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The latest SEO checklist from Matt Cutts and other prominent representatives of Google puts accent on onsite optimization of websites as well. This is the third blog in the series focusing on the critical parts of the session held by Matt Cutts.

• Make sure to stuff the pages of your website with text-based content that is visible to and indexable by the Google bot. it is one of the basics to check whether the webpage text is indexable or not. The best way is using a text browser like Lynx in order to diagnose the crawling-related issues.
• Adding substantial text to the webpage content is an onsite optimization factor. The lack of substantiality in the website content is a major negative onsite issue. Adding text to the content of a website that is full of flash images and videos is a difficulty. Let the site feature user comments and reviews so that when the visitors post comments implemented on the important pages, the site will gain value in search engines.

Two probable problems associated with this onsite SEO factor are as follows –

It is difficult to draw user comments for a newly launched website. A lesser known website does not receive substantial traffic. Other than search engines, there are several social networking media like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Stumble Upon to trap traffic for the site.

Potential user comments add value to the site in search engines. The only disadvantage of this solution for websites with little text-based content is that it puts the site at risk of receiving spam. Comment moderation is what lets you distinguish between quality comments and spam comments.

• Make a base of the services that you offer to formulate the title of your website. Using the domain name in place of the website title mars the onsite relevance of the website. The title should be descriptive and accurate, substantial and potential.
• Register an account in Google Webmaster Tools for your website. It will let you know if the site is hacked. This application is useful particularly for malware detection. Google Webmaster Tools offer several hacking and hosting malware detection tools.
• Avoid publishing syndicated content on the website. It is only original content that puts value to the site and ranks high in search engines. Put accent on publishing fresh and genuine content. High quality content can make mincemeat of search engine marketing. Original content can be the brand face of your site in search engines.
• A good hosting plan is one of the keys to onsite optimization of websites. If the bandwidth limit of your site is exceeded, it can cause the site to crash. As a result, the site will not load and the visitors cannot view it. It is not possible to get conversions without views.
• To generate snippets of a site in its search results, whether a Meta description is used or not does not matter. Make sure, the snippets featured in Google search result pages are in relevance to the search phrases. Learn how to improve the snippets to increase click through rate in the search results on your website.
• If the scroll box technique is implemented at the bottom of the home page of your site, don’t let text on the page go hidden. Make the text viewable and readable easily.
• Non-optimized URLs are not much search engine friendly. These URLs are not a great cause to worry about, if your website has lots of original content and is stable. There is no need to rewrite the URLs, if they are indexed and fetching traffic. Rewritten URLs may take months to be indexed. However, you must not ignore the duplicate content URLs.
• Do not use the same set of keywords to optimize the home page as well as the internal pages of your site. It may lead to canonical problems and thereby affecting the ranking. In this case, the conversion rate will be poor.
• Shortened URLs are getting popular with Twitter and other microblogging sites. According to Matt Cutts, shortening URLs is good if it passes 301 redirect.

The focus on ‘keyword research’, ‘link building’ and ‘marketing’ for website optimization in Google is a highlight of the latest SEO checklist from Matt Cutts. Here is an illustration on these sections of the SEO checklist -

Keyword Research

• Make a list of the search keywords or key phrases that most of the users are likely to use while searching for your content or product or service or website. Choose the most and the least competitive of the keywords to optimize your web content. Google itself recommends potential keywords for a particular content. Adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal is a free tool from Google’s kit for webmasters to conduct keyword research at ease.
• Do not stuff a blog with too much information. For better search results, choose a blog topic related to a well-defined niche. Pick up keywords from that specific niche to optimize the blog content. Log in to the Google Webmaster tools account of yours and then, go to the dashboard of your site. Click “Keywords” under “Your site on the web”. The keywords reflecting the content of your website will be shown in a list, prepared by Google.
• Website owners are involved in neck and neck competition to get high search volume in Google for their websites. The only source of web traffic is not Google. There are other such traffic sources as Facebook, Twitter, Google map listings, MySpace, LinkedIn etc. than Google. It is easy and fun to promote your website on social networking platforms on the basis of a difficult keyword that is hard to get ranked number one in Google.
• Analyze Google Webmaster Tools report on your website and checkout the keywords or phrases that the site appears in Google search result pages. Instead of focusing on the promotion of a single keyword, categorize the web content into multiple sections and choose keywords belonging to those sections in order to get better long tail results on search for your website. A website promoted on the basis of more than one or two keywords draws more and more organic traffic.

