How to Hire Virtual Assistants...

If you are a savvy businessman it is hard for you to do everything yourself. Certainly you would not want your valuable time to be eaten up by administrative tasks. When you do away with these responsibilities, you get more time to grow your business.  So, leaving these tasks to virtual assistants can be helpful in more ways than one.

As administrative experts, virtual assistants, can help you organize your business in a very efficient manner. You can rely on them to provide your clients the required administrative support. Hiring a virtual assistant is not that easy as it sounds. In order to delegate responsibility to the right person, you need to choose your assistants very carefully. You need to consider some practical points while you go about choosing the right assistant.

Reliable virtual assistants have their own websites. Always go for one who has a website where you can check in details about the person. You get to know a lot about the person’s competence and commitment by going through the website. You need to look for and take note of the following on their websites:

• Does the website have a business image? Is the image professional enough?
• Does the website talk about the skills of the person?
• Is the objective clearly stated?
• Is the message clear and well written
• Does it talk sense?
• Are facts presented in a credible way?

After you find the person who you think fits the bill perfectly, you need to talk to him or her to get a clearer picture. Conversation can help you know the person better. While conversing make note of the following:

• Is his/her conversation professional?
• How does he/she handle inquiries in a timely manner?
• How prepared is he/she for your conversation?
• How does he/she match her profile in the website?

Other important things that you need to take note of include her expertise, personal traits, professional skills, business commitment, experience, training and certification, and testimonials.

When you choose a virtual assistant, always go for quality and value. The right assistant can pay you back your investment many times over.

How to increase traffic with organic search optimi...

When I first tried to wade through the topic search engine optimization, I came across the term organic search. I was confused by the term as I had never heard of it before. At the beginning, I gave less importance to the term, but repeated reference to it made me sit up and think. It soon clicked that it was an important term and played a vital role in optimizing a site. So, I browsed to find out more about it. Organic search results are listings that come up on search engine results pages because of their relevance to the search terms. In other words these results are not advertised. So, organic search SEO can rightly be called natural search optimization.

After learning about the term, the next question that came to my mind was how to use organic search engine optimization effectively. I found that there are several steps in the process. You can begin with these steps when your website is in the planning stages. Most importantly, the process has to continue throughout the life of the website. Some important steps that you need to follow to bring more traffic to your site are listed below:

Keyword research: Your chosen audience will search for a site with a particular set of keywords. You must carry out extensive research to find out the possible set of keywords and phrases that your audience might use. You need to choose keywords and phrases that will generate the most traffic but are not so competitive. You just do not stand a chance to make it to the top listings unless you carry out a proper research on the popularity and competitiveness of keywords and phrases.

SEO copywriting: This involves writing content that centers on the keywords that you have targeted. You need to do this with great care. Do not want to go overboard and make your content keyword centric. The search engine can see through it and ignore your site completely. Search engines like fresh and relevant content. If possible change your content, once a month. You need not change it completely. Just little changes with small texts will suffice.

On-page optimization: You must optimize the code, text and the anchor text used for hyperlinks throughout your website.

Link building: This step plays a very important role in driving traffic to your site. In this process you look for other places on the web that will link to one of your website pages. These places in the web include blogs, other websites on topics related to yours and online directories. You need to do this with the list of keywords that you have chosen. With more incoming links, chances of getting a good ranking in search results and that too for highly competitive keywords increases considerably.

Choosing the right phrases—the synonym tool...

Understanding keywords is important, but more important is understanding what people are searching for? A major part of that includes finding out the variations of keywords that show up in searches all the time. SEO analysts sometimes even advice people to target the right synonyms of their business areas, instead of the main keyword (and they aren’t kidding).

This is especially true when one is trying to optimize businesses that are found in the Google local listings. Lots of people searching there search with descriptions and sometimes categories of business. Understanding those categories and phrases is key to ranking well in the maps.

Look at the Categories above, it is sometimes important to know the right category, than what you think is the right category for you.

On the same lines, Mike Blumenthal has put together a great tool for searching the right keywords/synonyms. The synonyms are taken from the Google’s database and provide great value to SEO analysts and local seo experts.

The search clearly highlights the most searched synonyms for the main keyword. Play around with it and let me know how useful you find it.

How to write a great SEO article-part 2...

So I hovered around the topic giving some background and my philosophy of how to approach writing a SEO article. But I would like to further clarify my stand by throwing some ingredients that cook a “great” article. Ok, let’s do it:

Know what you’re writing about

I cannot get any more basic than this; you cannot possibly reach McDonalds without knowing how to drive or having a map in the hand or mind. Sometimes the map is easy, and we are familiar with the route lots of times, but most of the other times things are not as easy.

