Understanding SEO With Aedig

The recession may be technically over but many people are still struggling with job losses and pay cuts.

With Americans facing lesser discretionary income. this Christmas is expected to be cold, not just the temperature but also empty shopping malls and lacklustre retail sales.

But Christmas is a season of giving. We can still shop around for gifts, only thing is that we have to stretch our dollar and sought out the best deals.

For a start, why not browse through ShopWiki.com first to get an idea of whether your shopping list fits into your budget.

I love ShopWiki as it is a revolutionized online shopping portal which finds finds every store on the internet by crawling like Google.

Unlike traditional shopping sites where the stores are mostly PAID for placement, ShopWiki is not biased and will give shoppers a comprehensive comparison shopping guide on anything for sale. This will translate to better deals and more savings.

I am looking to get a new laptop next month as my old laptop has seen better days. It has served and traveled with me for the last 2 years and suffered a lot of wear and tear, what with the screen cracking and the surface badly scarred.

Now is a good time to buy as the recession has forced many laptop manufacturers to be more competitive in lowering their prices while offering better design and specifications.

As for my wife, she will be looking to bolster her wardrobe but I have to remind her not to rack up my credit card bills, so no designer fashions this year!

Is Google favoring big brands and corporations? It seems ‘authority websites’ are being given priority in the rankings while smaller or less efficient companies run the risk of slipping under Google’s radar. There is now a “heavy emphasis” on branding

By permitting certain sites to rank highly for valuable and popular keywords that haven’t necessarily appeared in their backlink profiles, it certainly seems that the big brands are being strongly favoured. But is this a good thing?

One one hand, global brands tend to rank higher since they have the budget to promote their products, content and reputation. The SEO and PR teams of corporate brands are able to push their results up the SERPs and force negative press lower downwards.

But people could lose faith in Google if results are manipulated as Google has always an impartial brand, giving a voice to quality sites who are not necessarily big brands. Their mantra is to high quality search results for any search term entered by a user.

Still, small time owners need not be daunted. Google want to priortize “words like trust, authority, reputation, PageRank, high-quality”, and it is therefore of the highest importance to ensure these factors are being taken into consideration when carrying out SEO and website design for any company.

Bad quality SEO, website design, and weaker companies will slide down the rankings, meaning that for those doing the right things, Google will not abandon you.

If you can add brand awareness and development to the mix, the sky’s the limit.

One of my greatest frustration as a child was not being able to go to Disneyland and see Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. It is a place where children and even adults will be mesmerized.

Unfortunately, my parents were too poor then to afford a trip to Disneyland and I am content to watch Disney cartoons, movies and play with toys. I am also interested in wearing and collecting their shirts and cups too.

Since I am grown-up, I have been to Disneyland on two occasions (in America and Hong Kong) with my family. It has fulfilled my long awaited dream.

We have so much fun there but because the place is so big, it was impossible to explore all the entertainment in the short span of 2-3 days. We plan to be back soon possibly this summer.

My daughter absolutely adores Cinderella’s Castle. Of all the Disney princesses, Cinderella is her favorite. It is a bed-time story which she never tire of hearing and reading.

I am not surprised that my daughter likes the Cinderella story. The beautiful gown and accesories allows the wearer to be the center of attraction at a party and dazzles her beau.  Cinderella can have all the fun she wants until midnight when everything will go back to how they originally are. That is so much better than the restrictions and curfew we impose on her.

Well, we don’t have a fairy godmother here to grant her the adventure but we can certainly buy a Cinderella gown for her to wear during the upcoming Halloween. Thanks to Princess Time Toys.

Princess Time Toys carries an amazing collection of Halloween costumes for girls. Besides the Disneyland costumes, you can take a look at other outfits – yoga set, the pink striped rugby polo outfit, the soccer uniform, etc.

As for my little boy, he loves the white, soft and silkly Bichon Frise which has excellent lifelike details. The snuggly dog is a perfect bedtime friend for him.

