QeCeRa

อยากไปเซนทารา พัทยา

2011-07-16T22:35:00.000-07:00

หลังจากได้ไปพัทยาปาร์ค1คืนก็อยากไปพักโรงแรมรีสอร์ทที่มีสวนน้ำอีก
เลยได้อ่านของเซ็นทารา แกรนด์ มิราจ บีช รีสอร์ท พัทยา น่าไปมากๆ มีสวนน้ำใหญ่มาก บรรยากาศดี
เอาไว้เดี๋ยวจะเก็บตังค์ไปเที่ยวที่นี่

เมื่อวานเป็นวันไม่ดี

2011-07-01T01:53:00.000-07:00

เพราะมีเว็บเป็นล้านๆเว็บทั่วโลกต้องหายไปเพราะ google แบน

วันนี้วันดีกลับมาเขียนอีกครั้ง

2011-06-07T18:23:00.000-07:00

วันนี้วันดีกลับมาเขียนอีกครั้ง หลังจากไม่ได้เขียนมาสองปีเพราะลืมไปว่ามีบล็อกนี้ด้วย

Whats the Big Hurry?

2009-02-04T18:20:00.001-08:00

Quite often I get asked what the magic solution is for getting better Google ranking. Sometimes the questions sound fairly naive, something like this:

"I have recently established a site called wazooski.com and would like to rank much higher in Google, Yahoo and MSN. Can you tell me how to do this without spending a lot of money? Can I get into the top 10 within 1 or 2 months?"

This is one of those "rookie" questions. Experienced marketers know that predicting search engine rankings is always a hit or miss affair. SEO practitioners who "guarantee" high search engine rankings are making misleading claims, intended only to sell their services.

Imagine how many sites within any competitive area are going after those "top 10" rankings. Many of your competitors have been around for a few years, so they have an established site with lots of valuable content, steady traffic, and thousands of sites linking into them. How can you expect to just throw up a site and within a month or two walk away with a "top 10" position?

This is only possible within a narrowly defined, highly specialized niche. Say for instance you are going to hold a Wazooski family reunion next year, and want to use the internet to promote it. Chances are a few well placed announcements scattered around 20 or 30 article sites, directories and blogs will generate enough search engine activity to get you good positioning in the search engines. Within a month or two you should get the number one spot for "Wazooski family reunion", within the top 10 for "Wazooski", and possibly even an honourable mention further down the list for "family reunion". Using a blog or two will often speed this process up considerably.

The reason is pretty obvious: there is not a lot of competition for "Wazooski family reunion". In fact you may be the only one competing for that term. All you really need to do is get your site or your announcements spidered and the chances are pretty good that you will get a high ranking almost immediately.

But try this with a more competitive term and you are talking a completely different game. Considering that most competitive terms have thousands of sites chasing after that illusive "top 10" ranking, you will be lucky to even get on the radar screen.

And trying to do it within a month or two is almost completely unrealistic.

Rick Hendershot publishes the <a target="_new" href="http://www.sbo-linknet.com">Linknet Network</a>, a group of websites and blogs offering web owners advertising and link promotion opportunities.

Google Zombies Need To Wake Up

2009-02-04T01:50:00.001-08:00

Over the last couple of weeks, I've received more e-mails in response to my article, "Google's Trap, DMOZ's Nap, And Yahoo!'s Crap," than any other article I've ever written. And that's saying a lot because, I've written close to forty articles.

Most of the e-mails are very supportive and appreciate of the fact that I'm going after Google and the other large search engines, by telling it like it is.

Now even though I appreciate your e-mails and support, I need to make one thing perfectly clear. For the record, I AM NOT GOING AFTER GOOGLE!

Is Google a greedy, self-serving entity? Yes! Yes, they are. But lots of entities are greedy and self-serving. For that matter, so are a lot of people. The fact of the matter is, I happen to like certain things about Google. I think they're a fine search engine, and they perform a very valuable and much needed service.

No, my articles are not directed at Google per se. My articles are directed at the tens of thousands of Google zombies who blindly follow and applaud Google's every move and whim, like rats following the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

This also includes a good portion of the media, which also seems to be caught up in the bright lights of Google--not unlike a deer frozen by the headlights of an oncoming car.

Zombies, wake up! Google is a search engine--period! Nothing more, nothing less. And I will not exaggerate their existence or importance!

They are not a god or some sort of deity. They are a search engine--that's all.

And even though I've already said it in several different articles, I'm going to say it again. All of that money you're spending on search engine optimization, so that you can play in Google's sandbox is going to be all for naught.

Because other websites that haven't done any search engine optimization whatsoever are already starting to rank ahead of you in Google's results pages.

Yet, you keep spending your money, and beating your brains out trying to figure out Google's algorithms. And just when you think you've got it figured out, Google decides to take its ball and go home. Zombies, wake up! You're playing a game you can't win!

Didn't November 16, 2003 teach you anything? It's never wise to put all of your eggs into one search engine basket. I mean, forget about the "Florida Update." What if by some strange chance, Google goes offline for a day--for a week?

Think it can't happen? Think again. Nobody thought last summers crippling east coast blackout could ever happen either, but it did happen, and it turned about to be the biggest blackout in recent U.S. history.

Nothing and no one is infallible. So, zombies, wake up and do yourself a favor. Do the smart thing, and develop other ways to promote your website.

About The Author

Dean Phillips is an Internet marketing expert, writer, publisher and entrepreneur. Questions? Comments? Dean can be reached at mailto: <a href="mailto:dean@lets-make-money.net">dean@lets-make-money.net</a>.

Visit his website at: <a href="http://www.lets-make-money.net" target="_new">http://www.lets-make-money.net</a>

Search Engines: Tips and Strategies on Getting Listed and Ranking High for Newbies

2009-02-04T01:00:00.000-08:00

You've got a website. You've put countless hours into it, tweaking the look and feel and making sure all the links work. The bad news is there are a gazillion other websites out there. The good news is there are many things you can control to make sure your site isn't lost in the morass of dot coms.

One of the most important is showing up in the search engines, and getting listed in the top 20 for your subject. This article covers the steps you can take within your site.

First things first: Just like there's no "get rich quick", there's also no "get listed quick" (unless you pay for it).

Getting top listings in the search engines is an accomplishment. It gets you traffic and it gets you credibility. You can buy sponsored listings ? you can't buy credibility.

Always Remember: Search engines base their usefulness on the quality of the results they give. You want people who are searching for your product to find your site; they want people who are searching for your product to find relevant sites. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about making sure you both get what you want.

SEO requires many steps. They pay off, but not immediately. Once you're "spidered" you'll see the effects of changes you make pretty quickly, but getting "spidered" (sorry to all the arachnophobes) can take awhile.

Spidered: Search engines search sites throughout the entire World Wide Web (if that sounds a lot like Sally searching for seashells by the seashore, it's intentional). But, to search for your site, they have to know you're there. So, these benevolent spiders send their hairy arms searching through the Web and whatever sticks to their spindly legs they keep.

If you create a web these spiders might want to visit, this process gets you a more desirable string on their web. You want to create a spa for spiders.

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

Think about it: how do you search for something on the Internet? You put in a few words that say succinctly what you're searching for, i.e. downtown Chicago restaurants.

So, when you design or revamp your site, consider the keywords anyone would use to find what you offer.

The beauty of the Internet is the ability to target niche markets. You don't need a gazillion hits a month. You need people who are searching for YOUR product to find YOUR site. To illustrate the above example: if you search for "downtown Chicago restaurants" in Google, TheLocalTourist.com is the first listing. If you look for "Chicago Restaurants" it's aways down the list. But that's perfect. Because The Local Tourist only lists restaurants in downtown Chicago.

If The Local Tourist had a high listing for Chicago Restaurants, then someone looking for a place to eat in one of the outlying neighborhoods would be disappointed, and we don't want that.

By focusing on your niche keywords, on your target market's desires, you're forced to evaluate what you have to offer and the best way to present it. When you designed your product or service, you (hopefully) had the end-user in mind. So you know what they want.

As you're starting out, don't use the most popular keywords; use ones that don't get as many searches because there won't be as much competition. You're just trying to establish a presence. A good resource to find the popularity of keywords is http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. Type in the keywords you think people would use to find your work and this tool will show you how many people have searched for it in the previous month through Overture. Google searches are approximately 12x that number.

Scope Out Your Competition

Go to your favorite search engines and type in your chosen keywords. Now visit the top three for each set of keywords from each search engine. Try to figure out how they got such high listings.

An easy way to keep track of this reconnaissance work is to create a simple spreadsheet and use a different worksheet for each search term. You'll want to have a row for each of the following:

1. Search term

2. Search engine

3. Your ranking:

a. If I'm not in the top 50, I simply write that.

b. Add a date next to the ranking so you can track your movement up the listings

4. Overture traffic (number of times term was searched for last month)

5. Repeat the following 3 times, for the top 3 listings:

a. Listing URL

b. Title

c. Description

d. Keywords

When you visit each of your competitor's sites, you're going to use a wonderful tool called Source Code. Copy and paste their URL into your spreadsheet, then in your browser click on View?Source. A new window opens with their HTML. (I always feel a little dirty when I do this, like I'm a voyeur or a spy, which I guess I am. That being said, it's completely legit.)

Now that you're seeing all their dirty laundry, you're going to look for their Meta Tags, which will be at the top of the code.

Meta Tags are the code in the HTML that visitors don't see but search engines do. They used to be the main way to get listed, but search engines have gotten smarter since abusers were loading up their tags with irrelevant keywords. They aren't nearly as important as they used to be, but the Title and Description tags are still vital. Many search engines use the title for the listing and the description for, well, the description. If your tags are relevant to your content, they don't hurt and do help with some.

Find the tags for Title, Description, and Keywords. Simply look for "title", "description" and "keyword" at the top of the source code.

1. The title uses the main keywords potential customers use to find sites. For example, TheLocalTourist's home page title is "Downtown Chicago Restaurants, Bars and Nightclubs, Shopping, Events, Things To Do". This title highlights the areas of the site where I want to receive search engine rankings based on the number of searches on those terms.

2. The description is where sites give their metaphorical "sound-byte". The trick is to pick keywords and write a compelling, succinct description without sounding like you're trying to use all your keywords. Gee, it sounds so easy.

3. The keyword meta tag is simply a listing, separated by commas, of all the keywords people would use to find a site. They should be different for each page because the content is different. ONLY use keywords that represent your content. Don't go crazy and don't use the same ones too many times.

Copy their tags and place them in the appropriate rows in your spreadsheet.

Now go back to the page itself and read through it. Take note of how they use their keywords in their content. It's a good idea to print each one.

Finally, gather your spreadsheets and your competitor's site print-outs and pull the keywords and descriptions that reflect your site's content. Analyze how they present their information.

This process is time consuming, but it forces you to take a look at your competition. It also, of course, makes sure your site is search engine friendly and therefore potential-visitor friendly.

Step By Step Optimization

Now it's time to really get down to business.

Change your file names to include the most relevant keywords for each page. You can't do that with the home page since it has to be something like "index", but you can name the other pages on the site with the relevant keyword for each page. Believe it or not, it does make a difference. Pick one or two so the file name isn't too long.

Write a title (not a meta tag, a real title) for each page as close to the top of the page as possible using the best keywords to describe the content. Format it as Header 1. (Most HTML editors have an easy way to format text without going into the code if you're unfamiliar with HTML.) You're putting it at the top of the page because search engines read like we do: left to right, top to bottom. This placement and the header formatting is a flag stating that "This is what the page is about".

Within the content of each page, include a blurb that uses as many keywords as possible without being annoying or redundant. Make your keywords bold, but only once. A good, brief example is the Things to Do page http://www.thelocaltourist.com/ThingsToDo.htm. This is one of the most frequently visited pages on The Local Tourist from search engines.

Make sure every picture has an "alt tag" (alternate). That's the text that shows up while the picture is loading. Search engines can't "read" pictures, so the alt tags show them what the picture is about. On most HTML editors you add the alt tag in picture properties.

Use your hard-earned knowledge from spying to create your own meta tags. Tailor your competitors' usage for your own site. (Learning how to implement meta tags is beyond the scope of this article, but you can do a web search for "meta tag tutorial" to find plenty of help.)

Ta da! You now have a website that's ready to be submitted to the search engines. It's a good idea to check your rankings on a regular basis and track them with your spreadsheets. Remember, this is not an instant process. The absolute best way to get impressive rankings is to have a content-rich quality site that addresses your target market's needs.

Theresa Carter is the creator, publisher, and search engine optimizer of The Local Tourist, a free online guide to downtown Chicago. Find restaurants, bars, spas, salons, events, attractions, shopping, media, transportation, articles about Chicago and more. <a target="_new" href="http://www.thelocaltourist.com">http://www.thelocaltourist.com</a>

Linking for Fun and Profit

2009-02-03T21:00:00.001-08:00

Well actually, linking isn't fun at all. In fact, it's quite tedious. Seeking, responding to requests and adding links takes time and effort. But, if you're not actively building links the RIGHT way you are going to be left behind. In other words, your site will be "Lost in Cyberspace". The plain fact is Google, and to a lesser extent, other important search engines, reward sites with links from relevant and important pages.

If you want your site to deliver lots of targeted search engine traffic (and who doesn't?) there are two equally important factors:

1) lots of keyword-rich, search engine friendly content<BR>2) lots of relevant, incoming links from the RIGHT sources

For real success you need to cover BOTH of these strategies. Don't concentrate on one and not the other.

So, how do you go about building your links? It's not rocket science, but as I said, it does take time and effort. From my own experiences, here's what you should do:

1) Download and install the Google Toolbar:

<A target="_new" href="http://toolbar.google.com/">http://toolbar.google.com/</A>

This will show you the PageRank of the page you are viewing. PageRank is a measure, rated from 1 to 10, of the "importance" that Google gives to that page. There has been a lot written about PageRank. You don't need to become obsessed with it but it IS an important consideration when determining WHO to link to. A link from a PR-5 page is worth FAR more than a PR-0 page.

2) Establish a resource or links directory for your site. This lets potential link partners see that you are willing to exchange links. You should make it clear on your links pages what your linking policy is i.e. under what conditions you will agree to exchange links.

3) Your aim should be to build a resource directory that is relevent to your business. Don't try to build a mini Yahoo with umpteen different categories. Keep your directory focussed on your site theme. When you first start out you will be inclined to link to anybody in exchange for a link FROM anybody. This is a mistake. Be patient and choose your link partners carefully.

4) Before requesting a link from another site, add that site to your directory. Contact the webmaster and tell them you added their link because you believe their site would be of interest to your visitors (and so it should). Give the url where your link is located and ask for a return link, along with instructions on how you would like your link worded. NEVER demand by saying things like "if you do not link to us we will remove your link".

5) If you have not received a reply after 2 - 3 weeks send a polite follow up. Again, don't demand. No one is under any obligation to link to you. If you do not receive a reply to your second request it means that the webmaster does not want to link to you, or they are simply too busy to respond. In that case, leave it and move on. I receive dozens of link requests a day. Sometimes it takes me many weeks to get around to responding. You'll go mad worrying about links that have not been reciprocated. Your time is better spent.

6) When you receive a link request visit the site and check that it meets with your requirements as set down on your link pages. Is it a quality site with good content or just a "link farm"? If it doesn't meet your requirements don't link to it.

The webmaster SHOULD have already linked to your site but be prepared to overlook that breech of linking protocol if it's from a good quality, high PR site.

7) Beware of webmasters who add your site to their "directory" which turns out to nothing but a link farm i.e. has no useful content, just a bunch of links, and asks you to link to an entirely different site, one that HAS good content. These webmasters are playing you for a sucker. The benefit is all theirs.

8) As I said in point #1, links from high PR pages are worth more than links from low or no PR pages. Seek out high PR linking partners but keep in mind it is the PR of the actual page your link is on that matters, NOT the PR of the home page. In other words if the home page PR is 5, but the page your link is on is several layers deep in the directory, it will probably have a PR of 0 and be of little benefit to you. Check the PR of the actual page your link is on, or is going to be on, before agreeing to exchange links.

Each page on your links directory should be no more than one click away from your home page, and your linking partner's site should be the same. If your link is placed on a page which looks something like this - directory/category/subcategory/subcategory with your link - you will derive NO value from that link.

9) Be prepared to negotiate your links. Savvy webmasters understand the value of links from high PR pages. If you add a link to a PR-0 page on your site don't expect your link partner to put your link on a PR-6 page, and your link partner shouldn't expect the same from you. Exchange value for like value.

When you first start out your site may not have any PR due to a lack of incoming links. This reduces your bargaining power. However, you can overcome this by getting your site listed in as many large business directories as possible. Some of these you will have to pay, such as Yahoo and Microsoft's Business Directory, but many others are free. You'll find a good list here:

<A target="_new" href="http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php">http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php</A>

10) Be specific about how you want your link partner to link to you. It is MOST important that the link to you contain your targeted keywords in the anchor (linked) text. When I ask for a link to my site I don't want the link title to be:

Steve Pronger Web Business Solutions

Instead, I ask for:

Create Website | Small Business Website Designer

or whichever keywords I am targeting at the time. A search for those keywords at Google will illustrate my point!

11) And finally, here is an excellent resource to help you find quality link partners. It's called Value Exchange, and will put you in contact with like-minded webmasters:

<A target="_new" href="http://www.stevepronger.com/value_exchange.htm">http://www.stevepronger.com/value_exchange.htm</A>

Steve Pronger is a website designer and affiliate marketer helping small businesses achieve success on the Web. Visit his Web Business Solutions site at <A target="_new" href="http://www.stevepronger.com">http://www.stevepronger.com</A>

Breaking the Myth About Page Rank (PR)

2009-02-03T19:50:00.001-08:00

The most difficult challenge most web designers face is getting traffic to your site. There are plenty of companies who promise to send traffic your way. Sadly, most of this traffic is not qualified. Yes, your hit counter will move higher, however, if its not qualified, you may find you have unhappy visitors to your site. Unhappy visitors will not click on your ads or purchase your products.

Once you have optimized your site, consider submitting it to every search engine. If you want to get spidered quicker in Google, have a web page with a PR of 4 or higher point to your site. Your site will be spidered within a couple of days!

One myth I would like to bust is that PR is a measure of a web site. Its not. I receive countless emails offering a reciprocal link with their PR5 or PR6 site. Unless my link is appearing on the main page, or a page that has PR6, I am not getting a share of PR6. Most likely, my link will appear on a page that has a PR2!

Page rank is Google's ranking of that specific page's relevance. Just because the main page has a PR of 4, does not make every page on the site a PR4. Beware of sites who claim that they will exchange links with you and its to your benefit since they have a PR5 or PR6. Where is your link appearing? If its on a page that has a PR of 4 or 5 or 6, great!

Reciprocal linking, if done properly, will ensure that your keywords are at the top of the search engine. If you have a popular keyword, youll need to have more back links. Pick your link partners properly, and ensure that they are linking to your keyword.

For example: if your site is www.joesdinner.com, consider sending out requests to relevant higher ranking pages to start with, followed by lower ranking pages and ask web designers to link back in the following manner:

< a href= "http://www.joesdinner.com" >best dining in new york</a> - joes dinner is the only place to eat when you're staying in New York.

Presuming their keyword is "best dining in new york", having links pointing to your site with an anchor tag incorporating your keywords will improve your search engine rankings dramatically.

Once you have established a collection of sites pointing to your site using your keywords, you will start receiving reciprocal link exchanges from other sites. This is where you can start to be particular.

If you want to maintain an effective PR and attract better sites for linking, follow these tips:

a) Is it indexed?

While their site may be indexed, the page where they are placing your link, is it at least indexed by google? If you type in allinurl:www.sitename.com/links/right_here.html and there are no results, consider declining their offer. If the page your link appears on has not been indexed, there is no benefit whatsoever to you. If your pages have PR, they may consider placing your link on another page. If the page your link appears on is indexed, but does not have PR, consider accepting their offer. While the page today may not have PR, it will in time.

b) How many neighbours?

The value of the page rank is shared with each of the links on that page. If you are splitting that PR with several other sites, your share of PR will be small, which doesnt help you. Reconsider accepting any link exchanges if your site is 1 of more than 30 - 40 sites that will appear on that page, unless its a very high PR. Further, if there are too many links on that page, Google may consider the page to be part of a link farm, which may end up penalizing your site.

c) Is it relevant?

Google is big on relavancy. Ensure your links pages are relevant. If you operate a site about golf, having links from cooking sites will not help you establish your page rank. It may cost you more than you get in return.

How to Find Good PR sites:

a) Do a search for them by typing in your keyword and start asking for reciprocal link exchanges. Take a look at their PR and go from there. Remember, its the number of sites that backlink to you that matters, not strictly the PR of the page. I would rather have 50 pages that have a PR1 pointing to my site, than to have 5 sites that have a PR5. Of course, if you can get 50 pages that have a PR5 pointing to your site, you are laughing!

b) Take a look at your existing link partners and check out their links pages. Its clear the people appearing on those links pages are interested in reciprocating.

c) Purchase software that will help find quality link partners.

It is important to attract higher PR sites when you are on a reciprocal link campaign. However, its not the most important thing when it comes to search engine rankings. Its the backlinks that point back at you that are key. The more of those, the better off you will be for your keyword.

Remember: every page starts off as a PR0. Just because its new doesnt mean it wont get a higher PR once google gets around to assessing a score. If the page your site appears on is indexed, and its a relevant site of quality, consider exchanging links. You'll grow a large list of link partners in a short period of time, and increase your search engine rankings in the process.

Christopher Smith has been helping people make money through Google Adsense by providing them with the <a target="_New" href="http://www.adsenseheaven.com">Top Paying Adsense Keywords</a> for his visitors to Adsense Heaven. <a target="_new" href="http://www.adsenseheaven.com">http://www.adsenseheaven.com</a>

Twelve Steps to Higher Search Engine Placement

2009-02-03T00:40:00.001-08:00

Recent studies suggest that more than 80% of new visitors to any web site get there as a result of a search engine query. If this study is to believed, it certainly suggests that working to get high rankings in the search engines might be the most effective thing you can do to bring traffic to your site.

The following 12 design tips will help you get started in optimizing your site's search engine placement.

1. Design for Specific Search Engines - there are hundreds of different search engines, but for best results you should design your site to take full advantage of the search criteria of the big three - Yahoo, Google and MSN. If you can get high rankings in these three, you won't need to worry about the other search engines. Knowing how these search engines rank sites (as well as why they will penalize a site) is important. The rules change often, but the tips below are the most current.

2. Know your target audience. Before you apply any of the tips below, do some research and find out what are the most likely key words and phrases your target audience will be searching for. In most cases, the key words or phrases won't be your site name, but will be something related to the solution to a specific problem or the answer to a specific question. Knowing the question that will be asked is half the battle.

3. Use Meta tags. By now just about everyone knows about Meta tags. These are commands you can place in the html on your web page to help the search engines categorize what your page is about. The two most important Meta Tags are 'Keyword' and 'Description'. The description Meta tag should describe what is on the particular page, and the keyword Meta tag should include the important key words from the page. Avoid using 'fluff' words and phrases as these will be ignored by the site.

Warning: If the keywords in the Meta keyword line are not found within the text on the web page, some search engines will penalize the page or simply not list it. This is done to prevent 'meta tag' spoofing.

My advice - have a different Meta description tag on every page. And be sure that keywords in the keyword tags are used on the page.

4. Optimize your Title tag. Many search engines give considerable weight to the html title tag on the page. It is the first element the search engine will scan and weight. Not including a title instantly reduces the search engine ranking your page will receive. When yo create a title tag, include keywords and write it to catch the attention of the users be scanning lengthy lists of titles in search engine results.

For higher ranking, make sure the title tag matches headline text on the page. And be sure to use a different title tag for each page on your site. (Pages with the same title tag will often be ignored.)

5. Use Keywords in page headlines. Page headlines are important - to your visitor as well as to search engines. Use short keyword phrases, including hot button words and phrases. Avoid 'fluff' and generic words.

My advice - use a strong headline on the page, and use the same headline in the title tag.

6. Use interesting text. Search engines actually count all the words on a webpage, then rank those words by frequency of use. The more often you use a word or phrase(up to a point), the higher you will rank with that word or phrase in the search engine. For that reason, be sure to include words or phrases that are likely to be searched for on your pages.

My advice - Keep your text short, on topic, and packed full of keywords. Avoid useless and meaningless words, and certain phrases that will place you in the penalty box.

7. Use the AlT tags on all images. Search engines are starting to index sites by the images found on the site. They accomplish this by looking at all the image tags on the page, and cataloging the ALT tags accompanying the image. Obviously if you don't use the ALT tag, then images on your site won't be properly cataloged. When using the alt tag, be sure to use a keyword or phrase describing the content of the image.

8. Use the Title tag on links. Search engines look at all text on the site, including the title tag on the links on your site. Most sites still don't use the link title tag, so when you do, you gain an advantage. The link title should be a short keyword or phrase.

My advice - Check out how the pages on my site have a left navigation menu filled with department names. I try to make these names keywords for my site, and the link to the departments all make use of the title tag. Doing it this way means that the search engine ranks the department names twice. Once as text, and again as a Link Title Tag.

9. Provide a Link Trail. Search engines coming to your site follow the links on the front page that lead into your site. These links should provide a 2 level trail to all pages on your site. If you don't provide a link trail, the search engines probably won't find all your pages. (And even if you do provide a 'link trail' - if you use the same title tag and Meta tags on your pages, the search engine may ignore all the pages beyond the first one.)

My advice - check out how every page on my site has a one click link trail to any department on the site. You are never more than two clicks away from any page. Plus every page has at least 30 different link trails (through the departments) making it easy for visitors as well as search engine spiders to move through the site.

10. Avoid the Penalty Box. Search engines are getting smarter every day, and they will penalize a site if it violates search engine rules. These rules include:

Keyword spoofing - using keywords not related to site content

Keyword spamming - pasting hundreds of copies of the keywords on the page just to get high ranking

Numerous doorway pages - using hundreds of index pages that do nothing but point to the site

Link Spamming - submitting links to the 500,000 link submission services

Page Redirects - not necessarily a major penalty, but can cause loss of ranking

Frames on Main Page - not necessarily a major penalty, but can cause loss of ranking

Flash Movie on Main Page - not necessarily a major penalty, but can cause loss of ranking

My advice: Keep in mind that search engines are intelligent software. When they visit a page they try to determine what the page is about, relying primarily on the titles, headlines, text, links, and images on the page. That's why it is important to focus on those elements, and avoid the ones that can put you in the penalty box.

11. Check for errors. Before you submit your page to the search engines, run the page through an html checker and a spelling checker. Search engines do check and take into consideration spelling and html errors, and will penalize a page that has too many of either.

My advice - take the time to do it right. If you get a poor ranking on a search engine it might be six weeks before the search engine comes back to re-rank you. Get it right before you submit to the search engines, and then keep it right so when the search engine returns, you will continue to get high rankings.

12. Manually submit the site. Don't be tempted to use an automatic site submission program. They don't work, and can get you penalized. Better to manually submit your site to the top search engines. Yahoo, Google, MSN.

My advice - Start with Google.com, then yahoo.com, and then MSN.com. Each has a place to register your site with their search engine.

This may seem a lot of work, but if you do it right and get high rankings, it will pay off.

Craige Stacey has been studying search engines optimization as a hobby and has achieved some very good search engine positions in the past for PublisherGate - <a target="_new" href="http://www.publishergate.com">membership website software</a>

Is Something Missing From Your Keywords Research? (Part 2)

2009-02-02T12:00:00.001-08:00

In my previous article, I raised the issue that proper keyword research must take into account countries. The reason for that was that the demand for keywords can vary between countries. I gave examples of that fact using the Overture keyword tool.

To support my argument (that we need to be aware of countries when doing keyword research), I gave 2 reasons:

1. it will help us determine which countr(y/ies) to target, and

2. it will help us know what countr(y/ies) our visitors are most likely to come from.

I would like, in this article, to expand on these 2 reasons. I would also like to add further reasons why any keyword research must be country based.

1. When doing keyword research, we need to understand the limitations of our research. This is necessary in order to remove any assumptions we make about our findings. For example, if you find that the demand for a keyword is very high in the US, you cannot assume that the demand for that same keyword will also be vey high in other countries. You will only know for sure how much demand there is worldwide by doing country specific keyword research. Such research can be done using a tool such as the Overture keyword tool,

2. It will tell you where your visitors are most likely to come from. This in turn will tell you what features you need to add to your web site. For example, if you are targeting a keyword that is in demand in the US only, then obviously most of your visitors will come from the US. This then means that you need to design your web site primarily for US visitors. You will hence need to:

- use US spelling such as "color" and not "colour",

- if you sell products, then list your prices in US$,

- if you live in the US, then add a fax number so your visitors can place orders by fax,

- if you live in the US, you could organise a US free call number for your visitors to ring you should they need to,

- if you live in the US and you ship your orders, then you could include shipping costs. You could also include how long it will take for them to receive their order,

- if you don't live in the US, then you will need to make it possible for your visitors to pay you in US$,

- if you don't live in the US and you ship your orders, then you could include shipping costs. And you could include how long it will take for them to receive their order,

- and so on . . .

If on the other hand, you are wanting to target several non-English speaking countries, then:

- you may need to add a translation service to your site so that your visitors can read your site in their language,

- you may need to add a currency exchange service so that your visitors can convert your prices into their currency,

- you may need to make it possible for your visitors to pay you in their own currency,

- you may need to add other ways for your visitors to pay you apart from credit cards. You could offer international cheques/checks, money orders, direct bank transfers, . . . I once had a customer who wanted to pay me in Euros from Italy and needed my address to do so. The easier you make it for people to place an order, the greater the chances someone will place an order!

- if you ship your orders, then you could add the shipping costs to each of the countries you are targeting. And include how long it will take for them to receive their order,

- and so on . . . May be you can think of other things you will need to add to your site to accommodate your international visitors.

3. It will help you target the right keywords for the country you want to target. For example, if you want to target Canada, then you will need to use keywords that are in high demand in Canada only. There is absolutely no point doing keyword research in the UK if you are wanting to target Canada as the keyword demand between the 2 countries may vary greatly.

4. It will help you develop a keyword strategy so that you can target several countries at the same time. This can be achieved in several ways depending on the keywords' demand and supply.

- you could use keywords that are in common demand in the several countries. For example, if you sell "widgets" with your site and you find that there is a healthy demand for "black widgets" in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. Then you could target that keyword with your site as that keyword will help you target 4 countries in one go,

- you could use keywords in demand in each country, as long as they complement each other and are highly relevant for your site. For example, using the widget idea, if you found that "colored widgets" are in demand in the US, "white widgets" are in demand in the UK, "black widgets" in Canada, and "coloured widgets" in Australia. Then, you would just target all these keywords with your site which would not be hard to do as all these keywords can easily be targeted together.

Given the right circumstances, you could even use both strategies at the same time.

As I mentioned in my first article, the Overture keyword tool enables you to research the demand for keywords in some 19 countries around the world. To see the countries that Overture supports, go to www.overture.com and have a look at the top right corner of the page. By clicking on any one of the countries listed, you will have access to the Overture keyword tool for the country you selected, and this will enable you to research the keyword demand in that country.

