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So how do you get a top listing in Google and how do you get into Google quickly. Lets begin with the latter. You can submit your site using Googles submit site tool but amazingly enough this is NOT the fastest way to get listed. Here's the secret to getting listed in Google like lightening PRESS RELEASE'S Yep issue a press release relating to your website you will see your site in all the major search engines in 3 or 4 days. Here's a link to one of my press releases http://pressreleases.newspad.com/pr/20054/pr224817.html To issue a press release go to http://prweb.com Ok now that your sites in Google how are we going to get a top spot for keywords related to our site. Well I'm afraid to tell you this is no easy process it could possibly take months even years! But with some luck and the right tools it is achievable. There are two keys to getting a high ranking 1) Keywords Lets look at keywords first. So to go about finding these keywords we are going to use some free tools 1) Overture Keyword Tool - 2) Wordtracker - http://wordtracker.com Using these two tools you can search keywords related to your product/website & find out which ones are searched a lot and which ones have very little competition. What you want are keywords middle of the road i.e. not as much competition & not as much searches. Once you have decided on your keywords, try & get 40 or 50. You need to make sure these keywords feature all over the body of you website. Make sure to put the most searched keywords in your title & headings. Now you need to go about getting other websites to link to yours. You need to find websites related to yours but sites that are not in competition with you and email the webmasters of these sites and ask them for a link. To help you do this more quickly and easily there is a great piece of software available. Here's the link http://www.axandra-link-popularity-tool.com/index.htm I hope this information will help you achieve your search engine goals. Mark Flavin is the creator and editor of http://www.nicetodobusiness.com and is a specialist in free web site promotion. View his members area at http://www.nicetodobusiness.com/members.htm posted on Nov 22, 2006
If you're a non-American business with a .com web address, and your regional Yahoo ranking is important to you, then my story might interest you. Recently my copywriting website dropped out of Yahoo's Australian rankings. For quite a while, it had been at number 1 for my primary keywords "advertising copywriter", "copywriter", and "website copywriter". But then it suddenly disappeared. I clicked through about 10 pages of results, and it was nowhere to be seen. I then searched for my domain, and Yahoo couldn't find it. Something smelt fishy. I'd done nothing 'naughty' to my site to warrant a ban, and I still had heaps of links to my site (actually, I had more than ever before). I'm an Australian advertising copywriter. I'm based just north of Sydney and I host my website with a major Australian host. But my web address is a .com, not a .au. I started thinking this might be the problem. So I emailed Yahoo support, explaining the problem, and sharing my thoughts on the cause. And all of a sudden, nothing happened. So I waited. And I waited. And I waited. And finally, after about a couple of weeks, I received an email from a Yahoo support representative informing me ? incorrectly ? that my keyword wasn't featured in my page title or description. I should remedy this shortcoming and re-submit my site to Yahoo. Frustrated, I replied. I repeated the important facts from the first email just to ensure they'd listened. They hadn't. They hadn't even searched for my domain to confirm that Yahoo no longer recognised it. When they got back to me this time, they had started paying a bit more attention. The support rep confirmed my suspicion that Yahoo had excluded my site because of its .com URL. Her very helpful solution was that I should change my domain to .au! She included some ridiculously complex instructions for how to do so, and sent me on my merry way. As you might expect, I wasn't satisfied. Nor was I merry. I explained to her that this was not an acceptable solution because all the links to my site on the internet are pointing to the .com and my email address uses the .com. She was unmoved. She asserted that this was the best and only way to solve the problem. Oh? and it might help if I added my primary keyword to my title and description. My laughter was not good humoured! I wrote back expressing my displeasure at this "solution". I painstakingly explained how Yahoo had made a mistake, and that if Google was capable of recognising my Australian business despite its .com addresses, I would think it's technically possible. I also cited several other .coms in the first couple of pages of Australian results. No response. The situation didn't look promising? If this sounds like a familiar story to you, don't despair. A week or two later, I searched Yahoo Australia for my primary keyword, and surprise, surprise? My site was ranked number 1 again! The moral to the story? Don't be intimidated by Yahoo. Trust your instincts and don't give up. If you're an Australian business with a .com, and you're not listed in Australian searches, this might be why. In fact, I would think this story is relevant to all regional Yahoos. (Of course, before making any accusations, it's a good idea to make sure your site is properly optimised and that you have plenty of inbound links.) Anyway, that's my story. I hope it helps someone. And they all lived happily ever after. So far at least? Yahoooooooo! The End. -- You're welcome to publish this article free of charge provided:
About The Author * Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and Article Submission Specialist. He is a director of PublishHub and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com or http://www.publishhub.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to purchase his e-book, 'SEO Secrets'. posted on Nov 21, 2006
Did you know that you can dramatically increase the number of visitors that come to your site on a daily basis from Google? And it's not constantly improving your position in Google search engine result pages(SERPs) for your competitive keywords which can take some time after working on your search engine marketing campaigns. I take this example from Google because I've experienced it some time back now. Apart concentrating on getting and maintaining a top 10 ranking in Google, there are lots of easy traffic sources that you haven't exploited yet. We are still talking about search engine traffic here. What's that strategy you ask? The answer might surprise you but it's a technique that works and is pretty legitimate. It's not creating stand alone or doorway pages with practically no content, overly optimized with keywords and a link back to the homepage. Doorway pages work but only if you know how to do it well. And this article will talk a bit about this topic as well. The strategy is to search for overlooked keyword phrases which are not too competitive and create effective doorway pages related to these keyword phrases. These pages can be promoting a product for instance. Just by adding a few effective doorway pages, I managed to make 9 sales in just a few short weeks and earned $364.59. Imagine you come up with several keyword phrases that generate a few monthly searches, you now have several pages. So each page targeting a specific keyword phrase is worth traffic and not any type of traffic but it will be targeted. So if you have one page which brings you only 1 visitor per day and you have 50 pages, you can easily receive 50 visitors per day for free. You see the potential now. Keywords that have about 1000 searches on Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions previously known as Overture at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion are valuable keywords with lower competition. If you are using Wordtracker at http://www.wordtracker.com, a keyword with only 10 searches per day can get you a good ranking and bring you traffic. If you have already a website which is generating traffic, you can dramatically increase your numbers, simply by adding relevant doorway pages targeting a specific keyword. These pages have content and have your optimized navigation menu on it with their specific keyword phrases. These pages are just an entry to your site nothing more nothing less. They should not be overly optimized with keywords but they must have some optimized content which is readable by your visitors and friendly for the search engines as well. If you have a good website which is crawled by Google's robot called "Googlebot" often, your new pages will get spidered and indexed fast and will start bringing you small loads of targeted traffic. But be careful when adding pages, don't go in a frenzy with this and add hundreds or even thousands of pages all of a sudden. For eg if your site has 50 pages already indexed in Google and ranking well and you add 100 new pages at once, your indexed pages might suffer a temporary drop in rankings. The key here is to add pages on a regular basis say 1 or 2 pages daily until you reach the total number of pages to be added. Why not capitalize on this free source of traffic? The key is to research your keywords well first, work on your content and create these pages afterwards. Your website will grow bigger and bigger with time and it will attract loads of targeted traffic from multiple keyword phrases. Good luck and happy research and optimizing. This article can be freely published on a website as long as it's not modified in any way including the author bylines, plus the hyperlink must be made active just like below. Jean Lam is the author of the highly acclaimed eBook Top Search Engine Ranking Secrets in Google Revealed, a concise, step-by-step guide to high search engine ranking for the beginner to intermediate level webmaster. posted on Nov 21, 2006
First of all, Google and most other search engines do NOT look at the META keyword tag. Many people say not to bother with it, but I use the META keyword tag and I place my keyword phrases in it. Here's why. I use this tag to help me remember what keyword phrases I am optimizing the page for. You'll find this to be a big help later when you have a lot of pages and have forgotten what keyword phrases you were trying to optimize the page for in the first place. For the META description tag, keep your most important keyword phrase near the beginning of the sentence and make this tag a full sentence. Do NOT use bold or italic keyword phrases in the first sentence on the page, but DO use your most important keyword phrase in the first sentence, but not the first word. By all means, use your keyword phrases in your headings, (H1, H2 and H3). Start putting keyword phrases in bold in the second paragraph. Put your keywords or keyword phrases in italics a few times AFTER the first usage of the keyword. Never let the first usage of your keyword phrases be in Italics. Use keywords in ALT tags. It's very important to get other sites to use your most important keyword phase for your page in any inbound links. Of course, you are not in control of how other sites link to you, but work hard to get them to use your keyword phrase. Most sites will link to your home page, so give them the most important keyword phrase you are optimizing your home page for. When you are linking from any page back to your home page, use your most important keyword phrase in the link. When your home page is linking to any other page, use the keyword phrase in that link that the other page is being optimized for. Don't plan on getting much (if any) help by putting keywords or keyword phrases in your left Nav panel. Google likes keywords in full sentences. Putting the sentence in a paragraph is even better. By the way, a sentence according to Google is three or more words starting with a capital letter and ending with a period or other punctuation. Stop words such as: "I," "a," "the," and "of" do NOT count as one of your three words. Follow these rules and your Web site will make a big jump in its relevancy for your keyword phrases. Following these rules will NOT boost your PageRank. To be #1 or even in the top 10 on the search engines your relevance for a given keyword phrase is much more important than your PageRank. For example, you could have a PageRank of 10 and still not show up in the top 100 sites when someone is searching for "peanut butter sandwiches" unless of course, your page is optimized for (and has a high relevance for) the phrase "peanut butter sandwiches." One final point: Use your keyword phrase in an H1, H2 or H3 headline followed by a keyword-rich paragraph and then repeat this with another H1, H2 or H3 headline and another keyword-rich paragraph. And of course repeat this again. Use this format in addition following the 10 rules above and you will have a page with a high relevance for your keyword phrases. Don't try to optimize a page for more that two or three keyword phrases and always optimize for keyword phrases and NOT keywords. After all, the keyword is included within the keyword phrase. Most people don't search for just one word any more anyway. I have seen pages rank #1 with keyword densities form 1% to 20%, but I usually try to have a keyword phrase density of between 2% to 6%. Sometimes I go up to 10%. Craige Stacey has been studying search engines optimization as a hobby and has achieved some very good search engine positions in the past for membership website software. posted on Nov 27, 2006
If you have a website then you already know the importance of traffic. Traffic is to Internet marketing as location is to real estate. It's the only thing that really matters. If you cannot generate targeted visitors to your site, you will not make any sales. Usually the owner or designer of the website is the person designated to drive traffic to the site. The chief ingredient in generating traffic is the search engine. Of coarse, you can use advertising, but it's going to cost you. Using the search engines to generate targeted (interested in your product) traffic is the least expensive method known. Unfortunately, many website owners do not understand the importance of search engine visibility, which leads to traffic. They place more importance on producing a "pretty" website. Not that this is bad, but it is really secondary to search engine placement. Hopefully, the following list of common mistakes, made by many website owners, will help you generate more targeted traffic to your site...after all, isn't that what you want. 1. Not using keywords effectively. This is probably one of the most critical area of site design. Choose the right keywords and potential customers will find your site. Use the wrong ones and your site will see little, if any, traffic. 2. Repeating the same keywords. When you use the same keywords over and over again (called keyword stacking) the search engines may downgrade (or skip) the page or site. 3. Robbing pages from other websites. How many times have you heard or read that "this is the Internet and it's ok" to steal icons and text from websites to use on your site. Don't do it. Its one thing to learn from others who have been there and another to outright copy their work. The search engines are very smart and usually detect page duplication. They may even prevent you from ever being listed by them. 4. Using keywords that are not related to your website. Many unethical website owners try to gain search engine visibility by using keywords that have nothing at all to do with their website. They place unrelated keywords in a page (such as "sex", the name of a known celebrity, the hot search topic of the day, etc.) inside a meta tag for a page. The keyword doesn't have anything to do with the page topic. However, since the keyword is popular, they think this will boost their visibility. This technique is considered spam by the search engines and may cause the page (or sometimes the whole site) to be removed from the search engine listing. 5. Keyword stuffing. Somewhat like keyword stacking listed above, this means to assign multiple keywords to the description of a graphic or layer that appears on your website by using the "alt=" HTML parameter. If the search engines find that this text does not really describe the graphic or layer it will be considered spam. 6. Relying on hidden text. You might be inclined to think that if you cannot see it, it doesn't hurt. Wrong.... Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them invisible. For example, some unethical designers my set the keywords to the same color as the background of the web page; thereby, making it invisible. 7. Relying on tiny text. This is another version of the item above (relying on hidden text). Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them tiny. Setting the text size of the keywords so small that it can barely be seen does this. 8. Assuming all search engines are the same. Many people assume that each search engine plays by the same rules. This is not so. Each has their own rule base and is subject to change anytime they so desire. Make it a point to learn what each major search engine requires for high visibility. 9. Using free web hosting. Do not use free web hosting if you are really serious about increasing site traffic via search engine visibility. Many times the search engines will eliminate content from these free hosts. 10. Forgetting to check for missing web page elements. Make sure to check every page in your website for completeness, like missing links, graphics, etc. There are sites on the web that will do this for free. This is just a few of the methods and techniques that you should avoid. Do not give in to the temptation that these methods will work for you. They will do more harm than good for your website. Not only will you spend weeks of wasted effort, you may have your site banned from the search engines forever. Invest a little time to learn the proper techniques for increasing search engine visibility and your net traffic will increase. Jeff Casmer will help you setup your very own money making website today that's 100% ready to take orders and pull in MASSIVE PROFITS for you right now...GUARANTEED! Plus, you'll get your own pre-written ezine-in-a-box customized and setup for you absolutely free WITHIN 24 HOURS!! Get started immediately at: http://www.24hourwealth.com posted on Nov 24, 2006
In order that someone finds your website and buys your product on the Internet it is essential to make it known to the world. So the first thing you do is to submit to search engines. But a search engine listing alone does not assure you will receive any new visitors to your Website until and unless you appear among the high rankers. Your Website must achieve higher search engine rankings in order that your customers are able to find your site promptly. You will reach higher rankings if you follow the easy steps to optimise your website which I've compiled below: 1. Research Your Keywords! This is the single most important aspect of search engine optimisation, so there simply is no way out. If you don't know how your visitors search for your product or service, then you are only guessing. And can you imagine a hunter who doesn't know where to send his bullet? I bet you don't. Don't just assume you know how people are going to try and find you. Visit your competition and look at the terms they use in the keyword tags and throughout their pages and compile a list of keywords. You'll spend a good bit of time on this because it will payoff big later. Once you have your list, rank the phrases in order of importance starting with the most important keyword phrase. 2. Give Your Keywords Focus! Now it is time to start getting the text for your pages ready. When doing so, you will want each of your pages to focus on one of the keyword phrases from your list. Your homepage should focus on your most important phrase and each subsequent subpage should focus on another keyword phrase. Ideally, you should never focus on more than one or two keyword phrases per page. Trying to focus on more than this will dilute the theme of the page and could have a negative effect on your rankings. 3. Optimise Your Title Tag! The title tag is one of the most important elements of your page. Search engines put more weight on the title tag than any other single element of your page. Your title tag should ALWAYS contain the keyword phrase you have chosen to target for that page. Keep the tag short, no more than about 6 words generally, but make it appealing. Make the title irresistible to your visitors but keep it also short enough that you don't take away from the importance of your keyword phrase. 4. K.I.S.S. - Keep Your Pages as Simple as Possible! Avoid overloading your page with things such as frames, excessive javascript, flash, too many graphics or image maps. This can have a negative affect on your search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is that the simpler the page, the better it will generally rank. Even tables, when used too much can break up the flow of the text on a page and hurt your chances at a top ranking. 5. Create Good Content! For sure you will find top ranking sites with very little content, but you will have a much better time getting and keeping a top ranking with good content. This not only gives the engines more to index, but it gives your visitors something worth to read and absorb. Your customers will thank you and they will be more likely to return in the future to do business. Don't just compile large lists of links ? it's not very attractive to your customers. You should make it to your personal rule to offer only high quality ? no matter what target group you are trying to appeal. 6. Think Big! What does this mean? Quite simply, it means that a site of 30 or more pages has, at least, 6 times the chances to get a top ranking as a site of 5 pages. The more pages your site has with good, solid, quality content, the more keyword phrases you can target and the more chances you have of achieving a top ranking. 7. Create a System of Internal Linking! You should be able to get to just about any page on your site within no more than 3 clicks. Consider creating a site map with links to all of the pages within your site. This will assist the engines in properly indexing your site. When creating your internal links try to use the actual keyword phrase that you will be targeting on the page you are linking to as the link text. Many engines look at the visible text of a hyperlink as a description of the target page. If the visible text matches the focus of that page, it will help to give that page a boost in the rankings. 8. Build External Link Popularity! Even if this might appear to be a long and arduous task, but it is crucial to your success. All of the top engines use link popularity quite heavily when ranking sites. It is important to note that it is not only the quantity of links that is important but also the quality of those links. One link from a site such as Yahoo is worth as much or more than 100 links from unknown sites. Also remember, it is also important that you link to other sites. When linking to other sites, or attempting to get them to link to you, always shoot for sites that are of a similar theme as your site. 9. Monitor Your Rankings! This is best accomplished through a program like Rank Me, WebPosition Gold, or other similar programs. If you see your position starting to slide, look at your competitors sites that have overtaken you and see if you can determine a pattern. This will tell you what you need to do to regain your position. 10. Keep Going! Now that your're at this step keep at it, don't quit. This is just the beginning. If you don't get a top ranking right from the scratch don't get discouraged. Therefore be consistent and patient in your efforts. This will establish a basis for building a successful business online for years to come. Heck, how did your first attempt at rideing a bike turn out? Give yourself some time to get accustomed to this new field. Keep tracking your progress, analyse your competition, and making adjustments, and in no time at all, you will find yourself sitting among the high rankers. About The Author Marcus Schroefel is an Author, Publisher and Success Coach. Visit: http://www.mindclicking.com. You can get more proven traffic generating tips delivered to your e-mail box just 5 minutes away --- for FREE by sending a blank e-mail to: trafficgenerator@robotreply.com. posted on Nov 21, 2006
Google's calling your name... Hi, Google here. We want to index your website... Is anyone there? This article has a free corresponding online video tutorial that shows you how to summons the magic Googlebot to spider and index every page on your website, and it will only take about 10 minutes of your time. Go here now to watch exactly what to do, step-by-easy-step... http://www.gothrive.com/google-sitemap-video.htm What you have access to with the new Google Sitemaps program is truly a gift from the Google gods. They've offering you a tool that you can use to keep your site constantly indexed and updated in the search engine database. With Google Sitemaps, webmasters can now take charge and make sure that their entire site is crawled and indexed. One important note to make is that the Google Sitemaps program will not necessarily improve the ranking of your site's pages. It only ensures that Google knows what you've got online for them to look at. Before reading the following statement, promise yourself that you won't stop reading if you see a term that seems a little scary. OK? Promise? Good. Go ahead and keep reading then. The format specified by Google for "their" sitemap is XML (extensible markup language). Did I loose you yet? No? Good again. You do not need to understand how to code XML to participate in the Google Sitemap program. There are plenty of free online tools that will create your XML sitemap for you with no XML knowledge required on your part. More on this in a second. What information is including in this XML sitemap? 1) The URL for every file on your website. 2) A relative priority rank that you can assign telling Google which pages on your site are most important for them to look at. 3) The date last modified for each page. 4) Anticipated change frequency per URL. This again is a variable that you control. According to Google, your XML sitemap can include up to 50,000 URL's. If your site is a real monster and has in excess of 50,000 URL's, then you'll need to create a hierarchy of sitemaps with one leading to the next. This way you'll be able to lead Google to all of your pages. The options for generating and maintaining your Google Sitemap range from complex systems that are highly automated to very simple systems using online sitemap generators that require nothing more than clicking a few buttons. Google now keeps a list of these 'third party suppliers' of generators on their site. Find them here: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html The program that's demonstrated in our free video tutorial (http://www.gothrive.com/google-sitemap-video.htm) is found here: http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp In a nutshell, here are the steps involved with using online generators: 1) Start the program. 2) Enter your site's URL 3) Click the "Start Crawling" button 4) Customize URL priorities and change frequencies 5) Save the site map to your local hard drive 6) Upload your new Google XML sitemap to your website in the root directory (where your home page resides) 7) Validate your new sitemap (can be done here: http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/internet/google/submit-validate-sitemap/) 8) Submit your XML sitemap to Google. You can access the pages for the Google Sitemap program here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login 8 steps in about 10 minutes. That's all there is to it. One question that you might ask is whether or not you still need an HTML sitemap, and the answer is "Yes, you still need your conventional sitemap". XML sitemaps are not intended for human visitors. To see what I mean, take a look at the two following sitemaps: HTML sitemap: http://www.gothrive.com/sitemap.html XML sitemap: http://www.gothrive.com/sitemap.xml Which version do you prefer? Your visitors will like the HTML and Google prefers XML. When you add pages or new content to your site and you want Google to go back to have a fresh look, just log in to your Google Sitemaps control panel, select the sitemap to revisit, and click "Resubmit". It's never been easier to get Google to spider and index a website. Don't miss your opportunity to use this tool to your advantage. Copyright 2005 Ron Hutton Ron Hutton is a 20 year sales and marketing veteran with a passion for coaching and training. Subscribe to "GoThrive Online", for big juicy marketing tips in small, easy-to-chew, bite size servings. Free Video Tutorial Archives Here: http://www.gothrive.com/free-video-library/video-directory.html posted on Nov 24, 2006
First, you must realize that targeting the right keywords or phrases is the 'key' to making any kind of profit from your site. Choosing the 'right' keywords (the exact keyword or phrase surfers type into the search engines to find your site or product) can make or break your online venture. How do you find these profitable keywords? One simple way to do this is to just type your 'keyword' into the different search engines - then take note of the number of paid adverts listed for your keyword. If there are no paid adverts -- chances are high that your keyword is not a paying keyword. Perhaps, a more exact way is to use Wordtracker or Overture.com, they will give you the numbers of searches made last month for that keyword, along with a whole list of variations on that keyword or phrase. Overture will also give you a list of who's bidding on the keyword and how much they're willing to pay for traffic to that keyword. Getting a high ranking (at least on the first or second page) for a paying 'keyword' in one of the top search engines like Google, Msn, or Yahoo can set up a nice revenue stream on your site. It can mean a lot to your site's bottom line. So try these 10 quick ways to 'kick-start' your keywords: 1. PPC - Pay per click, this is the ultimate kick-start method but you must know what you're doing! Paying for traffic or hits to your targeted keywords is probably the best and fastest way to kick-start your keywords. Use Google adwords or programs like overture.com to bid on clicks to your keywords or keyword phrases. In PayPerClick marketing, many marketers target 'every' keyword for the product they are selling, including misspelled words and phrases. They may then narrow down their list to only the 'keywords' with a high conversion rate, how many hits it takes to get a sale. One sale in 10 clicks and you could be on easy street. One sale in 1000 clicks and you're probably on your way to the poorer side of town! In other words, you could lose a ton of money if you're not careful or prudent. Do some serious research before you jump into this arena. Recommended reading would probably start with Google Cash by Chris Carpenter. 2. Anchor text it to death! Especially if you're targeting Google traffic, you must have your keyword or phrase placed in a many on-site and off-site 'anchor text links' that you can possibly get. Anchor text in an url link is as follows: This is your anchor text! Off-page factors are very important to Google which ranks sites from PR0 to PR10; the number of 'anchor text' links with your particular keyword coming from high PR sites is extremely important -- the more high PR links you have, the higher the ranking for your keyword or site will be. Some savvy marketers have found that it might be more cost effective to buy 'keyword links' on high PR Sites for your targeted keywords rather than shelling out money over and over again for the PPC campaigns. One time or yearly purchase of certain high profit pulling keyword links that place your site or selling page at #1 on SERPs (search engine results pages). A #1 spot on Google for a high paying keyword that can keep paying for years is worth its weight in gold. Notice the large number of 'moans and groans' whenever a major shift in Google's rankings occurs i.e. as in the Florida update. If you're targeting Yahoo, make sure you repeat your keyword often, and at the top of your web copy page. Place it in your 'alt text' in your website's images. But be careful, don't keyword spam by repeating it hundreds of times on your web page. 3. Plug it into your existing site. Professional marketers, plug in their keywords into their existing sites by placing links on all or numerous pages on their sites. Some use a resource table at the bottom of each page, then when a new resource (keyword) comes along, they just update and plug in this new link. Do a little homework, and check out how some major SEO sites have this column of resources (keywords) listed on all their pages -- thus, providing a large number of internal links to their keywords -- directing or tunneling PR towards their most profitable keywords. 4. Place your anchor text link in your blogs. If you're a prudent marketer you will have already turned some of your site's normal offerings into blogs and rss feeds. Example, if you have an existing ezine or newsletter, place an online version into a blog. If you regularly do company updates, news releases -- place these into a blog and rss feed. 5. Likewise, you can start a series of blogs on your keyword or subject matter. It has meant an overall increase in traffic and rankings to my sites and perhaps more importantly the 'spider activity' has gone from almost nil to a daily infestation. Regularly 'ping' your posts by using sites like my.yahoo.com, this will get your keywords spidered and indexed more quickly. 6. Place your anchor text links on marketing forums or on forums related to your keyword's subject. Forums are a great way to kick-start any keywords that you are targeting. The traffic is great and most of these forums are spidered daily. 7. Place your anchor text keywords on a high profile site. If you can get your keyword links on some 'major players', sites which have over a million links or more, do it! I have noticed my site is spidered more frequently and by different robots after getting my links on sites like buzzle.com and addme.com, it probably won't hurt your Google PR ranking either! 8. Place your anchor text keywords on high profile blogs. Again, don't keyword spam but try and build strategic relationships with top bloggers in your 'keyword' subject area. Then the mutual exchanging of links will fall into the natural scheme of things. 9. Write articles around your keyword topic, and submit them to ezine directories like ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com. Many marketers suggest you NOT use your keyword in the Title or Body of your article! Place it instead in the anchor text link in your resource box. Reasoning behind this, your article may be picked up by some major sites with High PR rankings or ratings -- if you have the same article on your site -- you will lose traffic to these major competitors. So you have to be a bit sneaky and carefully funnel traffic to your keyword from the search engines. 10. Start a viral 'keyword product'. Many professional marketers also place their keywords into a 'viral' product of some kind: a free brandable ebook, free reports, mini-courses, or tutorials that can be used and passed around freely. So next time, don't just place a keyword on your site and wait for something to happen, instead, take a more pro-active role by trying these 10 methods of kick-starting your keywords and you will immediately see results. They do work and the proof is just waiting your next move... To learn more about Google Adsense, Adwords and PayPerClick Marketing: Google Cash File Copyright © 2005 Titus Hoskins of http://www.bizwaremagic.com This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached. posted on Nov 22, 2006
From the perspective of a business owner, webmaster, or marketing manager, the change exhibited by the Internet is profoundly exciting, yet profoundly disturbing. The information (and misinformation and disinformation) it offers, the business benefits it promises, and the rules it is governed by change at such a rapid rate that it's almost impossible to keep up. These changes have led to a growing appreciation of the value of quality web copy. This appreciation has, in turn, led to an influx of opportunistic 'copywriters' promoting themselves as website copywriters or SEO copywriters. Don't get me wrong, there are quite a few excellent SEO copywriters out there, and you should definitely shop around. The purpose of this article isn't to scare you; it's to help you find the SEO copywriter who'll deliver honest service and excellent results. So with that in mind, take a look at the following ten tips. These are the things you have a right to expect from anyone wearing a name badge that reads "website copywriter", "SEO copywriter", "internet copywriter", or "web copywriter"? (See also www.divinewrite.com/websitecopywriter.htm and www.divinewrite.com/makethemost.htm.) 1) An understanding of SEO Obviously, your SEO copywriter must have a solid understanding of the essentials of Search Engine Optimization. They must know that ranking is essentially the result of a website's relevance (i.e. keywords) and importance (i.e. inbound links). There are a whole lot of other factors involved, but if your SEO copywriter doesn't understand these two basics, you should look elsewhere. If you'd like to ensure your SEO copywriter knows a little more than just the basics, take a look at www.divinewrite.com/SEOCEO.htm, www.divinewrite.com/seocopy.htm, www.divinewrite.com/seotradesecrets.htm, www.divinewrite.com/webcopyenough.htm, and www.divinewrite.com/seoarticles.htm for some clues as to what you might like to ask in order to assess their knowledge. 2) Proven experience The proof is, as they say, in the pudding. It's not enough that your SEO copywriter can talk the talk; they must also be able to walk the walk. Ask to see some examples of websites for which they've obtained some good rankings. Note that it may be very difficult to find an SEO copywriter who has actually worked on both keywords and link generation, so if you find one who has, and they write well, snap 'em up! They'll have a very broad and useful working knowledge of search engines. 3) An understanding of how many keywords to use You don't want to fill every page up with every keyword you're targeting. This simply dilutes your site's relevance and reduces readability. Ask your SEO copywriter how many keywords they would recommend targeting on each page. Hopefully they'll suggest no more than 3, preferably 2. By targeting 2 keyword phrases per page, you can use them a lot without impacting readability. 4) Clear agreement on who will provide keywords Someone needs to perform a keyword analysis in order to figure out what words you should be trying to rank highly for. Your SEO copywriter should be able to do this for you, but it's quite often more cost-effective if someone a little closer to the business does it. Either way, make sure your agreement with your SEO copywriter makes it very clear who is performing this task. Don't assume the SEO copywriter is going to do it, because they may assume you're going to do it, and then you'll blow your budget. 5) Keywords or keyword phrases Expect your SEO copywriter to offer some advice regarding how specific you should be with your keywords. In most industries, the competition for keywords is so fierce that you'll be forced to target very specific keywords in order to rank ? at least at the outset. For instance, if you're in IT, you probably wouldn't start out by targeting the keyword "IT". The competition is immense (at the time of writing, there were approx 3,240,000,000 results for this search in Google.com) and the IT giants already dominate the search engines for this keyword. Instead, try using a more specific keyword phrase like "IT infrastructure consulting new york" (at the time of writing, there were only around 4,000,000 results for this search in Google.com). The other benefit to targeting more specific keyword phrases is that you'll generate more relevant leads. 6) Agree on word count per page Always make sure your SEO copywriter gives you an indication of the number of words they expect to write per web page. While it's necessary to have a decent body of words on most of your web pages, you certainly shouldn't have too many. What "too many" is all depends on your industry, the objective of the page, and the needs of your audience. It's always a delicate balance, but it's certainly possible to rank highly with only 100-200 words per page. So don't be fooled into paying for copy you don't need! 7) Density targets & measure SEO of a web page is NOT guess-work. A good SEO copywriter will talk about density measures. This is a measure of the number of time the keyword phrase appears on the page. It's expressed as a percentage of the total word count of the page. So if your page has 200 words, and your keyword phrase appears 10 times, its density is 5%. As a rule of thumb, your SEO copywriter should be aiming for a density of approximately 5% for your primary keyword phrase and 3-5% for your secondary keyword phrase. If your density measures are much higher than this, readability will be reduced, and you'll risk being perceived as spam by the search engines. Make sure your SEO copywriter understands keyword density, is prepared to state the target density for each keyword phrase, and is also happy to be measured by that standard (should you decide to measure). 8) Where to place keywords The question of keyword placement has been the subject of much debate amongst SEO copywriters. While it is still unclear how much impact placement has, there is a general consensus that it has SOME impact. Be sure that your copywriter is aware of this impact. Popular opinion has it that keywords are more effective if they appear in headings, bolded text, links, and generally toward the beginning of the page. 9) Some comment on structure & links Websites are generally better indexed by search engines if their spiders can traverse the entire site using text links. This means your SEO copywriter should be linking each page to every other page using text links. If your site is complex, this may be impractical, so your SEO copywriter will need to create a hierarchical structure for your site. First, they should break your subject material down into categories. Then for each category, they should write a summary page. These summary pages should be accessible from higher level pages via text links. They should also be accessible from each other. Each summary page should link ? using text links ? to a number of pages discussing the finer details of the category. And each detail page in a particular category should link to every other detail page in that category (once again, using text links). This way the spiders are able to travel from the top of your hierarchy to the bottom, and from left to right across any level. 10) Don't believe grand promises SEO copywriters can play a significant role in increasing your search engine ranking. But they can't do it overnight. By optimizing your site for your target keyword phrases, an SEO copywriter is simply declaring the relevance of your site. If you engage an SEO copywriter to write helpful articles containing a byline with a link back to your site, you can then submit these articles for publication on the Internet, and this will steadily increase your ranking. But if an SEO copywriter tells you they can dramatically increase your ranking in a matter of hours or days, be wary. NOTE: Your SEO copywriter should be able to submit your articles to various submit sites on the Internet. These sites are closely watched by hundreds of thousands of publishers of e-newsletters and article pages from all around the world. High quality articles are quickly snapped up and published prolifically. And each time your article is published, you've got another link back to your site, thus increasing the importance of your site (to the search engines). If you'd like to submit your own articles, your SEO copywriter should be able to sell you a list of 50 or more submit sites for as little as USD$99. Conclusion An SEO copywriter is a valuable addition to your marketing function. But you need to make sure you choose wisely. When you know what questions to ask, the battle is half won. Happy hunting! * Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter and SEO copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles. posted on Nov 21, 2006
There are millions of web sites trying to get listed in the top 20 spots of the major search engines. That amounts to a lot of competition! I say if you can't get listed at the top, indirectly get to the top. How do you do this? Look up the top 20 web sites on the major search engines under the keywords and phrases people would find your web site. The key would be to then advertise on those web sites. The most expensive way would be to buy ad space on those web sites. If you don't want to spend any money, you could use the ten strategies below. These strategies may not apply to every web site. 1. Participate on their discussion boards. You could post questions, answer other peoples questions, and join in on conversations. Just include your signature file and link at the end of your messages. 2. Ask the web site owner if they would like a free ebook to giveaway to their visitors. You could have them link to your web site or include your ad in the free ebook. 3. Submit content to their web site. You could write articles for their web site and include your resource box and link at the end of the article. If they publish it, you'll indirectly be at the top of the search engines. 4. Write an excellent article review of their web site, products or services. Then publish the review on your web site. E-mail the web site owner and tell him or her about it. They may link to your web site so their visitors read it. 5. Ask the owner of the web site if they would want to trade advertising. If you don't get as much traffic as they do, you could throw in some extra incentives. 6. Propose a cross promotion deal with the web site. You both could promote each others products or services together in one package deal. This means a mention and link back to your web site. 7. Give the web site a testimonial for their product or service. Include a little text link for your web site with the testimonial. You never know; it could end up on their ad copy. 8. Post your advertisement on their free classified ad section on their web site. You want to be sure you have an attractive headline so they will read your ad. 9. Post your text link on their free-for-all links page. You want to go back and post your link regularly so it stays towards the top. 10. Sign their guest books. You could leave a short compliment about their web site on their guest book. Just include your signature file and link at the end of your message. Ahmad Munawwar is the Financial Freedom Society Memberhsip Consultant. He is offering 30 Days of FREE Training for people who are serious about wanting to build a better financial future for themselves. If you are interested in getting FREE Training simply visit http://www.Give2Gain.com posted on Nov 23, 2006
