Fasten your seat belts my friends, as for the next few weeks your sites will be experiencing a roller coaster ride since the Big G is updating its Page Ranks. It has already had its effect of three of my sites while the rest are yet to show any changes. I also checked my friends’ sites and they too have had ups and downs in their PR’s. Fortunately, my SEO optimization worked and SEO eazy got a PR2 in this update. I will continue to do what I had planned and aim for a PR4 in the next update. Keep reading the tips and tricks and thank you all for your enormous support

I had written a post where I had posted some tools to check your PR and other stuff. You might want to check the SEO Tools post and check your site’s PR. Best of luck for your PR’s

Kindly Note: I have had a spam attack on my site and while deleting those spam comments, I messed up with the non-spam comments too and deleted them all. So now I SEO eazy with no comments I am really sorry that your comments are no more. However, I will try to restore it from my earlier backups. Sorry everyone!

NetBuilders, a fairly new webmaster’s forum is already creating buzz in the webmaster and SEO community. The forum is about 4 months old (or at max 5) but has made its name in this short time. I am a member a various webmaster forums and have been a member of netbuilders since the last two months. The unique thing about this forum is that Will Spencer (owner of the forum) doesn’t force unnecessary rules on its members and infact has no rules! (of course apart from the general rules of humanity). I would really recommend you to join this forum.

Anyways, this post is regarding the SEO contest that is started by NetBuilders. Here are some of the details of this contest:

Goal: To win, you must place first, second, or third in Google’s organic SERPs for the targeted keywords. Indented listing do not count — each domain can win only one prize.

Start Date: 15 March, 2009

Finish Date: 15 August, 2009 – High Noon GMT

Prizes:First Place: $1,000
Second Place: $500
Third Place: $250

Targeted Keywords: The targeted keywords for the contest are “sulumits retsambew” (without the quotes).

You can read more about the contest here. I would have participated in this contest but I found out about this pretty late and now I guess it won’t be able to make it anyway. I have seen some of the blogs of the participants and mahn, they really rank so well in Google! I would surely be particiting in their next contest (if any). But if you are interested just to give it a try then. Apart from this, I assure you that Will Spencer is one of the coolest person I have ever seen (on the net) and probabaly the least sleeping too! (NO I am not faking anything here for any reasons. This is nothing but the truth! )

Keywords! Keywords! and Keywords!  No matter where you go, you surely must have heard these a hell lot of times. In case you have just started with SEO and aren’t familiar with what ‘keywords’ are  then here it is for you – A word or a phrase that describes your site in short is called as a keyword for your site! Of course this is just a too short and basic definition of keywords. If you want to know why they are so important and why there is so buzz about them, read this post of mine.

However, what is sad to see that despite being so important, most people just don’t know how to choose their ‘right’ keywords and settle down for any keyword that either remotely describes their site or is too common for everyone. e.g. if your site is on ‘space’ that has articles on Space Adventures or providing tours of space, it would be useless to choose just ‘space’ as your keyword. You must go for ‘space adventures’ , ‘space travel’ and so on at least to get your ‘targetted’ audience as well as rank well for them. As a matter of fact, any person who is interested in space travel related stuff won’t just search for ‘space’!

So to avoid the above mentioned mistake in your sites, here are 10 rules of thumb that you MUST follow with each and every site:

• Don’t use single words. Use KEYPHRASES!
  e.g. if you have site on migs, don’t use just ‘migs’ as your keyword but use ‘fly mig’,  ‘mig pics’, ‘mig history’ etc.
• Your site’s description must match that of the content you post on it.
• Choose a keyword with less competition.
  e.g. ‘mig aerobatics’ might have more competition than ‘supersonic aerobatics’.  So choosing the later first would be a good idea. However, do include the first keyword as well.
• If your site targets a particular geographical audience, use keywords from those countries in your site’s content. e.g. ladyfinger in U.K. while okra in U.S.
• Choose your primary keyword to optimize for and choose it wisely. Make sure you describe your content well enough as well not have too much of competitors for the same.
• DO consider mis-spellings of your keywords. People many a times mis-spelt while searching. So do check for possible mis-spelt words of your keywords and try to include them as well.
• If you already have some content, edit a bit to accomodate your keywords in it. Reversly, choose keywords based on your exisitng.
• Target highly searched terms that have as little competition as possible. Nevertheless, if you happen to find a keyword with little competition, don’t include it on your web site just for this reason alone.
• Check the keyword density on your site. If a particular keyword is repeated too many times, edit it with some other word. If the density is too much search engines might punish you for excessive usage.
• Finally, test your final list on Google and other search engines. Although, this is too boring but this is important so that you can know if you can really ‘rank’ for those keywords!

You can also use a keywords research service if you have good budget for your website. Some of them provide really good services and can get you kick started in a small budget. There are of course some more points which I will add in other series of articles. However these are most important ones as far as I think. Feel free to add more in comments

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It’s often detabed that the age of a domain is beneficial for SEO and thus your site. Discussions at various SEO forums and webmaster forums often end in no result or two groups – One favoring the theory while the other discarding the theory! Hence I decided to post my opinion about it with some valid points of discussuions which are many a times not taken into account.

First, what’s the theory?

Well established sites have old domains and hence by reverse logic, older the domain more trustful the website will be from Search Engines point of view. Thus, it will give more weightage to older domains. Also spammers or unstable websites are often sold/passed on/closed early and hence their domain are not new or not old. Thus, newer domains are not given that much importance by search engines!

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Let’s study both the things first and then talk about other factors.

It’s certainly true that well established websites have older domains (as it takes time to get establish and hence domains grow old). But reverse cannot be true as:

• Domains can be made to look older by just registering them and parking them.
• A 301 redirect from older domain can make a newer domain look older to Search Engines.

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Thus, at least I, don’t agree that reverse of the first point in the above theory can be true. Now let’s move on to the second point.

• If a well established hosting company moves into domain business as well and registers a new domian name for the domain names business, why can’t it be trusted!
• If the theory holds true, then it would mean, no matter how good reputation a company has in the outside world, it can gain reputation in SEO only by growing old!

I am not taking a stand to any side of the above argument. What I just want to stress on is that only domain age is NOT important. With old domains comes the PR, backlinks, name etc and hence it’s given more important by Search Engines. Suppose there is a 5 year old parked domain that is not indexed and has no backlinks, then I feel there is NO point in wasting $50 for buying that old domain instead of a new one! It won’t make any difference in the eyes of Search Engines.

The only thing to be remembered is, old domains are good only if they have any kind of good reputation with them. Mere age cannot be taken as a positive factor for SEO. I hope this clears some of the confusion that still prevails in the minds of people!