As you may know, keyword demand is only one half of the equation. Keyword demand needs to be looked at together with its supply numbers. One of the ways of determining keyword supply is to use Google. This means that to you need to know how to use Google to research the supply of keywords in your country of interest. This is a bit harder to explain and beyond the scope of this article.

I hope that this second article has convinced you about the need to be country aware when doing your keyword research. The success of your web site may depend on it.

Serge M Botans

Serge M Botans is the CEO of <a target="_new" href="http://www.meta-keyword-advice.com/">Meta Keywords Advice</a>, a web site that provides advice on keywords. Free evaluation available. He is also the inventor of CID, which is an altenative to KEI.

Youve Got The Power, Why Arent You Promoting It?

2009-02-01T13:40:00.001-08:00

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,

7 Steps to Highly Relevant, Search Engine Friendly, and People Useful Web Site Content

2009-01-31T23:10:00.001-08:00

The task is to build a Content Rich Search Friendly and People Friendly Web Site Quickly. These 7 Steps will show you how with about 10 Hours work you can build over 50 pages of rich, Search Engine relevant content for your web Site

Step 1 - What is Your Web Site's Main Theme

This is a Fairly easy step. Most people know the main theme of there Web Site. Some Popular Themes are Health, Golf, Home Based Business, Weight Loss and Crafts

Step 2 - Find Sub-Topics for your Theme

Find as Many sub-topics as you can pertaining to Your Theme. One good way to do this is grab a Pen and paper and write as many Sub-Topics as you can in Five Minutes. Write everything down no matter how silly it seems. You may not use every sub-topic Just write it down.

Some Topics for Home Based Business:
Email-Marketing, Ezine-Publishing, Ezine-Marketing, E-Books, Web-Design, Site-Promotion, Affiliate-Revenue, Auctions, SEO,Traffic-Building, PPC-Advertising, Internet-Marketing,Branding,Self-Improvement,Copywriting, Public speaking

Some Topic for Golf
Tiger Woods, PGA, LPGA, Masters, Majors, Michelle Wie, Golf Clubs, Golf Balls,Drivers, Short Game, Putting, Best Golf courses, Best Golf Cities,College Golf

The Reason we want to find lot's of sub-topics is we want a good variety of keywords for people to use to find you.

Step 3 Rate Your Sub Topics

Determine the Importance of all your Sub Topics. Rate the Sub Topics from 1 to 10 with 1 Lowest and 10 Highest. It is ok to give the same rating to more then 1 Sub-Topic. Try not to give all the sub Topics the same rating.

(You will Repeat Steps 4 to 7 for as Many sub-topics as you can. Working from highest rated to lowest rated it is a good idea to completely finish 1 Sub Topic Before going on to the next sub topic)

Step 4 Find Articles for Your Sub Topic

Ideally your goal should be to find 10 or more Articles per Sub Topic. For Topics Rated 7 or Higher You may want to find 15-20 Articles. For Topics Rated less then 5 fewer Articles maybe 5-7 are ok. Topics Rated 1 or 2 may have even fewer Articles or none at All.

Select a good mix of articles for your sub-topic. Keep in mind your goal to create web pages that people will find useful and the Search Engine Bots will want to Index Highly

I find most of my Articles Here http://ezinearticles.com

If you can't find what you need there here is a page with over 50 Article Resources http://ewguru.com/hbiz/article-submit.html

Step 5 Create a Web Page with each article.

This is Fairly simple to do just cut the Article into your Template. Fill out the Title and Description Meta Data and publish it to your web Site. This can be done in about 3-5 Minutes per Article with a Little Practice. For Details see this Article on instant content http://ewguru.com/hbiz/instant-content.html

Step 6 Create an Article Table of contents

Create an Article Table of contents for your Each Sub Topic. This Gives you instant Links. Simply Create a Link to each article on a Web Page. Here is a Sample Table of Contents Page (http://ewguru.com/hbiz/df-toc.html).

Step 7 Write a Blog entry

Create a Blog Entry for your Table of contents for this Sub-Topic Be Sure and use Pingomatic to ping your Web Page

Summary

The Key is to build a Content Rich Web Page with many Keywords. By Finding 5 or more Sub topics and 10 Articles per Topic you would have 50 Different Web Pages. It is possible to create 10 Articles, a table of contents and do a Blog and a Ping in about 90 Minutes. If You do this 3 Times a Week in a less then weeks you will have over 50 pages of content.

After you have Completed Steps 4-7 for all of your Subtopics add 3 or 4 Articles per week to keep your page Fresh.

Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001. Subscribe to Mike's Newsletter here <a target="_new" href="http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/viraltraffic.html">http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/viraltraffic.html</a> Get some useful Free Downloads Here <a target="_new" href="http://trafficninja.com">http://trafficninja.com</a>

What is The Google Sandbox Effect?

2009-01-31T22:40:00.001-08:00

In the age of fair competition you may find it hard to believe that a search engine may hinder the appearance of a new website. This is what is currently believed to be happening on more web servers today. Some programmers have viewed Google as uncomfortable to rank newer websites until they have proven their viability to exist for more than a period of "x" months. Thus the term "Sandbox Effect" applies to the idea that all new websites have their ratings placed in a holding tank until such time is deemed appropriate before a ranking can commence.

However the website is not hindered as much as the links that are reciprocated from other users. Newer links that are created are put on a "probationary" status until again they pickup in rank from other matured sites or placed directly by an ad campaign. The idea behind the hindrance is to prevent a fast ranking to occur on a new website. The usual holding period seems to be between 90 and 120 days before a site would start obtaining rank from reciprocal or back linking.

Some advice has been given to have companies you are going to reciprocate back add your link first to the website. This may help grandfather your site in, thus reducing the waiting time associated with "new" websites. People have noticed a 0 page rank when first signing up and receiving a bolstering 7 page ranking after 4 months. Why the delay? The fact is, that if people realized how easy it would be to get a high ranking, would that take away the credibility of the engine. It depends on whom you ask, but it does seem to be happening frequently to newer subscribers. Do not discontinue back linking, your rank will eventually appear.

Jakob Jelling is the founder of <A target="_new" href="http://www.sitetube.com/">http://www.sitetube.com</A>. Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.

Submitting Your Site to Search Engines and Directories

2009-01-31T21:00:00.001-08:00

Regardless of which type of business you currently have, you will definately want to have a website and begin marketing it on the world wide web. After you have designed your website, the next step is to ensure it is properly "optimized", meaning that it's body text(the text you see), title and meta tags(the text that you don't) all have the words you are trying to be found for on the search engine results.

Many individuals optimize each individual page of their website for a different search engine, but I recommend that you focus on the biggest Search Engines like Google and MSN Search. Some high profile Search Engines such Altavista seem to be fading in importance fast so it may not be crucial to optimize any pages for such engines that only send a small amount of traffic anyway. I recommend a keyword density of about five percent on the keywords you wish to come up for. While these search engines are of prime importance for your site, you should not rely fully on Search Engines or Directories for traffic to your website. You will want to try other tools like web logs (also known as "blogs"), an e-zine you publish, free-for-all pages, usenet, articles, bulletin boards, and so forth.

The first lesson about search engine submissions is to simply do it by yourself. This will also save you much needed capital that can be better spent elsewhere. Even though here are a plethera of automated submission services out there, it is recommended that you submit your website to at least the primary Search Engines manually. This is due to the fact that the primary search engines are so vital, and some of them automatically reject any submission made from a program. Furthermore, each search engine has different allowable numbers of keywords and they vary on how many characters your site description can be. They also want different kinds of personal information (althought in some refreshing instances they just ask for your web address). Submission software, even when accepted, is generally not flexible enouph to cover all the bases. Plus, the reality is that manually submitting your website is easy enouph that anyone can do it, and I mean anyone who knows how to type a word. You essentially just go to the Search engine you want to submit to and click the "add website" or "add site" link. Then insert the website address. Actually a few are a tad more complicated than that, but most are really that easy. This is what some people are paying seo firms to do for them, sometimes not as well.

Some Search Engine "spiders" or "crawlers" will eventually find your website if you submit your URL (Uniform Resource Locator) to them or not. They will find your site by following links from other websites that link to yours. For this reason you should consider trading links with other similiar but non-competing websites. Doing this will also give you website a higher ranking on some of the major search engines. This is because some engines, like Google and MSN for example, rate your website at least partially on it's "link popularity" with other websites. This is also a free way to help your site recieve more traffic without wheelbarrels full of venture capital. And sometimes these free methods are as effective than more expensive strategies and do not always take up more time.

Although meta tags are not as critical to your site as they were in the past, they are still of some value. Concentrate mainly on the title and description tags and make sure the keywords you want to come up high for are there. To find out if your meta tags are optimized, go to scrub the web dot com as they have a free meta tag checking service. They will automatically spider your webiste and give you suggestions on how many keywords each of your tags should have, etc. Some search engines, such Inktomi still give a relatively high relevence to these tags.

When creating your "Alt" tags for your pictures on your site, do not stuff too many keywords there as the Search Engines, at least some of them, seem to be getting wise to this tactic and may penalize your page. The main Search engines and Directories you should focus on for yours site include Google (which is currently the most popular), Yahoo(you need to pick a category to submit your site if you are submitting to the directory side. Some categories are free to submit to and others are not), Search.msn.com, Inktomi(used in several search engines. Pay for inclusion or you can wait untill the spider finds your site for free), ODP or thr Open Directory Project(critical to be listed here, go to dmoz.org), Looksmart(free and paid listings) and Lycos.com.

For more information go to <a target="_new" href="http://www.home-business-match.com/">Home Business Articles</a> and find out more about search engine optimization in the business article archive.

Ryan Joseph is writer/researcher. For more info visit <a target="_new" href="http://www.aaronsfreebies.com/">http://www.aaronsfreebies.com/</a>

The Two Most Important Things You Must Do For Google Top Ranking

2009-01-31T19:30:00.001-08:00

Attaining a top ranking in Goggle or any other major search engine nowadays is a herculean task indeed. But webmasters are archieving this enviable position continuously. The common thing about many of these top sites is that they have plenty of good content and quality one way inbound links.

These are the two most important elements in search engine optimization today. Content and quality links are the most difficult aspects of present day SEO. I guess that is why the major search engines have adopted these two elements of SEO as a must for top ranking. They are right of course. Content is what the search engines crave and quality one way inbound links is what makes a site an authority site for a particular keyword.

CONTENT:

Providing quality content at your website is not an easy task. It involves research, coming up with good ideas always, visiting forums and discussion groups to know what the latest trend is and so on. There are so many ways to come up with great ideas to write on. Some of these are;

1. Visit discussion forums and learn what problems people are seeking solutions for.

2. Browse other relevant sites and see what other webmasters are doing. This could give you creative sparks.

3. Subscribe to quality newsletter that give the latest trends, tools and resources in your line of business.

How to create content for the search engines..

The easiest way to creating content for your site is through publishing other people's Articles. You can setup your site to receive and automatically publish articles after reviewing them. The trick here is to go for very good, useful and quality articles. Once your site becomes known for quality articles, visitors will keep coming back for more.

However, the downside is that a visitor reading a good article would want to click to the author's site. Another disadvantage is that most times articles are not written for good search engine optimization. Important SEO techniques like keyword Density, keywords in headings etc may not be taken into consideration by the author.

Another way to easily create content is to hire a ghost writer. You pay a certain amount to have somebody write articles for you. You can find good writers at elance.com

Using a blog to create content.

One way to continuously provide content for your site is by using a blog. In your blog you can link to the rest of your site. The blog could be part of your site. For example, http://www.ebizstartups.com/my-business-tips.html. That is the URL of my blog. I have links to the main site from my blog this ensures that the search engines visit my blog and the main site quite often because the blog is updated often with content and if you have a new product you want to introduce at your site, start from your blog and link to the product page. Updating your blog frequently with new content ensures the search engines visit often. Once the frequent updating trend is set you will find that the search engine spiders will visit even when you stopped updating for a while.

ONE WAY INBOUND LINKS.

How do you get these one way inbound links? This is the million dollar question. For an in depth strategy for acquiring these type of link go my site at http://www.ebizstartups.com and download a free PDF version of the report. If you can generate these type of link you are on your way to the top of the major search engines. But wait a minute. Is it just to generate links to your site? If it is just that, it's easy.

Write articles and submit to article submission sites. At the bottom of your article or your resource box you are allowed to put in a link to your site using the URL of your site. But what good will that do you? It will bring you traffic okay. But that is as long as you keep writing those articles. Once you stop the traffic stops. However, the links you acquire through articles using your site's URL may only increase your site's link popularity but not link reputation.

While link popularity is the amount of links that point to your site link reputation is the amount of links that point to your site with your keywords in the anchor text. Search engines use this anchor text link carrying keyword to judge your link reputation and determine whether your site is an authority site for that keyword. Understand all that? No? okay let's look at it in another way. If all the links pointing to your site have the text a s the URL of your site. Unless somebody searches using the exact URL of you site your site will never be found. And people do not conduct searches using URL like www.ebizstartups.com but if the other site pointing their links to your site with the link text having for example "link popularity" then you are on your way to the top for that keyword.

The author, Salihu Ibrahim, has several good articles to his credit. Examples are, "Google adwords made easy" and "How to acquire one way inbound links". These and other articles could be found at his site at http://www.ebistartups.com. He is also the owner of <a target="_new" href="http://www.autoresponders4all.com">http://www.autoresponders4all.com</a> which provides completely free autoresponders for webmnasters.

Not Ranking High Enough on Search Engines? Here?s Some Help!

2009-01-30T17:50:00.001-08:00

Search engines are frugal things. (Froogle, too, haha! Sorry, lame joke) They take many, many things into consideration when ranking your pages. Below are some things you should do to be sure you're ranked as high as possible.

Keywords

Go for keyphrases, not single keywords. Unless you want to spend the next 3 months trying to break into the first page for a single keyword, focus on keyphrases. Besides, most searchers search for two or more words. Single keywords just don't provide the targeted results searchers are looking for.

Focus on the keyphrases that you can take over. Keyphrases like "Exit now" or "Exit Here" or even a keyword like "Exit" will be next to impossible for you to get a top 3 ranking, because of the overwhelming popularity for porn site landing pages to put a link to Yahoo, Google, or Disney with the anchor text of one of those keyphrases mentioned above. Go ahead, try it out ? type one of them into Google and see what you get. Funny enough, Disney recently took the lead over Yahoo for the keyword "Exit." Go Disney go!

Site Focus

Don't allow your site to focus on more than 1-2 different things. Create separate sites for each product or service, and if you'd like, a main site to describe your company, and have it link to all of your products. This will allow you to better target your pages, because a user looking for widgets isn't going to stick around long on a page for a company that sells widgets and woozles, when they don't see information about widgets (even if it's blatantly obvious) Think about it this way: You're always one click away from losing a customer on the internet. Do everything you can to eliminate that one click.

Content: More is better

The more content you have, the better. Wait, let me rephrase that ? the more RELEVANT content you have, the better. Plain old content, or keyword-stuffed will only get you so far. Remember, you've got to keep your visitors in mind primarily, because it doesn't matter how high your SE ranking is if your visitors don't convert to customers.

How do I get new, relevant, free content?

Start posting articles on your site; you're the expert here, so utilize that information. But keep your articles from sounding like you're only writing it to advertise your product (advertorials). If it sounds too much like an ad, your visitors won't read it.

Also, try to mention your chosen keyphrases as much as you can without making the article sound "stuffed." What's "stuffed" mean? Here's an example: You're writing about widgets, you wrote the widgets article about widgets so you could say widgets as much as you possible while talking about widgets. Would you want to sit and read that? No. Neither would anyone else.

There are also quite a few places on the net where you can find articles that are free to reprint on your site. A few of them are <a target="_new" href="http://www.EzineArticles.com">http://www.EzineArticles.com</a>, <a target="_new" href="http://www.Content-Articles.com">http://www.Content-Articles.com</a>, and <a target="_new" href="http://www.ArticlesFactory.com">http://www.ArticlesFactory.com</a>. As I said, there are many sites like these, but these are the 3 best, in my opinion. Some article directories are focused on a single set of topics (like Business Marketing) and others, including the three mentioned above, contain articles from many, many categories.

If you write your own articles, submitting them to as many article sites as possible, again including the three I listed before. The more places you submit your article, the more sites will pick it up ? either through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or by cutting and pasting your article to their site. The latter option is preferable to you, because your article will stay on their site longer. This will work hard to generate you more traffic from visitors to those sites who read your article and increase your SE rankings through backlinks. (For more information, check out an article I wrote about backlinks at <a target="_new" href="http://www.Content-Articles.com/article.aspx?i=24">http://www.Content-Articles.com/article.aspx?i=24</a>)

How often should I add new content?

Add new content at least weekly, and absolutely no less than monthly to give your customers reason to come back, and Search Engines will also increase your ranking because your site is active and you've got good content.

What about forums?

Forums can be great tools for site promotion, if you do it right. Do NOT post ads to a forum that isn't for posting ads. You will do more to destroy your credibility than generate traffic. Put a link to your site in your signature, and post questions and answers to the site, just like everyone else. If a topic that your site contains information about comes up, feel free to post the URL in the body of the topic (make sure this is allowed by the forum rules first) but always mention that it's your site, so nobody is mislead and thinks the post is a referral, which it's not (because it's your site).

These tips are just a few of the things that you can do to increase your search engine rankings. Take your time and develop a good site, write quality articles, submit them to as many places as possible, and watch your ranking go up while the visitors come rolling in.

Jason a long time web developer and the owner of Premier MicroSolutions, LLC. If you're looking for more articles about getting higher SE rankings, go to <a target="_new" href="http://www.Content-Articles.com">Content-Articles.com</a> and check out their great directory of articles.

10 Steps To Higher Search Engine Positioning

2009-01-30T17:20:00.001-08:00

There is perhaps no more level playing field in business than the Internet. It is this fact that has created millionaires from paupers. The amount of money that can be made depends of course on your industry and your products and/or services but to be sure, if it can be sold at all, it can be sold online.

While there are many methods out there for building a profitable website, from banner ads to email campaigns, by far the most cost effective over time has proven repeatedly to be search engine positioning. That major advantage search engine positioning has over other methods of producing revenue online is that once high rankings are attained and provided that the tactics used were ethical and that continued efforts are made to keep them, they can essentially hold and provide targeted traffic indefinitely. Your site will rise and your site may sometimes fall in the rankings but a solid and complete optimization of your site will insure that through algorithm changes you may fluctuate but you will not disappear.

I have been ranking websites highly on the Internet for quite a few years now and there are some essential rules that, if followed, will insure that over time your website does well and holds solid and profitable positions on the major search engines.

Here are the 10 steps to higher search engine positioning:

Step One - Choosing Keywords

You first must choose your keywords. This is perhaps the most important step of the process as incorrectly targeting phrases can result in traffic that is not interested in your product. There are three tools that I use virtually every day to help pick the most appropriate keywords:

Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool (<a href="http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/" target="_new">http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/</a>)

WordTracker (<a href="http://www.wordtracker.com/" target="_new">http://www.wordtracker.com/</a>)

A Brain

The last in the list is the most important. Look through the potential keyword phrases and think, "Who would be searching using that phrase?" If the answer is, "a student looking for information" then chances are it won't result in a sale. If the answer is "Someone who is looking specifically for a product I offer," then obviously this is a prime candidate as a targeted keyword phrase.

Step Two - Site Content

Even before I optimize websites I like to get a good deal of new content down in order to insure that I know exactly where I'm going and exactly what I need to do to get there. Creating some of the new content before starting the optimization process can be doubly helpful in that it can reveal potential additions to your website that you may not have considered (a forum or blog for example). If you already have a site, perhaps simply sit on your back deck, sip on a coffee and image what you would do if your whole site was lost and you had to start again (other than launch into a very colorful discussion with your hosting company).

Step Three - Site Structure

A solid site structure is very important. Creating a site that is easily spidered by the search engines yet attractive to visitors can be a daunting and yet entirely rewarding endeavor. To adequately structure your website you must "think like a spider" which is not as difficult as it may sound. A search engine spider reads your web page like you would read a book. It starts at the top left, reads across, and then moves down.

Priority must be given then, to what you place near the top of your page.

Step Four - Optimization

Once you have your keyword targets, your content created and your site structure established you must now move on to the most obvious step, the optimization of your content.

As noted above, a spider places importance on what it reads highest on the page and so beginning with a sentence that includes your targeted phrase only makes sense. That said, stuffing in keywords in hopes that it will add weight to your page generally doesn't work. The term "keyword density" refers to the percentage of your content that is made up of your targeted keywords. There are optimum densities according to many reputable SEO's though exactly what they are is debata ble. Estimates seem to range anywhere from 4 or 5% to 10 to 12% (quite a gap isn't it).

Personally, when it comes to keyword density I prescribe to one rule: put your keywords in the content as much as you can while keeping it comfortably readable to a human visitor.

Some do it first, I do it last, regardless of when you do it you must choose your heading. At the beginning of your content you have the opportunity to use the tag to specify the heading of your content. This tag is given extra weight and is also an indicator to the search engine of where your actual content starts. Make sure to use your keywords in the heading but don't shy away from also adding additional words (though not too many).

Step Five - Internal Linking

To insure that your website gets fully indexed you have to make sure that the spiders have an easy path through your website. Text links make the best choice as the anchor text (the actual words used to link to a specific page) add relevancy to that page for the words used to link to it. For example, if I ran a website on acne and had a treatments page I could link to it with an image, with text reading "Click for more information on how to treat this skin condition" or simply "Acne Treatments". When a search engine spider hits an image it has no idea what the image is and, while it will follow the link, it will not give any weight to the page it hits. If you use text that does not contain the keywords you are targeting you are essentially supplying the engine with the same lack of relevancy as with an image, but if you use the phrase "Acne Treatments" to link to your acne treatments page you are attaching relevancy to that page for those keywords.

There are two main ways to insure that your site gets well spidered AND that the relevancy is added. The first is to place text links on the bottom of your homepage to your main internal pages (not EVERY page, that just looks odd). The second is to create a sitemap to all your internal pages and link to it from your homepage. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages but that's a whole article unto itself.

Step Six - Human Testing

So now you have your site, it's optimized and you have your navigation in place. The next step is to put it past someone who has never seen your site (and preferably who won't know how much work you've put in and tell you it's great even if it's not).

Ask them to find specific information and see how long it takes. Ask someone else to just surf your site and watch which links they click and ask them why they chose those ones.

Most importantly, find out how the content reads to them. You've spent hours working through the content at this point and are probably not the least biased on its readers. Find out how it reads to someone who has no invested interest in the site and correct any issues they may bring up.

Step Seven - Submissions

I take a different philosophy than most when it cones to search engine submissions. I submit to directories (both general and topic-specific) and to a few topical search engines but for the most part I've found submitting to Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other major engines has proven to be a bit of a waste of time. The major search engines are spidering search engines which means they will follow links to wherever they go. Simply having sites that are spidered by the major search engines linking to you will get your site found.

When I have spent time submitting my sites I have found they get picked up in about a week. When I have simply skipped this step and sought out reputable directories and other sites to get links from I have found that at least the homepage of the site gets indexed in as little as two days.

Neither will hurt your rankings but simply to make the best use of your time, seek our directories and other websites to get links from and leave the spiders to find you on their own.

Step Eight - Link Building

All of the major search engines give credit to sites that have quality links pointing to them. How many is enough depends on your industry and targeted phrases. Running a search on Google the reads "link:www.yourcompetition.com" will reveal approximately how many links a competitor has.

The first place to seek links is with general and topic-specific directories. After that you may want to move into reciprocal link building. Reciprocal link building is the exchange of links between two websites. Some webmasters will simply link to any website that links back to them. I highly recommend being more particular than that.

Find websites that you believe your site visitors would genuinely be interested in and you've probably found a good link partner. You want to find links from sites that are related to yours.

There are obviously many more methods to building links than directories and reciprocal link building. Again though, this is a whole article (or more) in itself.

Step Nine - Monitoring

Whether you use WebPosition Gold (<a href="http://www.webposition.com/" target="_new">http://www.webposition.com/</a>) or just run searches manually by hand you will have to monitor the major search engines for your targeted phrases. Also, you will need to review your stats to see where your traffic is coming from and what search terms are being used to find you.

If a month passes and you don't see any changes then more work needs to be done. I'm certainly not stating that you should take a month off, a solid search engine positioning strategy involves constantly adding content, building links, and insuring that your visitors are getting the information they want to have and finding it as easily as possible.

Step Ten - Reward Yourself

So you've done it. It's taken many many hours of work but you're rankings are doing well. What you've created is a solid position that will stand the tests of time provided that you continually revisit the above noted steps and insure that your website is always one step ahead of your competition (who have noticed you climbing and succeeding as you would notice others climbing up around your ranking).

Now it's time to turn off your computer, take your partner out (you haven't had much time for them lately) and have a great week(end). You've got a lot of work to do to maintain and build on these rankings but the hardest part is over. Congratulations!

About The Author

Dave Davies is the owner of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning (<a href="http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/" target="_new">http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/</a>). He has been optimizing and ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of success. Dave is available to answer any questions that you may have about your website and how to get it into the top positions on the major search engines.

<a href="mailto:info@beanstalk-inc.com">info@beanstalk-inc.com</a>

Which Search Engine Optimization Services to choose, Google OR Yahoo?

2009-01-30T02:10:00.001-08:00

Search Engine Optimization is emerging as the most powerful form of Internet Marketing in the recent years, and is bound to increase in the coming few years. Many companies have now emerged from countries like UK,CANADA, and India providing cost effective Search Engine Optimization Services.

Internet Marketing in the form of Search Engine Optimization has helped to build several successful business portals online. Many successful Software Firms,Travel agencies, Business services are becoming aware of the power of Search Engine Optimization.

Studies have shown that you can generate 60% of your traffic alone from search engines like google, and rest 40% from yahoo, and other search engines. Search engine optimization is emerging as a new era of Online Business science, which helps to generate more traffic, and more revenues from your existing businesses.

Search engine optimization is further categorized into two categories organic search, and PPC( Pay per Click). Organic Search engine optimization depends on the natural ranking of your web page, whereas PPC is a paid service offered for companies who want to kickstart their business from the day one without going through the labour of organic search engine optimization, which can be achieved over a period of time.

In the broader perception it has been observed that Organic search engine optimization is far more reliable in long-term, whereas PPC is reliable for short term solutions.

Many Internet marketing companies have emerged, helping business owners to achieve top rankings on major search engines either through Organic Search OR PPC.

Author's Profile :

Name: Bhupinder Singh

Occupation: working as webmaster for BSOLUTIONS, <a target="_new" href="http://www.bsolutions.s5.com"> http://www.bsolutions.s5.com </a>, and has worked for several international clients from UK,US,CANADA,and India. Having experience of more than 3 years in web development and Search Engine Optimization, I have evolved a wide expertise in Search Engine Optimization Techniques. Contact me: <a href="mailto:bhupinder@bsolutions.s5.com">bhupinder@bsolutions.s5.com</a> or <a href="mailto:bhupinder@seohawk.com">bhupinder@seohawk.com</a>

The Secret To Getting Indexed In Yahoo

2009-01-29T20:50:00.000-08:00

Getting indexed in Yahoo has become very difficult in the last few months. The indexing robot, Yahoo!Slurp, has become erratic. For some sites, the robot will view all pages, but only add a few to the Yahoo database. For other sites, sub-domain listings actually start disappearing! So, what's the secret to getting indexed?

Pleasing Yahoo!Slurp

The secret to getting indexed in Yahoo involves constant updates to your site. The updates, however, have to be done on both the site and through Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. Here's how you go about getting indexed.

The first step is to start a blog for your site. You can build a blog on your site or use a free service. I prefer blogger.com because it is easy to use, but you can use whatever you like. Once you have your blog up, you should make entries that correspond and link to content on your site. For example, I will post this article on my blog, Moshing Search Engines, and link it to the article page on MarketingTitan.com.

To supercharge the impact of the blog, you should also link to a site map on your site. If you don't have a site map, make one in HTML. The Yahoo robot will definitely follow it and index the pages. Don't rely on the xml site map strategy Google is promoting.

Once you have the blog up with content posted, you must turn the blog into a real simple syndication feed. Again, you can use your own system. I prefer to use a free service because I really don't have the time to waste on such things.

Feedburner.com seems to work find and is simple to use. Opening an account with Feedburner is so easy, I am not even going to explain it. At the end of the process, feedburner will kick out the link for your RSS feed. Here's where the magic begins.

If you have a yahoo email account, you need to access you're My Yahoo page. If you don't have an account, get one! Once you are on the My Yahoo page, do the following:

1. Click the "add content" link in the upper left hand under the search box.

2. When the new page opens, click the "Add RSS by URL" link on the right of the "Find Content" search box in the upper section of the page.

3. Enter the exact link provided by Feedburner and click "add." Do NOT add the url for your blog.

4. Click the "My Yahoo" tab at the top of the page and refresh the page.

At this point, you should see your feed at the bottom of the page. If you don't, be patient. Yahoo is sometimes slow, so just try it again in an hour or so. When the feed is added, you should see the name of your blog and the title of each post under it. Yahoo can take up to a day to add new posts, so don't panic if they don't show up immediately.

Once you've completed the above, Yahoo will follow the links in the blog and index the pages on your site. If one of the links goes to a site map, you are in business. As an added bonus, Google will do the same thing. Let's look at an example.

We are currently building NomadJournalTrips.com, which has been up for about a month. Roughly 10 to 20 pages are being added each day. Nomad Rick's Ramblings is the blog for the site and the feed is included on four "My Yahoo" pages for various email accounts. Yahoo has indexed 95 pages and is about four days behind the page additions. Google has indexed 151 pages and is adding to the index every day. The blog and RSS feed are solely responsible for getting these pages indexed this quickly.

Depending on the size of your site, the process can take a few days or a couple of weeks. Every time you add new content, slap it into your blog with links. In no time, you will be taming Yahoo!Slurp.

Halstatt Pires is with <a target="_new" href="http://www.marketingtitan.com">http://www.marketingtitan.com</a> - an Internet marketing and advertising company in San Diego, California.

How To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

2009-01-29T20:00:00.000-08:00

With search engines like Google currently indexing over 8 billion pages, it is becoming more and more difficult to get a top search engine ranking. Type in a popular search phrase such as "Internet Marketing" into Yahoo or Google and you will be returned over 8 million results!

Unless your website is in the first two or three pages, it is unlikely that you will receive many visitors from search engines.

So what should a webmaster do to give their website the best chance of ranking high in the search engines?

All search engines work slightly differently and have ever changing algorithms for ranking web pages, but these tips can be applied when planning, developing or marketing a website to help you reach that top page of search engine results.

(1) Choose your keywords carefully

It's extremely important to set aside time to research your keywords. It's best to do this in the planning stages, before developing your website, but many of us start a website without knowing a thing about how the search engines work, so you may find yourself doing this weeks or months later.

Try to choose phrases that are searched on frequently and if possible have a low number of competing websites.

To get an idea of the number of times a keyword is searched for per month, type a keyword into the box at

<A target="_new" HREF="http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/">Overture Search Suggestion Tool</A>

This will tell you how many times your keyword was searched on in the previous month (based on Overture's partner search engines) and give you a list of similar keywords.

