Keeping Up Means Keeping Track

Writen by Joe Borowy

There are millions of webmasters across the world. Most are fighting to get high rankings in search engines. Like anything else, search engines change with time. It is very important to keep track of your website's progress and standing within the engines. Monthly submission and link popularity checking are both key to maintaining good standing with the engines.

Most webmasters put forth a valiant initial effort to obtain high rankings, and they may even get them. But, most webmasters tend to forget about maintaining their standing in the search engines. Just like all aspects of modern technology, search engines are continually changing the way they rank websites. Unless you're a webmaster of a powerhouse website, keeping up with the times is critical. Link popularity changes all the time, and it's very important to make sure link partners continue to link to you. If this is overlooked, rankings could decrease dramatically in a few months' time.

Most webmasters lack a one-stop-shop tool to keep track of their progress within the search engines. Prices for these tools can vary, but there is one that combines both value and efficiency. MDTrafficBuilder is the best one-stop-shop tool for keeping track of link popularity, rankings, automated submission, and keyword research that I have found in my years of research. They are very affordable, and offer a 5-day free trial.

If link popularity is monitored regularly and monthly submissions can be automated, a webmaster can save a lot of valuable time. Search engines account for 70% of all traffic on the Internet, and they simply cannot be overlooked. They change with the times like anything else, so webmasters must keep up. Remember, success means keeping up, and keeping up means keeping track!

Joe Borowy is the Owner of http://www.SuccessForFreedom.com where they work hard to maintain an honest and reliable source for honest work at home internet business opportunities.

If you need to contact Joe please email him at Ravenfan3888@gmail.com Thank you!

MDTrafficBuilder can be found at http://www.mdtrafficbuilder.com

Search Engine Optimization Static Ip Vs Dynamic Ip Addresses

Writen by Shawn Hickman

First, let's define what we are talking about when we say "static IP" vs "name based" hosting. Here are some synonyms:

For "static hosting", the following all mean the same thing: static IP, dedicated IP, http/1.0, non-shared hosting. For "dynamic hosting", the following all mean the same thing: dynamic IP, name based hosting, http/1.1.

Let's take a brief history of the Internet to put things more in focus. Once upon a time, every host on the Internet had a unique IP address. It is usually expressed as 4 numbers from 0-255 separated by dots. An example would be 207.44.161.131. There are billions of such IP addresses possible... however, there is a finite number.

An organization called ARIN hands out IP addresses in the western hemisphere while another organization handles Europe and another Asia. Those organizations noticed several years ago that we were going to eventually run out of those IP addresses because of the proliferation of websites. At the time, every website had it's own dedicated IP address that was associated with it's domain name.

The solution? A new protocol was developed called HTTP 1.1 (to replace HTTP 1.0). The new protocol allowed more than one domain/website to share the same IP address. In fact, hundreds of websites can now share the same IP address. The new type of hosting is called "name based", "shared IP", "http 1.1", etc.

Some SEOs theorize that your choice of dedicated hosting vs. shared hosting might affect your rankings. Some others claim that is ridiculous because all hosting will eventually be shared in order to preserve IP addresses. Which is correct?

I decided to run it through our statistical analysis engine to get the facts. Here is the methodology I used to answer this question. I gathered the results of the queries naturally performed last month by myself and three associates using Yahoo and Google. I then pinged each site to get its IP address. I then tried to visit the site using the IP address. With shared hosting, this isn't possible. You get some kind of generic page instead of the specific site you want. I tallied my results for each of the first eight rankings.

First, it is interesting to note that the number of sites using shared vs. dedicated hosting is just about half and half. We expect that as time goes on, more and more sites will be using shared hosting.

The second thing to note is that there is no trend for either Yahoo or Google that would indicate any preference for either type of site. Google might show a slight preference for static IP. Yahoo might show a slight preference for shared hosting. The net effect is null. The correlations for both are very close to zero (on a scale of -100 to +100, Google's correlation was a +35 and Yahoo's was a -21). I generally consider anything from -35 to +35 to be statistically insignificant.

Notes:

1. Over 1,000 queries and over 10,000 sites were examined for this study.

2. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords. I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by three associates and myself during the prior month.

Conclusion:

Sites using static hosting do not rank significantly higher or lower than sites using shared hosting on both Yahoo and Google.

This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from this study whether the leading search engines purposefully entertain this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant from the factor we studied, but the end result is that both of these search engines do, in fact, rank pages with a "window.open" command higher on average.

Find more articles at http://www.4cornersflorida.com

Seo For Beginners Part 3 The Weakest Link Is Still Pretty Darn Good

Writen by Ross Lambert

In my last installment I promised that this time around I would discuss the importance of links in your search optimization efforts as well as how to get them. Unfortunately this article got long in a hurry, so we’ll just tackle the importance of getting external links now. I think you might be surprised at how vitally important they are, and mildly depressed at how hard it is to get high-value links. But stay tuned: Part 4 of this series will improve your mood.

In my opinion, the entire field of search engine optimization has become a lot simpler in the last year. In a nutshell, keyword optimization is nice, but getting external links is basically the whole enchilada. If you need to focus your time and energy, focus on acquiring unreciprocated external links.

Proving the Point

If you want to see how important links are, open your web browser, go to Google.com, and do a search on “Click Here”. The first result is Adobe.com’s Acrobat Reader download page. Interesting, no?

Even more interesting is the fact that the words “Click Here” are nowhere on the page. It would be silly to use “Click Here” as keywords because it is not a normal search term, and Adobe did not even include them anywhere on the page text, title, description, or in any metatags at all. So why does Google rank Adobe’s download page number one on that term?

The answer is external links. As a convenience to customers and site visitors, just about every web site that has a PDF file available also has a link to Adobe.com for the Acrobat download. And almost invariably, the link text is something like, “If you need Acrobat Reader, click here.”

Anchors Aweigh!

The Adobe example illustrates a key point about links: The search engines use anchor text as a huge hint as to what the target web page is really about. Anchor text, for those who need to know, is the visible link text that you click on in the browser when the page is rendered. The URL the link takes you to can be something like, “http://somewebsite.com”, whereas the anchor text can be, “Free money here”—or virtually anything the page author wants to say.

In some ways that makes our lives more difficult because we cannot control how others link to us, much less whether they link to us. There are some ways around this that I’ll touch cover in the next installment. But first a word about Page Rank.

A Salute to Those of High Rank

As mentioned in a prior installment, Page Rank is a term Google coined for how valuable or important it believes your web site to be relative to other pages on the web. Page Rank values range from 0 to 10 (which is an eleven point scale, oddly enough). The actual components of Google’s Page Rank calculation are yet another closely guarded secret, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that the number of external links to your page is a huge part of it.

The importance of Page Rank is sometimes overblown since search engines must by definition care more about a page’s relevance to search queries. However, Page Rank is definitely one of the factors that will push your page higher in the crowd of equally relevant pages returned as query results. If you have virtually no competitors for your primary keywords, don’t worry about Page Rank. The rest of us need to have it on our radar.

There are precious few PR 10 web pages and at the time I’m writing this, Adobe’s Acrobat download page does indeed have that coveted PR 10 ranking. It certainly got the bulk of its rank because so many sites provide unreciprocated links to it. Another factor in Page Rank appears to be age: All things being equal, sites that have been around longer tend to have higher Page Rank values.

A hint to those still awake: The age factor as well as the Google sandbox described in part 1 of this series are both powerful arguments for getting web sites up and spidered as soon as possible, even if only as prototypes or proof-of-concepts.

If you were to survey tens of thousands of web sites, I believe you’d find that the most successful private, non-corporate web sites have a PR of 6. There are very, very few PR 7 sites, and if you’ve managed to achieve a PR 4 or 5 without professional SEO help, you’ve done pretty well.

Now we come to the slightly depressing part: One of the best ways to improve your page rank (and therefore improving the tendency to show up higher in search results) is to get an unreciprocated link to your page from a page with a higher page rank. If the Acrobat download page linked to my site, I’d be sitting pretty.

But alas, such links are very difficult to come by. Even worse, as we said in part 2, the one thing we can easily offer is a return link, but such reciprocal links have dubious value. I have anecdotal evidence that their value is rapidly declining and they are worth far less now than they were just one month ago when I wrote those words.

Here’s another tip: Reciprocal links to sites that have nothing to do with your web site in terms of content are a total waste of time. If you have a site about wedding gowns and you exchange links with a gambling site, in my opinion you’ve achieved nothing.

I’m connecting some faint dots, I admit, but I know Google in particular is investing a lot of effort in what is called “semantic analysis”. In short, they have a pretty good idea of what your web site is about, and they are highly motivated to provide the best possible search results. If a wedding site and a gambling site link to each other, the search engines are not all that interested in your contention that marriage is a gamble. That link is worth nothing.

In fact, I predict that if Google finds many reciprocal links with unrelated sites on your web page, you will actually be punished in terms of your page’s ranking. I can’t prove it yet, but as I said in part 1, if you learn to think like the spider, you’ll be able to predict what they’re going to do.

