SEO Myths Busted In The Busby SEO Challenge
Posted in Busby SEO Challenge, SEO by DB
One of the biggest benefits of participating in the Busby SEO Challenge is the opportunity to learn and try out some of your theories. A unique aspect of a SEO Contest is the fact that you are competing with a large number of SEO consultants, in this case about 500 odd participants to rank a key phrase. In the normal course of events you would have competition but nothing this large and sustained.
I was planning to do this once the Busby contest ends and I may add more but for now I thought I will talk about a few SEO myths that have been exposed for what they are, myths.
Let’s start with the biggest myth of them all.
Too many Links too fast will land you in trouble.
Every SEO consultant on every SEO blog will have said this at one time or another. I’m sure you would have read this on a blog or in an ebook at some point. While this is true to a certain extent, the Busby SEO Challenge has shown that it cannot be a blanket statement. One of the top teams in the challenge, the French team’s flagship blog has over 150,000 back links as seen in Yahoo and is currently at the top of the SERP’s. Again folks, let me repeat that. A brand new blog, less than 3 months old has built up over 150,000 links in an incredibly short period of time and still ranks at the very top for the contest key phrase, Busby SEO Challenge.
Here is a tip guys, it is all about the key phrase and the trust you build with Google that matters in the end. Keep this in mind and you can go places on your next SEO campaign.
Get an equal number of PR links or higher and your site will move up the SERP’s.
While there is truth in the above statement, it is the blanket nature of the statement that is debatable. While there are a number of SEO products in the market that drive home this point, it is not necessarily the whole truth. Simply getting a PR 7 link when your competition has PR5 links and below does not guarantee you a place on the top of the search results. There are a number of other factors that are at play and to be more specific, a number of Onsite factors at play that will ultimately determine the link weight that PR 7 link will bring to the table.
On Page factors are a poor second when compared to Off Page factors.
Yes, incoming links are in the end what matters typically in a normal SEO campaign because incoming links often can compensate for a lot. But, when you have 500 SEO guru’s trying every trick in the book to get on top of the ranking, then On page factors do have a lot of weight in the ranking.
I have learnt and confirmed a lot In the course of this Busby SEO Challenge. While I joined late to the party, I am currently ranked at position 7. The next 13 days will tell if I can move higher up or if I have left things too late. Keep tuned in for more updates on the SEO challenge from Busby and for more tips on SEO and website hosting.
Are You Planning On Changing Your Web Hosting Company?
Posted in Hosting, How To, Web Master by DB
So it’s that time again. You just realized your current web hosting provider just does not cut it. It’s time to move your hosting account with all your sites or site to another company. If you are doing this for the first time then you’re probably wondering what you need to be doing. Let’s take this step by step.
First ofcourse is finding another web hosting plan from a decent hosting company. Be clear on exactly what you are getting from your new hosting provider before you sign up. Weigh carefully whether a monthly plan or a yearly plan is best for your business.
Once you’ve found the plan that suits you best, its time for the move. It is relatively easy if you have a static website. All you would need to do is setup your new hosting account, transfer all your website files over and finally create all your email id’s over at the new hosting account and you are good to go. Change the DNS for your website at your domain registrar and in a couple of days all requests to your website will be served by the new hosting account. I would cancel your previous hosting account only after a week of your website DNS switching over to the new hosting account.
As a website owner you are doing this to prevent the following.
- Avoid having your website users find your site down. Nothing puts off a user than finding a site down.
- Avoid losing any emails that is sent during your hosting migration exercise.
- Avoid getting penalized by search engines. Yes, search engines can remove your site from the rankings if they find that your site is not active. While the period before a search engine applies this penalty is usually 48 hrs, why take a chance.
Infact this point reminds me of the issue that some of the competitors are facing in the Busby SEO Challenge. Pogung’s busby seo challenge is seemingly hit with bandwidth issues and often is found to be down. While this could be a tactic from a competing team trying to sabotage his position it has not affected his ranking yet though for the first time I have seen some fluctuations around the top.
Back to hosting and moving web hosting companies. If you are running a dynamic site as in a site that captures information from users such as running a ecommerce site or you run a popular forum or blog, moving hosting companies is a bigger deal. A lot of thought and care has to be exercised to make the move seamless to the end user.
I will tackle the best options for moving a dynamic website between hosting providers in a later article. If you are looking to move your blog, you probably would be interested in my previous article that talks about moving your blog to another hosting company.
Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog for more tips on web hosting and search engine optimization.
Is It The End of SEO?
Posted in SEO by DB
I’ve been reading many reports of late that talk about the SEO bubble and that we are looking at a lean period when many corporations will soon move SEO in house leading to a burst in the SEO bubble.
