Understanding SEO

Increasing Traffic with Cross Promotion

2009-12-28T02:37:00.000-08:00

As pay-per-click costs increase, companies need to find new ways to save money to get visitors on their landing pages. In addition, companies need to have a plan to not only drive traffic to a website, but to gain customer loyalty for repeat visits.

Too often companies only focus on increasing website traffic as their method of strategic Internet marketing. While it is good to increase website traffic, the ultimate goal should be to make sales and generate leads. Just having traffic is not enough to make a website successful.

Collect E-Mail Addresses
In the off-line world, the rule of thumb is that it takes at least seven touches or interactions with your potential customer before the sale will occur. What most people don't realize is that this same situation occurs on the Internet. Generally, a person that comes to your website is not going to buy the first time, that's why it's so important that you get their e-mail address. Have a form on your homepage that entices people to opt in to your e-mail database.

Give people a reason for them to give you their e-mail address before they leave your website. One of my clients sells women's designer clothing on the Internet, and they needed to increase their visibility through strategic Internet marketing. We came up with a plan to create an online members only club for the women who shopped on this site. In order to join the club, visitors simply filled out a form with their name and e-mail address.

Create a Community
In two short months, this company was able to add 5,000 names to its database. But rather than using the database as only a way to solicit more business, we decided to create more value for the company's customers. We used their online club to create a community of women who were more than just customers who bought clothing. For example, as part of the club's benefits, each month, we interview famous hair stylists, writers, psychologists, make-up artists, and then make these audio recordings available to their online club members. Since the choice of the clothes you wear determines your attitude and identity, we pick topics that complement and enhance their members fashion statement.

Cross Promotion
The people we interview are happy to do these recordings, because it gives them an opportunity to get in front of their target audience and get free publicity. Quite often the people we interview also have a database, so we asked them if they would introduce our site to their list. This afforded us another opportunity to build my client's database and create more viral marketing buzz for the site. This technique is known as cross promotion.

Fresh ideas are what businesses need to be successful on the Internet. The big companies are spending millions to attract visitors to their websites, but it doesn't take millions of dollars to fund strategic Internet marketing that works for your website. All it takes is a creative idea that works to attract your target audience.

Anyone can be an SEO Expert

2009-12-27T02:34:00.000-08:00

There are a few things that you can do that rarely change when it comes to SEO. If you consistently do these things you will notice a good rise in your SE rankings. The two most important things you can do are having a title tag and description tag on each individual page and to make them unique for each page. This means you should not use the same title and description for every page on your site.

The Meta keyword tags used to be important but any SEO expert will now tell you that they do not matter. It is not a bad idea to go ahead and include the keyword Meta tag into your code though. Just do not over do it, include your main keyword and a few other good relevant keywords.

Another thing you can do that will help your site out and aid in avoiding the outsource of an SEO expert is to use bold and underline tags in the main body of each page. The idea behind this is that you are showing the SE spiders that these words are more important and they should hold more weight than other words. Do not overdo it but use a couple bold tags and an underline tag once or twice in each page for your main keywords.

Develop a good linking strategy and go by it. We all know that obtaining quality links to your site is important but many people do not take enough action. Find quality relevant websites and ask for a link exchange. Create a schedule that you can stick with and do not steer away from it. Try to mix your linking techniques with reciprocal, triangular and one way. It is always better to have a mixture of them all than a lot of one in particular.

If you want to invest a lot of hard earned money in a SEO expert go ahead but think about a few things before you do. If this person is such a guru why are they not making millions of dollars with their personal websites? If all of the little things that these experts know is so important then why are there so many successful websites out there built by those of us just doing the basic things stated above?

I have been seeing great results from the SE's just by doing these basic things and I have never outsourced an SEO expert.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

2009-12-25T02:36:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas !!!

Just One Click Away

2009-12-23T02:31:00.000-08:00

Search engines are used every minute of the day, which means advertising your website with pay per click will greatly increase the advertising of your website.

By advertising your website with pay per click, you are helping to advertise your business in what is usually an inexpensive way that is growing larger and reaching more people everyday. You can also tailor your pay per click advertising to fit your business or company budget needs.

This is a plus for those of you who are starting out on a budget and want to stay away from paying a lot for advertising that may or may not be seen. By advertising your website with pay per click, your ad is surely going to be seen.

More advantages to advertising your website with PPC include the speed of advertising, the increase in traffic to your website, and the ability to research and compare data to see what works best for your website.

There are times, however, when advertising your website with PPC can prove to be costly. For example, it will cost you more to use competitive keywords than it will to use that are not as competitive. Finely tune your keyword strategies.

You have to make a full keyword research before you start your campaign. My opinion is that use keywords that has about 1000 Overture searches per month. This is your keyword demand. Another element is your keyword supply. Ideal situation would be that the supply is smaller than the demand.

This requires special keywords like miss spellings, typo errors or quotes. This are very effective and you can find software to dig them. With these kind of keywords your cost profit ratio will be healthy. Of course all used keywords must be related to your site topic.

Another very important issue is the question of landing page of your pay per click campaign. Again my opinion is that you should never use your home page as a landing page. Use page , which offers a gift to a clicker.

This way you can capture his attention right away and get his address for your autoresponder. Now you can send him messages during a long time and build a business connection with him.

You can find information on the Internet on this or you might want to consider consulting a professional. Also remember not to bite off more than you can chew. Start with one pay per click provider first, using ads you have tested, and then extend your campaign accordingly.

Make a firm decision about how much you can spend to pay per click campaign and remember to set the daily budget at search engine settings. That will save you from unhappy suprises.

Advertising your website with PPC can be a very quick, inexpensive way to get your website and business rolling. Drawbacks can always pop up, but if you educate and prepare yourself, you will be able to make the most out of advertising your website with pay per click.

Kiss Your Keyword Meta-Tag Goodbye

2009-12-21T02:30:00.000-08:00

Hailing from parts unknown and circumstances that could be best described as humble, for quite some time now, the Keyword Meta-Tag with its better known younger sibling, referred to in the business as The Keyword (a la rapper style)or simply "The Word" by close associates and friends, have dominated the SEO stage with energy, style, wit and unmistakable charisma. But while The Keyword's star continues to soar high as ever, that of its lesser sibling, Keyword Meta-Tag, is sadly on the decline. Here then is the fascinating tale of these former SEO superstar brothers and one-time search engine darlings.

Some years ago, back when search engine algorithms were as functional and complicated as the androids depicted in B-movies from the late seventies, The Keyword and Keyword Meta-Tag began to take the SEO world by storm. Webmasters realized that they could manipulate their websites' rankings by tweaking the Keyword Meta-Tag. How? By inserting as many targeted keywords in the Keyword Meta-tag, they figured that they could influence the rankings of said websites by confusing the rather simple search engine algorithms of the time into incorrectly identifying their websites as qualified for those keywords; even though such keywords never appeared anywhere in the main body of text.

Not to be outdone by its less showy sibling, The Keyword really grew into its own and took center stage with a vengeance soon after. In a somewhat Paris Hiltonesque approach (no publicity is bad publicity) wily webmasters figured that more keywords translated into better rankings so why not stuff the main body of text with hundreds (if not thousands) of such keywords; never mind the trifling inconvenience that the text might read a tad awkward.

Thus was born the well established and proven technique (well at least for a while) known as keyword stuffing. In fact edgier webmasters ventured beyond the point of simple everyday keyword stuffing and started to incorporate invisible keyword text into their pages. This they achieved by inserting targeted keywords onto their web pages disguised in the same color as the background of that particular web page. The end result was that a keyword could be replicated thousands of times over on the same web page without interrupting the natural flow of the text (i.e., not read unnaturally to visitors to the site) because for all intents and purposes such text was invisible to the human eye. (This is an example of blackhat techniques.)

But the search engines quickly caught on and stiff penalties were meted out to offending websites. Truth be told, the search engine that really addressed this issue with swift, aggressive vigilante justice, was none other than The Big Dawg--Google. Bing appeared to be little concerned with the whole affair; it would seem that Microsoft was more concerned with listening to the sweet sound of ka-ching reverberating from the profits of its Windows Operating System. And also perhaps they were a little tied up with all those pesky law suits that seemed to never end. But I digress. The point here is that one could still get away with keyword stuffing on the lesser giants of search (i.e., Bing) but the party was most definitely over as far as Google was concerned. A new algorithm tweak was incorporated which led to the hotly debated keyword/number-of-words-on-a-page ratio or percentage.

It is still possible though to find a number of websites ranking high on Google with obvious elements of keyword stuffing. One can only assume that such websites got away with it because Google was more concerned with arresting the disturbing trend of keyword stuffing than punishing past offenders. But the same could not be said for the living-dangerously invisible-text webmasters. Google came down hard, smackdown style, and such websites fell off the chartered territories of known search. Interestingly enough, as Microsoft came to the better-late-than-never realization that there is mucho dinero to be made from search, and perhaps galvanized by waning fortunes in the OS industry, they too adopted Google-like web page filters which really kicked in early-to-mid 2006 (Yahoo generally seems to embrace Google tweaks before Bing so you can bet they are already onboard). Bottom line it's no longer as easy to skedaddle your way up the Bing SERPs (search engine rank pages) as it used to be.

In an ever increasing bid to return the most accurate results for a search query, it would appear that these days Google seems to ignore the Keyword Meta-Tag altogether and rather analyzes the words and identifies keywords from the main body of text on a webpage as its governing basis for ranking that page. You don't have to be a genius to figure out that Yahoo and Bing will soon implement the same modifications if they haven't already; where The Big Dawg paws the lesser mutts will surely follow.

So does this mean that you shouldn't bother optimizing for the Keyword Meta-Tag anymore? Not at all. There're plenty of lesser search engines out there that still identify the Keyword Meta-Tag as being important, so if you don't wish to lose potential traffic from such search engines, it's better to continue optimizing for the Keyword Meta-Tag.

As to what really dimmed the star of the once-upon-a-time SEO stage darling, the Keyword Meta-Tag, perhaps it was merely a matter of public fickleness or over-exposure. But if such was truly the case some argue, how come the Keyword Meta-Tag's sibling, The Keyword, continues to perform from strength to strength? To that we can only speculate, but maybe it's simply that the powers-that-be recognize the fact that to keep the show rolling you need at least one superstar!

Why Be Like The Loser Next Door Without This Proper Search Engine Optimization?

2009-12-17T02:29:00.000-08:00

E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is an indicator of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I abovementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make themselves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to improve your site better and better everyday.

So just what is SEO and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need SEO to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let's just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.

So once again, what is SEO? It is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site's existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site's content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.

You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers besides using SEO. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimization. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company.

Get Better Ranking With WebSite Optimization

2009-12-15T02:28:00.000-08:00

In an increasingly global Internet community, many techniques have surfaced in succession that companies may take hold of as much market share as possible. After all, the Internet is used by a fat variety of people from all over the world, each in their own way a potential customer.
Formerly, functioning through the Internet and finding content relevant to ones search was simple; only a few websites were up and running online. These days, however, the Internet is a deluge of content in all shapes and sizes, with people of diverse age groups, backgrounds, and geographic locations, generating their let on online publications and content. Therefore, customers rely greatly on various tools made available to them to simplify their lives.

Search engines are online interfaces used to search for relevant content online based on the keywords entered in the field by the Internet users. Therefore, businesses online must find a way to be prioritized among hundreds and thousands of businesses offering similar or congruent content.
One of these methods designed towards maximizing the potential of the Internet for businesses that rely greatly on generating Internet traffic towards their online website is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

Web site Optimization is a method used to give a particular website and its content better ranking in a search engines query response listings. It usually tries to give websites an edge over others, particularly in those organic or crawler search engines. Organic searches are those listings yielded without payment crawler search engines simulate the act of crawling ended the web and following links through to their respective web pages.
However, like all good things, SEO has come subservient attack of misuse by mortals who wanted to returns advantage of it. This is the reason why today, SEO is categorized into white hat SEO, or SEO legitimately used by consulting agencies to assist clients online, and black hat SEO, used to ply search engine listings with unethical methods.

While black hat SEO makes use of unethical methods to use listings and to deceive others, white bowler SEO focuses on honest methods of improving a website and its contents in order to promote it in the Internet much better.
Many websites try generating traffic to their website by various methods pay per click advertisings, prepaid advertisements, and organic search listings. SEO is powerfully more interested in increasing profitability through the last method, organic search listings.

Pay per click advertising, which entails the advertiser to pay Google or similar agencies only for the number of clicks an online advertisement banner generates and not for ad placement, may ride up costs. This happens when the website tops listings and generates traffic from a huge client base, of which not organic of them are interested in purchasing the product or service that will provide the company profit.
Organic search listings, however, display listings of websites regardless of whether or not they are paid. What SEO primarily does in rule to maximize the power of organic search listings is concentrating relevant keywords.

White hat SEO, because it focuses on improving websites collectively in order to generate genuine rankings in listings, concentrates on better content for the website. Accurate portrayal of a business individuality is at the core of ethical SEO.
The first way to do it is by making a clean code, which is a significantly simpler truth aimed more in delivering joyous to the users of the website. A cleaner, simpler code, helps crawler search engines decipher the relationships and links between pages and keywords.

The second means is creating beefed up content written in order to provide information and maximum satisfaction to customers. Search engines take into account the satisfaction of customers on the basis of relevance of content and even the frequency of visits, usually related to the quality of the content offered by the website. By concentrating on providing quality tip and content to customers, the website gains grounding among online visitors.
At the end of the day, by helping the consumers perceive and interpret better the content of the website straight at the point of indices in search engines, one can best maximize SEO and the rankings of the page in listings. Bag is key in trying to make sure traffic is directed towards the business website only by providing relevant content can longevity mean achieved amidst various trends that claim to provide the business all it needs.

Search Engine Optimization Articles

2009-12-11T02:28:00.000-08:00

The following article presents the very latest information on Search Engine. If you have a particular interest in Search Engine, then this informative article is required reading.

Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor. If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally. Once you achieve a high search engine position, it is essential that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve.

This means you must come up with a strategy to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions.

Be aware that at first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. What you need to be on the lookout for is the moment that upward climb reaches a plateau. When this happens, your search engine position campaign moves into stage two, the monitoring and protecting stage.

In stage two, do not be concerned about the short-term
fluctuations in your positions. These are similar to the subtle rising and falling of stocks in a portfolio.
Short-term movement is an integral part of the whole
process. It's the long-term changes that you must watch for and prepare to act on immediately.

Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes - many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking - your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings. To prevent this kind of precipitous drop, you must create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis. Devise a chart to keep tabs on your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch "the market" closely.

Each search engine uses a formula to compute website
rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, it may raise or lower your ranking. Some search engines use a number of different formulas, rotating them so that a formula doesn't become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly drop or rise in rank significantly. Therefore, you must check your positions frequently in order to catch when a search engine changes formulas and what effect it has on your positions.

You must also deal with your competition - a crucial factor you must always be vigilant about. Your competitor's position may suddenly rise, automatically lowering your position. Or their position may drop, pushing your position higher. Each month, expect position changes due to the continual changes that are occurring in your competitor's position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings. Monitoring these
fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search results.

So far, we've uncovered some interesting facts about Search Engine. You may decide that the following information is even more interesting.

Of course, you must discern what the most popular search engines are in order for your monitoring efforts to be effective. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most of Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge you face is that these top ten may change from month to month.

This means that your must not only monitor your search
engine positions, but you must also keep track of the
ranking popularity of the search engines you are
monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently every month and be sure to live in the present! People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The search engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news in the next few months. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of the Internet users.

Another factor to monitor carefully is a sudden drop of
your positions in all search engines. This is not the same as monthly fluctuations - this is a neon red warning sign! It could mean a number of different things.

It all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engines spiders - those sneaky
programs that seek out your site and rank their positions - have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become utterly confused and consequently drop your positions disastrously. If a spider creeps up on your website when it is down for adjustments or changes, you may actually disappear from a search engine index entirely. Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, and
suddenly all of your website come up as irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing all of your position to drop in all search engines.

Some search engines rely on the results from other search engines, and it is vital that you know which engines these are and keep track of all the engines they influence. The biggest problem here is that search engines will sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you
must not only monitor your own positions, but you must keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet as a whole.

Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they demand individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you have found that a number of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders. Or the competition for that particular keyword or phrase has recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground.

Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. It costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions from an objective perspective, and monitor your positions on a regular basis. Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture - your long-term marketing campaign.

When word gets around about your command of Search Engine facts, others who need to know about Search Engine will start to actively seek you out.

Search For Keyword

2009-12-07T02:27:00.000-08:00

Everyday, hundreds and millions of Internet users access the tidings in search of something they need or want. In the earlier days, users had a much easier time locating just exactly what they sought because very few online entities were in judgment, and they offered very little services. Consequently, it was easy to determine which sites actually contained what they needed.
Fast forward to the natural period, and instead you find hundreds and millions of content disparate in degree almost to the identical extent as to the number of average users of the Internet per day. Businesses, institutions, and even individual users generate their own websites and content by using simple means, and as such, a searcher may end growing having to choose from hundreds of choices in pursuit of materials related to what they are searching for.

Search engines play a huge role in making the plain synopsis work. Major search engine service providers, like Google, create user interfaces that allow for their users to enter words, or keywords, relating to what they are searching for. Various methods are then employed in order to search for the content links. Either they employ purely organic searches, which lists matches to the keywords regardless of whether they are paid or not, or they utilize crawler search engines. Crawler search engines simulate the crawling movement when they travel through the codes of each website and deciphering relationships between links and pages.
To maximize the potential of search engines in providing businesses their much needed online traffic and hopefully translate traffic into sales, SEO or Search Engine Optimization shortcut was created. SEO is centered in trying to provide a business with quality content and websites in management for it to hand rise in the rankings in the query listings. Central to SEO is a customer oriented nearing, and is achieved mainly by providing robust written information in the website, as wholesome as making thorough that the content found in their websites are relevant to what the users are looking for.

However, for SEO to work, there must be a clear and tangible relation between keywords and relevant content. After replete, if the search engine finds great difficulty in comp matches back to keywords provided by the users, chances are, the website will not be found by the target market.
SEO works with keywords at the very onset of the business. The business picks a variety of keywords to which their website will be related to in search engines. If the user enters in the search engine a keyword that matches the keywords near to the business website, a high ranking match is displayed among the listings.

Search for keyword and the effort that goes with it is only justified; after all, the nature of the keywords a business selects can make or break its campaign.
In order to effectively match a business keywords to those that will be entered by the users, selecting keywords must take into consideration the variety of keywords unbefitting the same topic that could be utilized when searching for it. For starters, making a list of around 50 keywords and selecting those that make greatest impact will help narrow down the keywords that should be bid for by the company when trying to get a spot in the listings.

In selecting keywords, it must and be taken game consideration the sort of response generated by certain keywords, alongside the people who would respond greatly to those words. By selecting keywords with the expressed intent of targeting a particular consumer base, the business creates a greater probability of visitors to the website being actual interested buyers instead of web window shoppers.
Besides, selecting keywords that are closest in relevance to the content of the website better streamlines traffic into that which yields profits.

Notorious keywords are those that users often enter concernment search engines and look for. These popular keywords and the subsequent websites usually are recipients to huge amounts of traffic, and as such, are subject to higher rankings in listings.
While popularity, absorption, and targeting are important, it must be balanced with the competitive demand for a particular keyword. Obviously, more businesses vying for the same word would create difficulties in acquiring that keyword for a business use. Before selecting keywords, it is imperative that checks may be made in order to make sure that while the keywords are popular, relevant, and targeted, they are also not within the vitally competitive bracket, which will make it extremely difficult to acquire and rank.

Keyword selection is important in every SEO campaign. Only in pre meditating keywords and studying market behavior in relation to these keywords can the benefits of this productive relationship be clearly seen.

A Brief Tutorial on Keywords and SEO

2009-12-05T02:26:00.000-08:00

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is something that webmasters try to implement on their websites, particularly if it's an online business or if they want a lot of traffic to their sites. Basically, SEO is developing your website in such a way that the search engines will display your site whenever someone does an internet search for specific keywords that you have craftily sprinkled throughout your pages. With the millions of websites out there, it can be very difficult keeping up with the competition so that your site is displayed in the top few search results, or even the first two pages of search results. This article will describe a few things you can do when optimizing your site for the search engines.

Firstly, there are different search engines that people use to find information on the net. The top three that you should be trying to optimize your site for are MSN, Yahoo, and Google. We all want to be at the top of the Google search listings, but it's a good idea to start with MSN and Yahoo, simply because it's usually quicker to get indexed and you still get a significant amount of your website traffic from these search engines. You will get more traffic from Google, but it's a little trickier and probably more competition there.

The next thing you want to do is come up with keywords for your website that you think a lot of people will do internet searches for. This is harder than it sounds and you have to be really careful to choose the right keywords and keyword phrases so that you can beat out the competition. The way to find the best keywords to use on your site is to use a keyword research tool that displays the number of times per month your chosen keyword is searched in the three major search engines. You may initially think that the more a term is searched, the more traffic you will get, but think again! The more a term is searched, the harder it will be to get your site ranked in the top few search results, or the first few pages of search results. You want to choose terms that are less popular, but still have a significant number of searches. A good number to aim for is any term that is searched about 5000-10000 times per month. It's pretty difficult to do this without using a keyword research tool, such as Good Keywords.

Once you've found some good keywords, you want to go into the source code for your site and add those keywords to your HTML code in the right places. The best places to put your keywords are in the title tag, H1 and H2 header tags, the description tag, and then sprinkled throughout the text on your pages. Keyword density is an important factor that the search engines take into consideration when listing pages in the search results. While you want to repeat your keywords throughout your text, you also want to be careful not to overload your pages with the same keywords to make it obvious that you're just trying to get ahead in the search engine listings. If you try this, you risk getting your site banned, so try to maintain a relatively high keyword density, but not too high.

Now that you have your site sprinkled with enough good keywords, it's time to write articles on topics related to your keywords. Use those keywords in the article title, the first paragraph, within the body of the text, and in the conclusion, again without overloading the text with your keywords. There is no better way to get traffic to your site, links pointing back to your site, and the search engines to visit your site than by writing a good quality, original article with your search terms embedded throughout. These are the basics of keywords and SEO!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!!! WISH ME LUCK!

The Right Headline Makes All the Difference To Your SEO Results

2009-12-03T02:25:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not, even though you may be targeting search engine spiders when you search engine optimize your website, when you are writing your content, the best technique is still to write as you would to appeal to an actual human visitor. This is just as true when it comes to your headlines as it is for the rest of your content.

This is the case because not only will you improve the search engine ranking because of the relevancy issue that is being considered by the latest algorithms utilized by the big search engines especially Google but also because your site will attract much more relevant visitors. When it comes down to it, one relevant visitor is worth the same as a thousand visitors who click to your site, and then quickly click away without taking a look at what you have to offer, or, more importantly, making a purchase.

By appealing to the people who will be visiting your website, you'll bring the right visitors to your website, and then your conversion rates will naturally improve.

To write an appropriate heading, you first need to know how to use your heading tags properly. The truth is that you can actually have as many headings as you want, but it is the first heading, "h1" that will really make all the difference when the visitors actually arrive at your site and read what you have to say.

Search engines look at the heading tags as an indication of what a given page is all about. Therefore, if your site heading has not only been search engine optimized with the right keywords, but has also been written in a way that it is relevant to the actual page, then you will achieve a much higher ranking.

All of the big search engines actively search for headings within the content of your website. When your headings are placed within heading tags, the search engines know where to find the information that they want, and you'll have told them directly what your web pages are all about.

Don't try to fool a search engine, however, by trying different manipulative techniques such as placing all of your text into a heading tag, or creating a heading that uses the right keywords, but doesn't actually make any sense. The search engines have been designed to identify this kind of abuse, and will not reference your site the way you'd like it if you try to tamper with the way your headings are laid out. In fact, the big search engines will actually ignore headings altogether if they detect misuse. Worst of all, you may even be blacklisted as a spammer. Therefore, it really is in your best interest to put a real heading into the heading tags.

The next step is to know exactly what you will be using as your heading. The best technique is to identify the best keyword phrase for the page you're working on. It is also a good idea to phrase the heading in a way that encourages site visitors to continue reading your content so that they will progress to the rest of your message, your requests to visit other parts of your site, and ultimately to make a purchase.

One good technique to encourage people to continue reading is to write in a tantalizing way, such as with a question that applies to the reader, so that they will want to know the answer or result of the statement. You may also state your heading in the form of a problem, where you claim that the rest of the article holds the solution. This is especially good for having the right kind of visitor spend time at your site, because the people who relate to the problem which, naturally, your product or service can solve will continue to read the page. Finally, you can also appeal to a person's curiosity in your heading by using techniques such as numbers such as "The 5 Ways to" and teaser terms such as "The Secret to".

By using these techniques to create targeted, functional, and powerful headings, you'll find that not only will your search engine ranking rise, but so will the number of targeted visitors arriving at your doorstep.

Internet Marketing With Seo Tactics

2009-12-01T02:24:00.000-08:00

Hearing the acronym SEO is not new for most Internet marketers. In fact, it is one of the unwritten protocols that must be learned and kept in mind by every aspiring Internet marketer. Thus, if you are unfamiliar with SEO, you will experience difficulty in terms of achieving your Internet marketing business objectives.

Before discussing SEO to Internet marketing beginners, let us first tackle search engines. If you are familiar with Yahoo, Google, or MSN, these are some of the widely used search engines on the Internet. If you are looking for any information on the Internet, search engines will always be your first and probably your sole option. You will just type several words that are related to the information you are looking for on the search box, and when you click the "search button", you will be redirected to a page that contains listings of websites containing the words that you type on the search box.

Because of the popularity of search engines to Internet users, Internet marketers consider it as one of the primary tools in getting online buyers. Thus, it paved the way to the birth of SEO as an essential attribute on Internet marketing. The acronym stands for search engine optimization, which is the art of producing web pages that will have high rankings on related search engine results. It is accomplished through optimization of several sections or elements in the HTML coding of every web page. Search engines specifically interpret such sections, and the latter will rank the former according to its level of optimization.

There are various methods and opinions on how a certain webpage should be optimized. Such methods and opinions will heavily dependent on the type website you have, its contents, the purpose of its existence, and the existing competition. However, when speaking about general SEO, it heavily depends on the proper use of certain keywords and/or key phrases that are used to describe your website's content.

Probably you will wonder how these keywords affect the SEO performance of your Internet marketing website. When you search for needed information using several words, you will notice that such words are "highlighted" when search results are displayed. The words that you type on the search box serves as the "keywords" that is utilized by webmasters in optimizing their websites. Although it may not be of importance to an Internet user, but it is as good as "gold" for Internet marketers who want their site to be shown on the top pages of every related search engine result.

Keywords that are used in SEO have standard placements on a website. For instance, such keywords must appear on the title section of your webpage's source code. Moreover, it must appear on the META description section wherein the page is described in an accurate manner by repeating the selected keywords. The META section often contains the keywords that are used to describe your site's content and its product or service.

If you will carefully analyze the previous discussion, you will notice that the performance of the site's SEO heavily depends on the keywords that you are using. Thus, the main keywords or key phrases must appear on the first 2 paragraphs of the content of every page, and then scatter it throughout the rest of the page. In scattering your main keywords, make sure that it will be an integral part of the content itself. It must appear as if it is among the original content of the page.

In addition, the last paragraph of each page must be keyword-rich. One of the unwritten rules involving keyword placement is that the keywords density of your page must be between 5 to 15 percent. Although it is advised that you maximize the use of your keywords, avoid using it excessively. A content with keyword density above the standard will not help on the optimization of your website.

