Official Google Statment: how to optimize your pages

In an online Q&A session, Google's Matt Cutts answered the questions of webmasters who want to get higher rankings on Google for their websites. This article summarizes the most important SEO relevant statements of this session.


The effect of +1 clicks on your organic rankings and ads

Google is still testing the effect of +1 clicks on the search results. It seems that only clicks from trustworthy people will influence the position of a web page. In other words, it won't help to buy +1 clicks.

In addition, the +1 clicks on ads will show others who have +1′d it but that is all at this time.

You cannot exclude keywords from your website

It's not possible to ensure that your website does not appear in the search results for a particular keyword. The reason for that is because that could be a way you could silence critics or not show up for negative reviews.

The age of a website is important but only one of many factors

The age of link anchors and domains can influence the position of a website in the search results. However, Matt Cutts says that you still need fresh information because old information can get stale.

Google decides per keyword if the search results show websites with newer or older content. Old websites often tend to have more links and that the links are often the reason why older domains have higher rankings.

Google will rewrite your meta description tag

Google will only use the meta description of a web page if they find it appropriate to the searched keyword. Google will also write its own description to show the searcher why the page was ranked for the query.

What to do if other websites steal your content

You should do a DMCA complain and a spam report, especially if the other website is a spammer who is scraping content completely.

Double 301 redirects are okay

A web page shouldn't redirect to more than 4 URLs. Chained 301 redirects should be only 301 redirects and they should not be mixed with 302 redirects.

Google also detects JavaScript redirects. Matt Cutts says that Russian spammers tried to fool Google with JavaScript redirects but Google could detect it.

Google uses many different factors to determine the position of a web page in the search results. Analyze your web pages with IBP's Top 10 Optimizer to find out how to adjust your web pages so that they get listed on Google's first result page for your keywords.

Article courtesy of Axandra.com

My SBI Experience And Why I Left

There are a lot of opinions out there regarding SBI vs blogging. Some have even gone as far as to say that SBI is anti-blogging. As an ex-SBI user I have to say that SBI isn’t anti anything. But I do see where some people may get the idea. SBI promotes websites almost to the point of annoyance, but that’s because that is what they are. For those who are on the fence about whether or not to go with SBI, read on about my experience, why I left it and whether or not I’d go back.

When I first got onto the work at home, bus I started with blogging. It was simple and a good way to learn how to develop content for a niche without the technical hassle. But blogging on a free platform like blogger has the drawback of inflexibility. There are a lot of things you can’t do, at least not without some proficient technical knowledge. Thus I wanted more and, after doing some research, decided that SBI was a good fit.

My  few years with SBI were pleasant. SBI has a great community of helpful knowledgeable people that will walk with you through the process. This is indeed a very powerful tool for a beginner who is still learning about online marketing. There are several videos and several guides that if you use give you basic fundamental knowledge about building a niche business.

But the action guide, while up-to-date, doesn’t provide advanced knowledge about using an online platform to build success. In fact, a number of the things in it I learned while blogging and you can probably Google and get the same information.

SBI likes to pride itself on being some kind of “coach” but the site itself is not fantastic in that regards. It’s the forum users who really offer the tips and you can actually gain access to the forum simply by being an affiliate and not buying the package.

Ken provided a lot of different case studies and website examples of different niches, giving confidence to anyone with any niche idea that their website may work. I chose to go with a self help magazine type site and noticed that with SBI it had the potential to be successful. I followed the action guide, hung out in the forum asking and answering questions, and made sure to use as many of the tools as were necessary for my site. Like with anything, it takes time to see success but slowly there was a buildup of traffic, adsense and affiliate revenue and subscribers. So why did I leave?

Something that I wish I had known about SBI before joining is just how tailored it is for people who provide physical or e-products or services. SBI is not the best platform for those who aren’t selling something of their own.

As much as it likes to toot about being an infopreneur site, it isn’t. For those who aren’t selling an ebook, homemade chocolates, or counseling services, SBI can be a difficult money making platform. The reason being most of the tool are geared to those who do more than just provide great content and affiliate products. If I had an ebook and wanted to presell it, then SBI would have been perfect.

 But I was simply writing helpful lifestyle content and after a while I noticed my SBI site was getting too cluttered with the information, especially since I was writing every other day. The site was not as easy to navigate anymore and it was getting difficult to manage all that content, especially if I had to update. With SBI, 30 pages seems to be the maximum in terms of content. Ken Envoy says after that you should be looking at simply promoting your site or building another one, and I agree completely. If you plan to create more than 30pages worth of content, SBI can seem small.

