Google Images A Source for more Traffic

Did you ever thought that images can also contribute to traffic towards your website, and that too well targeted one. Now the question comes into mind is how can images worth of providing traffic to the website.

Here is the answer to that above told. Yes, it's true that images can be a major source to obtain traffic to your website. Many people uses Google Image Search for finding the images of the wide variety of topics. Google Image Search is an online tool to find the images of the specific query entered by the user.

Google Search provides images for the specific search topics when a user searches for it. The highly relevant shows up on the top of the Google search results in the form of images. Getting listed in this prime position can possibly send lot of traffic to your website.


8 Strategies For Optimizing The Images To Get More Traffic Towards Your Website

The entire process lies in the attention and accuracy, while naming the images on the website. Here I have tried to list the maximum possible ways for using images as a source for traffic,

1. Using Keywords in ALT tags - Make a note of all the important keywords for your business, and use them properly while naming the images.
2. Use Descriptive ALT tags - Try to be a bit descriptive while naming the alt tags. A descriptive alt tag for images speaks for more other than a non descriptive one.
3. Description around Image - Put some relevant and descriptive text around your image, it helps to better place your image in the search results for that specific query.
4. Using Anchor Text in links to images - Using keywords as anchor texts in relating to images is of great significance.
5. Tagging - Tagging the images is another nice way to optimize your images to rank better and adds value to that image.
6. Check Robots File - Make sure that you have not blocked the images folder from getting indexed by the search engine spider.
7. Enable Google Image Search - Sign in to Google Webmaster Tools and click on the Diagnostic tab. Select enhanced image search on the left sidebar and click on the checkbox to opt into image search for your website.
8. Check out for Google Image Labeler - It allows you and others to write tags for images that show up. So you can go ahead and submit your relevant tags.

All the above strategies are trusted and recommended to be used. You can try and see the results yourself. Images are the additional way to provide traffic to the website, so we can go ahead in drawing some traffic to the website by optimizing the images.

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How to Optimize Website for Google?

Google always promises to show the accurate results for the search query by the user. It does so by maintaining the following set of guidelines which further helps Google in finding, indexing and ranking the website.

Optimize for Google | Google Website Optimization | How to Optimize Website for Google?

Google gives importance to many factors starting from the title of the webpage, to the links incoming to the site. There are a lot many factors listed below for optimizing the website in Google, but main thing to be considered is the RELEVANCE and the QUALITY.

15 ways to Optimize the Website for Google

1. The first and the most important task is to submit the website in Google once it is ready.
2. Sign in to the Google Webmasters Tools.
3. Submit an XML sitemap in the Google Webmasters Tools. The Sitemap helps Google in learning the structure of the website and increasing the coverage of the webpages.
4. Create pages while considering user on mind and not search engines. Showing some content to user and other to search engine spiders (CLOAKING) is considered as SPAM, and the website can be removed from the search engine listings or may be even banned.
   
5. Make a clear hierarchy and navigation for the site. Each page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
   
6. The content on the web page should be informative and useful to the visitors.
   
7. Think of the important words for your website and make sure to insert them in the content.
   
8. The title of the page should be accurate.
   
9. Create a static HTML Sitemap depicting the important pages of the site to visitors. Break the sitemap if it consists of more than 100 links into seperate pages.
   
10. Remove the Broken links / Dead Links.
    
11. Validate HTML for the webpage.
    
12. The number of links to a webpage should no more than 100.
    
13. Make sure that the website URL's does not contain Session ID's, and if it does then try to re-write them to static ones, which are more readily accepted by the search engine crawlers.
    
14. Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server, to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.
    
15. Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.

Google considers the following as SPAM

• Hidden text or hidden links.
• Using cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Sending automated queries to Google.
• Loading pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Creating multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Creating "doorway" pages for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

Important Points

• Google Webmasters Help
• Google Spam Report
• Submitting Website for Reconsideration in Google
  

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Some Useful Links

Some Important Posts 11 ways to Optimize for Yahoo? 13 ways to Optimize for MSN? Google's Search Engine Starter Guide Promote your site by organic methods, i.e., White Hat SEO Techniques Don't get your site penalized for using Black Hat SEO Techniques Cool advantages of SEO for your website and business 15 ways to Drive Traffic towards your Website

Suggested Reading Google's SEO Starter Guide SEO Tutorial - SEO Administrator Dynamic Website Optimization SEO Checklist for Developing the New Website

Most Read SEO Articles Google - Customize your Search Results Internet's Best Website Directory List Internet's Best RSS Directories Internet's Best Blog Directories How to promote your business using the Web 2.0 Techniques? Numbered Search Results How to write 301 redirects for your website? How to market your blog? How to Create a Custom 404 Error Page for your website? How to write good Press Release? How to know which design combination is best for your website? How to remove white spaces in the tables created in Blogger? What is Google's Hill Top Algorithm? Top 100 Article Directories 100 Top SEO Forums List Some easy ways to obtain Backlinks for your website How to Optimize your site for Yahoo? How to Optimize your site for MSN? How to Create Sitemaps? How to improve Bounce Rate for your website?

