Benefits Of Article Submissions

Writen by Andre Bias

People with websites are always looking for a great way to build links to their website. They do that because they no that link popularity is a very important part of where a website ranks on search engines. To increase link popularity people usually get link exchanges, submit their website to free directories, and buy link space on other websites. Those are all great ways to build links but one of the best way is by submitting articles to articles directories. Submitting articles to article directories are great because you are allowed to place your signature at the end of each article. That will give you a one way link back to your website. One way links are a lot more beneficial than link exchanges.

Writing articles does not have to be hard. Most recommend writing articles on subjects that relate to you website. If you have a difficult time writing about that then just write about anything you are familiar with whether it be sports, television, or just life in general. The best thing is that you can get multiple one way links to your website from one article because others get articles from article submission directories and post them on their site. That gives you a link from the article directory and from the other sites that have posted your article. Next time you are optimizing a website make sure to include article submissions in your plan. Submitting one or two articles per day to a few different directories can do a lot in a short time.

Andre Bias is the owner of the websites http://www.enlargementdeals.com, http://www.goodbyeacne.net, and http://www.inkjetdealz.com

How To Get Your Site Indexed Immediately

Writen by Gregg Hall

Everyone on the internet who owns a website wants to know the answer to the question, "How do I get my site indexed?" Well, let me enlighten you. The fastest way to get your website indexed is by writing articles and press releases. Surprised? Oh, you were expecting me to put you through some long boring ordeal. Let's examine this a little further.

One of the biggest things you can do to create more traffic to your website is to create back links from other sites. Let me clarify, what you want are one-way back links. Reciprocal links are okay but the search engines are catching on that this isn't real value but really just trading. If you can get hundreds of relevant one-way back links to your website then you are not only going to get traffic from the links, but also from your increased ranking in the search engines.

This is not a one time task. You must put article writing and submissions on your daily schedule as part of your daily business plan. This is time well spent in building your business because you will see instant results. The article directories are starving for content and will accept any well written articles. I have seen my articles indexed sometimes in the same day and my website showing in the major search engines as quickly as the following day! That sure beats waiting months, doesn't it?

So, now you are wondering "How do I submit to hundreds of article directories, won't that take forever?" Under normal circumstances the answer would be yes, but there have been many advances recently and there are automated article submitters to make the task easier. To see the one the author recommends, see the resource box.

Now, for the second step, press releases. Press releases are the next tool in the Internet Marketer's arsenal of online marketing weapons. And just as with articles, this cannot be a one time deal. One doesn't have to do press releases on a daily basis, but doing them on a weekly basis will go a long way to getting your website indexed quickly.

Just as with article submission, you can do the press release submissions manually or you can take a lesson from me and automate the process. By automating the process you will be able to submit press releases to all the major press releases sources and set it up where they will be repeated as often as you like. See, the software program the author uses in the resource box.

If you combine these two methods of promoting your websites I can promise you that you will see much quicker indexing as well as drive traffic to your websites faster than any other method. I brought a blog of mine from totally new in October of 2005 to an Alexa page rank of 45,000 as of January 25, 2006 by using these methods.

So get after it! Don't wait, your site could be indexed tomorrow!

Article Submitter for article submission and Press Release Submission to submit to all the major press release outlets.

Do Metas Still Matter

Writen by Eric Lester

Once the darlings of the search engine spider, the influence of Meta tags vanished completely. This article discusses why and whether they may be making a very weak "comeback."

Meta tags, specifically the "keyword" and "description" tags, are designed to provide quick, thumbnail sketches of a web page's content in order to better classify it. At one time, the meta tags were a key factor in on-page optimization for almost all search engines. That "one time" was around the late 90's. It soon became apparent that a reliance on these tags could be exploited, and exploited it was. Today, after the "fall" of the meta tag, they are making a partial comeback as very low-weight on-page optimization factor.

The influence of the meta tag, especially the keywords, faded away once most major search engines either dropped them entirely from consideration in their algorithms or greatly reduced their weight. This happened in response to the vast amount of meta-spamming that took place once their power was initially discovered. Techniques we all recognize today as blatant keyword spamming were commonplace. Webmasters added completely irrelevant, but highly searched terms (particularly "adult" terms) to a site's meta tags, usually in concert with similar hidden text blocks. These techniques were done only to drive traffic to their sites, highly untargeted and generally unrelated traffic, but traffic nonetheless.

Search engines responded to the problem once they realized their results were no longer relevant. It seems Google completely ignored the meta keywords in response to the blatant spaming. The fall of the meta tags gave rise to a still strong trend today, that of on page text analysis for keywords. Instead of blindly looking at the meta tags to classify a page, search engines turned to the actual content of the page. Text in paragraphs and titles rose to importance, as well as other indicators like text in "alt" tags from images. These factors produced better results for the people using search engines. In theory, the meta tags were a simple, easy way for people to help search engines classify and rank their pages. In practice they were highly abused, as the commodity the search engines provided became very important, especially to the budding ecommerce community.

Today meta tags may be making a quiet comeback. Years have passed since the blatant, irrelevant spamming that caused them to be so thoroughly discredited. With penalties in place, search engines have a way to punish those who would use such techniques. Wise, conservative use of your meta keywords and description tags can only be beneficial. Today the meta description tag sometimes serves as the small page sample Google uses on its result pages.

Like anything concerning search engine optimization, especially Google search engine optimization, make sure your meta tags appear to be as "natural" and "people friendly" as possible. If your description is just a word-for-word rehash of your keywords, that will not look natural, and may be a red flag to a search engine spider. Write out an actual description that a person would be able to read and understand. Use your keywords in the description, but don't repeat them. A single sentence or phrase should suffice, 2 at the most. The description is not a place to put a summary paragraph. The more words your description has the more watered down it becomes to the search engine.

