Saturday, September 30, 2006

How To Indirectly Get To The Top Of Search Engines

How To Indirectly Get To The Top Of Search Engines was written by Ronald Gibson and he writes "There are millions of web sites trying to get listed in the top 20 spots of the major search engines. That amounts to a lot of competition! Even if your website can't get in the Top 20, you can use indirect ways to get it there.

How do you do this? By using the success of others to your advantage. Look up the top 20 web sites on the major search engines under the keywords and phrases people would find your web site. The key would be to your website's link on those web sites.

The most expensive way would be to buy ad space on those web sites. If you don't want to spend any money, you could use the ten strategies below. These strategies may not apply to every web site..

1. Participate on their discussion boards. You could post questions, answer other peoples questions, and join in on conversations. Just include your signature file and link at the end of your messages. This is a great way to build link popularity for your website.

2. Ask the web site owner if they would like a f.ree ebook to giveaway to their visitors. You could have them link to your web site or include your ad in the f.ree ebook.

3. Submit content to their web site. You could write articles for their web site and include your resource box and link at the end of the article. If they publish it, you'll indirectly be at the top of the search engines and your site's link popularity will soar!

4. Write an excellent article review of their web site, products or services. Then publish the review on your web site. E-mail the web site owner and tell him or her about it. They may link to your web site so their visitors read it.

5. Ask the owner of the web site if they would want to trade advertising. If you don't get as much traffic as they do, you could throw in some extra incentives.

6. Propose a cross p.romotion deal with the web site. You both could promote each others products or services together in one package deal. This means a mention and link back to your web site.

7. Give the web site a testimonial for their product or service. Include a little text link for your web site with the testimonial. You n.ever know; it could end up on their ad copy.

8. Post your advertisement on their free classified ad section on their web site. You want to be sure you have an attractive headline so they will read your ad.

9. Post your text link on their f.ree-for-all links page. You want to go back and post your link regularly so it stays towards the top.

10. Sign their guest books. You could leave a short compliment about their web site on their guest book. Just include your signature file and link at the end of your message.

If your site is not in the Top 20 positions in the search engines, then your goal should be to get your site's link on those sites that are there. Using these indirect methods mentioned in this article should help you to accomplish just exactly that.

Copyright 2005 Ronald Gibson
Ronald Gibson is a Web Designer and Web Marketer. He is the Webmaster of AffiliateUtopia.com, which offers information about some of the best money making opportunities on the Web. For more information, visit: http://www.affiliateutopia.com/


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Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Taking Advantage of Googles Sandbox Effect

Taking Advantage of Googles Sandbox Effect was written by Bradley James and he writes "Most new sites submitted to Google (at least within the last year or so) encounter a peculiar phenomenon known as the "sandbox effect" within about 2 weeks to one month after appearing in the index. Sites may very well rank relatively high in the index at first if the keywords associated with the site are not highly saturated. After about 2 weeks to one month, however, the ranking of most new sites drop significantly. In fact, it is not uncommon for a new site to appear in the number one position for a specific keyword or phrase (typically similar or the same as the website title) up until this drop-off point. For the next 2 - 3 months, new websites are said to reside in the "sandbox," an abstract realm where new, fledgling websites are kept aside from older, mature websites in the index.

Many believe that Google instituted this sandbox effect to cut down on rampant spamming. Webpages with very little content, specifically created with the intention of trying to sell someone something (or provide links to an affiliated business), were appearing in the Google index at an alarming rate. Although many of these sites were eventually banned, they often obtained top positions for lucrative keywords for perhaps a month - sometimes longer. The spammers were able to make enough money off the sites to justify having to buy new domain names and building one site right after the other. The sandbox effect drastically cuts down on this practice since almost all new sites are effectively on a probationary period that can last as long as 3 - 4 months. Most spam sites can be eliminated during this time, while meaningful, high-quality sites simply wait it out - or continue to improve..

It is important to mention that the sandbox effect is quite different from banning. Google may ban a website for multiple reasons, but the end results is always the complete removal of the site from the index for an unknown amount of time (perhaps indefinitely for some). Sandboxing almost always happens to new websites, and does not result in the sites being entirely removed from the index. If your site has been relegated to the sandbox, this means that, in general, its ranking for any given keyword has gone down significantly. It is not uncommon for a site to come up on the first page of results for the first two or three weeks in the index, and then drop to position 100, 200, or lower after one month or so. Being in the sandbox, however, is not permanent, and it may in fact provide you with the time necessary to improve your website and build connections/ partnerships to make your site successful in the post-sandbox environment.

As mentioned earlier, your website can be in the sandbox for up to 4 months - although the average length of time appears to be around 2 ½ - 3 months. During this period of time, the most important thing you can do is continue improving and adding additional content to your website. Take a look at what other websites with similar content have done to attract and retain a steady flow of visitors. Original content is a given, but perhaps adding news (via a blog, RSS feeds) or a community forum (using a bbs system or chat program) would be a good idea as well. These extra features aren't right for every website, but for many they can offer your visitors a reason to keep coming back. In addition, most blog and forum programs automatically produce webpages that can be indexed by Google and other search engines. It isn't difficult to double the size of your website (with content that may actually be useful) within a couple of days by using these programs. Once your website comes out of the sandbox you should have a well-designed website with many webpages and plenty of useful content (the more webpages a site has, assuming they are useful, the better the site's PageRank will be, all other things being equal).

In addition to simply building your site, take some time to analyze the webpages and different areas of your website that you have already constructed. Do you have particular keywords that you would like your site to rank well on Google? If so, make sure that you use these keywords in whichever webpages they are needed. This is not to say, however, that you should saturate your webpages with keywords to the point that they look unnatural. You want the keywords to blend in with your content as much as possible (Google doesn't seem to like keyword super-saturation). In addition to keywords, take a look at your Meta tags, title (does the title contain your website name w/ the right keywords?), loading time (no one wants to wait around for 30 seconds while your webpage loads), and overall optimization. The sandbox is a great time to fine-tune your website and employ as many fair SEO (search engine optimization) techniques as you can.

The final thing all new websites should do while in the sandbox is acquire partnerships and establish connections with other websites with similar topics. Go ahead and send out some e-mail, politely asking the webmasters of established websites to exchange links with your site. Also, submit your website to the big directories, including Zeal, Yahoo!, and DMOZ. Getting listed on these three directories alone will improve your PageRank and provide a healthy amount of exposure for your site. But don't stop there. Consider providing content to established websites in exchange for a free link to your website. Anything you can do to persuade high PR websites to link to your site is probably worth some time and effort.

If you follow these simple suggestions, we think you will find your website's time in the sandbox less of an annoyance, and more of a chance to improve and establish your website. Once out of the sandbox, you will be very glad that you did.

Bradley James is the Chief Editor at GoogleAdvisor.org. The website provides free information for webmasters relating to the Google search engine, PageRank issues, AdWords and AdSense strategies, and more.


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Monday, September 25, 2006

Get Listed in Google Without Submitting Your Site

Get Listed in Google Without Submitting Your Site was writen by Mario Sanchez and he writes "With Google delivering so much traffic, it is only normal to be eager to submit your page and have it indexed as soon as possible. However, submitting your page is not your only option, and it's not the best one. If this sounds strange keep reading.

Talking about its indexing process, Google says:

"We add thousands of new sites to our index each time we crawl the Web, but if you like, you may submit your URL as well. Submission is not necessary and does not guarantee inclusion in our index. Given the large number of sites submitting URLs, it's likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the URL submission form."

We can therefore draw two conclusions:

1. Submitting your site does not guarantee inclusion.

2. Most pages are found and indexed automatically, when Google crawls the web.

The Google folks have also made it clear that Google gives a page more importance when it is found through an automatic crawl. This can be easily verified when we consider how Google's PageRank system works: when page A links to page B, part of page A's PageRank trickles down to page B, increasing page B's PageRank (and, therefore, its importance). A manually submitted page will not enjoy this benefit.

Now that you know that manual submission is neither necessary nor the best way to go, what can you do to make Google find your pages?