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How to Optimize Website for Yahoo?

As we are aware that Yahoo Search Engine is the second major search engine after Google, covering nearly 20% (approximately) of the online traffic. So as such it becomes necessary to know what all to consider for the optimization of the website in Yahoo, and how to get your website in the top results in Yahoo Search Engine Listings.

Optimize for Yahoo | Website Optimization for Yahoo | How to Optimize Website for Yahoo?

There are a lot of factors to be considered while optimizing the website for Yahoo. The Yahoo! Search Algorithm ranks the results by analyzing

• the web page text
• the title of the page
• the description
• the links to the page

11 ways to Optimize the Website for Yahoo!

1. To get started submit your site to Yahoo, requires registration.
2. Sign in to Yahoo! Site Explorer mysites to see how your website in performing in Yahoo.
3. Find out the important keywords relevant to the business and list/use then in the page appropriately.
4. The title of the page should be in accordance with the concept of the website.
5. Use the description tag and make sure to write an accurate description of the page. After title, description is the most important tag to draw users to the site.
6. Use a distinct list of keywords in tht keyword tag that relate to the specific page.
7. Yahoo focuses on placing the relevant text and links in HTML rather than in images, as it is difficult sometimes.
8. Using ALT for graphics, it helps improve the text content of your page for search purposes.
9. Develop links for your website, with the other related website. Yahoo strictly adheres to not considering the link farms for increasing the page rank for the site.
10. An HTML Sitemap, which helps in getting all the other links of the website crawled.
11. Yahoo provides Search Resources for Webmasters which helps in the proper optimizing and indexing of the website.
    

Yahoo does not considers the website for inclusion in it's search index if

• Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results
• Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page (doorway pages)
• Multiple sites or pages offering substantially the same content
• Pages that rely heavily on content or links to content created for another web site, such as affiliate content
• Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames
• Pages in great quantity, automatically generated or of little value (cookie-cutter pages)
• Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
• The use of text or links hidden from the user
• Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end user sees (cloaking)
• Sites cross-linked excessively with other sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity (link schemes)
• Pages built primarily for the search engines or pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords
• Misuse or inaccurate use of competitor or brand names
• Sites that use excessive pop-ups, install malware (i.e. spyware, viruses, trojans), or interfering with user navigation
• Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent, or provide a poor user experience

Important Points

• To request a URL review at Yahoo Search Content Quality Guidelines, fill the Yahoo Search URL Status Review Form
• Reporting the websites violating the Yahoo Search Content Quality Guidelines
• Read from Yahoo's Webmaster Resources
  

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Some Useful Links

Some Important Posts 15 ways to Optimize your Website in Google 13 ways to Optimize your Website in MSN Google's Search Engine Starter Guide Promote your site by organic methods, i.e., White Hat SEO Techniques Don't get your site penalized for using Black Hat SEO Techniques Cool advantages of SEO for your website and business 15 ways to Drive Traffic towards your Website

Suggested Reading Google's SEO Starter Guide SEO Tutorial - SEO Administrator Dynamic Website Optimization SEO Checklist for Developing the New Website

Most Read SEO Articles Google - Customize your Search Results Internet's Best Website Directory List Internet's Best RSS Directories Internet's Best Blog Directories How to promote your business using the Web 2.0 Techniques? Numbered Search Results How to write 301 redirects for your website? How to market your blog? How to Create a Custom 404 Error Page for your website? How to write good Press Release? How to know which design combination is best for your website? How to remove white spaces in the tables created in Blogger? What is Google's Hill Top Algorithm? Top 100 Article Directories 100 Top SEO Forums List Some easy ways to obtain Backlinks for your website How to Optimize your site for Yahoo? How to Optimize your site for MSN? How to Create Sitemaps? How to improve Bounce Rate for your website?

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How to Optimize Website for MSN?

Many webmasters ignore optimizing their website for MSN. Even though if you optimize your website for Google, it will automatically show off the results in MSN and Yahoo, but still they have their own indexing process, and as such optimizing the website for them (search engines) would be of great significant importance to the websites.

