Why Articles Are Not The Route To High Search Engine Rankings

If you have any interest in getting high search engine rankings for your website (and who doesn't) you've probably been sold the idea that writing and publishing your own articles will do it for you.

Here's why that's not entirely true.

Imagine the following scenario...

You write an article around a keyword or keyphrase you want to rank well for.

You submit that article to all the article submission sites and directories and ezines you can find.

Your article gets published in hundreds of places.

You now have hundreds of links pointing back to your main site...

But your own site never shows up in the top ten results for that particular keyword or keyphrase.

Instead you find that there are lots of other sites carrying your article that rank better than yours.

You've completely missed out on an excellent opportunity to get high rankings for your keyword or keyphrase.

Even worse... you just handed your precious keyword-rich content on a platter to possible competitors who happened to publish your article on their website, and may have lost some of your most targeted visitors and sales to them.

So where did you go wrong?

Your mistake lay in using your precious article - the keyword-rich content you toiled for hours to write - for entirely the wrong purpose.

You failed to use the power of the medium of article publishing to give your site an unbeatable advantage over others.

Here's how to use your articles the right way to boost your search engine rankings.

<BR>1. Publish Unique Content On Your Website

When you make an article available for reprint, the article, by virtue of it being published on hundreds of other sites, now no longer qualifies as unique content.

In the eyes of search engines, those pages with higher Pagerank (and hence greater importance) than yours will now rank better than you for the keywords your article is optimized for.

Instead of making your article the main course, use it as an appetizer to direct search engines and readers to a UNIQUE, keyword-rich, well-optimized report or white paper on your website, and you'll see dramatically different results.

<BR>2. Use Your Article As Spider Bait

Think of your articles as simply the conduit that leads search engines to your website.

Publishing your articles all over the web is like leaving scraps for a puppy (a.k.a. the search engines) that follows them all the way back to the kennel (a.k.a. your website) where it can feast on the main course - your UNIQUE content.

<BR>3. Use Keyword-Rich Anchor Text In Your Resource Box

Use your main keyword or keyphrase in the anchor text of the article resource box that contains a link pointing back to your unique content.

This will create hundreds of keyword-rich links pointing back to the well-optimized report on your website, and give your pages a powerful edge over other websites.

Often this factor alone is sufficient to take your website to the top of the search results, especially with search engines like Google and MSN.

The guidelines above include few of the steps you need to take to get high rankings for the keywords of your choice.



Copyright 2004 <A target="_new" href="http://www.PriyaShah.com">Priya Shah</A>

Priya Shah is author of the <A target="_new" href="http://www.NumberOneInYourNiche.com">search engine optimization ebook, Number One In Your Niche</A>, that shows how to use your articles and content to get long-term, top ten rankings for your website.

Whats Link Popularity?

Link popularity is just one of the ways you can try to promote your website with the intention of getting to the top of the search engines.

Obviously in this day and age it's just about impossible to get to the top of the search engines if you have a new website from a standing start.

In fact large companies will now use the services of a professional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) company to help them get to the top.

And still have no guarantees that it will get there!

It takes time, dedication and patience to achieve this and it certainly won't happen overnight. Sometimes you'll be doing things that just don't seem to show results but if you are doing work now that will bear fruit in the future then success is more of a reality.

What you need to ask yourself is...

What am I prepared to do to make my online presence successful for the long term?

And how much am I willing to invest in time and money to achieve this outcome?

See, quite often we want everything to happen for us immediately. In fact most of our societies now expect instant results or instant gratification. The reality on the other hand is very different.

To build a strong, sturdy house that is designed to last a lifetime, more planning and work goes into laying down the foundations of the building than what is seen above ground.

The foundations are what the house sits on but the work done and the financial cost are mostly unseen. Creating a long term business may require you to outlay more effort and investment in time and money to see the results down the track.

That unfortunately is an unknown but persistence and taking regular positive action will ultimately lead to success.

The moral of is to remind ourselves that Rome wasn't built in a day but great things can happen when you plan for the long term and lay down a great foundation.

How much time and effort are you putting into your business to get it where you want it to be, and if its not enough time, you need to ask yourself why you aren't committing yourself wholly.

Look at the big picture and take the essential steps to reach your goals today!

Tamra Forde
Marketing Director
Freedom Business Opportunity
<a target="_new" href="http://www.freedombusinessopportunity.com">http://www.freedombusinessopportunity.com</a>

Tips On Optomizing Your Website For Search Engines

I wish to give a few little tips, about optimizing. You may find it quite useful, depending on the type of website you have.

This is it; basically, when you optimize a website, you first want to enter at least 30 keywords into the 'head' of your web page. No problem there.

The next step in optimizing is that you must put each of your keywords into the text of your web page at least 4 times!

This is one area where your web page sinks or swims in the search engine 'spidering' process. This is where one must get, er.. creative.

We've all seen those web pages that are about a mile long and so wordy, that you kind of loose track as to what the heck they are talking about. Well, optimizing is what that's about. That and testimonials, which are a good thing to have, but most experts agree that you've got to get right down to the point and not loose your reader.

If this page is in a surf exchange, you're expecting your viewer to read a mile long page in about 30 seconds. Trying to get all your key words into your ad text 4 times, can make it read a bit funny.

So here are a couple of alternatives;

If you use graphics, (and who doesn't?), you are often able to enter text as mouse over text, as if you were going to link the graphic somewhere, but just put in some graphics that you don't plan to use as links and cram as many keywords into the mouse over as you can.

On some of my sites you see a few extra graphics that seem to be there purely for decoration, until you put your mouse on one and see a mouse over text that stretches off the screen.

But most folks don't put their mouse on a graphic unless they are told it's a link.

I honestly thought of that myself, but I have since seen the idea in Trafficology.

Another one that I thought up, and haven't seen anywhere else is this;

Just create a text box and load all your keywords into it as many times as you need, or use four boxes, (just copy and paste) then set the color of your fonts for the text in these boxes to match the background color of your web page. Now you have invisible keyword boxes that still work the same as if you had put them into your ad text!

Brian Beshore has been involved with Internet Marketing for several years. He publishes his own Home Business Guide. <a target="_new" href="http://surfinsafari.net">http://surfinsafari.net</a>

Cache in the Bank: Understanding Googles Advanced Operators

If you would like to know when your site was last indexed by Google, you can find out easily by using the Google cache command. By typing &quot;cache:www.logcabinrustics.com&quot; into the Google search engine, I learned that my site was last indexed yesterday. The Google cache also displays the web page at the time of indexing, so you can see the latest version of your page that was indexed by Google.

As some webmasters have learned, the Google cache feature can be particularly handy when a valuable website and its backup have been lost due to computer failures. It may be time-consuming, especially if you have hundreds of pages, but you can actually retrieve the &quot;lost&quot; pages from your site in the form that Google last indexed them. If this doesn't work, you might also try the Wayback Machine at archive.org.

Forensic experts have also used the Google cache feature to their advantage-to retrieve incriminating evidence from the web. This should be an important reminder to all webmasters not to publish sensitive material online. A later decision not to publish some tantalizing tidbit, and the frantic page-pulling that ensues, may not be enough to erase those ill-said words from the Net.

Webmasters are supposed to be able to block Google from caching their site by using the &quot;no cache&quot; tag. However, many don't even try this for fear of losing favor in the company's powerful search rankings. Although Google says the &quot;no cache&quot; tags don't affect web rankings, some webmasters aren't so sure.

Other Helpful Google Operators

Other helpful search engine operators of particular value to webmasters include:

LINK: The LINK operator, when used in conjunction with your domain name, is supposed to tell you how many links are pointing to your site. The syntax for this command is &quot;link:http://www.thevegetarianexpress.com/. By way of caution, this only shows how many links indexed by Google that are linking to you. A more inclusive option is found at the Marketleap website, where the Link Popularity Tool reports how many links are pointing to your site from other well-traveled search engines as well.

INURL: Google's INURL operator will restrict your search to one site only. For example, typing &quot;inurl:www.logcabinrustics.com log beds&quot; will bring up the log beds only on the Log Cabin Rustics furniture website. This is a particularly helpful option if you are looking for a specific phrase on one site.

INTITLE: The INTITLE operator is helpful if you are looking for sites with a particular keyword in their title tag. Use this phrase at Google by typing in &quot;intitle:furniture&quot; or whatever other search term you are looking for.

Variations of the above themes include the ALLINURL and ALLINTITLE search operators. These are particularly useful when you are looking for a string of keywords in either a title or site. For example, if you start a query with allinurl:, Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the url. For instance, [allinurl:logcabinrustics.com bunk beds] will return only documents that have both "bunk" and "beds" in the url.