If they want to have success, companies should do everything they can to ensure that their SEO firm doesn't provide lousy service. Here are 10 tips to keep in mind: 1. Be realistic. Don't waste your time or the SEO firm's expertise by arguing about broad search terms. Don't say you want to be in the Top 10 for "e-commerce." The SEO firm should ask: "E-commerce and what else? E-commerce consultants? Please be specific." 2. Think long-term. If you can't help yourself and you want broad search terms, such as "toys," think through what it may take to pull that off. Variations on your favorite term may be best in the short term. If you start looking a year or two out, then make sure there aren't site design, programming and link popularity flaws. 3. Be open with log files. Don't shield log files from the SEO firm. Admit if your web analytics capability is poor. How can the SEO firm do a good job if your host company can't provide decent statistics, such as the number of visitors from search engines and the actual search terms they use? 4. Change text. If an SEO firm wants to change text, give the consultant lots of room. If a graphic can be modified so the words appear as text, be open-minded about the change. Chances are, it won't hurt the overall look of the web site. SEO professionals grit their teeth when clients say they want rankings and then resist change. 5. Don't sit on recommendations. You may end up discouraging the SEO firm you're paying if you hire them and then fail to review their suggestions. 6. Reply to e-mails, voicemails and other communications. If an SEO firm contacts you, especially for a scheduled meeting, make a point to return the e-mail or call. Really, it's a good idea to be available for strategic conference calls. 7. Stick to the program. Don't ask the SEO firm to optimize the web site and then expect them to provide Pay-Per-Click (PPC) guidance as well. If you can't handle PPC on your own, pay the experts. 8. Keep statistics in perspective. With many search terms and engines, it's always going to be possible for some keywords not to rank. Don't get hung up on what search terms didn't pop in the Top 30. Focus on your traffic growth and conversions. 9. Know your limits. SEO firms appreciate informed clients ? to a limit. Read the articles. Pick up an SEO book. Keep up with the news. But don't hire an SEO expert and then tell them you're an SEO expert. For example, you may be excited to learn about all of the SEO devices that could be at your disposal. Don't blame the SEO firm for failing to use them all at once. Measured, gradual changes are best. 10. Take your company name out of title tags. Do yourself a favor and make title tags available for search terms, not your long company name. Only keep it if it's short and useful from a title tag proximity and density standpoint. Michael Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, a Cleveland, Ohio-based search engine optimization (SEO) firm. He authored the "U.S. Manufacturers Resist Natural Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Online Sales Leads" study and a white paper, "Search Engine Marketing: Get in the Game." posted on Nov 23, 2006
You need to be extremely careful with keyword research so that you don't miss excellent opportunities or aim so broadly that you target phrases that will never rank well. Here are 10 strategies to guide you along the way: 1. Know your potential customers. 2. Start with core words. 3. Look at the industry. 4. Study competitors. 5. Be specific - add other words to your primary phrases. 6. Visit Wordtracker. 7. Use your intuition. 8. Limit your selection. 9. Tie keywords to site planning. 10. Study your log files. Michael Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, a Cleveland, Ohio-based search engine marketing (SEM) firm. A member of Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), he also authored the white paper, "Search Engine Marketing: Get in the Game." posted on Nov 22, 2006
When used properly in combination with other basic search engine tactics, these tips can help to dramatically improve your placement with the search engines and increase the traffic to your web site. 1. USE KEYWORD FILE NAMES: By naming your html file relevant to your keywords, you can gain a slight advantage. This is a relatively minor aid so don't go overboard with it. 2. AVOID USING ROBOTIC SUBMISSIONS TO THE TOP SEARCH ENGINES: When submitting your web page to one of the top 8 search engines, try to post your page manually rather than using any automated software or sites that post for you to get into the prime search engines. Many people believe that over 70% of your hits will come from Google and Yahoo! It's probably worth spending a considerable amount of time trying to get a good ranking from theses search engines. (Actually Yahoo is more like a directory than a search engine and requires that you read their help pages about their listing method) 3. BE SURE TO USE YOUR KEYWORDS IN YOUR PAGE TITLE: Many search engines will look to see what words you have used in your page title tag. It is VERY important that you include the keywords you want to be found under in this title tag. 4. GET YOUR PAGE LINKED FROM OTHER SITES: Some search engines will increase your relevancy if your site is linked to from other sites. Try to establish as many links as possible from other locations before you submit your web page for placement. 5. AVOID USING JAVA AND FRAMES IN YOUR PAGES: Search engine robots have a difficult time with pages containing Java and frames (not the Java Script tip below which is ignored by search engines). In order to establish a high relevancy and therefore a high rank do not use these methods in the pages you submit to the search engines. 6. THE FIRST 250 WORDS OF TEXT: Search engine robots scrutinize the first 250 word of text in your page for relevancy and keyword count. You must use your keywords in the appropriate proportions in this part of your page. Some say a 10% - 40% keyword count in this section of text is ideal. ALWAYS start this text with the page title you used in the title tag. Avoid keyword repetition (i.e. repeating keywords one after the other). 7. DO NOT USE THE META REFRESH COMMAND: This command is used to automatically transfer a page to another without requiring reader input. 8. DO NOT USE TEXT THAT IS THE SAME COLOR AS THE BACKGROUND: Search engines look for text that is the same color as the background which is being used to increase the keyword count without the reader seeing the text. This has become a definite no no and you may be penalized for such tactics. 9. USE LINKS CONTAINING KEYWORDS: One way to increase a keyword count is to use a series of working or non-working links containing a description and link that incorporate your keywords. This also has the advantage of providing links to other web sites from your page which the search engines also look for. 10. USE THE IMAGE ALT TAG TO INCREASE YOUR KEYWORD COUNT: Every image allows you to include a text description of that image in the alt tag. Use these tags to incorporate keywords or phrases to increase your keyword count. Search engines do consider alt tags in their relevancy rankings. 11. USE KEYWORDS IN PLURAL: Try to use your keywords in the plural form. Such as, CLOCKS instead of CLOCK. A user search on the keyword CLOCK will find both CLOCK and CLOCKS but a user search for CLOCKS will usually not turn up pages using the keyword CLOCK in singular form. 12. KEEP META TAG DESCRIPTION TO 25 WORDS OR LESS: Most search engines will truncate your description if it is too long deleting possible key points you are trying to convey. Keep your meta description to 25 words or less to avoid having posted an incomplete message to readers. 13. KEEP META TAG KEYWORD LISTS UNDER 1000 CHARACTERS: Keep your meta tag keyword list to under 1000 characters. Anything more and you may have your relevancy rank penalized by search engines. Additionally, do not repeat any one keyword in the keyword meta tag more than three times. I truly hope you use these strategies soon and realize far more success than you have! Get started right away and watch the difference in your rankings. More free tips at http://www.GoogleWebsite.com/ posted on Nov 22, 2006
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) doctrine states that you should always find a keyword that has little to no competition and that has high demand so that you can rise to the top of the search engine results and dominate that particular keyword. The problem with the internet home business area is that many people online are creating new websites with the typical keywords like "work from home" and "home business" so as a result it is almost impossible to rise to the top of the search engines or risking having to pay lots of money for pay per click advertising. Instead of trying to compete with long established websites in the internet home business niche or high paying pay per click advertisers, this article suggests two ways you can think outside of the box and think of new keywords to promote your internet home business and its products. Motivations and the internet business opportunity It has been said that if you figure out someone's motivations well enough, you can determine what he could do. Instead of hitting the "work at home" keyword when promoting your internet business opportunity, why not instead start thinking of reasons why people would join an internet home business. Reasons such as early retirement, starting part time income, quitting the rat race, getting out of debt come to mind. So if you target the reasons why someone would be interested in an internet business opportunity you are in effect targeting your actual online target audience. So what you could do is write articles on these topics, optimize your websites to these topics with links to your internet home business which fit in with these motivations rather than the run of the mill work at home business websites. Another way to generate more internet business signups is to hang out at website forums that discuss such things and offer some constructive advice and have a signature that leads to your internet home business website. If people trust your advice on the forums, they are more likely to trust the internet home business that you promote. Solve health problems Many internet home businesses have as their products health supplements. The reason for this is that such products are consumable and can be consumed monthly. As a result of this, nearly every internet home business owner selling vitamins either floods the Google Adwords with ads promoting vitamins or builds websites promoting vitamins. One way around this problem is to find keywords targeting the problem rather than the solution. E.g. Heart attack if you are trying to promote antioxidants. Do some research into the area you are talking about and then either build a website that tells people more information about their health problems or advertise your product via Google Adwords as the solution to such a problem. Your competition may be significantly lower than if you had targeted "Vitamins" directly. So the lower the competition, the potential more money you might make with regards to product sales. In conclusion, always aim to find these niches and once you do, spend time on Search Engine Optimization in addition to PayperClick advertising and you will find that in the longer run you will make more money online that you would have dreamed with your internet home business. Joel Teo is the successful owner of several successful internet business ventures.Click here to learn how you can start your own successful internet business today. http://www.massive-profits-online.com Copyright © 2005-2006 Joel Teo the Coolest Guy On The Planet posted on Nov 25, 2006
Many marketers know that search engine marketing is among one of the best methods to get visitors to their websites. It's a profitable way to reach new subscribers and new customers. But getting search engine traffic is only one of the first steps to the doorway of incoming success. While getting top search engine rankings will open the floodgates of targeted traffic, all this traffic is useless if your website visitors don't take any action be it a subscription to your newsletter, a purchase of your products or your affiliate products or any other action. To capitalize on your search engine traffic, you need to be able to convert those visits into at least one action. Of course, not all your visitors will do anything on your website apart reading any valuable content you might have or download any free stuff. This is also a good way to get repeat visitors which can lead to an action in the future. Now is the time to concentrate on your website conversion strategies which will be very crucial for success. In fact this is the second most important aspect of Internet marketing after getting the initial traffic. The formula is as follows: => Targeted Traffic: Good Conversion: Sales/Leads/Subscribers Here are 2 powerful ways to capitalize on your search engine traffic: (1) Your Website Design Layout Website design which does not seem that important is extremely crucial to get success on the Internet. Consider this, you visit a site which is very unprofessional with flashing graphics, poor navigation, slow loading time, getting you confused and gives you a feeling of mistrust. Your only action would be to click on the "Close" button at the top of your browser. Now this site has already lost a potential customer or subscriber. Or you visit a professional site this time, but you don't really know what to do on the site. The reason is that the person who has designed the site has not taken into consideration the visitors like what he or she wants them to do once they arrive on their homepage or any other pages. Each page on your site must have an objective. So one of the things that you need to do is to ensure that your site is as professional as can be ie has a friendly navigation menu, fast loading and avoid unnecessary graphics where possible. The other thing is you need to know beforehand what you want your visitors to do once they arrive on your professional site. When the traffic comes, the best strategy now is to tweak your conversion and make testing often to see what works better for you. If you run a newsletter, you can place a subscription box on the upper left or upper right corner of your site or if you have some products to sell, you can display one or two on another space. So when your visitors come to your site, either they subscribe or buy one of your products. When any one of these actions is taken, your site is doing its job. (2) Your Sales Page or Pre-sell Page If you have affiliate products that you're promoting, the best thing is to pre-sell those visitors, hence you have more chances in making sales. It's like a personal endorsement. If you have your own products, make use of the following: (a) A powerful headline which catches attention and entices the visitors to read more, meaning more chances in making sales. Use quotes in your headline. They have been proven to make it more effective. A headline like "Discover 3 Hidden Steps That You can Quickly & Easily Use to Start A Profitable Internet Business In Less Than 48 Hours" is an example of a catchy headline which can make the visitor stop dead in their tracks. (b) Bullets to emphasize benefits of your product not features. Benefits sell. People want to know how your product can benefit them. (c) Real testimonials from other satisfied customers. Sometimes you can get unsolicited testimonials which is good but when you don't, a good way to get testimonials is to offer your product for FREE to experts so that they can review it and send you their feedback. (d) A professional banner which reflects your product and any benefit that your product conveys. (e) The use of other colors apart black. The color red catches attention, green makes you think of money, blue soothes the mind. (f) Use sub headlines to break your mini-site sales copy into chunks of information to make it well organized and more readable. (g) Use power words to make your sales copy more effective. Words like discover, exclusive, proven, secrets, guaranteed, limited-time, results-fast, quickly, easily etc...are simple little words that can have a dramatic influence on your sales. (h) Give bonuses or discounts for a limited-time. Put the price of the bonuses and offer genuine discounts. (i) Use a Post Scriptum(P.S) - This is used at the end of your sales letter to re-state the product benefits and what will happen if these people don't order today or how your product will make their lives better. (j) Be brave and put your own picture on your site. This seems to be rather banal but putting your photo on your site makes you more credible. Remember trust is important when doing business on the Internet. People like to know they are dealing with a real person instead of a machine. (k) Use a clear call-to-action eg "Click here now", "Click here now to take advantage of this limited-time offer" or "Click here now to get your discounted copy". This is very important. Don't expect your visitors to take action by themselves. If you have done everything right and forget about including a strong call-to-action, don't be surprised if you see your conversion drop. The AIDA principle (1) Attention (2) Interest (3) Desire (4) Action should be implemented in any sales copy. (l) State that all purchases are done securely on your site, hence inspiring trust. Include a picture of credit cards. (m) Offer a guarantee and use a guarantee icon. (n) Allow people to contact you by providing your personal details. Working on your website conversion is fundamental to the success of your Internet business. Traffic without any type of action is worthless and when your conversion improves, you'll probably get more results with the same number of traffic numbers simply because you know how to convert better. So now, you have no excuse not to get more positive results with your search engine traffic. This article can be freely published on a website as long as it's not modified in any way including the author bylines, plus the hyperlink must be made active just like below. Jean Lam is the author of the highly acclaimed eBook Top Search Engine Ranking Secrets in Google Revealed, a concise, step-by-step guide to high search engine ranking for the beginner to intermediate level webmaster. posted on Nov 18, 2006
Sometimes questions will arise around the subject of gateway information pages or doorway pages. People have heard that "doorway pages" are BAD and some have stated that search engines "hate doorway pages". For clarification on these type of issues, let's start by explaining some simple ground rules looking beyond the jargon and terminology. Do Search Engines Hate Doorway/Gateway Pages? To answer this we'll examine it in two steps. Let's understand: 1. What it is that the Search Engines "HATE"? and then... 2. What type of pages the search engines "LOVE"? With this approach it will help us gain some understanding of the criteria that is most important. 1. What the Search Engines HATE: a) To put it simply, search engines despise low quality doorway pages that contain little or no useful content. A few years ago these type of low quality doorway pages were rampantly produced as a means to try and trick the search engines. Looking at it from the search engines point of view, why even publish a page if all it contains is a couple of lines of text and an "enter the store" link. Pages with VERY LITTLE VALUE to the reader, do not belong in a search engine's index. b) Search engines also despise any kind of duplication or use of mirror pages. Again, little or no content (often just garbled text or keyword rich paragraphs that have no real value) were reproduced over and over and cluttered up the search engines. These pages were supposedly going to bring great traffic but the bottom line is that they were and still are all labeled by engines as Spam. c) Search engines hate any attempt made by Webmasters to manipulate pages optimized with content unrelated to the actual Web site. Some Webmasters were guilty of all types of trickery to try and attract clicks regardless of the site content. Understanding these issues, clearly you could NEVER blame the search engines for their war on Spam and low value doorway pages which contained no useful content or information. Next let's talk about 2. What pages the Search Engines LOVE: a) Search engines love pages that far "information rich" and contain useful, original content that will actually make valued reading to the online visitors. b) Instead of doorway pages (or pages with no value or little useful content), the term "information rich" can be used to describe a page loaded with useful, quality information. Search engines love pages that are content rich and able to stand on it's own merit. A quality information page is also part of the overall Web site allowing visitors to obtain more relevant and useful information having easy navigation through the Web site. Instead of lightweight pages with no content, today's pages need to contains high quality information, which is relevant to the online audience. The information rich page is 100% quality, put together with research, relevance, thought and care. No tricks are ever needed. Next Question is..... What kind of information goes into creating an information rich high performance page? Invariably this question often comes up when I am teaching one of our live hands-on workshops. People need to understand that this is wide open to all the discoveries you make while researching your target audiences behavior. How you can meet the audience's needs exactly, is only limited to "your imagination" and the most effective way to present the information you know they are looking for, back too them. You want to give them what they "really want" as opposed to what you "think" they want and do this right up front. The focus is on creating genuinely "useful content" for your ideal target audience of "potential customers" who happen to be already out there searching for you. Not only is this what your visitors want, it's also the key to success for search engine acceptance. You will never run in to trouble with search engines by offering lots of original, quality content that is interesting, useful and of high value, to your online readers. In brief, key to success for attracting your target audience, is doing quality research on your target audiences searching behavior and learning to identify their needs and what they are searching for and then, giving them what it is that they really want. Okay, so what kind of information might a information rich page really contain? That will depend on what "your research" reveals of course, but here are about 20 rough ideas just to get you started thinking in this fashion. 20 Ideas for High Performance Information Rich pages: Your high performance, information rich pages might be any of the following (but not limited just to these either): 1. A Questions and Answers information rich FAQ page. 2. An introductory story related to the appropriate Web site theme (something that is compelling or educational on topic). 3. Interesting and original statistics which you have discovered through your research, are in high demand by your audience. 4. An interesting interview with someone (make it exclusive and original). People love to read about other peoples experiences and or opinions and views. 5. It might be a page loaded with various product reviews with an emphasis on benefits of each in comparrison. 6. It could be a theme related feature article or story. 7. It could be a detailed tutorial loaded with valuable "How to" or "instructional" advice. 8. Your information page might even be a biography about someone's life that people are looking for detail on. Of course it should relate to the topical interest of your site's theme. Recent eg. At the recent, sad passing of legendary screen icon Marlon Brando, just do a search for his bio and see all of the movie or film related sites that are no doubt getting additional exposure from Marlon's fans who are looking to buy up some of his old classic films. 9. Your pages might something with a current events or newsworthy or hard news angle. Your audience is probably looking for interesting news if you take time to study what they are searching for. 10. Your information rich pages might want to contain detailed historical information that your audience is seeking. 11. There may be room for the use of information pages that use some humor or emotional content that is still of good value. 12. Would there be value to having a questionnaire which asks your audience a series of important questions. Remember that like real life, most Web based businesses are about building rapport and relationships. 13. You could build an index to a whole library of similarly themed topics and all though your articles would all be similar in theme, each individual information rich page would contain useful and diverse subject matter. Remember high value to your readers but all original (and no duplication in content). 14. What about an information rich page offering an entryway into a useful, interactive section like a message board perhaps detailing terms of use for the message board. 15. It might be a page containing an interesting advice column on your chosen theme. Just old fashioned "good reading" which offers your readers advice or solutions to their challenges. 16. Your information page might be a reference page loaded with interesting, inspirational or famous quotes quite popular with all types of personalities. 17. Your pages might contain a related territorial map (yes images can be used most effectively with text) 18. It might be a sales letter but remember the emphasis is on quality content and originality. Things like detailed product reviews or content that emphasized some value added layout. 19. It could be a community related page with important localized community information. Tremendous value for Web sites that are looking for region specific traffic. 20. It could be any of the above suggestions with a seasonal angle relating to Christmas, Halloween, Easter, or something else appropriate to the Web content within your main theme. One of the best ways to come come up with original ideas is to think laterally about "your audiences needs" in comparison to how they are searching on the major search engines. For more insight on how to research your audience's realtime behaviours you may want to visit http://www.wordtracker-magic.com Best Regards, About The Author John Alexander is Co-Director of Training for Search Engine Workshops. He has trained hundreds of people from over 80 different countries through seminars and workshops at locations across the globe. John also teaches instructional chats through his partner's, online SEO courses. Robin Nobles and John Alexander are also members of Wordtracker's special technical support team. John has written an eBook, Wordtracker Magic, offers unique strategies for applying the Wordtracker service to generate profits for online marketers. http://searchengineworkshops.com john@searchengineworkshops.com posted on Nov 18, 2006
When online "Use it. Use it. Use it." Google is our online friend, a tool, a Swiss army knife we carry with us while travelling on the Internet checking out the World Wide Web. Always here to shed some light the moment we think about something and need more information. And what do we think while online? Say we have a website about "dog grooming" and "...thinking about how to generate income from this site?....." GENERAL FACT FINDING (TOPIC) (A) Finding out the "What Is It" (B) Twist And Turn What We Know (C) Google For "Alternative/Con/Disadvantage" View CLOSING IN - FINDING OUT MORE FACTS ABOUT TARGETS SPECIFIED Say we have decided maybe "Joe Average Petshop" and "Jane Pets Store" may be are good affiliates to work with after looking at their commission program/etc. FOR PRECISE INFORMATION SEEKING - THROW IN THE KEYWORD In practise, the viewing/surfing, fact finding, understanding and deeper(pause) reading or downloading are simultaneous actions with back and forth googling action - quick review/glimpses of article relevance, 'back' action or going deeper with link(s), or opening more window(s). By the way most people will not exceed 3 pages when 'flipping' google's results. James NK Khoo is the owner of Qwenkay Information http://www.qwenkay.com a company providing accounting and content management systems software support. He is also the publisher for Go Uncle Web http://www.gouncleweb.com, a practical online business and web oriented guide. James has been in the commercial and industrial sector for many years. If you need solid practical advice with accounts/bookkeeping or a budgeted yet decent website, contact him at james@qwenkay.com posted on Nov 25, 2006
Have you ever stopped to think how much time is taken up over the course of a year just by that niggling thought at the back of your mind; "Am I on the first page?" I bet it if you counted up all the times you did it you would be looking at hours, maybe even days! But are search engines really that important to the success of your website? No, they're not - here's why.. 1. They waste your time. Admit it - you spend hours just seeing where in the rankings you appear when you could be spending that time improving your business, adding more great content to your website or following up on those sales leads. 2. They owe you nothing. There is nothing more dangerous than your website's traffic and hence your business' revenue being dependent on one type of resource (i.e. search engine) or worse still one particular search engine. They can change the way they list and rank sites over night - they are not indebted to provide you with consistent traffic. Just look at the latest sweeping changes made by Google - businesses literally went under as a result of being solely dependent on one primary source of visitors. 3. They sap your soul. There can be nothing more disheartening than seeing your ranking in the search engines either fall from page 1 to page 99 or disappear completely. People can get caught up in a mesmerising dance with the search engines constantly changing their site to pander to the needs of the search engines. Remember this - high ranking in the search engines does not equal profit. What brings you profit is a good product or service, an excellent website with valuable content and a great conversion rate of visitor into customer. 99% of website owners think their problem is lack of visitors - it's not, it's lack of understanding of what it takes to convert the current visitors into customers. Only worry about your search engine ranking if you've got all other elements of your business and your website as close to perfection as they can be. 3.5 They're not the be all and end all. There are much better ways to attract visitors via the web than search engines. Website owners who really know their stuff and have invested 100s of hours marketing their website (or got experts like magnet4web to do it for them!) attract over 80% of their visitors via sources other than search engines - directories, links etc. If a search engine goes bust or changes the way it ranks you and you rely on it too heavily you can suffer in a big way. If the vast majority of your traffic comes from many, many links then you can still continue to thrive. Remember - traffic from search engines should be treated as an additional source of visitors to your website - not the only source. Michael Cheney is Author of The Website Marketing BibleTM. Take the Free 7-Part Course "Internet Marketing Made Easy" and get your free sampler of 'The Bible' here: http://www.websitemarketingbible.com/marketing/ posted on Nov 18, 2006
Tip 1 - Hide And Seek Do not use hidden text on your website. This means having words and phrases in your pages somewhere that can't be seen to the naked eye. The tactic of having text on your page that is the same colour as the background, and is therefore 'hidden', will almost certainly result in your wanted poster being pinned up by most search engines. Tip 2 - Your Website Is Not A Turkey Do not cram your hands full of keywords and phrases and start trying to stuff them into your website's... pages. You need to have some phrases in there, yes, but don't overdo it. The search engine owners spend millions every year on their software so guess what - they know when you're trying to beat the system! Tip 3 - Man vs. The Machines Do not build your website for the search engine robots - build it for those squishy pink things - human beings! If you focus too much on having a search engine optimised site you can quickly lose track of why your website is there in the first place - to generate you business by people visiting it and doing what you want them to do. Would you create a new reception area in your office that was tailored specifically to the floor-waxing machine so it could get the best access? No. You would build it for people - do the same with your website. Tip 3.5 - Don't Be A Bunny Boiler Do not start pinning up pictures in your dark room of each search engine and then start stalking them by submitting your website every day, week or even month. Search engines hate this - if you over-step the mark you'll be well on the way to that blacklist.. You only need to submit your website to most search engines just one time - ever. Once it's done, it's done. Despite what some 'experts' might tell you - you don't need to constantly re-submit your site. Learn how to market your website like the professionals in the FREE 7-Part Training Course "Internet Marketing Made Easy": http://www.websitemarketingbible.com/marketing/ posted on Nov 18, 2006
Want to avoid being blacklisted by the search engines and banished to the sin bin never to receive a single search engine visitor ever again? Thought so. Here's some tips to help you.. Tip 1 - Hide And Seek Do not use hidden text on your website. This means having words and phrases in your pages somewhere that can't be seen to the naked eye. The tactic of having text on your page that is the same colour as the background, and is therefore 'hidden', will almost certainly result in your wanted poster being pinned up by most search engines. Tip 2 - Your Website Is Not A Turkey Do not cram your hands full of keywords and phrases and start trying to stuff them into your website's... pages. You need to have some phrases in there, yes, but don't overdo it. The search engine owners spend millions every year on their software so guess what - they know when you're trying to beat the system! Tip 3 - Man vs. The Machines Do not build your website for the search engine robots - build it for those squishy pink things - human beings! If you focus too much on having a search engine optimised site you can quickly lose track of why your website is there in the first place - to generate you business by people visiting it and doing what you want them to do. Would you create a new reception area in your office that was tailored specifically to the floor-waxing machine so it could get the best access? No. You would build it for people - do the same with your website. Tip 3.5 - Don't Be A Bunny Boiler Do not start pinning up pictures in your dark room of each search engine and then start stalking them by submitting your website every day, week or even month. Search engines hate this - if you over-step the mark you'll be well on the way to that blacklist.. You only need to submit your website to most search engines just one time - ever. Once it's done, it's done. Despite what some 'experts' might tell you - you don't need to constantly re-submit your site. Mike Cheney
About The Author You can get lots more free articles on search engines plus a Free Bonus Special Report "How To Turn Your Website Into A Customer Magnet" worth a value of £47 ($85) here: http://www.magnet4web.com/website_services/?page=freeguide posted on Nov 21, 2006
The biggest problem that most are running into seems to do with getting INTO the search engines. Rankings aside, you need to first get them to index you. Here are the four main ways to assure yourself fast indexing: Indexing Tip #1: Let's face it, there is no guaranteed method of getting indexed by Google fast, and buying links from high-ranking sites does not guarantees anything either. The most immediate red flag you should watch out for is your number of incoming links. According to Google, it takes time to get link popularity and sites should not have more than 100 incoming links. It's okay to launch with a quality link or two. But beyond that, you are pushing it! Here is the scoop! It takes 30-45 days for Google to deep index new sites. Instead of sitting around during "sandbox" time, use that period to build a strong set of natural back-links with a variety of sites. Indexing Tip #2: No I am not kidding! Whether you agree with it or not, history shows that Google takes older URLs far more seriously than newer ones. So register your domain name as soon as you plan on developing a site. Indexing Tip #3: Blogging & pinging is one of the fastest ways to get into the Yahoo index - it can literally get you into Yahoo overnight ? helps with MSN as well. Will blogging and pinging help get you into Google? Maybe. But over-pinging can set off red flags on the ping servers, and if you're using automated blogging software, overdoing it can cause Blogger.com and other services to shut down your blog. Blogging and pinging intelligently can get your blog indexed in Yahoo quickly, but ping carefully. Does Yahoo de-index junk blogs? Absolutely. Especially since the creation of all this software, the search engines are watching closely for red flags (use software wisely). So what can you do about Yahoo Search? Not much? You can be smart about blogging and pinging or even better, you can create real (not by software) blogs. You still have to be careful with pinging though. In the end, blogging and pinging should be part of every beginner's indexing strategy. Indexing Tip #4: We know it's such a blast to build those monster 1000-5000 page sites, even with growing evidence of Google bots' tendencies to stall after indexing the first 200 pages or so? So if you're into blasting out those gigantic directories and sick of waiting months for them to get indexed, experiment with building smaller sites around more targeted niches. In a nutshell: Divide those mega-keyword lists, spend a little time grouping your sub-lists, and build smaller sites. All in all, the best way to get indexed, stay indexed and eventually get ranked is to recruit incoming link partners. See, blogging and pinging could be gone tomorrow. But, linking is an integral part of how the internet works ? it will never go away. Concentrate on building sites and recruiting links ? the links get you indexed, ranked and even bring you free traffic from those who click the links! Copyright 2005 Kurma Group Anik Singal is a 21 year old successful internet marketer who has developed his own affiliate marketing system which helped him earn over $10,466 in just 60 days. Join his FREE Course at: http://www.AffiliateClassroom.com posted on Nov 24, 2006
Search engine optimization is THE most cost effective way for a company to market their products and services. Below are 5 extremely valuable search engine optimization tips: 1. Content is Key Webmasters are extremely concerned with optimizing their code and as a result, they often forget about optimizing the content. As optimization tips go, this is one you should pay close attention to. The first 200 words of your home page should be loaded with keywords, this includes your headline. Some search engines, particularly those that ignore meta tags, will actually use the first few lines of text (including the headline) as your site description. 2. Utilize Static HTML You don't need a "dynamic" website unless you have dynamic content, such as airline seat availability and pricing which needs to be dynamically published from a database because it constantly changes. You may store your website in a database but you're better off publishing it as a static HTML website. It's cheaper, the pages will download faster, and search engines will find it easier to comprehensively index your website. The less HTML code you have, the better, as it makes it easier and faster for the search engine to index your page. Aim for a total page weight of 50 KB for any page (that's including graphics). Certainly, anything over 100 KB is going to be slow, and some search engines don't like pages that are over 100 KB. 3. The Title Tag is Critical The title tag is the single most important piece of content for people who search. Keep it short: Don't have more than 60 characters (with spaces), which is roughly 8-10 words. Lead with the most important careword for that particular page. Always start off with what is specific about the page and move to what is general. Many websites begin their title with their brand or organization name, and then follow with what is unique about the page. (This is a very common mistake, so check out your website.) 4. Optimize Your Images This is another optimization tip that many people forget about. However, through use of your "alt" image attribute tag, you can slip in an extra keyword phrase or two that describes the picture users are about to see. The text only shows up when the user has turned off the 'view images' option in their browser or the image fails to load. But some search engine robots will pick it up too and the extra keywords could help your ranking. So take a few seconds to implement this optimization tip on your site and you could see improved results soon. 5. Why You Shouldn't Optimize Your Own Site While we have given you some basic optimization tips to help you quickly boost your search engine ranking, we still recommend that you hire a Search Engine Optimization professional for the best results. Search engines change their guidelines regularly, making it impossible for any one or two people to stay on top of all the changes while still running their business. What was a great optimization tip yesterday, could get your site blacklisted today. Your SEO professional will watch over your site as if it was our own, ensuring your site is always running in peak form. For example, we predicted many of the guideline changes Google made in November of 2003, saving many of our customers from the massive fall in rankings most experienced. About the Author Carmen is the VP Client Relations of Ms. SEO Inc., a Calgary based Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing Company. Ms. Seo Inc. works with their sister company Ms. Hype Inc., a Calgary Web Design Company, to offer their clients a powerful online presence. posted on Nov 25, 2006
After the latest PR update at Google and MSN's beta search going live, there is one thing for certain in 2005: the world of search is in for some major changes. There has been growing speculation around the SEO world that reciprocal linking is a thing of the past. Rumors are abound that PR means less and less, if anything. Bill Gates came out of his cave to say that "Today's search is nothing" and that it won't be that way for long. There are quiet rumblings in the SEO back alleys of a new, state-of- the-art search engine currently indexing the internet. Websites are dropping off the face of the planet. And we're all left to sit here and put together the pieces. So what is in store for 2005? 1) Reciprocal links, while not becoming totally dead, are decreasing in value, and there will most likely be an algorithm update to lessen their importance. The original thought process behind the importance of a link was that it was seen as a "vote" for the linked-to site. Now that reciprocal links are everywhere, it is hardly a great way to count "votes" for a website. Reciprocal linking will continue around the internet, although the amount of people who try to get away with one-way links (by never getting back to you once you've added their link) will increase significantly. This will, of course, be an attempt to acquire one-way links, which brings us to our next subject.... 2) One-way links and triangle linking, though already quite popular, should explode over the course of 2005. Both are much harder to control and acquire, which makes Google happy. The triangle link "ploy" makes links look like one-way links even though "Site A" is returning the favor to "Site B" through "Site C". There will be attempts to sell triangle linking programs and systems by SEO companies, however, the complexity, difficulty and time involved in this scheme will produce ridiculous prices. 3) What this about a new search engine that is going to index every site on the internet, EVERY 10 seconds? Become.com has turned a few heads with it's claims. Site owners have reported Become Bots spidering "like crazy". It's all quite hush, hush, however and you need to have an invite in order to test it out. It should be interesting to see what they're capable of if and when they decide to go live. I'll go out on a limb and say that it's a household name by this time next year. 4) MSN will scrap the "beta" tag on February 1st from it's sparkling new search engine, which is currently live at search.msn.com and Bill Gates thinks it will rival Google. There is a lot of debate over this issue, but there is no denying that it is far better than the old chugger they were using before. Love him or hate him, Gates has most likely given a hard right to the chin of Yahoo!, which seems to be suffering from a magnitude of quality problems. MSN will be second to Google in total searches in 2005. 5) PR still has importance. However, it is also decreasing in value. PR is only based on the quantity and quality of links (both inbound and outbound) from the given web page. The most obvious reasoning for the declining importance theory is due to the fact that on any given search on Google, the PR of each page seems to have barely any correlation with it's place in the rankings. For all you PR lovers out there, hold on to your toolbar's tight, because this could be a bumpy ride. Bobby Heard (bheard@abalone.ca) is the Vice-President of Abalone Designs (http://www.abalone.ca), which offers great SEO results at affordable prices. posted on Nov 27, 2006
Adding fresh, updated content to your website is the surest way to get search engines engines to spider your site more often. Search engines are known to index sites updated on a regular basis more frequently. Updating and adding to the content on your website frequently will give you an advantage in the search results and also help you expand the number of search terms or key phrases you can get found for. There are many tools and resources you can use to automate the process of adding fresh, updated content and creating more spider-food on your website. Here are six ways to add fresh content to your site:
A blog is an online diary or journal. Setting up a blog is easy and the many free blogging services make it possible for just about anyone to get started. Several blog programs allow your users to create an account and post their comments to your blog, thereby adding more fresh content for you. I use Blogger.com to create my own blogs like the Number One In Your Niche Blog.
