Ranking high for Top Keywords
As mentioned in my last post, I always do a bit of reasearch (whenever I find some time from my busy schedule) on the keywords, I want my sites to be ranked. One of my main income generating website on Baby Photo Contests - www.KidsandBibs.com is basically about baby photo, baby photo gallery and baby photo contests. So I am aiming for the same keywords and I want my site to be ranked high for these very competitive keywords. Ranking high for keywords which are not even searched makes no sense and it is not going to benefit your website. So when you use Google Adwords Keyword Tool, it gives you an exact idea about the search volume and also how many advertisers are actually after those keywords (not exact numbers though, but you get a rough idea). See the attached screenshot.
Doing SEO is an ongoing job. You need to keep working to maintain your rankings in the search engines. Recently I noticed that many visitors are coming from Google.com for keywords like baby photos , baby photo, baby pictures that is when I went in to check my rankings. It always used to be on 2nd page but to my surprise for both baby photo and baby photos, I am ranked on Page 1 and it was indeed a very good acheivement for me. I have attached the screenshot for my own archives 
The ranking keeps changing so having such screenshots in place will make a happy memory 
This is an update on my site’s ranking for the top keywords -baby photo and baby photos. See the competition, in Yahoo there are 368,000,000 web pages competing for baby photo.
Google.com – Baby Photo(out of 182,000,000 web pages)
KidsandBibs website – Ranked 2
Google.com – Baby Photos( out of 102,000,000 web pages)
KidsandBibs Website – Ranked 6
MSN.com – Baby Photo (out of 168,000,000 web pages)
KidsandBibs Website – Ranked 11
Yahoo – Baby photos ( out of 155,000,000 web pages)
KidsandBibs blog http://kidsandbibs.blogspot.com – Ranked 6
KidsandBibs Website – Ranked 14
Yahoo – Baby Photo ( out of 368,000,000 web pages)
KidsandBibs Website – Ranked 12
KidsandBibs Blog – Ranked 13
PPC Advertising on Popular Keywords
PPC advertising is pay per click advertising. The advertisers pay for the clicks. You might have often noticed those sponsored results on the top bar and side bar on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa etc. I have tried using Google Adwords 2-3 times but I run the campaign for just 10-15 days and then when I see no result, I just stop the campaign. I just don’t have patience to wait and watch. For me, the result should be quick. I often noticed that the times, when I run a campaign on Google Adwords, my Adsense earnings drops. It might be just co-incidence or maybe Google has a policy not to drive traffic from Adwords and then use it for Adsense as they have to protect themselves with so many new MFA sites coming up everyday, with no content but just to make money.
For PPC, you should exactly know what you are targeting, what are the right keywords to aim for. The goal of finding good keywords is to build a table of keywords that can bring targeted traffic to your Web site and keywords that are often searched for, but still not so competitive as to make a top ranking next to impossible.
There are many ways to find a good related keyword. I am listing the ones, I use very often and they are good tools all free of cost.
1. Google Adwords Keyword tool to check out the related and most searched – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. WordTracker – You can check out the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
3. Overture – http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
4. Keyword Tool from SEO book – http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/
So when an advertiser is putting money on keywords, it is better to do some research and then aim for those keywords. Well it is interesting, but this baby site called babycenter(I love that website and it really is a good site for baby related stuff), must have also done some research and they have actually bided on my domain name as one of their targeted keywords both on Google as well as Alexa. So if you search for the term “kidsandbibs” or “kidsandbibs.com”, it shows the sponsored result from babycenter. So this shows that my site is indeed a popular one. Here are some screenshots from Google and Alexa.
My blog’s review on OurBlogReview
This morning when I checked my emails, I saw this email from Rachel Henderson and she wrote to me that she has posted the review and gave me the link to check it out. I must say, I was so pleased to read the good review about my site. And as per her words, she feels that it is the “BEST BLOG”, she has read so far . I really felt good and since my blog is so new with a few posts, so such encouraging reviews will help me in making it better and informative. I do agree with her, about the cool colors I used, it gives a soothing and relaxing feel and that’s why I chose it
BTW the review on my blog Being Asha dot com goes like this -
“Being Asha dot com is a lovly girly looking blog. It has a great girly picture and the colour is a lovely relaxed blue – it really appealed to me and made me feel happy and relaxed before I even started reading. The articles are really long as to start with I thought this was not a good thing, but once I started reading, I realised that they were full of really useful information. For example there is an article all about robots (the web type !!) and it has so much information starting from a basic definition to a description of what they do. It has links to sites with more information should you need it. The articles actually reminded me of well written essays they have good structure and references and excellent detail. This is the best blog I have ever read – and I have read a lot!”
And the fact that it is not a paid review and it is a free review, makes me feel more good about it. So anyone who wants their blogs to be reviewed goto Rachel’s site at OurBlogReview and submit your blog for review.
World Wide Web Robots
Let’s first start with Robots, what exactly are Robots and how does this web robots work which we call as spiders, crawlers, bots etc.