Somehow I don’t think this is going to happen any day soon. Yes, there is an explosion of wannabe SEO consultants and firms out there and yes everyone is targeting the same market but the big difference is in skill and results. While SEO to a certain degree is knowing all the basics of ranking and understanding the different algorithm hot points it is also about skill and the art of doing it. Which is why no two SEO’s with the same knowledge but with different implementation approaches will have the same results.
That said, there will be some consolidation. The plethora of search engine optimization consultants flooding the market either looking for clients or working on their own niches will soon dry up when they realize that they cannot compete on competitive terms or in competitive niches. The real issue with the flood of SEO consultants is the negative fallout of the failed campaigns that many many of the SEO firms are going to leave behind in their wake.
This is one of the prime reasons you have so many medium sized companies looking to move their SEO work in house. Do all the grunt work in house and look to a SEO consultant for strategic and specific advice. You will have more and more companies signing up for this model but if you are a SEO consultant with decent ranking capabilities, you have nothing to worry about.
For wannabe consultants getting into search engine optimization, my only advice is to be on top of things from a knowledge perspective and from a resource perspective as much as you can. You can learn by following me on the Busby SEO challenge or by reading more SEO related tips on this blog and my other SEO blog.
Every industry goes through a shake up, it is the law of the land. The weak or the pretentious get weeded out and leaves the field all the more ripe for easy pickings for those that are left standing. As an SEO and if you good at SEO, you should be working on a few niches yourself that will be equally profitable if not more compared to SEO Consulting work that you do on your clients behalf.
In my opinion, if you are not working on a niche of your own then you are not any good at SEO. If you cannot trust yourself to rank your own site then how can you help a client? Some food for thought!
Must Have Plugins For Your WordPress Blog
Posted in Anatomy of a Blog, Busby SEO Challenge, General, How To, Optimize And Monetize, Starting Out by DB
Installing and setting up a WordPress blog is a peice of cake. Many web hosts offer a one click option to install a WordPress blog for your domain. One of the reasons WordPress has become the tool of choice as far as blogging is concerned is the availability of an extensive library of plugins to augment and enhance your blog’s functionality.
Once you are done with installing and configuring your blog, it’s time to add features and functionality. Unless you have a pretty unique requirement all you would need to do is find and install the right wordpress plugin and in rare instances, modify the plugin to work for you.
Below are some of the plugins that I usually setup whenever I start a blog.
- All In One SEO Pack
- Google Sitemap
- Blog SiteMap
- Akismet
- Related Entries
- WP-phpMyAdmin
- In Series Plugin
- Contact Form
- Image Manager
What is important is to also setup my blog correctly in terms of search engine optimization. This is for me an over riding factor and often will use plugins to help me out in this endeavor. WordPress has great many plugins that greatly improve On Page optimization and because of this has become a tool of choice for the vast majority of SEO’s out there.
I will do a follow up post to this with details on how to set up your blog so that it is best optimized for search engines. I will also detail some of my favorite plugins that I absolutely cannot do without. If you are interested in SEO and optimizing your site and need advice, get in touch and I will be glad to help you out. You can also follow me on one of the biggest SEO Challenges and learn all about search engines and search engines strategies.
If you are beginning your journey in blogging, I would suggest you read up some of my older post more geared towards a novice webmaster as much as you can but I would urge you to start your blogging or hosting journey. There is nothing better than learning on the job. Good luck !!
SEO For The Mobile World
Posted in Busby SEO Challenge, Optimize And Monetize, SEO, Web Master by DB
Mobile phones and internet applications for mobile phones are spreading like wild fire. We are at the beginning of the next cycle of internet phenomenons. There is no time like now to start preparing to climb on the next bandwagon. Soon we will have more and more sites looking to convert from their current clunky format into mobile friendly.
The world of search engine optimization will soon follow. Once we have sufficient gravity going on in the mobile world, people will start or feel the need to optimize their sites to appear higher on rankings just like in today’s browser world.
SEO today is biased towards off page/site factors such as the number of incoming links, quality of the incoming links, content relevance, anchor text, site authority and much more. On page factors though important is always secondary. All this could change once we start moving into the mobile world. While I do believe that incoming links will be important, it might just take second place to On Page factors such as
- Page size and Load time
- Browser and mobile compatibility
- Content structure
As an SEO, it is important for me to start experimenting with optimizing my sites for the mobile revolution that is pretty much upon us today. While seo challenges help you to fine tune your skills in today’s PC/laptop browser world, it is crucial to start thinking and planning for the next vehicle of choice for information dissemination.
