Open source technology has rapidly picked up pace over the past few years. The consumers have already adopted open source technologies for their requirements in a speedy way unlike the public and private sector companies. Despite the fact these technologies being faster, more responsive and easily customizable, there is still a great reluctance in its adoption. The robust nature of open source technologies greatly reduces the cost and time for customization.

Private as well as Public sector companies should look at adopting open source technologies to cut down their software spending and better utilize the same in better enhancement of essential services like Healthcare, Education, etc.

Due to excessive usage of open source technologies companies like Microsoft, Sun, Real Networks had to share the source codes to maintain their user base or risk shifting of user base to open source technologies. Open source softwares are compatible with more number of languages than their paid counterparts. The open source community at large is always there to help with the up-gradation of the software and applications; also collaborative effort drives innovation resulting in to better output.

Source :- kdubey ( at ) technoinspire ( dot ) Com

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Posted by TechoInspire.com/users/view/78590″>RobOusbey

Links. We often talk about why we want them and how to get them, but today I’d like to go back to basics and look at the constituent parts of the HTML code behind them. This is definitely a post for the new SEO, or web-developer looking to expand their experience, but even experienced search marketers may want to comment the nuances of some parts of the humble anchor tag’s attributes.

Here’s a couple of example links; the first is a link to the White House’s website, the other is to Distilled’s new US website.

TechoInspire.com/img/upload/link_examples.png” />

Do you like this post? TechoInspire.com/thumbs/add/blog/8684/1/0″>Yes TechoInspire.com/thumbs/add/blog/8684/0/0″>No

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Posted by TechoInspire.com/users/view/150132″>mgalecki

This post was originally in TechoInspire.com/ugc”>YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

A SHORT INTRODUCTION…

We all know that the search engine robots more frequently visit popular pages, i.e. those that have the largest number of incoming links, both internal and external ones. The architecture of a website is usually correlated with the popularity of these pages expressed by number of backlinks:

• Home page has the most backlinks,
• 1st (e.g. product categories), 2nd & 3rd level pages obtain less links,
• finally the least important are deep pages (with articles, classified ads, product pages, etc).

The above mentioned “importance” of web pages versus the web site architecture has been illustrated in one of the Rand’s posts titled "TechoInspire.com/blog/diagrams-for-solving-crawl-priority-indexation-issues”>Diagrams for Solving Crawl Priority & Indexation Issues":

TechoInspire.com/img/upload/site-arch-2.gif” alt=”Typical Site’s Link Earning Potential by Content Section” />

Important pages tend to have a different priority of indexation, and this was also presented very nicely by Rand:

TechoInspire.com/img/upload/site-arch-3.gif” alt=”Spider Crawl Priority Paths Graphic” />

Purple spots are those with the highest number of external links. As it can be seen, the pages which are close, take some of the popularity and they pass part of it further (pink spots). All the other spots stand for pages that are too far from the entrance points of search engine robots, which means that the chance of their indexation is much smaller.

In case of classified websites, which contain a lot of content, the above diagram should include subsequent category listing or search results pages. They are obviously less important than the main category pages, but their indexing additionally influences the indexation of their components – ad details pages. This is particularly important when the listing starts with so called premium ads, which change less often than standard classifieds.

BEFORE THE TEST…

Having this theoretical information, we have decided to see how it is like in practice. We have analyzed a website of http://www.morusek.pl (with animals and pets related classifieds from Poland) which has a total number of indexed pages exceeding 100,000. Using the combination of "site" and "inurl" queries we checked what is the number of indexed pages with a list of classifieds (in Polish “ogloszenia”): http://www.google.pl/search?q=site%3Awww.morusek.pl+inurl%3A%22%2F0%2F%22+inurl%3Aogloszenia

The initial results were the following:

To continue the analysis, we excluded the first pages, as the numbers here are influenced by existence of some category pages with no classifieds at the moment, but which are indexable (there are crawlable links in the menu). In addition, to verify the effectiveness of the "site" query, we took into account a number of pages reported by Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) under "Internal Links". The results were as follows:

WHAT’S IMPORTANT TO KNOW?

The first conclusion is obviously that the higher the page number is, the less probability that the page will be indexed. Secondly, while the actual numbers of GWT and “site” queries vary a lot, the trends (slopes) are almost the same. On average, the chance that the robot will crawl to the next page of search results decreases by 1,2-1,3% per page.

