CognianceSearch
Categories
- Categories
- Cogniance biz news (3)
- Cogniance life (2)
- HR and recruitment (1)
- Marketing & Optimization (6)
- Mobile technologies (4)
- Quality Assurance and testing (5)
- Uncategorized (9)
- Web 2.0 business (4)
- Web 2.0 technologies (11)
Archives
Meta
Archive for the ‘Marketing & Optimization’ Category
HOWTO optimize your blog on WordPress?
Monday, September 28th, 2009WordPress is a blog publishing application and content management system. Many Internet surfers have their own blogs and some of you have the WordPress blog, because it is easy to manage, add content and edit its appearance by setting up the themes from the network or create the own one. So we all know what WordPress is, but how to make a blog more search engine-friendly? This is what my today’s blogpost about.
First thing you might need to do is to change the permlinks through your blog to the one where the post name is present in blogpost URL, e.g /postname/ or /category/postname/. In this case you will get more visitors because post’s keywords are present in the link.
Also, change the titles to match the previous thought – to have keywords in Title. To do this, adjust the titles to the one where the post name or category name or even tag is displayed, e.g post title – blog title, tag – archives page – blog title, blog archives page – blog title.
Description meta tag as for any other html page should be added to every post page, it is suitable when a description is not the automatic words list, but human-written phrase understandable for Internet surfers.
All these above can be made using such WordPress plug in as All in One SEO Pack. Another important role in SEO is image optimization – adding title and alt tags, ensured by SEO Friendly Images plug in.
All the plugins above can improve your WordPress blog visibility in search engines; should you strive for more, please visit the page with other SEO plugins – WordPress SEO plugins. But if you are waiting for incredible results right upon optimization, you shouldn’t. You will need to engage with some other blogs, micro-blogs and social networks to get important visitors on your blog. So, good luck)
Got questions about WordPress optimization? Contact me – Yuliya Leonova
Main Google search operators, what do you think?
Monday, September 21st, 2009Google as the world’s popular search engine has many featured search options. For example, you may find weather forecast (using phrase weather: before mentioning your location) or calculate the mathematical phrase by writing it in Google search field.
But for sites owners the interest is in featured search, to get more information about the site position, site backlinks or when and what version of site Google has cached. So lets go)
First option is info:yoursite.com – it offers you a general information on the website (e.g. info:cogniance.com). It will present information about entered web page. On the opened page you also see several other link:
- cache:yoursite.com (e.g. cache:cogniance.com) displays cached web page, instead of the current page version. On the cached version of a page, Google will highlight terms in your query that appear after the cache: search operator (e.g. cache:cogniance.com software)
- related:yoursite.com (e.g. related:cogniance.com) lists web pages that are similar to the web page you entered.
- link:yoursite.com (e.g. link:cogniance.com) shows pages that are linked to that questioned site. Also you will find backlinks on your site. To exclude a certain website from search query type -site:site.com (e.g. link:cogniance.com -site:cogniance.com)
- site:yoursite.com (e.g. site:cogniance.com) restricts your search results to the site or domain you specify.The same option as to the previous one – you can include or remove the site from where the link would go to your site (e.g. - site:google.com).
allintext:, allintitle:, allinurl: show the search results with specified phrase in text/title/URL/subject. For example,
Tag define, another operator, is also very useful for definitions search; you can specify any word or phrase and the definition for it will be found in Google. For example, define:software
The main and mostly used search operators are mentioned above. What other do you know which you think would be useful for site owners?
Written by Yuliya Leonova
SEO harvest. What do you get except optimization?
Thursday, August 27th, 2009SEO as a Search Engine Optimization becomes a well-known term, especially in circles related to Internet/Web technologies and between website owners. But do you really know that what you get optimising your site?
First of all, at beginning you will have to list the key words for search and define your target audience, and this is almost the main goal for every website. Once you defined keywords and audience, you have the direction. Also you will need to set up a statistics application (like Google Analytics) to see and monitor the results of optimization work – it will let you know if you really reached your target audience.
At this step find your competitors and compare your and their keywords, target audience and page content that matters not only pages but the oversall website ranking.
The next is the content optimization for the defined keywords (unless the content is not optimized already). The task at this stage is to review all website content for mistakes and relevancy. Like in the case with content, the website structure should be optimized too – this will help search engines easily find the relevant page upon user request. And do not forget about the code optimization, which means the pages should have no html errors (you can use W3C validation for this).
In general, the Optimization Process is complete once you have finished inside changes. Next goes Social Marketing optimization that engages efforts in Social Networks and different directories. This will take much more time and will be during long period if you need many visitors and strong popularity of the site.