The best way, at least in my personal experience, is to write an article on your area of expertise and submit it to popular article syndication sites like http://www.marketing-seek.com or http://www.ideamarketers.com . These sites will post your article, so that online publishers can use them for free in exchange for including your resource box at the end of the article. A resource box (a.k.a. bylines) is a small paragraph about yourself, written by you, which contains a link to your homepage.

In very little time, your article will show up in websites and ezines across the web. It will then be just a matter of time (usually days) before Google crawls those pages and finds your links. If you followed good web design practices and have included a link to a site map in your homepage, Google will follow it as soon as it finds your homepage, and all your pages will be indexed. It's as simple as that.

The most popular articles you can write are those that list a collection of tips related to your area of expertise. One of my most succesful articles is called "50 Surefire Web Design Tips", and it is nothing but a checklist of guidelines to follow when designing a website.

Another good way to help Google find your pages is to exchange links with other sites. Google will crawl those sites, find the links to your page, and add it to the index.

Finally, remember to optimize your pages before you try to get them listed, so that you have a better chance of ranking high in the search engine results pages (SERPs). After all, what good would it do to get your pages listed if nobody can find them?

About The Author
Mario Sanchez is a Miami based freelance writer who focuses on web design and Internet marketing topics. He publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), a growing collection of web design and Internet marketing articles, tips and resources. You can freely reprint his weekly articles in your website, ezine, or ebook.


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Saturday, September 23, 2006

1 Simple SEO Strategy To Get More Visitors To Your Site From Google

1 Simple SEO Strategy To Get More Visitors To Your Site From Google was written by Jean Lam and writes "Did you know that you can dramatically increase the number of visitors that come to your site on a daily basis from Google? And it's not constantly improving your position in Google search engine result pages(SERPs) for your competitive keywords which can take some time after working on your search engine marketing campaigns.

I take this example from Google because I've experienced it some time back now. Apart concentrating on getting and maintaining a top 10 ranking in Google, there are lots of easy traffic sources that you haven't exploited yet. We are still talking about search engine traffic here..

What's that strategy you ask? The answer might surprise you but it's a technique that works and is pretty legitimate. It's not creating stand alone or doorway pages with practically no content, overly optimized with keywords and a link back to the homepage. Doorway pages work but only if you know how to do it well. And this article will talk a bit about this topic as well.

The strategy is to search for overlooked keyword phrases which are not too competitive and create effective doorway pages related to these keyword phrases. These pages can be promoting a product for instance.

Just by adding a few effective doorway pages, I managed to make 9 sales in just a few short weeks and earned $364.59.

Imagine you come up with several keyword phrases that generate a few monthly searches, you now have several pages. So each page targeting a specific keyword phrase is worth traffic and not any type of traffic but it will be targeted.

So if you have one page which brings you only 1 visitor per day and you have 50 pages, you can easily receive 50 visitors per day for free. You see the potential now.

Keywords that have about 1000 searches on Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions previously known as Overture at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion are valuable keywords with lower competition.

If you are using Wordtracker at http://www.wordtracker.com, a keyword with only 10 searches per day can get you a good ranking and bring you traffic.

If you have already a website which is generating traffic, you can dramatically increase your numbers, simply by adding relevant doorway pages targeting a specific keyword. These pages have content and have your optimized navigation menu on it with their specific keyword phrases. These pages are just an entry to your site nothing more nothing less.

They should not be overly optimized with keywords but they must have some optimized content which is readable by your visitors and friendly for the search engines as well.

If you have a good website which is crawled by Google's robot called "Googlebot" often, your new pages will get spidered and indexed fast and will start bringing you small loads of targeted traffic.

But be careful when adding pages, don't go in a frenzy with this and add hundreds or even thousands of pages all of a sudden. For eg if your site has 50 pages already indexed in Google and ranking well and you add 100 new pages at once, your indexed pages might suffer a temporary drop in rankings. The key here is to add pages on a regular basis say 1 or 2 pages daily until you reach the total number of pages to be added.

Why not capitalize on this free source of traffic? The key is to research your keywords well first, work on your content and create these pages afterwards.

Your website will grow bigger and bigger with time and it will attract loads of targeted traffic from multiple keyword phrases.

Good luck and happy research and optimizing.

This article can be freely published on a website as long as it's not modified in any way including the author bylines, plus the hyperlink must be made active just like below.

Jean Lam is the author of the highly acclaimed eBook Top Search Engine Ranking Secrets in Google Revealed, a concise, step-by-step guide to high search engine ranking for the beginner to intermediate level webmaster.


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Friday, September 22, 2006

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

The Two Most Important Things You Must Do For Google Top Ranking was written by Salihu Ibrahim and writes "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 http://www.autoresponders4all.com which provides completely free autoresponders for webmnasters.


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Thursday, September 21, 2006

Googles New SEO Rules

Googles New SEO Rules was written by John Metzler and he writes "Google has recently made some pretty significant changes in its ranking algorithm. The latest update, dubbed by Google forum users as "Allegra", has left some web sites in the dust and catapulted others to top positions. Major updates like this can happen a few times a year at Google, which is why picking the right search engine optimization company can be the difference between online success and failure. However, it becomes an increasingly difficult decision when SEO firms themselves are suffering from the Allegra update.

Over-optimization may have played the biggest part in the dropping of seo- guy.com from the top 50 Google results. Filtering out web sites that have had readability sacrificed for optimization is a growing trend at Google. It started with the Sandbox Effect in late 2004, where relatively new sites were not being seen at all in the Google results even with good keyword placement in content and incoming links. Many thought it was a deliberate effort by Google to penalize sites that had SEO work done. It's a few months later and we see many of the 'sandboxed' web sites finally appearing well for their targeted keywords..

With 44 occurrences of 'SEO' on the relatively short home page of seo-guy.com, and many of them in close proximity to each other, the content reads like a page designed for search engine robots, not the visitor. This ranking shift should come as no surprise to SEO professionals as people have been saying it for years now: Sites should be designed for visitors, not search engine robots. Alas, some of us don't listen and this is what happens when search engines finally make their move.

One aspect of search engine optimization that is also affected in a roundabout way is link popularity development. After observing the effects of strictly relevant link exchanges on many of our client's sites recently, we've noticed incredibly fast #1 rankings on Google. It seems Google may be looking out for links pages designed for the sole purpose of raising link popularity and devalues the relevance of the site. After all, if a links page on a real estate site has 100 outgoing links to pharmacy sites, there has to be a lot of content on that page completely unrelated to real estate. Not until now has that been so detrimental to a site's overall relevance to search terms. It goes back to the old rule of thumb: Make your visitors the top priority. Create a resources page that actually contains useful links for your site users. If you need to do reciprocal linking then keep it relevant and work those sites in with other good resources.

Keeping up with the online search world can be overwhelming for the average small business owner or corporate marketing department. Constant Google changes, MSN coming on the scene in a big way, and all the hype around the new Become.com shopping search function can make heads spin. But just keep things simple and follow the main rules that have been around for years. Google, as well as other search engines, won't ever be able to ignore informative, well written content along with good quality votes from other web sites.

John Metzler is the co-creator of Abalone Designs, Inc. http://www.abalone.ca, a Search Engine Optimization company in Vancouver, Canada. He has been involved in web design and web marketing since 1999 and has helped turn Abalone Designs into one of the top SEO companies in the world.


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Tuesday, September 19, 2006

SEO Tips for Google

SEO Tips for Google was written by Joe Balestrino and he writes "Getting a high ranking on Google is a big achievement. There are many factors that go into pulling a high page rank. I have put together a small list of things that should not be overlooked when optimizing your site. Let's start from the top:

META Tags- Sorry, but Google doesn't read META tags. That includes the KEYWORD tag. Some search engines, however, still use them.

URL- Having a keyword or words in URL will help you somewhat. Having a key word in your URL is not by any means a guarantee, but it never hurts.

TITLE Tag- This is an important step, use this tag wisely. Place your top keywords here. Remember, your page is indexed starting from the top of the page. Make this one count..

