2008 page had jumped to position #51 on Google, right at the top of page 6!

Here is a screenshot I saved from Google for my rankings Page 6 of SEOContest2008

Sadly, I just checked it a few minutes back and my site is again near the bottom of page 6 on Google. I’m looking forward to a lot of improvement in this week, especially after the new updates get indexed on Google.

There are now 3,480 results on Google SERPs for the search term SEOContest2008. Almost 55 days to go. They are definitely going to increase to a very large amount.

Yahoo Back Links Update for my SEOContest2008 page

I checked my back links on Yahoo yesterday and I had 13 Inlinks to www.seo-reloaded.com/seocontest2008/, but when I checked them in the morning today, Yahoo! wasn’t showing any links at all, which was a bit strange. I rechecked the Inbound links again now, and they are finally back. Yahoo is showing 43 Incoming links to my SEO Contest 2008 page, which is good 🙂

Here is the link to check my updated links on Yahoo to the contest page:

Yahoo InLinks for www.seo-reloaded.com/seocontest2008/

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing the site as per the needs of search engines. Nowadays most of the users using the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN for search on the internet. Because of that its very important for site to rank high on the search engines. High ranking sites on search engines can generate lots of business and its one of the very powerful tool for brand promotion.

SEO optimization is mainly divided into two parts.

  1. Onpage optimization
  2. Offpage optimization

Below are the major factors of onpage optimization

  • Title / Meta Tags
  • Keyword Research & Analysis
  • Site Navigation
  • HTML Sitemap
  • Content Analysis
  • URL optimization
  • Google Analytics Implementation

Below are the major factors of offpage optimization

Link Building

Backlinks for the site can be generate by directory submissions, article submissions, press releases, social bookmarkings.

Link building tips for search engine results

Link building is one of those time consuming things that all webmasters need to do. It does take a lot of time and resources however given the results that can be achieved through link building then it will be worth it. Link building is one of the most important elements of SEO

Link building is the best method of obtaining search engine results.

  1. Submit to well establish quality directories – Try to go for the best – some don’t offer the ability to use your anchor text, however they do carry great value.
  2. Article submission – Don’t just use article directories; get your article published in other sites. Don’t just write one article and promote it everywhere – Googles duplicate content filter will place multiple copies in the supplemental index.
  3. Buy links – ‘Yes’ Google say they can detect these links but in reality it is very difficult for them to do this. Google may be able to detect some paid links but most should go undetected. Try to get links placed within the content. These have a better chance of getting through Googles ability to detect paid links.
  4. Link baiting – This is the process of creating content so that people will link to your pages naturally. This requires a bit of skill and obviously you need to provide something link worthy. Promote your article through social networking sites like digg.com. Remember that most people who use these social networking sites are web savvy and can spot spam a mile off.
  5. Link exchange – many people say it does not work any more – they are wrong! There was a day a few years back when you could run hundreds of link exchanges and get a great ranking however those days are gone. Be more selective and don’t just go for a conventional exchange between two link pages – what about content exchange, article exchange or exchange with links being placed within the content? Remember link pages do not carry the same value as they did a few years back.
  6. Write testimonial’s for products/services that you have used – Although you may not get to use your anchor text in these links many of these links carry value in Google.
  7. Ask for links! Do not be afraid to contact others and ask for them. This is a tactic better used when/if you become an authority within your genre. Be polite and give them reasons why they should link to you. Even if you get 1 link out of every 50 requests it still will be worth the effort.
  8. Offer to write content/blog posts as long as you get to add links within your content. Provide quality examples of the content you have written and maybe suggest some topics you could write on for the site you are contacting.

Driving traffic to your Affiliate site

Having your own affiliate network website can be a very useful thing, as you can sell other peoples products and services on your website and earn commission by selling affiliate stuff.

The key to earning money from any website and to increase sales is traffic. When you have visitors and users coming to your website, it will definitely increase your sales and earnings. However, driving traffic to your site, especially an affiliate site can be a big problem. This can be due to several reasons:

  1. You are taking data directly from some affiliate network, in the form of XML Feeds or fetching and displaying it on your site using an API key.
  2. Your site has very little content and data of its own, so the website you have mainly has duplicate data from the affiliate network website like Amazon shop.
  3. Your Title Tags, Meta Tags and content is not unique, so most of your pages might end up in Google Supplemental Index (Supplemental Pages)

Such a situation can be problematic for your website and for its business. Duplicate sites and sites which mainly use some kind of feed to display and fetch data, like RSS Feeds sites, Affiliate network sites etc. usually suffer from these problems and hence have a hard time in getting traffic from the search engines.

More Traffic more Sales

There are various ways by which you can drive traffic to your website.

Paid Advertising

PPC, also known as Pay-Per-Click Advertising by using Google Adwords or similar program. This can be effective and fetch highly targeted traffic if you carry out a proper PPC campaign. However, over time it can get very expensive.

Website Promotion and Marketing

Online and Offline Marketing and website promotion can also drive traffic to a website. These methods include banner advertisement, link purchases, Press Releases and offline promotion like newspaper ads, hoardings etc. Please note that Paid Advertising like PPC is also a kind of online marketing and promotion technique.

However, the results for these are short term, and only last while you spend money on your advertising campaign. As soon as your advertising budget exceeds, and you stop the promotion, you lose all kinds of traffic coming to your website.

Search Engine Optimization

This is the most effective of all these methods and also leaves long lasting results. Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO involves changing your website pages in a way so that they become more Search Engine Friendly and hence achieve high rankings in SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

Some of the most important factors involved in SEO include:

  1. Keyword Research
  2. Market and Competitor Analysis
  3. Creation of Landing pages for the website, and defining a directory structure for the pages which is search engine friendly
  4. Content Writing and Addition to the website, related to the Keywords and website theme
  5. Title Tags, Meta Description and Keyword Tags generation for all the website pages
  6. Search Engine Friendly URL writing for all the pages
  7. Website submission to Search Engines, Web Directories, Article Directories and Social Bookmarking sites
  8. Getting Links (One-way links to the website) with appropriate Anchor Texts
  9. Monitoring the website progress and ranking on the Search Engines
  10. Improving the website and optimizing it, adding more contents and getting more links on a regular basis

SEO is a time taking process, and a new site can take up to 8 – 10 months to start showing in rankings for niche and competitive keywords on Search Engines. However, the results you obtain after all the efforts are fruitful, after which you can enjoy traffic coming to your website directly from the Search Engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN.

On first page of Google in less than 6 hours!

I launched a new section for SEO Jokes on my SEO Blog today and to my surprise, I was checking my website stats, when I found someone had visited my site by searching for ‘seo jokes‘ on Google! I quickly checked the SERPs and my blog was on the first page of Google for this not so competitive keyword 🙂 This happened in less than 6 hours since I added the posts on the blog!

My website is coming on the first page of Google and also on the regional Google Search Engine. See the results yourself in the screenshot below!

SEO Jokes Google SERPs