As a summary, let’s list the advantages you get apart from the site ranking:
- Strong understanding of your keywords and target audience
- Competitors’ list and their keywords
- Statistics data including number of visits, visitors, users profiles, traffic sources, etc
- Aligning each part of your website as structure, content and code with your targets
- Check and fix appearance of the site in different browsers
- Useful contacts in SEO field, target audience and social networks
- Define list of advertising sources clearly measured according to value they bring to your business
SEO specialist always helps you to plant seeds and harvest the site position and number of visitors. Be attentive to offered strategies, follow the list of actions defined by optimizator and always request statistics data to track the influence of each step.
Written by Yuliya Leonova
Site visibility depends on HTML validation
Friday, August 21st, 2009There are many sites on the web; one can find almost everything he or she needs. The main issues people are concerned in this instance are adequate site appearance in different browsers and the information itself we were looking for narrated in up-to-date facts and viewer-catching manner. At first glance, there is nothing about search engine optimization or validation. But these both are important, if you wish your portal to be visible for search engines and appear in Google or Yahoo! search results.
HTML Validation is the process of checking the document for compliance with web standards and bug search in html code, so the document is considered to pass the validation when it has been checked for errors, and a validator has no remarks to the code.
At the end of html validation process you will have a page without visible errors and your website will appear nice in any browser. This should be done at SEO stage doe to several reasons:
- this will add to site visibility for search engines; search engine will never quote your site in top10 if there are many errors there
- this will allow your portal be properly laid out in almost any browser
- validation optimizez the cod,e so the pages are loaded faster
There are many advantages for doing page validation – pages get the structure becoming a web-standardized document; for large sites this will simplify editing and creating new pages. But please remember that users are mostly interested in the content rather than the code changes.
So pay attention to the content making it popular and interesting, but do not forget about the code validation & optimization and marketing features that your website more popularity.
Written by Yuliya Leonova
SEO, SEM, SMO, SMM – what do they mean?
Friday, July 24th, 2009Almost every company now has its own web site or even a portal and wants to improve its ranking in search engine results. Due to this many terms appear on the stage.
So, the first thing you should do with your website is optimize the content for search engines; this process is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Many companies offer SEO services to help you make your site visible by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and following the simple steps below you can increase your site ranking yourself:
- Define the keywords which you want the website to be found by
- Rewrite the content of your website including selected keywords
- Add meta tags – keywords, description
- Optimize website tag structure
As soon as you fulfill these steps, your website will appear in search engines by the words you optimized. The relevant rank in search results depends on the quality of optimization.
The next step in promoting your website is engaging site visitors by placing the link to your site in specialized directories, contextual ads, link building and link buying. This is called Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEM will bring you more site visitors, but this doesn’t mean Page Rank is going up.
The process of site optimization and promotion is long and demands time and patience. To monitor the progress (increasing number of site visitors, increased position in search engine results), you can use special services, such as Google Analytics or Site position checkers.
The process of Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a part of the SEM. Its main goal is to increase the number of site visitors are interested in the information presented on the site, not idle surfers, i.e. your target audience. Steps to fulfill:
- Make your site tagging and blogging easy
- Create a group or user for your website in different Social networks
- Add articles to communities and forums
- Add links to other sites – even if it doesn’t help your goal now, it will in the future
So your web activities result in your website quotes on specialized target topics. And the final step in search engines and social media, optimization and marketing is Social Media Marketing (SMM). To implement this stage you may need to work with created accounts, improve the information there, build fan networks, so the people join your accounts like snowball. This step is the final stage and can last for years to ensure you staying on the top.
Following these steps can increase your site position in any search engine. But if the goal is to get to top10 you should call the experienced professionals who can solve your problem easily OR otherwise you may continue with self-aided promotion 25 hours 8 days a week, registering in specialized blogs, sites, forums and directories with corresponding audience.
Written by Yuliya Leonova
Twitter is becoming into SEM
Friday, July 17th, 2009Every site owner is looking for a way to level up its site ranking in search engines results and appear in top10 found links on some request. There are many Do’s regarding the code side (title, meta data, tags optimization), content (words not to use, positions of keywords on the pages), link building (sites to submit the links there, link exchanges), but it seems to appear another way.
Google began to identify “nofollow” attribute on hyperlinks in 2005 to avoid spam, advertising comments in blogs, so the links won’t be taken into consideration when the sites are ranking in search results. Thus any attempts to increase your site rank using microblogging service like Twitter, leaving comments with link to your site and other service which can add this tag to your link are not helpful. But…
…Recently Google changed its opinion on “nofollow”, says Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle, – this attribute isn’t so effective for spam and links weight as it used to be. So it means the services still add the attribute to the links, but search engines algorithms are becoming smarter and begin to differentiate between marketing-made pages optimized for search engines, and really good, match for the search words content.
We think that in nearest future Twitter and other links in Social Media Networks will make more influence on Page Rank and site position in search engines. So let’s make everyone know about us.
Written by Yuliya Leonova