seo-search

SEO Introduction

2007-05-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

If your looking to increase your websites presense on the internet we will provide you with a detailed insight into the world of Search Engine Optimization, so let us begin with this broken down introduction to SEO. In the current age having your site online is only one step towards making your mark on the internet, it's incredibly easy to get online but once you get online you will probably encounter a common dilemma, where are the visitors? Undoubtedly you have joined the many millions of websites that fall into the abyss of the search engine's, if you are fortunate to get listed by them at all. You may not think search engine positioning affects you but if you own or operate a website, it does. If you any ambitions for your website then you have to cater for this increasingly important webmaster role.
Search engine optimization is more than making your site rank well in the major search engines, it's about integrating it seamlessly into your page design without your visitors even being aware exists. SEO is an on going task that all webmasters need to undertake in order to keep reasonable positioning within search engines and recieve the subsequent traffic it brings. A common mistake many people make is to optimize their site once and believe that they can hold a rank, this might be true for some obscure key words but there is so much information flowing around the internet that there will always be someone willing to take your site on for rankings.

It is important to remember the complex algorithms search engines use to determine your position calculate thousands of different factors, you cannot rely on one to keep ahead of the game. SEO Assistance will bring you an indepth view into the world of search engine positioning, we have broken it down into easily digestible sections so you can move your site up inch by inch. One downside to keeping your website in the public eye is that it requires a constant effort but if you are planning to sell a product or keep your website active, it is definitely worth it.

Sitemaps - Uncover the Only Quick and Easy Site Submission Strategy

2007-05-27T08:23:00.002-07:00

What is the easiest and quickest way to get your site spidered and listed by Google and Yahoo?

This is an enternal question, one that many frustrated SEO specialists and online business owners are still trying to figure out. The trick to answering this question is to find out exactly what Google and Yahoo want you to do to get listed; not what you THINK they want you to do. That being said, the tried and true methods to get your pages indexed and listed by Google and Yahoo have been the following:

1. Blogging and Pinging

2. Submit your website through the standard submission form provided by Yahoo and Google

3. Pay a search engine submission service to do it for you

4. Figure out how to create a Sitemap for each of the engines to get the spiders to come to your site (you still have to manually submit)

These are all decent methods. However, the problems with 3 of these methods are many, and here are just a few:

1. Blog and Ping and submission forms are all slow ways to get listed. Who has that kind of time?

2. Search Engine Submission services can be expensive

3. Using an automated search engine submission service can get you banned, if the search engines think that you are "spamming"

Of all the methods listed above, both Google and Yahoo prefer that you create a sitemap and then submit your site to them. You create a database file that contains information about ALL of your web pages. You then load that file onto your website and then let Google know where that file is. Google is extremely specific about how the database should be submitted, which is in XML format.

By submitting your website in this way, you are cutting down on their overhead by a huge amount. You see, when you submit the old-fashioned way, using the standard submission form we talked about earlier, Google and Yahoo have to convert your information to the database XML format themselves. As you can imagine, this takes time, especially with the zillions of webpages that are submitted daily. So, those sites that are submitted in the manner and format that Google and Yahoo are already using will get their pages spidered faster...do you see the logic here? Using this process, you are enabling them to visit many MORE of your web pages quickly and easy. This is exactly what Google and Yahoo want you to do.

By submitting your sitemap in the preferred format, you will accomplish the following:

1. Save enormous amounts of your valuable time and money.

2. You don't risk getting banned

3. You will get Google and Yahoo to spider the pages of your site faster.

So, if you want to get your site spidered, and therefore listed, faster, you must create and submit the sitemap. In theory, the search engines can list your pages whenever they want. In reality, until you get them to spider your webpages, you will never get them listed!

Sitemaps 101 - Back To SEO School

2007-05-27T08:23:00.001-07:00

Sitemaps are without doubt one of the most often ignored and undervalued aspects of search engine optimization. You've probably spent a huge amount of time working on pages of original content, keyword density and getting incoming links but never once spared a thought for a sitemap for your new creation.

What is a sitemap?
Put simply it's a page or pages that contain a list of and link to all the other documents on your site. This is useful on two levels:

1. Your visitor can quickly reference all the documents on your site to find exactly what they're looking for.

2. Search engine spiders can also quickly find and index every single page of your site in the least amount of time. The SEO benefits of using a sitemap far considerable and should not be ignored.

This is a win-win situation for you, your website visitors and the search engines. Put simply you're nuts if you've not included a sitemap as part of your overall website promotion strategy.

The good news is that it's never too late to start. You can create a sitemap page today but there are some rules to creating an effective sitemap that you need to follow:

Your sitemap must only be linked to from your homepage and no other page. Why? You want the search engine spiders to find this link directly from your homepage and follow it from there. Your sitemap MUST NOT be linked to from every other page of your site. Also from a Google Pagerank point of view only linking to your sitemap from your homepage can also "funnel" PR quickly to pages all over your site.

If you have a large website of 50 pages or more limit the number of pages listed on your sitemap to a maximum of 30. This is to prevent your sitemap from being misinterpreted as a link farm by the search engines. It also makes the sitemap a lot easier for real human visitors to read through. Limiting the number of pages listed on each sitemap to 30 might mean splitting your sitemap over 5, 10 or 20 pages. This has to be done and the long term benefits are worth it. Bear in mind that if you do create a 20 page sitemap you've just created an extra 20 pages of content for your website!

Make absolutely sure that each of your sitemap pages links to the next. If you have 10 sitemap pages in total then each of those needs to link to every other sitemap page. Otherwise both visitors and search engine spiders will find a broken link, lose interest and go away.

Test your sitemap thoroughly. Make sure all the links works. Make sure it's easy to read and navigate through. Your sitemap is there to assist your visitor and not confuse them.

How should you structure your sitemap? The following tips must be adhered to in order for your site to gain the maximum possible benefit from having a sitemap.

1. The title of each sitemap link should be keyword rich and link directly back to the original page.

2. Include 10 - 20 words of text from the original page of content underneath the relevant sitemap link. This creates more content for search engine spiders and human visitors can see exactly what each page is about in advance of clicking.
uman visitor benefit is that they can see what the pages is about in advance.

3. Ensure that the look and feel of your sitemap page is consistent with the rest of your site. Use the same basic HTML template you used for every other page of your site.

So now you understand the importance of building a sitemap for your website. There is work involved but the long term benefits for your websites far outweigh any effort you have to make right now.

SEO Success: Step Three is Creating Long-Term Popularity

2007-05-27T08:22:00.000-07:00

Finally, after the hard-core efforts that are directly related to generating traffic to your website, you next step is to develop a strategy that creates follow-on, long-term traffic. Several methods exist for this Tier III strategy:

- Taking the large list of ancillary keywords that relate directly or indirectly to your website, begin purchasing keyword related domain names that will be used to create traffic driving websites that point to your money site.

- Setup satellite pages using the keyword domain names with the idea of capturing traffic geared toward those specific keywords, developing niche market traffic. As you develop niche markets for those new customers, you are going to be able to capitalize on those customers for the other products and/or services that your company offers when these sites link back to your money site as a result of informing and attracting these new customers through the niche sites.

- Create links, backlinks and cross-links between the satellite pages and your money site, improving your link popularity for all websites, especially your money site.

- Display articles or e-books related to your industry and place these articles on your websites being aware of the best location based on keyword dominance.

- For long-term, viral marketing results, create articles or e-books that you will either sell on your website or offer to public domain websites where your link information must be retained for use by anyone else on the internet; these articles will create links that go back to your money site or your niche sites.

- Follow the same steps in Tier I and II for all the niche sites as you did for your original money site; that is, design a SEO-optimized website and follow Tier II strategy to create the necessary link popularity to drive traffic to these sites.

Monitoring
In order to determine if the SEO efforts are successful, you must monitor results of for number and quality of backlinks, PR and web trend statistics. There are many sources for generating this data as well as programs that will assist in these analyses. Whatever method you choose, whether it is using specific programs or setting up a spreadsheet for entry of data, be consistent in tracking the data. There will be fluctuations from day-to-day that you should expect. You are looking for general, overall upward trends, not short-term blips. Upward progress followed by maintenance of a strong position with slow, steady growth would indicate a successful SEO campaign.

This 3-Tiered approach to SEO Strategy is very effective when implemented with the patience it takes for long-term results. Short-term "fixes" and "tricks" may have an effect in the short-run, but as the search engines change and adapt their algorithms -- as they doing almost monthly -- what worked today for quick results may actually get you banned tomorrow. This strategy is based on search engine directives: Well-designed websites, free of bad code, offering information, services or products of interest to the internet community will create their own base of popularity -- for which you will be rewarded by strong, growing traffic. When you are in it for the long haul, your strategy must utilize long-term efforts.

SEO Success: Step One is Good Web Design

2007-05-27T08:21:00.001-07:00

Creating a well-designed website is the first step in your internet marketing strategy. Once the website has been created and optimized, there are further techniques to employ that will drive traffic to your website for successful, long-term results. You wouldn't consider opening a retail store in a major shopping mall without signage and you shouldn't consider having a nice looking website designed without expanding your web presence in order to be found on the internet. But unless the website is designed correctly to begin with, follow-on SEO efforts will have limited results at best. The following strategy overview is designed to bring about productive SEO results:

- Create an attractive website that is complementary to your company image and provides your targeted audience with information about you, your company and your products and/or services.

- Design a website that has a call-to-action in the form of a purchase or providing you a contact, subscription or other commitment from your visitor.

- Create a successful marketing arm for your overall business promotion and marketing campaign to promote your business, products and/or services with the many follow-on strategies that drive traffic to your website.

- Become competitive in your industry and marketplace by meeting or exceeding the industry marketing standards and attracting a qualified audience for your products and/or services based on a strong reputation.

- Generate and maintain or grow internet traffic to your website resulting in a conversion of traffic into sales of your products and/or services by evolving as your market demands.

This search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is composed of several processes in three stages: 1) Good web design, 2) Attracting attention from search engines and directories, and 3) Creating long-term popularity on the internet. However, it all starts with good web design. Website design is the foundation and beginning of a successful internet marketing strategy. It is true that there are websites on the internet that are unattractive but somehow seem to work. If there are aspects of these websites that work, imagine how well they could do if they simply followed basic design implementation tactics that resulted in a good image as well as simply pushed information out to the viewer.

These basics are essential for Tier 1 success:

- Good web design will complement and enhance the company image and offline marketing campaign products creating a corporate branding if done well.

- Easy, logical navigation that leads the viewer deeper and deeper into the web of information provided by the website will keep the visitor on your site longer and give you more time to sell your products or services.

- Attractive but quick-loading graphics that are pleasing to the eye and meaningful to the website will guide the viewer along the route you decide is important for explaining what you offer.

- Keyword usage that is search engine-friendly depends on how the keywords are utilized, the placement of the keywords, the frequency of the most important keywords and their relevance to the website.

- Website coding that is lean, clean and without errors will keep the search engines happy and your viewer seeing exactly what you intended to offer.

- Relevance of content to the theme of the site is essential. Be concise, to the point and focus on your goals. If you have multiple themes and offerings, consider multiple websites to address the different markets, then tie each website back to the others by linking.

- Changing content that changes frequently and stays fresh keeps your viewer returning and prevents the search engines from treating your website as if it were stale news. A stale site will be ranked lower by the search engines.

Content is king -- it's all about content, content, content. But how that content is presented is what makes the difference.

SEO - Natural Linking Strategies

2007-05-27T08:20:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be the difference between a small, barely profitable or visible website and a traffic magnet website. There are a lot of ways, both good and bad, to influence the search engines. Some search engines react to certain strategies better than others. Some even have conflicting strategies that they react to. To document all of these things would require a significant number of pages and research that goes beyond the scope of this article.

However, there are a number of things that can be documented that will work for most if not all search engines. And let's face it; there are really only 3 that make a difference between a successful and an unsuccessful SEO strategy. They are the big three: Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three search engines in any given month are responsible for over 90% of all internet searches.

So, what is this article about? It's about what you can do as a website owner that will influence the search engines using commonly accepted practices of linking to other websites (outbound) and getting website links (inbound) back to you. There are basically 4 strategies that a website owner usually will employ to increase their website value in the eyes of the search engine. They are reciprocal linking, one-way linking, multi-site linking and directory linking. A website owner should not think that using just a single strategy is the right answer - sure it will help your SEO but it won't be the Best answer. The Best answer is to employ all 4 techniques and to do it naturally.

Each of the four linking strategies has specific descriptions that can be summed up as:
1. Reciprocal Linking = Site A links to Site B, Site B links back to Site A
2. One-Way Linking = Site B links to Site A
3. Multi-Site Linking = Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, Site C links to Site D, and Site D links back to Site A. Could be 3..N number of sites involved.
4. Directory Linking = Site Directory A links to Site A

That seems simple enough but it takes time and effort to perform all 4 strategies and most website owners aren't willing to spend the time or don't have the time to spend on it. As a website owner, SEO needs to be one of the highest priority tasks that you need to address, just after Order Processing and Fulfillment and Customer Service. Without free traffic from the search engines, other traffic generation strategies that usually require payment must be engaged.

Now doing the 4 strategies above is great, but it gets even harder because you have to do it in a way that doesn't trigger the search engines to enforce a penalty upon your website. No one except the search engine engineers know all of the exact penalties but we have some good theories for some of them.

The first is the rate at which links are created. There is a certain threshold for creating links that is too fast. It's possible that the threshold is a sliding scale and is related to the age of the website according to the engine. For example, a young low-traffic website should not normally be getting 1000 links a month whereas an older website that gets a lot of traffic could be OK to get 1000 links a month. As you progress in your linking strategies make sure you keep this in mind, especially if you are thinking about buying links.

The second is that having a link to every site that links to you will likely reduce the value of the links. In other words, if all you ever get is Reciprocal Linking, you will likely move up the SERP's (Search Engine Results Page's) but you won't reach your sites full potential. Having a mixture of all 4 strategies will appear more natural to the engines.

The third is having all inbound links to your site on "linking" pages will make those links less valuable than having a natural link on a contextually relative page for a percentage of the inbound links. The higher you can drive this context percentage, the better your website will rank. These types of links are often some of the most difficult links to generate an exchange for because it requires more time and effort for both website owners.

The fourth is to have links inbound from all different ranking sites. If all you have linking to you is page rank 6 and 7 sites then you are likely to be sending the message that you purchased your links and that is not natural to the engines. Some would argue that purchasing links for driving traffic is just fine and it is. However, you should not expect the search engines to give those inbound links very much weight when calculating your SERP positions. It is significantly more natural for you to have a large number of rank 1 and 2 inbound links and a decreasing number of inbound links as you move up the page rank scale (0 - 10).

The fifth is to have the text of you inbound links varied. It isn't natural to have every website that links to you to have the same text on the link description. The natural tendency would be to have a certain percent be the sites name, but after that it should be a wide variety of description. Your link text description is a key factor for how your site/page will rank, so make sure that you keep that in mind as you specify your preferred link text description on your website.

Finally, it would be best for a good percentage of your inbound links to appear within the text of a page that appears natural for the reader of that site. And for those links to not all point back to the home page of your website. It's most natural for a good high quality link to appear in the text of a page and have it point internally within your site.

So, when you begin or continue your SEO activities keep all of these things in mind and don't be impatient. Impatience could incur penalties or worse. Your website could end up in the "sandbox". It is rumored and becoming more concrete that Google supposedly uses a sandbox that questionable sites are put in until they have aged to a point that Google no longer feels that they are being manipulated. Many of the search engines use similar protection schemes to eliminate spam sites and manipulation sites to keep their SERP's from being cluttered.

SEO Made Easy - Winning Tactics For Internet Business Success

2007-05-27T05:38:00.000-07:00

Search engines are very difficult to completely understand. There are no complete explanations of how their ranking algorithms work. But the very fact that the average person does not intuitively know how to crack the search engine algorithms leads to all sorts of the same questions, usually variations of: "How do I get my website to the top of the search engine results pile?"

Search engine optimization is not magic or something equally difficult to understand. Instead, it is a step-by-step process and you should look at it that way. It can be summarized in the following points:

* An understanding of how search engines think.
* Knowing what search engines want
* Learning proven optimization techniques
* Applying your knowledge time and time again (experience - commonly known as trial and error!).

Of course, SEO is not completely explained by these four sentences. An automated software solution can give you the knowledge and tools to learn and implement SEO on your website with exceptional results. Success on the internet all boils down knowing how to implement Search Engine Optimization better than your competitors and getting it right the first time. If you do this, you will give your internet business that competitive edge.

However, if you have implemented SEO strategies correctly, and if you are still not seeing your website rank anywhere near where it should be on a particular keyword, then you may have one of the following problems:

* Your website may have been sandboxed (specific only to Google).
* Your website might be penalized or even removed from the index by a search engine for going against a stated guideline.
* A search engine might think that you are spamming them.

In the first case, you will have to "wait it out" with Google, while consolidating on your positions in the other search engines by continuously building links and adding content. You will not encounter the second case if you use and implement a very good automated SEO tool and understand exactly what the search engines will and won't permit.

However, like I said in the beginning, search engines are notoriously difficult to understand - their algorithms change by the second - and sometimes it is possible to all the right things and still not be ranked correctly. Search engines don't always get this part right. Called over-optimization by the major search engines, there is actually a lot of debate over this issue.

I know that optimizing your website and getting it listed is one of the hardest things to do. Believe me, I've been there. But now that you're armed with the information to get started, why not look for that automated SEO tool that will make your life easier and start you on the road to getting your site listed and ranked!

SEO Advertisting & Pay Per Click PPC

2007-05-27T05:37:00.000-07:00

Advertising can be an easy way to break into the internet but there are many downsides to it. Unless you are running a community based site, have a site offering very unique content, a valuable service or product the traffic usually only comes as long as your paying for it. Of course ad campaigns can also be very expensive to run and maintain so you need to be sure your squeezing everything you can out of it. You should only proceed with a ad campaign if you are positive your site is the best it can be, otherwise you may just be pouring money away. There are thousands of companies on the internet who offer to provide you with ad campaigns, many of which never deliver, do not let any of these points put you off advertising.

If you want quality traffic with affordable prices you are recommended to stick with the major search engines and their partners. Google Adwords, Overture and MSN are all well respected companies which will deliver you the best traffic. All of the forementioned websites use pay per click systems which can be perfect as they drive traffic with keywords you specify directly at your site, these advertisers are all interlinked with the main search engines so you should expect to get the most widespread sections of the population from them. Because they have the traffic numbers to support ad campaigns there can sometimes be bidding wars on popular keywords, I advise you to stay away from popular keywords and do your research. Overture provides a free Keyword Selector Tool which can help you find out how much traffic similiar keywords recieve each month, these are usually a lot cheaper and still provide the same high quality traffic.

As I mentioned before advertising wont necessarily mean a good flow of traffic after you stop paying, other routes of advertising can mean you get listed in a search engines immediately for a set fee. Yahoo offers the ability to pay for a index within their search engine or directory, although your site still needs to abide by the same rules as other sites it gives you the opportunity to get indexed immediately within the search engine, a more subtle way of advertising power. Alternatively you can find quality sites that are related to yours on Sitepoint.com and WebHostingTalk.com who may be willing to put a one way link up for a nominal fee.