Advice on the meta keyword tag varies a lot, but concentrate on your core keywords/keyphrases, placing the most important ones first and moving through to the least important. Don't use 50 keywords, even if you believe your site does, in fact, address all 50 in perfect detail. Keep the list short, and focused. Twenty is a good maximum, and only if you feel you absolutely must target all 20 keywords. Remember, its difficult to very effectively optimize a single page for more than 2 or perhaps 3 keywords. If you have a large number of them, then consider spreading your optimization efforts out across internal pages for certain topics. You can make these into "landing pages" that are specifically optimized for your secondary keywords. Note I said "landing pages" and not "doorway pages". Doorway pages imply pages targeted to a specific search engine that generally employ spamming techniques. A landing page is a natural part of your existing site, say a section title page, that you perform general on-page optimization on for a subset of your keywords.

Meta keyword and descriptions do not have the power they once did, and they never will. Giving that much weight to such an easily abused page attribute was a mistake the search engines eventually corrected. Today, your keywords and deceptions can provide you some small benefit if they are well crafted and devoid of any spaming techniques. Construct a friendly, natural description and choose your core keywords wisely and your meta tags should help you out, if only a little bit.

About the Author:

Mr. Lester has served for 4 years as the webmaster for ApolloHosting.com and previously worked in the IT industry an additional 5 years, acquiring knowledge of hosting, design, and search engine optimization. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers.

Established in 1999, Apollo prides itself on the highest levels of customer support.

Note: These articles are provided for general interest and content purposes only, and should not be construed as "support" materials. Apollo Hosting does not guarantee the information contained within. All articles are free to reprint so long as they remain unchanged, the "About the Author" section remains, all hyperlinks are preserved, and the rel="nofollow" tag is not added to the hyperlinks.

Seoing A Flash Intro

Writen by Vaclav Mach

Introduction

Why does a FLASH intro need SEO? Flash, the great SE killer, is basically nonspiderable, although there are reports of the opposite. In this way, the intro creates a solid, non-permeable barrier between the website and the external world. One way around is to place the intro into a frame and connect the other pages via links from the [noframes] tag. The SE will follow such links, but will not place much weight on the anchor text or any keywords within the [noframes] tag. In this way, the index page is practically lost for most SEO purposes. A tremendous waste, if you consider that, from the SEO viewpoint, the index is the most valuable page of your entire website. For example, it is significantly easier to obtain external links pointing to the index page.

Using frames is definitely a very bad option. The very best action is to talk the website owner into removing the FLASH intro at all.

Even offering a small discount is worth the expenses. But unfortunately, most business ownners are completely fascinated by the idea of their logo bouncing around the screen, changing colors and doing other rather annoying things. This is where the real SEO comes into the play.

Just to make things clear. I sort of like FLASH. I agree that it is a killer tool for webdesign - if used properly. But I do not think that an intro is a proper usage for this technology.

Planning

Traditionally, cloaking is based on simple principles.

1. Identify the visitor on the basis of the user agent or (better) its IP address.
2. Serve different content to SE and human.

Here we will use somehow different and as I believe, more gentle principles:

1. Find if the client accept FLASH (Google does not).
2. Serve the same page to both types of clients. The only difference: the FLASH accepting clients will get the real content of the page overlayed by the FLASH layer. Pressing the STOP button will remove the flash layer, revealing the actual content of the page.

Implementation

You will find a working example at our webdesign site. There you will also find the links for downloading the source code of index.php, flash intro and switch.php.

index.php

This is the page containing the FLASH intro. The FLASH object is contained within a [div] tag with a high Z index and will therefore overlay the actual text placed into the underlying [div] tag.

Flash intro itself

The only requirement is that the STOP button points to the page switch.php

switch.php

After the STOP button is pressed the script in switch.php is executed. The script will register a session variable intro ensuring that the intro will not be played again. Calling the script again through the play intro link will reverse the situation.

Problems

• The example above uses sessions for preserving the state information. Sessions are usually stored in cookies. Thus clients with disabled cookies will not be able to escape from the FLASH movie. A simple remedy is to store the state in both a session and _GET variable. You may also consider propagating the session in the url, by setting session.use_trans_sid=1 in the php.ini file. This problem will not affect the SE. They will not be served with the FLASH. Even if they are, they will see the real page content and will not press the STOP button to start the session.
• A minority of FLASH enabled clients will not admit the ability to interpret FLASH in the content of $_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"] variable and will not see the intro. Not a real tragedy. In fact you may decide to serve the FLASH uniformly, to all type of clients. The SE will see the real content immediatelly, the human users after clicking the STOP button.

Vaclav Mach is owner of the Scisoft webdesign - a website visibility and accessibility oriented company.

Content Management Systems Eyeball Seos

Writen by Kevin Kantola

Content Management Systems and search engine optimization (SEO) used to be mutually exclusive terms. But the SEO community has been driving the developers of Content Management Systems to integrate more SEO-friendly methodology within their systems.

Content Management Systems (CMS) are a hot topic right now with many corporate websites are turning to these systems to handle thousands of pages of dynamic data that they need to update regularly. Content Management Systems allow information to be added, edited or deleted automatically over the entire website. This can save hundreds of hours in manual updates. Pages of content are generated on the fly using a template driven system.

When Content Management Systems were first developed, most had little regard for the requirements of search engine optimization. For some Content Management Systems this still holds true. Most CMS's, however, now have workarounds to accommodate those wanting to perform search engine optimization on their websites. The workarounds in the Content Management Systems involve two areas: writing search engine friendly URL's and creating individualized title and meta tags per page.

Writing Search Engine Friendly URL's

Some search engines (SE's) and directories like Google and Yahoo! can now read dynamic URL's but there are still a fair amount which can't or can only partially read them. The SE's like to see pages that have unique content per page and may limit the number of variable strings (i.e. ?, =. &) in a URL to assure unique content.