Publishing a regular newsletter or ezine is an excellent way to add content at regular intervals and get repeat traffic to your site. Archiving your newsletters online is one way of automatically updating your pages and adding new content. As an example see the archives of my newsletter online
Content Management Systems (CMS) allow you or your website visitors to add,
edit or delete content to your website without having to create and format the
pages manually. Xongoo! CMS is a search engine friendly and zero-cost content management system Other open-source CMS include PHP-Nuke and Drupal
A forum or bulletin board is an excellent tool for building content and creating an online community that will bring repeat traffic. Many web hosts now provide packages that include bulletin board scripts on your server. The best part about a forum is that it allows your visitors to build your content for you. However, it does require time and energy, and some technical knowledge to moderate and maintain forums. phpBB is a popular open-source bulletin system
Reviewing and publishing a write-up on new products or resources in your field is becoming a favourite technique with affiliate marketers looking to boost their commissions. It is also an excellent way to get found for the keywords related to the product you review. You can also do regular interviews of experts in your industry and put up the transcript on your site. My product reviews have allowed me to get high rankings for specific keywords of my choice
RSS is the latest craze in online publishing because it allows syndication of *expert* news and content that is regularly updated at the source. Using RSS feeds you can enhance your site content without the need to write a single line on your own. Search engines love RSS feeds and are known to spider pages with such feeds more often. Express RSS is a tool that allows you to add RSS feeds to your site in under a minute Copyright 2004 Priya Shah Priya Shah is the author of the search engine optimization guide, Number One In Your Niche and edits the newsletters Be a Whiz at eBiz! and The Glutathione Report posted on Nov 23, 2006
Search engine listing delays have come to be called the Google Sandbox effect are actually true in practice at each of four top tier search engines in one form or another. MSN, it seems has the shortest indexing delay at 30 days. This article is the second in a series following the spiders through a brand new web site beginning on May 11, 2005 when the site was first made live on that day under a newly purchased domain name. Previously we looked at the first 35 days and detailed the crawling behavior of Googlebot, Teoma, MSNbot and Slurp as they traversed the pages of this new site. We discovered the each robot spider displays distinctly different behavior in crawling frequency and similarly differing indexing patterns. For reference, there are about 15 to 20 new pages added to the site daily, which are each linked from the home page for a day. Site structure is non-traditional with no categories and a linking structure tied to author pages listing their articles as well as a "related articles" index varied by linking to relevant pages containing similar content. So let's review where we are with each spider crawling and look at pages crawled and compare pages indexed by engine. The AskJeeves spider, Teoma has crawled most of the pages on the site, yet indexes no pages 60 days later at this writing. This is clearly a site aging delay that's modeled on Google's Sandbox behavior. Although the Teoma spider from Ask.com has crawled more pages on this site than any other engine over a 60 day period and appears to be tired of crawling as they've not returned since July 13 - their first break in 60 days. In the first two days, Googlebot gobbled up 250 pages and didn't return until 60 days later, but has not indexed even a single page in 60 days since they made that initial crawl. But Googlebot is showing a renewed interest in crawling the site since this crawling case study article was published on several high traffic sites. Now Googlebot is looking at a few pages each day. So far no more than about 20 pages at a decidedly lackluster pace, a true "Crawl" that will keep it occupied for years if continued that slowly. MSNbot crawled timidly for the first 45 days, looking over 30 to 50 pages daily, but not until they found a robots.txt file, which we'd neglected to post to the site for a week and then bobbled the ball as we changed site structure, then failed to implement robots.txt in new subdomains until day 25 - and THEN MSNbot didn't return until day 30. If little else were discovered about initial crawls and indexing, we have seen that MSNbot relies heavily on that robots.txt file and proper implementation of that file will speed crawling. MSNbot is now crawling with enthusiasm at anywhere between 200 to 800 pages daily. As a matter of fact, we had to use a "crawl-delay" command in the robots.txt file after MSNbot began hitting 6 pages per second last week. The MSN index now shows 4905 pages 60 days into this experiment. Cached pages change weekly. MSNbot has apparently found that it likes how we changed the page structure to include a new feature which links to questions from several other article pages. Slurp gets strangely inactive then alternately hyperactive for periods of time. The Yahoo crawler will look at 40 pages one day and then 4000 the next, then simply look at the home page for a few days and then jump back in for 3000 pages the next day and back to only reviewing robots.txt for two days. Consistency is not a curse suffered by Slurp. Yahoo now shows 6 pages in their index, one an errors page and another is a "index/of" page as we have not posted a home page to several subdomains. But Slurp has crawled easily 15,000 pages to date. Lessons learned in the first 60 days on a new site follow: 1) Google crawls 250 pages on first discovery of links to site. Then they don't return until they find more links and crawl slowly. Google has failed to index new domain for 60 days. 2) Yahoo looks for errors pages and once they find bad links will crawl them ceaselessly until you tell them to stop it. Then won't crawl at all for weeks until crawling heavily one day and lightly the next in random fashion. 3) MSNbot requires robots.txt files and once they decide they like your site, may crawl too fast, requiring "crawl-delay" instructions in that robots.txt file. Implement immediately. 4) Bad bots can strain resources and hit too many pages too quickly until you tell them to stay out. We banned 3 bots outright after they slammed our servers for a day or two. Noted "aipbot" crawled first then "BecomeBot" came along and then "Pbot" from Picsearch.com crawled heavily looking for image files we don't have. Bad bots, stay out. Best to implement robots.txt exclusions for all but top engines if their crawlers strain your server resources. We considered excluding the Chinese search engine named Baidu.com when they began crawling heavily early on. We don't expect much traffic from China, but why exclude one billion people? Especially since Google is rumored to be considering a possible purchase of Baidu.com as entry to Chinese market. The bottom line is that we've discovered all engines seem to delay indexing of new domain names for at least thirty days. Google so far has delayed indexing THIS new domain for 60 days since first crawling it. AskJeeves has crawled thousands of pages, while indexing none of them. MSN indexes faster than all engines but requires robots.txt file. Yahoo's Slurp crawls on again off again for 60 days, but indexes only six of total 15,000 or more pages crawled to date. We seem to have settled that there is a clear indexing delay, but whether this site specifically is "Sandboxed" and whether delays apply universally is less clear. Many webmasters claim that they have been indexed fully within 30 days of first posting a new domain. We'd love to see others track spiders through new sites following launch to document their results publicly so that indexing and crawling behavior are proven. © Copyright July 18, 2005 Mike Banks Valentine Mike Banks Valentine is a search engine optimization specialist who operates WebSite101 eCommerce Tutorial and will continue reports of case study chronicling search indexing of Publish101 Article Resource Click to Contact Mike Valentine posted on Nov 24, 2006
1) Title Tag ? When we're talking about SEO Technique, the Title tag is one of the best and most powerful tags that you can use. Every page should have it's own title tag, each tag should include the keyword that you are targeting, along with sub-keywords associated with the main keyword that you seek to drive traffic from. 2) ALT Tags ? These tags are most often ignored completely. Who would have thought that tags, that were meant to be for text browsers because the images didn't show in text browsers, would become part of a technique to raise the keyword density of a webpage. Your main keywords need to be included in some ALT tags- be careful, over-doing this could cause you to be banned and your PR could drop. 3) Link Popularity - Link popularity is the most powerful SEO tool, (arguably, of course). Typically a website must have a link to it, in order to be looked at by the spiders. This means that you should have at least 1-2 links going into your site from another website that has been visited by the spiders through search engines. Increasing Page Rank, depends on the number and quality of the sites that link into yours. Keywords should be in the links, along with sub-keywords. Keep the links short; this creates an easily readable keyword term for the search engines to recognize. 4) Keyword Density ? Research first ? Then decide on the keywords that you want to target. Don't over do it- you should use the keywords only once in the title tag, once in the heading tag, once in bold text, and then shoot for the density to be between 5% to 20% . Keywords should also be strategically located throughout your website. Place them in all locations. Several search engines will recognize bottom of the page or sidebar text/links and discount them, this is because many website designers will load certain sections with clutter. 5) Page Size - Try your best to keep your web page over 5k and under 15k in size. I just designed one that is close to 53k, this is mostly because of pictures and a flash file being used, rule of thumb?. Look at Yahoo! And Google, These are some of the fastest loading pages, and most popular, people don't like to wait ? even if you have "cool" graphics and pictures. Your web page's speed is important: robots will be able to spider your web page faster and easier. 6) Theme Rich in content - Search engines are looking at themes rather than just the words or pictures. Content is King ? I know, you hear it a lot, but it's true! Webpages should have content that's related to the targeted market. Link your visitors to other valuable and related content within your own site. The more pages the better. A good tool that I have found to show you linking info is: http://www.UpTimeBot.com You can preload upto 20 pages and then refersh them, it shows all the vital information, along with how many pages are indexed from each search engine. 7) Cross Linking within your Own Site ? You rely on other pages linking into yours ? in order to get indexed; the same is true for all the pages within your site. Any new content should be easily reachable through 1-3 pages of content. Linking back to your main home page, or a storefront will help you get indexed faster and achieve a higher Page Rank. Scott Fish posted on Nov 22, 2006
Ask any business person who's website is at the top of the search engines if his/her site is making money, and the answer is almost always "yes". An example is Glenn Canady, the author of "Gorilla Marketing" who employed only one of these strategies, and it made him over $1 million dollars. The fact is, search engines can get you an enormous amount of traffic, and it's traffic to your sites that's free. However, in order to ethically and effectively market in the search engines, you need to use strategies that actually work. Below are three different ways to effectively, and ethically, raise your rankings in the search engines. I've included seven different resources that you can use that will help you implement these strategies, and do it quickly and easily so that you can begin to see an increase in your traffic almost immediately. 1. Optimize your site. To make sure that you are properly targeting your market, you need to make sure that you are marketing using the right keywords. This means optimizing your site to make sure that the keywords you have on your site are the keywords that your site is actually optimized for. There are two tools that you can use to help you with search engine optimization: a. Search Engine Optimization Fast Start Ebook - http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/seo-book.php - will teach you simple and effective techniques for optimmizing your site. This ebook is now in its 4th edition, is completely up to date, and is one of the best ebooks I've seen on search engine optimization. b. Web CEO - http://www.smallbusinesshowto.com/search-engine-optimization-software.html - This is a complete search engine optimization suite that offers 10 different tools to help you optimize your site for the search engines. It offers the most comprehensive, and step by step, set of instructions I've ever seen with any software package. According to the instructions, you can get started in one hour. The free version of this software will work for most, and it also includes a $97 search engine optimization course as part of the package. 2. Develop a linking strategy. One factor that influences how well you are ranked in the search engines is linking. The more inbound links that you have pointing to your site, the higher you will be ranked in the search engines. For each link that you have pointing back to you, that's another opportunity for your potential customer to find you. With credibility being such a big problem on the internet, to have someone recommend you increases your chance of making the sale. To help you develop an effective strategy, I recommend that you read "Linking Matters" - http://www.linkingmatters.com/. This ebook shows you how to develop an effective linking strategy for your site, and do it very quickly. 3. Develop a content strategy. The truth is, "Content is King". Most people online are looking for information. The more information that you provide for your customers, and the more valuable it is, the more likely you will make the sale. Below are three different ways to develop content for your site. The first and most effective strategy are articles. Articles actually work for you in several ways. a. Brands you as an expert so that customers come to you. b. Provides valuable content to your potential customers. c. Builds a relationship between you and your potential customers. d. Creates a viral marketing strategy for your site. e. Builds a linking strategy for you every time a webmaster publishes one of your articles. No other strategy that I have employed has brought me more business than this one. To find sites that accept articles, go here: http://www.jogena.com. This is one of the sites that I use because it's one of the oldest, and most reputable sites online for finding information on ezines. Unfortunately, there's no search, but everything is done by category, and the information is comprehensive, so you will locate rather quickly what you are looking for. However, if the thought of writing your own content gives you nightmares, there's a way around this. You can use public domain information. Public domain information is information that is free to use because it's in the public arena, or the copyright has expired. To help you easily locate this information, I recommend that you download the public domain toolbar. You can get it at the Public Domain Forum - http://www.publicdomainforum.com/forum. You have to register for an account to get the toolbar, but both the forum account and the toolbar are free. The toolbar is a very comprehensive resource of public domain sources. The third content strategy you need to consider is blogging. What a blog does is allows you to create search engine friendly content on your topic of interest. Combine this with an RSS feed, which the search engines love, and you have a winning strategy. Not only will it help you build content for the search engines, but it can also help you raise your traffic and sales. Here is a comprehensive ecourse that you can take that will drastically reduce your learning curve, as well as provide you with the resources you need to implement this strategy. http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/blogging-course.htm Finally, to keep abreast of what's happening with search engines, you need to subscribe to Search Engine Watch - http://www.searchenginewatch.com. This site offers tons of resources, news, and a newsletter on search engine optimization. Apply one, or all, of these search engine resources to your search engine strategy, and you can expect a major increase in your traffic and sales to your site. Jinger Jarrett is a writer and internet marketer living in Alpharetta, GA. You can get all of her best free internet marketing resources, including freeware to help you market on the forums when you visit her site at http://www.askjinger.com posted on Nov 25, 2006
To many websites, webmasters discover that major sources of website traffic come from search engines. Therefore, they are all keen on gaining top search engine placements through search engine optimization. Based on our several years of SEO experience, we point out some common mistakes and shed some lights to correct it. 1. Cannot Get Indexed by Search Engines, Really? A garment ERP software solution provider came to me and asked a question: "I have established a new website for 1 year, and found a SEO company to submit my website. However, my website can be found in search engines only when I type my domain name http://www.indigo8-solutions.com in search query box. The SEO company told me my domain got banned. What can I do?" Ah, I told them they have been fooled by that SEO company. If you type your domain name in search box and your website can be found, which means your website has not been banned. Interestingly, your SEO company's domain name is no longer found in Google. Their domain got banned only. To help them find out their real problems, I found the following in search engines: a. When typing their domain name in search query box, their site will be displayed in search result. Instead of displaying Title Tag in the search result, search engine displays their domain name only. b. Only 1 page is being indexed. What's the problem then? With a closer look to their coding, I found that at the top of their webpage, they heavily use Javascript to present their heading, company name, visible content, and website menu. Actually, many search engines have difficulties in reading Javascript codes. Solution? Put those Javascript in external js files and leave the webpages with plain HTML codes. Search engines usually have problems in crawling Javascript. Since their whole site navigation menu is written in Javascript, they should build a sitemap using plain HTML so that search engines can read all of their pages. One more tips: When you cannot get indexed by search engines, do not blindly believe someone saying that your website get banned. You should firstly look at your website structure and see if your coding are clumsy and make search engines hard to "read" your website. The problem created by Javascript is not uncommon nowadays. Even a very big Asia Market Research Firm also commits this error. They are now starting to rectify it. 2. Link Building In many forums, some people are strongly opposed to link exchange and claim that it is a devil and it hurts your search engine ranking and even get you banned. I personally do not agree. Evidence shows that many top sites are doing link exchange and getting top rankings across all major search engines. In addition, link exchange has been a long used way for traffic building by smaller websites. I do not see why search engines will block people to promote websites using this simple and long used method. Indeed, link exchange becomes a problem only when you manipulate link text with a pure purpose of tricking search engines, exchange links with link farms, or buy hundreds of domain names and cross-link with your site. A solution to avoid link exchange hurting you includes: - Use a wide variety of link text - Seek link exchange with sites of similar theme - Emphasize on how many traffic you can get from your link partners instead of search engine ranking Some webmasters know the importance of link exchange. However, they think that it consumes most of their time and finally give up doing it. A solution is that you can consider using Linkautomate.com to manage your links. This kind of software saves you time in link checking and link page update. 3. Use of Flash Intro Web design companies try hard to persuade you to use a Flash introduction as your homepage. You think that "Wow! The flash animation is very appealing and it makes your site looks more attractive". However, do you know that it can hurt your website in search engine ranking? Let me explain.. Search engines analyze website based on text. Flash, unluckily, is not text. According to "How to Design Website Guideline" of Siuchu Suga, search engines are not able to read content presented by Flash. They just treat Flash as an embedded object or graphics only. If you use a Flash Intro as your homepage, you will never get good rankings. In addition, many Flash intro do not offer additional and meaningful content to visitors. Ask your visitors, how many of them are really interested in reading your Flash Intro before going straight to your website content? A solution to use Flash or not, please ask yourself whether the Flash intro is really useful and can offer additional information to your visitors? Secondly, instead of a Flash homepage, you may consider making a Flash header together with content at your homepage. 4. Hidden Text and Meta Tags Webmasters understand that keyword density is a way to improve search engine ranking, and some webmasters use a technique called "keyword stuffing". They will stuff keywords into their webpages repeatedly, e.g. "keyword 1, keyword 2, .... keyword 1, keyword 2...." Well, everyone knows it does not make sense to visitors. Therefore, those "clever" webmasters will make those text invisible. For example, make the text color identical to background color. Unluckily, this trick no longer works. Search engines are able to detect it, and penalize websites using this nonsense technique. If you do not want your site being penalized, remove those text immediately in case you have adopted this method. Okay, some webmasters only stuff keywords in Meta Keyword Tags, an area for putting keywords. I am sorry to say that stuffing keywords in Meta keyword tags is also no good. You can only repeat a keyword for 3 times at most. Nowadays, search engines place less emphasis or even no emphasis on Meta keyword tags. So, what is the point of risking yourself by stuffing keywords there? 5. Use of Dynamic Pages Many websites use content managment system (CMS) to generate their webpages. As generation of dynamic pages are easier for website development, CMS generally use dynamic pages. However, search engines have difficulties to spider and understand them. To solve the problem, you can consider using Mod Rewrite in case you use Apache server or finding a CMS that can generate static HTML pages. 6. Be a Pagerank Monster Many search engine marketers are too focused on their website's pagerank. Everyday, they are talking and checking pagerank. They perform link building based on pagerank only. In fact, pagerank is only one factor for Google to determine search engine ranking. It also cannot affect your rankings in other search engines like Yahoo and MSN. If you are too concerned about pagerank, you finally will ignore other important optimization criteria. Therefore, you should repeatedly remind yourself that pagerank is only one of the many factors and you cannot only work on it. 7. Too Believe in Sandbox Some webmasters propose that a new website will be put into sandbox by Google so that you cannot get any high rankings for highly competitive keywords. Even though their website cannot get any rankings after 1 year, they still believe that it is sandbox effect. Some even says Yahoo has Sandbox, MSN has Sandbox, etc... From Google's patent information, there is no clue that such sandbox occurs. From my experience, if your site is new and cannot rank high in highly competitive keywords, it is solely because other websites are more established in search engine world. For example, they have more inbound links, more content, etc. Therefore, webmasters should not focus on finding how to get out from sandbox. Instead, you should put more effort in link building and content optimization. Eventually, you will see your website's rankings rise. By Jimsun Lui, who is working in Search Engine Optimization division of Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Limited. The company assists clients in both Chinese and English search engine optimization posted on Nov 25, 2006
Search engine optimization refers to the technique of making your web pages search engine friendly so that search engines are more easy to understand and analyze your website. Consequently, your site has a better chance to gain high search engine ranking. However, please be reminded that high search engine ranking is not your only objective, and your objective should be website traffic and conversion. The following advice helps you to achieve the objectives. 1. Make Sure Your Site Will Not Be Penalized Webmasters realize the importance of attaining top search engine rankings. Hence, they perform many search engine optimization activities on their sites. However, improper implementation of search engine optimization can get your site heavily penalized by search engines. To avoid your website being penalized, webmasters must not commit to the following practices: - Use of hidden texts or hidden links on web pages. - Use of cloaking - Excessive automated queries to search engines like Google Web pages loaded with irrelevant words - Keyword stuffing - Multiple pages, sub-domains, domains with substantially duplicate content 2. Select Correct Keyword Phrases Correct keyword phrases allow you to drive targeted visitors to your website. Therefore, this step determines whether your search engine optimization effort can improve business result or not. Do not restrict yourself and be open minded in this area. You may think that most of the search is coming from 1 word keyword. However, it is wrong. Most people uses 2-5 words keyword phrases because they are more descriptive and yield precise results from search engines. In addition, think creatively and perform linguistics research can help you generate useful keyword phrases. 3. Optimize Title and Meta Tags According to Internet Marketing Articles, One of the important steps in search engine optimization is to optimize Title tag in your web page. Pages with the keywords appearing in the title tag are often assumed to be more relevant to the search query than others. Remember, title tag is the most important location of a web page after the main content of the body tag. Almost all search engines give importance to this tag. Some search engines also give importance to the presence of the keyword in the meta description and keyword tag. Currently, it does not applicable to Google though. 4. Optimize Website Content All search engines place emphasis on your body text content. The main content of your web page should contain the keyword a considerable number of times to make the search engine spiders feel that the content is relevant to the search query. The first two paragraphs are extremely important in search engine optimization. To prevent your site from being regarded as "over optimization", you should not stuff keywords heavily in your body content. We suggest that you should present the keywords in a natural way. Apart from this, your website copy should have at least 200-250 words. 5. Ensure Clean Coding To allow search engines to index and analyze your website correctly, you must check correctness of HTML coding manually. Webmasters may build webpages from WYSIWYG HTML editors such as Microsoft Frontpage 2003, but these HTML editors may leave some duplicated or unnecessary tags in your copy especially when you edit the pages very often during web design phase. In addition, search engines are not good at understanding Java Applet and Flash. If you have Flash or Java applet navigation menu, make sure to duplicate somewhere and include HTML links as well. Please also check whether your website has broken links. They may stop search engine spiders to crawl other web pages in your website, it may result in loss of hundreds or thousands website traffic per month, and waste your search engine optimization effort. 6. Link Building In case you have a little bit knowledge about search engine optimization, you likely know that link popularity is very important to attaining high search engine ranking in major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.. Yes, search engines use link analysis to determine search engine rankings. The phiolosophy is that if an inbound link points to your site, your site must have some value. Therefore, the inbound link is regarded as a "positive vote" to your website. The more inbound link you have, the higher is your link popularity. This can boost your search engine ranking. However, quality of links (link reputation) is also important. If you can get an inbound link from a high popularity website, your site will get more benefit. There are many methods to perform link building including seeking one-way link, reciprocal links, 3-way links, etc. Because link popularity and link reputation are of great importance to search engine positions, many search engine optimizers spend most of their time in link building. 7. Optimize Dynamic Website Content Search engines are not good at understanding dynamically generated web pages. Therefore, I suggest you should change your dynamic URL to static URL. If it is not possible, you should consider using some advanced search engine optimization techniques such as Mod-Rewrite to optimize website. Another simpler way is to create a sitemap and list all dynamic URLs on it. This can help a bit. Conclusion Search engine optimization is very important to search engine marketing. When it is done properly, it helps you attract many targeted visitors to your website, and can improve your business results. Written by Jimsun Lui from Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Ltd., a company offers Search engine optimization and search engine positioning service, and is developing PHP Shopping Cart Software, visit http://www.agogdigital.com to learn more. posted on Nov 24, 2006
Search engine optimization refers to the technique of making your web pages search engine friendly so that search engines are more easy to understand and analyze your website. Consequently, your site has a better chance to gain high search engine ranking. However, please be reminded that high search engine ranking is not your only objective, and your objective should be website traffic and conversion. The following advice helps you to achieve the objectives. 1. Make Sure Your Site Will Not Be Penalized Webmasters realize the importance of attaining top search engine rankings. Hence, they perform many search engine optimization activities on their sites. However, improper implementation of search engine optimization can get your site heavily penalized by search engines. To avoid your website being penalized, webmasters must not commit to the following practices: - Use of hidden texts or hidden links on web pages. 2. Select Correct Keyword Phrases Correct keyword phrases allow you to drive targeted visitors to your website. Therefore, this step determines whether your search engine optimization effort can improve business result or not. Do not restrict yourself and be open minded in this area. You may think that most of the search is coming from 1 word keyword. However, it is wrong. Most people uses 2-5 words keyword phrases because they are more descriptive and yield precise results from search engines. In addition, think creatively and perform linguistics research can help you generate useful keyword phrases. 3. Optimize Title and Meta Tags One of the important steps in search engine optimization is to optimize Title tag in your web page. Pages with the keywords appearing in the title tag are often assumed to be more relevant to the search query than others. Remember, title tag is the most important location of a web page after the main content of the body tag. Almost all search engines give importance to this tag. Some search engines also give importance to the presence of the keyword in the meta description and keyword tag. Currently, it does not applicable to Google though. 4. Optimize Website Content All search engines place emphasis on your body text content. The main content of your web page should contain the keyword a considerable number of times to make the search engine spiders feel that the content is relevant to the search query. The first two paragraphs are extremely important in search engine optimization. To prevent your site from being regarded as "over optimization", you should not stuff keywords heavily in your body content. We suggest that you should present the keywords in a natural way. Apart from this, your website copy should have at least 200-250 words. 5. Ensure Clean Coding To allow search engines to index and analyze your website correctly, you must check correctness of HTML coding manually. Webmasters may build webpages from WYSIWYG HTML editors such as Microsoft Frontpage 2003, but these HTML editors may leave some duplicated or unnecessary tags in your copy especially when you edit the pages very often during web design phase. In addition, search engines are not good at understanding Java Applet and Flash. If you have Flash or Java applet navigation menu, make sure to duplicate somewhere and include HTML links as well. Please also check whether your website has broken links. They may stop search engine spiders to crawl other web pages in your website, it may result in loss of hundreds or thousands website traffic per month, and waste your search engine optimization effort. 6. Link Building In case you have a little bit knowledge about search engine optimization, you likely know that link popularity is very important to attaining high search engine ranking in major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.. Yes, search engines use link analysis to determine search engine rankings. The phiolosophy is that if an inbound link points to your site, your site must have some value. Therefore, the inbound link is regarded as a "positive vote" to your website. The more inbound link you have, the higher is your link popularity. This can boost your search engine ranking. However, quality of links (link reputation) is also important. If you can get an inbound link from a high popularity website, your site will get more benefit. There are many methods to perform link building including seeking one-way link, reciprocal links, 3-way links, etc. Because link popularity and link reputation are of great importance to search engine positions, many search engine optimizers spend most of their time in link building. 7. Optimize Dynamic Website Content Search engines are not good at understanding dynamically generated web pages. Therefore, I suggest you should change your dynamic URL to static URL. If it is not possible, you should consider using some advanced search engine optimization techniques such as Mod-Rewrite to optimize website. Another simpler way is to create a sitemap and list all dynamic URLs on it. This can help a bit. Conclusion Search engine optimization is very important to search engine marketing. When it is done properly, it helps you attract many targeted visitors to your website, and can improve your business results. Written by Jimsun Lui from Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Ltd., a company offers Search engine optimization and search engine positioning service, the company also offers ecommerce solutions posted on Nov 25, 2006
Ask any business person who's website is at the top of the search engines if his/her site is making money, and the answer is almost always "yes". An example is Glenn Canady, the author of "Gorilla Marketing" who employed only one of these strategies, and it made him over $1 million dollars. The fact is, search engines can get you an enormous amount of traffic, and it's traffic to your sites that's free. However, in order to ethically and effectively market in the search engines, you need to use strategies that actually work. Below are three different ways to effectively, and ethically, raise your rankings in the search engines. I've included seven different resources that you can use that will help you implement these strategies, and do it quickly and easily so that you can begin to see an increase in your traffic almost immediately. 1. Optimize your site. To make sure that you are properly targeting your market, you need to make sure that you are marketing using the right keywords. This means optimizing your site to make sure that the keywords you have on your site are the keywords that your site is actually optimized for. There are two tools that you can use to help you with search engine optimization: a. Search Engine Optimization Fast Start Ebook - http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/seo-book.php - will teach you simple and effective techniques for optimmizing your site. This ebook is now in its 4th edition, is completely up to date, and is one of the best ebooks I've seen on search engine optimization. b. Web CEO - http://www.smallbusinesshowto.com/search.html - This is a complete search engine optimization suite that offers 10 different tools to help you optimize your site for the search engines. It offers the most comprehensive, and step by step, set of instructions I've ever seen with any software package. According to the instructions, you can get started in one hour. The free version of this software will work for most, and it also includes a $97 search engine optimization course as part of the package. 2. Develop a linking strategy. One factor that influences how well you are ranked in the search engines is linking. The more inbound links that you have pointing to your site, the higher you will be ranked in the search engines. For each link that you have pointing back to you, that's another opportunity for your potential customer to find you. With credibility being such a big problem on the internet, to have someone recommend you increases your chance of making the sale. To help you develop an effective strategy, I recommend that you read "Linking Matters" - http://www.linkingmatters.com/. This ebook shows you how to develop an effective linking strategy for your site, and do it very quickly. 3. Develop a content strategy. The truth is, "Content is King". Most people online are looking for information. The more information that you provide for your customers, and the more valuable it is, the more likely you will make the sale. Below are three different ways to develop content for your site. The first and most effective strategy are articles. Articles actually work for you in several ways. a. Brands you as an expert so that customers come to you. b. Provides valuable content to your potential customers. c. Builds a relationship between you and your potential customers. d. Creates a viral marketing strategy for your site. e. Builds a linking strategy for you every time a webmaster publishes one of your articles. No other strategy that I have employed has brought me more business than this one. To find sites that accept articles, go here: http://www.jogena.com. This is one of the sites that I use because it's one of the oldest, and most reputable sites online for finding information on ezines. Unfortunately, there's no search, but everything is done by category, and the information is comprehensive, so you will locate rather quickly what you are looking for. However, if the thought of writing your own content gives you nightmares, there's a way around this. You can use public domain information. Public domain information is information that is free to use because it's in the public arena, or the copyright has expired. To help you easily locate this information, I recommend that you download the public domain toolbar. You can get it at the Public Domain Forum - http://www.publicdomainforum.com/forum. You have to register for an account to get the toolbar, but both the forum account and the toolbar are free. The toolbar is a very comprehensive resource of public domain sources. The third content strategy you need to consider is blogging. What a blog does is allows you to create search engine friendly content on your topic of interest. Combine this with an RSS feed, which the search engines love, and you have a winning strategy. Not only will it help you build content for the search engines, but it can also help you raise your traffic and sales. Here is a comprehensive ecourse that you can take that will drastically reduce your learning curve, as well as provide you with the resources you need to implement this strategy. http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/blogging-course.htm Finally, to keep abreast of what's happening with search engines, you need to subscribe to Search Engine Watch - http://www.searchenginewatch.com. This site offers tons of resources, news, and a newsletter on search engine optimization. Apply one, or all, of these search engine resources to your search engine strategy, and you can expect a major increase in your traffic and sales to your site. You can get Jinger's best free internet marketing and small business resources, including free software, ebooks, newsletters, and more when you visit her blog at http://www.askjinger.com posted on Nov 23, 2006
My Grandfather ran a small Grocery Store and when you would ask him a Question about his Business he would laugh and reply does Macy's Tell Gimbel's. (At the Time Gimbel's was a major Competitor of Macy's in the New York Department Store Market.) Well if Macy's were on the Internet back then they could be telling Gimbel's a lot. If Gimbel's knew which tool's to use and what steps to take to 'spy' on Macy's. All Examples are based on the search term 'buckwheat pillows' I do not sell 'buckwheat pillows', but I did recently order some online. 1 - Who is Number 1 for the Best Keyword. Go to Yahoo, MSN and Google Type in "buckwheat pillows" see who your Top competitors are. You may want to look at the top 5 or 10 for results for Yahoo, MSN and Google, Do they overlap, Is someone number 1 in all 3 Searches or are they different. Which result Appears most often in the Top 3, the Top 5, the Top 10. Pick one of your Top competitors and see what else you can learn. Let's use http://www.l-oma.com/ for this example. 2 - What Keywords does use http://www.l-oma.com/ and how often. The Meta Tag Analyzer tool will tell you which keywords appear on these pages and how often. Just go to http://ewguru.com/tagtool and type in www.l-oma.com and click submit. You will get a Report. The Top of the Report contains information on the Title, Description and Keyword Meta Tags we will use these later now scroll down until you see the Report Heading [The Keywords Found on Page] This Heading tells you the Keyword Density for the Keywords and Keyword Phrases on this Page. You will notice the Keyword 'Pillows' appears 3.76%, 'Buckwheat' 3.29% and 'Pillow' 1.88%. You will also see that the Keyword Phrase 'buckwheat pillows' appears 2,88%. A Keyword density of about 3% is just about right for your Target Keywords and Phrases. Now Scroll up a little you will see the Heading [Keywords found in the IMG Alt tags] The Alt tag of an image is the text a user sees when the Image can't be displayed. In this case they are not using Alt Tags. They could improve slightly by adding Alt Tags to their Images. Maybe for the Pillow they could place 'Enjoy this Comfortable Buck Wheat Pillow' in the Alt Tag Scroll up a little more and you will see the Heading [Keywords found in the Anchor tags] This tells which Keywords are being used with there Hyper Links. Keywords in the Anchor can help your ranking. Perhaps they could have said 'Order Buckwheat Pillows' instead of just 'order'. 3 - Title Meta Tag Let's keep working with the Report from the tagtool. Scroll up the page a little and you will see [Meta tags analysis]. and [Meta tags report for: http://www.l-oma.com/index.htm] The First Entry under Both these Headings is Title. This is the Title that appears between the title and /title HTML Tags in the Header. The Report tells you the actual title is 'Quality Buckwheat Pillows Handcrafted in Maine by L-OMA' The 2nd Heading tells you The Title relevancy to page content is 89%. Yahoo, Google and MSN like this to be fairly accurate. 89% is pretty Good 95% or higher is Ideal. See http://ewguru.com/hbiz/perfectmatch.html for a Quick Lesson on how to get that number to 95% or Greater 4 - Description Meta Tag The Next Entry under [Meta tags analysis] and [Meta tags report] is Description. Think of this as a Summary of what is contained on the Page. This is also what Google, Yahoo and MSN Display when you're listing appears. Ideally the Description should match perfectly with what is on the Page, in this Example this tool won't measure the Description because it is over 200 Characters Google, MSN and Yahoo use between 150 and 200 characters in there Listing for this result. Look over there Description it uses the Keyword Phrase 'Buckwheat pillows' 3 Times. It uses the Company Name L-OMA. Notice too that it uses lots of word like Neck, Spine and sleeping that appear in the Keyword Density Report. The Description is Excellent as it is aims squarely at their target Market. 5 - Keywords Meta Tag Keywords is the 3rd Row in both the [Meta tags analysis]. [Meta tags report]. You get to see the actual Keywords they want to be indexed under and how well this page Matches. They got an 84% match which means out of the 19 Keywords they chose only 84% or about 16 Appear on this Page. Look at their Keyword List [buckwheat pillow, loma buckwheat pillow, l-oma, back pain, pillow, headache, snoring, neck pain, migraine headache, sleep apnea, tension, muscle pain, stress, buckwheat hull, Maine] You may want to type in some of their Keywords into Yahoo, MSN and Google and see how they did for those keywords and phrases. 6 - Link Tool (http://ewguru.com/linktool) To Find out a Little more about www.l-oma.com go to the Link tool and Type in www.l-oma.com and then click. You will Notice that they have 16 Backwards links from Google, 312 from Yahoo and 3 from MSN. Click on 312 under Yahoo and you get to see who is linking to them. Likewise click on 16 under google and 3 under MSN to see who they list as Back Links. Can you get links from these web sites too. 7 - What Other Keywords to use The Keyword Suggestion Tool is another Source of Fantastic Information. (http://ewguru.com/kw-suggestion) Just Type in your Keywords 'buckwheat pillows' and find out other Keywords you can use. Go back through the steps with these new keywords and see what else you can learn. You may want to target some of the Less Popular Keywords first to get your own High Page Rank. Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001. Subscribe to Mike's Newsletter here http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/list-sign-up.html Get some useful Free Downloads Here: http://trafficninja.com Some more Articles from Mike: http://weeklytipsandtricks.blogspot.com/ Copyright © 2005-2006 Mike Makler: all rights reserved. posted on Nov 24, 2006
The task is to build a Content Rich Search Friendly and People Friendly Web Site Quickly. These 7 Steps will show you how with about 10 Hours work you can build over 50 pages of rich, Search Engine relevant content for your web Site Step 1 - What is Your Web Site's Main Theme This is a Fairly easy step. Most people know the main theme of there Web Site. Some Popular Themes are Health, Golf, Home Based Business, Weight Loss and Crafts Step 2 - Find Sub-Topics for your Theme Find as Many sub-topics as you can pertaining to Your Theme. One good way to do this is grab a Pen and paper and write as many Sub-Topics as you can in Five Minutes. Write everything down no matter how silly it seems. You may not use every sub-topic Just write it down. Some Topics for Home Based Business: Some Topic for Golf The Reason we want to find lot's of sub-topics is we want a good variety of keywords for people to use to find you. Step 3 Rate Your Sub Topics Determine the Importance of all your Sub Topics. Rate the Sub Topics from 1 to 10 with 1 Lowest and 10 Highest. It is ok to give the same rating to more then 1 Sub-Topic. Try not to give all the sub Topics the same rating. (You will Repeat Steps 4 to 7 for as Many sub-topics as you can. Working from highest rated to lowest rated it is a good idea to completely finish 1 Sub Topic Before going on to the next sub topic) Step 4 Find Articles for Your Sub Topic Ideally your goal should be to find 10 or more Articles per Sub Topic. For Topics Rated 7 or Higher You may want to find 15-20 Articles. For Topics Rated less then 5 fewer Articles maybe 5-7 are ok. Topics Rated 1 or 2 may have even fewer Articles or none at All. Select a good mix of articles for your sub-topic. Keep in mind your goal to create web pages that people will find useful and the Search Engine Bots will want to Index Highly I find most of my Articles Here http://ezinearticles.com If you can't find what you need there here is a page with over 50 Article Resources http://ewguru.com/hbiz/article-submit.html Step 5 Create a Web Page with each article. This is Fairly simple to do just cut the Article into your Template. Fill out the Title and Description Meta Data and publish it to your web Site. This can be done in about 3-5 Minutes per Article with a Little Practice. For Details see this Article on instant content http://ewguru.com/hbiz/instant-content.html Step 6 Create an Article Table of contents Create an Article Table of contents for your Each Sub Topic. This Gives you instant Links. Simply Create a Link to each article on a Web Page. Here is a Sample Table of Contents Page (http://ewguru.com/hbiz/df-toc.html). Step 7 Write a Blog entry Create a Blog Entry for your Table of contents for this Sub-Topic Be Sure and use Pingomatic to ping your Web Page Summary The Key is to build a Content Rich Web Page with many Keywords. By Finding 5 or more Sub topics and 10 Articles per Topic you would have 50 Different Web Pages. It is possible to create 10 Articles, a table of contents and do a Blog and a Ping in about 90 Minutes. If You do this 3 Times a Week in a less then weeks you will have over 50 pages of content. After you have Completed Steps 4-7 for all of your Subtopics add 3 or 4 Articles per week to keep your page Fresh. Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001. Subscribe to Mike's Newsletter here http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/viraltraffic.html Get some useful Free Downloads Here http://trafficninja.com posted on Nov 24, 2006
At One Time Local Searches were reserved for services like City Guides and Online Yellow Pages. But the BIG 3 (Yahoo, Google and MSN) have all jumped into the Local Search Market. According to some Estimates Local searches represent 20-25% of all Internet Searches either implicitly or explicitly) 1 - Local Content Create a web site with a few pages that contain local content.