Another consideration in SEO performance of your site is the placement of relative back links, or hyperlinks directing to external sites. It is relatively important since search engine spiders navigate through links. In addition, the text of your page relating to external links may also contain keywords.

If you are one of the aspiring Internet marketers who want to take the challenge of earning on the Internet, do not ever forget the acronym that will lead you to the success of your Internet marketing career-SEO.

Link A Number One Search Engine Rank

2009-11-29T02:23:00.000-08:00

Linking your internet home business website to other similar sites is important because it helps in getting search engines find and index your website. Linking to different unique site will advance your web site page ranks and link popularity. Link popularity is a key tool used by search engine algorithms to rank and list website URLs.

What is the benefit of being indexed by search engines? If you can be found on the search engines under your keyword searches, and thus will get free traffic send to your site by the search engines. For your internet home business succeed, you will need a lot of traffic.

For you to be indexed by the search engines, and listed high on the list of search engine results displayed to surfers searching for specific keywords, there are certain rules you should follow. Listed below are the key common search engines blunders which you must avoid, and some key steps you must take to ensure success with your internet home business.

Do not submit your internet home business URL to search engines more than once in one month. If you submit your site to search engines more than one a month, this may be considered as spamming, and you can get your website penalized.

Do not try to trick search engines. For example, on your internet home business URL, do not repeat keyword phrases next the same keyword phrase in your metatags or page copy. This can be considered as spamming.

Do not have a home business website with duplicate content. Some internet home businesses that involve affiliate tend to have website with the same content. Have unique content on your website, and you must regularly add fresh content to your website. Having unique, fresh and useful information on your internet home business URL is the best way to get indexed and ranked high by search engines.

Link your site to high ranking sites that are similar to yours. You can approach owners of similar internet home business sites about having reciprocal links. With reciprocal linking, your get to put their main links on your site and they put your main link on their site. You can do this manually, or if you can afford it, you have purchase a tool that automates this, such as The Link Machine.

Creating one way links to your site is also very important and potentially more effective than reciprocal links. You can create one-way links to your site by submitting articles that have a link to your website or participate in forums. The more links you have pointing back to your website, the better. These links will be related to your keywords, so that means you will get some traffic that will be good for your internet home business.

Keep your site simple. Keep your pages on one or two levels of subdirectories. This makes it easy for search engine to reach all levels of your site.

Be patient! The process of establishing your internet presence, creating links back to your site and links with other similar sites takes time. Search engines do not index your site overnight. There are billions of other web pages that compete with yours. If you consistently follow the recommended strategies above, your efforts will soon start to pay off as you get index by search engines, and get some traffic send to your site, which will boost your internet home business.

Internet home businesses rely on a good and steady flow of traffic for you to make some sales and earn some profits. Follow the strategies outlined above, and your site will soon get indexed by the search engines.

How To Rank Number One In Google Perpetually - An Insight Secret Review/Reveal Of A Top Web Site

2009-11-22T02:23:00.000-08:00

I came across flash site which No. 1 perpetually. I am determine to find out the reasons behind it:

Initially, I found that:

1. It's not mere flash site. The flash site is not on the top page. Instead, the top page has only 2 buttons: view the flash presentation and go to the main site. With this, Google or other search engine will be able to crawl the main page, which is content rich and not overseeing the flash.

2. In the main page, it's full of magnetizing clicks: such as "Bookmark me", "Make me your home page" and "Tell a friend". This is good to get people to remember the site. This ar also good to market the site virally.

3. The main page have a "subscribe me" which able to send newsletter to users. This will be able to keep their subscriber in touch and inform them of any new items which is selling in the "store" page.

4. The main page has many testimonies from people who wrote in to tell how good the site was. This is very useful, as new users will be influenced by "social proof" that this is a great site!

5. The site sells many other products, such as screensaver, calendar, poster. . .etc

6. The site has the main poem dictated out which is content rich!

Well, all these look common as I have learnt these tricks from many SEO and how to make a good magnetizing website. However, are these the only secrets that I noticed? Actually, there were indeed the only secrets that I notice INITIALLY!

Did I miss out anything?. . . I reviewed the site again and WAIT... this time, I saw it!

I noticed that, wherever I clicked on this top flash site, the URL remains the same, I mean it will not show "main.html" or "god.html" or other html on the address bar. This mean, it's a frame and subform!

Hmmm...I smell something fishy now!

I click on the "view source" and the ultimate secret revealed!

What I saw was this is a REALLY CONTENT RICH site! (Go ahead, don't take my words...click on the "view source" and you will see what I mean. . .) You will bind to see many articles "embedded" within the main form, which is transparent to users, but, readable by search engineer and robot!

The author had skillfully, embedded many such articles in the main form, and make the main form size very small (0 or 1) and without frame and scroll bar. So to users, it looks like a normal 1 page html site that link call other html, but the fact is, it's a 1 page frame site with many God related articles embedded and calling many subforms!

Very smart and skillful indeed!

So, other then the magnetization of point 1 - 6 I mentioned above, the ultimate secret is point 7 which is not much people or web builder will normally do is: "embedding" large and massive content in the page, which is transparent to human eyes but friendly and readable by search engine!

What is Latent Semantic Indexing, and How Can It Bring You More Web Traffic

2009-11-18T02:22:00.000-08:00

Latent Semantic Indexing (or LSI) has become the most recent buzzword among web master communities. There is already a mystique about the term, yet so few seem to understand it's ramifications and the real benefit to any web site owner.

Back in April of 2003 Google purchased a company called Applied Semantics, whose products included software based on it's CIRCA technology. This technology understands, organizes, and extracts knowledge from websites in a way that imitates human thought. The result is more effective information retrieval.

In the beginning, this technology was used to make sure that Adsense ads were being correctly targeted to relevant websites. However, it was only a matter of time until the use of LSI technology was introduced to organic search.

The mathematics of Latent Semantic Indexing is quite complex. However, you don't have to understand the equations to benefit from them. If there is one single thought that distills the essence of Latent Semantic Indexing for the Webmaster it is this:

The more ways that you can say the same thing, the more you will appear to the search engines as an expert on your subject matter. This expertise will be rewarded with higher rankings and less fluctuation.

What does that mean? Think about any organization with which you have been associated in your life. Each organization has it's own glossary of terms, and in many cases, there is more than one way to express a concept.

This is synonymy; multiple terms with the same meaning. Google has given us a way to look into the way their algorithm "thinks" about related terms. It's called the tilde key and it looks like this "~" (to find it on the keyboard just hit Shift and press the key immediately left of the number 1).

If you go to Google and do a search for ~pet it will return your search term, along with words and phrases that it deems synonymous. You'll be able to tell what those words and phrases are because they are shown in bold.

In the example above, a search for the term ~pet will yield a bold return for things like 'animal,' 'pet dog,' 'cat, and so on.

The implications are important for web masters. The most important thing to remember about this is that more than ever before, you need to know your market. Plato said "first, let us define our terms." If you expect to perform well in the organic search results, you need to learn, and use the terms that your target market uses.

Develop your site around a theme, and use relevant, targeted synonyms to convey your message. If you do, you will begin to rank well for terms that are not even on your page.

As an example, today is October 9, 2006, in a search for ~pet the Animal Planet home page comes up number one in the search results. The word "pet" is not even on that page, yet it ranks first. Why is that? It is because, throughout their site, Animal Planet has used the expert verbiage of someone who's primary focus is animals of all kinds.

It is not certain whether Google is using Latent Semantic Indexing in their organic search algorithm yet. However, it is only a matter of time. Make sure you are ready when it happens.

Tips On How To Select Your Domain Name

2009-11-15T02:21:00.000-08:00

Changing your domain name once your site is well-established can turn out to be a very costly venture, so the solution is to select the correct domain name right from the get-go.

DOMAIN NAME REGISTRATION

Not too long ago I used to preach and practice that you should "Never register your domain name through your web hosting company however attractive the deal might appear" Why? Because in the past it was not uncommon for web hosts to react somewhat angrily to the idea of you transferring those ooooh so delicious annual registration fees to a competitor.

But times have changed, the web has matured, web hosting services have matured. Most recognize the fact that the big bucks come with providing quality service.

And what's more some very reputable web hosting companies provide some very attractive domain registration packages coupled with hosting.

So go ahead and take advantage of those cheap domain registration/web hosting packages just as long as the hosting company is well known and reputable.
If you ever do find yourself in a domain transfer battle you can contact the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Another thing to consider when registering your domain name is not to rely solely on your domain name register to ensure that the domain name you have in mind is available and does not infringe on someone else's trademark rights (unless you enjoy being sued). To be doubly sure your domain name has no trademark infringement issues, after conducting a search for its availability on your domain name register's website, you can also check at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) http://www.uspto.gov.

When registering your domain name it's a good idea to register it for more than one year. The reason being that, other than the usual discounts you get for multi-year registrations from most domain name registers, Google (and perhaps the other search engines) consider multi-year registered domains as less likely to be spam sites. Consequently, right off the bat your site will have a search engine advantage (at least with Google), such as a shorter evaluation period in the Google Sandbox.

A final note about domain name registration; there are plenty of domain name registration companies out there, all eager and equally willing to register your new name. Domain name registration prices range from as little as $10 a year up to $35 per year and beyond. Generally there is little point in opting for the more expensive registers because you more or less get the same service. In fact some of the cheaper domain name registration companies provide better quality service.

However whatever service you use, make sure that your domain name is registered in your name. Some less scrupulous domain registration services have been known to register new domains with their own information. You can verify that your domain is registered with your particulars at: http://www.internic.net/whois.html.

THE DOMAIN NAME GAME

So what kind of domain name do you want? Do you want to pick a domain name incorporated with a targeted keyword, or do you want to take the memorable-brand route that the likes of Google, Yahoo and Amazon (to name but a few) have done with astounding success. Well, if your website is going to be business related or involved in some form of commerce it makes sense to have a well-searched-for-keyword incorporated within the domain name. The majority of online businesses are still found through search engine queries. By and large though, a good rule of thumb is to incorporate the most searched for term (for your market) in your domain name.

The shorter your domain name the more memorable it's going to be. However you'll discover that most one-word/two-word domain names have been snatched up already. One alternative you've got is to hyphenate your targeted keyword with another word. The jury is still out about hyphens though, but most seo experts concur that hyphenating a string of words makes a long domain name more search engine friendly. The downside is that when it comes to word-of-mouth dissemination most folks won't bother including those pesky hyphens, with the resulting consequence that intended referrals to your domain could end up on your competitor's doorstep. So as you can see, the whole process of naming your domain is a fine balancing act.

CUTESY ARTSY DOMAIN NAMES

There's a budding artist in all of us waiting for just the right moment and place to show the world we are the new Leonardo da Vinci. Be that as it may, but naming your domain is not the place to express that inner artist. Avoid cutesy names interspersed with numbers in place of words (e.g., 4 instead of for), they'll only confuse potential customers and torment you with heaps of regret somewhere down the road. In fact the best rule of thumb is to avoid numbers in your domain name altogether. However, if on the other hand your domain functions merely as a cyber-platform to let an uncaring world know you exist, then by all means let loose!

Bottom line, your domain name is your online identity, so try to choose something that is memorable, fares well with the search engines, and also inspires confidence and respect.

TO DOT.COM OR NOT TO DOT.COM

These days there're more and more choices for domain name extensions. This is great news because it is getting increasingly difficult to find a good domain name ending in .com that runs under twenty letters (okay that might be a wee bit of an exaggeration but you get the point). However the drawback with using anything other than a .com extension is human nature. You see people are creatures of conditioning and habit, and given a choice of precisely similar domain names, (other than the extension) you can bet most of us will instinctively beeline for the domain name with the .com extension--Without question the .com extension is the most recognizable.

Also think twice before settling for a top level country code domain such as co.uk. Unless you are located in that region and ship primarily within the area, such a domain name could have a negative impact on your business. Think about it...a potential customer based in the U.S. or another part of the world is not going to relish the prospect of forking out a mini fortune for shipping and handling fees when they can easily find a more local competitor. In the same vein try not to regionalize your domain name (unless your business caters to a market found only within that region) because you'll probably lose potential customers who reside elsewhere.

On a final note, if you anticipate a lot of your traffic is going to come via word-of-mouth referral, you might consider registering similar domain names and redirecting to your main url (e.g. www.africasafarizone.com and www.africansafarizone.com) before cyber-squatters (people who register domain names in hopes of selling them for a profit) get wind of your growing success and beat you to it.

31 Ways To Promote Your Website

2009-11-11T02:20:00.000-08:00

ust creating a website is of very little use. It is extremely important to promote the website, to generate the maximum amount of traffic and the maximum benefit from it. In this article we'll discuss 31 ways to promote your website.

1.Search engines are important in promoting websites. This is why you need to have high rankings in search engines to get more visitors to your website.

2.Try to make the contents of your website keyword rich. This helps your website to get a high ranking in the search engines.

3.You can also promote your website with the help of inbound or back links. These links connect the visitor to sites that also prove to be useful to the visitor.

4. Add the most important keywords of your website in meta tags. Give a different color for your link text or make it bold or in italics to differentiate it from others.

5. People usually search for their information using keywords; so it is better to get as much keyword targeted traffic with the help of pay per click search engines.

6. Press releases provide a great form of promotion
for your website.

7. The most important rule to adopt for website promotion is to make your website appear on stationary, like letter heads, pens and invoices.

8. Get your website listed in as many directories as possible so that people looking for information sites through this directory are sure to come across your website.

9. If you have a business website, it proves to be beneficial to list it with relevant trade associations.

10. Offline advertising is as effective as online advertising. You could perhaps hold an event, where you have your web address displayed everywhere for people to see.

11. When meeting clients and prospective clients, try to implant your website into their thoughts whenever you hold conversations with them.

12. Promote your website by writing about the articles or services offered on the site so that the general public will be interested in your website.

13. Try offering something free to the first 100 people buying or using your product or services.

14. Offer a prize to the one who is slow and steady; the one making the 1,000th enquiry.

15. There are many queries placed in newsgroups that may relate to your product or service. You could answer these queries, and tell visitors that more information is available on your website.

16. Provide an opt-in mailing list on your website to generate repeat business amongst existing customers. Encourage your customers to sign up for newsletters, or any other promotional information about your website.

17. There are many reputed mailing lists on the internet. Compile an introductory message on your website, and send this mail to as many email addresses as possible with the help of this mailing list. You are bound to see some results!

18. Use referral marketing to promote your website. Here you refer your customers to a related website, who in turn do the same for you.

19. You will find many companies selling traffic; they charge a fee to get people to visit your website.

20. You could advertise your services in a trade show, and give information of your product or service at the trade show.

21. Place as many banner ads on the internet, informing surfers of your website.

22. Balloons are a great offline marketing technique to get more traffic to your website.

23. Avoid using large graphics on your website. Large graphics take a long time to download, which may discourage visitors from visiting your website.

24. Flash is rather attractive, but it is not advisable for all websites as they take a long time to download. Surfers are not that patient to wait for a website to download.

25. Create business cards with all of your contact information on them. People will visit your website upon seeing it on the card.

26. If you run a delivery van, you could consider adding your website address to the side of the van so that people can see your address, and learn more about your business.

27. If you are a company, consider printing your website on the company's uniform.

28. Creating a pamphlet about you and your service or product produces for interesting reading and information!

29. Distribute as many pamphlets and business cards to people in your neighborhood and in places where people frequent like the mall or church.

30. You could mention your website in some articles having content related to your product or service. This way your website will be promoted.

31. Make your website format and presentation good so that a visitor is sure to make a repeat visit, and provide referrals for others to use the website!

How To Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

2009-11-05T02:19:00.000-08:00

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you - the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your
cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this
sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.

What Can You Really Expect From Your Search Engine Optimization Efforts?

2009-11-03T02:18:00.000-08:00

Search engine optimization experts and SEO users are well aware of how competitive the search engine ranking world has become over the last few years. After all, the number of web pages that are being indexed by search engines every day has not only doubled or tripled, but has quadrupled itself over and over as the years go by.

Furthermore, a growing number of the webmaster population is becoming familiar enough with search engine optimization techniques to begin to pose a threat to those sites making massive SEO campaigns.

Not too long ago, the majority of webmasters were unaware of the concept of SEO, and, for that matter, hadn't even considered search engines as a part of their marketing strategy over which they had any realistic control.

Essentially, the only way to communicate with search engines that was understood at the time was placing keywords in the Meta tags of the webpage which had little to no real impact on the ranking when all was said and done. At that time, it too little to no effort to achieve very favorable search engine ranks in even the largest search engines. Even the more competitive areas were still within the realm of possibility for a new website.

Today, on the other hand, the opposite is true. Even when it comes to keywords and key phrases that nobody uses for searching can pose an obstacle for achieving a respectable search engine ranking unless you are extremely skilled with your SEO strategy.

Even then, search engine rankings that may have been achieved one day may only be there for a single day, replace the next day by someone who has done something slightly better. The problem becomes that much worse when it comes to businesses with new websites. New websites see very few results using search engine optimization strategies.

The older your website, the better its chances of seeing practical results from search engine optimization efforts. This is why it is important to consider your website a long term investment. The longer it's around, the better your chances of obtaining favorable search engine ranking.

At this point in the internet marketing industry, it is getting to the point that webmasters, website owners, and search engine optimization experts need to refocus their efforts on obtaining better targeted traffic that can be transformed into customers, instead of simply trying to grab at a great rank with any keyword at all. Unfortunately, most webmasters are still looking for short-term, instant results. This is something that today's search engines just aren't prepared to provide.

This is not to create the misunderstanding that search engine optimization has no value whatsoever. After all, achieving a #9 position is much more favorable than achieving the #57 spot. However, it simply means that those coveted top three spots should no longer be the single most important goal of the internet marketers who are using search engine optimization to help their results with search engines.

Instead, the focus of SEO efforts should be using the right keywords, instead of seeking the best space in the search results. It's time to see the big picture, instead of just the ranking that can be achieved for a twenty-four hour period, six months from now.

The trick is to make sure that the content in your website is of high quality. This means that it has interesting, usable information that is unique from everything else that is out there. It needs to be creative, practical, and well written.

This means that rewriting your competitor's material is out of the question, and simply copying content from public domain articles is completely useless. You need to think about what your website is really about, and come up with your own unique angle and thoughts that will be interesting and useful to your readers.

This is not at all easy, and may require the assistance of writing and web content professionals to get you started, but it should be considered a long-term investment that will be well worth your effort when you start to turn the traffic that you do have into a high percentage of new and returning customers.

Remember, everybody out there is trying to snatch up all of the "best" keywords and churning out fast content to get those phrases used the most. You need to make your site different by using great keywords, but placing them within exceptional content that will actually keep the visitors that you achieve.

How to Get Top Search Engine Rankings

2009-11-01T02:17:00.000-08:00

The methods used to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with optimizing your site. I am here to tell you - the time has come to face your website!

A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your
company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page.

If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign.

Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing.

Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.

Keywords And How To Use Them

2009-10-28T02:16:00.000-07:00

What are keywords and why are they so important in optimizing your website?

Keywords, basically, are the words or phrases that are most associated with the subject of your business. These are the terms that people will most likely use to search for information about the topic of your website.

For example, your website is dedicated to the general subject of "cat care". The keywords that are applicable for your business should be:

cat care
care cat
care of a cat
cat care clinic
cat care society
care of my cat
take care of my cat
take care of a cat
cat health care
to take care of a cat
how to take care of a cat
care for a cat
care of cat
care for cat
care of your cat
to care for a cat
how to care for a cat
taking care of a cat
cat dental care
persian cat care

There are more, most definitely, but these examples should give you a good idea on how to come up with the most effective keywords for your online business.

You could manually think of 1000s of applicable keywords, but such would be a brain buster. Instead, check out the tools found on the following website:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox

The features on this site will give you a lot of suggestions for possible keywords which you can use. Once you have selected your keywords, it's time to put them to good use. Here are the things that you should do with them:

Populate your website's content with the keywords. Try to insert 2 to 4 keywords per 100 words. This will give you a 2 to 4 percent density level, which many experts believe is the optimal amount of keywords to attract the attention of the search engine spiders without compromising the logical integrity of your content.

Remember, just because you use the keywords in your content, doesn't mean that the readability of your content should be sacrificed. Always keep in mind that you have to keep your content informative.

Insert the keywords in your meta tags. Meta tags are HTML codes that help the search engine spiders to identify your web pages. Simply include the following tag in your source code:

Please Note: In each of the HTML instances below, to create PROPER html tags you will need to replace [ ] characters with HTML tags.

[META name="keywords" content="(place your keywords here with each term separated by a comma)"]

Meta tags should also be present for your title, with the use of the tag [title], as well as your headlines, with the use of the tag [h1], [h2], [h3] and so on and so forth.

Here's an example of a title tag for your source code:
[title]An Introduction To Cat Care[title]

And here's an example of a headline tags:
[h1]Why Should You Care For Your Cat?[h1]

[body](the appropriate part of your content goes here)[body]

[h2]How To Start Caring or Your Cat[h2]

[body](the appropriate part of your content goes here)[body]

Use your keywords in your ALT tags. ALT tags is the alternative text that appears every time the mouse cursor passes over an image. It is advisable that you have a working knowledge of HTML for this, though most HTML editors like Microsoft Front Page and Macromedia Dreamweaver have features that will make this easier.

It is important to note how search engine spiders read your website. Once they have pinpointed your page, courtesy of the meta tags in your source code, the search engine spiders will read your content from the uppermost left part of the page going to the extreme right, and back left in the next line, much like how a web surfer will view your site.

It is therefore essential that the uppermost left portion of your webpage contains your keywords. This can be done by including the said keywords in your title.

Your first paragraph is critical. Make sure to include your keywords in the very first sentence, and also try to mention your keywords at least twice in the rest of the paragraph. Succeeding paragraphs need only mention your keywords at least once.

Divide your content into paragraphs, and introduce a shift in subtopic with a sub-headline. The sub-headline should also include your keywords.

Lastly, about the bottom-most right portion of a web page, many people are actually having a hard time figuring out how to include the keywords in this section. Here's a simple trick. The bottom-most right portion of a page is usually reserved for your copyright notice. In our running example of a business involved with cat care, where "cat care" are the primary keywords, you could use the copyright format below:

© 2009 cat care

That should do it, right?

Keyword research and website optimization are only a small part of getting high search engine rankings. I will cover other strategies in coming articles.

"Know Thy Enemy" and Then Thrash Them at Their Own Game

2009-10-26T02:16:00.000-07:00

Much as I would love to say that your success solely depends on how you build your business, I cannot. You see, much like in real life, you will need to compete to attain success. In Internet marketing, you will have to compete against the greatest and most innovative competition anywhere online.

The fact that Internet Marketing is so competitive is the reason for the massive growth in niche marketing where the competition is less fierce. In such a competitive market and even in the smaller markets you need to adopt a particular strategy to make sure you stand a good chance of getting your message seen at all by interested prospects.

The trick? You must beat your competition at their own game, of course. And the only way to do that is to "know thy enemy".

There are a number of ways to do this and resources to make your job a lot easier. Time is the most valuable commodity you have and if there is a way to save time by investing a little cash then I suggest you do this.

Run a search of your more popular keywords in any search engine. The results will reveal the number of websites targeting your market. Each and everyone of them is your competition. The ones at the top 10 in the first page of the results should be your targets. Your goal is to topple them from their position.

And you WILL be able to accomplish this by first knowing what they're doing right.

Try to visit their website and observe the way of how they do things. How are their keywords positioned? How are their pages designed? How is their content laid out? How is their information presented?

At the top of your browser click "view" then "source" this will show you the inner html workings of the page you are on. Have a look at the alt tags in the page, are they laden with keyword phrases?

What keywords are your competitors targeting in the meta tags?

One of the most important things you need to know about your competition is which, and how many websites are linking to them. I use Brad Callen's SEO Elite to find out this info.

With this info in hand your task then would be to get the same linkbacks and more. It is unlikely that the top rankings in your determined keyword phrase are all linking to the same websites. So take the top 10, find out all their link partners and beat their link popularity by swapping links with a greater number.

Especially target those link partners with high Google ranking. The aforementioned tool will give you all the required info. Google rankings of 0 PR should be ignored.

The golden rule in beating your competition is by copying what works for them and improving on the same.

Retain what works and discard what doesn't.

I hope you found this article helpful.

Number of Keywords on a Page

2009-10-23T02:15:00.000-07:00

One of the most accepted ways to catch the eye of a search engine spider is to optimize the number of keywords on a Web page. By keywords, we mean the core subject described on the Web page, or a particular word or phrase a person wants the search engine to find in cyberspace.

For the best SEO results, the keywords must be repeated at least three to four times within a page of text. There are no defined limits to the number of times the keywords can be used, but ideally they must not be used too often or too infrequently. For keyword phrases (combinations of several keywords), you must take care that the keyword phrases are repeated several times throughout the text, with each of word in the phrase appearing in the exact order every time. Additionally, each word in the keyword phrase must be used often and independently elsewhere in the text.

For example, if the keyword phrase is "SEO optimization," the whole phrase should be used a number of times in the text body, and the individual words "SEO" and "optimization" should appear spread throughout the text independently a number of times. As a rule of thumb, if the key phrase "SEO optimization" is used 10 times, the individual word "SEO" can be used 7 times and "optimization" can appear 5 times. This is not a set pattern, but it represents the general picture of keyword/key phrase distribution.

Another way to describe the number of keywords on a page is the term "keyword density." In fact, this is how Web designers explain the arrangement of keywords on a Web page. Keyword density denotes the frequency of times a keyword appears in the given text. It is usually expressed in percentages. For example, a keyword appearing 6 times on a page of 100 words has a keyword density of 6 percent.

Paying attention to keyword density is important because if the keyword density is too low, search engines pay scant attention to the page. Likewise, if a keyword density that is too high could invite trouble if the search engines regard it as spam and activate the spam filter for that particular Web page. If the latter occurs, Google will penalize the Web page and demote the Web site's ranking. Very simply, maintaining keyword density is like a tightrope walk, with very little room for error. It is hit or miss at its very best!

For optimal search engine response, keyword density on a particular Web page must ideally hit between 5 and 7 percent. In the case of keyword phrases, the total density of the individual words in the phrase must also fall within these limits. Anything more than 7 percent could be counterproductive, as it is detrimental to your SEO success and also spoils the readability of the page's content.

Another aspect of keyword use that could ratchet up your success with search engine response is the number of keywords used intelligently at the start of the page or in the headings. Search engines generally place more weight on keyword density at the upper portion of a Web page. Also, keywords used in the title tag, those in strong/bold font, and keywords or key phrases featuring links to other pages could influence search results phenomenally.

To conclude, keywords are vital for improving the rankings of any Web page. But you must use caution to use them often enough to positively affect the search results, but not so often that the spiders consider them spam. Once Google or other search engines penalize a Web page for its contents or ungentlemanly behavior, it becomes very difficult to regain the lost ground

The Art of Keyword Optimization To Earn Money Online

2009-10-17T02:22:00.000-07:00

Can you believe that you can earn money online by choosing the correct words you put in articles, newsletters and on your website? What's even more hard to believe is that this is nothing new to internet marketing, yet its one of the things people spend very little time perfecting. Keyword optimization can have a great affect on the amount of traffic you have, which ultimately leads to how much opportunity you have to earn money online.

People believe that if they make up a few keywords and optimize a few pages here and there, they will be able to climb quickly on the search engines. WRONG!! If you want to truly use keyword optimization to get to the top of search engines you have to research and know what you're doing. So where do you start?

The first step to keyword optimization is obviously figuring out what keywords you will target. Go through your website and each individual page to see what the common theme is. As you scroll through your site write down words that stick out. Remember, if you want to earn money online you have to think like the consumer. When selecting your keywords, try and think about what customers are typing into the search engines to find your product.

