Friday, 25 November 2011

The Ugly Side of black hat SEO: Tactics and Techniques you should Avoid.


In the early days webmasters used to perform some basic SEO for the web site they developed and maintain, it wasn't the separate field but with the passage of time, improvement in lots of search engines and websites starts to grow and make money SEO become an entirely separate profession, and companies starts to hire SEO professionals for the search engine optimization of their websites. Now SEO is a whole new profession and a big business in last few years, and it has different types i.e white hat and black hat. When a SEO professional is optimizing a website for a search engine, it is important to use the methods which are legit and approve by the search engines known as white hat or ethical SEO. However, there is a dark side to SEO, Black hat SEO, which is a method involves deception techniques to trick both search engine spiders and website visitors. Cloaking, spamdexing, keyword stuffing and generating fake traffic are few examples of black-hat.


Black Hat SEO strategies and techniques will hurt your positive process in the search engine and get you flagged for the bad practices, decrease your ranking and or at worst get you banned. Over optimization is one of these tactics and if the site owner is uninformed and doesn't have a good SEO expert, it is very easily done. Over optimization is defined as when a content on a webpage is written in a way that it looks like trying to get search engine attention rather than visitor or a user attention. Unnecessary keyword stuffing in the page content, meta, H1, title, etc. categorized as over optimization of a web page. It is considered as an unethical practice and when the keyword density of a web page content starts to go above 10% it hardly makes any sense for a human reader. Keyword destiny should be 3% to 5 % which is recommended. Over optimisation, my results in De indexation which means your page got removed format the search engine index.


According to google search engine guideline for webmasters, buying and selling links without no follow tag to manipulate search engine results pages, will get your website banned and de indexed by google. In the starting days of search engine optimisation, many seo experts purchase links from other websites in the hopes to improve their rankings. This did work for the benefits of some websites, but now it is widely discouraged and if you purchase a link from another site, it is possible that google would find out and penalize your website as a result. In general, search engines try to spot link sellers and downgrade or ignore the links coming from these sites.


Hidden text is another and probably easiest black-hat tactic to avoid, in this technique a webmaster usually set the color of a text as same as the color of the background of a page. Some search engine easily detects this strategy and penalizes the web page. Another technique is to make an image of same color as text and use it as a background. Sometimes the competitors find out and report it to get that particular website blacklisted. Since the above mention, techniques are traceable now some peoples are trying cascading style sheets and div tag to hide text. A webmaster must always avoid this sneaky and clever technique because it is dishonest and unethical.


URL redirects is a technique where a user click on a search result but it open a differentpage. People who use this technique usually have a high-ranking page and redirect all of its traffic from a search engine to a completely differentpage. This is a misleading technique and a redirect page usually doesn't have any content they just send traffic to another page. This strategy is frowned upon by google because it makes google search results look inaccurate to users.


Link Farm, another black hat technique, is a group of websites that is all linked to each other created by a person or automated software. These web pages are set up in the groups of 10 or more and they have only links of other pages from the same group. It is also known as spamdexing because it spam the index of a search engine. Some link farms have only dozens of websites which look pretty harmless, but some contain hundreds of website linking toward each other and when a search engine detects these huge link farms, sometimes they ban all the sites from their indexes.


Link spamming is also an example of overly aggressive marketing strategy where a spammer uses software or a program to post its link in blog comments, forum conversations, wikis, guest books and all other public discussion forums and groups. It is the king of black hat techniques. When these spammers posts their website links in a comment's box of the blogs with a high page rank, it increases their sites search engine ranking and increase in ranking often results in the spammer's web page being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, But now most of these blogs and social forums have softwares, which detect and filter link spammers.


It is a known fact that not everyone is able to creat a unique and interesting content. Sometimes people try to duplicate the content or create similar websites with alittle bit of tweaking. Webmasters often use this technique to manipulate page rankings of their website. According to these webmasters when the post the same content on different websites it means they will get more exposure. Search engine nowadays ableto detect duplication of the content and sometime if a search engine won't be ableto detect it, the competitors still able to report them and get their site banned.