Link Building

• According to Matt Cutts, the sites with huge traffic base and from a specific niche are the sites to get links from. Websites belonging to a specific niche are symbols of authority. Single niche websites are better than multi-niche sites like article directories to extract link juice. Links from the former will add search engine value to your site.
• Make sure to be careful of linking yours to other sites. Checkout the search engine relevance of those sites providing external links to yours. Checkout if the content of those websites relates to yours. The increasing number of links from the websites that are not in keeping with yours from any perspective does not benefit.
• To make your website flow with link juice, build links to only those sites that will benefit the users of your site. Do not let the navigation menu of your site feature them frequently. Build a good internal linking architecture instead of developing an excess of external links.

Marketing

• Instead of having several blogs or sites to fetch traffic, concentrate your efforts into developing a single website. It is difficult to manage several sites or blogs and improve them simultaneously from SEO viewpoint. Marketing a single website as a single entity across the World Wide Web is an incomparable strategy to get the best of the site in search engines.
• Think about how to brand your site to make it stand out from the milling crowd. Think of buying a brandable domain to differentiate your site from the rest. Branding is of immense importance to help you build your online identity. Being owner of a recognized brand in a specific arena, you will find it easy to implement the marketing of your website.
• Think of the things that make the visitors keep coming back to your website. Devise a marketing plan and enrich it with innovative products or services to make people return to the site. Updating the site with fresh content on a regular basis is a good strategy to promote the site among the visitors.
• For business or e-commerce websites, it is important to place the physical address on the contact page of the sites. The address including the city, state, country names and zip codes is a complete physical address. It is beneficial for geo-targeting and useful for the visitors. A website with a well-defined address is easily marketable.

Is a Google SEO checklist your wish to have as guidance for the wellbeing of your website? The latest SEO checklist from Matt Cuts and other representatives from Google is based on the SEO Site Review conducted at Google I/O 2010 in Moscone Center, San Francisco, USA on May 19, 2010. The SEO checklist containing tips on how to analyze, review and optimize a website has resulted from a tech talk by the team of Google experts headed by Matt Cuts. The latest checklist is an out and out technical approach to the Google search engine optimization of websites. The content of the checklist is categorized into five important sections –

• Web design
• Onsite SEO
• Keyword research
• Link building
• Marketing

Web Design - The following tips on web design are technically related to the SEO factors of websites, handled by webmasters.

• Immediate visibility of the content to the visitors during the loading of a webpage is of immense importance. If the content retreats due to slow loading of the page, the visitor will look for next in the search result page. To improve the loading efficiency of your website, learn about the application of Google Page Speed.
• If WordPress is the CMS of your blog site, updating it to keep the WordPress related hacks at bay is critically important. Therefore, it is necessary to get a hang of WordPress security tips.
• While developing a new website, optimize the URL with the keywords found in the webpage titles. It is easy to set in case of WordPress by moving from Dashboard to Setting, Permalinks, Common Settings, Custom Structure and Postname.
• Comment moderation is an important piece of the webmaster’s work. It will let you approve only relevant comments related to the targeted keywords in order to enhance your site’s relevance in search engines. Otherwise, tons of spam comments with Viagra related content will mar the search engine relevance of the site.
• Check the potential exploits as well as vulnerabilities of your site before launching it to a production server. Point the site to a development server, using Google Skipfish. Chances to get the site hacked are thick, if you launch the site with its vulnerabilities unchecked to a production server.
• Avoid or limit the use of images with embedded text in the design of your website. Rather, use images with alt tags.
• To say about the issue of using whether dash or underscore in URLs, dash is Matt Cutts’ preference over underscore. According to him, the words of a URL with underscores in between are not regarded as a combined keyphrase by the search bots.
• Webpage content design is part of website design. In all sorts of media – print, electronic and online, information is presented in a top-to-bottom fashion. Make sure to put the most important items of webpage content at the top and the least important parts at the bottom. If a webpage does not fully load in the browser, the visitor can see the topmost content that is important.
• Build an internal linking structure throughout the content of the webpages for an increase in the user engagement with your site. Let every page feature important content related links to other pages of the site. It is a promising strategy to make visitors stay longer on your website. It is a user-friendly approach to designing webpages.
• Exact and proper navigation is a considerable technical issue of good website design. Make sure if a visitor clicks on a particular product link and the link takes the visitor to the exact product page. It is exclusively important in case of ecommerce website design. Let your customers navigate easily to the product pages of their choice.
• A search engine friendly website can be developed based on AJAX with the application of website development tools from Google web toolkit. You need not worry about search engine related issues while developing an AJAX based website.