When you make your list, it should be a fairly extensive list to give you options. This way you can go back and narrow your list down to exactly what you want. After you have your list you want to decide on what to use for your keyword optimization. To have the best shot at success it is wise to go with less common phrases.

The reason for this is because targeting phrases such as "gambling" or "sports" are extremely competitive and difficult to get to the top of the search engine. If you make the keyword more specific such as "gambling at home" or "gambling online," you have a better opportunity of getting to the top.

After you have come up with a promising list, you want to research for stats. Visit Overture's keyword suggestion tool and type in the keywords you have come up with. This tool will tell you how many times each keyword has been searched on Overture over the last month to give you a general idea of how popular your keywords are. Another website that is perhaps more accurate is WordTracker, but it does inquire a fee to use.

The steps listed above should help you create and modify a keyword optimization list that is efficient. The whole goal in this entire process is generating more traffic through the search engines, which will in turn earn money online for your business. It is a simple process that can make a world of a difference in your traffic volume and revenue.

What Is Long Tail Marketing

2009-10-17T02:15:00.000-07:00

Long Tail Marketing is a marketing technique used to increase sales. It involves search engine marketing, selling products online, and realizing there are thousands of keywords that can be used when advertising on the internet to help you make more sales.

Basically any keyword being searched online should be content you create to get as many visitors to your site as possible. People do search differently so you must consider all keywords that relate to your site and have web pages built for those keywords.

In keyword research it is easy to spot and grow niches. Low search counts on Google, Yahoo, and MSN can mean business for you when there is no competition. Use Wordtracker to find out what these less used search engine searches can do for you. So what if there are only 10 searches a month for an item. If you happen to sell that item and no one else does, you want that business and stand an excellent chance of getting it.

Many lesser searched keyword phrases are very specific in how they are being searched and can be a very qualified visitor. The more words that are being typed in the search box the longer the tail of that search. These type of searches indicate that your visitor knows exactly what they are looking for and you will certainly want to provide it for them.

The long tail of search phrases will build traffic. You can not count on 80% of your traffic coming from 20% of your top used keywords based on readings at Google. Because competition for highly used words is so big, long tail marketing makes perfect sense.

If you are an Adsense publisher, imagine how many more relative ads you could display on all of those new low competition keyword pages. It is the total searches from all of those less used words that make using them worthwhile.

Create your content with a broader base of keywords to see the effect. Watch your site stats and be amazed at all of the new search terms you'll be found with. Many will tell you more content or more products would be easy to market.

With search engines today it is all about content and keywords, and Google flat out says so in their webmaster guidelines. Long tail marketing is real easy with search engines. All you have to do is know the words people are searching for. Then build web pages for all of those words to maximize your sites potential in traffic and sales.

Think Keyphrases Not Keywords!

2009-10-15T02:14:00.000-07:00

Why think keyphrases? Keywords are just not specific enough anymore to help you rank well in the search engines due to the large number of websites competing for traffic. So do not waste your time optimizing your pages using keywords only. By using specific keyphrases where there is less competition you have a much better chance to rank well in the search engines and to improve the quality of your
websites traffic.

Figuring out the best keyphrases for your website will determine whether you actually get any visitors! If you use the wrong keyphrases, then your site will not have a high page ranking in the search engines, so how will you get any visitors?

Every page of your website needs to be optimized to the best of your ability. To do this, you need to think like your target audience. What would someone search for if they were interested in what your website has to offer? It is important to come up with keyphrases that relate to the page you are optimizing.

One tip is to do a search using keyphrases that you want to target and view the source code of the top websites to see the keywords that they have in their meta tags. It is a must to only use keyphrases that relate to your page only! To view the source code click the View pull down menu at the top of your web browser then select Source.

The most important meta tag is the Title Tag. Most search engines and directories use the title tag of your page for their search results and they also consider the keywords that are found in your title tag to be very important for optimization.

The correct place for your title tag is between the heading tags within the HTML that makes up your web page. Your title tag should be between 50 to 70 characters, including spaces. It may be a good idea to place your keyphrases at the beginning of the title tag when possible to avoid having them cut off.

You should include one to two of your most important keyphrases in the title tag, but do not just list your keywords. Your title should be readable and contain your keyphrases. This is not an easy task since your title length is limited, but it is very important. So spend some time on developing your title. Be careful not to just list your keywords in your title because you may get banned from the search engines,
since it is considered spamming.

Just to add some more pressure, your title needs to be enticing. Even if you get the top listing in a search engine, it will not do any good unless someone clicks on it and visits your website.

The next tag is usually the description tag and it should also contain your main keyphrases. You should include the keyphrases that you used in your title tag.

The description tag should get right to the point of describing your website and should not just list your keywords. No selling in your description tag and keep the length to about 200 characters.

Did you know that the search engines read the copy on your page to figure out what you are offering? What do you think they are looking for? Maybe keyphrases?

The search engines like to see a lot of copy on your web page. The copy text should contain your keyphrases, but should be informative, helpful content. Why would someone visit your website if you just listed your keyphrases? Make sure that you use the keyphrases that you put in your title and description meta tags.

Remember, before you get to this point in promoting your website, you should have developed useful content that will make visitors stay on your website and want to come back for more! You can always add additional content by including links to articles, tips, and other resources related to your topic.

It is very important to optimize your page text since this could possibly improve your search engine listing and attract other websites to link to you!

Here is a quick list of things not to do for keyphrases:

1. When developing your keyphrases try not to use the same word more then three times in the meta keyword tag.

2. Only list your keyphrases in your keywords meta tag, meaning do not have them in your site content, like keyphrase1, keyphrase2, etc.

3. Search engines can detect whether you use the same color text as your background color to keyword stuff your web page.

4. Make sure you do not have more then one meta tag listed. For example, using more then one title tag is easy to do without knowing it.

5. Always submit just one version of a web page. Do not duplicate a page of your site and submit it under a different title and file name.

6. Do not submit your web page more then once within 24 hours.

7. Use only keyphrases in your meta tags that relate to the content of your website.

With the above information you can use keyphrases to get top listings in the search engines and bring targeted traffic to your website.

And remember, think keyphrases not keywords!

How to Begin Search Engine Opmization in 15 Minutes

2009-10-09T02:12:00.000-07:00

Are you ready to hear something unbelievable? It's not that hard to get website traffic from search engines. All you need to do is follow a certain guidelines from major search engines like Google and follow some of my tips here.

Here are some of my search engine optimization tips for you:

1) Don't pay a company to submit your website to search engines using an automated procedure because this technique often fails; search engines often ignore these submissions. In fact: Website Submission does not work anymore. You should submit your site to these search engines and directories yourself, or pay someone to manually submit your site. You can also look into search engine advertising (using advertising programs like Google AdWord). Yes it costs money but it ensures placement of your business name and website link in a visible position on the search engine page.

2) To optimize your search engine ranking (you want to be in the top 10 and preferably the top five), you must understand how your customers think and want. What does he/she know about your product or service? What keywords will he/she be most likely to type into a search engine? Get to know your current and potential customers so you can answer these questions.

3) Learn more about search engine optimization, even if you plan to work with a web designer. You can find free resources online or buy a book so you can dig into the methodology, find many useful tips about keyword searches and design your keyword references and tags to satisfy the most common words people use to search for your products.

4) Don't think your work is done after you manually submitted your site to search engines. The fact is, you have just begun! Website success takes time and effort. Even if you are recognized by a search engine, and your ranking is high one day or during a given week, it may slip the following week because of new sites or because your competition changes its site to get a better ranking. You must continually monitor your rankings. That's one of the keys to better search engine rankings

5) When you are looking at your website and deciding where to use keywords, keep in mind that you can use keywords in graphics ALT tag, but they must be in captions or in the file title, and not embedded under a graphic as a false lead. Of course, don't bother creating a picture or graphic that contains a word (animated or static). The search engines can't index words that appear inside pictures.

That's it! Here are some of my tips to better search engine optimization. Read this article again, apply them and you will see your website rocket through the roof!

Why A Number 7 Listing Gets More Clicks Than A Paid Top Of The Page Ad

2009-10-07T02:13:00.000-07:00

We all know statistics can say anything the author wants so it's always good to be a little careful when reading results. After reading about Googles Golden Triangle I did decide to undergo further research just to ensure the figures I was reading were somewhat accurate. With a little variation you can take any stats on this post as accurate to the very best of my knowledge.

Googles Golden Triangle - What is this? Basically it's a web page heat map. It was compiled from a survey done with 400 people to identify the habits of people when visiting a web page. It appears that we are all so similar in our online habits that just 8 people will give an accurate survey result so 400 should be a fair indicator. Even infra red cameras were used to track the eye movement of the testers.

Type in Googles Golden Triangle to see the page heat map. In essence the top right hand side of a web page is the hot zone. Be aware that the results work for all search engines, not just Google.

If you are within the top 7 naturally returned results you are going to get good traffic. This is because searchers are now conditioned to knowing where the paid ads are and they are usually looking, in the first instance at least, for information to make a buying decision rather than a straight sales page.

63% of top natural listing will get a click.

Natural search results will return 250% more clicks than Paid Search Terms.

Natural search visitors will convert around 30% more than paid search visitors.

Surfers Hit The Natural Search Results First Every Single Time

3, 4, 5 or 6 term phrases are much easier to optimize for. It's called a "long tail" search term and it's much easier to rank for. You will not get as much traffic but it is highly qualified traffic so definitely worth having.

Latent Semantic Indexing. Sounds a real mouthful but this LSI is actually very simple. It's all to do with page keyword density and related words / terms to your main keywords or keyphrases.

Google is one smart bunny and keeps getting smarter all the time. Keyword stuffing is a thing of the past and search engines are wise to such techniques anyway. Nowadays SE's are looking for a much more natural flow to the page and it seems that an acceptable keyword density is around 2 - 3% but an important factor is also associated words and phrases.

For example, if our keyphrase was camping holidays in France then it is worth doing some research on terms associated with this phrase and use them in the body text so the SE can associate them with your search term. Briefly some words would be tents, caravans, ferries, camping site facilities and so on.

Bad Example: Camping Holidays In France is our specialty. If you are looking for Camping Holidays In France call us now for more information where one of our expert representatives will be only to pleased to discuss Camping Holidays In France with you.

The Search engine will pick up on the keyphrase but it has no other related information to help it decide the value and relevance of your page. Always keep in mind that Google is obsessive over the quality of the information it serves up to it's clients.

To maintain a quality service then issues like the latest craze in churning out thousands of "unique" articles from a single source or the general poor quality of Adsense pages has to be addressed as a matter of priority otherwise Google will just become a has been. No one will continue to use a service if the results dished up are erroneous or just plain rubbish.

This is the basis of LSI.

Hope it has been of some interest and use to you.

The Orion Algorithm and Your SEO Efforts

2009-10-05T02:12:00.000-07:00

Every so often there is a new development that is so enormous that it changes the way the entire SEO-using world works with their websites for optimization and proper promotional structuring. Most recently was the purchasing of the rights to the Orion Algorithm by Google. Equally important is that Yahoo! and MSN have both taken an interest in the Orion Algorithm and vied for its ownership.

The Orion Algorithm - for those of you who aren't working for a search engine - is something that has actually been kept quite secret. Its specifics are not known, but what is understood is that it is a new technology for the performance of search engines. It allows search results to be immediately displayed as expanded text extracts so that users will know the relevant information without having to actually check the site to make sure that it is what they are looking for. The option to visit the website is, however, still quite available if the user chooses to opt for it.

To web designers, search engine optimizers, and other website owners, it means that there will likely be another shift in the way that websites are ranked and indexed. Furthermore, the traffic to the website will be much more specific to that site's target market, as fewer people will land there only to find that it is not what they are looking for.

For users in general, this will mean that the results that are displayed using Google searches will be much more similar to those found at Ask. It will allow users to judge the site's content compared to what they're looking for without having to click the link. It will make searching much simpler and more practical for users who will be able to review everything all in one place. Then, when they come upon the site or sites that interest them, they may still click the link and find out what the site is all about in more depth.

This means that the Orion Algorithm is essentially an entirely new way of evaluating websites with regards to the search terms that are used for them. Instead of ranking the website based on the search phrase being used by the user, the Orion Algorithm may also dig a bit deeper into the phrase, searching also for related phrases. This concept, while not entirely new for directories, is the first of its kind for the standard search engines that are typically used on the internet. This will mean that search engine optimizers will need to change their overall strategy so that they will now appeal to search engines in different ways.

Among the techniques that may be utilized in searching with other relevant terms with the Orion Algorithm are the following. Their relevancy and weight has not been determined, as the Orion Algorithm is being held in the deepest secrecy. However, knowing what we do about Orion, it is logical to believe the following:

1 Directories are the least likely to be considered using relevant phrases. Though they may be utilized for supplementary keyword sources, they will not likely be considered as results in themselves. The drawback presented by this approach is that there will therefore not be as many cross-referenced popular keywords as there are currently due to the results brought up by directories with a search engine query.

2 Thesaurus are relatively unlikely to be used for discovering related phrases since the technique rarely works for related keyword phrases that are used with searches. It may be possible for single word searches, but as soon as multiple words are used, or even when acronyms are employed, it is much more difficult to find proper terms using thesauruses.

3 Search behavior is also unlikely to be used in order to document relevancy for future searches. The concept is sound, as it would allow search behavior patterns to be collected and then predicted. However, this would not allow for decent results until the search engines have had enough time to compile adequate results and then assess the behaviors that have been recorded.

We may never know precisely what goes into the Orion Algorithm, but search engine optimizers "as always" will continue testing new results for creating sites that are most likely to achieve superior search engine ranking results.

How To Beat The Google Sandbox

2009-10-03T02:11:00.000-07:00

The Google Sandbox is an algorithmic filter designed by Google and implemented around March 2004 with the purpose of weeding out spam sites by placing all new websites under quarantine for a period of assessment.

How Does The Google Sandbox Affect Your New Site?

Although the Google sandbox was designed with the primary aim of targeting spam sites, in reality it affects all new websites. The general consensus in SEO (search engine optimization) circles is that the Google sandbox algorithm functions to prevent new sites from blasting their way to the top of Google (using whatever means possible) and in effect overtaking quality websites that have been around for years.

WHICH SITES GET SANDBOXED?

All new sites are subjected to a period of quarantine.

HOW LONG WILL YOUR SITE REMAIN IN THE GOOGLE SANDBOX?

As far as Google is concerned not all new sites are born equal. Certain factors will determine the length of your website's duration in the Google sandbox. If the keywords your website is targeting are highly competitive then your website will be quarantined for longer. If you think about it, this approach makes sense. Most spam sites have one goal--to make as much money as quickly as possible. So accordingly the average spam site will target big-profit keywords which naturally tend to be more competitive.

Following this thinking, if your website focuses on keywords and markets that are not very competitive, your stay in the Google sandbox will be considerably shorter. Once again, this explains why niche market sites tend to ascend the SERPs (search engine results pages) much faster.

WHAT FEATURES DO SITES IN THE GOOGLE SANDBOX EXHIBIT?

Sandboxed websites tend to be characteristic of the following:

1. Do not appear in the Google Index

2. Have Google page rank without being in Google's index;

3. Have good homepage page rank (4 or 5) but no PR for inner pages;

4. Have good Google page rank (PR) but rank poorly for primary keywords; and

5. Have a good number of inbound links yet rank poorly for primary targeted keywords.

THINGS TO DO WHILE YOUR SITE IS IN THE GOOGLE SANDBOX
Like most other situations in life, here you have a number of choices. You can sulk, fret, stamp your feet and moan and groan that the those tricky Google folk have hijacked your site--or you can get into the swing of things and utilize your time effectively:

1. Go ahead and add quality content to your fledgling site.

2. Work on increasing the number of inbound links (quality links not just any old link).

3. Tweak and improve the SEO quality of your site.

4. Write articles.

The list of things to do while your site is sandboxed is literally limitless. The purpose of doing these things is that by the time you site is released from the Google sandbox, it will rank much better for those competitive keywords you're targeting and will have better SERP (search engine rank pages) listings than your competitor's site that is equally new.

Because, instead of taking the effective action you did (while your site was under quarantine) your competitors spent the entire time fumbling around in the dark wondering just why the heck they couldn't their site indexed by Google, let alone get any PR!

A word of caution though--Do not spend all your time trying to outwit Google. There are plenty of other methods to draw traffic to your site as well as other search engines to woo. Just implement good SEO techniques and with time they will pay off.

HOW TO SHORTEN THE TIME YOUR SITE IS IN THE GOOGLE SANDBOX

Is it possible to cut short the time your site spends in the Google Sandbox? Most SEO experts concede that on average any new site is going to spend at least 3 months in the sandbox.

However the good news is that there're ways around this:

A. Register your domain name for more than one year (spam sites are rarely registered for longer than a year).

B. Upload your site for live viewing as soon as possible even if it isn't ready for prime time (content-wise). Tweak the content later on or on-the-fly. The logic here is that the search engine spiders will crawl your site sooner. What is more, as you perfect and change the content of your site it will register positively to the search engines as constantly changing content (think blog).

C. Maintain good-practice SEO-linking campaigns. By doing this you will be killing two birds with the same stone.

Here let me explain:
THE NEW LINKS AGING FILTER

Other than the sandbox, Google has another filter in place aimed at reducing the effect of newly acquired links until a certain period of time has elapsed. The logic here is that your new inbound links will not be allotted full value immediately in an effort to counter the habit of buying links and other link purchasing schemes that people like you and I participate in to improve our search engine rankings.

This makes sense otherwise anybody with the cash could quickly acquire quite a stable of high page rank links and in effect outrank far older sites on the SERPs. One other thing about link acquisition--When you get links make sure you retain those links even though they aren't apparently registering with the search engines to begin with. What is actually happening (as I just mentioned above) is that the search engines (notably Google) is sequestering your newly acquired links to ensure they are genuine long-term links, not links you acquired for say, one month or so, so as to get quickly indexed.

How To Be Certain Your Site is Ready to Handle Substantial Growth

2009-10-01T02:11:00.000-07:00

It's funny how quickly a website that was originally supposed to be a tiny web presence can quickly turn into web weed that starts growing out of control. Naturally, having a very large and well-known website is a very desirable thing for any webmaster seeking success. However, not every website is ready to handle sudden and substantial growth. There are many different elements that can pose problems along the way when a site becomes quite large.

To begin with, the hosting service that you chose for your original website may not be able to handle a much larger site, creating traffic problems because of bandwidth issues. Running into unexpected bandwidth problems can become quite expensive, so it is important to anticipate such growth in traffic before it becomes an issue. The primary problem faced in these cases is either that the web host cuts off the site after it has reached its limit for a given month, or, more commonly, the web host will apply expensive overage charges for exceeding the maximum limit.

Either of these cases is very expensive. The overage charges are more directly expensive because they are often quite substantial. When the site is shut down for the remainder of the month, on the other hand, the expenses are indirect, but can be much more costly. You risk losing the popularity of the site that was just taking off; you risk blocking any prospective sales; you risk losing any possible return on investment for your marketing efforts; and you risk losing any favorable search engine ranking that you may have achieved. These issues can be enough to sink a website just as it was beginning to reach the big time.

Therefore, if you find that your site is becoming dramatically more popular, or even before that, when you're looking around for web hosts, make sure that you're thinking ahead about your bandwidth. Have a look a the bandwidth policies and data transfer policies. This will allow you to be billed according to the amount that the bandwidth has actually been exceeded, and you will not need to make a pre-payment. Don't forget to read the fine print in case of any hidden traps you might not yet have been aware of.

Another issue faced by many webmasters when growing their sites is that they build their sites to be so vast that they have too many pages to update. Large sites can be extremely challenging to manage. This is especially the case when many of the pages need to be updated and changed on a regular basis. It doesn't take much at all for these activities to become overwhelming.

Furthermore, when you believe that you'll be adding a large number of new pages on a regular basis, you will need to have a good quality web design program or system in place. Sure, for a small site, it doesn't take too long to individually insert things such as the logo, navigation menu, and standard "look" of the site onto each page. However, when you're working with a much larger number of pages, you'll need to have something in place that will replicate the look into any new page, instead of having to redo every page every time. This will also help when you change something that will need to be common across your entire site. You will be able to make a change that will become universal.

When you have this large site on its way to being designed and built, you will also need to make sure that your web host is reliable enough to deal with a website of the magnitude you'll be working with. When you have a very small site that doesn't have a huge number of visitors, a budget web host makes sense to keep costs low. However, when you need a larger site, you may also need a more reliable web host to make sure that it is always up and running when you need it to be. This will be very important to the impression that your company makes, and to make sure that you aren't missing out on any potential opportunities to make new customers.

Basically, as with everything, growing your website needs careful planning. As long as you prepare for the changes you may be making in the future, you will not run into any problems that may be harmful to the success of your website.

Successful Search Engine Optimization Needs Effort Not Quick Fixes

2009-09-29T02:10:00.000-07:00

It would be nice if we could master search engine optimization and procure high rankings simply by editing Meta tags but thats just not going to happen. The reason is because in order to achieve SEO success a combined effort of different longterm methods is required. There is no one quick fix that will solve the problem.

Nevertheless despite the fact that there are no easy solutions people still insist on using various techniques to try and find them. For instance it is possible to quickly generate high rankings from words that no internet users will search for. However even if you rank number one if no one uses the words your business will flop.

In addition the following are some more quick fixes that many people try and fail at.

Changing or Adding Meta Tags Search engines are limited when it comes to deciding what sites should be shown in the result list of a keyword search. Meta keyword tags assist search engines and help them select the pages with the most relevancy that pertain to the keyword of a Web surfer.

Of course there is a difference between a public search engine like Yahoo and an internal search engine. A public search engine contains virtually every webpage they are aware of. Therefore they cant trust all the Meta tags they find as not all website have been designed to provide the internet users with relevant information on the keyword they are searching for. Some website have been set up for the sole purpose of advertising and generating traffic. Thus the goal of a public search engine is to weed out these irrelevant websites and help searchers find exactly what they are looking for.

An internal search engine, on the other hand consists of only a small amount of web pages or products. Therefore it is less difficult for the search engine to produce the most relevant pages. Moreover the Meta tags that are present on the internal search engine on your site are trustworthy because your goal is to help your visitors find what they are looking for.

When all is said and done by adding or changing the Meta tags on your website doesnt quickly or slowly fix anything. The bottom line is this method will have not effect on the result of your SEO traffic.

Increasing Web Content Increasing web content can boost your SEO success but this is something that takes plenty of time. Sure you can quickly increase the content by writing useless puff pieces using auto generating software or ripping off content from other sites but none of these methods are actually going to improve your business profits in the long run.

The only web content that is going to secure your success is information that is relevant and valuable. It takes time and experience to generate this type of information so dont try to cheat your way to the top with wasted words or words that are not your own. Stay true to your business and keep your integrity.

Link Popularity One of the most popular quick fix methods out there are link schemes. Anyone who does business on the internet knows how valuable links are. Links are what help to increase web traffic and increase website visibility. That being said you will want to avoid becoming a link farm because if your goal is to only get links to increase your SEO rankings youre not going to take your business anywhere.

As tempting as it might sound you need to ignore link popularity. Your focus should be on your target market, and how you can reach them to let them know your website exists. Thus you need to market your website which means you may have to dish out a little money to publicize your website in local newspapers magazine or even in a television ad. The more your site is recognized the better chance it has of ending up in the right niche markets to attract the right attention.

If you want to be successful with search engine optimization you need to commit yourself to achieving long term results. This does take patience but is necessary if you want to come out on top. The following tips can help bring you closer to your high ranking goal

Tip 1 Conduct thorough research for keyword phrases use effective keyword programs such as Keyword Discovery or WordTracker. The paid programs of their software will help you generate the best keyword phrases for your business.

Tip 2 Valuable web content Dont create a website that is overrun by graphics. SEO spiders will crawl right over these graphics and pass you by. Your website needs a reasonable amount of web content that is pumped full of valuable information. It needs to be clear and concise and should also convey your website message which needs to include the keywords youve selected to rank high for.

Tip 3 Relevancy Ensure that all your link anchor text and title tags are relevant to one another, as well as to the web content that is presented on your site.

Tip 4 Patience is a virtue It will take almost a year or even longer before you begin to see any traffic from the natural results of search engines. Try not to let this get you down. Take this time to continue to improve your site and give the competition a run for their money. Eventually your persistence patience and positive thinking will pay off.

Always remember it doesnt matter how well you market your website you are not going to achieve overnight success. Just like most things in life taking the easy way out when it comes to marketing your business online isnt going to create you long lasting success. If you want an impressive future that provides you with plenty of reward, you need to spend the time and money and do things right the first time.

Anchor Text: Will it Make Your Website Traffic Sink or Swim?

2009-09-25T02:09:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of talk about the merits of "anchor text," the technique of using keyword text linked to your website URL. For example, you could link "bass fishing" to your bassfishing website.

You can use anchor text on your website to link to other pages within your site, or you can use it with your links on other websites. This technique can be quite effective.

One well-known example of the effectiveness of anchor text is "failure" -- just go to Google and type in "failure," and you will get the website of George W. Bush's biography!

How did this happen?

Well, many of Bush's detractors put the text "failure" on their websites and linked it to Bush's biography. Over time, and with enough anchor text on many, many sites linked to Bush's biography, now Bush's biography is listed number one in Google for the keyword "failure."

This teaches us an important lesson. If you want to get listed number one in the search engines for a keyword, then pick a keyword you want to be listed for, and then put a link to your website behind that text keyword on hundreds or thousands of websites.

But, hey, not so fast. Bush's "failure" story has gone its rounds and a lot of people know about it. In fact, so many people have used this ploy that Google now has a name for it: "anchor text spamming."

It's like so many things on the Internet -- what worked for a while doesn't work as well any longer. In fact, now Google gets suspicious when they see the same anchor text linking to the same website over and over. And so, it's better if you pick a half dozen keywords and then vary them as anchor text to your website link.

(However, it is interesting that Google has not de-indexed the sites using the anchor text of "failure" to Bush's biography ... but that's politics.)

What's also effective is to use keywords of 3-5 words for your anchor text. You not only reduce the competition by using more keywords, but you also narrow your traffic to just the people who are interested in your website.

Let's face it, using a keyword like "fish" as anchor text to your website probably won't get you the most qualified traffic. After all, "fish" has a lot of meanings -- you can even attract people just wanting learn how to play the card game Fish.

But if you use keywords like "bass fishing tackle," then you will get qualified traffic to your site -- people who actually do bass fishing and want to know how to do it better. Even better is "bass fishing tackle lures." With that, your visitors can really zero in on your website.

Using 3-5 word anchor text keywords will always do better than one or two words. Also, vary the text, like "fish for bass tackle" or "best lake bass fishing lures" -- use your imagination. The more words and the more variations, the better your chances to get your pages picked up in the search engine results pages (SERPs). You really don't want to compete with all of the anchor text for "bass fishing."

For best results, use 3-5 keywords in your anchor text and vary it from link to link ...

Using Landing Pages to Turn Visitors into Buyers

2009-09-21T02:09:00.000-07:00

When a prospective client uses the internet to search for a product, he or she usually types a keyword or a phrase into a search engine and uses the results to find what he or she desires. If your ad is among those listings, you therefore have a much better shot at having prospective clients visit your website to find out what information you have, and what you are offering. However, just because they have found your site, doesn’t mean that he or she will buy from you. It depends on if you have taken the right steps to persuade them to shop with you.

To convince visitors to buy something, one of the most effective steps that you can take is to create a landing page which is designed specifically to encourage them to click the “buy now” button that you have made available. Landing pages have been found, today more than ever before, to be among the most effective sell tactics on websites.