2 - Local Yellow Pages Get Yourself listed in the local online Yellow Pages both free and Paid. Currently much of the local Search results for the Local Searches perfromed by the Big 3 Come from Yellow Page Listings 3 - Local City Guides Get Yourself listed in the local City Guides both free and Paid. Currently much of the local Search results for the Local Searches perfromed by the Big 3 Come from City Guides. 4 - Local Blog Get Yourself a Local Blog. If you sell Insurance in Florissant MO call your Blog 'Insurance-In-Florissant-MO' Try and Post one or 2 times a Week with topics relevant to your Local Market. See Step 1 for Ideas on what to post. 5- About Us Page Create an About us page on Your Web Site. Make sure your about us Page has your Name, Local Information and the Products or Services you offer. An About us page can be as simple as
6 - Contact Information on All Pages Place you contact Information on All of your web pages. At a bare minimum include
7 - Article Resource Box When You Submit Articles you should create a Resource Box that includes the same information from Step 6 above. You should also have a Link to your web page. About the Author Get Mike's Newsletter Here http://ewguru.com/fin-news Copyright © 2005-2006 Mike Makler [You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as the bylines are included. A courtesy copy of your publication would be appreciated getarticles At Ewguru .Com] posted on Nov 25, 2006
1) Title Tag - The title tag is the most powerful on-site SEO technique you have, so use it creatively! What you place in the title tag should only be one thing, the exact keyword you used for the web page that you are trying to optimize. Every single web page should have it's own title tag. 2) ALT Tags - ALT tags were meant to be for text browsers because the images didn't show in text browsers and the ATL tags would tell the visitor what it's about. You should put your main keyword(s) in the ALT tags, but don't over do it because you could get dropped in the results or even worse banned for life! 3) Link Popularity - Link popularity is the most powerful SEO tool out of all them. Most search engines don't even consider web sites if there is not at least one or two links pointing to the web site. Having another site(s) link to your web site is important when it comes to getting your site a good ranking. Your keywords should be in the links you get and keep the keywords short. When you receive requests for a link exchange, check the site out before linking with them, check for spam (Repeat keywords, hidden text, etc.). 4) Keyword Density - This is also vital and should be used with research. You should use the keyword(s) once in the title tag, once in the heading tag, once in bold text, and get the density between 5% to 20% (Don't over do it!). Also use your keyword(s) both low and high on the web page, keyword(s) should be in the first sentence and in the last one. 5) Page Size - Your web page's speed is important to your visitors and the search engines. Why? Because the robots will be able to spider your web page faster and easier. Try your best to keep your web page over 5k and under 15k in size. 6) Rich Theme - Search engines are looking at themes more and more. Build content (Articles, FAQ, tips, etc.) much as possible and keep the web pages around 200 to 500 words. Create content that's related to your market and link them out to other related content on your site. Try to get 200 web pages or more. 7) Web Site Design - This is also important, if you want to get indexed! Text content should out weigh the HTML content. The pages should validate and be usable in all of today's leading edge browsers. Stay away from flash and Java Script, search engines dislike them both a lot. 8) Insite Cross Linking - This will help you get all of your web pages indexed by the search engines. Your web pages should be no more than three clicks away from the home page. Link to topic related quality content across your site. This will also help build you a better theme through out your web site. On every page you should link back to your home page and your main service(s). Matt Colyer is the owner of the Superior Webmaster. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer. posted on Nov 20, 2006
Some web sites receive hundreds or thousands of unique visitors a day, whilst others only get a handful or none. The reason is often because the web designers or Webmaster has built the site in one 'really bad way' or other. This can end up hindering the potential success of the web site. If you want to make sure your site is not a 'traffic flop' then here are some simple rules to follow. Bad Move 1: Build the site using a frameset. Framesets may save designers time but are bad news for search engines. They can struggle to follow links into the web site or read text on the page unless you use a no frames tag effectively. In addition to this, if an engine does keep a cache of a site with frames it will often pick up the individual frames/ pages and not the complete frameset. The downside of this is that you may lose your navigation for many of your pages, which is likely to turn visitors off. Whilst one or two partial fixes to framesets are out there, it's still no wonder that many web site promoters still cry "Please No Frames". For more information on why framesets can cause problems visit http://www.html-faq.com/htmlframes/ Bad Move 2: Build the site purely in flash. Flash intros and web sites can be visually stunning, but at the same time they can be rather limiting when it comes to search engines. If your main site is all one flash site it will typically play in just one html page. Some search engines simply can't read Flash and so your web site to them is just one relatively empty HTML page. If your competitors web site has 15 or 20 pages in HTML talking about their good sand services then they will have a big advantage on you. If you must have a Flash site for graphical reasons then it would be wise to budget for a separate HTML web site to have along side the Flash so your site content can be read and indexed by search engines. Bad Move 3: Decide that graphics are more important than words Be careful. As great as some images can be, try not to let designers convince you that you don't need copy on your web site or that a few lines is enough. Only very occasionally is there ever an excuse to fill your web site with graphics at the expense of text. If the graphics look great, then match them with great copy. Sales copy is important to tell your audience why your goods and services are important. Search engines also like to index plenty of useful copy too. 250-500 words is a sensible starting guide for most pages or ½ of the amount you would place in a brochure. Text copy is important and will always be so make sure web site has some! Bad Move 4: Leaving out the Meta tags This is a bad move as Meta Tags are important to search engines. Clear and concise title tags should be written for every page reflecting what it contains. Avoid writing things like 'Home' or 'welcome' as it's fairly meaningless. If you page is selling blue widgets then get 'blue widgets' in the title and keep the title to 10 words or less. In addition to this create a well-written objective Meta description for each page, and list your Meta Keywords. These keywords should also reflect the content on your web page. Leaving these 3 things out, or doing them badly can be disastrous. The impact of Meta tags on rankings may vary from engine to engine, but without them your pages could be ignored. Most HTML editors allow you to easily insert Meta Tags into your web page and it only takes a few moments to add to a page. So there are no excuses. Make sure you have good Title tags, Meta Description and Meta Keyword tags on your pages today! Bad Move 5: Use lots of JavaScript Search engines have a few problems understanding JavaScript in pages. At the best of time they struggle with it, at worst they may even ignore it. On its own, it can be an unreliable way to make web site navigation. If you must use JavaScript for your navigation make sure you have some alternative ways to get to pages by using HTML text links at the bottom of the page. If you have a large amount of JavaScript think about linking to it as a separate JavaScript file. Bad Move 6: Don't have sites linking to yours Unless you want your web site hidden from the outside world you want to be found right? Well search engines ideally find a new web site by following a link from another site. This happens when people link to you and this kind of underpins the Internet. By having sites link to you search engine crawlers will find your web site and you never need to submit your web site to the likes of Google. It is still the case that web sites that rank highly on Google and Yahoo for relatively competitive key phrases often have scores if not hundreds of web sites linking to them Google help to explain the importance of linking here http://www.google.com/technology/. So "think links" and be sure to get your site listed in some quality web directories as part of the process. Bad Move 7: Focus on submitting your web site to thousands of search engines and forget the ones that matter Now and then you will see some companies attempting to promote this idea - often by using Bad Move 8! It is true that there are thousands of search engines but the highest volume of traffic comes from less than 10 major search engines. The logic of "If I get one hit a day off each of the 1000 mini search engines I'll get a 1000 visitors a day" unfortunately in practice does not ring true. It is a fact that a huge volume of search engine traffic comes from a small handful of search engine: most notably the Google, Yahoo and Msn. Bad Move 8: Using unsolicited/ Spam email This may seem obvious that this is not the best way to promote your business but is always worth stating. If you're in any doubt simply ask yourself: "Do I like getting Spam emails?" It's common sense to avoid using techniques that annoy people or damage your brand. Using unsolicited email campaigns could result in complaints and at worst your ISP could ban you. If you want a successful email campaign it is advisable to target genuine opted in newsletter subscribers and to always offer an opt-out button in every email. Written by Gareth Davies 2005. You are free to reprint this article with both disclaimer and copyright notice in tact. Gareth Davies is a web promotion consultant working for GSINC Ltd based in North London, UK. For feedback on how to build better sites for search engines email Gareth via garethskettyATyahoo.co.uk or visit http://www.garethsketty.com posted on Nov 20, 2006
You finally have a website and you are ready to sit back and let the visitors start rolling in. How does that saying go? "If you build it they will come." This may be true in Hollywood but certainly not true in the case of your website. You need to constantly work at improving your site to ensure that your website achieves a decent search engine ranking. This is a process that doesn't happen over night but with some concentrated effort you can get better search engine rankings. Here are some tips on getting to the top of the search engines.
To get better search engine rankings you need to keep it simple, natural and use your common sense. Don't try to trick the search engines as this can often result in getting your site banned or dropped from the index. Remember, it can takes month for your optimization efforts to pay off, but when they do you will enjoy better search engine rankings! © 2005 Tanya Beaudoin o/a Office on Demand, All rights reserved. You are free to use this article in its entirety, as long as you include complete attribution, including live web site link. Please also notify Mrs. Beaudoin as to where the material will appear. The attribution should read: "Tanya Beaudoin, B.A. owns and operates a Web Design Company ? OOD Web & Graphic Design Studio - that specializes in e-solutions and graphic design (including web design, search engine optimization and internet marketing products like e-stationary and newsletters). To learn more about getting better search engine rankings, please visit Tanya's web site at http://www.officeondemand.ca posted on Nov 25, 2006
A recent Google patent application has the SEO community buzzing. At a bare minimum this document reveals the direction Google is taking its future search criteria. Changes in the way Google will be evaluating pages for search rankings are intended to address two major problems: - Search engine spam, and - Ensuring that "fresh" documents score higher than "stale" ones Here is a summary of some of the general principles outlined in the document. Most SEO specialists agree these are reasonable principles, and it is only a matter of time before they are adopted. 1. Anchor text of links is still very important. Focus on your anchor text. It should contain your most important keyword. 2. Google expects that anchor texts will vary. A lot of identical anchor text suggests an "unnatural" linking pattern. Anchor texts should vary, but contain related phrases. 3. Google will record when specific links were first discovered, and watch how they change over time. Links with a long life span are considered more valuable than links with a short life span. This adds support to the link delay theory -- that links do not start "counting" until they have been in place for a few months. So get working on those links right now, but don't expect immediate gratification from Google. 4. If a new website gets a flood of new inbound links, this will be an indicator of possible spam activity. Links should be introduced gradually and according to a consistent pattern. 5. Google acknowledges that there may be link "spikes", and so an influx of new links will be interpreted as legitimate if some of the links are from "authoritative" sites. Go after links from authoritative sites. 6. If a stale webpage continues to receive new incoming links, it will be considered fresh. Keep adding links pointing to important pages. 7. Links from fresh pages will in some cases be more valuable than links from "stale" or old pages that have not been recently updated. Get links from pages that are active. If you have high value links from important sites, develop a strategy for keeping those links fresh. 8. Google places more value on a site where link growth remains constant and slow. Slow and steady wins the race. Keep getting those links. 9. Pages with many inbound links will require proportionately more new links in order to remain fresh. The assumption is that the more links a page has, the more it should be getting in the future. Otherwise it starts slipping into the "stale" category. Focus more attention on your most important pages. Regardless of whether of not Google implements all of these criteria, the general direction is clear. More importantly, these points make good SEO sense, and provide a very good place to start when planning a link strategy. Rick Hendershot publishes the Linknet Network, a group of websites and blogs that offer web owners advertising and link promotion opportunities. posted on Nov 23, 2006
We all know that the search engines can't "see" or "read" the graphics on our pages. We also know that we need to provide text on a page, so the spiders will have something to crawl and index. After all, we have to prove to the search engines without a shadow of a doubt that our pages are about what we say or claim they're about if we want to achieve top rankings. That's why I believe so strongly in focusing each page on one single keyword phrase only. As soon as a spider hits a page, I want the spider to know exactly what that page is about. But, many sites out there are graphic intense, often by virtue of their very nature. The sites may sell prints, wallpaper, pictures, graphics, or posters. Or, the sites may sell hats, for example, so that each page is full of pictures of a particular type of hat. Many Web site owners don't want to add text to those pages, because they want to highlight exactly what they're selling. They've created the site with their audience in mind, which is as it should be. After all, when visitors stop by a wallpaper site, they want to see loads of pictures of the different wallpaper samples. They don't want to read about them! So, being careful to adhere to Google's Guidelines that prohibit hiding text, what options do we have with our graphic-intense site? Let's look at some possible solutions. 1. Can you put visible text above or below the graphics on the page? If so, this is your best solution, because you're giving the engines some content to crawl. Simply add a paragraph of content above the graphics, and then a paragraph or two of content below the graphics. Make sure the content focuses on your keyword phrase and that it describes the page accurately. If you don't want to add a full paragraph of content above the graphics, try adding a heading tag containing your keyword phrase. Then, add content beneath the graphics. The bottom line is: you want to start the page with text if at all possible, not graphics. 2. Be creative! Can you add descriptive text about each graphic under or beside the graphic? Can you add little "Tips" or "More Info" boxes on the page that contain valuable information for your users and keyword-containing text for the engines? Can you include testimonials from happy customers that will add valuable keyword-containing content to your page? 3. Leave your existing graphic-intense pages the way they are, and create some new text-based interior pages that are full of valuable content related to your graphics. Pull in traffic through those pages, and provide text links to your pages full of graphics. Be sure to use your important keyword phrase in the link text that links to the pages of graphics. Keep in mind that these new pages are interior pages, which means that they should provide a link to other pages on your site, and your site should provide a link back to those pages. If you've done your homework right, these new pages are providing value to your users, therefore providing value to the search engines, so there's no reason why you wouldn't want to link to these new interior pages. Can you use redirects from the text-based pages to the pages of graphics? I highly recommend not doing so. The engines have never been fond of redirects for one thing. But, even if your redirects aren't "sneaky" (as Google says in their Guidelines), if you don't use text links with the keyword phrase in the link text, you're missing out on one of the most valuable search engine optimization strategies available to you: using your keyword phrase in link text pointing to your pages. 4. You can leave your existing graphic-intense pages as they are, and instead concentrate on "off page" factors such as building link popularity to those pages and making sure that the pages linking to the graphics pages use link text that contains your important keyword phrase. In other words, you can work on your "link reputation." After all, you can compete with the big boys using almost any strategy that is detrimental to search engine rankings if your link popularity and link reputation is strong enough, and if the sites linking to you describe your site using your important keyword phrase. By "strong" enough, I mean that the links should be from popular, authoritative sites in your topic area. Sheer numbers aren't what we're after here. We're after links from popular and authoritative sites in our topic area. We're also after links that use our important keyword phrase in the link text describing our pages. In Conclusion Though the best solution is to add text to your pages of graphics, sometimes you (or your client) won't want to go that route. They may want to keep the existing pages just as they are. In those situations, it's important to have some "Google friendly" solutions that will give you the best chance at achieving top rankings for your pages, while making sure that you're following the guidelines as stated by Google. About The Author Robin Nobles is the Co-Director of Training of Search Engine Workshops with John Alexander. They teach 2-day beginner, 3-day advanced, and 5-day all-inclusive "hands on" search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe. She also teaches online search engine marketing courses through http://www.onlinewebtraining.com, and she's a member of Wordtracker's official question support team. With partner John Alexander, she's co-authored a series of e-books called, "The Totally Non-Technical Guides to Having a Successful Web Site." And, they opened a networking community for search engine marketers called The World Resource Center for Search Engine Marketers. robin@searchengineworkshops.com posted on Nov 18, 2006
Oops! I meant "web content management system for windows." Do search engines understand consumer search engine typos? Typing something so close to what you are looking for, like typing "web content management system fr window" instead of "web content management system for windows" may not seem like a big deal, but search engine bloopers alter consumer searches more than we know. The phrase used in the title, "web content management system fr window" is a real-life example of a common search engine typo. In fact, within that phrase, the "o" and the "s" are missed so often that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN have recorded the phrase "web content management system fr window" as searched about 481 times on a monthly average. You might ask how this affects your search engine searches. Well, let us use the same phrase for an example. Typing the phrase you are looking for, "web content management system for windows," yields about 29.6 million indexed pages in Google, 14.7 million in Yahoo, and 2.3 million in MSN. However, the typo "web content management system fr window," only slightly different from what you really meant to type, yields drastically different results: 654 thousand indexed pages in Google, 131 thousand in Yahoo, and 56.5 thousand in MSN. That doesn't seem so bad. Who doesn't want to narrow down the search? The problem is that the number of indexed pages is not the only difference with search engine typos; the poor search engines are trying to find the most relevant pages they can to the misspelled search, but it may not find what you need. On the one hand, you have tens of millions of relevant pages with a correct search; on the other hand, you have hundreds of thousands of semi-relevant pages. Which would you rather have? Search engine typos are very common, but they do alter the relevance of your results. Joe Miller is an author of informational articles and online advertisements on business, technology, and health. 'Web content management system fr window' is actually 'web content management system for windows'. posted on Nov 23, 2006
There are more than 105 million of them in the United States. Worldwide, there could be at least 250 million of them. Them, according to statistics from the Nielsen/Net Ratings service, is the number of active Web surfers. 250 million in the whole world? The figure is more than the populations of Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and a few non-English speaking countries combined. That's a lot of them! With so many active surfers around, you would think Webmasters and site owners have an easy time attracting them. Actually, they face an uphill battle to bring visitors and, more importantly, consumers to their Web sites. And a Web site without traffic is like a store built in the middle of the desert. You could have the greatest products and most attractive Web design around, but they're worthless if no one visits them. There is one way, however, to turn your Web site into an oasis of business, a way to drive as much traffic to your site as your server can handle: a classified ad. More on that later. First, all Web builders and site owners should know the basic and time-tested ways to attract traffic to their Web site. The key to all of these methods is to attract the right Web surfers. You want what experts call "targeted visitors," or people who are actually interested in what you're selling. To guarantee that this happens, you should follow this checklist of Web traffic golden rules: Step 1: Optimize your Web pages. Webmasters in the know take the time to set their meta tags. These tags, or codes, are hidden keywords in the Web page that tell search engines like Google and Yahoo exactly what your site is all about. A meta tag, for instance, could be "designer handbags," "sporting equipment," or whatever else you happen to be selling. These keywords tell the search engine to direct all handbag or sports shoppers to your site. Step 2: List your site with every search engine out there. For this step, you simply need to surf over to Google, AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines. Click onto their customer service page, where they allow Web builders and site owners to manually submit their site addresses. Step 3. Spice up your site with interactive features. With articles, newsletters, offers, promotions, and discounts, you give your targeted visitors a reason to stay at your site once they find it. More importantly, you give them reasons to come back and tell their friends about the site. Word of mouth is one of the best, and cheapest, forms of advertising on the planet. Step 4. Exchange banner ads with friends and with other companies that you do business with. Banner ads are those eye-catching designs at the top and bottom of Web pages. They're like the billboards of the Internet superhighway. But with these online billboards, a simple click transports the Web surfer directly to your Web site. Step 5. Exchange Web links with friends and business associates. This, Webmasters and site owners, could be the most important way to drive Web traffic to your site. All of the major search engines rank sites by measuring how many links come to and leave from your Web site. So links are a way to measure how worthwhile and how legitimate your site is. The better this measurement, the better chance your site will have to show up well in Web surfers' searches. In other words, these links could be the difference between your site being listed on page 20 of a Google search results, or on page 1. Building better Web links and search engine results-that's where classified sites come into play. Some of the most savvy classified sites on the market now offer Web links in their ads. These links lead right to your business' home page. Not only are these links convenient one-click ways for more customers to reach your site. They also boost your search engine rankings. Of course, for business owners, classified sites have so many other benefits, too. ? Unparalleled exposure. Classified sites are like online malls. Not only will you get exposure from shoppers coming specifically to find your goods. You get "spill over" attention from shoppers who came for another item but then start browsing through all of the other ads in the classified "mall." ? A new arsenal of Web sites. Having online classified ads is like setting up multiple new Web sites across the Internet. Unlike your own original site, these classified ads come with low-cost IT support, security, and advertising. ? Incredible growth opportunities. Businesses and individuals selling on online classified sites pull in more than $1.95 billion a year, according to the statistics firm Kelsey Group. That figure does not even include money from eBay. ? Money for nothing. As valuable as classified sites are, many of the best ones charge very little or absolutely nothing to set up your ads. Add up all of these numbers-250 million active Web surfers in the world, $1.95 billion in classified sales, and $0 cost-and your Web business is sure to come out in the positive. Donald Lee is the public relations manager for Buysellcommunity.com. Buysellcommunity provides free classified listing services for individuals and businesses to market their products and services online. For global and localized classifieds, please visit http://www.buysellcommunity.com Free Buy & Sell Classifieds posted on Nov 22, 2006
Little do you know but you too could be making mistakes with your website that are costing you your search engine rankings. Goggle and the other search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to keep pace of search engine spammers. Some novice website owners may be like me and be making big mistakes in the eyes of the search engine bots which will lower their search engine ranking or blot their website right out of existence from everyone except those people that have been given their website URL. Let me tell you my mistakes and what I've learned from them... In 2000, I started a small research vineyard. Soon I wanted a website to tell people about it, advise others how to grow grapes, and get my research information out to the public. I was on a shoe-string budge so I learned HTML myself. My website was quickly posted to one of those "free" website hosts. Two months later, my website was hitting the top "5" in the search engine rankings for all of my keywords. I had lots of relevant content which made this possible. I was in heaven! I soon realized that the free web host didn't provide all that a webmaster wants (cgi-bin, commerce, etc). I found a better host provider at a reasonable price and I moved my website. Big Mistake #1: I didn't remove the pages from the free website host. I figured with time, that host would see no activity and just drop me from their server to make more room for other websites. Little did I know how long that free website would persist on the Internet. Big Mistake #2: This one is much like the first one, just done in a different manner. After three years, I got tired of my website's appearance. I had learned CSS and wanted to make my website more uniform and professional looking. Slowly, I began transitioning my pages to the new look. Since the search engines knew the old pages, I simply left them on the backend of my website, while naming the new pages differently and more google friendly. Little did I know at the time the search engines would spider both the new and the old pages now. I really didn't know that I was doing anything wrong. When I checked my search engine rankings, I still ranked very high. I should have paid more attention and noticed that sometimes it was the new pages that ranked up there but often it was the old pages. They had been there all along and still commanded those high search engine rankings. Once in a while I even saw some of the old pages from the free web host days. I guess I was only concerned about my search engine rankings, not which pages, new or old were being indexed. After all, as long as my site was getting noticed, And traffic was coming to my website so why care? Big Mistake #3: I wanted to put up more relative content in the form of articles related to growing grapes and win on my website. I though this would help my search engine rankings for some keywords I was low in and also help my website visitors. I purchased a program named "Article Equalizer" to make this task easier on myself. Being a new user of this program, I began to use this software with the templates that came with the program. It seemed to work well and produced the results I wanted. Little did I know that by using the built-in templates that came with this software, a "finger print" would be placed in the resulting pages that would identify that I used this program to generate the index to the article and the article pages themselves. Mistake #4: To aggravate the above mistake, I loaded the index page to the back end of my website. This index page was a collection of hyperlinks, no content, just links. Goggle drastically changed its algorithm early in the year 2005. The unthinkable happened. Not only did my search engine rankings drop, they disappeared altogether. I wasn't even in Google. Google had treated me as a search engine spammer! I had lost my top rankings and now wasn't even indexed. I had violated Googles new rules. I learn a lot from my mistakes. What rules did I violate? First, I had multiple pages of the same content all over the web and my own website. Google says, "Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content." Boy, had I done that. And without even knowing it. I had links up on the search engines that lead to multiple pages on my own site and to my old free one. I had created pages that had multiple links that lead back to my main page through my article directory index. I know it looked like I was spamming Google but it was just a naive mistake, compounded through the software that was going to save me time. Naive mistakes can cost you everything when you're running up against google. My laziness cost me. I didn't erase what I had created before and had used a program to save me some time. I've remedied my mistakes but am yet to be found in Google. They are unforgiving in that respect but I believe that I will soon be back in their good graces. Learn from my mistakes and don't make them. If you have disappeared from Google, you might want to check and see if you too have made some naive mistakes like I did. Change your website to conform to Google's guidelines and then re-submit your site. If that doesn't work. You'll have to start all over with a new domain name. And that can be a painful waste of time. Jim Bruce of Ristvin Marketing helps newbie internet marketers develop their online businesses through advice and business software. You can find out more at http://www.ristvinmarketing.com posted on Nov 24, 2006
There has been a good deal written about the Google 'sandbox' effect, as it's known. It has been taking up a lot of forum and article space over the last few months. I can't help wonder why most of the comment I've been seeing is negative or at least ambivalent about the concept (if of course, it really exists, as is the case with much about SEs that we don't truly know). I'm sure most are very familiar with the concept of the 'sandbox' but for those who aren't and at the risk of boring everyone else, here is a very brief rundown: Google, it is said, have decided that newly listed websites should have their listing (and PR etc) placed on hold for an 'unknown' period (the consensus seems to be around 90 -120 days) in order to make sure that they firstly, stick around for more than the specified period, and probably also continue to rank in the same way as they 'initially' do. The concept has been likened to 'sending them off to play in the sandbox with all the other kiddies' until they mature and can be judged by the same criteria as the rest. Frankly, I can't see any problem with the idea at all. I have websites that have been online some time and other, newer ones that would be included in this 'sandbox' category, so I'm not saying this as someone who has only established sites that wishes to make it as difficult as possible for new competition to 'get established'. Over the last few years, I've seen so many people decide (often on a whim and as often again with much planning) to try their hand at one form of Internet business or another, only to give up after a very short time. Certainly not long enough to see themselves out of the 'sandbox' (if it exists). I'm not sure of the exact count, but Google® have around 8.2 billion web pages indexed and in my opinion, that's far too many websites in almost every category on every topic. It's also true that the vast majority are idle and contributing nothing to the average Internet user. Speaking strictly about the Home Based Business area, I'm sure no one could possibly disagree that any kind of idea or system, which requires a website to first prove itself as a positive contribution and demonstrate it will be online for more than a few months, is surely welcome. After all, anybody who has had any degree of success in an Internet Home Business will tell you that it takes work, time and perseverance to get to the point where it is remotely worth your while (except for a few limited exceptions). So why would anyone who is serious about it be opposed to a relatively short 'trial' period, where their commitment needs to be examined and established? If anyone really thinks that they are going to see any great benefit from an Internet business website in the first 90 -120 days, then they really need to re-evaluate their reason for doing it (even though so many 'gurus' guarantee success in far less time...) As for websites of an educational, information or entertainment nature, I feel the same should apply. If something like the 'sandbox' had been around a lot earlier and was implemented by all the SEs, there certainly wouldn't be as many dead links and inactive websites as there are. In most cases and in most places, there is no licensing or certification whatsoever needed to begin a website about anything at all (even in the guise of a so called 'expert' or 'guru'). So anything in the form of a trial or cooling down period (even though the 'sandbox' doesn't fill the bill to any great degree) is a step in the right direction towards controlling the number of completely useless and pointless websites that exist, for a short time, purely on a whim or search for a quick buck. Just to qualify my comments a little, I know there are a number of 'personal' websites and 'Journals' etc. These, of course, are a means of personal expression and everyone has the right to tell the world about themselves and to discuss whatever their fancy. I don't believe that these types of websites are in any way unwanted. Obviously, such sites would not be included in the vast majority of meaningful searches, purely by virtue of their very nature and such, are not contributing to the abundance of 'dead' or 'idle' websites. The 2005 Edition of Steve Brennan's popular ebook title 'The Affiliate Guide Book' is now available. He also operates a number of Affiliate wesbites including Hair Loss Remedy and Quit Smoking OnlinePlus. posted on Nov 25, 2006
The term, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), refers to a set of techniques by which web sites and web pages are constructed for maximum recognition and ranking by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search. Using the right techniques can guarantee top listing positions for keywords and keyphrases that are related to a site. Search engines have one simple objective: To deliver results that are relevant and meaningful to its users. If this objective is kept in mind, building web pages that help search engines meet this objective is not difficult. Most SEO "tricks" generally don't work because search engines quickly discover and ignore them - or worse, penalize the site than uses them. LeaseGuide.com uses a number of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods to lock in its #1 position for "car leasing" and many other search terms on Google, MSN, Yahoo, and others. Here are the primary SEO techniques used: - Keyword or keyphrase in HTML page title. - Keyword or keyphrase in the text title at top of page. - Keyword or keyphrase in ALT parameter of appropriate IMG tags. - Keyword or keyphrase in first paragraph of text on page. - Keyword or keyphrase in name of HTML page file. - Keyword or keyphrase used frequently (but too frequently) in text of page. - Keyword or keyphrase in text of all links to the page. Notice that I haven't mentioned using META tags in HTML headers. Although you'll find them on many of our pages, they were placed there in the past when these parameters were more important than now. Although Google sometimes uses the contents of the META DESCRIPTION tag in its site summary description, it's apparently not used in determining search results. It takes a little time for SEO techniques to work, so be patient and don't expect overnight success. Once you begin getting good rankings on your site, any new pages you add will automatically enjoy easier and faster results. Al Hearn is owner and operator of LeaseGuide.com, a popular and highly ranked automotive consumer web site. It has helped thousands of visitors since 1995. posted on Nov 22, 2006
Extra, Extra Google Now Gives you feedback. By Creating a Google Sitemap using free online tools you can get Google to crawl your site within 24 Hours. As an Added bonus after Google Crawls your site they give you feedback about any problems they encountered. To take advantage of this amazing service from yahoo just follow these 4 simple steps. Step 1 Get a Google Site Map Account In order to create a Google Sitemap account just cut and paste the below URL in your browser and follow the simple directions https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login) Step 2 Create Your Site map You can create your Sitemap either as an XML file or a TXT file. XML is the PPreferred method since you can give Google more information about your Web Site. You do not need to know XML to create a Google Sitemap. Not with this free web based tool. Simply go to the below web site type in your domain and it will automatically spider your site and create a Google Site Map for you. http://www.sitemapspal.com/ If You prefer to use a text file simply following the below direction taken directly from the Google Help File (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/other.html) Google accepts simple text files that list URLs. As the text files contain only a list of URLs, Google prefers that you use the Sitemap protocol so you can provide additional information about your URLs. The text file must follow these guidelines: Step 3 Upload your Site Map File To Your Web Page Once you have created an XML or TXT Sitemap using the instructions in Step 2 you would just upload it to your web page either by FTP or by using the Cpanel from your Web Host. Step 4 Tell Google The last step in this process is to tell Google about your Sitemap. You simply Log In to your Google site map account and add the URL of you Site Map. Be sure and check back a few hours later to make sure it uploaded correctly. https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login Now be sure and repeat the above 4 Steps whenever you change your website Bonus Step 5 After Google has read your Sitemap and crawled your site (usually 12-24 Hours) you will see a verify link next to your Sitemap name. Click the link and Google will instruct you to create a blank file and place it on your Web Page, Once you have done that Google will tell you any problems it encountered crawling your Page About The Author: posted on Nov 25, 2006
Everybody knows that getting indexed in Google is getting more and more difficult each day and every body is looking for that edge over the competition. Most "white hat" SEO's frown upon methods like cloaking, blog and ping and other such "black hat" techniques and never had any special technique that they could use to help get their pages indexed better. Well, presenting Google Sitemaps, Googles latest offering which is still in the beta stage, and which won't make the purists frown. https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/stats Google sitemaps is a service that allows webmasters to define how often their sites' content is going to change, which is supposed to give Google a better idea of what pages to index. By placing a specially formatted XML file on your web server, you inform Google of whenever your pages change, and then the googlebot crawls the updated pages making the necessary updates to its database. Google has provided the format your xml file has to be in at https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html An interesting point is that the xml file has 2 tags, changefreq and priority with which you can also indicate how important each page is, and how frequently the page changes. The valid values for changefreq are "always", "hourly", "daily", "weekly", "monthly", "yearly" and "never" and similarly the priority can vary from 0.0 to 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s) on your site and 1.0 identifies the highest priority page(s) on your site. Once you have the xml file in place on your server, you need to inform Google about it by opening this URL in your browser http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=URL where the URL part in the above URL should be the URL-encoded location of your Sitemaps xml file. Now Google has provided an open source script that will automatically generate the xml file for you. The only drawback being its in a scripting language called Python. There are however several Free Third Party scripts and tools available. 1)Softplus GSiteCrawler: This is a windows software and is extremely easy to use.It has been coded in Visual Basic 6.0. http://johannesmueller.com/gs/ 2)SiteMaps Pal: This is a online service that generates the sitemap for you.It has a limit of 1000 links. So if you web site has more than 1000 links, this won't work for you. http://www.sitemapspal.com/ 3)Google Sitemap Generator: This is another free online sitemap creator.This service lets you crawl sites 3 levels deep and limits the number of links to 400. http://www.my-google-sitemap.com/ 4)phpSitemapNG from enarion: This is a php script that you need to upload to the root of your web site and the script generates the sitemap file on the server. It also lets you submit the sitemap to Google by clicking a link. The drawback of this script is that you will need to upload it to each of your sites and it also doesn't recognize subdomains. http://enarion.net/google/ 5)Google Sitemap Generator for Dreamweaver: This dreamweaver extension by George Petrov lets you quickly create Google Sitemaps for your dreamweaver sites. http://www.dmxzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=10538 6)Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress: Here is a plugin for wordpress users http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator- v2-final 7)SecretSpider generator: This is a paid software priced at $97. Its advantages are that it also lets you gzip the xml file thereby making it smaller in size. So, go ahead and make your website more Google-friendly. About The Author This article may be reprinted provided the resource box is kept intact, with the active links included. posted on Nov 23, 2006
If you're reading this article, you've probably discovered that simply building a website is not enough to ensure success with your small business. Competition on the web is fierce. Rising to the top of the search engines is often a combination of web-savvy marketing, link trading, and understanding the intricacies of complex ranking algorithms for search engines. You may have already spent a great deal of time optimizing your pages, creating content, and building your email lists. It's easy to get overwhelmed in your web marketing endeavors, especially if you're a small business or a business moving online from a brick-and-mortar location. Don't worry - the marketing tools that you're about to work with will enhance your search engine rankings AND attract more visitors, and they don't require any extra coding or hard core marketing. You can accomplish a lot in three days - maybe enough to take the rest of the week off! Day #1: Use Craig's List. (http://www.CraigsList.org) This is a simple, but rarely used, tool for those that are not so tech-savvy. If you're not familiar with Craig's List, here is a bit of information: it is one of the most highly-trafficked websites for thirty-something's and twenty-something's on the web. CraigsList announced last year that they were currently serving over 75 million page views per month. The site is ranked among the world's 125 busiest websites (Alexa). Almost all ads are free (only employers pay to post "help wanted" ads in some areas), and highly trafficked in major cities such as San Francisco, New York, and DC. Craig's List adds instant link popularity - a friend of mine started a literary website and found himself with over 800 hits a day from several well-constructed CraigsList ads that were "googled". How to Do It: Step 1: Write the ad first. 50-100 keyword-rich words work best, along with a link using your target keywords. Craig's List accepts html tags and allows you to upload images. If you are an online retailer, consider advertising one product as a test with a link to your website's entrance. Step 2: Decide which region you are posting in. If you are a national company, try out a major metropolitan area. If you are regional, stick to the area you service. Step 3: Find the appropriate category for your ad. Don't spam the forums, the Craig's List Counter Culture will resent you! If your website advertises a massage business, choose "therapeutic services". If you offer classes, choose "lessons". If you don't fit into a specific category, choose "small business ads". Step 4: Write a specific, keyword-minded headline - don't try to be too vague or clever. If you offer freebies or coupons, mention this in your ad. Step 5: Post! And make sure you check your email to confirm the ad. (You can always tweak the ad as long as you keep the email.) If you have time, create an additional ads. You'll have to change most of the content. CraigsList's software is intelligent with recognizing duplicate content. If you are compelled to place a second, third, or 30th ad, change up your keywords and rewrite the ad. Craig's List erases ads after 30-60 days, so be prepared to post again in a month or so. It's worth the effort - if not for the direct response, then at least for the link popularity. Craig's List is one of the first websites in line for the infamous "Google dance." Day #2: Become a Vendor Okay, you're probably thinking, I already AM a vendor. My question to you is, "Why aren't you listed as one?" I'm not talking about the internet directories or link exchange websites that list thousands of vendors under the term "resource directory". What I'm referring to, specifically, is what associations, trade publications, and commerce websites term as a "vendor list". (Sometimes also called a "vendor directory".) Vendor lists and directories are great tools to market your website, services and products to a specific niche. The best part is that most of these places don't require a link-back and your listing is permanent. The resources listed are provided as a service to their members. In fact, many of these companies will also send out a yearly print version of their vendor list. Your link popularity will be affected as well, since associations and other professional organizations are typically linked to by their members.(making them a "popular site" in the eyes of the search engines?) It really doesn't matter what you're selling - a quick Google search will turn up links to a plethora of vendor lists in various industries and niches. How to Do It: Step 1: Using your keywords, prepare your descriptions ahead of time. If you've worked with link exchanges, you'll probably already have a few descriptions in mind. The link title should contain your primary keywords. (Not necessarily your website or company name!) for example, if you sell magic supplies, you'll probably want to use the word "magic supplies" in the title. Step 2: Find the directories. Keep in mind, a lot of government website use these terms as well, which is great if you have a service or products to sell to the government - you can print out the paperwork to do later. Otherwise, ignore the .Use Google (of course!) to find specific niches. The following terms will help you find what you need. Substitute your market or service for the word "keyword" to find the directories you need. - "vendor list" keyword - "keyword" vendor list - "keyword" supplier list - "supplier list" keyword - "vendor directory" keyword - "keyword" vendor directory - "supplier directory" keyword - "keyword" supplier directory Some of the website will require you to email the information, while others simply have a form to fill out and wait for approval. It may seem a bit tedious, but if you turn on "auto fill" through your browser, you'll find it easier to fill out a lot of forms in little time. Remember, a permanent link from a respected authority is a powerful thing! Day 3: Get Froogled (http://www.froogle.com) If you sell a service or information product, it's time to try out Google's newest feature: Froogle. Froogle allows you to upload images, product descriptions, and physical store information to its search engine within 24 hours. And remember, as a Google product, your website unofficially has a chance of increased ratings - after all, Google googles Fro ogle! (say that ten times fast!) How to Do It: You can find all of the step-by-step information on using Froogle at its respective homepage. If you don't sell specific items, however, Google isn't going to approve your listing. If you're a service provider, you MAY be allowed to create listings. For example, you can't list vague graphic design services but you may be allowed to use a "logo design package". You may also be able to publish a report or eBook and market it alongside its print competition. If Google doesn't accept your product feed, it may be worth it to open up an eBay store. Ebay stores are automatically added to Google's feeds, and although they cost a little extra money a month, it may be worth it considering the sheer numbers of searches Froogle is already claiming. Once you've put these powerful tools into motion, keep a eye on your rankings and your website statistics to see what's working and what isn't. Take a breath before you get back to your enormous to-do list. Congratulate yourself for being ahead of the game. After all, up to 70 percent of small businesses are still without a web presence. Take some pride in building your business in a global market. And get back to your weekend, instead of your work. :- ) Melissa Brewer is a freelance copywriter specializing in original web site content. Her articles have appeared across the web and she is available for hire through her website or eLance.com. posted on Nov 24, 2006
