Omar Kattan » SEO Tips & Tricks

Researching Your Competitor’s SEO Strategy

Omar Kattan — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 09:57:37 +0000

Do you research your competitor's seo strategy and activities? If you don't then you should, this is the only way to beat them at their own SEO game.

Firstly lets define a competitor. Comptetitors are not necessarily your traditional bricks and mortar competitors. Your online competitors are the websites with the number one to five positions in the search engine results pages (SERPS) for the keywords you're targeting.

Now that you've discovered your true competitors, its time to start researching their seo strategy in ord... Read more..

Managing your Link Juice with “NoFollow”

Omar Kattan — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:28:13 +0000

"Link Juice" is the cumulative effect of the link popularity that your site gains over time as more and more sites link to yours. If not managed properly, this link juice can be diluted unnecessarily within your site's internal pages. So how do you go ab... Read more..

Using Link Title Tag for SEO

Omar Kattan — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 10:42:58 +0000

Here's a good optimisation tip, did you know that you can add optimised title tags to your site's internal links? Here is what it looks like:

title="Computer Monitors " href="your-link" mce_href="your-link">Home

Home

I've bolded the title tag in the above example "Home" link, and as you can see, while the visitors can still see home as t... Read more..

Finding Spam on Your Site

Omar Kattan — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 09:41:55 +0000

Here's a quick way to find and eliminate spam on your website.

Type: "popular spam word" site:yoursite.com in Google and analyse the results. You'll be surprised, well I was! I noticed that someone had managed to spam some of my members' blog comments in my Invision forum blog software. They had used spam words such as "vi*g*a", "c*si*o" and "p*nis enlargement". Anyway I deleted them right away.

A Reciprocal Link Building Strategy that Works

Omar Kattan — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 14:06:34 +0000

If you're stuggling to gain links pointing to your website then you might want to try this technique.

Email the owner of a site that is similar to yours in content and ask them for a reciprocal link but here's the trick, instead of asking them for a straight reciproacal link (ie I link to yours from my links page and you link to mine from your links page), find an intersting piece of content on their site and tell them that you will link to it from your site in exchange, ask them to do the same for you.

Make sure to ensure that the... Read more..

Recovering from Google’s 950 Penalty

Omar Kattan — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 07:09:03 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote about Google's 950 penalty and gave an off the cuff solution to fixing it.

Buying your Name’s Domain Name

Omar Kattan — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:58:52 +0000

Do you own your name's domain name? If you don't then this is the time to do so. I bought my name's domain name 4 months ago (omarkattan.com) and have been developing it as a search blog ever since. The main benefit of owning your name's domain name (especially the .com one) is that it shows up in first position when people search for your name. This is becoming more important since more and more people are "googling" people they want to learn more about. Googlers can include:

Employers wanting to learn more aout you

Changing Charatcteristics of a File – Static to Dynamic

Omar Kattan — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 06:46:00 +0000

Did you know that you are able to change the characteristics of a static file such as a .html or .txt file to allow it to accept dynamic code such as php or asp? Well you can, here's how...

Lets say you're looking to create a dynamic .csv or .txt for a shopping feed for one of the shopping comparison search engines such as Shopping.com, normally, you would not be able to do so because .xml/.txt/.csv files are static and would not ordinalrily execute php commands to output the products from a database.

The solution...

Purchasing Links – A Best Practice Guide

Omar Kattan — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:23:59 +0000

If you're deciding to purchase links to boost your link popularity (I know I know, its against Google's rules, but hey everyone's doing it!) make sure you purchase the links for a long period of time. The longer the better.

There are a few things to consider when purchasing links:

As mentioned above, go for the long haul, the longer the better. This is good from two perspectives; 1) you guarantee that the search engines recognise the link and award you the benefit of it. and 2) you're more likely to negotiate a better... Read more..

Fresh Content to Boost Search Engine Rankings

Omar Kattan — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 18:05:27 +0000

Search Engines love content, actually they crave fresh content, after-all thats their raison d'etre (theire reason for existing) to spider and index fresh original content.