It is also interesting that, according to Google Webmaster Tools, pages from 2 to 4 have a good indexation ratio which later decreases dramatically at the fifth position. For example, for sites with number 4 the level of indexation is 60%, while for pages number 15 it falls below 30% (according to Google Webmaster Tools), or 40% (for the command “site” in Google). This is due to the fact that Googlebots have a much longer way to reach the appropriate link in case of the latter (a link to page 15 first appears on page 12), while there are direct links to pages 2, 3 and 4 on the first pages of search listings (see below):

THE SUBJECT OF THE TEST: INTRODUCING MORE LINKS

We decided to test what would be the changes in indexation ratios if we introduced more links to subsequent ad listings pages. On the first page of each category we added links to the 5th, 10th and 15th pages as show on the picture below:

After a month we tested the changes. Due to inaccurate results returned by the command “site” in Google (number of indexed pages seemed to be greater than the actual number of them) we present data from Google Webmaster Tools (internal links) only:

THE RESULTS

The graph clearly shows us that indexation of pages that were added to the listing on the first page is much higher after the change (pages: 5th, 10th and 15th), and actually equals the indexation of pages 2, 3 and 4.

However, the increase in indexation of pages directly linked from the home page did not affect the indexation of the neighbouring pages. For example, we can see a huge increase for page 10, but there is no change for pages 9 and 11. The conclusion is that for Googlebots these pages are too far from the points of entry. Only category pages for main region have incoming links. To index page 9 of the intersection of categories and regions, the robots would have to go the following path:

1. main category page (entry point),
2. category page + region (first page of results),
3. category page + region (tenth page of results),
4. category page + region (page 9  of the results).

What makes it even worse, not all the category pages have incoming links.

THE CONCLUSIONS

For classifieds or e-commerce websites, the conclusion is that the more pages linked in the listing, the greater the chance that they will be indexed. In general, it is clear that the farther from the point of entry (external link), the less chance that the page will be indexed. Therefore, it is advisable not to create sites with a very deep structure and to remember that the pages far from the points of entry should be additionally linked to (for example as "similar products", "see also", "related categories", etc.).

Looking at the chart we can see yet another change – a slight decrease in indexation of pages 2, 3 and 4. This can be either because there are new pages added recently and they have not been indexed yet (when the number of ads in a certain category has started to exceed the space on the first page), or due to increase in the number of outcoming links on the first page. I would rather bet the first explanation, because in fact the new links were added to a small percentage of pages. There are only 400 fifth pages (so the links to fifth pages were placed on 0,5% of all the first pages). Pages 10 and 15 are even less numerous.

Introduction of additional links has not increased the level of indexation of classifieds, however I suppose that the rate of change was simply too small to affect their indexation. Moreover, the indexation of ads of Morusek.pl exceeded already 80% when the experiment started. Such changes can produce a visible increase in the number of indexed pages in case of sites where the rate of change is much higher and the level of indexation of classifieds or products – lower.

Do you like this post? TechoInspire.com/thumbs/add/blog/8472/1/0″>Yes TechoInspire.com/thumbs/add/blog/8472/0/0″>No

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Posted by TechoInspire.com/users/view/21348″>great scott!

Will Critchlow of Distilled (who recently TechoInspire.com/blog/the-end-of-consulting-a-new-partnership-our-focus-on-software”>took over SEOmoz’s consulting business) is back in Whiteboard studios to help Rand discuss how to Choose an SEO consultant–or any consultant for that matter.

Whether you’re a consultant yourself, you frequently work with consultants, or you’re thinking of outsourcing some work for the very first time, you’ll find this week’s video worthwhile.  Knowing beforehand how the engagement needs to be structured, what you expect to get, where to find good recommendations and/or sources of consultants, and how to determine whether they have the skills and expertise you require are all critical steps to a successful and relationship (and making sure you get what you paid for). Join Rand and Will as they help you figure out how to get the best results for your consulting dollar.

Do you like this post? TechoInspire.com/thumbs/add/blog/8678/1/0″>Yes TechoInspire.com/thumbs/add/blog/8678/0/0″>No

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Posted by TechoInspire.com/users/view/140292″>Sam Niccolls

TechoInspire.com/img/upload/google_news_logo.png” alt=”Google News” style=”padding-left: 22px;” />The New York Times, CNN, and Yahoo News each get more traffic than Google News, but in a given month Google News sends almost a billion clicks to publishers worldwide, which makes it an incredibly compelling syndication platform for sites with newsworthy content.

