First step after the concept of a website is to finalize the URL structure. URL of a web page is like the address of a person.  Frequent change of address by a person, creates problem in contacting the person and needs reference to the new address or update of the old address. Similarly if the URL of a page is frequently changed it’s a problem for search engine to track the same and correlate to the old one.

Hence it’s best to finalize the URL structure for a web site before we start developing it. Though Google is good at crawling all URLs but it’s better to give a friendly URL. So here I would be discussing the best practices and dos and don’ts for Optimum URL structure. In advance view we can say, the different URL architectures are Themed, Flat and One-Off Site URL Architecture

Basic Over View

Length of the URL: Google can crawl all length of URLs but the best suggested would be to have four to five words in the URL excluding the domain name.

This was suggested by Matt Cutt in his interview, http://www.stephanspencer.com/matt-cutts-interview/. Not taking the suggestion on the face value, I have done little search and noticed it’s the length that Google displays in the Result Page.

He states that if there is more than six words the priority of the words is decreased.

There is one more evidence in favor of short URL,  recent research shows that short URLs within Google SERPs get clicked twice as often as long ones http://searchengineland.com/080515-084124.php. So short readable URLs you get both better rankings and better click through.

Short URLs will also help in direct type ins of URLs (if anyone still uses that instead of Google) as it’s easy to remember.

Readable URLs: It’s better to design URLs with words than numbers or other unreadable characters. It also has an advantage of getting direct traffic as remembering the same is easy. If we use “exact match” naming conventions (http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/how-to-reference-material/how-to-increase-relevance-using-consistent-naming-conventions-tags-site-architecture-and-links/)targeted keywords it is highly probable that the click through would be higher, as the searched key words are highlighted as bold in the SERP pages of search engine, increasing the probability to be clicked.

URL is case sensitive: Unlike domain name the URL is case sensitive. This meaning that if by any reason ( choice or CMS or mistake) we stick to a an upper-case version, this can cause a few issues:

• People are most likely to link to the standard lower case format
• We will Lose page authority & link juice as search engine see the URLs as two different page URL
• Some web server is equipped to handle the case sensitive URL but some are not, so loss of traffic
• Suffer from duplicate content issues on search engine Index.

Changing static or Dynamic URL structure: The favorite or advised tactic is to use 301 redirect only for most powerful (in terms of linking and traffic) pages and leave all others to be handled via 404. The search engine loves server side redirections over client side redirections done by JavaScript.

File extensions: (i.e. don’t end your URLs with .exe or .bat http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dont-end-your-urls-with-exe/) as they might prevent your pages from being crawled.

I prefer no extension if possible, as it gives me freedom to move from one technology to another or static to dynamic pages, without any loss of traffic or investment in redirection.

Best practices check list for URLs, believed to be true:

• Fewer the parameters passed in dynamic URL, the better. Less than five word length parameters are much better than seven or eight.
• Superfluous/nonessential parameters like tracking codes to be avoid.
• A clean static looking URL (containing no ampersands, equals signs, or question marks) is more search engine friendly than a dynamic one.
• Having keywords in the URL is better than no keywords.
• The file naming with Keywords is more beneficial than the directory/sub-directory name (this is relative statement; keyword sequencing in URL is appreciated).
• Hyphens are the preferred word separator, although underscores are also used over times. So if you have multiple-word keyword phrases in URLs, it’s recommend using hyphens to separate them.
• Stuffing too many keywords in the URL looks spammy. Four, five or max six words in a URL looks perfectly normal, shorter the better, according to Matt Cutts.
• The domain name is not a good place for multiple hyphens, although as said, sometimes a domain name should have a hyphen, as the domain ‘arsecommerce.com’ or ‘penisland.com’ demonstrates (Hope you get this joke!).

Looking forward for your comments.

With venture capital funding looking very strong for Q1’11 registering $7.5 billion – a 27% YoY growth – there’s a sudden increase in the amount of well-funded startups. A key question that a lot of them are asking is – how do we grow traffic economically and where’s the best place to spend our ad dollars.

Read the full article on Pubcon – http://www.pubcon.com/seo-for-start-ups

“The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

-          Geus, Arie de

SEO is one of those traffic acquisition channels where it’s easy to get completely engrossed in the day to day activities and hence forget to ask yourself key questions around the larger strategy piece – what are the latest trends in the SEO space, what is the competition doing? It’s important to stop and smell the competition!