Even if you don’t manage to sell anything, your landing page can also encourage visitors to sign up for a free newsletter that will be compelling and frequently remind them of your company, and what your company is selling. This way, when they do want to make the purchase, your company will be the natural option for shopping.

In fact landing pages are considered to be among the most vital stages that, when missed, can lead to the largest percentage of lost potential sales. After all, one of the most important part of your marketing strategy is to send targeted traffic directly to the part of your site where they can buy. Therefore, landing pages are the direct solution to that need.

To make your landing page most effective, there are a few important steps that you can take:

1. Don’t send your visitors to your homepage. This may sound strange, since your homepage is really the hub for the rest of the pages on your website. However, though it may seem like the natural place to start visiting your website, it has not been designed to create the sense of urgency to “act now” and make the purchase. It has only been designed to move the visitor around the rest of the website. Without immediately creating that sense of urgency, you immediately lose a good deal of the potential that you had to start with.

2. Build a sense of trust. This should start as soon as possible on your landing page. Though the main purpose of the landing page is to encourage a purchase from your visitor, you need to show them that they are not being rash by acting right away. By building trust, you give them a sense of security with the decision to make the purchase. This can come in the form of a guarantee or warranty. This will allow them to make the decision right away, knowing that if they have made the wrong choice, there is an “out”, and they aren’t stuck with their mistake.

3. Ask for a purchase. Be direct with your visitors and use your landing page to ask flat out for the purchase. However, this doesn’t mean that you need to make a hard sell that pushes visitors away. Instead, use the right techniques, that primarily include these three:

•Use strong action words
•Minimize navigational options
•Place all of your strategic selling information at eye level, before the place where the visitor will need to scroll down to see it.

4.Remember the basics of making a sale. These same basics of selling have been known for over a hundred years and haven’t really changed much. They are tried and true, and work even with the internet to apply them. They include the understanding of why people choose to buy from you. These are:

•That it is a logical decision
•That they trust your company
•That they have a desire or a need for your product.

With these steps, and the right landing page, you’ll have everything you need to convince your visitors to not only use your site for its information and content, but to make their purchase, and to do it right away. You’ll convince visitors that the time is now for buying your product, and that they can feel safe in making a decision right away.

What you Need to Know about Search Engine Optimization and Spam

2009-09-17T02:08:00.000-07:00

There is a fine line between proper search engine optimization, and what a search engine will consider to be spam. As we all know, not all search engine optimization methods are ethical. Search engines, such as Google, are making every effort to try to differentiate between ethical internet marketers and those who are simply taking the “easy” way out with spam.

The definition of spam, however, has been something of a debatable topic for many search engine optimization experts. The reason that everybody is working so hard to define it is because when it comes time to search engine optimize, there is a grey area between what is spam, and what is not. What is ethical marketing, and what is not. For a word that is so commonly utilized, spam is a very difficult thing to pinpoint and around which to place boundaries. An internet marketer would not want to inadvertently have their site penalized after all of the time and effort they have put toward making the site as search engine optimized as possible.

In theory, the difference is that a “non-spam” website that is truly meant for content, selling a product or service, and is optimized so that its content – which has value to the reader – is most attractive among search engines. On the other hand, a “spam” website is created for marketing purposes only. It has no real informational value and its content is worthless except for its attempts to achieve a search engine ranking.

Such spam sites can include those that have pages copied directly from other websites that are not of public domain. They might also include pages that are simply lists of keywords, instead of articles that happen to use the keywords among their information. Another kind of spam site is one that appears to either be blank or have text or images on it, but it also has hidden text in the background that has keywords repeated over and over, or simply in lists. This is done by making the text color and the background color the same color so that it is not visible to the reader.

However, some would argue that creating a site, such as one with keywords hidden in the background, is not unethical at all. The reason they argue for its validity is that it does not try to fool the search engine in any way, and it is unobtrusive to the viewer. Computers can see the text in plain sight, it is only the human eye that does not detect it.

However, by doing this, it reduces the chances of sites that are based on legitimate information and keywording techniques. These have been carefully created to include the right words, without taking away from the information and appearance of the site. It means that the sites for whom the keywords are truly relevant have a lower chance at achieving proper search engine ranking.

To prevent such efforts, search engines have employed such techniques as penalizing web sites and web pages that include information that has been copied directly from other sites. They also penalize pages and sites that have the same word repeated too many times in its content. There are other rules that are utilized as well, but they differ from search engine to search engine.

Penalization from a search engine can mean anything from assigning a very low rank, to blocking it from being indexed altogether. Naturally, when you are a legitimate site, you will want to avoid such punishment at all costs. Therefore, when you are performing your search engine optimization, it is important that you take care not to break the “spam” rules of the search engines. This includes one very important technique: when in doubt, err to the side of safety. It’s much better to achieve rank number two instead of number one, when you risk being kicked out altogether.

It is not difficult to search engine optimize legitimately. Simply create your own original copy, and write naturally, refraining from repeating your keywords so many times that things look a little bit “fishy”. The same thing goes for repeating the same website under a number of different domain names. Just keep yourself unique and natural, and all will work out in your favor with the search engines.

What to Keep in Mind About Keywords

2009-09-15T02:08:00.000-07:00

When building a new website, it's really not enough to just whip up a site and let it be, hoping for hoards of traffic to arrive and purchase your products and services. In order to get indexed by the search engines, and in order for people to find our websites, we must generate good keywords. Once we create a list of keywords that people might use to find our sites, there are a few more important steps to consider.

It's not just about generating a list of keywords and using those keywords on your site. We have to find the right keywords, and by that, I mean keywords that are closely related to your site's content. If you own a website about how to make a good residual income online, then use specific keywords such as "residual income" that people are likely to search. Once you've found keywords like this that are likely to be searched though, you have to do your research, and look for terms that are not the most highly searched and popular, but that people might still search. You can do this using one of the many keyword search tools available on the net today. This will tell you how popular or not your search term is. If you choose keywords say above 2000 searches per month and less than 30000 searches per month, you are probably choosing a decent keyword that can get you the results you seek. Make sure you don't just choose keywords once and leave them alone forever. Every month or so, check your keywords and their popularity, and make modifications as required.

Next, you want to include those keywords in various parts of your website so that the search engines can find them when they spider your site. The first place to consider using your keywords is right in the title tag headline of your site. Do this for all of your website pages, not just the main page. You can also place your keywords in your header, alt, anchor tags, bold and italic tags, body, URLs, file names, and meta tags. Be careful not to plug up your site with these keywords though, or you will get penalized by the search engines and get the opposite result of what you want. It's more important to have solid, quality content on your site than it is to pack your site with keywords. It's good to repeat your keywords, but not too much. You only have to use your keywords once in each tag, and especially near the top of your pages. You can actually use the words repeatedly with the body text, as long as you're not over-doing it, and the words are highly relevant.

One way that you can get ahead of your competitors and the similar keywords they use for their sites is by using two or three word phrases rather than single keywords that are searched more often. Look at your competitor's source code when you view their sites and notice what keyword phrases they are using or not using, and what tags they have that contain or do not contain important keywords. If their sites are lacking in some way, you can gain an edge on them by doing what they have not. You should also keep tabs on your own website statistics by finding out what keywords your website visitors are using to find your site. That way you will know which keywords generate the most hits and which you should be using more or less of. If you follow these tips and ensure your site has quality content on all of its pages, you will have competitors trying to get ahead of you!

Quality Keyword Analysis

2009-09-13T02:14:00.000-07:00

Extracting good keywords can mean the difference between mediocre to poor results or Real Success to your online business. Keywords are what drive the search engines and are the Key to having people find your online business.

How are we supposed to find Great keywords?

What is a great keyword? (550 Words In Just The Article)

Well, Depends on your use of keywords but I am assuming that you want your site optimized for the search engines. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Network (MSN); provide 90 to 95 % of the traffic to websites.

Commercial website owners want traffic to their sites for different reasons. Some want to sell a product or service right there on the spot. Others want to Pre-sell a product and then send the visitors to a sales page. Some website owners want traffic so the people will click on advertisements on their site and this will generate income for the site owner.

So, keywords are critical to success for the site owners. Keywords can be one word or a string of words, e.g. "books" and "book binding methods" are two keywords. One is a single word long the other has multiple words to it and represents the way most people type in search terms to find information.

Few people would type "books" into a search engine; the result would be overwhelming and very broad.

But someone might type in "book binding methods" because that could represent a real interest of theirs.

So, specific keywords are usually more valuable than broad keywords since the subject is more targeted to a particular niche audience.

Now, here is where we start to get to the basics of quality keyword analysis.

If you were to optimize your site using high traffic keywords you would probably be buried back in the search results. The high traffic keywords are very hard to get decent ranking with.

To get your site in the first 10 to 20 search results in the search engines you need to use less competitive keywords for your site topic.

Take "health insurance" as an example. That keyword probably costs advertisers big bucks to use and to have a website that ranks in the 1 to 20 range at the search engines is costly. Lots of people search using that keyword and the competition to get that traffic is extremely fierce.

So smaller websites, without deep pockets want to find keywords that are not as competitive but still draw a decent amount of traffic.

With "health insurance" you might want to try "health insurance for 40 year olds". That is very specific and is probably not worth the big boys going after it so you could stand a good chance of ranking highly for that keyword!

I like to have a list of quality, high dollar, high traffic keywords to use on my websites and in my articles. My website has Google Adsense ads that return a good income when people click on the ads. Google will pay me, as a website publisher, a portion of the revenue of the ad if someone clicks an ad on my site.

I don't worry about competition for the high traffic keywords because I drive traffic to my sites by submitting articles to article directories and not from search engine optimization.

Domain Names - The Good and The Bad

2009-09-12T02:07:00.000-07:00

Working on improving your rank within the different search engines - especially Google - can feel like a very complicated puzzle sometimes. This maze can be extremely time consuming; especially when you just complete one effort and then find out that they've once again changed the rules on you - rules that you weren't even sure of to begin with!

It is very well known that when you try to better the rank you've achieved with search engines, the best techniques that you can use are:

Acquiring quality inbound links
Acquiring any links to your site at all, including reciprocal links
Continually adding new, relevant, and fresh information to your site
Using a good density and placement of the right keywords Creating a website that is interesting and relevant enough that visitors who arrive spend time there.

However, what is not so well known is a major point that is missing from this list. Domain names are beginning to become extremely important with Google. It isn't the domain name itself - that is, the words in the domain - nor how long it is, but how long you've had it. Google is now valuing sites that have been registered for longer, and that prove their intention to stick around for a long time.

Google is starting to give lower priority to sites that have been registered for a year or less, since they may simply be spammers who are looking for a fast dollar and then disappear.

On the other hand, for sites registered for five years or more, Google considers them serious websites or businesses that intend to exist for a good long while.

Therefore, one of the strategies important to gaining a strong ranking is to pay a little bit more money for your domain name registration to register for a few extra years, so that Google can tell that you intend to stick around for a long time. This will give your site Google value and your ranking will go up.

The problem that many webmasters are finding with this is that they either don't have the budget for the additional years of registration, or they don't want to register a site for a long time when they haven't proven to themselves that the venture will be successful. They don't want to pay for an additional four or more years of registration for a project that may not get off the ground.

The decision that therefore needs to be made is how important Google ranking will be to your website. Will it be the primary part of your internet marketing effort? Will you be concentrating a good deal of your time gathering reciprocal and one-way links? Will you be working hard on search engine optimizing (SEO), possibly hiring a professional, so that your site contains the right keywords the right number of times and in the right places?

If you'll already be putting a lot of time, effort, and possibly money into your Google and search engine ranking, then you may find that registering your site's domain name is really a minor investment to get you started in the right direction.

It's all a matter of balance, and making sure that you do the search engine optimizing strategy completely, and not cheap out before you can even give yourself the chance to truly shine. In fact, simply shelling out a little bit more to reserve your domain name may be the easiest part of your search engine optimizing strategy. As long as you do your homework in advance and find an affordable, or even cheap domain name registry business, then you likely won't have to pay much more than fifty dollars to get going.

As you can see, if search engine optimizing is important to your website, it's vital that you don't miss the most commonly overlooked part of SEO and reserve your website for a good length of time, to prove to Google that you're serious about building a quality, successful web presence. You'll show that you indeed deserve to be among the top ranking websites out there. With that done, you'll be ready to move to the next step of your SEO and watch the traffic start rolling in.

8 Steps To Better Search Engine Rankings

2009-09-09T02:06:00.000-07:00

Have you created a web site and submitted it to search engines only to find that no matter what you do, your site still does not feature in the rankings. Are you interested in better search engine rankings? Here are 8 things you can do to improve your rankings and these need to be done before you even submit your site to be indexed.

1. Web site Content:

Web site Content is one of the most important factors that will decide the rankings for you. The site pages should provide valuable information on specific subjects rather than providing directory of all free articles found on the web. When a search engine is used to find information, generic terms are rarely used. Rather search engines are used to find specific terms or phrases that describe the product or service people are searching for. One of the important things that your website should have is the niche keywords sprinkled in to the content thus making your pages more relevant to the search engines.

If niche keywords are located in a web page that is carefully constructed to highlight keywords known to produce traffic, the chances that your site will appear in a search result for a very specific search improves. It's also important to understand that the search engines cannot be tricked by flooding the engines with multiple versions of the same page, repeating the same term over and over - these tactics will only make sure your web site stays out of search engines reach.

2. Link / Web site popularity:

This is one of the most important factors that you should consider for achieving good rankings. Most of the search engines today treat link popularity as one of the factors that determine your ranks in the search engine results. The number of websites that link to your website determine your relevancy for a search term. The link popularity or the incoming links does not necessarily mean that you should be submitting your web site all possible FFA link sites / directories or even classified ad directories.

The best way to get links to your web site would be to type in the search terms that you are targeting in your favorite search engines. You should visit the sites returned by your search engine and look carefully for adding links or exchanging links. Most of the web sites today provide an link exchange option. using Google toolbar to see the page rank for these web sites will be helpful since exchanging links with web sites with Page Rank 5 and above is definitely going to improve your chances of getting your site indexed.

The next important things that should be considered when optimizing your web site are the Off-page and the on-page elements. some of the on page elements are Title Tag, META Tags, Heading, ALT Tag and highlighting of the text using BOLD tag. The Link tag i.e. the A Tag is considered as an important off page element.

3. Meta Tags:

Meta-Tags are the HTML tags that will be used to describe the web page. You need to put the important keywords for your web page as well as the brief description of your web page in these tags. Though these tags are not directly visible to the users, they serve an important purpose of guiding the search engines through your page. Although the importance of META TAGS has reduced significantly today, they still help the search engines to decide on the relevancy of your page with the search keyword.

The META Keywords should contain important keywords and phrases you are targeting for your web site. They should be consistent with the HTML Body Text and Page Title. You must make sure you are not stuffing the META tag with keywords which would annoy the search engines. Ideally the META keyword tag should contain 100-150 characters. Being specific and accurate is the mantra to success with keywords.

The META Description tag will contain a brief description about your web site, services provided by you. The description you put in the META description tag should be relevant to the content on the page where this tag is located. i.e. You should not be talking about your product in these tags when the page contains some article on unrelated topic. The description you provide for your page has to convince the person that you are providing exactly what want. How would you feel to visit a page with stuffed keywords but no relevancy to the content.

4. TITLE Tags:

Ideally the title tags should contain 50-80 characters with your important keywords embedded in them and more importantly should be relevant to the content in the page. if multiple keywords are to be used in the Title tags they can be separated using a | (Pipe), though it must be seen that keywords are not stuffed in the Title Tag. Moreover the keywords in the title tags should be readable and should describe the content of the page.

5. Heading Tags:

The Heading tags are given more weightage than the ordinary text. The higher the H tag the more weightage it carries. You need to make use of the Heading tags to highlight the important keywords in the paragraph headers. These keywords should be used to describe the contents of the paragraphs on your page. this will ensure that you are not stuffing the page with keywords but they are a part of the flow on the page.

6. Bold text

The important keywords in your page should be put in the bold tags. Normally the bold text has more weightage than ordinary text. Even Though the bold tags are considered to be less important than the Heading tags, they are still important to be ignored. Make sure to enclose the search term in bold tags when it appears on the page.

7.Alt text

The Alt tags are normally used by the browsers if they are unable to load the images. Some of the users might have disabled downloading graphics on their browsers, or if the images are too heavy to download for the users internet connection. Having your important keywords to describe the images will help you get the important keywords on the page, As much as possible try to include the search term in the alt text of all images on the page. Beware, naming all your images like spacers, irrelevant images with the keywords might be a shortcut to get yourself banned with the search engines.

8. Off-page elements:

Link text - This is considered as an important factor in good rankings. The link text might have been placed on your own sites or other web sites linking your site. Either way, it is important. Ideally the link text should contain an important keyword describing the target page. Make sure you do not use identical link text for every link. The text links will have even more weightage if the text around them is related with the target page's topic and search keywords.

If the website is optimized for the above points, it definitely will help you get a better search engine rankings.

What Alex Ratings Mean For Your Site

2009-09-07T02:05:00.000-07:00

Alexa is an online tool used to rank website traffic. The relationship between Alexa rankings and how popular a website is however, is not simple or obvious. They consider website ranking, links, traffic, and many other criteria known only to the most experienced Alexa users.

It can be mysterious optimizing a site for Alexa. One, it appears outgoing links to important, heavily traffic websites, matters. Relevant links are helpful to site visitors. Search engines want to know if a site is worth going to. If it is, they are happy to index it in a higher spot. This is a general rule of thumb that you should keep in mind at all times when performing SEO operations.

The simple difference between a site with moderate search results and a site with high search results is that the site with the higher results is generally more user friendly. Alexa Ratings and other rating systems try to emulate how a visitor will see your site. Once they've determined the worth of your site to a visitor they index it accordingly. This is why it is so important to have relevant links. If you are
linking to sites that your users would find interesting, Alexa will enjoy it.

By targeting sites that are similar to yours, but not exactly the same, you'll get relevant links that
Alexa will like. The best sites to link to are with content that complements your own. For example, if your site is dedicated to rock and roll and you link to a guitar sales web site, you'll probably get traffic flow back and forth. One way of ensuring relevant information is to link to yourself from other sites that you own: why try to hunt down other webmasters if you have 20 or 30 websites of your own you can use? Traffic flow is the biggest factor, however, as most of what Alexa does is traffic-based.

Alexa will also assign a site a ranking number.
The higher the ranking number is, the better traffic you are receiving. Many search results utilize Alexa Rankings in indexing their results, therefore, if you have a high Alexa Rating not only are you already getting a good deal of traffic, you will begin to accumulate even more traffic.

You can view a site's Alexa rating by going to Alexa's website. Use the Alexa toolbar and enter
the site information. For example, you might be considering whether you should exchange links with a site. If the site you're considering has no traffic then a link exchange won't be worth your time and it may even have an adverse effect on your Google Pagerank which is at least as important as your Alexa Rating.

Using the Alexa ranking system allows you to compare the traffic of your site or other sites with the
traffic of the web as a whole. Number 1 is the top rank, so the larger the ranking number, the lower
the traffic is likely to be. Let's say that your site's rank at Alexa is something like 1,578,459.
No matter how professional the website looks, or how high the Google PageRank is, your website just
doesn't have much traffic - in fact, Alexa knows of 1,578,458 websites that have more traffic than you do.

It is, however, important to keep in mind that a high Google PageRank will almost certainly increase your traffic. If you have a high Google PageRank and a low Alexa Rating, your site is probably new to the internet. It will take your visitors some time to find the site via Google and the links from other sites. Generally, the Alexa Rating is the second rating that SEO managers should worry about.

The Alexa Rating is very useful in analyzing a comparison between your site and others, but you must
also keep in mind that because Alexa ranks sites based on visits by users who utilize their toolbar,
these ratings can be inflated or under-stated.

How to Create Your Own Link Campaign

2009-09-03T02:04:00.000-07:00

There are many different reasons out there fore creating a link campaign; after all, it can benefit you in so many different internet marketing strategies. In fact, links - especially one way links, but all links do count - are among the most determining factors for your rank among search engine spiders and indexers.

Since links are one of the vital components to the algorithm used by Google and the other big search engines, the creation of links for your website should be a major part of the efforts that you put forward.

The first step to accomplishing this is to understand that there are different kinds of links, all with their own values, strategies, and uses. While all links do have their importance, some create better results than others. By understanding them, you'll be able to ensure the right kind of link campaign is working in your favor.

• Reciprocal links - these types of links occur when two sites exchange links so that each one has a link to the other's site.
• One-way links - also known as inbound or in-bound links, these occur when a site links to another's without receiving a link in return.

One of the most common strategies for links is reciprocal linking. When done correctly, however, this link strategy can be extremely time consuming. It has to do with searching throughout the internet for sites that are relevant to your own website's cause, and then contacting their webmasters to request an exchange of links.

This communication has to be a personalized e-mail to each and every one of the webmasters, not just a spam-style form letter. Naturally, they will all have the same elements to them, but they all need to be geared directly toward the site in question, or no webmaster will even consider it.

An example of a successful reciprocal link request email can be as follows:

Dear Mr. Doe, webmaster of gwidgetsRus.com,

As I searched through quality sites with topics relevant to my own for a link exchange, I came across your Gwidgets R Us website. I am writing to request an exchange of links between your site and my own. Below is my site's information. Please feel welcome to have a look at what we are all about before making your decision.

Backlinks Equal Free Traffic

2009-09-01T02:04:00.000-07:00

As an Internet Marketer you want to gather as many links as you can to your website so that it appears to be an authority on the subject for the search engines. This kind of traffic is reasoned by many to be "free" traffic. It's not similar to pay per click (PPC) or other kinds of traffic where you are paying for people to visit your website. Anyone that finds you through a search engine is really a free visitor! And if they purchase from you, then that means they are free money too!

Obtaining a high ranking in this field is calculated by many to be a specialist art, with the search engines elite trying to keep one step ahead of the search engine optimization gurus. With the continual impermanence in this technology it is very difficult to keep up to date with them and to keep your site optimized and ranking high.

This is why backlinks indeed work out to be one of the most productive search engine optimization techniques on the market. They are cheap, quick to generate, and long lasting. They are also not likely to ever be entirely penalised by the search engines. Yes, certain types of links or links to certain sites may depreciate from your search engine ranking, but quality backlinks will always be better for your website and your business.

A backlink is for all practical purposes a link from another website to your own. Here we are talking about one way links, i.e. they link to your site, but you do not reciprocate. This supports more value in the eyes of the search engine and entitles you to much more.

There are a lot of diverse ways to get backlinks to your website, including:

Articles - submit articles to the article directory and the resource box will accommodate a link to your website - a free backlink!

Directory entries - every niche will have at least several hundred directories of websites that are pertinent to that niche. Get yourself listed in all of these, and you have a ton of free backlinks!

Three way link exchange - unlike conventional reciprocal link exchanges where two sites point to each other, this is a somewhat more cunning way, which is meant to trick the search engines. It does mean one of the link partners needs two websites though. Website A links to Website B which links to Website C. Person A owns Websites A and C and Person B owns Website B. To the search engines, these appear as one way links (at the moment! There is gossip of the search engines catching on to this).

Forums - posting in forums is yet another mode of getting your link seen. If you engage in the forum discussion then usually you can have a link to your website in your signature file. Remember though that you must add value and not just blatantly promote your website or post to get your signature file shown as this will result in ill feeling towards you and eventual blacklisting or exclusion.

Blogs - putting comments on blogs is another way to get backlinks. However, be aware that if you are not adding value with your comment it may well be considered spam and then deleted and blacklisted. So don't just post "great blog", writing something that is useful and becoming.

Backlinks are surprisingly easy for you to obtain with a small amount of work. If you don't want to do the work yourself then you can very easily hire someone who will do it on your behalf, though make sure they will be ethical about it!

With backlinks you can increase your search engine rankings and get yourself free traffic, which means free money when they buy your product!

Search Engine Site Submission Tips

2009-08-29T02:03:00.000-07:00

Submitting your site for the search engines to find and index is a necessary and big step for any webmaster and site owner. The question is, Are you going to submit it the right way or the wrong way?
To do it right, you need to know a few things about search engine optimization before you take it anywhere near a search engine.

How can you know if your site is ready to submit? First, make sure:
-Your keywords are in your title tag
-Your keywords are in your description
-Your keywords are in your content smoothly and naturally

Make sure you're site is tightly focused on only one or two keywords. You should also check for broken links, as these can cause big problems with search engines' spiders.

Once you've submitted your site, be patient. It may tke weeks before your site is indexed.

The following are "Rules of the Submission Road:"

1. Submit your site only once. Despite the hype, you should never resubmit your site unless it gets dropped entirely. This doesn't apply to new pages, however. If you have created a few hundred pages in
the last month or so and you don't think that they will be indexed quickly enough via links to them it is a good idea to submit them manually rather than waiting for your site to be indexed again. If you are using a Google Site map, simply adding them to this document will get them indexed pretty quickly.

2. Do the sumission right the first time. Be thorough, especially to directories. Take the time to
research and find the most appropriate category for your site. If your site would fit into multiple
categories find out what the policy is on multiple submissions. Some directories want you to submit to
every relevant category, others want no more than one submission or they reject all submissions. Some
want every page, others want your index page and nothing more.

3. Be brief in your site description. Get right to the point in two short sentences. Most directories
will actually restrict the number of characters that you can use. If they don't it is still a good idea
to try to wrap it up within twenty-five to thirty words. This is one of the largest differences between
directory listings and search engine listings. In the directory you only get a short line to attract
visitors; this is static for every visitor.

4. Be as accurate in your site description. Don't try to trick people into visiting your site, as it'll only backfire. Most directories are actually monitored by a team of editors. These editors will visit your link and red flag you if you are trying to deceive visitors or if you are trying to cheat in any other way. When it comes to directory listings, there are even less avenues for cheaters than there are in search engine listings as directories are checked out by hand.

5. Make sure that all your information is relevant. Make it appealing to humans as well as dense with keywords. Directories don't care about your key words very much. If your site isn't attractive to human beings it will be listed poorly. When human beings edit, human beings rank, and human beings get what they want.

6. Be patient. Let the search engines take their time.

7. Don't submit any more than your homepage. The crawlers are quite capable of following your links
and indexing your whole site from just your homepage's URL.

Finally, submit yoursite to the powerful DMOZ site Directory. It is a very large, powerful, all encompassing web directory. The key to being listed is to submit your site once and correctly. It can take up to a year to get DMOZ to list your site. USe the following guide for follow up with them.

1. Submit your site.

2. Write a follow-up email to the category's editor, explaining that you've been waiting and would like to know your site's status.

3. Email the next category editor up, in case there's a problem with your category's editor.

4. Seek assistance at the Open Directory Project's public forum.

5. Email DMOZ senior staff seeking help. This is pretty much the last resort.

Submissions can be time consuming at first, but you'll quickly get it down to a science. If you work
hard on your SEO before you submit your site you'll get to the top more quickly.

Think Young For a Solid Long-Term Business Plan

2009-08-27T02:02:00.000-07:00

Internet promotion has undergone quite a few changes over the last five years, with many more on their way in the coming years. One good way to develop your long-term online business plan is to keep an eye on the trends among young people today. When you think about it, the high school students of today will be your target market in 5-10 years. As their search habits change, so will the market share held by the search engines. This will require internet marketers to come up with new methods of site promotion in order to keep up with the changing market.

These tech-savvy youths approach the Internet differently because they have grown up using it as a common household appliance, just like the television or the phone. They spend time socializing online through chat rooms, IMs, message boards, and Myspace and are likely to have developed attachments to their online communities. A teen will often pose his or her question to their particular peer group instead of looking through generic results on the search engines. Forums are especially useful for obtaining very detailed and up to date answers to a specific problem.