Google operators can be especially helpful in analyzing the web pages of key competitors. To learn more, visit http://www.google.com/help/operators.html.

Copyright 2005 Log Cabin Rustics

Cari Haus is webmaster for <a target="_new" href="http://www.logcabinrustics.com">http://www.logcabinrustics.com</a>, an online retailer of quality log furniture.

Press Releases Can Increase Search Engine Positioning

When you write a press release, what is your ultimate goal? No doubt, getting the information to as many publications and on as many Web sites as possible. The focus lies in moving outward? taking the press release to as many *other* sources as possible. We buy lists of journalists, pay public relations companies to distribute the release to thousands of targeted leads, use online press release distribution services, and create our own in-house list of reporters to touch base with. This is

the &quot;standard&quot; route that press release distribution takes.

However, we generally don't think about how these releases can work for us in other ways. For instance, have you considered the fact that adding your press releases to your own site can increase your visibility and boost your lead generation efforts?

How? Because press releases can open new avenues for search engine spiders and site visitors to find you.

Writing A Search-Engine-Friendly Release

Press releases have some unique characteristics that can contribute to an increase in search engine positioning for your site. They are similar in many ways to pages that use search engine copywriting techniques. For instance, they:

<li>Have a narrow focus.

<li>Include copy that deals with one specific topic.

<li>Incorporate the use of keyphrases.

<li>Use keyword-rich headlines.

Press releases, by nature, incorporate each of the elements used with good search engine copywriting. That makes them the perfect addition to your site.

With very little effort, each of your press releases can be turned into optimized pages that draw in additional, qualified traffic. When you write your next press release, consider adding these two simple steps:

<li>Choose keywords that can be easily included in your release.

<li>Incorporate keywords into your headline where possible.

Incorporating Press Releases Into Your Site

Next, you'll want to develop a page structure that caters to the search engine spiders. Because spiders follow links, you'll have to open a door from your home page to the section of your site that houses the releases.

First, add a link to your navigation bar that points to a &quot;press release directory.&quot; On the directory page, list each individual release with a one- or two-sentence summary and a link to the entire content of the release.

Then create a separate page for each release you write. Using the keywords you've researched for the content, write a title and description tag for each page. Then upload everything to your host's server. Once the pages are spidered, you'll find numerous new roads leading from the engines to your site.

With just a little more effort than you would normally give, your press releases can pull &quot;double duty.&quot; Through a push-pull effect, your releases can be pushed toward media outlets for additional exposure, and they can also pull visitors back to your site through the use of search engines. The result? Even after the initial media explosion over your releases takes place, they'll be working to drive traffic to your site and increase your search engine positioning.

About The Author

Karon Thackston ? 2004 <a href="http://www.copywritingcourse.com" target="_new">http://www.copywritingcourse.com</a>

Copy not getting results? Learn to write SEO copy that impresses both the engines and your visitors at <a href="http://www.copywritingcourse.com" target="_new">http://www.copywritingcourse.com</a>. Be sure to check out Karon's latest e-report &quot;How To Increase Keyword Saturation (Without Destroying the Flow of Your Copy)" at <a href="http://www.copywritingcourse.com/keyword" target="_new">http://www.copywritingcourse.com/keyword</a>.

Get A Top Position In Google In Three Days!

So how do you get a top listing in Google and how do you get into Google quickly.

Lets begin with the latter. You can submit your site using Googles submit site tool but amazingly enough this is NOT the fastest way to get listed.

Here's the secret to getting listed in Google like lightening PRESS RELEASE'S

Yep issue a press release relating to your website you will see your site in all the major search engines in 3 or 4 days. Here's a link to one of my press releases http://pressreleases.newspad.com/pr/20054/pr224817.html

To issue a press release go to http://prweb.com
It's free to do.

Ok now that your sites in Google how are we going to get a top spot for keywords related to our site. Well I'm afraid to tell you this is no easy process it could possibly take months even years! But with some luck and the right tools it is achievable.

There are two keys to getting a high ranking

1) Keywords
2) High Page Rank Websites Linking To Your Website

Lets look at keywords first. So to go about finding these keywords we are going to use some free tools

1) Overture Keyword Tool -
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

2) Wordtracker - http://wordtracker.com

Using these two tools you can search keywords related to your product/website & find out which ones are searched a lot and which ones have very little competition.

What you want are keywords middle of the road i.e. not as much competition & not as much searches.

Once you have decided on your keywords, try & get 40 or 50. You need to make sure these keywords feature all over the body of you website.

Make sure to put the most searched keywords in your title & headings.

Now you need to go about getting other websites to link to yours. You need to find websites related to yours but sites that are not in competition with you and email the webmasters of these sites and ask them for a link.

To help you do this more quickly and easily there is a great piece of software available. Here's the link http://www.axandra-link-popularity-tool.com/index.htm

I hope this information will help you achieve your search engine goals.

Mark Flavin is the creator and editor of <a target="_new" href="http://www.nicetodobusiness.com">http://www.nicetodobusiness.com</a> and is a specialist in free web site promotion. View his members area at <a target="_new" href="http://www.nicetodobusiness.com/members.htm">http://www.nicetodobusiness.com/members.htm</a>

10 Minutes to Your Google Sitemap

Google's calling your name...

Hi, Google here. We want to index your website...

Is anyone there?

This article has a free corresponding online video tutorial that shows you how to summons the magic Googlebot to spider and index every page on your website, and it will only take about 10 minutes of your time.

Go here now to watch exactly what to do, step-by-easy-step...

http://www.gothrive.com/google-sitemap-video.htm

What you have access to with the new Google Sitemaps program is truly a gift from the Google gods. They've offering you a tool that you can use to keep your site constantly indexed and updated in the search engine database. With Google Sitemaps, webmasters can now take charge and make sure that their entire site is crawled and indexed.

One important note to make is that the Google Sitemaps program will not necessarily improve the ranking of your site's pages. It only ensures that Google knows what you've got online for them to look at.

Before reading the following statement, promise yourself that you won't stop reading if you see a term that seems a little scary. OK? Promise? Good. Go ahead and keep reading then.

The format specified by Google for "their" sitemap is XML (extensible markup language). Did I loose you yet? No? Good again.

You do not need to understand how to code XML to participate in the Google Sitemap program. There are plenty of free online tools that will create your XML sitemap for you with no XML knowledge required on your part. More on this in a second.

What information is including in this XML sitemap?

1) The URL for every file on your website.

2) A relative priority rank that you can assign telling Google which pages on your site are most important for them to look at.

3) The date last modified for each page.

4) Anticipated change frequency per URL. This again is a variable that you control.

According to Google, your XML sitemap can include up to 50,000 URL's. If your site is a real monster and has in excess of 50,000 URL's, then you'll need to create a hierarchy of sitemaps with one leading to the next. This way you'll be able to lead Google to all of your pages.

The options for generating and maintaining your Google Sitemap range from complex systems that are highly automated to very simple systems using online sitemap generators that require nothing more than clicking a few buttons.

Google now keeps a list of these 'third party suppliers' of generators on their site. Find them here: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

The program that's demonstrated in our free video tutorial (http://www.gothrive.com/google-sitemap-video.htm) is found here: http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

In a nutshell, here are the steps involved with using online generators:

1) Start the program.

2) Enter your site's URL

3) Click the "Start Crawling" button

4) Customize URL priorities and change frequencies

5) Save the site map to your local hard drive

6) Upload your new Google XML sitemap to your website in the root directory (where your home page resides)

7) Validate your new sitemap (can be done here: http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/internet/google/submit-validate-sitemap/)

8) Submit your XML sitemap to Google.

You can access the pages for the Google Sitemap program here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

8 steps in about 10 minutes. That's all there is to it.

One question that you might ask is whether or not you still need an HTML sitemap, and the answer is "Yes, you still need your conventional sitemap". XML sitemaps are not intended for human visitors. To see what I mean, take a look at the two following sitemaps:

HTML sitemap: http://www.gothrive.com/sitemap.html

XML sitemap: http://www.gothrive.com/sitemap.xml

Which version do you prefer? Your visitors will like the HTML and Google prefers XML.

When you add pages or new content to your site and you want Google to go back to have a fresh look, just log in to your Google Sitemaps control panel, select the sitemap to revisit, and click "Resubmit". It's never been easier to get Google to spider and index a website. Don't miss your opportunity to use this tool to your advantage.