When you are trying to cheat the system, it might result in temporary success but eventually the success driedup and you have to face the consequences. Same is the case of the black hat SEO you can cheat and get some instant traffic but no one will come back to a site which is full of unethical techniques like keyword stuffing, links farm, sneaky redirects, hidden texts, etc. and are just created to cheat a search engine robot. SEO experts often debates on the merits of the white and black hat SEO and which is the best, but my take is that it is best to do ethical work and earn the money you are proud of, and I am confident that you will never use the techniques I have mentioned above.

Tuesday, 15 November 2011

The Basics techniques of White Hat SEO that you can benefits from starting today

Webmasters or site owners who want to achieve their website success for long term basis usually go for white hat seo or ethical seo. It is natural and approved ways of using strategies and techniques to generate human audience for their web pages according to the well documented rules define in search engines guidelines for webmasters.

When it comes to white hat seo, there are few basics techniques a webmaster should consider when working on their own website or making pages for their clients. Making urls readable for the search engine spiders is one of these techniques and it can be done by removing session IDs from the page url. For example if a domain name or a url contains dynamic characters like = $ & % etc, search engine will not to read these characters. To solve this issue we host websites on the unix base operating systems and be able to rewrite the urls with the session IDs.

Internal linking is a white hat seo technique in which you link one page of your website to another page of your website making it easy for the search engine spiders to spidered these links and make it sure that all pages are found by the search engines. Internal links Contextual or Structural are the best way to establish a site architecture and easy way to help optimize your website. Some sites might not see the dramatic results from internal link but other will certainly be shocked to see forgotten about articles gain significant amount of traffic. Contextual links are the hyper links embedded within the content of a web page and structural links are the one which are created during the designing phase of a website includes navigation bars and site maps.

The golden rule of seo is "Content in King" and it always will be. content is the information given on a web page and it drive the web. The success of a website depends on its uniqueness and usefulness, it should be interesting to follow so that more people want to visit the site again and again. The quality content should be engaging the reader, helps webmaster increases search engine ranking and most importantly it should promotes the likelihood of quality links from the other websites. It is your weapon on the web and you should use it wisely to win the market share and to do so you have to make sure your content is really noteworthy and serves it purpose to communicate with the reader.

When you are trying to attract human visitors and search engine spider to your page you use ALT and TITLE attributes whenever you can. Usually some webmasters don't see any difference between these two. ALT and TITLE attributes increases the website usability level and also the possibilities to promote. What is ALT attribute? it is an alternative text description for the images which displays before the image loaded on the page. TITLE attribute is use to describe links, tables, individual table row and other other structural HTML elements. So both are primarily meant for the visitors although ALT text seems more important for the crawlers. in Conclusion you can include your main keywords in both these attributes but avoid keyword stuffing.

The essential part of every web page is title and meta tag. <title> is simply use to defines the title of the document or a page. It is used is all HTML/XHTML documents and supported in all major browsers like Internet explore, Mozilla Firefox and Safari etc. Optimizing the website <title> is one of the most important tactic to achieve high ranking in a search engine. You can generate quick and appreciable difference in your rankings just fixing the title tag of your page. <title> should contain your company name along with specific keyword phrases. The best format will be use your company or brand name at the start of the title tag and then use primary and secondary keyword. The best practice is to use less then 70 characters because this is a google limit to display in the search results. Meta tag is not a requirement when your are creating a web page but it is special HTML tag written in the <head> section of a HTML document that provides information about a web page. It do not affect how the page is displayed instead <meta> includes information such as who created the web page and when the page was updated and what it is about and what are the keywords that define the page contents. A lot of search engines use the information provided in a meta tag to build their indices. Meta tags are officially referred to as Metadata elements and they are used in accordance with the W3C - world wide web Consortium Metadata specifications and those of the targeted search engines.

Keywords are the key to on page SEO in which we directly optimize and make change to our web page to get high ranking in the search engine. Optimization of the web page with visible keywords is a key to a good search engine ranking. In the past webmasters use to think the stuffing a page with keywords is a way to get high ranking in the search engine. However, those early black hat SEO techniques weren't completely successful because the keywords often doesn't match the actual content on the page and was misleading to both users and the search engines. Keywords in the url is a good technique to get the search engine attention. e.g coolvirgocool.blogspot.com/white-hat-seo.html. We can also use keywords in title tag and also H1 tag. To create the keyword list for the site or web page a webmaster should think like a customer or ask people that what keywords they will use to search for that particular product or service in the search engine. For keyword selection you have to be creative and choosy at the same time and avoid the competitive keyword phrases and including few misspelled keywords in your keywords list is also a good side.

