About Me

Keen Learner, enthusiast and a practicing SEO professional. I have spent around 6 years in SEO and SMO and love exploring the web. A civil engineer when I started out after college, I took to online marketing like fish to water in a few years. oDesk Certified Search Engine Optimization Consultant oDesk Certified Google Analytics Consultant oDesk Certified Google Webmaster Expert

A Tryst with Social Media Day in Chennai

9:43 PM 0 Comments

I (@HariKrishnaDev) was at the social media day celebrations conducted by @Mashable in Chennai city (India) today evening. There were more than 100 people registered for this Mashable Social Media Meetup (http://www.meetup.com/Mashable/9859/) and around 40 people attended this meetup.
Day: 30th June, 6:30 PM lasted till 9 PM
Venue: Unwind Centre (Gandhi Nagar, Adyar)


I attended the Meetup with my friend and colleague (@KarTek).

Here is the brief of the meetup:

The event started with the welcome speech by the organizer Sorav Jain (@SoravJain). He had a brief on social media’s growth in India with the slides to show up. He also had some statistics for the progress of India among the social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn over the last couple of years. India is one among the top 10 countries in twitter for the number of registrations now which was not even in top 50 last year. There are around 70 Lakh Indians in Facebook and there are close to around 5 million professionals registered in LinkedIn from India.

Then the meetup moved on to the individual introductions. I was surprised to see the diversification among the participants, there were house wives, college students, CEOs, professors and IT professionals and also freelancers. This shows us that Social Media is here to stay. Everyone added a lot of value to the conversation session. There was a talk mainly on how they are leveraging the social media for their businesses, clients and/or for their personal networking.

We started with 140 character introduction (tweeduction) of participants, followed by a platform to discuss ‘How Social Media has influenced lives’. Few participants had amazing stories to share, relevant to Social Media and Success. The discussion went on How :
- Social Media can be used for a small business with low budgets
- the balance of social media and personal life

I spoke on how I emerged as an SEO expert taking the advantages of SMO. Kartik also had some of the notes how he is leveraging the social media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn in AppStore Apps (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) marketing. Few of the CEOs shared their thoughts on using Social Media for their successful business. Few attended to know how social media can help their small businesses grow.

To make sure that the session did not deviate into only presentations, we also had an engaging and light session of Housie/Tambola.

Few photos of the Mashable Social Media Meetup:





Some of the interesting people i connected with are: SoravJain, Karthik.K, Aarti, Vinoth Chandar, Sathyanarain

And in all it was a memorable event, successfully executed.

Various content types in Sitemap to Submit to Google Sitemaps

7:46 PM 0 Comments

So far we are creating a video sitemap for video files, Image sitemap for Images and Web sitemap for Web pages. But now we can  submit your various content types (video, images, etc.) in one Sitemap. If your site contains videos, images, mobile URLs, code or geo information, you can now create—and submit—a Sitemap with all the information.

Site owners have been leveraging Sitemaps to let Google know about their sites’ content since Sitemaps were first introduced in 2005. Since that time additional specialized Sitemap formats have been introduced to better accommodate video, images, mobile, code or geographic content. With the increasing number of specialized formats, we’d like to make it easier for you by supporting Sitemaps that can include multiple content types in the same file.

The structure of a Sitemap with multiple content types is similar to a standard Sitemap, with the additional ability to contain URLs referencing different content types. Here's an example of a Sitemap that contains a reference to a standard web page for Web search, image content for Image search and a video reference to be included in Video search:


Hope every Webmaster will save time and also taking out different files to make a single sitemap file.

{Via Official Google Webmaster Central Blog}

Improve Web Site Rankings with SEO Copywriting

9:11 PM 1 Comments

You have already optimized your website content, but your domain is not showing up in the search engine rankings?

Check with the keyword density, proximity and prominance. Start tweaking with your keyword density, placement, highlighting the keywords by making them blod and italic and other factors that may influence that rank with your past experience. If you haven’t been doing anything new, provide fresh content in the form of new pages or a frequently-updated blog. Do not forget that BLOG is the main factor in making your website content dynamic and attract the search engines' crawlers regularly. And Search engines don’t want to offer their customers stale information, so keeping your content on the leading edge is imperative in keeping the ranks high. Bear in mind that copywriting is only a part of your website’s overall success, but done correctly it can be a very large part in achieving and maintaining your desired rank and traffic levels.