Applying the theory of Causality (cause-effect relationship) – SEO competitive analysis can be broken down into 3 basic segments

1)      Cause – How do my competitors rank?

2)      Effect – How much SEO traffic do my competitors drive?

3)      Reason – Why are my competitors out ranking me?

How do my competitors rank?

It’s important to know where you rank versus your competitors. There are a number of different tools out that that can help you figure this out – my personal favorites are:

1)      Advanced web ranking – The thing I like most about this tool is its flat pricing ($99-$599/year) and the control it gives you with reporting.

2)   SEOMoz Rank Tracker or Raven Tools – These are both great online rank tracking tools, they come bundled with other great value ads like – linkscape, link manager or social monitor.

You can take this a step further by segmenting your ranking report in to different bucket – head, torso and tail keywords. This gives you an idea of where you’re doing better than the competition versus where you might need to improve. Example: Competitor A is much better in ranking for key head terms but your site does a much better job in ranking for torso/tail keywords.

How much SEO traffic do my competitors drive?

After we’ve figured out where we rank with respect to our competitors, the next logical step would be to try and find out the amount of traffic that these rankings might be helping drive.  This analysis also helps answer other key questions – What’s the gap between you and your competitors? What’s the overall market opportunity here? Are you overlooking some crucial area of opportunity?

There are several tools that help with this analysis – Compete.com, Comscore.com and Hitwise.com to name a few. All tools are paid, so this might require a little investment, comscore and Hitwise are a little more expensive compared to compete.  Compete’s search referral report breaks up traffic by paid and unpaid (see image below)

You might also want to use Hitwise to validate these results –

This report might also help shed some light on what other channels the competition is using to drive traffic to their website – PPC, Affiliate, Facebook etc.

Why are my competitors out ranking me?

Probably one of the most asked questions in the field of SEO – why is my competition out ranking? Although, there are 1000+ signals that Google & Bing use to rank websites, the one that has the most weight are links – where content is king, links are God!  The best ways to analyze the competitions backlinks are using SEOMoz’s OpenSiteExplorer Tool. OpenSiteExplorer gives you an in-depth look in to

1)      External Links – Links from external websites point to:

1. Sub-domain
2. Root Domain

2)      Linking Domains – Pages and websites that link to a website, sorted by Domain authority[1]

3)      Anchor text distribution – Distribution of the various anchor text links that are pointing to a website.  This helps analyze and understand the competition’s link development strategy! (wink, wink).

The analysis of competitor ranks, traffic and links gives us a holistic view of the competitive landscape which in turn helps us to form informed decision on key SEO projects and prioritization.

Lastly, I would recommend using Google insights & Blekko –

Google insight keeps you in touch with the growing trends and seasonality the affects these trends.  You can narrow by –

• Web, Image, News or Product
• Zone in by Geography
• Filter by month or year

Blekko.com is great to quickly analyze a number of metrics all in one go –

• Inbound Links by state & country
• Duplicate Content
• Crawl stats

Understanding what the competition is doing is pivotal in the race for #1 – It’s important to figure the reasons behind the “cause-effect” to outperform the competition.

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[1] Domain Authority: Predicts this domain’s ranking potential in the search engines based on an algorithmic combination of all link metrics.(SEOMoz.org)

Have the launches of universal search, personalized search, and real-time search affected your CTR on SERPs ? Let’s examine how you can use these to your advantage.

Universal Search

The launch of Google universal search in May 2007 improved user experience, offering intuitive alternatives to standard Web results. The real intent of the searcher was more closely met, and universal search helped those who didn’t have optimized Web sites. But in the SEO world, traffic acquisition became tougher, since CTR on the results pages fell – all the SEOs were thinking, how do we benefit from this?

Read the complete article at

Duplicate content is one of the most discussed, blogged, and talked about SEO topics – well, after link building, of course. Based on Google’s webmaster guidelines, “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or is appreciably similar. Most of the time when we see this, it’s unintentional, or at least not malicious in origin.”

What exactly do “substantive” and “appreciably similar” mean? In my view, two pages can be termed “duplicate” if 30 percent or more of the page elements – title, URL, content – are similar to each other. For example, in the news/blog world, articles are often syndicated across numerous websites.

Two types of duplicate content exist: within a domain and cross-domain.

Read the complete article at -

For fear of getting your company’s website delisted or even banned on major search engines, careful consideration should be given to your choice of internet marketing agencies for promoting your company’s website.