Similarly, Wikipedia-type sites are becoming trusted resources among young people. The definition of a wikipedia (from Wikipedia.org, of course) is "is an international Web-based free-content encyclopedia. It exists as a wiki, a website that allows visitors to edit its content". The public editing process gives the wikis a communal feel that both appeals to young people and also serves to improve the quality of information provided.

Just as my generation laughed at our parents' inability to program a VCR, this new generation is befuddling many of us with its rapidly developing and changing terminology. For example, only a couple of years ago, only tech geeks and lonely high schoolers were likely to have a blog. Now, even former Dodgers manager Tommy LaSorda is peddling his baseball blog in radio ads. Now there's a sure sign that blogging has become part of the mainstream culture.

It's not enough anymore just to have a blog on your site. You also need to understand how to use tags and social bookmarking sites on that blog or you will miss out on a huge amount of visitors. The most active bloggers are found hanging around at sites like Furl, Reddit, del.icio.us, and Backflip, not Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

These social bookmarking sites are by far the greatest threat to the search engines' market share. The basic concept behind social bookmarking is that real people vote for webpages they have actually seen and like enough to recommend, instead of a search engine ranking pages based on its own secret algorithm. Anyone can register an account on these sites and share "bookmarks" to their favorite sites. Most of these sites allow the submitter to also include several keyword tags and a short description.

Another rising challenge to the search engines is the mobile web. Cell phones have become the Swiss Army knife of technology. It is now possible to make phone calls, shoot video clips, watch television, surf the Web, IM, and play MP3s, all on one convenient device that fits in your pocket.

It is still too early to tell what effect these newer, more versatile phones will have on computer sales and search engine numbers. Many phone providers come with a mobile version of Google, Yahoo! or MSN, so there will be some overlap there.

As these developing technologies become more common, the market share held by search engines will decrease significantly. A solid long-term plan is crucial for webmasters who wish to sustain their business as market conditions shift.

Using RSS Feeds To Increase Your Site Traffic

2009-08-23T02:02:00.000-07:00

Millions of dollars and multiple hours are spent daily to increase traffic to websites. The demand for increases in traffic and SEO optimaizing solutions is so great it generates a multi billion dollar industry. People will go to any ethical and un ethical length to get ranked higher in the search engines.

But how can samll business people like you and me afford this high cost traffic? With RSS feeds
to our websites. You can increase your traffic by about 20% right now by just adding RSS feeds to your site.

This particular method of boosting traffic is not a
scam. And, it's ethical. It is a genuine method of increasing traffic via a future internet standard. This is the reason it works so well; it's the ground floor of a new technology which will revolutionize the internet and the way that traffic is distributed.

What is RSS? Basically, it's a standard format for sharing your content instantly with users and other websites. People can quickly get access to "teasers" for your latest newsletters, articles, blogs, content and more, and click through to see the full version. This method of distributing your information is very helpful because it basically generates dynamic newsletters without spamming and without causing your visitor any grief at all. In fact, many users find RSS to be their preferred way to hear about updates as RSS is so fast, user-friendly and, most importantly dynamic.

RSS feeds are often used by news sites or blogs. The content changes often enough to make it worth while for people to read just as often. By using highly targeted RSS feeds, you can improve your site's
web content without having to write it on your own - if someone offers you an RSS feed of their site, you can add it to your site easily. This provides you with a good content base which will keep visitors coming back.

The more information that people associate your site with the more important they consider your site.
The more important they consider your site, the more important search engines will consider your site.
Providing RSS yourself will get lots of people to link to you and so potentially improve your search
engine rankings.

Why?

1. RSS feeds can provide good, relevant content for your website - there are plenty of RSS publishers
with themed content for you to choose from. These highly-targeted feeds will often contain your
keywords, and so increase the keyword relevancy of your website. This helps even more than you may
think as the key words will be within link or
"anchor" tags. Search engines value anchor tags almost as much (if not more than) header tags (h1-h6).

2. RSS feeds can provide new, fresh content. When new content is added to them, the old content drops off, making sure that your website's content doesn't go stale. Most of your visitors will not visit your site if they find that there is nothing new between the first and second time that they visit it. If you want to keep your visitors where they belong, you have to have a good selection of content that is updated on a regular basis.

3. RSS feeds can get search engines to crawl your site more frequently - daily in some cases. This helps your site to rank higher in the search engines, and gives you an advantage over your competition. Your RSS feed can do your SEO work for you.

RSS feeds can also be great for getting your newsletter, articles, or blog onto other people's sites and that's very powerful.

Meta Tag Myths For Beginning Webmasters

2009-08-19T01:58:00.000-07:00

Most beginning webmasters make a handful of critical mistakes when optimizing their websites for search engine optimization. One of the biggest mistakes they make is utilizing meta tags incorrectly. Here are the nine biggest mistakes to avoid when utilizing meta tags for your website.

1. Add every meta tag that you can.
Use the old adagewhen applying meta tags, KISS or "keep it simple, stupid." Don't add tags unless you know what you're doing. Don't make up your own tag names because no-one's paying any attention to them. Most of these tags are skipped over by most search engines today. The only crucial tags are the description tag and the keywords tag which are both utilized only occasionally. Many other tags are there just for the sake of crediting the webmaster, author, etc. These kinds of tags are there mostly for the sake of other webmasters if they need to know who to contact about the page itself.

2. Have lots of keywords.
Using the 'keywords' meta tag correctly is good. Getting too hung up on it is bad. Many search engines now ignore it altogether, including Google and AltaVista. Remember that putting too many words in this tag could be considered spamming could get your site banned. Keep the keywords related to your site only. As previously stated, many of your meta tags will be skipped over anyway, but you should keep to your primary key words and not worry too much about assembling a gigantic list. Be descriptive, be honest, don't be excessive.

3. Keyword lists must have a formula.
People have a tendency to get very distracted by the keyword meta tag. Relate it to your site and do not expect miracles from it. It gets skipped more often than not by the SE spiders. Even it's used it is used in conjunction with the content on your page. If you want to obsess with optimizing something, optimize your content.

4. The title tag doesn't really do much.
Out of all the tags, this one is the most important when it's used correctly. Just like with your site's content, write your title tag for your audience first and the search engines second. Think about your site's branding and navigation issues as you create
your title tags. Your title should be relatively long. A seven to ten word title is not out of the question. The title is the first thing that a search engine really cares about and it should be the most common thing that you want your visitors to find you for. Your most important key words should all be worked into your title.

5. If I copy my competitor's keywords I will do just as well. You need to understand tags and the details of search engine optimization in general. What works for one site doesn't necessarily work for another! You do not have identical sites so you cannot work with identical keywords. Aside from this detail, a site that has been around longer is more likely to have success from its key words than a new
site. If you are trying to take over a small niche, you have to expand and do something that your competitor hasn't done yet.

6. If I repeat my keywords in a comment tag I will rank better.There was a time when this was true but it is not so anymore. Search engines are all wise to this trick nowadays.

7. We need to have as many different keywords as possible throughout our site. This is an SEO nightmare. Your pages need to be focused, not always trying to cover all basis. Limit your keywords. A ketword density of 5-10% of total copy is good and they should be woven into sentences to make sense.

8. Anyone can write a website's tags.
SEO calls for copywriting and marketing talent. Practice at it. Writing good tags that can attract both humans and search engine spiders isn't easy.

9. Google doesn't rank me by the description tag, so why should I use it? Google does still use the description tag from your site. It displays it to its users in their search results. If there's no description tag, they'll just see a nonsense excerpt from your site, which is bad. Don't forget that there are still plenty of uses for the description tag. Make the title and the description complement each other, as they will often be displayed together.

Top SEO Advice: Forget About Fooling Google

2009-08-17T01:57:00.000-07:00

With your SEo efforts, focus on the things that will get the best results the fastest. The latest articles, news and ebooks seem to think its methoda that fool Google. Stop wasting your time. Save your hard earned money.

Google is the king of the search engines. What Google does, all others follow. They employ some of the best minds in the internet and software industry. They are as ethical as can be on the web. Why would you even want to try to fool them in any way? As a general, do your keyword research, have good, fresh content on your site and indexing and
site rankings will follow.

Yes, some people think that they have tricked Google. They truly believe that something they did has rocketed their site to the top of Google's listings.
They believe that they have managed to "stick it to the man." Nine times out of ten when this happens they either performed an SEO procedure that Google allows or even endorses or they just happened to fill Google's criteria better than other sites in their
keyword niche without even realizing it.

Once in a while someone does actually come up with a way to fool Google. For a few months they seem to ride high, but as soon as Google notices it has been cheated the site is removed from their index. Usually they get banned.

The reality is that Google has incredible power on the web. Anyone with a real interest in making money on the internet should consider that getting banned from the search engines effectively removes your site from the marketing arena. They don't have to let you back in, and they don't have to give you any right to respond. Stay on the SEO "good" side.

Aside from the fact that Google will remove you from its listings, there is another incentive against trying to fool them. Ethically, you are fooling your clients. There is no reason to try to lure visitors onto your page expecting to get something and really giving them something else. This is a poor way to conduct business and more often than not it will
chase the customer away for good.

If you want your website to be found in categories that don't apply to it, try purchasing ads on pages that are listed towards the top of the Google listings in these categories. You can actually increase your sites reputation in Google's eyes rather than hurting it by adding another link to your site. This is an excellent form of marketing because it allows you to reach out beyond your market simply by dishing out a few dollars a month.

Some of the most popular methods of trying to fool Google's PageRank system are link farms and link exchanges. Link farms are basically websites that exist only to get links to specific sites counted by the search engines. Link exchanges are groups of websites that each pay a monthly fee to link to each other - like link farms, only more expensive
and dodgy. In both cases, the websites involved are attempting to climb the ranks of Google's search results through the sheer quantity of links to them -this is known as Googlebombing. But it doesn't always work.

Why is Google so harsh?

It knows that cheaters can ruin their search engine's reputation, thus marketing revenue. It's all about money and porfits and power. If link farms inflate the rankings of less-useful Websites, then we'll all start seeing worse search results. That's why Google constantly updates PageRank to keep those kinds of sites away. The Page Rank formula that Google implements is complicated, not published and ever
changing.

It has been found recently that Goggle is now sending out 'cloak bots', disobeying robots.txt to find out whether sites are 'cloaking' - serving a different page to search engines - than what visitors see. These 'cloak bots' are controversial but seem to have some positive effects on the Google's results.

Unethical methods make it difficult for people who are trying to do SEO the proper way, which is one of the reasons why it needs to be monitored so carefully. If people stopped trying to find ways to manipulate the system, it would be much easier to keep up with what's going on.

Search Engine Optimization Myths

2009-08-15T01:55:00.000-07:00

There is nothing fancy or magical about optimizing your website for the search engines. The myths about it are greater than the facts. For as long as SEO
has been in existence, there have been all sorts of myths about it.

The situation isn't helped by the number of so-called "SEO Experts" spreading them.

Here's a list of the biggest SEO myths you need to be aware of so you can avoid being drawn into buying useless services that tout help with them:

-You can't optimize perfectly for every site
With the right keywords, title, description and tags that accurately reflect your content, you can optimize every site of your for the search engines.

-There are 10,000 search engines out there
The onlye search engine you need to target to get listed in is Google. Once Google picks you up all the others will, too. Google leads the pack and what Google does the other major search engines will follow: MSN, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. Forget the other ones, the traffic is small and inconsequential.

-PageRank is dead
Today Pagerank is as importatn as ever with Google.

-You should repeat your keywords 100 times on each page.
A keyword density of optimum around 5-8% on each page. The keywords should also be wound into good copy and make sense where they are placed. Stuffing pages with keywords is a good way to get you ignored or even banned by the search engines.

-Search engines don't have time to ban you for bad SEO.
One of the biggest ways to get banned from the major search engines is bad SEO.

-You should submit your site to every search engine going
Again, submit to just Google and you'll be picked up by all the other search engines eventually.

-You don't need content to get ranked high
Content, fresh and relevant, will always be king for good SEO. The web was founded on information and content is information.

-Meta tags are very important
Most search engines ignore meta tags today however, you can still place them.

-All you need is more links
Links into your site need to be related to your content. So called "link farms" which are lists of hundreds of unrelated sites will lower your pagerank.

-SEO doesn't require patience
Good SEo requires, not only patience but research, thought and time invested into it.

-New sites can't get listed in search engines.
Good, well SEO optimized websites can get indexed in a s little as 48 hours.

-You should have multiple domain names
One well chosen domain names for your sites theme is all you need.

-It's good to resubmit every week or every month
Once a month is the rule for submission but only if you update your site monthly. If you do not then submit every 2 or 3 months.

Avoid companies that advertise any of these items. The only techniques you should be using are ones that are proven to increase your website's ranking.

There are a lot of unethical, unprofessional business practices in the optimization industry. Get the facts on your side and compare the services you're being offered. Use your money wisely and invest it properly in good marketing, advertising, and content.

When inexperienced and unprofessional optimizers scam uneducated SEO customers, it gives everyone who works in the field a bad name. If anyone tells you that it's OK to keyword stuff, or that you don't need PageRank - well, they're just completely wrong.

If you're trying to make money with your website, you need visitors, and that's where SEO is iimportant. SEO is important to get on top of your competition and the search engines. Good SEO means sales.

The Internet Business Promoter

2009-08-11T01:55:00.000-07:00

An internet business promoter is a program that can help you attain higher page rankings on search engines. In other words, it is an application that will help you optimize for the search engines.

If you have been operating an internet business for any period of time, you know that optimizing for the search engines is one of your main tasks. For the obvious reasons, you want as many people to know about your site as possible. More people mean more business, more business means more profits.

Whenever potential visitors use search engines to find the sites they want, they will usually only visit the sites that rank the highest. If you are ranked number 112320 out of 237,899 results, you are out of luck; and pretty soon, out of business. Most visitors will not bother to look at a site ranked so low. An internet business promoter (IBP) can help you ameliorate this situation.

Internet business promoters offer a variety of features, which usually include the followings:

Search engine optimization, ranking and submission tools: Your main objective in using internet business promoters is to improve your rankings on the search engines, so obviously your IBP should include a set of tools geared towards this goal. IBP optimization programs analyze the current top search results for particular keywords on the search engines you select. After the analysis is complete, the application will generate a report that details the changes you have to make to achieve the same results. It is important that your IBP optimization program use up-to-date information for its analysis. It should preferably operate in real-time. A good IBP will allow you unlimited use in terms choosing keywords, checking rankings and so forth. It should also allow you to analyze the various elements that comprise your site.

Online directory submission tools: IBP programs also allow you to automate or semi-automate various tasks, such as submitting your sites to online directories. Automatic submissions work in exactly the way you would submit your site. There is no appreciable difference except that you don't personally have to do the work. By decreasing the amount of work that needs to be done, you will be able to increase the number of directories you actually enlist in. This in turn will help you generate more site traffic.

Miscellaneous applications: Most IBP's also come bundled with various applications, usually those related to crafting reports. These reports are intended to be shown to your various clients. The reports are often fully customizable. You can alter the cover sheet, the title of the report, your business logo, the company name, the company's address, your company URL and the recipient's address.

By using an internet business promoter, you are assured of better ranking results. So why wait? Think of purchasing one today. It will be an investment that will more than pay for itself in the long run.

To Your Success

The Worst SEO Mistakes That Lead To Lowering Your Search Engine Ranking

2009-08-10T01:54:00.000-07:00

Though there are many different theories out there regarding what makes the best SEO technique, when it comes to some issues that will work against your SEO efforts, there are some issues where everyone agrees. Among these, the most prominent are:

• Not having a web page title • Using too many graphics, images, or flash animation on a given web page • Having a menu system that is prohibitively complex

It is extremely important that every web page on your site has a title. Without providing a descriptive title that is search engine optimized with the right keywords, you'll not only hurt your ranking, but you'll turn visitors away. Consider it the equivalent to owning a store without a sign and with blackened windows. To make sure that you're doing your best on that level, make certain that each web page on your site has its own unique title that is specific to its content. Try to make sure that it includes the primary keyword for that page, to ensure proper SEO for search engine spiders.

By using too many graphics, images, or flash animation, you may be pleasing the eye, but search engine spiders won't see it the same way. Search engines focus on the text content of your website. Their spiders crawl through your site looking for text, keywords, and other indications of purpose. They cannot, however, understand images or flash animations, nor will they ever understand their appeal. Therefore, though images are great ways to add appeal to your visitors, by adding too much to any given web page, you're decreasing the value of your search engine optimization. To reduce this problem, try to create a balance on your page where the text content is given the true priority, and images, graphics, and flash animations are only a compliment, not a focus for the page. You can also help your website by adding alt tags to each of your images so that you are providing the search engine spiders with a bit of text, even when it's an image that actually shows up on the page.

The menu system of your website is the key to being able to properly navigate around it. Search engine spiders are typically considered to be relatively basic programs and struggle with anything but the most primitive menu systems. For example, if your menu involves JavaScript or a Java applet, the search engine spider will not be able to recognize any of the features, and will not be capable of properly navigating the site. Certainly, these can be very appealing to people, but search engine spiders don't have the same ability to interpret the features of a website as people do. For proper search engine optimization, a simple textual link is your best option as it is the easiest for a search engine spider to understand. It makes your site much more likely to be seen in full by the spider, and therefore receive the best indexing and ranking results. Furthermore, the majority of the time, an extremely complicated menu system can quickly be replicated and implemented using textual links and CSS. This will make an enormous difference in your SEO results, and will be welcomed by all of your visitors who are still using dial-up and other slow connections.

If you must use a complex menu or site navigation system, then make sure that you at least provide a site map that is readily available via a text link from the home page. This site map should use text to clearly link to every one of the other pages of your web site. This way, even if a spider is unable to use your regular menu system, it will be able to reach all of the pages by way of the site map.

By carefully watching to make sure that you've avoided these mistakes, you'll be making a big difference in your odds of achieving high ranking due to your search engine optimization efforts. You'll refrain from working against your own SEO efforts due to simple errors, and will enjoy much larger amounts of traffic to your website.

The Facts on Google Page Rank

2009-08-08T01:53:00.000-07:00

"Page Rank" is a number Google gives to a web page that represents how important Google thinks that page is on the web. It's that simple. How Google calculates page rank is another thing.

When one page links to another, Google considers it to be effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes for a page across the whole web, the more important that page must be.

The importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself really is, meaning in Google calculations a page's importance comes from the votes cast for it. These votes are then taken into account when the page is ranked.

As a general rule of thumb, Google Page Ranks along with Alexa ratings are the best indicators of how well your SEO work is. The more relevant one way links that you have pointing at your site, the better off you are. That's a basic rule that will apply throughout your SEO operations. These must be quality, related links. Avoid "link farms." These are sites that link to hundreds of unrelated sites in
link exhanges.

Page Rank matters because it's one of the most influential factors that determine a page's ranking in Google's search results. The best way to increase your page rank is to contact people with relevant and complementary content. This means content that does not compete with your own but that enhances it. These links are most likely to last and they will not only increase your Google Page Rank but they will also provide relevant hits via the links themselves.

How is PageRank Calculated?

Google calculates the PageRank PR of all pages it indexes, taking into account all the links to and from each site. When a page 'votes' for other pages by linking to them, it shares out some of its PageRank value amongst these pages.

This algorithm means that a link to your site from a page with PR4 (i.e. a Page Rank of 4) and five outbound links would be worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and a hundred outbound links. It's not just the Page Rank of the page that's important, but also the number of links it has.

The more links there are on a page, the less Page Rank value your page receives from them. You should also remember that it takes progressively more Page Rank to move up a level. It is generally pretty easy to achieve a Page Rank of three. Once you achieve a Page Rank of four, your site is getting formidable. Increasing past this mark may prove difficult and will require very important content. Reaching 8+ is very difficult. These ranks are usually reserved
for sites that are crucial for the functionality of the internet.

Google repeats its PageRank calculatons many times at each update, and each time the calculation is made it gets more likely to be accurate. Total accuracy can never be achieved, however, because one site's PageRank is entirely relative to the others'. You should understand that the results searchers end up with can really only be properly worked out by Google, because they're the only ones with access to the whole index.

How To Implement A Really Useful Blog for SEO Gains

2009-08-07T01:53:00.000-07:00

We are repeatedly told that implementing a Blog (weB log) is an excellent way to steadily increase the depth of content on your site in an easy and efficient manner. We are also told that there are numerous benefits, because a Blog, if properly used, enables you to;

- Distribute new information to clients and prospective clients
- Efficiently increase site content by rapidly adding new material
- Provide "advertorial" material to other sites
- Increase links to your site as your Blog contents are disseminated across other sites on the 'net.
- Increase "deep link" count to internal pages e.g. www.yoursite.co.nz/your-log/archives/articles/Your_Tips
- Increase traffic as people find extracts from your Blog, and come looking for the source
- Increase your credibility as people find lots of useful, up to date information on your site

However, what is lacking is some hard information on "How To Implement A Really Useful Blog" for SEO Gains." So, here's some traction to help you up the hill...

Utilising a Blog as a business enhancement tool is far superior to a newsletter. There is minimal trouble to get a blog up and running, but make sure you host it on YOUR site. You have the choice of establishing a "hosted' blog on www.Wordpress.org and other Blog software services, but the greatest benefits will be accrued if you get it up and running at www.yoursite.co.nz/your-blog/

Software
In our case, we've used Wordpress (www.Wordpress.org ) an Open Source application that not only has all the required "bells and whistles" but is easy to install, set up, and manage. It has an excellent "web browser" interface that means you can add new material from your desk, or from home. Hell, you can even configure it to accept and post incoming emails from yourself!

There are some basic system requirements - your (Apache) server must support PHP, and MySQL databases. These days, that's level of technology is available on most "basic" level hosting packages.

Installation
If you've got cpanel hosting with Fantastico, you can do the Wordpress installation in a few minutes because the installation scripts are probably pre-installed already for you! If not, it might take a little longer, but the Wordpress guys take pride in the "5 minute install" concept. It is really easy - even if you've got to download the application, unzip it, upload it to your site into it's own directory, add a new MySQL database, add a user, start the configuration file and insert the database / user /password details into the configuration file, it should be up and running inside 30 minutes. Be a good idea to read through the "Read Me " file before you start... the instructions are clear, concise, and in a logical and coherent order! Pity all documentation was not like that! :-)

Configuration
With Wordpress, there are a handful of system settings to consider once you've got your blog operational. Of these, I'd say the three most important are as follows;

1: Options / Writing / Update Services

The setting for the automatic update services, where blog search engines, directories and news feed services are "pinged" each time you add new content. By default, Wordpress includes a few services, some of which will in turn update other services. However, you will probably want the widest coverage possible, and to extend that list to include all known services! Takes a little longer to process a new posting, but means you get the best overall result... and that's what its all about! There is a list of possibilities available at http://www.comauth.co.nz/ping-page.htm Copy and paste the ones you want to use into the "Update Services" panel at bottom of your "/wp-admin/options-writing.php" page and choose Update Settings to add them permanently.

2: Options / Permalinks

As they put it; "By default WordPress uses web URL's which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links."

From an SEO point of view, we've chosen the numeric options so that our URL's not only look sensible, but the Search Engines will be also be able to navigate them. However, getting this arcane bit of trickery to work requires you to implement the supplied "mod_rewrite" in your .htaccess file... if you are developing a glazed look about now, just bear with me a little longer! :-)

The .htaccess file is a dangerous area to be playing in, as a mistake in this file can render your site inaccessible - until the Host Company's support guy sorts it out for you - usually by renaming it! How do I know so much about this shit? Well, it happened to ME! :-)

You should have installed your blog into its own directory, which minimises the potential problems substantially! Wordpress provides the correct "mod_rewrite" code in;

www.yoursite.co.nz/yourblog/wp-admin/options-permalink.php - its nasty looking stuff, as you can see below;

[IfModule mod_rewrite.c]
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /yourblog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /yourblog/index.php [L]
[/IfModule]

So, choose the Numeric Option
1) Copy it into a text file - e.g. open Notepad, paste the code in.
2) Save it as htaccess.txt in your local copy of your site
3) Choose Update Settings in Wordpress Options / Permalinks
4) Use FTP to upload htaccess.txt into your BLOG directory - Please, NOT your root directory!
5) Using your FTP application, rename the htacces.txt file to .htaccess

Open your Blog, browse around it and (hopefully) not only will everything be working, but the URL's will now not have any of those dreadful &, ? or = thingy's embedded in them. If its not working... the Wordpress support forums offer rapid response times to such teething problems. :-)

3: Categories

From an SEO perspective, its important to develop a good Category Structure, because the category names are going to be embedded as "tags" in all your Blog posts, a little like the concept of the "keyword meta-tag" and this will help define and describe your content.

Content
Now that you've got the basics sorted out, start populating your blog with some quality content. I recommend writing it in an HTML editor such as FrontPage) because you can the make sure it's spell-checked as you go. Once you've got it formatted the way you want, go to the Wordpress / Write / Write Page and paste it in. Add the Title, select your Category/s from the right menu, and click the "Save and Continue Editing" button. You will then have a preview of your article in the lower section of the page. Double-check the formatting, and when you are happy with it, choose "Publish."

Blog Search Engine's and Directories
Once you've got some content built up over a couple of months, you will then want to get serious about getting it distributed to blog search engines and directories... So, in a future article, we will outline how to go about this process.

SEO Strategies for Using Holes in Search Engines to Their Fullest

2009-08-05T01:52:00.000-07:00

You may have heard of black holes - not the astronomical kind - but don't know what they are or how to use them to your advantage when it comes to your site and the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. To begin with, it is important that you understand that black holes in search engines can seriously impact the quality of all of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.

For example, Google is currently the leader in both popularity and technology among search engines on the web. It functions by allowing its users to run a search using words or phrases. This will only happen more frequently as text-to-speech applications expand in their use. The way in which Google applies these words and phrases immediately presents the first fault within their indexing and searching strategies. Here, there lies a big black hole in the accuracy of the search results that Google produces. The location of this black hole? Whenever smaller, common words are used within a Google search phrase, it will provide you with different results than you would receive by using other common words instead. The following example explains this.

If you perform the following searches:

• Toronto Hotels • Hotels in Toronto • Hotels for Toronto • About Toronto Hotels

You will receive different results every time. Though Google will indicate to you that you have used a common word, and that this word was excluded from the search, it will still have provided you with different search results depending on which ones you have used.

Obviously, all of the above searches were for the same thing, but because of the small words used in the phrases, they achieved different results. Why? It is because of the black hole in Google's searching algorithm

The same is true when one changes the words from singular to plural, or otherwise makes grammatical changes. For example, the following searches all produce different results:

• Debt management • Managing debt • Managing debts

Again, these searches are obviously for the same things, but produced entirely different results. Try these two examples on your own computer, using Google, and you'll see for yourself.

It is important to recognize that in both examples, all of the searches produced relevant results. However, while they are all equally correct as far as context, the fact remains that searches for the same thing, depending on how they're worded - right down to the pluralizing - does give different lists, with differently ranked sites.

How does this impact you and your SEO? Consider you are running a website that sells widgets. You have done a great deal of work making certain that it is fully search engine optimized and have even reached the point where you are in the second rank at Google for the keyword "widget". It has taken a great deal of work and maintenance, but you've done it...except that your target market doesn't search for widgets using the keyword "widget". They pluralize their search term, typing "widgets" in almost universally. Furthermore, when you check your rank with the term "widgets", then you discover that you're down at number 23!

Though your work will bring you increased traffic due to your ranking for "widget", it would have been a great deal higher if you'd included "widgets" in your search engine optimizing strategy.