Site content- The first paragraph of your site is a crucial part of your optimization. This will also be used as your site's description. Be careful not to overdo it on the keywords. Make sure your content makes sense. Your keywords should make up a total of 6% to 8% of your page content. An average of three hundred words is a good rule of thumb.

Header Tags- Header tag <> should be considered important. Make headers uniform on your site. I like using them on the top of my page just before the first paragraph.

ALT Tags- These tags are great for adding keywords to images, so take advantage of them. I also use mouse over text with linked text.

Links- Any links you have on your site should have key terms in them. Never use "Click Here" or other unrelated words when creating links.

Bonus tip: When exchanging text links, use key phrases as the actual links. This will certainly help you out.

For Example:

Affordable Search Engine Optimization & Web Site Marketing Mr. SEO is the leader in SEO. We handle targeted traffic, marketing and more. We also offer Web Site Marketing Articles to help you get more traffic to your site.

Links exchange- This will help boost your overall ranking. It's actually better to be linked from another site (one way) than reciprocal (both sites linking to each other). Being linked one way is a huge bonus. However, the following should be kept in mind.

A: The site you are linking to needs to be related to your site.

B: Google's page rank of the site should be higher than yours; the higher the better.

C: Avoid linking to sites that have too many links. A site that has forty or more links will only hurt you.

Bonus Tip: See where you rank on Google by using this free tool. http://www.googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php

This Google ranking tool will show you under what keywords you are found on. Use this to help adjust the keywords you want to be found under. Be sure to check your ranking before you start any optimization. Then do it again 3 - 4 weeks after you have made your adjustments. See if your ranking has gone up.

Joe Balestrino is a published author and owns http://www.mr-seo.com and http://www.jnb-design.com . For more info on SEO or his services, visit his websites or email him at joe@jnb-design.com


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Monday, September 18, 2006

LSI and Link Popularity

LSI and Link Popularity was written by Andy Hagans and he writes "When Paypal's official Web site no longer ranked #1 in Google on a search for "paypal," it was obvious that Google had become more aggressive in penalizing sites with "unnatural" backlink anchor text. Although the high-profile Paypal example has since been rectified, thousands of webmasters are suffering the consequences of not ranking for even their official company name, let alone their top keywords. It is important for search engine optimizers to understand both how anchor text penalties are being applied and how LSI ensures that anchor text variance will not dilute a link popularity building campaign.

Anchor Text Penalties

In the past year, webmasters have found that the aggressive link popularity building tactics that work well in search engines such as Yahoo! do not fare well in Google. Google has implemented several features to filter out sites that appear to have an unnatural backlink structure; one of these features seems to be specifically penalizing sites with unnatural backlink anchor text..

It has always been an SEO best practice to use descriptive anchor text in both external and internal links. But search engine optimizers have often focused on a single keyword phrase when choosing anchor text, especially if their topic has one keyword that receives vastly more traffic than any secondary keywords. Since good links are hard to come by, they do not want to "waste" any of those backlinks with anchor text that does not contain their main keyword.

The drawback to this approach is that it can be interpreted as unnatural by a search engine. A site with organic, passively-obtained backlinks will have a wide variety of backlink anchor text variations such as: "official site title," "keyword," "keyword synonym," "www.thesite.com" and even "click here." If the vast majority of a site's backlink anchor text is simply "keyword," it is obvious to an algorithm that the link popularity was not obtained organically.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Basics

Let's now touch upon the myth I mentioned before, that if a backlink's anchor text does not contain your Web site's main keyword, its power is wasted. The concept of latent semantic indexing, which may be more fully implemented by major search engines in the near future, will prove this myth to be false.

Latent semantic indexing can help overcome the "vocabulary mismatch" problem when a human uses a search engine. Individual words do not always provide reliable evidence about the conceptual meaning of a document. For instance, a Web page that is highly relevant to the term "laptop" may never use the term "notebook," however it is clear to a human being that "notebook" is often used as a synonym for "laptop."

While it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the mathematics behind LSI, its implications for search algorithms are simple. LSI can use statistical techniques to create a semantic analysis for any given query topic. In practice, this means that a page can be considered relevant for a particular keyword, even if it does not contain that keyword. For instance, a page that is considered relevant for "laptop" can also be considered relevant for "notebook" even if it does not contain the word "notebook," if LSI determines that "notebook" is semantically related to "laptop."

The principle can be applied to backlinks as well. Backlinks with anchor text that do not contain your Web site's main keyword, but instead contain a synonym or related word, may still be giving your site a bonus for the main keyword.

Link Popularity Building Best Practice: Vary Your Anchor Text

The recent increase in penalties given to sites with unnatural backlink anchor text, along with the possible implementation of LSI, should give webmasters motivation to vary their backlink anchor text heavily. Rather than seeking to only obtain links using their main keyword, webmasters should include synonyms, variations and related words. Certainly no single keyword variation should be used the majority of the time; rather, the text of all links should vary widely, just as they would if the links were obtained passively. This will ensure a site's improvement in the SERPs, without drawing a penalty flag.

Andy Hagans is a search engine optimization consultant who specializes in link popularity building and risk management. Visit http://www.andyhagans.com for more information. See http://www.andyhagans.com/link-building.php for more information on Mr. Hagans' link building services.


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Sunday, September 17, 2006

Keyword Density And How To Use It To Keep Traffic Flowing To Your Site!

Avril Harper has written Keyword Density And How To Use It To Keep Traffic Flowing To Your Site! and writes "Generating high traffic to your web site can be costly, or not, depending on time and effort you commit to the business.

One of the easiest, least expensive and most effective ways to get visitors is via a concept called 'Keyword Density'.

Mini Site Profits by Phil Wiley was my first and most valuable introduction to keyword density and would eventually become the focus of my online marketing campaigns.

Wiley tells how many search engines spider the Internet for sites containing keywords similar to those someone has just keyed into a search engine. The more times those words appear on your site - conditionally - the more chance you'll get that high ranking..

But search engines aim for relevance, too, so a site actually bearing little relevance to specific terms might rank high for a short while, until human editors come in, check it out, then abandon the site as irrelevant to their customers.

It's all about 'content' which for our purposes means useful articles, information and advice which search engines consider valuable to their customers, rather than pages packed with advertisements and little else (unless they're getting paid for it via pay per click promotions, of course!).

For example, 'sex' is a hot topic on the Internet and the subject of millions of searches every month. How wonderful for your site to appear to everyone searching for 'sex' - (one day I will rephrase that) - who happens upon pages offering discount holidays, printer refill cartridges, golf clubs, pencils, but not sex!

The point is, anyone using specific techniques to lift their own non-sex-related site high on the listings when someone keys 'sex' into search engines will soon be exposed and probably banned for life from most search engine listings. By 'techniques' I mean pasting the word 'sex' all over the background of your site selling lawn mowers, or calling your site 'Everything to Do with Sex' when your site bears no relevance at all to the 'S' word.

Here are a few ways to use keyword density to increase your chance of a higher ranking over site owners who don't try quite so hard:

-Choose a domain name containing words and phrases most commonly searched for by your target audience. The site for my mystery shopping book, for example, is www.mystery-shopping.org.uk. Other examples from my own collection, with titles, articles, domain names based on keyword density: www.smartbackpacker.com, www.smartpublisher.net, www.resell-rights.net.


-Include your best key words and phrases in page titles, for both the home page and all additional pages. My mystery shopping site has pages entitled: Get Paid to Shop or Even Start Your Own Mystery Shopping Business, Travel Free, Get Paid to Play Golf, and articles entitled: Start Your Own Mystery Shopping Business, Get Paid to Shop and Keep Everything You Buy Without Having to Pay! Those titles came, not surprisingly, because 'Get Paid to Shop' and 'Start Mystery Shopping Business' are common terms used by people seeking products like mine.


-Descriptions, keyword entries and metatags used when designing your site should also contain some of the most common terms used by your target audience. For a dating agency, the keywords might be 'dating', 'dating agency', 'online dating', and so on.