You may find websites on the internet offering "banner exchanges", "free traffic" and other such promises, I wouldent look at them twice unless you want to lose out. The traffic they send you is of the worst quality, many of these websites operate bots, own networks of link farms and even pay people to visit your site. This of course means that no one being referred from these sites are actually interested in your content or services, in worst case scenarios you may even end up being banned from search engines due to these malicious sites. Even if they are reputable companies it is hard to judge whether they will work for you, many of the smaller search engine companies simply do not get the traffic to give you value for money

Search Engine Results and the PDF USER TRAP

2007-05-27T05:36:00.001-07:00

Many major search engines (Google, Fast, Inktomi, MSN) now have the capability to index PDF files and return them in search results. If you are a Web site owner with PDF files on your site, this is good news. If you are an SEO, you also know that the new capability presents potential usability problems. And what exactly is the big deal? Let's find out.

Searching for "blessing of a Christmas tree" on Google returns a link to a PDF file as the first result: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=BLESSING+OF+A+CHRISTMAS+TREE

If searchers click on it, the link automatically opens a PDF file with no navigation back to the main site. Users are trapped! So, what's going on and, more importantly, how to do we fix it? Essentially, the PDF format is not the culprit; the real problem is the author's failure to create the files with Web users in mind.

PDF authoring software, such as Adobe Acrobat 5.0, offers the ability to include both a navigational structure and hyperlinks on a PDF page. Ideally, the best solution is to create your pages in HTML, rather than PDF format. Depending on the purpose, however, a PDF format can be preferable. For example, PDF files offer better functionality for pages that are commonly printed, such as order forms and price lists.

To avoid the PDF USER TRAP, you will have to republish your files, adding some type of navigation structure and/or link back your main Web site. This is the best option for SEO's, because it allows the pages to still be indexed. If this is not an option, the next best solution is to place all of your PDF files in a single folder and do a robots exclusion.

Search Engine Optimization Tips - Part Two

2007-05-27T05:34:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the second part of our series of articles on search engine optimization. In the previous article we discussed keywords, domain names, content and keyword density issues. This article moves past that to the nitty gritty of improving your web pages and website for better search engine rankings.

Page Title
It's truly amazing how many people don't realize how critical the TITLE tag can be to the success or failure of your website. Your TITLE tag needs to have your most important keyword for that page included in it. This is for the benefit of the search engines.

From a visitors point of view it also needs to entice them to click on your title tag when they see it in the search engine results. If your page is about PDA Accessories don't just use that phrase in the TITLE tag.

Dress it up a bit. For example "PDA Accessories For The Busy Geek" or "Need Accessories for Your PDA? Come right in!" Those examples took me 10 seconds to come up with. You can do far better with a little more time and effort.

META Keyword Tag
Anybody still using the Meta Keyword tag as their sole search engine optimization method please leave the room. Go on get out and don't come back.

The Meta Keyword tag is all but dead to the search engines. When building your pages it's still worth including but simply put in the top 3 or 4 keywords that are relevant to your business and leave it at that. Do not spend hours coming up with hundreds of keywords to stuff into the Meta Keyword tag. It's a total waste of time and anybody who tells you different has no idea what they're talking about.

META Description Tag
This still has some limited value for your SEO work. When Google or other search engines display search results they display the contents of the TITLE tag and your Meta Description tag (if present) or a random selection of text from the page. Your Meta Description tag will take priority if present.

The Meta Description tag is still worth using. Your most important keyword should be in there and again you need to work this keyword into an eye catching phrase or sentence. Don't just copy and paste the main keyword in there.

If the Meta Description tag is used well, in conjunction with the TITLE tag, then it can make your displayed search result more inviting to the potential visitor. Again don't spend more than a few minutes on your Meta Description tag but do make sure that you include it on each page. One final note - make the Meta Description for each page different; don't just recycle the same one over and over.

RSS
Stands for Really Simple Syndication and is probably something you've heard a lot about over the last few months. RSS allows you to display the news items and/or content from other sites on your website as part of a "news feed". This adds a huge amount of value to your site from a vistors point of view - they don't need to leave your site to get the latest news on a given topic. The other benefit is that search engines love seeing fresh content on websites.

At the moment there's a huge upsurge in the use of RSS for search engine optimization. The question is does it work? Yes it does. Using RSS can most definitely encourage the search engines to come back to visit your site more often. How does it work? Well again that goes beyond the scope of this article so please refer to our site for more information.

Blogs
Also called Web Logs are basically online diaries. For a long time these were used solely by... well.... geeks to record their thoughts and as a way of sharing information on Star Trek. Seriously though initially blogs were never seen as anything more than a curiousity.

Recently with the increased visibility of RSS blogs have also seen their profile rise. Why? Well because many RSS feeds feature blog content. Which means what exactly? It means your blog could be included on and linked to from thousands of websites all over the world. Are you seeing the possiblities? There are some other nuances to consider but to mention them here would give the game away completely and certain ebook authors would put a price on my head for giving away their secrets.

(c) Niall Roche - All Rights Reserved

- continued in Part 3

Search Engine Optimization - Site map Optimization Technique

2007-05-27T05:33:00.000-07:00

Site Maps can be a great tool for making search engines crawl through your web site in a much more effective manner, thereby helping you get more pages indexed, and ultimately getting you more visitors. Most people know what site maps are, as they can be seen on many of the major websites, although for those who don¡¦t, ¡§a site map is a page which contains a list of all the links within a website, under different categories and headings, just like a table of contents of a book¡¨. Now when a search engine hits the site map page, it gets to see all the links within that website and this enables it to crawl through those pages. It¡¦s just like guiding search engines with the help of a map, in this large universe of internet.

Site maps also help visitors to get an overview of the entire web site, and hence act as a great navigational tool. It helps visitors find specific pages through a single page, for which they might have had to follow several links to reach the desired page. Here are some examples of well designed site maps.

http://www.google.com/sitemap.html
http://www.lycos.com/sitemap.asp

This leads us to the next question, i.e. how should site maps be designed. Designing a site map can be as simple as designing any other static pages without any pictures, graphics, etc. But all effort should be made to keep the structure logical and simple. Its best to browse through the web, and check out a variety of site maps before you decide on what kind of structure you want to follow.

Here are some things you should keep in mind, before designing a site map.

Homepage Link: It is important to give a prominent link from the homepage to the sitemap page, so that visitors and search bots can easily hit the site map page. In fact, preferably there should be a link to the site map page from every page of your website.

Text Links: Plain text links should be used for all the links, as some search bots can have problems crawling through ¡§JavaScript¡¨.

Categories: It is important to organise the contents into well defined categories, and even sub-categories for easy navigation of the user. Although this doesn¡¦t have direct SEO implications, it makes more sense to the user.

Descriptive Content: It is ideal to add some content describing the links, as search engines tend to ignore pages, full of links. It is also important to use your targeted keywords in your descriptive content as well as in your anchor text.

Anchor Text Link: It is important to use page titles as your anchor text, so that you can increase your anchor text back links. This is helpful for search engine optimization as it increases your link popularity.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical to the success of your website

2007-05-27T05:32:00.000-07:00

Drive Visitors To Your Website And Increase Your Market Share.

SEO is the key to unlocking your website's full potential. Google handles over 200 million internet search requests each day, and people who search for information clearly express what they want. Imagine capturing a relevant stream of such web traffic. It's therefore important to optimize your web pages to improve search engine rankings using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site.

The search engine optimization process begins before you start building your website, when you decide on the domain name to register. The process then continues on as long as your website remains online.

Please note that optimizing your web pages to get high rankings takes time. Your rankings may start out low and slowly improve. Link popularity, i.e. the quantity and quality of external links to your web pages, greatly influences your rankings, and it takes time for your website to become popular in its niche.

Every time you improve your site, you need to allow time for the full effect to show in search engine results. Don't tweak your web pages too frequently. The time and effort is better spent on adding high-quality contents to your site and building inbound links.

Search Engines have computers and programs called "Spiders" that collect information about your web pages in an attempt to "figure out" what your pages are about. These spiders gather information from your pages and use these in factoring which sites get ranked higher than others. Search Engines analyze over 100 On-Page Factors when analyzing your web pages.

Search Engine Optimization - Inside Google Page Rank

2007-05-27T05:31:00.002-07:00

At present Google is the leading worldwide search engine, it supports multiple languages and has one of the most sophisticated search engine algorithms around. If you bear in mind Google's unprecedented popularity and simplicity you will see that your site needs to master its rankings for your particular key phrases, this will usual mean that other search engines catch on to your website with similiar positionings. It isnt easy to understand such a complex system but you need to master it to give your site an edge in an increasingly demanding market.

Google is a mystery as far as search engine theories go, you essentially have to try and understand what makes one site rank better than another. Although the forementioned algorithms are constantly changing Google themselves have shown link backs play a large roll in a search engines view of any web page, in order to do well a website needs to have links from other sites directly to it. Not only that the websites that link to it are usually respected by search engines themselves. PageRank is google's own measure of a website, there is much speculation on how it is composed but a key factor is proven to be back links, below is a scale that is widely believed to be the backbone of how it judges your website. The amount of PageRank distributed around the internet is believed average at 1 for every website, thats why we begin this at PageRank 2.

PR 2 = 0-6 Link backs

PR 3 = 6-60 Link backs

PR 4 = 60-600 Link backs

PR 5 = 600-6000 Link backs

PR 6 = 6000-60000 Link backs

PR 7 = 60000-600000 Link backs

PR 8 = 600000-6000000 Link backs

PR 9 = 6000000-60000000 Link backs

PR 10 = 60000000-600000000 Link backs

We used a base number of 6 for this example although it is disputed whether it could be 5 or lower. The amount of back links your website recieves plays a large role within your search engine positioning but a strong anchor text and title tag for your links is also key to success, you can see how to do this as demonstrated below.

a href="http://www.linkhere" title="Keyword Title Text" Keyword Anchor Text

PageRank analyses more than link backs. External links are known to "leak" page rank from your website, in simple terms - your website can cast one vote against each websites it links to, if these are external links it takes from a pool of PageRank that your website has to offer. It is recommended you either seek recipirocal links from websites you link to or use other methods like javascript to prevent your PageRank from being dispersed from your website.

Search Engine Optimization - Advice and Tactic

2007-05-27T05:31:00.001-07:00

Unique content is King. Search engines love new, unique and updated content. If you produce new content at a rate of just one reasonably sized page per day and tied in with the other advice throughout the site, I can almost guarantee you will get good listings. Remember though, write for the visitors but cater for the search engines. If your field of expertise fits into a niche in the market, all the better for you but you must get unique content all you will fall behind.

Page Structure. Search engine bots can sometimes get confused with poorly coded html, javascript and other web languages. If the bot has to wait too long or cannot decipher the web language then it will just abandon your site and move on to the next, even if it manages to get through the code it usually leads to poor search engine indexing of your website. You should also keep to widely used file extensions like .htm, .html, .php, .asp for your pages.

Loading Speed. The loading speed of your website should be kept to a minimum, if it takes long than 5 seconds on 256kb+ connections then you lose visitors - both real and search engine bots. There are a variety of reasons why pages can load slowly, it may either be your web server, poorly coded server side code like php or client side code like javascript which can slow or even stop your page from loading.

Visitor Navigation. This is more an aesthetic feature of your website focused at real visitors but you need to have some sort of standard navigation that is the same throughout your whole site. People can be put off and leave your website if they find it difficult to browse easily, search engine bots may also miss links if they can only be found deep within your site. Try to make as many internal links as possible available on each page.

Site Hierarchy. Site hierachy can be great for adding keyword density to your web site. An example of site hierachy working effectively would be this page, seo-advice.php. The full link contains SEO twice - www.seoassistance.com/seo-advice.php which is very beneficial in the way search engines determine your sites relevance to a particular subject. Use your domain, folders and file names to your advantage.

Avoid Blackhat SEO. Blackhat SEO is a vast topic that commands little respect from real webmasters as it means using underhand methods to gain search engine rankings, although the site is usually banned quickly. Blackhat SEO includes using link farms, search engine spamming, hidden or disguised text, fake meta tag data, using duplicate content and using doorway pages. I would recommend you stay away from tactics like this as you will end up losing out in the long run.

Targeted Linkswaps. Link swaps are great but you must make them work for you. It does little good for you when your going for top search engine positions when your link swaps are untargeted. You should choose some specific keywords for both the link text and the link title text then make sure before you link swap that the other webmaster adds those specific keywords with the link.

Search Engine Metrics… Organic Search vs. Paid Placement

2007-05-27T05:30:00.001-07:00

Let me preface this report by citing advertisers in 2004 have spent 4 Billion dollars on search engine marketing according to (SEMPO) the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization.

Website marketers cited Search engine positioning was the top method to drive traffic to their sites (66%), followed by email marketing (54%). Source: Direct Marketing Association. Accordingly, the most cost effective way to market your web site online is to obtain several top 10-search engine rankings in the major search engines for your keywords.

According to a recent Jupiter Research Survey, searching on the search engines is one of the main uses of the Internet among 79% of users. Source: September 2002 Jupiter Research Survey. So that being the case, whatever your promoting you’ll want to make sure it can be found on the first page of the search engines results page.

The reason is numerically simple. An Iprospect Survey in 2002 reported that 78% of web users abandon their search if the first 3 pages don't provide an answer to their question, and 28% don’t scroll past the 2nd page of results. Source: Media Post article reporting results of Spring 2002 IProspect survey.

Combine those facts with the Internets explosive growth rate of 1.8 Million people worldwide going online every week for the very first time, Source: Official Guide To Internet Promotion and you can soon appreciate what a top 10 ranking can mean to you.
Google receives approximately 39.4% of all search engine traffic. Yahoo receives approximately 30.4%. They’re simply the largest search engines being utilized online today.

Bringing up the rear is MSN at 29.6%, and AOL 15.5% then Ask Jeeves with 8.5%. Source: Nielsen//NetRatings January 2004

How much traffic is that? Well, Google and its partner sites were reporting a whopping 250 million searches a day in February 2003.

Overture and its partners were reporting over 167 million searches per day. Inktomi reported 80 million followed by LookSmart with 45 million per day.

FindWhat reported 33 million while Ask Jeeves reported 20 million, Alta Vista reported 18 million and finally Fast reported 12 Million searches per day. Source: Searchenginewatch.com 2004.

With all said, you can easily see how your search engine rankings are directly proportional to the traffic your web site receives, and your site traffic is directly related to your potential to profit online.

Oh, and in case your wondering how much money is spent online; a recent Forrester Research Report indicated that online spending reached $95,700,000,000 million in 2003!
That's a cool 95.7 billion dollars. Projected online spending is estimated to grow to $229 billion in 2008! A whopping 139% increase in online spending! Source: Forrester Research

Now with these facts in mind I’m confident you can clearly see what a top 10-search engine ranking can mean for your bottom line. Although it does leave a question unanswered in my mind, what has a higher ROI… organic search engine optimization or paid search?

According to SEMPO’s key analysis, the U.S. & Canadian SEM Industry Size Estimate by tactic in 2004, organic SEO accounted for 12% of the market share or $492,057,200 while Paid Placement accounted for $3,341,878,176 or 81.8%.

Interestingly, 9 out of 10 respondents are actively engaged in organic SEM marketing programs accounting for 89% of the respondent advertisers. This trend can be contributed to the average cost of popular keywords continuing to escalate.

If the escalation continues to rise it could make paid search engine advertising exponentially cost prohibitive for all but the largest advertisers… the 900lb gorillas!

Simply put, ROI is outpacing inflation: SEMPO’s key analysis indicates advertisers could afford to pay on average 33% more for their keywords and remain profitable, while they say prices have gone up 26% on average in the last 12 months. That’s leaves a 7% advertising margin to maintain current profits for 2005!

SEMPO’s data also noted that advertisers will get smarter about managing their paid placement programs before they cut back on spending.

This is also consistent with a report released by Nielsen/NetRatings indicating that the growing demand for search engine advertising is outstripping the supply of currently available advertising space.

These findings seem to indicate the inventory of keywords is approaching a critical demand problem however; most advertisers felt they still have some degree of price flexibility in their paid placement programs before they will reach the threshold of diminishing returns.

Is there any wonder why organic search engine positioning has gained popularity for online marketers in 2004? Could it be higher (ROI) return on investments?

SEMPO also cites that 43% of advertiser respondents have shifted their budgets away from other marketing programs for Organic SEO.

So what does it all mean? Let the numbers speak for themselves.

Organic SEO is undeniably gaining favor over the lower ROI paid advertising. This is evidenced by virtue of the fact that paid advertising is becoming less profitable.

Although paid advertising will continue to hold a large portion of the market share, as paid advertising returns diminish and keyword costs soar my early 2005 forecast is for the materialization of a progressive organic SEO market trend to facilitate the need for advertising space.

Search Engine Copywriting Explained

2007-05-27T05:29:00.000-07:00

Copywriting in the world of marketing has always been an expensive process and the main aim of the copy is to attract the reader attention and lure him into buying a product or using a particular service. Copywriting in the online world has pretty much the same meaning, but I believe it is slightly difficult, as here the main aim is to not only grab the readers attention but in order to make it more effective, it is also important to make the copy rank well in the search engines, so that the targeted audience actually get to read it.

Search engine copywriting refers to the process, where a copy is written in a way, where it not only reads well to the reader, but also repeats specific target “keywords?within the text, in order for that copy (webpage) to rank well in search engines for those keywords.

Copywriting experts believe it is ideal to have around 300 words on a page with one or two targeted search terms cleverly placed within the text a few times. Along with the text, it is also important to optimize other elements on the page such as the title text, headings, description and keyword tags, and alt text.

Advantages and Disadvantages of SEO Copywriting

Advantages
Long term Rankings: It is believed that this method helps in maintaining SEO rankings for much longer as compared to other optimization techniques, even when search engines change their algorithms. Although many search engine optimization experts believe that this is a myth.

Quality Content: It not only helps in the optimization process, but also helps to have quality and well written content on your website, which is likely to get you returned visitors or referrals.

Disadvantages
Works for Less Competitive Search Terms: It is believed that this technique works best for less competitive search terms. Competitive search terms refer to highly searched keywords such as sex, insurance, credit cards, cars, etc. Although this can aid the optimization process for highly competitive search terms too, but to be competitive other more robust optimization techniques will also be needed.

Does not work for all Sites: Many sites cannot accommodate enough text on them, for e.g. it can be difficult to optimize certain pages/sites which have too many graphics, flash, etc. and little space for content. Many webmasters are not willing to alter the text, as it may affect the aesthetic appeal of the site.

Expensive Process: Search engine copywriters are expensive people, and hence this whole process can be very expensive. They usually charge on per page basis, and the total expense largely depends on how many pages are to be optimized and the number of keywords being targeted. Another reason why it can be expensive is that you have to depend on the copywriter for all further changes to that page, and hence it can become a permanent expense. Making alterations to that page yourself, unless you know exactly what you are doing, can ruin the optimization of that particular page.

Press ReleasePromote Your Website in Google Absolutely Free

2007-05-27T05:28:00.000-07:00

Free SEO help. The SEO Book helps charities promote their websites in Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other major search engines. The recently updated number one ranking SEO Book is now available to charities free of charge.

State College, PA July 20, 2004 -- Aaron Wall has made his recently revised best selling SEO Book available to charities free of charge.

Hiring a quality search engine optimization firm can often cost thousands and thousands of dollars, which is well beyond the budget of many charities.

Without proper placement in search engines people who want to help your charity may not be able to find you.

The SEO Book is a simple and straightforward guide which helps even the most novice webmaster learn how to promote their website.