By using a web server module called Mod_Rewrite it is possible to remove the stop characters from the URL string, thus making it more SE-friendly. To do this you will need to add a rule to the .htaccess file. For more information, see the following article on the Apache website: http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html

Creating Individualized Title and Meta Tags

Some Content Management Systems such the latest release from Hot Banana Software boast full integration with SEO performance such as offering Conversion Tracking tool, Robots.txt and Meta Tag Management. Other CMS's such as PostNuke.com is struggling to catch up and offer workarounds to make their system more flexible and SE-friendly.

PostNuke.com says that their next version (.8 release at this writing) will be fully SEO compliant. Until then, they recommend the pnMeta module, which will give control over the title, keyword and description tags over an individual page. Dynamically generated meta tag information, however, is not recommended. For more information see: http://www.miragelab.com/News+article-sid-19.phtml

What Does CMS Mean For SEO's?

Search engine optimization experts and others using SEO techniques will need to work closely with Webmasters and developers who use Content Management Systems on their web properties. This collaborative effort is necessary to insure that URL's are SE-friendly and that unique title and meta tags are severed up for each optimized page. A large website with tons of valuable content, should rank well in the search engines according to the SE's guidelines and the CMS technology would do well not to inhibit this, but rather would do well to promote good search engine rankings for large websites.

Copyright © 2004 SEO Resource Search Engine Marketing Specialists

Kevin Kantola is the CEO of SEO Resource, a California search engine optimization company, and has published many articles over the past 20 years.

Five Simple Steps To Getting Links To Your Site

Writen by Matt Colyer

Today if you want your site to survive in the search engines your going to need backlinks. Almost all the major search engines rank sites based on the number and the quality of backlinks. Besides getting a good search engine ranking with links, it also one of the most effective ways to increase a site's traffic. So, how do you build your link popularity? In this article I'll show you 5 simple steps that will help you build your site's link popularity.

Step 1 - Determine the type of sites you want to trade links with. Focus on sites that are related to your site's market, don't go after sites that are not related, it won't help your ranking that much. To locate link partners search with your main search phrases in the search engines. Example, if your site is about cars, you could search with phrases such as car repair, tires, etc. The sites you see on the first few web pages of the search results should be your main targets. Remember to stay away from direct competitors.

Maybe the best way to Locate quality link partners is by visiting the Yahoo's directory or ODP because all these web sites were reviewed by humans before being listed. If you decide to use a directory visit the category that's most related to your web site, if your web site's subject is popular enough you should find more then one category that's related to your web site.

Step 2 - Review each web site you found carefully, check to see if they are using spam, if they are using spam, stay away, this will only hurt your web site in the long run. Remember to aim for the big money and not a quick dollar. Look to see If they have a links or some call it a resource page. If they don't have a links page, you should most likely move on and forget about it.

You should also review their content and resources they provide. Would their content or resources be useful for your visitors? Do you feel that it's a good resource? Is it a web site that you feel good about recommending?

Step 3 - After reviewing the web sites, you'll need to gather information about them. First, find out the owner of the web sites name. Sometimes the owner with list his or her name on the site, usually located on the about us page. Otherwise, you can get their name is by doing a WHOIS search. There are several available you can use, just search with the phrase WHOIS lookup.

Find out their email address. Remember to get the right one, you don't want to contact them through their support email address, instead search for their marketing or partnership email. Also find something on their web site that is unique and useful, this could be an article, an online tool or a service, use this to compliment them.

Step 4 - Create a list of all the web sites you have found related to your web site. You can list these web sites however you prefer. Personally I always rank them based on their link popularity, ranking and Page Rank. This allows you to have a good idea which ones you should target first. If your web site is new you should go after the web sites that don't have the highest link popularity or Page Rank.

Step 5 - Finally, we are nearly done. It's time to put all the information you have gathered into action. Send a custom e-mail to each site requesting to exchange links. Remember not to use generic e-mail link exchange request, half of the time these are deleted without ever being truly considered. State the webmaster's name, this will show that you have at least looked at the web site.

Next, you need to mention something you liked about their web site. Who doesn't like a nice compliment every once in while? I know I like them and you are probably the same way. Compliments can help seal the deal, they not only make the webmaster like you more, but also show that you took the time to look over their web site.

Tell them about your web site. What is offers and how it can benefit their visitors. Unfortunately many webmaster no longer care about offering a useful resource and only care about money. So, you'll need to tell them how much traffic you get and how it can benefit both of you. Tell them exactly where you think your link should be placed on their site. Also tell them URL of where you'll be placing their link on your web site.

Matt Colyer began as a SEO Specialist in 1997. He founded Superior Webmaster in 2004 as a source of articles and tutorials for Web site owners looking to improve their Web site.

Introduction To Search Engine Optimisation Seo Essentials

Writen by Kathryn Dawson

We have written this analysis to provide readers with a brief guide to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) essentials. If you have a website that is not bringing you as much traffic as you would wish, or you are planning a new website, you need to consider the following SEO essentials to ensure that you have the best chance of being ranked well in the search engines.

Keyword Research
Keywords or key phrases are the words that people type into search engines to find the results they want. If an initial search does not produce the kind of results that people are looking for they will refine their search so there will be a good number of phrases that people could use to find your website.

Brainstorm as much as possible to consider your target audience. Ask potential customers what keywords they would use, ask colleagues and compile a list of phrases that you think will be used. Then check it out using keyword research tools such as Wordtracker and Overture which will provide you with data on what people actually searched for. This is a useful exercise as you may find that a minor difference in search term can produce significantly more traffic!

Try to identify one primary search term per page and several secondary terms that would compliment the primary term. You can now apply your optimisation to individual pages.

Title Tag
This appears between these two tags. It should start with your primary phrase and be about 5-7 words. This title will appear in the blue bar at the top of your web page and will also provide the clickable link fro the search engine rankings.