Wouldn't it be nice if the search engines could comprehend our impressions of search results and adjust their databases accordingly? Properly optimized web pages would show up well in contextual searches and be rewarded with favorable reviews and listings. Pages which were spam or which had content that did not properly match the query would get negative responses and be pushed down in the search results. Well, this reality is much closer than you might think. To date, most webmasters and search engine marketers have ignored or overlooked the importance of traffic as part of a search engine algorithm, and thus, not taken it into consideration as part of their search engine optimization strategy. However, that might soon change as search engines explore new methods to improve their search result offerings. Teoma and Alexa already employ traffic as a factor in the presentation of their search results. Teoma incorporated the technology used by Direct Hit, the first engine to use click through tracking and stickiness measurement as part of their ranking algorithm. More about Alexa below. How can Traffic be a Factor? Click popularity sorting algorithms track how many users click on a link and stickiness measurement calculates how long they stay at a website. Properly used and combined, this data can make it possible for users, via passive feedback, to help search engines organize and present relevant search results. Click popularity is calculated by measuring the number of clicks each web site receives from a search engine's results page. The theory is that the more often the search result is clicked, the more popular the web site must be. For many engines the click through calculation ends there. But for the search engines that have enabled toolbars, the possibilities are enormous. Stickiness measurement is a really great idea in theory, the premise being that a user will click the first result, and either spend time reading a relevant web page, or will click on the back button, and look at the next result. The longer a user spends on each page, the more relevant it must be. This measurement does go a long way to fixing the problem with "spoofing" click popularity results. A great example of a search engine that uses this type of data in their algorithms is Alexa. Alexa's algorithm is different from the other search engines. Their click popularity algorithm collects traffic pattern data from their own site, partner sites, and also from their own toolbar. Alexa combines three distinct concepts: link popularity, click popularity and click depth. Its directory ranks related links based on popularity, so if your web site is popular, your site will be well placed in Alexa. The Alexa toolbar doesn't just allow searches, it also reports on people's Internet navigation patterns. It records where people who use the Alexa toolbar go. For example, their technology is able to build a profile of which web sites are popular in the context of which search topic, and display the results sorted according to overall popularity on the Internet. For example a user clicks a link to a "financial planner", but the web site content is an "online casino". They curse for a moment, sigh, and click back to get back to the search results, and look at the next result; the web site gets a low score. The next result is on topic, and they read 4 or 5 pages of content. This pattern is clearly identifiable and used by Alexa to help them sort results by popularity. The theory is that the more page views a web page has, the more useful a resource it must be. For example, follow this link today - http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=http://www.metamend.com/ - look at the traffic details chart, and then click the "Go to site now" button. Repeat the procedure again tomorrow and you should see a spike in user traffic. This shows how Alexa ranks a web site for a single day. What Can I Do To Score Higher With Click Popularity Algorithms? Since the scores that generate search engine rankings are based on numerous factors, there's no magic formula to improve your site's placement. It's a combination of things. Optimizing your content, structure and meta tags, and increasing keyword density won't directly change how your site performs in click-tracking systems, but optimizing them will help your web site's stickiness measurement by ensuring that the content is relevant to the search query. This relevance will help it move up the rankings and thus improve its click popularity score. Search Engines Can Use the Click Through Strategy to Improve Results Search engines need to keep an eye to new technologies and innovative techniques to improve the quality of their search results. Their business model is based on providing highly relevant results to a query quickly and efficiently. If they deliver inaccurate results too often, searchers will go elsewhere to find a more reliable information resource. The proper and carefully balanced application of usage data, such as that collected by Alexa, combined with a comprehensive ranking algorithm could be employed to improve the quality of search results for web searchers. Such a ranking formula would certainly cause some waves within the search engine community and with good reason. It would turn existing search engine results on their head by demonstrating that search results need not be passive. Public feedback to previous search results could be factored into improving future search results. Is any search engine employing such a ranking formula? The answer is yes. Exactseek recently announced it had implemented such a system, making it the first search engine to integrate direct customer feedback into its results. Exactseek still places an emphasis on content and quality of optimization, so a well optimized web site, which meets their guidelines will perform well. What this customer feedback system will do is validate the entire process, automatically letting the search engine know how well received a search result is. Popular results will get extended views, whereas unpopular results will be pushed down in ranking. Exactseek has recently entered into a variety of technology alliances, including the creation of an Exactseek Meta Tag awarded solely to web sites that meet their quality of optimization standards. Cumulatively, their alliances combine to dramatically improve their search results. ExactSeek's innovative approach to ranking search results could be the beginning of a trend among search engines to incorporate traffic data into their ranking algorithms. The searching public will likely have the last word, but webmasters and search engine marketers should take notice that the winds of change are once again blowing on the search engine playing field. Did you find the information in this article useful? Feel free to pass it along to a friend or drop us a line at comments@metamend.com. About The Author Richard Zwicky is a founder and the CEO of Metamend Software, a Victoria, B.C. based firm whose cutting edge Search Engine Optimization software has been recognized around the world as a leader in its field. Employing a staff of 10, the firm's business comes from around the world, with clients from every continent. Most recently the company was recognized for their geo-locational, or GIS technology, which correlates online businesses with their physical locations, as well as their cutting edge advances in contextual search algorithms. posted on Nov 20, 2006
As a search engine optimization specialist I often optimize existing web pages for small business clients, upload them to the site and see pages re-indexed by Google within a week. This only happens with existing business sites that have been online for a few years. Google seems to be updating their index as often as every other week at this point and older established sites that are already indexed seem to be re- crawled on that twice a month schedule on a fairly routine basis. Two clients that hired me for recent work saw their rankings shoot to the top for a newly targeted search phrase in a weekend when I did optimization on a Thursday and they were ranked instantly by Saturday. Now keep in mind that this doesn't happen for everyone, only those that have been online for some period and already have significant content that simply needs tweaking and proper title and metatag information added. They usually have relatively good existing PageRank and do well for other RELEVANT search phrases already. I offer that warning only to avoid instilling false hopes in anyone hoping to achieve the same instant ranking boost overnight. Those clients that do succeed in this way are often thrilled with the results accomplished in such short order. I'd love to be able to offer that type of ranking boosts to everyone, but some are more equal than others when it comes to easy, inexpensive SEO tune-ups that rev up your rankings overnight. Your mileage may vary. WHY DO NEW SITES SUFFER? What is going on with newer sites that don't get crawled for months? I've got a client, a newer attorney directory that offers tons of great information in the form of articles on specific areas of law, links to incredibly valuable and relevant legal sites and over 600,000 attorneys listed by practice area and state. Yet the site has not been re-crawled by Google for over 3 months! Now this would not be such a big issue for many sites, but this site is relatively new and we've optimized all the titles, tags & page text, created a complete site map and placed links to all these resources on the front page. I know that the site is not being crawled because Google's cached copy of the front page shows it before we did the work four months ago, without the new links and without title tags. We've submitted the site by hand, (manually) once a month for three months via the Google Add URL page. http://www.google.com/addurl.html When the hand submission failed to get it re-indexed for four months, we submitted the sitemap page, which has not been crawled at all. Google shows only ONE page on this site, when in fact it has thousands of pages, a sitemap and dozens static pages! Part of the problem is that this site must be dynamic, since a database of over 632,000 attorneys must be accessed, retrieved and served for any of those law firms searched for to be returned to the site visitor. Google warns owners of dynamic sites that Googlebot may not crawl dynamically generated pages with "?"" question marks in the URL. This is to avoid crashing the server with too many concurrent page requests from Google's spider. http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html#A1 The solution to this dynamic URL problem has been discussed widely in search engine forums and solutions have been bandied about including software provided by SEO's, URL re-write techniques for dynamic pages on APACHE servers http://www.alistapart.com/articles/urls/ and PHP pages http://www.stargeek.com/php-seo.php to generate search engine friendly URL's. Others recommend simply adding static HTML sitemap pages as alternatives for the search engine spiders. In this instance the client's developer simply said "I can't do that (PHP solution) on this server". So we resorted to putting up the static HTML sitemap pages with hard-coded URLS to the main 54 pages of the site at http://lawfirm411.com/Law-Firm-411-sitemap.html This should get at least those fifty pages crawled by Googlebot, but Googles' spider appears not to be crawling this site at all. How do we know this? See for yourself by using the following query in the search box at Google: allinurl:www.lawfirm411.com where the result page shows ONE page in the results. If you try that query on your own site (replace your own domain name for lawfirm411.com), you'll see the results lists ALL your pages. The site home page was crawled by Google four months ago, when they took their "Cached Snapshot" of the page. You can see this by visiting the Google cached page here: http://66.102.7.104/search?sourceid=navclient&;ie=UTF-8&q=cache:www.lawfirm411.com where the date of this snapshot is "Apr 20, 2004 07:42:19 GMT" and they haven't been back since. The page in that snapshot has none of the newly added links, an outdated title tag, and old content. This problem is not unique to this site. One client we worked with two years ago had a dynamically generated, framed site! Those two site structures have always given search engines trouble. Their site was not crawled at all and only the front page showed up. Our solution was to create a second domain (owned by the client), which had static HTML pages that precisely mirrored the content of the client's framed, dynamically generated site. Guess what happened after Googlebot crawled the static site? Google indexed the framed site in full and then banned the static site from the index! Not an approach we advocate, but the one that worked for this client. We're still searching for ways to get Googlebot back to LawFirm411.com before creating that new static site, but decided to share this odd experience with the SEO community before going to any extremes. Google provides over 70% of most search engine referred traffic to ALL of our clients and we realized we can't site idly by and see a major client languish because Googlebot didn't like what it found at the client site on the first visit four months ago. This issue dogs newer sites in other places as well. The Open Directory Project has also become notoriously slow in adding new sites to the directory and in this case, has not picked up this site even after 6 regular monthly submissions. The web playing field may have begun tilting toward older, established sites and away from new ones. ------------------------------------------------------------ Mike Banks Valentine is the SEO for http://www.lawfirm411.com Contact him at http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm Improve Your Small Business Online at our Ecommerce Tutorial http://website101.com/Free-Tutorials/index.html ------------------------------------------------------------ posted on Nov 27, 2006
The question for this article is whether or not you should use "absolute url's" or "relative url's"? Not only that, this article researches whether or not Google ranks these methods differently. Absolute: You use the entire url pointing to the designated page. ex. www.yoursite.com/page1/index.html Relative: You use an automatic path to the file ex. /page1/index.html Relative gives a path that is "assumed". Your browser will automatically "assume" to put www.yoursite.com before the link. When researching these two methods, I used 4 factors to consider: So here's the results of this study: So it seems safe to say that Google doesn't necessarily rank "absolute/relative" paths differently. Google may recognize the fact that neither method is wrong, it only reflects the designers preference. There's only 1 type of Absolute and Relative paths that get a bad rank. Web sites that use "tracking url's" or data base urls get a significant reduction in page rank emmediately. The easiest way to notice this in action is to go to www.pogo.com (Online games). You would think that pogo has a great rank but nope, in fact their main page rank is 0/10. This happens because every time google crawls through their url, the site is different. So if you care about page rank, keep your url's the same as the day your site was born! About The Author Martin Lemieux is leading the field online for web design and online advertising. Visit his company right away for many marketing tips & strategies: http://www.smartads.info OASES - Online Advertising Search Engine Services http://www.flyinggelatingames.com The Web Clinic - FREE MARKETING TOOLS posted on Nov 18, 2006
It's no secret that Search Engine marketing can drive significant amounts of very qualified traffic to a web site ? as 85% of Internet users utilize search engines to find/research for goods and services. The problem for many companies is the difficulty they face sifting through conflicting information and hyperbole! Here is my top five list of myths that need to be run to ground. Big Picture Myth One ? Search engine ranking leads are not as good as those which originate from other forms of traditional marketing (print, direct mail, PR, etc.) ? this is absolute hogwash, the truth is many agencies don't have a clue about s/e ranking, so they push their clients to ignore this form of advertising. They simply don't want to recommend anything they don't understand and/or utilize an interactive marketing vehicle that requires a blend of very specialized technology and processes. We've in fact found just the opposite when we've analyzed s/e traffic versus other types of leads for our clients; i.e. search engine traffic can be much better, as it is comprised of individuals who are actively seeking info, not just people whose curiosity has been piqued by an eye-catching publication ad or press release. And, when we've analyzed the data by tracking leads via a landing page (on a web site) we've discovered that CPL (cost per lead) numbers can be much lower for s/e ranking than other more traditional marketing methods. Big Picture Myth Two ? Effective s/e marketing can be done in house ? this is rarely the case, the sheer complexity and online competition (digital warfare!) for rankings makes this extremely difficult for most companies. Based upon our analysis over 73% of corporate accounts don't understand the basic fundamentals; i.e. how to properly use keywords, meta tags and titles and worse, don't submit their web sites to top tier Directories (Yahoo, LookSmart, OPD) and the hundreds of second tier directories. Most companies delegate the s/e submissions to the webmaster or web site development staff and they just don't have the time to understand the daunting complexities required to generate page 1-3 rankings - or to stay abreast of the shifting submissions and ranking criteria standards, as modified monthly by top tier search engines. And, in many companies the s/e ranking is added to the over worked webmaster's tasks purely as an afterthought ? as opposed to being addressed formally by the marketing department, with dedicated personnel and a budget. Big Picture Myth Three ? off the shelf software that submits a site to thousands of web sites and presents snazzy reports can do it all. This is so inaccurate and nothing can be further from the truth ? it takes a tremendous amount of labor and time to identify keyword sets (not just words), optimize the content for these keywords, submit the pages while obeying the rules of the road and then continually analyzing rankings and tweaking to maintain and drive rankings (web site visibility). Software can certainly help to automate some facets of the process and be used for back end analysis ? but you can't expect any application to make the job easy, there is too much inherent complexity in the processes. And, competition for keyword sets is fierce ? as there are an estimated 5-10M registered domains (the numbers vary widely) with 60K new domains being registered every day. Big Picture Myths Four and Five ? Any page listing will help to drive traffic to a web site ? this is another misconception. If you are aren't achieving page 1-3 rankings then your wasting a great deal of time and resources ? most people never drill down below these pages. Another common mistake is trying to achieve s/e rankings for a specific URL or product ? if people know the name of a company or product they will find your web site easily, it's a waste of resources to optimize for these specialized terms in 80% of most cases. About The Author Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of business development and marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc., http://www.intelective.com, a results-driven marketing services company providing proprietary services to clients encompassing startups to public companies. Lee@intelective.com posted on Nov 21, 2006
The search engine giants are locked in an all out power struggle to get your attention and patronage. Over the past 6 months there have been many changes. The big guys are getting even bigger, but there are a number of new players vying for your patronage too. The top three Search Engines are Yahoo, MSN and Google. It would seem that Yahoo serves the most searches followed by MSN and then Google. Only a year ago Google supplied both Yahoo and MSN with search listings. Yahoo has progresses from a Directory to a fully fledged search engine as has MSN with the launch of their new Search Engine. However Google still supplies search results to many other search engines including AOL, Alexa and a host of small and medium sized search engines. It is my belief that any small business owner should know the basics of search engine placement and it is surprisingly easy to list your Web site, but even easier to get it ignored or even black listed by search engines. All the information you require to list your site is only a search away. But you have to use the right search query. Don't type in 'search engines' into any search engine, as you will end up with a heap of useless information. It will probably list the top search engines, but it will probably not tell you how to prepare your Web site or how to get the best coverage for a listing. For information on how to prepare your site I would try a search for a phrase like "search engine optimism" with the quotes so that your search is for that exact phase. The trouble is with first time Web site owners they don't always know the terminology, even a search for 'seo' will bring up a list of useful resources. Other search phases include, optimize website, website optimizing, website optimization, web site optimization and website promotion, these are all useful search phases. My experience is that any search engine submission company that promotes its services through paid memberships or sites that offer to list your site on many of the 100,000 plus search engines has more chance of getting your site ignored or black listed. Some companies do provide a good service but they are few and far between. I personally only add a site to one search engine at a time and only the one time although there are a small number of search engines that will only list your site for a set period of time. There is no set right way to list your site in search engines. It is not even necessary to physically add your site to a single search engine. A good example is my Ezine Web site. To date I have not submitted my site to a single search engine. Internet-Income-Index.com I have added links to a couple of my personal sites and added my ezine articles to an Article directory or two and for a number of searches my site now comes up in the top 10 listing. Go to Google.com and try a search for the three main companies I promote online and see for yourself, TrafficOasis, ItsYourNet and Madison Dynamics ! So as you can see it is not necessary to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on promotion of your Web site. If I can get top 10 listings for my site within 6 months for Affiliated programs that have in the case of TrafficOasis over 125,000 members who I would assume are also promoting their TrafficOasis page. A top listing is possible. Listing your site will be a different process to how others promote their sites. Even I promote one site different to another site. Check http://www.allsearchengines.com for lists Search Engines by product, service, category and country. If you have a communications company, I would suggest you list your site in communications specific search engines and directories. Using pay-per-click is one way to promote your Website But even then my ezine site has listings on the first page of Overture.com who are one of the major pay-per-click search engines owned by Yahoo. Pay per click can become an expensive choice if your site is not optimized for both search engines and people. There are a number of theories that the Gurus claim are best. Yanik Silver suggest that with mini sites of a few pages focused on one product or service are the story. I totally agree, but a problem does arise when you are promoting a number of companies that have numerous products. This requires creating a site that houses the various products on individual pages like my ezine site. It will take you more time keeping it updated but either a mini site or a larger site will work if the proper research, optimizing and planning is completed. Learning as much as you can about search engines is of the utmost importance if you hope to achieve high page ranking and for your prospective site visitor to stay at your site to make a purchase ... Like you choosing the right search phase to get useful information on site optimization, the same applies to your site too. Your site content must have the relevant content to provide to search engines so that they can list your site within the appropriate search results, then to get the searcher to decide to visit and stay at your site. Let me simplify that. Your site content must be relevant both for your visitors and search engines. Failure in one area directly affects the other. May all your promotions be Successful. PETER GREEN. Editor of ~ The INDEX ~ ezine. Editor@Internet-income-index.com http://www.Internet-Income-Index.com Your Free Weekly Internet Marketing News, Ideas, Resources and Sources Ezine. posted on Nov 21, 2006
In recent times, I have been closely studying keywords that have famous city names at the end of them and what I have discovered is nothing short of amazing. My research started off with pay-per-click ads. With Google Adsense the same keyword with only a city inserted at the end can attract substantially higher paying adsense ads to your site. That really surprised me and I went further and researched the kind of traffic the same keywords get for different well know American cities. Again I was in for a shock. Some cities have very high traffic for a certain keyword when you compare them to others for the same keyword. What all this means is that you can target certain high traffic niches by simply adding the names of cities to the end of your keywords. On your site you can go further and do a little research about a certain keyword subject in the city or cities that you are targeting and have a page for that city. The effect is that your site will end up being ranked very high in certain cities. This should automatically drive more traffic to your site. In fact you will be able to reach traffic that you would not have otherwise been able to reach. The really amazing and attractive thing about this strategy is the fact that you only need to make very minor adjustments in your existing content, maybe even only create city pages with exactly the same content adjusted. What's more, with some subjects you only need to plant the name of the city in the article a few times and you will have started targeting popular searches that include the names of popular cities. It really is amazing that such a simple thing as inserting the name of famous American cities can make such a huge difference in the traffic and earnings of a website or blog. Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for http://www.websitesource.com and http://www.lowpricedomains.com with experience in the website hosting industry. posted on Nov 25, 2006
If you have been a webmaster for more than a week, you've surely heard the saying "Content Is King". And it really is true! This article will explain why the regular addition of fresh content to your website is so crucial and explain several ways to do it easily and inexpensively (even free). Why Adding Fresh Content Regularly Is So Important Adding new content to your website on a regular basis is the key to your online success for several reasons: 1 - The search engine spiders LOVE to crawl new pages. Their is intense competition in the quest to be considered "the best" overall search engine, and the total quantity of pages in their index is an important bragging right for the winner. Believe me, if you'll invest the time required to add new high-quality informational articles to your website on a regular basis, Google and the other search engines will reward you very well for it! 2 - Adding fresh content to your site on a regular basis (every day, if possible) keeps Google's spider "interested" in your site. Once it realizes that you add at least one new page every day, it will visit your site and crawl your your pages more frequently. Your new pages will get crawled, indexed and begin showing up in searches in days instead of weeks! 3 - More quality content is good for attracting more visitors to your website. Why? It's a numbers game - if your site has 1,000 pages indexed in the search engines, that means there are 1,000 "roads" to your site from the search results. Your site will have a greater chance of being "found" on the search engines for a whole slew of search terms than if you had only, say, 50 pages. Note that I said QUALITY content. Don't just put up junk - believe me, the search engines and your visitors alike will hate junk. 4 - More content attracts more one-way inbound links, which in turn boosts your search engine rankings. Gaining lots of links to lots of pages will help boost the status of your website in the "eyes" of Google, Yahoo, etc. and your pages will rank higher for their search terms. So how do I go about continuously adding new content to my website? There are many easy ways to add great quality content to your site, even on a daily basis. Here are just a few that work very well for me: 1 - Write articles. Simply do a Google search on topics related to your website's theme, read the information you find, then write an article about what you have read. DO NOT copy another site's articles without the owner's express permission. Doing so is "copyright infringement", and it will cause you more trouble than you can even imagine! Simple 4-step process: Search > Read > Understand > Write! 2 - Hire others to write articles for you if you don't have the time, ability or desire to write them yourself. College students are often more than capable and willing to write great articles for $10 - $15 a pop. Check with your local community college or post an ad in the classified section of your local newspaper. 3 - Solicit article submissions from other webmasters in exchange for a link back to their sites. Reprinting interesting articles is a tradition in the publishing industry, and if you do it the right way it can work for you too. The key is avoiding a duplicate content penalty from the search engines by having a significant amount of other text on the page in addition to the article text. Navigation links, header and footer information, etc. all help make a page different from others on the web. 4 - Visit the many "Free Content" websites that are easily found on the Internet. There are literally thousands of great articles already written that are free for the taking in exchange for a simple link back to the author's website (usually in a 4 or 5 line "resource box" tacked on to the end of the article). Simply do a Google search for "free content". Important: Observe the "no junk" rule stated above. You want your website to be seen as an asset to the web, not an eyesore. Besides, it does no good whatsoever to get visitors to your site just to have them hit the Back button once they see the page! Rick Rouse is the owner of RLROUSE Directory & Informational Resources http://www.rlrouse.com, your one-stop resource for interesting and useful information on virtually any topic. Visit his SEO Blog at http://www.rlrouse.com/blog/ for lots of great site promotion and traffic-building articles. posted on Nov 23, 2006
Previously... In our article on Understanding Google's Algorithm, a brief explanation was given on what the Google algorithm is and a few general tips were given to help the beginner to optimize their website for it. This article will go into much more depth on different tactics to use to further optimize your site for higher rankings in Google's search engine. Types of Optimization As explained in the previous article, there is a myriad of things needed to be done in order to properly and completely optimize your site to take advantage of Google's algorithm. Here is a quick list of the things we will be learning to optimize, which will be explained in further depth shortly. Things we will be going over in this article will include: Text Links and Optimization, Content Optimization, Domain Registration, Whois Information, Click Through Rates, PR (Page Rank), Traffic, Frequency of Updates, and IP address. Text Links and Optimization Although briefly explained in the first article, there are new ways of getting good links coming out almost daily, and having a deeper knowledge of getting links to your site from related ones is always important. As said before, try to stay away from the doorway pages or portals out there, as well as the FFA pages, as these will hurt your rankings on the major search engines more than help them. Be careful who you request links from, in regards to sites that are not within your specific category, or at the very least make sure they have a section for your general area on their links page, such as a "web services" section if you are a web hosting company. Links from completely unrelated sites on a page with links from all different categories from all over the internet will not benefit your site much, if at all. This being said, don't worry if a site adds a link to your own without a request simply because they like your site or services or product. The added traffic is always a plus, and if you don't already have a lot of incoming links, every little bit helps. Content Optimization Be sure your content is all related to the subject your site is based on. Don't have articles on the latest video games if you sell furniture, as the keywords are much less likely to get picked up, and most people looking to buy furniture online don't want to be bogged down searching through hundreds of pages of video game reviews while trying to find a couch that will match their living room set. Free content sites are always helpful, and although the content is duplicate, with the added articles and guides you will attract more visitors, increasing your rating through the quality of your traffic. Be sure to always include the article exactly as you got it, and include the actual author's name and a link to their site at the very least. Stay away from tactics such as simply copying another site's front page for an article, even if you plan on giving an author name and a link to where you got the information from. This can be seen as not only duplicate content, but is also a technique used by spammers to provide a huge collection of "content" in order to boost their rankings. Once the same information has been seen enough times by the Google spiders, it is considered "duplicate content" and therefore disregarded. The most important thing to remember when trying to optimize your content is that writing your own articles and information will provide your site with free, unique content. This attracts browsers and at the same time impresses the Google spiders. Having unique content will even make other webmasters much more apt to link to your site as an "authority" in the field. Domain Registration Another thing checked for by the Google algorithm is how long your domain is actually registered for. Many Spam sites only register domain names for one year, leaving it to die so they can move on with an untainted domain name to attempt to spam their way into the top rankings on Google. Keeping your domain registered for five or more years, although it may cost a bit more initially, will help your rankings considerably in Google's search engine rankings. Whois Information Your Whois information, as stated in the previous article, is also taken into account when calculating your rankings on the search engine. Is your physical address a real place, or was it falsified? Is your contact information up to date, including your phone number and mailing address? Is your name associated with spam sites from the past? All this information is recorded and worked into the algorithm. Just be sure to have your actual information used when registering a domain name, and make sure your contact information is accurate. Another tip would be to use your full name when registering a domain name, including middle name as well as any titles, such as Junior or the Third, as this will help to prevent confusion between yourself and other webmasters. Click Through Rates (CTR) Click through rates on your site are now observed by Google as well. If your site is seen on the Google search results, how often is it clicked instead of the other 9 sites on the same page? This is tracked with many things in mind, including seasonal click through rates as well as current trends among browsers. In this system, if you own a ski shop online, obviously your site will be ranked higher during the winter on certain keywords than during the summer. Likewise, if you promote a beach resort online, then your site will be more likely to be ranked higher during the summer months and during spring break than during the winter or fall. PR (Google's Page Rank) PR, or Google's Page Ranking system, is a way to keep track of how popular your site is. This is determined through traffic to your site as well as the amount of related sites linking to your own. The complexities of this system have not fully been discovered yet, but the main thing to know is that the more related links and the more high quality traffic you have coming to your site the higher your PR will be. With links from high PR sites, your own PR will skyrocket, bringing you ever higher in Google's search results. The algorithm also takes your PR into account when working out rankings. The higher PR your site has (on all of its pages), and the longer your site has a high PR, the more likely you are to get in the top rankings with Google. Even with a page ranking of 6 (out of 10), the results can be astounding, and your ranking within the search results will continue to grow. Traffic Traffic is also monitored to and from your site, and even how long your visitors stay. This allows Google to accurately gauge the amount of "real" traffic you get in any given month, as well as the type of visitors you receive and the overall popularity of your site. Now, for the younger sites that only get a few hits a day at most, this will not effect your rankings as much as the larger sites with hundreds or thousands of visitors a day. Instead of focusing on the amount of traffic you get to your site, focus on the quality of the traffic you receive. With more visitors that stay longer and actually stay to view your site and purchase your product or sign up as users, you should be able to get better rankings than some of the sites that have three times the volume of traffic but one tenth the amount of time spent by that traffic on your site. Quality is king, while quantity is simply an added benefit on today's internet. Work on your quality and then you can focus on the quantity. Update Frequency Spiders from Google also check the frequency your site is updated with their new algorithm. The more your site is updated, in essence, with fresh and unique content, the higher it will become ranked in the Google search engine. If you take a month vacation, leaving your site to gather dust until you come back, be prepared for a drop in your rankings. If you update your site daily, on the other hand, you can expect to be ranked much higher (provided you have fresh, related content) than the sites that only update once a week. Basically, as the old adage says, "You reap what you sew." Or, in other words, the more work you put into something, the better results will come of it. In general, this remains true for not only Google, but the other search engines and directories as well. IP Address Even the IP address is considered in the Google Algorithm, which can be a good or bad thing, depending on the other websites that are currently sharing your IP. If you are on a specific IP address that is dedicated to your site, you have little to worry about, but if your IP is shared between multiple websites, you could have a real problem. IP addresses are recorded and compared between your site and others on the web. If, for example, your site just happens to be on the same server as a spammer who shares your IP, not only will Google delete the spammer from their rankings, but they could also delete your site simply for being related to the Spam site. Obviously, there are some simple solutions to this problem, including talking to your hosting company to get a dedicated IP address specifically for your own site. This might cost a bit more per month or year, depending on your billing schedule, but the benefits will be numerous. If you simply don't have the cash flow to pay the extra money per month, you can search through the sites that share your IP and report spammers to your hosting company. In nearly every case they will be ready and willing to get rid of spammers on their server. Overview Again, the basic idea is to keep your site reputable in its promotion practices. Stay away from anything that could possibly classify your site as a Spam site, and keep good, relevant links and content coming. For more information, please look at our articles below: You can see other articles by Claude Beavers on this topic at: SuperFaster.com - Free Search Engine Optimization Articles and Resources posted on Nov 23, 2006
While search engine advertising has been a great advertising medium for businesses capable of or interested in marketing their products and services to a national or international audience, the effectiveness of this type of advertising was limited for businesses interested in advertising to a local market until very recently. For example, a realtor with a web site in Minneapolis is likely interested in advertising on search terms such as "homes for sale" and "sell my home." The only problem was the realtor would have to advertise to everyone in the country who happened to type those terms into search engines. This was wasteful and ineffective because the vast majority of visitors clicking through to the site would not be qualified visitors since they lived outside the realtor's regional market. At that time, the only work around to this was to include a regional qualifying term next to each search phrase, so instead of advertising on the term "homes for sale" the realtor would have to advertise on "Minneapolis homes for sale." What about the prospective clients who live in Minneapolis, but only type in "homes for sale?" They're likely just as qualified for the realtor, but it there wasn't a way to target this type of searcher. The gap between forcing advertisers to use regional qualifying terms or advertising to a national market was finally closed this spring by Google. Local Targeting Targeting a known geographic location of searchers became a reality earlier this spring when Google launched their local targeting program. So now the realtor in Minneapolis can advertise on the more general terms, then specifying a geographic area they'd like the ads to appear within. The options for this include picking specific cities, metropolitan areas, or even a distance radius from a specific point. For example, maybe the realtor only wants to generate leads from within 30 miles of their home. Does this work? Yes, it works very well. There are very few types of advertising online or offline where you have such detailed control over who you are advertising to. Basically it's pretty hard to beat advertising to people who are searching for what you sell and happen to live close to your business. And, since this is pay per click advertising, you are only charged when searchers click through to your web site. Local Advertising Tips Promote Your Location - You'll definitely see better conversion rates for your local advertising if you include your physical address on your web site. We recommend including this in the footer of every page of your site to reinforce that you're local to the prospects. Track Performance - When you use local advertising you will still have to compete against businesses willing to advertise nationally on the same search phrases. This means search terms can get expensive but your conversion rates should support this. However, as with any form of advertising, it's important to track what's working. Ed Kohler is the president and founder of Haystack In A Needle - http://www.haystackinaneedle.com/ - a full service web marketing and search engine positioning firm based in Minneapolis, MN. posted on Nov 22, 2006
Don't put the cart before the horse. You can't do SEO (optimize your web site for search engines) until you've researched keywords. You can't research keywords without a clear view of your target market, your prospect types, and how your offerings fill their needs. Affordable Small Business SEO Affordable small business SEO not only uses the same old business and marketing basics, but also leverages the depth of accessible metrics for creating increased online traffic and better web site ROI. When small business people ask me how their web site could be improved by SEO, I give them some version of the following list of questions. When you know the answers to these questions, you're much less likely to waste money on SEO efforts, and more likely to succeed online. You might even pull off some of this stuff yourself- and that'll save you big in consultant fees! To find the right keywords to target with SEO and/or PPC, consider the following? Goals: How much monthly traffic and sales do you get now? Where would you like these numbers to be? What are your most wanted responses- what do you want your ideal prospects to do on your site? (e.g. buy something, sign up for your ezine, etc.) Market Segmentation: Who's your ideal customer or target market? If there is more than one group, characterize each. Keywords that work: How do people find your site? What search phrases show up in your web logs? PPC Metrics: Do you already use pay per click (PPC) advertising? What are your conversion rates? Are your bids profiting, or at least breaking even? Getting more traffic is pointless if your site isn't an efficient sales machine. Profit Margin: What is your online profit margin for each offering? Conversion Rate: What percentage of your offline prospects make the purchase? (to gauge expected conversion rate for your services and find disparity in online results) Customer Loyalty: How many people are on your ezine list? How often do you email them? What do you send them? 5 Common Critical Website Errors and How to Fix Them About 75% of the web sites I've seen make all of these mistakes. As a result, their rankings and traffic suffer, and they lose potential sales revenues. No Sitemap. No matter how well your pages are designed and no matter how nice the graphics are, every site need a good 'sitemap' page for search engines to index it more easily. This is a simple page of links- no frills except perhaps a bulleted outline structure. Even better, you can use the new Google sitemap xml template, and upload it to Google to increase the chances they'll index your whole site. Insufficient Search Engine and Directory Submission. In the ideal cyberworld, you wouldn't have to submit your site anywhere- it would just get indexed and put where your prospects could find you. The reality is we still have to meet these services halfway. There are only a half dozen super-big sources of traffic (e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.), but you have a better chance of showing up in them if you've submitted your site to the 100-200 minor directories and search engines. Also, there are niche directories that will help you rank on your best keywords and attract more prospects directly. Submit your site to these places with a free tool like WebCEO. Mysterious Website Owners. Your visitors want to know, "who are the people behind this website? Can I trust them?" Unless you have a particularly snobby target market, put your picture and brief bio on the very first page of your site (if not every page). Let them know who you are. This might be taboo in offline marketing (not really- look at Ben & Jerry, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump, etc.), but online, genuine personality is a competitive advantage. It fosters trust, creates credibility and emotional bonds, and bridges the cold gap of cyberspace. You can do it appropriately for most target markets. The real question is: are you ready for the prime time? Confusing Site Structure. Does your site confuse people? Do you know where they want to go, what they're really looking for? Where do you want them to go? Good site structure both guides your various prospect types to the places you want them to go and satisfies their needs. Get some of your target market to sit in front of you and use your website- watch what they do- it'll surprise you. And put a search engine on your website that gives you reports on what people search for- you'll get clues about what else to put online. Ezine Neglect. The ezine signup form isn't prominent on some sites ? make it obvious and 'sell' your visitors on signing up. Tantalize them into ezine subscription with a free bonus. Why? Not everyone will become your customer the first time they reach your site. They may like your offerings but not trust you enough yet or be ready to buy. They may have questions. Once you have them on your list, you can sell them on you and your stuff (by helping them with tips) every week or two until they buy. Not only do they need a free bonus to stimulate them to sign up, they also need to know what kind of thing you'll be sending them, that you'll keep their email address private, and that they can unsubscribe anytime. And I'd suggest using double opt-in to avoid spam- that means they sign up (you don't add them), and they confirm via email before they ever get an email from you. Since 1999, San Diego SEO Consultant Brian B. Carter, MS, has reached more than 2 million readers online. His most popular site ranks in the top 1% of all major websites. Brian's second book, "$1000 Keywords: How I Made as Much as $1,200.64 a Day Online With My Secret Keyword Analysis Techniques" will be available in July, 2005. posted on Nov 23, 2006
If you read The Search Engine Showdown, you know Google is my favourite search engine. Why? Google always offers the most results for any given search (they currently have over 8 billion pages indexed), it's faster than the Audi Quattro we test drove this morning, and 9 times out of ten, in my experience, all the front page results are relevant to my search. In fact, I usually find what I'm looking for within the first few sites listed. I also really respect the fact that two college kids started it (kinda like Abalone Designs!) and that those two college kids seem not to have forgotten where they came from. If you check out the images at Google's press center (http:// www.google.com/press/images.html) and scroll down to the Everyday Life Inside Google section, you'll get a feeling that life at Google is fun. Google is the most used search engine on the web. In May, 2004, 36.8% of all searches on the web were done using Google. Also during that month, Google powered 54% of all searches done on the web (Read more about these figures here). Google owes their success to their mind-boggling algorithm. This intricate formula sucks in a web page, considers its keyword density, its link popularity, domain name, how often it is updated, the amount of content in the site, and a myriad of other things that few know and spits out a number called PageRank. There is absolutely no way to be sure how to get your site to number one on Google, but there are a few things that we know can help: Make sure your site is well organized, visitor friendly and useful. Google seems to like sites that are listed in the Open Directory Project, and my theory is that it's because the Open Directory Project is human edited. This means real human eyes have looked at each site that is included in the directory and deemed it useful in some way or another. If your site has a link on The Open Directory Project, you're on the right track. Avoid "spamming". Spamming refers to many different things. If you add keywords to your site that are out of context or hidden from plain view, it's considered spamming. Resubmitting your site to Google can be looked upon as spamming. The basic principal is to make sure every page on your site is professional looking, clean, organized and has its own unique information to offer. Try to trade links with good quality sites that you like, 'cause if you like them, chances are they have something to offer and Google will recognize that. The more good quality sites around the web that have links pointing to your site, the higher your link popularity will be. Stay away from hi-tech sites unless you offer an alternative. ie. If your site has been designed in Flash, try to offer a plain HTML version of the site. Google can index flash but it's not likely that it will be indexed well, and your ranking will suffer. Frames are also a no-no. Although Google can index framed sites as well, again, the ranking can suffer and more importantly, frames are universally recognized in our industry as hideous! Keep the content on each page to a decent level. You don't want too much content, but you definitely do not want too little. A good way to judge what a good content level is, is to search for the #1 ranking site for the keywords you wish to target, and see how much content they have. Make your content keyword-rich, but don't make it so full of keywords that it sounds ridiculous to visitors. You want to keep the visitors you get from Google, right? Google almost always offers you the best resource for your query due to the fact that all of these things matter to them. They are also always trying to find ways to improve on the Google Algorithm so they can continue to offer us the best service. Every once in a while we hear about this new search engine and that new search engine, but no one seems to have been able to catch up. As long as this remains true, these simple tips will be applicable. Courtney Heard is the founder of Abalone Designs, an Internet Marketing and SEO company in Vancouver, Canada. She has been involved in web development and marketing since 1995 and has helped start several businesses since then in the Vancouver area. More of Courtney's articles are available at http://www.abalone.ca/resources/. posted on Nov 27, 2006