The spider likes it when you link to things that provide value to your visitors. And the spider gets angry when you trade worthless links solely for the purpose of fooling it into thinking your site is wildly popular. I predict spidey will bite you, if not today then tomorrow.

So what’s a new web site owner to do? There is no free lunch, but we’ll evaluate the items on the menu in part 4.

Ross Lambert founded Midnight Marketer, a newbie-friendly community, and created Sonic Page Blaster (http://spbsavestime.com), Ross's Guide to the Masters of Marketing (http://saleslettergenius.com), and CB Product Alert (http://midnightmarketer.com/cbalert.php).

Search Engine Wars Quality Searches Vs Quantity

Writen by Martin Lemieux

It is no secret that Google and Yahoo are on a continuous battle to win our hearts and get everyone to convert, but is converting someone really a matter of the quantity or the quality?

Let's take a look at some top key searches and compare them with some search engines online. I will outline a few things for each search result:

1) Search Engine
2) Number of results found
3) Quality & content of the top 10 sites
4) What you find going beyond the first 10 pages

Each section will get ranked out of 10 points for quality (information taken on August 26,2005).

Starting with my all-time favorite search term: "INTERNET MARKETING"

Google.com
- 99,000,000 results
- 10/10 on quality
- 10/10 Past 10 pages still delivers top quality results

Yahoo.com
- 281,000,000 results
- 7/10 on quality. There's no reason to list a "Hotel Marketing Firm" & "Building websites". The #1 spot was reserved for Yahoo marketing.
- 9/10 Past 10 pages, it is very generic for business, not specific.

MSN.com
- 93,661,176 results
- 10/10 on quality
- 10/10 Past 10 pages still delivers high quality results. I am surprised and give MSN two thumbs up for their attention to detail.

Moving onto the search term for "BUSINESS NEWS"

Google.com
- 627,000,000 results
- 10/10 on quality
- 10/10 Beyond 10 pages delivers high quality & local news centers.

Yahoo.com
- 1,260,000,000 results (wow)
- 10/10 on quality
- 9/10 Beyond 10 pages. There are still some sites that should never be there.

MSN.com
- 381,631,054 results
- 8/10 on quality - Some aren't related at all and brand new sites as well.
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages. Their results seem to tighten up and get better.

Let's now take some more "local" search results to see deeper and more targeted results...

Moving on to the search term for "WASHINGTON UNIVERSITIES".
I hope to find the "University of Washington" come up #1 or thereabouts.

Google.com
- 22,700,000
- 10/10 on quality (www.washington.edu is #1)
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages. The results still deliver "university" topics.

Yahoo.com
- 143,000,000 results
- 9/10 on quality - The top spot is reserved for Yahoo on Washington University in St. Louis. There seems to be a strong battle going on here on which university to list.
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages. Content is specific and relevant.

MSN.com
- 34,442,536 results
- 9/10 on quality - Again another battle going on and washington.edu is #10 tilting on the verge of page 2.
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages. All related to Washington & University living

Let's now get even more specific than that... For this search term I will be using something very local that I can relate to and give a better analysis.

Moving on to the search term for "HAMILTON ONTARIO CANADA".

Google.com
- 3,700,000 results
- 10/10 on quality - Great job
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages - Anything goes but is directly related to Hamilton.

Yahoo.com
- 14,900,000 results
- 10/10 on quality - Almost the same as Google but a couple of different choices.
- 9/10 on quality - Some results are found by keyword stuffing their pages.

MSN Local *New (http://search.msn.com/local/)
- 1,280,405 results
- 9/10 on quality - Getting some random placements & keyword stuffing
- 10/10+ beyond 10 pages - Many local companies well listed in the results.

Let's now take a look at these results as a total. Out of a possible score of 80 points, here are the total scores for each:

Google - 80 points
MSN - 76 points
Yahoo - 73 points

Total search results delivered:

Google - 752,400,000
Yahoo - 1,698,900,000
MSN - 511,015,171

And people wonder why Google is the king of searching?! But wait, without even noticing the results, as I totaled the final point standings, MSN came up in second place! In my study, I tried to be as neutral as possible.

How is it that Msn & Google have 50% the amount of results shown in Yahoo, but outrank Yahoo in quality?

In conclusion:

Even though Yahoo delivered a report stating that it has over 19 billion search items, what does it matter when you're still trying to figure out how to deliver all that content? MSN & Google seem to know exactly what to do with their results. They don't seem "off the wall" at all. If Yahoo is to step up and be crowned the search king, I really think that they need to refine the amount of search terms they have, to match the quality of search results as well.

Yahoo has major potential to outreach Google but they still have a lot of work ahead of them and by the time they figure things out, Google may even step up their game even further and wow us all on some other search plateau.

About The Author:

Martin Lemieux is the president of the Smartads Advertising Network. Smartads is dedicated to helping you expose your business online and offline.

International: http://www.smartads.info

Article Submission Website (Beta): http://www.article99.com

Copyright © 2005 Smartads Advertising Network - Reprints Accepted - One link must be active in the bio.

Google And The Orion Algorithm

Writen by Rick Vidallon

Google Inc. has acquired "Orion" search engine technology from an Australian university that last year described the product as potentially revolutionary.

The software's inventor, Ori Allon, is now an employee of Google. "Orion" is a complement for queries running on search engines such Google, Yahoo Inc. and MSN Search.

Orion provides an expanded text excerpt from the list of web site results so the user does not have to click over multiple web pages to see the information relevant to a search query. It also displays results which are topically related to the keywords the user entered. This helps you gain additional information you might not have originally conceived, thus offering an expert search without having an expert's knowledge.

What Will the Search Results Look Like?

Search engine companies recognize that their engines need to move away from the model of providing long lists of search results, and instead aim to provide the specific facts users want. To varying degrees, major search engines deliver a digest of information collated from various online sources, particularly for queries involving news, weather, movies, actors, celebrities, and geographical locations.

To some degree Ask.com provides this function. Go to Ask.com and search 'Virginia'. On the left there are alternative categories related to 'Virginia' under 'Narrow Your Search', 'Expand Your Search' and 'Related Names'. I wonder what the 'big three' search engines are going to do with their sponsored ad space? I doubt Google will depart from their right-side browser display. If results are included in the organic or main text display area, then we are looking at expanded page scroll.

How Can I Prepare for the Orion Algorithm?

We do not believe that the implementation of 'Orion' will negatively impact web sites that have good ranking, quality links and great content. In fact, links and content will even become a more important issue to consider. A few basic search engine optimization rules will never change, that the consistent amount of traffic a web site receives in combination with textual content, in-bound links and out-bound links will remain the benchmark for good ranking.

About the Author
Ricardo Vidallon is owner and creative director for http://www.visionefx.net

Why Optimize Your Site For Search Engines

Writen by John Metzler

Sometimes a search engine optimization company will miss that glaring question posed by potential clients and assume the benefits of search engine optimization are obvious to everyone. While shelling out a couple thousand on an SEO campaign is common sense to some, others may find it hard to part with the cash unless they know it is an investment in their business that is sure to bring a good return.

Search engines account for a huge portion of traffic to web sites. Data varies depending on what sources you read, but the bottom line is that search engines are used millions of times each day by consumers searching for goods and services. And having your business displayed at the top of search results is essential if you want to do any business from the major search engines. Nine in every ten users will find what they're looking for in the top 10 results and won't go to page 2.

It's obvious that people can make a lot of money from online sales, but how you advertise your products has a large bearing on what kind of profit you make. If you buy advertising space on Google AdWords or other services that charge per click, you may only shell out 10 cents for every visitor to your site - But what if it takes 100 clicks to make one sale? If your products only sell for $10 a piece, then there is no profit being made. Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns will also never stop costing you money. Search Engine Optimization, on the other hand, can be very affordable over months and years.

Many SEO and Internet Marketing companies will say that ongoing maintenance is needed to reach and keep top search engine rankings. While this is true, be careful how the company says they do it. There is an affordable way and then there's a way to pad the pockets of the "experts." For more on this issue, read my other article entitled "What Constitutes a Complete and Effective SEO Campaign?" In short, the affordable way will involve an intense content optimization followed by work to raise link popularity. This link popularity development should be the bulk of any ongoing maintenance. A couple times a year keyword research should be done again and the content should be looked at. Search trends can sometimes fluctuate so you want to make sure your content is still aimed at the right audience.

What is affordable and what isn't varies greatly from company to company, industry to industry. In the bed and breakfast industry, $30 per month may be enough to keep a top 5 ranking on Google if the market is not very competitive. A web site competing for a top spot in a database administration field may be looking at several hundred a week if not more. The bottom line is, if you pick the right Search Engine Optimization company, your return on investment from an SEO campaign can be over 1000%.

While there are other ways to advertise a web site (No, search engine optimization is not the be-all and end-all of online advertising) very few can match the wide targeted audience and affordability that search engines provide.

An expert at organic SEO, John Metzler has held executive positions in the search engine marketing industry since 2001. He is the President of FreshPromo, a Canadian-based company, and services American clients through the SEO firm, SEOTampa.com.

