Website Essentials - 3 Must Haves

When implementing tricks of the trade on your website there are 3 things you just can't ever go wrong with. Big or small, every website deserves these 3 essentials:

Implement SEO >> Upgrading your website or working on launching a new one from scratch, consider SEO. It's never too late to implement SEO and the sooner you do it, the better. So start today!

Creating Quality Content >> Whether you own a website or just a blog, you can never be too big or too little for quality content ever. No matter how much traffic you get (or don't get), no matter what business you're running, you would always need good content. Even when you think that your visitors don't read it or your services aren't popular enough... Quality content on your webpages can just never be enough. So keep updating good content every now and then!

Link Sharing >> Link sharing is good. Distribute some of the content from your website to others on a free-reprint basis. This helps in not just earning links but will also increase your visibility chances and bring more traffic to your website.

Easy, isn't it? ;)

Instant Website Knockouts - Insignificant SEO Worries

And Murderous March continues...

There are some things in SEO on which we like spending our time. Then there are a few things we have to spend time on. And then there are a few others we should NOT be spending time over at all, let alone think about them.

These 'other things' we should 'Not be spending time on' are what I refer to as the 'Instant Website Knockouts'. Research shows that small business owners are amongst the hard hit by these as they tend to obsess over many insignificant SEO related things. So a word of advice...

Don't knock yourself out fretting over the following:

Google Page Rank Obsession >> In case you didn't know, Google Page Rank is not very significant. What the page rank tool bar probably shows you are rankings that are many months old and are barely relevant. What you should be concerned more with is whether or not any of your web pages got stuck in the supplemental index.

Multiple Domains >> Trying to get yourself up in the SERPs by having additional domains or multiple sub-domains is a bad idea to start with. Multiple domains are generally required under different considerations and are mostly this involves user's involvement. Don't try to be over smart with the search engines or the users by spreading out your content over many domains.

Website Submissions to Search Engines >> Huge wastage of time and big loss of money. Search engines are generally crawler-based and will find your website eventually. So don't waste your time submitting your website to search engines. So not the in-thing anymore.

Website Rankings >> It's absurd checking your website rankings every day. If they have dropped down, your looking constantly at them will not make them come back. The best thing to do is to keep working on improving your web pages.

Replying to SEO spam emails >> Don't ever believe a company that claims that you can buy over a 2000 quality links for a mere $50 or less. Neither should you believe any claim of getting your website submitted to over 1000 websites and search engines with just one click. It's not likely that an authetic SEO company would send you such an email. If it sounds too good to be true, it could be spam.

The list can continue well beyond this point. Your comments and suggestions are welcome :)

Good Content - The Teeny Weeny Details to Success

[Part 3]

Web pages in the top search engine results have one thing in common - Good Content. The rest of the website is usually just built around it. Yes, good content is still the deal but there are a couple of teeny weeny clever details that you can work on too.

For instance:

Frequent Updates: Frequently updated content is one way that search engines, especially Google, find you. That is how some blogs end up on the top positions in the search engines. It pays to update creative content or add new pages with unique content at least once a week on your website/blog.

Mis-spelled: Sometimes mis-spelled words can also get you a good position. Believe it or not but some specific keywords (often mis-spelled in the query) can get you astonishing results. Why? Because most of the audience is not literate let alone literate in English. So every now and then a couple of common spelling mistakes (in some specific pages) can help loads. Check 'merchant acounts' for instance. However these are not many and there are good chances that search engines like Google will not care to notice. But it's definitely worth a try ;)

K.I.S.S: Keep it Short and Sweet! Short sentences are not just sweet but are also simply easy to read and better to understand than long ones clumped together.

Precise Words & Bulleted Lists: A couple of sentences for a couple of paragraphs and bulleted or numbered keywords and phrases can work wonders. It is makes the text reader-friendly and gives very specific info about your services. Tends to work for the search engines too.

Headings, Headings & Sub-Headings: A great place to use your keywords most creatively. Plus compelling heading or sub-headings for that matter can help you create user interest, generate call to action and provoke further reading. Don't forget that search engines will be reading the added keyword in these place with interest too.

Link it: It's not just your keyword optimization that matters but also the inbound links and anchor text on your web page that can also do the trick. Search engines tend to go for the overall quality of the web page so its always good to have relevant (and maybe 'keyworded') text links on your page.

Good Content: If your website is up and running doing an OK business then its only wise to invest in the quality of your content rather than on silly campaigns. Coz no matter what they say out there, Good Content is still the King!

Good Content - Firing up those Basics

[Part 2]

In the last part we covered the basics and understood that in order to create good content it needs to be relevant, useful and compelling. Now it's time to put these basics into action.

Here are the 3 Essential Ingredients for Creating Good Content:

• Keywords & Phrases: Be creative. Apart from using the general keywords that all your possible competitors are already using, give it some thought and come up with keywords or phrases that a customer might use in order to find your particular product or services. It always helps if put yourself in your audience's shoes and see things from their perspective.

• Headings & Titles: Don't forget to use targeted keywords in titles and headings while keeping them fresh and compelling. Choose words wisely, because your titles and heading are doing half the work most of the time, and you want to make sure that the reader gets some promising answer to his query in just that.

• Home Content & Otherwise: Of course long articles and thousands of words can be quite compelling, but it's better to leave long stories for the article pages or pages that are made specifically for offering detailed info. It's cool to have a 600 word article but it's a complete NO NO for the Home page or any of the Landing pages. Where large word count can show your authority over the subject, having such a lot in crucial pages can also help lose whatever traffic you might be getting. It's better to keep word count under 300 for basic pages and leave the long stories for the inner pages.

Combined together, the keywords, titles and content, coupled with relevancy and usefulness can create quite a compelling content for your website. While keeping all the basics in focus you can create quite a comprehensive strategy that will fire up your site (without burning it down of course :p) and has a good chance of working all by itself to attracting customers and search engines alike.

Good Content - Back to the Basics

[Part 1]


There are plenty of articles out there that tell you what to do and how to write in order for you to get your site 'on the top' of 'the' search engine, offering you long stories and strategies about writing 'good content'.

First of all lets just determine what exactly is 'good content'. Very simply put, good content is quality content. Content that is capable of driving home customers and attracting search engines. Now that this is determined, what you need to understand is that there are only 3 basics to writing good content. And by good content I mean the kind that will make you, your readers and the search engines happy.

Relevant: First and foremost make sure that the content on your website, especially the home page and the landing pages is relevant to the subject matter of your site. Relevancy is of utmost importance. Be it the readers or the search engines, if they don't find relevant information within the first few lines of the content, they are likely to lose interest (and you are likely to lose them!)

Useful: If the products or services that you provide on your website are useful, then why can't your content be? Useful content has the capacity to drive a major portion of quality traffic to your website. Believe it or not, but people need to know about your services or what your products can or can't do for that matter. So if you want to keep your business flowing, you would make it's usefulness apparent.

Compelling: While your content should no doubt be useful and relevant, it should also be compelling. By this I don't mean that you should use flowery language but create content that people would like linking to. It should be straightforward, giving the visitors a clear-cut picture but should also be clever enough to turn them into customers.

So there you have it... 3 simple steps to writing good content that will not only attract search engines but will also turn your visitors into potential customers. Guaranteed 100% ;)