-It might be beneficial to use key words in titles for pictures and graphics used on your site. For example, my site www.boxerdog.biz has several pictures of cute boxer dogs, all mine, with gifs labelled boxerdog1, boxerdog2, boxerdog3, and so on. Beneath each picture there's a caption including the phrase 'boxer dog'. One of my first excursions into keyword analysis showed the term 'boxer dog' is keyed into search engines around 46,000 times every month. Not only that, but I love boxer dogs, and can think of nothing more delightful than marketing products for them and their two-legged friends. But, realistically, editors might consider my graphics titles a bit OTT (Over The Top) and this could adversely affect my rankings. I shall just have to wait and see!


-Have articles uploaded to your own and other people's sites. Search engines love articles and other chunks of useful information to benefit their customers, making articles one of the very best ways to lift your site high in search engine rankings. Again, use your keywords in page headings and article titles to further increase your chances, as I did for www.boxerdog.biz which includes articles called The Boxer Dog Who Cheated Death Row and Became a Television Star Instead, The Boxer Dog With the Longest Tongue, The Boxer Dog Who Received Hate Mail. Make sure the articles contain links back to your main web site, the one you want people to visit, and try to include those same articles on other sites to increase links to your main site which might also attract visitors to your site.

About The Author
Avril Harper is the author of 'Keyword Density and How to Get A Top Listing on Major Search Engines' and 'How to Turn a Handful of Classified Ads. into a Reliable, Regular, Repeat Income for Life' which are yours free by emailing avril@publishingcircles.com with subject 'Keywords Report'. More articles can be obtained at www.articlefactory.com


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Saturday, September 16, 2006

Do Not Ever Link to a Site Without Doing This First!

John Krycek has written Do Not Ever Link to a Site Without Doing This First! and writes "Links are a crucial part of attaining high search rankings, but you must be very careful about to whom you link. I'm going to help you develop a simple link strategy for your website that will help you decide which sites to link to so you're making your way up the search engine rankings and not accidentally hurling yourself backwards.

So the natural questions are:

Should I link to everyone I can find?

Should I allow everyone to link to me?

Should I get one of those "link to 2,000 site for $10" things?

The answer to all of the above is NO!

Develop A Link Strategy

We're going to do an easy-to-digest version of what a search engine optimizer would do if you were to hire one. There are many reasons for having your site professionally optimized which would take up articles in themselves. This is one of the attack strategies for determining optimum, quality links for your site..

Step 1 Where are your competitors linked?

Don't arbitrarily find random sites that you like and link to them. A little bit of research goes a long way. Start with your competitors. Type the keywords for your site into a search engine. You have them, right? This is the list of key word phrases that you want to score the number one position when someone types them in a search. Who appears in the top 10 positions? They're your direct competition that is doing something right or they wouldn't be coming up first. So let's look underneath and see how they got it to work and save you a year of work!

Go back to your search engine and type "link:www.competitorsite.com". Up will pop a long list of sites that have a direct link to your competitor. Do this for your top 10 competitors. Do you see any trends in those results? Do you see any similar sites, or perhaps directory listings? Take some notes. A spreadsheet or a few sheets of loose-leaf paper is helpful and analyze what you've uncovered. You should have a good solid list of links that are helping your competitors rank high!

Step 2 Search for similar themed sites.

Look at your keyword list again. Do these words appear more so on any of the pages you have listed so far? Narrow down your list to sites that have at least the same theme or related content to yours. Even your competition will have quite a few odd links.

If there are 300 links to a site that sells pumpkins, it's natural to have a car dealer or an airline in there too. Chances are they were so pleased with their pumpkin purchase that they added the site to their own web page. You can disregard these right away.

Take your list and look at the potential link site for similarities to your topic. If in the pumpkin market your competition links to a site that tells all about how to cook pumpkin seeds, see if you can find other sites that tell how to make pumpkin pie, make jack-o-lanterns AND cook pumpkin seeds. Make a list of these sites as potentially better ones.

Step 3 Look at the Google Page Rank

You can find a page's page rank by looking at your Google tool bar if you have it installed or by going to a site like http://www.top25web.com/pagerank.php. The actual importance of Google Page Rank to Google searches in particular seems to depend on whom you talk with. It shouldn't be the make or break, but it can help to choose between several similar sites if your unsure of which one to go with.

Page Rank is more of a relative scale of the number and quality of links to a site. The higher the rank, the higher the number. The lower, the worse. It's not unheard of for a link from a site with a Page Rank of 6 or 7 to boost up a low score by a couple numbers. This seems to, at least in Google's case, get a site indexed much faster. And the faster you're indexed, the faster you can start climbing.

Step 4 How many sites link to your selections so far and how good are they?

The more links a site has pointing to it, the more important it appears to be to the search engines. Say your looking at company ABC to put a link on their site to you. Let's first see how many sites link to company ABC. (Just as you looked at your competition). We know search engines place more weight on sites linked to you that have similar content. Now the big search databases seem to know what kind of content is on those linking pages.

Using the pumpkin model, if your potential target is teaming with 100 inbound links from gambling, girls, horses, moons, leprechauns and horoscopes then throw it in the trash pile fast, even if it has a Page Rank of 8 (very rare).

Find that site that has 10 links good, quality links to it. From a pumpkin farmer, a vegetable recipe blog, Halloween and Thanksgiving festivities, how the first settlers used the pumpkin to build houses, etc and has a Page Rank of 5. This is the better choice. Quality, related themes and content to your site and keywords outweighs quantity of random, useless links.

Step 5 Your final list

Don't think you can do this in an hour, or a day! It's quite a bit of work just to find good, potential targets. Here's a bonus? when you have your finished your first wave a link possibilities, here's great way to give it a solid foundation.

Find some relevant directories to list with. Directories of a given theme will have many, many similar links pointing to it. Directories are usually considered to have Authority. (It's not uncommon to have to pay a fee for the good ones anyway.) Try to find a directory of pumpkin farms and pumpkin recipes to build your other links upon.

Another bonus. Avoid this mistake at all costs! Do NOT link to Link Farms or Free for all sites or any sites that will give you 1000 links for $10. These are not directories, but collections of completely unrelated links that exist solely to try to boost search engines rankings. Search engines ban many of these sites. The consequences of being listed with a banned site could ban you, and then you're doomed. The only way to succeed is to build your links honestly and strategically with a plan and method.

Note: Search engines give more weight to one-way links rather than reciprocal links. i.e. links that link to your site without asking for one in return. The easiest way to get these is to buy them. This plan will work on all the different kinds of links you can get.

So now you have some potential sites to link to. In the next article learn how to phrase your link for maximum effectiveness. The sites to link with is only the first half? the quality of the words you use that make up the link's content called anchor text are just as crucial! Hint: using the same link in every web site is a very bad idea. See you soon!

John Krycek is the owner and creative director of theMouseworks.ca. Read more articles on the insights and secrets of web design and development and search engine marketing in easy, non-technical, up front English!


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Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Search Engine Optimization For Blogs

Search Engine Optimization For Blogs was written by Priya Shah and he writes "Blogging software is really a simple Content Management System (CMS) that easily adds new pages and integrates them into your site's navigational structure and linkage.

Blogs and blog posts are naturally search engine friendly because they are text-rich, link-rich, frequently-updated webpages that use stylesheets or CSS, and have very little extraneous HTML.

Optimizing a blog is very similar to optimizing a website, and optimizing a blog post similar to optimizing a web page.

But depending on the blogging service or software you use, the results may look somewhat different..

If you follow some simple rules for search engine optimization, your blog can rank much higher than static website pages in the search engine results pages.

Here are the most important rules to follow to get your posts listed for keywords of your choice.


1. Use your primary keyword in your blog domain

Whether you purchase a separate domain (recommended) for your blog, or host it on a blogging service or a subdomain of your own site, try to ensure that your URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for.

For example, if you want your blog to get found for the keyword "rss" get a domain with the keyword "rss", or use the keyword in a subdomain as in

http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/rssnews

Getting a domain name with your own name might make for good branding, especially if yours is a personal blog.

