Blog archives for September, 2008

by Guy Siverson

Long tail keywords

I read an article today that suggested optimizing for longtail keywords was a myth not to be followed.

Perhaps I would believe them if I was not a first hand witness of this process taking my articles to the first page of Google search engines within 24 hours.

I found it amusing that this article did not show on the first page when I searched on the term…

“SEO”

However when I did a search on the long tail combination of…

“organic seo myths”

It was in the #1 position of Google against 2,700 other competitors.

Don’t get me wrong. The article had a lot of interesting points that it brought up. I just happened to disagree with myth #10.

Perhaps the authors point was not to avoid “long tail keyword” marketing but rather optimizing for those exact keywords would not be necessary. In either case I disagree with the final analysis.

Here’s why…

As more people become familiar with the process of targeting long tail keywords I believe it will be more competitive. Therefore, if you only list the keyword once as suggested it will be easy to overtake a given position. Thus, not only would I optimize for each long tail keyword you select but I would also choose 1 or maybe 2 keywords per page as your focus rather than 15 or more like I see some sites doing.

I would include your long tail keyword in both your H1 & H2 tags (which happens to be another point of disagreement I had with the article I read). It doesn’t take long to be working with SEO Elite before the reason to target these tags becomes quite clear.

Also, I would include the exact long tail keyword exactly once at the beginning of your article and once at the end. Not to mention adding it to your keyword & description meta tags as well as the title tag for the page.

Not only does this optimize your page for specific long tail keywords, but it also clearly positions you as a force to be reconed with if and when someone chooses to challenge you for your spot with a given long tail combination you happen to be targeting.

Guy Siverson (AKA SEOGuy) - Are meta tags relevant today? My opinion is @ http://seo-and-beyond.com/A-Art-Dir/Tit1/Search-Engine-Optimization-Basics/Top-Ten-Organic-SEO-Myths-Challenged.htm. - Partner of http://ViralMarketing4U.com

by Megrisoft

There are lot of websites which are fully or partially clone of ODP (Open Directory Project).These websites or part section of websites, which are using ODP script to reformat the data on there site are useless and they have no original new contents. It is learnt that search engine specially Google is purging or banning such kind of sites. Why search engines are against Dmoz clone sites? Is the data in them not worthwhile or are they been misused by site owner’s? We will try to find our reason, but before that let us first understand all about Dmoz Directory

What is Dmoz Directory (ODP) The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory on the web. It is owned by “Time Warner” and constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors, and is truly unique in many ways. The Open Directory, also known as DMOZ (the domain name of ODP), is a large, categorized directory of websites and pages, which is staffed by volunteers. Every website and page that is added to the directory has to be manually reviewed before it is included. Since its index is manually constructed and edited, categorization and relevancy is superior to any other index of its kind and equally as unique, is the fact that this data is open and free to the public for replication. As of July 2005, ODP had about 4.6 million listings organized into over 580,000 categories derived from the contributions of some 69,000 editors.

How is this free data been used to make Dmoz Clone? There are a lot of ODP scripts to make clone of the ODP. These scripts enables you to add live data of the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org to your own website using a very easy to customize template based system. Users can browse and search categories of websites. These scripts that grabs live contents of the Open Directory dynamically and formats them to make your own version of the Open Directory. These are small scripts have few files to just uploaded on your server and you can get Thousands of Dmoz directory pages on your site in your own templates design. These scripts just get live data from Dmoz.org and it has no original new contents.

Does Dmoz Clone bring traffic? Webmaster do not like Dmoz clone websites as they have not original content rather have duplicate contents and no body will like to link a site or vote a site which has duplicate contents. Most people will not even browse your directory. Most people will just browse 2-10 pages of your directory, they will just leave and never come back.

Why Search Engines are against Dmoz Clone? There are various reasons which are explained as:

# There is no Original Content which is required to make a Quality Site.

# Duplicate contents as all scripts extract live data from Dmoz and create thousands of similar pages on the web.

# The Dmoz directory has more than 580,000 categories If thousands of site will grab the live contents from Dmoz it will results into creation of millions of similar pages which is making web a junkyard of similar pages with nothing new.

# The Dmoz clone sites has thousands of pages created on fly with no extra hardwork and lot of spammer are using it for advertising or Google adsense program

# The lot of webmaster has just created a section of Dmoz to get inbound links from thousands of pages to increase link popularity and search engine ranking

# Text link advertiser also created Dmoz clone to sell links on thousands of pages to increase artificially link popularity of text link ads buyers.

Which kind of Dmoz clone Search Engine’s will Like Search engines are concerned with presenting quality results to there users If you can modify and enhance the data retrieved from Dmoz and present in unique format it will definitely be preferred by Search Engines, Webmaster and Web Surfers. Google has got its own directory for which it has got data from Dmoz but enhanced by Google technology i.e ranking of sites on each directory page by Page Rank.

Using ODP Clone Scripts just to make simple odp clone will get your site banned from search engines due to duplicate contents. Therefore it is advised not to use this virtually useless script on important sites or sites that rank well on search engines. Lot of ODP Clone Scripts makers sites were banned, because too many websites with duplicate content ( as they all have Dmoz clone) were linked to them. These scripts owner require there site URL to be linked at the footer as “Powered by …” Which results into link farming or inbound links from similar pages.

Therefore if you want your site or directory to be safe and run for longer times then have original and unique contents in it which will not only make it rank but also get good traffic on your site and increase its popularity.

by Jill Cooper

If there’s one question that every website owner asks herself, it’s this:

How can I get more traffic to my website?

The more visitors your site gets, the more opportunities you have to make money through sales and advertising.

But as more and more websites pop up everyday, the competition for traffic is getting fierce. Ideally, you should be getting traffic from many different sources. And for the most part, anything that brings you new visitors is good.

But there a few traffic-generating methods that are just not worth the headaches. Let’s talk about two of them now.

The first traffic method you should avoid is paid hits.

Now let’s not confuse this with legitimate advertising programs like Google AdWords. I’m talking about services that advertise:

“10,000 unique visitors for only $9.95!”

Common sense should tell you that something is fishy about these types of services. How can they possibly deliver quality visitors for that price?

They can’t.

They generally work in one of two ways. They either use a script to “hit” your website over and over again or they are part of a “paid to surf” program. This type of program pays people to visit websites, so all that happens is they add your site to their queue and pay people to visit it.

Unfortunately, your visitors will mostly keep your site in the background while they do more important things. Your sire will be visited, but rarely read.

The second traffic method to avoid is called “safe lists”.

A safe list is a list of email addresses of people that have supposedly agreed to receive promotions via email.

A major problem with safe lists is that you have no real way to verify that the owners of the email addresses actually opted in. Their email addresses could have been scraped from any number of blogs, websites, forums, or discussion groups.

Sending emails to a safe list could result in a rash complaints that could get your entire website banned by your ISP.

It’s just not worth the risk.