Another useful tool to help you choose your keywords is Word Tracker. This tool will help you choose your keywords and give you a "KEI" for each set of keywords based on the popularity of the keyword (number of searches) and the amount of competition.

You can try this out for free on <A target="_new" HREF="http://wordtracker.com">Wordtracker</A>

If you manage to pick your keywords in the planning stages you may even be lucky enough to find a domain name that contains your keywords.

(2) Optimise your pages

Once you have decided on your keywords you will need to optimise your pages for those keywords. Here are a few tips.

- Ensure that the Title of your page contains your keywords.

- Mention your keywords inside the meta tags. Most search engines no longer use meta tags, but some make use of them so it is still worthwhile using these.

- Try to make sure that the first occurance of readable text on your page contains your keywords

- Ensure that your keywords are mentioned in the initial paragraph of your page

- Use your keywords throughout the text of your page - but be careful not to overdo this. Your page should still be readable by humans!

- Use your keywords between the headline tags on your page ("H1" tags or H2/H3 if H1 is too big)

- Occasionally bold or italicise your keywords

- Make sure that links pointing back to each page on your site contain the keywords for each page

- Give all your images an "ALT" tag and put your keywords in here too - again, don't overdo this

- Try to put some of your keywords in your outbound links

(3) Start Linking

One of the most important criteria in getting a good search engine ranking is the number of backlinks you have to your website from related websites.

Type in your chosen keywords to Yahoo or Google and take note of the top 3 sites returned to you.

Now go to <A target="_new" HREF="http://tools.marketleap.com/publinkpop/">Link Popularity Checker</A> and put the URLs of the top three sites into the linking tool, along the URL of your own site.

Have a look at the difference between your site and the top 3 sites and this will give you an idea of how many links you need in order to get a top search engine ranking for these keywords.

The best ways to get links back to your site are:

- By writing articles related to the subject of your website and getting them published on the internet

- Reciprocal Linking with other related websites

- Posting on newsgroups and forums that allow you to have a signature attached to your posting (with your uRL in it)

- Submitting your site to directories.

Try to make sure that the anchor text (clickable text) that links back to your site contains your keywords.

(4) Add Content Regularly

Another thing you may have noticed is that top ranking websites have lots of content.

Regularly updating your website and adding fresh content will also help your site to rank more highly in the search engines.

If you don't have time to create your own unique content there are plenty free articles available Just type "Free website content" into Google and you'll have your pick of the 18 million results that it returns to you!

To improve your ranking, follow steps 1 and 2 above and repeat steps 3 and 4 regularly.

Suzanne Morrison is the webmaster and owner of <A target="_new" HREF="http://www.homebiz-direct.com">http://www.homebiz-direct.com</A> To learn more about how to promote your website visit her <A target="_new" HREF="http://www.homebiz-direct.com/internetMarketing.html">Beginner's Guide to Internet Marketing</a>

Winning the Search Engine Wars!

2009-01-27T18:00:00.001-08:00

Creating and building effective Search Engine marketing campaigns is like trying to nail jello to the wall! The challenge can be daunting to many, requiring very specialized knowledge of process that must be blended with unique and disparate technology. Here is some insight gained from years of experience providing these services to clients.

<ul>

<li>SE marketing is very effective in driving qualified traffic to a web site. Over 85% of global surfers utilize Search Engines to find goods and services.

<li>What can you expect for Search Engine ranking via back-end conversions or desired responses? There is no "silver bullet" answer to this question; we've seen results vary from a low of 1.4% to a high of 22%. You'll make a dangerous assumption if you measure results purely by focusing solely on SE marketing. Your back-end response mechanisms (sales rep interaction, e-commerce fulfillment, newsletter signup, web site, etc.) will greatly affect the ROI. Assess and critique from a holistic perspective.

<li>It's a zero sum game if you use any of the low cost "we submit to thousands" of search engines service companies. These submissions do very little to drive viable rankings. If you aren't achieving rankings in the top 20-30 (page 1-3) listings then you're wasting marketing resources.

<li>Don't make the mistake of focusing solely on Search Engine marketing to drive market awareness (online branding) and revenue. Develop mutually reinforcing processes that are synergistic by utilizing Directory submissions, Usenet/Newsgroup seeding, Newsletter sponsorships, Opt-in e-mail, PR and other offline marketing processes.

<li>Stringent keyword analysis for HTML text is one of the underlying foundations of a successful Search Engine Ranking campaign. It's analogous to the importance of ad copy for a conventional print campaign. Most good SE firms use a commercial database service like WordTracker which enable them to analyze the relative popularity of keywords and then build a submissions and optimization process around the selected keywords.

<li>The actual Title for your Index and Interior pages will also have a significant impact on whether or not a campaign works. It needs to be the right length, typically 10-20 words, have no hyperbole and pique a searcher's curiosity.

<li>Contrary to endless marketing hype, there are no quick solutions in this form of interactive marketing. It will take at least 1-2 months before you see any immediate results. And for significant results; i.e., page 1-3 listings via top tier engines add another 2-3 months on top of this on average.

<li>Web site content development impacts good SE rankings - the more the better. Develop content which is relevant to keywords. We use linguistic analysis software for our clients and then build a standalone "stealth web site" which has content expressly designed for SE spiders (bots). This level of sophistication and proprietary process is expensive and time-consuming but very effective.

<li>Remember the Armand Hammer quote about Russia? "An enigma wrapped inside a box buried deep in the ocean." This is apropos to the Search Engine world, as the top tier SE's all change their submission rules and algorithms on a regular basis. So hire a SE firm that understands the market - or be prepared to invest a great deal of time to achieve tangible results.

</ul>

About The Author

Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of business development and marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc., <a href="http://www.intelective.com," target="_new">http://www.intelective.com,</a> a results-driven marketing services company providing proprietary services to clients encompassing startups to public companies. Lee@intelective.com

<a href="mailto:Lee@intelective.com">Lee@intelective.com</a>

Submit Your WebSite: Add Your URL to Web Directories & Search Engines

2009-01-27T15:20:00.001-08:00

Why get into Search engines and directories?

Increase backlinks of your webiste. If your website is listed in Directories then your website can get traffic from directries and search engines counting that backlinks for ranking of your website.

Search engines continusly finding websites through "Bots" follow links on the internet, as they find new links, they updates those pages to their database. if someone linking to your website or If you submit your website in search engines then only they can list your site.

You can submit your website into various Directories. Every Subject Related Search Engines and Directories are Available today.

You can find folloing B2B trade leads Directories, Trade events, resources to submit your website and Increase backlinks for your website.

Industries Specific Business Directories, Agriculture and Food Related Industries Directories, Automotive And Other Vehicle Directories, Chemical Related Industries, Computer, Telecommunications and Electronics Directories, Construction Materials and Cement, Consumer Goods Directories, Energy Directories, Environmental Industries Directories, Medical Related Industries Directories, Metal Industries Directories, Mining Directories, Packaging Industry Directories, Scientific Products Directories, Textiles and Apparel Directories, Tool & Machinery Directories, Toys & Sporting Goods, Wood, Pulp and Paper Industries Directories

Nowdays you can find Countrywise Search Engines and Directories also. If you are promoting products and Services in overseas Market then you need to submit your website into Countrywide Search Engines also.

You can find more than 10,000 search engines from more than 200 countries at <a target="_new" href="http://www.smartoffice.org">http://www.smartoffice.org</a> website. here you can find list of all types of Directries also.

here you can find top 300 search engines and Directories all over the world. mostly 80% Internet Traffic coming from these Search Engines and Directories.

Yogesh Ahire is eMarketing Consultant from India and also Author of ebook Discovery of e-Marketing URL: <a target="_new" href="http://www.e-guru.org">http://www.e-guru.org</a> and <a target="_new" href="http://www.superbrand.co.in">http://www.superbrand.co.in</a>

Earn with Fun by simple SEO (search engine optimization)

2009-01-27T12:30:00.001-08:00

It all happened 3 months back, I have a blog & 1 fine day i saw my blog was ranking on top 10 position for a keyword which is less targeted, but was excited to see that & planned to promote it. Now watz the catch before promoting i placed Google Ads on my page.

I started promoting my blog by simply making submissions to blog directories, Search Engines & General Directories in related categories.

I was real amazed with the results, My position improved in search engines this resulted in good traffic & was able to see flow of $$$ in my Google Ads account. It took me 43 days to reach $99,

I have learnt lot & will be working more on that, if I have to suggest some 1 how can any individual earn $100 & more by simple seo my answer would be

#1 Create a blog (google blogs are not ranking good in google but has good ranking in yahoo.com) Make sure you create a blog in the topic where you I have deep interest so that you can post more about the topic & share information.

#2 Start Submission for your blogs net presence. You can start submitting to blog directories & general directories in relevant categories.

#3 Keep posting regularly....

I bet by this simple task you make more than 100$ I understand its a small amount but its worth in proportion of the time you spent & fun you have posting something you would love to talk about.

Ravz..! http://expertseo.rediffblogs.com

Ravz is into research & analysis of online marketing. SEO India site <a target="_new" href="http://expertseo.rediffblogs.com">http://expertseo.rediffblogs.com</a> which offers Search Engine Optimization at affordable prices.

Google Love - Five Top Tips To Make Google Love Your Site

2009-01-27T09:40:00.001-08:00

1. Google love ...

Google and all its programming is not some form of enemy - unless you are a piece of web scum, that is.

Google is based on the idea that it should help people FIND WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR.

That's all.

Sit with the statement above. Meditate upon it if necessary. Use EFT.

But UNDERSTAND that a pointless site that has no unique content will NEVER get ANYWHERE with Googly or any other outfit that is using their techniques and methods.

You can buy books and ebooks until your wallet bleeds on "how to trick Google" this and that - just forget it.

Unless you have SOME THING that SOME PEOPLE will HONESTLY WANT and be grateful for when they find it, there is no hope and there is no point in reading any further.

Also, trying to fight Google or be cleverer somehow is pointless, distructive and the wrong attitude.

Learn to LOVE Google and work WITH IT.

If you have the contents, and you follow the most simplest common spider robot courtesy protocols, then it will come and it will index you.

It will be that mystical bridge between YOUR (customers, people, communities, friends) and your site.

That's what it does, that's what it is, that's it's nature and if you know that, then all is well.

You will get good results following the rest of this.

2. Dressing For Google ...

So now, let's have a DECENT website with DECENT content.

A decent website means:

- All the pages and directories have links that work properly and allow Google to slide with immense ease from one place to the other, without ever hitting an annoying dead end;

- All the pages are cleaned up so that you have the absolute MINIMUM of html instructions and nothing that doesn't need to be there, such as vast and pointless java scripts or the truly appalling "mso" instructions;

- All the pages have the right meta tags which ACCURATELY REFLECT what's on them, and including title, content, description, keywords at the very minimum;

- All your pages have proper headings and descriptions and content WHICH MATCHES your meta tags to a T;

- All your images are title and alt tagged CORRECTLY and resident on your own site.

Decent content means:

- Whatever you've got, it is USEFUL. If it is UNIQUE, so much the better, and that's not hard. All you need to is to be yourself and use your own words, even if you are affiliate - write your own reviews, put your own dog's picture on it, be unique, be YOURSELF.

- Whatever you've got, I'm sure there's some people who want to look at it, read it, do something with it. There's billions of people out there. Just make sure YOU KNOW WHO YOUR PEOPLE ARE and write to THEM.

- Decent content also means that what you've got is presented so that both Google and a human being get it what that is all about.

When your website is up and running, test, test and test again. Try every single hyperlink on your own computer, on someone else's and on all manner of different browsers.

Only when you are happy that it all works as it should, we go to Step 3.

3. Let Google SEE You

You need a minimum of 35 decent links going to your site for Google to take any notice of you and start paying attention.

Please be aware that "one link" is just that - www.snark.net is NOT the same as http://www.snark.net, which is not the same as http://snark.net, nor even remotely similar to any variation including http://snark.net/index.php

All, each and every ONE is viewed as a single separate link - when you need 35 ALL GOING TO ONE SINGLE ADDRESS to do the magic.

So now, to the "decent links" part.

A site that isn't indexed much by Google or doesn't turn up until page 1,993,990 on a Google search for its kind is WORTHLESS to you.

Find HIGH RANKED directory listings for your site and list your site THERE. This goes for any of the many variations on getting a link from another site, be it a guestbook signed or an article placed. Don't waste your time with anything that itself doesn't turn up on Google's own top ten.

Now, you've got a date with Google.

What we need to do next is to BUILD A RELATIONSHIP - prove our value and worth over time, in other words.

That's the next of our Google top tips - seniority and reliability.

4. Be THERE When Google Calls!

Make sure you've got a decent ISP with 99% uptime or better - that's of course elementary.

Don't ever take your site down for whatever reason and make any changes gradually.

Most importantly, get the best tracking software you can afford and find out who is already coming, and what they are coming for.

That's the key to long term success - to find what you're doing well and then expanding on it. For example, if one person came from Google (or any other search engine) for the term "snark", then build on that. Write more articles about snarks, what to do with them and without them, collect snark images - in other words, become the first port of call for any snark enquiry.

Build on your speciality some more with a web directory, guest articles, reviews and then we're more than 3/4 the way to a real web presence and Google responding to changes in your site near instantly, which is what we want.

5. Keep Improving ALL THE TIME.

The final success tip is to keep improving ALL THE TIME.

Pull up the html or php you wrote a year ago - I bet you can do better now.

Review your meta tags and your site copy and improve on both.

Name your pages, images and directories better. Improve the content, structure, navigation of your site.

Keep at it with directory listings and submissions - directories come and go, you need to be always there with the "state of the art".

Keep doing useful link exchanges with matching high ranked sites too and keep adding VALUE and UNIQUE CONTENT to your clean and well presented pages.

That's the most important thing of all - to keep at it with continuous improvement.

Follow these steps EXACTLY with a well named new site with decent content - and you WILL see immediate improvement in your Google rankings.

Good Luck and Good Spirits always,

Silvia :-)

Silvia Hartmann

CEO, The StarFields Network

Author, <a target="_new" href="http://starfields.org/MindMillion.htm">MindMillion</a> - Rags To Riches In 6 Phases

<a target="_new" href="http://starfields.org">Silvia Hartmann</a> PhD is an author, NLP, Hypnosis & MET Trainer and international motivational speaker. Her published books include the international best seller "Adventures In EFT", "Project Sanctuary" and "EmoTrance". After a five year research project, she created MindMillion, a unique approach to wealth building and reality creation.

Are Your Keywords Making Money for You?

2009-01-27T07:40:00.001-08:00

I built my website, it's perfect. My chosen subject of the website is Computer Support Services. Of course this is an example, but moving along, what should my keywords be?

Keywords are what people type into a search engine to find something on the internet. These words are what drive user requests.

Words to live by I like to call them. Why? Because on the internet your website will live and die by the words you use, or the words I use when you hire me to optimize your site.

How many words should I use?
What should they say?
How many phrases should there be?<Br> What's a phrase?

First off, let's cover what a keyword is. A keyword is a word or collection of words used to describe your website. For those doing their own website design these words are applied in what is called a meta tag such as the following:

meta name="keywords" content="these words, would describe, your site"

keywords should say something about your website. They should also directly reflect the content of your site. They should not be random words that have nothing to do with your site, or you. If they are, you can expect that your page ranking will fall rather than rise. Of course, you will still have to submit or resubmit your website to keep your page in the eyes of the various search engines.

The number of words and phrases should be no more than 21-22, or a combination of the two. I have seen sites that had over 780 keywords, but no content to support them. Even if there was content there to support that large number of words, it's fruitless to have that many words. Most search engines will ignore anything over the 22 words limit.

A phrase is defined as more than one word. "Real Estate Sales" is a phrase. "Real, Estate, Sales" is a collection of keywords. Both of these if used in a search would render completely different results.

Short, to the point, and using some of the keywords that describe your service or product. Here it's Auto Repair Service, it's New, and it's Terrific.

Description - The second most important item on the page. Make this relevant to the content (typing) that you have on your webpage:

Bob's New Terrific Auto Repair Service is the most experienced auto repair shop on the coast. Servicing All types of autos from 9am - 5pm 7 days a week. We offer early bird service on Fridays and Free Car Washes to all customers who pay by cash.

KEYWORDS -
Select about 22 words/phrases that descibe your product or service, and separate them with a comma. This line would look like: auto, automobile, service, terrific, new, free car wash, pay with cash.

How do I find these keywords? Use the following tools:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

This tool known as the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool is one of the most widely used methods of finding out what subjects people are searching for. What products they are searching for, what services they search for.

Enter your words like this: star wars or use something like business plan sample and when you click the button, you will be presented with a listing of how many times that word or words was searched for in the past month. Picking the higher ranked ones will be good for your site.

How does keyword selection help sales? It helps in the sense that by selecting the correct keywords, your site will be more visible, found more often in searches, and as a result of more visitors, eventually you will get more sales. Please make sure that the BUY IT NOW message on your website is clear. If not, all the optimization in the world will not help your sales increase.

Michael Murdock - former Macintosh Systems Engineer for PIXAR now owns/runs DocMurdock - A website optimization & Internet Marketing company. Helping websites move higher on the right search engines, and helping clients products move out the door and into the hands of the ideal clients.

Site-Digest 7 Simple Steps To Place Your Site Map On Steroids

2009-01-26T21:10:00.000-08:00

The Site Map is a too often overlooked piece of the Search engine Optimization Puzzle. Here is a Simple Step 7 step approach to create a Super Charged Site Digest on Steroids that will get your web pages indexed faster and more often.

Step 1 Use Pseudo Directory Naming Convention

A Recent Article ('See How Using a Pseudo Directory Can Increase your Page Ranking and Organize your Web Site') discussed how you could increase your Page Rank scores by using a Pseudo Directory. (<a target=_blank href="http://ewguru.com/pseudo-directory">http://ewguru.com/pseudo-directory</a>).

Briefly keep all your web pages in one Directory but append a Prefix to the name so you could organize your pages like a Directory structure and still get the Page Rank Boost for having all your pages nearer the root.

As an Example For a Web Site about Pillows may have <ul>

'Buck' as Prefix for Buckwheat Pillows

'Fea' as a Prefix for a Feather Pillow

'Poly' as a prefix for Polyester Pillows. </ul> Files would now be named: <ul>

Buck-QueenSize.html

Fea-QueenSize.html

Poly-Queensize.html </ul>

Step 2 Keep Your Pseudo-Directories Small and Manageable .

An Efficient way to use this method is to find and republish 10 to 20 articles at the same time with the same topic. All articles on the advantages of Buck Wheat Pillows would be named: <ul>

buck-article1.html

buck-article2.html

buck-article3.html

....

buck-article10.html </ul>

After 10 to 20 Articles are Published to the Web-Site a Table of contents is created as per step 3. A few days later more articles about Buck Wheat Pillows are added and are assigned a Prefix 'buck2'. All these new pages are now named: <ul>

buck2-article1.html

buck2-article2.html

buck2-article3.html

....

buck2-article10.html </ul> A Table of Contents is Now Created for 'Buck2'

Similarly next time Articles about Buckwheat Pillows are collected 'Buck3' would be used as a Prefix.

The Main advantages of this method are: <ul> Google will easily find and index all your new pages

Lots of Small manageable Pseudo-Directories Each with their own Table of Contents.

Your Site-Digest in Step 4 is always Fresh and Changing changing.

</ul>

Step 3 Create a Table of Contents for each Pseudo Directory

So Lets say under Buckwheat you have the Following Pages <ul>

Buck-QueenSize.html

Buck-TravelSize.html

Buck-NeckPillow.html

Buck-isBetter.html

Buck-releivespain.html </ul> Create a Table of contents for your Buckwheat Pillows Listing only your Buckwheat Files and Call it 'Buck-Table-of-Contents.Html'. Similarly you would have a Table of contents for your Polyester and Feather Pillows.

Step 4 Create a Site-Digest with all your Products

Create a File and name it Site-Digest.html and list the Buck, Poly and Feather Table of Contents Files. Of course this Site-Digest File would also contain your Mattress Table of Contents and Towel Table of contents and anything else you may sell.

A Sample Site Digest may look like this <ul>

Buck Wheat Pillows Table of Contents

Feather Pillows Table of Contents

Polyester Pillows Table of Contents

Mattress Table of Contents

....

Bath Shop Table of Contents </ul>

Step 5 The Google Sitemap File

You would now create a Google Sitemap file. Be sure and tell google that your Site-Digest File Changes often. This way google will grab this page and Index your site (<a target=_blank href="http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/googlesitemap.html">http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/googlesitemap.html</a>)

Step 6 Step Keep Your Site-Digest Current

Every time you create a new pseudo-directory and Table of contents for that pseudo-directory simply add it to your Site-Digest. Now when Google grabs your Site-Digest it will Spider all your new Table of Contents and Magically Index your new pages.

Step 7 Super Charge your Site- Digest

If you would like to Super Charge your Site-Digest Name your Hyperlinks with descriptive Keywords. Add A Summary about each item in your Site-Digest

<ul>

Buck Wheat Pillows Table of Contents - Description

Buck Wheat Pillows Table of Contents - Link

Feather Pillows Table of Contents - Description

Feather Pillows Table of Contents - Link

Polyester Pillows Table of Contents - Description

Polyester Pillows Table of Contents - Link

Mattress Table of Contents - Description

Mattress Table of Contents - Link

....

Bath Shop Table of Contents - Description

Bath Shop Table of Contents - Link </ul>

By Following the above simple steps and creating a Super Charged Site-Digest you will make it easier for Google to index your current and all of your new Web Pages.

Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001 and has built a Huge 100,000 Member Organization in a Popular online Program.

Subscribe to Mike's Newsletter here <a target="_new" href="http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/list-sign-up.html">http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/list-sign-up.html</a>

Get some useful Free Downloads Here: <a target="_new" href="http://trafficninja.com">http://trafficninja.com</a>,

Some more Articles from Mike: <a target="_new" href="http://weeklytipsandtricks.blogspot.com/">http://weeklytipsandtricks.blogspot.com/</a>

Mailto:weeklytips@kioskcities.ws

Boost Your Search Engine Ranking And Generate Free Traffic With Reciprocal Links

2009-01-26T14:50:00.001-08:00

Reciprocal links are an important step in your overall plan to get site visitors.

What are they? Reciprocal links are mutual links you and some other web site owner agree to post on your respective sites.

Why are they so important? It goes back to the basic nature of the Internet. The Internet exists as an information medium. When you go to a search engine, you are looking for links to the information you need. The better information sources have already been found by others, many of whom thought so much of those sources that they placed links to them on their web site. So the number of other web sites linking to a particular source of information, the better the chance it is a good source of information. All the major search engines take link popularity into account when they determine how to rank the results of any search. The end result is that to get a good ranking in the major search engines, an important step is to make sure there are lots of other sites that link back to yours. And, since the links are reciprocal, you will need to put a link to each site that links to you. You can't expect someone to link to you unless you link to them.

All right, you say, I will get all my friends to put links to my site on their sites. Not so fast! The number of links isn't all that matters! In addition to looking at the number of links that point to your site, the search engines also examine the quality of those links. Links from sites that are relevant to yours rank highest. If you sell dog food, for example, some good sites to link to yours would be pet toys, dog training, dog grooming, etc. Acquiring a lot of links that don't relate to your site not only doesn't help your search engine ranking, it will hurt it, because the search engines will assume you are trying to fool them into thinking your site is popular with a lot of "junk" links. Don't worry, there are lots and lots of relevant sites to do reciprocal linking with.

The number one ranking for any search term isn't entirely determined by the number of links to a site, but it is an important factor. And, as you know, having a ranking in the top ten for a search term will guarantee more visitors to your site. But in addition to improving your chances of being found through search engines, having links to your site on lots of other sites means you will get exposure to many site visitors who look at the links page or links section of a site for other related sites to visit. And, the more places your name and site name pop up, the more you are likely to be recognized as an authority on the topic of your site.

So how do you go about building reciprocal links on your site?

First of all you need to realize that reciprocal link building is an ongoing process, not a one shot deal. It needs to be something you continue to work on, although some of it can be automated. You will want to build a links page on your site, where you will place links to other sites which are also linking to you. Since you expect your links page to grow, you should establish separate link categories, all relating to the theme of your site. You can get an inexpensive script for creating and managing a link directory at Linking101.com, not to mention a lot of good, general information about linking.

On your links page, be sure to include simple instructions for anyone who wants to link with you. Many sites include a short piece of HTML code including all your link information, ready to be placed on the reciprocal sites links page. Be sure to place an easily-found link to your links page on the main page of your site as well.

Now you are ready to go looking for relevant link partners, sites that are complementary to yours, but not competitors. You can do it the manual way, by doing searches on your site's favorite keywords. When you find a site, evaluate it for content relevant to your own, evaluate its quality and note its search engine rank. If you have to choose between a site that is ranked #2 and one that is #20, always choose the higher ranked site. Look for the links page, where you should find instructions on initiating links between your sites. If you don't find one, it usually isn't worth your time to contact the webmaster to inquire about links; go to the next one.

One method to speed up the process is to use a free service from http://linkpopularity.com/. From this site you can check the link popularity of your site. But, you can also check which sites are linked to your competitors ? particularly your competitors with the high search engine ranking. With that information, you can go to each of these sites and most likely get a reciprocal link. A similar product, Link Survey, is available at http://www.antssoft.com/linksurvey/index.htm.

Another system for speeding up the process is http://links4trade.com/. Although not free, it also helps to manage the headache of link page maintenance.

Link exchange services which claim to completely automate the link exchange process can be found at http://www.powerlinks.com/ and http://www.softbizscripts.com/link-exchange-script-features.php.

A quite amazing tool you might look at is called Zeus, at http://www.cyber-robotics.com/index.htm. Zeus is an intelligent robot that builds a link directory and creates reciprocal links for your web site. A free version is available. You can also find a group of Zeus users ready to swap links at http://www.zeuscollective.com/.

Regardless of how you do it, continue to pursue reciprocal links and make it a part of your overall marketing strategy; you are sure to find it rewarding!

About The Author

Darryl DeLong is a successful Internet Marketer and Ezine Publisher. Learn how to build up your opt-in list, site visitors and sales with my brand new ebook entitled "Viral Internet Marketing Strategies" get a free copy here: <a target="_new" href="http://www.viral-internet-marketing.com">http://www.viral-internet-marketing.com</a>

You Have More Web Sites Than You Think You Have: The Importance of Deep Submission

2009-01-26T14:40:00.001-08:00

If I ask you how many web sites do you have? You may say "One, yes it is www.mycompany.com " or "two" in case you have a second organization or company. When I first began promoting my web sites I was, like most people, only thinking in terms of one web address, the url of my main page. And I thought that this main page was a difficult one to promote because it was the index page of a magazine that covered a wide variety of fields (environment, arts, science, politics, spirituality, etc). How could I optimize a page for so many keywords, which market could I focus on?

It was only after discussing the subject with another web master, who had a similar site, that I learned that the diversity of all the inner pages of my site was a huge asset. Each of these pages was like a mini-website, and capable of attracting a multitude of visitors using a variety of keywords. Part of my ignorance at that point was due to a lack of accurate tracking data. I had a simple tracker on the main page that told how many visits that page was getting, but I had no idea of what was happening deeper inside the site. Then I was able to get access to the raw access logs of the site and using a log analysis tool I began to see the real picture of what was happening.

I saw that the main page was getting one third of the total traffic of the site. I found out that one article, "The Causes of Tropical Deforestation" was a big hit and consistently getting a lot of traffic. Other articles were also quite popular, but covering completely different subjects. It was then that I realized that I had not one web site, but more than 100 web sites.

What does all this mean in terms of design, optimization and submission? It means that one has to realize that people may well enter your site through the "side door" or the "back door" and you have to prepare accordingly.

For design, it means that the structure of your pages and navigation system should invite the people who enter from the inner pages, to make it to your important pages (about us, main page, or your order page!). For optimization it means that you should take more care about the placing of keywords, description and title tags on all the pages. Have you ever seen websites where the blue line at the top of the browser is showing the title of the page to be "New Page"? Even very good designers become a little bit sloppy on the inner pages, and though they do usually manage to put a proper page title on those pages, they seldom take the trouble to write separate meta tags for the keywords and descriptions. But as I learned, these pages are an asset and can be optimized and promoted to gain more traffic.

The first thing that I did was to redesign my navigation system to take advantage of this traffic and make sure that those who entered through the back door would visit the important departments of the magazine. I also put a newsletter sign-up form on all the inner pages, and to this day these pages are bringing in a steady stream of subscribers to the magazine's e-mail bulletin. The next thing I did was to make sure that the inner pages had proper meta tags, and finally I did a deep submission of the whole site.

What is a deep submission and why is it necessary? When you submit the main page of your site to a search engine, the search engine sends a "spider" to look at your page and put the data on that page in the search engines index. Sometimes the spider will follow the links on your main page and also pick up some of the inner pages (Google, for example is very good at this) but sometimes they don't go deep enough into the site and only one or two of your pages are indexed. To get the other pages indexed you have to submit them all separately, just as if they were other web sites. However, if you have 100 pages you can't submit them on the same day to one search engine. That would be regarded as spamming. If you submit one url per day per search engine you will not get into any problems.

So, think about your site more deeply. Your inner pages are mini-websites and if prepared and promoted properly they could increase your traffic and your sales dramatically.

About The Author

Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. Hehas been working on the Internet since 1995, and is currently the director of A1-Optimization (<a href="http://www.a1-optimization.com" target="_new">http://www.a1-optimization.com</a>), a firm providing low cost search engine optimization, submission and web promotion services.

<a href="mailto:support@a1-optimization.com">support@a1-optimization.com</a>

Search Engine Optimization Tips For 2005 - Part One

2009-01-25T17:10:00.001-08:00

Anybody who has their own website or is involved in business online understands the importance of SEO or search engine optimization. Higher rankings equal more traffic. More traffic equals more potential sales. Simple, eh? Or is it?

The problem here is that most people think search engine optimization is like magic and that only search engine "gurus" have all the answers.

Forunately, for you, this is far from true. In fact search engine optimization is relatively easy. What stops most people from ranking well in the search engines is misinformation and the promise of quick fixes. Every week there's a new tool or ebook that promises to solve all your search engine woes. There are no quick fixes folks. Accept that as a truth and move forward.

What follows in the next three articles is a 10 step program for improving your online presence and search engine rankings. Enjoy!

Keywords
Keywords should be the first step in your search engine optimization campaign. People put keywords or phrases into search engines looking for information. The search engines then check their index for pages that contain these keywords. Unless your pages contain keywords relevant to your business or service then do not expect search engines to rank you well. It's that simple.

For example if you have a website about dating then you'll find it very difficult to rank well for the keyword "dating" because so many other sites are competing for it. However if you were to target a specific area like gay and lesbian dating then you're dealing with a smaller, more targetted market. You could even regionalize it by targetting gay and lesbian dating in Toronto. See where we're going with this?

So what keywords tools are available to you? Describing each of them goes beyond the scope of this article so please refer to our site for more information on this topic.

Content
Make this your motto - Provide Useful Content. DO NOT provide keyword stuffed, spammy, automatically generated pages. Write something useful for your visitors based on keywords which are relevant to your business or service.