Inbound or back links are the links from other website pages that are linking back to your website. They are a great tool to bring new visitors to your website. Search engine spiders follow links between two websites, more inbound links a website have, the more often a spider will visit that website.Its always good to get inbound links from high page rank websites because it will add great value to your website. Profile backlinks, blog comment type back linking, article backlinks, backlinking with RSS and social bookmarking are some good techniques. Inbound links are very important for a webmaster or a site owner because with the help of these backlinks a website have a great chance to get noticed by a search engine. If these links are genuine and from high page rank websites, search results for the site will be amazing.

White hat SEO strategies and tactics are use for promoting a websites according to rules and search engine guidelines and to achieve long time goals and results. When you are using white hat SEO to optimize and improve your website always start with the good quality content, use good keyword phrases and build links with high page rank websites. There are few limitation toward this approach at first but the reputation stay stable in the future and your organization will become more reliable.
ASR Search Engine

Sunday, 16 October 2011

Tips and tricks to Undo, Redo and Repeating in Ms Excel


Undo, Redo and Repeat operation are used for recovering from mistakes and help us edit our document more efficiently and in a better way.


UNDO

This Excel feature can easily correct your mistakes you made while working on your excel worksheet. You can reverse every command or a step you have taken in your Excel worksheet. The undo located on quick access toolbar which is normally displayed on the left side of the excel title bar. Or appears next to the “Save button” on Quick Access toolbar. We can undo from keyboard by just pressing Ctrl + Z and to make multiple undo just continue to press Ctrl + Z until all the mistakes have been undone.

Now you must be wondering how many actions we can undo. We can undo last 100 actions and can do that by using undo for multiple times. There are some commands and actions we can’t undo in Ms. Excel. Can’t undo anything we do by using the File Button which is on top left of the excel worksheet and also the effect of executing a macro.

REDO

Great thing about Ms. Excel there is an undo for an undo, we call it redo and we can do that by pressing Ctrl + Y or F4 from the Keyboard. In Ms. Excel the redo button located on the Quick access toolbar and it is on the right side of the undo button.



REPEAT

Lets Say we want to format a report and while creating a report we do a lot of formatting like font colors and size, bold italic, background color, cell borders etc. to repeat these formatting in a cell we use the repeat function Ctrl + Y. Repeat function is a great timesaver. We can insert the Repeat button in quick access toolbar because it is not normally there. To do this first step is to go to customize quick access toolbar by right clicking quick access toolbar. From there select popular commands form the drop down list on the left in Excel options dialog box.
Just select repeat in that list of commands and click add and then ok.

Here is the list of few keyboard short cuts which are related to the tutorial above and also will be helpful while working with Ms. Excel.

Ctrl + C ============= Copy the selected cells.
Ctrl + A ============= Select all contents of the worksheet.
Ctrl + B ============= Bold highlighted selection.
Ctrl + I  ============= Italic highlighted selection.
Ctrl + Z ============= Undo last action.
Ctrl + Y ============= Redo last Undo.
F2 ================= to edit the selected cell.
F5 ================= Go to a specific cell. For example, C2.
F7 ================= To Spell check the selected text or entire document.
F11 ================ It creates new chart on separate chart sheet.
Ctrl + A ============= Select all contents.
Ctrl + Arrow key ======= it move to next section of text.
Ctrl + Space ========== Select entire column.
Shift + Space ========= Select entire row.

Thursday, 13 October 2011

Situation of jobs in Pakistan

Pakistan is located along the Arabian Sea and has a coastline spanning approx. 650 miles is a developing south asian country with countless resources and valuable assets. Pakistan is the world 27th largest economy and its consider one of the largest in south asian countries has been forecast to grow 5.5% in 2009 but due to factors like power shortage, flawed policies and lack of sincere leadership, economic growth chances a little slim. Directly getting effected by this situation is Job market in Pakistan and causing unemployment rates to grow to 15 percent and ranks 51 among the countries with high unemployment rates.