Julia: Welcome Bob. Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions about link building. I'm going to jump right in ask you why Web sites need links? Bob: There are a number of reasons to have links pointing to your site. But let's start with the reason they were created in the first place. The original purpose of the Internet was to enable the sharing of information. For example, if a scholarly paper existed on a server at the University of California, and a professor at Oxford wanted to read it, the Internet made that instantly possible. Now, if the Oxford professor had a paper that referenced information from the UC paper, they could link directly to that other document rather than just quoting from it. So a hyperlink was intended as a way of connecting data, ideas, and references together. It's like saying, "if you'd like further information on this topic, here's a place to find it." When the Google search engine was created, its developers took this into account. And drew the conclusion that a link was an indication that the page being linked to was relevant to some particular subject-matter. So that's a rather long introduction to a short answer to your question. Web sites need links because they send traffic that's already targeted to their subject matter to other sites, and because they help the search engines determine both their theme and what the web as a community deems their importance to be. Basically (although not absolutely), the more links that point to a page, the more relevant that page is determined to be. In addition, links are now considered the most reliable way (apart from paying) to get a site into the search engines in the first place. While both Google and Yahoo allow you to submit a site to their index, it's clear that the best way to get the search engines to pay attention to your site is to get a page that their spiders already know about to link to yours. The spiders then follow that link to your site, and add it to their index. Julia: Thanks, Bob. But there are different types of links aren't there? Can you explain differences? Bob: As we discussed in the previous question, there are text links from other sites. Some of these are reciprocal (that is, they link to you and you link back to them) and others are one-way (the owner of the other site decides, for whatever reason, to link to your site and doesn't expect you to link back).There are also image links: banners, buttons, etc. These have the advantage of standing out visually from the rest of the page, but many people have become immune to the standard banner ad and just ignore them, because it's assumed they're just advertisements, and as such, not necessarily relevant to the page on which they appear. Then there are directory listings, where a link to your site appears on a page containing links to numerous other sites in what the directory editor has determined to be your particular niche. An important thing to consider regarding getting a link is the code behind it. If your primary concern is to send traffic to your site, this isn't important. In that case, what you need to think about is whether the link is going to send the right people to you. But if you want the link to be recognized by the search engines and to contribute to your ranking in searches, you need the link to be in simple HTML, without JavaScript or other code that will hide the link from search engine spiders. There are also links that won't help you at all, or will put you in danger of losing your position on the search engines. Guestbook spam, the practice of going to a site's guest book area and posting a message like "Nice site. Come visit mine, at?" will do you no good. The search engines know that such links carry no value, and just ignore them. The same is true for free-for-all links pages, on which you can immediately add a link to any site, without any editorial oversight. Link farms are a far more dangerous subject. These are networks of sites that are heavily cross-linked and offer to link to you as long as you link back into the network, or host a page on your site that serves as a directory of sites that the link farm has linked to. The idea here is to abuse the power search engines give to links by exponentially increasing the number of links to your site, without regard for theme or value. You link into the farm, and you have hundreds, perhaps thousands of links pointing back to you. But the links are only there to increase link popularity. The sites on which the links reside are not intended to actually be viewed by people; they're just intended to give search engine spiders the mistaken impression that your site is extraordinarily popular. Julia: So, what's the best way to get legitimate and relevant sites to link to yours? Bob: Before you can get a site to link to yours, you first have to find it. You need to do research on the subject-matter of your site by searching on the keywords you hope people will use to find it. The results of those searches will give you a list of sites that are already performing well for those keywords. You should then study those sites, so that you can write to the webmaster and request a link in such a way that demonstrates that you understand the purpose of their site. And give reasons as to why you think their audience will find your site of interest. You can buy links from sites as well, sometimes on a single page, and sometimes all across the site. These are just like any other form of advertising. So before you part with your money you need to determine if they're worth the purchase price by deciding if they'll send you enough of the right traffic. That's why sites that offer the opportunity to buy links will make claims about how much traffic they get and how their audience is made up of "decision makers." Finally, there are directories, which normally require you to drill down to find the most relevant category for your listing. You can then (depending on the directory) either contact them with your information, or fill out a form on the directory itself and request a listing. Julia: What would you say to Web site owners who are reluctant to use links because they think it will take people away from their site? Bob: For one thing, a Web site without any off-site links is a dead end, and there is some evidence to suggest that search engines view sites that don't link out as being less valuable. Unless you're willing to pay, you may have a hard time convincing people to link to you if you're not planning on linking back to them. But it's still possible, especially if you've got content that's so good people will want to link to you anyway, but it's definitely harder to get one-way links than reciprocal ones. I'm not suggesting that people link directly to their competitors. The idea is to link to sites that complement the content that you're providing. By doing so, you're contributing to the impression that your site is an authority on your theme: not only do you have great information, but you have links to other sources of information. That's another reason for people to come back to your site more often. And if you're still worried about sending people away from your site and never seeing them again, you can set your off-site links to open in a new window, by adding target="_blank" to the code for the link. If you do this, however, it's a good idea for usability purposes to let people know that the link will open in a new window. Otherwise, people who have their browser windows maximized may not realize what's happened, and should they try to get back to your site by hitting their back button they're likely to be confused when it fails to take them anywhere. Julia: We often hear the term "Anchor text". Can your explain what this means and why it's important? Bob: Anchor text is the part of a text link that's visible on the page. On a Web page, that would look like this: Search Engine Marketing and Copywriting Services. "Search Engine Marketing and Copywriting Services" is the anchor text. What's important about it is that it tells both the user and the search engine spider what the page the link points to is about. In a search engine optimization project, getting links to your site that use your keywords in the anchor text helps to get your page to rank higher for those keywords. That's why it's important to have something other than "click here" as anchor text.The power of anchor text can be seen by the example of the practice of "Googlebombing," in which numerous sites will link to a particular page using the same anchor text. If enough sites do it, Google will rank that page at the top of its listings for searches on that text. George W. Bush' biography page on the site of the White House is still number one in Google for the query "miserable failure" about half a year after that particular Googlebomb was created. Whether or not you personally agree that those words do a good job of describing Mr. Bush, Google accepts what it sees as the opinion of the general online community. If enough pages tell Google that miserable failure George W. Bush, then as far as Google is concerned, it must be true. Julia: Another thing we hear a lot about is Pagerank?-a tool webmasters often use to determine whether a site is worth linking to or not. What does this mean? Bob: PageRank (not to be confused with "page rank") is a part of Google's algorithm for ranking pages. There are numerous theories as to how it's calculated, but only Google knows for certain. In any case, that's not important to this discussion. What matters is that PageRank is a measure of the value of a page based on the links pointing to it, the value of the pages on which those links reside,and the number of other links that are on those pages. It's strictly numerical, and has absolutely nothing to do with relevance or value to the reader. In other words, if I have a page about Shakespeare, and I link to two pages, one about Shakespeare, and the other about the care and feeding of parakeets, the same amount of PageRank will be passed to both of those pages. The fact that one of those pages is about the same subject as my page does not enter into the calculation. You can see an estimation of the PageRank of a given page if you have the Google toolbar installed. But it's important to keep in mind that PageRank is not everything, nor is it the most important thing. It's one of many factors Google takes into account when it ranks pages for queries, and it's not at all uncommon to see that a site that ranks on the top of a SERP (search engine results page) has a lower PageRank than the pages below it on the SERP. One of the reasons people believe that PageRank is important is that if you do a backlink check in Google by typing "link:www.site.com" in the search box, you'll generally (but not absolutely) only see pages that link to the URL in question and have a PageRank of 4/10 or higher. People have taken this to mean that a link from a page with a lower PR doesn't count, and that simply isn't true. It's true that, all other things being equal, the higher the PR of a page linking to yours, the more PR it's going to pass to your page, but as I said, PR is just one aspect of Google's algorithm, and every link apart from the troublesome ones we spoke of earlier has some value. It's also worth keeping in mind that a page that shows a PR of 2/10 in the toolbar today may have a 5/10 or 6/10 a few months from now.When I'm looking for sites from which I may wish to request links, the only time what I see in the toolbar matters to me is when I see that it has no PageRank at all. Assuming the site isn't new, that can sometimes be an indication that the site has done something which caused Google to demote it. That is, it may be what Google refers to as a "bad neighborhood," and as such, you should be extra careful in checking it out before you agree to link back to it. Julia: Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, Bob! I hope you all will check out Bob's site at www.raisemyrank.com for more information about his company. About The Author Julia is an independent copywriter specializing in advertising and search engine marketing services. To learn more about how Julia can help boost your company's profits visit her site at www.juliahyde.com. You may also like to sign up for Marketing Works! Julia's monthly ezine. Visit her website or email Julia for details. posted on Nov 21, 2006
First let's start with definitions: SEO: Search Engine Optimization, SFO: Search Friendly Optimization. These two things are what most webmasters have trouble balancing. These things seem to always be on opposite ends. On one hand you have to make sure search engines can crawl your website without any problems. On the other you have to keep the site looking good to keep your visitors. These are all based on what kind of site you plan on making. A corporate website selling shoes in the real world might focus on keeping the site looking good to visitors. And maybe pack it up with flash and all kinds of descriptive images. On the other side a site about online products, e-commerce, might cut back on the images and focus on seo. I will go into both of these just in case. Let's start with seo. The first thing you need if you choose seo is to meta tags. Now there many meta tags generators out there for a quicker way to make them. But I suggest like me you make them yourself according to the search engines you want your site to better perform at. In short you have to study those search engines and find out how they get their content and what meta tags they require or may find usefull. Mine is based on google so check out the source of the blog and those are the tags that google uses. posted on Nov 24, 2006
You built that content rich web page optimized for your Keyword phrases but is it really working? By looking at these 5 Stats readily available from your CPanel you will quickly learn what you are doing well and what you need to improve on. Most Web Hosts will provide you with a Cpanel, where you can create E-mail Accounts, Upload Web Pages and check your stats. Most of the Cpanel's are very similar if not identical to the one my Hosts uses. When it is time to check my web page traffic statistics I click on Log and then Web/FTP Stats and finally AWStats. I am now presented with a List of all kinds of Stats to look at. Daily History, Monthly History, Country, Browser, Day of Week, Hour or Day. Trying to understand them all will make you dizzy. Since my traffic comes from 3 primary places Search Engines, One Way back links and Reciprocal links I concentrate on the following 5 Stats 1 - Referers Origin This Stat will give you a breakdown of what percent of your traffic came from the following categories
This stat is a snap shop of your overall traffic. Some questions to ask yourself 2 - Referring search engines This Stat will list all the major search engines and tell you what percent of your search engine traffic came from each Search engine. It is best to concentrate on the Big 3 (Yahoo, MSN and Google). Google is the Most Popular Search engine with Yahoo a close 2nd and MSn 3rd. Is the Search engine Traffic to your web page divided the same way? Does any search engine over perfrom or under perform it's internet average? 3 - Referring sites This will tell you which web pages are your best link partners. If you do article submissions or other forms of linking this will tell you how well this worked. I was shocked to see that 10% of all my non Search engine traffic came from 1 web page where I gave a testimonial. 4 - Search Keyphrases Here you can see your Top 10 Keyword Phrases as well as a full list of your keyword phrases. Look over the top 10? Are those the one's you expected? Are you surprised by the results? Where can you do better? Next look over the full list? Do you have under achievers or over archives? 5 - Search Keywords Unless you happen to be optimizing for a keyword like Babies, Pillows or Graduates you wouldn't need to worry about this Stat. Most of the Keywords reported don't give much useful information. If you are optimizing for a Keyword like babies then find babies in the list and see how well you are doing. About The Author: posted on Nov 25, 2006
Strategic search engine optimization involves far more than keyword research, META tags and content. If you want to mange an SEO program, you need to be aware of any issue that can affect your success. Domain name management is one of the big factors. Effective domain name management is critical because you could end up getting banned from Google and other search engines if you take the wrong approach. Why would Google ban you? Even if you don't maintain your identical content with two or more domains, you can still run into problems. It's possible to update just one set of web pages, but have them look like duplicates because of how the domain names are administered. You may be risking everything if someone enters Many web site owners redirect one domain to the next rather than configure the server to associate the core content with a second domain name. In many cases, a 301 redirect is your best bet. It's a server-side redirect most administrators can handle in a few minutes. In effect, it's a proper way of telling search engines to ignore one domain and favor another. You may have many good reasons for owning multiple domains, including brand protection. Some companies get extra domains on the off-chance that someone may simply try a domain name and see what comes up. A classic example is 1-800-FLOWERS.COM. One of their domains is www.1800flowers.com, but you can get there with www.flowers.com as well. The Bottom Line Michael Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, a Cleveland, Ohio-based search engine marketing (SEM) firm. A member of Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), he also authored the white paper, "Search Engine Marketing: Get in the Game." posted on Nov 20, 2006
... and why I 'm dying to get finally in the Google SERP Have you also experienced that getting indexed on Google, despite the Google crawler visits each day your site, is getting tougher and tougher, not to say it's apparently almost impossible in short term?! Between us, in the corridors of Google, they're talking about the notorious 'Google Sandbox' theory. According this theory, a new website is first 'sandboxed' and doesn't get a ranking when the keywords of that website are not incredibly competitive. The Google Sandbox is in fact a filter placed in March of 2004 which new websites prevents from having immediately success in the Google search engine result pages. This filter "is only intended to reduce search engine spam". The sandbox filter is not a permanent filter for your website, what means you can only wait, wait and wait until Google liberates you from this filter. In mean time, don't recline, but write original and well optimized content; write, publish and share articles, place a link on other websites etc. An example: I started with wallies.info this year on April 1st and submitted this URL on Google, Yahoo and MSN Search on the same day. Two months later, when I'm searching for 'http://www.wallies.info' and 'wallies.info', Google has twice 1 search result, Yahoo! twice 65 results and MSN Search 313 and 266 results. A remarkable difference, isn't it?! Anyway, Google has a huge problem and backlog to index (new) pages. But two or three times a week, I receive a Google Alert for these two searches, but they aren't encountered again in the Google search engine results pages (SERP) at all. With the introduction of Google Sitemaps (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/), a beta website update reporting service, on Friday 3rd of June 2, I hope this will restrict the Sandbox waiting room. With a Sitemap, crawlers are better enabled to find out recently changed pages and get immediately a list of present pages. As Google Sitemaps is released under a Creative Commons license, all search engines can make use of it. Important to know is that Google Sitemaps will not influence the calculation of your PageRank. Sitemaps has its own variant of the XML protocol and is called the 'Sitemap Protocol'. For each URL some additional information such as the last modified date can be included. There are several methods to create your XML Sitemap: 1. The Sitemap Generator (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html) is a simple script that can be configured to automatically create Sitemaps and submit them to Google. 2. Make your own Sitemap script 3. With the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting (http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html) 4. With RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 syndication feeds 5. A simple list of URLs with one per line In the current RSS era, it's obvious that the fourth method is the most logical and easiest. Roughly said, you need only to make a new XML template. For a working Sitemap example of the wallies.info blog, got to http://www.wallies.info/blog/gsm.php. This XML Sitemap has to be submitted on the Google Sitemaps page ( https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ ). When you've updated your listed pages or your Sitemap has changed, you have to resubmit your Sitemap link for re-crawling. After I've submitted the wallies.info Sitemap, it took approximately between 3 and 4 hours before Google has downloaded the file. Please note that Sitemaps doesn't influence in no way the calculation of your PageRank, Google doesn't add every submitted Sitemap URL to the Google Index and Google doesn't guarantee anything about when or if your Sitemap pages will appear in the Google SERP. Off course, it's easier for you to set up an automated job to submit this XML-file. You can do this with an automated HTTP request, like this example (your sitemap has to be URL encoded, this is everything behind /ping?sitemap=): www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap= What is the Sitemap Protocol? The Sitemap Protocol informs the Google search engine which pages in your website are available for crawling. A Sitemap consists of a list of URLs and may also contain additional information about those URLs, such as when they were last modified, how frequently they change, etc. An example of the XML Sitemap format: - - http://www.wallies.info/blog/ 2005-06-07T05:34:36+02:00 daily 1.0 - http://www.wallies.info/blog/item/130/index.html 2005-06-05T10:59:22+02:00 1.0 - ... The XML Sitemap Format uses the following XML tags: - urlset : this tag encapsulates all other tags of this list; - url : this tag encapsulates the changefreq, lastmod, loc and priority tags of this list; - changefreq (optional) is how frequently the content at the URL is likely to change. Valid values are 'always', 'hourly', 'daily', 'weekly', 'monthly', 'yearly' and 'never'; - lastmod (optional) is the time the content at the URL was last modified. The timestamp has to be in a ISO 8601 format; - loc (required) : the URL location / a URL for a page on your site (< 2.048 characters). - priority (optional) : the priority of the page relative to other pages on the same site and is a number between 0.0 and 1.0 (default 0.5). This priority is only used to select between URLs on your site. The priority of your pages will not be compared to the priority of pages on other sites. An urlset may contain up to 50.000 URL's and the file must not be larger than 10MB when uncompressed. Multiple Sitemaps are gathered in a Sitemap index file with a maximum of 1,000 sitemaps of the same site. The Google Sitemaps URL: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ For feedback of this Sitemaps article, please feel free to visit http://www.wallies.info/blog/item/132/index.html Walter V. is a self-employed internet entrepreneur and founder-webmaster of several websites, including wallies.info: A snappy blog about snappy blue things: blog | wiki | forum | links - http://wallies.info mblo.gs: a snappy moblog community - http://mblo.gs posted on Nov 23, 2006
Would you like a checklist of the important steps to take in optimizing a web site? Well, here it is: 1. Use a keyword research tool to find profitable phrases (i.e. those that are actually being searched for). 2. Build each page optimized for a single keyword phrase. Also sprinkle in some secondary keywords relevant to the main keyword. 3. Link your web site together so that all pages are only a couple of clicks away from the homepage. 4. Use text links instead of fancy graphics or buttons to link to your pages. 5. When you add a link to a page where the main keyword phrase for that page is "blue widgets", make sure the links to that page include the phrase "blue widgets". 6. Build a sitemap. 7. Add articles / Content to your web site and add links from these articles to your important pages. 8. Get quality link partners. Once you have completed these 8 steps, repeat steps 7 & 8 over and over again. I would say that 80% of your time on a new site should be steps 7 and 8. Add content & find link partners. A great way of getting links into your site is writing and publishing articles on article submission sites. When webmasters take up your article and publish it on their site, you get an incoming link to yours. As your site climbs in the search engine rankings, you can decide when you are happy with your rankings and reduce the amount of time spent on 7 & 8. ********************************************************* posted on Nov 25, 2006
Optimizing web pages for high rankings in the search engines involved two main processes. Firstly there is the on-page factors which include what keywords you place where on the page itself. The second, and more important process is getting the off-page factors right - incoming links. This article explores mainly the on-page factors. As the competition for a keyword phrase increases, off-page factors become more important to good rankings and these often mask the effects of on-page factors making it impossible to see what on-page factors are important. For this reason, I am going to look at a high ranking page with low levels of competition in Google. First, let's consider what we mean by competition. There are two ways to look at competition in Google. There is the competition a page has when you type the phrase with quotes, and the competition when you type the words without quotes. The number of results returned by Google in each case is YOUR competition. The main differences between these two types of search are as follows: Search with Quotes - this returns only those pages that have been "optimized" for the exact phrase. Search without Quotes - this returns all pages that have been "optimized" for the words making up the phrase. e.g. (in simple terms) a) If you search Google for alsatian dog Google returns 41,000 competing pages. b) If you search Google for "alsatian dog" Google returns 6,390 competing pages. In (a) above, there are 41,000 pages that refer to alsatian AND dog, but not necessarily to alsatian dog. In (b) above, there are 6,390 pages that refer to the exact phrase alsatian dog. Now, if you want to rank well for the term "alsatian dog" on Google, you only have to compete with 6,390 other pages for this exact term. However, there are 41,000 - 6,390 = 34,610 other pages that are related to this search, and might still beat you if Google sees them as more relevant than your page. We have discussed before the importance of link reputation and PR in ranking. It is possible for a high PR page to rank well for a term like alsatian dog, even if it does not have the exact phrase on the page. This fact clouds the issue somewhat, and so although I recommend searching with quotes to find the real competition, I also recommend that you look at the top few results in Google (as searched without quotes) to determine how important those "partial match" pages are. A quick search at: http://www.prsearch.net/ for alsatian dog, shows me that the top pages for this search without quotes have a low PR (0-3) and many of those pages have 0 incoming links. The same search at PRSearch.net using quotes around the phrase show very similar results. The competing pages for the exact term have low PR and low incoming links. This phrase should be easy to target and get top rankings if done properly. A word of warning: Because the PR reported on the Google toolbar is out of date (see earlier), you cannot be 100% sure of the PR of the pages, even using a site like PRSearch. They will use the same formula that the toolbar uses, and so will be equally out of date. Only Google knows the exact PR it is using in its ranking for any one page. A second check I often do is to check what the PR of the homepage of the site that is ranking well, as this gives me an indication of how important the site as a whole is. For the phrase alsatian dog (with or without quotes), the top page is: http://www.castleofspirits.com/stories02/alsatian.html The homepage http://www.castleofspirits.com has a PR of 6 - quite an important site. However, there is no link to the alsatian page on the homepage, so the PR 6 homepage wont directly help towards the high ranking of the alsatian dog web page. Doing a backward links check on Google does not help since there are no backlinks listed for this top ranking page. OK, putting on my detective hat, I see a link at the bottom of the Alsatian page called "March 02 Ghost Stories". There is another link to "Ghost Story Page". Clicking on the link to Ghost Story Page, I am taken to a PR 5 page: http://www.castleofspirits.com/storypg.html where I find a link to March 2002 Ghost Stories. Clicking that link takes me to a PR 3 page: http://www.castleofspirits.com/stories02/mch2002.html And on this page I find a link to Ghostly Alsatian dog. So, the top ranking alsatian dog page has one link I know of from a PR 3 page. I might assume that this site also has a sitemap (although I cannot find one) where it contains a second link to the alsatian dog page. That means a total of 2 links, both internal. I can assume from this that the alsatian page with a PR 2 is probably the correct PR, and the page itself has very few incoming links. I am confident that if I targeted the phrase alsatian dog, I would easily get a top ranking. The phrase alsatian dog is therefore an EASY phrase to target. As a final check I went to the searchguild difficulty tool mentioned in section 6 of this newsletter and typed my phrase into that. The Search Guild rates this term as EASY. With relatively few off-page factors contributing to the high ranking of this page, I can only assume that the on-page factors are what makes this page stand out from the rest and rank at number 1 on Google. There are a variety of tools available for calculating density, but I use a tool I wrote for myself and is not available for purchase. Running this URL through my tool tells me a lot of useful information. Density of the phrase "alsatian dog" on the page is 0.49% The keyword is found ONCE in the title (11.11%), and TWICE in the main text on the page (a density of just 0.34%). The keyword is not found in any header or meta tag! As a second check I always look at what I call the partial density. That is the sum of the densities of all words that make up the phrase. e.g. the phrase "alsatian dog" is made up of two words - alsatian AND dog. I look at the density of alsatian, and the density of dog, and combine the two densities. This is useful because it tells me the density on the page of the words that make up the phrase (remember it is possible to rank well without the exact phrase on the page) - a kind of simplified page reputation. The partial density of this page is 3.09%, made up of 7 occurrences of alsatian, and 12 occurrences of dog. This page is obviously about alsatians and dogs! Let's look at the prominence of this phrase on the page. First an explanation of what prominence means. Prominence is a measure of where on the page a word exists. A prominence of 100 would mean it was the first word on the page. A prominence of 1 would indicate it was the last word on the page. A prominence of 50% would indicate it was the middle word on the page. If the phrase was the first word (100% prominence) and the last word (1% prominence) on the page, the average prominence on the page would be about 50%. That means the keywords are well spread out on the page. As prominence increases, the keyword is found higher up the page, as it decreases, it is found lower down the page. For analysis of top ranking pages, I look at not only the average prominence of ALL occurrences of the phrase on my page i.e. how the keywords are spaced out on the page, but also the prominence of the first occurrence on the page. i.e. how close to the start of the document is the phrase first found? The prominence of the first occurrence of the phrase alsatian dog is 99.67%. That means it is almost the first phrase on the page (only the word ghost comes before it). The average prominence of the whole page for this term is 62.62%. That means that the keywords are distributed more in the upper portion of the page. Haven't I always told you that it was important to get your main keyword in the top one-third of the page?. This page is a good one to study. It shows a top ranking page for a low competitive keyword phrase. Because of the low competition, incoming links and PR are less important (though if you have both, you could dominate this phrase), while on-page factors will make or break the ranking. Even though the exact phrase is only found 3 times on the page, the fact that the phrase is in the title of the document and in the body text seems to be enough. This low density is backed up by using the words that make up the phrase several times on the page. Google will be in no doubt what this page is about. A final help to the ranking of this page is the filename. Notice that part of the keyword phrase is found in the filename - alsatian.html ***************************************************** posted on Nov 25, 2006
What's more important to your business success - the question or the answer? Certainly, you want your questions to reflect what you are trying to find out. Obviously, your questions should be easily understood. Most definitely, you're hoping for some positive responses. But, what you really need to do is count repetitive keywords and phrases found in your respondents answers. If you agree with the philosophy about how people tend to buy from the perspective of avoiding pain and moving towards pleasure, you know how important it is to your market research, product development and sales strategy to ask good questions and listen very closely to the answers. Open-ended answers are made up of the words respondents have chosen to tell you how they feel about something. You need to analyze the answers to open-ended questions for repetitive keywords and phrases that match those of your current or future products and services. The greater the density of the keyword and phrase matches the higher the probability of building your opt-in list or making a sale. The key to your business success is combining everybody's answers and counting the density of repetitive keywords and phrases to help you craft your products and services into search engine friendly content pages you can use to build your opt-in list, make a sale, generate pay-per-click revenue or leverage affiliate income opportunities. "Learn & Do" Action Steps: 1. Design your questions for open-ended response. 2. Count the number of repetitive keywords and phrases. 3. Build your page content around keywords and phrase density. 4. Set up your lead in ads to match your keywords and phrase density. 5. Create links to non-competitive offerings with matching keywords and phrases. Don Osborne is the Author/Publisher of THE PROFIT PUZZLE, an ideal business tool for anyone thinking about, planning, starting, running or growing a small or home-based business: http://www.ProfitPuzzle.com posted on Nov 23, 2006
The "Number One" Question - the question that I (and probably every other Internet marketing expert on the planet) am most frequently asked: "How do I get to be Number One in the search engines for widgets? After all, my company is the world's leading provider of widgets - it's ridiculous that these other nobody companies are coming up in search engines ahead of us . . . " My response is almost always along the lines of: "Forget that right now, and get a life!" OK, so I am a little more tactful than that - and I do occasionally encourage an in-depth search engine optimization strategy, but usually I'll encourage clients to spend their website promotional budget in other ways. Here are the main reasons why I'm not generally enthusiastic about free search engines: 1.  You have to be really careful in choosing keywords Many people make the mistake of focusing on very generic keywords. Not only are these even more difficult to get top placement in, but they also won't generate you targeted traffic. A prospect approached me recently for help with a coaching site. This site promotes teleseminars to help clients implement life changes described in various motivational books. This prospect initially said that he wanted to be "Number One" on a search for "books". I'd suggest this would be a virtually impossible challenge for any search engine optimizer. But in addition, someone searching for "books" is probably really looking for Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, and not my client's teleclasses. He could spend a lot of money for very few qualified leads. 2.  You need to speak the language of your visitors We all talk "geekspeak" - it's often second nature to us within our industry or area of expertise. And it's easy to forget that our prospects don't always use the same terminology. One of the most difficult areas in copywriting that I see is when technology sales people are trying to describe their products to a non-technical market - the result is usually incomprehensible! But there's also the jargon that we use as a matter of pride, or because we've lost touch with how our markets think of us. I worked recently with an association of plastic surgeons. They had their member database on their Web site, and wanted to attract visitors there to find a local practitioner. Their "Number One" target keyword for the search engines was "rhinoplasty". Well, I can only spell this because I just looked it up for this article - but usually you and I in the general public would never think of that - of course, we'd be searching for . . . "nose jobs"! The surgeons didn't like this at all from an academic standpoint. But they had to concede the point when I presented evidence on most common searches from Overture's very handy Search Term Suggestion Tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion. 3. It's very passive marketing . . . My most pressing argument for not spending too much time on free search engines is that it's a very passive form of marketing. You're relying on a prospective visitor waking up in the morning, and realizing that they need something that you might provide. Then, you're relying on them choosing the precise keywords that you've targeted for search engine optimization. It's a fairly hit or miss business. When do I disagree with myself? There are some exceptions to all this. I do believe that search engines are well worth it when you have a niche product or service with extremely unambiguous and well-defined keywords. For example, an audience member in one of my recent programs was working on a Web site to sell some incredibly advanced yoyos. I did recommend a search engine strategy to him - after all, if someone puts in "yoyo" as a search term, they'd almost certainly be a qualified lead! What do I do instead? That's the subject of numerous other articles. To get you started, you can find twenty-three of my favourite techniques in my free tipsheet. But in short, I much prefer aggressively seeking out sites where your target markets are likely to be reading, or searching for information. That way, you can proactively bring your ideas, products and services to them, in places where they are much more likely to be receptive and interested. And there are so many options for different budgets and campaign sizes, both online and offline. So, are search engines worth it any more? I'm not advocating ignoring search engines. And I do like the better paid models, such as Overture. But I do suggest that you should be very clear about how much passive marketing you want to undertake, and whether the product or service that you're offering lends itself to this. And if you do decide to optimize your site for search engines, pick the keywords that will be in the mindset of your customers . . . and be willing to settle for "Number Two" sometimes! © 2003 Philippa Gamse. All rights reserved. Philippa Gamse, CyberSpeaker, is a Web strategy consultant and professional speaker. Check out her free tipsheet for 23 ideas to promote your Website: http://www.CyberSpeaker.com/tipsheet.html Philippa can be reached at (831) 465-0317. posted on Nov 27, 2006
Since the last Google update, there have been many instances and examples of the Google Nuke Bot! This is what I call it anyway. Have you visited a favorite website lately only to realize they've been nuked by Google? More and more we are seeing internet marketing / SEO companies getting nuked, by Google completely removing them from their data banks. I am not going to mention any names because I'm sure the owners of the once populated websites already know and are embarrassed from this development. Since the word went out on WebPositionGold getting banned from Google for automatic queries sent to Google, we are noticing other related websites going down for the count as well. For the info on WebPositionGold, go here: http://www.socialpatterns.com/search-engine-marketing/webposition-banned/ The things is, we already know about Webpositiongold, what about other sites that are getting hit hard? Has your site been nuked? It seems as though, some sites that had thousands of links pointing from Google are getting hit the hardest. It seems like Google is cracking down on "spam tactics", "submission tactics", and anything related to unethical SEO practices. Is Google Making An Effort To Uphold Their Webmaster Guidelines? Will it come to a point where if we don't uphold the Google guidelines, we cannot be successful online? This thought is ridiculous but almost scary to think it could happen! What about website's that still hide text through same background colours? Hidden div layers? and mirror pages? Why hasn't Google attacked those issues first? You can almost make the assumption that by Google nuking websites that send automatic ranking & link popularity queries to their data base, this may be a huge effort to relieve the strain on the query servers in order to free up some memory. How Does Getting Your Website Nuked From Google Affect Your Credibility? An event like this could ultimately ruin your reputation online. People who have come to trust your knowledge and judgment on Google rankings may never look at your company the same ever again. People might think to themselves "I don't want to get nuked like they did!". How Can You Tell You've Been Nuked? * Your Google Page Rank is now 0-2/10 and should be at least 5/10 * You have zero backlinks listing in Google anymore * You have zero internal website listings within Google by doing (site:www.yoursite.com) * Google's cache of your website is no longer to be found For newer websites, don't be confused between this nuking process and your own evolution online. Getting and maintaining a high PR level takes a lot of work. Once Nuked, Does Google Still Come Back? The question I have for websites that have been nuked: Can you still see Google in your stat log files for your site? If so, I wonder if Google is still keeping an eye on you and watching your every move? In Conclusion: Stay away from programs that generate automatic queries into Google. Don't check your link popularity 3 times a week and especially don't check your search engine rankings twice a day. Just simply promote your website and measure your success through your internal website stats and monthly profits. Google doesn't appreciate websites that consistently draw their power in order to measure their success, just simply take that out of your daily actions. Cheers to your online success! About The Author: Martin Lemieux is the president of the Smartads Advertising Network who helps companies like yours to increase your business offline and online. Smartads Internet Marketing: http://www.smartads.info Copyright © 2005 Smartads Advertising Network - Reprints Accepted. Author resource must be included! posted on Nov 24, 2006
It's unfortunate that many website owners are so hung-up on Page Rank, they'll rarely if ever, link to a site with a page rank lower than their own. I'm frequently approached by other website owners who it's clear want to exchange links with one of my websites for no other reason than its Page Rank and so they can get more back links to their own website. That's my experience with quite a few of my own websites. It's not until you get around a Page Rank 4 do back links come without you having to go and find them. Back link requests tend to come more from sites with Low Page Rank wanting to improve search engine ranking by getting back links from higher ranking websites. They're also frequently from websites that offer no relevant content to your visitors and are from totally unrelated areas. Many website owners have read a little about why and how to gain back links, then set about gaining as many as possible from any site that will give them one in return. They know it's important to gain back links, but what they forget or never knew, is it serves little purpose if they're of poor quality. Poor Quality Back Links are from Unrelated Websites with Low Link Value. I was reminded recently of the Google Page Rank obsession by one of my linking partners. I had advised them that because of some necessary changes to my website I had moved their back link to another page. The website owner quickly emailed to tell me they had checked the page rank on the new page and finding it to be lower, advised me there was little point in them continuing to have a back link to my site. Although we had been linking for over a year, it only served to prove they were not linking to my site because of its great content or because of its value to their visitors, but just for the Page Rank. When I advised them that their Page Rank check must have been in error because the page was the same PR as the previous one, they retained the back link to my site. The obsession with Page Rank and how many back links a website has, led Google to put limits on this information. For those of you obsessed with back linking by Page Rank you probably know that it only gets updated about every 3 months. Google also no longer reveals the true number of back links to a web site. Limiting information about back links is also something other search engines are starting to do. An article of mine published on over 17,000 Websites Gained only 4 back links in any of the major search engines. I recently proved the limits placed on information about back links and the discounting of back links, after one of my articles got taken up on over 17,000 websites. Since the article has a back link to my website, in theory that should mean 17,000 back links to my website. A popular tool for checking back links among other things was a software tool called Optilink. Its popularity became such a problem for Google that they set about trying to detect its electronic signature and then blocking it when people used it. It looks as if in the past months, that Google have been successful, because Optilink has been disabled by the developer from conducting queries on Google for back links. It's also no longer able to do queries on back links with MSN or Yahoo and the only one left now is the minor search engine Hotbot. I'm only telling you all this, because it proves how obsessed many website owners have become about checking for back links to their websites and checking Google Page Rank of potential and existing link partners. But are these web site owners right to be hung-up about Page Rank and Back Links and are you one of them? What if I could prove to you that the value of back links from another website is not just about Page Rank. That in fact back links from Low PR sites could be of more value to you than back links from High PR sites. Would you believe me? No, well if you want the proof you'll need to read another article called "How Low PR Web Sites Can Improve Search Engine Ranking" by Andy Theekson who advises on Search Engine Optimization. The article shows how the value of back links from other websites is not just about Page Rank but also how many other outbound links there are from the same page. It was possible to show how a back link from a PR 2 web page can be of equal or greater value than a back link from a web page with a PR 7, 8, 9 or even 10. The article should be read by anyone who only looks for back links from High PR sites. It's often said that people don't value what they get for free and only value what they have to pay for. This may also be true of back links since the website owners who value them the most will often buy links. Many website owners who have the cash will buy links, or to be more correct with terminology, buy text links from websites with High PR pages. Some people would argue this is cheating and trying to buy links to improve search engine ranking. The cost to buy text links varies widely from $5 to $30 per month for a PR 4 link up to $50/mnth for a PR 5 text link. They become progressively more expensive up to PR 8, when in some cases, you can expect to pay several $100's per month. So why would people pay these prices to buy text links on high PR pages? Is it for the traffic they expect to get by being on a high ranking and assumed high traffic page, or is it to gain from an improved search engine ranking for their own website? If they want traffic there are cheaper ways, even if you include Pay Per Click where even at 50 cents per click your $1000 would give you 2,000 targeted visitors per month. When you buy text links there are no guarantees you'll get traffic and you're paying for the text link not by the click but by the month, regardless of what traffic you get. So I would suggest that someone who is going to buy text links obviously believes they're going to improve search engine ranking for their website. But are people who buy text links getting value for money? For the answer to that question you'll need to read the continuing part of this article "Can You Buy Text Links And Get Value for Money?" Tony Simpson, advises on website design, promotion and optimization; in particular website automation for the one person operator. The continuing part of his article is at: Can You Buy Text Links And Get Value for Money? posted on Nov 24, 2006
I built my website, it's perfect. My chosen subject of the website is Computer Support Services. Of course this is an example, but moving along, what should my keywords be? Keywords are what people type into a search engine to find something on the internet. These words are what drive user requests. Words to live by I like to call them. Why? Because on the internet your website will live and die by the words you use, or the words I use when you hire me to optimize your site. How many words should I use? First off, let's cover what a keyword is. A keyword is a word or collection of words used to describe your website. For those doing their own website design these words are applied in what is called a meta tag such as the following: meta name="keywords" content="these words, would describe, your site" keywords should say something about your website. They should also directly reflect the content of your site. They should not be random words that have nothing to do with your site, or you. If they are, you can expect that your page ranking will fall rather than rise. Of course, you will still have to submit or resubmit your website to keep your page in the eyes of the various search engines. The number of words and phrases should be no more than 21-22, or a combination of the two. I have seen sites that had over 780 keywords, but no content to support them. Even if there was content there to support that large number of words, it's fruitless to have that many words. Most search engines will ignore anything over the 22 words limit. A phrase is defined as more than one word. "Real Estate Sales" is a phrase. "Real, Estate, Sales" is a collection of keywords. Both of these if used in a search would render completely different results. Short, to the point, and using some of the keywords that describe your service or product. Here it's Auto Repair Service, it's New, and it's Terrific. Description - The second most important item on the page. Make this relevant to the content (typing) that you have on your webpage: Bob's New Terrific Auto Repair Service is the most experienced auto repair shop on the coast. Servicing All types of autos from 9am - 5pm 7 days a week. We offer early bird service on Fridays and Free Car Washes to all customers who pay by cash. KEYWORDS - How do I find these keywords? Use the following tools: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ This tool known as the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool is one of the most widely used methods of finding out what subjects people are searching for. What products they are searching for, what services they search for. Enter your words like this: star wars or use something like business plan sample and when you click the button, you will be presented with a listing of how many times that word or words was searched for in the past month. Picking the higher ranked ones will be good for your site. How does keyword selection help sales? It helps in the sense that by selecting the correct keywords, your site will be more visible, found more often in searches, and as a result of more visitors, eventually you will get more sales. Please make sure that the BUY IT NOW message on your website is clear. If not, all the optimization in the world will not help your sales increase. Michael Murdock - former Macintosh Systems Engineer for PIXAR now owns/runs DocMurdock - A website optimization & Internet Marketing company. Helping websites move higher on the right search engines, and helping clients products move out the door and into the hands of the ideal clients. posted on Nov 23, 2006
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a long and complicated process that can be highly rewarding if done correctly. SEO is not a waste of time, but can be if your site doesn't appeal to visitors or function properly. Your potential customer will be turned off if your site lacks trustworthiness, an eye pleasing color scheme and easy to use navigation. Why lose visitors and possible sales because of a small design flaw or unappealing color scheme? Those visitors could have resulted in sales if those small imperfections were fixed. As I arrive from your high position in the search engines looking for your product, I want to be able to trust the company I am buying from. People are very leery with making purchases on the Internet, and even more so from sites they don't know a great deal about. You want to gain trust from the visitor with guarantees, a professional design and color scheme, testimonials and by any other way. If your site doesn't boast its trustworthiness and make me feel secure, do you think I will purchase your product? No. Visitors are especially leery when they are required to give credit card information. Make them feel protected, boast about your privacy policy, encrypted servers and whatever else you have set up. Be enthusiastic about your site's security. I need to be able to find what I want and navigate to where I need to go FAST after I arrive at your site via the search engines. Some visitors get lost and frustrated with poor navigation and will leave your site without a second thought. Do not leave your visitor with a bad taste in their mouth! Allow them to flow through your site with ease and comfort. If your navigation is confusing your potential customer will likely leave and travel to one of the other three billion web sites on the Internet. Speed is also a factor in navigation. Visitors don't want to sit there for twenty or thirty seconds while your page loads. Don't make them wait. Cut down on the size of your pages and graphics. The colors you choose for your site also impact on whether the visitor will make a purchase. A color scheme that hurts the eye will turn visitors off which will lead to lost sales. Visitors may also question how accountable your site is. You cannot have a black background with white, yellow or neon green text. It hurts the eyes. Color schemes such as that scare visitors away. With professional colors visitors will likely feel more secure and relaxed while surfing your site, which will lead to more sales. A top position in the search engines can provide huge amounts of sales, if your site can be trusted and appeal to visitors. With a defective design and color scheme, slow loading pages or lack of trustworthiness all of the time spent performing SEO could go to waste. So get out, fix those flaws and discover more sales! About The Author Derek Croote is a SEO, web design and usability enthusiast. He practices ethical search engine optimization and strives to make sites across the web better for visitors. Derek is the webmaster of the http://www.saratogalakesideacresassociation.org/, a small homeowners association. You can reach him at dcroote@gmail.com. posted on Nov 22, 2006
According to the dictionary, the definition of the word "overture" is as follows: "An opening or initiating move toward negotiations, a new relationship, an agreement, etc.; a formal or informal proposal or offer." Hmmmmmmmm...very interesting definition--especially that part about "a new relationship." I think pay-per-click giant Overture should look up the definition of their own company name, because they appear to be breaching their "relationship" with their customers big time! Here are the most common complaints:
So, why hasn't Overture done anything about the complaints? Because, and I'm going to as blunt as I possibly can here-- they don't care about you. They only care about your money! Arrogance and greed seems to be the common thread that bonds the major search engines. But you have only yourselves to blame. That's exactly what happens when you "place all of your eggs into one arrogant search engine basket!" When you're totally dependent on someone and they know you're totally dependent on them, more often than not, they'll put the screws to you. That's exactly what you see happening with Google, Yahoo and Overture. They're screwing you over big time! I received some very interesting e-mails in response to my article, "Googles Trap, DMOZ's Nap, And Yahoo!'s Crap." The writer of one of the e-mails wanted to know if I was afraid of being penalized by the search engines, because of my criticism's of them. Penalize me how? How can you penalize someone who neither benefits from nor is dependent on your service? I don't depend on the search engines! I don't benefit from them! I never have. I get almost no traffic from the search engines. For example, so far this morning I've received over 300 unique visits to my website. Out of that total, none came from the search engines--not a single one! My traffic comes from the dozens of articles I've written, like this one that have been picked up and published on popular websites all over the Internet. I also get traffic via word of mouth, newsletters and ezines that my articles are published in, and a few other secret methods that I use. That's the kind independence and power you give yourself, when you're not totally dependent on any one entity. Find alternative ways to attract traffic to your website. Here are a few suggestions: Ezines, newsletters, forums, online magazines, sponsor listings on other websites, exchanging links. Here are a few offline suggestions: Magazines, direct mail, shopper newspapers, cable television, radio, flyers, hospital newsletters, card decks, trade journals and directories, bulletin boards, tabloid newspapers. Here's what the writer of another e-mail I received had to say: "Wow! What a pleasure to read your article, Googles Trap, DMOZ's Nap, And Yahoo!'s Crap. Boy, I've been complaining about this type of scenario for at least a year. I will also include Overture with the terrible trio. Overture has recently, with the long standing pay per click program, decided that all your keyword phrases will be broad matched. The reason they gave was that it was too time consuming for the user to manage their listings. Well, they forgot to mention that they will also receive more money because of the change. Also, they say that you can enter words in quotations or negative words against your keyword phrase so that you receive the correct response. In other words, your keyword phrase will not show up when those negative words are searched for. Well, do you know how time consuming the negative word process is? And, there's no way you can muster up all of the possible negative words that could be searched for so that your listing will not appear. Absolute CRAP, to term your expression. The terrible trio you mention in your article plus Overture have gradually swung towards "God" like service providers. They have the power and the user is very much at effect. Well, that's my 5 cents worth. After saying all of the above I am a user of these services but have been working for a long time now finding other ways and means of marketing and promotion so that all of our eggs are not in the one basket. I have, in the main, been exchanging links with other websites plus placing relatively inexpensive ads on websites that have similar services to ours." I love getting e-mails like that! That tells me that some of you are finally starting to "get it." Give yourself the power! Claim your independence! Find alternative ways to attract traffic to your website. If you do that, one day you'll realize you really don't need the search engines after all. I guarantee it! About The Author Dean Phillips is an Internet marketing expert, writer, publisher and entrepreneur. Questions? Comments? Dean can be reached at mailto: dean@lets-make-money.net Visit his website at: http://www.lets-make-money.net posted on Nov 18, 2006
was asked by an author to remove a free content
article from a client web site where we had posted it (with
several others from different authors) to increase topical
relevancy at a site that fit the article perfectly.