So if you are a search engine consultant or firm offering seo and seo services like I do, pull up your sleeve and start your learning today. Your next mobile search campaign may be sooner than you think.
Optimizing Your Meta Description
Posted in Busby SEO Challenge, Optimize And Monetize, SEO by DB
One of the most abused tags on a page is the meta description tag. Long long ago, actually a few years ago, you could get away with keyword stuffing your meta description and see a positive effect on the search engine result pages.
Over time Google and the rest got a little smarter and now the meta description tag has virtually no effect in terms of ranking. However what is overlooked by many is the control you have as a webmaster in influencing click throughs to your site. Snippet generation by Google uses the meta description quite extensively but then again is not limited to meta description.
Why don’t I simply hand you over to Matt Cutts. In the video below Matt gives a detailed tour about snippets and snippet generation.
If you have been following me in the Busby SEO Challenge contest, you will notice that many of the top ten search result snippets are the meta description itself while a few are generated by Google based on the keyword being searched for.
Meta Description used to previously be one of the favorite tags of knowledgeable webmasters in their attempt to manipulate search rankings. These days it is the other extreme, many webmasters are completely ignoring it. I hope this short post helps you identify the potential the meta description tag has on bringing in organic traffic.
Busby SEO Challenge On Social Media
Posted in Busby SEO Challenge, SEO by DB
One of the favorite tactics of all the Busby SEO Challenge participants is to use Social Media sites to build back links to their contest page. Social Media has increasingly become a potent tool to manage and better your ranking on search engines.
Being the first out of the blocks always has an advantage. Social Media bombardment works best when the topic being posted is fresh. This is the best time to create a buzz without having to think of an angle that nobody has thought of before because you are literally the first out of the block. The chances of your story getting dugg or stumbled upon are greater right in the beginning because in a week or so almost all of the participants would have submitted some version of the Busby SEO Challenge story to all the popular and not so popular social media and digg clones out there.
While many of these sites are becoming more and more difficult to game, it is twice as difficult when you have 100 versions of the same story running amok. Sites like Digg can potentially drive huge traffic and the add on effect of the story going viral being tons and tons of backlinks which is why Digg still is the holy grail of social media sites and will continue to be so with Google looking at a Digg buyout.
The SEO Challenge from Busby has seen some interesting tactics. Social Media is just one of them but nevertheless an important one. Keep tracking all the updates about the Busby SEO Challenge and make sure you subscribe to my blog for more insights into search engine optimization and web hosting.
On Page SEO Best Practices
Posted in Busby SEO Challenge, Optimize And Monetize, SEO by DB
Search Engine Optimization can be broadly classified into On Page Optimization tactics and Off Page Optimization. Let’s take a close look at the former today. While there are many techniques that are situation specific, there are quite a few generic rules of thumb that one must employ to rank high on the search engine result pages (SERP’s)
So what are these On Page optimization techniques? Let us look at some basic On Page factors in no order of priority. Let’s save the more specific ones for another day.
- Title TagPerhaps one of the most important aspects of On Page optimization. Having your main keyword as part of your page title is a must. The title tag is one tag that is often abused by novice SEO consultant and companies. You will often come across title tags that are a thesis in itself. Either the SEO in charge does not realize that there is a limit to the number of characters or they have no clue which keyword to target for that page. All classic examples of bad SEO.
- Header TagsStill considered to very important part of On page optimization. Usage of the header tags must be done with care. The most ideal would be to have a single H1 tag that contains the main keyword for that page followed with 3 – 4 H2 tags that contains the secondary keywords for that page. Not much importance given to H3 and further.
Another point that is generally considered a good practice is to order the Header tags in increasing importance. So always have the H1 tag coming first followed by the H2 tags and so on.
- URLHave your keyword in your domain/sub domain or file/folder is always a plus and a good SEO consultant will ensure that your page/folder URL contains your most important keyword. Avoid too many parameters as this is guaranteed to confuse the search bots though these days the bots are getting more and more adept at it.
- Keyword densityHaving the right keyword density is another aspect of On Page optimization that is often abused by novice SEO’s. Keyword stuffing can get you into trouble but I’ve seen sites that have built authority getting away with stuffing to a fair degree. While I will not quote percentages, the target should always be to pass any visual inspection that might occur with ease.
- Meta ContentMost search engines have reduced the importance of the meta description and keywords. Keyword stuffing is these tags is so outdated that if you find a SEO company doing this then you should simply move on because the SEO company is still employing tactics that are years out of date.
That said, the meta description is easily overlooked and can be very important and if often the difference between your site getting clicked on or overlooked on the search engine results. Remember that this is what is often showed to the user when a search result is displayed and the description in there is crucial in converting a potential visitor
While there are many more on page optimization techniques one can employ, they are all specific to the CMS or niche itself. For example, there are tons of additional things you can do with a blog running WordPress that will optimize your site in addition to the above.