But if you're doing it for business and want the targeted traffic to flow your way, keywords in the domain or subdomain are a move in the right direction.


2. Use your primary key phrase in your blog header tags and the title of your posts

If your primary key phrase is "business blogging" make sure that the word business, or blogging, or both, appear in your blog headers (the H1 or H2 tags) as well as the title of each of your posts.

Most blogging software will take the keywords in your post title and put them into the file name of the permalink posts it creates.

For example, if you have a blog on Blogger and title your post "Search Engine Optimization For Blogs", Blogger will automatically create a page with your post and name the file "search-engine-optimization-for-blogs.html" or something similar.

With other server-side software like Wordpress and Movable Type, you may require the mod_rewrite command to save the title of your entries as a permalink.


3. Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post

If you want to get listed for secondary keywords use them infrequently in the body of your post and pepper your blog titles or links with them appropriately.

Don't overdo this or your posts will end up sounding unnatural and spammy to readers.


4. Use your keywords in the anchor text of links

Keyword in links have more importance than simple text.

Use your primary and secondary keywords in the anchor text of links when linking to other blog posts or to other pages on your main site.

Link keywords where they naturally appear in the body text, but again, don't overdo it, or you'll end up with spammy looking pages.


5. Make sure search engines can spider your blog easily

Set up your blog so that the side navigation bar is present on all pages.

Make sure your archives and previous posts are accessible from all pages of your blog so they get spidered easily.


6. Get backlinks from other blogs or websites

Links pointing to your blog or posts are essential to build pagerank and make your blog rank higher in the search engine listings.

I've seen many people recommend Blogrolling as one method of building links to your blog.

BlogRolling)http://www.blogrolling.com/ is a one-stop linklist manager for your blog or journal. But all this service actually does is give you a bit of javascript code that "calls" the links.

As far as search engine rankings go, this method of linking is of little use, because spiders can't read external javascript code.

Instead I recommend that you focus your linking efforts on the methods here.

Submitting to Blog Search Engines and Directories:

Submitting your blog and RSS feed to blog search engines and directories is essential for getting high-quality links back to your blog.

Here is the best list I've found of places to submit your feed or blog.

Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites

Link Exchanges:

Many similarly-themed blogs are often willing to exchange links with other blogs and form richly interlinked networks or communities. Link exchanges with other blogs are easy to implement with most blogging software.

Trackbacks:

You can also get links back to your blog using trackbacks. One of the disadvantages of using Blogger is that it does not automatically create trackback urls that others can use to link back to your posts.

Haloscan is a free service that will automatically add comments and trackbacks to your Blogger blog.

But if trackbacks are an important component of your linking strategy, I would advise using another software or system that adds this feature automatically.

Comments:

You can also get back links to your blog by posting legitimate comments in response to posts on other blogs.


7. Update frequently

There's no better food for search engine spiders than fresh content.

Post and update your blog frequently using all the rules outlined above and there's no reason why your blog will not get you top rankings in a short period of time.


8. Stay put

Once you create your blog, try to stick to the same domain and blog host or system for as long as you continue to publish.

You could end up losing a lot of your traffic, your readers and all your search engine listings if you decide to move.

For more ways of building traffic to your blog, read the article "How To Build Traffic To Your Blog."http://www.blog-maniac.com/build-blog-traffic.htm

Priya Shah publishes an internet marketing ezine by day and doubles as a Blog Maniac by night. Blog Brandz is the legitimate offspring of her affair with the blogosphere.


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Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Search Engine Optimization SEO Made Easy

Search Engine Optimization SEO Made Easy was written by Brian Hawkins and he writes "SEO is a never ending battle!

So is SEO over-rated? I don't think it is. Some say that Google's automated PageRank? system and Alexa's Traffic Rank system are losing ground. This may be may be true to some point but the fact still remains that we want at the top of the search results. And to achieve this we need to educate ourselves and do the work or hire someone else to the work for us.

Search Engine Optimization "SEO" is a term we see all over the net. For those of you that are unsure exactly what is meant by SEO, it's simply adjusting many characteristics of your website to conform with what the major search engines deem important. That's where the simple stops. It's complicated only because no one other than the developers themselves know all the rules and even then the rules are constantly changing..

What I'll try to do here is cover the basics that have fairly consistent lately. Keep in mind however there will always be inconsistencies when it comes SEO. For example, I recently read an e-book that said to imbed a few of your primary keywords in the "alt" tag of your logo graphic. The same day, I was reading an online article of equal quality and this author cautioned against such a tactic due to possible penalties by the search engines. So which did I do? See for yourself by hovering your mouse over the logo. I don't mind a little risk as long as the risk is low and there may be nice benefits, but don't get carried away. We certainly don't want to get banned by any search engines. I get the heebie-jeebies just saying it. That would simply end many of us. Because Google's PageRank? and Alexa's Traffic Rank systems are really two different animals, I will focus primarily on Google's PageRank? system for now.

So lets get started in no particular order.

Link Popularity: I guess we can start with the hardest part of search engine optimization. Link popularity. The ultimate goal here is to gain the respect of the search engines. And how we do that is by who we know or at least associate with in the spiders eyes. We want as many quality incoming links as possible with as few low-ranked outbound links as possible. We need to consider several factors when we approach any site to request a link exchange.

1. First of all, we want to focus only on sites that compliment ours. By that I mean directly on indirectly are in the same category or field or relating field as our site without necessarily competing with our site. I say not-necessarily because personally I have no problem linking to competitors site as long as we both mutually agree benefits. Some fear they'll lose some of their site visitors but I feel the best way to keep visitors on your site and get them to return is by providing a high quality site with great original content.

2. Second we want to pay attention to their Google page rank. To do this if you haven't already done so, download Google free toolbar http://toolbar.google.com/ Once installed, you can see the PageRank? of any site you go to. You want as many sites as possible with high PR's. Set a goal of getting a few PR6 or PR7 sites. This will do wonders to your rank. In fact one PR7 might do more for you than hundreds on no or very low PR sites.

3. Third, the engines like to see incoming links from what they consider on authoritative site. So aggressively go after well established, high ranking sites that share the some focus as your site.

4. Fourth on our list are the sites to stay away from. Sites that generate artificially created links. Link farms and even huge link exchange sites can even get your site banned. I don't mean to make anyone nervous here. The fact is, if you are generally doing the right thing for the right reasons, you probably have nothing to worry about. If you find yourself trying to hide something or hoping an search engine doesn't catch something, then you may want to re-evaluate your strategies.

Requesting a link. The first thing you should do when requesting a link exchange is little research. Glance over the site in question and consider where your site link might hold the most relevance one their site.

This will benefit both parties. And then don't be afraid to offer the suggestions when you contact the site administrator. I have had sites accept my link on a suggested page even though they have a section designed just for outside links. I have even accepted links that I would have normally rejected because the fit would have seemed wrong if they hadn't shown a better fit.

Always add their link to your site before you make the request and include the page url of the link when making contact. Keep track of the contacts you've made and if you haven't received a reply. Do a simple search on there site to see if they added your link and forgot to reply. At most, send one more request and be sure to include the words link exchange in the subject line so they don't delete your mail as spam. Then if you still don't get a reply within a week simply remove theirs from your site and move on. Don't send any more mail. Consider the lack of response as a rejection and accept it. Don't take things personal and send a negative e-mail. I have actually received a couple of these and there's really no point. If you do get a reply and a link send a short thank you note.

Always include the exact text of the link you want on their site. Again, before you do this it helps if you look at other links on their site. If they have a 3 or 4 word description with each link, you don't want to send a whole paragraph in your links description. What you do want to do is include your best key words. In fact, a short description with the right key words can benefit you far better than a watered down version. Keep it short and sweet.

Make things as easy as possible for the webmaster. Include the html code of your link so he/she can just copy and paste if they decide to.