Keep your eyes to the series of next blogs pertaining to keyword research, link building, website marketing and online SEO.

Google keeps updating its tool kit and improving its webmaster tools to deliver the best. Google Webmaster Tools are the tools to diagnose and troubleshoot the technical problems of a website. The search giant has lately updated its webmaster tools for search engine optimization. This blog of mine is a focus on the new tools in the Google’s webmaster kit for SEO tasks.

The significant addition to the kit of webmaster tools for SEO, made by Google in the month of May 2010, consists of several new diagnostic tools. Using the latest diagnostic tools, the webmasters can improve the crawlability and search engine visibility of their websites in Google. The blog is a review on the new tools from the updated version of Google’s webmaster kit.

Change of Address Tool to Speed up the Website Transfer to a New Domain

Moving your website to a new domain is a technically painstaking task. It also affects the ranking and visibility of the website in Google’s search world. Changing the website domain means decline in the number of visitors and the figure of sales leads. Adding to the worse, the website loses the relevance of its indexed pages and the ranking of its key phrases.

301 redirecting a website to its new domain is the classical solution to this problem. It takes a couple of months or more to restore the site to its previous ranking reputation and traffic drive. But, the “Change of Address” tool in the latest version of Google Webmaster Tools quickens the website transfer to the new domain in a simple and smooth process. It helps get the webpages with new domain URLs indexed in Google. The following is the procedure to use this Google Webmaster tool –

• Set up the website with the new domain name
• Redirect the website from its old domain to the new domain using either 301 or the link rel= canonical tag
• Go from Google Webmaster to Change of Address
• Look for the new domain in the list under ‘Select a verified site’ and select it
• Click the submit button

Parameter Handling to Deal with Duplicate Content Issues

Google’s webmaster kit is equipped with several tools to do away with duplicate content issues. Using robots.txt or Meta non-index tag or 301 redirect is the classical way. the link rel= canonical tag as a solution to the problems regarding duplicate content is the last year addition to Google Webmaster Kit for SEO. It has helped those having a Blogger account without a 301 redirect.

“Parameter Handling” the latest tool to deal with duplicate content issues is what the updated version of Google Webmaster Toolkit features. It is good alternative to 301 redirection. It is helpful for those who cannot edit the page source in order to implement the link rel= canonical tag. The following is the procedure to use “Parameter Handling”-

• Identify the parameter causing duplicate content issue
• Log in to the Google Webmaster tools
• Go to “Sites” and click the website where you want to implement “Parameter handling”
• Move to “Site configuration”, then to “Settings” and “Parameter Handling”
• Make a click on “Adjust parameter settings”
• Enter the duplicate content causing parameter in the “Parameter” textbox
• Select “Ignore” button under “Action” and click Save.

Search Queries to Solve Keyword Rank Checking Problems

Knowing the ranking of the targeted key phrases for a site in a particular geographical location was a problem that SEO experts and webmasters used to face. Without relying on proxies, there was no any other way to check the ranking details. To check the ranking details of specific key phrases for a website in the UK, the user had to rely on a UK-based proxy and go to www.google.co.uk, if he or she is not in the UK. Moreover, the accuracy of the process is not 100%.

Google has added the latest feature to solve rank checking related problems to its webmaster tools under the section, “Search Queries”. The following is the procedure to check the ranking of SEO India, a keyword for www.eparadise-india.com in India using this functional feature –

• Log in to the Google Webmaster Tools
• Move from “Your site on the web” to “Search queries”
• Select India in the drop-down list of countries
• Expand the ‘+’ symbol located by the targeted keyword
• See the ranking details of the keyword SEO India and the ranking URL

Though a specific keyword ranks well in Google but it does not receive many click throughs nor drive organic traffic to the website. Such keywords are low performing in number of click throughs. “%Click Through = Total Clicks / Total Impressions” is the formula under the section, “Search Queries”, that will calculate the percentage of click throughs from Google. If the click through is not more than 1%, the webmasters need to check out the possible problems.