Take for example the Busby SEO Challenge that is currently in progress. A quick look at some of the various competitors in the Busby Challenge will throw up various On Page optimization techniques that the participant believes in very strongly. Some are a little far fetched like using the same blog theme as Matt Cutts ( 
like that will help) since they obviously believe that the theme is search engine optimized to the more plausible use of images and video on the blogs.
Another factor that can be considered as an On Page Optimization factor is the content itself. No I’m not taking about keyword positioning or density. I am referring to the frequency of fresh content that is added to a site or blog. If I again use the Busby SEO Challenge as an example, you will find two camps. One that firmly believes that fresh content is key and the other group that is more than happy with a more spaced out content strategy. The SERP’s itself throws up many contrasting examples on this particular point. I firmly believe that this cannot be viewed in isolation. This particular point has to be examined with many other factors, domain authority, the topic niche. More on this in a later post.
Ok folks, I’m going to end this post here. Do not forget to subscribe to this blog for more tips on website hosting and search engine optimization and yes, take some time to read through my Busby SEO Challenge entry and looking forward for your support in helping me winning the SEO challenge from Busby.
Website Hosting Options
Posted in Hosting, Starting Out by DB
Deciding on what hosting option works best for your website is a complicated exercise if you are a beginner to the world of web hosting. This post hopefully will shed light on the various hosting options that are out there or on offer from various web hosting companies.
Shared Hosting
The basic and most popular category of web hosting is shared hosting. Shared hosting is when you and several other websites share resources such as the web server disk space, RAM and processing. To put it in simple terms, shared web hosting entails hosting number of websites, either belonging to you or other customers on hosting infrastructure that is shared.
Most of the offers that are advertised by web hosting companies or resellers are shared hosting plans. You could be looking at spending around $10 for decent shared hosting plan from a reputable hosting provider.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is pretty much is opposite of shared hosting. Pretty much most of the infrastructure apart from the connectivity is dedicated to one website or one customer. Dedicated hosting affords you flexibility that a shared hosting cannot be it directly from a hosting provider or from a reseller.
As a complete newbie, you are better off starting with shared hosting and moving within the realms of shared hosting as you go along. So basically you start with a shared hosting plan and as you gradually start pushing the limit of the shared resources or if you start to launch more websites, you can then migrate to a reseller plan.
A reseller hosting plan typically gives you more flexibility and control on your websites and resource allocation to your websites. A reseller plan also effectively helps you to segregate different websites and reduces your chances of your entire hosting portfolio getting yanked if you have an issue with one website.
The next step from a reseller hosting plan is to go for a virtual private server or VPS for short. A VPS is for all practical purposes pretty similar to having your own dedicated server but as the name says, it is virtual. You have VPS software that can effectively partition a server’s resources such as disk space, memory and processing speed into separate units. Each unit is then given to a customer who has complete control over that particular unit. While it may seem to be a dedicated server, a VPS is still a shared hosting option.
The final step in the hosting ladder is the dedicated option. You could start with running a single dedicated server and slowly migrate to a rack to even a complete datacenter as your website or business grows.
Cloud computing such as EC2 and S3 from Amazon and Big Table Google have taken the VPS unit concept and applied it at a dedicated server level.
Website Hosting can be incredibly complicated from a newbie. Finding the right hosting company and the right hosting plan for your website requires you to do the right due diligence and a reasonable understanding your website requirements. Good luck in finding that web hosting plan. As a first step I would recommend you look at your web hosting needs. Next would be to specify those needs and choose your hosting option accordingly. After that it is a question of setting up your hosting account, do the necessary configurations and flip the switch to take you live. Ofcourse I am kinda generalizing a little bit here but I’m sure you get the picture.
One last note, do not forget the search engines. I will post an article, hopefully soon on what you should be doing from a hosting perspective to help your website rank better on search engines. Hey, if you are interested in SEO, let me end this post by pointing you to Busby SEO Challenge, a search engine contest that is currently going on. Enjoy!!
July Web Hosting Coupon From Omnis Network
Posted in Web Hosting Coupons by DB
If you are in the market for website hosting and are looking for a deal, Omnis Network is currently now offering $15 off of every hosting package. Simply use the hosting coupon “15off” and save $15. Follow this link to find all the web hosting packages from Omnis Network.
Omnis Network plan on offering discounts and new coupons each month as part of their marketing strategy to acquire more and more clients. Keep this site bookmarked for more hosting coupons and web hosting news.