Sample Link Exchange Request Letter

Hi, I am the administrator and site owner of YourSiteHere.com
I would like to apply for a link exchange with your site.
I have already linked to your site, you can view it at:
http://reciprocal.YourSiteHere.com/

Basic exchange information
Site name:


Extreme Site Promotions
URL:


http://www.YourSiteHere.com
Site Description:


Extreme sit promotion techniques for internet marketing campaigns, site promotion and internet advertising.
Category:


Internet marketing/Web promotion
Where our site reciprocates:


http://reciprocal.YourSiteHere.com.com/

Contact information
Name:


Your Name
Email address:


admin@YourSiteHere.com

Extreme promotions techniques for internet marketing campaigns. Site promotion andinternet advertising. Feel Free to download the supplied graphics located at http://www.YourSiteHere.com/graphics and use them to link back to our home page. Our site can only reciprocate with a text link.

Link/ Resource Page- If you decide to dedicate a page or two to link exchanges, stay with the over all theme of your site. And the best way to create a links page is by doing it manually. An automated system can be less affective and can even get you in trouble if not maintained closely.

Organize your links into categories and set a limit of about 50 links or so to a page.

Include on your links page an example of the link you want used linking back to your site. Again, use your key words. It might also be nice to offer a few graphics or banners in case a site would prefer to use a graphic linked back to you. Give them permission to download the images and use them to link to your site. I always include a comment such as,

"Feel Free to download the supplied graphics located at www.YourSiteHere.com/graphics and use them to link back to our home page. Our site can only reciprocate with a text link."

I think it's better to provide a link to the graphic page rather than sending attachments. In today's age of viruses, you risk you email getting deleted right away if it contains an attachment.

I have learned from experience that many sites aren't going to play fair, and even more of them are not keeping their sites updated. I have a nice link exchange program that I've built over a many month period and a couple months ago, a friend of mine let me in on a new link tag: content="noindex,nofollow" He suggested that I use it for links such as affiliate links and other non-reciprocating links. Why let these sites suck up my page rank with nothing in return? As I was adding the tags, I went to my links page and began checking each site for a reciprocal link. To my amazement, over 50% had no link back to my site. This means that most of the 50% had removed the link after a short period and maybe a few had squeaked by me without ever adding one. Another reason I was surprised by this is that about 75% of the links on that site were requested by the other party. So what can you do? Ireined my system. I added a note at the top of the page and I began making these changes:

For every site that I couldn't find a like from, I added the word "pending" and I also added the content="noindex,nofollow" tag. This would reduce one sided benefit until I notify each site and give them a chance to ad mine. I could have deleted these links but this method is better for a few reasons. First, it relays a message to future exchange sites that we're paying attention. Second, it's possible that I made a mistake and the link is there. And lastly, they may have a mistake themselves. so each site will be contacted individually before they are removed. A huge project that I'm not looking forward to but it has to be done.

As for the sites that did reciprocate, they get a double benefit. They get the word "confirmed" next to their link with a second link to their site going directly to the page where our links resides. This will make life much easier in the future when it comes to re-checking reciprocal links. All I'll have to do is click on the 'confirmed' link and it should be there.

Brian Hawkins - Entrepreneur, Internet Marketer, Online business consultant, Author. Site owner and administrator of several sites including: http://www.extremesitepromotions.com/ and http://www.csc4u.com/


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Sunday, September 10, 2006

8 Essential SEO techniques

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Colyer is the owner of the Superior Webmaster. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer.


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Saturday, September 09, 2006

How to Avoid Being Dropped by the Search Engines

How to Avoid Being Dropped by the Search Engines was written by Michael Turner and he writes "For websites, one of the most important things in their existence is their ranking with the search engines. The reason why this is so important is because when websites are ranked high by the search engines, they get flooded with free, targeted web traffic from visitors who are looking for information or products. Obviously, any kind of activity that might hurt a websites chance of getting a premium listing should be avoided at all costs. The following tips are things websites should completely avoid if they want to optimize their results with the search engines.

Tip #1 Don't Spam

Almost none of the search engines index websites long term that practice spamming. Also, search engines frequently update their definition of "search engine spam" than say the average Internet user, so it would be worthwhile to educate yourself and stay current on the definition of spamming by the major search engines. Search engines frequently blacklist URLs that engage in spamming, so not only will you not get indexed but you could get blacklisted for life. Certainly worth avoiding..

Tip #2 Don't Use Frames

Search engine spiders that crawl the web do not respond well to websites using frames and frequently miss many of the pages that are listed within the website. As a result, you should avoid using frames on your website because search engines do not treat them favorably.

Tip #3 Don't Have Pages Under Construction

Make sure when you submit your URL to the search engines to get indexed that you do not have pages currently still under construction. Search engines as a rule don't like to list pages that are still under construction, so if you have these be sure to finish them before submitting for indexing. Also, never use the phrase "Under Construction" on your pages that are unfinished!

Tip #4 Don't use Invisible Text or Other Sneaky Tricks

Do not use invisible text with keyword stuffing to try and beef up your search engine rankings. Your viewers might not know that you are using invisible text, but the search engine spiders will catch you and may blacklist your URL. Play fair and by the rules.

Tip #5 Free Hosts

Frequently businesses that use free web hosts find their websites not getting indexed by the search engines. The reason for this is that free hosts have a lot of restrictions and cause a lot of problems for users, not to mention sites that are down because the server is down. Problems with your server will cause problems with SE indexing, so avoid it if at all possible.

These are just a few of the more popular suggestions to keep your web pages indexed by the search engines and ranking in the SERP's. If you ignore these tips, you should not be surprised if your pages are not spidered, indexed, and ranked.

Michael Turner reveals step-by-step how you can increase search engine traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/


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Friday, September 08, 2006

Search Engine Optimisation Why And How To Do It

Search Engine Optimisation - Why And How To Do It was written by Justine Curtis and writes "In the following article I will give you some basic guidelines to follow in order to help get your web site ranked at the top of popular organic search engines. More detailed information can be found in our DIY Internet Marketing Guide "Start at the Beginning" Click here for an excerpt: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk/html/book_2.html

What Is Optimisation?

Search engine optimisation is the process of creating or modifying a web site so that it encompasses the design, background coding, text copy, and link-building elements search engines check through when indexing your web site. Through the process of optimisation, you can develop or alter a web site so that the search engines will move your web site towards the top of the results generated for your particular, relevant searches. This means people who are actually searching for what you have to sell will click to your web site, as it will be listed above those of your competitors..

How Does Optimisation Work?

There are three fundamental elements to the search engine optimisation: background coding, text copy and link popularity.

Background coding is the manipulation of your HTML code so that it is "clean", uncluttered, positioned correctly, and easily accessible to the search engine spiders and crawlers. You need to be sure that the most important information to the spiders is located near the top of the page where it can be quickly and easily found and positioned thus, the spiders will consider that it is more relevant than information nearer the bottom of the page. You also need to ensure that java scripts and other such coding are moved out of the spiders' way.

Text copy relates to the text on your site. Professional search engine copywriters are able to write in such a way as to include your primary key phrases in strategic places so that you get the most "points" from the engines and also appeal enough to your customers to persuade them to purchase your product or service.

Link popularity deals with how many sites have links that point back to your web site and the quality of those web sites with regard to relevance. The theory is, that if others in your field think highly enough of your web site to link to it, your web site, and the products or services it offers, must be of good quality.

When you have a good combination of all three primary elements, you stand a much better chance of ranking high within these engines.

A Couple of Myths Exploded?
Isn't It All About the META Tags?

A long, long time ago, in a land far away?it used to be! When the Internet was first founded, virtually all you had to do to get high rankings was to stick a load of key phrases into your keyword tag and boom, lots of targeted traffic flooding to your web site. Now, however, the engines are smarter. They pay no attention to the keyword tags and very little attention to the description tag. The only tag that carries much weight anymore is the title tag and it is extremely important.

Isn't it All About stuffing Your Pages Full of Key Phrases?

No! Not only does key phrase stuffing (as it is attractively known) put you at risk of spamming the search engines, it makes your text copy look and sound horrible to your human site visitors. What good are high search engine rankings if your web site text puts off and doesn't convert those visitors into paying customers? You need to maintain the balance between natural language and key phrase use.