Another thing I disliked about SBI is how difficult it actually is to change the template. People say you don’t need to be tech savvy to work it, but you do. Because these days with all the vibrant hip looking blog templates, it’s essential that your website looks at least close to ranks of “pretty.” Users expect more now and SBI was slow to react to what many web readers want today.

 I had fresh content on my site, Google liked my site, but my site looked and felt outdated. It didn’t have a fresh look or even up to date tools. And updating it wasn’t easy anymore. All this made the revenue generation slow. I thought I was alone in this, but noticed that many SBI users had the same complaint of having clunky looking websites with a lack of community building tools.

The biggest thing with SBI however is the expense. It claims that all the tools together would cost more than they charge, but honestly a number of their tools can be found free and are provided by some blog platforms.  It was costing me $300 to run a site and learn about web marketing at the same time. If you have your own products some adsense and affiliate programs and are market and tech savvy, you may be able to break even by the time you have to renew. But if you’re purely on affiliate programs and aren’t a skilled marketer, you can easily get the 2 year blues where you see your site close up sooner than expected.

SBI does have many advantages and it is a good site for those who want a web business. So, if I did have the time to create and manage my own product or service I would choose them over a blog. However, if sharing great content and gaining sponsors or hosting advertising is your main goal, then blogging may be a more economic and easier platform.

If you are looking for great web hosting or want more information visit SBI today

Google uses page speed as a ranking factor

Last Friday, Google announced that they started to use site speed as one of the 200 signals that influence the position of a website in the search results:

"As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. [...]

We've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites."

Will your website rankings drop?

Google's Matt Cutts says that the change will affect only some websites:

"Fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking. That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page.

So please don?t worry that the effect of this change will be huge. In fact, I believe the official blog post mentioned that 'We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing.'

The fact that not too many people noticed the change is another reason not to stress out disproportionately over this change."While 1% does not sound much, it can be a problem if your website belongs to the pages whose rankings will drop.

At this time, Google's new site speed signal only applies to visitors searching in English on Google.com.

How to keep your web pages listed in Google search results

There are several things that you can do to improve the speed of your web pages:

1.    Choose a fast and reliable web host with a good connection to the Internet. A "cheap" web host could cause problems.

2.    Combine external JavaScript code files into one file. The fewer files the server has to request, the faster your web pages will load.

3.    Compress your JavaScript code to make the JavaScript file smaller.

4.    Combine external CSS files into one file and compress your CSS files.

5.    If your web server supports it, enable gZip compression (your web host can do that for you).

6.    Use as few images as possible on your website and compress your images. Most graphic tools enable you to choose the compression rate when saving an image for the web.

7.    Put tracking codes and other JavaScript snippets at the end of your web pages.

The faster your web pages load, the more visitors of your website will be able to see the contents of your pages. Web surfers are impatient people. The average web surfer wants immediate results.

Page speed is not Google's most important ranking signal. The end of Google's page speed announcement contains a very important sentence: "While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page."

It is important to optimize the speed of your web pages but it's also important to optimize all other elements of your web pages if you want to be listed on Google's first result page. IBP's Top 10 Optimizer analyzes all important ranking elements/signals that lead to high rankings on Google, including page speed and many other factors.

   Article originally from  http://www.axandra.com/  

Work at home: Creating out of season sales

Yesterday, I bought myself a digital camera for Christmas. I don’t usually buy myself a present during the holidays because to be honest, everyone else comes first and then I may manage to scrounge up enough couch change for boxing week, when things are a little cheaper. This year, I was a little kinder to myself and wiser too. Instead of waiting, I started shopping during summer. If I saw something a friend might like I just picked it up; this helped me save a bit for myself to buy myself a nice expensive gift.

It’s great if you’re a site that sells general items, things that people can use all year long. It makes it great for people like me who like to shop earlier, but what if you are a seasonal shop? How do you promote yourself once your season has passed?

Here are three examples and possible ideas

1. Swimsuit website: Suppose you sell swimsuits and other fun-in-the-sun merchandise. You’re loved when April comes around but no one wants to hop on summer site when they have snow falling out their window right?

Wrong. If you own a website that focuses on summer goods, you can still sell a bundle when the weather gets cool, because holiday travelers need your wear. You can spin your promotion to target people who are going to warmer climates for the holidays. Surely, they can’t be caught in last year’s bathing suit. You can also offer great deals and even run contests.