Copyright 2005 Ron Hutton

Ron Hutton is a 20 year sales and marketing veteran with a passion for coaching and training. Subscribe to "GoThrive Online", for big juicy marketing tips in small, easy-to-chew, bite size servings. Free Video Tutorial Archives Here: <a target="_new" href="http://www.gothrive.com/free-video-library/video-directory.html">http://www.gothrive.com/free-video-library/video-directory.html</a>

Search Engine Success & The Google-Vision Secret

Want to know the secret to great search engine listings? Ignore Google.

No, I'm not crazy.

Have you ever seen a horse plodding down the road wearing blinders? A lot of people see the road to good search engine listings the same way. With blinders on. They can't see anything but Google. Google is number one. They obsess on Google. They desperately want to get a good listing in Google.

That is crazy. True Google-Vision requires removing the blinders.

If you do a Google search for "Google Marketshare" you'll find some interesting numbers.

<ul><li>comScore Networks says Google has 36.9% of the search market.

<li>eMedia says 45.85%.

<li>Search View agrees with eMedia.</ul>

Do you know what that means? It means that if you're obsessed with Google, you're not seeing over half the searchers on the Internet. That's pretty crazy, too.

The top four search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Ignore Google. Ignore Yahoo, too. Trust me on this.

MSN loves content and they prefer a relatively flat hierarchy to your site. For example;

BAD:
www.your-domain.com/folder/folder/folder/folder/page.html

GOOD:
www.your-domain.com/folder/page.html
www.your-domain.com/page.html

Each slash (/) represents another level in your file hierarchy. Less is more.

Make sure you have great content on your site. Submit to MSN. Then submit to AllTheWeb.com. Once you've done those two, submit some articles to article directories. Yes, just like this one.

When you've done all the above, submit just your main page to dMoz.org. Read their policies very, very carefully first. You do not want to make the submission wrong and get rejected. dMoz feeds AOL search, and you know how many members AOL has... They're like the McDonalds of ISPs.

Then, keep an eye on your website stats program. Odds are, one day you'll log in and see a little visitor named Googlebot. It works almost every time.

See, Google doesn't like websites that exaggerate their importance, stuff pages with keywords or cheat their algorithm to attempt to get to the top. Even on their website, they state that they examine the entire web when calculating results.

Looking at the web as a whole, instead of focusing on Google is true Google-Vision. It's how Google looks at the web, and it's how you need to look at the web, too.

When you stop obsessing on Google, and start working on providing good content to the rest of the Internet, Google will find you. In my experience, Yahoo won't be too far behind.

<a target="_new" href="http://www.LindaCaroll.com">LindaCaroll.com</a> clients have been featured in Forbes, The New York Times, People Magazine & more. You can get great results, too. Start with the free email course, at <a target="_new" href="http://www.Google-This.com">Google-This.com</a> or enjoy the <a href="http://www.Google-This.com/ea.html" target="_new">discounts for Ezine Article readers</a>

This article may be reprinted in full as long as you include a live credit link to LindaCaroll.com or Google-This.com.

Google Traffic Report Card-Does Your Website Pass? Part 1

This is part 1 of a 7 part series that examines the 7 factors of incoming links that Google considers when choosing a spot for your website in it's SERP's.

Why incoming links? First because these are what Google places the highest value on. But, all incoming links are NOT created equal. This 7 part course looks at the kinds of links Google values when "rating" your website in the SERP's. Each type of link discussed is important to your overall link strategy and consequently your free traffic levels.

The first factor is of course the anchor text used in your incoming links. The importance of the keywords used to link to your website are more important to Google than the content that is actually on your page. You can generally use anchor link text with your keywords and not even have the keywords on the page and still get a good ranking in Google for that term if enough incoming links have that keyword pharse in them.

If you've heard of the phrase "Google Bombing" then you know what I'm talking about. Basically it's when a set of webmasters or blog owners decide to get a page ranked for a certain term and all leave links back to the selected site with the keyword phrase that they want that page to rank for.

The most notorious example of this is the "bombing" done by several blog owners to the George W Bush biograpby page. Several bloggers left links to the page containing the keyword text "miserable failure" and consequently this page turns up as the number 1 result in Google for the term, even though the words don't appear anywhere on the page.

The "Google Bombing" was done by at most a few hundred links with this link text pointing to the page. Though more links would probably be necissary for a more competative term. Still, it goes to show how important link text is to the rankings of a page.

Google Bombing is nothing new. But what many people don't realize is that Google places more relevance on the anchor link text that it finds when it first discovers a link to your website. Each consequent link either adds value to that first impression or subtracts from it.

Many times you can control which link google finds first just by knowing where google goes regularly (like on a daily basis) and effectively placing your link in it's path. This is called "baiting" the google bot to visit your website through this link.

Each link you place after this initial link should further show google that their first impression (or the first keywords it discovered that linked to your website) was and still is correct. Each subsiquent link is a "vote" so to speak to validate Google's original impression of what your website is about.

Placing that first link to be found by Google is only the first step, but a very important one. Choose your anchor text keywords carefully. Each incoming link you place after this one should serve to validate this first impression. Part 2 will discuss the appearance and disappearance of links over time and how they effect your traffic and search engine placement.

Leah J. Bradshaw is the author of the <a target="_new" href="http://www.thefreetrafficreport.com">Free Traffic Report</a>; "Jumpstart Your Traffic in as Little as 10 Days". She also authors a <a target="_new" href="http://www.wahm-blog.blogspot.com/">Free Traffic Blog for wahm's</a> to help work at home moms get free traffic.

Search Engine Marketing Hype Killing Small Businesses

Think about the first thing you ever heard about &quot;marketing a website&quot; on the web. 99% of the time the first words anyone ever hears are &quot;search engine marketing.&quot; Or some semblance of the phrase.

And from that point on, the hammering of misinformation never lets up. You are led to believe that your business will die a terrible death without the search engines. You are led to believe that only people who can guide you through the mine field of search engine optimization are the SEO &quot;experts.&quot;

Also you are told time and again that the only way to market online PERIOD is through the search engines. You are conditioned over time to focus most, if not all, of your efforts on tricking the search engines into liking your site above all your competitors for search terms where &quot;there can be only one.&quot;

Well, here's a wake up call: The vast majority of small business startups will never have the resources, time, or know-how to turn an idea into a profitable online business focusing only on search engines.

Just look at the deluge of information there is out there on Google and how to rank well with them. People are picking apart their ranking patent application right now to try an glean a website promotion strategy based upon what Google reveals in their application about their ranking system.

Is this information valuable to a small business wanting to sell its wares to a whole market rather than just the part of that market which uses one of the big search engines?

It is in extreme moderation, yes. In a well balanced marketing campaign that focuses on many ways to bring in targeted traffic, search engine marketing has its place. You do what you can, and you move on to all the other ways there are to promote your business.

Yet, so many people are falling victim to the gleam and glitter of search engine riches being pushed on them by SEO firms and people selling search engine how-to manuals.

It is not long before a new business finds itself wrapped up in a game where the only winners are the geeks and deep pockets.

If you do not fall into either of those categories, your business is doomed from the start if you hop right off the porch to play with those big dogs.

&quot;But I hired a 'big dog' SEO firm to make my business stand out and compete with the geeks in my market niche.&quot;

More power to you. In actuality, unfortunately, you probably just hired a teenager from India with an internet connection in his parents' house. Most small business start ups cannot come close to affording a major SEO firm. They charge corporate-level premiums to be able to access their services.

Everyone else in the SEO world is practically working out of their garage in comparison.

Scared yet? You don't have to be as long as you are spreading your marketing around to the non-search engine traffic you should be getting.

Writing articles and syndicating them in your market is a direct traffic strategy that has nothing to do with search engines. Except that search engines find your site through those links as well. But you should be doing it solely for DIRECT TRAFFIC from readers on other sites and taking the search engine traffic boost as mere icing on the cake.

You see, as people spam the search engines, they must adjust how they rank sites in order to compensate. This means a lot of good sites take a hit when Google changes the way it ranks sites.

You could have done everything completely on the up and up and gotten dropped in the engines because they made a new rule that everyone who registers their domains only for one year is a possible spammer. There goes your legit site. Hope you weren't planning on search engine traffic for your SOLE source of traffic.

Can you see how dangerous it is to get bitten by the search engine bug? YES you can propel your business overnight from a profitless dead zone to a glamorous profit machine with one top ranking.

Of course that is possible. It is not likely.

People who are turning their small online businesses into success stories are doing one thing across the board: Conducting a multi-faceted marketing campaign that includes search engines along with a good mix of other non-search engine marketing such as reciprocal and non-reciprocal linking tactics too numerous to mention here.