Description Tag
This appears between these two tags. Your primary phrase should appear as soon as possible in the description but make sure it describes the page because there is nothing more frustrating for a visitor to your site if they get there and find that your description was not accurate. Often, but not always, the description will for part of the wording that is presented in the search engine rankings that will persuade a visitor to click on your link.

Keywords Tag
This appears between these two tags. Commas or no commas – whichever you choose be sure to be consistent. Don't spam the keyword tag i.e. don't repeat keywords over and over. Provide a list of relevant and complimentary keyphrases for those algorithms that give them a value.

Alt tag
If you have images or pictures on your site use the alt tag to provide information that describes the picture. Search engines cannot read pictures but they can read alt tags, in addition specialist software can read alt tags if disabilities prevent a user from viewing the pictures.

CONTENT IS KING!!
Write your web page copy for your human visitors first while also keeping search engine spiders in mind. Keyword density and prominence are measurements that are most efficiently considered in relation to competitors for specific rankings. Search engines also like to detect regular updates as this is an indication that sites are being maintained.

Anchor text
Anchor text is the text that you define as a hyperlink to another page. The anchor text is expected to describe the theme of the page you would be jumping to by clicking on the link therefore anchor text has been given more value in search engine algorithms. If you use something like 'click here' as hypertext rather than something more descriptive (and keyword rich) such as, for example, 'SEO Case Studies' then you are missing an opportunity.

Site Map
Add a site map to your site and link it from the home page so that spiders can crawl the site map quickly and from it crawl every important page on your site.

Google Site Map
Add a Google sitemap to your site – this is an xml file which visitors do not see and it is specifically for Google. By creating a Google sitemap, locating it in the root file and submitting it to Google you are ensuring that Google can easily identify every page on your site and also ensure that updates are notified to Google quicker than would happen without a Google sitemap.

Inbound links
Inbound links or links from other websites into your site provide credibility and emphasis the relative importance or authority that your site has over another site that has fewer links with relatively lesser importance. Inbound links have always been important but as search engines refine their algorithms in order to provide better and more relevant results they give more weight to 'quality' links that are considered relevant to the theme of the site or page. Irrelevant links or links from link farms are increasingly undesirable and may even incur a diminishing affect.

Site Structure and Navigation
The structure of your site can affect how efficiently search engines are able to spider your site – hence the use of site maps. It can also affect how efficiently a human visitor will be able to interact with your site and whether or not you are able to persuade them to complete the action you desire – whether it be to place an order, make an enquiry or gather the knowledge they need.

If possible steer clear of framed sites and flash sites as these may cause problems for the effective spidering of a site.

Black Hat vs Ethical SEO
Black hat SEO uses methods to trick the search engines into awarding higher rankings and as these tricks are considered unethical you run the risk of having your site banned if you employ them. Duplicate sites, spamming, hidden text and cloaking are just a few black hat techniques. We would recommend ethical SEO every time.

Conclusion
The elements discussed above are considered to be the basics of search engine optimisation. Addressing these elements may be sufficient for some sites but more advanced SEO may be necessary to get rankings for other sites. If you have the time available to learn, research, test, adjust and test again then you have a good chance of being able to produce the kind of results in the search engines that you are looking for. There is however much more to search engine optimisation than has been covered in these basic elements but this is an excellent starting point. Other elements to consider would include more advanced elements such as competitor research, keyword density and prominence, deep linking, ensuring clean code (W3C compatible), optimal site structure and navigation. You may also wish to consider blogging and RSS feed which can also be very effective methods to increase traffic.

As a final word…. Remember that search engine optimisation is not just about achieving rankings, it is about increasing traffic to your site and converting that traffic to profit. Best of luck!

Kathryn Dawson, BSc (Hons), MBA, is the general manager of Strategy Consulting (http://www.strategyconsultinglimited.co.uk). She is an experienced consultant, former head of Strategic Business Analysis and International Client Administration with multinational corporations in both the UK and US, and is responsible for client, supplier and associate relationships, delivering effective search engine optimisation solutions to her clients.

Website Traffic Whom Would You Trust

Writen by Gagandeep Dhaliwal

Getting traffic from Search Engines is not as easy these days as it used to be 2 years back. Lot of companies have come up and make claim to get your website on top rankings for your required keywords. Then, Google started contextual advertising for which one has to pay per click.

Now, as getting traffic from Search Engines is getting more and more difficult, what strategy one should adopt in order to get good rankings?

There are a few ways to do this.

1. You go to forums on SEO and dig information about best SEO Techniques. There are a few forums which are having lot of professionals and novice user base. But that needs lot of digging into the forums to find something you are looking for.

2. Believe some SEO professional and give him huge money to get good rankings.

3. Visit blogs and other informative websites that provide articles on various concepts related to SEO. But even then, who can be trusted for the information.

Not everyone has knowledge of SEO techniques and they believe what they are told by those who claim to be experts. I won't say that I am an expert in this, or I will share some very special secret, but I will put together some good concepts about SEO.

I have an answer to this situation.

I am having some knowledge of SEO and have worked on more than 500 websites and can share some ideas. I will also provide insight on many SEO techniques and will also warn you against some myths that people have created for their benefit.

While I will do the hard work here to find the new techniques of marketing your website and its content, you can just sit back and enjoy and come to read the new concepts on this website regularly. In the days to come, I will talk on various important aspects for the benefit of Webmasters and SEO community.

I would like a little favor from everyone who reads and benefits from this website. Please link back to our website so that we could create a platform for tried and tested SEO techniques and reduce the confusion in mind of webmasters about various SEO techniques.

We will also feature articles from other marketing Gurus in near future, but be rest assured that only those things will be published here, which are tried and tested.

The author owns a website Do Not Confuse SEO on which he shares concepts about Search Engine Optimization. You can check his website for latest tips on http://www.dncseo.com

Learn How Improving Your Web Site Content Could Improve Your Roi

Writen by Wayne Hagerty

Web Content, content, content. What the Search Engines were originally designed for and over time web content has been somewhat put on the back burner of Website Marketing Importance.