But how do you get articles indexed and ranking in Google News? And how can you get your article snippets to appear in the SERPs for Google web search?

In an attempt to answer some of the basic questions around getting started, this post builds off the information provided in the Google News publisher help center and in Maile Ohye’s awesome video on Google News to provide publishers with a basic primer of factors to consider before submitting to Google News.

Google News SERPs

One of the best parts of Google News is that news snippets are not just included among the news results on Google News. They also often appear amidst the organic search results for Google web search in the form of a Google News one box.

TechoInspire.com/img/upload/google_news_serps(1).png” />

Getting Articles Discovered

Indexation: Google News’ bot discovers content in one of two ways: through a discovery crawl where it sees new URLs and crawls them, or through a news sitemap. Discovery crawls are often broad and deep, but just as XML sitemaps are a great way to help Googlebot discover new website content, news sitemaps are a great way to ensure content gets crawled and to push meta information. To create a news Sitemap read the Google News’ sitemap documentation. Or, if you run WordPress, you can run the Google News Sitemap Generator plugin. It’s also important to note that as Vanessa Fox wrote about on Search Engine Land, Google News recently changed their news sitemap protocol.

Re-Crawl: Typically the initial discovery process is fast and it takes just a few minutes for your content to be crawled. But it’s important to note that if you make changes to your article, Google News will come back. Generally Googlebot-News re-crawls for new content within about 12 hours.

Exclusion: For content you do not want indexed by Google News, you can employ the robots exclusion protocol, you can create either a robots.txt file or you can use META tags to identify the documents you want excluded from search results. As Google News’ robots tips explains, either method is effective (however, at SEOmoz, we TechoInspire.com/blog/headsmacking-tip-13-dont-accidentally-block-link-juice-with-robotstxt”>recommend against blocking with robots.txt whenever possible).  

TechoInspire.com/img/upload/how_google_news_works(1).png” alt=”" />

Categorizing Articles

For any given article Google News tries to classify both topic and location in order to populate the most appropriate sections of the editions in the most appropriate country. This is done through recognition of words and word combinations. For example, if an article contained words such as "democratic," "political party," "congressman," and "voter" it would indicate that the article should be categorized under politics. Similarly, if the same article contained "Chicago," "Illinois," and "United States," this combination of words would indicate the article has greatest relevance in the US, and specifically in Chicago.  

TechoInspire.com/img/upload/google_news_categorization.png” />

Keyword stuffing is definitely something you want to avoid. Two additional recommendations to help categorize your articles are – #1 put your articles into relevant categories or sub-folders on your own site and – #2 open the article with an explicit "city, state", the way the above article does. Each are great ways to help categorize without compromising user experience. You can also use the keywords field of your news sitemap.

Ranking Factors

Google News ranks stories in two distinct ways. An oversimplification of this process is that a story rank is first applied which identifies the story topics that are most talked about across the web. Then, once the most popular story topics are identified, each cluster is displayed in descending order based on relevance and interest in the topic. After cluster positions are set, Google News then tries to figure out which articles on each story topic should be included within each cluster.

Story Ranking

Determines which stories rank atop news results based on editorial interest and the amount of coverage the story is getting. Does the article have local interest that appeals only to a niche audience? Or is it a massively popular story with global interest, such as the TechoInspire.com/blog/a-bad-day-for-search-engines-how-news-of-michael-jacksons-death-traveled-across-the-web”>death of Michael Jackson? Based on the amount of editorial interest, the top story topic will either appear at the top or bottom of the cluster.

TechoInspire.com/img/upload/google_news_story_ranking_clusters.png” alt=”" />

Article Ranking

Once Google News has identified the top story clusters, they try to sift through the hundreds or thousands of stories on the topic and surface the most important articles to lead the cluster. Then, they prioritize the additional article links to display within the cluster. Some of the key factors that are looked at when ranking articles include:

• Freshness: Recent, important, and objective articles are what Google News is looking for. So no matter how great your comic strip, op-ed or press release is, it’s not going to be lead a Google News cluster. 

