Contents:
HTML Tags & Search Engine Optimization
This post is a part of series on Search Engine Optimization.
When we discuss about Search Engine Optimization, everyone talks about Content is King!! But the question is how to win the battle? In this post we will focus on how to use HTML tags and keywords to optimize our content for better search engine rankings and to make our content a real king.
Save Your Content
We all know that Search Engines don’t like duplicate content so the first step to follow it to keep our content unique and make sure its not stolen or republished on any other website, we don’t want. You can read more about protecting your content in my previous post on how to copyright and protect your blog content. This will help Google to index our page in appropriate category to improve our listings in search results.
HTML Tags & Search Engine Optimization
Over a period of time I have learned that we can optimize our website’s or blog’s SEO Score by properly using HTML or xHTML tags. Meta tags & Keywords are already explained in this series and you can read more about these topics here. Let’s learn more about increasing SEO Score with HTML tags.
TITLE Tag:
This tag is placed within the <head></head> tag to set the title of the page which is displayed in the Title Bar and Search Results. It’s really important to have our keywords in this tag as all search engines consider this tag as important as meta keyword tag. This tag will be displayed upfront in the search results so it’s really important to be careful while setting the title of the page. If you notice the title of this page it says “HTML Tags & Search Engine Optimization” which includes these two keywords “HTML Tags” and “Search Engine Optimization“ to attract Google bots to index this page under these keywords.
If we put all our keywords in the title tag, it will have a negative effect on SEO Score as it will look spam to Human Eye and users will think twice to visit the page. We need to make a balance between Search Bots and Human Eye to attract both of them at the same time.
Keyword Rich Domain Name & Links:
I am sure you are aware of this well known term; “keyword rich domain name“, if you’re not, it’s all about choosing a domain name with keywords we have selected for our business or personal website.
Now you must be thinking why I have chosen www.MohitAneja.com for this website. It’s not at all a selling keyword and only few people might hit the search button with Mohit Aneja typed in the search box. However for me it’s a different story. I don’t blog for money or to sell any products to make a living. This blog/website is my home on the WWW (world wide web) and I believe all my friends and family members can find me with my real name :D. I am the first one in Google, Yahoo and MSN search results with keyword “Mohit Aneja“. Pretty easy to find me, huh!! 
Same way if you are providing info about Personal Loans or anything else you can register a domain with the keywords. I would like to change you can register a domain with the keywords with you cannot register a domain with the keywords. Why? Because domain marketers have spoiled the fun, they have already registered almost all keyword rich domains and left them in a domain parking area with no use, expecting $$$ in return.
So Is there any solution or work around??
Yes there is, As these domains are in parking lot, search engines don’t index them. Now, what can we do to enhance our website for such keywords. Let’s take an example and assume our desired keyword or domain name is “best design studio” and is not available with .com, .net, .org or any other but is listed for sale on some domain marketing website.
The work around for this situation is to keep this keyword in internal links. 
Hyper-Link tag and Title:
While creating a website we need to create some directories to place our images, html, javascript, css files etc. so we can create the directories with our desired keyword as directory names. For example, to keep different files we can have the following directory structure on the server:
Landing Page: index.htm
HTML FIles: best-design-studio-html-files
Images: best-design-studio-images
But, How will it help to increase the keyword Score of your website? While creating the navigation for a website we need to link all the pages to our home page and viceversa, so this keyword will be appearing a lot of times in the code which is clearly visible to search bots and your pages will be indexed with the same links. Make sure you give proper title to the link as it will be added in the code and considered by search engine bots while indexing. This way we will not be using the keywords one after another so this practice will not be considered as keyword spamming. I have tried this practice with one of my other websites and it works.
Headings (H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6)
Now lets talk about the heading tags, If we use keywords in heading tags it will have a positive impact on SEO score. Heading tags are bigger than normal text and search bots focus on the text between these tags. However if we use H1 tag it might look bad because the font is really big for the design and layout. Here you can use some CSS code to format the heading tags and make it a little smaller. I know what’s in your mind!! Keep everything in the H1 tag with the same formatting for peragraphs.
NOTE: Make sure you use heading tags for maximum 5 to 6 words and don’t even think of replacing it with peragraph tag as in a paragraph you have a lot of -ve keywords like “a, the, on, as etc.” normally known as stop words. These stop keywords are ignored by search bots. So this practice can have a total -ve impact on the search enging optimization of your page.
Bold (<b></b>,<strong></strong>):
With in a paragraph you can mark “best design studio” that’s our desired keyword in bold tags as I did in this line itself. This will help you to increase the SEO score of the page. However, please make sure you are not using bold tags every time you are writing best design studio to avoid keyword spamming, try to keep it 4-5 times in a page not more than that.