Optimize for MSN | Website Optimization for MSN | How to Optimize for MSN?

When it comes to optimization of website in MSN, there are several key aspects to be considered. First let us see how live search ranks the website.

The Live Search Ranking Algorithm analyzes the factors

• the web page content
• the linking websites (both number and quality), and
• the relevance of the websites content to keywords

Each time the index is updated, the previous rankings are revised, and as such there is a change in the rankings for the current website.

13 ways to Optimize the website for MSN
The following points should be considered while optimizing the website for MSN,

1. The first and the fore most task is to submit the website to Live Search
2. Thereafter sign in to MSN Webmaster tools to know how your website is performing in the Live Search Results
3. MSNBot is very particular about the Description Tag, this is what is being preferred
   
   • Use proper relevant description tags.
   • Place descriptive content near the top of each webpage.
   • Use keyword one time in the description tag.
   • Make sure that each webpage has a clear topic and purpose.
   • Add a website description to a Description tag, meta name="description" content="Describe your site here"
4. Maintain the overall keyword weight of the visible body text of less than 6%. Try to achieve minimum 3% where possible.
5. Choose a domain name with the business related keyword into it. If a keyword phrase is used then better choose for the keywords seperated by hyphens than underscores.
6. While naming the pages, try to name them based on the keyword (keyword-phrases) for the domain. The search engines place added relevancy on keywords found in the name of the page, or the URL.
   
7. MSN gives ranking honors to sites with an abundance of incoming links. That means the greater the number of incoming links, with the keywords in them as anchor texts, its a boost for the ranking for those keywords.
   Furthermore, make sure that the page of the Website linking to the website is in the MSN index and that it has a strong number of incoming links to that domain as well as having less than 80 links on the page linking to the website.
   
8. MSN recommends one topic per page.
   MSN Quote: "The best way to attract people to your site, and keep them coming back, is to design your pages with valuable content that your target audience is interested in.
   
   In the visible page text, include words users might choose as search query terms to find the information on your site.
   
   Limit all pages to a reasonable size. We recommend one topic per page.
   
   An HTML page with no pictures should be under 150 KB," Google appreciates under 100KB.
9. The sites linking to the websites should be of the same theme or area, not necessarily of the same product as yours website.
10. The linking strategy can affect the site getting indexed by MSNBot, here is what MSN recommends,
    
    • Consider validating the HTML, check for all the tags, anchor texts leading to proper webpages and not to deadlinks.
    • Remove the Deadlinks if there are any on the website.
    • If the webage is redirected, then specify the same using 301 or 302 redirect.
    • Use Robots.txt to restrict the robots from accessing the files and directories that are of least importance to the users.
    • MSNBot prefers Static URL's, so try using them.
11. XML Sitemaps provide the information about the important pages and their relevance to the spiders.
12. MSN recommends the webpage hierarchy to be completely flat. All the webpages should not be at the maximum of three clicks away from the default page.
13. MSN provides Guidelines for Webmasters for successfully optimizing and getting the website indexed in MSN.
    
    

Important Points

• To find whether your site is listed in Live search index just do a query site:Your Website Name
• To list your site in Local Business Results, use Add a Local Business Listing form
• Don't fill the pages with keywords as they are considered as spam by the search engines.
• Using Hidden Texts/Links can lead your website out from the search engine results or even getting it banned.
• Link farms for getting lot of incoming links for higher rank in MSN is considered as SPAM.
  

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Some Useful Links

Some Important Posts 15 ways to Optimize your Website in Google 11 ways to Optimize your Website in Yahoo Google's Search Engine Starter Guide Promote your site by organic methods, i.e., White Hat SEO Techniques Don't get your site penalized for using Black Hat SEO Techniques Cool advantages of SEO for your website and business 15 ways to Drive Traffic towards your Website

Suggested Reading Google's SEO Starter Guide SEO Tutorial - SEO Administrator Dynamic Website Optimization SEO Checklist for Developing the New Website

Most Read SEO Articles Google - Customize your Search Results Internet's Best Website Directory List Internet's Best RSS Directories Internet's Best Blog Directories How to promote your business using the Web 2.0 Techniques? Numbered Search Results How to write 301 redirects for your website? How to market your blog? How to Create a Custom 404 Error Page for your website? How to write good Press Release? How to know which design combination is best for your website? How to remove white spaces in the tables created in Blogger? What is Google's Hill Top Algorithm? Top 100 Article Directories 100 Top SEO Forums List Some easy ways to obtain Backlinks for your website How to Optimize your site for Yahoo? How to Optimize your site for MSN? How to Create Sitemaps? How to improve Bounce Rate for your website?