Good Web Site Content could set your site apart from your competition online by providing the information that surfers find so valuable as well as search engines and putting together great copy that sells could convert visitors into buyers or subscribers.

Although web content is important, well-written web copy that demands attention, talks to the customer and gives a proper call to action can be very powerful in your website marketing campaigns.

Here is how you can make you web site content sell: First thing to consider is the headline, it should speak out loud grabbing the attention of the reader making them want to read on. Be creative and don't be afraid to be a little controversial.

Then you may want to start with a question or a statement that makes the reader start to think about the problem they are having which is the reason they are looking for the answer that can solve that problem.

Next you may want to list some bullet points which list problem solving items to their problem. Try to avoid talking strictly about how great your item is, how wonderful your service is, this area will come later.

Note: Internet surfers can tell in seconds if your are advertising to them in your web site content, I think it is better to ease the reader to the call to action vs jumping in there face with another lame ad. Studies have shown that visitors will just click away if they feel that your are selling to them instead of trying to solve a problem for them.

The idea is that your web site content needs to create trust with the customer, make them invision using your product an or service and have them realize that they just can't live with out your product. If you show that you can help ease there pain and solve the problem they have they will be more likely to purchase from you.

Next you can tell them a little information about you and your products and or service.

This one may seem like it does not have much importance because customers should know what to do next but it is very important to include a call to action ( buy now!, call today!, click here, etc ) telling them what you want them to do next. This part is crucial.

There is more in-depth information about web site content writing but I think this will give you a good idea on what you may want to think about when putting together your web site content.

This article was written by Wayne Hagerty certified Search Engine Internet Marketing professional with years of SEO experience. Discover how to increase traffic to your website. FREE Internet marketing news, and more. Succeed online, visit us today at: http://www.pixseo.com

Whats With All The Fuss Google Is Making Seo Easier

Writen by Bobby Heard

I'm an SEO professional. I spend every morning reading a few newsletters, checking out some hand-picked sites and reading through a sampling of threads at my favorite forums. Then I forget everything I've read and get to work. The fact is, everyone is this industry panics when anything changes as if they'll wake up one morning and find that Google has banned half of it's index. Instead, the SEO's that will last are the ones that embrace Google's algorithm improvements. Besides, is anyone going to miss the tedious outgoing SEO techniques?

If you take the X's and Y's out of Google's algorithm, and look purely at their motivation, it is not hard to see what they are trying to do. They are sick of websites that do not offer the most relevant information for a given query being manipulated to the top of the search engines through "man-made" links. They are continually trying to differentiate between "natural" links and "man-made" ones. Naturally, the masses of SEO's read this and run for their computers, trying to imitate a natural pattern of links. However, the algorithm will continue to improve and make this harder to imitate. All the while there is a much easier way to rank well under Google's ever improving algorithm.

I have to profess that there is one webpage I read every morning that I don't forget, and that is Rand Fishkin's Blog at SEOmoz.org. He made an excellent point when discussing his questioning of prospective clients. One of the first things Rand asks his potential client is why they feel they "deserve" to be at the top of the search rankings. This is definitely the single most overlooked question in the history of internet marketing, and unfortunately most internet marketing professionals always fail to look at our industry at different angles like this.

Us SEO's, were a technical group. We love theories and algorithms. We love to speculate and converse based on countless hours of internet manipulation. Sometimes we need to leave those avenues behind and think in a different way. If you forget about all this stuff, you will quickly realize Google wants the best information at the top of their results! THAT'S IT! So instead of trying to imitate the backlink patterns of highly regarded websites, why don't we simply make a highly regarded website? Of course we will have to tell people about the site. We will have to look at all of the site's on-page factors. But if this website truly deserves to be at the top of the search rankings, it eventually will be. If it isn't today or tomorrow, you can rest assured that Google is working on it.

Scan back up through this article. Do you notice a link in there anywhere? Yup, there's a link to Rand Fishkin's Blog. I don't know Rand at all. He didn't ask me for a link to his blog, I simply find it very useful and used one of his ideas in my article. You know what? If you go there I'll bet you'll find it very useful too. You will most likely visit his website more than once. If you have a website or a blog or participate in forums, I'm fairly certain you will end up making a reference ("linking" in today's internet world) to something on his site. Now do you see the benefit of creating a website that deserves to be at the top of the search rankings?

About The Author
Bobby Heard is a Managing Director of Abalone Designs, Inc., a search engine optimization company based in Vancouver, Canada. You can see their site at: http://www.abalone.ca/searchengineoptimization.html.

Microsoft Search Engine Window To The Future Of Seo

Writen by David Casey

SEO experts around the world have grown comfortable in the knowledge that a strong link campaign, some adequate optimization and some semblance of optimized content can help drive clients to the top of search engines.

Google and Yahoo made small modifications to their algorithms over the past few years, however, little has changed the formula for success for search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO experts and so-called experts concentrated on link campaigns above all else and clients were none the wiser because these campaigns improved rankings.

With Kosmix and now Windows Live (which will become the search engine for MSN) opening windows for change that will soon become doors, many SEO experts are concerned about how this will impact their existing clients and future clients.

The future of search engines clearly point to a change of focus from link campaigns based on keywords to content. With a growing demand of Internet users for search results based on the content of a site the future of SEO is now the present.

Virtually all SEO companies optimize a website including titles, tags, internal links and the like. Most of these same SEO firms also concentrate on link campaigns with varying success (the strategy and approach of the link campaign are crucial, yet often overlooked). Few SEO firms, however, take content seriously and that may spell disaster for their clients and their future success.

Content has always been king when it comes to what web surfers want and look for. Content is likely to now become king when it comes to search engine rankings and that means savvy site owners will begin to ratchet up their efforts for increasing and improving website content.