Image and Alt Tags:
As discussed about the website structure above we have our images in best-design-studio-images directory so this way your page is also optimized for image search for this keyword. I hope you know that Alt tags are used for description of the images which is displayed as a tool-tip on the browser. This tag is also considered important by search bots as they can’t read images but they can read the title tag associated with that image. Again avoid keyword spamming, I would recommend you to use each keyword not more than three times in ALT or Title tags.
Flash & Video tags:
Search engine bots cannot read images and text in flash and videos so avoid using them. A flash website looks very nice to human eye due to lot of animation and cool effects, but Search Engine Bots simply ignore them as its an alien language or code for them. However if its really important to embed flash or video on a website make sure you are using the keywords in the title tag of the code. This way you can optimize your flash and video codes too.
I hope the above information was helpful to understand a little bit more about Search Engine Optimization and indexing. If you feel that I have missed something in this post please feel free to add your inputs in the comments and don’t forget to share it with your friends as they might find it useful.
Wow that’s a long post, anyways I hope you find it useful.
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How to copyright & protect your blog content?
I am sharing what I have learned so far however your inputs are really important to keep internet free from spam. Please feel free to post your comments/inputs to help each other finding a solution to this problem.
Internet is full of spam and a bunch of lazy bloggers are stealing your content everyday. This happens to me you and every one who is posting good content. The question is How to solve this problem and keep our content unique to invite Google to index it under positive titles. In this post I will discuss about some precautions and solutions to this problem.
While writing on any topic, a blogger does a lot of research on the topic he/she is going to write about and It’s not at all wrong if we are not copying and pasting the content to fill out some space on our website.
In today’s demanding world its getting very difficult for bloggers to write on unique topics. The worst part, I have seen a lot of blogs where bloggers don’t care to include their own views on the topic. They simple copy and paste first few lines of another blog and then provide a link to read the full story without permission.
There are some spamming websites with hell lot of ads which display articles from different blogs with scripts to post via RSS feed. They don’t even care about what the topic is about. The spamming scripts are doing the good job for them.
Some of us might think positive about this fact and might think - “What’s the harm if I am getting a back link from that website, its good for SEO. Isn’t is?”
If you think the same way, I recommend you to think over once again. In my opinion, this is not at all positive approach because your content is being copied to a different web site which is not recommended. Google bots don’t like duplicate content and these websites are helping your content to get indexed as duplicate content. It’s possible that Google mark these websites as “Spam” and you have a track back link in your comments. The problem is you are linking to a penalized website and Google will take care of this, while indexing your website.
The Solution
The solution to this syndrome is very simple, we need to prepare ourselves to keep our content unique. We can follow these steps to ensure the originality of our conent.
Copyright The Content: The most important step is to copyright the content of your blog or website and this is pretty easy to do. Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org) is a non-profit organization which let authors, developers, artists, publishers and educators to copyright their contnent and link to a detailed copyright page that can be used in the legal proceedings. To know more about this free service you can visit their official website or vist the FAQ’s page where you will get answers to most common questions.
Finding Stolen Content: Another issue is how will You be notified that your content is being stolen by someone?
Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) is a well known solution for this issue. You can create alerts with key phrases you are using in your content and Google will send you an email with the link to the website where that particular phrase is published “anywhere” on the internet. Try this service and I am sure you will write a love letter to Google.
Google Blog Search: You can use Google Blog Search to find out duplicate copies of the content. To use it in an effective way follow the steps below:
1. Open the http://www.google.com/blogsearch. 2. Copy some text from your own article and paste it in the search box in double quotes and hit the search button. 3. You will have the results on the page from different websites including your own website.
Note: To get best results from Google blog Search copy the text from two lines for e.g: “..some words from the first line. Some words from the second line..”
CopyScape.com is another service you can use to find out duplicate content, however I have realized that it has lagged behind in having its database updated, however we can give it a shot.
Removing Stolen Content: Let’s assume you have received an email from Google Alerts about the phrase used on a particular website. What to do next? In most cases you will not find any contact info on the website about the administrator because that jerk knows he is stealing and violating the terms of use.
You can use WHOIS Lookup service to find detailed info about the owner of that website but I am pretty sure he has set the Domain Privacy “ON” to keep his info unpublished however, you will get an email id similar to privacy-546494@domainprivacygroup.com which will forward your email to the admin of that website.
You can write an email to this email id with a notice to remove your content from the website including a link to your Creative Commons copyright page. In most cases your content will be removed from the site by administrator to avoid any leagal consequences. If that’s not the case you can use the following service to report forgery.