If you want long-term success online, you must be willing to look past all the sleeze merchants selling you dreams of riches through search engine marketing.

Search engines care about one thing: Their own hides. You should care more about your hide than anything else and use a well-planned, disciplined marketing strategy that puts search engines in their place. Not in the epicenter of your marketing campaign, but just another tool in your toolbox for bringing in targeted traffic.

Do this, and you will escape the fate of thousands of startups this year who will realize too late that they hung their hopes on the wrong marketing strategy as their engine for profits.

Copyright 2005 Jack Humphrey

Jack Humphrey explains his proven marketing strategies in the all new Power Linking 2005 at <a target="_new" href="http://power-linking-profits.com">http://power-linking-profits.com</a> Jack is proudly NOT a &quot;search engine expert.&quot;

Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

There are methods to increase your search engine rankings which may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue.

I did once upon a time until I realised its not so bad after all! I am here to tell you - the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking as you can manage for your website is essential to get any free visitors rather than burn your wallet on pay per click such as adwords for example.

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.The higher the pages come 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 lose in all the technical information to figure out how to optimize your web pages. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, and quite likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

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.

Next, click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you click through. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself.

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.

Website content has much relevance. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than amazing graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your information etc such as your site.

Aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. For 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 I need to mention something called meta tags. I never paid much attention here previously as I did not really know what they are about in web page design.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.The rules always seem to change anyway! 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."

If there are meta tags, they 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. If 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.

Contact quality sites and request 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.

Only if its a relevant link will the traffic be of value.Oh.. by the way don't get upset if you get no response from a request to exchange links, its nothing personal and if you have low ranking, you need to improve it before someone might consider a link swap.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. I have to admit to ignoring it for a long while mainly because it seemed like long and tedious work! There was a time maybe only a few years ago when you could show up in a search engine like google quite quickly like a month.

Well that day is over for many sites due in part to sheer volume of pages on the web from the very good to the very awful. Its easy to find or look for the latest SEO secrets some of which are recycled rubbish so why not, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself.

This is a critical all-important factor in Internet marketing. Ok, we can't all have the number one spot but occupying the millionth listing is not so clever either.Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality visitors will be directed your way.

Sure there are probably a few good people or companies on SEO but you can start off with the tips above and apply them if you have not done so before now.

Christopher Ruane

New to ecommerce and looking for a resource to help grow your online enterprise? For solid advice for digital money tips go to: <a target="_new" href="http://www.Digitalmoneymakers.com">http://www.Digitalmoneymakers.com</a>

8 Essential SEO techniques

1) Title Tag - The title tag is the most powerful on-site SEO technique you have, so use it creatively! What you place in the title tag should only be one thing, the exact keyword you used for the web page that you are trying to optimize. Every single web page should have it's own title tag.

2) ALT Tags - ALT tags were meant to be for text browsers because the images didn't show in text browsers and the ATL tags would tell the visitor what it's about. You should put your main keyword(s) in the ALT tags, but don't over do it because you could get dropped in the results or even worse banned for life!

3) Link Popularity - Link popularity is the most powerful SEO tool out of all them. Most search engines don't even consider web sites if there is not at least one or two links pointing to the web site. Having another site(s) link to your web site is important when it comes to getting your site a good ranking. Your keywords should be in the links you get and keep the keywords short. When you receive requests for a link exchange, check the site out before linking with them, check for spam (Repeat keywords, hidden text, etc.).

4) Keyword Density - This is also vital and should be used with research. You should use the keyword(s) once in the title tag, once in the heading tag, once in bold text, and get the density between 5% to 20% (Don't over do it!). Also use your keyword(s) both low and high on the web page, keyword(s) should be in the first sentence and in the last one.

5) Page Size - Your web page's speed is important to your visitors and the search engines. Why? Because the robots will be able to spider your web page faster and easier. Try your best to keep your web page over 5k and under 15k in size.

6) Rich Theme - Search engines are looking at themes more and more. Build content (Articles, FAQ, tips, etc.) much as possible and keep the web pages around 200 to 500 words. Create content that's related to your market and link them out to other related content on your site. Try to get 200 web pages or more.

7) Web Site Design - This is also important, if you want to get indexed! Text content should out weigh the HTML content. The pages should validate and be usable in all of today's leading edge browsers. Stay away from flash and Java Script, search engines dislike them both a lot.

8) Insite Cross Linking - This will help you get all of your web pages indexed by the search engines. Your web pages should be no more than three clicks away from the home page. Link to topic related quality content across your site. This will also help build you a better theme through out your web site. On every page you should link back to your home page and your main service(s).

Matt Colyer is the owner of the <a target="_new" href="http://www.superiorwebmaster.com/">Superior Webmaster</a>. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer.

What is Your Sales Message?

So you built a website, you have a product, but it's not selling. What's your sales message? Does your site scream out to potential customers "BUY ME!!" or does it simply say "Hi, we're here, we have a product, if you want one...well you could buy it here...or go...YUCK!

Let's look at a simple way of changing that perspective of using a call to action.

Dr. Jerry Teplitz in one of his lessons at a place I will call IBI. You can look at it as the Free Enterprise Forum through IBI Global, located at <a target="_new" href="http://www.ibiglobal.com/">IBI GLOBAL</a> described people's reading habits when reading a webpage as that of looking at a large capital letter "Z".

Within that letter "Z" are about 5-6 action points or calls to action. At least there should be. Upper left...Subscribe to our newsletter...upper right...BUY our PRODUCT...middle of the page...did you know this?...lower left...join our mailing list...lower right...BUY MORE PRODUCTS.

Question is, does your web page do this? If not, it should. Why? What if I told you that by doing this one simple thing, that you could increase your revenue from your website by as much as 30%! Would you do it then? If you were making $0.00 and you could increase that by 30% I think you might. Or if you were making $1,000.00 per month and you could increase that to $1,300.00 per month..or more. It keeps going up. Best part is 30% is not the limit of the increase. It goes up exponentially.

Granted this will not do it alone. You still need traffic coming that is searching for your product, or your service, and you need an attractive price point to deliver them to your shopping cart. However, this will increase their stay time on your website, and the longer people are there, the more apt they are to buy. This is a proven fact.

Language is key to everything in sales. Positioning of the product, size of images, attractiveness of the image/box, the way you ask someone to buy. The way that you "close" the sale.

Don't be afraid to ask for the business. Ask for it directly. Offer incentives to customers. Offer a money-back guarantee. All of these things instill confidence in your being the best alternative and make sure that you communicate that they'd be foolish to do business with anyone else but you.

You can be direct in that language "You'd be foolish to buy a product similar to this one". Or you could say "If I were you, I'd think twice about purchasing a "similar" product. You figure out what works for your buying public, but make the message clear. You want the business, you're willing to do just about anything to get the business, but you're the best deal going.

Once you have done that, your sales will increase. Make the message clear, position the product calls to action on your webpages in obvious places and then hire a firm like DocMurdock.com to optimize your website and expose it to your target market with traffic looking to purchase your product or service. Nothing like having a website for auto parts and the visitors who show up are looking for candy and don't buy anything. I can help you change that. So don't waste your time and your money. Come to someone who will work with you, examine your expectations, ensure they're realistic for your website, and help you with consulting for offline as well as online marketing.

After all, just because you built the building, filled it with goods and hung out the sign that says "OPEN FOR BUSINESS" doesn't mean people will flock in and buy. You still have to market to them, and give them a reason to purchase from nobody else but you.

See you on the web.

Michael Murdock, CEO
<a target="_new" href="http://www.DocMurdock.com">DocMurdock.com</a>

Michael Murdock former Macintosh Systems Engineer for PIXAR, and Systems Engineer at SUN Microsystems brings his expertise of the web to SEO. He's been doing this for more than 8 years and helped many companies gain prominence on the Internet Search Engines. He can be found at <a target="_new" href="http://www.docmurdock.com">http://www.docmurdock.com</a>

Search Engine Ranking... Oh, the Mystery!

Rankings, Rankings, Rankings!

How do you get your website ranked well by the search engines? Well, it isn't as hard as you think, but it may not be as simple either. It takes patience and an ongoing commitment to making search-engine ranking a long-term investment in your website. You will need to give it time and energy ? it isn't a quick fix.

One caveat before I dive into this: If you are a company that is working on attracting local customers, there are many other incredibly effective offline marketing tools to DRIVE people to your website. So, what if you really want to work on search-engine ranking for your site?