A Website's content should have a big involvement in every search engine optimization.

Why Blogs are Important?

8:48 PM 0 Comments

Blogs are an excellent way to create content on a website for SEO purposes. One study showed that small businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors. Blogs have many things that search engines love:
* Freshness
* Relevant
* Inbound links

But the main concern for small businesses when it comes to writing a blog is They are time-consuming.

So how can a search engine optimization service provider perform strong SEO for their clients without a blog? Content so important for a website.

The concept of an optimized custom content center can work great for businesses that want to invest in SEO, and also want to provide authoritative and useful content to their customers. It really is a nice double-whammy marketing strategy. You get the authoritative brand-building and the inbound marketing bait all-in-one. We mainly propose this concept to banks, credit unions, hospitals, and utilities, but there are many other types of businesses that have a need for brand reinforcement and inbound marketing growth.

Google's US Search Share Increases to 72%

8:37 PM 0 Comments

Google continued to dominate search in May, accounting for 72.2% of all US searches conducted in the four weeks ended May 29, 2010, up 1% from April, while Yahoo, Bing, and Ask received 14.4%, 9.2%, and 2.1%, respectively, according to Experian Hitwise data.

The remaining 74 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 2.03% of US searches.


{ Via MarketingProfs LLC}

Keywords VS Potential Customers

6:12 AM 0 Comments

Most people use a keyword suggestion tool to find new keywords for their campaigns. Though the keyword suggestion tools are good, they should not be the first step in your keyword research activities.

Before you start, ask yourself the following questions:

How the product or your service special?
What are the potential customers searching for?

Features of the products and services do you offer?
As you can see, the products and services that you offer are the least important. A person with a headache might not now that the Shiatsu that you offer will help them. They even might now know what Shiatsu is and if they know it, they might not be able to spell it properly. The same applies to all other services and industries.


Hence, it is important that you focus on the first three points before using your products or services in the keywords.


When you try to find new keywords, tell a short story that describes the problem and the solution: “A person seeking for an insurance agency with the additional features of Whole Life Insurance. The person does not look for the Health Insurance Plan because only A whole life insurance policy covers him for the entire life, not just for a specific period such as term insurance." You’ll find many keywords around which you can create new web pages and PPC ads. Of course, you can also combine this method with keyword suggestion tools.

Do list these type of examples for your products or Service and work on the keyphrases.

URL Version - To slash or not to slash

5:48 AM 0 Comments

As a webmaster, I heard this question lot of times in discussions, forums and blogs. Recently Google Webmaster Central Blog answered this question in detail.

it’s common for URLs with a trailing slash to indicate a directory, and those without a trailing slash to denote a file:

http://example.com/foo/ (with trailing slash, conventionally a directory)
http://example.com/foo (without trailing slash, conventionally a file)

But they certainly don’t have to. Google treats each URL above separately (and equally) regardless of whether it’s a file or a directory, or it contains a trailing slash or it doesn’t contain a trailing slash.

Different content on / and no-/ URLs okay for Google, often less ideal for users

From a technical, search engine standpoint, it’s certainly permissible for these two URL versions to contain different content. Your users, however, may find this configuration horribly confusing -- just imagine if www.google.com/webmasters and www.google.com/webmasters/ produced two separate experiences.

For this reason, trailing slash and non-trailing slash URLs often serve the same content. The most common case is when a site is configured with a directory structure:
http://example.com/parent-directory/child-directory/

Your site’s configuration and your options

You can do a quick check on your site to see if the URLs:

http:////
(with trailing slash)
http:///
(no trailing slash)
don’t both return a 200 response code, but that one version redirects to the other.

If only one version can be returned (i.e., the other redirects to it), that’s great! This behavior is beneficial because it reduces duplicate content. In the particular case of redirects to trailing slash URLs, our search results will likely show the version of the URL with the 200 response code (most often the trailing slash URL) -- regardless of whether the redirect was a 301 or 302.