Now, use these latest features in the updated version of Google Webmaster Toolkit for SEO to get the best of your site in terms of ranking, visibility and traffic in Google.

A sudden nosedive in the search engine ranking of and organic traffic to a website is a troubling concern with the site owner. The strength of web traffic to a site depends on the SERP ranking of the site. Ranking and traffic, two most essential building blocks of a site’s success are directly proportional to each other. These are the pillars providing support for the search engine strength of website that sell products or offer services. There are several factors related to the design, content, navigation and internal linking structure of a website, that are responsible for fluctuations in the search engine ranking, visibility and relevance of the site.

Website Redesign

Frequent significant changes to the design of a site wreck havoc with the site’s visibility in the online search world. Updating the site’s visual look with the application of innovative webdesign techniques is good to stay ahead in the market that is red in tooth and claw. But wide disparity between the site’s design that search engine spiders have copied and the site’s design with major changes is the bane of the site’s visibility in the search engine result pages. Consult a SEO before having your site redesigned. Have the site edesigned in search engine friendly ways.

Changes in Content Management System

Alongside new website design, changes in the content management system of a site lead search engine spiders to confusion about the identity of the site. Content management systems too are on the way to evolution in function. Adapting the site to the innovation of its CMS can bring down the site’s SERP ranking. A change in the content management system means a change in the templates, URLs and navigation structure of the site’s pages. Search engine bots will have to crawl and index the site again. And, it takes time. Executing the CMS related changes in the site in a search engine friendly manner is a method to keep the site’s ranking intact.

Inbound Link Loss

In SEO, content is king while links are queen. Though, search engine bots crawl the content of a website. They take an account of the site’s link popularity when it comes to ranking the site in search result pages. Changes in the CMS of a site are reasons for the site’s link loss. Being unaware of the changes in the site’s CMS, other sites will link to the old URL of your site and search engines will view it as a loss of links. Many other factors are responsible for the loss of links. A significant link loss axes down the search engine ranking of the site. Many SEO methods are there to build organic inbound links in order to drive traffic to the site and signal the search engines to rank the site’s pages.

Content Duplicity

Duplicate content with different URLs to update a site confuses the search engine spiders. Sites offering product or service information are likely to get involved in duplicate content issues. Printer friendly webpage versions and content copy from one site to the other are causes for content duplicity. Search engines do not feature multiple webpages with the same content in their result pages. The search engine relevance of a site drops down if the site is found to have duplicate content. A SEO pro can help you manage duplicate content issues of your site. There are ways to check duplicity of the content.

A SEO pro is also a SEO doctor to fix the search engine ranking and visibility problems that a site suffers from due to the changes in its design, content, CMS and link architecture. The service of SEO experts is continuous support for the search engine position and reputation of sites.

The global SEO industry is thriving on the rising number of websites and the increasing demand of their owners for the reputable ranking of their sites in search engines. Wishing to carve a niche in this industry, many individuals are getting trained in the art of search engine optimization as well as the use of SEO tools and technologies. Link building is a most important SEO activity for website promotion. So, I have attempted to turn up with a tutorial on link-building practices for the benefit of SEO novices.

A reciprocal link refers to a mutual link shared between two websites of almost similar essence. Having mutual traffic for the websites is the purpose of building reciprocal links. A website owner needs to submit is website to the reciprocal link exchange directories. It ensures him good SERP ranking in search engines.

Three way linking is a special sort of non-reciprocal linking. The go at building three way links is a SEO method to create natural links that are highly relevant in the eyes of the search engine spiders. Therefore, the value of three way links is higher than that of general reciprocal links.

Two way linking is better known as link exchange, an alternative to the above-mentioned link building processes. This SEO is practiced on the community-based forums where the registered members exchange links to their webpage content. Usually, the sites listed under the same category participate in this SEO activity.