Google Safe Browsing: Once again thanks to Google for providing such services to help us browse safe. If you are unable to contact the website owner you can report it to Google and raise a request to remove content from its index. Google will check the website for the concern raised and will make sure to ban that website from its index. Mostly these websites use Google AdSense to earn some money and Google will ban their account due to Copyright Violation. (Updated the link as per info provided by Abhinav Sood in comments)
This way we can protect our content from being copied and increase the chance to be unique on the Google Index that will result in high page ranks and more organic traffic.
I hope the above information was helpful, if you have something to share please provide your inputs in the comments below and feel free to spread awareness on this topic by sharing it with your friends.
UPDATE
I got a real-time example for this post after just five minutes of publishing this post. Please notice the name of the author of this post. I am going to follow the steps I have listed above. 
Stolen Content
What do you think of this illustration??
While stumbling the internet I came across a lot of websites using illustrations and they blew my mind.
So I decided to try my hands on Adobe Illustrator CS3. After practicing for about one week today I have created this illustration. I am really happy with the final outcome of today’s work and I need your feedback.
Please rate this illustration and provide your feedback. Thanks in advance.
Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.
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Blogger’s Meet in Chandigarh - Finally!
Let me start with this, I have not been updating my blog for long time and I won’t lie that I was busy with my job, projects and other crap, because if you are willing to write then nothing can stop you. And in my case I didn’t feel like writing for last 2-3 months, not sure about the reason but I tried a lot to write.
Of course I never intended to be out of touch and I got an invitation to attend a blogger’s meet in my town. So there I was, how could I miss a chance to meet people of same interest. My wife always complained that because of my blogging and passion for web-development, I never socialized…. We hardly got to go out together. Well now she is the one MOST EXCITED about it.
I have all the resons to be equally excited and enthusiastic about it. We landed in the pouring and waited outside the conference room where this meeting had already started. I was really excited about the meet and forgot to carry the required info (phone numbers) with me. However thanks to the knowledge of hotel people about blogging, they didn’t even know what we are here for, but there was only one meeting they had organized that day. I couldn’t control my pulse and jumped in to the room to confirm if I was at right place. Well that was the beginning of the great time!!!
Well it was an informal meet so we started with the introductions in the most informal and wacky way… another brain child of Mr. Bakshi’s great sense of humor. Well the idea really worked. Everybody seemed to gel along pretty well and very comfortable with each other. Truly a community of like minded people, we had all the talent and skills.
Thanks to Gaurav for initiating this idea to city beautiful and Mr. Bakshi’s & Rajesh to organize a great and lively event.
Not to forget the great experiences and leanings I got to share with all the founder members, as we now proudly call ourselves.
Last but not the least I wanna personally thank Abhinav Sood, Jasdeep Singh, Abhishek Vaid, Sameer Relan, Rajesh, Sorabh Dutta, Preeti, Sukhbir Kaur and my lovely wife Reet to share their experences and motivate me to write again.
Other readings about Chandigarh Blogger’s Club
Gallery
If you are residing in Chandigarh or nearby please
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Speed Up Windows Vista Start Menu Search!
As you execute a search you will be using the search box located in the start panel. Then Vista will start searching the file index without any prompting. Keep in mind that the file index will be very big due to the fact that it has all files included on your hard drive. If you are looking to speed up your searching methods then you can try this.
Go to your Start Menu and narrow down the scope of the search. In other words try to narrow down what you are looking for. Instead of a general term use something more specific. There are two ways in which you can do this.
The first way is called the Registry hack and for that this is what you have to do. Make sure you take the registry backup before changing anything in there.
Step one: Open up the registry editor using the word regedit.
Step Two: Guide to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > Explorer and then choose the Advanced key.
Step Three: Locate and then right click on the Start_Search Files and then select the Modify key.
Step Four: You now have to change the Value to Zero.
Step Five: Then restart your Explorer.exe or you can simply just reboot the computer.
If this method does not work for you then you can try this:
Step One: Using your mouse right click on the Start button and then choose the Properties key.
Step Two: Then click on the button that says Customize.
Step Three: Then see all of the checked items, uncheck the Search Communications.
Step Four: Then reset the search files to the setting Don’t Search for files.
Step Five: Click the Ok button.
I hope this helps, stay tuned for more tips and tricks on Microsoft Windows.
Windows XP - Get Going Faster
Have you ever noticed that sometimes computer starts in few seconds but Microsoft Windows XP takes a lot of time to show the icons and desktop background and moreover when you try to click on Start button it shows you the stupid hour glass icon. (I really hate that icon).
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