Those SEO firms and Internet marketing firms that already concentrate on content will likely find their clients shooting to the top of the rankings as the sites of competitors that concentrated solely on link campaigns sink faster than a ship hitting an iceberg.

Though Google and Yahoo may not be shaking in their boots over the competition by Microsoft, and certainly not Kosmix, they are aware that the future is here and it is time to reevaluate their ranking system and give searchers what they want - relevant sites based on content.

David Casey, VP, SetSitesHigh (http://www.setsiteshigh.com) works as part of a team of SEO experts, marketing experts, website designers, developers and content writers for an Internet marketing and SEO firm.

Web Site Copy Is About More Than Keywords

Writen by Nick Usborne

Let's say you are writing a web site to sell beach homes on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada.

You look for some good keywords and come up with 'Vancouver Island waterfront property'. So you use that term in your title, headline and here and there in the text.

So far, so good. The phrase will help you with your rankings. And the use of the phrase on the first screen of your home page will let your visitors know they are in the right place.

But for writers who focus too intently on keywords and phrases, there is a danger.

A danger in optimizing your pages for good keywords? Yes, I think so.

There is a significant difference between the keywords that pop into visitors' minds, and the hopes and ambitions they carry in their hearts.

Let's look at the real estate example again.

As a potential buyer I might type the phrase 'Vancouver Island waterfront property' into the Google search box, because that's what I'm looking for. But that term doesn't reflect what I'm feeling.

Having a home on the coast may have been a lifelong dream. It may be something I feel very strongly about. So when I come to your site, I am looking for two things.

- First, the rational part of my mind is looking for confirmation that your site can help me find what I want. And this is where the use of keywords and phrases makes perfect sense.

- Second, there is a strong, emotional element at play. As a potential buyer, I am looking for someone who can help me fulfill my dream. And this is where a writer who focuses too intently on keywords and phrases can end up with poorly performing copy.

By all means, optimize your pages for Google and for the rational part of a searcher's mind. But be sure to understand and address the emotional needs of the visitor as well.

That means using keywords as the starting point. Beyond the keywords, you need to use language that addresses the deeper needs of the reader.

Yes, understand what Google wants. And understand what your visitor is looking for. But if you want results, you also need to understand and address what the visitor is feeling and hoping for.

Nick Usborne is a copywriter, author, speaker and advocat of good writing. You can access all his archived newsletter articles on copywriting and writing for the web at his Excess Voice site. You'll find more articles and resources on how to make money as a freelance writer at his Freelance Writing Success site.

Help My Keywords Are Too Common

Writen by Lawrence Andrews

What can you do if your keywords are too common? Is there anything that can help?

Well, for a start, including misspellings in your meta tag keywords could help you to get visitors who don't know how to spell or those who type too fast – this traffic is just as good as any other, after all. How many people do you know that use a dictionary when they don't know how to spell a word? I certainly can't think of many. Including misspellings will help you to some extent, but it probably will not provide you with a drastic improvement in traffic especially considering that many search engines now have built in spell checkers so that if a user spells a word incorrectly it asks "Did you mean ?" You can use tools like WordTracker to find out which misspellings are the most popular, and target those.

Try to think on the same level as your users, not always like a webmaster. Thinking like the average person will make you more successful – you should constantly remind yourself to think like the average person when you're trying to pick what words people will use to find you. If you can get into the mind set of a lay person and think "What would I type into the search box if I was looking for the content on this web page?" You probably come up with the key words that are most important. Think of each group within your audience and try to come up with realistic search queries. Entering each word from these queries into your meta tags should help you substantially in terms of increased search engine traffic.

One of the things that will set you apart from the rest of the world is learning the special language of your trade. When you learn about your chosen trade, you start using acronyms and other words that would be foreign to most people, but mean something to the people who would be searching for you. Words that people outside your industry would search for aren't the same as ones that people inside it would search for – targeting jargon words can help you to get highly-targeted traffic with little competition.

Another thing that will set you apart is using words that someone unfamiliar with your trade would use in an attempt to find content regarding your trade. You can't target your site only to those who already know a good deal about what you have to offer. Your content probably won't be fresh to people who are experienced in your field so you are much more dependent on your products at that point. If, however, you are able to target people who know little or nothing about your particular trade, you will be able to generate a good deal of traffic and probably move a sizable amount of inventory.

One last, but very important, method of providing good key word is to discuss the subject of your site with others and observe their reactions to your language. If they seem to suddenly understand what you are saying, that phrase may be a good one for your key words. Talk to your friends, your family, and other web masters about your subject and see what language is generally associated with your subject. This language is generally the correct language to use when generating your key words.

The most important thing to keep in mind when attempting to come up with unique key words is that there are huge groups of people out there who are interested in your goods but have not been targeted by other sites. These markets (known as niche markets) are basically ripe for the picking. If you can come up with a group that would be interested in your product but has not been targeted thoroughly by your competition, you will be able to drastically increase your traffic and/or sales. The ability to identify and target niche markets is an art and it can be developed by any truly dedicated marketer, but you have to be observant and patient in order to come up with valuable niche markets. After all, you are attempting to do what nobody has done before!

As an SEO, you will constantly be fighting with your key words. You will be trying to come up with more interesting or unique key words, and you will be trying to implement them more smoothly into your web page. The fact of the matter is that this takes time and practice. You have to get thoroughly engrossed in the community surrounding your market. Check out some forums relating to your market, look at the common forms of media coverage such as magazines and books. There are possible key words everywhere just waiting to be exploited for the sake of increases in your traffic and sales.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about SEO and PRL.

You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews

Using A Free Keyword Tool To Find Moneymaking Internet Market Niches

Writen by Douglas Hanna

Yahoo has a great, free tool that can help smart marketers find new market niches. It's called the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool.