"In a field like Internet marketing, where so much nonsense dispensed by self-proclaimed experts passes for decent advice, it is refreshing to find a talent as down-to-earth and unpretentious as Aaron, who just seems to get a kick out of being honest and helping other people avoid the traps and dead ends set by the hype-meisters and snake oil salesmen."
- Mario Sanchez, "The Internet Digest"

Search engine optimization is a complicated industry filled with confusion and error. Much of the applicable information changes from month to month or year to year and much of the available information on the web is outdated or absolutely incorrect. The SEO Book is published in ebook format so that it is constantly revised to keep current with the ever changing SEO field.

If you are the webmaster of a charity, church, or educational institution feel free to inquire about acquiring your complimentary copy of The SEO Book today at http://www.seobook.com/charities.

PPC Advertising – The First Step In A SEO Marketing Campaign

2007-05-27T05:26:00.000-07:00

Often, sites view seo and PPC marketing as exclusive marketing techniques. Each marketing method has its advocates. In reality, both have a place in the Internet marketing process. If you intend to pursue a major seo effort, a PPC campaign is a critical early step.

PPC For Testing

Let’s say you have a site offering a service or product in the travel market. You’ve put together a healthy budget and decided to go for broke. Yep, you’re optimizing and trading links in an effort to go after keyword phrases with major traffic and competition. For instance, you’ve decided to have a go at “Europe travel”, which has roughly 400,000 searches each month and major competition for high rankings. You spend two years trading links, adding content and so on. Miracle of miracles, you pop on to the first page of search results. You start shopping for your private jet only to realize a very disturbing thing. You are getting thousands of visits, but few sales. After running calculations, you find the site is converting at 1 in 10,000.

Houston, we have a problem.

A PPC campaign should be used to test your site against keyword phrases before you spend the time and money on an seo campaign. The best platforms to use for your campaign are Google Adwords and Overture. Yes, click fraud is a problem, but less so on these platforms.

After opening accounts and laying a credit card down at the PPC alter, you need to give some thought at to how you will test your keywords. Here’s a hint. The campaign should be designed to test the keyword phrases, not maximize sales. This may sound like a strange statement, but keep in mind the purpose of the campaign. You are determining whether you have picked appropriate keyword phrases for the seo campaign. So, how does it all go wrong?

With both Overture and Adwords, you have the ability to designate the reach of your keyword phrases. Most pick the “broad match” option, which is terrible for testing. With broad match, your advertisements are going to appear for your keyword phrase AND variations of the phrase. Since the ad is appearing on a variety of keyword phrases, the results can give you a false impression of the value of the primary keyword phrase.

Going back to our example, we start a Google Adwords campaign for “Europe travel” and use the default broad match option. After a month, we are happy to find the ads converting at 1 in 70. Having validated the keyword phrase, we set off on the long seo campaign. But are we really sure about the validity of the keyword phrase. Since Google has been known to seriously expand keyword phrases under the broad match option, how do we know that the true keyword phrase isn’t “European travel”? We don’t unless we take a few additional steps.

The first step is to limit the PPC advertisements by bypassing the broad match option. Instead, you want to limit the appearance of the ad only to searches for the exact keyword phrase. In Adwords, this is known as the “exact phrase” match. To designate it, you simply place brackets “[]” around the keyword phrase. Second, you need to track traffic originating from the ads. This can be done using tracking tools on your server or through the tracking options offered by each PPC platform. Regardless of your choice, the resulting data will give a much truer picture of the value of the particular keyword phrases.

Nothing is more aggravating then getting top rankings, but miserable conversions. The only way to beat this problem is to test, test, test. Using PPC campaigns at the outset of an Internet marketing efforts can save you a lot of headaches later on.

Popup Ads - Redesign Them and Explode Your Sales!

2007-05-27T05:24:00.002-07:00

Most people put popup ads and Spam in the same category; they genuinely don't believe in their effectiveness.

However, marketing statistics show that popup ads are powerful marketing tools that can significantly increase your sales and subscribers to your opt-in list or newsletter. On the flip side, popup ads are the third most hated entity on the Internet, behind Spam and adware. This is because most popup ads are the rude interrupting variety that traps the user into an unending loop.

It is possible to produce Popups that provide relevant information to users in a non-intrusive way. You just need to be sure that you are providing relevant information to the visitors to your site (information that they are already actively looking for.

If you are using conventional popup ads on your site, you may have noticed oh, in the last year or so...that your opt in list has been continually declining. You can attribute this decline to the advent of the popup blocker. Just in case you're not familiar with pop-up blockers, here's the short summary…over the past year, a lot companies, even the major ISP's (Internet Service Providers) such as AOL, Google and Yahoo have been releasing software designed to block pop-ups, so that anyone who has the software installed can control how many pop-ups they see from what website or even block them totally. In lots of cases, the average Internet user doesn't even know that they have a popup blocker installed on their toolbar.

There is new technology available now that lets you create a new type of popup ad. This ad is an animated floating ads that look and behave like pop-ups but are essentially a part of the main web page, so popup blockers can't stop them.
Unlike conventional popups, which open new browser windows, these ads are part of your web page.

Using this new technology, you can:

Conduct polls and surveys to can get useful feedback from your visitors/aid your marketing efforts

2. Capture email addresses from visitors by offering them free information

3. Use your thank you pages to introduce your visitors to your other products. Since they are already in a buying mood, there is a pretty good chance that they will be receptive.

4. Add "tips of the day" and change them every so often to generate interest.

As a smart internet marketer, I'm sure you know that by capturing the visitor's email address, and then following up with them via an effective auto-responder campaign, you can more than double your chances of closing the sale. By using the new popup ads, you can do exactly that!

Pay Per Performance Web Traffic

2007-05-27T05:24:00.001-07:00

Why should you pay to get web site traffic, isn't SEO enough?

It's a fair question - after all most businesses on and offline have tight budgets to play with and need to make each and every penny count.
So why should you as a business pay good money to drive targeted traffic to your site?

Perhaps there's a clue in the last question.

What other options are there?

You have 3 basic choices to get traffic to your website:

1. You pay - using PPC, ezine ads, banners etc...
2. You borrow - constructing Joint Ventures and endorsed offers with partners
3. You grow your own - with natural search engine optimisation

So which is the best?
---------------------

Well they all do a different job and have different characteristics, perhaps the best information source you could hope to find on the subject is found here:
http://www.trackingandtesting.com/dystatic/TrafficGeneration.php

But why PPC?

You need PPC because you can:

* Control the flow of traffic to your website
* Target buying customers and those most likely to buy through correct keyword targeting
* Test different offers

The last benefit above is perhaps the most important. Remember a page on a website doesn't have to stay recorded online forever...

Just because you've completed your site in terms of the pages you want to add (although in truth you'll never be finished as you can continually add more related content), this does not preclude you from testing other pages...

The value of testing
--------------------

Simple scenario: You want to test 2 price points for a product/service. (Yes you can do this and people don't have to know about it so don't be worried).

With a PPC campaign you can have your normal web page (Page A) sitting as normal at the well known web address with all of your normal links pointing to it.

You 2 price point test pages (Page B & C) are a different kettle of fish - they sit off to the side and you push traffic to them using PPC to quickly determine which is the winner.

You can do this for any test you dream up, the bottom line is you can quickly determine what is working and what is not in your marketing.

Knowing what's not working is more important than what is (particularly if you are sailing close to the wind) because you SAVE money you would otherwise have thrown away.

The Affiliate Advantage
-----------------------

When you have a website that is converting well, you will be able to attract many affiliates (and even super affiliates if you are doing a good enough job and providing a good enough incentive package).

Affiliates can make your business explode overnight if you have done your homework and have the site converting well.

If you have not you may attract them, they may pump some traffic and then they will disappear to pastures new when they see you are not doing a good job.

In summary
----------

If I could give you one reason why you should use PPC and in particular Google Adwords as part of your internet marketing campaign it would be this:

"Feedback fast, feedback cheap"

Yes you may spend a little money up front, but you can save yourself a whole lot of heartache on the back end.

optimization

2007-05-27T05:23:00.000-07:00

The Good and the Bad of SEO – From Googles Mouth!

I recently had the opportunity to ask questions of some Google staffers. There were some questions I felt I needed to get verification on, so when I had the opportunity via a conference call I took it.

In this article I highlight some of the points made during the call so you know what Google thinks.

You know its bad when you take time from your holidays to come into work to attend a conference call. But that’s what I did a few weeks ago. You see I had to because I was going to have the opportunity to ask some Google employees specific questions on things that I’d been pretty sure about, but wanted to hear it right from the horses mouth.

The call lasted less than an hour, but in that time I found that there were many things I figured were indeed true. So lets start with the most obvious:

Is PageRank still important?

The short answer is yes – PageRank has always been important to Google. Naturally they couldn’t go into details but it is as I suspected. Google still uses the algorithm to help determine rankings. Where it falls in the algo mix, though, is up for speculation. My feeling however is that they’ve simply moved where the PageRank value is applied in the grand scheme of things. If you want to know what I think, be sure to read this article.

Are dynamic URLs bad?

Google says that a dynamic URL with 2 parameters “should” get indexed. When we pressed a bit on the issue we also found that URLs themselves don’t contribute too much to the overall ranking algorithms. In other words, a page named Page1.asp will likely perform as well as Keyword.asp.

The whole variable thing shouldn’t come as a surprise. It is true that Google will indeed index dynamic URLs and I’ve seen sites with as many as 4 variables get indexed. The difference however is that in almost all cases I’ve seen the static URLs outrank the dynamic URLs especially in highly competitive or even moderately competitive keyword spaces.

Is URL rewriting OK in Google’s eyes?

Again, the answer is yes, provided the URLs aren’t too long. While the length of the URL isn’t necessarily an issue, if they get extremely long they can cause problems.

In my experience, long rewritten URLs perform just fine. The important thing is the content on the page.

That was a common theme throughout the call – content is king. Sure optimized meta tags, effective interlinking and externalizing JavaScript all help, but in the end if the content isn’t there the site won’t do well.

Do you need to use the Google Sitemap tool?

If your site is already getting crawled effectively by Google you do not need to use the Google sitemap submission tool.

The sitemap submission tool was created by Google to provide a way for sites which normally do not get crawled effectively to now become indexed by Google.

My feeling here is that if you MUST use the Google sitemap to get your site indexed then you have some serious architectural issues to solve.

In other words, just because your pages get indexed via the sitemap doesn’t mean they will rank. In fact I’d bet you that they won’t rank because of those technical issues I mentioned above.

Here I’d recommend getting a free tool like Xenu and spider your site yourself. If Xenu has problems then you can almost be assured of Googlebot crawling problems. The nice thing with Xenu is that it can help you find those problems, such as broken links, so that you can fix them.

Once your site becomes fully crawlable by Xenu I can almost guarantee you that it will be crawlable and indexable by the major search engine spiders.

Does clean code make that much of a difference?

Again, the answer is yes. By externalizing any code you can and cleaning up things like tables you can greatly improve your site.

First, externalizing JavaScript and CSS helps reduce code bloat which makes the visible text more important. Your keyword density goes up which makes the page more authoritative.

Similarly, minimizing the use of tables also helps reduce the HTML to text ratio, making the text that much more important.

Also, as a tip, your visible text should appear as close to the top of your HTML code as possible. Sometimes this is difficult, however, as elements like top and left navigation appear first in the HTML. If this is the case, consider using CSS to reposition the text and those elements appropriately.

Do Keywords in the domain name harm or help you?

The short answer is neither. However too many keywords in a domain can set off flags for review. In other words blue-widgets.com won’t hurt you but discount-and-cheap-blue-and-red-widgets.com will likely raise flags and trigger a review.

Page naming follows similar rules – while you can use keywords as page names, it doesn’t necessarily help (as I mentioned above) further, long names can cause reviews which will delay indexing.

How many links should you have on your sitemap?

Google recommends 100 links per page.

While I’ve seen pages with more links get indexed, it appears that it takes much longer. In other words, the first 100 links will get indexed right away, however it can take a few more months for Google to identify and follow any links greater than 100.

If your site is larger than 100 pages (as many are today) consider splitting up your sitemap into multiple pages which interlink with each other, or create a directory structure within your sitemap. This way you can have multiple sitemaps that are logically organized and will allow for complete indexing of your site.

Can Googlebot follow links in Flash or JavaScript

While Googlebot can identify links in JavaScript, it cannot follow those links. Nor can it follow links in Flash.

Therefore I recommend having your links elsewhere on the page. It is OK to have links in flash or JavaScript but you need to account for the crawlers not finding them. Therefore the use of a sitemap can help get those links found and crawled.

As alternatives I know there are menus which use JavaScript and CSS to output a very similar looking navigation system to what you commonly see with JavaScript navigation yet uses static hyperlinks which crawlers can follow. Therefore do a little research and you should be able to find a spiderable alternative to whatever type of navigation your site currently has.

Overall, while I didn’t learn anything earth shattering, it was good to get validation “from the horses mouth” so to speak.

I guess it just goes to show you that there is enough information out there on the forums and blogs. The question becomes determine which of that information is valid and which isn’t. But that, I’m afraid, usually comes with time and experience.

On-Site SEO and Link Building

2007-05-27T05:22:00.000-07:00

A discussion between 2 SEO´s, Mr. Ethical and Mr. Links, about link building.

Mr. Ethical: There is no need for link building if you know how to optimize a website properly. It’s all on-site work and some basic submissions to some directories.

Mr. Links: Yeah that’s what it starts with, but you have to admit that once you’re done with on-site optimization and the results are not there yet, you need to do link building in order to increase the rankings.

Mr. Ethical: Nothing of the sort, Mr. Links. Links will come by them selves if you have enough content that will attract links naturally.

Mr. Links: So how are these people going to find your website if links are what you need to be found in the first place? Those couple of basic submissions won’t give you high enough rankings, if at all, to be found by people that want to link to your content. It’s a chicken and the egg problem.

Mr. Ethical: Most websites already have a bunch of back links so that’s not really an issue. All you have to do is optimize the site and eventually enough people will find the site to get even higher rankings.

Mr. Links: But what about a site that is in a very competitive market and most top sites have many back links already? Wouldn’t you want to get some more links?

Mr. Ethical: Link schemes are unethical.

Mr. Links: Unethical link schemes are unethical.

.
.
.

Mr. Ethical: Natural links are ethical.

Mr. Links: And links obtained through other types of ethical marketing?

Mr. Ethical: Other types of ethical marketing?

Mr. Links: Yes, advertising for example. Isn’t advertising a very natural business?

Mr. Ethical: Bought links are unethical because links need to be relevant.

Mr. Links: What about relevant bought links?

Mr. Ethical: Natural links don’t cost anything.

Mr. Links: And how much time does it take for links to naturally occur?

Mr. Ethical: Doesn’t matter. You have to do everything ethically. And obviously you don’t know how to optimize a website because you think you need links to get high rankings.

Mr. Links: But you do too. You just said that most sites already have a bunch of back links. In fact, you said that natural links will help you get higher rankings. So you actually agree that for high rankings you do need links.

Mr. Ethical: Everything needs to be done ethical.

Mr. Links: Does that include selecting clients that are in not the most competitive markets?

Mr. Links: Never mind answering that.

Link Popularity: Distribute content, not just links.

2007-05-27T05:20:00.000-07:00

You've spent many hours trying to increase your online traffic with your linking campaign. You've sent out 200 e-mails pleading with other web sites to trade links with your site. Many of your e-mails bounce back.

The requests that find thier targets get rejected for numerous reasons. For example, your Google pagerank is too low or your links pages are dynamic and not static, etc., blah, blah, etc., ad nauseum. Out of those 200 requests, you wind up getting 25 reciprocal links, if you are lucky.

So, you say to yourself, "Great, now i have 25 more links!". But are these links really worth it? Do they generate any traffic?

There are many reasons why your links won't even get counted or indexed by the search engines. If your link is on a page among 100 other links, or the page is irrelevant to your subject matter, the page probably won't hold much weight with most search engines. It's also rumored that Google is changing it's algorithm to discount reciprocal links altogether.

So, what can you do to get your links indexed and noticed? Write your own content, distribute it to article directories or trade it with other related websites!

Here are 8 tips on increasing your online traffic with distributed content.

1. Try to write about popular content. The more popular it is, the more people will download it and want to include it on their websites and the more links you'll have pointing back to your site.

2. Try not to use any promotional jargon or sales pitches in your articles. If you do, many webmasters will not want to include your article on thier site.

3. Use plain English. Don't try to get too technical. Read it back to yourself and make sure you don't get tongue-tied while reading it.

4. If possible, work in your site's main keyword phrases into your articles. If your site is about online marketing, write articles about online marketing.

5. Make sure you include an "About the Author" section at the bottom. Make it somewhat short and always include a link back to your site in an anchor tag. And once again, include your keywords in the link text.

6. Proofread your article carefully. I see so many articles out there with misspellings. It just makes you look bad. After you spell check, have a friend or co-worker read it to double check for errors.

7. When you're finished with your article, submit it to popular article directories like goarticles.com, articlefactory.com, amazines.com and imparticles.com. For a fee, there are even services out there that will submit your articles to the top directories for you.

8. Make sure you publish your articles on your own website too, more content equals more traffic. Don't worry about getting penalized by search engines for having duplicate content. You only get penalized if the content is duplicated on your own domain, not if it's duplicated on other websites.

So there you have it. Distributed content allows you to make every link count, by creating targeted links that directly contribute to your search engine rankings, and by delivering targeted traffic on it's own. And besides, it might even make you famous!

Keyword Targeting Strategy In Your Site

2007-05-27T05:19:00.000-07:00

Once the keywords have been decided for the site one has to come up with a strategy to target those keywords across the site. Here is a primer on that.

Keywords Targeting Strategy for Keyword of Single word:
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Keyword of Single word is useful to attract general audience and helps in getting high rank ,if the web site is new. Keywords Targeting Strategy for Keyword of Single word is that they should be more used in the root level pages or top level domain pages. This is because these pages are the ones that attract the general traffic & are generally the pages which do not specify specifics. Hence single word keywords based on themes can be targeted for on these pages.

Keywords Targeting Strategy for Keyword of Multiple words:
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Keyword of Multiple words are useful for attract targeted audience therefore should be used topic wise for each page according to subject of that web page. Relevant set of Keywords should be use in Title tag, Header Tag, Meta tag, Body tag, Alt tag, Anchor tag, Comment tag and in the url (uniform resource locator) of that specific web page. Use underscore or hyphen to differentiate Keywords. These keywords are normally targeted upon in deeper level or sub directory level pages.

Keywords Targeting Strategy for Keyword based on Theme:
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Keyword based on theme is useful to attract targeted audience therefore they are strongly recommended to be used. Typically, although it is not a hard and fast rule but in theme based keyword we use general keywords in root level and uses specific keyword in directory level.

Overall one can safely say that in keyword targeting one uses a dart board strategy. Wherein the smallest circle attracts your core audience & hence should have theme oriented multiple word keywords. As we move up on the theme (dartboard) the circle ( traffic) tends to get larger & the keywords tends to get simpler( singular) even though they are theme based.

KEYWORDS and KEYPHRASES usage in Domain Name:
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Keywords and keyphrases use in Domain Name & urls of directory pages is also a factor in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well as it helps to inform targeted audience, about the sites content . Therefore, special care should be exercised in choosing a domain name. All the search engines start reading each web page with its respective domain name.

Having said that, let me add that there is a raging debate amongst the seo community to determine the exact importance of keywords in the domain name. One camp believes that it is hugely important to have keywords in domain whereas the other maintains that brand building domain name is more important than keywords incorporating one.

Whether keyword is a factor or not is debateble however it has been observed that domain name extensions do definitely play a part in rankings. Search engines ( specially google) have a predilection for sites having extension .gov,.edu,.mil in domain name. Search engines believe that information available at these domains would have a greater likelihood of being authentic as no commercial interest is served here.