Ask yourself one question - do you want your website to last? Yes? Great then provide content that's actually useful to your visitors. Not only should you provide the initial content but keep adding content to your site. A page a week, a page a month it doesn't matter. Give your visitors a reason to come back to your website.

You can't write? Yes you can! Most people just think they can't write. Most of us send emails every day to friends, colleagues and loved ones. If you can compose an email like that then you're perfectly capable of writing 200 - 300 words of text for a page of content. The mere thought of writing a page of website content can fill people with terror but if you need help on this please refer to our website for a list of resources.

Keyword Density
This is how often your keyword is used on the the page. For example if you have 100 words of text on a single page and you mention your keyword 5 times then your keyword density is 5%.

So what's the ideal keyword density? Do yourself a favour and don't focus on keyword density at all. The forums are full of "experts" with theories on the perfect keyword density percentage. Here's a wake up call - there is no perfect keyword density.

Mention your keyword towards the top of your page within the body text, in the page title and in the Meta Description tag. Apart from that only ever use the keyword or keywords within the page itself as is contextually appropriate. Forcing a keyword into a page over and over again is going to produce a webpage that's difficult to read and sounds silly.

Domain Name
You have two choices when choosing a domain name. You can use a branded name that doesn't relate to your business e.g. Amazon.com have built a hugely successful brand name as an online retailer using the name of a South American river for their company. It just works for some reason.

Your other choice is to use a keyword rich domain name. What this means is that if your website is about baby clothes you'd use a domain name like www.baby-clothes-guide.com. Should you really use hyphens to separate the keywords in the domain? The simple answer is yes because a search engine can read each individual keyword in the domain.

If you were to use www.babyclothesguide.com the major search engines can only read the first word from it which is "baby". Therefore it has no idea that the domain is specifically about baby clothes (targetted) and not just about baby (untargetted).

- continued in Part 2

This article was provided courtesy of Search Engine Fuel where you'll find tons of information on getting <A target="_new" HREF="http://www.search-engine-fuel.com">effective search engine optimization</A>

Do You Submit Your Website To All The Search Engines?

2009-01-25T13:40:00.001-08:00

There is really only one search engine to worry about submitting too and that is Google and you should only submit one page your main once and maybe a sitemap a week later but never more than once a week. If you have a link coming to your new site from a site that is currently listed in Google then Google will find you quicker.

Most importantly search engines that have any bearing will find you if Google has you listed. Not that there are not any other worth while search engines. There are just many that look to Google. If you have a non comercial website you will want to look into DMOZ for a seperate submission.

So don't pay for directory submission many directories will bring you no traffic at all.

Here is the #1 tip to getting into Google. Get people to link to your site. In particular links form site that are in Google already.

Important Note: The more links that you have going out from your site will effect your page rank with Google negatively. The more links coming in will help your page rank. If you have the highest page rank for a particular key word you win.

INTERNET SHOCKER!

You have to read the stunning details for yourself:
<a href="http://www.acceleratedinternetprofits.com" target="_new">http://www.acceleratedinternetprofits.com</a>

About The Author

Internet Marketer and Consultant that lives in Texas. His Current project is at <a href="http://acceleratedinternetprofits.com" target="_new">acceleratedinternetprofits.com</a>

<a href="mailto:support@acceleratedinternetprofits.com">support@acceleratedinternetprofits.com</a>

SEO Expert Guide - Search Engines Explained (part 1/10)

2009-01-25T02:20:00.001-08:00

Before we explore the world of search engine optimization, it is vital that you know a little about how search engines work and their relative market shares. It will help you to prioritize your activities later!

<h3>(a) What are Search Engines and who powers them?</h3>

There are essentially four different parts to a typical large search engine; the crawler, the directory, sponsored results and the search engine itself.

Crawlers (e.g. Google) automatically visit web pages to compile their listings, making use of a so-called robot or spider (eg. Googlebot), which follows links from one website to another, ultimately compiling an index of all the pages and sites on the internet. These crawlers provide an index, which can then searched by the search engine. You may find that several or all of the pages on your site are indexed in thisway. Some search engines have their own crawler and others buy-in crawler results from others.

Human-powered directories, such as the Open Directory, rely on submissions from the public, which are reviewed by editors for inlusion in the directory. If you get included in a directory, generally only one page from your site (usually your home - or index - page) will be listed.

Crawled results are combined with sponsored results, supplied by pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers, and the results from human-maintained directories to complete the search engine index. Check out the <a href="http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm" target="new">Search Engine Reationship Chart</a> at Bruce Clay inc. for the latest picture on who powers whom. You will note a couple of things right away. Firstly, the dominance of the Google and Yahoo! crawlers and secondly the importance of DMOZ directory results as a back-door for many search engines.

<h3>(b) How do Search Engines find and rank sites?</h3>

Search engines do not really search the web directly, but rather an index database of the full text of web pages, which itself is drawn from the billions of web pages on the internet's servers. Search engine databases are selected and built by computer robot programs called spiders.

If a web page is never linked to by any other page, spiders cannot find it, unless the (usually new) site is submitted manually by a human at the search engine's "add URL" page. All search engine companies offer ways to do this.

After spiders find pages, they pass them on to another computer program for "indexing." This program uses an "algorithm" to assess the text, links, and other content in the page for "key words" that might be searched on at the engine. This allows the search engine to order results served by their "relevancy" to the search terms used. As each search engine has a different algorithm, it will index sites in a different way and thus serve up different relevant results.

Some types of pages and links are excluded from most search engines by policy. Others are excluded because search engine spiders cannot access them. Generally, the use of frames, flash graphics and dynamic URLs all get in the way of effective spidering and should thus be avoided.

In addition to indexing pages, most algorithms seek to establish the "authority" of a site. A site which is linked to by many other sites (using keyword-rich anchor text) is assumed to be of greater merit than one with no links at all. This activity is called "ranking" and helps search engines to sort otherwise similar results into ever-more relevant and authoratative results.

<h3>(c) Which Search Engines are the most popular?</h3>

Based on US analysis in January 2005, the top search engines (by share of total searches at home and work) are as follows:

Google Search - 47%

Yahoo! Search - 21%

MSN Search - 13%

All Others - 19%

These shocking figures do not convey the true dominance of the top players, as you have seen from the interdependence of search provision in section (a) above. You could be searching at AOL (part of the "other" 19%) and viewing Google results, for example.

There is also strong anecdotal evidence that Yahoo! and MSN tend to send more searchers through to their sponsored (or paid) results than do Google (due to the prominence of these results on their results pages). As such, for a typical small webmaster who does not use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, they might get up to 80% of all their traffic from Google's various sites across the world.

Now you understand the market a little better, you will perhaps understand the obsession many webmasters have with Google! A top-10 position at Google for your key search terms can make your online business fly. If you drop out of that top-10, your business can literally collapse overnight!

Don't forget these key stats as you embark on your optimization journey...

<h4>Navigate the guide</h4>

Previous : <a href="http://viney.com/search-engine-optimization-expert/2005/03/seo-expert-guide-index-of-contents.html" target="new">SEO Expert Guide - Index of Contents</a>

Next: <a href="http://viney.com/search-engine-optimization-expert/2005/03/seo-expert-guide-proposition.html" target="new">SEO Expert Guide - Proposition Development (part 2/10)</a>
About the author:

David Viney (<a href="mailto:david@viney.com">david@viney.com</a>) is the author of the Intranet Portal Guide; 31 pages of advice, tools and downloads covering the period before, during and after an Intranet Portal implementation.

Read the guide at <a target="_new" href="http://www.viney.com/DFV/intranet_portal_guide">http://www.viney.com/DFV/intranet_portal_guide</a> or the Intranet Watch Blog at <a target="_new" href="http://www.viney.com/intranet_watch">http://www.viney.com/intranet_watch</a>.

Increase Web Site Sales with a SEO Proposal - Part 2

2009-01-25T01:40:00.001-08:00

Part I of this article discussed some of the points that should be included in a search engine optimization proposal. Visit the resources section at the bottom of the page if you wish to get a copy of the whole article.

Part 2 will discuss the following topics:

Creation of Meta Information
Site Map Creation
Link Popularity Building
Web Site Load Time and HTML Validation
Downloading and Uploading of Web Pages
Browser Search Engine and Directory Submissions
Compatibility and Resolution Checking

Creation of Meta Information (title, description, keywords)

Meta information is used to provide additional information about HTML documents so that the search engine crawlers are able to index the information more accurately.

There are 3 important types of Meta tags as far as search engine optimization is concerned:

Title tag:

The Title tag is not a Meta tag. However title tags play a vital role in your site's rankings. It is these words or phrase that appear in the title of your page in the hyperlink listings on the search engine results. I include the most relevant and specific keywords or key phrases in the title tag that best describe the contents of the page.

Meta description tag

This gives a short and concise summary of the content of your web page. The description appears in the SEs just below the title tag. I ensure that the meta description tag is brief but includes some of your top keywords. The words used must inspire the visitor to check your site out further. Each page must be customized so all your web pages will not have the same meta tag descriptions.

Meta keywords tag

Although not as relevant as the other tags mentioned above, the Meta keywords tag is still recognized by some SEs. I include a number of meta keywords for you that are relevant to the content of your web pages.

Site Map Creation

The creation of a site map page enables SE spiders better crawling of your site. It also helps visitors to quickly scan your whole site for relevant information. A link and a short description of that link is created for each page of your site. The site map page is then added to your main navigation menu.

Link Popularity Building

Link Popularity refers to the number of links pointing to your site, from other sites on the web. There are other terms used for Link Popularity, such as Link building, In Bound Links, Back Links, etc The Search Engines consider your site important and rank it higher if other sites link to your site. There are two types of links you can establish on the web. One type is to trade links (Link Exchange), where you give a link from the links Page on your site to the partner sites. The second method is to establish only "incoming links" also called 'one-way links' or 'non-reciprocal links". With non-reciprocal links, you do not need to link back to them.

There are several ways of developing Inbound links.

Some of the techniques I follow in one way link building are:

a) Submitting to Free Directories

b) Writing articles and submitting to various sites for publishing to increase the link popularity of your site.

c) Press releases

d) Sending requests to established sites explaining the site quality and asking for links. In the link exchange process, you trade links with prospective partner sites by offering a link to their site from your own site. I provide reciprocal link building services to increase the link popularity of your site.

Web Site Load time and HTML Validation

Search Engines don't like sites which take a lot of time to load. They sometimes ignore these sites and place them lower in their index than fast loading sites. Some reasons for slow load times include html errors and bad image optimization. Sometimes sites are coded badly which can be a big block for visiting search engine crawlers. I will check your site's load times and make the necessary changes to the html where necessary.

Downloading and Uploading of Web Pages

To make the necessary changes to your site, web pages will need to be downloaded to my computer. After changes are completed the pages will then be uploaded to the server.

Search Engine and Directory Submissions

Your site is submitted by hand to all the major search engines, directories and some specialized directories. Not all SEs and Directories have the same rules for submission, therefore care will be taken to submit to the appropriate search engines by following their specific guidelines.

Browser Compatibility and Resolution Checking

People view sites in different browsers and at different resolutions. I make sure your site can be viewed in all the major browsers and in the most common resolutions. Adjustments will be made to the site's code where necessary.

Resources
Increase Web Site Sales with a SEO Proposal - Part 1 & 2
http://www.isitebuild.com/seo-services

Why You Need a SEO Maintenance Plan
http://www.isitebuild.com/seo-maintenance-services

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of <a target="_new" href="http://www.iSiteBuild.com">http://www.iSiteBuild.com</a>

To choose a Search Engine Optimization Plan or SEO Maintenance Plan that fits your web site, visit: <a target="_new" href="http://www.isitebuild.com/sitepromotion">http://www.isitebuild.com/sitepromotion</a>

Link Exchange Tips, No Tricks

2009-01-24T19:40:00.001-08:00

<ul> <li>Use text links, avoid image links.</li> <li>Anyhow, if you have used image links, then always make sure to put your keywords in the alt tags.</li> <li>Put your prime keywords in text links and always insure to put a short descriptions of your website/page in minimum of 20-30 words or more if allowed.</li> <li>In text links if you are not allowed to add descriptions then always try to put a short descriptions in title tag. E.g.: < a href =" link-exchange.html " title =" Link Exchange Tips, No Tricks " >Link Exchange< /a ></li> <li>Avoid repetition of keywords, repetition will lead to low rankings.</li> <li>Always try to exchange links from related websites (e.g. if you have a football league website, then a link from other sports websites will be known as related website links)</li> <li>Never, exchange links with unrelated websites/pages.</li> <li>Always ensure that the website that you are exchanging links with, is well optimized and has a good content.</li> <li>Never try to exchange links in quick sessions. Since search engines ignores or does not index those sites who gets bundles of links in quick time.</li> <li>Give your link exchange works few hours every day, to ensure that you get limited but quality links.</li> <li>Mainly for new websites, avoid exchanging bundles of links in quick sessions.</li> <li>Avoid creating a link/links.html file, since search-engines do not index link/links.html files, often.</li> <li>Always make a 'resources' (any appropriate name) folder and create an index.html file for that named folder and create appropriate html files for appropriate links going into them. (a sort of web-directory)</li> <li>Never, never exchange links with pages bearing more than 50 back-links. Generally 25 is appropriate and should not be more than two clicks away from the index/main page.</li> <li>Always ensure yourself that the page/website you are exchanging link is being indexed by the search engines or not.</li> <li>Also ensure on your own that the page/website you are exchanging link with, is not being blocked by any scripts, or disallowed by robots.txt, or disallowed by using noindex, nofollow on html page.</li> <li>Avoid linking to those tricky and false websites, and if possible inform already linked websites about the matter and ask them for link-exchange, if related to your websites.</li> <li>Links from the main/index page of the related website is the most quality link that a website can get. But, never try to place more than 20 back-links in index/main page.</li> <li>Exchanging links with your competitor's back linking website/pages are also the quality links that a website can get.</li> <li>Never post your website links to FFA, Guestbook, or other unrelated areas. Since search-engines completely ignores such links and may penalize your website.</li> <li>Site bearing good Google page rank are appropriate for link-exchange. Generally 4+ Google page rank is great for link-exchange.</li> <li>Exchanging links with old website is excellent.</li> <li>Link exchanging with new websites, with decent Google ranking at first, but bears quality contents and is well optimized, is also an excellent option for exchanging-links, since new websites bears less outgoing links than the old websites.</li> <li>While exchanging links for homepage of your website, also try to exchange links for sub-pages of it, for better ranking for that particular sub-page.</li> <li> Personal verification of the linking partner's website is recommended.</li> <li>Check for total incoming and outgoing links for whole website or for particular sub-pages of your linking partner's website and off course of your own before getting link exchanged.</li> </ul>

A link back to the author's article page <a target="_new" href="http://indianhandicrafts.f2g.net/link-exchange.html">Link Exchange Tips, No Tricks</a> is compulsory, in case of publication of this article in featured article websites or others. Example of author's search engine optimization and link building work can be found at <a target="_new" href="http://indianhandicrafts.f2g.net/">The Indian Handicrafts</a>.

Search Engine Marketing Simplified

2009-01-24T07:00:00.001-08:00

All the great efforts made for making your own site, goes in vain when your site doesn't bring you business. The reasons can be anything right from less traffic, to less page-per-views, or lesser PageRank. Upon serendipity of elaborating all of the above said problems, I would land up in search engine marketing basics.

- Less Traffic means fewer hits to your site.

- Fewer pages per views mean users checking your site but not getting interested in clicking on other pages. They don't find it interesting to surf through.

- Lesser PageRank. PageRank is Google's way of measuring the quality of a site. They will give your site a rank marking out of 10 as maximum. So your site may stand 0/10 initially. Then it may acquire higher PR (PageRank) according to the above said factor enhancements. It is to be noted that a PageRank of 4 is thousands time better than a PageRank of 3.

- If your site doesn't appear on any search engine result pages (SERPs), upon searching for any keyword, then it may take a backseat.

So here is some advice to what can be done to improve it.

For outrageous results on your business-through site, make your site lucrative in terms of design. Such imponderable designing factors as aesthetic sensibility and human-user friendly site-making can be an obstacle. But you have to go through each and every aspect of your site to make a mark through your site. So design terminology would go as follows:

The architecture-savvy site should or I would say must have Home, About us, Contact us, sitemap, products, articles. All these links and others should be present on each and every page of the site, so that these are accessible from every corner of the site.

Interlinking of the site pages would make an impact, so I will add-up here that sitemap plays a vital role in connecting your site in a star-shaped connectivity. Whereas, product information to users can be conveyed via articles. So articles need to be well placed and comprehensive in language.

I would like to share my experiences on how your keywords can be found out by a human user, who doesn't know about your site. A normal person goes to internet and opens up any search engine to look for the information on the product he/she wants to purchase. Now he is landing up on the pages where a site of your competition tops and the user clicks and buys the necessary things; you stand to be the loser. Here comes the role play of keywords on your site.

Your site should be full of keywords, which are, or related to the products on your site. The articles would be enriched with these keywords. Title, description and images of the pages should be named with the keywords.

If your site is selling an ebook on meditation, then the keywords will be the same as the product and they will read as "ebook on meditation", "find peace online", or "online meditation book" on your site. More these kind of keywords are accommodated on your site, the more your site could be searched out by a user via using any search engine.

Is there any special way by which search engines work and pick up the site for the keywords? Yes, they do. They have automated crawler or human auditor system. The crawler acts as a scanner, a human user uses the search engine to find out ebook on meditation, he types in the same keywords, and the search engine crawlers at the backend does the scanning on the server database to find out the same keywords. If they find the keyword on a genuine site and appearing explicitly and not spammed, then they will show that site on top. The keyword search via automated crawler will be broken down into a few steps as follows:

- Crawlers will check out for the content of the site, expert pages (expert pages are the product related pages, or articles), title and descriptions of the site. - They will also read the headings on the page which is mainly H1 sized headings, and yes if they read as "ebook on meditation" then an added advantage for those keywords to your site. - Crawlers will also look for the Meta tags, Meta descriptions and Alt tags used. - Crawlers are more prominent and effectuously look for the anchor text pointing towards your site. Anchor text has been explained below:

Anchor text (link text) is the text that points towards the page or resource for which the link has been placed. It is the normal text attached to the URL of any site. Clicking on that text it will take you to that URL/site. A link can lead to either a page on the same site (internal link) or to a page on a different site (external link). Thus, a user who clicks on one of your site's internal links would be directed to another page on your site.

Linking further is bifurcated into two parts, namely Incoming and outgoing. An incoming link is an external link that appears on a different site and points toward your site, while an outgoing link is an external link that appears on your site but points toward a different site.

The link text is also known as Title and it's followed by a nice description. Description again can contain keywords of your site; it's a little advantage to your site but surely is a benefit. Links are usually placed on the Links page or Resources page of the site; some sites name these pages as "Other sites" or "Other cool links."

A title should not exceed 65 characters but we recommend a title of not more than 55 characters and a description of not more than 250 characters in length as per latest strategies of search engines.

The more the number of links pointing towards your site, with the right anchor text, the more meritorious results of your online presence for that keyword.

If you want to know more on types of linking, and what kind of links benefit and what are the hazards of linking for your site, please feel free to contact author. He shall serve you for no charges.

About the author: Sandeep Juneja is Manager-Internet Marketing, in a leading Company and is an avid researcher in the SEM segment.

This Article is Copyright protected. If you have any comments or would like to have this article republished free on your site, please contact the author here: sandboy@rediffmail.com We just require all due credits carried; and text, hyperlinks and headers unaltered. This article must not be used in unsolicited mail.

Sandeep Juneja is a search engine marketing specialist and an avid researcher. He specializes in Links exchange strategies and internet techniques. He loves to learn from others and wants to explore search engine marketing.

Search Engine FAQ

2009-01-23T20:10:00.001-08:00

Some Company's claim that they submit your website to 5000+ search engine.very special interest web page or, even worse, websites masquerading as search engines. The majority of these 5000+ so called search engine are free links for all pages, Submitting your web page to these 5000+ search engines means, Quality matters so much more than quantity. that you'll receive 5000 spam e-mail messages.

Can Visual Orange guarantee top 10 search engine rankings?

Visual Orange to helps you to optimize you web page so that they get the best possible the rankings. No one that can guarantee the number 1 rank on Google - but Bewares of SEO's that claim to guarantee ranking, or that claim a "special relationship" with Google, or that claim to have a "priority submit" to Google.that is no priority submit for Google. but the only way to submit a site to Google directly, is by using the page .You can do this by yourself at no cost whatsoever.

We keep the hearing this question and it is about for at least 8 years Resubmitting date back to time when Webcrawler become the biggest search engine and no the Pentium yet around. It doesn't guarantee the ranking. But it make sense to resubmit on some every three months, because the simply cancel after this period at you web site.

What that we can conclude is the following info:

To Submission is necessary but dosn't guarantees inclusion in the search engines. We don't add all of your webpages to search engine, and can't predicts when they will appears."

The more other web sites link to your web site, the higher is your link popularity. Link Popularity helps you to increase the search engine ranking results of your web site. Web sites that have many links from other good rated web sites, get much better search engine rankings than web sites with no other sites linking to them.

It's really easy: you name the category of your web site and Visual Orange searches for web sites that might place a link to your web site. Web sites will link to your web site and the link popularity of your site will be improved. As a result, you'll get higher search engine rankings, more customers and more sales.

Billy Horner is the author of this article,and has many years of experience in the SEO world. He worked for many companies and helped to show the way to succes.He now works for Visual Orange Co., Ltd. based in Ayutthaya Thailand.

Search Engine Optimisation: The Soon to be Impossible Dream!

2009-01-23T18:00:00.001-08:00

There are today search engine and internet marketing services, in fact a new industry has materialised to exploit the fear of low search rankings.

This is not a new trend, back when simply resubmitting your website to the engines resulted in keeping your site at the top of the index, there was an accompanying boom in resubmitting "companies", as we know, these were just men in back bedrooms with a host of CGI and Perl submitting scripts and a timetable.

Search Engine optimisation or "SEO", is the latest incarnation of this bedroom profiteering, the important difference is that now the webmaster's are not just passively involved but are being forced to adopt totally artificial and unsocial practices that ultimately serve only to help damage the Internet!

SEO is supposedly the methodology and processes related to designing search engine "friendly" web content, the basic premise is something like "If I follow all the engines formatting and connectivity criteria, then my website will rank higher then a comparable website that does not".

All other things being equal, this seems quite positive given that the quality of a search engines database (index) directly effects its output; then webmaster's optimising their content so that search engines can correctly categorise the internet should logically improve the speed and quality of "the crawl".

SEO then, logically, should be good for the search providers, being able to maintain an efficient index, this should use less raw processing power, require less equipment and thus less energy; this must also be good for the users, being able to quickly and intuitively find what they want from a reliable source. Sounds reasonable right?

Well that's the happy version. The fact is that initially this may be true, you may gain a short term advantage, but once we have all optimised our content for analysis and (in so doing) ignored our users; We will then be back to where we started, and the search providers will just think up some even more ridiculous "laws" by which to "judge" us by, and like sheep we will all do that as well, thus the causal paradox is perpetuated and the users feel abused!

Even this is a vast oversimplification, the true nature of SEO is a lot more complicated; The heart of the problem and the real issue here is related to the search providers task, which is to strip mine the information junk yard otherwise known as the Internet, it may be full of interesting stuff but also plenty of garbage and they need to devise intelligent techniques to mine the interesting stuff!

The current "solution" is literally for the search engines to use their hegemonic standing to bully the webmaster's into organising their work in ways that have the primary effect of allowing quick "analysis" so they can categorise the website, but this has the secondary effect of requiring content to be designed "for" analysis, which typically translates to highly distributed connectivity, ie the website being effectively divided into "micro sites", which makes the maintenance of links and content more troublesome!

This is not necessarily a bad thing, most of these imposed linking and design methodologies are often positive and beneficial for a lot of subjects. My problem is that this is unilaterally enforced and it is this type of issue that is generating all the money for the SEO boys.

However this will soon be of no consequence. To understand the problem with this type of SEO operation, it is necessary to think about how we can approximate and simulate the human process of mining information and knowledge.

Let us assume we have set our Crawlers to work, automatically indexing pages (at random, looking at previous indexing and guided by user requests); we then format the resulting text: ASCII is usually used and validation follows this, search engines tend to ignore some tags and make use of good ones that help identify the content. At this point we would have reduced the Internet to a corpora, ie the collection of all HTML documents about no particular subject.

We then would set about item normalisation, ie identification of tokens (words), characterisation of tokens (tagging meaning to words), and finally running stemming algorithms to remove suffixes (and/or prefixes) to derive the final database of terms; this can be efficiently and compactly represented in lower term dimensional spaces, (Goggle are still essentially using inverted file structures).

Imagine each document of a corpus as a point ie a term in an N dimensional space, here the literal word matching type search is lost, but we acquire more of a semantic flavour, where closely related information can be grouped in to clusters of documents bearing similarities, however N dimensional vector spaces are of no help to the users.

After applying our algorithms to the corpora, we get a term by document matrix, where terms and documents are represented by vectors, a query can also be represented by a vector. So we have a query and our corpora (represented as vectors, both having the same dimensions), we can now start matching the query against all the available documents using the cosine angle between these two vectors.

But we now have a new artificial "problem"; we know the general answer to the question "which website's best match my search terms", this information now exists in our mathematical object, at a high level of abstraction, ie the cosine angles for all terms against the query vector, this is expressed as a vector corresponding to the sought column and therefore the document we are after, all we need do is present this to the user, right, well....

The issue is that a search engine needs to generate a linear index, ie convert the vectors corresponding to the minimum cosine angles into a human readable format, and until such time as someone thinks of a better way to do it, all engines output lists, like your shopping list, it has a start, a middle and an end, therein lies the problem, how to order the list!

The hypothesis seems simple, ordering information that might look chaotic at first, using the fact that closely associated documents tend to be relevant to similar requests. However, the internet (being a scale free network) is so vast that it is not possible to present a chosen feature space that represents the x closest documents to the convergence point in a given cluster from the common Euclidean distance. This is what should then be presented to the user in a more intelligible (semantic) display.

The engines could just present the returns as produced by the matching algorithms after decomposition, because the grouping generated using probabilistic/fuzzy patterns directly from the cluster might belong to more than one class, but the strength (degree of membership) value measured on a scale; using probability on a [0,1] interval, is quite adequate.

The reason decomposition in singular values works for ordering is related to the fact that the occurrence of two terms (say tomato and potato) is very high is reflected in the term-by-document matrix by showing that only x of the n terms are used very frequently.

The idea is that since the term say pepper is used/mentioned very little, then its axis/dimension does not affect much the search space, making it flat and relevant only in the other two dimensions

However the engine's demonic creators can't do this because they are still essentially using an inverted file structure, but they still want absolute correctness in their indexes and returned results which means trouble, because this assumes your index is perfect, incapable of being manipulated and that you can somehow order the returns in a meaningful way!

So the returned results can't generally represent the documents that match semantically, we now need to account for some subjective quantities, that can not be derived directly from the corpora, they attempt to deal with this by a cocktail of criteria that rank the returns in such a way as its more likely that the "better" results are closer to the top of the list.

There are many ways of doing this, the current trend is to use inference about the quality of web sites were possible because such quantities are beyond the direct control of the content creators and the webmaster's.

PageRank provides a more sophisticated way of citation counting but this is embodied in the consept of link analysis, using a relative value of importance for a page measured based on the average number of citations per referance item.

PageRank is currently one of the main ways to determine who gets into the top of the listings, but soon this will all become irrelevant when the engines stop using inverted file structures, because they can just use the grouping generated using probabilistic/fuzzy patterns resulting from the convergence point in a given cluster from the common Euclidean distance.

When the changeover from inverted file structures occurs, there will be two direct consequences:

1) The corpora will be capable of vastly more representative and more detailed data then is Currently possible.

2) The corpora will no longer be indexed as is currently done, they will embody semantic meaning and value, where some subjective quantities can be derived directly from the corpora without the need for cocktails or totally artificial rules.

The effect is that corpora will be more accurate and incapable of manipulation, thus variations of SEO that involve indirect manipulation of the index will become pointless overnight.

It is worth noting that the search providers are becoming increasingly pessimistic about website promotion in all forms, they currently penalise many things that can effect the results such as duplicated content (which can be perfectly legitimate), and satellite sites, ie one webmaster interlinking seemingly separate but highly relevant website's.

They may well start penalising webmaster's that promote their website's through articles they submit for third party distribution, as they do for people that post their sites information to bulletin boards!

Being banned from the top search engines can effectively destroy your business, if not directly through loss of visibility then indirectly in that people tend to judge you on weather your are organised enough to be listed !

The criteria are continually changing, as the amoral SOE boys attempt to pervert the resultes, these "laws" are not always clear and there are no appeals, where we are all subject to the providers up ending a drum then dispensing swift and hard "judgements", that can doom us at any time!

The part that erks the most is that as the indexes converge, (goggle's index is used directly by 2 of the 3 top engines and 5 others indirectly use it for their rankings) a bann by anyone of these engines is enforced by them all.

? I am the website administrator of the Wandle industrial museum (<a target="_new" href="http://www.wandle.org">http://www.wandle.org</a>). Established in 1983 by local people determined to ensure that the history of the valley was no longer neglected but enhanced awareness its heritage for the use and benefits of the community.

Keyword Popularity Check

2009-01-23T14:20:00.001-08:00

Before using keywords for your site, it is always better to check for the popularity of these sub theme keywords. Some or all of the tools mentioned in the keywords tools section could be utilized to measure the popularity of these keywords.

Based on the popularity count of these tools we should come up with a descending order listing of our most unused but good key phrase. These are our good target keywords. As the competition increases on the keywords, deeper optimization then just building keyword specific pages will have to be done.

Variations on sub- theme words:

This is the word- play to get into the mind of the user.

Now our set of 25 to 30 keywords will be expanded to include singular-plural word combinations, juxtaposing the same words in a different combination, using synonyms, building on the list of words using Thesaurus & a good dictionary.

The ideal set of keywords/ key phrases is to come up with around 70-100 possible ways of looking for that web site on the search engines (our keyphrases)

Research on these variations of the sub theme keywords for actually combing up with the combinations that are relatively un optimized for yet popular. At the end of this exercise we will have the ranked list of keywords, which we can start optimizing for.

General observations & other nuggets:

When using google to check for the competing pages through the SERP house the keyphrase in quotes. This will do the exact phrase searching for the phrase that we are optimizing for. Now to have a real feel of the actual competition on this phrase use the adword tool.

Typically offline competition for the business & online competition are not equivalent. The client needs to be driven out of this mindset. Online the competition for us depends on the key-phrases that we choose rather then the industry or the competition chosen keywords.

Another useful tip is to watch out for the ranking of the subpages on the SERPS page.

A higher occurenec of a sub- page suggests a lesser competitive key- phrase.

Keep excel sheets handy to work out on your key words

Here is a benchmark: If the site is fairly well optimized, and has a focused theme, then the combined total number of visitors from secondary variations of the main keyword phrase, should be higher than the number of visitors from your main phrase by itself.

Another yardstick can be that 20% of your search traffic reach you through your primary theme words. Another 20% through the sub theme words & their combos & the remaining 60% is fractional. A true pyramid.