»»  read more

Google on the Killing Spree

Google is also now on the rolling back of employees in it's Sales and Marketing departments. Google has announced in it's post to shed off 200 employees globally in the Sales and Marketing Departments.

They say that it's because to improve the order of effectiveness and efficiency in the organization, they are taking such a step. But is it worth it? Will removing the employees cause them increase in efficiency and effectiveness for their organizations?

I was thinking to get answer to these questions before writing this post. How far does it goes to increase their success?

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New iGoogle Game Themes Launched

Want to personalize your Google Page? No, problem at all!

Google has launched iGoogle Themes, based on the concept of game super heros, like "MARIO", "MEGA MAN", "WII SPORTS" & "SPORE".

Now have a colourful theme based page for your iGoogle page. Check for your own iGoogle Themes

For more detailed information check iGoogle Themes

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Google provides two enhancements for Search Page

Google enhanced it's search result feature by providing two additional features to the search results,

• an expanded list of searches, and
• an expanded search result descriptions

both focused on the ultimate aim of providing detailed information to the users, for their queries.

For more detailed information, click here.

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Dynamic Websites Optimization

Optimization of the dynamic web pages and/or websites is always one of the major concern for the optimizers. This post puts some focus about the optimization of the dynamic webpages. First, let us know what is meant by dynamic website.

Dynamic Website

A Dynamic Website is a database driven website in which part of the content is generated by Server Side Programs. Unlike a static page, a dynamic page does not exists as a file on a hosting server, until the request comes for a page.

Dynamic Website & Search Engines

These days dynamic web pages are created "on the fly" with various technologies such as ASP (Active Server Pages), ASP.NET, Cold Fusion technology, JSP (Java Server Pages), PERL and PHP. These pages are user friendly and works very will for real users actually visiting the web site, but they usually create a mess with most search engine spiders.

A Dynamic page is generated by the request of the user, and as such it consists of a Session ID, something like

http://tusharvickkie.blogspot.com?Name=Value&BalahBalah%BlahBlah%BlahBlah@Session_ID=@@@@@1473653&BalahBalah%BlahBlah%Blah=79

As the dynamic page does not exist and is being created by the request for user, so search engine bots cannot index them while crawling the pages, and further more search engine bots cannot read characters such as "?", "%", "$" "#", "&", "*", "!". So as such it becomes difficult for the search engine bots to know the page.

Furthermore, search engine consider Dynamic URL's as a set of infinite links, because each time a page is generated a new session ID is incorporated to the page. As session IDs of the particular page changes, search engine bots need to index the infinite number of copies of the same page, which is almost impossible. Doing this may lead to overloading of information in the web servers, and therefore search engines may not be able to provide the relevant information in the fastest time.

How to Optimize Dynamic Websites?

Now the question is how to optimize the dynamic website. Even though it's difficult but not impossible. Here we are

Creating a Static Page
This is an easy solution for big problem. If you do have small website (dynamic page) and enough time you can do it. Just right click on page by page of you site, copy the source code and create new static page with .htm or .html extension.

URL Re-writing
URL re-writing is a process to convert the dynamic URL to the static one. There are a lot of software tools to re-write the dynamic content to the static one.

Link to Dynamic URL's from Static Pages
Linking Dynamic URL's from Static Page(s) is another good technique to get the dynamic content indexed by the search engines. This is particularly better if you can’t convert your dynamic URLs into static URLs.

Use CGI/Perl Scripts
Writing CGI/Perl scripts is the easiest way to get the dynamic websites indexed by the search engines. The CGI/Perl srcipts take all the information prior to the query string and put the rest equal to a variable.

Re-configuring the Web Servers
Re-configure the servers to convert your URLs that contain query strings into ones that the search engines can index.

For Apache Server - Apache has a rewrite module that enables you to turn URLs containing query strings into URLs that search engines can index. This module however, isn't installed with Apache software by default, so you need to check with your web hosting company for installation.

For ColdFusion - It is needed to reconfigure ColdFusion on your server so that the "?" in a query string is replaced with a '/' and pass the value to the URL.

In the end, it's just not difficult to optimize the dynamic webpage, it requires certain tuning for the pages to get indexed by the search engine bots.

