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.

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.

What are you doing about the local rankings?...

More and more local businesses are entering the web because they want to maximize the business. One way of doing that is by marketing on the web. More and more people are willing to buy online, not only because it takes less effort, but because the entire experience of buying things online has taken leaps these days. Just the other day I was speaking to ILana, owner of a clothing store in LA, and she told me about her plans to expand the business by exposing the products in the store through a website. She herself writes the descriptions of the products available on the website and was talking about how she was teaching herself to do SEO for the website so that more people around LA could visit her site. ILana is just one person whom I happened to meet, I am sure there thousand of other businesses who are doing or trying to do the same for their businesses too.

Google always provides IP based results, so as a user, we can just ask for “trench coats”, without worrying about the place. And that is where we SEO for local listings come into pictures. In fact, it is believed that about 15% results for any product search shows the

Google Maps results, which are clicked by 85% of the people who get such results. So what are some of the factors that are important for improving your results on the local listings? Well our team has been involved in figuring out this thing for some time now, and we are able to come up with few optimizations (yeah, that’s the key—optimize, optimize and optimize).

• Key word expansion is a key factor; include as many permutations as you can before you think that your keywords represent your business the best.
• Organic search is still important, don’t forget that.
• Try various GEO keyword phrases. Do surveys, see what people are talking about, see what they are searching for; it’s fun and work at the same time.
• Evaluate the advertising sources available at hand.
• Look out what other people are doing, don’t reinvent the wheel.

Let us know how it is going.

SEO predictions 2010—SEO spending will increase...

After few serious posts about search issues that the SEO industry might end up chasing around, let’s not forget that SEO is fun—there is nothing better than doing it and seeing the results in front of you. Good news though is that more and more businesses now want to do the same. They finally realize that Web is big and that they were unaware of the sleeping lion’s power all these times. Don’t believe me, go here and see it for yourself.

Don’t mistake me for saying that the traditional marketing methods are becoming obsolete. It is still an 80-20 game, but SEM is slowly and surely eating away the pieces of the larger pie. Email marketing, and display of ads via search engines is going to quadruple in the coming years. How exactly to spend the money depends on few factors, so companies would want to spend money wisely by taking the help of the SEM and SEO companies.

SEO is still not out, though it hasn’t outsmarted PPC. But, search engines are becoming increasingly pivotal for consumers and producers, who prefer to put their business online. If one hires smartly, one would spend smartly, and hence SEO providers come to fore front there. The spending is rising, but at the same time, industry always sees that people hold back from spending money even after getting outstanding results. But failure to capture the potential due to hesitancy in spending money will only lead to failure of business and losses for the businesses.

Don’t ask for guaranteed ranking, that’s unethical I have said it before. Be ready to spend money, see what you want to sell, and how much you want to sell. May be SEO is not suitable for your type of business, hire a good consultant, we can help you too if you want. So wait for the results—as they say, you only reap what you sow!

SEO predictions 2010—“Social-recommendations�...

The way data is “picked up” from various sources to give users the best data for search has changed over the years. In the beginning it used to be straight up blogs, which were supposed to be the best possible updated source of information for a company of person. That has evolved—we have information coming from so many sources, and now the search engines display the latest information from a wide array of sources.

The way Google and other search engines are trying to calculations for displaying the search results that are most relevant is probably going to be a subject of research in the coming year too.

As mentioned earlier, real time search is picking up, and personalized search is the main aim of doing that. The kind of metrics that are going to be impact the personal search experience has still to be confirmed. How the organic results will sort out? Will it be just based on what a user clicks through? Or will it just be based on the history of the users, or may be it will be a combination of everything. May be Google will track the clicks on the Adsense ads, who knows?

But the experimentation will be on in 2010 on these two fronts. As things move forward there will few things that will remain the same in SEO world:

• The top websites will remain on top
• Small businesses will concentrate on branding (more about this later)
• There is not going to be a simple rule book for SEO

Let’s keep our search lenses on all the time and see what happens in 2010. Btw it does take a month to realize that we are in 2010. When I started writing this piece, I started with “SEO predictions 2009”—I need to get over it!!

SEO predictions for 2010—Real time search will g...

With Twitter, facebook and other micro-blogging sites gaining popularity, Google has started including real-time information in the SERPs. Google took some time to get into the business, but now it has started playing with it, even though the initial search engine talks proved that Google real time search is a failure.

Yes, if you see the above results, you are certainly going to believe that the real time search is doing enough damage by getting results which were last uploaded on to the Internet, but this is just the beginning. The SEO gurus have censured Google for this and have handed over the game into the hands of some engineers, who, according to some, are responsible for putting it up altogether.

It isn’t about the fact that whether such results will confuse SEO experts, it is about the fact that it is natural for people to ask for latest information than the “best” information most of the times. That said, it is true that we are long way away from there.

It is a very natural for people to expect the latest Lil Wayne song when they hit the artist’s name. A song name, its small video along with some information can do wonders to search experience. I cannot believe people think it should be done away with. Although I understand the rationale behind the criticism for the real time search thing, but it will be surely one of the biggest areas of research in the year 2010.