To use this tool, to go http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/.

All you'll find on the page is the title Keyword SelectorTool, a couple of short paragraphs of text, and a search box labeled Get Suggestions for.

Now, comes the neat part. Just type in a word or phrase, for example, "pet supplies," and click on the arrow to the right of the box. After a few seconds (or minutes), you will see a list of keywords related to "pet supplies." The number to the left of the term is the number of times people searched on that phrase in the past month. In the case of "pet supplies," you will see that the phrase most often search on is "pet supply," with 322,491 searches. Below this, you will most likely see something like the following:

151,580 pet store supply

41,938 discount pet supply

38,899 online pet supply

11,078 pet plus supply

8234 pet supply wholesale and so on down to

1376 bird pet supply

Bird pet supply represents a potential market niche because it's fairly specialized and yet people are clearly searching for products in this area. But you could segment even more.

Change the phrase in the search box from "pet supplies" to "bird pet supply," and click the arrow. The search tool generates a second list with "bird pet supply" at the top with its 1376 searches. But second on the list is 81 searches for "bird discount pet supply." Here is a niche within a niche – people looking for discount bird supplies. You might not attract a lot of visitors to a site dedicated to discount bird supplies, but you can bet those that arrive at your site will be ready, willing and able buyers.

For that matter, look down the list a bit further and you will see 27 searches for pet supply bird cages. Couple this with the searches for bird discount pet supply, and you end up with 108 potential customers. You say this doesn't seem like many? Maybe not but if you could sell $20 worth of supplies to these people a month, you'd be grossing $2160 a month. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Since the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool is free, you can run searches to your heart's content – on anything from pet supplies to the Korean War (22,655 searches last month).

It's a great way to find market niches and the price is right!

Here's anothr thing that's great and the price is right. Plan to vacation this year in Denver. A Denver vacation offers the best of both worlds. You get all the fun things to see and do that are found only in a big, bustling city and there is the spectacular scenary and breathtaking vistas offered by our nearby Rocky Mountains. For more information on a great Denver vacation, just go to http://www.best-denver-vacation.com

Douglas Hanna has lived in the Denver metro area for more than 30 years and is an expert on both Denver and Colorado. He is also the author of more than 100 ezine articles on a variety of subjects.

Getting Better Results From Your Search Engine Traffic

Writen by Tinu Abayomi-Paul

"I did what you said and I'm getting 100 visitors a day from Google. But they still aren't buying my product."

Never minding that some small businesses would be deliriously happy with 3000 addiitonal visitors a month - what do you do when the plan you had to increase your search engine traffic doesn't give you the results you want?

You re-evaluate your plan.

Did you target the right keyword? Are your pages ready to convert? How's your lead capture system? Do you even have one?

You'll need to ask yourself all these questions, and more, but before you even get to that, here's the thing that doesn't seem obvious, the thing you have to resolve before you can move forward.

There's some outside chance - way, way outside - that an increase in search engine traffic just isn't the right way to solve your traffic problem.

What's more likely is that you have made one of the following mistakes or oversights. Before you abandon hope, make sure that the reason for lack of conversions isn't one of the following reasons.

1. You're trying to generate more traffic than a particular keyword can provide.

There might not be ten thousand people online looking for how to make ropes out of cheese every day. If your area is obscure, find out how much of a traffic yield you can expect from search engines, get as much of it as you can, then move on.

2. It would work if you would do all the steps.

In every plan, you'll have to work on optimizing both your content and how it is found. There's just no two ways about it. Depending on your site and how it delivers its information, how frequently it does so, and how many sites are linking to it, and a host of other factors, whether you'll have to lean more on updating content or links will vary.

There's no cookie cutter solution, so do all the suggested steps for traffic success.

3. You don't have a plan.

You know what they say about a failure to plan. If you don't, trust me, it ain't good. Have a goal. If you don't know what to set it on, base it on an increase in revenue. Think backwards from the increase in buyers you would need to make the kind of money you'd like.

4. You're using the wrong plan.

Not every traffic generation method you can leverage for search engine traffic is good for every site or business.

While it's true that the proper blog configuration can turn your site into a search engine magnet, that isn't the only reason to blog, and it doesn't mean that just any platform is suited to your site.

By all means, don't stop blogging because no one is reading your blog - find out why and address that problem. It could be that they can't find it, but it could just as well be what you're writing about.

5- You bought into a sales pitch as a search engine traffic plan.

I'm not going to tell you that article marketing won't help your search engine traffic if executed correctly. I will, however, tell you that most people don't set it up to get the most benefit out of the process, and that it's not a search engine strategy in and of itself.

6. You're paying no attention to analytics, so you have no idea what changed and when.

Getting 100 visitors a day to a site that was getting none is a triumph. Getting 100 visitors a day from search engines to a site that used to get 1000 search engine visitors a day? Not so much.

You need, at bare minimum, a starting place to compare to, or else how do you know you've gotten anywhere?

7 - The traffic plan is fine. Your conversion plan isn't so hot though.

If Google sends you a million visitors and they land on a page full of huge banners, they'll just leave. Give every page a clear purpose, and make sure each one has the ability to get your visitors to buy, subscribe, join, or whatever you'd like them to do, right then or on another day.

Those are the seven most common ways that search engine traffic can leak back out of your site. Even if one of those doesn't solve your search engine traffic problem, if you take action on each applicable point, it will at least help you get more out of your existing traffic.

Go to http://www.freetraffictip.com to learn more about all aspects of traffic generation, including blogging, article marketing and and getting traffic from search engines. Find out what Does work.

How To Choose Keywords To Theme Your Pages And Boost Your Traffic

Writen by Andrew Williams

One of the most frequent questions I get asked is in the choice of keywords for a new site, specifically secondary keywords.. These are the words or phrases that you use when writing your content to help theme the page so that the search engines know what your page is about. These secondary keywords also help to bring in more traffic, because they add more depth to your page, meaning that your page is found for a lot more phrases than just the primary phrase you page is built around.