• Citation Rank: For any given story topic, Google News will look at who is citing whom as the original source. For example, if the Seattle Times breaks a story about SEOmoz TechoInspire.com/blog/the-end-of-consulting-a-new-partnership-our-focus-on-software”>focusing on building awesome SEO software, then 10 other blogs reference that article, it’s a good indicator that the Seattle Times’ article is the original, most authoritative source on the topic.

• Local Relevance: For geo-targeted stories, greater authority is given to hyper-local publishers. So if there was an important local event such as a shooting in Spokane, Washington, a smaller publication with local trust like the Spokesman-Review might have greater relevance than a bigger publication in a different location.

• Trustworthiness: Click through data over time is something Google News uses as an indicator of trust. This is done less on an individual article basis or on a total click number basis (which would be fairly easy to game), but more on a by category and by country basis. In other words, if the same personal finance blog repeatedly got high click through rates within the business category or in France, it will develop high trust as being a high quality resource for the business category in that particular country.

TechoInspire.com/img/upload/google_news_article_ranking.png” alt=”" />

Optimizing Multi-Media

To maximize traffic from the SERPs in both news and web search, articles need to include images that adhere to Google News’ desired specifications. Additionally, though less imperative, using video can also provide high click through rates and significant traffic.

Images: Articles with images to do better than articles without images. To optimize your article’s images you should:

• Save images as JPEGs – PNG, GIF, and other formats are less optimal.
• Use large images with good aspect ratio.
• Give images descriptive captions and keyword targeted alt text.
• Place good images at the top near the title to help associate the image with the subject matter.
• Put image inline and make it non-clickable.

Video: YouTube is a trusted video hosting platform for Google News. So for best results, setting up a YouTube channel and submitting it to Google News is likely going to be more effective than using other platforms. One thing to be aware of with video is that video can be hard to categorize. So to ensure correct categorization, textual descriptions and transcripts are each great ways to associate videos with subject matter.

Additional Recommendations

• URLs: Create permanent unique URLs with at least 3 digits. Reason being, publishers have historically used article ID=number in their URL strings and this helps show it’s an article and not just a static HTML page. Of course, we’d recommend against dynamic parameters in your URLs (you could rewrite these as static URLs like newssite.com/story/345). If your news publishing system does not have at least 3 digits, you can submit a news sitemap and identify which URLs you want included as news. In general though, you don’t want your URLs to be too long, too short or non-permanent.

• Article Titles: There are a handful of best practices for news article titles, but titles are incredibly important, especially as a way to ensure good categorization. Ideal titles are ones that are keyword rich, indicative of story topics, yet still catchy and compelling to click on.

• Between Title & Body: Putting publication date between the title and body helps the date extractor identify the correct publication date and include it in the snippet. Similarly, you want to make sure there’s no extra text between the article’s title and body in your article’s source. Doing so will make it difficult for Googlebot-News to extract the appropriate snippet to display in the SERPs.

• Article Body: There are a number of article text considerations, but among the most important is that you don’t want to break up your article body. You want sequential paragraphs. This means you should not have elements such as user comments, advertisements, or links to related posts breaking up your content.  

• Inbound Links: Inbound links matter a great deal for web search, but news is fundamentally different in this respect. As Google News’ Josh Cohen said in his TechoInspire.com/www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-josh-cohen.shtml”>interview with Eric Enge, "to be able to build up links over time is just something that isn’t really all that applicable on the news side of things."

Google News is not a platform for every website or blog, but you also don’t have to be a mega-publisher churning out 10 articles a week to be Google News-worthy. It will help for rankings if you are, but it is not necessary for indexation. So your website or blog is probably more newsworthy than you think. For example, in the tech category you will find the big sites you might expect like TechCrunch, Huffington Post or ZDNet, but amidst the articles from these mega-publishers, you will also find articles from lesser known sites such as gadgetsteria or ithinkdiff, both of which are included in the news results even though you might not think of either as the "most newsworthy" technology sources.

So if your blog is a good fit with one of Google News’ categories, odds are submitting to Google News or submitting to Yahoo News would each be effective methods of distributing content and increasing traffic.

Do you like this post? TechoInspire.com/thumbs/add/blog/8649/1/0″>Yes TechoInspire.com/thumbs/add/blog/8649/0/0″>No

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Posted by TechoInspire.com/users/view/63″>randfish

I ran across this survey data eMarketer released last week and my heart sank:

TechoInspire.com/img/upload/top-priorities-2010.gif” /> 

This first chart looks innocent enough. It’s when you look at the next one (from the same report) that things get ugly:

TechoInspire.com/img/upload/ad-metrics-2010.gif” />

As a CEO, an SEO, a web marketer and a participant in social media, this drives me absolutely crazy. The very last item on the list is "conversions, ROI, etc." If your pulse isn’t pounding, you might need to cut back on the pharmaceuticals.