Domain Name can be classifieds into two categories:

1. Keyword Specific

2. Brand Name Specific

Keyword Specific Domain Name
----------------------------

When Keywords and Keyphrases are used in a Domain name then its called Keyword specific Domain name.

Keyword in the domain name to my mind has two advantages.

One It is better to have a keyword domain name for it is worth remembering that most of the people link to you using your URL. If your URL has the keyword or the keyphrase then you are automatically using the keyword in the very important anchor tag.

Secondly, though marginally, in a ranking scenario with every other parameter remaining equal, the Keyword Specific Domain Name will enjoy a slight edge over the other web site. However remember Keyword used in Domain name should be primary and generic. Specific keywords can be used in the sub domains. Read about the use of subdomains.

Keywords and Keyphrases uses with hyphen/underscore in Domain name are said to preferred as they are read by search engines as separate words. So the domain name can have a search phrase incorporated into it. However the flip side of it is that domain names with hyphen or underscore are inconvenient to carry.

Brand Name Specific Domain Name
-------------------------------

When company or organizations’ name is used in Domain Name to brand it then it’s called as Brand Name Specific Domain name.

Brand Name Specific Domain Name does not help online searches at all. However they are very powerful tools for company identification in the mind of users. In the anonymous online world a brand spells loyalty, trust & value. So if you choose to go for building your brand rather than deep rooted optimization, one way of incorporating keywords is through your directories & pages names.

KEYWORD DENSITY
---------------

Keyword Density is a proportion of the searched term ( Keyword or Keyphrase) against the whole words written on a given page. The ideal Keyword Density is 6%-8% though various search engines have various tolerance levels before their spam filters get activated. Higher Keyword Density does help to boost a pages’ ranking.

Keyword Density can be increased by using target keywords repeatedly in Title tag, Header tag, Body tag, Comment tag, Alt tag, Anchor tag, Paragraph Tag , Domain name and in diretory/page names.

However one disadvantage of trying to hike the keyword density is that the visible text on the page starts to look spammy if it is not carefully crafted. That makes for a bad copy.

Keywords are for humans not search engines

2007-05-27T05:17:00.000-07:00

It seems keywords are making the top of SEO list time and time again. The problem is that some optimizers do not understand the rightful purpose of keywords. Keywords should not be solely embedded for the purpose of reaching the top of search engines. Search Engine Optimization should not be the primary focus of any website. The primary and number 1 focus should always be the visitors. If you create a website for your audience and for your visitors then you should rank fairly. I can't see why any legitimate website can not rank properly within search engines, after time and dedication. Search Engine Optimization main purpose is ranking faster within search engines. Instead of gaining a good balance of traffic within 1 or more years, it is possible to gain a good balance of traffic within 6-9 months with SEO.

Keywords play a major factor in SEO and search engines in general, but the question is are keywords for the search engines or the visitors? The visitors are the ones who are trying to find your site by typing in a keyword, but the search engine is the one locating your site and delivering your site to the visitor based on the searched keywords. Therefore I would have to say, keywords, visitors, and search engines all work hand in hand, but if you focus on the visitor and not the search engine, then you will reap greater rewards. A webmaster should have a plentiful of quality and researched keywords, which becomes the sites core. To receive a good balance of keywords you need to think like your visitors or know how your visitors think. It boils down to research and tracking your visitors. Tracking visitors on your site is business-wise and is not an unethical practice, it’s your website (business). In an offline business you are well aware when a visitor opens the door to your business and comes in the store, the same applies online. It becomes unethical when you continue to track visitors when they exit your site, when you invade visitors’ privacy, or when you intentionally collect personal information about a visitor without their consent or knowledge. Tracking a visitor within your site does not need to be intense, the common web log files are helpful enough. With the web log files you should be able to track the keyword used to find your website, track where a visitor came from to find your site (the referrer), track the total number of unique visitors, track the total number of all visitors, track how many pages were viewed, track the path visitors take within your site, and much more information is available through the web logs. There are many tools that can translate your raw web log files into graphical and legible text, such as: Nihuo or Web Log Expert which both offers a free log analyzer download as well as an inexpensive analyzer for more detailed stats and more features. There are other upscale web log analyzers which are mostly for enterprises or larger sites but are extremely detailed and rewarding, such as: Web Trends, Deep Matrix, or Urchin (which has recently been acquired by the search engine giant 'Google'). Knowing your visitors can only benefit your site. If you have a new website without any visits then you will not have the benefit of knowing your visitors and you will have to create your visitors habits, by using good judgment and research to determine which keywords best suits your site. Your best effort should provide you with at least 250 keywords and keyword phrases, depending on your site category.

Once you have tracked your visitors and/or have completed researching keywords, you are ready to make informed decisions and begin the process of elimination. Many argue to stay away from popular or general keywords because the market for popular and general keywords is flooded and over-crowded, you will never be able to compete. My sentiments exactly, but remember keywords are for visitors, not search engines...so yes, I recommend including popular and general keywords as long as the keyword(s) show room for opportunity. Meaning, it has been used by your visitors...as a solitaire keyword or within a keyword phrase. Creating keyword phrases is important because at least 95% of internet users search using keyword phrases, not many use one word. With that said, you should still include a few solitaire keywords. Use singular and plural expressions for keywords. Once you have gathered all your keywords make two lists, one list can be titled active keywords...keywords which you are currently using or plan to use in the near future. The second list can be titled inactive keywords...keywords which have been eliminated and may never be used. Eliminate keywords based on your research, visitor data, and site category. Regardless how general your site is try to have only one focus audience, this zooms in on your target, makes marketing the site easier, and more successful. When done eliminating you should have a plentiful of keywords and keyword phrases. Generally, the goal should be to have at least a combination of 100 keywords and keyword phrases. This number may be greater or lesser depending on your site category/niche market. Keyword research can be accomplished a number of ways. I would recommend using best judgment and sticking to your site topic. If your site is about “the rules of playing baseball” then anything pertaining to the rules of baseball should be included as keywords. Remember think like your visitors, if you were a visitor looking for 'the rules of baseball' how would you search...your search words would probably be something like "rules of playing baseball"...."baseball playing rules"...."playing baseball rules"....rules of baseball"...."baseball rules"...."how to play baseball"...."baseball and the rules"...if your site contains the 'rules of baseball' then each of those keyword phrases will be sufficient for inclusion into your active keyword list. A few links that can help with keyword research are: NicheBot, Wordtracker, Google Keyword Tool, Digital Point Keyword Tool. Some of the main attributes which you want to research is how often the keyword/keyword phrase is searched for within search engines, how much competition there is for the keyword/keyword phrase, and if you are considering pay-per-click then you would probably like to know the average cost per click for each keyword/keyword phrase. You should not rely 100% on any of these reports or other reports from any third-party because there are many deterrence which may offset the reports, you should collect data from each of them and derive a census report which will allow you to make an informed decision.

Think about your visitors each step of the way when using keywords. Which keywords will catch their attention, directly or indirectly? Meaning, if a user searches for 'baseball rules' then when the search engine searches through billions of web pages...it should pull your web page into the results because you have a entire website dedicated to baseball rules and the entire site is centered around keywording. When the search engine crawls through the billions of web pages it should see that your web page title has "baseball rules" within the title, your meta-tag description has “baseball rules” within the description, your meta-tag keywords have “baseball rules” within the keywords, the link to the page is titled “baseball_rules.htm”, and the content on the web page itself has a proper amount of keyword density, basically, the keyword phrase "baseball rules" is plastered throughout the web page mostly leading towards the top of the page. I know most of what I have just mentioned is Search Engine Optimization practices and techniques, yes, that is true, but in actuality the entire process is for the visitors not the search engine. If you create your site easier for the search engine to find then the visitor will also find it easier and faster, but at all times it is important to keep the visitor in mind. Many SEO practitioners would include any keyword about baseball such as: "baseball"..."major leagues"...."major league baseball"...."minor leagues"...."minor league baseball"...."atlanta braves"...."new york yankees"...."baseball players"….etc. Those keywords are for the search engines not the visitors. If a visitors enters "atlanta braves" as a search keyword and your link is displayed as an result the visitor will be disappointed when he clicks on your link and does not find any solid information pertaining to the "atlanta braves"...instead he/she is greeted with "baseball rules". The visitor will immediately back out without referencing your site or indexing it for later retrieval because it does not pertain to their search quest. Once in a while you may become lucky and get someone who stays because it does mention baseball, but if you tracked conversions, it would surely sink, using this method. The better you target your visitors the more success you will have on the web. Properly using keywords to target your visitors and not the search engines will aid in more ways than one. It will create a healthy online circuit and greater chance for success. Imagine if each time you search the web...you had a perfect search! You only needed to search once, because exactly what you were looking for was found in the first results.

Internet Marketing Without a Big-Picture Strategy Dances in Circles

2007-05-27T05:16:00.002-07:00

Stop Tracking the Illusive "Magic Bullet"

It seems like everyone is beating the drum for one Internet
marketing method or another. And in the process they create
plenty of hype and conflicting messages.

Website owners are left to wonder whom to believe when it
comes to impressing the search engines. Which approach can
deliver the "magic bullet" they've been promised? Is it time
to jump to the next "sure thing," that will entice both
search spiders and web surfers?

The primary methods promoted to attract search engines and
Web traffic aren't new:
- Links and reciprocal links
- Pay-per-click (PPC)
- Search engine optimization (SEO) in all its variations
- Blogs and forums
- Writing and posting articles or press releases
- Paid placement with ads and banners

But each of them shares a common limitation. At its best,
each is only part of the answer. An answer that won't hold
still long enough to get nailed down - before the next "must
have" appears.

The Internet is Maturing, and so are Search Engines

In recent years, the capabilities and sophistication of the
search engines have exploded. Public use and expectations
have grown to match it. The public's reliance on the
Internet as a reliable source expands ever faster. Recent
studies found the Web to be the most trusted source of
information for making major purchase decisions, second only
to spouses for finding referrals.

A Harris Interactive consumer survey (2004) reports that 73%
of adults are now online - 156 million users. That's up from
69% eight months before. Most Internet users (80%) expect
that they'll find reliable, detailed facts online (Pew
Internet and American Life Project). So they go online first
when they need information. And they have confidence in what
they're able to find.

Now more than ever, access to that gigantic pool of
information-hungry Internet users depends on a website's
relationship to the search engines. Is it possible for
people to find it? The stakes are high.

Integration of Methods is the "Next Big Thing"

Refined keyword and page optimization are the standard
anymore. SEO has morphed into Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
The key difference is integration. SEO method aren't seen as
separate solutions, but as parts of a multi-pronged
endeavor. Success now depends on how well they all dovetail.

That's a fundamental shift from the lurching "do this...,
now that..., now that... approaches, which have
characterized the on-line norm. And anyone who's still
playing by that game plan will be left behind.

Be suspicious of any SEO strategy that's wedded to a single
method - no matter what impressive statistics they cite. And
when the search engines "burp," (as they surely will now and
then) a site's visibility can be lost. A diversified
approach to links and search engines reduces vulnerability.
Achieving that requires shifting focus to a bigger, more
inclusive picture.

My Experience with Reciprocal Linking

As a person who has been in SEM for years (and fine-tuned
hundreds of websites) I've gotten good at spotting trends as
they develop. And I've seen too many "can't lose" methods
fade.

No question that linking is important for search engine
placement. There are effective and targeted ways to acquire
incoming links that don't require a link exchange. However,
I saw some problems with the way many reciprocal links are
pursued. My concerns led me to write an article, Reciprocal
Linking is Dead,
http://www.etafficjams.com/reciprocal-linking-is-dead.htm
back when most insiders were proclaiming it to be the way to
go. (Fresh articles about why you should develop reciprocal
links appear daily.)

An integrated search engine marketing strategy is vital for
your website's visibility and survival. Resist the
shortsightedness of putting too much reliance on what
everyone is recommending.

Beat the Pack by a Country Mile

If you're ready for the "Next Big Thing," stop chasing the
flavor of the month. The trend is toward building an
integrated strategy where all the options mesh. Achieve all
the added benefits that come with integrating every method
your website employs. Now that's a next thing with staying
power.

Back To Main Page Click Here for more articles Internet Marketing – Long Term Strategy

2007-05-27T05:16:00.001-07:00

Once your site is up and running, the best method for getting immediate traffic is pay-per-click search engine marketing. Although you have to be patient, you should also be focusing on search engine optimization as a long term strategy.

Search Engine Optimization – “SEO”

Search engine optimization, or “seo” as it is better known, is the definitive long term Internet marketing strategy. So, what is it? Seo simply refers to taking steps to make sure your site appears high in non-paid search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The reason seo is considered a long term strategy is…well, it takes a long time. If your marketing is focusing on highly competitive keywords, such as “Europe travel”, there is so much competition that you could be looking at two or three years before getting top rankings. The time period is really a factor of how fast you can build links. Sometimes you can move up within 6 months, but sometimes it takes a few years.

Is it worth it to wait for 2 years to get into the top five for “Europe travel”? There are over 2,000,000 searches a month for the keyword phrase. What do you think? If you offer a service or product related to traveling in Europe, how much money would you make if even 1 million people visited your site each month? Think about that.

The Big Three

There are three, and only three, search engines that matter when it comes to seo – Google, Yahoo and MSN. What about Alta Vista, etc.? They simply don’t have enough traffic to make them worth pursuing.

There are four keys to seo. First, you must research the amount of traffic various keywords are receiving. Second, you must modify your site to include the exact keywords phrases in the meta tagging and text. Third, you must add and add and add content to your site. The more content, the more the big three will like your site. Finally, you must trade links with other sites that have content related to your site.

The keys to pursuing a seo marketing strategy are discipline and patience. Let’s take a quick look at each.

You must have the discipline to stick with your seo effort when you are seeing no results. The desire to throw one’s arms in the air in frustration is going to be strong. Just remember that every step you take today will pay off down the road.

Patience balances feelings of frustration and you are going to have a lot of those. Look, it is going to take a long time, so resist the urge to whine. Stick a sign up over your desk counting off the months or have a regular exercise routine. If nothing else, you can day dream about all of the free traffic you are going to get one day.

Search engine optimization is not for the weak of mind or impatient. If you can stick with it, this long term marketing strategy always pays off.

"Pay-Per Click" Ad Campaign: Earn More By Spending Less

2007-05-27T05:15:00.001-07:00

What is "Pay-Per Click"? "Pay-Per Click", is an easy to understand advertising strategy. There are around 300 million searches at major search engines everyday. This causes 80% of internet traffic. Placing your websites on these search engines is very important in reaching as many potential customers as possible. But in order to be seen and clicked most frequently, your website should be viewed at the top most of the search list. Most people only reach up to the third page of a search engine so the lower your rank, the lesser the chance you will be clicked. In "Pay-Per Click" advertising, you pay to be always visible on the internet. You select keywords or key phrases about your website, and the highest bidder ranks the best. There is no upfront cost. You only pay after a visitor clicks your link. This is why it is called "Pay-Per Click".

Everyday millions of people around the world click on Pay-Per Click Advertising Campaign. With the booming internet industry and the ever growing online business, an ad of virtually anybody on the planet can be seen on the internet anywhere in the world.

The "Pay-Per Click" advertising campaign is the premier growth area in online marketing. Last year, an estimated $741.2 million was spent on "Pay-Per Click" advertising. The usual search engine optimization can take weeks or even months to produce results. "Pay-Per Click" advertising can attract customers at an instant. Why? Because, this cutting edge ad campaign can be placed on any website and can be viewed by potential online customers, anywhere, anytime and all the time. The only challenge is placing the ads on proper websites that will attract possible customers for a specific product or services.

"Pay-Per Click" advertising campaign attracts the right consumers at the shortest possible time. This is the most cost effective way of marketing products or services. You can also monitor the customers who visit your site, what they are looking for and what they are buying. With the right creativity on using the right search-phrases, we can direct the right people who are willing to do business with us.

"Pay-Per Click" advertising can easily be managed 24 hours per day and 7 days a week through the internet. This allows you improve the campaign strategy by effectively responding to the activities of both customers and competitors.

So what are you waiting for? "Pay-Per Click" now and let your business take the fast route to success.

If You Build It, They Will Come...

2007-05-27T05:14:00.001-07:00

...No they won't. On the web, building a web site is not enough. If there are no links to the site anywhere, no-one is going to visit it. The site won't even be listed in any of the search engines without some incoming links. To get traffic, you will need to do some promotion.

Web Directories
The basic part of any promotion campaign, web directories, whist they may not generate much in the way of traffic, will help in your site's search engine ranking. A good list of free, non-reciprocal, search engine friendly directories can be found at http://info.vilesilencer.com.

Pay Per Click Advertising
This is advertising such as PPC Search Engines, like Yahoo!'s Overture, and contextual advertising, like Google's AdWords. Be warned, it is very easy to go through a substantial amount of money for no reward using these services if you are not careful. AdWords (amongst others) lets you pick a maximum budget a day, but, although $5 may not sound like much, $5/day is $150+ per month. Better make sure your keywords are correctly identified, and, in preference, not highly competed on, and that your sales copy is good enough before doing this.

Quality Traffic, not Just Traffic
It's what everyone is after, more traffic to their website. Traffic is easy to obtain, though. Autosurfers, manual hit exchanges and purchased traffic will all send visitors to your website. However, this traffic is just visitors, many of whom will just burn up your bandwidth for no reward. Unless you are receiving decent money for pay per impression advertising, such as banners and popups, this traffic can be totally valueless.

Repeat Traffic
Unless you only require visitors to visit your site once, because you are selling a one-off product, and your sales copy is fantastic enough that they are hooked to buy on the first visit (and if you are regulary doing this, write an ebook explaining how and sell it), you will want visitors to return. If there is nothing of value at your site, visitors may come once, but they won't come back of their own accord. Typically, it is estimated that a prospective customer will be exposed seven times to a product etc. before buying.

Reciprocal Linking
Whilst somewhat frowned upon, and generally thought to not be as valuable as one-way linking (see below) for search engine optimization, a relevant reciprocal linking campaign can be an important traffic generating tool. swap links with sites in a related, but non-competing, business to your own. It isn't really a good idea to link to competitors; although visitors will be interested in your product, there is a good chance you will lose them to your competitor, especially if their website or product is better or looks better than your own. Not a desirable outcome. For example, a web hosting site could link to a site that sells scripts and programs; visitors to one will more than likely use the other, but the sites are not in direct competition. You can also swap links with web directories that require a reciprocal link.

One-Way Linking
Considered the best form of link for SEO purposes, this can also be a good source of traffic. There are a number of ways of getting one-way links. The easiest is submission to free web directories (see above). Another good source is by writing articles relevant to your site or industry, putting a resource box at the bottom, then posting the article on the directories such as GoArticles, or by sumbitting to the ezines. Webmasters and ezine publishers are always in need of fresh content, and will publish your article for free. The hardest way of getting one-way inbound links is by having websites voluntarily link to you. The only way to do this is by providing a valuable tool, service or resource that other webmasters will want to direct their visitors to

How to run a successful link exchange program.

2007-05-27T05:13:00.001-07:00

Link Exchanges are a very time consuming project. The time it takes to find the sites to exchange with, contact them and place a link on your page can seem like an eternity. The hardest part about link exchanges isn’t the research, it's the waiting. This article will give you some tips to help speed response time to your requests.

"How long does it normally take?" you ask. The average wait can be 2 to 3 weeks, sometimes even longer. The reason for this is that many people operate their web site as a hobby or side business and may not be on top of their email. Keep these timeframes in mind before you judge the successfulness of a link campaign.