One way linking is another link-building method used by webmasters to boost the link popularity of websites. It is in fact a hyperlink pointing to a website having no link back from the website. Also known as inbound or incoming link, it is a one-dimensional way of website linking. the search engines consider one way links more natural.

Multi way linking is a hardcore SEO technique implemented for website promotion in search engines. Multi-way links are one-way non-reciprocal links from three or more than three sites. the latest algorithm of the leading search giants pays less value to the sites having a large number of reciprocated links but more value to the sites having a high percentage of incoming one-way or non-reciprocated links.

Incestuous linking is a search engine optimization trick adopted by webmasters to promote websites. Owing to the domination of Google and its PageRank technology, the websites having high strength of inbound links from the high-ranked sites with quality content deemed more important. Social media sites are a good source of inbound links.

Overlinking refers to too many of hyperlinks in the content of a webpage. A word of a phrase consisting of a few words in a sentence is rendered as a link. A single term is linked repeatedly in the same page. To make the meaning of certain words clear, they are linked with the underlying little information.

Link doping is the practice of creating a large number of hyperlinks on a website to get reciprocal links in exchange from the website. A person practicing link doping, hyperlinks to a site that he has not visited, in order to get a place on the blogroll of the site so as to inflate the popularity of his own site. The algorithm of search engines depends on the strength of hyperlinks to a site in order to determine the site’s influence.

A FFA or free for all link page refers to a webpage that webmasters set up to push up the search engine position of websites. Using a software application, they place a link to a particular site on many FFA sites in expectation that the inbound links from the FFA sites will add to the ranking of the site in the search engine result pages. However, this way of website linking is not in good favor of the SEO experts.

In the category of link-building practices, link baiting is aimed at enhancing the quantity and quality of links to a particular website. Described as “interesting enough to catch people’s attention” by Matt Cutts, link bait is a content based feature to persuade visitors to place links to a site from their websites. It is an extremely powerful means of link marketing. Only quality content deserves to be the medium of link baiting to trap social media traffic.

Link building is one of the efforts that SEO experts make to enhance the search engine visibility and popularity of a website. The search giant Google takes a hard look at external links to a website or a webpage to determine its SERP ranking. All links are not equally treated by Google. Relevance of the links to the target website or webpage is a prime consideration for the search engine. This blog of mine will tell you tell you how to evaluate the relevance of a particular link and ensure if it hits the jackpot. Keep reading…

No need to say that links from the high quality websites do wonder. Links meeting the criteria set by the search engines deliver the best goods. You need to weigh several factors to assess relevance and quality of the website or webpage which links to yours.

Prominence of Inbound Links

Checking if the webpage linking to the target page of your website is the first must do. Check if keywords of the webpage are relevant to the keywords of the target page. Besides prominence, the placement of keywords in the webpage that you want to link to yours is the other factor that is worth consideration to evaluate the relevance of links from that particular page. Title tag, heading tags, webpage content, anchor texts, domain and URL are the parts of a webpage to look for keywords.

Significance of Nofollow Links

Link equity is a most important factor to consider. Check how much link juice the links from a website or webpage will pass to yours. Link equity and link juice are considered to be associated with Page Rank that in turn, has little direct influence on the SERPs. The links that do not pass link juice to the target page are nofollow links. If a link is marked “rel=nofollow”, it is not countable as a vote for the webpage that it links to. There is no gain in Page Rank without link juice. However, nofollow links from a high PR site add some SEO value though no link juice to yours.

Evaluate the link equity of a linking page on consideration of three factors – the page’s PR, the number of the page’s outbound and internal links, and the number of the page’s nofollow links.

Permanence of Inbound Links

Not only prominence but also permanence also matters in the game of SEO. A link from a budding site that features updated content and builds trust with the search engine bots grows gradually in SEO value with the rising maturity of the site. Such links are likely to exist for a long time and benefit the page that they link to. It is not much true about the links from a high PR site. If a link is gone, its benefits too, disappear. Buying links is not recommended because those links exist for a specific period of time. Once the period is over, you will have to pay more to maintain them.

Positioning of Inbound Links

Next to prominence and permanence, the positioning of links is too a must consideration. Links from external sites can appear in different places of a web page – the top, the middle, the sidebar and the footer. Google does not value every part of a webpage equally. The top of a page is supposed to be more valuable than the bottom. So, adding a link to the beginning of your target page will benefit.