Keep these points in mind:

1. Search engines often change their ranking formula.

2. Each search engine has its own algorithm (formula) to determine site ranking.

3. META tag keywords are not a magic bullet to improve your ranking.

4. Search engines can take many months to index new information, so patience?patience.

5. Be cautious with graphics-rich websites if search-engine ranking is important.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Let's start at the beginning. When you type a query into a search engine, what happens? Some people think that each time a search is entered into a search engine like Google, that the program hunts through the entire Internet to produce the answer. This is NOT what occurs.

Let's say I type in the words &quot;dog obedience&quot; into Yahoo. Yahoo then takes these keywords and searches through its own unique database of indexed websites to find matches. To add to and update their databases, search engines have programs called &quot;spiders&quot; that crawl through pages on the Internet looking for pages and sites to index. However, they do NOT locate sites on their own. They find sites if someone has purposely entered a website into a search engine's &quot;Add URL&quot; form. They are also able to find a website if another site in its database has links to it.

When a search engine finds a site, it considers the text on the website to be the number one thing to extract. It places data its database categorized by information it perceives as being important. So, if you have a company that has free articles teaching people how to train their dogs, but you don't have the word &quot;obedience&quot; listed anywhere, your site may not be listed in the above sample search.

So then, after all of this ? how do you get a high-ranking search engine?

Your Keys to Search Engine Ranking

You must think of search engine optimization as a long-term investment in your website. It is an ongoing marketing effort that takes persistence. As you begin to implement optimization techniques, remember it can take several months before you see the results, so be patient. Here are some tips to help you improve your website rankings in the future.

1. Plan Your Content: Before you develop your site, make a list of all the possible search words and phrases you think a potential customer would use to locate your website. A research tool such as WordTracker can help you in this process. Write compelling, professional marketing content for your site that is rich with these search words and phrases, especially on your home page. Make pages about 250 words. Tip: Hire a professional web copywriter to write your site content.

2. Meta Keyword Tags Are Overrated: Contrary to what many people believe, your META keyword tags in your HTML code have very little bearing on the words a search engine uses to reference your site. What does this mean for your site? Make sure your web pages have easy-to-understand paragraphs that describe your site and contain many of your important search words. These search words should match your META keyword tags, otherwise, the spiders tend to disregard the keyword tags.

3. Title Tags Are Vital: Most search engines give a lot of weight to your title tags. These are also the phrases that appear at the top of each web page. So, take the time to create juicy and precise title tags. Use words and phrases that people would be likely to use in their search for your business. Reflect what is actually on the specific web page.

4. Meta Description Tags: This is the area where you write HTML content to describe each of your web pages. Although it is not a major factor in search engine ranking, it IS what is displayed in the search results. People searching will use this description to make a decision to visit your site or not. Use this area for marketing purposes to entice people to click on your link.

5. Design a Site That Search Engines Like: Websites that have graphic Splash pages or are designed in Flash are not as friendly to SE indexing. For the most part, search engines do not index graphics. They read text (but not graphic text). Use small amounts of Flash animation and graphics in appropriate places, along with great HTML content. Along with these graphics, use text for your image ALT tags. If you have a graphic-based navigation system, make sure you have a site map that the spider can use to find all of your site page links.

6. Create a Compelling Site: If you haven't created a website with gripping content that speaks to your visitors in plain, easy-to-understand language, you won't get good long-term search-engine visibility. Nor, will visitors ever want to come back. Make your site so good that people will want to link to it. They will want to provide their viewers with your copious amounts of useful information. You can also go to sites that offer complimentary services or products and e-mail their webmaster to ask them to add a link to your site. This will enhance your link popularity, something search engines tend to consider important.

7. Submit your URL to the Directories: Read each search engine's FAQs and follow it exactly. Mistakes in the submission process can make things extremely difficult to change down the road. Keep your website description short and sweet. Be sure to include keywords, but don't use a lot of sales jargon.

8. Balance Your Online Marketing Approach: You will get the best results if you create a website that is content rich, popular with viewers, has a credible reputation, and is programmed using a smart approach to Meta tags.

Search engine spiders can be extremely slow to index new information, so be patient! It may take months to see your changes affect your search engine ranking. Remember, a website is a dynamic marketing tool that you are building over time. Treat it well, give it a little love and attention, and your long-term rewards will be well worth your efforts!

Wendy Maynard, your friendly marketing maven, is the owner of Kinesis. Kinesis specializes in marketing, graphic and website design, and business writing. Visit <a target="_new" href="http://www.kinesisinc.com/resources/articles.html">http://www.kinesisinc.com/resources/articles.html</a> for more articles and free marketing wisdom.

You can visit Wendy's marketing blog, Kinetic Ideas at: <a target="_new" href="http://www.wendy.kinesisinc.com">http://www.wendy.kinesisinc.com</a>

Want to harness the power of kinetic marketing? Sign up for Kinesis Quickies, a free bi-monthly marketing e-newsletter: <a target="_new" href="http://www.news.kinesisinc.com">http://www.news.kinesisinc.com</a>

How To Choose Keywords Before they Skyrocket in Popularity

Long before the days of researching phrases with the helpful online resources of today, the art of keyword/phrase selection was often left just to guesswork. However, guesswork by today's highly competitive standards is just not good enough. So how is it possible to select a powerful traffic-pulling phrase in this fashion without researching it in real time? Better yet, is it possible to choose such a phrase and get positioned before it becomes popular?

Well of course it requires some research, but in a slightly different way. Every single day, we have a world of information that happens all around us. With all of the focus on the Internet these days, we need to also consider giving our attention to other medias as well. We have television programs, we have the news and the radio which all bring us current and upcoming events. With the news itself, there are often many ideas that can help the SEO to really think and plan ahead for some truly unique optimization strategies. I am talking about the potential of developing part of your client strategy around an upcoming newsworthy event. Of course it needs to be relevant and useful to the target audience. It also needs to genuinely "relate".

If at first, it does not sound that exciting, let's think about it and give you an example.

Here is a simple example.

If I were promoting a video store online right now, one of the things that I might be doing would, would be to optimize a page for the single search phrase "Johnny Eck." Perhaps an information or a tribute page would work.

But wait....Who was Johnny Eck, you ask?

A way back in 1932, there was a movie by Todd Browning called "Freaks" starring a man named Johnny Eck. The film "Freaks" was about the fictionalized lives of physically and mentally challenged people who, in them days, were exploited in what were commonly called "freak shows". Johnny Eck just so happen to be born into this world without the lower half of his body and was just one of the "main actors" exploited in this rather unusual film which marked the end of Todd Browning's career as a Director.

Although you may have never heard of Johnny Eck, in over 60 years you can count on the fact that everyone will soon know who he is. The film "Freaks" (1932) already has a tremendous cult film following around the world.

So why optimize a page for a film which is over 70 years old?

What many people may not be aware of, is that a brand new movie based on the lives of Johnny Eckhardt is currently being produced. The new movie has a big budget, good script, and you can be certain that many, many people are going to plan to see this film on it's release. There's no way to predict for certain, but it'll probably be quite a blockbuster.

Simple Strategy: Optimize well and relate to the audience

As part of the strategy, you could prepare this optimized page offering to sell the old movie, which is now available on video. On the same page, I would talk about the film. I would write about my remembrances of seeing it for the very first time. As strange as the film is, it makes quite a statement about the how so called "normal looking" people can be very cruel.

You could talk about the film, review it. Talk about how it made you feel. Really try to relate to the audience. In creating the content, you would write for voice, just like you were talking to an old friend. At the same time, offer some trivia or anecdotes about how the film was made. I would prepare the page and get it ranked firstly for the phrase "Johnny Eck" and perhaps secondly around the name of the old film.

The Traffic Payoff:

Usually when a new "big name" movie is released, there is always a tremendous flurry of activity on the Internet by movie goers who enjoy looking up information about it. When they start searching for info on the new film and your pages come up in the top ten, they'll also be reminded about the old film and quite possibly want to purchase it. In this type of promotion, don't take the page down after the movie comes out because you may get double waves of heavy traffic. Actually, if you're lucky the whole routine is going to happen all over again when it's released on video usually six to eight months later. Might there be a third wave when it finally makes it to DVD?

Fine Tune Your Thinking:

Think along these lines, now ask yourself if there may be value to optimizing a page around other big events that are definitely scheduled to happen. The use of a new movie release is only one idea, amongst hundreds of others. If you practice thinking this way, you can develop strategies for retail, professional clients or even business-to-business Web sites. Newsworthy events happen all the time.

