Well, Google is on a cleanup spree to weed out all the web spam in their search results with this update, though not 100% successful with it, they are not very far from it. If you have been wondering why the top slots for some keywords are filled with low quality pages or websites or parked domains, then please note that Penguin update was not aimed at improving the search quality at all, rather, it was Google’s strongest ever attempt to get rid of spammy sites, no matter how good they were in terms of content quality, quantity or authority! But obviously there were some hardcore black hat sites that managed to sneak through to the top slot in the search results, but it’s just a matter of time that everything gets balanced and they are totally wiped out as Google fine tunes its algorithm in the days to come.

The types of Web Spam that Penguin Update Targeted

Manipulative Linking Practices

The sites involving in shady or spammy linking practices that clearly violate Googles Webmaster Guidelines were hit very hard. This includes link exchanges, acquiring links from spun articles submitted on blog network containing irrelevant links, links coming from splogs, paid links, blog comment spamming or excessive blog commenting primarily intended to build back links etc. have all come under the Penguin radar.

Matt Cutts, the Web Spam head at Google only reiterates only one thing to all the webmasters, over and over, provide good quality stuff to your visitors and you will have no problem in getting natural, good quality links pointing to your website, without doing any kind of artificial link building.

Thin Affiliate Sites

Affiliate marketing sites that provide little to no value to its visitors were also affected. Google certainly has no problem with affiliate marketing as long as your site provides good quality content to your visitors.

Bad Outgoing links

Websites that linked to spammy sites or bad neighbor hoods have also come under attack by this algorithm. So get rid of them if you have any.

Sending Automated Queries to Google

The websites that were using tools that send automated queries to Google to check ranking, indexes, alexa ranking and so on were also affected. So be cautious with such tools. Never overuse them, it’s against Google’s guidelines as it overloads their resources.

Anchor Text Spam

Overuse of same combination of anchor texts to build backlinks also fall under the category of web spam according to Google, so those sites are also hit by this update. So from now, when you are building back links use different combinations of anchor texts.

For e.g. if you are excessively using the anchor text “baby clothes” to build back links to your site, then there is good chance that your site gets penalized, instead try using different combinations like “clothes for babies” “kids wear” “baby wear” and so on)

Scraped or Automatic Content

Websites that were fed with scraped content from article directories, RSS Feeds or other sites were also affected by this algorithm. Such sites provide no value to its readers, so never resort to short cuts for generating content. It no longer works! Take your time, do some research and come up with original content for your visitors. It need not be very lengthy or written in hard to digest vocabulary. Just plain simple language would do as long as it is well written, provides valuable information, spell checked and has proper grammar. Your visitors would love to read such content and be eager to visit your blog again and may be link to it.

So ultimately it all comes down to one cardinal rule. Provide great content and don’t get overly obsessed with SEO while building your site. Just be natural with your content, provide quality and follow the rules set forth by the Big G and you will be just fine.

By the way, it would be worth a while to read this official blog post by Google’s Matt Cutts, regarding this update.

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I have learned that implementing a Silo Architecture is quite an expensive task and not an easy task for a non-techie or non-professional website developer to implement it on a regular website unless it is hosted on a WordPress platform. Fortunately, WordPress provides all the necessary tools to easily implement Silo architecture on your website. And I will be discussing about that a little later. So please read on.

What is a Website Silo Architecture?

This can be seen as those big silos used by farmers to store different types of food grains. Each silo will contain a particular type of food grain, and our Website Silo Architecture is pretty similar to that.

A Website Silo Architecture can be defined as the careful segregation of website content based on different topics for easy access. It can also be defined is a thematic grouping of web pages or blog posts based on related keywords for keyword relevancy, easy and efficient retrieval of the website content for search engines and website visitors. A Silo Architecture helps you in organizing your website based on thematically related content grouped under different silos.

A Silo Architecture can be understood as an inverted tree structure with a top level page or a “Home Page” on the top that branches out to different Silos, with each silo having separate landing pages with the targeted keywords. These Silos can also be thought of as “Categories”. Under each Silo you will have posts or web pages with content that is closely related – using the targeted keywords – linking to that Silo. Each Silo then acts like a mini site or sub-site grouped separately, containing web pages or posts with closely related content under the main site.

Types of Silos

Directory Silo – This type of silo is developed by creating directories or folders within the website, where each silo will have a dedicated folder where all the posts/articles of that Silo are stored.