When you are creating a search engine optimizing strategy for your website, if you want to ensure that you will receive the highest results, it is important that you always include not only your primary keyword in your efforts, but also add a basket full of sub-keywords to cover all of your bases.

By making certain that you are using your phrases in all (or at least many ) of the ways in which your target market will be performing their searches, you will bring in a great deal more traffic, and customers ready to purchase your products or services.

If you are not qualified to do this alone, it is well worth the investment in an expert who can bring your search engine optimization up to a level that will cover all of your most important keywords.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleStreet.com/

How to Choose a Reputable Search Engine Optimization Content Writer

2009-08-03T01:51:00.000-07:00

Choosing the right Search Engine Optimization (SEO) content writer can be a challenging task, because there are so many different styles and writers from which you can select. However, you don't want to just select any SEO content writer, because you need to make sure that the job is done right. It is an art form which must be properly mastered before it can be effective. So how do you know if your prospective SEO content writer has mastered this skill? There are certain things that you can look for to make sure.

For one thing, you will want to be certain that you are happy with the SEO writing technique that the prospective writer uses, or that s/he is willing to implement your technique, if you have one of your own. There are almost as many SEO writing techniques out there as there are SEO writers, so it is important that you look into the exact style that will be used. While some writers have a specific keyword pattern that they use, others simply make certain that they sprinkle the keyword throughout the webpage, and yet others include sub-keywords as well.

Everybody has his or her own idea of what works best with the different search engines, and while none of these have necessarily been proven to be the best, you may wish to find out about the results that the SEO writer may have achieved in past projects. Some of the questions that you may wish to ask along those lines are as follows:

• How long has the writer been writing SEO? • How long has the writer been using the specific SEO style that s/he feels works best? • Has s/he ever received the highest ranking for a keyword article written? • Has s/he ever received second to fourth place with keyword articles written? • Will the writer provide samples of keyword articles written in the past? • Is the writer able to work with strange sounding keywords that aren't necessarily grammatically correct or spelled properly?

Many web designers believe that for good SEO, the writer must have a background or experience in the precise field about which he or she will be writing. Surprisingly enough, in the majority of cases, this is not true. The reason for this is that keyword articles are generally not written for informational purposes as much as they are simply there for their keyword placement. Though SEO content may contain accurate and useful information, it is usually more general in its topics, allowing a non-expert to write about it. The focus of these articles is writing a general, accurate piece that uses the keyword properly. Anything too in depth will not allow an SEO writer to properly utilize the keyword in the correct pattern and the right number of times.

Therefore, it is important that when you are hiring an SEO writer, you need to understand that any information included in the articles you'll receive will not likely be anything too innovative, but will rather be information that can be easily gathered using a search engine, or information that you have provided the writer. Keyword article writing and standard article writing are two different art forms.

The final factor that you should consider among SEO writers is price. When looking at the prices offered, make sure that you believe that the price you're paying is fair, but don't undervalue the product that you'll be receiving. If you are expecting a superior product that will achieve the best results in search engines and web directories, then you will likely be paying a little bit more due to the experience and skills that are necessary to provide such results. Consider your SEO content an investment that will serve your website and your business well. It will give your site a good start at achieving high ranking on search engines, and will continue to provide traffic for your site into the future. Furthermore, if you find a good quality, dependable writer, then you'll always have someone to use when more SEO content is needed. Considering how much it takes to find such a quality writer, that alone is well worth a few extra dollars.

Keyword Domination on Google With Blog Links

2009-08-01T01:50:00.000-07:00

One of the key ingredients that most search engines use when ranking websites is the number of incoming links. Google is well-known for using this formula in ranking web sites from the search results of specific keyword or keyword phrases.

One of the key ingredients that most search engines use when ranking web sites is the number of incoming links. Google is well-known for using this formula when ranking web sites according to the keyword searches.

Let's take a look at 2 key components in the search engine ranking formula.

1. Incoming Links
Incoming links mean a link from another website, let's say website (B)to your own website (A).

Website B could be your own, or it could be another person.

Generally the higher the number of incoming links, the higher your website will rank in the search engines.

2. Anchor Text
Anchor text actually refers to the keyword that is being used in linking back to your web site.

For example, let's say you have a site on dieting tips. At the time of writing this article, there were a total of 3.5 million competing websites on Google for the keyword "dieting tip".

A search at Overture reveals there were 2121 searches done in April 2006 on the keyword "dieting tip".

If you want to rank high for the keyword "dieting tips", then you need to get lots and lots of incoming links to your dieting tips website.

However, having many incoming links alone is insufficient to ensure a high ranking for your targeted keyword.

You have to ensure that the keyword or anchor text used in linking back to your site is "dieting tips".

This will add even greater weightage to your ranking for the keyword "dieting tips" in the search engines.

So how does a blog fit into this picture?

When used properly, blogs have the power to help you leapfrog in terms of your keyword rankings.

There are basically two three ways to increase the number of incoming links to your website so that you can increase your keyword ranking.

a) The first method is to email other website owners asking them to link back to your site using the right anchor text, which is basically the keyword that you want to target.

If done manually, this task might be a quite time consuming.

There are software in the market that helps you look for link partners as well as to automate the sending out of emails to these blog or website owners to request and ask them to link back to your site.

However, having said that, there is still the waiting time factor. You'll have to wait for the blog or website owner to respond, and he/she might not necessarily accept your request for link exchange.

b) The second method is to buy or purchase incoming links.

Well, if you have the money, you can always buy links to your website.

This method is fast but can be quite costly.

c) The third method that I want to share is create your own incoming links with Blogs.

If you're using a free blogging service like Blogger, technically you could create hundreds of blogs. Then you could make a post to these blogs and insert the keyword that you want to target and link it back to your main website, in this case the "dieting tips" website.

There are already software in the market that allow you to create hundreds of blogs at one go, as well as to automate the posting.

The end result is an increase in the number of incoming links containing the target keyword. Within weeks, you can see your ranking easily jump up to the top three position.

This technique might not go down well with 'white hat' search engine practicioners, who believe in getting incoming links the proper way.

However, in this article I merely want to point out the method and technical feasibility of dominating any keyword you want.

A top ten ranking in the search engine means more visitors to your website and definitely more subscribers.

If you have a subscriber box you can capture these visitor's email address by offering a free course or some incentive to sign up. Once the visitor joins your list, you can then follow up with them using an autoresponder.

What entails then is of course more sales for your online business.

Imagine how powerful this method is and what it means to your profits and bottom line?

3 Common SEO Mistakes That Are Easy To Avoid

2009-07-31T02:38:00.000-07:00

Many web designers fall into the trap of designing a fancy website that looks great but includes elements that will cripple its search engine rankings. It is a huge waste of time, effort, and sometimes money to create a beautiful looking site that does not attract any visitors. What good is all that beauty if no one can find it? Here are some common design elements that should be avoided whenever possible.

Image Links

Using images instead of text links for your site's navigation menu can confuse search engine bots and may make your site difficult for them to spider completely. If you must use graphic elements for links, be sure to also include a set of text links for the spiders to follow. Many sites do this in their footer, either above or below the copyright information.

Frames

If you use frames to display your site, you run the risk that the search engine's spider will not pick up all of your content. Most bots will only spider the first HTML file they encounter, ignoring your other frames. If you use frames and notice that only a fraction of your pages make it into the search engine's index, the frames could be the problem. Also, many users are turned off by the sight of multiple frames and will not stick around your site long enough to purchase your product or click an advertisement.

Splash Intro Pages

Splash introduction or entry pages, often using flash animation, are another SEO pitfall for many new webmasters. While the graphics and animation may look impressive to human visitors, they lack any useful content for the search engine spiders. Usually, the only text on the page will be a "skip intro" link, which won't do much for your site's ranking. Making this even worse is the fact that the splash page comes before your index page, which is the most important page to a search engine bot. Many times, splash pages also include an automatic redirect if the introduction is not skipped. Search engines usually do not index redirects and there is always the possibility that a new algorithm will penalize sites for this.

In order to get high rankings in the search engines, first they have to find your site, then they have to be able to read enough of your content to rank the site. Eliminating style elements that confuse or restrict the spiders will help make your website more accessible and easier to index. If you must use things like image links, make sure to also have an alternate set of text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow. More dramatic elements like frames and splash pages should be avoided altogether if you want to get the best possible search engine ranking for your site.

Is SEO Really Worth The Effort?

2009-07-30T22:39:00.001-07:00

With the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN seemingly changing their algorithms on a regular basis, it sometimes feels like you're fighting a losing battle trying to keep up with them. We're all constantly tweaking our websites and chasing links in a desperate attempt to grab, or hold on to, that elusive spot on the first page of results for our chosen keywords, so is SEO really worth the effort?

Well firstly if you have optimized your site well, both through onpage and offpage optimization, and manage to obtain top rankings in the search engines, then you can get a great deal of free traffic to your site, depending on how popular your keywords are that you are ranking well for. So yes of course in this instance SEO is most definitely worth spending time over.

The problem, however, is that if you are launching a new site and plan to get the bulk of your traffic from search engines, you may end up being disappointed because it can take many months before you even get close to achieving high rankings. This is particularly true of Google and Yahoo. MSN is easier to rank highly for, but this is negated by the fact that a lot less people use MSN than Google and Yahoo.

This is why when I now launch a new site I'm focused more on receiving traffic from other sources, and concentrating almost solely on building my own list of subscribers. There are endless ways to start getting immediate traffic to a new site and start building your list.

I personally like to post in forums, write and submit articles to article directories and relevant ezines, pay for advertising in these same ezines, write and submit press releases, promote a squeeze page on traffic exchanges (if my site is related to making money online), credit-based safelists (free safelists are a waste of time) and other list-building services. I also like to write free reports and ebooks (containing links to my site) which can be freely given away (and rebranded for greater distribution) creating a viral effect.

I still carry out the standard onpage search engine optimization techniques, and offpage techniques such as getting keyword-rich text links from directories and other related sites, but I now no longer base my whole future profit model on obtaining top search engine rankings. My thoughts are that if they come they come, but whatever happens as long as I keep building a list of subscribers for each of my sites I know that I can always achieve good profits regardless of where I rank in the search engines.

It also eliminates any stress that can occur when the leading search engines change their algorithms. I've seen many instances of long-established websites whose entire livelihood relied on the traffic they received as a result of being at the top of the search engines, but who suddenly saw their sites disappear from the first few pages of results, wiping their profits out almost immediately. Some of these sites had no mailing lists either so they had no alternative profit model in place.

Hopefully you can see that while everyone wants top search engine rankings, it's not the be all and end all, and certainly shouldn't be used to base your whole business model on. There are numerous successful websites online who couldn't care less about SEO, and indeed are nowhere to be found in the search engines. They rely on other traffic-generating techniques, such as viral marketing, joint venturing, or recruiting affiliates, for example, to build and grow their online business.

To conclude, while it's important to spend some time optimizing your website and obtaining links for SEO purposes, spending several hours a day tweaking every page of your site just to please the search engines is not a productive way to spend your time. Instead you should be focusing on building your list of targeted subscribers, using other more immediate traffic-generating methods where you can see results very quickly, and not have to wait several months before you're ranking highly in the search engines.

Just keep adding good quality content to your site, and providing a reason for your visitors to return to your site. This should have the effect of boosting your search engine rankings anyway, without having to spend hours on SEO, because other sites will start linking to you automatically, and the search engines will generally reward your site with a higher ranking if it is constantly updated with good content.

Do-It-Yourself SEO: How to Get Started

2009-07-30T22:37:00.000-07:00

Search engine optimization is the top way that visitors find websites today. So how do you optimize your website?

Selecting Keywords
Keywords are the terms that you expect targeted prospects will use in search engines to find your company.

Choose Keywords Associated with Your Company's Focus
When selecting keyword, start by selecting keywords that best describe your company's focus. For example, if your company sells athletic shoes, keywords like "athletic shoes" or "tennis shoes".Be sure to account for plural versus singular versions of keywords, such as "shoe" vs. "shoes" as Google currently treats plural and singular versions of keywords as two different words.

Avoid Broad Keywords
Don't choose terms that could be considered too broad in scope. For example, the keyword "shoes" would be too broad for an athletic shoe company. A searcher who enters the keyword "shoes" in a search engine query may be looking for a variety of shoe types, such as "horse shoes" or "nursing shoes" -- items which an athletic shoe company is not likely to carry.

Choose Keywords by Popularity
There are several useful tools available for selecting the right keywords, such as the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo! (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/), which allows you to enter a keyword and see how many searches were performed the previous month on Yahoo!'s properties for that keyword and related keywords. A search for the keyword "shoes" using this tool may yield the following results:

Searches Keywords
715362 shoes
288926 new balance shoes

234565 womens shoes

131741 shoes store

97197 jordan shoes

95219 man shoes

70525 nike shoes

62668 prom shoes

58193 shoes repair

48386 puma shoes

From these results, an athletic shoe company might also select additional keywords that describe its products, such as "new balance shoes", "jordan shoes", "nike shoes" and "puma shoes".

Editing Your Website Content
Assign One Page on Your Website to One or Two Keywords
Once you've selected your keyword list, select one page per keyword on your website. For instance, on the website of an athletic shoe company that sells Nike brand shoes, the keyword "nike shoes" might be most appropriate on the website page that details the Nike shoes the company carries.

Proliferate the Keyword Throughout The Website Page
Search engines use website page content to determine a page's theme. In the example above, a page with the keyword "nike shoes" repeated often on the page would signal to the search engine that the website page is about "nike shoes". Therefore, repeat a keyword throughout its appropriate website page as often as possible without sounding repetitive. Aim for high "keyword density," the percentage of times a keyword phrase appears throughout all of your content on that page.

There are several free, online tools to help you determine your keyword density on a webpage. GoRank offers a free keyword density analyzer tool (http://www.gorank.com/seotools/). A generally desirable keyword density is 4-7%.

Sometimes, website owners go overboard when repeating a keyword on a page. Remember that your website page must also be comprehensible to your website's visitors. So don't repeat a keyword just in an attempt to have maximum keyword density. Carefully balance marketing message with keyword density when editing your website pages.

What To Do When an Appropriate Page Doesn't Exist
When you don't have a website page that seems appropriate for proliferating a keyword, ask yourself is, "Is this keyword appropriate?". If you don't already have a page on your website focused on that keyword, it may not be an appropriate keyword for your company.

There may situations where you have too many keywords that do in fact relate to your company's focus that do not currently have website pages. In that case, examine your website site map and organization and determine if there are appropriate ways to extend your website's content without being redundant.

Link Building
The quantity of third-party links, or links from other websites that point to yours, are the best way to be listed higher in search engines. Although, it is not just the sheer number of links that determines your search engine ranking but also the words within the linking text, also known as the "anchor text".

Create a Link Building Strategy
With the anchor text rule in mind, build a company link building strategy. Ideally, your link building strategy should include ways to naturally build links through viral marketing or partnership methods. In our example of the athletic shoe company, perhaps links from manufacturer sites would be helpful, or perhaps implementing a self-created affiliate program will help. Whatever your approach, be sure to define the words within the anchor text of the links.

In Conclusion
Track Your Progress
Search engine rankings are never permanent -- search engines are always updating their algorithms that index and rank websites. So it's important to track your progress on a regular, ongoing basis, to alert you if changes need to be made.

WebPosition (http://www.webposition.com) tracks and reports on search engine rankings based on keyword and search engine. WebPosition's scheduler function allows you to run reports automatically on a set schedule, so that you can keep track of your rankings and those of your competitors on an interval basis.

Basic SEO Rules For Beginners

2009-07-30T22:35:00.000-07:00

Search engine optimization for your website is pretty straight forward, but it can seem complicated. Basically, the point of SEO is to make everything simpler and cleaner. This is the way search engines like it. And, if you use the "KISS" principle, "keep it simple, stupid", even a beginner can optimize a website well.

Everything a search engine does has a pattern and a reason. Even if the algorithms are too complex for you to understand, there are patterns that can be found. There are many sites online that offer tips and help with finding and explaining these patterns.

Good SEO requires work and effort. It is, for the most part, very basic. To have a successful website campaign, follow these simple rules:

1. Bad Sites Get Pushed To The Bottom
Search engines always try to give users whatever they can find that is relevant to their search. You have to realize that most search engines don't work by moving the good stuff towards the top: instead, they try to push the bad stuff towards the bottom, and hope that what's good will "float to the top."

2. Content Is King
Content is king and it can get you good search engine rankings easily if it's written properly and sprinkled with the appropriate keywords. This not only brings visitors to your site but also feeds search engine spiders and crawlers.

A fast way to develop good content is to generate a series of articles or an ebook regarding your topic. These items are very powerful in the world of SEO because they provide your visitors with something to read and they allow you to conquer some keywords that you normally wouldn't be able to touch. If you are managing a website for pets, an article about dog food is more likely to generate a high position in the search results for "dog food" than your home page. Therefore, if you write articles pertaining to your subject but slightly more in depth than you can put on your home page, you will benefit drastically.

3. Check Your Position
To try to get to number one in an index, you must first find out where your site is now. That means checking each search engine to see your position, and coming up with a strategy for each one - who knows, maybe you're already number one on one of the smaller search engines! You can't just assume, however, that because your site is listed in one search engine that it will be listed in all of them. That's not how search engines work.

4. Simplicity Is Best
Look at the sites that currently rank high on the search engines and you will see that have simple designs with graphics that use minimal bandwidth, and they're easy to navigate. Simple, clean designs are what both search engine crawlers and search engine users like, as it lets them get the content they want without any fuss. This is what you should be aiming for.

5. Optimiaze Tags And Keywords
Let's take a look at meta tags, keywords, descriptions, and titles. They're all important elements, even if they're not what will make or break your site - they're just one part of your strategy. These elements need to be compelling and sprinkled with your keywords, as this will entice users to click through from the search results page to your website. It's best to start off slowly, gradually adding things in as you learn.

If you have any questions and you don't know where to go, then check out some of the forums on the subject. A simple search for "seo forum" will give great results. Remember, be patient. Learning SEO or search engine optimization takes time and effort but pays off in the end.

Introduction To SEO

2009-05-30T22:41:00.000-07:00

Search engine optimization, or the more popular term SEO, is a set of methods aimed mainly at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. It is considered as the subset of search engine marketing. Search engine optimization is mainly categorized into two categories - White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO.

White Hat SEO is the method that is generally approved by almost all search engines. These include adding more content with targeted keywords and improving website quality. While Black Hat SEO includes tricks such as cloaking and spamdexing. Black hatters usually counter the methods used by the search engine optimizers as irrelevant.

SEO is mainly concerned with the improvement of the number and position of its search results for a number of relevant keywords. It is also used to increase the number of visitors to a website. Search engine optimization is often provided as a stand alone service or as part of a larger marketing effort, incorporating it into the initial development and design of a website. Pay per click (PPC) advertising is significantly high for competitive and high volume search terms. Hence SEO is essential for the high volume search terms. A significant savings can be done by ranking well in the organic search results. Usually the website owners go for search engine optimization of their sites only when the cost of optimization is less than the cost of advertising.

The goal for search engine optimization differs for various sites. Broad search optimization strategy is ideal for websites having wide interest such as a periodical or a directory. Most of the website owners optimize their sites for a variety of highly specific keywords. An excessive broad search optimization results in the prevention of the progress of marketing strategy. It is due to the generation of a large volume of low quality inquiries. This problem can be reduced considerably by focusing more on the desirable traffic. Search engine optimization is very effective when it is used as a part of smart niche marketing, which is a focused and target-able portion of the market. Organic SEO is the search engine optimization that is done manually without using any Black Hat methods, underhanded methods, and automated scripting. This is the purest form of search engine optimization.

It is very important to understand the search engines and their general concept for the use of effective SEO methods. Each page of the search result is usually ranked according to relevancy, popularity and several other factors. Theoretically, the web pages are more likely to appear at the top of the listings as the relevancy of the page increases. Search engines usually use automated software for the judgment of the relevancy of the page.

The basic components of SEO mainly come under two categories such as on page and off page optimization techniques. The on page SEO includes several factors such as keyword inclusion, content optimization, and page structure. In off page optimization, inbound links are the main factor. Usually different search engine optimizers provide the varying information on which factors are most appropriate to gain the higher rankings. This wide difference in opinion is due to the fact that nobody is certain about the algorithm criteria.

In SEO, high search engine ranking is achieved by performing keyword research and by modifying the HTML code to reflect such keyword categories. Anyone having knowledge of basic HTML or the ability to learn can perform SEO. The ranking of a website is usually done in SEO by using a complex mathematical equation called an algorithm and hence drawing a solid conclusion is not relevant.

SEO is one of the most beneficial ways by which one can promote his/her website on the internet. Search engine optimization is found to be very cost effective when compared with other methods and it produces long term results.

Conclusion: Implementing an SEO Strategy

2009-04-30T23:09:00.000-07:00

The process of SEO is not easy to tackle, largely because so many pieces of a site factor into the final results. Promoting a site that writers on the web are unlikely to link to is as deadly as creating a fantastic website no one will see. SEO is also a long-term process, both in application and results - those who expect quick rankings after completing a few suggestions in this guide will be deeply dissapointed. Search engines can often be frustratingly slow to respond to improvements that will eventually garner significant boosts in traffic.

Patience is not the only virtue that should be used for successful SEO. The strategy itself must have a strong foundation in order to succeed. The best sites adhere strictly to these guidelines:

Unique Content - Something that has never before been offered on the web in terms of depth, quality, or presentation (i.e. a unique value proposition)
Access to an Adoptive Community - Connections or alliances with people/websites in an existing online community that is ready to accept, visit, and promote your offering
Link-Friendly Formatting - Even the best content may be unlikely to be linked to if it displays ads, particularly those that break up the page content or pop-up when a visitor comes to the site. Use discretion in presenting your material and remember that links are one of the most valuable commodities a site/page can get, and they'll last far longer than a pop-up ad's revenue.
Monetization Plan - Intelligent systems for monetizing powerful content must exist, or bandwidth, hosting, and development costs will eventually overrun your budget.
Market Awareness - If your site is targeting highly competitive terms, you should make available an online marketing budget, including funds for link buying, and hire or consult with someone experienced in bringing newer sites to the top of the SERPs.

If you take these steps and have a robust knowledge of the methods described in this guide, you are ready to begin an SEO campaign.

Quantity vs. Quality

In order to optimize a site to rank well in the search engines, pay diligent attention to the quality of your website and the effectiveness of your promotional tactics. While creating thousands of pages targeting every conceivable keyword may seem like a viable tactic, in fact, a single, phenomenal article or content source on a single term is far more likely to be profitable and less likely to be flagged for spam by the search engines.

This same rule applies to the sphere of promotion. While thousands of low quality, spammy pages or reciprocal free-for-all links pointing to you may provide some boost in the SERPs, a far greater effect can be achieved with just a few highly valuable, well-placed links from relevant sources that will drive both traffic and rankings. In the age of advanced link spam analysis, search engines will give greater credit to one link from CNN.com, Berkeley.edu, or Usability.gov than from 50,000 guestbooks, forum signatures, or reciprocal link directories.

Measuring Success: Website and Ranking Metrics to Watch

One of the most valuable sources for data, analysis, and refinement in an SEO campaign is in the statistics available via website tracking and measuring programs. A good analytics program can provide an incredible amount of data that can be used to track your visitors and make decisions about who to target in the future and how to do it.

Below is a short list of the most valuable elements in visitor tracking:

Campaign Tracking - The ability to put specific URLs or referrer strings onto ads, emails, or links and track their success.
Action Tracking - Adding the ability to track certain actions on a site like form submission, newsletter signups, add to cart buttons, and checkout or transaction completions and tying them together with campaigns and keyword tracking so you know what ads, links, terms, and campaigns are bringing you the best visitors.
Search Engine Referral Tracking - Seeing which search engines sent which visitors over time and tracking the terms and phrases they used to reach your site. Combined with action tracking, this can help you determine which terms are most valuable to target.
Referring URLs & Domain Tracking - This allows you to see what URLs and domains are responsible for sending you traffic. By tracking these individually, you can see where your most valuable links are coming from.
First-Time vs. Return Visitors - Find out what percentage of your visitors are coming back each day/week/month. This can help you to figure out how "sticky" and consistently interesting your site is.
Entry Pages - Which pages are attracting the most visitors and which are converting them. You can also see pages that have a very high rate of loss - those pages which don't do a good job pulling people into the site.
Visitor Demographics - Where are your visitors coming from, what browsers are they using, what time do they visit? All these questions and many more can be answered with demographics.
Click Path Analysis - What paths do your visitors follow when they get to your site? This data can help you make more logical streams of pages for visitors to use as they navigate your site, attempt to find information, or complete a task.
Popular Pages - Which pages get the most visitors and which are neglected? Use this data to help improve low popularity pages and emulate highly trafficked ones.
Page Views per Session - This data can tell you how many pages each visitor to your site is viewing - another metric used to measure "stickiness."

Applying the information you learn from your visitor tracking is a science unto its own. Experience and common sense should help to discover which terms, visitors, referrers, and demographics are most valuable to your site, enabling you to make the best possible decisions about how and where to target.

Working with a Pro vs. Do-It-Yourself SEO

As in many other areas of web development, a long-standing argument exists between those who feel that learning and practicing SEO should be done in-house, vs. those who feel it is best left to the professionals. There are advantages to either side, and it's best to weigh these against each other when making a final decision:

Advantages of Working with a Professional SEO

Diverse Experience - Professionals with several years of SEO experience under their belts can tell you what to expect from the search engines as you conduct the optimization process. They can also interpret and understand rankings data and "hiccups" in the results that may indicate certain trends or strategies that should be implemented or avoided.
Pre-Existing Relationships - Many SEOs have contacts inside the SEO industry to folks with experience in certain fields and expertise in unique areas (i.e. press releases, article distribution, directories, etc.) that can have a great impact on the success of your efforts. Several SEOs even have personal relationships with the folks at the search engines, although the use of these contacts is very rare and SE representatives pride themselves on not showing favoritism.
Link Building Knowledge - Professionals will have the ability to quickly identify topical communities and the most popular and relevant sites in them, thus saving time when link building. SEOs also have considerable experience with link acquisition and will recognize the requirements of certain sites for paid links, link requests, etc.
Identifying Linkable Content - SEOs are often masters of crafting and launching content. Not only can they identify the content most likely to get links from the specific web community, they're also experienced in how to package and promote it.
Fixing Possible Problems - Professionals are competent at identifying and managing issues that can cause a lack of indexing, low rankings, or penalties from the search engines. This is a skill that can be very hard to develop without years of practice and experience. If you have a ranking issue, an SEO can be of great value.
Time Savings - SEO can be an exceptionally time-consuming endeavor. An experienced SEO has the processes and systems of optimization down to a science, and can use that efficiency to provide better service in less time.

Advantages of Do-It-Yourself SEO

Complete Control - With personal responsibility comes complete control for each element of your site's progress. There can be no question as to who or what created a link or modified a document.
Learn from Your Actions - The ebb and flow of the SERPs will quickly teach an amateur SEO what works and what doesn't. Certain links, timing, and on-page changes will be fully visible and recordable, making it a learning process.
Personal Responsibility - Your success or failure will depend entirely on your own efforts, narrowing responsibility and preventing overlaps in work or issues of blame.
Cost Savings - Doing SEO yourself means you don't have to pay someone else. If you find that your time is less expensive than hiring an outsourced provider, do-it-yourself SEO can be a great way to save money.

With these pieces of information in mind, you're prepared to make an informed decision. Remember, too, that many SEOs offer consulting services, which provide you with a strategic plan that can be implemented and a helpful consultant to provide advice as needed on the project. This type of arrangement may offer a good balance if you're torn about which direction to choose. Look for costs between $100-$300 per hour, depending on the experience and notoriety of the consultant.