The first step is to find sites related to your web site that DO NOT have a large directory of links posted. You want to link to sites that have less than 100 links on their link page. Their Page Rank (PR) should be at least equal to yours. Higher is better, so always aim for the heavy hitters. Now, on to the business of saving you time.

Once you have located a site to contact, send a short but poignant email. If your email is too long, it may not be read. What should be in your email? First of all, your email should be personalized. Don't send the same email to dozens of people, send one at a time. This will help avoid being thought of as a spammer. The personalized touch shows you are serious and that the email was sent by a real person. Nothing says "this is of little importance to me" like a form letter, so avoid using them.

The letter should also include:
The HTML code to your text ad. This will make it easier for people to add your link to their site.
A link to your link page. This will make easier for whom ever you are requesting a link from to find your page.

Also, if they ask for you to link first, do so. If you have already been to their site (and certainly you should have if you are requesting a link), you will more than likely
know if they want a good faith link up. The email you send them should have a confirmation that their link is up and that you are requesting a reciprocal link.

Once you make contact with the web site owner, how long will you wait? A week? Two weeks? Honestly, it may be a month before you see your link unless you show some persistence. It doesn't always depend on how often they do updates. I would contact them once a week after your initial inquiry after checking their site first. They may have placed a link up without notifying you.

So, in summary:
Spend time finding sites that will be an asset to your enterprise to save time by not corresponding with those that won't.
Succinct, personalized E-mails
Include all coding and links necessary to make it easy on the site you want to exchange with
Research their link policy ahead of time
Be persistent

Link exchanges are very time consuming. It takes patients and great recorded keeping to keep track of who has and has not added you. I do this with an excel spread sheet. It makes keeping track a lot easier to do. Especially, if you are doing large link campaigns.

Good luck.

How to promote your site and also make it sticky

2007-05-27T05:12:00.001-07:00

If you have just designed your own site, then you have probably already realised how hard it is to get visitors to it. You are probably also finding that once you get visitors to your site, you are then having problems in making them return back to your site.

Well there are many ways of promoting your site and also making it sticky so that you can receive returning visitors.

To promote your site you can:

5. Write your own reprint articles that are on the same subject/topic as your sites content.

Writing your own articles with your website links contained within your authors bio line is probably one of the best ways to promote your website online. This is because you can add them to some of the article directories where others then can search these article directories and then add your articles to their site, which will then give you credit in return.

Some article submission directories include:
http://www.simplysearch4it.com/article/articledir.php
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.articlecentral.com
http://www.articlefinders.com/submit.html
http://www.articlecity.com
http://www.businessnation.com/cgi-bin/library/articles/add.cgi
http://www.freesticky.com/stickyweb/submitarticle.asp

6. Exchange links with other sites

Exchanging links with other sites take up a lot of work but can give you some positive results. This is because exchanging links with other sites will mean that your site will get more exposure across the Web plus your link popularity will increase, which is then most likely to give your website better search engine rankings within some, if not, most of the major search engines.

7. Add your site to some of the free to submit general and specialty web directories

Adding your website to some of the free to submit general and specialty web directories is a good thing as you don’t have to provide a link back to their directory. Submitting your website to free to submit web directories is better than doing link exchanges as your link is more likely to be given higher priority than what it would on a site that has two way linking. A lot of web directories do rather well in some of the major search engines and also has a good Google PR, which means your site should benefit from this.

8. Do SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a very important factor to consider when designing your website. This is because in past research it shows that over about 85% of people use search engines first before using anything else to find what they are looking for online. So if your site has poor SEO then you will not do all that well within the major search engines. If you do well with your sites SEO then you are likely to see some good results from the major search engines. Some sites even receive most of their traffic from the major search engines.

To make your site stickier you can:

4. Add games to your website

Adding games to your website is a very good way of making your site stickier. This is because a lot of people like to play games when they are either bored or have nothing much to do. http://games.simplysearch4it.com is an example of a site that has got games added to it just so that it can increase its stickiness.

5. Add free reprint articles to your website
If you find it hard to find content to add to your site to make it bigger or stickier then a good thing to consider is reprint articles. This is because these reprint articles can be added to your site for free and it makes your sites content larger, which can then increase the stickiness of your website. You can find some free reprint articles at the following categorized article directories:

http://www.simplysearch4it.com/article/articledir.php
http://www.goarticles.com

6. Add features to your site that many others do not offer

You could look through a large amount of other sites to see what they have to offer. Once you have done that, you can then see what would be a good thing to add to your site in, which many of these other sites don’t offer. For example, http://products.simplysearch4it.com offers a product price comparison directory, which is a feature that many other sites across the web do not offer.

Doing something like this where many other sites don’t offer it means that more people are likely to come to your site just to use it.

How my page rank went from 0 to 5 in one update. How yours can too.

2007-05-27T05:11:00.002-07:00

Increase Your Google Page Rank!

This article will put a damper on web sites that sell information which will supposedly increase your page rank. I may make some enemies here, but this is already common knowledge. In fact, to make sure it worked, I designed a new site just for this purpose. Before you shell out money for an ebook, software, or CD telling you how to do this; read this article. If you achieve great results after following my advice and feel it was worth some money, feel free to write me a check for any amount you choose. I 'll add my own zeros.ƒº

Page Rank. We all know what is. We all want to rank higher. Higher rankings mean a lot of things to a lot of people. To web masters it means achievement. They have accomplished a move in the right direction. A high page rank to a website owner is money in the bank. It is also an impressive accomplishment. To other website owners your page rank may be a source of envy.

To Google your page rank means quality, importance and relevancy. It lets Google know you are a viable resource and a valuable asset. Google takes your Page Rank and combines it with their text-matching techniques. This, combined with a page¡¦s content and the content of the pages linking to it, determines if your site is a good match. So, a higher Page Rank will certainly help you on Google.

As for surfers. Most of them could care less about your Page Rank. In fact, many of them don't even know what it is. However, those that do use it in a different way. Some use it as a way to unofficially gauge your credibility.

Ok, I am sure you've been wondering when I was going to tell you about how to achieve a ranking like I did. I went from a 0 Page Rank to a 5. Now, mind you, I did not purchase any links from high ranking sites, or any sites for that matter. I did not launch a link exchange program. I did exchange links with about five directories related to my site¡¦s topic, but that was it. Actually, 97% of my links are all one-way links (links pointing to my site).

So, how did I do it? Any ideas? If you know SEO you may already know the answer.
Link Farms? Of, course not. We know Google will frown on that method. Did I design or optimize sites and add my URL? Hmmm..Yes! However, that is a small percent of the success. SEO companies don¡¦t usually add their URL to sites they have optimized. Ok, so what else?

Content? Yes, content is king as always. Content is what was used to help boost my ranking. But how?

I create articles. These are quality articles, just like the one you are reading now. These articles were not generated from any program. I authored the content from my own knowledge and researched over 100 web sites that accept articles in my area of expertise. SEO happens to be a very popular topic. These sites agree to post my articles on their site, along with my url(s). Many of these sites have a decent Page Rank of their own. Their rank will transfer over to my site. Also, as time goes by, those articles will have a PR effect of their own which will transfer to my site(s). Don¡¦t forget, other people may pick these articles up and use them on their site as well. They will also include my URL(s) on their sites. Now, if I do 100 sites a week times four articles a month, that's at least 400 articles a month. The last Google update was 86 days, the longest has been 111. That could lead to 1200 or more links between updates. What will Google think about all these links at once? They¡¦ll love it! Content, quality, one way links. I also promoted my blogs and my website in some of my articles. This way, they too have their own PR generating effect. They also link to my site and my site to them. This, in turn, increased the PR to them as well. At the time of this article and the most recent Google update, one of my blogs went from 0 to 3 and the other 0 to 4 all in the same update.

These tips should help you increase your page rank. The hardest part will be creating content related to your field and finding sites that will post your work. You can always hire writers and/or article submission services. Here's to the next Google update. Cheers!

How important are back links?

2007-05-27T05:11:00.001-07:00

When setting up your website for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on Google there are several factors you need to look at in order to obtain a high rank on their search engine. Of course your content and meta tags must be inline with positive density percentages and reciprocal links. Google then takes your website and performs a mathematic equation and places a numeric value on your website depending on one of the most important features, reciprocal or back links.

A back link and reciprocal link are identical. They both say the same thing to the Google engine, that your site should be ranked higher in the order because other people find value in what your website has to offer, thus they provide a link to your site. In turn, you keep a closed loop by reciprocating the favor to the other website by extending the same courtesy of a back link. Thus creating a solid network connection. Google likes to see interconnectivity and will reward your website well for planning it this way.

There are drawbacks to the equation. As things change a website that you are affiliated with may drop a hyperlink or a page may get accidentally deleted. When the Google robot goes through your website and finds a dead link it notes that you aren’t keeping good care of your website and punishes your web rank by reducing its point value. If you wish to know what your sites current point value is download The Google Toolbar and search for your website www.yourwebsitename.com in the box and perform a Google web search. Upon reading the full URL, Google will go directly to your site first thus pulling up your home page. There on the toolbar will be a page rank for your website between 1 and 10. 1 being a less visited and noted website and 10 a site that screams traffic 24/7.

Some of the individuals you share reciprocal links with may in fact scan all their links for continuity, should they receive a bounce back for a broken link on your website you can be assured you will receive an email from them. Keeping your website in balance with other sites you share links with will keep the Google engine happy. If you go off and add a company that is not Google friendly, meaning they have no back links you may also lose points.

Google’s New Direction - Could Your Linking Strategy be Hurting Your Rankings?

2007-05-27T05:10:00.002-07:00

Over the past week, most people have noticed significant changes in the SERPs at Google. Web sites that previously held number one positions have dropped to number 89, and some web sites have disappeared off the Google results pages altogether. As is the case with all major Google updates, SEOs have been panicking in forums and there has been much discussion about one topic in particular: reciprocal linking.

The first thing you have to do to understand the direction in which Google is taking with this update, is to get into the minds of the people who run it. Something that is so often overlooked is the fact that Google (and any other search engine) is first and foremost, a business. The reason they offer the service they do, is to make money, to make stocks soar and to keep shareholders happy. Google’s income comes from many sources, but the main one is advertising. In order to be able to sell their advertising real estate for a profitable price, the ad space needs to be seen. In order for the ad space to be seen, many, many, many people must visit the Google web site and use the Google search engine. In order for Google traffic to be at such a level, Google must offer a great, if not the best, search engine service.

So, how does Google offer, or attempt to offer, the absolute best service possible? By having the most relevant, and most useful search results.

Useful and relevant web sites are sites that are extremely visitor-friendly, sites that offer a lot of quality information in many different forms, from RSS feeds, to articles, to forums. Sites that are organized and have developed, naturally, a respect on the internet. A great example of such a site is About.com - search for any topic on About.com and you get a page with a lot of information on that topic and many, many links to other web sites that carry further information. It is, undoubtedly, one of the best places on the Internet to go for information.

Now, here’s where it gets tricky. In the past, Google has evaluated web sites by looking at areas of the site that are easily manipulated by webmasters and SEOs, such as meta tags, alt tags, keyword density, page titles, etc. We all know this has changed. Google has begun to reward sites with a more natural approach to these areas, and to penalize sites that have been over-optimized.

The key now, is visitor-friendly, natural web sites. Google will attract more repeat users, and thus, more advertising capital, if their search results always yield web sites that have the information searchers are looking for and are easy to use and understand.

Natural web sites are web sites who’s page titles reflect the page content in an easily understandable way. They are web sites who’s keywords meta tags contain only the words that apply to the page content. They have description tags that reflect the content in a concise, easily understood way. They have image alt tags that describe the image properly. Most importantly, natural web sites are web sites that develop a natural link popularity. That is to say, they don’t have someone working on finding web sites to swap links with. This is an unnatural linking strategy. A natural linking strategy is to offer a good, resourceful web site and have people link to it of their own accord because it’s such a great resource. Such a strategy also includes linking out to quality web sites that offer further information on your web site’s topic, whether or not they link back to you. This is a huge indicator that the goal of your web site is simply to offer the best information possible to web site visitors.

Cross-promotion will happen naturally as well, and links that are a result of cross-promotion are still considered a natural linking strategy, and as a result, Google or any other search engine cannot not outlaw reciprocal linking all together. But you have to be extremely picky about the sites you decide to engage in cross-promotion with. They must be very relevant and should have a decent presence on Google. Stay away from automated linking programs, link farms and most importantly, exchanging links with excessive amounts of web sites. Your links page should look like an excellent place for your visitors to go should they require further information on the topic your site deals with.

In short, the most important factor contributing to your Google ranking, is visitor-friendliness. Amassing enormous amounts of link exchanges simply does not work anymore. You absolutely must have your web site visitor’s needs foremost in your mind. If you meet those needs, you will be rewarded both in your rankings and in repeat traffic.

Google Page Rank Is Dead - Part III

2007-05-27T05:10:00.001-07:00

HELP! My PR page rank is grey, call the development doctor. As the world of Google is turning a mile a minute these days, some really big changes are happening. This weekend, marketers all around the world don't believe what they are seeing... Google's Page Ranking system is dead.

Is it really dead?

In an online forum post from WebProWorld.com (A discussion on Google), people from all over are speculating about what is going on. In fact, one member was quick to point out that the last big shift Google had, we saw the PR system go down as well. This begs the question...

Are we on the verge of a BIG PR shift? or,
Are we seeing a Google marketing scheme just to shake people up?

In many ways, Google needs to be improved upon their "broken down PR system". There are so many areas if they payed attention to forums and blogs all around the world, they would have more than enough feedback about their PR system to fix this growing PR issue.

Page ranking is a potentially a great system. It CAN be a great system if it directly ranks websites properly by content, relevance, and not simply by the number of links pointing to an individual website.

These days, you see a website with 15 "medium relevant" links pointing to it while its front page holds a PR of 7-8 out of 10. How do you justify that?

What will it mean if Google's PR systems stays down?

I believe it will mean a big shift to online marketing. Many newbies out there that are barely legal when it comes to SEO have an opportunity to measure everything they do. In turn, the newbies may even sound professional to their clients. Take away these tools and you are left with true marketing gurus that have stood the test of time and can deliver results for themselves and their clients.

The internet is vastly growing into a pool of professional fakes and scammers. This is really giving the internet marketing community a bad name. Without the Google PR, many people won't be able to prove their results nor will they have that "fake respect" that you get from having a website with PR 7/10.

What about MSN & Yahoo?

In growing efforts to keep up with MSN & Yahoo's strong and growing marketing campaign, Google may be feeling left out these days. Many people think that their PR system is simply a gimmick; a gimmick that attracts a lot of attention. By disabeling this system, you create mass fear and confusion. Bad publicity is still publicity neverless?

So, is Google trying to create a buzz?

This could be possible and it could be possible that everything will be back to normal within a couple of days. We won't know until time catches up with us.

Until then, take this "dark saga" moment and find other ways to build your business online. Don't worry about what Google is doing, worry about what you are doing to improve your internet marketing campaign.

Google manipulates search results: A boost for small business?

2007-05-27T05:09:00.001-07:00

As more and more businesses strive for a top ten Google ranking, it's becoming harder and harder to achieve. This is especially true for smaller businesses that simply don't have the budget for a big link popularity campaign. But hope may be just around the corner. If a top ten ranking for your primary keywords has been eluding you, then read on!

Google manipulates the results

Google is trialing an 'enhancement' to the way it displays its results. Instead of showing the top ten results for the exact words you enter, in the trial Google suggests three related results that you might want to check out. Where does it display these suggestions? It shunts (or replaces) results 6, 7 and 8 !!!

In this article, I refer to these results as 'intruders'.

To see some 'intruder' results in action, search for "piggy bank". Results 6, 7 and 8 are actually 'intruder' results; they're the top three results for the more specific, less popular search, "piggy bank lyrics". Google assumes that people searching for "piggy bank" will probably be interested in results of a search for "piggy bank lyrics".

On first impressions, it's tempting to think that this makes it harder to get into the top ten (because now it's really the top seven, and the last two results may be easily overlooked). But it may actually make it easier - especially for smaller businesses. Let me explain why...

The advantage for smaller businesses

It all comes down to who can rank in the top ten for the most popular searches - like "computers", "cars", "doctor", "pets", etc. For anyone in these industries, a top ten ranking for these keywords is the holy grail. Unfortunately, these sorts of searches are presently dominated by big corporations with hefty search budgets. Most smaller businesses don't even try to compete. Instead of focusing on these hotly contested keywords, small businesses tend to focus on much more specific keyword phrases - like "computers boston", "second hand cars ohio", "female doctor new england", "discount pets for children", etc.

But Google's trial may change that. Remember, it's replacing results 6, 7 and 8 of a popular, broad search with results 1, 2 and 3 of a less popular, more specific search. If the trial becomes a standard feature, a search for "computers" might well include three 'intruder' results from a search such as "computers boston". As discussed above, results 6, 7 and 8 are likely to belong to big companies, whereas results 1, 2 and 3 of the more specific search are more likely to belong to smaller businesses. Therefore, when the switch occurs, it's out with the big and in with the small!

In principle the enhancement appears to work in favor of small businesses:

1) Big business dominates popular / general search results

2) Smaller businesses have a greater chance of dominating less popular / more specific search results

3) General search results are replaced by specific search results

4) Big businesses are shunted out of the top ten by smaller businesses

Now I hear what you're saying: "Why wouldn't the big companies simply start optimizing for the more specific searches?" Granted, this is a possibility; but for most big companies, it would be a monumental task. Big companies tend to service a large geographic region, and they typically offer numerous products and services. Even a hefty search budget would be stretched to the limit if it was required to bankroll optimization for every single product, every single service, and every single location. And this is what would be required to dominate all of the more specific results, thereby gaining back their number 6, 7 or 8 position. It's far more likely that they'll simply try harder for a position in the top 5 of the popular/general search. This approach would be less complex and probably more rewarding.

The fine print

Of course, where Google is involved, nothing is ever that simple. I've oversimplified things above to make the trial a little easier to understand. In reality, the situation is a bit more complex because of the way Google chooses which search the three 'intruder' results come from. Take the "piggy bank" search for example. Google assumes that most users who search for "piggy bank" will also be interested in results from a search for "piggy bank lyrics". This assumption is based on the fact that thousands of other people are searching specifically for "piggy bank lyrics" - in fact, it's one of the most popular searches containing the original term "piggy bank". And that's why it gets the nod.

In other words, the intruder results come from popular searches (less popular than the original, but still popular). This means you'd already have to rank highly in a very popular search before you'd become an intruder. So, in reality, the above "computer" example is a little simplistic; the intruder results for "computer" are more likely to be from a search for something like "computers ibm". In reality, the top three results for "computer peripherals boston" are more likely to appear as intruders in a "computer peripherals" search.

Conclusion

The important thing to remember is that if this trial becomes a standard feature, it will be implemented on all searches. And the more specific the original search, the easier it would be to become an intruder in that search. In theory, it has great potential to help smaller businesses reach the next rung of the search engine ladder.

Other examples

Here are some further examples if you're interested:

Search for "add url"

Search for "on demand"

Happy shunting!

Get Listed In Google By Making An XML SiteMap and Without Spending A Dime.

2007-05-27T05:08:00.002-07:00

If you have been unsuccessfully trying to get listed in Google or just hitting roadblocks when trying to get more of your pages listed in Google, then you need to read this short article. I am about to reveal a simple SEO secret that can save you a lot of time, money and effort.

Google has a preferred search submission format that it actually asks webmasters to use, It's called a Google SiteMap.