Virtual Silo – This type of silo doesn’t use a directory structure for creating silos, instead it is achieved by logical interlinking of posts and pages. WordPress sites and other CMS based websites use Virtual Silos.

How to implement Silo architecture on a WordPress site?

Let’s imagine that you have a WordPress website that sells clothes and you want to implement the Silo architecture on it. To accomplish Silo architecture, you must segregate or compartmentalize your content based on different sub-topics, like Baby Clothing, Gents’ Clothing, Women’s Clothing and Teen’s Clothing under separate categories using highly targeted relevant and short keyword phrases. In case of WordPress, the Category page acts like a Silo Landing Page.

Now when you create posts under this category, give a link back to the Category Page (or the Silo Landing Page) with an anchor text containing a highly relevant keyword. Also interlink the posts belonging to the same Silo. So in course of time you will have 10s and 100s of posts linking back to the Category Page which ultimately helps in improving it’s ranking in the search results pages. It is also good to give a link back to the home page from each blog post from each category (or Silo). This will help in boosting the overall ranking of your site or the top level domain (e.g. www.yoursite.com).  Optionally you can also link to other categories (or Silo landing pages) from the posts as necessary, but not to the other posts directly – belonging to other categories or silos.

Benefits of implementing a Silo Architecture on your website

1. Search engines are always striving to serve their users with the most relevant information on the internet. And Silos help the search engines in finding the most relevant information for their users as the website is themed and grouped topic wise. Silos help the search engines in determining the overall theme of the website using a complex process called Latent Semantic Indexing and helps in efficient and easy retrieval of web pages.
2. A Silo also helps them compare your site for relevancy over your competitors who help in turning your site into an authority resource on a particular subject, boosting your PR (PageRank) and search engine rankings.
3. Silos help you to interlink and group related content together logically into easily manageable sections. This makes your website highly organized and manageable for the users. This helps your visitors in finding all the related information on your website with ease in the minimum possible time. This greatly improves the user experience (UX) and increases the time spent on your website, which is a powerful SEO signal in boosting your site’s search engine rankings.
4. This architecture gives you an edge over your competitors who have poorly themed or unorganized sites and easily helps you outrank them on the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) with less than 90% of inbound linking.
5. Saves your time, money and energy in building innumerable backlinks to easily communicate the theme of your site to the search engines – for better rankings.

I hope this article has helped you in giving a basic understanding of what a Silo architecture essential is and how it can maximize your SEO efforts in ranking high on the search engines.

If you found this article useful, please do share it with your friends and colleagues using the social sharing buttons. And if you have something to add related to this article, please do leave it as a comment. I am eager to hearing from you; please do give your valuable feedbacks as comments. And thanks a lot for stopping by and reading my article.

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Though it’s impossible to cover all of that in a single article, you may find many of them covered in my earlier articles on this site. So please do a quick search to see if you can find what you are looking for anything specific,

In this article I am try to give you an overview of 2 crucial SEO factors that you must look into for securing better rankings in the search results.

Is your website easily crawlable?

If you are new to SEO the word “crawl” may give you an eerie feeling. No! I am not talking about any REAL scary creepy crawlies here, but virtual crawlers or software programs or spiders or bots that visit your website (once in a while) to check the number of webpages it has, and how easy are they to reach out, are they properly linked together, categorized, segregated and so on and then stores them (copies of these pages) into a huge database known as the “Index”. But your website can only end up in the index, only if your site is crawlable. That’s why it is very important to make your site easily crawlable for the spiders.

When a user fires a query using a search term, the search engines scans and sift through this extensive index (with the help of complex algorithm or programs) to bring up the desired search result for the user.

So while developing a business website, it’s paramount that it is extremely crawler friendly and accessible for the search engine bots.
Tips to make your Website Crawlable

In order to make your website easily crawlable for the search engine bots you can follow these tips.

•    First and foremost, choose a highly search engine friendly website theme that comes in-built with search engine friendly linking structures
•    Incorporate menus or Category structures on the top or side bar of your website so that it makes it easier for the search engines to reach each and every webpage on your site.
•    Use “alt text” tag for images to make it meaningful for the spiders
•    Have a search engine friendly Sitemap (xml and HTML versions) in place that gives a solid roadmap of your entire website to the bots.
•    Don’t use flash or JavaScript to inter-link your webpages as they are not crawlable by the bots.