Context of Inbound Links

The context of a link refers to the placement of the link in webpage content. Readers pay more value to the link placed in the middle of an article than to the link in the author’s bio at the end. Likewise does Google. Try to get a link placed in the beginning or middle paragraph of webpage content. Make sure, the paragraph is optimized with relevant keywords.

Acquisition Cost of Inbound Links

The cost of acquisition is among the remaining factors to be evaluated when you acquire inbound links. It refers to not only money but also time that you spend. It is difficult to get links from .edu sites. If they pay off, difficulty does not matter. Think of the factors that are likely to affect the possibility of acquiring links from particular websites.

The growing popularity of Facebook has prompted Google to launch Social Search service. In the third week of March, this year Google received a defeating blow from Facebook in number of visits and views. Social Search is an outcome of Google’s innovative efforts to affirm its stand as the most visited platform against social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. This Google service is an all-in-one key to explore the social media sites for updates from friends, fans and followers in online social circles.

Online identity, online reputation and online entity are the terms associated with social networking activity that has been made a part of SEO campaigns. The promotion of social media content is one of the SEO measures for the enhanced search engine relevance and reputation of websites. Google Social Search is a medium to generate visitors in a bulk for the social media content. It is not a mere launch from the Google labs but an advanced step of the search giant to help you keep up with the social networking activities of your friends.

Know how to Get the Best of Google Social Service to Gain Huge Notice in the Online Social World -

• To get your social media content noticed widely and access tweets, feeds, reviews, blogs, buzzes, diggs and social updates from your friends in the Google Social Search world, you need a Gmail account. You are required to form a social circle that will automatically incorporate the contacts from your Gmail chat list and groups like Friends, Family and Coworkers.
• You can widen the sphere of your online social circle by linking your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, FriendFeed, Yahoo! Buzz, Picasa and other social media accounts to your Google profile. Google will access all your social media contacts from your Google Profile and feature them as in its Social Search world.
• You can conduct search on a particular keyword or phrase related to your friends’ or your social media content, once you are logged into your Google account. Right keyword usage is similarly significant in Google Social Search as on the other search platforms of Google. The Social Search bot will pull information on the search keyword from your social media links and your friends’ social media profiles.
• The search result pages will feature the results on your search topic at the bottom. The Social Search results will highlight the social media content from those who are in your social circle, if it is found relevant to your keyword or search phrase. Providing personalized search experience is another objective of Google Social Search service.
• Get into the swing of online networking with more and more people. Keep your social media profiles active by updating the content at regular intervals. Let all sorts of your social media content go publicly visible and accessible in order to drive traffic from Google Social Search world to your social media profiles.

Google Social Search is a benefit for active bloggers, online social networkers and social media marketers from SEO perspectives. The wider your social network expands, the more it will be difficult to manage. The Social Search is Google’s voluntary service to help your keep track of all happenings in the circle of your social networks at one go.

In near future, Google Social Search will, no doubt, turn up with opportunities for SEO experts to devise strategies in order to promote one’s social media content to the top of social search result pages.

Alexa rank is one of the key factors on consideration of which the popularity and position of a website are evaluated by webmasters as well as online advertisers. Alexa ranking of websites is of great account from SEO perspectives. The higher the Alexa ranking of a site is the higher the volume of traffic to the site is. A subsidiary of Amazon.com, Alexa helps monetize the webspace with online advertisements. If you are an active blogger and want to make a pile from advertising in your blog, you need to increase the Alexa ranking of your blog. I have made an assortment of a few tips on how to boost Alexa ranking for your benefit.

Have an Alexa account. Once you are done with creating the account, verify your ownership of the blog by inserting Meta tags or uploading a file. Keep updating the blog content using the self service tool. Reviewing and rating the posts of your fellow bloggers will ensure a pickup in the reviews as well as ratings of your profile in Alexa.

Alexa rank depends on the number of visitors to your website or blog. Alexa toolbar is available free to download. You can make use of such Alexa widgets as Alexa Traffic Graph, Alexa Site Stats Button and Alexa Traffic Rank Button. If you use Firefox, you had better use the plug-in named SearchStatus. Apart from displaying Alexa rank, this plug-in shows other details like page rank, Meta tags, no follow links, keyword density etc.