How can you get the balance right? Read the detailed information in our DIY Internet Marketing Guides "Start at the Beginning" excerpt available here: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk/html/book_2.html and also "Writing Text That Sells" excerpt here: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk/html/book_3.html

How to Optimise Your Web Site.

Set your goals.
The first thing to consider when embarking on a new search engine optimisation campaign is to establish the goals for the site and the optimisation in general. For instance, is the goal to drive more targeted traffic to the site, to get people to sign up for a newsletter, to get someone to make a purchase online, or is it to entice people to call or fill out a form requesting more information? Usually, the goals will be a combination of things. Very often different pages within the site will have different goals, and these need to be kept in mind throughout the SEO process.

Identify Your Key Phrases.
With the end goals in mind, the next step is to compile a key phrase list. Brainstorm the phrases you feel are important to your business and also make sure you go through the existing pages or your web site and add to the list any phrases that appear naturally within the copy. With list in hand, it's time for some heavy-duty keyword research. You can use a free suggestion tool such as those provided by Overture or Google or pay for time limited access to WordTracker.

WordTracker - http://www.wordtracker.com
Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Google AdWords - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox

More often than not, you'll find that phrases that you thought were important are not actually searched for by real people. The key phrase suggestion tools above will give you alternate suggestions to test.

You will now be armed with a list of actually searched for, highly targeted, relevant keyword phrases. Weed out any irrelevant phrases from the list and rank the relevant ones in order of importance for your business. Then decide which 2 or 3 phrases to focus on within the copy of each page of the web site. The home page of the site should usually focus on the main 2 or 3 phrases that encompass the general theme of the site. Inner pages should each focus on 2 or 3 more specific phrases. If your pages already have some text copy to work with, take a look at the existing words on each page and see which 2 or 3 keyword phrases in your short list will fit best with the current copy. If pages of the site don't have much copy to begin with, or if there is no specific focus on any given page, a rewrite from scratch will be necessary.

Write the Text Copy.
Now it's time to get down to the nitty-gritty of writing the text copy for your pages. If you're starting from scratch, be sure you keep in mind which phrases need to be used, what the goals of the site are, and who the target market is as this information will affect how you write the copy. If you're lucky enough to have some existing copy, the next step will be to work in the necessary keywords whilst maintaining the flow and rhythm of the text. Once your copy is finished you should have a number of pages focusing on 2 or 3 key phrases each. Edit the HTML Code.

Optimising the HTML code includes creating Title tags, Meta description tags, Meta keyword tags, hyperlinks, and possibly headings and image alt attributes. All of these are factors in helping the search engine spiders to properly classify your site, with some being more important than others. There is too much detail to go into in this newsletter but more information can be found in our DIY Internet Marketing Guide "Start at the Beginning" Click here for an excerpt: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk/html/book_2.html

Upload and Submit.
Once you have completed all the steps above upload your new pages to your server and if this is a new web site, submit them to the search engines. If you are updating an old site that is listed (all-be-it badly) in the search engines, it is not necessary to resubmit it.

Also don't forget to perform your directory submissions or directory change requests. Make sure you submit to directories only when your web site is complete as this aids the directory editor categorise your site more easily, and they'll be less likely to edit your submitted description.

Link Building.
Now it is time to begin your link-building campaign in earnest. Link building can be started in a quick burst, but should also be an ongoing process. You should always be on the lookout for sites that are a good fit with yours and contact them about exchanging links. For more info on link popularity and its effect on search engine rankings, please read our guide "Start at the Beginning" Click here for an excerpt: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk/html/book_2.html

Wait and See.
All that's left to do now is wait for your organic listings to begin listing. If you've paid for inclusion with the search engines and directories that offer this service, you should start to see results within two weeks. If the initial rankings aren't as high as you'd like them to be, don't panic. Concentrate on your link building and your efforts will be rewarded over time. Try not to make any major changes to the web site its-self for at least 3 to 6 months.

Now all you have to do is sit back and wait for all those free, targeted, highly motivated customers!

For a complete guide to marketing on the Internet, including:

· The General Principles of Internet Marketing
· Start at the Beginning
· Writing Text that Sells
· Building Online Relationships
· Maximising Your Pay Per Click Campaign
· Measuring Success

Why not purchase the whole series of downloadable guides for the discounted price of £64.95. Click for more information: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk/html/promo_ebooks.html

Justine Curtis
Enable UK
Internet Marketing Information and Resources
Make your web site work harder!
Web: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk
Email: info@enable-uk.co.uk
Article from Internet Marketing Tips Newsletter, a monthly publication of Enable-UK
Copyright © 2004 Enable-UK.


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Thursday, September 07, 2006

How Web Design Can Affect Search Engine Rankings

How Web Design Can Affect Search Engine Rankings was written by John Metzler and he writes "Uniquely built web sites can create unique issues when being promoted on the search engines. From a basic 3 page brochure site to a corporate site with hundreds of dynamically generated pages, every web site needs to have certain design aspects in order to achieve the full effects of an SEO campaign. Below are a few points to take into consideration when building or updating your web site.

1. Size Matters.

The size of a web site can have a huge impact on search engine rankings. Search engines love content, so if you have only a few pages to your site and your competitors have dozens, it's difficult to see a top page ranking for your site. In some cases it may be difficult to present several pages of information about your business or products, so you may need to think about adding free resources for visitors. It will help in broadening the scope of your web site (which search engines like) as well as keep visitors on your site longer, possibly resulting in more sales..

2. Graphics-Based Web Sites.

While web sites that offer the visitor a more esthetically-pleasing experience may seem like the best choice for someone searching for your product, they are the most difficult to optimize. Since search engine robots cannot read text within graphics or animation, what they see may be just a small amount of text. And if we learned anything from point #1, small amounts of content will not result in top rankings. If you really must offer the visitor a graphics-heavy or Flash web site, consider creating an html-based side of your site that is also available to visitors. This site will be much easier to promote on the search engines and your new found visitors will also have the option to jump over to the nicer looking part of your site.

3. Dynamic Web Pages.

If most of your web site is generated by a large database (such as a large book dealer with stock that is changing by the minute) you may find that some of your pages do not get indexed by major search engines. If you look at the URL of these pages they can be extremely long and have characters such as ?, #, &, %, or = along with huge amounts of seemingly random numbers or letters. Since these pages are automatically generated by the database as needed, the search engines have a tough time keeping them up to date and relevant for search engine users.

One way to combat this problem is to offer a search engine friendly site map listing all your static pages just to let them know that you do have permanent content on your site. If search engines see links going to and from these dynamic pages within a good internal linking system, this may also lead to the pages getting indexed. The link popularity of your site may carry more weight in this case as well, so if you can't offer as much static content as your competition, make sure you have an aggressive link campaign on the go.

4. Proper Use of HTML.

There is quite a bit of sub-par web design software out there. Word processors usually have a way to create HTML documents which can be easily uploaded to a site via ftp. However, in many cases the code that the search engine robots see is mostly lines and lines of font and position formatting, not relevant content. The more efficiently written web sites usually achieve higher rankings. Our choice for web design software is Macromedia Dreamweaver, as it is an industry standard. It also makes using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) a breeze, which can drastically cut down on the amount of text formatting in HTML code. Hand-coding HTML to design sites is also a good method if you are proficient enough.

There are some no brainers too: Web sites with abnormal amounts of hyperlinks, bold or italicized text, improper use of heading, alt, or comment tags can also expect to see low rankings.

5. Choosing a Domain Name.

The golden rule to web development of any kind is to keep your visitors in mind above all else - even search engine optimization. When choosing a domain name, one should pick either your business name (if you have a high-profile business name such as Chapters or Coca-Cola) or a brief description of your products. Domain names can always help with search engine optimization, as it is another area of your web site that important keywords can appear. Forget about long- winded domains such as www.number-one-best-books-on-earth.com as no one will ever remember it and it will be hard to print on business cards or in ads.

If you need to change your domain name for any reason you obviously don't want to lose existing rankings. An easy way to do this, and one that is currently supported by most search engines, is the 301 redirect. It allows you to keep your existing rankings for your old domain name, while forwarding visitors to your new web site instantly.