Why Search Engine Traffic Should Be Your Top Priority

Writen by Richard Zwicky

Most Internet marketing methods are risky and many will not have any affect on traffic to a web site. Some online marketers will sell you anything from banner impressions, to mass email campaigns (spam), to popup ads. All these marketing tools can work, but they are also extremely risky. Some people I know find pop-ups and spam so annoying that they will never purchase anything from a business that uses them. These plans are probably not the best customer acquisition strategies, and more likely they are a total waste of money. So why would anyone bother risking money on marketing strategies that probably will not increase traffic to your website? Why not concentrate on what does work? - The search engines.

Have you ever been contacted by online marketers who promise to deliver a "ton of traffic" to your website" ? I get these emails every day. Here's a quote from one I used to get 10 times a day (until I automatically filtered it to trash):

"Hi I visited www.metamend.com, and noticed that you're not listed on some search engines! I think we can offer you a service which can help you increase traffic and the number of visitors to your website.

I would like to introduce you to thispromotioncompany.com. We offer a unique technology that will submit your website to over 300,000 search engines and directories every month.

You'll be surprised by the low cost, and by how effective this website promotion method can be.

To find out more about thispromotioncompany and the cost for submitting your website to over 300,000 search engines and directories, visit www.thispromotioncompany.com. (...)"

Have you ever received one, and wondered why they were contacting you? First off, how did they find your web site? What search engines are they referring to? If they really could deliver on their promise, then they would have so much repeat, and word of mouth business, that they wouldn't have time to be calling or emailing you. Lastly, how many people actually believe that there are 300,000 search engines?

While it's true you need traffic from the search engines, you don't need to use spam techniques to get it. You need real results, and not false hope.

Increase Web Site Traffic,.. Naturally

It is true that the best way to obtain lots of targeted traffic (customers) is to acquire it based on relevance, via the search engines. Various studies show that anywhere from 83% to 92% of first time visitors to a web site find it through the search engines. That's an incredible statistic. If you are not acquiring those customers as a result of a relevant query, then they will be disappointed. They may be disappointed with the search result, but more likely, they will be disappointed with your web site.

In the online world that's your first impression. We all know how important a first impression is. You can never get a bad one back, and a good one will carry you a long way. You have to make sure that the search engines are sending you visitors that are looking for your products or services. If your web site matches their interests, they will remember it, and come back, even if they do not make a purchase on that visit. If they find it irrelevant, they may have subconsciously formed a negative opinion of your online business, through no fault of your own.

Search engines provide a continuous stream of targeted visitors to your website, and for the most part, it's free of charge. Some engines do charge a listing fee, but most do not. The only thing the search engine asks is that each web site operator makes an effort to provide relevant and good information to web surfers for a particular search phrase. If a web site does so, the search engines will reward the site with increased good quality traffic.

Search engine traffic is a win-win situation for any online business. It doesn't take much to improve on most web site's search engine traffic - it just takes optimization. Did you know that as of January 1 2002, there were 160,000,000 domain hosts in use worldwide? Did you know that 88% of the web pages worldwide are not indexed by the largest search engines? 88% of web pages are not optimized. How can any business survive on the Internet if it is not optimized for the search engines, and thus can never be found? How can they exist if over 83% of first time visitors never find their web site? How much more money could a web site operator earn if they ensured their web site was even partially visible?

If you have an informative web site, the search engines want to send you lots of customers. That's because the more web surfers find what they want, the more they'll use a particular search engine and recommend it to their friends. The search engine also benefits, as it becomes known as a resource that gets its clients - the searchers - to their destinations quickly and efficiently. The more people recognize how well the engine works as a resource, the more it gets recommended, and used. As the popularity increases, so do the engine's revenues from advertising.

What Does Your Web Site Need To Receive Traffic From The Search Engines?

Small web sites with only 1 or 2 pages set themselves up for failure, simply because they usually don't have enough content of interest. There are of course exceptions, where the 1 or 2 pages are each as long as a book. But these are awfully frustrating to read, and no one will be satisfied with them. Most often 1 or 2 page sites are simply too short to provide any useful information, so the search engines don't take them seriously. Among other factors, the search engines examine how deep a site is. The more meaningful content present, the more weighty the site is viewed as, and the more importance it is given.

If you are wondering about whether to bother, ask yourself this: Why does your company have a web site? What does the company do with it? Think about it. Most companies today have web sites, and most market the web sites to facilitate customer acquisition, to increase their customer base, and to improve customer retention rates.

There are a number of reasons for having web sites. Many companies use theirs to enhance their customer service. Using a web site as a marketing vehicle is a great way for a company "to put the word out" about products, services, or offerings.

Most importantly, remember that your web site is an online resource that your clients can use to find answers to frequently asked questions, "how to" tips, and to educate themselves. When including content on a web site, always remember that the knowledge shared may be common to you, but it's likely that you are an expert in the eyes of your clients. People visit your web site for your product or service, but also for information. If they find useful, relevant, information, they will keep coming back, and will likely make purchases. People like to buy from experts.

Instead of thinking of your web site as nothing more than an online billboard or business card, think of it as an online menu, that lets people get an idea of what it is you do, and how you do it. Develop a content rich website, optimize it, and let the search engines increase your website traffic, naturally. If you optimize each major web page within your site, you will increase the rankings in the search engine results and therefore receive targeted traffic for each of those pages.

Doing each of the above - ensuring relevant content is present, and optimizing the pages - will ensure that the search engines have what they need so they can do their work. It will also ensure that they can send you targeted traffic (customers), so that you can get that 83% of first time visitors your online business needs to survive.

About The Author

Richard Zwicky is a founder and the CEO of Metamend Software, www.metamend.com, a Victoria B.C. based firm whose cutting edge Search Engine Optimization software is recognized as the world leader in its field. Employing a staff of 10, the firm's business comes from around the world, with clients from every continent. Most recently the company was recognized for their geo-locational, or GIS, and phraseology and context search technologies.

articles@metamend.com

Search Engine Tips Amp Techniques

Writen by Terri Seymour

As you are building your site or getting your site built, you need to do as much as you can to ensure higher rankings in the search engines. There are a variety of little tips and techniques you can use to do this.

Meta tags & keywords - Meta tags are included in the section of your site and are read by the search engines. The two most important kind are "description" and "keywords" Description is a description of the content of your site and keywords is a list of keywords relevant to the page.

Research what people are searching for and use those searches (relevant to your site) in your meta tags. A great little keyword search tool is available here: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Find more great info on meta tags here: http://www.metamend.com/search-engines-meta-tags.html

Site content- Make sure you match your site content with your meta tags. Also, keep updating your site content. Search engines love new content. Try adding articles to your site or doing a blog. Do NOT let your site get old and stale!

Blogging - A blog is basically a journal that is posted on a web site. A person who blogs is a blogger. Blogs are usually updated daily or every other day. Blogs can be used on personal or business websites. Blogs can draw a lot of targeted traffic to your site. You can create your own blog here: http://www.blogger.com/start

Site map - A site map is simply a page that lists all the links on your site. This makes it easy for the search engines to spider your site. A site map page is a good navigational tool for your visitors as well. It contains links to all important pages of your web site and it gives your visitors an overview of your web site structure all in one page. Take a look at these well designed site maps:

http://www.ireland.com/about/map/
http://www.google.com/sitemap.html

Links page - Having a quality reciprocal links page can benefit your site in several ways. First of all, it gets your site listed in more places on the net which can bring you more traffic. More and more major search engines will rank your pages higher when there are more links to your site. Also, quality links can help the spiders find you more easily each week, therefore keeping you indexed longer and dropped less frequently. Take a look here for an example of a link exchange page:

http://www.seymourproducts.com/exchange/index.shtml

Articles - Not only do you want to post relevant articles on your site, but writing and submitting them to other sites will help you as well. Posting new articles on your site will keep your content fresh and new so the spiders like your site. It will also keep your visitors coming back for more.

Writing and submitting articles can increase your link popularity and bring you more traffic as well as helping your search engine ranking. A few places to submit your articles is listed below:

http://webmarketingspecialists.com/articlesubmit.html
http://wahmteam.com/submissionform.shtml
http://www.home-business-tips-newsletter.com/articles/submit.html
http://www.webpronews.com/submit.html
http://www.creativehomemaking.com/submit_article.shtml

Using these techniques and others will greatly improve your rankings in the search engines and bring you more targeted traffic which in turn can increase your sales substantially! For more info on search engine tactics, visit http://www.searchengines.com/

Find tons more tips, information and articles at http://www.SeymourProducts.com.

Terri Seymour and her husband Terry also offer a no-cost, non-MLM home business opportunity. They strive to help you build a successful home business. Take advantage of the tips, support, resources, and more for your home & business.

How To Syndicate Your Content

Writen by Rick Rouse

Note: In order to preserve the proper format for the HTML code snippet in this article, copy and paste the article into Notepad, then copy and paste it from Notepad into your HTML web page.

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Do you have regularly updating content that you would like to make available to other websites? Perhaps a computer tip of the day, a daily recipe, or even a daily cartoon?

Do you want to give your website more exposure, boost sales, enhance your search engine rankings, or grow your newsletter subscriber list?