You may please check out this informative tutorial on Search Engine Ranking Factors extremely useful in enhancing your SEO efforts.

Is your website fast in loading?

Your website’s speed is a crucial SEO signal picked up by the search engines that affects your rankings in the search results. So it is very important that you choose an SEO friendly theme for your website that is lighter, and loads faster upon request.

Tip: Both of the above factors are easily taken cared of if you run your website on a self-hosted WordPress.org platform using a highly SEO friendly WordPress theme.

If you found this article useful, please don’t hesitate to share it with your friends on social media. And please do leave your valuable feedback as a comment.

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So this means that a person located in USA would see a customized search results listing based on his country or area for a search query, than a person located in Australia or UK or other parts of the world giving the same search query. These can be termed as International Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Local SEO.

Country Specific SEO

All major search engines these days will process a search query and bring up search results based on the country that the user is physically located in. So if you are a global company offering specific services or products tailored for different countries, then your website is required to be optimized internationally to be able to show up in country specific search results listing. This technique is known as Internal SEO.

If a person is searching for details on a specific car company on Google in UK, then the search engine will display the results relevant to that person’s country, which is UK. The search engine will bring up the car dealers and agencies located in UK rather than in other parts of the world.

So if your website is not yet optimized for a specific country, then you are losing out on the search traffic based on your country and leaving serious money on the table. So be quick and get your website optimized for your country. It is one of the major SEO signals that search engines evaluate to rank your website.

Locality Specific SEO

Search engines personalize your search query results and go deeper into a more micro level i.e. to city level or locality level when it comes to serving its users. Search engines have become extremely smarter in showing search results relevant to the exact locality of the user. So if you are a business primarily targeting local customers then you better get your website optimized for your locality.

If you are running a company that offers services in SEO and website design to small businesses in New York, then in a Local SEO point of view it makes more sense to keep your domain name, title and description of your website in such a way that includes both of the highly relevant keywords such as “NY SEO” or “SEO in New York” that will drastically improve your business website’s odds to be included in local search results.

Personal History Specific Results

Search engines now days do take your browsing history, likes, preferences and dislikes on the internet into account before bringing up search results for you. Factors like, what do you generally search for on the search engines, the sites that you regularly visit, your social media presence and sharing of such sites are taken into consideration while displaying the search results for you.

So as a website owner or a blogger you must be able show off a well-designed, content rich, easily navigable and impressive website in front of your audience in their very first visit, so that they will have a reason to come back again for more and your website will have greater chance of coming up in their search results more frequently. Frequent visits to your site are also a powerful SEO signal evaluated by the search engines to rank your websites on the top slots of the search results of certain users.

I hope these SEO tips would definitely come in handy especially if you are going beyond the regular SEO techniques and thinking of making your website more personalized and customized for easily reaching out to your targeted audiences around the world.

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Links form a major part of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) activity and influences the ranking of your website is massive way. So if you are an internet marketer or business blogger, desperate to get ranked high for a bunch of keywords through your website or blog, then it’s high time that you have a solid understanding of the search engine friendly linking practices and linking architecture as laid out by Google and other search engines.

Internal Linking

Before you start hunting for relevant backlinks from other sites you must first ensure that you have a healthy and search engine friendly internal linking structure for boosting your site’s ranking on the search results.

Internal linking makes your website easier to crawl for the search engine bots (or spiders) which help in better indexing of your web pages as well as diffusing the PageRank or link juice amongst other webpages within the site. This helps in building the relevancy of certain targeted keywords on your website to other web pages which helps in improving their PageRank.

Internal linking can be achieved through different methods, the most popular being the navigational menu or links on the top or side bars as well as inline text links in the content. Try to use your targeted keywords in the menu items and inline text (or anchor text) for building maximum relevancy to the webpages for those keywords. This can significantly boost the ranking and importance of the webpages in search engines’ eyes.

A robust and SEO friendly linking structure is highly essential for your website to rank high on the search results, improves the user friendliness and experience. It is also a strong signal for search engines in evaluating the keyword relevancy of your site.

Essentially, a well interlinked website also makes the navigation of your human visitors easier, quicker and helps them find what they want more efficiently. This improves the overall user experience of your site, reduce bounce rates and can ultimately boost your search engine rankings.