If you choose to outsource to an SEO firm, be well aware of the many pitfalls that await the uninformed. SEO has classically been an industry that has attracted many untrustworthy and dishonorable firms, resulting in an unfortunate perception from many. Pay particular attention to the following:

Manipulation & Search Spam - Overly aggressive tactics can get you banned from search engines.

Link Exchanges & Free-for-All Links – While the promise of easy link building through link exchanges or link farms is tempting, these tactics often achieve subpar results. Natural, organic inbound links from sites that your competitors can’t get links from are the best way to rank well in the long term.

Optimizing Pages for Search Engines vs. Visitors – Professional SEOs should have specialist copywriters who can craft well-written pages that attract both users and search engines. Repetitive keyword use (as noted above) is largely useless, but compelling, intelligent dialogue is a great way to get both searchers and engines interested in your content.

Guaranteed Rankings – Guaranteeing rankings is often one of the first indications that you’re dealing with a less-than-reputable firm. No SEO can guarantee rankings, because the search engines are responsible for the results and are constantly changing. Be wary, too, of promised success at “thousands of engines” (remember that the top 4 account for 95%+ of all search traffic), daily submission (completely unnecessary), and other “tricks” or “secrets”. Great rankings come from having great sites with quality links – no tricks or secrets required.

Investigate – The firm you work with should be able to provide references, preferably from both customers and industry folks that will let you know their skill and ability. Use your best judgment here – if a review or response seems canned or fishy, it probably is.

Finally, if you opt for do-it-yourself-SEO, be aware that are many, many parts of the SEO process not covered by this guide. SEO is a practice that has even the most respected professionals learning and researching every day to keep with trends on the web and algorithmic shifts in the search engines. A business or site owner will certainly want to join several SEO web communities (see the list in the links section) and keep up-to-date with information and best practices from the industry experts.

Where to Get Questions Answered

Whether you're considering running an SEO campaign yourself or hiring a professional, there are thousands of additional questions about the practice that I discover each day. Getting these questions answered quickly with the best possible information may require paying an SEO consultant, but the online SEO forums offer a second alternative.

Of particular value is the "Website Hospital" at Cre8asiteForums, where some of the world's best SEO professionals (including many of the folks who contributed to the creation of this guide) offer advice and input about posted websites. Other forums, like HighRankings & SearchEngineWatch, can provide good advice in both general and specific areas of SEO. A full list of forums can be found in this guide's list of resources.

« Growing a Site's Popularity

Growing a Site's Popularity

2009-04-30T23:08:00.000-07:00

While developing a great website is half of the SEO equation, the other half is promotion. Search engines are very particular about growing their ability to detect artificial manipulation and link spam, so effective SEOs who want to promote sites to the fullest extent must use natural, organic link building processes in order to have success.

The techniques and approaches described below are all ultimately designed to improve search engine rankings by growing the number and quality of links that point to a website. However, each also offers natural growth of your user base and provides visitors that come through systems other than search engines. Strangely, although the goal of SEO is better search rankings, the best sites in each industry often receive 50% or fewer of their total visitors from search engines. Why? Because if thousands of visitors are anxiously visiting your site via bookmarks, links, and direct type-ins at the address bar, you've achieved the content and status necessary to not only be ranked exceptionally well, but have visitors that know your site and want to visit, no matter what the search engines say. This methodology is particularly valuable because a site that doesn't rely entirely on search engines for traffic, ironically, has a far better chance of getting visitors through them.

Community Building

Creating a user base that develops into a full-scale community is no easy task, but it's one of the holy grails of online marketing and promotion. The idea is to develop frequently updated content in the form of a blog, forum, wiki, or other muti-user input system that can become a central reference and gathering point for a significant number of individuals in an industry.

Once a community is established, the input of individual members and coverage of events in these systems are natural sources for incoming links from bloggers and writers in the field, be they members or simply browsers. In addition, many members who run sites of their own will point to the community as their gathering place, creating even greater link value. Community building requires finesse and good online relationship skills, but the rewards are tremendous.

Press Releases and Public Relations

Influencing mainstream or niche press outlets to cover your company or its actions can be a highly effective way to drive attention to your site, which, if link worthy, can earn a fantastic number of links in short order. Press release sites like PRNewsWire and PRWeb are good starting places for driving traffic and links, and as both feed the major online news search engines (Yahoo! & Google News), they can provide high visibility as well. Optimizing press releases is a unique practice in and of itself - placement of text in the title and in visible headlines, compelling story writing, and proper content structure are all important elements. One of the most touted experts in this field (Greg Jarboe) runs a site with specific advice (SEO-PR) on the subject of optimizing press releases in particular.

Beyond releases, however, is influencing journalists to write editorial news stories about your subject and including a link or mention of your site. Some of the most highly touted PR (public relations) firms in the world charge a fortune for this service, but on a small scale it can be performed in-house. The trick is to have content and information so compelling and interesting that journalists would love to cover it. If you have the makings of a great story with a near-perfect fit for your site, email a few journalists whose work you've found to be on similar topics. Don't start with the New York Times, though. Go local, independent, and friendly to increase your chances of success. For a great example of how standard PR techniques operate, read Paul Graham's article on the effectiveness of PR firms on the web.

Link Building Based on Competitive Analysis

Looking at the links obtained by your top competitors and pursuing methods of your own to get listed on those sites/pages is an excellent way to stay competitive in the link building race. It's also a good way to get natural traffic; as these are the links and sites that send your competitors their traffic, they will also bring visitors to your site. The methodology for investigating a competitor's links is fairly straightforward, although more complex methods can be used by the advanced researcher.

The best source of linkage data is Yahoo!. Google purposely does not report accurate link data with their link: command, and MSN's rankings of links can often show less valuable and effective links at the top. Yahoo!, however, currently shows the greatest accuracy in numbers of links, and also sorts well, typically placing more valuable links near the top of the results.

At Yahoo!, the following searches can be used to find pages that link to other sites/pages:

Linkdomain:url.com
This command will show you all the pages that link to any page hosted at the domain url.com.
Link:http://www.url.com/page.html
This command will show only those pages which link directly to the specified page.
Linkdomain:url.com word
This search will show all pages with the term "word" that link to pages hosted at the URL. You can use this to find topical linking pages that may be providing benefit for specific areas.
Linkdomain:url.com -term
Use the - sign to indicate that pages which include a particular term should be excluded from the search; for example, searching for all links that point to a site that don't contain your company name on the page (i.e. linkdomain:seobook.com -seomoz). Note that searches can contain multiple - signs and terms if you require very specific information (or wish to exclude lots of noisy data).
Linkdomain:url.com -site:url.com
In addition to the - sign as a term remover, you can remove sites from the results as well. This can be especially valuable if one large site links to the target site on every page, and you wish to see the links that don't include that site. It can also be valuable to remove the site itself, (i.e. linkdomain:seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org), so as not to see results from internal pages.

Competitive analysis also includes using the top search results themselves as sources for links. If a site or page ranks particularly well for many related searches, a link from that site can send a healthy number of interested surfers to you. Rankings in the SERPs is also an excellent way to determine the value of a link, so if a page ranks highly for the term or phrase you're targeting, a link from that page is sure to provide great assistance in your goal to achieve top placement.

Building Personality & Reputation

The cult of personality on the Internet provides excellent opportunities for charismatic, well-written individuals to make headlines, friends, and links through online networking. A variety of social interaction sites operate across industries on the web, delivering ready-made sources for building a reputation and earning links. The keys to this methodology are to provide honest, intelligent contributions to existing discussions while maintaining a connection between yourself and the communities.

Online forums are great places to start, and can frequently lead to additional venues for the engagement of your colleagues. In building a successful reputation in an online forum, honesty, integrity, and openness provide the best chances to be taken seriously and seen by others as an expert on your subject matter. Forums typically offer a built-in system for referring folks to your site - the signature link. Although debate exists on whether search engines count these links for ranking purposes, there can be little doubt about their effectiveness in driving forum visitors to your site. One last tip for forums is to use a single link to your site in your signature - ensuring that people identify you with one unique online property, rather than several. Combining these effective techniques of forum posting and signature links with blogging can also be very valuable.

In addition to forums, outlets like blog comments (which frequently use the "nofollow" attribute, and are thus valuable for live visitors but not search engines), ICQ Channels, chatrooms, Google groups, and privately hosted boards or chatrooms can all serve a similar purpose. Stay consistent in each format - using the same voice, avatar (the accompanying photo on many forums), and username in order to build reputation and recognition.

Highly Competitive Terms & Phrases

For some terms and phrases, even the best websites with the most diligent promotional efforts will have a very difficult time penetrating the top 10-20 results. In these instances, it can be tempting to rely on efforts outside of the search engines' guidelines. However strong this temptation may be, be advised that search engines do not tolerate spam or manipulation via automated links, nor do they allow such results to flourish for long. Although these methods, commonly referred to as "black hat SEO", may have some effectiveness in the short term, they have little chance of long-term success in the SERPs and may become permanently banned from search results.

For highly competitive results (from "mortgage" to "car insurance" to "university degree"), targeting the above described "long tail" (the more niche-related search terms for which a smaller degree of heavy competition exists) can be the best method. Search engines are also careful to consider the age of a site and its links and give heavy weight to those sites with long-held, highly trusted links. Thus, while rankings may be sparse at first, over time an enterprising site owner can achieve some measure of notice, even in the most competitive of searches.

« Building a Traffic-Worthy Site

Implementing an SEO Strategy »

Building a Traffic-Worthy Site

2009-04-30T23:06:00.000-07:00

One of the most important (and often overlooked) subjects in SEO is building a site deserving of top rankings at the search engines. A site that ranks #1 for a set of terms in a competitive industry or market segment must be able to justify its value or risk losing out to competitors who offer more. Search engines' goals are to rank the best, most usable, functional, and informative sites first. By intertwining your site's content and performance with these goals, you can help to ensure its long-term prospects in the search engine rankings.

Usability

Usability represents the ease-of-use inherent in your site's design, navigation, architecture, and functionality. The idea behind the practice is to make your site intuitive so that visitors will have the best possible experience on the site. A whole host of features figure into usability, including:

Design
The graphical elements and layout of website have a strong influence on how easily usable the site is. Standards like blue, underlined links, top and side menu bars, logos in the top, left-hand corner may seem like rules that can be bent, but adherence to these elements (with which web users are already familiar) will help to make a site usable. Design also encompasses important topics like visibility & contrast, affecting how easy it is for users to interest the text and image elements of the site. Separation of unique sections like navigation, advertising, content, search bars, etc. is also critical, as users follow design cues to help them understand a page's content. A final consideration would also take into account the importance of ensuring that critical elements in a site's design (like menus, logos, colors, and layout) were used consistently throughout the site.

Information Architecture
The organizational hierarchy of a site can also strongly affect usability. Topics and categorization impact the ease with which a user can find the information they need on your site. While an intuitive, intelligently designed structure will seamlessly guide the user to their goals, a complex, obfuscated hierarchy can make finding information on a site disturbingly frustrating.

Navigation
A navigation system that guides users easily through both top-level and deep pages and makes a high percentage of the site easily accessible is critical to good usability. Since navigation is one of a website's primary functions, provide users with obvious navigation systems: breadcrumbs, alt tags for image links, and well-written anchor text that clearly describes what the user will get if he or she clicks a link. Navigation standards like these can drastically improve usability performance.

Functionality
To create compelling usability, ensure that tools, scripts, images, links, etc. all function as they are intended and don't provide errors to non-standard browsers, alternative operating systems, or uninformed users (who often don't know what/where to click).

Accessibility
Accessibility refers primarily to the technical ability of users to access and move through your site, as well as the ability of the site to serve disabled or impaired users. For SEO purposes, the most important aspects are limiting code errors to a minimum and fixing broken links, making sure that content is accessible and visible in all browsers and without special actions.

Content
The usability of content itself is often overlooked, but its importance cannot be overstated. The descriptive nature of headlines, the accuracy of information and the quality of content all factor highly into a site's likelihood to retain visitors and gain links.

Overall, usability is about gearing a site towards the potential users. Success in this arena garners increased conversion rates, a higher chance that other sites will link to yours, and a better relationship with your users (fewer complaints, lower instance of problems, etc.). For improving your knowledge of usability and the best practices, I recommend Steve Krug's exceptionally impressive book, "Don't Make Me Think"; possibly the best $30 you can spend to improve your website.

Professional Design

Elegant, high quality, high impact design is critical to gaining the trust of your users. If your site appears "low budget" or only marginally professional, it can hurt the chances of gaining a link and, more importantly, the chances of engendering trust in your visitors. The first impression of a website by a user occurs in less than 7 seconds. That's all the time you have to convey the importance and authority of your company through the site's design. I've prepared two examples below:

Workplace Office UK's Website

Amateur Logo Styles
Discordant Colors
No Clear Navigation Element
Basic Stock Photography
Template-Like Layout

Haworth Furniture's Online Catalog

Well-Defined Navigation
Elegant Color Scheme
Attractive Lines & Shading
High-Quality Photography
Design Creates Intuitive Flow to Information

Although the above examples are not perfect (note that Haworth is missing a critical element - a search bar, while Workplace Office UK has one), it's easy to see why consumers visiting websites like these would be more inclined to trust and buy from Haworth rather than Workplace Office. The application of professional design to sites can induce greater numbers of links from visiting content creators, greater number of users who return to the site, higher conversion rates, and a better overall perception of your site by visitors.

Although high quality, professional design is not one of the factors directly ranked by search engines, it indirectly influences many factors that do affect the rankings (i.e. link-building, trust, usability, etc).

Authoring High Quality Content

Why Should a Search Engine Rank Your Site Above All the Others in its Field?

If you cannot answer this question clearly and precisely, the task of ranking higher will be exponentially more difficult. Search engines attempt to rank the very best sites with the most relevant content first in their results, and until your site's content is the best in its field, you will always struggle against the engines rather than bringing them to your doorstep.

It is in content quality that a site's true potential shows through, and although search engines cannot measure the likelihood that users will enjoy a site, the vote via links system operates as a proxy for identifying the best content in a market. With great content, therefore, come great links and, ultimately, high rankings. Deliver the content that users need, and the search engines will reward your site.

Content quality, however, like professional design, is not always dictated by strict rules and guidelines. What passes for "best of class" in one sector may be below average in another market. The competitiveness and interests of your peers and competitors in a space often determine what kind of content is necessary to rank. Despite these variances, however, several guidelines can be almost universally applied to produce content that is worthy of attention:

Research Your Field
Get out into the forums, blogs, and communities where folks in your industry spend their online discussion time. Note the most frequently asked questions, the most up-to-date topics, and the posts or headlines that generate the most interest. Apply this knowledge when you create high-quality content and directly address your market's needs. If 10,000 people in the botany field are seeking articles that contain more illustrated diagrams instead of just photos, delivering that piece can set your content (and your site) apart from the competition.

Consult and Publish in Partnership with Industry Experts
In any industry, there will be high-level, publically prominent experts as well as a second tier of "well-known in web circles" folks. Targeting either of these groups for collaborative efforts in publishing articles, reviewing your work or contributing (even via a few small quotes) can be immensely valuable. In this manner, you can be assured that your content is both link and visitor-worthy. In addition, when partnering with "experts", exposure methods are built-in, creating natural promotion angles.

Create Documents that Can Serve as One-Stop Resources
If you can provide a single article or resource that provides every aspect of what a potential visitor or searcher might be seeking, your chances for success in SEO go up. An "all-in-one" resource can provide more opportunities than a single subject resource in many cases. Don't be too broad as you attempt to execute this kind of content creation - it's still important to keep a narrow focus when you create your piece. The best balance can be found by putting yourself in the potential users' shoes - if your piece fits their needs and covers every side of their possible interests while remaining "on-message," you're ready to proceed.

Provide Unique Information
Make sure that when you design your content outline, you include data and information that can be found nowhere else. While collecting and amalgamating information across the web can create good content, it is the unique elements in your work that will be noticed and recommended.

Serve Important Content in a Non-Commercial Format
Creating a document format that is non-commercial is of exceptional importance for attracting links and attention. The communities of web and content builders are particularly attuned to the commercialization of the web and will consciously and sub-consciously link to and recommend resources that don't serve prominent or interfering advertising. If you must post ads, do so as subtlety and unobtrusively as possible.

One Great Page is Worth a Thousand Good Pages
While hundreds or dozens of on-topic pages that cover sections of an industry are valuable to a website's growth, it is actually far better to invest a significant amount of time and energy producing a few articles/resources of truly exceptional quality. To create documents that become "industry standard" on the web and are pointed to time after time as the "source" for further investigations, claims, documents, etc. is to truly succeed in the rankings battle. The value of "owning" this traffic and link source far outweighs a myriad of articles that are rarely read or linked to.

Link Bait

When attempting to create the most link-worthy content, thinking outside the box and creating a document, tool or service that's truly revolutionary can provide a necessary boost. Even on corporate image or branding sites for small companies, a single, exciting piece of content that gets picked up en masse by your web community is worth a small fortune in public relations and exposure. Better still, the links you earn with an exciting release stay with your site for a long time, providing search visibility long after the event itself has been forgotten.

With content that generates links becoming such a valuable commodity, creating solely for the purpose of gaining links has become a popular practice for talented SEOs. In order to capitalize on this phenomenon, it's necessary to brainstorm. Below are some initial ideas that can help you build the content you need to generate great links.

Free Tools
Automated tools that query data sources, combine information or conduct useful calculations are eminently link worthy. Think along the lines of mortgage calculators and site-checking tools, then expand into your particular area of business/operation.

Web 2.0 Applications
Although the term Web 2.0 is more of a buzzword than a technicality, applications that fit the feature set described by the O'Reilly document do get a fantastic number of links from the web community and followers of this trend. Think mashups, maps, communities, sharing, tagging, RSS, and blogs.

Collaborative Work Documents
Working in concert with others is a good way to produce content more quickly and with generally higher quality. If you can get high-profile insiders or several known persons in an industry to collaborate, your chances for developing "link-bait" substantially increase.

Exposes of Nefarious Deeds
Writing a journalistic-style exposé detailing the misdeeds of others (be they organizations, websites, individuals or companies) can generate a lot of links and traffic if done in a professional manner (and before anyone else). Make sure you're very careful with these types of actions, however, as the backlash can be worse than the benefit if your actions provoke the wrong type of response.

Top 10 Lists
Numbered lists (of tips, links, resources, etc.), particularly those that rank items, can be a great way to generate buzz. These lists often promote discussion and thus, referencing.

Industry-Related Humor
Even the most serious of industries can use a bit of humor now and again. As with exposés, be cautious not to offend (although that too can merit mentions) - use your knowledge of stereotypes and history inside your market to get topical laughs and the links will be yours.

Reviews of Events
Industry gatherings, from pubcrawls to conferences to speeches and seminars, can all garner great links with a well-done review. Write professionally, as a journalist, and attempt to use as many full names as possible. It's also wise to link out to all the folks you mention, as they will see the links in their referral logs and come check you out.

Interviews with Well-Known Insiders
Anyone inside an industry whose name frequently appears in that industry's internal press is a great candidate for an interview. Even if it's a few short questions over email, a revealing interview can be a great source of links, and esteemed professionals are likely to answer requests even from smaller sources, as they can benefit from the attention, too.

Surveys or Collections of Data
Offering large collections of industry data culled from polling individuals, an online survey, or simply researching and aggregating data can provide a very link-worthy resource.

Film or Animation
Particularly in industries where video clips or animations are rare (i.e. Geology, not Movie Reviews), a high quality, entertaining, or informative video or animation can get more than a few folks interested.

Charts, Graphs, or Spreadsheets
These standard business graphics should certainly include analysis and dissection, but can provide a good source of links if promoted and built properly.

High Profile Criticism
Similar to the exposé system, well-written critiques of popular products, companies, sites, or individuals in a sector have the ability to pull in quite a few links from folks who agree and disagree.

Contests, Giveaways, and Competitions
Giving away prizes or public awards (even if they're just website graphics) can get a lot of online folks interested and linking.

Trend-Spotting
Identifying a story ahead of the crowd is commonly called "scooping" in journalism. Do this online, and all (or many) blog posts on the subject will reference your site as the first to "call it."

Advice from Multiple Experts
If you're creating an article that offers advice, pulling opinions from the well-known experts in the industry is a great way to make sure links flow your way. The experts themselves will often be inclined to link.

There are dozens of other great ways to get bloggers, writers, and website editors in your field to add links to your site. Imagine yourself as an industry blogger, seeking to cover the most exciting, unique trends and pages in the sector. If this individual stumbled across your content, would they be likely to write about it? If the answer is yes, it qualifies as link-bait.

« Critical Components

Growing a Site's Popularity »

Critical Components of Optimizing a Site

2009-04-30T23:05:00.000-07:00

Each of the following components are critical pieces to a site's ability to be crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engine spiders. When properly used in the construction of a website, these features give a site/page the best chance of ranking well for targeted keywords.

Accessibility

An accessible site is one that ensures delivery of its content successfully as often as possible. The functionality of pages, validity of HTML elements, uptime of the site's server, and working status of site coding and components all figure into site accessibility. If these features are ignored or faulty, both search engines and users will select other sites to visit.

The biggest problems in accessibility that most sites encounter fit into the following categories. Addressing these issues satisfactorily will avoid problems getting search engines and visitors to and through your site.

Broken Links - If an HTML link is broken, the contents of the linked-to page may never be found. In addition, some surmise that search engines negatively degrade rankings on sites & pages with many broken links.

Valid HTML & CSS - Although arguments exist about the necessity for full validation of HTML and CSS in accordance with W3C guidelines, it is generally agreed that code must meet minimum requirements of functionality and successful display in order to be spidered and cached properly by the search engines.

Functionality of Forms and Applications - If form submissions, select boxes, javascript, or other input-required elements block content from being reached via direct hyperlinks, search engines may never find them. Keep data that you want accessible to search engines on pages that can be directly accessed via a link. In a similar vein, the successful functionality and implementation of any of these pieces is critical to a site's accessibility for visitors. A non-functioning page, form, or code element is unlikely to receive much attention from visitors.

File Size - With the exception of a select few documents that search engines consider to be of exceptional importance, web pages greater than 150K in size are typically not fully cached. This is done to reduce index size, bandwidth, and load on the servers, and is important to anyone building pages with exceptionally large amounts of content. If it's important that every word and phrase be spidered and indexed, keeping file size under 150K is highly recommended. As with any online endeavor, smaller file size also means faster download speed for users - a worthy metric in its own right.

Downtime & Server Speed - The performance of your site's server may have an adverse impact on search rankings and visitors if downtime and slow transfer speeds are common. Invest in high quality hosting to prevent this issue.

URLs, Title Tags & Meta Data

URLs, title tags and meta tag components are all information that describe your site and page to visitors and search engines. Keeping them relevant, compelling and accurate are key to ranking well. You can also use these areas as launching points for your keywords, and indeed, successful rankings require their use.

The URL of a document should ideally be as descriptive and brief as possible. If, for example, your site's structure has several levels of files and navigation, the URL should reflect this with folders and subfolders. Individual pages' URLs should also be descriptive without being overly lengthy, so that a visitor who sees only the URL could have a good idea of what to expect on the page. Several examples follow:

Comparison of URLs for a Canon Powershot SD400 Camera

Amazon.com - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007TJ5OG/102-8372974-
4064145?v=glance&n=502394&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&n=3031001&s=photo&v=glance

Canon.com - http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?
act=ModelDetailAct&fcategoryid=145&modelid=11158

DPReview.com - http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canonsd400/

With both Canon and Amazon, a user has virtually no idea what the URL might point to. With DPReview's logical URL, however, it is easy to surmise that a review of a Canon SD400 is the likely topic of the page.

In addition to the issues of brevity and clarity, it's also important to keep URLs limited to as few dynamic parameters as possible. A dynamic parameter is a part of the URL that provides data to a database so the proper records can be retrieved, i.e. n=3031001, v=glance, categoryid=145, etc.

Note that in both Amazon and Canon's URLs, the dynamic parameters number 3 or more. In an ideal site, there should never be more than two. Search engineer representatives have confirmed on numerous occasions that URLs with more than 2 dynamic parameters may not be spidered unless they are perceived as significantly important (i.e. have many, many links pointing to them).

Well written URLs have the additional benefit of serving as their own anchor text when copied and pasted as links in forums, blogs, or other online venues. In the DPReview example, a search engine might see the URL http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canonsd400/ and give ranking credit to the page for terms in the URL like dpreview, reviews, canon, sd, 400. The parsing and breaking of terms is subject to the search engine's analysis, but the chance of earning this additional credit makes writing friendly, usable URLs even more worthwhile.

Title tags, in addition to their invaluable use in targeting keyword terms for rankings, also help drive click-through-rates (CTRs) from the results pages. Most of the search engines will use a page's title tag as the blue link text and headline for a result (see image below), and thus it is important to make them informative and compelling without being overly "salesy". The best title tags will make the targeted keywords prominent, help brand the site, and be as clear and concise as possible.

Examples and Recommendations for Title Tags

Page on Red Pandas from the Wellington Zoo:
- Current Title: Red Panda
- Recommended: Red Panda - Habitat, Features, Behavior | Wellington Zoo

Page on Alexander Calder from the Calder Foundation:
- Current Title: Alexander Calder
- Recommended: Alexander Calder - Biography of the Artist from the Calder Foundation

Page on Plasma TVs from Tiger Direct:
- Current Title: Plasma Televisions, Plasma TV, Plasma Screen TVs, SONY Plasma TV, LCD TV at TigerDirect.com
- Recommended: Plasma Screen & LCD Televisions at TigerDirect.com

For each of these, the idea behind the recommendations is to distill the information into the clearest, most useful snippet while retaining the primary keyword phrase as the first words in the tag. The title tag provides the first impression of a web page and can either serve to draw the visitor in or compel him or her to choose another listing in the results.

Meta Tag Recommendations:

Meta tags once held the distinction of being the primary realm of SEO specialists. Today, the use of meta tags, particularly the meta keywords tag, has diminished to an extent that search engines no longer use them in their ranking of pages. However, the meta description tag can still be of some importance, as several search engines use this tag to display the snippet of text below the clickable title link in the results pages.

In the image to the left, an illustration of a Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) shows the use of the meta description and title tags. It is on this page that searchers generally make their decision as to which result to click, and thus, while the meta description tag may have little to no impact on where a page ranks, it can significantly impact the # of visitors the page receives from search engine traffic. Note that meta tags are NOT always used on the SERPs, but can be seen (at the discretion of the search engine) if the description is accurate, well-written, and relevant to the searcher's query.

Search-Friendly Text

Making the visible text on a page "search-friendly" isn't complicated, but it is an issue that many sites struggle with. Text styles that cannot be indexed by search engines include:

Text embedded in a Java Application or Macromedia Flash file
Text in an image file - jpg, gif, png, etc
Text accessible only via a form submit or other on-page action

If the search engines can't see your page's text, they cannot spider and index that content for visitors to find. Thus, making search-friendly text in HTML format is critical to ranking well and getting properly indexed. If you are forced to use a format that hides text from search engines, try to use the right keywords and phrases in headlines, title tags, URLs, and image/file names on the page. Don't go overboard with this tactic, and never try to hide text (by making it the same color as the background or using CSS tricks). Even if the search engines can't detect this automatically, a competitor can easily report your site for spamming and have you de-listed entirely.

Along with making text visible, it's important to remember that search engines measure the terms and phrases in a document to extract a great deal of information about the page. Writing well for search engines is both an art and a science (as SEOs are not privy to the exact, technical methodology of how search engines score text for rankings), and one that can be harnessed to achieve better rankings.