A fast and easy way to accomplish all of these goals is by using content syndication. Content syndication is the simple process of making a block of content (which usually changes on a regular basis) available for other webmasters to use on their websites.

Sound complicated? Well, it isn't!

There are several ways to syndicate your content, but the easiest way by far is to use a simple IFRAME (Inline Frame). Here is the HTML code for creating your own content syndication IFRAME:

<iframe src="http://www.yoursite.com/content.html" width="150" height="300" frameborder="1" scrolling="no"></iframe><br>Content courtesy of <a href="http://www.yoursite.com">http://www.yoursite.com</a>

To display your content on his/her web page, all the other webmaster has to do is copy and paste this code into his/her web page in the place where he/she wants your content to be displayed.

Instructions:

1 - Replace http://www.yoursite.com/content.html with the URL of the page on your website that you wish to syndicate. Make sure this page contains only the content itself along with any related HTML code such as bolding, colors, etc. Do not include headers, footers, navigation, etc.

2 - The width and height attributes set the size of the IFRAME in pixels. In the example above, the content would fit in the left-hand navigation column of most websites.

You can change these attributes to any size you wish, but keep in mind that the IFRAME must be large enough to accommodate your content. Also keep in mind that the smaller your syndicated content, the easier it will be to find webmasters who are willing to use it.

3 - The frameborder setting determines whether your content will be displayed inside a box. The default setting is yes (1). If you change this setting to 0, there will be no border, hence no box.

4 - Setting the scrolling attribute to "yes" will add scrollbars to the IFRAME. This is useful if you wish to syndicate a long article while keeping the IFRAME small.

5 - Change the URL in "Content courtesy of http://www.yoursite.com" to your website's URL. This way visitors can click to visit your website if they found your content useful.

I recommend making this line mandatory as a condition for using your content. It will generate targeted traffic to your website and provide a valuable backlink for search engine ranking purposes.

6 - Important: Copy and paste the code above into NotePad, then into your HTML editor. This helps ensure proper formatting in your web page.

7 - Let other webmasters know you have content available for them to place on their websites. You can place a link on your site that says: "Syndicate our content!" or "Like this content? Place it on your website!"

You can also submit your content to the many "free content" websites that are found on the web. Just do a Google search for "free content".

That's all there is to syndicating your content on other websites! Have fun!

About The Author

Rick Rouse is the author of the popular Webmaster SEO Toolkit, a free step-by step guide to getting a top-10 ranking in Google, available at http://www.rlrouse.com/SEO.html

Think Theme Not Keyword Phases

Writen by Andrew Williams

I was reading through some articles that were submitted to my article site the other day. Some are really very good, but on the other hand, some were not.

Of the "bad" ones, the thing that struck me was how easy it was to pick out the main keyword the author was using when he/she wrote the article. Even after reading only the first paragraph, I could spot it, and my suspicions were confirmed as I continued down the article.

Articles written around a main (primary) keyword often read very badly. The author tries to insert the exact phrase over and over again, even when it is not grammatically correct to do so. The article sounds forced (because it is).

And my point is?

Well my point here is that if I can spot this type of keyword focused content, so can a search engine. Articles written in this way are written for the search engine, not the visitor, and are therefore going to be the type of article that the search engines want to remove from their database. Remember, the search engines want to serve up the most relevant content with the best information. They will assume (as I would) that any article written purely for the search engine is not going to be of interest to a visitor.

So, where does that leave us in terms of keyword research? Does this mean we should not target primary keyword phrases?

Keyword research, and manipulation of keywords going into an article has evolved in recent years.

When I first started out it was simple. Write content around one primary keyword and 2 or 3 secondary keywords. Insert the primary in the title, meta tags, H1 header tag, twice in each paragraph, H2 header etc etc. Insert the secondaries throughout the article.

Nowadays that optimization technique would be labelled as keyword stuffing by the search engines and ranked appropriately.

In fact, I would not recommend any technique that had hard and fast rules about where to insert keywords into a document. With rules, you leave footprints, and footprints are visible to the search engines.

This week I read a newly released "SEO tutorial" which offered exact methods of keyword placement involving inserting exact numbers of keywords into various parts of a page. Sure it helps a writer concentrate on the objective of the article having such firm rules, but don't expect it to help your rankings. If you follow the same rules on all your content, all your content has the same footprint.

Obviously keywords are important since they will tell the search engines what a page is about. Don't forget though that keywords in incoming link text is important (even more important than the keywords on a page) in the page ranking.

Keyword optimization must involve both on-page and off-page strategies.

Off page factors are relatively easy. Select several phrases you want to rank for, and get incoming links that include those phrases. Add more phrases into the inbound link text mix as time goes by.

On-page optimization appears a little trickier.

The way you should be thinking about writing content is not so much about focusing on individual keywords, but more on the overall theme of a page.

When people search for stuff at the search engines, they enter a wide range of phrases, even when searching for the same information. Your job is to find all of the variations of search terms used, and pick out those words that often appear in the set of searches. Using these common words in your content will ensure that your page is themed around the topic of your main keyword.

For example, if you were writing a web page about baby shower invitations, you would look for all phrases related to baby showers AND invitations.

Here is how I would do it.

1. Go to Wordtracker and do a compressed search for baby shower invitation (with "number of results" set to 500).

Wow, Wordtracker returns 500 results for this phrase. THat will give us plenty to work on.

2. Get Wordtracker to calculate the competition for you. Using this method of keyword harvesting, Wordtracker will only find the competition for the first 100 words, but that is OK. These 100 will be the most common search phrases in the group, and those are the ones we are most interested in (since they are the phrases that are most often typed in, and therefore can be used to most strongly theme our page).

3. Email the results to yourself.

4. Import the keywords into your favourite "keyword manipulation" tool. I use Keyword Results Analyzer, but you can use a spreadsheet if you have the relevant spreadsheet skills.

Now, you need to find the words that are most often associated with your main phrase "baby shower invitation(s)" in the queries made at the search engines. This will tell you what words are highly related to your main phrase, and therefore should be used to theme your page.

5. Order your phrases by Count, with the highest count at the top. This will put the most common phrases at the top of your list.

The next step depends on how many "themeing words" you want.

6. Select the top 10 phrases. Here they are in my example:

baby shower invitations
baby shower footprint invitation
baby shower invitation
free printable baby shower invitations
baby shower invitation wording
free baby shower invitations
free baby shower invitation
baby shower invitation ideas
wording guide for baby shower invitations
abc girl baby shower invitations

All you now need to do is make a list of all unique keywords that appear in this list. They will be the words that are most often associated with baby shower invitations searches, and therefore the best ones to use to theme your page.

Fortunately KRA gives us this information in the reports:

Here are the themeing words:

abc
baby
footprint
free
girl
guide
ideas
invitation
invitations
printable
shower
wording

A web page that is written to include these words in the page, will inevitably be seen as a page on baby shower invitations by a search engine, since these words are most commonly found in baby shower invitation searches.

Add into the mix, one or two occurrences of the exact phrase "baby shower invitation" on the page, plus inbound links containing this and other related phrases, and you will have a page that should do well for a variety of baby shower invitation queries.

If you are writing a longer article, this last step can be changed to include the top 20, top 30 or more phrases.

Here are the unique themeing words to use if you use the top 20 phrases instead of the top 10 as shown above:

abc
baby
bear
cheap
create
footprint
free
girl
guide
ideas
invitation
invitations
pooh
print
printable
shower
teddy
unique
winnie
wording

This has added a few more themeing words into our arsenal:

bear
cheap
create
pooh
print
teddy
unique
winnie

This can also give us ideas on different related pages that we could write. Looking at the additional phrases, it might be worth a web page devoted entirely to Winnie the Pooh invitations.

Checking KRA, 5 of the 100 phrases we collected are related to Winnie the Pooh, but I am sure we could find even more at Wordtracker by searching for "pooh shower invitations". Sure enough, there were another 17 phrases found related to this phrase. Here they are:

baby pooh baby shower invitations
cheap winnie the pooh baby shower invitations
classic pooh baby shower invitations
classic pooh shower invitations
classic pooh timeless memories baby shower invitations
classic winnie the pooh baby shower invitations
classic winnie the pooh shower invitations
free printable pooh baby shower invitations
free printable winnie the pooh baby shower invitations
free winnie the pooh baby shower invitations
pooh baby shower invitation
pooh baby shower invitations
pooh classic baby shower invitations
the pooh baby shower invitations
winnie the pooh baby shower invitation
winnie the pooh baby shower invitations
winnie the pooh shower invitations

And letting KRA do its work, here are the themeing words for a page on Winnie the Pooh baby shower invitations:

baby
cheap
classic
free
invitation
invitations
memories
pooh
printable
shower
timeless
winnie

As you have seen, selecting keywords for themeing pages is very easy to do, and just by making sure that these words are included in your page, you will be themeing your page and getting the on-page factors right, all without overly focusing on a primary keyword.

All you then need to do is work on off-page factors, getting incoming links with link text rich in a range of primary phrases and themeing words.

Keyword Results Analyzer is a professional keyword anlaysis tool. Sort, filter, find niches and sub-niches, and so much more. You can get a free demo version from the Keyword Results Analyzer homepage.