Keep the keyword density on your pages in between 5-20% while optimizing. The latest talking optimization based on keywords is that almost none of the things mentioned above might apply as it is. You create text based on the end user perspective & optimize for 5-6 keywords per page. Check your referrer stats & fine tune optimization.

Free Keyword Tools:

The first tool that can be used is Overture.

One trick is to check the keywords on all the Overture tools, US, UK, DE, FR and even JP. You would be surprised at the ideas you can come up with on the other O Tools that do not appear on the US one. Also, the de-pluralizing and match-drive-alphabetization some times does not appear on the other tools. Second tool of course is the word tracker.

Use Google adwords to check on the competition for the chosen phrases using the CPC barometer. Higher the CPC more the competition.

Another tool is at:

http://espotting.com/popups/keywordgenbox.asp

Yet another tool is Alta Vista “PRISMA”

One can use Refine search option of Teoma to arrive at more generic/Primary keywords. Another way of doing that could be through the DMOZ subcategory study.

Refining of key words can be done using the Server side data or the referrs log.

7Search.com's Keyword Suggestion Tool

http://conversion.7search.com/scripts/advertisertools/keywordsuggestion.aspx

More tools in here:

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Authoring/Online_Tools/Keywords/

Once the keywords have been finalized lets look at the places where we can utilize them.

Rakesh Ojha is a successful Internet marketer utilizing both pay-per-click marketing and search engine optimization to increase website traffic. To learn more, visit <a target="_new" href="http://sem.mosaic-service.com">http://sem.mosaic-service.com</a>

See No Google, Hear No Google, Speak No Google

2009-01-21T22:20:00.001-08:00

That's right - I dreamt of a World Wide Web without the Googlopoly. And let me tell you - it was a scary place.

Well the thing is - at first I thought it was frightening - but as the nightmare went on it started feeling less scary as I began to realise that I no longer had to check my rankings every day, worry about how my website was built from a 'Google perspective' and constantly battle over positions with my online competitors. And this got me to thinking..

What Would The World Be Like If Google Didn't Exist?

Exactly the same really. Okay - the world Wide Web would be different, but would it really be so bad? I think, that as website owners, we should behave as if Google doesn't exist. It is only by doing this that we can free ourselves from some of the chains that it has on us. Just take a step back a moment and think of the number of times you've visited Google purely to see where in the rankings your own site is listed. Quite a few times right? What about all those hours your spent researching how Google works and what changes you could make to your website to effect a positive effect on your ranking.. Sound familiar?

Are You A Killer Google Zombie?

So instead of all this wasted Google-Gazing - what would your website be like now if you had spent that time creating excellent new content? Or what if you had spent that time finding key partners in your industry and launching affiliate arrangements with them? Or what about if you sat down and really improved your homepage so that your conversion rate from visitors into sales increased two-fold? Don't you see? Your Google-tinted glasses are tainting your entire view of how to be successful on the web. Take off your GoogleSpecs - I urge you to smash them right now. From this moment onwards promise me that you will take steps to ignore the fact that Google exists and look for other ways of growing your website's profile and improving its capacity to make you money. Don't be a Killer Google Zombie!

"Michael - You Ignore Google At Your Peril!"

What? Wise up! I bet you there are thousands if not millions of hours wasted every single year by people Google-gazing, researching how it works, trying to beat the system, discussing it in online forums, trying to jump one position higher or pandering to the latest Google dance. Imagine how much better the web would be right now if these millions of hours had been spent on making websites more effective, more user-friendly, more informative, more enjoyable and more fun! The next time you find yourself being drawn into the Google-gazing trap just take a step back and think about how you could use the time to actually improve your website for those pink squishy things that actually buy from you - people!

Michael Cheney is Author of The Website Marketing BibleTM. Take the Free 7-Part Course "Internet Marketing Made Easy" and get your free sampler of 'The Bible' here: <a target="_new" href="http://www.websitemarketingbible.com/marketing/">http://www.websitemarketingbible.com/marketing/</a>

HTML Title Tags Dictate Your Rankings

2009-01-21T11:30:00.001-08:00

There are a lot of things in Search Engine Optimization when done to your site that can increase you rankings. But one aspect that always comes up and that always affects your rankings in a huge way is altering the title tag.

The title tag is perhaps the most important tag out of all your html tags that can make or break your optimization process.

The reason why this is so is because the title tag is seen and always present in the search engine results pages.

The search engines always take the contents out of the tag and inserts them into the contents of the result pages in the search engines. And this is why the title tag should compile the contents or summarize the contents of your website to a "T".

It is this summarization of your site with the title tag that can take you into the top rankings, (along with some other aspects of course) or leave you in the bottom rankings.

With the title tag, each search engine looks at it and uses it primarily the same way, to summarize and compile the websites contents for its search engine users. It is primarily the HOW and WHERE the keywords are placed within the tag thats most crucial.

The HOW and WHERE your keywords are in your title tag are the most important element with to which you can get benefit from using title tag.

Below are a few items with which you can compare your title tag against before launching your webpage.

** Be sure your title tag is keyword rich
** Try to put the more important keywords in the first part of your title tag (in the first half of your title)
** Try to keep your tag to a minimum in length, including spaces
** Try not to use to many, if any, stop words(a, the, it, etc.)
** Try to weave in and implement webcopy tactics too if possible.

To sum up, search engines use the title tag primarily to sum up the sites content for its users, and also weigh it most heavily compared to the other tags, so it pays to take the time to craft an award winning title tag as it's the most used and most visible tag within the search engine result pages.

This article was written by Burke Ferguson of <a target="_new" href="http://www.the-ace-ezine.com">the-ace-ezine.com</a>. Burke holds both a BSc. degree in Computer Science as well Certification in Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Strategies. He also regularly publishes The ACE! newsletter, in which he shares his experience, methods, and knowledge with others. Burke can be contacted by his main website <a target="_new" href="http://www.altacanweb.com">AltaCanWeb.com</a>.

How to Verify and Monitor Your Search Engine Listing on Google?

2009-01-21T06:40:00.000-08:00

Being listed in search engines and ranked high on searches is the overall goal a webmaster is trying to achieve when dealing with search engines. Search engine optimization is probably one of the most commonly used words among webmasters. In the Internet market becoming much more critical to business success this is almost natural.

While the professionals know how to verify search engine rankings and listings, the normal user or startup webmaster might not know how to verify these things. The often just type their domain name into the search engine of choice and are happy if they get a result back that includes their domain name. But there is a little more these startup webmasters should know about.

Every page indexed by a search engine is a possible landing page for visitors to enter the website. As more pages get indexed the higher number of possible entry points to the website. But how can a webmaster verify how many pages are currently in the index of a search engine?

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3DomainName.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3DomainName.com

Replace "DomainName.com" with the actual domain name that needs to be verified. A webmaster should also run the following variation to get an impression of what is really out there.

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Awww.DomainName.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.DomainName.com

The next thing a webmaster should check is to see how many other websites are linking to his/her website at all. As almost everyone knows nowadays - the higher the number of links pointing to a website (incoming links) as higher the possible search engine ranking on search can be (and we all want that number 1 spot, right?!). The problem is that Google will never show you all incoming links to a website. But even a ball park number can be helpful in finding out if the SEO work of the past paid off. So, how does a webmaster can get this ball park number of incoming links?

http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Awww.DomainName.com

This command will show the 'ball park' number mentioned above. It will give the webmaster a hint how successful the website is and how many people/websites are linking to it.

By researching the information of how many pages and how many links to/for a website are registered/indexed in a search engine a webmaster can gain important knowledge. This knowledge makes it easier to see what works and what does not work when it comes to search engine success for a website.

About the Author

Christoph Puetz is a successful entrepreneur and international book author. Examples of his search engine optimization work can be found at <a target="_new" href="http://www.webhostingresourcekit.com">Web Hosting Tutorials</a>, <a target="_new" href="http://www.highlandsranch.us">Highlands Ranch</a> and at <a target="_new" href="http://www.realcreditrepair.info">Credit Repair</a>.

This article can be published by anyone as long as the resource box (About the Author) is posted on the website including the links. These links must be clickable.

Search Warrant

2009-01-21T01:50:00.001-08:00

So, you've just paid ?300 - ?10,000 for a new web site to be designed 'registered your URL' and now it's sitting on the World Wide Web. All your new stationery and Business Cards give the Web Site address quite clearly. The designer assures you that it has been 'submitted' to all the 'Search Engines' and, when you type in the address, there it is.

You've told your customers all about it and they visit it occasionally ... No-one else seems to find it. No new enquiries and the visitor counter is moving slowly nowhere. Sound familiar?

What could have gone wrong? Was it all a waste of valuable marketing resources? Is the Web a wasteland and has the 'dot.com' bubble really burst?

The simple answer is that nothing has gone wrong, all that remains to be done is to 'market your site' effectively and the enquiries should come flooding in.

So let's go back to good, old fashioned, Sales and Marketing basics - AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

Unless you get the customers attention they won't even know your Web Site exists and, if they don't know it exists, how can they find it among the 2.6 billion other Sites on the Web!!

Entrusting the 'selling' of your site to a Web Page designer is a little like expecting a printer to distribute your brochures to your prospective customers and waiting for the orders. The responsibility, therefore, is yours and you, or a member of your marketing team, have to grit your teeth and get on with it.

Interest, Desire and Action should emanate from the design and content of your Web Page, however the first step, Getting Attention, has to be done successfully before any of this can take place. This article focuses on this vital first step

How to get Attention on the Net

To get attention on the World Wide Web you have to get your site listed on the major search engines, and that means within the top 20 places, otherwise your prospective customers will find a similar product, or service, long before they reach you.

Imagine the Internet is like a giant Yellow Pages, with no index, wherever it falls open is where your prospective customer starts to look. It is therefore essential that your site is right at the top of the first page they see.

80% of all traffic to a Web Site is through the major search engines and 'off-line' marketing activity currently accounts for only 2% of 'hits'. This will probably continue into the future, so no amount of advertising will bring the response that a search engine 'listing' will bring, particularly if you are using the Internet to reach the International Market.

To achieve a high listing you, or someone in your team, have to understand how search engines work and then adapt the web site to get their attention. Alternatively you could pay a consultancy to achieve the same results - however no-one will understand your customers the way you do therefore the time and effort invested in developing net skills in house would be worth it. In addition it would be more beneficial if the person selected were from a Sales and Marketing background, who knows the products, with a smattering of IT know how, than a 'techie' - After all, this is marketing.

However, a mistake often arises from a simple misconception. The customer you are targeting with the web site is not the end user - your product, or service, and the design of the site, once they get there is supposed to do this.

The customer for the web site itself is the search engine and its 'buyers'

The 'buyers' fall into 2 categories Search Engine 'spiders' or 'robots' who are totally logical, electronic and not very clever and Human reviewers who are not so logical, know what they do, and don't, like and may be influenced by a snappy description. Let's take each in turn

Search Engine Spiders

Spiders are computer programs that roam the World Wide Web ceaselessly, travelling from page to page of every web site they visit remembering every word on every page. They like pages that change and ignore pages that haven't changed since the last time they were there.

They can only reach a Web site by one of two methods

1 By being told about it - this you can do by registering your site with the search Engine and, eventually, it will send a spider out to visit it.

2 By visiting a Web Site from a link that has been established from another Web Site that it knows about and regularly visits.

The First Rule, therefore, is to register your Web Site with all the major search engines and to begin to develop reciprocal links with other complimentary web sites. The more links you have coming in to your site the more important it must be in the eyes of the spider!

What do the Spiders look for when they visit a site?

Contrary to popular belief, they do not all look for 'keywords' - for instance the Excite, Lycos and Google spiders ignore keywords almost altogether - no amount of conjuring with keywords will get your site to the top 20 in these search engines. What will get your site higher in the ratings is the of the site and the of the site. You can check out what the and of the site are by selecting View, Source in the menu bar of your Web Browser - this shows you what the spider, not the visitor, sees.

The Second Rule, therefore, is not to call your site by the name of the company ( as most businesses do) unless your company name is so well known that everyone will search for it, or the name of your company says what you do quite clearly and unambiguously. No-one cares who you are, it's what you do for them, that counts. If this sounds a little like 'selling the benefits, not the features' it's meant to.

For example - imagine your company is called ABC Electronics and that you manufacture electric vehicles in the UK. Then the of your site could be 'Electric Cars and Vehicles UK, ABC Electronics'

Anyone searching for electric cars and vehicles would find your site at the top of the list, or very close. Whereas if the site were called 'ABC Electronics Limited' it would come much lower in the Search Engine listings, if at all, unless someone searched for 'ABC Electronics Limited' and, bear in mind, the intention of the Internet is to reach a wider audience - if they knew who you were, wouldn't they have already contacted you by other means?

Therefore the single most important part of marketing your site is getting the right. However the preceding sentence is written in invisible ink and most businesses will continue to ignore this simple fact.

The Third Rule is to beware of 'frames' within your web site, particularly the first page, since some of the spiders can only index what is inside the top frame and not the links you would like it to in the main frame.

If you need to use frames as a navigation tool then consider using a 'portal' , or 'doorway', page, or one without a frame, as the first, or entry, page of your site. This, at least, should be identified by all the relevant search engines. You would then link this page to the framed pages on your main site. This may result in some of the Search engines only listing one of the pages on your site, however that is a price you may have to pay.

The Fourth Rule is to ensure that the of the site, in particular the first paragraph of text on the page, contains some of the keywords and / or phrases that your prospective customer will be searching for.

There are some technicalities to observe, such as repeating the keywords within the between 3 and 7 times is optimum. Any more than that and the spiders will penalise you and possibly ignore your site altogether, any less than that and you are not taking full advantage of the spiders totally logical process.

Avoid having repetitive text the same colour as the background in the hope of fooling the spider - this is a myth and will result in the spider banning you from the search engine!

So, for the Electronics Company example above. If the text was to the effect 'Formed in 1985 ABC Electronics is based in Andover, Hampshire, close to the M5, etc. etc.' the spider will not find the words Electric Cars and Vehicles in the and therefore reduce your rating.

However if the said

'Electric Cars and Vehicles (as a headline) - Formed in 1985 ABC Electronics is a world leader in the design and development of Electric Cars and Vehicles for the Armed Forces, Electric Vehicles for the Ambulance Service, etc, etc' the spider would find a high 'density' of keywords in the and improve your sites' rating.

The Fifth Rule is to understand and develop the sites Tags.

Tags are not as important, to some search engines, as the and keyword density of the , but they do include a variety of different items that some search engines and all human reviewers may see which include , , etc. If you employ a range of tactics it will increase your overall success.

This is now the place for on the site - these would be the words that your prospective customers would search for through the search engine. In doing this try to think the way the customer would think - in other words sell benefits, solve problems, anticipate the questions they would be asking. AltaVista and Mirago operate almost exclusively on and tend to ignore .

List all your keywords on a word processing page then prioritise them. What do you think will be the order that people will type in keywords to search for your service or product? Remember, try to think like your customers think, so, for instance, if you produce massage oil is it possible that they will type in sports injury (or injuries)? What does your product do, or solve, not just what is it.

The next step is to pluralise your key words, as in the example above if someone typed in sports injury and your keyword was injuries they would miss you. If you make orange, oranges then searching on either word will find you.

Consider putting in mis-spelt keywords if those words are commonly mis-spelt or mistyped for instance 'servcie'. This is to ensure that people who mis spell or mis type can also find you.

However, a word of warning, the market leader in a particular product range is very low in the ratings on most search engines because their designer mis-spelt a keyword in the design of the web site. If you're not sure whether or not this is true go to www.google.com and search for 'veleting' or the word Barnaley (for Barnsley) - It's amazing what some people do

Also, it may be useful to include a ridiculous such as 'agriptanch', why? Because when you need to find out if your site is registered with a based search engine you simply search on 'agriptanch' and if your site is registered up it comes. If not you may have to re-register it.

The next step is to take a calculated gamble and opt for one of the following methods of using the keywords:

Target vs. Blanket

This is deciding whether or not to use a series of keywords that will cover everything anyone could possibly type in when looking for your product or service, or taking the gamble and knowing what he or she will type in and just put that as a keyword or phrase.

So, for example, if you dealt with a specific subject such as Sea Fishing then you may use just that phrase knowing that the majority of people who were searching for you would type that in as their query.

Target will bring you higher on a search engine listing but you have to be certain that people will search for exactly that word, or phrase.

Blanket covers a larger list of key words you will therefore be listed in more categories but lower on the listings for each, since the density is lower.

You are allowed approximately 200 per page, of course, if you choose to target the prospective customer you may only use 2 or 3 of these. Nevertheless the correct format for is word, comma, space e.g. "cleaning, upholstery, upholstery cleaning, etc"

The Sixth rule is possibly the most misunderstood rule of all : Spiders cannot follow graphically embedded links. This means that when your web page designer has put all those buttons and GIFS and animations on the page, if there are no text links to other pages then the search engine will only see one page. This means that if you have a 100 page web site, as far as the search engines are concerned you have given them a book with all the pages stuck together, unless they are linked in a way that the spiders can follow. There are very simple bits of coding that can be placed in the source code of each page to ensure the spiders access all pages.

There are other, more sophisticated ways to attract the attention of the spiders, such as the development and publishing of separate 'portal' pages, each directed back to your index page. However, by adapting the information above and applying it to your companies web site you will start to see a rapid increase in visitors and a promotion to the upper echelons of the 'Spider' based Search engines.

Human Reviewers

These are people who are either employed by the search engine company or are volunteer editors. They control what appears where in the King of all search engines, Yahoo, and in the human edited directory known as Open Directory. In order to attract their attention you need to develop snappy, factual, compulsive sales copy for the and the element of the web site.

Although these appear in the tags and are therefore unseen by the normal viewer, they are also the words that are used when registering with the Human edited Search Engines. they are the words that will entice them to review and, hopefully, categorise your site.

Restrict the to 150 characters, including spaces, it does not require keywords, but make it appealing to a human being since they probably see hundreds of sites per day. avoid phrases like 'simply the best', 'the only web site to visit'. Just like the editor of a newspaper, or magazine they are looking for interesting, quality, information for their clients who are the end users, the people who are ceaselessly searching the Internet for exactly the type of service, or product, you provide.

Finally

Whatever you invest in web site development is wasted money unless you are willing to 'market the site' to the Internet 'buyers'. With 2.605 Billion Web Sites out there (yes it has increased by 5,000,000 since you started to read this article) it's a little like throwing a pin on the floor, in a house, in London, and expecting someone to find it - without giving them the address.

Go back to basics in sales and marketing - identify the buyer, study the buyer, understand buyer behaviour and then make it easy for them to buy. And remember, if you have a 10 page web site that's 10 opportunities they have to 'buy' since each can have it's own , , and .

Ensure that you get the Attention of the Search Engine Buyers, work with your marketing department on developing a Site that Interests the end user, builds their Desire to buy your service, or product, and deliver a compelling call to Action that produces e - success for your on-line business.

About The Author

John Saxon is a Companion of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management and a Director of Fastlink Solutions Limited and Site-Pro Limited. He has had a number of articles published in different mediums including the internet and the ISMM Magazine. His web sites may be visited at <a href="http://www.fastlinksolutions.co.uk" target="_new">http://www.fastlinksolutions.co.uk</a> and <a href="http://www.site-pro.co.uk" target="_new">http://www.site-pro.co.uk</a>

What is Google Pagerank?

2009-01-21T01:20:00.001-08:00

PageRank is one of the factors that Google uses to evaluate your web site and determine its position in the Google search engine results. PageRank is a number from 0 to 10.

Generally, if your web site has a higher PageRank, it will appear earlier in Google search results pages, all other factors being equal. In fact, you can see a significant improvement in where your pages appear in search engine results when your PageRank increases.

How do you find your PageRank? Install the Google Toolbar. You can get it for free at this link:

http://toolbar.google.com

After you install the toolbar, you will see the PageRank in the middle of the toolbar. It may have a small green bar. Hold your mouse over the green bar to see the Google PageRank for the site you are viewing.

So how does Google determine your PageRank?

Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes a page receives, however. Google also looks at the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important.

How can you improve your PageRank?

By getting votes from important pages (or, links to your web page from other web site pages that themselves have a high PageRank).

You can also be sure to include plenty of relevant, useful, fresh text in your pages. This is useful for Google, since you are providing information for the search engine to index, and it is useful for the people who visit your web site too.

Herb and Monica Leibacher operate Web Builder Express. Create a professional web site for your business or non-profit organization with Web Builder Express. At <a target="_new" href="http://www.WebBuilderExpress.com">http://www.WebBuilderExpress.com</a>, you can request your free Quick Start Guide that tells you how to create a great web site.

The Two Most Important Things You Must Do For Google Top Ranking

2009-01-20T11:40:00.001-08:00

CONTENT:

1. Visit discussion forums and learn what problems people are seeking solutions for.

2. Browse other relevant sites and see what other webmasters are doing. This could give you creative sparks.

3. Subscribe to quality newsletter that give the latest trends, tools and resources in your line of business.

How to create content for the search engines..

Another way to easily create content is to hire a ghost writer. You pay a certain amount to have somebody write articles for you. You can find good writers at elance.com

Using a blog to create content.

ONE WAY INBOUND LINKS.

Search Engine Optimization - Enhancing Web Site Visibility

2009-01-20T09:30:00.001-08:00

I've had several prospects and clients say to me "I want my web site to come up on top in search engines." And some have been contacted by an SEO company asking for lots of money and claiming that they can guarantee top search engine results, which in many cases is just false promises. There is no quick and easy way to make a web site display in the top 10 on search engines. Getting a web site to come up high in search engines "naturally" can take time and effort. When I say naturally, I mean without paying to be a sponsored link. The content of the web site has to be relevant. By this, I mean the web site content should be very descriptive, and ideally unique, about your business, product or service. This way search engines can rank your site according to this detailed, descriptive and relevant content. Some reasons that a web site will rank high:

* Content is relevant to the company or business web site.

* Keyword and keyword phrases are used in important tags such as title, description Meta tag and Header tags.

* Site has been updated with new content regularly.

* Other related businesses web sites have links to your site.

The title of each page needs to be descriptive of the page and not just the web site. So keywords and the site or business name should be built into the title of each page. Avoid using any word more than three times in the title tag.

Make Meta tags keyword-focused. Meta tags are tags in the HTML web page that describe certain things about the page such as the page description, list of keywords, page author, etc. The tags that are important here are the keywords and description Meta tags.

For images on the site, alternate text should be set to keywords as well. Alternate text is the text displayed before an image is completely downloaded and displayed. Alternate text will be displayed in place of the image for text only browsers and if you've disabled the show pictures option in your browser settings. A title can also be set for an image, and by hovering your mouse over an image; the title text will be displayed in most browsers.

Header tags should be used in your web pages, where possible. Search engines look for the h1-h6 Header tags as important indicators for what the text of the document will contain.

Here is an example of building keywords into your hierarchical web page to enhance search engine results.

<a target="_new" href="http://www.njedesign.com/seo1.asp" target="_blank">View an example diagram here</a> of building keywords into your hierarchical web page to enhance search engine results.

Prominent tags used are title, description Meta tags, keyword Meta tags and h1 and h2 header tags. Keyword phrases relavent to the business of the web site should exist in the content of the web page as well is in these important HTML tags. Search engines analyze the text for relevant keywords, among other things, and rank the page accordingly. Additional keywords can be used throughout the document. Many experts recommend not using any keyword in excess of 5% of the total text of the page. Doing so may actually lower your ranking.

A site map can help your search engine ranking as well as help your web site visitors find what they're looking for. For more information on this topic, and other search engine optimization topics, visit google.com.

These are some basic techniques used to achieve higher visibility in search engines, and should help you attain higher results if they are used along with efficient, valid HTML markup. Contact us if you'd like more information on how we can help you achieve high web site visibility.

Norm Euker of <a href="http://www.njedesign.com" target="_blank">NJE Design</a> provides high quality web design, Internet and email marketing to small businesses.

Top 5 Search Engine Optimization Mistakes

2009-01-20T08:20:00.001-08:00

There are a lot of ways to promote your website and, unfortunately, a lot of these methods are mistakes. Here is a list of some of the more common mistakes (often referred to as Black Hat SEO) that you should steer well clear of.

1. Bad Neighbourhoods

These sites are also known as free for all (FFA) pages and link farms. They serve no other purpose other than to list tens of thousands of unrelated websites. Not only will these sites not provide your site with any traffic, certain search engines will ban sites who participate.

2. Over Optimization

Optimizing your web pages for a particular search engine can be a good thing. Over-optimizing can defeat the purpose, however. Search engines are catching on quickly to pages that appear 'over-optimized'. Stuffing keyphrases into your pages is the most common problem. Never use hidden (invisible) text to add keywords. You will get caught, and your site will get banned.

3. Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are orphaned web pages that are typically optimized for a particular keyphrase and a particular search engine. They are promoted to the search engine in an effort to achieve high rankings. They are not linked back to by any other page on the website and, as such, search engines are able to flush them out quite easily and penalize the entire site.

4. Traffic Generation Scams

Services that purport to drive lots and lots of traffic to your website are typically not very useful. The traffic tends to come from seedy places like domain names that have lapsed in payment or commonly misspelled domain entries. Most of the traffic that hits these pages is accidental and is therefore of no value to you. Other traffic may come from other participants in the program who are required to visit other websites to gain 'credits' for their own site. Again, this traffic is not targeted and therefore of no value. Some traffic may even be generated by automated software!

5. Shadow Domains

Shadow domains are small, optimized, supplementary websites designed to drive traffic to a different website. The way this works is that an SEO company will design and optimize a website on your behalf. The danger here is that the you do not own this new website; the SEO company does! This means that if the relationship sours, they may choose to redirect this site's traffic to whomever they choose (see #4 above), or even sell the site to one of your competitors! Be very, very careful of this technique, as some supposed search engine 'experts' even use this method (no naming of names here, however).

One final note: Any company that tells you that it can achieve 'guaranteed' rankings is either lying to you or using some of these Black Hat techniques. Unfortunately, there is no way to guarantee a number one result within (unpaid) search results. When choosing a search engine optimization company to work with, be sure you feel comfortable with them and trust them (e.g. money back guarantee). And if you decide to promote your website yourself, consider yourself a little better educated against these common mistakes.

About The Author

Robin Eldred is the president of Apis Design, a Calgary Web Design and Promotion company specializing in building, managing and promoting quality, results-oriented websites for small businesses (<a href="http://www.apis.ca/" target="_new">http://www.apis.ca/</a>)

<a href="mailto:robin@apis.ca">robin@apis.ca</a>

How to Get One Way Backlinks

2009-01-19T17:10:00.001-08:00

Don't be fooled into believing that all backlinks are created equal because their not! Why, you may ask? It's no secret that many webmasters trade links left, and right, for the benefit of a higher ranking in the search results, but search engines have caught on to this technique, and are very aware that this is major threat to the relevance of the search results.

Search engines such as Google have took steps in an effort to prevent this from becoming major problem by placing more importance on one way backlinks. So, how do you get one way backlinks to your web site? Well, there are number of ways to go about this, but the most effective techniques are listed below.

1) Having a useful, and valuable web site, especially if your web site is free, (Such as providing articles, tools, games, and software.) will cause other web sites to link to your web site. Why? Because by linking to useful, and unique web sites offer value to their own web site's visitors, and therefor increases their own value. This one can take while to really pay off because like all new web sites, you won't get much traffic.

2) Getting listed in directories, especially related ones, won't only bring you tons of traffic, but will also improve your search engine ranking. The two most important directories to get listed in are the ODP (Otherwise known DMOZ), and Yahoo's directory. You can also find directories that are related to your web site by searching with your favorite search engine with your keyword, and adding at the end resource or directory.

3) Writing articles, and submitting them to Ezines, and article directories, which are than picked up by webmasters looking to add content to their own web site, which will get you tons of one way backlinks. You can also find web sites that are related to yours, and ask them to publish your articles. When writing these articles make sure they are related to your web site, so that the link will appear more relevant to your web site's theme to the search engines.

4) Write a unique testimonial for products, or services, and put a link to your URL in it. Many webmasters will accept the deal because this will cause more visitors to buy their products, or services. If they decide to publish your testimonial you'll get a free backlink to your web site. Before you write the testimonial make sure you understand the product.

5) Participate in forums that are related to your web site's subject, which also allow you to link to your web site in the signature, make sure to read the rules first though. They will send you visitors that are interested in your web site, and will provide a related backlink to your web site.

6) Anytime you first start a web site, add a new product or service to your web site write a press release about it. Submit your press releases to news sites such as PRWeb. Make sure that the press release is attention grabbing, and unique, this will make other webmasters add the press release to their web site.

Matt Colyer began as a SEO Specialist in 1997. He founded <a target="_new" href="http://www.superiorwebmaster.com/">Superior Webmaster</a> in 2004 as a source of articles and tutorials for Web site owners looking to improve their Web site.

Google News - Just another article announcer?

2009-01-19T01:50:00.001-08:00

In Google's recent battle towards becoming an international news center, I've come to notice that the results delivered from Google News seems like nothing more than the articles we publish everyday. So I ask, doesn't it seem like Google News resembles an article directory of some sorts?

Google News World: http://news.google.com
Google News Canada: http://news.google.ca
Google News UK: http://news.google.co.uk

I only mention this because when submitting my internet marketing articles, I often wonder if they show up within Google News? 9 times out of 10, they do! In fact, they usually show up within 48 hours of being indexed from other top related websites.

How does Google News select it's content?

Right now, it seems that "news centers" & "press release companies" related to your field online are profiting from these search results. When you think about it, wouldn't a press release be a form of news anyways? Possibly...

If you take a good look at the websites who deliver the content within Google news, you will notice that only a select few are providing all of the results. Again, it's possible that Google's news algorithm is still in its infant stages and probably has a lot of uphill battles to conquer.

It may be in Google's best interest to assemble a team of experts in different fields to accept articles/news submissions in order to keep the news source within the Google kingdom.

There is Only A Fraction of Results Showing:

While searching through the GN section, you will also notice a relatively small portion of actual search results coming up. Only a fraction of a percentage of results get listed within the GN search results compared to the same results within the regular search results found on Google's main page.

Google News Alerts - Ezine anyone?

When you think about it, you are giving Google your email address to get related articles to the search term delivered to your inbox, how does this differ from any other regular newsletter? Are we going to start seeing Google Adwords within the news alerts? Will they consider giving large corporations the opportunity to advertise within their email alerts as a one time mailing! I hope not.

More and more we are seeing less of the Google we once knew and have come to love (A search bar with some great results). Since Google's IPO, the development team at GG are starting to launch applications online that are starting to resemble what we now know as the great Yahoo Portal.

Will there be any difference? Probably not.

One Great Point About Google News:

They have given you the ability to customize your page to show whatever news topics you want. Simply look at the right side for a button that says "Customize this page New!". Once you click on this link a drop down box shows you all the main topics you have listed within your page. Simply click on the topic you wish to customize or remove. The best part of it all is that you can click on "Add a custom section" and simply search for the topic you wish to have listed on your page.

All in all you can create an entire custom news page (author articles) that relate to your industry.

About The Author:

Martin Lemieux is the president of the Smartads Advertising Network. Smartads helps their clients to maintain a strong presence online through up-to-date marketing tactics.