Recommended WordPress Plug-in

If you have your blog on WordPress (Self Hosted) then I would certainly recommend SEO Smarklinks plug-in by Vladimir Prelovac that will automate internal linking on your blog with just a few easy setups.

Should I Go Behind Quantity or Quality of Backlinks?

Definitely Quality!

Getting a good number of high quality backlinks is a major SEO factor in improving your rankings on the search results as well as the PageRank. But in your desperate quest for a rank boost never employ any automated commenting software for leaving spammy comments on hundreds of blogs – just for building backlinks. This is pretty risky and can get your site penalized by the search engines.

More than the quantity, it is the quality and relevancy of the links that you must focus more while building links. Always try to get backlinks from high ranked blogs and websites that are highly relevant to your topic. Make sure you link in using the anchor text containing the targeted keywords which will immensely enhance the ranking of your website for the desired keywords.

For e.g. if your site is on pet food supplies, then you must try to get links from related sites with an anchor text “pet food supplies” or “Pet food” to rank high on those keywords.

Summary

To sum up the article, internal linking is the most fundamental and powerful SEO activity that you must undertake in order to boost your rankings, and also an activity that you have full and total control on – since you are interlinking the webpages of your own website.

Backlinks are definitely a major attribute in SEO for boosting your site’s ranking. But you should never go blindly after the numbers, build the links wisely and slowly from high ranked and highly relevant sites.

If you linked this post, please do share it with your friends. And hey! Do leave your valuable feedback as a comment.

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Search engines like Google and Bing (esp. Google) are tracking signals from your site related to the trustworthiness and track record of your website to rank your site on the search engines. So, just focusing on on-page or off-page SEO factors might not just assure you higher rankings in the search results.

Does Authority Affects SEO?

“Provide Quality content” has almost become a cliché in blogging circles these days, but the truth is that many bloggers still don’t follow it religiously or consistently.

Quality of the content is definitely more important than the quantity. Of course you need good quantity of content on your blog to get more traffic, but it should never be at the expense of the quality. If you really want to rank higher and become an authority on your topic, take charge of your content – NOW. Never compromise on quality. Always give top notch stuff to your audience that can captivate them and convert them into repeating visitors – forever.

Google is keeping a close watch on your content, how it is being shared on social media, who is sharing it, the reputation of the person who’s sharing, the level of user engagement on it. These are very crucial SEO signals that Google determine and analyze to rank your website on the search engines. Did you know that, a negative or positive review about your site can also be a strong SEO signal for the search engines that goes into ranking your site?

The authority factor is also determined by Google by the quality and quantity of sites linking in to your blog/website. It is very hard to predict the exact signals or sub signals that Google tracks for evaluating a site’s authority. May be it is does an overall assessment of the site based on various parameters, but the aforesaid factors are definitely checked by Google in evaluating a site’s trustworthiness and authority.

Site’s Track Record and SEO

The search engine bots can easily sense any abnormal activities on your website, especially if your website was around for a while; say 2 or 3 years on the internet. Search engines will track your content and compare it with the earlier ones, the quantity, the quality and the general pattern, the topic that you have covered so far and so on. Any drastic changes on the topic or quantity can be perceived as negative SEO signals by the bots.  Your outbound linking pattern is also a very important SEO signal as part of evaluating the overall history of your site. So be careful that you are not linking out excessively or to spammy sites.

I am sure these SEO tips will surely come in handy in maximizing your traffic and revenue goals with your SEO efforts.

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But its rest assured that, search Engines won’t just ban or penalize your website unless you make deliberate attempts to cheat or trick them – whether knowingly or unknowingly that you are performing unethical SEO activities.

Here we will check out couple of those factors that you must take care in your SEO efforts that can potentially jeopardize the existence of your website on the internet.

Low Quality or Thin Content

Having low quality, shallow content didn’t affect your website much in terms of SEO until Google rolled out the Panda update in February 2011.  Until this algorithmic change, having low quality, think content on one’s website was not a major factor and didn’t affect its search engine rankings much. But on Google’s perpetual quest for staying as the top search engine on the internet, and furthermore in their struggle to secure that position forever, they have always strived to provide the best to their users in terms of search query results, and this resulted in the roll out of this “much needed” algorithmic change in the form of “Panda Update”; which raised the bar for online entrepreneurs and bloggers in terms of content quality like never before.