Write quality content on the topics related to webmasters. That is because the Alexa toolbar is a hit with most webmasters. Focus on the SEO applications and utility of webmaster tools in your articles. Webmasters in search of information on new tools will consider making frequent visit to your website or blog. Promote the articles on social media sites and social networking forums to steal the attention of webmasters.

The redirection technique is one of the dos to plug up the Alexa ranking of your blog or website. Implementation of the technique requires you to use /redirect?www.yourblogname.com in place of http://www.yourblogname.com. http://redirect.alexa.com is another site to implement the redirection technique. Some auto-surf services like upmyrank.com, rankraise.com and surfsieve.com are there to have the Alexa ranking increased.

Have an account with webmaster forums. You can buy banners and links from there. A well-designed and displayed ad can fetch you a huge bulk of webmaster traffic. Only good and unique visitors can keep the visitors hooked to the site or blog of yours. Follow social bookmarking and networking measures to get your content stumbled, dug, sphunn. As a result, the flow of traffic will push the Alexa rank of your blog up.

Blogger is a free blogging platform hosted as well as owned by Google, the search giant. This blog publishing software is all the rage with small bloggers including both students and corporate professionals. Blogger is updated with a new XML template to stand out from the competition with other free blog publishing platforms in the search engines. If you want to get the best of your blog in Google, make sure to optimize the latest XML template. It is a good SEO to be practiced by the Blogger users.

Determine the Type of Your Blog’s Template

What you need to do first of all, is to determine if your blog is sticking to the Classic template of following the new XML template. Swim out of the confusion prior to proceeding with the onsite SEO procedure to optimize your blogs published by Google Blogger. Here is the way to help you out –

• Log on to www.blogger.com and log into your account
• Access the dashboard containing your blogs
• Move to “Manage Blogs” and then the list of your blogs
• Check the criteria to find out which template your blog is using
• “Layout” verifies the use of the new Beta Blogger template
• “Template” confirms the use of Classic Blogger template

Tweaking the Title Tags of Your Blog Posts

The title tags of the blog posts are the first thing to tweak. You need to make sure that the title tags are unique and properly optimized with prominent keywords. The title tags featured by the default Blogger XML template are hardly SEO friendly. For example, your keyword is “ways to increase height” and one of your blog titles is “Top Seven Ways to Increase Height”. “Height Increase Blog” is your blog’s name. The title tag will appear like – “Height Increase: Top Seven Ways to Increase Height”. Title tags with the keyword placed at the end are less effective relevant than title tags with the keyword placed at the beginning. It is a vital on-page ranking factor.

Tweaking the Title Tag of Your Blog’s FrontPage

Similar is the true about the title tag of your blog’s front page. The front page title tag should be optimized with the keywords targeted for the front page. By default, the blog name is considered the front page title by the Blogger XML template, if it is not customized. Create a SEO friendly title for the front page to get the best SEO results. Using the default front page title is of no use.

Customizing the Titles of Your Blog Archives

The next important do is customizing the archive titles. Archive titles too are set by default, for example - Height Increase Blog: March 2010. This sort of naming convention demeans the significance of your blog’s name. Archive titles as simple as March 2010 | Archives are recommended. This naming convention is an index to two things – the month when the posts are published and visit to the blog archives. Here follows the step-by-step procedure to make the Blogger title tags set by default, SEO friendly –

Turn the Archives Unindexable but not Uncrawlable

The importance of archives as a guide is undeniable for they help readers navigate to the previous posts in the blog. Archives can be unindexable but should not be uncrawlable. If you make archives uncrawlable by blocking them with , it may impair the crawlability of the older posts in the long run. Navigating archives is the only way the Google bot can penetrate the old posts. Since the archives are blocked with the tag , the Google bot will not be able to crawl them. Using the code - is a recommended solution. The process to implement it with the new XML template is a series of steps following as –

• Log in to the Blogger account in Google
• Click on the “Layout” link of the blog of yours
• Click on “Edit HTML” and you will find a source code
• Go to the tag in the source code
• Paste the code below the tag

This tag makes the older posts in the archive pages crawlable for the Google bot on the one hand and does not let the archived pages go indexed in the search engine result pages on the other.