Online Marketing SEO Blog by SEO Consultant Farhan Fawzer

Farhan Fawzer

July 4, 2013

Planning an SEO project

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) projects need good planning to obtain the best results and needs to be considered during, and incorporated into, all stages of a website development or redevelopment of the project. For example, the site architecture (including the selection of a content management system or CMS), the marketing plan (including branding concepts), and much more are impacted.

How SEO projects start

• Putting together an SEO plan
• Performing a technical SEO audit of a site
• Setting a baseline for measuring results and progress

These are the things you want to do at the very beginning of your SEO efforts for any website.

Farhan Fawzer

April 22, 2013

Google Site links

Ever wondered how Sitelinks work on Google.

First let me say that it’s not certain how Google assigns the number of links to each website. The text that is used for the Sitelinks can be the text that are used for the link (or anchor text) on the homepage or the title of the linked page.

Google seems to prefer links near the top of a web page.
Sitelinks usually only appear for more general search phrases.
Sitelinks do show up most often on brand related searches.

Which links does Google choose for the Sitelinks?

You’ll notice that they always seem to be first level links on any website. In other words, any links not included on your homepage won’t be used as Sitelink criteria.

Unpopular Keywords that are not searched too often don’t get Sitelinks.
Older Web sites seem to be awarded Sitelinks more than newer sites.
It also seems that your website has to get a certain volume of clicks for the searched keyword.

See more SEO tips.

Farhan Fawzer

April 2, 2013

SEO Tools

There are many web based and downloadable tools which are used by SEO’s and online marketing experts. SEO tools are used for various purposes, you may want to do a competitor analysis, check your rankings on search engines or find who are linking to your website.

Using the right tool for the right job is most important. There are Free and Paid software and online tools. Some tools are very popular and used world wide for specific tasks. If you want to perform a keyword research Google Adwords is one of the best and free tool. Likewise you may find other tools such as open site explore, ahrefs, sheerseo & majestic seo which allows to create a free account with (limited) access.

Sheer SEO is a all in one seo tool which has a very nice dashboard and easy to use options. I have been using this tool for over 4 years and would recommend them for anyone from a starter to an expert in the online marketing world.

Farhan Fawzer

March 22, 2013

WordPress Security Tip

WordPress will by default name the administrator user account as admin. If you haven’t made any changes while installing WordPress, that is probably what you will use to log in.

WordPress Tips

The issue with this is evident: if someone wanted to gain access to your blog, all they would need to do is to keep using the “admin” user name with a number of passwords combinations. This is called brute force attack, and with automated tools it works quite often.

Whenever installing WordPress from scratch, therefore, remember to use some other name instead of admin for the administrator user account. If you already have WordPress installed, the fix is very simple. Just create a new user and set it as administrator. Then log in with that new user and delete the “admin” user. Don’t worry if you have many posts written by the user, WordPress will ask whether you want to delete them or re-assign them to a new user (choose the latter obviously).

As for choosing the new user name, make sure that it is not similar to the name you display publicly on your blog. If you sign your posts as John Doe, for instance, naming the administrator user as “john” or “johndoe” wouldn’t help. You need something that others won’t be able to guess easily.

Need assistance regarding SEO for WordPress Do not hesitate to get in touch with me.

Farhan Fawzer

January 12, 2013

Essential SEO tips to succeed online

Nowadays, many web surfers use search engines to find about websites that cater to their need. They also have a tendency to have a search engine as their home page for easy access. This is one of the many reasons as to why you need to have search engine optimisation for your website.

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO will not be a strange term if you are engaged in online marketing. It helps your website to gain a better ranking on the search engines. In SEO there are two types; internal SEO and External SEO. Whilst building your website your developer and web designer would focus on internal SEO. However if your site is not hitting the external SEO then you would not be having a successful online business.

In order for you to reach external SEO there are five essential tips that you would need to use; backlinks, avoiding link spamming, linking profiles, .gov links and forums. The next few paragraphs would explain you how these tips can boost your external SEO.

Back links

Back links are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks and inward links. You may have good backlinks and at times bad backlinks. Search Engines prefer to have good backlinks as it helps your website to get a good ranking in the search engines.

Avoid link spamming

Though link spamming gives a boost to your website initially it can put your site in to the Google Sandbox, which will not push your site on top of the search engines. Therefore when you backlink you should avoid automatic backlink generators to you website.

Linking profiles

Adding the links for your main homepage on social networking profiles (Googleplus), pages (Facebook) and various blogs could optimise results in search engines. This too should be done sensibly to avoid spamming.

.gov links

.gov and .edu are links that google would give the highest preference when ranking your website. Therefore if you can get your website linked with one of these sites your ranking would be doubled. As the value of a .gov or .edu link equals to 10 or even 20 normal links from blogs and forums.

Forums

Being a part of a forum can provide you the opportunity to post quality content and add links to your target website. However you should be mindful not to spam the forum as they are strict with the information that is shared on their forums. Should your content grab the attention of the readers, it would also bring in clients through the links that you have posted, and will boost the ranking of your website.

SEO is essential for you to gain top online visibility, popularity and page rank and the tips given above would definitely assist you in achieving it. You might also need to put up SEO contents created on specific keywords, phrasings to reach the top rankings and should be done prior to creating your web page. If your website is still not on the first pages of the search engine results, it is high time you start off with your SEO activities.