So if you are a blogger or an online entrepreneur who is planning to build a flourishing online empire, then you must rise above the league of bloggers who are churning out rehashed mediocre textual junk and start giving the BEST of the BEST for your audience on your website, if you really want to be branded as the BEST by your audience as well as the search engines on your subject. Always try to come up with high quality and helpful content that no one has ever published before anywhere and also try to make your blog posts and articles highly comprehensive with diagrams, videos, info graphics and audio and other engagement objects. Providing quality content to your audiences is one of the most powerful SEO techniques to cut through the competition and earn higher rankings in the search engines.

Keyword Stuffing and Hidden Text

If you go overboard by overusing your targeted keywords in your content to gain higher search engine rankings, then beware! You are probably doing the most scorned, unethical SEO practice called “Keyword Stuffing” which can land you in a mess. This is highly frowned upon by all the major search engines and can easily get your website penalized or even BANNED for good. By now you must be wondering what is the right quantity or percentage of Keywords to be used in your content. I would recommend you not more than 3 or 4 repetitions of your keywords sprinkled in a natural way in the article are enough to make your article optimized for the search engines for a particular keyword phrase.

Some folks go to the extent of hiding their stuffed keywords by making them white in color or to a colour that matches their website background so that it’s invisible to their audience. They knowingly or unknowingly do this highly dangerous, unethical SEO practice to gain higher search engine rankings, but little do they know that they are risking their online businesses by SPAMMING the search engines which can easily invite a permanent ban or a heavy penalty from them.

Search Engines don’t want to find anything hidden out from your audience on your website. What is visible to the search engines must also be visible to your audience.

Being aware of these SEO tips would definitely help you maximize your SEO efforts and build a website that can accomplish your revenue goals.

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A collection of articles, news items, features and columns in theLink Building: Linkbait | Search Engine Land library at Search Engine Land…

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Both Google and Bing have added many social search features over the past year. There’s also been talk about using “social signals” to help rank regular search results.

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Interestingly, your blog’s content need not be always written words! It can be an audio, video, or even a phone call to your client. Yes! Content need not be always conventional articles or a 1000 worded blog posts. Ask your audience how they want the content to be presented on your blog, through a survey or poll. If you have a list of email subscribers try to know what their preferred way of learning is.

Some of your audience may prefer the content in audio format and finds it easier to digest information by listening. And some may be more visual and would prefer to learn something by watching videos or slide shows. And there are some who may not digest anything without showing them few diagrams or flowcharts. Then there are those bookish types who wouldn’t miss out anything written that comes their way. So you must first find out the content format that is widely accepted by a bigger percentage of your target audience and then tailor your it accordingly.

Creating multimedia content is not a big deal these days as you have many free and low cost software applications at your disposal. You just need to have mobile phone with a video capturing capability, a PC and an internet connection to create a video or audio, edit and publish it on your website for the world to see.

You can create content for your blog in different ways and need not be always a formidable ordeal for you.

Creating Content yourself

Creating the content for your blog on your own is the most popular method of content generation. It’s a cake walk to churn out articles or make other type of content for your blog if you are an absolute expert on that subject. If you are a passionate writer, you would love to create new and informative articles for you audience every single day without feeling much effort. And if you love technology and like to try out innovative things, you may find it exciting and interesting to create useful videos and audios for your blog.

But before you create content you must make sure you have the skills and expertise on a subject to generate content on a regular basis or not, otherwise it is better to get it done from someone else who are best at it.

Other Interesting Ways

There are other easier ways to generate quality content on your blog. One such method is by inviting guest bloggers to contribute to your blog. If your blog is pretty new, it may not have a good search engine ranking, so bloggers may not want to take an effort to contribute to your blog. Well, in that case, you might need to find out some creative ideas to entice guest bloggers, by running a guest blogging contest or offering a nice incentive to them in return for contributing an article.

If you can neither create content on your own nor manage to get any guest bloggers, you may probably have to shell out few bucks to outsource the work to freelance writers on various freelance sites like, oDesk.com or Elance or Freelancer or Fiverr.com or from any other reputed article writers that you know.

You can also consider the option of syndicating the content from other article directories, online magazines or automatically feed the RSS feeds of other blogs to your blog.

I will be discussing more innovative ways to create fresh and unique content on your blog in my future posts. So please stay tuned by subscribing to the RSS feeds.

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