If both slash and non-trailing-slash versions contain the same content and each returns 200, you can:
Consider changing this behavior (more info below) to reduce duplicate content and improve crawl efficiency.
Leave it as-is. Many sites have duplicate content. Our indexing process often handles this case for webmasters and users. While it’s not totally optimal behavior, it’s perfectly legitimate and a-okay. :)
Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris.
Steps for serving only one URL version

What if your site serves duplicate content on these two URLs:

http:////
http:///

meaning that both URLs return 200 (neither has a redirect or contains rel=”canonical”), and you want to change the situation?
Choose one URL as the preferred version. If your site has a directory structure, it’s more conventional to use a trailing slash with your directory URLs (e.g., example.com/directory/ rather than example.com/directory), but you’re free to choose whichever you like.

Be consistent with the preferred version. Use it in your internal links. If you have a Sitemap, include the preferred version (and don’t include the duplicate URL).

Use a 301 redirect from the duplicate to the preferred version. If that’s not possible, rel=”canonical” is a strong option. rel=”canonical” works similarly to a 301 for Google’s indexing purposes, and other major search engines as well.

Test your 301 configuration through Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools. Make sure your URLs:
http://example.com/foo/
http://example.com/foo
are behaving as expected. The preferred version should return 200. The duplicate URL should 301 to the preferred URL.

Check for Crawl errors in Webmaster Tools, and, if possible, your webserver logs as a sanity check that the 301s are implemented.

Top 15 Most Popular Social Bookmarking Websites

9:06 PM 0 Comments

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

Here are the 15 Most Popular Social Bookmarking Websites as I work on. I had the list of 150+ Social Bookmarking Websites, Out of which I listed the popular 15 Social Bookmarking Websites from which I have seen some traffic to my websites.

These are not only popular but also have very simple steps to register. Hope this list will help you.



1. Digg







2. Delicious






3. StumbleUpon






4. Reddit






5. Yahoo! Buzz






6. Mixx






7. FARK






8. Slashdot






9. Friendfeed






10. Clipmarks






11.Blinklist






12.Diigo






13.Propeller






14.Mister-Wong






15.Faves

More about Soft 404s ‎

9:30 PM 0 Comments

I have observed Soft 404s ‎in my Google webmaster Central under Crawl Errors. And then read the post on "Crawl Errors now reports soft 404s".


A brief on Soft 404s:

Some websites report a "not found" error by returning a standard web page with a "200 OK" response code; this is called a soft 404. Soft 404s are problematic for automated methods of discovering whether a link is broken. Soft 404s can occur as a result of configuration errors when using certain HTTP server software, for example with the Apache software, when an Error Document 404 (specified in a .htaccess file) is specified as an absolute path (e.g. http://example.com/error.html) rather than a relative path (/error.html).

Other search engines, like Yahoo, use automated processes to detect soft 404 errors.

Here’s a list of steps to correct soft 404s to help both Google and your users:

1. Check whether you have soft 404s listed in Webmaster Tools

2. For the soft 404s, determine whether the URL:

       A. Contains the correct content and properly returns a 200 response (not actually a soft 404)

       B. Should 301 redirect to a more accurate URL

       C. Doesn’t exist and should return a 404 or 410 response

3. Confirm that you’ve configured the proper HTTP Response by using Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools

4. If you now return 404s, you may want to customize your 404 page to aid your users.
 
Contact me if you want help on how to set up .htaccess.

Google's new search index: Caffeine

8:19 PM 0 Comments

Google announced the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than the last index, and it's the largest collection of web content Google offering.

As per Google "Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before."

This is a great news to all of us, the webmasters more depended on Organic for the web site Traffic will many benefits of being indexed and searchable quickly over the Google Search. Thanks to the search "God" "Google"



I am very happy to see my blog posts appear in Google just in 6 minues after my post time. Now I wish to see the updated blogs sooner than that with Google's new search index: Caffeine.

{More details on Caffeine can be found at Google Webmaster Central Blog}

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