Seo Search Engine Optimization Are People Going Mad On There Websites With This

Writen by Karl Daniels

The more and more I look around on the internet these days the more websites I see that are nearly fully search engine optimized so this brings me to the point of my article.

A fully search engine friendly webpage should consist of the following

1. A good title of the page.

2. A URL containing your main keyword.

3. H1 H2 HTML tags for the title of the subject, which the page subject is about.

4. Text links to other related subjected pages on your website.

5. Text links to other related websites.

6. Some good related information about what your website and what it has to offer, don't forget you should but your keywords in the description on the website, as this will be good for the SEO. A webpage without much written text on isn't worth much to the top search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

7. One important thing you should always do is still make the webpage look attractive to your viewers, don't cover the page in big images and lots of adverts, doing an attractive looking webpage will help keep returning visitors and make better page views, all this will help your traffic on your website.

8. Always try and end you page with a link containing some good keywords and some text containing keywords.

Remember this is on site SEO and will help a lot with were you rank in the top search engines. You should never over do it with your keywords on your webpage, because search engines could class it as spamming. There is a lot more to on site SEO than this but I am not going to go into great detail all in one article. Please keep a look out for more of my SEO articles to come, here is a list of what articles and subjects I will try and cover

- SEO with images
- More SEO on site
- Off site SEO

And lots more, thank you for reading my article I work full-time with my comunity webmaster website helping other webmasters solve problems they have and give great tips out. For more information, visit: http://www.mkpitstop.co.uk/

Search Engine Optimization The Facts

Writen by Benjamin Hargis

In order to succeed online nowadays you need to implement a search engine marketing strategy. There are many different things you can do to to get better search engine results.The goal is to increase traffic to get more sales or qualified leads.

For instance if your in real estate in Washington D.C. you want to focus on keywords for your area such as Washington D.C. real estate. Real estate agents still use traditional marketing methods such as the newspaper when online marketing is more effective, cheaper and further reaching. I think the best way ultimately is get good results in the search engines organically not thru PPC or Pay Per Click over time. That way you dont have to invest money for advertising online. Dont get me wrong Pay Per Click will bring you traffic.

With PPC you bid on keywords. There are services such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing, they price of the bids depends on what keywords your bidding for and competiion.

There is alot of talk on the Internet of white hat and black hat SEO methods. Black SEO methods will get you banned from search engines which is not a good thing for business.

Search Engine Optimization includes analzying your wrbsite to make sure it is search engine friendly, focusing on keyword density which is the amount of times your keyword shows up on your webpages. You need to focus on your descripion tags, meta tags, you should also bold, italize and underline your keywords. I would not overdo it thought there is a fine line between SEO and search engine spamming.

You should have a plan to succeed online. There are many steps such as checking your current rankings, amount of links and working on improving those.Identify keywords for your target audience and put your efforts into optimazing your website for those phrases.

Links play a important role as well both inbound links, those are linking pointing to your website from other websites.Work on link building to increase your link popularity to improve your search engine results.

Outbound links, who are you linking to? Not only are links important but the quality of links. If your a real estate company you should work on getting real estate related links pointing to you.

There should always be new content added to your website. A blog is also a great idea becauce you put links into it for your own website.

Submit your websites to search engines. This is an easy process.

Check your logs as this will tell you where your visitors are looking and you can foscus on those pages.

Doing SEO work is often time consuming. I talked to people on a daily basis who do not have the time to work on their websites. Its understandable. There are people who do this fulltime. They are called search engine optimization experts.I do not claim to be an expert but can perform search engine marketing and have done so for many clients who have seen an increase in traffic.

The search engine field is changing constantly. Google is constantly changing their search engine algorithims. I think Google is a great company and honestly we havent seen anything yet as far as search engines go.

Benjamin Hargis

Phuture Networks

http://www.phuturenetworks.com

Free Computer Security Advice !!!

http://www.computersecurityadvice.com

Easy Seo In 6 Simple Steps

Writen by Jeremy Hoover

If you want to increase traffic to your website and better your search engine positioning, here is an easy 6 step process that will enable you to do so.

1. Get a free blog.
Go to blogger.com and sign up for a free account.

2. Link your website to your blog.
In your blog template, add a link to your website. Also, set up your blog so there is a link field in every post. Set this field to link to your website. Thus, every post will contain a link at the bottom of the post to your main website.

3. Write 3 articles each week.
Even better would be one article each day (5/week), but 3 each week is a great start. Each article only needs to be 300 words, so you don't need a major essay. Just write an opening sentence, expound on that sentence in three short paragraphs, and conclude your post with a restatement of your opening sentence, reworded just slightly. Then, post your article to your blog.

4. Submit your article to EzineArticles.com.
Doing this will enable your article to be indexed by Google. This is very good for you, because once your article is indexed at Google, a backlink to your website will be generated for you. This will result in better search engine positioning and more traffic for you.

5. Submit your article to GoArticles.com.
There is software available that searches Go Articles for articles in specific niches and genres. These articles are then pulled by the software and put on websites. This generates more backlinks and exposure for you, and builds traffic to your main website.

6. Keep this process going.
Make a commitment to write one article each day, post it to your blog, and submit it to EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com.

Following these 6 simple steps will increase both your traffic and search engine positioning.

Jeremy M. Hoover is an online freelance writer who writes promotional and content articles for website owners. Each article is $15, or you can buy 5 articles for $50. If you need articles, contact Jeremy at his website, http://www.jhooverwebcopy.com

Read more marketing articles by Jeremy at his blog, http://www.jhooverwebcopy.blogspot.com

The Ultimate Free Google Ranking Tool

Writen by Torgeir Sunnarvik

The first months my website was online, I was constantly checking the search engines to see if my site was listed under the keywords that I was targeting. And always with the same negative results.

The truth is that the keywords that you are targeting are often not showing your site the first months at all on the first 200 search listings. OK,if you try to get your site listed for hoooohjgaagga or something like that, it could get you a first place in no time. But who wants to target that keyword?

In fact, I get a lot more traffic from keywords that I haven't thought of using as a keyword in the first place. One tool that I have found online can easily show you the keywords that your site is ranking well for.

You can find it at: http://www.googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php Here you simply enter your domain name and hit the "Analyze Keyword" button.

If you want to,you can change the different settings on this page before you hit the button. But I usually leave this at default.

Then on the next page you can see a detailed report on keywords that are found on your site. You can see their numbers and density. It shows the number of 2 Word Phrases and 3 Word Phrases.

Step 2 Create Position Report

Now to the cool part of this tool. When you hit this button, the tool will search Google for the keywords and keyword phrases that it have gathered from your site. After a few seconds it shows your position for each of them. So now you don't have to wonder if your site is listed in Google.

But as I said, the first months you shouldn't be worried if you don't find your site under any keyword at all. Google use a lot of time to index new websites. I have found that MSN are a lot faster to show my pages under the keyword that I want.

I hope you'll find this tool as useful as I have.

Torgeir Sunnarvik is the owner and webmaster of: http://www.everypleasures.com/. His site offers free ebooks, ebooks with reprint rights and review of business ebooks. Visit my ebook and Internet marketing forum at: http://everypleasures.com/phpBB2/index.php

Googles Big Daddy Update Makes Marketing Articles More Popular

Writen by Christopher Kyalo

Google's Big daddy updates are causing quite a lot of anxiety online right now amongst many web masters.

While there is no doubt that there are those who have greatly benefited from it but are most likely quiet about it, the ones making a lot of noise are those who have lost big. Google's Big daddy, which is the most major algorithm update ever undertaken at a major search engine in history has definitely touched virtually every webmaster online, either negatively or positively.

Interestingly Google's Big daddy has also had a major impact on articles marketing and promotional articles in general. What has happened is that they have become a lot more popular and widely used. My favorite articles directory has been flooded with so many articles in recent weeks that they've been forced to hire more editors to approve articles. All articles posted at this great site have to be approved by an editor.

This surge in interest in promotional articles probably means that webmasters who have slipped or have been totally wiped out of the search engines by Google's Big daddy are now turning to other effective ways to promote their sites. And it seems that articles are next in line and that's why so many of them have gone for them.

Learn more about the best home business opportunity from a blogger who rakes in thousands of dollars... and growing from their home business. Also get the bloggers' amazing free report How I used only free articles marketing to get thousands of hits daily at my site.

7 Free Search Engine Optimization And Writing Tools

Writen by Jinger Jarrett

Traffic. Everyone wants free traffic, and what better way to get it than optimizing your site?

There are some very simple things that you can do to optimize your site. If you want to get more from your website, then implement these strategies, use these tools, and make your website spider food for the search engines.

Below are some of the best sites I have found for optimizing my sites.

1. Check your site.

Before you start tweaking your site, you need to make sure that it's either in Google or not banned by Google.

The truth is, you want to optimize your site for Google, which is now the number one search engine in the world.

It won't do you any good to optimize your site if Google won't accept it.

Use this tool to check your site.

Google Banned - http://www.googlebanned.com

2. Toolkits

If you can find the tools you need in a collection, this will save you a lot of time, as well as frustration because you will know exactly what you need to do to properly optimize your site.