This article was submitted to free web content list archives which I'd found online. A search turned up dozens of additional uses across the web. I began to believe that this author simply didn't like the site that used the article and was seeking removal to avoid competition. We took it down to avoid an unnecessary battle over something we didn't wish to fight about. The site we used it on did compete with this person, but the client site has more to lose than the author, because readers could click through to the author site from the resource box link and gain the customer instead of the client. Having YOUR article on competitors sites is an incredible marketing coup! You should be glad anytime this happens as long as they follow your use restrictions and provide live links from the resource box at the end of your articles. The client wisely saw topical web content for their site more valuable than the concern of that external link to the author/competitor. It does immeasurable good for your link popularity as well since that link comes from a relevant and on-topic site, rather than from a useless links directory. Your articles serve as 500 to 1200 word advertisements for your business and if it appears on competitor sites, it is as if you have been able to sneak in the back door and steal customers from the competing site via your article. Would you rather appear in a random list of links, or have 1000 words to convince people to buy your products or services? All of this just baffles me as a content distributor. All of those authors that requested removal would gain a valuable one-way inbound link to their websites from topical and relevant content that increases their link popularity and their visibility. Why on earth would they want those articles, that notoriety, that credibility and the high quality links removed? When there is no copyright issue present, you gain far more from use of your article than you lose by having an article on sites you don't like. I've got articles lose in the world that I'm not proud of, simply because I've become a better writer since I distributed them originally. Several are outdated and recommend things that are no longer valid or, in some cases, not at all useful for current standards in search engine ranking - but that is because the search engine algorithms have changed and best practices have changed. That is why I now date my article copyright to clearly show the date associated with the article. But I would NEVER request removal of my articles from sites that have old articles posted. They will STILL be more relevant and valuable to me than any cluttered, off-topic reciprocal links directory, because they are a link within relevant text that gain link popularity and sometimes lead to new clients and further visibility. Removal of your articles from compeitor sites would be silly in most cases and will reduce your visibility and your link popularity. Be the Fox in the Competitor Hen House instead of Chicken Little in fear of the article marketing sky falling. Copyright © August 10, 2005 Mike Banks Valentine operates http://Publish101.com Free Web Content Distribution for Article Marketers and Provides content aggregation, press release optimization Custom web content for Search Engine Positioning http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm Learn at http://WebSite101.com Ecommerce Tutorial posted on Nov 25, 2006
Don't share this with people of a nervous disposition because I really can't restrain myself any longer. Picture the scene if you will... [A conversation last week though it could be this week or the next - it happens all the time...] Anon: "We want lots of people to find our website but it doesn't seem to be happening for some reason." Michael: "Can you tell me some of the methods you've been using to market your website?" Anon: "Well really we're just waiting for Google to update and then we'll be fine. Once that happens our problems will be over." Michael: "What else are you doing to market your website?" Anon: "There isn't anything else you can do is there?" [Michael slaps head..] In Search Of The Holy Google Grail Yes - it's the attack of the Killer Google Zombies. People that think Google IS the Internet. Google is not the Internet. Google is not the search engines. Google is one search engine. That's all. There are millions of Killer Google Zombies out there right now just staring at Google looking to see whether they are ranked on page 124 or 125. Wasting their energy, efforts and life in pursuit of the Holy Google Grail - The Number One Ranking... The Single Best Way To Get Customers To Your Website If there is one single and most-important fact I have learned in the past 9 years about how to get customers to your website it is this: There is no one single way!!!! If you're looking for the 'magic bullet', the 'ultimate secret', the 'hidden treasure' or any other cheese-tastic analogy that you care to mention - forget it. Stop looking for that one "killer way to explode your website's traffic levels over night" - it doesn't exist. You need to start seeing the wider picture and leaving the Google Zombies to it. You need to try other search engines, try links, try online advertising, try developing partnerships with other websites, try viral marketing techniques, try dispersing your message on other people's networks, try creating multiple websites for different niches, try an affiliate programme, try getting listed in directories, try launching an email marketing campaign and try tattooing your website address onto your forehead. Whatever you do please promise me you will try lots of different things and not turn into a Killer Google Zombie! Learn how to market your website like the professionals in the FREE 7-Part Training Course "Internet Marketing Made Easy": http://www.websitemarketingbible.com/marketing/ posted on Nov 18, 2006
Searching online can not only be fun, but you sometimes need to be downright inventive. For those of you who have been searching online for years now, you've probably adapted ways & techniques to find what you are looking for quickly. Unfortunately when it comes to promoting your site, nothing out there is classified as a quick fix. If people say it's a quick fix, it probably has a major risk attached to it. Your ultimate goal when promoting your site should be to acquire some of those "Big" search terms online! For example, "Marketing Tips" or "Marketing" in general. The only way to ever come close to the Big Dogs is to start small. Increase the search term and decrease your competition. Here's an example of this, let's use "Marketing". Wow, what a powerful search term, but someone has to get it, right? As of today, June 1st, 2004, if you search for "Marketing" you will get 72,700,000 results found within Google. That's a tough one. Going further, let's add "Marketing Tips", you get: 7,560,000 results found. Going a little further now, let's add "Web Marketing Tips", you'll get around: 5,760,000 results found. Let's go beyond that for our final search, let's add "Web Site Marketing Tips", you'll get: 4,940,000 results found. Now take a good look at all those search terms, what do you see right in the middle??? You got it, that oh so powerful term called "Marketing"! Are you starting to see the value of targeting larger search terms? (Larger meaning more words attached to it). Eventually as time goes on, once you've done your due-dilligence and worked hard at targeting these larger search terms, search engines will start rewarding your site with much smaller and more difficult terms to acquire. Another way to accomplish this is to target your local market 1st. Instead of targeting "Web Site Marketing Tips" as a whole, you can target "Marketing In Hamilton, Ontario". By targeting the area you live in, you not only target your local market 1st, but you also setup your web site for success in the future market, which ultimately, is the rest of the world! Let's just say I was to remove "Ontario" from that search term "Marketing In Hamilton, Ontario", how many cities are named "Hamilton" ??? Many more than you think! So in conclusion: Don't be afraid to work for your key phrases and set your web site up for success by targeting larger key phrases to increase your chances of better search engine placements. In the end, you'll receive what you've been after all along, more exposure for your enterprise! I hope you enjoyed the article! Read more of Martin's articles online here: http://www.smartads.info/newsletter About The Author Martin Lemieux Eye Catching Print Design Powerful Internet Marketing Tools posted on Nov 21, 2006
The date: 29th July 2005. The time: early morning. I got out of bed and fired up my PC. Opened my browser to check my site. Had a look at the third-party Google toolbar plugin (http://toolbar.google.com/) on said browser (FireFox). It showed grey. Ice formed in my stomach. I opened my bugged version of Internet Explorer: my PageRank was 0. By now I was frantic. I went to http://www.google.com and typed in 'site:www.tigertom.com': no pages listed. I did this for two other satellite sites of mine: ditto. What had happened? TigerTom.Com (http://www.tigertom.com) had been banned by Google. I went to the WebmasterWorld forum (http://www.webmasterworld.com), and found out the awful truth. Google was doing one of its periodic updates of its algorithm, and had filtered out my sites completely. Further research there, and a bit of soul-searching, revealed why. I had too many pseudo-directory pages with auto-generated external links. Snippets from search engine results were used as descriptions of said links. Said links were run though a redirect script. These are hallmarks of pseudo-directories and 'AdSense scraper'* sites. Google is reportedly trying to filter these from its 'SERPs'**. I say reportedly, because Google doesn't announce these purges. They are inferred. To compound my sins, these pages were also effectively doorway pages?. The theory was that legitimate sites had been hit as 'collateral damage'. I say theory, in that Google rarely comments on individual cases. It won't tell you exactly why your site was banned. I guess this is for reasons of time, and to give no clues to spammers. In my case the ban was justified for my two satellite sites; while not looking like spam, they were effectively doorway sites. My main site was different. It had offending pages, but was mostly a diverse labour of seven years; a personal site on steroids. Google bans sites algorithmically: a site that fits their 'spammer' profile gets dropped via software from their index automatically. Real spammers shrug their shoulders and move on; honest webmasters write emails begging for mercy. Like me. I did some searching via Google, to find out how to do a re-inclusion request. Here's how: 1. First, you check your site is truly gone, by going to http://www.google.com, typing 'site:www.yourdomain.com' without the apostrophes. If it returns no pages at all ... 2. You check Google's webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. These are not really guidelines; you should treat them as iron-clad rules. 3. You stop the offending content from being web-accessible, permanently. If you're familiar with Apache web-server mod_rewrite you can: - Send a 410 'Gone' response to requests for the offending pages, or - CHMOD them to 600, which will return a 403 'Forbidden' response, or - Move them to a different directory if you need to keep them, or - Just delete them. Don't try to be clever. Just get rid of them. 4. You go to http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py, tick the relevant boxes, and type 'Re-inclusion request' in the subject box of the form. 4a. You add the complete URL of your site i.e. http://www.naughtydomain.com, 4b. You state that you have read the webmaster guidelines above, 4c. You admit what you did wrong; simply, succinctly, with no carping or special pleading. Don't try to be clever. Don't argue. Don't lie. Don't waffle. Google has cached copies of your site. When an engineer checks your site, he'll look for the offending content, and compare it against their cache. He'll spend about two minutes on it; don't give him a reason to continue to exclude you. 4d. You ask for re-inclusion. 5. You wait. In my case, it took about a week; a long, unpleasant, fretful week. I sent follow up emails saying what I was doing, and a fax, and I was going to write letters if that didn't work. That was probably excessive. Once you have a ticket number, that's all that should be necessary. They emailed a standard reply saying "the problem had been passed to their engineers". That's good. I understand they send no reply to spammers. A week later my site was back in. Lesson learnt. To make sure I'm not so vulnerable again, I'm splitting my content to different sites, on the principle of 'best not to have all your eggs in one basket'. Have I learnt anything from this? Yes. Have more than one site as your 'money-maker'. Spend less time on search engine optimisation and more on traditional marketing. Come up with a unique selling proposition that compels people to link to your site. Easy(!) ------ * A site specifically set up to host Google Adsense advertisements (http://www.google.com/adsense). Usually of low quality, consisting of pages of links to other web sites, text copied from free-print articles, and a big Google ad block 'above the fold'. ** Search Engine Result Pages ? Doorway pages are low-quality keyword-rich web pages whose sole purpose is to lead the viewer to the 'real' content, usually whatever the site is selling. About the author: T. O' Donnell (http://www.ttfreeware.co.uk/) is an ecommerce consultant and curmudgeon living in London, UK. His latest project is an ebook on buying property in Spain (http://www.tigertom.com/spanish-property-for-sale.shtml). His blog can be read at http://www.ttblog.co.uk/. posted on Nov 25, 2006
There are those that get on the computer one night and find that all of their Web pages have disappeared from Google. While, others are still in the search engine index, but don't rank high for nothing, not even for their Web site's name. It's a Web site owners worst nightmare, getting kicked out of the search engines. Ultimately, many webmasters had little or no warning that this was going to happen. Many webmasters are left with no idea why they were kicked out and are left wondering how to get back in Google's search engine. There could be any number of reasons why a Web site is banned by Google. The most common reasons for being banned are listed below in this article. 1. Duplicate Content To check for duplicated content simply search with unique phrase on your Web page. If you find a Web site that has stolen your content you should contact the site owner and tell them to take it down or face legal action. Also, for copyright violations visit www.google.com/dmca.html and notify them that someone is infringing on your site's copyright 2. Cloaking You can also deliver cloaked pages to the search engines by IP address, but Google and other search engines say they can detect cloaking. There are other reasons to use cloaking, such as custom language delivery and geotargeted advertising. 3. Hidden text or hidden links 4) Keyword stuffing 5) Linking to bad neighborhoods 6) Buying links for Search engine ranking 7) Machine Generated Web sites This is a site that generates hundreds of web pages that are basically the same page repeated hundreds or thousands of times, but with a few unique lines of text and unique title. Often times, search engines can't spot this, if done right by the site owner. However, if a spider doesn't spot your machine generated Web pages, a competitor might find it and report your Web site. What to do after you are Spam clean? Once you have cleaned up your Web site, you can try contacting Google by visiting http://www.google.com/contact/. Tell them that you made a mistake and won't do it again. Even if you do contact Google, they most likely won't let your Web site back in and if you happen to get back in, you better keep your Web site squeaky clean because I doubt you will get other chance. If you can't get in touch with Google, I suggest that you wait for a few months after Google's spider visits your Web site and see if you get your ranking back or at least where you can see that your ranking is going up in the search results. During this time you should not change your Web site around much and give the search engines time to spider your Web site. I really don't think that many Web sites have dropped because Google is penalizing them. Instead, I think Google has changed the factors or adds more weight to a factor(s) that they use to rank Web sites in the search results. All search engines make periodic changes to the way they rank Web sites in the search results, so don't be surprised if one week you rank number one and the next week you rank 30TH. Matt Colyer began as a SEO Specialist in 1997. He founded Superior Webmaster in 2004 as a source of articles and tutorials for Web site owners looking to improve their Web site. posted on Nov 22, 2006
I can't tell you how many times people have asked me, "How to do I get my site to come up in the top ten of the search engines so I can get hits and sell my product?" What they really want to know is, "How can I get people to show up to my website without spending any money on advertising my site!" People usually don't like my answer because accomplishing a "top ten ranking" on any search engine always requires careful thought along with a significant amount of work. Three types of "Search engines" abound on the Internet. They include true search engines, directories, and links pages. At last count approximately 10,000 sites referred to themselves as search engines, though only about a dozen sites rate your attention since they drive 97% of the Internet's search traffic. These sites include Google, Yahoo!, Overture, MSN, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, Lycos, DMOZ, and a few others. When a visitor logs onto a search engine looking for information, they enter "keywords" about the subject in hopes of obtaining a list of relevant websites. Each search engine or directory operates with its own rules about judging a site's relevancy to a keyword search. They look at text on the web page (body text) as well as words you can't see which reside in the actual code of the web pages. This code includes such things as alt tags, title tags, and others. Depending on the search engine, what you can't see may represent a far more important part of ranking well than the words appearing on the page. Search engines look at how many times a keyword shows up in the various parts of your website as well as actual location on the page. Assuming that an important subject for your pages would appear at the beginning of a page, those web pages starting with the keyword should rank better than those that don't. Also, in many cases, the more websites linking to your site will drastically impact your rankings. Entire books and websites exist to teach eager website owners how to pump up their rankings on all the various search engines, however these promotion tips will serve you well in your quest for the "Top Ten!" ** See what others have done for maximum exposure! Go to the various search engines and perform a search under which you would like to appear. Dissect those pages to find the common elements that make them show up. ~ How often and where do the keywords appear on the page? ** Beware of registration vs. promotion Plenty of companies will "register" your website with thousands of search engines for about $50-$100. But simply submitting to the search engines won't do much for you. Without the proper structure in your website, only sheer luck will cause your site to pop up in the top ten! (c) Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved http://www.thenetreporter.com About The Author: Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the co-author of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how to use fr-e articles to quickly drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website or affiliate links... Simple "Traffic Machine" brings Thousands of NEW visitors to your website for weeks, even months... without spending a dime on advertising! ==> "Turn Words Into Traffic" posted on Nov 22, 2006
Search Engine Optimization popularly known as SEO. SEO is the process of optimizing or modifying a website to increase its popularity and ranking in listings of search engines. What is Search Engine? A Search Engine is the one which keeps a data base of the websites with good content or dedicated to the search and retrieval of information for the purpose of cataloging the results. Usually based on an index of several webpages or websites you are looking for your purpose. Customers Search for the products or service on these Search Engine for keywords and the results will be provided as per your site indexing on that search engine or based on the popularity of your keyword. Basics of SEO 1) Keyword Research 2) Site Building a) Title Tag 3) Links a) Inbound Links These are used to improve the ranking and popularity of your site. Now a days google is most searchable Engine 60% of the search traffic you will get from google. and the Rest Yahoo 20% and the rest 20%. You should optimize your site as per the google's search methodologies. If you are interested in optimizing your site for Search Engine ranking and popularity, please feel free to contactseo@gmail.com. Thanks and regards, Iam Mirza Mohd Ali Baig working for an offshore IT company having more than 3 years of experience. Contact me at Contactseo@gmail.com or call me at 0091-09391136471. WebSite: http://www.mcsweb.in posted on Nov 23, 2006
Most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts agree that links back to your site have a great impact on your ranking in the major search engines. Think of it like an election; your site is a candidate and every link to your site is a vote. Of course, it was never quite that simple (high ranking, relevant sites have more voting power) but now it may have gotten even more complicated. The Dampening Link Filter It seems that Google may have introduced something called a "Dampening Link Filter" into its indexing algorithm. I'll give you a layperson's overview of this filter, but for more intimate details, check out WebProNews. More and more people are realising the importance of links back to your site (or "backlinks"). For some time, companies have been engaging in all sorts of link campaigns designed to generate thousands of backlinks. Many of these campaigns haven't really paid too much attention to the context or lifespan of these links. And Google knows it. Because these campaigns are designed to artificially generate the perception of a site's importance ? to trick the search engines into thinking they're important ? it's been suggested that Google has decided to put an end to it. Apparently, there's evidence to suggest that Google has introduced a new link filter to dampen the effect of new backlinks. So if your link generation campaign has just created 500 links in a day from seemingly irrelevant sites, Google will suspect it of being artificial, and refuse to pass on the full effect of those links ? at least for a while. Well, that's how the theory goes, anyway. It has been argued that you can avoid being penalized by this filter by generating links:
The wisdom of relevance and lifespan is already well established; the dampening filter is simply one more reason why people should start to heed it. Writing and submitting SEO articles for online publication is one way to do so. This article explains how SEO articles satisfy each of these three conditions. (For the basics of SEO article writing, take a look at How to Top Google by Writing Articles.) Build Backlinks Slowly Writing quality articles takes time. It's as simple as that. Even an SEO copywriter can't just bang an article together in a morning ? it has to be well considered. It must be accurate, informative, interesting, well written, and topical. And once you've written the article, the real work begins. You then have to submit it to your favourite article submit sites. And as they all have different requirements and idiosyncrasies, submitting your article to 50 submit sites can take you all day! Once submitted, even the best articles will only be published gradually. A good article can be published 2 or 3 times a day for a week or two, then interest tapers off. But still, over the course of 6 months a single good article can be published hundreds of times! And remember, each time is a link. Build Backlinks From Relevant Sites As soon as you choose the topic of your article, you define the type of site that will publish it. All online publishers have an agenda; they want to generate traffic. Whether for commercial or benevolent reasons, they want particular kinds of articles for very specific audiences. Your article won't be published on irrelevant sites simply because the publishers of those sites get nothing out of it. Of course, your article may be published on sites that are only marginally relevant. For instance, this article may be published on general copywriting websites, advertising websites, web design websites, home business websites, etc. But the beauty of a well written SEO article is that you get to optimize it for the keywords that you want to rank for. So even if the keywords on the publishing site don't quite match your own target keywords, the page containing your link (i.e. your article) does. What's more, you even have the power to optimize the links themselves. For instance, as an SEO copywriter, I can distribute backlinks throughout my article that use my target keywords as the link text (e.g. "copywriter", "SEO copywriter", "advertising copywriter", and "website copywriter" ;-). Some submit sites don't let you do this, but most will ? at least in the byline. And one other thing ? other people link to good articles. This can increase the Page Rank of the site containing your article, which, in turn, can increase the page rank of your own site. It's a win-win situation! Build Backlinks With a Long Lifespan The quality of your SEO article determines the lifespan of your backlink. Write a very helpful article, make it easy to read, and choose a topic which isn't going to go away in a hurry, and your article will stay online for years. In any event, most publishers tend not to clear out their article libraries simply because it's better for them to have lots of content available to both readers and search engines. Conclusion While it's no new phenomenon to SEO veterans and SEO copywriters, the writing of SEO articles to generate backlinks is a tactic which offers much in the way of ranking. The possibility of a Google dampening link filter simply increases the value of that offering. Happy writing! * Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter and website copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles. posted on Nov 20, 2006
When Google Adwords first came on scene, it was not immediately apparent to most people how to utilize the system to create wealth, until John Carpenter popularised it with his Google Cash system, a book he wrote some time back. Since then, Google Adwords has become one of the main traffic generation tools for most affiliates. It was the fastest way to generate traffic. By now, most people would have learnt about the latest Google Ruling on their Adwords' programs Basically it goes like this: 1) Google will only display two ads for the same website at the same time AND only ads with the best click thru rate, 2) You can remove the three letter word 'aff' from your ads, if you are a reseller. How do you ensure you are the top 2 ads besides having to bid up keywords until your nose bleed? With this new ruling, there will only be 2 ads displayed at any one time, and only for ads that has the best click through rates. The rationale is that there isn't any value add to show multiple ads that all point to the same web site. In any case, experienced affiliate marketers would probably capture the email address of the person who clicked on the Google Ad, rather than directing the person straight away to the vendor's web site; So there goes an easy and fast way to get traffic So how do we counter the latest 'dance' from Google? I have a solution which targets to key areas of concern: 1. Offering Value Add content through the use of Blogs 2. Getting F.R.E.E Traffic with RSS Feeds Thousands of blog communities are sprining up all over the Net, and depending on what you are trying to market (as an affiliate) you can easily set up a blog centered just around the topic which relates to that product. If you're selling slimming pills, you can have a blog just related to weight loss. Next, turn your blog into an rss feed and syndicate it all over the Net, by submitting to the 27 major blog directories and 41 major rss directories. (There might be more at time of writing, but these are the main ones I submit to.) Besides it's ability as a traffic tool, blogs give your potential clients value add in terms of useful contents you make. Since you have to make postings to your blog, you are in a way 'forced' to study the area in which you want to market (e.g. weight loss) and provide good value add information, very much like a 'consultant'. Which in a way is good for anyone wanting to build a sustainable business and stay in the 'game' in the long run. Brandon is Author of Multimedia Ebook "Marketing Rampage with Blogs and RSS". Learn how to leverage the power of blogs and rss feeds to drive more FREE targeted traffic, gain more leads and sales. Get Listed in Google and Yahoo for Free and save $299. http://www.marketing-rampage-with-blogs-and-rss.com posted on Nov 27, 2006
Once you have your web site complete and ready to be listed you need to take a slow step by step approach to get listed in the search engines. If you do it right the first time and then build on that formula, your profits and your site will benefit in the long run. Those willing to spend the time and put these techniques into practice are the ones that will benefit and are more likely to be successful. 1. Your first page is where search engines will start and making sure that this page is fully optimized is one of your first goals. What's optimization your ask? It's making your site as search engine friendly as possible. You will also see people refer to this in the short form of SEO. Your first step is the TITLE TAG. This is one item that search engines look for to start getting information about what your site is about. It is also what search engines will show above a clickable line on their results page. It is also a major consideration of where you will rank when certain inquiries are made of the search engine. TITLE TAGS are one of the major things to concentrate on and to make sure that you get it right. Doing so will result in not only better placement in the search engine, but enticing descriptions will also result in more people clicking on your link and visiting your site. Take a look at what your competition is doing in order to get some ideas for your site. To see their TITLE TAG go to their web site and in IE or Netscape click on View then Source and you will be able to see their TITLE TAG. Don't copy theirs, but let this help you get some ideas for your own site. 2. Putting keyword phrases into your pages - Finding the perfect set of keywords for your web pages and knowing the right keywords to use is very important because your site should provide people with what they are looking for. A free program to help you can be found at: http://www.goodkeywords.com Good Keywords makes use of various tools provided by search engines like Yahoo, Google, Teoma and other services like Alexa. Using Good Keywords makes it all very simple, fast and straight forward. Just remember...don't over do it or you will be penalized. 3. Writing your web page copy - Your next step is to incorporate those keywords into the copy on your web site. This is extremely important as search engines need to see these keywords on your page so they can then analyze these words and decide where your site should be listed in their categories. Write your content around the keywords and use them as many times as possible, keeping in mind though...that it is not just a search engine that is reading the copy but also your visitor. 4. META TAGS - Meta tags provide search engines with information about the content and purpose of a Web site. A Web site that uses meta tags to the best of their ability will appear more often in search results and will also be seen closer to the top on those search results. Many people feel that stuffing keywords into the meta tags will help improve their rankings. The original idea behind meta tags was to give a way to classify the web site. The problem now is that many engines don't consider meta tags to be as relevant to the ranking, therefore they give them less weight overall because of the keyword stuffing techniques used. That's not to say that you still shouldn't use meta tags, just consider to use them for what they were originally intended - that is to give your site an accurate title and description with a few keywords (3 or 4 phrases max) outlining what the page, or site is about. 5. ALT TAGS - The ALT tag or 'alternative text' is an attribute of the IMG tag. (Any graphic on your web site) An ALT tag should be included for every image within your web site. The ALT tag provides an alternate message to your viewers who can't see your graphics. Without ALT tags, images on a web site are meaningless to these users. If you will be using a graphic menu systems for navigation, these alternate messages are an especially important aid to users without the ability to see your graphics. Adding an appropriate ALT tag to every image within your web site will make a huge difference to the accessibility of your web site. Also, for those who use Yahoo and Google image searches, your ALT Tags can be very important and will help bring traffic to your site. Take for instance one of my sites - http://www.spasoftheworld.com I have loads of graphics of different resort spas and the graphics all carry the name of the resort. People looking for information on this resort may easily end up at my website because I names a picture with the name of the resort. On the reverse side, ALT TAG stuffing, which is using the tags in an image to hide keywords will rarely help a site's position. If you can insert a key phrase into the image description then by all means do so. Remember that Alt tags do usually count towards your overall keyword density so it's better to have relevant keyword alt tags rather than something like "image01.gif". 6. Linking - with more search engines coming online every day, search engines are looking for ways to serve quality links to visitors. This is where linking to other sites and having them link to you becomes important to both you and the search engine. People who assume that the more inbound links to them will help them, are very wrong. This may have been true at one time but not today. Search engines need to give quality results. One way they have of rating your site is by the quality of inbound links to your site. Therefore sites that are closely related to your site and that link to you will help boost your popularity in search engines. With Google this is a huge issue in how you rank with them. Having a hundred links from all sorts of site may result in hurting your ranking and you may be viewed as a link farm. 7. Spiders - A search engine is a database that has been put together by spiders. Spiders scour the Internet going through pages and recording information available on web pages. Spiders then give the information to the database and the database feeds the results. Theoretically, the web site should show up in the search results the next time the engine updates. It is important that all links on your site be active. A dead link may prevent a spider from doing your entire site. 8. Robots Text file - Search engines will look in your root domain for a special file named "robots.txt" (http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt). The file tells the robot (spider) which files it may spider (download). This system is called, The Robots Exclusion Standard. 9. FLASH - This has to be one of the top mistakes a web site owner can do to hurt their search engine rangkings. Good content will win over flash every time and getting visitors to your site is what you are trying to accomplish. The only thing the search engines will be able to see when visiting a site where the first page is all flash are the title tags and links. In most cases that will not be enough. Over and over it's content rich pages that will get you the rankings you need. You may have to decide between getting a high ranking or having a "pretty" entry page. Remember that you goal is customers and sales. It might be kewl the first time you visit the site but when you have to go there over and over again it becomes very annoying not to mention that people on dialup must cringe when faced with such a page. They often give up because of the length of time it takes to load. 10. Don't expect results overnight. It takes time to get your ranking up there, even with paid inclusion. You may start out with a low ranking when you are first listed but as you continue to optimize your site and build "relevant" links you will start to see a gradual climb. As you wait for your rise to the top, concentrate on building as many relevant links as possible. Beside increasing your ranking you will be surprised at the number of referrals that you will received from those linked pages. Jean Sutherland has successfully run her own ezine for over 6 years and has a subscriber base of 35,000. Her ezine is geared to people doing business online and beside offering free software, it also provides traffic & marketing tips, informative business articles, free ebooks and computer tips for those trying to work online. http://www.emailpromotions.net posted on Nov 25, 2006
After Google latest update nicknamed "Florida", many webmasters discovered that their traffic plummeted. What happened? More importantly what can you do about it? And what will Google do next? What happened was that Google made an algorithm change on how they rate web pages. Every time you make a search, Google tries to show the most relevant web pages that match your search term. By being able to give the most relevant results for queries, they have become the most used search engine in the world. In order to keep out competitors they have to constantly adjust and improve how they judge web pages. Because this judgment is done automatically using software, many webmaster have been modifying their sites in order to improve their position in the search results. To do this they have exploited different shortcuts and loopholes made possible by shortcomings in the software algorithm. Periodically Google make changes in order to stop some webmasters to get unfair advantages by plugging one or two of the loopholes. This is what happened during the Florida update. With this update Google introduced new algorithms which intended to stop overuse of some search engine optimization techniques. More specifically they seem to have targeted search terms found in text links also called anchor text. Web pages with good positions in the search result, which had had a disproportional number of in-bound links to them from other web pages with the exact same search term in the anchor text that the page was optimized for suddenly, disappeared from the listings. The pages did not disappear altogether. Just for the search term that the page were optimized for. For Google, the high proportions of anchor texts with the same text indicate that the texts were put there for one purpose only, to boost ranking. One suggestion for you is to spread out the anchor text with a mix of different texts to keep your page in the search results. We don't know if your pages will come back after some time if you do this, but it is likely. Apparently the search result generated after the latest update have been of a lower quality than before. What seems to have happen is that a large percentage of web sites have traded links with one another. This link trade has been done with the same search term in the anchor text that they have optimized their pages for. The victims more often than not have been commercial web sites that relied to heavily on search engine optimization technique. The search results have been taken over by web sites composed of low quality directory and link farms. Now, what will Google do next? I don't know, but TRY TO THINK like Google! This is what I would do if I was responsible at Google for this. First I think that they will modify and adjust the new algorithm they have introduced during the latest update. Changing the threshold or don't let the "over optimized pages" drop out of the search result so easy, but rather penalize them and put them under the threshold point. I think, Google have a problem! You see, many "over optimized" sites are of higher quality that those that are not. To simply drop them out and say that there are enough pages for the same search term is not always true. There is a thin line between optimization and spamming and where this boundary should be. After this, what will Google do next? It is clear to me that the many low quality directory sites found in Google search results is a nuance to Google and to the average web user. It is in this area that, I think, they will make the next modifications. Google rate web pages according to relevance. The level of relevance is judge based on the web page content and/or how popular the web page is in the view of Google. To get a page popular you need to have links from other pages. This can come from pages on your own site or from other sites. Ideally these links should be many, come from pages dealing with similar or identical subject or come from pages that themselves are popular. The best is to have many links from pages dealing with the same subject that themselves are popular. This had led to an intense link exchange active among webmasters. And the primary reason has been to achieve better ratings. The primary purpose has not been to increase the visitors experience value. This goes against Google's principles. To quote Google webmaster guidelines:
To counter this I think Google will target several popularity increasing schemes like: - Low value directory sites which have been created automatically by robots. These sites contain extracts taken from search engines and directories. Google can easily spot these sites. - The building of link directories attached to web sites. They are built with link partner extracting software and services. With them you can upload directory structures directly into your site. This way you can build up a massive number of link partners and also identify link partners with high Page Rank values. Of course, one can say that by doing this you can add to your visitors experience as the directories make it easy for them to find similar web sites. However this is an argument that Google most likely would disagree with. Web sites using tactics like this are easy identifiable by Google. The directory pages are composed of outgoing links which either have the Title, Meta descriptor or other content directly taken from the web pages they are linked to. Google just have to look at the texts from the directories and the text on the web pages for matching. Using product or services for this purpose is risking you get banned or at least being penalized by Google. Will this happen? I think so! When? I don't know! Anytime soon, next month,..next year! Nobody knows, only Google can tell! I think Google also will look into reciprocal linking as a whole. Maybe they will start to identify pages with outgoing links on them that link to other web sites and identify which links are coming back from those domains. What they like to see is spontaneous linking to your site from web owners that regard you as a valuable resource to link to, without you linking back. I believe that they will limit the impact of reciprocal linking, somewhat! What can you do to improve your web traffic from Google without violating its guidelines? Build web sites that give value to your visitors. Make it into a popular site, so that others want to link to your site. Build niche information rich sites. Either as mini sites or as larger information sites. Larger sites within a niche are given higher popularity rating than smaller sites by Google. If you do this your web site will not be affected next time Google make a change. Unless of course your competitor drops out of Google, then your traffic will get a boost. About The Author Per Strandberg is a web marketer and software developer! Currently he operates a web site for backup products and data security information! At http://www.data-backup-and-storage.com posted on Nov 18, 2006
Your Website visitor reports are a goldmine of information. If you don't review these on a regular basis, you can't fully evaluate the return on your Web investment. And, you could miss critical clues as to how user-friendly your site is, how effectively your message reaches your visitors, and what unmet needs they may have. But the reports can be overwhelming - a confusing mass of graphs, numbers and URL's. How can you find the information that you really need, how do you know what to look for, and how do you make strategic decisions using the answers that you obtain? Step 1: Knowing your markets First, identify all the different types of visitor to your site, together with the reasons that they might be coming to you. This may sound obvious, but in my experience there are nearly always visitor segments that are overlooked. Here are my starting suggestions for an association site: * Current and prospective members If you don't have a press center on your site, you should consider it if you're interested in publicity. Reporters are increasingly looking for information online, and appreciate ready access to press releases, sample interview questions, and downloadable photographs of your key spokespeople. The content seekers category describes visitors looking for content that you provide, but who are not prospective members. They might be searching your member database for a referral, or they might be interested in your information products - and so they're great prospects for non-dues revenue. Step 2: Knowing your goals It's also key to know the required outcomes, not only for your overall site, but also for each individual section and page. I have a mantra in my speaking programs: "Every page of your site should have a strategy". Too many pages on the Web give great information, and then tail off, with no clear call to action. They expect visitors to go back to the navigational elements, and decide what to do next - but instead, many of them will leave. Step 3: Asking the right questions Now that you have the audiences and outcomes for your site, you can start to make sense of all those numbers and graphs. Based on what should be happening, you can formulate questions with which to approach the traffic reports to measure your site's effectiveness. Here are some ideas: Are your long pages effective? Often, I see long pages with key content "below the fold" - below the first screenful of information. Many visitors won't scroll down the page if they're not immediately engaged by it; therefore they'll miss the lower elements. Can you measure member benefits? If you provide an online database for prospective customers to find a supplier, track how many searches are done, and how many click-thru's your members receive. This can give you some powerful statements for your member benefits material. What are the hot content areas? Knowing your "Most Requested Pages" gives you some key clues about what's hot - and from that, which content might be worth developing further, either as a member benefit, or for non-dues income. It can be helpful to design your site to delineate this. For example, instead of having a long page of different pamphlets, show each product on a separate page. Now you can track which ones are most sought after, and perhaps consider offering these as online, instantly downloadable e-books. What are your conversion rates? If there's a hot content area - a highly requested page that doesn't translate into its required outcome, something's wrong. Possibilities include: * You believe you have an exciting offering, but your visitors don't - so perhaps you should rethink your content or product Step 5: Tweaking and testing The good news about the Web is that it's a great testing ground for new products and ideas. When you find an area on your site that isn't performing optimally, you can make small incremental changes, and immediately see the results reflected in your traffic reports. So you can keep tweaking until you hit the winning formula for each page. Step 6: Don't forget your internal search engine Your internal search engine allows you to track the keyword searches that visitors perform once they're on your site. This also has some valuable clues: * You'll almost certainly see searches for content that should be obviously apparent. This proves that visitors won't work to find anything - but it can also give indications as to the usability of your structure and navigation. * Lots of searches for content that you don't currently provide will give you ideas for developing future products or services, based on visitor demand. I think of Web traffic reports as "market research that cannot lie". They represent what your visitors do, unprompted, and really can contain some gold nuggets. Happy Mining! Philippa Gamse, CyberSpeaker, is a Web strategy consultant and professional speaker. Check out her free tipsheet for 23 ideas to promote your Website: http://www.CyberSpeaker.com/tipsheet.html Philippa can be reached at (831) 465-0317. posted on Nov 27, 2006