Another target is people who shop out of season. Someone like myself, waits till the season is over to buy, because things are usually cheaper. By targeting your ads to hit us cheapos you can continue to make profits throughout the year.

2. Winter gear: During the winter months, you can drive traffic like crazy, but what happens when the snow melts?

You keep driving traffic. People may not want to think about winter when they are laying in their hammock, but it will return.

By publishing an ezine, to remind people of how to get ready for winter you can keep your traffic from ceasing all together. So let’s say you wrote an ebook on snowboarding tips, you can publish another about how to care for the equipment during summer, best places to store it during out of season months, as well as selling merchandise at great deals.

3. Holiday website: When everybody has Christmas, Thanksgiving, or even Easter on the brain, you’re their go-to site. But just because the holiday ends doesn’t mean your sales have to.

Find the root meaning of the holiday, so for Christmas it’s family. Don’t people celebrate families various times of the year? There are birthdays, anniversaries, and appreciation parties people throw and need stuff for.

If you’re going to pick a seasonal niche, create a strong list by publishing an ezine. This way you have people to send out offers to even when you are not in the lime light. Also, try looking for as many complimenting products and services as possible. So a summer site can include travel affiliate programs, weight loss programs ect. And a holiday site can pair up with event planning and stress reduction sites.

Can working from home make you fat

There’s no denying that sitting on your butt all day can sabotage anyone’s health regime. But are people who work from home more susceptible to weight gain?
Working from home can have negative and positive effects on your weight.




On a negative note:

1. Too many hours in front of the computer. The average work at home business owner spends about 6 hours in front of the computer working. Those who juggle several clients or deal with admin responsibilities can work for over 12 hours. This doesn’t give you a lot of time to exercise.
However, not all that time is spent working. Net surfing takes up a lot of hours from a person’s day. We easily become absorbed in watching videos, participating on forums and chat sites, and reading blogs or browsing profiles on social network sites. All this contributes to a lack of exercise.

2. Tend to work late. A number of those who work at home have day jobs. They work on building their businesses in the evening, sometimes late in the evening. Not too many people want to come home from an eight hour job, work 3 more hours on a web business and find time to exercise.

3. Food is within easy reach. It’s not a long walk to the kitchen to grab a snack or to make a meal. This can lead to eating more throughout the day. If we all ate well, eating several snacks may not be a big deal but honestly speaking, do you reach for an apple every time you have a snack attack. Even supposed healthy snacks are loaded with sugars. Because food is easily within reach, and many people have poor snack habits, it’s easy for work at homers to put on a little more weight.

4. It is easier to obey all your cravings. Ever been sitting in front of your computer and you see a picture of a great looking dessert? Before you know it, you’re in your car driving to the nearest bakery. It is so much easier to give into cravings. You cannot leave whenever you like at an office job for a coffee run. Many jobs do not let you eat on the job. But without the need for permission, you are more likely to give into the demands of your taste buds.

5. Juggling too many things. Stress causes us to overeat, and eat poorly, and there are many things that can stress you out when you work from home. The biggest problem is being your own boss means wearing a lot of hats, especially if you are on a budget. If you are not organized, you can be susceptible to bad eating habits.

But it’s not all bad there are also positives to working from home




The positive side:

1. Easier to make healthy meals. You’re home. You can make hot, delicious, healthy meals. When you work out of the home you may not have time to make great lunches or even time to eat so you grab whatever is convenient. More times than none it’s something fattening. But making your lunch at home means you can consider ingredients and portions carefully.

2. More convenient to fit exercise into your schedule. If you work at home full time, there really is not an excuse to not exercise. You can step away from your desk when it’s best for you and go for a walk, run swim ect. There are even workouts you can do at your desk. It’s just about finding activities you like to do and fitting them into your schedule.

3. Less lunch dates. Let’s be honest, friends and clients can make you fat. The daily latte runs, the lunch meetings where the only thing being served are too many carbs with a side of oil, and my favorite, when all the coworkers gather at their favorite greasy and fatty joint. Maybe it isn’t that bad, but being around others makes you eat more. You may miss out on the office gossip but your waistline won’t suffer as much.

4. Positive attitude. People who own work at home businesses tend to have a holistic view about life. They treat themselves the way the treat their business. That is they want to make sure they perform just as well. This means taking care of themselves by eating and sleeping well, finding ways to reduce stress and maintaining a positive outlook. I know we all sound like a bunch of happy sappy go getters ;P

Working from home can be either positive or negative on your weight. You choose how you want to be affected.

Adelaide Kwaning

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