In general, the following are basic rules that apply to optimizing on-page text for search rankings:

Make the primary term/phrase prominent in the document - Measurements like keyword density are useless (see kw density myth thread), but general frequency can help rankings.

Make the text on-topic and high quality - Search engines use sophisticated lexical analysis to help find quality pages, as well as teams of researchers identifying common elements in high quality writing. Thus, great writing can provide benefits to rankings, as well as visitors.

Use an optimized document structure - The best practice is generally to follow a journalistic format wherein the document starts with a description of the content, then flows from broad discussion of the subject to narrow. The benefits of this are arguable, but in addition to SEO value, they provide the most readable and engaging informational document. Obviously, in situations where this would be inappropriate, it's not necessary.

Keep text together - Many folks in SEO recommend using CSS rather than table layouts in order to keep the text flow of the document together and prevent the breaking up of text via coding. This can also be achieved with tables - simply make sure that text sections (content, ads, navigation, etc.) flow together inside a single table or row and don't have too many "nested" tables that make for broken sentences and paragraphs.

Keep in mind that the text layout and keyword usage in a document no longer carries high importance in search engine rankings. While the right structure and usage can provide a slight boost, obsessing over keyword placement or layout will provide little overall benefit.

Information Architecture

The document and link structure of a website can provide benefits to search rankings when performed properly. The keys to effective architecture are to follow the rules that govern human usability of a site:

Make Use of a Sitemap - It's wise to have the sitemap page linked to from every other page in the site, or at the least from important high-level category pages and the home page. The sitemap should, ideally, offer links to all of the site's internal pages. However, if more than 100-150 pages exist on the site, a wiser system is to create a sitemap that will link to all of the category level pages, so that no page in a site is more than 2 clicks from the home page. For exceptionally large sites, this rule can be expanded to 3 clicks from the home page.

Use a Category Structure that Flows from Broad > Narrow - Start with the broadest topics as hierarchical category pages, then expand to deep pages with specific topics. Using the most on-topic structure tells search engines that your site is highly relevant and covers a topic in-depth.

For more information on segmenting document structure and link hierarchies, see Dr. Garcia's excellent guide to on-topic analysis.

Canonical Issues & Duplicate Content

One of the most common and problematic issues for website builders, particularly those with larger, dynamic sites powered by databases, is the issue of duplicate content. Search engines are primarily interested in unique documents and text, and when they find multiple instances of the same content, they are likely to select a single one as "canonical" and display that page in their results.

If your site has multiple pages with the same content, either through a content management system that creates duplicates through separate navigation, or because copies exist from multiple versions, you may be hurting those pages' chances of ranking in the SERPs. In addition, the value that comes from anchor text and link weight, through both internal and external links to the page, will be diluted by multiple versions.

The solution is to take any current duplicate pages and use a 301 re-direct (described in detail here) to point all versions to a single, "canonical" edition of the content.

One very common place to look for this error is on a site's homepage - oftentimes, a website will have the same content on http://www.url.com, http://url.com, and http://www.url.com/index.html. That separation alone can cause lost link value and severely damage rankings for the site's homepage. If you find many links outside the site pointing to both the non-www and the www version, it may be wise to use a 301 re-write rule to affect all pages at one so they point to the other.

« How to Conduct Keyword Research

Building a Traffic Worthy Site »

How to Conduct Keyword Research

2009-04-30T23:01:00.000-07:00

Keyword research is critical to the process of SEO. Without this component, your efforts to rank well in the major search engines may be mis-directed to the wrong terms and phrases, resulting in rankings that no one will ever see. The process of keyword research involves several phases:

Brainstorming - Thinking of what your customers/potential visitors would be likely to type in to search engines in an attempt to find the information/services your site offers (including alternate spellings, wordings, synonyms, etc).
Surveying Customers - Surveying past or potential customers is a great way to expand your keyword list to include as many terms and phrases as possible. It can also give you a good idea of what's likely to be the biggest traffic drivers and produce the highest conversion rates.
Applying Data from KW Research Tools - Several tools online (including Wordtracker & Overture - both described below) offer information about the number of times users perform specific searches. Using these tools can offer concrete data about trends in keyword selection.
Term Selection - The next step is to create a matrix or chart that analyzes the terms you believe are valuable and compares traffic, relevancy, and the likelihood of conversions for each. This will allow you to make the best informed decisions about which terms to target. SEOmoz's KW Difficulty Tool can also aid in choosing terms that will be achievable for the site.
Performance Testing and Analytics - After keyword selection and implementation of targeting, analytics programs (like Indextools and ClickTracks) that measure web traffic, activity, and conversions can be used to further refine keyword selection.

Wordtracker & Overture

Overture Keyword Selection Tool

Wordtracker Simple Search Utility

Currently, the two most popular sources of keyword data are Wordtracker, whose statistics come primarily from use of the meta-search engine Dogpile (which has ~1% of the share of searches performed online) and Overture (recently re-branded as Yahoo! Search Marketing), which offers data collected from searches performed on Yahoo!'s engine (with a 22-28% share). While neither's data is flawless or entirely accurate, both provide good methods for measuring comparative numbers. For example, while Overture and Wordtracker may disagree on numbers and say that "red bicycles" gets 240 vs. 380 searches per day (across all engines), both will generally indicate that this is a more popular term than "scarlet bicycles", "maroon bicycles", or even "blue bicycles."

In Wordtracker, which provides more detail but has a considerably smaller share of data, terms and phrases are separated by capitalization, plurality, and word ordering. In the Overture tool, multiple search phrases are combined. For example, Wordtracker would independently show numbers for "car loans", "Car Loans", "car loan", and "cars Loan", whereas Overture would give a single number that encompasses all of these. The granularity of data can be more useful for analyzing searches that may result in unique results pages (plurals often do and different word orders almost always do), but capitalization is of less consequence as the search engines don't deliver different results based on capitalization.

Remember that Wordtracker and Overture are both useful tools for relative keyword data, but can be highly inaccurate when compared to the actual number of searches performed. In other words, use the tools to select which terms to target, but don't rely on them for predicting the amount of traffic you can achieve. If your goal is estimating traffic numbers, use programs like Google's Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing to test the number of impressions a particular term/phrase gets.

Targeting the Right Terms

Targeting the best possible terms is of critical importance. This encompasses more than merely measuring traffic levels and choosing the highest trafficked terms. An intelligent process for keyword selection will measure each of the following:

Conversion Rate - the percent of users searching with the term/phrase that converts (click an ad, buy a product, complete a transaction, etc.)

Predicted Traffic - An estimate of how many users will be searching for the given term/phrase each month

Value per Customer - An average amount of revenue earned per customer using the term or phrase to search - comparing big-ticket search terms vs. smaller ones.

Keyword Competition - A rough measurement of the competitive environment and the level of difficulty for the given term/phrase. This is typically measured by metrics that include the number of competitors, the strength of those competitors' links, and the financial motivation to be in the sector. SEOmoz's Keyword Difficulty Tool can assist in this process.

Once you've analyzed each of these elements, you can make effective decisions about the terms and phrases to target. When starting a new site, it's highly recommended to target only one or possibly two unique phrases on a single page. Although it is possible to optimize for more phrases and terms, it's generally best to keep separate terms on separate pages, as you can provide individualized information for each in this manner. As websites grow and mature, gaining links and legitimacy with the engines, targeting multiple terms per page becomes more feasible.

The Long Tail of Search

The "long tail" is a concept pioneered by Chris Anderson (the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, who runs the Long Tail blog). From Chris's description:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

This concept relates exceptionally well to keyword search terms in the major engines. Although the largest traffic numbers are typically for broad terms at the "head" of the keyword curve, great value lies in the thousands of unique, rarely used, niche terms in the "tail." These terms can provide higher conversion rates and more interested and valuable visitors to a site, as these specific terms can relate to exactly the topics, products, and services your site provides.

For example:

Keyword Term/Phrase

# of Searches per Month

men's suit 27,770

armani men's suit 723

italian men's suit 615

Jones New York Men's Suit 424

Men's 39S Suit 310

Gucci Men's Suit 222

Versace Men's Suit 178

Hugo Boss Men's Suit 138

Men's Custom Made Suit 126

*Source - Overture Keyword Selection Tool (Sept. '05 data)

In the scenario in the table above, the traffic for the term "men's suit" may be far greater, but the value of more specific terms is greater. A searcher for "Hugo Boss Men's Suit" is more likely to make a purchase decision than one searching for simply a "men's suit." There are also thousands of other terms, garnering far fewer monthly searches, that, when taken together, have a value greater than the terms garnering the most searches. Thus, targeting many dozens or hundreds of smaller terms individually can be both easier (on a competitive level) and more profitable.

Sample Keyword Research Chart

The following chart diagrams how we conduct basic keyword research at SEOmoz. You are welcome to copy and use this format for your own keywords:

Term/Phrase	KW Difficulty	Top 3 OV Bids	OV Mthly Pred. Traf.	WT Mthly Pred. Traf.	Relevance Score
San Diego Zoo	63%	$0.41 $0.41 $0.40	116,229	42,360	25%
Joe Dimaggio	51%	$0.28 $0.19 $0.11	5,847	7,590	10%
Starsky and Hutch	53%	$0.16 $0.00 $0.00	19,769	16,950	30%
Art Museum	77%	$0.51 $0.50 $0.25	19,244	7,410	5%
DUI Attorney	52%	$1.63 $1.62 $1.60	13,923	3,960	60%
Search Engine Marketing	83%	$4.99 $3.26 $3.25	1,183,633	74,430	40%
Microsoft	89%	$0.69 $0.51 $0.32	1,525,265	256,620	10%
Interest Only Mortgage Loan	50%	$4.60 $4.39 $4.39	3,745	8,910	75%

Key

KW Difficulty - The score from SEOmoz's tool

Top 3 OV Bids - The bid amount from the top 3 listings in Yahoo!'s PPC results

Overture Monthly Predicted Traffic - The amount of traffic estimated via Overture for the previous month's data

Wordtracker Monthly Predicted Traffic - The amount of traffic estimated via Wordtracker (note that you must add up all terms in their database that match and multiply by the number of days in the month - the "exact/precise search" function can help make this easier)

Relevance Score - The % of searchers using this term/phrase that you feel are likely to be interested in your site's products/services/offerings. Although this is a subjective number, you can use conversion rates or click-through rates from previous campaigns to more accurately estimate this in the future.

In selecting final terms, those with lower difficulty, higher relevance, and more traffic will offer the greatest value.

« How Search Engines Operate

Critical Components »

How Search Engines Operate?

2009-04-30T22:58:00.000-07:00

Search engines have a short list of critical operations that allows them to provide relevant web results when searchers use their system to find information.

Crawling the Web
Search engines run automated programs, called "bots" or "spiders", that use the hyperlink structure of the web to "crawl" the pages and documents that make up the World Wide Web. Estimates are that of the approximately 20 billion existing pages, search engines have crawled between 8 and 10 billion.
Indexing Documents
Once a page has been crawled, its contents can be "indexed" - stored in a giant database of documents that makes up a search engine's "index". This index needs to be tightly managed so that requests which must search and sort billions of documents can be completed in fractions of a second.
Processing Queries
When a request for information comes into the search engine (hundreds of millions do each day), the engine retrieves from its index all the documents that match the query. A match is determined if the terms or phrase is found on the page in the manner specified by the user. For example, a search for car and driver magazine at Google returns 8.25 million results, but a search for the same phrase in quotes ("car and driver magazine") returns only 166 thousand results. In the first system, commonly called "Findall" mode, Google returned all documents which had the terms "car", "driver", and "magazine" (they ignore the term "and" because it's not useful to narrowing the results), while in the second search, only those pages with the exact phrase "car and driver magazine" were returned. Other advanced operators (Google has a list of 11) can change which results a search engine will consider a match for a given query.
Ranking Results
Once the search engine has determined which results are a match for the query, the engine's algorithm (a mathematical equation commonly used for sorting) runs calculations on each of the results to determine which is most relevant to the given query. They sort these on the results pages in order from most relevant to least so that users can make a choice about which to select.

Although a search engine's operations are not particularly lengthy, systems like Google, Yahoo!, AskJeeves, and MSN are among the most complex, processing-intensive computers in the world, managing millions of calculations each second and funneling demands for information to an enormous group of users.

Speed Bumps & Walls

Certain types of navigation may hinder or entirely prevent search engines from reaching your website's content. As search engine spiders crawl the web, they rely on the architecture of hyperlinks to find new documents and revisit those that may have changed. In the analogy of speed bumps and walls, complex links and deep site structures with little unique content may serve as "bumps." Data that cannot be accessed by spiderable links qualify as "walls."

Possible "Speed Bumps" for SE Spiders:

URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; i.e. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors)
Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one)
Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages)
Pages requiring a "Session ID" or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can)
Pages that are split into "frames" can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.

Possible "Walls" for SE Spiders:

Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button
Pages requiring a drop down menu (HTML attribute) to access them
Documents accessible only via a search box
Documents blocked purposefully (via a robots meta tag or robots.txt file - see more on these here)
Pages requiring a login
Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic)

The key to ensuring that a site's contents are fully crawlable is to provide direct, HTML links to each page you want the search engine spiders to index. Remember that if a page cannot be accessed from the home page (where most spiders are likely to start their crawl), it is likely that it will not be indexed by the search engines. A sitemap (which is discussed later in this guide) can be of tremendous help for this purpose.

Measuring Relevance and Popularity

Modern commercial search engines rely on the science of information retrieval (IR). That science has existed since the middle of the 20th century, when retrieval systems powered computers in libraries, research facilities, and government labs. Early in the development of search systems, IR scientists realized that two critical components made up the majority of search functionality:

Relevance - the degree to which the content of the documents returned in a search matched the user's query intention and terms. The relevance of a document increases if the terms or phrase queried by the user occurs multiple times and shows up in the title of the work or in important headlines or subheaders.

Popularity - the relative importance, measured via citation (the act of one work referencing another, as often occurs in academic and business documents) of a given document that matches the user's query. The popularity of a given document increases with every other document that references it.

These two items were translated to web search 40 years later and manifest themselves in the form of document analysis and link analysis.

In document analysis, search engines look at whether the search terms are found in important areas of the document - the title, the meta data, the heading tags, and the body of text content. They also attempt to automatically measure the quality of the document (through complex systems beyond the scope of this guide).

In link analysis, search engines measure not only who is linking to a site or page, but what they are saying about that page/site. They also have a good grasp on who is affiliated with whom (through historical link data, the site's registration records, and other sources), who is worthy of being trusted (links from .edu and .gov pages are generally more valuable for this reason), and contextual data about the site the page is hosted on (who links to that site, what they say about the site, etc.).

Link and document analysis combine and overlap hundreds of factors that can be individually measured and filtered through the search engine algorithms (the set of instructions that tells the engines what importance to assign to each factor). The algorithm then determines scoring for the documents and (ideally) lists results in decreasing order of importance (rankings).

Information Search Engines Can Trust

As search engines index the web's link structure and page contents, they find two distinct kinds of information about a given site or page - attributes of the page/site itself and descriptives about that site/page from other pages. Since the web is such a commercial place, with so many parties interested in ranking well for particular searches, the engines have learned that they cannot always rely on websites to be honest about their importance. Thus, the days when artificially stuffed meta tags and keyword-rich pages dominated search results (pre-1998) have vanished and given way to search engines that measure trust via links and content.

The theory goes that if hundreds or thousands of other websites link to you, your site must be popular, and thus, have value. If those links come from very popular and important (and thus, trustworthy) websites, their power is multiplied to even greater degrees. Links from sites like NYTimes.com, Yale.edu, Whitehouse.gov, and others carry with them inherent trust that search engines then use to boost your ranking position. If, on the other hand, the links that point to you are from low-quality, interlinked sites or automated garbage domains (aka link farms), search engines have systems in place to discount the value of those links.

The most well-known system for ranking sites based on link data is the simplistic formula developed by Google's founders - PageRank. PageRank, which relies on a mathematical formula (based around finding a given document in a random pattern of clicking on links), is described by Google in their technology section:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Google uses a PageRank “proxy” value, which logarithmically translates the actual PageRank of a document to a value between 1 and 10, to rank Web sites listed in its directory (which offers a PageRank order or an Alphabetical order for listings) and in its toolbar (below).

Google's toolbar (available here) includes an icon that shows a PageRank value from 0-10

PageRank is, in essence, a rough system for estimating the value of a given link based on the links that point to the host page. Since PageRank's inception in the late '90s, more subtle and sophisticated link analysis systems have taken the place of PageRank. Thus, in the modern era of SEO, the PageRank measurement in Google's toolbar, directory, or through sites that query the service is of limited value. Pages with PR8 can be found ranked 20-30 positions below pages with a PR3 or PR4. In addition, the toolbar numbers are updated only every 3-6 months by Google, making the values even less useful. Rather than focusing on PageRank, it's important to think holistically about a link's worth.

Here's a small list of the most important factors search engines look at when attempting to value a link:

The Anchor Text of Link - Anchor text describes the visible characters and words that hyperlink to another document or location on the web. For example, in the phrase "CNN is a good source of news, but I actually prefer the BBC's take on events," two unique pieces of anchor text exist - "CNN" is the anchor text pointing to http://www.cnn.com, while "the BBC's take on events" points to http://news.bbc.co.uk. Search engines use this text to help them determine the subject matter of the linked-to document. In the example above, the links would tell the search engine that when users search for "CNN", SEOmoz.org thinks that http://www.cnn.com is a relevant site for the term "CNN" and that http://news.bbc.co.uk is relevant to "the BBC's take on events". If hundreds or thousands of sites think that a particular page is relevant for a given set of terms, that page can manage to rank well even if the terms NEVER appear in the text itself (for example, see the BBC's explanation of why Google ranks certain pages for the term "Miserable Failure").

Global Popularity of the Site - More popular sites, as denoted by the number and power of the links pointing to them, provide more powerful links. Thus, while a link from SEOmoz may be a valuable vote for a site, a link from bbc.co.uk or cnn.com carries far more weight. This is one area where PageRank (assuming it was accurate) could be a good measure, as it's designed to calculate global popularity.

Popularity of Site in Relevant Communities - In the example above, the weight or power of a site's vote is based on its raw popularity across the web. As search engines became more sophisticated and granular in their approach to link data, they acknowledged the existence of "topical communities"; sites on the same subject that often interlink with one another, referencing documents and providing unique data on a particular topic. Sites in these communities provide more value when they link to a site/page on a relevant subject rather than a site that is largely irrelevant to their topic.

Text Directly Surrounding the Link - Search engines have been noted to weight the text directly surrounding a link with greater important and relevant than the other text on the page. Thus, a link from inside an on-topic paragraph may carry greater weight than a link in the sidebar or footer.

Subject Matter of the Linking Page - The topical relationship between the subject of a given page and the sites/pages linked to on it may also factor into the value a search engine assigns to that link. Thus, it will be more valuable to have links from pages that are related to the site/page's subject matter than those that have little to do with the topic.

These are only a few of the many factors search engines measure and weigh when evaluating links. For a more complete list, see SEOmoz's search engine ranking factors article.

Link metrics are in place so that search engines can find information to trust. In the academic world, greater citation meant greater importance, but in a commercial environment, manipulation and conflicting interests interfere with the purity of citation-based measurements. Thus, on the modern WWW, the source, style, and context of those citations is vital to ensuring high quality results.

The Anatomy of a HyperLink

A standard hyperlink in HTML code looks like this:

SEOmoz
SEOmoz

In this example, the code simply indicates that the text "SEOmoz" (called the "anchor text" of the link) should be hyperlinked to the page http://www.seomoz.org. A search engine would interpret this code as a message that the page carrying this code believed the page http://www.seomoz.org to be relevant to the text on the page and particularly relevant to the term "SEOmoz".

A more complex piece of HTML code for a link may include additional attributes such as:

SEOmoz
SEOmoz

In this example, new elements such as the link title and rel attribute may influence how a search engine views the link, despite its appearance on the page remaining unchanged. The title attribute may serve as an additional piece of information, telling the search engine that http://www.seomoz.org, in addition to being related to the term "SEOmoz", is also relevant to the phrase "Rand's Site". The rel attribute, originally designed to describe the relationship between the linked-to page and the linking page, has, with the recent emergence of the "nofollow" descriptive, become more complex.

"Nofollow" is a tag designed specifically for search engines. When ascribed to a link in the rel attribute, it tells the engine's ranking system that the link should not be considered an editorially approved "vote" for the linked-to page. Currently, 3 major search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, & Google) all support "nofollow". AskJeeves, due to its unique ranking system, does not support nofollow, and ignores its presence in link code. For more information about how this works, visit Danny Sullivan's description of nofollow's inception on the SEW blog.

Some links may be assigned to images, rather than text:

This example shows an image named "rand.jpg" linking to the page - http://www.seomoz.org/randfish.php. The alt attribute, designed originally to display in place of images that were slow to load or on voice-based browsers for the blind, reads "Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz" (in many browsers, you can see the alt text by hovering the mouse over the images). Search engines can use the information in an image-based link, including the name of the image and the alt attribute to interpret what the linked-to page is about.

Other types of links may also be used on the web, many of which pass no ranking or spidering value due to their use of re-direct, Javascript, or other technologies. A link that does not have the classic text format, be it image or text, should be generally considered not to pass link value via the search engines (although in rare instances, engines may attempt to follow these more complex style links).

SEOmoz

In this example, the redirect used scrambles the URL by writing it backwards, but unscrambles it later with a script and sends the visitor to the site. It can be assumed that this passes no search engine link value.

SEOmoz

This sample shows the very simple piece of Javascript code that calls a function referenced in the document to pull up a specified page. Creative uses of Javascript like this can also be assumed to pass no link value to a search engine.

It's important to understand that, based on a link's anatomy, search engines can (or cannot) interpret and use the data therein. Whereas the right sort of links can provide great value, the wrong sort will be virtually useless (for search ranking purposes). More detailed information on links is available at this resource - anatomy and deployment of links.

Keywords and Queries

Search engines rely on the terms queried by users to determine which results to put through their algorithms, order, and return to the user. But, rather than simply recognizing and retrieving exact matches for query terms, search engines use their knowledge of semantics (the science of language) to construct intelligent matching for queries. An example might be a search for loan providers that also returned results that did not contain that specific phrase, but instead had the term lenders.

The engines collect data based on the frequency of use of terms and the co-occurrence of words and phrases throughout the web. If certain terms or phrases are often found together on pages or sites, search engines can construct intelligent theories about their relationships. Mining semantic data through the incredible corpus that is the Internet has given search engines some of the most accurate data about word ontologies and the connections between words ever assembled artificially. This immense knowledge of language and its usage gives them the ability to determine which pages in a site are topically related, what the topic of a page or site is, how the link structure of the web divides into topical communties, and much, much more.

Search engines' growing artificial intelligence on the subject of language means that queries will increasingly return more intelligent, evolved results. This heavy investment in the field of natural language processing (NLP) will help to achieve greater understanding of the meaning and intent behind their users' queries. Over the long term, users can expect the results of this work to produce increased relevancy in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and more accurate guesses from the engines as to the intent of a user's queries.

Sorting the Wheat from the Chaff

In the classic world of Information Retrieval, when no commercial interests existed in the databases, very simplistic algorithms could be used to return high quality results. On the world wide web, however, the opposite is true. Commercial interests in the SERPs are a constant issue for modern search engines. With every new focus on quality control and growth in relevance metrics, there are thousands of individuals (many in the field of SEO) dedicated to manipulating these metrics in order to control the SERPs, typically by aiming to list their sites/pages first.

The worst kind of results are what the industry refers to as "search spam" - pages and sites with little real value that contain primarily re-directs to other pages, lists of links, scraped (copied) content, etc. These pages are so irrelevant and useless that search engines are highly focused on removing them from the index. Naturally, the monetary incentives are similar to email spam - although few visit and fewer click on the links (which are what provide the spam publisher with revenue), the sheer quantity is the decisive factor in producing income.

Other "spam" results range from sites that are of low quality or affiliate status that search engines would prefer not to list, to high quality sites and businesses that are using the link structure of the web to manipulate the results in their favor. Search engines are focused on clearing out all types of manipulation and hope to eventually achieve fully relevant and organic algorithms to determine ranking order. So-called "search engine spammers" engage in a constant battle against these tactics, seeking new loopholes and methods for manipulation, resulting in a never-ending struggle.

This guide is NOT about how to manipulate the search engines to achieve rankings, but rather how to create a website that search engines and users will be happy to have ranking permanently in the top positions, thanks to its relevance, quality, and user friendliness.

Paid Placement and Secondary Sources in the Results

The search engine results pages contain not only listings of documents found to be relevant to the user's query, but other content, including paid advertisements and secondary source results. Google, for example, serves up ads from its well-known AdWords program (which currently fuels more than 99% of Google's revenues), as well as secondary content from its local search, product search (called Froogle), and image search results.

Below is a screenshot of Google's search engine results page. Hover on any of the areas of the image to reveal the source of the content:

The sites/pages ranking in the "organic" search results receive the lion's share of searcher eyeballs and clicks - between 60-70%, depending on factors such as the prominence of ads, relevance of secondary content, etc. The practice of optimization for the paid search results is called SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, while optimizing to rank in the secondary results requires unique, advanced methods of targeting specific searches in arenas such as local search, product search, image search, and others. While all of these practices are a valuable part of any online marketing campaign, they are beyond the scope of this guide. Our sole focus remains on the "organic" results, although links at the bottom of this paper can help direct you to resources on other subjects.

« What is SEO?

How to Conduct Keyword Research »

What is SEO?

2009-04-30T22:47:00.000-07:00

SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. Firms that practice SEO can vary; some have a highly specialized focus, while others take a more broad and general approach. Optimizing a web site for search engines can require looking at so many unique elements that many practitioners of SEO (SEOs) consider themselves to be in the broad field of website optimization (since so many of those elements intertwine).

This guide is designed to describe all areas of SEO - from discovery of the terms and phrases that will generate traffic, to making a site search engine friendly, to building the links and marketing the unique value of the site/organization's offerings.

Why does my company/organization/website need SEO?

The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines - Yahoo!, MSN, Google & AskJeeves (although AOL gets nearly 10% of searches, their engine is powered by Google's results). If your site cannot be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases, you miss out on the incredible opportunities available to websites provided via search - people who want what you have visiting your site. Whether your site provides content, services, products, or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all Internet users.

Search queries, the words that users type into the search box which contain terms and phrases best suited to your site, carry extraordinary value. Experience has shown that search engine traffic can make (or break) an organization's success. Targeted visitors to a website can provide publicity, revenue, and exposure like no other. Investing in SEO, whether through time or finances, can have an exceptional rate of return.

Why can't the search engines figure out my site without SEO help?

Search engines are always working towards improving their technology to crawl the web more deeply and return increasingly relevant results to users. However, there is and will always be a limit to how search engines can operate. Whereas the right moves can net you thousands of visitors and attention, the wrong moves can hide or bury your site deep in the search results where visibility is minimal. In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO can also help boost rankings so that content that has been found will be placed where searchers will more readily see it. The online environment is becoming increasingly competitive, and those companies who perform SEO will have a decided advantage in visitors and customers.

How Search Engines Operate? »

Keyword Term/Phrase	# of Searches per Month
men's suit	27,770
armani men's suit	723
italian men's suit	615
Jones New York Men's Suit	424
Men's 39S Suit	310
Gucci Men's Suit	222
Versace Men's Suit	178
Hugo Boss Men's Suit	138
Men's Custom Made Suit	126
*Source - Overture Keyword Selection Tool (Sept. '05 data)