Absolutely nothing in the analytics world should trump conversions and ROI for "senior marketers" or anyone else who cares about the success of a company. If you’re thinking in terms of time on site or unique page views as primary metrics – metrics you’d describe in a survey as being those you’re "most interested in" – there’s a big problem. The web as a medium is designed to let you capture data beyond number of viewers or engagement level. It lets you track return visits and actions and build sophisticated models that predict what activities will drive up revenue and earnings in the most cost-effective ways. Why let it go to waste?

TechoInspire.com/img/upload/forrester-im-spend-2009-201.gif” />

This report from Forrester suggests that the spend on web marketing has a lot of growth, and social media in particular is poised for exceptional CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate). But, I’m tremendously concerned that if marketers obsess over metrics like time on site, unique page views and CTR, they’ll miss out on the real opportunity of all these channels.

TechoInspire.com/img/upload/marketers-smm-cartoon.gif” />

ROI should be the ultimate metric – it should be the most important thing on every marketer’s mind for every project and every channel. I’ll grant that prioritizing the projects and investments that have the highest return is challenging, and even the best do it imperfectly. What worries me is that there are marketers who may be taking their cues not from the great analytics data suggesting that, although first-time visits from social media may have low value, over time, they can drive greater brand engagement, predict higher rates of repeat visits and eventually become buyers and brand evangelists, but from the onslaught of press coverage and media attention around social networks.

If you’re taking your clues about where to spend your marketing budget from the media, rather than experiments and data, get ready for disappointment. Likewise, if you’re measuring the wrong thing, you’ll never know the right place to spend those dollars.

The beauty of online channels like SEO, landing page testing, conversion rate optimization, email marketing and, yes, social media is that the data tells a story we can read. So long as we’re willing to hear the message, we can draw the connections to find the traffic sources that cost less and earn more. We can invest in those until the ROI from them diminishes to a point where other channels become viable. But only if we’re paying attention to the metrics that matter.

There have been tools, data and experienced professionals in this field, fighting these fights for over a decade now. Tragically, it seems that we’re in for a long slog.

p.s. We’ve filled up about 600/1,000 spots for TechoInspire.com/dp/pro-webinars”>Thursday’s PRO webinar on SEO Analytics – feel free to join in

Do you like this post? TechoInspire.com/thumbs/add/blog/8660/1/0″>Yes TechoInspire.com/thumbs/add/blog/8660/0/0″>No

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

TechoInspire.com/blog/does-your-website-deserve-to-be-ranked/attachment/entitlement/”>TechoInspire.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/entitlement.JPG” alt=”entitlement” width=”248″ height=”216″ align=”right” />3 clues of what your site may be missing.

I have a buddy who once had a crush on a girl friend of mine. But in all honesty, he simply did not deserve her due to some bad decisions and a rough personal history. So I found myself trying to explain to him that to be with a girl of that caliber, he had to be the kind of man she would want to be with. He had to “deserve” her.

No, this is not a lesson on relationships. However, the idea of attracting website visitors is similar. In TechoInspire.com/”>search engine optimization, and with our websites in general, we do things with the intent of deserving a good ranking. We use a number of methods to target a specific market and we seek for quality links to link back to our sites. But do our sites really deserve it? Do our sites really deserve to rank well? Unfortunately, we live in an age of entitlement, and all too often people think they deserve things without having to do the work to merit the prize. Sometimes we make bad site decisions, or sometimes we do nothing at all, and yet how many of us still entertain an expectation that we deserve better rankings, or that people should notice us?

Think about it for a minute or two, and forget about what matters most to the Search engines. What attracts you personally to a website? A need or a want of some kind? The design? Images? Usability? Obviously a good website will satisfy the individual in some way and entices them to return. So do we really care how poorly designed a website is as long as it satisfies our needs, offers a certain level of enjoyment, or does not require much effort on our part?