If your site's homepage is updated on a daily basis with fresh unique content, this will ensure that Google et al will visit (with time) on a daily basis to spider the new content you have to offer.

If you don't have the time or the budget to add fresh new content on a daily basis, then here's a little tip...

Add a few RSS feeds on your site's... Read more..

Getting Your Site Spidered More Quickly

Omar Kattan — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:58:09 +0000

Here are a few tip to get your site spidered more quickly by Google and Yahoo!.

Getting your Site Spidered More Quickly with Google

In the past it was said that placing Adsense Ads on your website was a catalyst for a quicker indexation of your site however this is no longet the case.

The way to get your site spidered more quickly by Google is to install the Google... Read more..

New Keyword Research Resources

Omar Kattan — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:32:19 +0000

Did you know that Google, Yahoo and MSN now all offer a free source of information for your keyword research efforts?

The new versions of MSN Live and Yahoo! both offer oppor... Read more..

Using Way Back Machine for SEO Research

Omar Kattan — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 17:56:53 +0000

Have you heard of the Way Back Machine Read more..

SEO’ing a WordPress Blog

Omar Kattan — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 16:30:20 +0000

A video about optimising a wordpress blog including tips on how to avoid duplicate content and setting up theming or siloing on a wordpress blog installation. Enjoy! ... [youtube BiCn6y6JU8o]... Read more..

Google’s 950 Penalty

Omar Kattan — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 18:19:16 +0000

I was asked to look at a website today that had suddenly dropped in Google's search results. Now when I say dropped, I mean DROPPED... from page 1 to page 950!

My first though was they've been penalised by Google with the dreaded 950 penalty, that's the penalty used for sites who're penalised for obtaining paid links for SEO purposes (950 refers to the last page of the Google results pages).

My first SEO instinct was to check the backlinks of the said website and to see where it had obtained these links and to also check th... Read more..

The Perfect Inbound Link

Omar Kattan — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:20:48 +0000

To begin lets define what's an inbound link. An inbound link is a link that points to your website from someone else's website, its as simple as that! Another important definition before we get started is Link Popularity: Link Popularity is the measure of how popular your site is from an inbound link perspective; ie how many sites are linking to yours. Now that we got the definitions out of the way, lets discuss the the characteristics of the perfect inbound link... Here are the main things to pay attention to when you analyse the quality of the links pointing to your site: ... Read more..

Site Redesign Best Practice

Omar Kattan — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 21:43:12 +0000

If you're thinking of redesigning your website or changing your site's architecture for any reason, its worthwhile to keep in mind the following SEO best practices:

Use the mod_rewrite (Apache) or ISAPI Rewrite (IIS) to map old URLs to new files

Analyse your major traffic entry pages and ensure that these pages are not deleted or changed unless it is absolutely essential to do so.

Do not permanently delete all pages until they have passed their popularity to the new pages... Read more..

Image Alt Tags for SEO

Omar Kattan — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 21:22:25 +0000

Image alt tags, have you heard of them? If you haven't let me tell you.

Image alt tags are basically the alternative text you see when you hover over an image. Image alt tags describe what the image is about.

here is an example of the HTML code of an image alt tag:

Read more..

SEO Tips for Bloggers

Omar Kattan — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 16:07:46 +0000

Matt Cutts just posted a link to a presentation he made about SEO tips for Blogger. Here is a quick summary:
SEO Tips for Blogs - General
Don't put blog at root page of domain

People link to main page and main blog page, so you get some extra links that way.

Name your directory "blog“, not “wordpress”

Might want to change your software someday

Also makes upgrading easie... Read more..

Write for Traffic

Omar Kattan — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 19:42:08 +0000

Not sure what to write about? Here are a few links that will help you select topics that can potentially drive bucket loads of traffic to your site:

http://buzz.yahoo.com/

http://technorati.com/pop/

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

Read more..