Sign up for Martin's weekly newsletter here: <a target="_new" href="http://www.smartads.info/newsletter">http://www.smartads.info/newsletter</a>

For a free SEO evaluation, go here: <a target="_new" href="http://www.smartads.info/website-evaluation.html">http://www.smartads.info/website-evaluation.html</a>

Complete Web-Site Optimization For Search Engines (Part 1)

2009-01-18T16:50:00.001-08:00

SEO or search engine optimization strategy now becomes widely popular among online business operators. Nothing strange about it as it allows to substantially increase your gross income, as a result of growing traffic or visitors flow.

That is why one point should be stressed out - your business return on SEO is directly proportional to the results your business have now. It means that SEO strategy, unlike marketing optimization, directed to boost quantity, not quality. If your business enjoys 1% response rate for any action you demand, whether it is sale, subscription, feedback or other it keeps on having similar response rate after SEO will be accomplished, although the response will grow in absolute numbers as a result of increasing traffic flow.

As you see SEO is not a panacea. The highest and the most efficient return on your SEO campaign as well as business investment may be reached upon one condition. Only when your current business model and marketing campaign has already been optimized and reached high level or response rate and efficiency, it is smart to grow your business "in quantity".

The reason for such attitude lies within the next speculation as well. Having inefficient business model under conducting web-site SEO will force growing number of visitors to turn your online business down for good. The obvious reason is that too few people actually return to the site once they left it for any reason, so having low response rate will substantially decrease your SEO result!

Let's draw an example. With previously mentioned 1% response rate from every 100 visitors you get, would mean that 1 visitor only takes desired action. Suppose SEO campaign increased the flow of targeted traffic to 1000. Using children's math we can easily come up with 9 new people, who would start to express their interest in your offer every month.

Now what if your, as some marketers say, "conversion" rate is 10% (10 visitors from every 100) and the SEO helped to bring the same 1000 targeted traffic. You now have 100 "desired actions" per month! In other words, your net SEO achievement is 90 new people. Compare this to 9 people with 1% conversion rate and it all becomes clear. That is why SEO is mainly about quantity, while response rate is mainly about quality.

I haven't intentionally mentioned about high quality of traffic search engines generate. Many experts would probably be skeptical by now for my evening-out the quality of traffic and focusing on quantity only. The explanation is simple - the quality of SE traffic is an Individual parameter.

Unlike many marketing and SE experts I cannot tell you how "quality" visitors coming from SE will be for your particular business as I don't know your present promotion methods. That is why the quality of traffic SEO campaign brings may be neutral, slightly positive or even negative. Yes, it may be negative.

I anticipate a small shock among online marketers, who were taught for their whole internet business career that search engine traffic is the most quality traffic they may have. It is not true under some conditions. If banner or classified ads were the only ways of generating traffic for you, then SEO will surely bring a quality improvement to your business response, on the other hand, imagine, that your present visitors are interested readers of your books, ebooks, reports, articles and other publications. Do you really think that "response quality" of people coming from "Description tag" of your search engine listing will be higher? Hardly, you can surely expect a slight decrease in response rate of SEO campaign, despite the unquestionable quantity growth in accordance with our previous example.

Next vital point is to understand that before anything we, firstly, should have those web-pages, otherwise there would be nothing to optimize. That basic logic will lead to another obvious conclusion. The more theme-based web-pages you have the better SEO result you can achieve. If your online business represented by 3 web-pages (main sales letter, about the author and contacts), your initial SEO "resources" are too weak to reach any substantial goal. SEs look for information, that is why, content rich web-sites may truly enjoy advantages of SEO.

Secondly, your pages should have already been listed in SEs. If you haven't submitted your web-site to SEs yet, no point to optimize the SE listing position you don't have.

An important dilemma every business operator faces is the extent s/he allows to reach in desire to get outstanding SEO results. Here is what I mean. As we all know the basic rule of successful web-site optimization is focusing on keywords with low or very low competition. In other words, the less supply of internet resources for some particular keyword or phrase is, the more chances are for your web-page of being "noticed" and ranked high.

Here is the problem, if you want to get a maximum for your web-site SE position you should be prepared not just to rewrite or edit your web-pages, but to completely change the theme structure and priority of informational content!

There would undoubtedly be web-site sections or pages with extremely high competition that would stress the popularity and importance of that topic, so if you decide to keep it "as is", optimization will raise your listing, but somewhere from 796,021 place to 545,932. Does it help you?

The extent of your "flexibility" and how far you can go to look "pretty" from SE viewpoint is what should be decided beforehand, because there are always 3 parts: you/your business, target market/consumers and search engines/directories, between which about 90% of informational preferences are common, but the rest 10% differ and it is up to you to decide what themes you should focus on. Whenever you are implementing any of the SEO tactics mentioned in this publication, keep in mind your business and consumers' needs.

Having understood these fundamental features of SEO, could we make a step further into a complete web-site search engine optimization, expanding your business to the new markets.

Note that SEO, despite all mentioned above, is all about "asking for high ranking" and there cannot be any results guarantee as no one except for SE developers themselves control ranking algorithm and determine "who is where". More than that, SEO takes much time before effecting your listing positions and this timeframe may range somewhere from week to several months, so don't panic if your optimization efforts haven't resulted in Google #1 position by tomorrow morning.

Structure

Let's start from drawing a scheme of your web-site link structure very similar to one every web-developer draws before designing a web-site. Under other equal conditions, we will speak about later, it is also clear that the more theme based web-pages or even web-site sections you create, the more chances of being ranked high you have, no matter how optimized your competitor's single web-page is.

Each web-page of web-site section should represent a particular theme or topic. This way you can diversify your "keywords market", increasing chances of high rankings. Despite obvious visitors advantage your site is more likely to win market recognition.

For now try to have "horizontal" as well as standard "vertical" link connections between pages. If one of your pages got a high ranking position (Google Page rank) it may help to improve the rankings of web-pages connected to it as well.

Keyword analysis

Next step is to determine keywords, mainly, phrases that we would like to target. Talking about mentioned dilemma, I would like to point to the other approach you should know about, that is suggested by some experts. Let's call it SE-oriented approach.

According to this approach, before creating a web-site your first step implies searching for the best key phrases via competitive analysis on main SE and then starting to develop content around these keywords. It means that your web-site will get highest SE ranking, but the informational richness will be dictated by neither you nor your consumers. Under such conditions it is SE or, to be more specific, your compe tition will determine what kind of content you will have at your web-site. As you see, according to SE-oriented approach, the more competitive some key phrase and based on it topic is, the less attention you should pay to developing that theme at your own site.

My attitude is slightly different. I offer at first to create and evaluate your current web-site content based on your business preferences and your niche-market needs and then optimize those web-pages according to keywords taken from your existed web-pages, no matter how tough the competition may be. Of course, you are free to create new pages around keywords with low competition just for traffic building purposes, but the primary accent should be focused on your business development and marketing needs.

As for the keywords, the basic rule is to choose the most targeted phrases rather than single words for two reasons:

<ul>

<li>Phrases could describe your web-page theme usually more precisely than a word;

<li>Phrases usually have substantially less competition in comparison with one-word.

</ul>

Write down 3-5 the most targeted key phrases for each web-page or section we are going to optimize. Then by evaluating supply/demand ratio find the easiest keywords for SE positioning.

Standard procedure of determining your key phrase competition or, as i said "evaluating supply/demand ratio" is to look at their supply and demand at popular SEs. Supply is determined by results of searching them on SEs while demand can be found through query on PPC programs at Overture.com or Google.com's AdWords that have tool for discovering how many time keywords or phrase have been searched on them.

By doing so we are searching for the most prospective and promising for optimization key phrases. Having them allow us to go further and start optimizing the web-pages themselves.

(to be continued)

About The Author

Pavel Lenshin is a devoted Internet entrepreneur and founder of the entrepreneurship portal, where you can find discounted Internet services, FREE ebooks <a href="http://ASBONE.com/ebooks/" target="_new">http://ASBONE.com/ebooks/</a>, FREE reports <a href="http://ASBONE.com/reports/" target="_new">http://ASBONE.com/reports/</a>, and finally uncover innovative strategies through FREE "NET Business Magazine"

<a href="mailto:info@asbone.com">info@asbone.com</a>

King + Queen = Royal Success

2009-01-18T09:50:00.001-08:00

Ever wonder how or why your competitor gets better search engine rankings than you do? Does he know something you don't? Well, maybe he actually does?And that's where I come in. I'm here to unveil the secret tricks of the trade that may be giving your competitor that much-needed edge in search engine rankings and to show you how you can reclaim your position without skipping a beat. Quite simply, I am going to give you the key to unlocking the secret chest of information that your competition is using to get better rankings.

It is not that difficult. There are two main criteria to getting good rankings:

<li>Content (which is king)

<li>Linking (which is queen)

Content is King

Content is easily viewable and just as easy to measure. It basically includes what you see on the site: the text. If your competition has more text than you, consider increasing yours; if he has more keywords, consider increasing yours; if he has bigger headers, consider increasing yours. By all means, I am not saying to make a carbon copy of his site, but do look at the "on the site" factors that you are lacking and evaluate whether to increase them on your site. A note of caution - make sure that any changes you make actually improves the site and increases its value for your customers. In other words, don't sacrifice quality for quantity unless you believe that the added text actually serves to better the overall look, feel and quality of your site.

Some ideas to increase quality/quantity of content:

<ul>

<li>Write a monthly article about your topic

<li>Write a page about your keyphrase/product/service

<li>If your headers don't have your keyphrase in them, then be sure to add it

<li>Make sure the titles on all your pages relate to the content of the page

<li>Write, write, write (and then write some more!).

</ul>

Linking is Queen

Linking requires more research. Look up your competitions site on Google by typing in: link: <a href="http://www.competitorsdomain.com/" target="_new">http://www.competitorsdomain.com/</a> into the search box (replace competitorsdomain with the URL of your competitor). Now the search results you will be looking at is a list of all the sites that are linking to your competitor. Go through that list, and for each site, figure out how he got that link. Some links might be paid for, some might be link exchanges, some might be directories like dmoz.org or Yahoo, and others might be references or testimonials. Make a spreadsheet with each site linking to your competition, and jot down how he got the link. Then, for each site that is appropriate, get it to link to you. Remember to stay away from link farms and low quality links. Link farms are sites that have nothing but links. Low quality links are sites with little to no content. These sites will often try to exchange links with you: Don't do it! Only link to a site if it will enhance the user experience of your clients.

For more about linking, see my article entitled Linking is Queen: (<a href="http://www.redcarpetweb.com/promotion/0409.html#feature" target="_new">http://www.redcarpetweb.com/promotion/0409.html#feature</a>)

Royal Success

Getting links takes time and patience, and writing is not usually done overnight. To top it off, once these projects are done, you then have to wait for the search engines to discover and re-evaluate your site. Both the link campaign and the writing projects should be something done on a regular basis, not as a one-shot injection. Try to create new pages every month, and to get some links every month. That way your site will make the gradual climb to the top. And who doesn't want that?

About The Author

Shawn Campbell is an enthusiastic player in the ecommerce marketplace, and co-founded Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc. (<a href="http://www.redcarpetweb.com/" target="_new">http://www.redcarpetweb.com/</a>). He has been researching and developing marketing strategies to achieve more prominent listings in search engine results since 1998. Shawn is one of the earliest pioneers in the search engine optimization field. Contact: <a href="mailto:shawn@redcarpetweb.com">shawn@redcarpetweb.com</a>.

DIY SEO - Part 2 Tags n Things

2009-01-17T03:50:00.001-08:00

Part 2 Tips 4 tags

Meta tags are the descriptive tags used by website designers to explain to the search engines exactly what your website is all about. They look like this,

title Put title of your page here, include important keywords /title

meta name="Description" content="Put a short keyword rich description of your site here" /

meta name="Keywords" content="Put your keywords in here" /

meta name="AUTHOR" content="Your name or company name here" /

meta name="COPYRIGHT" content=" Your name or company name here " /

meta name="DISTRIBUTION" content="Global" /

meta name="RATING" content="General" /

meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /

meta name="revisit-after" content="1 Week" /

meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /

Note: the opening and closing brackets have been missed off to make this article compatable for publication.

These tags should be placed inside the HEAD and /HEAD of your page. You don't really need to worry to much about what each one means, just be sure to include lots of keyword rich phrases in the " description" tag and all the carefully chosen keywords in the "keywords" tag. The rest is self-explanatory. Although not all search engines bother with these tags it is important that you include them for the engines that do use them.

You can always get them done free online at http://www.submitcorner.com/Tools/Meta/

The title tag is the important one, it's your shop window if you like. Target the right keywords or phrase as I showed you in part one, (you can still view it http://www.small-website-advice.com/wordpress/) and be sure to include it in your title tag for maximum effect. If every page has a different description in the title tag at the top of the page you can expand the number of searches you can compete for

More tips with tags

Another title tag is the tag you can use after a url such as this

a href="http://made-up-name.com" title="here is the result" target="_blank" The title tag (in between opening and closing tags)

If you hover over the resulting link you will see "here is the result", if this phrase were in your keywords list then this would also count with the search engines. Make the page loads up in a new window by using the "target="_blank" command, that way your visitor stays with you.

Use the "alt" tag that you can use when adding links to pictures, for example;

img src="yourpicture.gif" width="150" height="100" alt="another keyword here"(in between opening and closing tags)

Adding your keywords in these places will add more weight to your site, you should hopefully see an improvement in your position.

Basic Page Design

The first thing about page design is that search engines read web pages from the top left-hand corner down. Why is this important? Well, the placing of your keywords (yep! Them again) is vital, you should have at least one in-between h1 /h1 tags and if possible at the top of the page. As well as this you should have any ads such as google on the right hand side of the page, keeping your content on the left-hand side. An even scattering of keywords in your page text should help and you should have a keyword near the end of the page.

Don't have to many pictures if you can help it, most browsers' only load 4 pictures at a time and this can seriously slow down the page load time and put people off your site. You are better off having pictures on inside pages where your visitors are happier to wait; they do after all want to see your products.

Avoid garish colours, flashing banners and masses of text that you don't need, you don't want to scare your potential customers away or lead them to another person's website via an ad before you get them to view your site.

Most of all you should get you page scrutinised by a friend who is going to be honest with you, or find a forum that will do a constructive site review for you, you can find a forum like this here. The eyes of another person will not be tainted with the same "this is my baby" eyes that you have as the designer.

That's it for now, next time we move on to talk about advertising.

Mark white has been involved in IT for 16 years and has been active in internet marketing and web design for 5 years.

For help and advice please visit <a target="_new" href="http://small-website-advice.com">small-website-advice.com</a>

Can Google Really Deliver Country Specific Searching?

2009-01-16T11:40:00.001-08:00

This is a serious matter, can Google really deliver top quality search results for other countries? The answer so far is "sort of". In this article I will use Canada as an example of the quality or lack of thereof, that is delivered by Google's search results.

Let's take a look at Canadian search results by Google.ca:

When you highlight "Canada" through Google search results and then start searching, you may be surprised at the amount of companies that aren't really Canadian. All of this also applies for the UK and other major markets as well...

In fact, many of the "paid results" come from American companies. Now some would argue that this is to be expected, coming from American companies with large budgets but I would disagree because a lot of the bulk of the "Canadian specific" results are also American companies.

It is quite evident that this is a growing concern with business owners residing in different countries.

As an owner not from the US, I would rather compete with companies that are more local than not, simply because the results would then be relevant. Irrelevant results equal to poor results and less people take the search results seriously when they keep sifting through poor quality results online.

For example; If you highlight "search in Canada" and search for "web design", the top 2 results seem not to be from Canada. This is a serious issue. What if people click on "I'm feeling lucky", they are redirected to a company outside of Canada. The average person won't know what to think about that and may disregard searching through Canadian results any further.

The more content specific the results are, the more people will search through those results. The more people will tell their friends & peers to search through those results. See, as web marketers, we do have the power to create a search term that people get familiar with. Just look at "Blogging". A couple of years ago, if you asked people to search online for "blogging" sites, you would have had a lot of confused faces staring at you. Nowadays, if you search for blogging, there are more than 900,000 results found in Google and to top that off, there is more than enough paid advertisers as well.

What do we see changing in Google?

The #1 thing we are now seeing more and more is search results listing websites with country specific domain name extensions. Here's what I mean by that....

If you were Google and you wanted to deliver better search results for Canada, how would you go about doing that?

I would look at 2 things:

1) Does the domain name end with .ca? (Ex. www.canada.ca)

2) Does the "contact" information about the company match the country - Street, City, Province/State, Country. Are all of these factors listed within the contact page?

These are very important factors, evidenced to the fact that, I see Google weighing your "contact" page higher than anything else within your website other than your front page. So the moral is, make sure to list EXACTLY where it is that you do business within your contact page. Your website will rank higher for local searching when this technique is utilized.

Second, make sure to buy a domain name(s) that is country specific. If you live in Canada, buy a domain with the extension (.ca). If you live in the United Kingdom, make sure to buy a domain name with the extension (.uk). If you live in the US, make sure to buy a domain name with the extension (.us).

You may be asking, what if I don't want to concentrate on just local searching? Create a separate website to target different areas. There is nothing with .com, in fact most people automatically type in .com but, if you truly want to target locally, you have to play locally.

The future of search engines is local searching! We are seeing an increasing amount of evidence to sustain this claim. Targeting locally is a great start and will ultimately help you to target internationally later on!

I hope this article helps you out!

About The Author:

Martin Lemieux is the owner of the Smartads Advertising Network (<a target="_new" href="http://www.smartads.info">http://www.smartads.info</a>). Smartads helps companies to promote their business online and offline through time tested marketing strategies & design.

Read weekly internet marketing tips by Martin Lemieux: <a target="_new" href="http://www.smartads.info/newsletter">http://www.smartads.info/newsletter</a>

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article within your newsletter or website as long as the entire article remains the same, including the author information.

What All Top Google Websites Have in Common

2009-01-16T10:50:00.001-08:00

While it is okay to admire and envy all those sites enjoy top ranking with leading search engines like Google, it is much more important to study these sites closely. You will definitely end up learning a lot that will prove to be very useful in helping you take your own site to the top of Google rankings. Topping the search engines will mean huge volumes of traffic on a daily basis without you having to do anything. Healthy traffic, as you know almost automatically translates itself to healthy revenue for the site. And when you consider that over 75 per cent of the traffic that finds its' way to websites comes from search engines, you quickly realize how important and crucial top rankings in search engines are to any online business.

So what will you be looking for when closely studying some of the top ranking sites? The answer is in the fact these sites have done something right and have certain strengths which millions of other sites all over the world do not have. It will be even more useful if you can find a common thread that links all the top sites.

In this article we will look at two that this writer noticed recently when studying top ranked Google sites.

Very well written, quality, targeted, content

With the hundreds of small details that a webmaster usually has to take care of, it is very easy to forget or downplay the importance of well written quality content. All the handful of top Google sites that I took a closer look at had exceptionally well-written, targeted, quality content. No visible typos or grammatical errors. It is clear that at least Google take into account the quality of writing when ranking websites. This simple observation means that if you make efforts to sustain a high standard in the quality of content on your site, you are already on the right path to higher search engine rankings.

Good quality content will not only bring back your site visitors again and again, but will also trigger word of mouth, and even more important, quality links pointing to your site which are bound to bring loads of traffic.

A Marketing Plan To Get Traffic To Their Websites

All the top ranked Google sites that I studied all had elaborate marketing plans for generating constant and increased traffic to their sites. The majority had affiliate programs. In the offline hey days I remember people used to say that without marketing it did not matter how good your product was, your business would die. The same is very true for any online enterprise today.

Take the time to take a closer look at top ranking websites, study their history and find the secrets they used that you too can apply to your online business.

Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for <a href="http://www.websitesource.com" target="_new">http://www.websitesource.com</a> and <a href="http://www.lowpricedomains.com" target="_new">http://www.lowpricedomains.com</a> with experience in the <a href="http://www.websitesource.com" target="_new">website hosting</a> industry.

SEO 101

2009-01-15T10:20:00.001-08:00

SEO (search engine optimization) is a booming businees these days. Everyone wants to obtain top rankings in google, yahoo, and msn. The problem most SEO companies face is the fact that they forget the basics.

Spiders (robots) love the basics. Spiders will crawl through the web looking for sites that are rich in text. When a spider finds a site rich in text, it will sit down and go to work. Who knows sometimes they even invite other spiders. When you are trying to get listed high in the <a target="_new" href="http://www.ranktips.com">Search Engines</a>, make sure that you have lots of text. After all Content is KING!

The next thing that you need to worry about is how the spider crawls your site. Make sure that you remove all javascript and css. Put your CSS and javascript in external files. Then make sure that you have quality Meta Tags. Many Search Engines still use <a target="_new" href="http://www.ranktips.com/seo-articles">Meta tags</a>, Google still uses the description and title meta tag for its results.

After your meta tags, then check your links. Make sure that you have plenty of internal links so that the search engines can find all of your pages. If you are having a links page you may want to use the "NOFOLLOW" meta tag to prevent loss of PageRank.

Bobby Eubank is a SEO expert. His webssite <a target="_new" href="http://www.ranktips.com">RankTips Free SEO</a> is the source for everything about SEO.

Building Link Popularity As Easy As 123

2009-01-14T17:10:00.001-08:00

The most difficult area of SEO is building link popularity. You may be thinking why? Because there are no easy ways to build link popularity. In this article I will tell you how to get links and how to find them.

First thing you must do is find a web site that you would like to trade links with. How do you find them? You can join link exchanges like <a href="http://www.linkexchangeit.com" target="_new">www.linkexchangeit.com</a> or you can search the search engine with keywords related to your site. Remember RELATED sites only! Let's say your site is about cars, so you would search with keywords like car body repair, car, SUVS, trucks, vans, etc or let's say your site is about games, so you would search with keywords like checkers, card games, chess, online games, etc. Now that you know what to do go and search for sites RELATED to yours and ask for a link exchange.

You could send them this email below if you like.

Dear (Put there name here),

Thanks for taking the time to read my email.

My name is (Put your full name here), I came cross your site today while I was searching on AOL and really like your site. I love the (put something here you like about there site here). Your site and our site is somewhat the same, so I was wondering if you would like to exchange links with our site (put your URL here). Our site is about (put what your site is about here).

By chance is your news section at <a href="http://www.there-web-site-here.com/news.html" target="_new">http://www.there-web-site-here.com/news.html</a> a good place that you could put my link at?

If you have any questions or need anything feel free to contact me at put-email@here.com or call me at (put area code here) 777-7777.

Try to find out the site owner's name and if they have a phone number listed on the site call that number, you will get much better results that way because they know you are not some spamming robot that emails every site they come a cross. Download Google's Toolbar (<a href="http://toolbar.google.com" target="_new">http://toolbar.google.com</a>) to make sure that inbound links are from decent sites, with a minimum of 1 on the toolbar. The higher the PageRank the better. Also remember that your homepage is not the only part of your site that you can get links for, so try to get links to other pages on your site. This will allow robots to spider your site better and have more ways in.

Here is more tips on how to get more links to your site.

1) Link to them first

2) Put no more than 20 links on your links page if you use one.

3) Use categories on your links page.

How To Get Number 1 Spot In Google, Every Time, Guaranteed

2009-01-13T04:50:00.001-08:00

Woaah! Wait a minute. Before I exclusively reveal these insider secrets can I ask you question? Well, actually, I want to ask you a series of questions.

Why do you want to get Number 1 in Google?

"Because it's good to be there isn't it? It means my website is the best out there."

Well, no, it doesn't. Why do you really want to be Number 1 in Google?

"Well, everyone wants to be Number 1 don't they? If I'm right at the top everyone will see my business and customers will come flooding to my website in their thousands."

They might. But it depends what you're top for. Have you thought what you would like to be top for in Google?

"My company, ABC Widgets Limited, comes top in Google when you type in 'ABC Widgets Limited'. That's pretty impressive isn't it?"

No, frankly, it is not. How many other websites do you think are competing for the phrase 'ABC Widgets Limited'? There won't be very many unless there are others out there who share your company name. Why is being top for your company name any use?

"Because people looking for us on Google will find our website".

Big deal. You need to be found by the thousands of people already out there looking for what you provide that don't know your company name. They don't know what you look like. They don't know where you're based. They don't even know you exist! What sorts of search phrases do you think they will be typing in on Google?

"Phrases like 'widget suppliers', 'widget sales online' and things like that?"

Yes - you've got it! But are you listed Number 1 on Google for phrases like that?

"No. We're nowhere to be seen Mike. I think I've been patient enough with you though now answering your questions. Please will you reveal the secrets of getting Number 1 on Google?"

No, I won't.

"Why not?!"

3 Reasons I'm Not Going To Reveal How To Get Number 1 Spot In Google, Every Time, Guaranteed

Reason 1 - There Are No Insider Secrets

Getting a high listing on Google, or any other search engine, is a combination of hard work, having the right phrases on your website, having lots of great content on your website, having lots of other highly-ranked websites linking to you and having your website built in the right way. There are no short-cuts, no magic bullets and no insider-secrets.

Reason 2 - Getting Number 1 on Google Is The Tip Of The Website-Marketing-Iceberg

If you focus on getting Number 1 on Google and nothing else it will never happen. You need to focus on all the other elements I mentioned above and especially on developing reciprocal links with other relevant websites. Remember - the top website marketing experts in the world (who do nothing else but market websites day-in, day-out) only attract around 15% of their website visitors from search engines. This is not because their websites don't have a high ranking in the search engines (because they do and many of them will have that elusive Number 1 spot!) - it's because they attract so much more traffic from other places such as directories, associates' websites, reciprocal links etc.

Reason 3 - It's Too Dangerous

When you were a child how many times did you hear the following phrase?

"Don't put all your eggs in one basket"

And yet day after day I hear people asking how they can get top on Google. There are websites dedicated to 'the art'. People become obsessive about it and many derive their entire livelihood from visitors they get from Google searches. The result? When Google makes a big change to how they rank the websites in their index (which they did in November last year and to a lesser extent in January this year) many of these Google-dependent businesses actually WENT UNDER. That's right - bankrupted because of an over-night change made by the powers that be at Google Towers.

So yes - search engines, and Google in particular, should be an important part of your online marketing mix. But nothing more than that - just one small part of the bigger whole. Especially with recent rumblings from the likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft, who are queuing up to topple Google's throne, you would be wise to set your sights on achieving a medium profile on hundreds of websites rather than a high profile on just one.

Mike Cheney
<a href="http://www.magnet4web.com" target="_new">www.magnet4web.com</a>

About The Author

You can get free access to lots more of my articles plus a FREE Special Report "How To Turn Your Website Into A Customer Magnet" worth a value of ?47 ($85) here: <a href="http://www.magnet4web.com/website_services/?page=freeguide" target="_new">http://www.magnet4web.com/website_services/?page=freeguide</a>

HTML and Search Engine Optimization - What You Dont Know Can Kill You

2009-01-13T02:10:00.001-08:00

When it comes to search engine optimization there is a lot of information available, some accurate, some not. If you really want to know what is going on regarding your website and how to best optimize it for good results with the search engines, you need to do some SEO research. Review the following suggestions and above all get your information verified from a variety of sites, don't just take one site's information as the truth and run with it because you could be running in the wrong direction.

-Frames Equal Death

If you are using frames on your website then your website is dead in the water when it comes to search engines. Frames cannot be indexed by the majority of search engines. Obviously this is bad because you want to be indexed by the search engines so eliminating frames from your website or building a new website without frames should be one of your major goals.

-No HTML Links

If you do not have HTML links on your site, but rather are using an image map from your homepage to your other pages then you might simply be asking the search engines to ignore these other web pages and these more than likely have some of your website's most important information. If you are not using HTML links, start doing so, and bring your web page rankings in the search engines back to life.

-URL

Your URL is important and it is what will direct people to your website. However, if you include a "?" in your URL you are causing problems for many search engines. By using "?" in your URL formatting, you may be ignored and not indexed by the search engines. Do your best to keep the "?" symbol out of your URL and use keywords instead.

-No Links

If you do not have links to your website throughout the Internet, you are not maximizing your website's true potential. To solve this problem, all you have to do is simply get other websites to link to your site. This can easily be done through reciprocal linking and the search engines will pick up your webpages and index them.

-No Keywords

If you do not optimize your website with keywords you will have some major problems when it comes to getting targeted search engine traffic. Search engines use keywords as a method to weigh your website against others so be sure to know your important keywords and include them in the content of your website.

Now that you have some information on search engine optimization and what you need to do to increase your targeted search engine traffic, get started optimizing you website so you can enjoy being ranked higher in the search results and ultimately boost your income.

Michael Turner reveals step-by-step how you can <a target="_new" href="http://www.powertraffictactics.com/">increase search engine traffic</a> in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it now at <a target="_new" href="http://www.powertraffictactics.com/">http://www.powertraffictactics.com/</a>

How I Suddenly Stumbled Onto No.1 In Google and Yahoo Without Search Engine Optimization - So What?

2009-01-13T00:10:00.001-08:00

Sometimes, the search engines act really strange. And this story will prove how I've got top positions (80% on no.1) into the major search engines - such Google, Yahoo!, MSN - without lifting a finger! What is REALLY strange? I did not optimize my page!

But first allow me to give you some backgrounds. Couple of time ago I buy a domain name and hosted into a very reliable server. At that time I intended to build a mini-site around a very powerful service which was released at that period.

I can't remember why at that time I was very busy. So I just write a simple page, insert a few links to the program I promote and upload it. Everything it don't takes me more than 1/2 hours.

That was the beginning. The page stays there for around a month. I remember I post 3-4 messages into some forums and link them to my newest mini-site. That was ALL I can do at that time. But one day I decided to make a little change.

I login to my hosting account and take a look at the stats. Surprise! I saw traffic from Google and Yahoo! What??? I didn't submit my website to the search engines!

What the hell is going on?

I open my WebPosition Gold 2 software and check my website. Geez, my site was there, on no.1 for 3 keyphrases in Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, and take no.1 through no.5 spots on other 2-3 major search engines.

I couldn't belive that was happening to my website, but the evidence was there. It was very hard to believe that I've got no.1 places into the search engine without doing a little optimization. Because my friend, THAT page was NOT optimize for the search engines!

So I said to myself: "That won't last forever. I give one week and I'll saw my website going down because it has no support for all those positions!". Well, it didn't last a week. After only 5 days, my website was vanish. Not a single position into the top 10, not even found on search engines!

OK, what it was it was. For only couple of days (perhaps hours) I was on no.1 spots. It means that I can do it again IF I'll do everything by the book. Despite of general opinion, search engine optimization it's not so hard. If you know what to do, if you take your time to study the right stuff and have patience, there's impossible not to rich the position you desire.

That was fine, but I also plan to go into vacation with my family. It was on July, the weather was great, and we plan this vacation from a long time. My son dream about this vacation, so I said, "Why not? Let's do it!" You know the rest: spend a lot of time for making reservations, baggage, prepare the car for the trip, etcetera. Less time for me to build my website.

So I left my mini-site and going to vacation. Two weeks later when I come back, after settle down the things into the house, I first check my emails. Oh no! - up to 300 emails waiting for me. Check couple of them, get VERRY angry (you must read below website hosting story!) and then take a ride to see my stats.

Total SURPRISE! My website was AGAIN on the no.1 for Google, Yahoo!, MSN... plus positions between no.1 and no.4 on others!