Only white hat SEO techniques and methods should be practiced by your chosen SEO consultants, if they are good at their craft, and in time and with patience, your website’s results will increase in page rank and will show good gains in search engines results.

The SEO consultants at internet marketing agencies are not miracle workers, but selection of an agency with a good and proven record, will provide the additional traffic and new business that you are seeking.

Any number of internet marketing methods can be utilized to achieve your company’s goals and objectives, but the plan used should be well thought out and balanced. By utilizing several methods and key elements in marketing your company’s site, trust and Google page rank will increase, and that will also increase the site’s ranking in other major search engines.

As long as “black hat” techniques are not used to game the search engines, a new site or new domain name, will not be relegated to Google’s sandbox for too long, and the site can achieve high-listing after a few months, even while using high competition keywords. While correctly selecting keywords is vital, it is not wise to select high-competition keywords for a new site or new domain name.

A better approach would be to aim for higher listings by targeting lower competition keywords. As the site gains search engine trust, then more competitive and lucrative keywords of the site’s industry should be attempted.

Adequate time should be spent planning and analyzing the target search terms utilizing reliable keyword analysis tools, so as to maximize the effectiveness of the internet marketing campaign.

The foregoing factors are the justification for hiring a competent internet marketing agency to manage your company’s marketing campaigns. The return on investments will by far overshadow any other approach to marketing, especially if SEO techniques are consistently followed in the maintenance of the site.

A large number of SEO consultants and internet marketing agencies can be found today, and it becomes critical to choose the right agency for your business. When deciding between agencies, make sure that the one you select has page rank of five or above, is able to provide you with proper tracking statistics and results, can show proof of high listings in MSN, Yahoo and Google, and can provide a listing of the activities and services provided by the agency.

On the internet, your website is your place of business. It’s where your customers go to connect with you, and it’s what potential customers see and interact with before purchasing through or from your digital business place. Unfortunately, too many online business owners fail to understand the role that professional web design plays or the importance that it holds for their ultimate success. If you want to succeed online, you need a professional web design. Here are three reasons why your website’s design can make or break your online business.

Improves your credibility – instantly

Much like people make judgments about you as a person based on how you present yourself, people judge your business and what it has to offer by how your website presents itself to them. You may have the best products or services on the market, but if your website doesn’t convey professionalism, or it’s disorganized, confusing, or somehow broken, people will not take your offer as seriously as you might like. When it comes to business, perception is more important than reality, and your image is more important than the products or services that you offer. You can always work to improve your offer, but you only get a single shot at making a great first impression.

A professional web design lends your website credibility instantly. It says in a single moment — that first impression — what thousands of perfectly-penned words cannot convey. Ultimately, either your website’s design will help you achieve your goals, or it could be the very thing that leads to your business’s failure.

Provides a user-friendly experience

Effective web design is about more than just creating a visually-appealing interface — it’s about creating an environment that is comfortable, intuitive, and easy-to-use for your website’s visitors. Technology can be a fantastic asset, and certain website technologies can add fresh dynamics to your website to make it friendlier for your users. However, technology can also become a liability and cause annoyances and inconveniences for your visitors, or even hinder your ability to market yourself through search engines effectively.

A professional website designer understands how to weigh out the available technologies to provide the best user experience while adding significant value to your website.

Gives you more SEO options

SEO, or search engine optimization, plays an integral role in a website’s success today. Unfortunately, not all website templates or designs give you the SEO options you need to maximize your website’s optimization potential. Professional web designers, however, not only understand the basics of SEO and how to create a visually-appealing and user-friendly website design, they also know how to construct your website to take advantage of all of today’s most important on-page SEO elements.

Your website’s design is much more than just a face for your business. It represents who you are, what you offer, and it is the foundation for your website’s search engine marketing strategies. You can always work to improve your products or services, but unfortunately, you only get one chance to make a great first impression. The question is — what will your website say about you?

Search engine optimization tools can be critical to your success. They can aid you in getting your article, business, product, and website to the top page of search engine results, which is what search engine optimization is all about.

There are many internet marketing tools that you can use for search engine optimization. Some are free, and some may have to be paid for, but either way they will enhance your search engine marketing results.

A head checker tool can optimize your search engine results by checking your header tags on any given web page to ensure re-directs are working properly and your URL’s have the correct status codes.Without the proper codes your website could experience a number of erroneous re-directs and in turn hurt your rankings.