Are shades of grey SEO really Black Hat SEO? Black hat SEO is a strategy which gets a web page or entire site banned from a search engine. A shade of grey is when you use a black hat strategy but your site has not been banned yet. Remember the acronym for YET: You're Entitled Too! There are many different opinions on the subject of Search Engine Optimization. Many folks will deliver advice which will work to get you top 10 rankings but what is really the difference between Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO? There has been many good attempts to define Black Hat SEO. All are relevant and an example can be found at http://www.blackhatseo.com. The site contains a page of example Black Hat SEO and a directory of not recommended products and services. But is there more to it than just keyword stuffing, hidden text and spamming image alt tags? If you read the the Webmaster guidelines at Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html, you'll notice that sneaky Redirection pages are not welcome. (This does not include the 301 redirect.) What are Sneaky Redirection Pages? Sneaky redirection pages are set up in in groups of 10 or 20. They all target similar and related keywords or phrases. The only links on these pages are links to other pages in the same family creating a false sense of related linking. They do not contain content that any human would be interested in. These pages show up high in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). When you click on one of these pages from a search engine result, you will be redirected to another page. (Usually a high pressure sales page.) Is this misleading? You bet. Why? Because the page you click on from the serps is not the page you actually get to read. Can Sneaky Redirects be considered as a Black Hat SEO tactic? I think so. The reason being is that if your page is discovered, it does get banned. These pages are smart when it comes to getting a higher search engine position but they will vanish if another marketer reports your page. What SEO Strategy Should You Use? All SEO strategies have value. I think that the focus of attention should be to avoid Black Hat SEO if your intention is to keep your site from being banned. Visit SEO forums and use the ideas that you feel comfortable with. There are many SEO forums out there. Here is one to get you started: http://www.searchguild.com Be aware of search engine guidelines. If you read conflicting information, or if the tactic does not feel 100% OK, maybe the tactic should be placed on the back burner or even avoided forever. The author, Ed Zivkovic is based on the Gold Coast in Australia. Ed writes and publishes home business and webmaster articles at http://www.ezau.com and enjoys going to http://www.gold-coast-beaches.com. posted on Nov 27, 2006
Email marketing once proved to be immensely effective, but the greedy and idiotic polluted the well by spamming the planet with everything from weight-loss products to sexual enhancement drugs and beyond. Because of the stench, filters and laws have been created to attempt to fix the problem, but still the Internet is polluted with more and more junk each day. So obviously, filters and legislation are not the solution, for consumers, publishers, or marketers. Everyone has been left scratching their heads and asking... What do I do to avoid this crap and make the Internet mine again? How do I build my business and promote it without having to deal with email? After all, what's the point in spending money on email advertising campaigns when there is no guarantee that the emails will even reach their destination? Enter... RSS. RSS is the perfect communication tool. It's applications far outreach those of email for marketing, publishing and personal communications. RSS is the answer to our communication woes. Using RSS to create blogs for communicating with customers, affiliates, partners and family is far and away more effective and reliable than email ever was. As a marketing tool, it really packs a punch that email never could. The reason being is that blogs are targets for search engine spiders. They are themselves, a web presence, whereas email never was and never will be. Just like a web page, search engine spiders hit blog pages and rank them. The difference between the static web page and the RSS feed is that web pages seldom update their content, RSS feeds, by design, are created to be dynamic and provide regularly updated content, in theory, depending on the blog owner of course. This prompts the search engine spiders to revisit and rerank them more often. For writers, publishers and and anyone else with something to say, RSS has been a godsend. It has provided the answer to the question of what to do now. Blogging has replaced email for those who have become frustrated with dealing with the problems of email publishing and marketing. Publishers can now get their message out to their subscribers without the headaches associated with sending email, or posting static pages to the web. Even publishing an ezine to the Internet as a web page required the sending of email to make readers aware of the newest issue. As with anything, there is a right way and a wrong way to do things, and blog publishing is no exception. Now that RSS has become the rage for marketing purposes, several people have taken it upon themselves, in the name of the almighty dollar, to pollute this well too. The newest rash of 'RSS tools' have created some issues of ethics and and credibility. With perhaps the honest intention of being search engine optimization tools, or an automated system for fetching content, this batch of stuff has too much potential for misuse. The result of misuse of these types of programs can be devastating. Already some of these programs have been banned from places like Google and Blogharbour because of this potential. Programs such as these in the hands of the inexperienced, will cause future problems for bloggers down the road. More and more pages generated using these programs will be banned, and getting banned, right out of the gate, for a newbie, would be a sad thing indeed. The right way to use blogging to increase your search engine presence is to publish good content. Period. Provide useful information to those who are looking for it. Become someone's trusted information provider, and you have a customer for life. Publish keyword rich articles that give the searcher what they are looking for... solutions for problems. Publish your information regularly. Weekly is good, daily is better. Sending pings and things too often will get you blacklisted too. And here is where networking comes in... Find content for your blog from article banks, where authors submit their work for reprint. List yourself in databases as one who accepts article submissions. Get to know other authors and publishers and share content with them. Syndicate your blogs in exchange with other bloggers. Watch your world explode with new opportunities. Automation in business is a good thing, but it has its place. Nothing beats human communication when dealing with people and creating partnerships. Do you want to talk to an autoresponder? No, and I doubt anyone else does either. Some of the new programs designed for the automation of article collection have legal issues to consider. The biggest being copyright infringement. Not every author wants their work reprinted, or they require control over where their work is displayed. (Which is as it should be.) Without manually seeking your content, you could very well find yourself being served papers for publishing someone else's work without permission. Plagiarism is another issue. If you don't follow certain rules for reprinting contributory work, you stand to be hounded for plagiarism. Yet another sticky issue. Some of the new programs mock safelists, or resemble FFA sites. Before long, those types of blog pages will become banned as well. Search engines will figure out a way to block non-informational blog pages, those that carry nothing but links or classifieds. (Is your head sore from hitting that brick wall yet?) Still, there are other programs designed to post spam to blogs using the comments feature. This is referred to as comment spam. The only solution thus far, to battle comment spam, is to disallow your readers the option of leaving comments. This is a bad thing, because allowing your readers to interact with you is supposed to be one of the benefits of using this form of communication. The makers of these programs may have had good intentions to start with, but have ultimately created Frankenstein's Monster. Many are stating that their programs are not spam, because they do not involve email. That is a cop out if I ever heard one. Spam is the transmission of unwanted stuff, whether it is sent to your inbox, or your blog, or even the search engines themselves. Search engines want relevant content, not pages of of keywords, or links. So feeding them page after page of nonsense is spam. Everyone hates spam, except the spammers, so why be a part of something loathed by so many and embraced by a few? Bad business if you ask me. The only real way to combat these issues is to simply not use the programs themselves. Do your due diligence and create a reputation as a trusted information provider, not a blog bomber, and your business will prosper. Using these programs will ultimately diminish your reputation and your livelihood. Your customers are looking for information, a solution to a problem. Give that to them, not just endless pages of links. You will achieve your rightful spot in the ranks, and you stand a far better chance for longevity. There are good RSS tools available, you just need to look beneath the sales copy to find them. And if you are new to RSS and blogging, do some research. Find someone who knows, really knows what RSS is and how to use it, and ask some questions. Don't go out and spend buckets of money on something you're not sure how to use, because you could be doing yourself more harm than good. A few good books to read some solid information on RSS and blogs... RSS, Blogs and Syndication RSS Advertising Secrets Taming The eBeastie Copyright © 2005 The Trii-Zine Ezine http://www.ezines1.com Trina L.C. Schiller - http://www.trinaschiller.ws posted on Nov 22, 2006
Reciprocal links are an important step in your overall plan to get site visitors. What are they? Reciprocal links are mutual links you and some other web site owner agree to post on your respective sites. Why are they so important? It goes back to the basic nature of the Internet. The Internet exists as an information medium. When you go to a search engine, you are looking for links to the information you need. The better information sources have already been found by others, many of whom thought so much of those sources that they placed links to them on their web site. So the number of other web sites linking to a particular source of information, the better the chance it is a good source of information. All the major search engines take link popularity into account when they determine how to rank the results of any search. The end result is that to get a good ranking in the major search engines, an important step is to make sure there are lots of other sites that link back to yours. And, since the links are reciprocal, you will need to put a link to each site that links to you. You can't expect someone to link to you unless you link to them. All right, you say, I will get all my friends to put links to my site on their sites. Not so fast! The number of links isn't all that matters! In addition to looking at the number of links that point to your site, the search engines also examine the quality of those links. Links from sites that are relevant to yours rank highest. If you sell dog food, for example, some good sites to link to yours would be pet toys, dog training, dog grooming, etc. Acquiring a lot of links that don't relate to your site not only doesn't help your search engine ranking, it will hurt it, because the search engines will assume you are trying to fool them into thinking your site is popular with a lot of "junk" links. Don't worry, there are lots and lots of relevant sites to do reciprocal linking with. The number one ranking for any search term isn't entirely determined by the number of links to a site, but it is an important factor. And, as you know, having a ranking in the top ten for a search term will guarantee more visitors to your site. But in addition to improving your chances of being found through search engines, having links to your site on lots of other sites means you will get exposure to many site visitors who look at the links page or links section of a site for other related sites to visit. And, the more places your name and site name pop up, the more you are likely to be recognized as an authority on the topic of your site. So how do you go about building reciprocal links on your site? First of all you need to realize that reciprocal link building is an ongoing process, not a one shot deal. It needs to be something you continue to work on, although some of it can be automated. You will want to build a links page on your site, where you will place links to other sites which are also linking to you. Since you expect your links page to grow, you should establish separate link categories, all relating to the theme of your site. You can get an inexpensive script for creating and managing a link directory at Linking101.com, not to mention a lot of good, general information about linking. On your links page, be sure to include simple instructions for anyone who wants to link with you. Many sites include a short piece of HTML code including all your link information, ready to be placed on the reciprocal sites links page. Be sure to place an easily-found link to your links page on the main page of your site as well. Now you are ready to go looking for relevant link partners, sites that are complementary to yours, but not competitors. You can do it the manual way, by doing searches on your site's favorite keywords. When you find a site, evaluate it for content relevant to your own, evaluate its quality and note its search engine rank. If you have to choose between a site that is ranked #2 and one that is #20, always choose the higher ranked site. Look for the links page, where you should find instructions on initiating links between your sites. If you don't find one, it usually isn't worth your time to contact the webmaster to inquire about links; go to the next one. One method to speed up the process is to use a free service from http://linkpopularity.com/. From this site you can check the link popularity of your site. But, you can also check which sites are linked to your competitors ? particularly your competitors with the high search engine ranking. With that information, you can go to each of these sites and most likely get a reciprocal link. A similar product, Link Survey, is available at http://www.antssoft.com/linksurvey/index.htm. Another system for speeding up the process is http://links4trade.com/. Although not free, it also helps to manage the headache of link page maintenance. Link exchange services which claim to completely automate the link exchange process can be found at http://www.powerlinks.com/ and http://www.softbizscripts.com/link-exchange-script-features.php. A quite amazing tool you might look at is called Zeus, at http://www.cyber-robotics.com/index.htm. Zeus is an intelligent robot that builds a link directory and creates reciprocal links for your web site. A free version is available. You can also find a group of Zeus users ready to swap links at http://www.zeuscollective.com/. Regardless of how you do it, continue to pursue reciprocal links and make it a part of your overall marketing strategy; you are sure to find it rewarding! About The Author Darryl DeLong is a successful Internet Marketer and Ezine Publisher. Learn how to build up your opt-in list, site visitors and sales with my brand new ebook entitled "Viral Internet Marketing Strategies" get a free copy here: http://www.viral-internet-marketing.com posted on Nov 22, 2006
The chase for a high web ranking is constantly on and is in fact very demanding given the tough competition provided by all the other websites out there who happen to be putting up material on the same subject as you. All websites with average or below average content become victims of isolation and cyber ostracism. A good web ranking while ensuring a website's popularity pays off in the form of greater earnings from advertisers on the your website. In order to attract maximum search engine traffic and enhance ones website ranking, it is not only wise but in fact mandatory to include in the website, expert content. Expert content is relevant, pertinent, comprehensive as well as intensive content. The relevancy of the content would depend on how much affinity it seems to show for the latest developments in the area if the website is regarding current, developing, organic issues for instance. On the other hand, if it is regarding an issue which is historical in nature it must contain comprehensive yet intensive information about the subject. It may in such cases even include expert opinion on the issue along with attached links to other relevant websites that may add ancillary information. While being relevant the content becomes pertinent if one is wise to keep it short, precise and neat. The layout of a website is crucial as well, as it must be easy for the surfer to manoeuvre through. It must accordingly be more user-friendly rather than being customised according to ones personal likes and dislikes. Personal choices may not always be the most sought after. Even though eventually the popularity of a website depends on how useful it turns out to be for the user and how easily the user is able to navigate through the layout, attracting the surfer to your website depends on its being listed in search engine results. Most search engines including Google use a standard an algorithm (indexing capabilities) that enables them to track websites with relevant material. In order to make optimum favourable use of these indexing capabilities of search engines it becomes mandatory to include not only relevant material but make repeated and pronounced use of 'keywords' that reflect on the essential theme of the web content and highlight the matter in context. Most search engine while producing results for a search conducted by a surfer display along with the concerned link and the title of the website, an extract from the website that contains the word or phrase with which the surfer may be conducting his search. Therefore the combined use of relevant material as well as appropriate keywords will in turn not only assure an identification in search engine results but will also result in display of importunate details of your website content and give the surfer exactly what he may be looking for while conducting his search. Adding only expert content on ones website definitely enhances the quality of the website and makes the battle for high web rankings fair and interesting. Mr. Vishnu is CEO and founder of easternBrain Inc. a gen nex .com company based in Rajasthan, India. easternBrain Inc. specializes in providing professional content and copy writing services. They provide a full spectrum of writing services and have written on varied topics like politics and economics apart from web content and copy writing. Under the supervision of Vishnu easternBrain Inc. has also written business plans and eBooks. You can reach Vishnu at emailvishnu@gmail.com posted on Nov 24, 2006
Branding versus search engine optimization is a marketing dilemma that larger companies will need to come to grips with on the Internet. Often companies will need to decide whether to promote their own brand name as their main keyword phrase or optimize for a more generic keyword phrase. For instance, one search engine report states that 1.3 million visitors per month search for the term "Best Buy." This same report states that the term "electronics" is searched for by 1.1 visitors per month. The obvious choice in this scenario is for Best Buy to optimize for their own brand name first and the word "electronics" second. But, take a competitor such as Fry's Electronics. Approximately 95,000 visitors search for the term "Fry's" every month, far short of those who search for "electronics". Does this mean Fry's Electronics (a partner with Outpost.com) should optimize for "electronics" first and Fry's (and/or Outpost.com) second? At this writing (August 2004), a search on Google for "electronics" will show that Best Buy does not show up in the first two pages. Fry's (Outpost.com) is on the third page. But let's take a further look to see who is in the number 1 position: Sony. And Samsung is a close second. Sony, with 450,000 searches per month for the word "sony", has managed to grab the number one spot for its brand name and the generic word "electronics". A search of the Sony homepage source code will reveal that this page is optimized for both words, "Sony" and "electronics." By optimizing for both words Sony has grabbed a lot of traffic neglected by Best Buy and perhaps even exceeds Best Buys traffic in doing this. Another issue in branding is trademark infringement. Courts have upheld that websites using another company's branded name in its meta tags is engaging in trademark infringement. For instance, a site about cats would be infringing if it put the name Best Buy in its meta tags in hopes of gaining traffic from this trademarked word. Large companies have to protect themselves from others stealing traffic that is rightfully theirs. These companies cannot however protect a generic term such as "electronics" as that is fair game for all electronics companies. So in order to create the largest return on investment, large companies need to optimize their websites both for their own brand names and for the generic, high-traffic keywords and keyword phrases relevant to their sites. Otherwise, they are letting tons of online business just slip away. About The Author Copyright © 2004 SEO Resource Kevin Kantola is the CEO of SEO Resource and has published many articles over the past 20 years. posted on Nov 21, 2006
The most difficult challenge most web designers face is getting traffic to your site. There are plenty of companies who promise to send traffic your way. Sadly, most of this traffic is not qualified. Yes, your hit counter will move higher, however, if its not qualified, you may find you have unhappy visitors to your site. Unhappy visitors will not click on your ads or purchase your products. Once you have optimized your site, consider submitting it to every search engine. If you want to get spidered quicker in Google, have a web page with a PR of 4 or higher point to your site. Your site will be spidered within a couple of days! One myth I would like to bust is that PR is a measure of a web site. Its not. I receive countless emails offering a reciprocal link with their PR5 or PR6 site. Unless my link is appearing on the main page, or a page that has PR6, I am not getting a share of PR6. Most likely, my link will appear on a page that has a PR2! Page rank is Google's ranking of that specific page's relevance. Just because the main page has a PR of 4, does not make every page on the site a PR4. Beware of sites who claim that they will exchange links with you and its to your benefit since they have a PR5 or PR6. Where is your link appearing? If its on a page that has a PR of 4 or 5 or 6, great! Reciprocal linking, if done properly, will ensure that your keywords are at the top of the search engine. If you have a popular keyword, youll need to have more back links. Pick your link partners properly, and ensure that they are linking to your keyword. For example: if your site is www.joesdinner.com, consider sending out requests to relevant higher ranking pages to start with, followed by lower ranking pages and ask web designers to link back in the following manner: < a href= "http://www.joesdinner.com" >best dining in new york - joes dinner is the only place to eat when you're staying in New York. Presuming their keyword is "best dining in new york", having links pointing to your site with an anchor tag incorporating your keywords will improve your search engine rankings dramatically. Once you have established a collection of sites pointing to your site using your keywords, you will start receiving reciprocal link exchanges from other sites. This is where you can start to be particular. If you want to maintain an effective PR and attract better sites for linking, follow these tips: a) Is it indexed? While their site may be indexed, the page where they are placing your link, is it at least indexed by google? If you type in allinurl:www.sitename.com/links/right_here.html and there are no results, consider declining their offer. If the page your link appears on has not been indexed, there is no benefit whatsoever to you. If your pages have PR, they may consider placing your link on another page. If the page your link appears on is indexed, but does not have PR, consider accepting their offer. While the page today may not have PR, it will in time. b) How many neighbours? The value of the page rank is shared with each of the links on that page. If you are splitting that PR with several other sites, your share of PR will be small, which doesnt help you. Reconsider accepting any link exchanges if your site is 1 of more than 30 - 40 sites that will appear on that page, unless its a very high PR. Further, if there are too many links on that page, Google may consider the page to be part of a link farm, which may end up penalizing your site. c) Is it relevant? Google is big on relavancy. Ensure your links pages are relevant. If you operate a site about golf, having links from cooking sites will not help you establish your page rank. It may cost you more than you get in return. How to Find Good PR sites: a) Do a search for them by typing in your keyword and start asking for reciprocal link exchanges. Take a look at their PR and go from there. Remember, its the number of sites that backlink to you that matters, not strictly the PR of the page. I would rather have 50 pages that have a PR1 pointing to my site, than to have 5 sites that have a PR5. Of course, if you can get 50 pages that have a PR5 pointing to your site, you are laughing! b) Take a look at your existing link partners and check out their links pages. Its clear the people appearing on those links pages are interested in reciprocating. c) Purchase software that will help find quality link partners. It is important to attract higher PR sites when you are on a reciprocal link campaign. However, its not the most important thing when it comes to search engine rankings. Its the backlinks that point back at you that are key. The more of those, the better off you will be for your keyword. Remember: every page starts off as a PR0. Just because its new doesnt mean it wont get a higher PR once google gets around to assessing a score. If the page your site appears on is indexed, and its a relevant site of quality, consider exchanging links. You'll grow a large list of link partners in a short period of time, and increase your search engine rankings in the process. Christopher Smith has been helping people make money through Google Adsense by providing them with the Top Paying Adsense Keywords for his visitors to Adsense Heaven. http://www.adsenseheaven.com posted on Nov 25, 2006
A Brief Introduction To Link Popularity As webmasters research various ways to get more traffic to their site one method that is gaining more and more publicity is Link Popularity. Link Popularity is the number of links that point to your website as measured by the search engines. In theory if your site has many sites linking to it then it is considered to be a valuable resource on the particular topic so the search engines will give it a higher ranking. The Problem As with many rules/laws eventually people found a way to manipulate it. Sites were created solely to build the link popularity of other sites. These sites are called 'Link Farms' and contributed to the pollution of search engine results. They increased the search engine rankings of many sites that did not deserve the position they received. Eventually the search engines caught on to this deception and some such as Google adjusted their algorithms accordingly. Google now penalizes websites associated with Link Farms imposing penalties they deem appropriate based on the site and the scenario. Many people that felt the effects of this penalization were fairly innocent, well that is if you consider ignorance to be an alibi. They simply did not know that what they were doing was wrong; some even paid for SEO services and were victims of bad services. As the search engines change their algorithms aiming to reduce fraudulent activities by webmasters, more and more ways are conceived to manipulate them, and so the battle continues. An Honest Link Building Strategy Getting quality links to your site from related resources is not always as easy as some make it sound. The key word here is 'quality'. It is a very time consuming process and involves the following steps:
There are also some automated methods of doing this that speed up the process, however, I would not recommend any of them and hence won't list them in this article. So you have started your link building campaign and are hopefully seeing the results. Now you say this is great but how can I make this process more efficient and effective without risking your good standings with the search engines. Here is the solution. The Smart Way To Build Link Popularity. One thing webmasters are always looking for, and find hard to refuse, is good quality content. If you are knowledgeable on a particular topic that is related to your site, writing informative articles is a great way to gain your website additional link popularity. If you are reading this article and are not reading it on http://www.lilengine.com then there is your proof. If you don't consider yourself a writer don't worry, you don't have to be. Get your article in the best shape you possibly can and then have others, who you consider to be better at writing than you are, look it over. Make your edits and there you go. How is writing articles efficient and effective? Well-written articles do take time to produce but as you write more you will get better and will find that it starts to take less and less time. This method offers several more benefits than the linking method listed above. These are as follows:
Summary Building link popularity is a vital part to your search engine ranking and should be approached in either of the two methods listed above that you feel is more appropriate for your individual situation. The benefits from writing, however, far outweigh those of requesting reciprocal links in most situations. Hopefully this article has helped to shed some light on this and will encourage more knowledgeable people to start sharing their knowledge with others. For more information on Link Popularity visit http://www.lilengine.com About The Author Alec Duncan is the founder of http://www.lilengine.com, a search engine optimization resource site. Visit http://www.lilengine.com and also visit their new Web Hosting resource section at http://webhosting.lilengine.com. posted on Nov 21, 2006
The most difficult area of SEO is building link popularity. You may be thinking why? Because there are no easy ways to build link popularity. In this article I will tell you how to get links and how to find them. First thing you must do is find a web site that you would like to trade links with. How do you find them? You can join link exchanges like www.linkexchangeit.com or you can search the search engine with keywords related to your site. Remember RELATED sites only! Let's say your site is about cars, so you would search with keywords like car body repair, car, SUVS, trucks, vans, etc or let's say your site is about games, so you would search with keywords like checkers, card games, chess, online games, etc. Now that you know what to do go and search for sites RELATED to yours and ask for a link exchange. You could send them this email below if you like. Dear (Put there name here), Thanks for taking the time to read my email. My name is (Put your full name here), I came cross your site today while I was searching on AOL and really like your site. I love the (put something here you like about there site here). Your site and our site is somewhat the same, so I was wondering if you would like to exchange links with our site (put your URL here). Our site is about (put what your site is about here). By chance is your news section at http://www.there-web-site-here.com/news.html a good place that you could put my link at? If you have any questions or need anything feel free to contact me at put-email@here.com or call me at (put area code here) 777-7777. Try to find out the site owner's name and if they have a phone number listed on the site call that number, you will get much better results that way because they know you are not some spamming robot that emails every site they come a cross. Download Google's Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com) to make sure that inbound links are from decent sites, with a minimum of 1 on the toolbar. The higher the PageRank the better. Also remember that your homepage is not the only part of your site that you can get links for, so try to get links to other pages on your site. This will allow robots to spider your site better and have more ways in. Here is more tips on how to get more links to your site. 1) Link to them first 2) Put no more than 20 links on your links page if you use one. 3) Use categories on your links page. Matt Colyer began as a SEO Specialist in 1997. He founded Superior Webmaster in 2004 as a source of articles and tutorials for Web site owners looking to improve their Web site. posted on Nov 21, 2006
One of the important factors in ranking high in search engine results is link popularity. It is not enough to just have the best website in the world--other sites have to point back to you. The thought is that if your site is good enough for others to link to you, then you must have a great site. How do I increase link popularity? Building link popularity is hard work. You've searched endlessly. You've sent every reciprocal link email you can think of. What else can you do? Surprisingly, writing articles on your topic can lead you to a wealth of link popularity. What are the benefits of writing articles? Think about it. If you write articles, you get to use them on your website and you build your website content. You can also submit your articles to other sites. With both methods you get a lot in return: *You build your content. More is better when it comes to site content. *You promote your website. With more keyword-rich text on more pages, you will increase the number of pages indexed by the search engines. *Other websites link back to your website content. Sites focused on related topics link back to you. *You receive a link back to your website from the site you submitted the article to. Remember to include a link in all guest articles you submit. *You become an authority on your topic. Search engines reward sites with a larger number of inbound links from sites dealing with similar topics. What do I write articles about? The saying goes "write about what you know." Sometimes it takes thinking in a creative way to open the door to a new route for link popularity success. Think of what your visitors might be looking for. Why do they come to your site? What can you help them with when they arrive on your website? Answer their questions about your topic. We all search to find information, so give them what they are looking for. So what are they looking for? That is easy enough to find out. Review your web server logs to see what keywords and phrases your visitors are using when they find your site through the search engines. Run your own searches using those keywords. What kinds of sites are returned in the search engine listings? Pay attention to visitor feedback. Know your visitors. Answer the questions they are asking, or even those questions they do not know yet to ask Most importantly, write because you have something to say. If in the process of building your content and inbound links, you benefit your readers with your content, all the better in terms of providing visitor satisfaction. This is the best reason to write, which is the way of the web, to seek out and share information. Where do you put articles? On your site. The first and obvious answer is to put them on your site. After all, you have all this knowledge; why not share it with your visitors? You may want to create an Articles page on your site. This will give you a place to put your articles, and any new ones that you write. Make sure to add this new page into your site navigation, and especially to add it to your sitemap page. Add a link to your main articles page on your sitemap, and a link to each new article on your articles page, and you are on your way to having your good content indexed. Make sure your visitors and the search engine robots can find your new pages. Adding article content not only answers your visitors' questions, it adds to your website. Your visitors will have a richer experience with your site when there is more content. Not only can they buy the widgets you are selling, but they can also learn more about how to select widgets, exciting news from the world of widgets, and so on. The more pages you add to your website, the better chance the already visiting search engine robots will also pick up your new pages to be indexed. More pages mean more links. Be sure to make an archive of your articles on your website. Always keep your pages in directories close to the root of your site for optimum indexing by the search engine robots. Submit to the search engines. As always you will want to submit your new pages to the mainstream search engines and directories. In addition, look for specialized, topical directories that deal with your particular subject. There are also many general business directories available. Submit guest articles. In addition to submitting your articles to the various search engines and directories, think about submitting the articles themselves. Submit your articles to sites that accept guest articles. It may take a little detective work to find some of these locations. You can start small, submitting to lesser-known portals seeking information on your topic. Some sites are focused on one topic; others need articles about all sorts of topics. Get searching and you should be able to come up with a healthy list of sites to submit to. Searching in Google and in categories in Yahoo! and ODP (Open Directory Project/Dmoz) would be helpful. Once you are featured as a guest writer on a website, you will notice that most sites archive these articles. How many articles can you write? How many articles are archived and linked? How many different search engines indexed those pages? You get the idea. Always include a bio of the author, article re-print instructions, copyright information and a link back to your website. Add an active link in your link text in your submission or request one for your listing. Be aware of dynamically generated pages--a static URL also increases the chance that the article you have submitted has the optimum chance of indexing by the search engine robots. What if I don't write? What if writing is just not your thing? You are in luck, because there are sites out there that have free content and articles available to you. When you add them to your site, you still build the content on your website. Legitimate links, no spam The best part is that your new links are all legitimate and not just junk links. You add important information to your site, and that is good for your visitors and good for your image. Naturally, using your keyword phrases in your Title/META tags and the text of your articles as you would in your regularly optimized pages makes sense for good search engine ranking. It will pay off Be creative when writing articles and submitting your content for linking, it takes hard work but will be worth it in the long run. Resources
*General Content EZinearticles.com (free content/submit articles) GoArticles (free content/submit articles) ArticleCity (free content/submit articles) World Wide Information Outlet (free content/submit articles) *Marketing Articles IdeaMarketers.com (free content/submit articles) Marketing Seek (submit articles) *Business Articles BPubs (submit articles) *Internet and Web Web Source (free articles) *Site Carrying Links To Free Content Sites Freesticky (free content) Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Marketing company serving small businesses. She has specialized in Search Engine Optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O'Reilly Media, Inc., a technical book publishing company. Copyright © 2002-2005 Search Innovation Marketing. http://www.searchinnovation.com All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without editing, including the bio information. Please include a hyperlink to http://www.searchinnovation.com when using this article in newsletters or online. posted on Nov 23, 2006
With search engine algorithms changing seemingly daily, the quest to rank high in the search engines and stay there is proving to be quite the challenge for most webmasters. One of the more recent popular ways of achieving this is through buying text links on websites that have high PR's (page ranks) on Google and that also rank well in the other major search engines. Is buying text link placement worth it? Purpose Not only are text links great for search engine purposes, but if placed well, can actually drive traffic to your site. And whose website nowadays couldn't use more traffic? Enough said. Those are the benefits behind purchasing text links. But what are the disadvantages? 1) Cost ? it's not uncommon to pay $100 monthly for a 3 word textlink on a PR 6 website. If you do choose to go this route, choose your text carefully and budget wisely. 2) Relevancy to search engines ? if you're running a homemade toys website and have a popular online pharmacy website linking to yours, this won't be as relevant as say having Mattel® linking to you. Remember that search engines are becoming more and more sophisticated and they can tell whether two sites have complimentary, competitive, or completely unrelated website content. 3) Limited link length - rarely are you given the option of selecting more than three words when purchasing links. You may have difficulty coming up with only three keywords relevant to your website, so this can often prove to be a difficult task. 4) Page is already populated with other text links ? online auction sites that have sellers auctioning off website text links are notorious for selling textlinks on websites that already have 50 more on the same page. Look for sites that limit the number of textlinks sold. 5) Search engine spam ? your site linked on every single page of a 3000 page website using the same keywords and url can be considered spam to a search engine. If you choose to purchase multiple text links on multiple websites, make sure your linking text varies. The lesson is to be simply cautious. Using a textlink broker to find relevant and complimentary websites to buy links from can prove to be highly beneficial ? just do your research first. Would a $100 monthly textlink investment be better spent on a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, or will the long term benefits of buying a text link outweigh a temporary influx in visitors? Return on investment is key ? whichever route will yield you the highest ROI should be your ultimate determining factor. Veronica Dubak is an SEO expert, internet entrepreneur, and the owner of the successful free online paid surveys directory, SurveyBounty.com. With a comprehensive listing of market research companies classified by region, and background information on the online survey industry, SurveyBounty.com is the legitimate source for online survey information. posted on Nov 23, 2006
Ever see a website that seems to speak a foreign language...in English? We encounter many SEO client websites that rely on buzzwords in the page copy to get the word out about their product. The problem lies with visitors who may not be familiar with those terms. This means optimizing with buzzwords may not be the best way to gain traffic. If your prospective visitors are not searching for those terms, how do they find your website? Start With The Obvious You really need to know your industry. Study your prospective visitors--who your target audience is. If your prospective visitors are highly technical and work and talk in "buzzword speak", no problem. But if you also want to attract prospective visitors who may not be immersed in the terminology used in your business, you must compensate by optimizing with a wider array of targeted keywords. How Do I Find All Those Keywords? Start researching. Yes, it's going to take a little work on your part to take a close look at what keywords you may be missing out on. Keep account of prospective website visitors who may use other terms to find your website. Track the keywords used by visitors through your log reports. Most log statistics programs have a report showing the keywords used by searchers to find your website. Using your server logs or log statistics program for keyword information is a good way to get a better picture of how visitors are finding your website. Use Overture's keyword tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) or Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) and note the words used on your competitors' websites. Using these, or similar tools, type in your buzzwords and see what variations come up. Competitor websites may use a slightly different language than you when writing copy for their pages. Visit their websites and learn all you can about how many ways your business can get its message across. Read online articles; visit business newsgroups and forums. Find research information through industry websites and companies that specialize in producing reports about your industry. Help Search Engine Robots Do Their Job Search engine robots are just automated programs. Their concept and execution is relatively simple: search engine robots "read" the text on your pages by going through the source code of your web pages. If the majority of the words in y |
Thursday, July 29, 2010