You'll want to check different aspects of your site like page rank, metatag information, and links. Nothing will drive your potential customers away faster than broken links.

This site, in addition to offering a forum on search engine optimization, also offers a nice collection of tools for helping you optimize your site.

SEO Chat - http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools

These two sites also offer search engine optimization tools. It's really a matter of preference, as well as what tools you need to optimize your site.

Add Me - http://www.addme.com

Evrsoft - http://www.evrsoft.com

3. SEO Software

You can also use software to help you optimize your site. Where software will help you the most is to actually help you optimize your site for the keywords you are trying to target. It's a waste of time to optimize your site if you haven't optimized for the right keywords.

This is the software I use, and it's free. It works for both MAC and PC, and it has some of the best documentation I've ever seen on search engine optimization because it's written for the average person. It also includes a basic search engine optimization training course, a 50 page manual, and excellent, step by step directions for preparing your website for the search engines.

Web CEO - http://www.webceo.com

4. ROR Generator/Robots Text Generator A what?

ROR is similar to a robots.txt file in that it gives information about your site. The difference is that an ROR file is in XML format.

You can use this generator to create an ROR file for your site, and then paste a button to the main page of your website. When the search engines spider your site, they'll spider this file and have a better description of what your site is about.

I would also recommend that you create a robots.txt file because this will tell the search engines what not to spider on your site. If you own a members' area, or you sell anything, you don't want the search engines spidering your download pages.

ROR Generator - http://www.rorweb.com/rorgenerator.php

Robots Text Generator - http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/robots-text-creator/simple-robots-creator.php

5. Site Map

A site map is not only a great tool for letting your customers know where everything is located on your site, it can also help you with the search engines.

By creating a site map, you will have an index of all the pages on your website. When the search engines spider your site, they'll find all of the pages. This will help you with your rankings.

Creating a site map, especially if you have hundreds, or even thousands of pages on your site, can be very time consuming. This generator will speed up the process.

Spider Map Creator - http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/spider-map/creator.php

6. XML Site Generator

Google is now offering webmasters a chance to submit an XML site map.

An XML sitemap is a search engine friendly sitemap of your site. This isn't written for your visitors though. It's written for the search engines so that they can find all of the pages on your website.

Even if you include a sitemap on your site for your visitors, I would still recommend that you use an XML sitemap. This can speed the process of getting your site indexed by Google. This is an easy way to make sure that all of your pages get indexed.

Creating a sitemap is easy. You can use the generator listed below. Once you've created your sitemap, submit it to Google.

XML Site Maps - http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/index.php

Submit your sitemap to Google - https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

7. Linking

There's been a lot of talk about linking because linking is one of the most important strategies for getting high ranking in the search engines.

The more links you have pointing back to your site, the higher the page rank you will get, as well as creating a way for others to find you. You can use this strategy to get referrals from other sites, which is free traffic. It's targeted, and you are being recommended by another site.

Before building your linking strategy though, you should check your popularity. See who you are linked to first.

Link Popularity Checker - http://www.marketleap.com/siteindex/default.htm

Once you have checked your link popularity, begin by building links back to your site. Below are two sites that offer directories you can submit your site to.

Directory Manager - http://www.123promotion.co.uk/directorymanager/

Free directories that don't require a link back - http://www.directoriezsubmission.com/free-web-directories.htm

Linking can drive a lot of traffic to your site. The more backlinks you have pointing back to your site, the more popular it will be. You'll also get a lot more traffic.

Before you start to market, complete your site. Optimize it for the search engines, and use these tools to help you get higher rankings.

Jinger Jarrett will show you how to use the most effective "White Hat" search engine optimization strategies to build traffic and sales to your site. You can get her free ebook, "Search Engine Secrets", when you visit http://www.jingerjarrett.com/

Search Engine Marketing The Race For Popularity And Profit

Writen by Jay Peterson

Search engine marketing (SEM) can deliver large numbers of qualified prospects and the most cost-effective marketing vehicle for driving qualified traffic to your website. Search Engine Marketing is the first solution in the industry, helping you to optimize your site's relevancy and visibility to improve your search ranking options.

A comprehensive search engine marketing campaign should also aim to persuade prospects to take the specific actions you want them to take.

The following group of search engine marketing services is available to help you exceed your online marketing goals:

Natural Search Engine Optimization. This is also known as organic search engine optimization. A specialized process that involves analyzing your websites' underlying code, architecture and visible content and making enhancements so that the location is returned more prominently in the natural search result of spider- based search engines.

You also have to evaluate and update continuously your natural search engine optimization methodology to keep up with the ever- changing search algorithms used by the major search properties and to keep pace with any changes made to your website as new pages are added or updated.

Natural search engine optimization includes:

• Search Engine Submissions. Present the pages of your site so that they will be included in the indexes of the major search engines and returned prominently when customers and qualified prospects doubted keywords that relate to your website's offering.

• Directory Submissions. Submit key sections of your website to appear within the four major online directories.

• Keyword Research. Find out which keywords and phrases will bring the most qualified traffic to your website.

• Website Content Enhancement. To make your site more appealing to search engines you should develop and enhance your website's content and navigational structure.

• Website Competitive Intelligence. Be able to detect what your competitors are doing and find out how you are going to position yourself against them

• Website Conversion Auditism. Determine the obstacles that your website poses to visitors that try to perform a "conversion action" (buy, register, download, request more information, etc.). Be able to learn how to build momentum toward conversion

• Link Popularity Enhancement. It helps increase and improves the quantity and quality of external websites that link to pages on your site in order to improve your site's visibility within search engines.

Pay Per Click Advertising Management. A search engine marketing that requires you to pay a fee every time someone click's your websites from the ad that you placed on the search engine results. The more you bid to pay per click for a specific keyword and more effective, the higher your website will rank in the paid search results.

Paid Inclusion Management. A critical component of your comprehensive search engine marketing strategy.

Web Analytics. Use to measure and maximize the results by breaking down the website statistics to a smooth level and organizing the data into practical categories.

International Search Engine Optimization. Ensures that your website achieves outstanding visibility within foreign search properties.

Having a success search engine marketing, websites should be designed nicely and wonderful. But the most important thing, people should visit your site. No matter how beautiful it is with all the bells and whistles it will be useless if you're site is not being visited. The more visitors you have the higher possibility of securing orders and getting more clients and the higher chances for the search engine marketing success.

Jay Peterson writer, web designer marketer. http://www.TicTacWebsites.com is the easiest do-it-yourself website builder on the web. No programming or design skill required. Get your small business online in just 5 minutes with http://www.tictacwebsites.com loaded with 30+ business features.

Big Daddy Update

Writen by Mark Lawson

If you own or run a website and are trying to increase your search engine ranking, you are probably very interested in learning more about the Google Big Daddy update. Google is one of the major search engines that determine site ranking and also one of the most popular among those searching for information. Many webmasters and online businesses design their content around Google's site ranking policies. While Google will not go into great detail in terms of describing the ways that they determine a website's ranking; there is a lot of information online written by knowledgeable SEO experts and successful online business owners.

The emergence of the Big Daddy update is causing much confusion and upset especially among the ecommerce community. When ranking a website, the search engines do not take into consideration how long the site has been in existence. Although it does sometimes take a couple months for your site to be included in all of the major search engine rankings, the length of time you have operated your site is not a relevant factor is determining how it ranks among other sites. Since Google's Big Daddy update, many veteran websites have experienced a drop in their search engine ranking. If you depend solely on you online business income, this drop in visitor traffic can have a devastating effect. Many webmasters and business owners are frantically struggling to try and figure out how to regain their previous rankings.

Websites that are designed mainly to provide the owner with affiliate income are being affected the most by the latest Big Daddy update. Often times when a website is created for the purpose of generating income from ads or affiliate advertising, the sight itself does not contain a lot of useful information. Webmasters or business owners will often use short keyword articles to fill the content of their pages. Often times these articles are written for the search engines only and do not provide content that is easily readable for actual visitors. Many of the articles may include the required search keywords but the articles themselves are not relevant to the topic and do not make a lot of sense. Google is now able to better detect this and the result is that these sites are being penalized for their marketing techniques.

Whether you are a new or experienced webmaster, the best advice you can heed in dealing with Google's Big Daddy update is to make sure your website contains content that is of value to visitors. Don't write your web pages just to please the search engine spiders. Try to have as much helpful and useful information as possible for visitors to your site. If you have a website that contains around one thousand pages of content, you are more likely to be higher ranked among the search engines than a site that only contains fifty pages.

Another important point to remember is that although Google has a big impact on how your site is ranked, it is not the only search engine available. In recent years, Yahoo has also become a popular search engine company for Internet users. Be sure that your site is listed with all of the major search engines. By doing this the Big Daddy update will not have such a dramatic effect on your ecommerce site.

Websites that have a high number of incoming links seem to be enjoying a reasonable amount of success since the Google Big Daddy update. It is a good idea to ask webmasters who have a product or service that compliments your site to add a link for your site to their web pages. However, before doing this you should make sure that the company is reputable and has a good customer service track record. Also, be sure that their site contains quality content that is valuable to visitors.