If you are interested in costumes or accessories for the 2009 Halloween season, please visit the site to find out more. You will not be disappointed with the wide array of costumes for kids ages 1-9 as well as adult women.

Stay Away From Unlawful Content
Search engines will not put up with any unlawful use of copyrighted content nor will they promote any website that condones illegal behavior. Stay far away from any unlawful activities and do not raise any suspicions amongst search engines.

Do Not Hide Content
One sure way to get blocked from a search engine is to hide content. This is a black hat method of SEO accomplished by coloring text the same color as the background of a website so that only a search engine spider can find it.

Do Not Practice Any Cloaking
Cloaking, serving up different content to search engines than to actual users, is highly banned by search engines and is also a sure fire way to be blacklisted immediately.

Do Not Use Doorway Pages
Doorway pages were once popular however, search engines have caught on and know when you are pretending to be one thing when you are not. Stay away from doorway pages and take down any that you might currently have set up.

Do Not Reuse (Duplicate) Content
Using the same content from page to page on your website does not make it more relevant nor bigger. It’s also important not to copy or duplicate content from any other websites as search engines will pick up on this as well.

Internal Link Structure is one of the most important aspects of on-site SEO and at the same time one of the most complex issues. With all honesty, it would take whole post dedicated to it to be even close to explaining basics. So instead of trying to explain such a broad and complex subject as a whole I’ll focus on the effect that internal links have on rankings of specific pages.

Internal link popularity of a specific page is very important and significantly affects its rankings compared to some other on-site SEO factors. Basic rule is that the more popular certain page is within website’s internal link structure better it ranks.

This is particularly important for long tail keywords. Linking certain page from home page and some other popular pages on your website that pass a lot of link juice, especially if you can get proper anchor text for those internal links, will boost rankings for long tails a lot.

Certain pages might get top rankings despite lacking backlinks if enough inbound links point to it. This is really good because it can help you get some important pages, for example certain product page on your ecommerce website or some article which you’d really like to receive more attention, that may be buried deep within the site to front rows by simply linking to them.

Before I sign out I’d like to make something clear. Weights given to different factor are, at the time of writing, more or less accurate but that doesn’t mean things are set in stone and that they won’t change. In fact you can rely on the fact that some factors will influence SERPs more or less as time passes with search engines constantly working in improving and changing their algorithms.

Another thing I’d like to point out is that at least two important things were not included in list: introduction of rel=”canonical” and changes to how nofollow works. Reason behind decision not to write about them is pretty simple – both of these, at the time of writing, deserve a separate post so trying to squeeze them into this post would simply be too much.

Do you outsource your blogging? I mean, this doesn’t make sense since blogging is supposed to be like our personal diary and should contain our voice and opinions right?

But many bloggers are outsourcing non core blogging activities (like design, blog maintenance, marketing, etc.) That is fine but I think outsourcing content creation is too much. and

A lot of big blogs are now moving towards a group blogging model, ie. depending on guest bloggers, reader submissions.

Why would you want to outsource elements of your blogging (particularly content creation) by adding new authors to your blog? Well there are numerous advantages that immediately leap to mind:

1. fresh ideas.
2. new styles/voices.
3. less reliance upon you personally to drive the brand.
4. introduce new skills, opinions, experiences and expertise into the mix
potentially increase posting frequency.
5. having people in different time zones to keep things well maintained
gives you a break or allows you to focus on new projects.

Of course for every upside there’s usually a downside to accompany it and some of the negatives of outsourcing through adding new bloggers can include:

1. more time spent on managing others and the issues that they can bring.
2. motivational issues for bloggers.
3. potential dilution of your own personal brand.
4. risk of lower quality content.
5. new voices can disenfranchise some loyal readers
6. compensation challenges – finding the right model and administering it
7. recruiting – how do you find the right person with the right ‘fit’?

What is right or wrong is debatable.

If you outsource to free up a little more time and a desire to add a few new voices into the mix, then readers will not be put off.

But if you want to start a blog and then depend on submissions from others to keep it going and make money, it will be a very difficult task.