<ul>

<li>Do you think "the Olympics" might benefit a sporting goods store which offers an overview of the various participants.

<li>Do you think that a scheduled tour of a famous rock group might influence traffic to a music site offering a contest for free tickets?

<li>How might that upcoming children's film influence traffic to a toy store?

</ul>

These are only a few quick examples but learn to think laterally about news events. Take full advantage of the media in its entirety to bring maximum benefit to your clients. It's just a matter of paying close attention to those big scheduled events and creatively examining how these might benefit a your strategy.

In the scenario I explained above, it would be ideal for a video store who is selling old classic films to (if they have any films available starring Johnny Eck) to take advantage of the public interest that might be generated by a new movie.

By the time the film is released, (assuming it is created at all) I expect there will be a flurry of interest about this actor's life and any old films he may have appeared in.

About The Author

John Alexander is the Co-Director of Training of Search Engine Workshops with Robin Nobles. Together, they teach 2-day beginner, 3-day advanced, and 5-day all-inclusive "hands on" search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe. John also teaches online search engine marketing courses through <a href="http://www.onlinewebtraining.com" target="_new">http://www.onlinewebtraining.com</a>, and he's a member of Wordtracker's official question support team.

<a href="mailto:john@searchengineworkshops.com">john@searchengineworkshops.com</a>

These 7 Back Link Strategies Will Get You a Top Ranking on Google Guaranteed

Google use a very complex function to determine which search results to return, Google is always changing and Modifying that function to better Serve the Search Engine User. The one constant is quality back links. These are pages linking to you without you linking back to them.

1 - Post to Newsgroups

Many Newsgroups will allow you to post links especially if they are related to the topic or question being asked.

2 - Post to Forums

Forums are Similar to newsgroups but they are typically broken down by topic

3 - Add Comments to a Blog

Many Blogs will allow you to post comments. Find 10 or so blogs a day that are related to your web page and post a comment about your web page. Be sure and use Pingomatic to ping the Blog after you post your comment

4 - Give Testimonials

Send in unsolicited testimonials for products and services you use. Make sure and say You have permission to use the above testimonial.

5 - Circular Linking

There are many strategies involving circular linking. As a simple example you own or operate 2 Web Sites, called Site-1 and Site-2. You can offer a link partner a link on Site-1 if they agree to link to site-2.

6 - Buy Text Ads

Many e-zines are not only sent out via e-mail but are posted on the Internet. By finding an Ezine that keeps that past articles online you can often buy a text ad for a few days get back links

7 - Submit Articles

You can Write and Submit Articles. This might be perhaps the most viral way to get back links. It is not unusual to have your article re-printed in 25 on 50 Web pages the same day you submit it. As other people read these 25 or 50 pages they in turn decide to reprint your article. It is like a snowball rolling down a never ending hill. The More it Rolls the bigger it get and the faster it go's.

About The Author:
Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001 When he Built an Organization of over 100,000 Members

Get Mike's Newsletter:
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Copyright ? 2005-2006 Mike Makler the Coolest Guy in the Universe

Youve Got The Power, Why Arent You Promoting It?

Like all things, theft is theft, misery loves company, negative people are everywhere, business is sometimes bad, things go up and others go down.

If those are all true then knowledge is power right? Wrong, knowledge is only power if applied. So why is it that most of us only apply "commercialized" marketing tactics and fail to utilize the little stuff that counts?

For instance, Google allows us to promote 2 url's, www.yoursite.com & http://yoursite.com

So ok. Nothing new...

Then why aren't you promoting the power Google gave to you?

See there's some of us who know that adding a link to both urls within our sites is a powerful thing. But what most of us don't know is that you can't just simply add both url's and expect good results!

You can't just want popcorn without poping the corn!

What you want to do is give 2 URL's and 2 Key Phrases. That's it, there it is! So if you promote your main page twice,

re: www.yoursite.com & http://yoursite.com

.. Then you want to give Google 2 key phrases for both urls seperately within your title tag.

Don't stop there though, try utilizing both key phrases respectively within your description tag, alt tags, H1 tags and within a portion of your text.

Here are the results of your efforts:

So the next time google searches your site, it now has more food then before and you actually didn't have to do too much. Your search terms have now doubled for 2 urls pointing to the same information.

Have fun with this and remember, search engines don't like spam tactics and neither do your visitors, so play safe and stick to the rules!

About The Author

Martin Lemieux

Founder and President of Smartads.

<a href="http://www.smartads.ca" target="_new">http://www.smartads.ca</a> & <a href="http://www.smartads.info" target="_new">http://www.smartads.info</a> - Here to provide you with effective web design & web advdertising services.

To read more of Martin's articles and get these weekly tips,

Sign up here: <a href="http://www.smartads.info/newsletter" target="_new">http://www.smartads.info/newsletter</a>

Google Loosing Fan Base?

"Nothing last forever but the Earth and sky." - from Dust in the Wind by Kansas.

Google has spent the last year evolving from a search engine to a giant media corporation. At birth Google was worried about only one thing, search - and that focus is why it became so successful. As Google spreads out many are wondering, are they doing it too fast? Are they letting quality slip? As any company evolves it will make mistakes, but has Google lost sight of its goals?

Google gained large distribution when Yahoo switched to it to drive down Inktomi stock price, only later to buy Inktomi. Google then came to power stealing traffic from Yahoo by providing clean, relevant results, and good search tools for surfers and webmasters alike. Many estimate that Google controls in excess of 75% of the search market.

Microsoft is still working on its search engine. Yahoo recently acquired Overture and is working behind closed doors in much the same way as MSN is. LookSmart has not updated Wise Nut in a long time, is hated by a large portion of the internet community, and is soon set to loose most of its distribution. And Ask Jeeves (owner of Teoma) has its top results powered by Google AdWords. With Google powering Yahoo, AOL and many other sites Google lacks a clear competitor today.

Right now Google can take its huge lead and extend it, or let it slip. No system is perfect and there will always be complaints, but I have to wonder if Google has forgotten why or how it became such an icon.

Many people have reported their Google Toolbar has been failing to return PageRank 90% of the time. While the hysteria around PageRank is somewhat overrated, it would be more assuring if the feature worked often.

One of the biggest problems search engines face today is a lack of quality content on the web. Earlier this year Google introduced a program called AdSense which displays its pay per click AdWords ads on many mid sized web sites. AdSense was designed to help pay to produce better content sites. Soon after Google introduced AdSense they included a related searches link set underneath the ads which made webmasters angry. This technique was siphoning off traffic from websites back to Google with no payment of any kind. Quickly Google had to repeal this move.

Google has also signed its AdSense members to a gagging clause. Beyond that gagging clause many have complained about getting kicked out for reasons they could not even challenge. Then for these same members to see how much money Google had owed them up to that point they had to agree to another set of terms that prevented them from criticizing the AdSense program. But the ads get worse.

Google was in a race with Overture to be the first to provide broad matching on its search terms. Google got there first. The idea behind broad matching is that it will allow Google to sell more of its ad space by providing ads on similar terms that were not yet sold. Overture allows different bid prices on different levels of matching. Google sets a single price on the ads, and this causes a huge problem for those who do not know how to use the system.

First the broad matching ads are less relevant. The term broad indicates far reaching and is self explanatory to its end effect on relevancy - which is in the exact opposite direction of Google's roots. This new type of broad matching matches many remotely close search phrases to those paid for by the advertiser. Couple near matching with the fact that ad sites and pages are scanned for relevancy (which is frequently inaccurate) and a big problem starts to come about with how to provide relevant ads on the syndicated results.

While many of the SEO experts know how to use negative keywords, tracking, and other advanced features, the smaller advertisers do not always have the resources or understanding to effectively use this new, more complex medium.

Now instead of rewarding businesses for hunting out the phrases that exactly match them (and thus providing higher quality search results), Google is rewarding the largest companies by allowing them to be lazy. Google is shooting itself in the foot by degrading relevancy for short term profits.

Large companies bid on generic cover all terms at prices where they loose money on every transaction until the competition goes under. Not only do these name brands enjoy higher click through rates (due to brand recognition), but those with stockpiles of cash can afford to burn through thousands without a blink. Many small sites can not, thus the sad state of internet media is that it is now consolidating much the same way as offline media is.

It gets even worse for the small website now though. These same ads which they are using may now appear on pages that sometimes do not even remotely fit the ads. I was looking at the GMT clock time zones to ensure my clock was set at the right time today (so I missed daylight saving time). The page which had the different time zones listed a few cities and a group of AdWords. Most of these AdWords were targeting Las Vegas (most likely the most expensive US city). Las Vegas was not even one of the cities mentioned on the list. Not a relevant ad set. Bad for all parties involved.