Although Google's new Big Daddy update may be having a temporary ill effect on some websites, this can often be overcome but simply making a few changes to your site. First of all, try increasing the number of pages linking to your website. Second check your site to make sure that all of the pages contain quality well written content. If your website is mainly composed of a lot of ads and outgoing links, do not expect to have a favorable ranking among any of the major search engines. In order to achieve and maintain a successful ranking among the search engines, you have to update and add new content to your website on a regular basis. Remember there are no shortcuts or quick fixes available to improve your site's ranking. A successful website takes time and patience

Mark is an editor with article alley a leading free content directory. Please feel free to republish this article provided a working hyperlink remains to our site.

Basic Search Engine Optimization For Dummies

Writen by Darius Mikolajewski

OK, you published your site, now you just sit by the phone with a notepad as the orders pour in, right? Well, weeks go by and nothing happens. What's wrong?

Oops, you forgot to submit to search engines. No problem, you go onto Google, Yahoo, MSN, perhaps a couple more, and after some hassle with the usual red tape you get yourself submitted. Surely the orders will pour in now?

Or will they?

Let me illustrate the problem for you with an example.

Let's say you are considering buying a new home theatre system this year. You want to do a bit of research so that you don't get ripped off. How would you go about it?

Of course, you'd use a search engine. You might type in "audio visual suppliers melbourne" (assuming you live in Melbourne). Let's say the search returns 30 thousand results, ten per page.

How many pages will you look at? One, maybe two? In other words, if your business is not within the top 20 in your category, it might as well not exist. So, the big question is, how do you get into the top twenty?

The search engines use complex mathematical formulae (algorithms) to determine the ranking of sites. To make matters worse, the algorithms are different for each engine, and secret. However, in general terms the engines look at only two factors: relevance and popularity.

Relevance means simply how relevant is your website to the search the customer is conducting (ie. To the keywords they typed in). The search engines make money by selling advertising space, and their prices depend on traffic they can generate; the traffic in turn is a direct result of how relevant the search results are for people visiting the engine's site.

Relevance is influenced by:

• How early the keywords appear on the page, are they in headings, meta tags, titles, picture names? (Keyword prominence)
• How often are the keywords used? (Keyword frequency)
• What's the proportion of keywords to the page's word count? (Keyword weight)
• How close are the keywords to each other? (Proximity)

Of course, the ultimate in keyword prominence is when it appears in your domain name (remember fastweightlossdiet.net?).

Now, you probably gathered that it's next to impossible to optimise a page for more than one sequence of keywords. However, your customers might actually search for you under dozens (if not hundreds) of keywords. How can you possibly hope to capture this traffic?

Well, the solution lies in creating so-called doorway pages. Once you've done your research and you have a list of keywords your prospects are using, you need to create a separate page for each keyword, and then optimise it for this particular keyword or keyword sequence. When the prospect clicks on the doorway page's link it takes them straight to your site.

Now, once you've covered relevance, it's time to consider popularity. It is judged by two factors:

• How many other websites (preferably related) link to yours?
• How long does an average visitor stay on your site before getting out?

There are several strategies you can use to get other sites to link to yours. Start by linking to good-ranking sites in your category, then email them saying you just linked to them and ask politely to link back to you. Visit guestbooks of related sites and sign your entry with your URL (URL is www + your domain name) – this automatically creates a link. Research link farms (free-for-all link areas).

To increase the time an average visitor spends on your site, there is only one effective way: having interesting and compelling content on it!

A word of caution about search engine optimisation – as the Net grows, it takes longer and longer to wait from making changes on your site to seeing your rankings actually go up; currently 3 months seem to be the norm, and you probably need to allow a year to achieve a decent ranking in a popular category. Also, once achieved it needs to be constantly maintained, as the algorithms change all the time and your competitors don't sleep!

Search engine optimisation is a very significant time commitment that is not realistic for a majority of busy business people. Once again, the only solution is to hire someone to do it for you. Prices range from $500 to $10,000; on-going maintenance $50 - $150 per month. They depend on the number of keywords and doorway pages, and the keywords popularity (it's harder to get into the top of ten in a keyword category with millions of businesses competing, such as "weight loss", than it is for a niche category such as "natural diet recipes").

Make sure you get a guarantee on results, so that when they don't achieve the agreed ranking for you at least you get your money back.

Darius Mikolajewski is Director of Allwelt International, an Australian Internet Marketing Company, and author of books and articles about internet marketing as well as weight loss and nutrition. For more information visit http://www.allwelt.com

Introduction To Pay Per Call

Writen by Damon Lightley

If you know the principles of pay-per-click (that's 'click') advertising, you'll know a bit about pay-per-call already. The process runs along the same lines. If you don't know about either though, the next paragraph will give you a quick-ish run-through.

Pay-per-click has been used by search engines for a while now. Run a search, and you'll find that the top listings in most engines comprise of companies and organisations that have used some of their online marketing budget to be there, they're shown as 'sponsored links', 'sponsored results' or something similar. But the idea is that suppliers bid on search terms that could be used to find their businesses. Take a printing company, for instance. Using a search engine marketing company, it might bid on terms such as 'cheap printing' or 'South London printing company'. It bids against others who are also interested in these terms. Usually, the higher the bid in relation to the others, the better it rates in the search engine pecking order. And, in terms of payment, the company pays the going rate every time their link is clicked on. Let's say this printing company bids at 10 pence per click. Everytime a link for the company's website is shown in a search engine – and someone clicks it – the company will pay roughly 10 pence.

So, pay-per-call runs along the same principle as pay-per-click, with the twist that the business pays each time a potential customer calls rather than when he or she links through to the business' site. A search engine user will see an advert that's similar to those that appear on Google and Yahoo! as sponsored links. And clicking on the advert will bring up a separate window that gives a bit of information on the business and specified freephone telephone number.

The great thing about this form of advertising is that you don't need a website to take advantage of it. You may have been in the position where your only real advertising opportunities online were Yellow Pages and other directories. Well, not now. What's more, this form of advertising caters equally well for local businesses as it does for bigger national players. Going back to the example of the printing company, there's always the option of bidding for terms with your town, city or area referenced in it. And so this limits the bidding price (there'll be less competition in your home town). It also means that the advertisements attract people who live nearby (the relevant people).

Unlike pay-per-click, pay-per-call advertising is in the beginning stages. The big players at the moment are Google, Yahoo!, Miva, Overture, Kelkoo and AOL. But, with numerous other providers joining up every week, like the service that came before, it's set to rocket. At the end of the day, if pay-per-call is providing a good return on investment for businesses, it's a winning formula. And, from the early signs, it looks like this will be the case.

Damon Lightley is a director at search engine marketing specialists, SiteVisibility. SiteVisibility helps its clients attract, convert and retain profitable customers through their websites.

For more information, visit Site Visibility

Abc On Getting Your Wisconsin Site To Score High Part 2

Writen by Johnny Smith

In case you are a local Wisconsin business owner, my guess is that you want to improve your search engine ranking in Wisconsin for phrases that are related to you specific location and service.

Let's say that you own a flower shop somewhere in Wisconsin. We can take Green Bay for an example.

What do you think people will type into the top search engines when they are looking for flowers in Wisconsin?

My simple guess would be:

- green bay flowers

- flowers green bay

- flower delivery green bay

- flower shops in the green bay area

Can you see where we are going here?

In order for you to improve your search engine ranking in Wisconsin and the Green Bay area, it's not enough to simply show different types of flowers on your website. You need to write articles about the above keyword phrases and upload them to your site.

All the top search engines enjoy good informational content, and so do your visitors and potential buyers.

I actually think that you are getting the hang of this.

Am I right?

Now you know that you will need a lot of content in order to improve your search engine ranking in Wisconsin and the surroundings. But is it enough for you to just guess what people are typing into the search engines when they are looking for flowers in Wisconsin?

Many of the most searched for phrases you can most likely figure out yourself, but these are also the phrases with the most competition.

What you should do in order to improve you Wisconsin search engine ranking is to use Wordtracker. It is a keyword research tool and it will help you find hundreds or thousands of related words to you niche as well as the demand and supply figures.

Having access to this information is key to building a high ranking Wisconsin site. Just imagine what an edge you will have over your competition.

Johnny runs a hockey site and loves ice hockey equipment and skates more than anything.

How To Improve Your Site Search

Writen by Tim Fidgeon

Making sure that your search engine makes it as easy as possible for your customers to find what they are looking for is business-critical. It is also very difficult - good search engines can cost an awful lot of money and require a lot of ongoing effort to keep them up to scratch.

As an example: on Monday 12th December 2005, I wanted to buy a copy of Jamie Oliver's new cook book Jamie's Italy from amazon.co.uk. So, I went to the "Books" section of their website and searched for "olivers italy" and these 9 items appeared on the results page:

1. "The American Tractor" by Patrick W. Ertel

2. "A Garden in Lucca: Finding Paradise in Tuscany" by Paul Gervais

3. "History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans" by Pamela Ballinger

4. "Oliver Tractors" by Jeff Hackett, Mike Schaefer

5. "Wyoming (Moon Handbooks S.)" by Don Pitcher

6. "Wines of Australia (Mitchell Beazley Wine Guides)" by James Halliday

7. "All Music Guide to Jazz: The Definitive Guide to Jazz Music" by Ron Wynn (Editor), et al.