This is my real story. If you spent some time on search engines like I do it, you know this is weird. Not because I was again on top, it's weird I'll get to the top WITHOUT optimization.

Now let me tell you more about this page:

- total words: 864

- links to the affiliate program I promote: 4 (position them from middle to the bottom of the page)

- use the keyphrase mainly from middle to the bottom of the page

- use only a ".gif" picture for my signature (no keywords for "ALT" tag)

- headers at the top of page: 3 (first use font size no.3, the next use H1, and the last H4 tag). NO keywords or keyphrases inside!

- first appear of the keyphrase is on "word" no.100, the next on no.283 (from 864!)

- number of times my keyphrase appear on the body of page: 5

- number of times my keyphrase appear on the links: 3

- my keyphrase is build on 3 words and a number

- no use of META tags

- layout: use 2 tables to design my page, one in other

- couple of short Java scripts at the bottom of page

- use six bullets on the middle of page, two P.S., and a line of copyright, address, and contact info at the bottom of page

- it was uploaded as a home/ index page, NO keywords into my domain name

- I DID NOT announce this page/ website to the search engines!

If I'm right, THIS is not an optimized page. And remember: depending on HOW people will search and what keywords/ keyphrases will use, my competition is between 32 and 2,750,000 and continue to grow!

I hope not a single SEO webmaster will read this issue. Because, in a way, it's outrageous! I didn't do anything to deserve this position. I know people try harder to get top positions. They work a lot to optimize pages, to get relevant links, build content to become search engine friendly, and many other things.

This time it's not my case. But there is a hard lesson here and I want to shear it with you. These days Netpreneurs likes a lot to build one page mini-sites. Those things works and I prove it to you. Beyond the SEO problems and the no.1 spots on major engines, there is something which only a few people will ask you: "So what if you have a no.1 position('s)?"

Most people will aspect a hoard of targeted visitors ready to use their credit cards to buy something they offer, probably their own product/ services or something from an affiliate program or joint venture. Sometimes this is completely wrong! If your keywords are not "hot", chances are that your no.1 spots will drive only couple of visitors. Not to mention sales...

The real Netpreneurs knows that. So if you want to build a mini-site in the next days, think about how many people will come and BUY what you promote. To help you, here's a 6 step plan to build a profitable mini-site:

--> Step no.1: find a "dream" product or service with an affiliate program (or joint venture partner) which pay well.

--> Step no.2: determine if you can use "hot" keywords to promote the program. Use a tool like WordTracker (http://www.internetmarketingprofitscenter.com/wordtracker/), the best service on the Internet for such a job.

Find keywords/ keyphrases with low supply (little competition) but have a higher demand (appear on many searches around the 'Net).

--> Step no.3: get a relevant domain name and host it into a reliable server (try to insert keyword into the name of domain, or think at something close to the product).

--> Step no.4: start building 3-5 pages (build a theme around the product), do SEO and announce your site to the major search engines.

--> Step no.5: concentrate your efforts on getting links from top related websites.

--> Step no.6: once you rich on top and get back your initial investment and something more, determine your ROI and start using pay-per-clicks search engines to boots your profits.

If you follow EXACTLY these steps, chances are that your mini-site will jump on top of search engines and will REALLY drive that particular targeted visitor eager to buy what you promote! Otherwise, you will lamentably fail.

Final thoughts on my search engine story:

By all odds I regret my page is not what I first intend to do. Because, I have to tell you this, my page was just throw away into the cyber-space! The idea was to have something on my index/ home page until I build my website. Has NOTHING to do with my theme idea. That's why I NEVER think at optimization.

But I don't regret too much that I'll have to delete it soon. I learn something very useful: no matter how many top positions you have on the search engines, unless you write a very compelling web page, chances are that you'll have poor visitors. And poor visitors means no sales, no ROI.

(Chances are that, at the moment you read this article, my "magic" web page simply dropped from no.1 positions or I delete it. So don't bother to spend time on find it. You have to believe me! And if you don't, I'll have to PROOF on my computer, as a ".gif" picture.)

Attention Ezine Publishers/ Site Owners
Feel free to reprint this article is its entirety in your newsletter/ ezine or website as long as you leave all links in place, do not alterate the content and include our resource box as listed above. If you do use the material please send us a note so we can take a look. Thanks!

Valeriu S. Popescu is the editor of the "Internet Marketing Profits Newsletter", a gazette dedicated to help new marketers to drive thousands of targeted visitors to their websites or affiliate links. Proven tips, tricks, techniques and strategies revealed every single month! <a target="_new" href="http://www.internetmarketingprofitscenter.com/archive">http://www.internetmarketingprofitscenter.com/archive</a>

Google PageRank Explained

2009-01-12T14:20:00.001-08:00

1. What is PageRank?
Here is what Google says:

" PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

<a target="_new" href="http://www.google.com/technology/">Click here for more... </a>

In other words, PageRank is simply a mechanical algorithm by Google that attempts to evaluate the importance of your website larged based on the amount and quality of backlinks your website have. For the more intellectual crowds out there, check out <a target="_new" href="http://dbpubs.stanford.edu/pub/showDoc.Fulltext?lang=en&doc=1999-66&format=pdf&compression=&name=1999-66.pdf">The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web</a>.

2. How do I check the PR of a webpage?
If you use Internet Explorer, download and install the <a target="_new" href="http://www.google.com/toolbar.html">Google Toolbar</a>. There will be a green ind icator on the toolbar that tells the PR of a particular page. Hovering your mouse over the ind icator will give you a numeric value of the PR. In addition, there are numerous tools out there that will check the PR of a page without the toolbar (do a search on Google). If you use Mozilla Firefox, you can install the <a target="_new" href="http://pagerankstatus.mozdev.org/">PageRank Checker</a> extention.

3. Why do I want a higher PR?
It used to be believed that a higher PR value will give you a higher position in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). However, this is no longer the case. As any experienced webmaster, and even <a target="_new" href="http://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html">Google themselves</a>, would tell you, there are hundreds of factors that determine where your page is displayed in the results.

Google states that they do not recommend webmasters exchange links to increase their PR. They see it as trying to "game" their search engine. Lastly, many people believe that a higher PR causes Googlebot to crawl through a page more often.

4. Is it a good idea to buy links for a higher PR?
Websites with higher PR (6, 7, 8) often make money by selling links to sites with lower PR. As Google states, if they are aware that sites are selling PR instead of just advertising space (how they can differ the two I can't say or if, ind eed, they can), both the buyer and seller may be penalized. The penalty may take the form of a lower position in SERPs and/or a downgrade of PR. Thus, we recommend that you do not buy links simply for a higher PR.

5. But I still would like to improve the PR of my site. What should I do?
First of all, sites don't have PR, pages do. (hence the name PageRank) Therefore, it is possible for an internal page to have a higher PR than the homepage. In order to get PR, the only way is to get links to it. Incoming backlink from a page with a higher PR is more valuable than incoming a backlink from a page with a lower PR. In addition, the PageRank that a link "gives" is spread out between the number of links on the page. For example, a backlink from a PR4 page with only two links on the page can be more valuable than a backlink from a PR7 page with fifty links on the page.

6. How many links would I need to get my homepage to PR7?
The answer to this question varies greatly between different sites. Sometimes a couple links from other PR7 or PR8 pages will do. On the other hand, you may need hundreds of backlinks from PR3 or PR4 pages.

7. I've acquired many backlinks to my site. Why isn't my PR improving?
There are many reasons why you may not be seeing the results. First of all, if you see PR5 for a page, the real PR may be PR5.0000 to PR5.9999. You have no way of knowing the exact PR of your site. Thus, you are simply not seeing the results. Secondly, Google might have done a PR algorithm update. Lastly, the PR of the pages that are giving you incoming backlinks might have changes, thus changing your PR as well.

8. How often do PR change?
Results may vary (a week to six months).

9. Why is my PR in the Google Directory different than my toolbar PR?
Google uses a different scale for measuring PageRank in the Google Directory.

10. Why is it so much harder to go from PR6 to PR7 than from PR5 to PR6?
Google Pa geRank value goes up logarithmically. (i.e. going from PR9 to PR10 may look like the same as going from PR1 to PR2, but is actually 1000 times more difficult). The exact logarithmic scale is unknown, but there has been speculation that it may be around 5. (i.e. going from PR2 to PR3 is 5 times more difficult than going from PR1 to PR2)

11. I just lost all my PR!
Don't panic just yet! Check to see if your PR is white-barred or grey-barred (white or grey in the PR ind icator). If it is white barred, then your PR will probably come back. However, if your PR is greyed, then it means that Google saw your site as having used unethical SEO techniques (e.g. selling/buying PR, keyword stuffing). Also, Google sees http://example.com/abc.htm and http://www.example.com/abc.htm as two different pages. In this case, the PR of the page is spread between these two UR Ls.

12. If PR is virtually useless, then why is it so expensive to "buy"?
Over the years there have been many misconceptions about PR. Sites with higher PR claim that PR is valuable so that they can make more money selling links. Gradually, the misconceptions quietly built up.

13. What's up with the PageRank formula I see on the Net?
You may have seen a formula to determine PR. I cannot say that the formula is untrue, but it's the implementation of the formula that is in question. Just remember, the Internet is NOT all about PageRank!

Tony Zhu is the owner of an <a target="_new" href="http://www.inawhim.com/">online business resource website</a>, InaWhim.com, the largest free resource center for the new and experienced home business owner. At InaWhim.com, you will find <a target="_new" href="http://www.inawhim.com/surveys.html">massive listings of paid survey companies</a>, products with free resell rights, exclusive quality articles, friendly community, and much more. Everything FREE!

Goofy Mistakes that Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings

2009-01-12T07:50:00.000-08:00

One thing is for sure, you don't want to spend hours, perhaps days, months, or years on a website to have some stupid little mistake get your site dropped or never even listed in the search engines. There are a lot of rules that search engines have created to block out what they call spammers, so don't kid yourself by telling yourself you are not an evil spammer. As the courts might say, ignorance of the law is no excuse. So what kind of horrific mistake could sneak upon you and possibly ruin all your hard work?

When I first starting making web pages, I created basic templates that I used for an entire site. Of course it's great to have a uniformed look for your site, but what if you had a screw up on a template you used over and over again. What kind of screw up? How about hidden text or a hidden link? You see the old WYSIWIG editors, like the older versions of FrontPage sometimes leave behind links within the html code even after you've deleted the link. As far as hidden text, that can happen by not paying attention to what you are doing. If you make hundreds of pages eventually you might accidentally color some of your text the same as your background. You say it's not likely. I wouldn't think so either, but it's happened to me several times. If you use the mistake ridden template over and over again, you might have a problem. It's generally understood that search engines frown on hidden text and links. How many will they overlook is anybody's guess. So if you haven't checked your old web pages, it might be profitable to check out your html code. Look for urls with no link text in the code. You can usually find hidden text by simply highlighting your webpage in your browser.

Solutions

If you find out you have the problem over hundreds or thousands of pages, it might be worth investing in Microsoft FrontPage 2003. It has a split screen that helps in finding html errors, and best of all you can do a site wide search and replace. The software will find the code you search for, and all you have to do is leave the replacement code box blank, thus removing the offending hidden link.

The good news is that there are some other ways to avoid this problem altogether. You can learn CSS for template designs for instance. A trick I like to use is Server Side Includes (SSI) for my links menu. To make it work you have to have two things, a code like this [an error occurred while processing this directive] with your links menu page inside the code, and your server has to be set to take it. Most servers are automatically set to use SSI includes in shtml pages, but most web hosts allow you to pick .html or .htm pages to parse. The only thing to keep in mind is it puts an extra task for the server to perform on each and every page that contains the extension you choose to parse. For example one of my web hosts has in their control panel a apache handler section. I simply go there put server-parsed in the Handler box, .htm in the extension box, and click add. That's it. Now if I need to add a link to my menu I change one page the menu.htm page and I'm done.

Webmaster of <a target="_new" href="http://webmastertips.us/">WebmasterTips.US - Free scripts, articles, & web hosting reviews</a>

Great Site Ranking in Google The Secrets Out

2009-01-11T10:20:00.001-08:00

How many years did you register your domain name for? If it was only one then Google could hold that against you.

Why?

Because the majority of Spam websites only register a domain name for one year. A domain name registered for a longer period implies that the owner is more likely to be legitimate and serious about their web site.

This is just one of the unusual factors possibly considered by Google when indexing and ranking a website. Factors you could never even have guessed at in some cases.

How do I know this?

Google have recently made public, March 31 2005, the contents of their filing of United States Patent Application 20050071741.

In which many of the search giants secret ranking criteria is revealed and it makes very interesting reading. You must read this if you are serious about ranking well in Google. The days of Spaming Google are drawing to a close. With this patent they reveal just how hard they're coming down on Spam sites. You Do Not want to get caught out.

Listed below you will find the hard facts, I recommend you bookmark this page now. You will need to reference it each time you optimize a new site.

? Links.

It's common knowledge that Google relies heavily on inbound relevant links to rank a site. Now they explain exactly how it works.

As well as the number, quality and anchor text factors of a link. Google seems to also consider historical factors. Apparently the Google 'sandbox' or aging delay begins count down the minute links to a new site are discovered.

Google record the discovery of a link, link changes over time, the speed at which a site gains links and the link life span.

With this in mind fast link acquisition may be a strong indicator of potential search engine Spam.

Gone are the days of pages and pages full of links. You must grow your links slowly to stay below the radar and be careful who you exchange links with. That means no more buying hundreds of links at once or other underhand tactics.

PR is now very valuable.

Your link anchor text should vary but remain consistent with your site content. No more using your main keywords on every link exchange you gain. That's 'anchor Spam'. Instead vary them around your top five to ten keywords.

Link exchanges are still very important but you must work and utilize them ethically. If you don't and you get caught the recovery from a ban can be months in coming and your host and IP may also be recorded.

Softly softly seems to be the message. The fact is fewer but better quality links will benefit you more anyway and they will be much more likely to long-term which is good to.

? Site click through rates (CTR)

CTR may now be monitored through cache, temporary files, bookmarks and favorites via the Google toolbar or desktop tools. Many have suspected for some time that sites are reward for good CTR with a raise in ranking. Similar to how Adwords works.

CTR is monitored to see if fresh or stale content is preferred for a search result.

CTR is also analyzed for increases or decreases relating to trends or seasons.

? Web page rankings are recorded and monitored for changes.

? The traffic to a web page is recorded and monitored over time.

? Sites can be ranked seasonally. A ski site may rank higher in the winter than in the summer. Google can monitor and rank pages by recording CTR changes by season.

? Bookmarks and favorites could be monitored for changes, deletions or additions.

? User behavior in general could be monitored.

As Google is capable of tracking traffic to your site you should closely monitor the small amount of copy returned in search results. Ideally you want to integrate a call to action in there to increase your listings CTR.

Clicks away from your site back to the search results are also monitored. Make your site as sticky as possible to keep visitors there longer. As mentioned above it may also help if you could get your visitors to bookmark you.

? The frequency and amount of page updates is monitored and recorded as is the number of pages.

Mass updates of hundreds of files will see you pop up on the radar.

On the other hand few or small updates to your site could see your rankings slide. Unless your CTR is good. A stale page that receives good traffic may hold it's own and not require an update. So don't update for the sake of it.

Depending on your market fresh content may not be a requirement. If the information your pages contain does not go out of date then updating may not be necessary. If your market is more news based for example then changes regularly are a must. In general changes don't necessarily have to mean fresh content. They could involve simple edits to current content.

A further indicator that Google is really cracking down on Spam is made clear in the following extract from the Patent. Mention is made of changing the focus of multiple pages at once.

Here's the quote - "A significant change over time in the set of topics associated with a document may indicate that the document has changed owners and previous document indicators, such as score, anchor text, etc., are no longer reliable.

Similarly, a spike in the number of topics could indicate Spam. For example, if a particular document is associated with a set of one or more topics over what may be considered a 'stable' period of time and then a (sudden) spike occurs in the number of topics associated with the document, this may be an indication that the document has been taken over as a 'doorway' document.

Another indication may include the sudden disappearance of the original topics associated with the document. If one or more of these situations are detected, then [Google] may reduce the relative score of such documents and/or the links, anchor text, or other data associated the document."

There's still more to look out for:-

? Changes in on page keyword density is monitored and recorded as are changes to anchor text.

? The domain name owner address is considered, most likely to help in a local search result.

? The technical and admin contact details are checked for consistency. These are often falsified for Spam domains.

? Your hosts IP address. If you are on a shared server it's possible somebody else on that server is using dirty tactics or Spaming. If so your site will suffer since you share the same IP.

The impression I get here is that Google have learned from the Spam 'attack' they suffered in early 2004 and they are determined to eradicate it from their listing results.

So what do you do?

There's a lot to take onboard here and consider. But you can't go far wrong with your SEO if you try to grow your site as organically as possible.

If you know what you are doing you can take short cuts. Carry on with link exchanges but consider each site carefully and slow down in your gathering of them. Vary your anchor text. Add small amounts of good quality content to your site regularly. Check your search engine listings and edit your site to include a call to action in them if possible. Make your site more 'sticky' to encourage visitors to stay a while. Encourage visitors to Bookmark your site. Oh and register new domain names for at least two years.

Before you do anything remember to reference the above info first. It may just save you months of misery as your site gets banned and 'Sand boxed'.

Overall keep it ethical and you can't go far wrong. Do not be tempted to Spam. Stick to the guidelines above and you are much more likely to outlast and out rank your competition.

About the Author
Darren Yates is owner of <a href="http://www.how-to-make-money-online.info" target="_blank">How-to-make-money-online.info</a> a site focused on Making Money Online and Internet Marketing, listing the many and varied ways of making money online. Featuring, resources, thousands of Internet Marketing articles and useful links.

This article comes with reprint rights. You are free to reprint and distribute it as you like. All that we ask is that you do not make any changes, that this resource text is include, and that the link above is intact.

Search Engine Optimization Tips For 2005 - Part Three

2009-01-11T09:30:00.001-08:00

Welcome to part three of our series of articles on search engine optimization. In the third and final part of our series of articles on search engine optimization we cover the topic of links, the types of links and what makes them so important.

Links<BR> Links, links, links. Everybody wants people to link to their websites. Why? The truth is that high quality links to your website are important as regards search engine popularity. The question everbody asks though is "... yeah that's great but how do I get people to link to my site?"

Well firstly there are three different types of links:

Reciprocal<BR> A reciprocal link is when you find a site that you want to get a link from. You place a link to this website on your resources page. You then email the webmaster of the other site and ask for a link in return. The webmaster can then either accept or decline your request.

This is a very hit-and-miss process. If you make 100 reciprocal link requests you may only get 5 links. It's also very time consuming but can be worthwhile if you get a few strong links from it. These links can "lead" the search engines directly to your site and get you indexed faster.

One note is to never name your links page "links". Call it resources. Call it related sites but never call the page "links". Some search engines frown on this. Also try to avoid the automated reciprocal linking software packages - personally I delete any request received from users of these packages without even reading it. Most other website owners will too.

Non-Reciprocal<BR> A non-reciprocal link is where you ask another website to link to yours but you don't offer to link to them in return. Unless you have a truly massive and popular website this is not a request you can make very often . Don't expect website owners to fall over themselves offering free links to your brand new site. Very few people can ask for a non-reciprocal link and make it happen. One possible way of getting this type of link is to offer some kind of freebie in return. A free ebook or some other incentive might just work.

Organic<BR> An organic link is a non-reciprocal link that you never ask for. Organic links happen when webmasters link to your site simply because it's a great resource and it offers value to their visitors too. This all ties in with the point made earlier of writing useful content. Give people a reason to come back to your site and they will. Not only will they come back but they'll link to your site for free without being asked. These are the best possible kind of links because you don't need to go looking for them.

Having other sites linking to yours proves the importance of your site to the search engines. If the content on your site is so valuable that other site owners want to link to it then it must be important. That's the foundation of Googles approach to website popularity and let's face facts Google know what they're doing.

There are other methods to get links to your site but that again goes beyond the scope of this article.

Well I hope you enjoyed what you've read in Parts 1, 2 and 3. These articles will provide you with the basic knowledge you need but there's lots more to learn if you want to be truly successful in the search engines.

This article was provided courtesy of Search Engine Fuel where you'll find tons of information on getting <A target="_new" HREF="http://www.search-engine-fuel.com">affortable search engine optimization</A>

Quick Keyword Research that Works!!!

2009-01-10T05:10:00.001-08:00

Keywords are terms or words related to particular topic. Keyword research involves various aspects, for example; to find sales oriented keywords or to drive maximum qualified users to increase the online sales.

Sound keyword research is the first step toward successful search engine optimisation campaign. We have to be careful while selecting keywords. It is tricky to select target keywords for a website. Keyword selection should be always based on various aspects like product names, services, company name, brands, features and general terms. People always forget about targeting geographical terms when they have global presence and provide offsite offerings.

While doing keyword research it is always recommended to do a thorough market research and competitive analysis to find best keywords used by search engine visitors to find products and services online and what keywords are targeted by your competitors who are doing well in online marketing.

First step to find best target keyword is make list of topics, products and services offered by you. You can also make use of website logs to know which keyword has brought you the traffic and conversions in the past. Always do research on competitor's website which keyword they are targeting and which keywords rank well for their website.

Select such keyword which clearly defines your business and product to drive qualified traffic from search engines. There are some websites which get high traffic through general keywords but they might not convert into sales.

Today search engine users are aware of the usage of search engines, for searching products and services online. They always look for better services, discounts, geographical locations etc. Cover all possible terms for each; products, services with geographical locations.

There are tools available which help your identify keywords suitable for your business, such as WordTracker, Overture and other various to assist you in keyword research. But the challenge is, which keyword is the best one to get you qualified traffic. You can make use of statistics like count, KEI, competition to determine the best keywords.

Common tendency is to select most popular keywords having high competition on search engines. There are factors which play a crucial role for getting high rankings for popular keywords, such as content, page rank, link popularity and age of your website in search engines indexes. When you are starting with a new website or fresh search engine optimization campaign, always go for less competitive keywords to get a reasonable traffic, as a start. Once you start getting traffic you get a better idea on selection of popular keyword in logical terms. Always cover general terms, broad terms, geographical terms, short forms, misspelling, and thesaurus and your own innovation to find best keywords.

Search engine optimization experts at SEO Internet Marketing Corporation follows well defined standard to find best keyword for website optimization and Pay Per Click Campaigns. Our internal process makes use of in depth market research and use of statistical data like Count, KEI, Competition while selecting best keywords. Our aim is not to target high traffic but to target quality traffic using sales oriented keywords.

Popular keyword research tools:

https://adwords.google.com/select/m...=KeywordSandbox
http://inventory.overture.com/d/sea...ory/suggestion/
http://www.wordtracker.com/
http://www.gorank.com/seotools/ontology/
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
http://www.espotting.com/popups/keywordgenbox.asp
http://www.goodkeywords.com/

Click here to get free search engine ranking keywords to know your strength in various search engines.

SEO Internet Marketing Corporation offer extensive keywords research and analysis reports for search engine optimisation and PPC Campaigns.

URL:http://www.seo-internet-marketing.com.au
Email: info@seo-internet-marketing.com.au

Ashish Mehta - D.Bus, B.Bus, G.D.Bus, G.C.Info.Mgmt.Sys. - SEO Internet Marketing Corporation Australia

How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate? Part 1

2009-01-10T02:20:00.001-08:00

Question 1.

What do you mean by conversion? Do you mean getting someone to answer the simplest call to action such as "read more here" or actually selling a product or service?

What you're talking about here are two different ways to measure your website. "Read More Here" is what I would call a variable affecting your conversion rate. I call these kinds of variables "Micro Conversions" because they are all small (microscopic even) steps toward a full conversion. A micro conversion is something that you should test and measure. "Read More Here" might get a worse click-through rate than "Click here to find out how to win a month's supply of vintage wine." So by improving this click through, you get the person browsing to take another small step toward your final website goal. By doing this, you improve your overall conversion rate, which in this case is to get someone to register or subscribe to win a month's supply of vintage wine. Micro conversions can be tracked by measuring the click through of links, or the read time for content, or the bounce rate for headlines and copy. Full conversion is persuading your visitors to do what you want them to do. In my example, it would be registering to win wine, but it could be subscribe to a newsletter, download an audio file, buy a product, sell a service or whatever, but it should reflect what your website's business objective is.

Question 2.

What strategies would you suggest when there is no "online" conversion possible? I need them to call me for more info, to learn more and to eventually give them a proposal.

There is no such thing as "no online conversion". You're looking for leads who will eventually phone you but the visitor is the one with the power. If you don't give your visitors a reason to let you continue to have a dialog with them, then they won't. Using opt-in is one answer. If, for instance, you ask for a name, email address and telephone number from your visitor so that he can then get useful information from you in the form of a free report or audio file, you do two things. First, you qualify the visitor as someone who is interested in your services, and second, you get permission to contact him/her again. You need to build into your website a powerful reason for your visitors to give you permission to email or talk to them rather than expect someone to pick up the phone. In your case, you say they need to ring you to learn more. Put what they need to learn into some form that they can opt in to get, such as a white paper, report or audio file. Then you have a conversion rate that is the percentage of people who give you permission to continue the dialog with them by giving you their email address or phone number so that they can learn more about your offering. People visit a website to get information, so give them the means to get it.

Question 3.

What if the product you sell is also sold by several others on other websites? How do you get someone who is browsing the Internet to notice your site and want to order from you?

In offline marketing, a successful tactic is differentiation. It's no different online. If you stand out from your competition, then you get noticed. What makes you different (not necessarily better, just different) from your competition? A USP makes an enormous difference to conversion rates. We improved subscriptions by 11% per month for six months by differentiating ourselves. The second point is that your site should be of use to your visitor. The one thing that all people online have in common is that when they browse they are looking for information. So give your visitors what they want in the form of education. If your potential customers become educated about your offer and take away something useful from your website, they will remember you over your competition.

Question 4.

How do you get the address, telephone number and name of the owner of any company that you're trying to get in touch with to see if they would be interested in what you sell?

You need to get permission from the visitor to get that information. It can't be done with any tracking tools available. There is a very good reason for this and it's called privacy. If you or I went online and could have our names, addresses and phone numbers tracked by software, it could be potentially dangerous. Imagine if you were online and were talking in a chat room about going on holiday in a faraway land for the next few weeks and your personal information could be gathered. The person who sees that information then knows when to go to your address and rob you while you're away. It's OK to track browser behavior because no personal details are ever tracked. I for one hope it stays that way.

Question 5.

What should one look for in the web logs to determine conversion rates?

Web log files are a problem because they record everything. Web logs record every request to your site's pages from search engine indexes, to email harvester software, link harvesters and visitors. So first you need to filter out from log files the information that isn't relevant to visitors. Then you're looking for unique visitors (not visits) or unique sites. Once you have that filtered figure, you have the approximate number of visitors coming to your site, still not close to 100% because of proxy servers recording multiple visitors as one browser, but it's as close as you can get with log files. Then you divide the number of people who complete the conversion action by the total visitors. That is your conversion rate. If you can get software that doesn't use logs like IRIS Metrics or log software that works out the filtering like Web Trends, it makes your job much easier.

Question 6.

What factors have the biggest impact on conversions on my web site?

The short answer is differentiation, target marketing, your site's relevance to your desired audience, measurement, experimentation, and most importantly trust.

Differentiation is the first step in the process. You must find a way to stand out from the competition. It should start with the domain name, and continue throughout your entire website's strategy.

Then in your content, your copy and your design, you must smack your target audience between the eyes. You have to find out exactly what it is they want and answer the wants and needs of that audience.

Relevance is hugely important, too. If you're running a campaign on Overture or Google with certain keywords, your audience should land at exactly the right place after typing those keywords and finding your website. So if the audience types "Red Vintage Wine" into Overture and your link appears, on clicking through they should be taken to the page on your site talking all about and selling red vintage wine. They shouldn't land at the home page of your website which has a small link to the red vintage wine section and 5 or 6 other types of wine for sale.

Measuring and experimenting is then the key to improving conversion rates. You can't improve conversion without measurement unless you're making educated guesses or you're just plain lucky. So get a good measurement system, learn what it's all about, and test your changes.

Finally and most importantly trust. You can't sell anything if your audience doesn't trust you. You can help them to trust you by prominently displaying your privacy policy, your shipping procedure, the fact that you use SSL encrypted protection for the forms on your site, that hundreds of satisfied customers have already bought from your store, that you make it very easy to find contact information such as a name and address as well as support via email. You could educate via your website with articles and 'how to sections' or newsletters and instill trust over time. In short, your prospect must trust you to part with his or her money.

What's next?

In part two of this series, we'll be looking at measurement software tools, the pros and cons of logs versus ASP vendors, average conversion rates, why it helps to track visitor activity using the software which is available, and what you should test and tweak to improve conversion rates.

Steve Jackson is CEO of Aboavista, editor of The Conversion Chronicles and a published writer. You can get a free copy of his e-book sent to you upon subscription to the Chronicles web site (<a target="_new" href="http://www.conversionchronicles.com">http://www.conversionchronicles.com</a>).

One Way Linking Campaigns II

2009-01-09T22:20:00.001-08:00

There is a way to generate links with the content that you have not as yet created. For this contact the established authorities (writers, publishers ) in your domain area & let them know that you are available as a resource for researching & writing on any topic from the chosen domain. When they will use you they will credit you for it. Also submit your articles to them. If they ever quote you they will link to you & the added advantage will be that their articles will get published in good places. Imagine an incoming link to your site from TIME or NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC.

What if you don't have great content writing skills or the necessary expertise. Then do the next best thing. Ask for permission from writers to host their content on your site in exchange from link from it. So, if you are able to create a good selection of articles people will still link to you for a good compilation.

Now to the next step of creating one way links:

Apart from content you can use other free available downloads from your site as the carrot for people to link to you. This free carrot can be a good software tool relating to your domain or an ebook (content again) etc. If people perceive value in what you are offering chance are they will reciprocate by linking to you. Another way to leverage this free download scheme is to get listed in the directories & portals which offer a listing of freeware on the net. Search the SE using keyword freeware directories. Or shareware directories

You can possibly start with

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Freeware/Directories/

or http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Freeware/Download_Locations/.

Or http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/WWW/Free_Stuff/Link_Pages/.

Or http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Shareware/Directories/

Survey the products & services in your domain. Pick up the good ones & write reviews for it. Then submit those reviews to the concerned site/s. More often then not they will use it while providing a link back to you for the credits.

Another way of getting some links is to hold a contest or host sweepstakes on your site. Once you have this in place get it listed with the directories which offer free contests & games listings. You can search SE for contest directories or start from here

http://directory.google.com/Top/Games/Gambling/Contests_and_Sweepstakes/Directories/

All this is effective when you are creating content or giving something free or reviewing someone elses' offering. However there are ways to create one way links which are different than the abovementioned strategies. This entails leaving your footsteps where ever you go. In simpler terms keep your signature file ready( with a hyperlink) & then post it wherever possible.

Whenever you visit a site, write a comment in the guest book with your signature file.

Post messages on the forums or some chat rooms relating to your topic with hyperlink built in ( check which forums allow that).

Post messages in the usenet newsgroups with hyperlink. For selecting the right newsgroup to send a message you can search with your prime keyword on google groups.