Situation of jobs in pakistan is getting more difficult and the conditions are not as good as it was used to be and the main factors behind the growth in unemployment rate are power shortage and energy crisis, Law and order situation, Political instability, lack of capable policy makers, defective educational system and lack of facilities and infrastructure.

Our economy is underdeveloped and is not very attractive for the job seekers. Job hunt is getting tougher and opportunities are very limited. A successful job hunt in the current economic crisis is not easy anywhere in the world and situation of jobs in Pakistan is no exception. Fresh graduates complain that either they don't get the jobs they deserve or instead of a permanent post they are getting offers for temporary position in organizations. Unfortunately, we are one of the developing countries where the job market is considered to be saturated, which makes it difficult for the young graduates to have promising start of a career.

Jobs creation is very critical to pakistan economic growth. Situation of jobs in pakistan is not as bright as one would wants but the future outlook of jobs in Pakistan are still very promising. We have lots of potential to grow. we have two most important seaports and great amount of assets and resources to develop and improve the situation of jobs in Pakistan. With proper planning in big cities like Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore, political stability, promoting research in agriculture, overcoming the power crisis, providing facilities and good infrastructure to industrial sector and improving education system, we can easily increase the growth rate of economy and lower the unemployment rate in Pakistan.

Policy makers would hopefully implement policies that create opportunities and favorable conditions for the new comers in job market and Fresh graduates should work hard to develop and polish their unique skills and expertise. There are many sectors like IT, banking, telecom, construction and few others, in which our young work force can participate and take an active part in the development of their country.

Wednesday, 28 September 2011

Microsoft Excel Tips and Tricks: How to select cells more efficiently


Microsoft Excel is a very common and popular software program. People around the world especially at work use it regularly but there are still lots of impressive tricks this amazing creation can do. In my Excel tips and tricks tutorial series I will be explaining these amazing tips and tricks from very basic like selecting the cells to very complex things like VBA & Macros.
So let’s start with the basics:

How to select cells more efficiently

It is very common thing among excel users to select cells they just drag over the cell with the mouse which is not that effective way to do the selection. The best way for the selection is using your keyboard. One very simple way is to press & hold shift key and then use the arrow keys to make the selection and when you have a large area to select use page up and page down keys. If you want to quickly go to the last non empty column use End key for that.

Here are few more ways for selection:

Selecting Range:   To select large rectangular section of cells move cell pointer anywhere in the region and press Ctrl + A. When selecting very large rectangular area in the worksheet people mostly use clicking and dragging method. For this purpose click may be the most efficient way but you don’t have to do the dragging. Just click and select the upper left cell and then scroll down to the right cell of the range. Now you just have to press and hold the shift key and click on that lower right cell and the desired range will be selected. There are two ways for selecting non adjacent cells and ranges. First method, simply press + hold Ctrl key and click then select the cells or ranges you want. Second method, select the range by using shift key method describes above, then press shift + F8 to select another cell or range. When you press Shift + F8 you will be able to choose another cell or range without canceling the previously selected one.

Complete Row:        To select the entire single row just click the number of that particular row which you will find on the left side of the worksheet. Another way of doing this is to just select any cell in the desired row and press Shift + Spacebar.
If you want to select the multiple rows adjacent to each other with mouse you will just click and drag in the row number region. Using keyboard, just select any cell in first or last row of the adjacent rows you want to select and press Shift + Spacebar and then while still pressing Shift use the arrow keys to move up or down to select the number of rows you want.
And one more thing, to select multiple non adjacent rows press and hold Ctrl key and click on the number of the rows on the left side on the worksheet. Using this technique you can easily include any row in your selection without any particular order.

Select ranges on multiple sheets:         You can select multiple ranges from different worksheets. People mostly select multi sheet ranges when they want to organize and apply the same format to all the sheets in the document. For example if I want to make all the heading on every sheet bold and make its background Yellow. I will select headings on all the sheets and apply the desired changes.
To individually select the worksheets, press and hold Ctrl & then click on the sheet tab of the worksheets that you want to include. To select ranges of the multiple sheets first you have to select the range on one sheet and then select other worksheets to include in the range. For selecting a group of adjacent worksheets, you will press and hold Shift & then click on the sheet tab of the last worksheet which you want to include in your selections. To leave the group mode you just have to click on any sheet tab.