I am not advocating poorly designed sites. Search engines may not care specifically about what your site looks like on the surface, but people do. And perhaps this is where my concern comes to light. If we are not careful, we can get warped into a paradigm of search engine optimization which tends to optimize solely for search engines and not for the people who use them. So I think it is fair to ask whether our SEO efforts are as much for humans as they are for search engines. Maybe we blame the search engines or maybe we blame ourselves for the tunnel vision; but either way we are not going to deserve high conversion rates or a return on investment (ROI).

It is often easier to market a site through paid links, submitted links, and advertisements than to produce a well-optimized website that naturally attracts attention. But perhaps we create a false sense of “optimized security” when we run a PPC campaign, or a link building campaign. Are we merely trying to compensate for our site’s shortcomings by using superficial antics to build up links or paying to try and woo the good rankings? Sure, you can generate a lot of links and maybe even drive a lot of traffic but if those high bounce rate statistics are any indicator, your site likely needs some work to retain your audience and entice people to keep coming back.

So what is the solution? We should remember that SEO is not a dichotomy of search engines and site design. Nor should it be. Good site design is an inseparable part of SEO. So what can you do to help your site deserve more attention?

1)    Site Redesign or Facelift? Think Simple.

Does your site still look the same as it did 10 years ago? And if your site is not that old, does it look like a website from the 90s? A complete site redesign may not always be plausible for some businesses, but you should consider those things that can be done to give your site a modern digital facelift.

Making your site more “current” does not mean adding every bell and whistle known to modern Web technology. Small site upgrades done right can fit in naturally and go a long way to upgrade your online image. Just look at the DrudgeReport.com, it has had practically the same simple design for the past 10 years and it still receives droves of traffic in the millions. On the other hand, design changes done wrong can be quite noticeable, – have you ever seen someone with bad or overdone plastic surgery? Of course there are other factors that determine whether or not you receive traffic, but investing in your website design is a key part of the equation.

2)    Write Great Content

Why does great content on your site make a difference? It has been shown that a majority of people respond primarily to web site looks and visuals, but great content keeps your visitors coming back for more.  This might include such things as interesting articles, blogs, videos and other media.  Incorporate something unique and intriguing to make your site stand out.

Equally important to the type of content on the site is the manner in which it is presented. Is your content high quality? Does it offer something of value? Is your blog article readable and easy to understand, or full of grammatical errors?

3)    Establish Trust

Trust. You often hear this word a lot in regards to the online presence of websites. Establishing a good reputation requires hard work and a lot of time, and doing what is ethically necessary to make your website stand out as something exceptional and credible.  With the exception of a few lucky sites, the status quo might not cut it anymore.

On another note, get active in social networking. Get to know others in the business and your industry, and use social networking tools to promote your online presence.

I fail to understand how some people who have badly designed or outdated sites will pay for TechoInspire.com/services/”>SEO services, but all they want to do is build links. I suppose if that works for them then so be it, but there is more to SEO than just TechoInspire.com/blog/why-arent-you-building-links-from-relevant-sites/”>link building. You can put as much makeup and cologne on a stinky rotten fish as you want, and link to it from a thousand locations; but a painted rotten fish with links is still a rotten fish.

Become the site that truly deserves the good ranking. What good is being number one on Google when no one wants to stay on your site because it stinks?

TechoInspire.com/~ff/seocom?a=Wfrq56K0AKA:VYzBNmJDWQE:yIl2AUoC8zA”> TechoInspire.com/~ff/seocom?a=Wfrq56K0AKA:VYzBNmJDWQE:7Q72WNTAKBA”> TechoInspire.com/~ff/seocom?a=Wfrq56K0AKA:VYzBNmJDWQE:F7zBnMyn0Lo”> TechoInspire.com/~ff/seocom?a=Wfrq56K0AKA:VYzBNmJDWQE:gIN9vFwOqvQ”> TechoInspire.com/~ff/seocom?a=Wfrq56K0AKA:VYzBNmJDWQE:qj6IDK7rITs”> TechoInspire.com/~ff/seocom?a=Wfrq56K0AKA:VYzBNmJDWQE:l6gmwiTKsz0″> TechoInspire.com/~ff/seocom?a=Wfrq56K0AKA:VYzBNmJDWQE:dnMXMwOfBR0″> TechoInspire.com/~ff/seocom?a=Wfrq56K0AKA:VYzBNmJDWQE:KwTdNBX3Jqk”>

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

So when was the last time you went to GoDaddy and found that the domain name you were looking for was already taken ? Well, if you’re anything like me, the answer would be almost every time. Domain name registration is getting cheaper day by day and as more and more domain name registrars pop up, the probability of finding a domain name of your choice is close to impossible. So the next best option is to go for a close match to what you’re looking. And how do you do that ? Well the godaddy suggestions are fine but there are some other cool tools too that will help you do a better job, if you suggest them the keywords you are interested in.