What is the result of this change to AdWords? Lower quality ads at a higher price. Nick Denton predicted that the expansion of these ads across the web (especially coupled with decreased relevancy) that users will start to ignore them. Much the same way as banners have faded, only a few years may be left before this advertising medium chips away and destroys itself.

What about the regular Google search results? At least they are strong, right? Sometimes they are rather week. Some clients have had search results dominated by the same sets of interlinking sites. Aiming to fight spam, Google is acknowledging this fact by incorporating a new major algorithmic change on the web live. My site went from #17 to #7 to not in the top 1000 websites for "search engine marketing". While I still have customers that need work done on their sites, this sporadic re mixing is not refreshing in my mind, as well as in the minds of many of my customers.

I have already had concerned emails arrive from friends worried about loosing thousands of dollars a month as their top listing evaporated. All I can tell them is wait and see.

Much of what people have feared would happen to Google after it goes public has already happened. It is clear that competitive open source alternative search engines such as Nutch are not desired so much as required.

About The Author

Aaron Wall

author and owner of Search Marketing Info

<a href="http://www.search-marketing.info" target="_new">http://www.search-marketing.info</a>

<a href="mailto:aaron@search-marketing.info">aaron@search-marketing.info</a>

Beginners - Getting Listed In Search Engines

Once you have your web site complete and ready to be listed you need to take a slow step by step approach to get listed in the search engines. If you do it right the first time and then build on that formula, your profits and your site will benefit in the long run. Those willing to spend the time and put these techniques into practice are the ones that will benefit and are more likely to be successful.

1. Your first page is where search engines will start and making sure that this page is fully optimized is one of your first goals. What's optimization your ask? It's making your site as search engine friendly as possible. You will also see people refer to this in the short form of SEO.

Your first step is the TITLE TAG. This is one item that search engines look for to start getting information about what your site is about. It is also what search engines will show above a clickable line on their results page. It is also a major consideration of where you will rank when certain inquiries are made of the search engine. TITLE TAGS are one of the major things to concentrate on and to make sure that you get it right. Doing so will result in not only better placement in the search engine, but enticing descriptions will also result in more people clicking on your link and visiting your site.

Take a look at what your competition is doing in order to get some ideas for your site. To see their TITLE TAG go to their web site and in IE or Netscape click on View then Source and you will be able to see their TITLE TAG. Don't copy theirs, but let this help you get some ideas for your own site.

2. Putting keyword phrases into your pages - Finding the perfect set of keywords for your web pages and knowing the right keywords to use is very important because your site should provide people with what they are looking for. A free program to help you can be found at: http://www.goodkeywords.com Good Keywords makes use of various tools provided by search engines like Yahoo, Google, Teoma and other services like Alexa. Using Good Keywords makes it all very simple, fast and straight forward. Just remember...don't over do it or you will be penalized.

3. Writing your web page copy - Your next step is to incorporate those keywords into the copy on your web site. This is extremely important as search engines need to see these keywords on your page so they can then analyze these words and decide where your site should be listed in their categories. Write your content around the keywords and use them as many times as possible, keeping in mind though...that it is not just a search engine that is reading the copy but also your visitor.

4. META TAGS - Meta tags provide search engines with information about the content and purpose of a Web site. A Web site that uses meta tags to the best of their ability will appear more often in search results and will also be seen closer to the top on those search results. Many people feel that stuffing keywords into the meta tags will help improve their rankings. The original idea behind meta tags was to give a way to classify the web site. The problem now is that many engines don't consider meta tags to be as relevant to the ranking, therefore they give them less weight overall because of the keyword stuffing techniques used. That's not to say that you still shouldn't use meta tags, just consider to use them for what they were originally intended - that is to give your site an accurate title and description with a few keywords (3 or 4 phrases max) outlining what the page, or site is about.

5. ALT TAGS - The ALT tag or 'alternative text' is an attribute of the IMG tag. (Any graphic on your web site) An ALT tag should be included for every image within your web site. The ALT tag provides an alternate message to your viewers who can't see your graphics. Without ALT tags, images on a web site are meaningless to these users. If you will be using a graphic menu systems for navigation, these alternate messages are an especially important aid to users without the ability to see your graphics. Adding an appropriate ALT tag to every image within your web site will make a huge difference to the accessibility of your web site. Also, for those who use Yahoo and Google image searches, your ALT Tags can be very important and will help bring traffic to your site. Take for instance one of my sites - http://www.spasoftheworld.com I have loads of graphics of different resort spas and the graphics all carry the name of the resort. People looking for information on this resort may easily end up at my website because I names a picture with the name of the resort.

On the reverse side, ALT TAG stuffing, which is using the tags in an image to hide keywords will rarely help a site's position. If you can insert a key phrase into the image description then by all means do so. Remember that Alt tags do usually count towards your overall keyword density so it's better to have relevant keyword alt tags rather than something like "image01.gif".

6. Linking - with more search engines coming online every day, search engines are looking for ways to serve quality links to visitors. This is where linking to other sites and having them link to you becomes important to both you and the search engine. People who assume that the more inbound links to them will help them, are very wrong. This may have been true at one time but not today. Search engines need to give quality results. One way they have of rating your site is by the quality of inbound links to your site. Therefore sites that are closely related to your site and that link to you will help boost your popularity in search engines. With Google this is a huge issue in how you rank with them. Having a hundred links from all sorts of site may result in hurting your ranking and you may be viewed as a link farm.

7. Spiders - A search engine is a database that has been put together by spiders. Spiders scour the Internet going through pages and recording information available on web pages. Spiders then give the information to the database and the database feeds the results. Theoretically, the web site should show up in the search results the next time the engine updates. It is important that all links on your site be active. A dead link may prevent a spider from doing your entire site.

8. Robots Text file - Search engines will look in your root domain for a special file named "robots.txt" (http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt). The file tells the robot (spider) which files it may spider (download). This system is called, The Robots Exclusion Standard.

9. FLASH - This has to be one of the top mistakes a web site owner can do to hurt their search engine rangkings. Good content will win over flash every time and getting visitors to your site is what you are trying to accomplish. The only thing the search engines will be able to see when visiting a site where the first page is all flash are the title tags and links. In most cases that will not be enough. Over and over it's content rich pages that will get you the rankings you need. You may have to decide between getting a high ranking or having a "pretty" entry page. Remember that you goal is customers and sales. It might be kewl the first time you visit the site but when you have to go there over and over again it becomes very annoying not to mention that people on dialup must cringe when faced with such a page. They often give up because of the length of time it takes to load.

10. Don't expect results overnight. It takes time to get your ranking up there, even with paid inclusion. You may start out with a low ranking when you are first listed but as you continue to optimize your site and build "relevant" links you will start to see a gradual climb. As you wait for your rise to the top, concentrate on building as many relevant links as possible. Beside increasing your ranking you will be surprised at the number of referrals that you will received from those linked pages.

Jean Sutherland has successfully run her own ezine for over 6 years and has a subscriber base of 35,000. Her ezine is geared to people doing business online and beside offering free software, it also provides traffic & marketing tips, informative business articles, free ebooks and computer tips for those trying to work online. <a target="_new" href="http://www.emailpromotions.net">http://www.emailpromotions.net</a>

Speed Indexing - 3 Steps to Getting Your Website Listed in Google Quickly

Getting your website listed in Google quickly simply requires that you know what Google is looking for and how to apply that to your site. Fortunately, what Google is looking for is pretty easy to understand and use in your marketing plan. Start with these suggestions as soon as possible so you will increase your traffic. Consider the following suggestions to get your website listed with Google, and listed as well and quickly as possible.

Tip #1 - Submit Your URL

After you develop your website, you will want to register with Google to get your URL in their database. However, the inclusion of your URL is not promised so you will need to do everything you can to guarantee this. One such thing is to make sure all web pages are fully completed. If all web pages are not fully completed, your URL might not be picked up by Google robots crawling the web, and certainly not the unfinished pages. Also, only submit your URL once as per the guideless set forth by Google.

Tip #2 Keywords

Keywords are another thing you should use when writing content for your website. The reason for this is Google relies on keywords to rank web pages. When you research important keywords for your market and use them in titles, in the beginning of paragraphs, and throughout your content, Google will be able to return your site as a result when people search for these particular keywords. Make sure you know how to use keywords properly and the words that directly apply to your market because if you use keywords in the wrong way they can actually hurt your rankings.