Admittedly, creating and using XML is no easy task for anyone who is non-technical or inexperienced with web coding, however there is a site or two on the web that can actually help you create an XML sitemap and then submit it to Google so that this venerable search engine can crawl your previously unknown web site and get you listed.

Of course there are no guarantees that your site will get high ranks or that it will meet Google's guidelines for inclusion, so be sure to make sure that your site is properly optimized and meets their guidelines before using these tools.

Before I reveal these tools and show you where to go to find out how to use them, let's take a look at the basics.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a special document formatted created to allow communication between applications and also between organizations. XML is a practical system that structurally defines the format and composition of intricate documents and data such as invoices, news feeds, inventory reports, catalog listings and other complex documents. A seasoned programmer who understands XML can easily create XML applications that know how to pull data from XML sources and then format it for presentation to end users.

In the case of Google, this same XML data format can be used to define your site's pages and their position in relation to each other. So for example, your "about_us.html" page is usually connected only one click away from your "index.html" page. When used in this manner to define pages and their positions we are creating what is commonly known as a sitemap.

Google says in the own words, "Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It's a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages."

So in essence, Google is asking us to help them index the web by using this simple technique that will no doubt become a major help to struggling webmasters everywhere.

Google, by the way, will accept simple text file based sitemaps. Please consult their site for more information.

How to get your sitemap indexed.

Once your sitemap has been created and uploaded to the main directory of your web site, simply use this URL to submit it:

www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

Just replace the parameter, "sitemap_url" with the actual URL of your sitemap. Example:

www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.mywebsiteabc.com/
sitemap.xml

You can also open a Google account before submitting to make sure that you can actually track your submission to check your sitemap status.

https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount

I promised to reveal the tools used to facilitate the creation of XML sitemaps and here they are...

The Tools Revealed:

SiteMapspal:

Use this Google recommended online tool to generate a Google friendly xml sitemap that you can simple cut/paste and then upload to your site. Simply provide your site URL and select a few optional settings and with one-click ease you will have a sitemap, ready to go.

http://www.sitemapspal.com/

Google SiteMap Generator:

Provided by Google themselves, this is not for the faint of heart, it requires some knowledge of working with Python scripts (a web coding format) and will requires installation on your site.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html

SiteMap Validator:

Use this Google recommended tool to validate your sitemap for accuracy.

http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/internet/google/submit-validate-sitemap/

Get a top 10 ranking without paying a cent

2007-05-27T05:08:00.001-07:00

If there's one thing that Google loves, it's content. Done right, a content rich website is almost guaranteed to rank highly. But how to get that content? You can write it yourself, but that takes a lot of time. You can pay an SEO copywriter to write it for you, but that takes a lot of money. If only there was another option...

What if you could get your content for free? And not just a little bit of content; a lot! What if you could get an almost unlimited supply of keyword rich, expertly written content, specific to your subject matter, absolutely free of charge? Would you snap it up and upload to your site in an instant? Of course you would! Well here's the good news: you can! Read on to find out how you can get a top ten ranking in the search engines without paying a single cent...

Yes, content gives you a great ranking

Content is king. This is widely acknowledged as fact, but if you need further convincing, consider the following two points:

Point 1 - In Google's own words, one of the keys to a high ranking is to "create a useful, information-rich site" (from “Google Information for Webmasters” - http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html).

Point 2 - Google insider, codenamed 'Google Guy', advocates a list 26 steps to building a high ranking site. Step 5 of the list says, "build one page of content and put online per day at 200-500 words" (from Brett Tabke's "26 steps to 15k a Day" - http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/guide.htm, advocated by Google Guy in a WebMasterWorld QA session - http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29727-6-10.htm).

But why does content give you a great ranking?

I won't go into any further detail about IF Google loves content. I will, however, briefly explain WHY. Google's love affair with content is based on two key attractions:

1) Google loves sites with a lot of content because it assumes they provide a lot of useful information. And remember, that's the whole reason Google exists - to help people find useful information. The more helpful Google's results, the more traffic (and revenue) it gets.

2) Google loves sites that have a lot of links pointing to them because this means other webmasters hold your site in high regard, and Google assumes this means the content is useful. And naturally, if you create a useful site, other webmasters will link to it because this makes them useful to their visitors (thereby developing site loyalty), and they gain credibility and authority because they're associated with you.

So how can you get free content for your website?

Three words: 'free reprint articles'. There are hundreds of thousands of people out there writing high quality, helpful, informative articles on virtually every topic imaginable, then giving these article away to any webmaster who wants to publish them on a website. In exchange for the article, the author asks only that you retain the author bio at the end, complete with all links (e.g. "Glenn Murray is an SEO Copywriter and Article Submission Specialist...).

To find free content for your website, simply visit any one of hundreds of 'article banks' on the Internet such as http://www.ezinearticles.com, http://www.goarticles.com, or http://www.articleblast.com. Browse or search for the subject you're interested in, then take the article(s) for free. There is absolutely no charge. Some of these sites will even send a regular stream of articles direct to your website (using RSS).

Alternatively, you can sign up to any number of article distribution lists and get articles delivered direct to your email inbox. Again, it's absolutely free! Some of the better known distribution lists include http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce, http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Content, and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Reprint-Articles.

TIP: The article banks and distribution lists mentioned above are just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds more - just do a search for "free reprint articles", "article submission", "article submission site", "submit article", "article submit site", "free articles", or "free content". You may even find a site or list which only deals in articles relating to your particular subject matter.

Why is it free?

Why are these authors giving their articles away? Because it helps the author's own search engine ranking. It's a promotional activity known as 'article PR'. As explained above, Google loves sites with lots of links pointing to them. Every time their article submission is published, the author gets another link to their website. In fact, if the article is really good, it may be published hundreds of times. And each time, it's another link to the author's website. Put simply, article submission is a writer's free pass to the top of the search engines. (In this sense, the "PR" in article PR stands for PageRank.)

Furthermore, like traditional public relations, article PR also conveys a sense of authority because your articles are widely published. And because you're proving your expertise and freely dispensing knowledge, your readers will trust you and will be more likely to remain loyal to you. (In this sense, the "PR" in article PR stands for Public Relations.)

How do I know if the quality is good?

It's a process of natural selection. The better the article submission, the more often it will be published, so it's in the author's interest to write and submit articles of the highest quality. Of course, this doesn't always happen, but in most cases, you'll be reviewing the articles before you post them anyway, so if you discover one that's not up to scratch, don't use it.

In time, you'll become familiar with the authors who consistently put out good quality content - you may even find enough of them that you don't need to go looking for content from anyone else...

Where do I put the free content?

Most people put the articles in an 'Articles' or 'Resources' section on their website, but you can put them anywhere you like.

How much free content should I use?

As much as you want or as little as you want. It all depends on your needs and the needs of your audience. If your audience expects that at least some of your site is original content, then give it to them.

But what about the duplicate content issue?

It's not an issue!

There's a lot of a talk about how Google penalizes duplicate content. The theory is that when the majority of the content on two separate webpages (on different sites) is the same, the one with the higher PR will be shown and the other one will not.

Whether or not this theory is true is still a hot topic in search engine circles, but regardless, it doesn't affect people publishing free-reprint articles. When you publish the article, just make sure you have unique content around it. Generally, it's enough to have your own unique introduction to the page (which may be common to all pages), and your own navigation elements, headers, footers, sidebars, logos, images, etc.

Conclusion

Free reprint articles are a great way for you to achieve a high ranking. And you don't have to pay a cent! So what are you waiting for?

Five Time Tested & Proven Ways To Promote Your Web Site

2007-05-27T05:07:00.001-07:00

One of the biggest hurdles online marketers face is web site promotion. There are literally countless ways to promote online; some are good while others are a complete waste of time.

What works? Well there are several good strategies to get your message out to your niche. Each strategy will produce different results for various niches.

Contests or Sweepstakes

Holding a contest or sweepstakes is a proven way to promote your web site. You can announce your site to hundreds of web sites that list free contests and sweepstakes.

Press Releases

One of the most powerful promotion strategies is sending out press releases about your contest or sweepstakes. Ask entrants to your contest or sweepstakes if they would accept offers from your business in the future by e-mail.

Chat Rooms or Forums

Use online chat rooms to promote your web site. Find the right chat room where your targeted audience or niche would gather. Announce to everyone in the chat room something interesting or free that's offered on your web site to attract visitors.

Always be aware of chat room rules before engaging the visitors in a sales pitch that could be considered spam.

Cross promotional enterprising

Cross promote or joint venture your web site with other sites.

I try to find other web sites that have the same target audience, but are not in direct competition with my business. It’s a sure fire method of increasing my exposure to qualified prospects.
Cross promotional enterprising with other businesses will increases your online exposure, sales, and helps beat your competition to the top of the search engine results pages.

It doesn’t matter what your promoting you’ll find businesses to cross promote and joint venture with all over the Internet.

Traffic Generators

You can easily promote your web site by using traffic generators. I’m not talking about magic bullets or hocus pocus schemes either.

They could be free e-zines, a service, e-book or contest etc. Giving away traffic generators gives you the opportunity to get free advertising by including your ad on them.

Take it one step further and make it viral. Write a short ebook and give away the distribution rights. Other webmasters are generally receptive to promote quality content! .

I sweetened the deal for my subscribers by adding a viral ebook, PPC Cash Bonanza and an issue-by-issue contest for free advertising in my newsletter, the Ranking Report.

There are literally hundreds of online directories that will also let you submit your freebie information. Remember; let other people give away your traffic generators.

Email Discussion Groups

Posting messages to e-mail discussion lists is another great way to promote your web site.

An e-mail discussion list is a group of people connected together via e-mail that can communicate with one another.

When you post a message to a list always make sure you include your signature file at the end. Include an attention getting sentence why they should visit your web site. Just like a headline. Make it provocative and compelling!

There are many more ways to promote your website. If one of these methods doesn’t work for you find another, but whatever you do… do something.

Once you've committed to taking action everything you do online from sending emails to blogging or even just surfing the web, should be motivated towards producing more visitors to your web site and referring prospects through promotional means.

Do nothing… get nothing, do a little & get a lot!

eMergent Marketing- Website Conversion, Usability & SEO

2007-05-27T05:06:00.002-07:00

eMergent Marketing of Cleveland, Ohio is a bright, young search engine optimization company emerging in an industry surrounded by hype and cynicism. eMergent Marketing has expanded its SEO arsenal by offering Web site usability testing and conversion services to its clients, in order to improve the likelihood that their Internet marketing efforts have the greatest impact on consumers.

eMergent Marketing represents a whole new way of thinking about Internet marketing and eCommerce strategy. It's no longer good enough to just focus on driving Web site traffic. With growing competition and increasingly savvy online consumers, it has become critically important to attract the right site visitors in the most cost-effective manner. By offering a more complete service than most traditional search engine optimization (SEO) firms, eMergent Marketing delivers more value to its clients by leveraging the in-house usability expertise as part of the search engine optimization and search engine marketing processes.

The eMarketing experts at eMergent Marketing have been studying and practicing search engine optimization since the late 1990’s. Their proven optimization methodology has helped countless companies improve their search engine visibility in the natural search engine listings and attract potential customers to their sites.

While eMergent Marketing continues to experience rapid growth, they remain focused on providing the highest levels of customer service and communications. According to Paul Elliott, President of eMergent Marketing, “The search engine optimization industry has historically been plagued by unethical providers and those who simply do not understand the complexities of search marketing. At eMergent Marketing, we go the extra mile to ensure our optimization clients know exactly what we are doing, when we are doing it, and the results our services will produce. While no ethical search engine optimization firm can guarantee first place rankings, eMergent Marketing has achieved outstanding results for all of our organic optimization clients – a fact our clients will be happy to share with you.”

If you are currently looking for an SEO company that provides leading edge results and customer service, eMergent Marketing is the logical choice. Their combination of experienced Internet marketing professionals with Web site usability and conversion experts creates the new standard for the Web marketing industry. Contact eMergent Marketing today to learn more about the Search and Conversion Methodology for improving the return on investment (ROI) from your site.

Driving your website through Google Sandbox

2007-05-27T05:06:00.001-07:00

What is Google Sandbox?

Google Sandbox is applied on new websites, it determines the timing of site inclusion as well as ranking in Google search engine results (SERPS).
This process could take up to 6-8 months, which could be against your plans causing frustration to webmasters.

The question is what is to be done during the time in which websites are in Google Sandbox?

Do not waste time on checking your website listings in results page instead emphasize on SEO methods to accelerate your listings & improve status of ranking results.
Also make efforts to appear on other major search engines such as MSN & Yahoo since they do not have sandbox like Google, this will help drive traffic to your website while waiting for Googlebot to index your pages.

Link building strategy is another important issue not only will it improve ranking but also it will help Googlebot spider to find your pages easier while it’s in the sandbox instead of repeatedly submitting your website every time.

Content is king

Main part for ongoing development of your website is to add new content on continuous basis since the most thing search engines are after is good quality websites with relevant content.

Conclusion at the end is that waiting for Google Sandbox is nothing but a waste of your precious time; instead do some useful efforts on developing your website with relevant content & adding inbound links as a part of your linking strategy to make Google happy with what it sees as well as your target visitor.

Do It Yourself Search Engine Optimization: How to Generate Free, High Pagerank Links Quickly and Easily

2007-05-27T05:05:00.002-07:00

Here's a quick and easy search engine optimization (SEO) technique that anyone can use to generate free, high Google pagerank links to their site.

SEO in a nutshell: get quality links to your site; the higher the pagerank, the better.

The problem is that if you submit your site to a high pagerank directory or search engine, it can take months for your site to appear. Moreover, many high PR directories and search engines charge big bucks for the privilege of getting listed with them. For example, the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) directory takes several months or more to list a site. And Yahoo charges $299 per year for a commercial site to be listed in their directory.

While it's great to be listed in these directories and search engines, many will automatically find and list your site free if you have good quality links to your site. High pagerank links to your site indicate to many search engines that other sites that they rate highly link to you. Therefore, they conclude, your site will probably be useful to their users. So you deserve a higher pagerank, according to Google. And the higher your pagerank, the better your search engine visibility. It's part of the SEO game and you can learn how to play.

Now here's my secret to getting some high pagerank sites to link to you immediately and at no charge.

First you need to create a web page on your site with a list of links. You will be adding links to other sites on your links page in exchange for these sites adding your link to their link pages. So let's call this page a reciprocal links page. You don't just add any site to your reciprocal links page, however. You will be looking for high pagerank links to add to your links page. It's better if you include links to sites that are related to your products or services. To make search engines happy, limit each of your reciprocal links pages to about 50 links.

Many sites maintain their reciprocal link pages using the free LinkMan script from PHPJunkYard. If you wish, you could do the same, but it is not necessary. You can download this php script from http://phpjunkyard.com

The LinkMan script allows a site's visitors to add their links immediately after they add links to the site on their pages. So all you have to do is to find sites using this LinkMan script, add their link to your reciprocal links page, and you can immediately add your link to theirs.

Because the LinkMan script is free, the developer requires the following notice on the links page: "Powered by Link manager LinkMan 1.02 from PHPJunkYard - free php scripts."

You can find sites using LinkMan then by searching for the exact phrase "Powered by Link manager LinkMan 1.02 from PHPJunkYard" on Google, for example. Note that there are other scripts named Linkman, so you should not just search for "LinkMan". Play around with your search phrase to find also sites using earlier versions of LinkMan.

Visit some PHPJunkYard LinkMan link pages with a browser showing the Google pagerank. You will very soon come across a site using LinkMan that has a high Google pagerank. Bingo! Add their link to your reciprocal links page and then add your link to theirs. You immediately have a free link on a high pagerank site. Free instant SEO!

And that's a quick and easy search engine optimization technique you can use to generate free, high pagerank links.

Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization

2007-05-27T05:05:00.001-07:00

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is big business. If you rely on search engines to bring visitors to your business website, you need to rely on more than luck. Your business will lag far short of its potential unless your site is optimized and re-optimized for search engine results.

What is search engine optimization?

SEO is optimizing your website for search engines, acquiring inbound links, and monitoring your traffic and referring links to use them optimally. SEO is also studying and monitoring your competitors’ techniques.

The goal of SEO is to bring in targeted traffic that is organic, i.e., from search results. When people type in a keyword or phrase that you’ve optimized your site for, you want your site to appear on the first page, preferably high on that page. Good SEO results in increased traffic without the cost and time spent on advertising.

The SEO industry

Where there’s a need, there’s an industry ready to help you spend money on that need. SEO firms charge from a few hundred dollars up to six-figure amounts to optimize your site for search engines.

If paying thousands of dollars to an SEO firm isn’t in your budget, consider using SEO packages to optimize your site yourself.

A combination of SEO tools is needed to get the best results. The SEO packages described below offer a variety of tools to help you optimize your site for search engines.

SEO tools compared

While we’ve listed numerous features of each SEO tool, these comparisons are summaries only.

Internet Business Promoter (IBP)

Known for their link popularity tool ARELIS, IBP also produces a three-step suite of tools to help you promote your website:

1. Page optimization
• Generate, analyze, and edit keywords
• Optimize for the top 10 search engine rankings
• Optimize the title, link texts, and other parts of the web page
• Validate the HTML
• View the site via a spider simulator

2. Page promotion
• Submit your site to search engines and directories
• Search for sites that might add a link to your site

3. Results tracking
• Verify search engine positions automatically

Price: $179.95 or $349.95.

LinksManager

Links Manager is designed to help users manage reciprocal linking. It doesn’t require any software downloads, and current links pages can be imported into it. Some of its features:

Link organization and formatting
• Organize your links into multiple categories, subcategories, and “most popular links” lists
• Store the links on your own server
• Highlight newly added and featured links

Link management and tracking
• Remove dead links temporarily via a dead link checker
• Check whether or not reciprocal links at other sites exist
• Rotate links automatically
• Deny link submissions according to the criteria you set via a blacklist
• View the most popular keywords on your links pages

Price: $19.95 a month.

SEO Administrator

SEO Administrator automates website promotion with tools that can do these tasks:

Keywords and site visitors
• Track your site’s position for your keywords in over 30 search engines
• Report on the keyword weight and density of your site as well as of competitors’ sites
• Suggest keywords that are relevant to each page
• Analyze your site logs to find out about site visitors, keywords used, referrers, and more

Search engines and directories
• Check which pages at your site have been indexed by various search engines
• Check Google PR, the number of inbound links, and whether or not the site is listed in the DMOZ and Yahoo directories
• Show the automated descriptions that search engines display for your pages

Price: from $70 to $150, depending on the version.

SEO Elite

With SEO Elite, you can find out exactly what your competitors are doing and copy their strategies. You can find out about your competitors’ web pages:

• Keyword density and prominence
• Their headings
• Their meta keywords
• Whether their site is listed in the Yahoo directory
• Which websites your competitors are advertising on

Concerning link partners and search engines, SEO Elite can:

• Find thousands of possible link partners
• Track details about pages with inbound links
• Check whether or not reciprocal links at other sites exist
• Indicate which of your pages search engines have indexed
• Keep a record of where your site is ranked for search terms

Price: $167.

SEOToolset

The focus of SEOToolset is to provide data to help with website promotion. The toolset includes:

Your website
• Keyword density analyzer
• Keyword selection tool
• Reports on rankings for keywords, page names, and indexed page counts
• Link partner finder

Search engines and directories
• Engine-specific keyword research
• Traffic checker for keywords
• DMOZ category selector
• Search engine submission tool
• Search engine ranking monitor

Your competition
• Keyword research summary
• Link analysis of inbound links to competitors’ websites

Price: $90.00 per quarter per site.