6. Using Frames.

Don't use frames. Frames are a thing of the 90's (and in the Internet world that is eons ago) and are not even supported by some search engines. The search engines that are able to index your site through frames will most likely frown upon them. Whatever you are trying to accomplish by using frames can usually be done with the help of PHP includes or CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Some browsers are not frames-compatible, so there is the danger of some visitors not being able to see your site at all. Bookmarking of individual pages within a frame becomes difficult without lengthly scripts being written.

7. Update Your Information.

Not only does information printed two or three years ago look badly on your organization when it is read by a visitor, it is also looked down upon by search engines. Web sites that continuously update and grow their web sites usually experience higher rankings than stagnant sites. When the trick to SEO is offering visitors the most relevant information, you can bet that the age of web pages is taken into consideration by search engines. Consider creating a section of your site devoted to news within your organization, or have a constantly updated resources area.

Many shortfalls of web sites can easily be attributed to designers who just don't keep the user or search engines in mind. Search engine algorithms are quickly improving to try and list the most user-friendly sites higher, given that the content and link popularity are there to back it up. So first and foremost, know your target market and make your web site work for them before focusing on search engine optimization. If you build it (properly), they will come.

Copyright John Metzler of Abalone Designs, November 2004. This article may be freely distributed if credit is given to the author. Abalone Designs is a family-run Search Engine Optimization firm in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Visit http://www.abalone.ca for a free personalized analysis of your web site.


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SEO Hints and Tips and Free SEO Tools

SEO Hints and Tips and Free SEO Tools was written by Alan Boyer and he writes "Do you realize that if you manage your website, SEO tools, and pay-per-click tools, you can literally have as many leads as you want from your website? I assume that a website should convert approximately 5% of the viewers to doers, taking some kind of action that you want them to take. So, all we have to do is make sure the website does convert viewers to doers, and then we make sure we've got the right amount of traffic arriving at the website. All quite manageable. Today, we're mainly talking about how to get the traffic to your website through Search Engine Optimization, SEO.

Here is a list of the best tools I've found to do SEO and a quick review of some of the top issues for SEO. Most of these tools are either free, or can be tried for free before buying

Most search engines are looking at your site to find relevant search words. How relevant determines your eventual search engine position..

How do they determine relevancy? Although every search engine has slightly different rules, here are some of the key ideas. Keep in mind, they could change tomorrow. Search engines are continually changing because just as soon as they determine how to find the relevant search words on your site, someone finds a way around their rules. Then search engines change the rules again.

A key word usually has to show up in each of the following areas of your site, with a density that falls within a range that search engine would like to see. They also like to see the words at a certain position in that area, usually at or near the beginning of these areas:

Areas search engines look at:

1)Meta tags (title, description, and keywords) (NOTE: I'm told that most search engines don't consider meta tags any longer, but I keep seeing my keywords pop up from the meta tags).
2)Body text of the site
3)Headlines
4)Alternate text behind the graphics
5)Links, and link text

How do you choose the right keywords?

Here's a big warning: Consider what people are looking for, not who you are or what your product is. For me, I would rather be found for "small business help" than for my company name, The Leader's Perspective. Obviously I want people to find me, if by chance they are looking for me by name, but just think about this:


Aren't there more people in the world looking for "small business help" or "business help" than could possibly be looking for my name. Those looking for my company name are those that I have probably met personally and sent them to my site. That's a small number, in comparison to the number of companies on the internet looking for help that don't have any idea who I am?.yet anyway.

Here are some tools to find the right keywords.

http://inventory.overture.com Enter a keyword, and Overture will return the number of times that keyword was searched for in the last month. It will also show you other variances of that same keyword and the number of searches for each variance. Use this to brainstorm keywords. (NOTE: I've also discovered this is a VERY useful tool to use before sending out any kind of marketing. Find what people are looking for and then make sure those words show up in your marketing, AND in your website.

http://www.wordtracker.com

Now, this is an even better tool. This one contains a thesaurus as well, so it will show lots of other ways people have been searching for the keywords you've typed in.

This tool also has a way of measuring the RIGHT keyword that is even better than Overture for Search engine optimization.

Overture reports the number of searches last month for that keyword, so you can find the words that have the greatest number of searches. However, Wordtracker, reports the greatest number of searches for the words with the LEAST competition.

When you are doing SEO it won't do you any good to go after the words that have been searched for the most if there are millions of competing sites. It's just not likely that you COULD get a page 1 ranking among millions of sites.

So, Wordtracker helps you find words that have been searched for ENOUGH to give you traffic, but at the same time have the least competition. They provide their own proprietary ranking that finds the best search words that you are likely to get a search engine position for.

Just make sure that the words you end up with from that search actually are words that someone would be looking for to find you.

Hint: I use Overture to find the greatest number of searches and use that for pay-per-clicks, and use Wordtracker to find the right search words for Search engine optimization.

Here are some other useful tools.

Tools that help you Learn Search Engine optimization while guiding you through the process.

Internet Business Promoter will provide not only an analysis of many of the search engine sensitive stats, but will give you almost a step-by-step how to fix your site. Although this has ended up down the list, this is probably the number one greatest tool to learn search engine optimization. www.axandra.com
Another similar tool is http://www.wpgsales.com/

Link Popularity
Search engines tend to give websites that have more external links from other websites pointing at them a higher search engine ranking. Here are a couple of free tools to track your link popularity, and to check our competition as well. www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com http://www.marketleap.com (this one shows a graph if your history)

Alan Boyer, President/CEO of The Leader's Perspective, LLC is considered one of the world's leading breakthrough specialists. He has worked with some of the worlds largest companies, on projects in the multi-billion dollar area, and with single proprietor companies. He has worked on many hundreds of projects with companies that have resulted in multi-$100 million savings or gains.

With over 35 years of business, quality, and process experience, he has catapulted businesses lightyears ahead in weeks. Some have doubled and some have jumped 10 times. He claims the key to that is:


Helping the business owners/employees develop the business skills


Helping them overcome the limitations and attitudes that they built between their ears (the self imposed limitations, I can't, this won't work for me, I'm different)


By helping them find the breakthroughs in their business and thinking

He helps companies worldwide reach further than they EVER thought possible?.FASTER
http://www.leaders-perspective.com/Small-Business-Help.aspx
mailto:AlanBoyer@leaders-perspective.com


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Tuesday, September 05, 2006

How To Enhance The Internal Link Structure Of Your Site

How To Enhance The Internal Link Structure Of Your Site was written by Aaron Nimocks and writes "To enhance the internal link structure of your website, it is first important to understand the definition of "Link Weight." New studies have shown that on page factors are not very important in determining the search engine rankings of your website. Search engines are more concerned with how your site is promoted by other websites. Link weight is different from page rank, and the two terms should never be confused. Page rank deals with pages, while Link Weight deals with links. It is important to make sure that every page on your site is indexed without using a lot of internal links.

To give you an example of the difference between the two, imagine that your website has received two PR8 links from two different sites. One one site, your link is on a page with only two other links. On the other site, your link is on a page with 200 links. Even though the page rank of both sites are equal, the page with the least number of links will carry a much higher Link Weight. When you hear people talk about links, they are generally talking about links which come from other sites. If you go to websites which are well optimized, you will find that few place an emphasis on the internal link structure..

The reason for this is because these webmasters fear that their page rank will be reduced by linking to other websites from their homepage. At the same time, they are wasting at lot of link weight on pages which are not that important. By using the link weight on your index page, it can be transferred over to weaker pages which are competing for specific keywords. The first thing you should do is analyze the the keywords on each page of your site, and look at the conversion rates for those words. You will also want to look at the competition these keywords have in the search engines. After this, you will want to transfer the link weight the pages which are the weakest, while leaving some link weight on pages which can easily give it out.

Please feel free to reprint this article, just be sure that my signature file remains in tact and the link inside of it is clickable to the proper destination. To learn more about what Aaron Nimocks does visit his site at Amber Directory.


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