Tip #3 Links

Another very important consideration for a high rating in the Google search engine is links... links to your website from other websites. However, you can do this relatively easily by simply communicating with other quality websites and asking them to link to you. You can also link back to them. This is a very popular practice. Also, there are reciprocal linking software programs you can use to help you increase and manage your links. It is recommended that you go the personal route with the more important links you are interested in to ensure the link reciprocation process occurs.

There are many things you can do to optimize your site for Google's search engine, however by following the above tips you will get your site ready for Google searches fast and with little effort. Make sure you know what you are doing, however, because if not you might do more harm than good. Once you have a clear understanding of what you need to do regarding links, keywords, and registering your URL, you should have no problems.

Michael Turner shows you exactly how to <a target="_new" href="http://www.powertraffictactics.com/">increase web site traffic</a> in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it today at <a target="_new" href="http://www.powertraffictactics.com/">http://www.powertraffictactics.com/</a>

Your Search Engine Optimization Strategy: Make Love, Not War

When it comes to search engine optimization strategy, there are basically two camps ? those who view search engines as adversaries to be conquered at any cost and those who regard search engines as partners in their online marketing efforts. Long-time readers of my articles probably already have a good idea of which camp I fall into; however, I believe both approaches can be effective optimization methods.

Adversarial Optimization Methods

Service providers who have this &quot;adversarial&quot; philosophy will tell their prospects that the formulation of a search engine optimization strategy is much like a high-stakes game of chess. It's an &quot;us vs. them,&quot; &quot;winner-take-all,&quot; and &quot;every man for himself&quot; mentality. It's also rooted largely in technology ? under this philosophy, success is defined as unraveling the latest search engine algorithm to find new optimization methods and exploiting its technical aspects for immediate benefit.

The underlying premise of this search engine optimization strategy is that you must use optimization methods that trick the search engines into showing a website predominantly in the results since the site isn't currently offering attributes that the search engines consider valuable. The primary benefits of this approach are that it doesn't require much work on the part of the client and that results can be realized more rapidly. These qualities both stem from the fact that there isn't a large amount of additional content needed, nor are there many wholesale changes to make to the website when using such optimization methods.

While this is not the methodology that I recommend, it is a valid ? albeit potentially volatile ? search engine optimization strategy.

Partnership Optimization Methods

Those who view search engines as partners have a very different search engine optimization strategy. These service providers embrace the idea that the attributes and optimization methods that give a website high rankings in search engines are, by and large, the same ones that make the site more valuable to website visitors and potential customers.

This theory makes sense. Every search engine needs to return results that their users find to be the most relevant and useful. If search engine R&D people operated in a vacuum, they would probably find their market share rapidly diminished while they lamented about how &quot;people are stupid&quot;. This means that each of the major search engines spend endless research dollars to determine exactly what it is that search engine users find valuable, and each has a high stake in the results of the research. No search engine marketing or web design firm has the resources or motivation to conduct studies of this magnitude. It is, therefore, highly advantageous to use the findings of these studies, deduced from common algorithm traits of multiple search engines, to improve your search engine optimization strategy and website.

I consistently hear from companies who are puzzled as to why their expensive, cutting-edge website is perpetually outranked by a site of perceived inferior quality ? &quot;our website is better than theirs&quot; or &quot;we are a much bigger company&quot; are common remarks. Beauty is, as always, in the eye of the beholder. The sites that consistently rank highly are almost always using optimization methods that offer something of value to people who entered the search query. Search engines care as much about the size of a company or how much it spent on its website about as much as they care about what you had for breakfast this morning (I had blueberry muffins, but Google hasn't called to ask).

The advantages to the &quot;partnership&quot; search engine optimization strategy are numerous. Rather than chase the ever-changing technical attributes that can get you short-term results, you instead use optimization methods that leverage your company's knowledge of your industry to create something useful for the searcher. You can improve your website and offer the information and products that prospects are seeking, even if those prospects are in the earliest stages of the buying cycle. In general, you will not have to watch your rankings swing wildly based upon new spam filters and algorithm shifts, and thus will enjoy a higher level of predictability when it comes to your website (although with search engines, there are never any guarantees). Since you aren't constantly forced to re-address your site's search engine optimization methods, you'll have more time to focus on other online marketing areas that need attention, such as the website's conversion rate, an e-newsletter, or online PR.

Conclusion

It's a fact that websites rise and fall in the rankings all the time. The only real constant is that the sites of TRUE value, the ones that offer something relevant and important to the searcher, are generally always near the top ? even after the latest algorithm shift has sent the &quot;adversarial&quot; crowd into a frenzy of activity as they attempt to reformulate their search engine optimization strategy.

While it may take a little extra effort, I like to think of the relationship with search engines as a &quot;partnership&quot; in a real sense. We use optimization methods that apply the attributes search engines have deemed to be valuable to a website, which improves both the website and the website's search engine rankings. The search engines, in turn, send highly-targeted visitors who have shown an interest in your industry, products, or services. Sure, it may seem that we get more out of the deal, but the engines don't complain. They haven't even acknowledged our partnership.

Scott Buresh is managing partner of <a target="_new" href="http://www.mediumblue.com">Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing</a>. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including ZDNet, WebProNews, MarketingProfs, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, SEO Today, and Search Engine Guide. He was also a contributor to the recently released Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004). Medium Blue is an <a target="_new" href="http://www.mediumblue.com/profile.html">Atlanta search engine optimization company</a> with local and national clients, including Georgia-Pacific, DuPont, and Boston Scientific. To receive Scott's monthly articles, sign up for Medium Blue's e-newsletter, <a target="_new" href="http://www.mediumblue.com/newsletter.html">Out of the Blue</a>.

Marketing Articles: Getting A Better Search Engine Rank For All Of Your Pages!

In one of my articles, I discussed how to market your web site link twice. It detailed out how to promote not only www.yoursite.com but how you should also promote your site without the www., like this: <a href="http://yoursite.com" target="_new">http://yoursite.com</a>.

This article is to talk about promoting ALL of your pages within your marketing campaign. See, most of us typically only promote the main page on our sites. Ex. www.yoursite.com. The truth is, your site is much more than just the 1st page right? Well, let's condition ourselves to promote everything available within your site...

Search Engine Marketing is crutial for all companies who want to succeed online. I'm sure at one point or another, you will hear how "Optimizing your site for search engines is crutial". Of course, they aren't fooling you, it is a crutial marketing tactic but, what is also crutial is learning how to use different tools to boost your search engine placements once you've optimized your site for the web.

So let's talk about the marketing tactics available to you and implement strategies on how to promote all your pages within them.

LINK EXCHANGES:

Link popularity has become a norm for most small companies to implement in their daily promoting activities. Here's the problem, most companies that perform link exchanges daily fail to utilize it to their advantage. For ex. Let's say you perform approximately 10 link exchanges daily. For each one, you submitted your link "www.yoursite.com". What you'll want to start implementing is submitting 10 different links within your site.

Ex Link Exchanges:

<ul>

<li>Link #1: http://yoursite.com

<li>Link #2: http://yoursite.com/resources

<li>Link #3: http://www.yoursite.com/services

<li>And so on...

</ul>

A good strategy would be to open up "Note Pad" and create all the links you want to promote.

<li>Add each link

<li>Assign an appropriate title to each link

<li>Create an appropriate description for each link

Now all you have to do is to copy and paste each link when performing your daily link exchanges.

WRITING ARTICLES:

Do you write articles to promote your site??? If you do, then you probably have created a "Resource Box" at the end of each article right??? Good, let's change the resource box a little.

My site is host to 100's of Marketing Articles and the 1 thing I notice time & time again is that each author (no disrespect to any of the wonderful authors) Typically only add the main page of their web site within their "resource box".

Ok, let's say you write articles about "Search Engine Marketing". At the end of the article, add a link to a page on your site that talks about "Search Engine Marketing" or something similar.

Ex. http://www.yoursite.com/search_engine_marketing.html

So with that in mind, try revising all your articles to point to specific pages on your web site.

DIRECTORY SUBMSSIONS:

Submitting your site to directories will give your site long lasting traffic. Not all directories will accept any link from your site besides the main page. This is ok though, there are literally 100's of other directories that will allow you to submit any page you want.

Experiment with this and try to change up all your links when your submitting to directories.

I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND : Using anything other than your main page for directories like: OPD Open Project Directory or Yahoo.

So now you have 3 proven marketing strategies on how to improve your search engine placements for all of your pages instead of only your main page. Be creative with this and look for more strategies you can implement this tactic with.

About The Author

Martin Lemieux
Smartads - President
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