Another helpful search engine marketing tool is a search combination or keyword phrase checker. What this nifty little internet marketing tool can do is generate a broader list of search terms based on a phrase or keyword you input into it. This can lead to new ways to promote your website and also contribute to reaching a broader audience. You can even use this search engine marketing tool to optimize URL’s and title tags.

There are also internet marketing tools that can analyze your keyword density. This is an important part of search engine optimization as that is how search engines determine their results. By simply entering in any url, you can find the keyword density for all words associated with that web page. Your content ratios will provide you with the information you need to figure out if your page contains too much of one keyword or not enough. This will give you balance within your content and enable your pages to be matched with the proper keywords.

A Spider Viewer is another useful search engine marketing tool. Search engines use “spiders” to “crawl” your website and determine your search engine results. This internet marketing tool can help you find out where your website needs to be tweaked so you can achieve maximum search results. You will be able to evaluate your page content, meta information, and internal links, which will enable you to achieve maximum search engine optimization.

These are only a few of the many helpful search engine marketing tools you can find available across the Internet. By using the right internet marketing tools, you can get the search results you need to be successful.

Getting a website that speaks to you customers up and running is one thing, but getting one that speaks back to you about what your clients said they wanted is a whole other ballgame. For most companies there’s nothing worthwhile to be found in the huge amount of coding, testing and attention to detail needed to optimize your online presence in such a fashion that your ads and content generate sales on their own. Fortunately, online website development graphic design services can make sure that your search engine marketing campaigns drive relevant traffic to you.

Hunting down consumers is a thing of the past with modern marketing methods. The problems and hassles associated with targeting, recording and delivering a message to the masses of your customers have been replaced with the difficulties involved in conversation tracking, bid optimization, keyword selection and ad creation that is in line with the rest of your marketing plan. These are critical issues, but they’re impossible to tackle alone.

With the right graphic design and SEO agency, you can even get progress reports on your ad campaign through its Research, Traffic, Analysis and Optimization stages. This means that you won’t be left in the dark about what works and what doesn’t, since step-by-step updates allow you do see the exact revenue generating effect of every single banner ad, keyword and content filled page. Pay for performance marketing wherein you’re charged only for sales, leads and registrations, instead of failed content that gains you nothing, is about the only solution to your advertising needs that delivers the value your company needs not to continually lose money.

Graphic design firms are everywhere nowadays, so making certain that the company you choose is well versed in all aspects of Social Media Optimization, Web Design and online ad campaigns is critical. Settling for a company that doesn’t have the skills, tools and visually innovative design needed to directly target the market you need to touch with your message is business suicide. Fiscal responsibility in marketing entails only using the methods that generate proven revenues. Adlift knows how to use SEO to generate those vital incomes, and that means they know how to get your business done online.

Any business that makes sales online understands the importance of having a good looking and functional web page. While a few years ago, ecommerce sites were simply rows and columns of products for sale and their description, the majority of today’s successful websites employ far more interactive content.

There are many examples of this: let’s say if a user searches for a particular item, the site may automatically recommend related items or accessories that the customer could get as well. The site could also automatically calculate and show shipping options and payment methods available depending on the item being ordered and the user’s geographical location.

Another important component of an ecommerce site is not only the content that a user sees, but also the back end which enables the site to function correctly. Ecommerce sites use a series of databases to store and retrieve content based on the user’s input. This includes showing which items are in stock and storing the user’s payment and shipping information to enable the order to be sent out.

Even if you have the most beautifully designed and functional website on the internet, it will do you no good if no one visits it. There are online marketing solutions which can help businesses, large or small, get sales or leads through their websites.

One quick and profitable way to generate revenue is by using search engine marketing. This consists of showing a small text ad above or to the right of search results when a user does a search for a keyword that is relevant to your site or to the products that you sell. Search engine advertising operates on the Pay Per Click (PPC) model, where you pay a certain amount (determined by the particular keyword and other factors) when a person clicks on your ad. While using search engine marketing can be very profitable for a business, it is important to plan your advertising campaigns thoroughly and constantly monitor your results to ensure that you are getting the best results for your budget.

Another way to market your site with search engines is by using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This consists of getting traffic to your site through search results on popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. To ensure that your site appears as close to the top results as possible, there are many items, both on your site and offsite that need to be adjusted. This is best accomplished by experts in SEO who can analyze your site, recommend necessary actions and monitor your site’s presence in the search results.