Do a comprehensive research on the topic at hand

Think about the topic; try to read as much as possible. Let the mind do some unconscious thinking about the topic. Lot of times, the requirements for writing are incomplete, it is our job that we make sure that we get them completely before starting hitting away on the keyboards. It is simple—if you give un-researched and incomplete information, people will move somewhere else. Fight with your marketing team, ask them for more information, and try to convince them that you’ve got to know more.

Know some SEO, or sit down with your SEO analyst

You have to know the relevant keywords related to your topic and you have to use them in your article. Now “have to” doesn’t imply centering your entire article on the required phrases. That is why you need to speak to good SEO analyst, and he will tell you exactly what works.

To write good SEO articles, first read the great ones

Please just do it. Don’t assume you’re the only person who knows everything, and don’t make an opinion by reading few of them out there. Again, do some research.

Experiment with few writing styles; find your own style while doing that

It is ok to write few bad ones while finding your way, but it is unacceptable not to have a style (even a bad style!!) after months of your first stint.

Have fun while writing

Cannot stress the importance of doing this, it just shows in your article. The article reflects a lot about your state of mind, don’t write or blog because you want money, you will do a bad job 9 times out of 10.

On that note, I will end my lecture because I think I am overdoing what I just mentioned above!!

How to write a great SEO article...

Before I came into SEO industry, I used to wonder why some of the pages on the web show up in the results again and again. I now know that Google is not intelligent, it is pseudo-intelligent. It picks up content based on what it thinks is the best match for the search. So when I wrote my first ever article, which was actually a tutorial, I wrote an article on a very niche topic, and I got it to rank right on the first page, and it was searched a lot because it was a new and upcoming topic in programming world. And it still ranks among the top articles for that search just because more and more people clicked through that article when they searched for it, and hence Google attached more and more relevancy to it.

So I started writing articles just for the sake of ranking, and I was surprised how I was not able to do what I wanted to do. Some of the posts even on this blog were written by me keeping traffic in mind. But I realized very quickly that it won’t work. The information that I want to provide was driven by keywords rather than the idea of writing a post. One of the most important things I realized was that I cannot rank for everything. We have to write something because we want to communicate an idea, and if the idea is good enough to rank in the search engines, it will.

I rank well for most of the articles written on this blog. I just searched for few, and I found out that I ranked well for articles when the article content had what is required when users searched for it. Imagine how would users search for something? What are they looking for? That is the way you would want to go about writing articles which are really “SEO” based, rather than stuffing articles with keywords, and phrases which are most searched for. Below is an example blog from this site:

There is another side to it though. Writing articles for search engines and for article directories is a different game altogether. We are feeding parts of the Internet about the data, and we are searching for relevant backlinks while doing that, I assume that we can use of knowledge of keywords and phrases there.

Lots of times, writers write according to what people ask them to write. But SEO writers should assume the role of consultant sometimes, and they should advise what is best for the client, instead of blindly doing what they ask us to do. I will gather some more points in the next one.

..to be continued

Implications of personalized search...

Personalized search is on by default now. It is interesting to know that Google considers that to be the way forward, but I have my qualms about the subject. First of all let’s take a look at what the company thinks about the idea, and the main reasons they think personalized is better search.

Today we’re helping people get better search results by extending Personalized Search to signed-out users worldwide, and in more than forty languages. Now when you search using Google, we will be able to better provide you with the most relevant results possible. For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.

Well I do like the suggestions in the search, but ask myself if I want the links that I click in the Google are good and updated ones? It is better to let the users choose what they want, or is it better to present them with the latest and best options? Considering the number of people who search web, and considering the number of people among them who are end users who don’t know what is going behind under the hood, personalized search sometimes seems to be a sneaky option. Lots of user data is being transferred without a people knowing about it.

What is still interesting is that Google doesn’t tell us “how much personal” is the personalized search in reality. God knows if my atheist instincts will be further cemented into my mind because I will start seeing quotes about rationality and ‘how atheists are more utilitarian’ articles all around my search results!!

Btw, for people reading this article, personalized search can be turned off.

So what are the implications that SEO industry might have to battle with? Well to start with, geo targeting will become a difficult job. Lots of times, it will be difficult for small SEO companies to display their results to their clients just because clients will see different results based on their search history. It might mean lots of nightmares for the SEO analysts.

..to be continued

SEO mettle–Getting the back links...

We all know that getting the competitors back links is probably the toughest task in SEO field. It can be really cumbersome to analyze the links over and over for all the clients we are working for (unless you are using expensive software for doing the same). Lots of times the data itself is old, the links may or may not be relevant today, and many times we do not know how relevant the link we see in front of us is. So what do we do?

I stumbled upon the tool Yahoopipes, and interestingly, it has amazing tools to track our SEO project progress. Getting back to the point, it has a tool which can check the back links to a URL (the competitor in our case).