Web CEO

The 10 tools in the Web CEO package are designed to help you promote and maintain your website, improve search engine results, and analyze site visitors. A summary of these tools:

At your website
• Keyword research
• Website optimization
• Inbound link tracking
• WYSIWYG website editing and file uploading
• Link checking
• Website monitoring
• Stats analysis to track visitors, ad campaigns, transactions, and more

Search engines and competition
• URL submission to search engines
• Search engine rank checking
• Tracking who links to the competition

Price: $295 for one person. A free version is also available.

WebPosition

WebPosition, one of the oldest and most popular SEO tools, offers a five-step SEO process:

1. Determine your position in search engines
• Create search engine ranking reports
• Monitor your site’s placement in search engine results

2. Research and choose keywords
• Identify the most searched and least competitive keywords

3. Optimize your pages
• Compare your pages to those of top-performing sites and specific competitors
• Detect when your competitors’ pages have changed
• Be alerted to changes that could affect your site rankings

4. Design and submit your pages
• Use Page Builder and Upload Manager to design and maintain your site
• Submit your site to search engines with the Submitter tool

5. Analyze your results
• Track the correlation between search rankings and revenue
• Import top-performing keywords

Price: $149 or $349.

How to hire an SEO firm

If you’d prefer to hire an SEO firm instead, do your research. You’ll be spending a minimum of a few hundred dollars, more likely thousands of dollars for a medium-sized or larger website.

While many SEO firms are good at what they do, the field unfortunately has its share of scammers as well. They may tell you that a variety of tricks such as hidden text or cloaking will improve your site’s position in search engines. In reality, these techniques may get your site banned from search engines. More information is at these pages at Google.com:

• http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html Webmaster Guidelines
• http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html Search Engine Optimizers

If you’re considering an SEO firm, ask how they measure success. Will your site hits be organic? Look at the sites of SEO firms’ clients and the site for the SEO firm itself. Do the sites rank well for keywords at these sites? The search engine results for relevant keywords will indicate how successful an SEO firm is.

Different kinds of Keywords

2007-05-27T05:04:00.000-07:00

Keyword can be classified into three categories :

-Single word Keyword
-Multiple word Keyword
-Keywords based on Theme

Keyword(s) are basic raw material used in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Keyword selection or Keyword Research as it is called technically, where we use special tools to find out a list of Keywords (search terms) searched by targeted audience, recently. Keyword can be single word, two or three words, multiple words and theme based.

Lets detail each of these one by one . Understanding these categories of keywords would also help one to decide as to their targeting on specific pages.

#Keyword of Single word

Keyword of Single word is used to target a large traffic but leads to highly competition category of sites. Keyword of Single word are known as generic Keyword(s) where we target general audience. Keyword of Single word does not help to target a specific page for a specific audience.

Although, Keyword of Single word helps in bringing huge traffic but these terms are mostly not relevant these days, as, searchers mostly use two or three keyword to find out their required information.

Instead single word keywords are good theme keywords.

We can use these primary keyword 5 to 7 times in a web page for good theming according of a site. The inside pages of the site can qualify these themes into product or service categories by adding qualifiers to these theming keywords.

Example:

Keyword “Services” will produce result of all the web sites related to Services which can be United States Department of Health and Human Services, The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services, direct Services, online Services, offline Services, Indian Services, American Services, food Services, agricultural Services, business Services, free Services, paid Services, etc.

#Keyword of Multiple words

Keyword of Multiple words is used to target a specific traffic, which leads to high sale, top position in search result listing as well as improves page rank competition. Keyword of Multiple words are known as Specific Keyword(s) where we target a specific audience & not general searcher. Keyword of Multiple words helps to target a specific page for a specific audience.

Keyword of Multiple words, more often than not are location specific and related to geographic area of your intended services or products.

#Keywords based on Theme

Keyword based on Theme are used to target a highly targeted audience, which leads to quick high sale, top position in search result listing as well as boosts page rank. Keywords based on Theme are known as Conceptual Keyword(s).

Keywords based on Theme consists all possible primary Keywords related to the web site therefore attracts high traffic of targeted audience. Keywords based on Theme add quality by providing Keyword Rich Text to search engines, which improve results and provide targeted search result listings.

Keywords based on Theme are used in each page of web site to focus on a specific topic correlated to a targeted topic or idea (theme). Keywords based on Theme effectively contribute in growth of informative pages for its site focusing on different related topics.

Creative Search Engine Optimization - A Case Study

2007-05-27T05:03:00.002-07:00

Search engine optimization this and search engine optimization that. You read and hear about it all day, but what about your site? While there are plenty of articles providing useful information, this article shows you how a real world example met with success. The point of this article is to emphasize creativity when approaching tough optimization situations.

Problems for BusinessTaxRecovery.com

In November of 2004, our firm took on the seo marketing for BusinessTaxRecovery.com. The site was being promoted through offline activities and pay-per-click campaigns. No effort had been made to achieve high rankings in Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Keyword analysis revealed that combinations of the root keywords, “business” and “tax” were going to be difficult to attack. The primary problem concerned government agencies with web sites. The IRS site, for instance, had roughly 9,680 inbound links and an absolute ton of content. State agencies weren’t far behind. The California tax agency site had roughly 7,000 inbound links and, again, tons of content.

For a final nail in the coffin, the client informed us the business was cyclical with the busiest months being January through April when people focused on taxes. The site absolutely had to rank highly during this period. We had two months to achieve results.

Gulp!

The Solution for BusinessTaxRecovery.com – 140,000 Hits

After staring at a Salvador Dali painting for a few hours, we came up with a solution. It involved a combination of internal site page focus, meta tag optimization, link exchange and massive article promotion. The results produced 145,828 hits from January through April, with only 5,000 coming from the pay-per-click program.

The first step was to change the focus of the site from the home page to the article page. Jumping the tax agency sites on keywords such as business tax and taxes was impossible in two months, so we didn’t even try. Instead, we decided to focus on the keyword phrase “business tax articles” and bring people into the site through the article page. Meta tags were optimized and a link exchange program undertaken. The key to campaign, however, was a strong article promotion campaign.

Since taxes are confusing, it seemed obvious that an article campaign focusing on tax information would meet with success. Boy, did it. Approximately 35 articles were written, published and submitted to article directories. Since the articles were timely, they were snapped up and published. The articles produced direct traffic to the site as well as numerous inbound links because of the link created in the article byline.

As for the search engines, we focused on everything but Google. We expected nothing from Google because the major content and meta tag changes would take six to eight months to show results per the usual practices of Google. In reality, it didn’t matter. The Yahoo and MSN search engines produced big time.

In mid-January, the site went to number 1 on MSN under “business tax articles.” By the end of January, Yahoo was also listing it as number 1. MSN started listing it at number 1 for “tax articles” in February. The combination of these listings produced a significant amount of traffic, conversions and a very happy client.

Can we go on cruise control now? No! With the end of the tax season, the traffic to the articles page of the site has dropped by 75%. Nobody is looking for tax information after April 15th, so this is hardly surprising. The promotion of the article page was simply a short-term solution to a difficult situation. While it should produce traffic during the first quarter of each subsequent year, it is not a year-around solution.

Over the next six months, we will focus on the long-term goal of jumping over the tax agency sites for keywords such as “business taxes”, etc. It is going to take a lot of patience, but will eventually produce a significant amount of business for the client.

Creativity is often the key to conquering seo situations. Blindly slapping up new meta tags and links isn’t always the best answer. Sometimes, a little pre-emptive consideration can yield amazing results.

It did in this case.

Creative Search Engine Optimization – A Case Study

2007-05-27T05:03:00.001-07:00

Confused About Google's Index, Link Dampening, & No. of Links?

2007-05-27T05:01:00.000-07:00

I recently received another 'please help' email from a gentleman named Ian who runs an adventure company in Tanzania (http://www.betheladventure.co.uk ). Ian was concerned about the effect of a variety of issues including indexing and link dampening, and was desperate for help. Unfortunately, he had read some fairly misleading articles in the past, so he had a somewhat mixed up understanding of the factors at play. Because I suspect he's not alone in his concern and confusion, I decided to publish the details of our discussion.

Ian's email consisted of several questions. I've listed each separately below, followed by my response.

Q: When I search for the number of backlinks to my site using "link:www.betheladventure.co.uk", I see only 23 results. It appears that only 23 of our backlinks have survived Google's dampening link filter. Is there a time delay before they are credited to a site? "

A: Firstly, I think you may have the dampening link filter a little confused. According to the dampening link filter theory, your links are found and recognized by Google, you just don't get the full benefit from them until a given period of time has elapsed. The dampening link filter (if it exists) doesn't stop links from appearing in Google's results when you search for them. (The only reason your backlinks might not appear in a Google search is if Google hasn't yet indexed the pages containing the links.) Also, don't worry too much about things like the dampening link filter. For a start, it's far from established / accepted fact. Many well regarded SEO experts don't believe in it at all. Furthermore, even if it does exist, it only affects those businesses with the budget to generate the huge numbers (hundreds or thousands probably) of links reputedly required to trigger it. If your number of backlinks suddenly increases by 20, that's no problem.

And secondly, don't believe everything Google tells you. By searching for "link:www.betheladventure.co.uk", you generally only see a small percentage of actual links to your site. The best way to search for links is to search for just the URL "www.bethaladventure.co.uk" , then on the page that displays next, select "Find web pages that contain the term "www.bethaladventure.co.uk" ". When you do it this way, you'll see all the pages that contain your URL. In most cases, the URL will be an active link (or at least it should be, and you should ask them to make it so). When you do this search, you'll see that your site has about 169 links, not 23.

Q: Another question is about indexed pages (using site:www.betheladventure.co.uk). I understand this is a record of pages that have been changed. I had 32, it went down to 28 and now this morning it is down to 26. Do they only keep the pages for a month or is there more to the indexed pages than I realized?

A: The number of indexed pages is simply the number of pages on your website that Google 'knows about'. Theoretically, the only time the age of a page comes into play is when the page is too young*, i.e. Google spiders haven't visited it yet, or Google hasn't updated its index. As to why the reported number of indexed pages is reducing, I suspect it's just a temporary shift. The number of results in Google's searches varies pretty much constantly.

*Actually, technically speaking, it has been suggested that Google is not capable of indexing all 11.5 billion pages currently believed to be online (and the 10 million more that are added every day), and that as it indexes new pages, old pages are pushed out of the index. (This is a very rough description of the theory - if it's happening at all, it's likely to be far more complicated than this.) If this is happening, it may explain why the reported number of indexed pages is reducing. Although I think it's a long shot, a good way to deal with it is to maintain high quality content, to keep increasing it, to keep generating backlinks, and to generate a Google sitemap. To find out more about sitemaps, go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login . To download a free - and very useful - tool for generating a sitemap, go to http://johannesmueller.com/gs/ .

I know there's a lot of confusion surrounding these issues, so I hope you've found this exchange helpful.

Happy indexing!

Buy Traffic – Successfully Buy from Traffic Brokers.

2007-05-27T05:00:00.002-07:00

Buy traffic - There is one fast way to deliver traffic by the thousands to your website within 24 hours. Buy traffic from traffic brokers. Most traffic brokers show your website as a full page pop-under without the internet explorer bar on selected type of geo targeting and category. Today the standard website traffic categories are –

Untargeted – Untargeted traffic is usually a source of the fastest traffic and it has no Geo targeting or category. Untargeted traffic is good for sites that are not a specific niche. Such traffic is good for joke websites or dating websites.

Targeted traffic – Targeted traffic is not Geo targeted but it usually consist of a wide range of categories witch can be found here for example -
http://www.prosubmit-traffic.com/programs.html

USA Targeted – US targeted traffic is from servers that host websites in the US and target a broad range of targeted audience. S o if your website is in English and is once again like a joke website or retail website than this would be a good choice.

USA Category Targeted – US category targeted traffic in my opinion is by far the best. You can target the US geography and pick your website to show as a full page pop-under on a category specific range of websites. A wide range of categories witch can be found here for example -

http://www.prosubmit-traffic.com/programs.html

Automatic Website Submissions Beware

2007-05-27T05:00:00.001-07:00

Submitting your website to search engines is the first and the most basic step a webmaster takes to get the word out about his/her new website. There was a time when this was a very long and tedious process, where one had to go through many different search engines, and submit their websites manually, but now there are many services, which promise that they will automatically submit your website, for a low cost, thereby saving you a lot of time and hassle. So are their claims genuine? Should you go with them? Or is it better to do this boring and tedious job manually? This article aims to answer these questions.

¡§We will submit your website to 10,000 search engines for only $30¡¨, ¡§Get listed in 1000 search engines for only $15¡¨, these are the sort of claims you would have probably read on many websites, offering search engine submission services. It is strictly advised against using such services, due to many reasons, discussed below.

Firstly, there are at the most 10 major search engines, which send 95% of the traffic to all websites, and the other 5% are usually free for all (FFA) search engines, which just take in submissions, and may rank your site at the top for a short period, and will lower your position as soon as a new load of submissions come in. Even if they do send you little traffic it is likely to be untargeted. It is also to be noted that most FFA search engines are topic specific. Another danger with these types of search engines is that your email address is most likely to be sold to third parties and ultimately your inbox filled with spam, and when you are going for a 1000 submissions, there is no way to find out which search engine actually sold your email address.

There are some other services which actually claim to submit your website free to these search engines, now as the saying goes ¡§there is no free lunch¡¨, they purely work with the sole intention of obtaining your email addresses for spam purposes.

Another claim made by some search engine submission services is ¡§we can get you high rankings in major search engines¡¨. This is totally untrue, and impossible. Search engine submission by these services is done by using automatic software, which opens up the site submission page, fills up the form with the help of information provided and submits it. This process has nothing to do with optimizing your website for better rankings. Some of these services also claim that they can get your entire site indexed in only a day. Once again, this is not possible as most search engines have limits on the number of pages that can be submitted to them, in a day. For e.g. with Google you can submit a maximum of five pages per day.

Are You Getting Nuked By Google Lately?

2007-05-27T04:59:00.001-07:00

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!

An SEO Glossary - Common SEO Terms Defined

2007-05-27T04:58:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become an essential weapon in the arsenal of every online business. Unfortunately, for most business owners and marketing managers (and even many webmasters), it's also somewhat of an enigma. This is partly due to the fact that it's such a new and rapidly changing field, and partly due to the fact that SEO practitioners tend to speak in a language all of their own which, without translation, is virtually impenetrable to the layperson. This glossary seeks to remedy that situation, explaining specialist SEO terms in plain English...

AdWords

See ‘Sponsored Links’.

algorithm

A complex mathematical formula used by search engines to assess the relevance and importance of websites and rank them accordingly in their search results. These algorithms are kept tightly under wraps as they are the key to the objectivity of search engines (i.e. the algorithm ensures relevant results, and relevant results bring more users, which in turn brings more advertising revenue).

article PR

The submitting of free reprint articles to many article submission sites and article distribution lists in order to increase your website's search engine ranking and Google PageRank. (In this sense, the "PR" stands for PageRank.) Like traditional public relations, article PR also conveys a sense of authority because your articles are widely published. And because you're proving your expertise and freely dispensing knowledge, your readers will trust you and will be more likely to remain loyal to you. (In this sense, the "PR" stands for Public Relations.)

article distribution lists

User groups (e.g. Yahoo, MSN, Google, Smartgroups, and Topica groups) which accept email submissions of articles in text format, and then distribute these articles via email to all of the members of the group. See also 'article PR'.

article submission sites

Websites which act as repositories of free reprint articles. Authors visit these sites to submit their articles free of charge, and webmasters visit to find articles to use on their websites free of charge. Article submission sites generate revenue by selling advertising space on their websites. See also 'article PR'.

backlink

A text link to your website from another website. See also ‘link’.

copy

The words used on your website.

copywriter

A professional writer who specializes in the writing of advertising copy (compelling, engaging words promoting a particular product or service). See also ‘SEO copywriter’ and ‘web copywriter’.

crawl

Google finds pages on the World Wide Web and records their details in its index by sending out ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’. These spiders make their way from page to page and site to site by following text links. To a spider, a text link is like a door.

domain name

The virtual address of your website (normally in the form www.yourbusinessname.com). This is what people will type when they want to visit your site. It is also what you will use as the address in any text links back to your site.

ezine

An electronic magazine. Most publishers of ezines are desperate for content and gladly publish well written, helpful articles and give you full credit as author, including a link to your website.

Flash

A technology used to create animated web pages (and page elements).

free reprint article

An article written by you and made freely available to other webmasters to publish on their websites. See also 'article PR'.

Google

The search engine with the greatest coverage of the World Wide Web, and which is responsible for most search engine-referred traffic. Of approximately 11.5 billion pages on the World Wide Web, it is estimated that Google has indexed around 8.8 billion. This is one reason why it takes so long to increase your ranking!

Google AdWords

See ‘Sponsored Links’.

Google PageRank

How Google scores a website’s importance. It gives all sites a mark out of 10. By downloading the Google Toolbar (from http://toolbar.google.com), you can view the PR of any site you visit.

Google Toolbar

A free tool you can download. It becomes part of your browser toolbar. It’s most useful features are it’s PageRank display (which allows you to view the PR of any site you visit) and it’s AutoFill function (when you’re filling out an online form, you can click AutoFill, and it enters all the standard information automatically, including Name, Address, Zip code/Postcode, Phone Number, Email Address, Business Name, Credit Card Number (password protected), etc.) Once you’ve downloaded and installed the toolbar, you may need to set up how you’d like it to look and work by clicking Options (setup is very easy). NOTE: Google does record some information (mostly regarding sites visited).

HTML

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the coding language used to create much of the information on the World Wide Web. Web browsers read the HTML code and display the page that code describes.

Internet

An interconnected network of computers around the world.

JavaScript

A programming language used to create dynamic website pages (e.g. interactivity).

keyword

A word which your customers search for and which you use frequently on your site in order to be relevant to those searches. This use known as targeting a keyword. Most websites actually target ‘keyword phrases’ because single keywords are too generic and it is very difficult to rank highly for them.

keyword density

A measure of the frequency of your keyword in relation to the total wordcount of the page. So if your page has 200 words, and your keyword phrase appears 10 times, its density is 5%.

keyword phrase

A phrase which your customers search for and which you use frequently on your site in order to be relevant to those searches.

link

A word or image on a web page which the reader can click to visit another page. There are normally visual cues to indicate to the reader that the word or image is a link.

link path

Using text links to connect a series of page (i.e. page 1 connects to page 2, page 2 connects to page 3, page 3 connects to page 4, and so on). Search engine ‘spiders’ and ‘robots’ use text links to jump from page to page as they gather information about it, so it’s a good idea to allow them traverse your entire site via text links. (See ‘Link paths’ on p.21. for further information.)

link partner

A webmaster who is willing to put a link to your website on their website. Quite often link partners engage in reciprocal linking.

link popularity

The number of links to your website. Link popularity is the single most important factor in a high search engine ranking. Webmasters use a number of methods to increase their site's link popularity including article PR, link exchange (link partners / reciprocal linking), link buying, and link directories.

link text

The part of a text link that is visible to the reader. When generating links to your own site, they are most effective (in terms of ranking) if they include your keyword.

meta tag

A short note within the header of the HTML of your web page which describes some aspect of that page. These meta tags are read by the search engines and used to help assess the relevance of a site to a particular search.

natural search results

The ‘real’ search results. The results that most users are looking for and which take up most of the window. For most searches, the search engine displays a long list of links to sites with content which is related to the word you searched for. These results are ranked according to how relevant and important they are.

organic search results

See ‘natural search results’.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click advertising)

See ‘Sponsored Links’.