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Some Useful Links

Some Important Posts Google's Search Engine Starter Guide Promote your site by organic methods, i.e., White Hat SEO Techniques Don't get your site penalized for using Black Hat SEO Techniques Cool advantages of SEO for your website and business 15 ways to Drive Traffic towards your Website

Suggested Reading Google's SEO Starter Guide SEO Tutorial - SEO Administrator SEO Checklist for Developing the New Website

Most Read SEO Articles Google - Customize your Search Results Internet's Best Website Directory List Internet's Best RSS Directories Internet's Best Blog Directories How to promote your business using the Web 2.0 Techniques? Numbered Search Results How to write 301 redirects for your website? How to market your blog? How to Create a Custom 404 Error Page for your website? How to write good Press Release? How to know which design combination is best for your website? How to remove white spaces in the tables created in Blogger? What is Google's Hill Top Algorithm? Top 100 Article Directories 100 Top SEO Forums List Some easy ways to obtain Backlinks for your website How to Optimize your site for Yahoo? How to Optimize your site for MSN? How to Create Sitemaps? How to improve Bounce Rate for your website?

»»  read more

How to improve Bounce Rate

The Bounce Rate Defined
Simply speaking, BOUNCE RATE is defined as the percentage of the website visitors who arrive at an entry page of the website, and then leave without visiting the other pages of the site.

Approaches for Bounce Rate
There are two approaches to be considered for the bounce rate - the first one is based on the time the user spends on the site and the other one is the number of page views by the user during the visit to the website.

Generally the page view approach is considered by the search engines to count for the bounce rate for the sites using Google Analytics, as it becomes difficult for the search engines to determine the time spent on the site.

A bounce occurs if a visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting the other pages of the website. A visitor can bounce by,

• By typing a new URL
• By clicking on a link to a page on a different web site
• By closing an open window or tab
• By clicking the "Back" button to leave the site
• Or session timeout

The Bounce Rate Formula

B.R. = Single Page Access/Entries * 100

The Bounce Metric
A high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren't relevant to your visitors, ie the user was not able to find the information that they were looking for.

An entry page with a low bounce rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into the web site.

Lower Bounce Rate = More Visitors From Search Engines + Higher Conversion Rate.

The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert.

Optimum Bounce Rate
An Optimum Bounce Rate depends on the page and the industry. A Bounce Rate of 20% or less is considered as excellent, but anything in the range of 35 - 45% is also considered as OK. But if your site has a bounce rate of more than 50%, then it's the cause of worry.

How to improve the Bounce Rate?
There are a number of ways to improve the bounce rate for your site, i.e., lowering the percentage of the Bounce Rate for the site.

• Understanding the Business and the Audience - The first and the foremost step is to understand the target audience and what type of information they would be looking for.
  
• Informative Landing Pages - After knowing the type of audience, and what they will be looking for create an informative landing page, depicting the exact information for which it is created. Create well optimized and eye catching Titles and Heading to make sure that the user stays longer on the site.
  
• Use A/B Testing - To know which pages of your landing pages are performing and what is required or what can be done to increase the performance, use A/B Testing. Try to be creative while designing the pages.
  
• Clean Pages - Keep your pages clean and well structured. The important thing to be kept in mind is to provide the visitors what they are looking for, and to make it more informative and easy for them to search for the information what they are looking for.
  
• Site Stickiness - Try to increase the focus and devise ways such that the user spends more time on the site. Use Social Bookmarking buttons, or RSS Feeds, to popularize your content.
  

NOTE:

• To view the Bounce Rate, in Google Analytics, go to Visitors > Visitor Trending > Bounce Rate.
• If you’ve not paid any attention to your bounce rate before, try starting today. It might help you to dramatically improve your website.

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Yahoo MyWeb is done!

Yahoo! Services has started a new bookmarking service called as Yahoo Bookmarks, in lieu of ending the long term service called MyWeb. Yahoo on March 18, 2009 will be shutting down it's popular service My Web. Lauched in 1995, my web provided a way to share and organize the bookmarks.

You can use your bookmarks on My Web till 18th March, 2009, or can start using Yahoo Bookmarks from now itself. All the bookmarks are available on Yahoo Bookmarks now.

Enjoy the new bookmarking service from Yahoo. Share your bookmarks with your friends, via DELICIOUS, or start using Yahoo! Bookmarks or import all your bookmarks.

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Google Logos!

This post is about the collection of the various Google Logos. Google has a wide variety of logos, of which I have tried to post some of those. Enjoy these beautiful logos,


Google's Main Logo



Google Services Logo










Google Environment Day

Google Olympics Logo







Google Valentine's Day Logo









Google Halloween Logo






Google Proton Collision Logo



GOOGLE Miscellaneous

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