Just login with your Yahoo account and the tool is pretty straight forward to use. Add the feed to your favorite feed reader and you are ready to go. The links you get are the fresh ones and that is how you know what your competitors are up to. Also, that tells us that Google is giving importance to which websites.

You might not get all the links, but for a free tool, you wouldn’t want to miss out on any data that is available. Google alerts is another tool that you might use to monitor the back links and link activities for the sites you want to monitor, but lot of times the back links are contextual and hence we might miss out most of the links. Try this and let us know what your thoughts are.

India again the top SEO outsourcing destination...

Facts speak for themselves; India has been a top outsourcing destination for variety of IT work over the past decade. As businesses go online and look for cheap solutions, they look to places like India, where many SEO companies provide top quality solutions for 10% of the price compared to the US counterparts. It is interesting to see the trends that most of the regions which top the search volumes are dominated by South East Asia.

Google continues to dominate the search market, and hence the SEO searches are attached with the term “Google”. Interesting to see that more searches are “SEO Google”, “SEO wordpress”, “SEO tools”, which shows that more and more people are blogging a lot, and more and more people are doing some basic SEO for themselves instead of relying on experts.

We spoke a bit of local seo, and it is one of the terms that are rising in the list of searches. I ran quick insights on local search in US, and I was shocked to see that the only place where the term is searched at is California. But that also is sign of things to come at places where local seo is still at infancy.

Most of the US based companies now see the potential of outsourcing, and more and more SEO companies now have offices in India. Talent gurus is one of the top companies provided SEO solutions for clients all over the US. Give us a call for a free consultation.

More insights on local search ranking factors...

Last week I talked about some of the factors that could influence a small business search ranking in your area. This would I would like to expand the research a bit further by highlighting some of the most important factors that could make a difference to your local search engine optimization campaign. I have listed the factors and given them a rating out of 5, which is my view of importance of the particular factor in local search results.

• Address of the local business listing—5
• Citations from big directories and listing providers—5
• Incoming links from big directories and listings—4
• Importance of claiming the listings on the web—5
• Amount of reviews that are present on the listing—3.5
• The phone numbers of the business—5 (yes, shocking)
• Reviews on Google which have profiles—2.5
• Categories and keywords in the business descriptions.

• Reviews on websites other than Yahoo and Google—3.5
• Photos and videos on the profiles—4
• Address, name of street, city on the listing—4
• Inclusion of detailed description about services and products—4.5

Apart from these positives, one of the most harmful things you can do to lower of chances of ranking is to have multiple listings with same address or phone number (that’s a killer). Let us know what you think about the rankings.

Tips for boosting your SEO career...

Talent gurus has hired many SEO analysts in the past, some of them good, some not so good. We as SEO analysts sometimes have this question in our minds—what does it take to excel (excel is one as we bullet it afterwards!) in this field? The answers are probably easy to find if you’re committed to your field, but we would still try to make few notes for people who haven’t got it right yet:

• Get some professional certification: It can never do you harm to get certified in your field. If you’re a doctor you need a medical degree, similarly, you can get something like an Adwords qualified stamp on your resume by enhancing your skills and taking a test.
• Own multiple skills: I as a SEO analyst assumed variety of roles whenever needed. At times, I have seen people asking for help when the clients need a simple modification on their blogs or their websites. It is always helpful to know a bit of html, javascript and css. It always adds value to what you are as a SEO analyst.
• Get a good resume: Most of the SEO resumes I have seen include link building, PPC and other experience. Not to say that they are not important, but they are the minimum, isn’t it? We would want more from a resume; it should highlight your achievements as analysts, something that clearly shows the graphs of what you have achieved for the businesses.
• Excel is important: As I said in the beginning, knowing MS Excel is not necessary, but it should be part of daily activities. You cannot go far in SEO field unless you know how to put together a good report.
• Are you attending seminars?: Only yesterday I saw a conference held at San Diego which was aimed at providing information about SEO to small business providers. Don’t be tricked by the title of the seminars, make sure that you attend such things and note down the nitty-gritty’s of the trade.
• Social networking: Not in the SEO sense, but in general, you need to have a bunch of friends who are into similar field. Expanding your skills is only possible through knowing that you do not know.
• Reading and researching: Most of the seasoned analysts spend about 30% of their time updating themselves with the current trends.  SEO is a dynamic area, there are changes happening everyday, you can never do well if you don’t know what is happening out there.
• Create a brand: In the end you should be in a position to dictate terms in your career. You would want to have a brand for yourself. How can you do that? Write a blog, meet people, be known on discussion sites, just do anything, but create a brand for your self.

Do you think you own most of the above qualities?  If yes, then we would like to know you.