PageRank

See ‘Google PageRank’.

rank

Your position in the search results that display when someone searches for a particular word at a search engine.

reciprocal link

A mutual agreement between two webmasters to exchange links (i.e. they both add a link to the other’s website on their own website). Most search engines (certainly Google) are sophisticated enough to detect reciprocal linking and they don’t view it very favorably because it is clearly a manufactured method of generating links. Websites with reciprocal links risk being penalized.

robot

See ‘Spider’.

robots.txt file

A file which is used to inform the search engine spider which pages on a site should not be indexed. This file sits in your site’s root directory on the web server. (Alternatively, you can do a similar thing by placing tags in the header section of your HTML for search engine robots/spiders to read. See ‘Optimizing your web ’ on p.22. for more information.)

Sandbox

Many SEO experts believe that Google ‘sandboxes’ new websites. Whenever it detects a new website, it withholds its rightful ranking for a period while it determines whether your site is a genuine, credible, long term site. It does this to discourage the creation of SPAM websites (sites which serve no useful purpose other than to boost the ranking of some other site). Likewise, if Google detects a sudden increase (i.e. many hundreds or thousands) in the number of links back to your site, it may sandbox them for a period (or in fact penalize you by lowering your ranking or blacklisting your site altogether).

SEO

Search Engine Optimization. The art of making your website relevant and important so that it ranks high in the search results for a particular word.

SEO copywriter

A ‘copywriter’ who is not only proficient at web copy, but also experienced in writing copy which is optimized for search engines (and will therefore help you achieve a better search engine ranking for your website).

search engine

A search engine is an online tool which allows you to search for websites which contain a particular word or phrase. The most well known search engines are Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

site map

A single page which contains a list of text links to every page in the site (and every page contains a text link back to the site map). Think of your site map as being at the center of a spider-web.

SPAM

Generally refers to unwanted and unrequested email sent en-masse to private email addresses. Also used to refer to websites which appear high in search results without having any useful content. The creators of these sites set them up simply to cash in on their high ranking by selling advertising space, links to other sites, or by linking to other sites of their own and thereby increasing the ranking of those sites. The search engines are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and already have very efficient ways to detect SPAM websites and penalize them.

spider

Google finds pages on the World Wide Web and records their details in its index by sending out ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’. These spiders make their way from page to page and site to site by following text links.

Sponsored Links

Paid advertising which displays next to the natural search results. Customers can click on the ad to visit the advertiser’s website. This is how the search engines make their money. Advertisers set their ads up to display whenever someone searches for a word which is related to their product or service. These ads look similar to the natural search results, but are normally labeled “Sponsored Links”, and normally take up a smaller portion of the window. These ads work on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) basis (i.e. the advertiser only pays when someone clicks on their ad).

submit

You can submit your domain name to the search engines so that their ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’ will crawl your site. You can also submit articles to ‘article submission sites’ in order to have them published on the Internet.

text link

A word on a web page which the reader can click to visit another page. Text links are normally blue and underlined. Text links are what ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’ use to jump from page to page and website to website.

URL

Uniform Resource Locator. The address of a particular page published on the Internet. Normally in the form http://www.yourbusinessname.com/AWebPage.htm.

web copy

See ‘copy’.

web copywriter

A ‘copywriter’ who understands the unique requirements of writing for an online medium.

webmaster

A person responsible for the management of a particular website.

wordcount

The number of words on a particular web page.

World Wide Web (WWW)

The vast array of documents published on the Internet. It is estimated that the World Wide Web now consists of approximately 11.5 billion pages.

Back To Main Page Click Here for more articles 12 Things You Really Should Know About SEO

2007-05-27T04:57:00.000-07:00

From the very beginning of the Internet, the number one challenge which all of us have faced is how to attract qualified visitors to our websites. Throughout the boom years, one of the most popular solutions was to get massive funding, relatively easy to get in those days, and "buy" traffic, by various means.

As an iconoclastic young developer, with ambitions of beating the "big boys" at their own game, more time than money or the connections to get it, I sought a less capital intensive methodology to achieve the same results. Years of study and rapt attention to the pertinent forums, trying everything that even seemed to make sense (making many mistakes along the way, and learning much from each one), then carefully monitoring the results, has lead to many highly workable tools in our SEO bag of tricks. The outcome of these trial and error methods, (lots of both) lays the foundation of our SEO services and the basis for the ongoing growth of traffic to your website and ours.

The simple fact of the matter is this: Expertise in any other form of writing in no way qualifies one for the type of writing required to optimize a website for the Internet. There are many sites which have less than correct punctuation, grammar, and even spelling which rank #1 in their optimized search phrases. This is not to say that I don't think these things are important, only that to be found in the search engines, they are not the most important consideration.

The flip side of this argument is equally true. Just because someone knows all the ins and outs of all of the search engines, can write algorithms in their sleep, has lunches with Dr. Eric Schmidt and is on a first name basis with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, does not, in any way, make them a writer. All of the writing on this site was done as a collaborative venture between Susan K. Thompson, a professional writer with strong academic credentials and real world experience, in both business and marketing, and myself. Was there a lot of editing and re-write? Yes. Were there disagreements? You bet! Was it worth it? Look at the record.

Emerald Coast Entrepreneur was launched on May 1, 2005 with most site optimization in place and submission to the directories just beginning. With a total monetary investment of less than $100.00, and a time investment, I'd rather not think about, but which approached 300 hours, the site was given a PR5 ranking by Google on it's first update, less than 2 months after our launch.

Studies show that over 90% of all online users use search engines to find what they are looking for, whether products/services, or just plain old information.

The following twelve points will, I hope, summarize a philosophy, approach and methodology to the SEO question which is both sound and effective, along with giving some helpful insight into the industry itself.

1. Content. Content. Content.
Effective, professional, optimized Copywriting is the single, most important factor in any SEO campaign. Search engines index websites based on the content found on each page of the site. With a thorough understanding of the language and grammatical conventions combined with intensive research, to find and exploit the market focus, one can move a website to the upper echelon of the "SERP's" (Search Engine Results Page) in a methodical as well as ethical manner.

2. Analyze Web Logs.
Measure everything, at least twice, and then check again. While I would be the first to say that many of the procedures that make up website optimization are more art than science, one needs to take a very scientific approach to the results of the effort. This is done by methodically keeping a record of, and making an analysis of the sites web logs. There are a number of specialized software which make the job easier but at the bare minimum, one needs to keep a close eye on the site visitors and their activity while on the site. No matter how well planned the strategy, it is largely theoretical until proven by the results, which can only be measured by the logs, and a thorough analysis of their content.

3. No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google, or any other search engine.
Those who promise such feats will either optimize for such vague search term phrases (such as, "green stunted widgets with purple Polka-dots and icing") that no one will ever likely look for, or they are making a false claim, which they have no intention of keeping, or they have an inside edge at Google, something which they will loose, quickly, when the honest folks at Google find out about it. The other option, that they will take the money and run, is worth mentioning here but I'll be polite.

4. Some things are just plain silly.
You don't need to submit your site to 50,000 search engines. Businesses which offer this service are suspect, at best. 85% of the search results on the Internet come from one search engine, which, if you have one link from an established website, or better yet, a directory, will find your site just fine, on it's own. Four (4) search engines account for over 90% of the traffic on the web. As for any supposed benefit which may accrue from being listed in an obscure search engine in Botswana which specializes in safaris to the Kalahari Desert and receives 7 hits per day; well, you figure it out.

5. SEO is not Pay-per-Click.
While no one would argue the effectiveness of getting increased traffic and sales, through a well planned, pay-per-click campaign, the fact remains that the conversion rates are generally low and they cease the moment the "pay" stops. With a well planned and executed SEO campaign, while results may take a bit longer, they continue to produce, and in fact grow, long after the work is done and paid for. Quite often we have found that after a thorough optimization of a site, only minor adjustments are needed on an ongoing basis, primarily related to new content and/or new items of sale or service.

6. SEO is not witchcraft, Druidism, shamanism.
Neither does it require any special chants, ceremonial fires, or vestments, though some of us do like to howl at the full moon, on occasion. There are no "Top Secret" practices which a reputable SEO can not tell a client, a judge, or his mother, for that matter. The very nature of the Internet has always been cooperative and there is nothing about SEO that can't be learned, with a heavy dose of time and money. A reputable SEO firm will give you an item per item breakdown of just where the money goes. Be wary if you sense a secretive atmosphere or any unwillingness to answer questions. While there are technical points which might take some background to fully understand, if one has a solid overview of the entire situation, a simple explanation should be easy enough to come up with.

7. Do-it-yourself SEO.
Yes, you can execute your own SEO campaign and find a reputable SEO firm to help plan and organize it for you. About one half of my own clientele do some part of the actual work themselves, or have their in-house dedicated personnel do it, after discussion of the goals and aims of the business/website, a thorough website analysis, comprehensive search phrase research, and focused instruction on the ways and means of achieving high SERPs. These preliminaries are followed up with a detailed program of suggestions and methods which the client can then implement themselves or hire others to perform. Average savings; 30-40%.

8. Phased Implementation.
While many companies spend thousands of dollars per month on Search Engine Optimization, an alternative is available which will pay dividends to you in increased sales and leads without the high initial investment. The most important consideration is to have a reputable firm handle the initial evaluation and suggested optimization planning first. The trial and error method will cost much more, in the long run, with or without the desired result. After studying the plan and establishing a workable budget you may implement the plan as finances allow.

9. Remember the old saying, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."
Never was this more true than in the realm of SEO. While concrete and measurable gains will always come from a well thought out and executed optimization strategy, the Internet is a competitive media and we all want to be number one. Accept that a steady upward movement, over time, will place you worlds ahead of a flash followed by a crash.

10. A thought to ponder.
At stake, in the race for the top, is the very existence of your website, your business, and quite possibly your reputation. Beware of any "shortcuts" or less than ethical schemes that anyone might suggest to further your business goals. When it's all said and done it is you, the business owner, who bears the responsibility for any company or individual you hire. Insist on knowing exactly what the strategy is and what steps are being performed to implement it. If it seems, in the least, suspicious, ask for and get an explanation. In this case, not only is Ignorance not bliss, it could very well be the beginning of the end for your business.

11. All incoming links are not created equal.
Both the relevance to your line of business and website subject matter and the PR value of the incoming link determine how valuable they are to your own PR ranking. With Google starting the trend, nothing new there, and most of the others following close behind, the days of grabbing all the inbound links, in any way possible, are gone. Not only will low ranked and/or irrelevant inbound links not help, they will, in fact, cause a penalty. Link farms, free-for-all link schemes, automated link accumulation software, or any other fad that doesn't carefully screen the links and websites they are coming from will, in the long run, do more harm than good.

12. It's more than just facts and figures.
The relationship between an online business and SEO is, perhaps, one of the closest of business relationships. In order to be effective, a SEO must know not only the facts and figures pertaining to the endeavor, but s/he must know something of the dreams and aspirations of the business principals. Things which don't normally come out in a prospectus are often invaluable information when searching for the "right fit" into the complex world of the Internet. My own clients sometimes ask, due to the frequency of my calls and email in the early phases, "Am I your only client?" I usually laugh and say something to the effect that until I know your business almost as well as you do, yes, you are the only one that counts.

"7 Secrets To Top Search Engine Rankings (Yes, Even #1 Positions!) For SEO Dummies"

2007-05-27T04:56:00.000-07:00

There's hope for the 'little guys' in the
search engine ranking game, even if they
can't tell the difference between the title
and keyword meta tag!

You can achieve high rankings for important
keywords simply by applying certain rules
that stand the test of time and even
technology...and the number one rule is
really to...

...Help the search engines provide relevant
search results!

How do you do this? I'll reveal the
'secrets' soon.

While I'm far from being an SEO (Search
Engine Optimization) expert and am just
sharing experiences here, I've achieved
some phenomenal results by following these
basic rules and without resorting to
'tricks'. Importantly, these are rankings
that last.

- side note -

I'm not suggesting you shouldn't learn
about SEO or use genuine software that
helps, in fact you should.

To learn about SEO, some sites you can
check out:

http://www.selfpromotion.com : shows you
how to construct your webpages and submit
them to hundreds of search engines and
directories absolutely FREE.

http://www.searchenginewatch.com :
everything you need to know related to
search engines.

For software to facilitate your website
positioning, this one's the best:
http://www.turnkeymoney.com/te.htm

- end side note -

For example (at this time of writing), here
are my rankings for
http://www.Marketing-Make-Money.com in
Yahoo alone (remember these are extremely
competitive keywords):

'Make money online' | rank: #1 of 33.9
million sites Proof:
http://tinyurl.com/2wtr9

'Make money' | rank: #27 of 85.4 million
sites Proof: http://tinyurl.com/35cc3

'Web marketing' | rank: #4 of 113 million
sites Proof: http://tinyurl.com/yv8de

'Web marketing tips' | rank: #6 of 10.2
million sites Proof:
http://tinyurl.com/388a6

How did I achieve such incredible rankings
without being some SEO guru or even
obsessively optimizing my site?

Recall the number one rule? It's to help
the search engines provide relevant search
results.

Now I honestly believe there are only two
MAIN things which support this rule and in
the process, reward your website with the
high rankings you desire.

These two things are Keyword Rich Content
and Targeted Back Links which we'll talk
about later...

Here then are 7 powerful secrets you can
use to model your website after to explode
your high search engine rankings!

Step 1: Determine Highly Searched Keywords

Determine highly searched and targeted
keywords/keyword phrases related to your
site and put them into a list. Here're the
tools to use:

http://instantmarketingsecrets.com/keyword.htm : compares results of keyword searches
from Overture and Wordtracker and displays
them side by side.

http://smtek.info/cgi-bin/keywordtool.cgi :
allows you to find relevant hot keywords
with a single click...very cool very useful.

http://www.goodkeywords.com : excellent
software to find targeted keywords in
Overture and various other engines.

Step 2: Register Keyword Rich Domain Names

While there've been contrasting arguments
about whether having keywords in your
domain helps, I strongly feel it does. The
same goes for dashes between words in the
domain.

Use these to source for domain name ideas:

http://www.nameboy.com
http://www.deleteddomains.com

You can also register your domains for
peanuts per year here:

http://www.namecheap.com
http://www.registerfly.com

Step 3: Use Your Targeted Keywords In Your Copy

Use the list of keywords in step 1 within
your website copy, especially in the title,
headline and first paragraph. The important
thing is to make them flow smoothly within
the context of the copy so prospects will
not find it weird.

Step 4: Insert Keyword Rich Relevant Content

Next, build up your site's content with
relevant topics containing your keywords.
Don't worry, here are some ways to get
instant content:

- Posting suitable articles that contain
your keywords. These can either be your
own or from article directories like
http://www.ezinearticle.com ,
http://www.goarticles.com or
http://webpronews.com

- Posting newsletter issues in an archive
online if you write any

- Do reviews and commentaries on related
products and services in your market as
content

Step 5: Aggressively Acquire Targeted Back Links

This is the second most important (some say
it's the first) factor to note after
targeted and relevant content.

Get as many good quality incoming links
from other sites as you can, believe me,
this will really make a huge difference to
your rankings. These links should come from
sites in your market and preferably those
with high PageRanks of 5 and above.

Use http://www.webmasterbrain.com/prog/ to
search for sites with top rankings in
Google for your specified keyword/keyword
phrases. It also reveals their individual
PageRanks next to their listings.

An excellent resource to check PageRank can
also be found at http://rankwhere.com.

Alternatively, you can download Alexa
toolbar from http://ww.alexa.com as it also
shows Alexa traffic ranking for any site.
This is very useful for seeking high
traffic link partners.

If you are looking for mind-blowing linking
strategies and tricks, the best guide I've
ever seen must be "Power Linking 2:
Evolution" at:
http://www.turnkeymoney.com/powerlink.htm

Step 6: Hand Submit Your Site To The Top
Directories and Search Engines

There's no point in using those 'submit to
millions' services as only a few search
engines really matter.

Using those services may actually cause
your site to be penalized by these major
engines.

In fact if you've done enough important
reciprocal linkings, you don't even need to
submit your sites as spiders which crawl
your link partner sites (already indexed)
will pick up your link easily.

However, if you must submit, do it by hand
at these directories and search engines
here:

Ask Jeeves: http://tinyurl.com/467y
LookSmart/Zeal: http://tinyurl.com/2uzan
Mama: http://tinyurl.com/38gdb
Open Directory: http://tinyurl.com/2jk82
Google: http://tinyurl.com/hlzz
Yahoo: http://tinyurl.com/fq32
All The Web: http://tinyurl.com/2hq24
Inktomi: http://tinyurl.com/26cgu

Step 7: Tune Your Site For Maximum Optimization

The final step would be to constantly
monitor and analyze your website traffic
against rankings. This is so you can review
and tweak for further improvement in your
rankings.

I hope this article will prove highly
useful to you. Do not be scare away by SEO,
it's simple once you follow the above
system. While these steps are not
everything you can do, it'll be enough to
get your site ranked very well for the
targeted keywords you chose.

Again, remember the number one rule of
giving relevant content and establishing
good back links. Help the search engines
provide relevant results for their
customers and your rankings will
automatically skyrocket to the top!

5 Steps to Get Top 10 Website Search Engine Rank

2007-05-27T04:55:00.000-07:00

1. Step One: Select right keyword for web SEO Optimization.
You must choose your keywords carefully. This is the most important step of the SEO. Wrong or ineffective keywords mean invalid keyword optimization. You should find popular keywords and phrases related to your business, then know search popularity and competition number of every keywords. The keywords with more popularity and less competition will be your targeted keyword phrases.

Resources:

Best Promotion Keywords - http://www.websitepromotionsoft.com/bestpromotionkeyword.html
Overture - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Google - https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox

2. Step Two: Optimize your website ranking factors.

Once you have finished keyword analysis and selected specified keywords, you should optimize your web site to improve search engine position. The important ranking factors including website title tags, description tags, meta keyword tags, heading text, link url, link text, image alt, comment and web page body text.

Every keyword frequency, weight, size, prominence
and proximity all affect the ranking. You should optimize all these factors carefully. The top 10 ranking website content and ranking factors will give your more help.

Resources:
Web Optimization Angel - http://www.websitepromotionsoft.com/weboptimizationangel.html
WebPositionGold - http://www.webposition.com/d2.pl?r=TBI-55EC&FN=download.htm

3. Step Three: Submit url to search engines directories.

After search engine optimization page design, Submiting all your web sites to Google, Yahoo, MSN, DMOZ and the other major engines. Manual free submit url is recommend. At
http://www.websitepromotionsoft.com/submit-url-free.html you can find top 588 search engine list with homepage, submit url address, alexa rank, google page rank, google inbound links and google including site pages.

Resources:
search engine PageRank order list - http://www.websitepromotionsoft.com/search-engine-list-page-rank.html

4 .Step Four: Link Exchange and Manager.

Link popularity is the total number of websites that link to your web site, and is an extremely important method of improving your site's relevancy and position as many engines are using
this information as a ranking criterion. Both the quantity and quality of link popularity is important. The best links are "relevant" links from web pages related to your keyword or topic.

Resources:
External Link Promotion - http://www.websitepromotionsoft.com/external-link-promotion.html

5. Step Five: Monitoring and ReOptimizing.

Often checking your website search engine position of your targeted keywords, if not satisfied with optimization ranking results, you should do more SEO to achieve higher search engines ranking position.