8. "Larousse Gastronomique: The World's Greatest Cookery Encyclopedia" by Prosper Montagne

9. "The Teacher's Calendar: The Day-By-Day Directory to Holidays, Historical Events, Birthdays and Special Days, Weeks and Months" by Holly McGuire (Compiler), et al.

Jamie Oliver's book didn't appear anywhere on the results page, even though it had been Amazon's 3rd best-selling book in the previous 24 hours.

The problem was that I had typed "olivers italy", instead of "oliver's italy" (which would have returned Jamie Oliver's at the top of the search results list). That single missing apostrophe was all that it took for Amazon's expensive search engine to splutter, fall over and fail.

So - if Amazon can't do it, it must be impossible, right?

Wrong - here are some things the boys & girls at Amazon could - and should - have thought about.

Two types of problems

There are two basic types of problems that a user can experience when they are searching for something:

- User-error - the correct search term is entered incorrectly (i.e. the user intends to enter a search term that would cause the search engine to return results that are relevant to their needs, but they enter it incorrectly).

- Search engine error - the wrong search term is entered (i.e. the user enters a search term that the search engine does not relate to their needs).

User error

People generally enter the correct search term incorrectly because they either:

- Don't know how to spell it.

- Have made a typing error

It's important to realise that there are millions of potential customers who can't spell very well. For example, a 2003 survey of the literacy (i.e. reading and writing) estimated that there were 16% of English adults (aged 16 to 65-year-olds) had literacy levels no higher than those expected of an 11 year-old (source: The Skills for Life Survey).

Also, let's not forget that according to the British Dyslexia Association around 4% of the population are severely dyslexic and a further 6% have mild to moderate dyslexia problems.

This means that your search engine has to account for people making basic knowledge-based spelling mistakes.

Your search engine should also account for people who know how to spell what they are looking for, but make typing errors. The main categories of typing error are:

- Characters close to one another on the keyboard being entered erroneously (either in place of - or in addition to - the correct letter). For example: wrong/wring ; for/dfor.

- Characters being omitted. For example: missing/missng ; oliver's/olivers.

- Characters being entered too many times. For example: impossible/imposssible.

- Characters being entered in the wrong order. For example: disaply/display ; being/ebing.

Your search engine should allow people to make these mistakes and still return useful and relevant results.

Even though we have named these types of issues 'User error', if your search engine fails to return information that that the user is looking for it is, of course, your fault and not theirs!

Search engine error

When people enter the wrong term into a search engine, it is only wrong because you have not anticipated it. You should aim to cover as many bases and anticipate as many different search terms as possible.

What to do

The next steps for making your search engine perform better are really simple:

- Sit down and make a list of all the spelling errors, typing errors and alternative search terms that you think could possibly be relevant to your site (e.g. actually look at your keyboard and think about what letters are close to one another).

- Ask other people in your organisation to make similar lists.

- Do some research into what search terms people are using on your site (e.g. interviews, questionnaires, check your search engine logs, etc.)

- Apply everything you learn to your search engine.

And that's it. You now have the knowledge you need to begin improving your site's search engine.

Other thoughts

- Improvements in word processing software have made people lazy typists. Software that auto-corrects many spelling and typing errors means that people are no longer forced to review and correct their work to the same extent as in the past. This means that many people are getting out of the habit of precise spelling/typing. So, when they move out of an auto-correcting environment (and onto a website, for example) they are more likely to make - and less likely to notice/correct - mistakes!

- Search results pages should display the search term the user entered in large text (e.g. 28pt). This would help people spot any inadvertent errors.Results pages should also provide the telephone numbers for customer enquiries/assistance.

This article was written by Tim Fidgeon. Tim's crazy about web usability - so crazy that he's head of usability with Webcredible, an industry leading web usability and accessibility consultancy ( Webcredible - http://www.webcredible.co.uk ).

Seo All About Links

Writen by Amit Verma

What is SEO? We call it, Search Engine Optimization – a process or method to gain higher positions on major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN by searching the targeted keywords and phrases to increase online visitors, customers and inquiries to a particular website which is to be optimized for its web promotion, services offered by web development and search engine optimization companies.

Major Techniques and methods used in search engines optimization for a website are meta tags placement in website code, alternative tags (alt tags), directories submission which could be free or paid, link building or link popularity services which includes one-way links and link exchanging campaigns to increase the website popularity in search engines.

Now, let us elaborate these technique one by one -
1. Meta Tags Placement – these are the tags used to define website title, description and keywords to search engine spiders or crawlers for fast indexing in search engines which can be appear in organic listing on searching any keywords or key phrase for a website. Meta tags are basically used to show your keywords and phrases to the search engines and to online visitors that what services you are offering.

2. Directories Submission – submitting a site to free directories like dmoz and paid directories like yahoo directory which is the most important technique to raise your website up in search engines. There are thousand of free submission website and paid directories on internet. Directory submissions will make a website link popular by giving listing to that website in their directory category or categories. Like if you have submitted your website in 500 directories, then your website link is 500 times popular, if got listed. It means your website is being popular to the online visitors.

3. Link Popularity – the techniques includes one-way link service and link exchanging services. One way links are those link directed to your website on any other website which is not so easy to gain and helps in making more back links to a website. Second one is link exchanging which is a partnership between two websites. We can simply say it exchanging of links which is also good method to increase website back links. So, by both methods in link popularity services, we make our link listed on other website, means giving website links to get popular to online customers and visitors. There are so many websites that are looking for link exchange campaigns for the their websites and also buy one way links with web pages that have a higher Google page rank.

Nowadays, Blogs and articles are also a good source in website promotion. We are saying search engine optimization process is website promotion. So, we have to understand what really website promotion is – promotion of website means promotion of your website link.

How can a visitor come to your website?
Simply by clicking your website link – what matters from where? No one can predict the customer.

Even from major search engines point of view, if you have higher no. of relevant links pointing to your website, then you can win on search engines with your targeting keywords and key phrases. That's why it is concluded that its all about Links - your own website links which is to be popular to achieve ranking on search engine listing.

Note – These are only my thoughts and views about this context.

Amit Verma is with Neuronimbus software services providing Custom Website Design and SEO Services worldwide as Sr. Internet Marketing Executive and writes about Search Engine Optimization. Currently working on Swiftravel International providing Tour Packages in India.

7 Steps To Prepare You For The Local Search Bonanza

Writen by Mike Makler

At One Time Local Searches were reserved for services like City Guides and Online Yellow Pages. But the BIG 3 (Yahoo, Google and MSN) have all jumped into the Local Search Market. According to some Estimates Local searches represent 20-25% of all Internet Searches either implicitly or explicitly)

1 - Local Content

Create a web site with a few pages that contain local content.

• If you sell Life insurance in Missouri you may want to have information on how to file a Dispute with the Missouri Department of Insurance.
• If you have mortgages you may want to discuss a Missouri State Government Loan Program for low income first time Home Buyers in Missouri
• If you sell flowers you may want to discuss the best time to plant Roses in St Louis Missouri

2 - Local Yellow Pages

Get Yourself listed in the local online Yellow Pages both free and Paid. Currently much of the local Search results for the Local Searches perfromed by the Big 3 Come from Yellow Page Listings

3 - Local City Guides

Get Yourself listed in the local City Guides both free and Paid. Currently much of the local Search results for the Local Searches perfromed by the Big 3 Come from City Guides.

4 - Local Blog

Get Yourself a Local Blog. If you sell Insurance in Florissant MO call your Blog 'Insurance-In-Florissant-MO' Try and Post one or 2 times a Week with topics relevant to your Local Market. See Step 1 for Ideas on what to post.

5- About Us Page

Create an About us page on Your Web Site. Make sure your about us Page has your Name, Local Information and the Products or Services you offer. An About us page can be as simple as

• About US: Mike Makler located in Florissant Missouri in North St Louis County Missouri offers Financial Services such as Life Insurance, Annuities and Mortgages.

• One or more paragraphs with inforamtion about You or your company.

• Contact US:
  Mike Makler
  Florissant MO, 63031
  314 398-5547
  

6 - Contact Information on All Pages

Place you contact Information on All of your web pages. At a bare minimum include

• Your Name
• Your Company Name
• A Brief Description of Services Offered
• City, State and Zip Code (Street Address Optional)
• Contact Information (E-Mail Address and/ or Phone Number)

7 - Article Resource Box

When You Submit Articles you should create a Resource Box that includes the same information from Step 6 above. You should also have a Link to your web page.

About the Author
Mike Makler is a Financial Consultant in Florissant in North St Louis County Missouri Specializing in Real Estate Loans (Mortgages), Life Insurance and Annuities. To Learn More Call Mike at 314 398-5547 or Visit Mike's Web Page: http://ewguru.com/finance

Get Mike's Newsletter Here http://ewguru.com/fin-news

Copyright © 2005-2006 Mike Makler

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