1. Domains Bot

This tool asks you the keywords that you’re interested in, and finds out all the domains available based on possible matches.

2. Domain Tools

This domain tool suggests you the best alternative domain in .com. .net, and other TLDs based on your keyword. Also it shows the existing registrant information of already registered domains.

3. Shout Domains

This is an amazing tool that brings in lot of creativity to the whole exercise of finding a domain name. It has three tools that will suggest you better domain names based on the keyword you enter. It also allows you a lot of options like color, prefixes, suffixes and a variety of categories. I promise you’ll never run out of ideas here.

4. Name Tumbler

Another great tool, this one asks you a few simple questions first.

1. Enter a Keyword – Choose the keyword that you want to combine with our database of common words.
2. Combine Your Keyword – Select from our different databases of words to combine with your keyword.
3. Choose Keyword Placement – Add your keyword to the beginning of each domain name suggestion or the end.
4. Use Hyphens – Separate your keyword and suggested terms by a hyphen or not.
5. Extension – Choose your domain name extension.

Based on these, the available domain names are suggested.

5. Aap Ka Domain

This is an Indian website that allows you to search for available domains stemming in one keyword. Just plug your keyword and it shows the available domains around that keyword.

So, there you have it. Domain Registrars that don’t suck, but suggest you alternate free and available domain names based on your interest, suggestion and keywords. Do you know of a better tool, let me know.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Keyword research is one of the primary things in SEO, and as all of us know, there are a set of keyword research tools that we all have been using for years. I personally feel that the keyword research area is the most important one in terms of laying your foundations for SEO, and unfortunately, this is also one ares where we don’t have much options.

So what does it take to create a better keyword research experience ? We all have the same set of keyword research tools, the same keyword research procedure, so what makes the difference ? Let’s see.

1. Use more than one tool, mix it up and get the best of it

Of course we all have out favorite tool, but does sticking to just one tool narrow down your possibility of finding out better keywords ? It does. In my opinion, one should always try it out with as many tools as possible and then get the best of everything. For instance the Google Adwords Tool has the advantage of popping up “realistic” keywords, but the search number and the competition is probably not accurate. You could use the SK Tool instead.

2. Do not pick the obvious keywords

Remember, in SEO its more about doing things better than doing things right. So if you pick the obvious keywords with the best search volume, you are forgetting the fact that other SEOs in your niche probably doing the same thing, and even better than you. So the wise thing to do is to track your competition and over-doing them, even if that means you have to deviate form the regular procedures.

3 – Match search volume in context with your site content

A mistake SEOs often repeat is getting carried away by the search volume and picking the most competitive keywords which they may not stand a chance to rank for. The problem here is that there is no focus on the content. Only if your content matches in context with the keyword selection would it be possible for you to go ahead with the rest of SEO factors and possibly get some traction. If you make the wrong selection, then you got things all messed up right from the beginning.

4 –   Pick up the low lying fruits first rather than jumping for the big ones

Why ? Its easier to get the momentum. When you try and pick up competitive keywords first, you have to spend a lot of time on it until you get anything for result. Instead try picking up the low lying fruits first (long tail, lesser competitive keywords) and then once you have some momentum gained, leverage on it for the bigger ones. Makes sense ? Saves a lot of time too.

5 – Start from bottom up of your site

Another grave mistake SEOs do, especially with new websites is to start with their homepage. Nothing wrong technically, but you’re losing out on the opportunity that a lot of your content that lies in the inner pages of your website are still not optimized or catered properly to the search engines. There are several options available with them, so why not fix them first and move up gradually to the homepage ?

So there you have it. Five overlooked facts in keyword research, that could really make some difference to your overall SEO strategy. Did it help ?

Can’t wait to hear your thoughts.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Today is famous American painter Norman Rockwell’s birthday, (Feb 3rd) and Google is celebrating it with a new doodle.

“Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator. His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States, where Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over more than four decades.” -Wikipedia

Did you spot it yet ?

Bookmark It

Hide Sites