The Silent Avatar Speaks

Recently there is a huge stir around the phrase “long tail marketing.” It primarily deals with retailing online and makes some real interesting points you should consider. The concept is by Chris Anderson and you can get his book at Amazon.

But what does it all mean? It means get busy with keywords and content to get all the searches possible to your site. People do search differently so you must consider all keywords that relate to you.

An example is a hobby site. Imagine the “length of the tail” in how many keywords that could be. Everything from backyards to zebras. It’s the length of the tail when all of those keywords are connected that can bring you more business. Think about a big tail on a huge animal, it covers a lot of ground and gets your attention when connected to an alligator

So to coin a phrase, “get your tail moving” and leave no rocks unturned. Some search for refrigerators and for some it is an ice box or the fridge. Think about what people name things in other parts of the world that are the same thing in your world.

In keyword research it is easy to spot and grow niches. Low search counts at the top 3 search engines can mean business for you when there is no competition. Use Wordtracker to find out what these less used search engine searches can do for you. So what if there are only 6 searches a month for an item; if you happen to sell that item and no one else does, you want that business.

The long tail of search phrases will build traffic. You can not count on 80% of your traffic coming from 20% of your top used keywords based on readings at Google. Because competition for highly used keywords is so big, long tail marketing makes perfect sense.

If you are an Adsense publisher, imagine how many more relative ads you could display on all of those new low competition keyword pages. It is the total searches from all of those less used words that make using them worthwhile.

Create your content with a broader base of keywords to see the effect. Watch your site stats and be amazed at all of the new search terms you’ll be found with. Many will tell you more content or more products would be easy to market.

With search engines today it is all about content and keywords, and Google flat out says so in their webmaster guidelines. Long tail marketing is real easy with search engines. All you have to do is know the words people use.

I’m the silent avatar… and i have spoken

Tags: SEO, Traffic Generation by the silent avatar
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Getting high rankings in most important search engines is essential for maximising your visibility online and improving traffic to your small business website. More and more small businesses are realizing that the best way to reach prospective customers is through search engines like Google. Hiring a good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) specialist is important, but what do you do if you don’t have the budget?

Here are a few SEO tips small businesses can use:

Tip 1: Use a keyword research tool to research the most popular keywords that pertain to the subject matter.

Tip 2: Add your site to website directories on the Internet.  I previously posted a blog titled “There Is a Significant Benefit to Directory Submissions“  which delves more fully into this area.  Search engines like links to your site and there are a lot of directories that will allow you to add your site for free.

Tip 3: Provide unique content on your site that people will find valuable (advice, tips related to your business, products or services).

Tip 4: Do not use “tricks” you don’t understand. Lots of links from highly regarded sites (avoid shady sites) and great content will usually be enough.

Tip 5: Give it time. After you added great content and lots of links it may take a few months for you to see results.

Bonus: SEO is a field which is always evloving as the rules change and different strategies emerge. If you tried your best but still do not understand SEO and are not getting results you want, it may be time to hire a professional.

I’m the Silent Avatar.. and I have spoken

Tags: Business and Management, SEO by the silent avatar
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The robots.txt file is probably one of the least understood aspects of the search engine optimization world.

Essentially, a robots.txt file tells the various search engine spiders (a.k.a. robots or bots) to crawl or not to crawl specific sections of a website.

The robots.txt file can indicate files or pages not to be indexed at all, or can instruct spiders and bots with specific instructions about how to index your site.

Many search engine spiders routinely look for the robots.txt file as they arrive on a site and many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts agree that including this file makes good sense because it acts as an invitation to crawl and to index your websites content.

There are however some important instances when you may want to limit or to even exclude bots from crawling a site.

Some examples of this are

• when there are rogue spiders that are crawling for the chief purpose of indexing your site for their own use
• when there is sensitive information (e.g., unfinished projects you do not want indexed such as site redesigns or exclusive beta-tests)
• in situations when site owners decide that there is no need to index portions of their site such as image files, download files, or cgi bins.

Search engines scan through files that surfers will never see and this is reason enough to put a robots file on your site. If your site stats include a section on ‘files not found’, it’s possible to see many entries where search engines’ spiders looked for and failed to find a robots.txt file on your site.

Creating the robots.txt file
Creating a basic robots.txt file is a relatively simple process.

Open notepad or your favorite text editor and follow along with the instructions below.

Every robots.txt file contains records of two fields : a “User-agent” line and a “Disallow” line.

The User-Agent line specifies the robot or spider that you are instructing, and the “Disallow” line provides the instructions on what can or cannot be indexed.

Here are two examples…

Example #1 allows robots to index everything while Example #2 prohibits robots from indexing anything:

In the case of the User-agent, the asterisk (*) is the symbol for ‘all’ – so in the example it allows all ‘User-agents’ or robots.

The ‘Disallow:” field informs the robot (User-agent) what to crawl or what not to crawl.

If you want to allow all of your website to be crawled leave the Disallow field blank (see example #1).

If you want to disallow all crawling include the wildcard forward slash (example #2).

You can use this disallow command while creating a website. Just don’t forget to remove it once the site is live.

The majority of websites welcome robots to freely index a website, however there are some instances where the robots’ crawling may be unnecessary or is forbidden and therefore “off limits” to the robots.

Say you have some confidential documents, or downloadable files for users, by indicating these sensitive files are not to be indexed by the robots you eliminate them being indexed and the subsequent files being accessible to all. You can exclude files files from all robots or from individual search engines.

For instance, say you have a file called TopSecret.htm in a directory called ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ that you do not want to be spidered by robots (because you don’t want everyone to have access to these files).
You would simply add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

You can disallow whole directories by:

If, for some reason, you choose to prohibit some robots/spiders from crawling your site, the User-agent should include the name of the specific spider indexing your site.

For example, if a rogue robot keeps indexing your forum, you would include the following in your robots.txt file:

Alternatives to Robots.txt file:
Having said all of the above about the robots.txt file you do not have to actually create one if you don’t want to, however it is an older, more respected method of controlling robots and webcrawlers.

The alternative is to use the “noindex,nofollow” attribute in their HTML meta-tags. Though not a foolproof way to eliminate robots that routinely burn up bandwidth, such an attribute does mesh with the general objectives of many websites.

Here’s an example of a “noindex,nofollow” HTML meta-tag:

There are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of bots and spiders crawling the Web which will take note of your robots.txt file, but not all of them will, so if the information is very sensitive then better no to store it on a server.

If you would like to use a cool tool to generate your robots.txt file you can check out my Resources page on my website.

Tags: Web Design by the silent avatar
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A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1) Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with ease.

2) Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

3) Site optimization purposes
When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to
every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4)Organization and relevance
A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the reasons listed above, it’s most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organized for everyone.

For a Sitemap Generator for Wordpress simply click here

Tags: SEO, Web Design by the silent avatar
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