Always remember to have your signature file in your email.

Another way of creating one way incoming links into your site is by either starting an online award category or by participating in an award category.

If you are an award giver the recipient will place your gif file(with hyperlink in it) on his site. If you win an award you will link to the award site & they in turn generally link to you.

Another play is to book additional space/ additional url on any other server & create a small site on it(related to your topic area with some unique content) & link it to the original site. A variation of this is to create a blog ( search SE for blog ) or start here

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/Tools/?tc=1 .

Link this blog to your web site.

Another long winding however effective way to create incoming links is to host affiliate programs or launch banner exchange programs or launch a web ring program from your site. People who will sign up will have links pointing to your site from theirs. However this approach does take time & efforts to bear fruit.

In almost all these variations one of the most important parameters you can control is the anchor text.

These are just some of the methods that you can undertake profitably.

Once you are done with your one way linking campaign, its time to start with reciprocal linking campaigns

Do You Submit Your Website To All The Search Engines?

2009-01-09T18:50:00.001-08:00

So don't pay for directory submission many directories will bring you no traffic at all.

Here is the #1 tip to getting into Google. Get people to link to your site. In particular links form site that are in Google already.

INTERNET SHOCKER!

You have to read the stunning details for yourself:
<a href="http://www.acceleratedinternetprofits.com" target="_new">http://www.acceleratedinternetprofits.com</a>

About The Author

Internet Marketer and Consultant that lives in Texas. His Current project is at <a href="http://acceleratedinternetprofits.com" target="_new">acceleratedinternetprofits.com</a>

<a href="mailto:support@acceleratedinternetprofits.com">support@acceleratedinternetprofits.com</a>

Playing in Googlebots Sandbox with Slurp, Teoma, & MSNbot - Spiders Display Differing Personalities

2009-01-09T18:40:00.001-08:00

There has been endless webmaster speculation and worry about the so-called "Google Sandbox" - the indexing time delay for new domain names - rumored to last for at least 45 days from the date of first "discovery" by Googlebot. This recognized listing delay came to be called the "Google Sandbox effect."

Ruminations on the algorithmic elements of this sandbox time delay have ranged widely since the indexing delay was first noticed in spring of 2004. Some believe it to be an issue of one single element of good search engine optimization such as linking campaigns. Link building has been the focus of most discussion, but others have focused on the possibility of size of a new site or internal linking structure or just specific time delays as most relevant algorithmic elements.

Rather than contribute to this speculation and further muddy the Sandbox, we'll be looking at a case study of a site on a new domain name, established May 11, 2005 and the specific site structure, submissions activity, external and internal linking. We'll see how this plays out in search engine spider activity vs. indexing dates at the top four search engines.

Ready? We'll give dates and crawler action in daily lists and see how this all plays out on this single new site over time.

* May 11, 2005 Basic text on large site posted on newly purchased domain name and going live by days end. Search friendly structure implemented with text linking making full discovery of all content possible by robots. Home page updated with 10 new text content pages added daily. Submitted site at Google's "Add URL" submission page.

* May 12 - 14 - No visits by Slurp, MSNbot, Teoma or Google. (Slurp is Yahoo's spider and Teoma is from Ask Jeeves) Posted link on WebSite101 to new domain at Publish101.com

* May 15 - Googlebot arrives and eagerly crawls 245 pages on new domain after looking for, but not finding the robots.txt file. Oooops! Gotta add that robots.txt file!

* May 16 - Googlebot returns for 5 more pages and stops. Slurp greedily gobbles 1480 pages and 1892 bad links! Those bad links were caused by our email masking meant to keep out bad bots. How ironic slurp likes these.

* May 17 - Slurp finds 1409 more masking links & only 209 new content pages. MSNbot visits for the first time and asks for robots.txt 75 times during the day, but leaves when it finds that file missing! Finally get around to add robots.txt by days end & stop slurp crawling email masking links and let MSNbot know it's safe to come in!

* May 23 - Teoma spider shows up for the first time and crawls 93 pages. Site gets slammed by BecomeBot, a spider that hits a page every 5 to 7 seconds and strains our resources with 2409 rapid fire requests for pages. Added BecomeBot to robots.txt exclusion list to keep 'em out.

* May 24 - MSNbot has stopped showing up for a week since finding the robots.txt file missing. Slurp is showing up every few hours looking at robots.txt and leaving again without crawling anything now that it is excluded from the email masking links. BecomeBot appears to be honoring the robots.txt exclusion but asks for that file 109 times during the day. Teoma crawls 139 more pages.

* May 25 - We realize that we need to re-allocate server resources and database design and this requires changes to URL's, which means all previously crawled pages are now bad links! Implement subdomains and wonder what now? Slurp shows up and finds thousands of new email masking links as the robots.txt was not moved to new directory structures. Spiders are getting errors pages upon new visits. Scampering to put out fires after wide-ranging changes to site, we miss this for a week. Spider action is spotty for 10 days until we fix robots.txt

* June 4 - Teoma returns and crawls 590 pages! No others.

* June 5 - Teoma returns and crawls 1902 pages! No others.

* June 6 - Teoma returns and crawls 290 pages. No others.

* June 7 - Teoma returns and crawls 471 pages. No others.

* June 8-14 Odd spider behavior, looking at robots.txt only.

* June 15 - Slurp gets thirsty, gulps 1396 pages! No others.

* June 16 - Slurp still thirsty, gulps 1379 pages! No others.

So we'll take a break here at the 5 weeks point and take note of the very different behavior of the top crawlers. Googlebot visits once and looks at a substantial number of pages but doesn't return for over a month. Slurp finds bad links and seems addicted to them as it stops crawling good pages until it is told to lay off the bad liquor, er that is links by getting robots.txt to slap slurp to its senses. MSNbot visits looking for that robots.txt and won't crawl any pages until told what NOT to do by the robots.txt file. Teoma just crawls like crazy, takes breaks, then comes back for more.

This behavior may imitate the differing personalities of the software engineers who designed them. Teoma is tenacious and hard working. MSNbot is timid and needs instruction and some reassurance it is doing the right thing, picks up pages slowly and carefully. Slurp has addictive personality and performs erratically on a random schedule. Googlebot takes a good long look and leaves. Who knows whether it will be back and when.

Now let's look at indexing by each engine. As of this writing on July 7, each engine also shows differing indexing behavior as well. Google shows no pages indexed although it crawled 250 pages nearly two months ago. Yahoo has three pages indexed in a clear aging routine that doesn't list any of the nearly 8,000 pages it has crawled to date (not all itemized above.) MSN has 187 pages indexed while crawling fewer pages than any of the others. Ask Jeeves has crawled more pages to date than any search engine, yet has not indexed a single page.

Each of the engines will show the number of pages indexed if you use the query operator "site:publish101.com" without the quotes. MSN 187 pages, Ask none, Yahoo 3 pages, Google none.

The daily activity not listed in the three weeks since June 16 above has not varied dramatically, with Teoma crawling a bit more than other engines, Slurp erratically up and down and MSN slowly gathering 30 to 50 pages daily. Google is absent.

Linking campaign has been minimal with posts to discussion lists, a couple of articles and some blog activity. Looking back over this time it is apparent that a listing delay is actually quite sensible from the view of the search engines. Our site restructuring and bobbled robots.txt implementation seems to have abruptly stalled crawling but the indexing behavior of each engine displays distinctly differing policy by each major player.

The sandbox is apparently not just Google's playground, but it is certainly tiresome after nearly two months. I think I'd like to leave for home, have some lunch and take a nap now.

Back to class before we leave for the day kiddies. What did we learn today? Watch early crawler activity and be certain to implement robots.txt early and adjust often for bad bots. Oh yes, and the sandbox belongs to all search engines.

Mike Banks Valentine is a search engine optimization specialist who operates <a target="_new" href="http://WebSite101.com">http://WebSite101.com</a> and will continue reports of case study chronicling search indexing of <a target="_new" href="http://Publish101.com">http://Publish101.com</a>

Reciprocal Link Exchange Management Software

2009-01-09T16:40:00.001-08:00

When shopping online for Link Management Software that can help create and automate your links directory, some important features that you should look for are as follows:

The software should, <ul> <li> Create the links page based on your own template.
<li> Allow addition or removal of links at the click of a button and have the links page rebuilt.
<li> Allow webmasters to submit their site.
<li> Notify you when a webmaster has submitted their site and give you the option of accepting or rejecting their submission. .
<li> Automatically check whether link partners linked back to you.
<li> Help to automate the process of finding new partners.
<li> Be easy to install.
</li></li></li></li></li></li></li></ul>

The key to success for a website or online business is good search engine ranking. All of the major search engines use link popularity to determine how well a site will rank so the more high quality, relevant links that lead to your site, the higher it will rank.

There are a number of link management software scripts on the market but the one that I really enjoy using is LinkMachine. This is a relatively new link exchange management software that does not require an mySQL database and is very extremely to install. This software makes it very easy to find and contact quality link partners, generate custom link pages that match your site, and keep track of reciprocal links. LinkMachine automatically updates your link pages the instant they're changed - no uploading required. Link exchanges increase a site's targeted traffic, search engine ranking, and sales.

LinkMachine finds hundreds of popular, relevant sites to potentially exchange links with. Invite the webmasters of these sites to exchange links, using LinkMachine's fast e-mail templates. Generate custom link pages that perfectly match the look of your site. And keep track of each reciprocal link to your site.

LinkMachine is a Php application that runs on your web server. So it can automatically update your link pages the moment a change is made - no need to upload files each time a new link is added.

There is a free 10 day trial and a 30 day money back guarantee.

Ken Austin
<a target="_new" href="http://www.linkmachine.net/trk.php?ID=224">Install LinkMachine Free</a>
<a target="_new" href="http://www.gdrmarketing.com">Take your internet marketing to new heights</a>

Googles Back Door... Get Your Website Indexed Quicker!

2009-01-09T01:10:00.001-08:00

It's the buzz word's going across the internet marketing guru's strategy platform at the moment?Google's Sitemap to index your web pages within days if not hours.

This new system will revolutionize how marketers will now be able to submit an xml file of their website pages direct to Google and work along side the mega giant search engine to provide detailed information regarding the total amount of your websites pages and how often they are updated.

Googles aim is to cut down the time and sheer volume load of work its spiders has to perform to keep its search engine listings up to date with all the current websites that are evolving on an ever-increasing daily basis.

This of course allows all "savvy marketers" a great opportunity to index their web pages with the full permission of Google and therefore get an immediate presence and earning potential far quicker than was ever previously possible.

Of course processing an xml file of your website and its pages may have presented a problem for most marketers, however even this problem has now been overcome with the latest software offerings.

So if you're looking to get your web pages indexed I would suggest you take a look at this new technology and keep one step ahead of your competition.

Terry Till

<a target="_new" href="http://www.trafficgt.com/sitemaker.html">http://www.trafficgt.com/sitemaker.html</a>

How To Measure Search Engine Marketing ROI

2009-01-08T21:30:00.001-08:00

According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), advertisers spent $4 billion in 2004 on search marketing programs and are expected to spend 39% more than that this year.

Search engine marketing appears to be a great way to advertise but is it right for you and your business? If you are not already employing search engine marketing(SEM) for you business is there a way to forecast the return should you decide to invest in it? Is there a way to measure the results you are getting if you have already invested in SEM?

The answer is mostly yes. By utilizing data discovered in recently released research surveys and with the help of a few free online tools you can put begin to take some of the guesswork out of search engine marketing ROI. By using Overture's free keyword suggestion tool (inventory.overture.com) you can get an idea of how many times a keyword is getting searched each month. Another free tool to use is called Good Keywords and can be downloaded from www.goodkeywords.com.

Let's say for instance that you are a mortgage broker in the Denver Colorado area and you are interested in getting more leads for your business. You have a website and are considering search engine marketing to bring in some new leads. You get a quote from a search engine marketing provider who can guarantee top 10 positions among the major search engines for 6 months for your keywords for $1,500.00.

The question now becomes is it worth it to you to spend the $1,500.00. To figure this out we need to look at some numbers.

Berrier & Associates estimate that 65% of all traffic generated by a search in a search engine will go to the sites listed within the first 10 results (first page) returned for that search. By using Overture's keyword suggestion tool you discover that the term "Denver mortgage broker" gets approximately 540 searches a month.

Using this criteria a first page position for "Denver mortgage broker" would bring you approximately 65% of 540 searches a month = 350 visitors to your site each month. Having a compelling title tag in your website's pages might even boost this visitor number since the title tag is what appears as the clickable link in the search results.

The formula we just used would then be applied to all the other keywords you are targeting such as "mortgage Denver" which gets approximately 2,600 searches a month or "mortgage company Denver" with 466 searches a month. A first page placement for any of those would yield similar results.

So let's say we just use the "Denver mortgage broker" key phrase as our example with its estimated 350 visitors a month for a first page position. You would now need to know what your website conversion rate is. The website conversion rate is the ratio of leads or sales you get per visitor amount. The average website conversion rate is about 1-2% or 1-2 leads or sales for every 100 visitors according to Shop.org.

If your website conversion rate is average then you would expect on average 2-3 good leads from your site each month for that one first page listing. Then depending on your sales conversion rate which is the number of sales per leads you get on average multiplied by your average sale price you can begin to calculate what your return might be.

So let's say as a mortgage broker you make roughly $2k on each deal you broker and your sales conversion rate is 1 sale for every 3 quality leads. In any given month then you could estimate 1 sale at $2k out of the 3 quality leads generated from your website which came as a result of the 350 visitors you got from being on the first page of Google, Yahoo or MSN for the term "Denver mortgage broker".

You paid the search engine marketing company $1,500.00 dollars for 6 months of first page listings. From one of those first page listings you stand to gain $2k x 6 months = $12,000.00. That sounds like a really good return for money invested.

In closing the methodology outlined in this article to calculate search engine marketing ROI is by no means 100% accurate due to several factors but it is a good way to get a "feel" for what you might get back for your marketing dollars. Its also a way to get business owners to start thinking about how to better track their e-business. I have just finsished building a quick and easy seo tool that will enable you to do these calculations automatically available for free at this link <a target="_new" href="http://www.seocalc.com"> SEO Tool </a>

Charles Preston is an Austin based SEO with 7 years of industry experience. Charles is the President of Click Response an internet marketing company focused on teaching small businesses how to get the most out of their internet marketing. For a free consultation or more information please visit <a target="_new" href="http://www.clickresponse.net">http://www.clickresponse.net</a>

Going To Market: Keywords and Backlinks, Part 1

2009-01-08T09:40:00.001-08:00

As I waded into the 'Make Money Online' waters on the Internet, I felt I needed to do some research on what keywords might help me generate traffic for my websites. I am very, very new to this whole Internet marketing arena but at the simplest level it seems that the keys to generating income are:

Blog >>> Choose Target Keywords >>> Write Articles Incorporating Keywords >>> Create New Pages For Articles >>> Link Article Pages To Blog >>> Link Article Pages To Each Other >>> Populate All Pages with PPC Links >>> Submit Articles To Outlets >>> Submit All Pages To Search Engines

Did I say it was simple? As I said, I am new to this area so there may be a step or two (or 5, or 10, etc...) I've missed. Your end goal is to get your links to appear on the first page of the major search engines when someone searches on your targeted keywords.

Smithutopia.com (http://www.smithutopia.com) was developed utilizing one of the leading blogging systems today, Google's Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com). A blog is a great place to cut your teeth writing articles. As you post your ideas, situations, actions and events you will notice that some of your items start to resemble articles. All it takes is a little polish at that point to have a finished product.

How does all of the above steps help you achieve the goals you have set forth? The magic word is 'backlinks'. Backlinks are the links that people have placed on their websites that lead to your website or any of the pages of your website. Several of the major search engines place a high value on the number of links that go to your website from out sites and thus place you in their search engine accordingly. Here is a simple example.

Site 'A' has 1000 sites that link back to it.

Site 'B' has 10 sites that link back to it.

Site 'A' should place higher in the search engines when someone searches for a targeted keyword/phrase that both sites covet.

At this point, some of the more 'seasoned' web gurus are crying foul at my above statement. Relax, I realize there is more to it but I'm just taking one step at a time.

Next time...Quality of backlinks, Placing targets on keywords

Donnie Smith is a technology specialist. You can read more about this subject and others at his online blog, Smithutopia (<a target="_new" href="http://www.smithutopia.com">http://www.smithutopia.com</a>).

Your PC can Contribute with Google Compute

2009-01-07T11:00:00.001-08:00

Have you heard of the SETI Project? SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the project is operated by the University of California at Berkeley. SETI monitors and processes radio signals from space, looking for possible signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. SETI uses proprietary software to distribute computer processing power among all connected PCs participating in SETI project so that the radio signals can be processed faster and more efficiently. SETI effectively creates one big supercomputer from thousands of connected PCs across their network. Now users of the Google Toolbar can contribute to scientific research in much the same way, through Google Compute.

Google has teamed with Folding@home for their first project. This research organization is non-profit and based at Stanford University. They use participants' combined computing power to analyze the genetic structure of proteins for medical research.

Once installed to the Google Toolbar, Google Compute can be disabled easily at any time. While enabled, it will use your computer's otherwise idle time to process computing work assigned to it automatically from Folding@home, then automatically transfer results back to Folding@home when complete.

Users have plenty of informational and control options for Google Compute. A system tray icon (a double helix) indicates that Google Compute is running, and when bright, the same icon indicates that processing work is being performed. There are two modes available to help prevent interference with other programs that you use.

Google Compute requires Windows, IE5 or higher, 64 megabytes of RAM minimum, and the English version of the Google toolbar. A high speed internet connection isn't required, but you should routinely connect to the Internet every few days, and be prepared for a delay while the processed data is uploaded. Data is transferred using outbound HTTP, so it will work through most semi-transparent firewalls. About 20 megabytes per month of data is transferred to the Folding@home project.

About The Author

Jakob Jelling is the founder of <a href="http://www.sitetube.com" target="_new">http://www.sitetube.com</a>. Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.

Banned from Google and Wondering Why?

2009-01-07T08:10:00.001-08:00

There are those that get on the computer one night and find that all of their Web pages have disappeared from Google. While, others are still in the search engine index, but don't rank high for nothing, not even for their Web site's name. It's a Web site owners worst nightmare, getting kicked out of the search engines.

Ultimately, many webmasters had little or no warning that this was going to happen. Many webmasters are left with no idea why they were kicked out and are left wondering how to get back in Google's search engine. There could be any number of reasons why a Web site is banned by Google. The most common reasons for being banned are listed below in this article.

1. Duplicate Content
This is when multiple Web pages have the same content. Usually Google will just give a penalty to the Web page for this, where the page won't rank very high for the keywords in that Web page, but there have been cases where complete Web sites were banned because they had to much duplicate content. You should make sure there is no other Web site using your content.

To check for duplicated content simply search with unique phrase on your Web page. If you find a Web site that has stolen your content you should contact the site owner and tell them to take it down or face legal action. Also, for copyright violations visit www.google.com/dmca.html and notify them that someone is infringing on your site's copyright

2. Cloaking
This is Web pages created just for search engines, where it delivers one version of a page to a Internet user and a different version to a search engine. Cloaking Web pages are created to do well for particular keywords. There are various ways to deliver cloaking Web pages. Each search engine's spider has an agent name, the cloaked page is than only delivered to the spider with the user agent name that was chosen.

You can also deliver cloaked pages to the search engines by IP address, but Google and other search engines say they can detect cloaking. There are other reasons to use cloaking, such as custom language delivery and geotargeted advertising.

3. Hidden text or hidden links
This is text or a link that is invisible to the naked eye on a Web page, but are seen by spiders. Search engines use to have a hard time spotting this technique, but now days you should avoid doing this because Google and other search engines can spot this easily. Even if a search engine doesn't spot your hidden link, a competitor might find it and report your site. Sometimes this can be done without even knowing, so you better double check each Web page that you have messed with in the past few weeks.

4) Keyword stuffing
Keyword Stuffing is when you load a Web page up with keywords in the Meta tags or on the Web page's content. The General techniques today for keyword stuffing are repeating the same word(s) over and over again in the Meta tags or on the Web page's content or using invisible text, as we talked about up above in this article. If the word is repeated to much it will raise a red flag to the search engines and they likely will place a Spam filter on the site.

5) Linking to bad neighborhoods
Bad neighborhoods are designed to increase your Web site's ranking or is Web site's using Spam techniques to increase search engine ranking. You should not link to any Web page that uses Spam techniques to increase ranking. You also should not join link exchanges that are designed to improve ranking or Page Rank. If you are not aware of linking to any Web site like this, you should check each outbound link on your Web site.

6) Buying links for Search engine ranking
This where a Web site owner buys links just to increase his or her ranking. This is also used to increase Page Rank. Google and other search engines still have a hard to detect this, but they are starting to catch on to this technique. If Google is aware of the site, they can just discount the Page Rank, so they can't pass Page Rank on.

7) Machine Generated Web sites This is a site that generates hundreds of web pages that are basically the same page repeated hundreds or thousands of times, but with a few unique lines of text and unique title. Often times, search engines can't spot this, if done right by the site owner. However, if a spider doesn't spot your machine generated Web pages, a competitor might find it and report your Web site.

What to do after you are Spam clean? Once you have cleaned up your Web site, you can try contacting Google by visiting http://www.google.com/contact/. Tell them that you made a mistake and won't do it again. Even if you do contact Google, they most likely won't let your Web site back in and if you happen to get back in, you better keep your Web site squeaky clean because I doubt you will get other chance.

If you can't get in touch with Google, I suggest that you wait for a few months after Google's spider visits your Web site and see if you get your ranking back or at least where you can see that your ranking is going up in the search results. During this time you should not change your Web site around much and give the search engines time to spider your Web site.

I really don't think that many Web sites have dropped because Google is penalizing them. Instead, I think Google has changed the factors or adds more weight to a factor(s) that they use to rank Web sites in the search results. All search engines make periodic changes to the way they rank Web sites in the search results, so don't be surprised if one week you rank number one and the next week you rank 30TH.

Increase Web Site Sales with a SEO Proposal - Part 2

2009-01-07T04:50:00.001-08:00

Part 2 will discuss the following topics:

Creation of Meta Information (title, description, keywords)

Meta information is used to provide additional information about HTML documents so that the search engine crawlers are able to index the information more accurately.

There are 3 important types of Meta tags as far as search engine optimization is concerned:

Title tag:

Meta description tag

Meta keywords tag

Site Map Creation

Link Popularity Building

There are several ways of developing Inbound links.

Some of the techniques I follow in one way link building are:

a) Submitting to Free Directories

b) Writing articles and submitting to various sites for publishing to increase the link popularity of your site.

c) Press releases

Web Site Load time and HTML Validation

Downloading and Uploading of Web Pages

To make the necessary changes to your site, web pages will need to be downloaded to my computer. After changes are completed the pages will then be uploaded to the server.

Search Engine and Directory Submissions

Browser Compatibility and Resolution Checking

Resources
Increase Web Site Sales with a SEO Proposal - Part 1 & 2
http://www.isitebuild.com/seo-services

Why You Need a SEO Maintenance Plan
http://www.isitebuild.com/seo-maintenance-services

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of <a target="_new" href="http://www.iSiteBuild.com">http://www.iSiteBuild.com</a>

Using Google

2009-01-06T16:30:00.001-08:00

Thanks to a unique algorithm that produces most relevant results to any given query, Google has become, indisputably, the best search engine on the Internet. On the last count, Google has indexed over 4 billion pages and tackles around 200 million searches a day! A cluster of 100 thousand servers are used to store, crunch and spew out the query results with lightning speed that you are so accustomed to see.

This phenomenal growth has made Google from a garage startup to an Internet behemoth faster than any company has done before. The prodigies behind this unique search engine, Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the process already got enlisted themselves in billionaire club.

Google is no longer a mere search engine! It is increasingly broadening its offerings to include great new services and excellent tools. Among these services, most notables are News - a news aggregation and searching service, Blogger - an online journal-keeping solution, Froogle - a marketplace for comparison shopping, Groups - online discussion groups, Answers - a place to get hard-to-find information for a price, etc.

Google also recently unveiled two more programs. Orkut - a social networking service and Gmail - a free web mail service. Orkut is an online community, where a person can participate in it by invitation from a member only.

If you constantly frown over limited space of your hotmail or Yahoo accounts because they get filled up with junk mails and force you to delete old messages frequently, you will love Gmail with its 1 GB of storage capacity. There are several great features available in Gmail system too. One of them, dubbed as Conversations, allow you to view all exchange mails with somebody, once you select one of the mails. Sorting and searching emails also become much easier with Gmail. The only catch is Gmail displays relevant ads - based on the keywords found in your email - on the right side of the screen when you view an email, much like Google displays ads when you view search results.

Although, Google is constantly adding new and extremely useful features, most of us unfortunately do not use all the capacities of the search engine itself. The following tips will make your Internet browsing more effective if even you are an avid net user.

Choose most specific search words

Google returns web pages that contain all the words in your query. If you would like to see the most relevant pages on the first page of your search result, be very specific with your choice of words. For example: if you would like to research on former NHL hockey player Makarov, you should start your search with Makarov not hockey player. Even better if you search for the words: hockey player Makarov. Because just the word Makarov will show web pages on "Makarov" a Russian-made handgun and numerous other people and products with the name Makarov. Refining your query in Google means adding more specific words to your initial search. In this example you will hit the right web pages if your search contains: NHL hockey player Makarov.

Sets - a new feature

What if you are looking for a pair of Valentino designer jeans but can't recall the name of the designer? Query on Italian designer jeans may bring you the right result; however, there is a better tool that Google is planning to implement soon, called "Sets".

Fill up the names of some designers that you remember in the given form such as Levis, Wrangler, Versace and click either of the two buttons and voila! You will get a list of designers name and probably, Valentino will be there. But bear in mind that this feature is still at Beta stage.

Calculator

The other day, I was sitting in a colleague's office. She needed to calculate some basic stuffs and looking for her calculator on her desk. Much to her dismay, she could not find the calculator and started to fumble through her computer programs in her attempt to find Microsoft calculator. I noticed that she was online and the browser was open. I, politely, asked her whether she knew that Google could actually calculate most common mathematical expressions. It came out to be, she did not! She was just amazed after trying it herself. Google is even capable of unit conversion! Give it a try!

Definition

If you are looking for a definition of a particular word or a phrase, Google is the best place to get it. In Google search box, write "define: the word or phrase" without the quotation marks and click search button. If there is a definition available for your search term you will, most certainly, get it. It's a very useful feature for students and people, those who write research papers.

Synonyms

You may think that search engines are too dumb to show query results of the synonyms of your search term. It's not so! At least, in the case of Google! If you use tilde "~" in front of a keyword in your search term, Google will bring results on the synonyms of that word as well.

Searching within a website

Another great feature of Google search engine allows you to make your query within a specific website. First you write your search term in the Google search box and then write "site: the website or domain name". For example: if you are looking for word "Microsoft" within the website www.micromedia.com you will write: Microsoft site: micromedia.com.

Check backward links to your website

If you have a website, Google search engine also has a nice feature to show you which web pages are linking to yours. In the search box, write: Link: you website address.

Other important tips to remember are:

There is no need to use "AND". Google always relate all the words in a search term with Boolean "and".

However, if you would like to make your query for two words - one or another - you can use "OR". You have to write "or" in capital letters to give it Boolean value.

Google is not case sensitive. You can write your search terms either in capital or in small letters. You can even mix them up.

Google omits most of the very common words, such as the, in, etc. If you, indeed, need to add a specific word forcefully, use plus (+) sign in front of that particular word. Same way, you can exclude a word from your search expression by putting minus (-) sign in front it.

If you would like to make a search on an exact phrase or expression, put the words within quotation marks. That way, your search result will show only those pages where the exact expression was found. In order to search the phrase: For whom the bell tolls, write "For whom the bell tolls" in the search box. I'll also suggest you to download the Google Toolbar. Apart from the search box and its ability to block pop-ups, Google Toolbar also shows the pagerank of the website you are visiting now. Pagerank is a system of evaluating web pages - developed by Google founders and used as the core of Google's search engine algorithm. The Toolbar also includes feature with the ability to fill up online forms from stored information automatically. You can also keep your daily journal or blog right from the toolbar.

Much to net users delight, Google, in accordance with its ambitious mission statement to organize world's information and make it universally useful and accessible, so far doing a great job by providing us the best search engine and extremely handy features and services. We can only hope that the flow of innovative ideas from Google will not slow down in future, when it becomes a public company.

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to start and run online business. You can contact him at mailto:nowshade[at]rusbiz.com, <a target="_new" href="http://ezine.rusbiz.com">http://ezine.rusbiz.com</a>, <a target="_new" href="http://www.rusbiz.com">http://www.rusbiz.com</a>

Picking Keywords for SEO ? A Different View

2009-01-06T03:50:00.001-08:00

The first step to developing any search engine optimization effort is picking keywords. The general consensus is pick keywords with solid amounts of traffic and a minimum of competition. At the risk of being laughed off the Internet, here's a different view.

Going Big?Going VERY Big

Should you do research to identify keywords receiving lots of traffic? Absolutely. Of this group, should you identify the keywords with the lowest amount of competition? Again, yes. After all, who would be foolish enough to try to attack keywords with a few million competing sites? Well, me for one.

People that go for a keyword phrase like "for sale by owner" [2 million plus searches a month and KEI of 0.000000000?] are often dismissed as amateurs with unrealistic expectations. For those of us that have been in the business for some time, this bias deserves some reconsideration. The motivation is greed?pure and simple greed.

Seo greed is arises when one achieves top listings in Google, Yahoo and MSN for a site. Using the example above, assume the client is a car-listing site and you've conquered all the listings for "car for sale by owner." Yes, it took 15 months, but the client is happy and so are you. Or are you?

After a few weeks, you start thinking, "Damn, I should have gone for the phrase 'for sale by owner' and the extra 700,000 searches a month." You start getting visions of changing the site, but the anchor text in links and so on is already set. In the end, you feel dissatisfied because you want more, damn it!

A Different Approach

Okay, I am not advocating you throw competition analysis out the window. You should absolutely find keywords that have solid traffic and low competition. If nothing else, you need short-term carrots to keep you motivated. That being said, you must also plan for the inherent evil greed in your twisted little seo soul. Don't even try to deny it.

Here it comes?

I am advocating you go for keywords with monstrous amounts of traffic, competition analysis be damned! Yes, I know. What a fool.

Throwing caution to the wind, I am even going to argue that?[drum roll]?you consider one-word keywords! I know? Blasphemy!?Insanity!?Stupid Moron?etc. But think about it. When you've accomplished your goals with low competition keywords, why not have a go at the biggies? What if you get them?even a few?

Putting it all together, my theory is this. Identify the low competition keywords, optimize your site and so on. Just make sure you also throw some "wishful thinking" keywords. If the optimized site survives for three or four years, you might just be thankful you did.

I'm off to optimize for the keyword "travel." Lets see, Expedia is listed number 1 with a page rank of 8 and 67 thousand back links on Google.

Ha! Expedia I mock thee!

Halstatt Pires is with <a target="_new" href="http://www.marketingtitan.com">http://www.marketingtitan.com</a> - an Internet marketing and advertising company in San Diego, California.