“A robot is a program that automatically traverses the Web’s hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced.Note that “recursive” here doesn’t limit the definition to any specific traversal algorithm; even if a robot applies some heuristic to the selection and order of documents to visit and spaces out requests over a long space of time, it is still a robot.Normal Web browsers are not robots, because they are operated by a human, and don’t automatically retrieve referenced documents (other than inline images).Web robots are sometimes referred to as Web Wanderers, Web Crawlers, or Spiders. These names are a bit misleading as they give the impression the software itself moves between sites like a virus; this not the case, a robot simply visits sites by requesting documents from them.”
For more details on WWW Robots, check here at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html
Today I was browsing through my Parenting Forum and I see that there are currently 5 active users, when I checked further to see the 4 other guest members to my forum, there they were all browsing along with me, two googlebots, one MSNbot and one Yahoo Slurp!. Well I think, they do love my site and they are my forum’s regular visitors always on the lookout of a new post and content to spider it. See the attached screenshot.
Now, let’s see how useful these Robots are.
The web robots reach out and grab pages from the Internet and if it’s a new page or a page that has been updated since the last time that they visited they will take a copy of the data. They find these pages either because the web author has gone to a search engine and asked for their site to be indexed, or the robot has found their site by following a link from another page. As a result, if the author doesn’t tell the engines about a particular page, and doesn’t have any links to it, it’s highly unlikely that the page will be found.
Robots are working all the time; the ones employed by AltaVista for example will spider about 10,000,000 pages a day. If your website has been indexed by a search engine, you can be assured that at some point a robot has visited your site and by following all your links, will have copied all the pages that it can find. So it is entirely upto the webmaster whether to allow indexing of the pages or not and accordingly write the instructions in robots.txt file. For more details on robots.txt content, check out Robots FAQ.
If a webmaster wants to restrict the visits of these robots, then they can add directions in their robots.txt file and all the well behaved robots follow the directions specified in your robots.txt file.
If you have noticed, I mentioned well behaved, which means there are also, some not well behaved robots out there and as MSN has pointed out that web master can check if the spiders, bots coming to their site are authentic or not. As mentioned in the Live search blog
“But what about crawlers that aren’t so well-behaved? After all, anyone could call themselves ‘MSNBot’, and proceed to be as rude and aggressive as they like. Fortunately, there is a way you can catch these impersonators. Here is how it works:
1. When you get a page view request, it specifies a user-agent and an IP address. As I described above, all requests from Live Search use a user agent starting with the word ‘MSNBot’.
2. If you see the MSNBot user-agent, it’s time to check the identity of the bot. Starting with the IP address (i.e. 207.46.98.149), you can use reverse DNS lookup to find out the registered name of the machine.
3. Once you have the host name (in this case, livebot-207-46-98-149.search.live.com), you can check that it really is coming from Live Search. The name of all live search crawlers will end with ‘search.live.com’. If the name doesn’t end with ‘search.live.com’, you know it’s not really our crawler.
4. Finally, you need to verify that the name is accurate. In order to do this, you can use Forward DNS to see the IP address associated with the host name. This should match the IP address you used in Step 2 – if it doesn’t, it means the name was fake.”
So this gives a fair idea on how to check if the crawlers visiting your webpages are fake or for real. You might have often seen those CAPTCHA images on web forms ( to fight spam), just to test if the person filling up the form is a human being or a robot. We will discuss about CAPTCHA in another post.
Trip to London – a memorable one!
I am back from London after a week long vacation. It was for business meetings cum vacation as we have a few clients in UK and planning to make more clients in UK. I like London especially since it is a great city and it is the financial hub for the whole of Europe.Also this time it was special visit since our son accompanied us. He always wanted to visit London right from his childhood and for him, his mom and dad keeps going to London. No matter which country we visit, he will say we have gone to London.
This time, for the first time, we took the London Pass tickets but it was not of great use as we could hardly visit all the places listed, though it is a great value for money for the first timers to London and those who are without small kids. With kids, you just cannot plan things. They just give up.. saying I am tired now.. so we visited only a few places where I felt that Urjit will enjoy himself.We took him to London Zoo, London Aquarium, Kew Gardens, Museum of Childhood and he did enjoy walking on the Southbank Riverside and enjoyed the street theatres and dances and magic shows. He had prepared himself by checking out websites of London zoo and watching all the videos of the animals. So he knew what to expect and he was telling me which all animals we have left out, so it was quite interesting for him.
We had a funny incident though while going. We had a halt at Kuwait was we had taken Kuwait Airways. In Kuwait they made us wait for quiet a long time and called up UK embassy and asked my husband to speak to the embassy. Their main query was..”Are you Indian?” well.. we do look asian as we belong to the north east part of India and since people outside India (within India too) have very limited knowledge about India and they have a certain image of Indian people on their mind.. so it was surprising for them, when they came to know that we are indians. Before boarding the flight, one of the staff member said sorry and he was saying.. you people look so much like Phillipinos, so there was a confusion. And yes, if you are travelling by Kuwait Airways, please make sure that you reconfirm your flights 72 hours prior to flying.
