SEO Blog » Search Engine Optimization

Search Engineering vs Social Marketing

Administrator — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:53:41 +0000

Lot has changed since rise of instant traffic generators like Digg, StumbledUpon came and then onwards Facebook/Twitter established as de-facto place for social marketing. With facebook/twitter came in the concept of Social Marketing and it really added whole new dimension to Internet Marketing. Marketers saw instant, huge ROI which smashed their wildest expectations. We saw incoming traffic from Facebook/Twitter reach heights beyond regular traffic from search engines.

However important factor which still keeps Search Engine Marketing in run is consistency. In a longer run your traffic from Search Engine will still be more than your one day wonder from Facebook/Twitter. So it still matters to be in top ten results on Google – marketers know this and as a result Google Adwords is raking in cash for Google even after Facebook use reached its peak.

SEOMoz – your survey application is broken

Administrator — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:47:10 +0000

I generally avoid taking any surveys and I should have really stuck to that, but somehow email from SEOMoz (or chance of winning iphone?) today convinced me to take their so called ‘SEO Industry Survey’. So what follows is complete waste of time – the survey has around 51 question and when I am through to 35th – SEOMoz survey application breaks apart and kept me showing ‘Recording your answer – please be patient’ message for more than 20 minutes now – effectively wasting all the time taken to reach upto 35 questions.

What the heck SEOMoz – I was hoping better from you.

Central Ads block for Mambo or Joomla

Administrator — Sun, 25 Dec 2005 05:24:30 +0000

Central AdSense or YPN Block for Mambo and Joomla

Google heat map for ad placement gives highest weight to the ads placed in the center of page. Ads placed at center location on screen generates maximum CTR thus increasing the revenues.

A sample of application of such ads at the central location can be seen at www.healthdebitcard.com and www.skincarediary.com

Below is step by step instructions to create a new module position for ads placement at the center of screen.

First of all you need to create a new module position for central location on your page. To do this go to Site > Template Manager > Module Position and add a new position. Name it ‘central’ or whatever you like.
Now you need to edit the html of your page and load this module at this position. To do this go to Site > Template Manager > Site Templates. Select the template you want and then ‘edit html’ for it. Now you need to find the right place to position this new module at the center of your template. Use this to load central module at your desired location in template.
< ?php mosLoadModules ( 'central' ); ?>
Check if central module is appearing at the desired location by using the inline preview tool (site > preview).

Once this is done, now you need to create banners to appear in this new module position. For this I used the existing banner component

Create a new client for banner and then create a desired banner for this client
Now you need to create the module to show this new banner at the central location. For this go to Modules > Site Modules. Use the existing banner module and copy it. Edit the copied module specifying the banner client id you just created (in the previous step). Change the rest of module properties as per your needs
Publish the module and that’s it you will be seeing ads appearing at the new module position you created.

This process is actually generic way to create new modules/content block, here we use it for creating central ads block.

Launching Answers Forum

Administrator — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 02:19:38 +0000

I am glad to announce launch of forum to this blog www.seodon.com/forum

If any of you have questions about Mambo/Joomla feel free to post them in, I will try to answer or point to right source.

The forum discussions cover (not exhaustive list)

Mambo/Joomla General Help
Adsense/YPN general Help (and use of it on various CMS softwares)
Search Engine Optimization
Wordpress

What is search engine friendly URL in Mambo or Joomla

Administrator — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 04:07:37 +0000

How to use search engine friendly URLs feature of mambo and joomla? Read on for step by step instructions to turn on the SEF URLs in mambo or joomla.

To make URLs in mambo or joomla search engine friendly, do following:

Make sure your server has mod_rewrite enabled (so you need to have apache servers)
Server must allow .htaccess override

If you have both of these, then you can turn ON the search engine friendly URLs feature in mambo or joomla by going to admin > global configuration > SEO. You will need to rename the htaccess.txt provided with installation to .htaccess

If all goes well for you, your content URLs will look like http://www.site.com/content/view/5/2/ and component URLs will look like http://www.site.com/component/option…tact/Itemid,3/

These type of URLs are much friendly to search engines than the default mambo or joomla URLs.

However, these URLs doesn’t have any keywords in it so there still more to do. Best option is to use open source components from OpenSEF or 404 SEF to rewrite the URLs so that it has content title in the URL. With openSEF URL rewriting component installed, your urls will look much nicer like http://www.site.com/section_name/ category_name/content_title.html.

Search engines will love such URLs and you get full benefit of keywords in your content titles. Example of above techniques can be seen at www.photogrow.com which uses Open SEF component.