Let's look at an example.

Suppose you were building a niche site on hemorrhoids.

One of your main pages is likely to be about treating hemorrhoids. Let's use "hemorrhoid treatment" as our primary keyword phrase for this page (it has high searches, but also high competition, so secondaries are going to be working hard to get this page ranking high for related phrases).

So how do you find secondary keywords for use on this page? Surely there cant be many possible secondaries?

Well, you have a few options for finding secondaries. There is a paid service called Thememaster which a lot of marketers use for this purpose (search Google for this one if you are interested - I have not used it, so cannot recommend it). However, my own favourite method is using Keyword Results Analyzer. If you own it, you have all you need to find those secondaries.

I carried out research at Wordtracker for this niche, and imported them into KRA. One of the strengths of KRA is the filtering and reporting features. To find secondary keywords, I simply filter the phrases that contain the word "treat". This will pull out all phrases containing treat, treatment etc. Since all phrases in my database are related to hemorrhoids, all phrases returned will be related to treating this condition.

KRA gives me 61 phrases that are searched for at the search engines related to hemorrhoid treatment. Now the difficulty is not how to find secondaries, it is how to choose from 61 related phrases (which is obviously too many for a single page).

Here are the 61 phrases:

Alternative Treatments Hemorrhoids
Best Hemorrhoid Treatment
Chiropractic Hemorrhoid Treatment
Cure Hemorrhoid Treatment Hemmoroids
External Hemorrhoid Treatment
Haemmaroid Treatment
Haemorrhoids Treatment
Haemorroid Treatment
Hemarroid Treatment
Hemorhoid Home Treatment
Hemorrhoid Cures And Treatments
Hemorrhoid Home Treatment
Hemorrhoid Home Treatments
Hemorrhoid Internal Treatment
Hemorrhoid Treat Holistic Herbal
Hemorrhoid Treatment
Hemorrhoid Treatment By Infrared Coagulation
Hemorrhoid Treatment By Micro Current
Hemorrhoid Treatment Cure
Hemorrhoid Treatment Drugs
Hemorrhoid Treatment Hemoids
Hemorrhoid Treatment Hemorrhoids
Hemorrhoid Treatment Hemorrhoids Common Cure For Piles
Hemorrhoid Treatment In Pregnancy
Hemorrhoid Treatment Phoenix Az
Hemorrhoid Treatments
Hemorrhoid Treatments Hemorroids
Hemorrhoidal Polyps Treatment
Hemorrhoidal Treatments
Hemorrhoidectomy Treatment
Hemorrhoids Banding Surgical Treatment
Hemorrhoids External Treatment
Hemorrhoids Symptoms Causes And Treatments
Hemorrhoids Treatment
Hemorrhoids Treatment Care
Hemorrhoids Treatment Cure Hemorr
Hemorrhoids Treatment Of
Hemorrhoids Treatment Review
Hemorrihoid Treatment
Home Hemorrhoidal Treatments
How To Treat Hemorrhoids
Internal Bleeding Hemorrhoids Hemorrhoid Treatment
Internal Hemorrhoid Herbs Treatment
Internal Hemorrhoid Treatment
Irc Hemorrhoid Treatment
Kansas City Hemorrhoid Treatment
Laser Treatment For Hemorrhoids
Med Treatment Hemorrhoid
Natural Hemorrhoid Treatment
Natural Treatment Hemorrhoids
Natural Treatment Of Hemorrhoids
Natural Treatment Of Hemorrhoids During Preganancy
Pph Hemorrhoid Treatment
Treat Hemorrhoids What To Eat
Treating Haemmeroids
Treating Hemorrhoids
Treatment For Hemorrhoids
Treatment Hemorrhoids
Treatment Of Hemorrhoids
Treatment Of Hemorrhoids During Preganancy
Type Of Doctor To Treat Hemorrhoids

If you used all of these phrases as they are, you would not only have a very large page, but you would have a very high density of certain words like treatment, treating. We obviously have to be very careful about not using a word too many times, so one of the useful features built into KRA is its unique keyword list report. This report shows you all of the unique words that make up a set of phrases. Here are the unique words that make up the above phrases:

alternative
az
banding
best
bleeding
Care
causes
chiropractic
city
coagulation
common
cure
cures
current
doctor
drugs
during
eat
external
haemerroid
haemmaroid
haemmeroids
haemorrhoids
haemorroid
hemarroid
hemmoroids
hemoids
hemorhoid
hemorr
hemorrhoid
hemorrhoidal
hemorrhoidectomy
hemorrhoids
Hemorrihoid
hemorroids
herbal
herbs
holistic
home
how
infrared
internal
irc
kansas
Laser
med
micro
natural
phoenix
piles
polyps
pph
preganancy
pregnancy
review
surgical
symptoms
treat
treating
treatment
treatments
type

What this list gives you is a set of keywords that you can use in your content where they make sense. By adding these words to your page, you can theme your page so that it matches lots of frequently searched for phrases.

For example, if you used these words:

treat
treating
treatment
treatments

on your page, you would have the chance to rank in Google for "treat hemorrhoids", "treating hemorrhoids", "hemorrhoid treatment" & "hemorrhoid treatments".

By also using Mispelled variations of hemorrhoids highlighted in this list:

haemerroid
haemmaroid
haemmeroids
haemorrhoids
haemorroid
hemarroid
hemmoroids
hemorhoid
hemorrhoid
hemorrhoids
Hemorrihoid
hemorroids

together with the above treatment words, you can expect to be found for search phrases containing every combination of the mispellings when searched with a treatment phrase. That's 48 different search phrases that your page could be found for.

Now, the above example is one I don't necessarily recommend you follow, since all those mispellings may make your page read very badly. But you get the idea.

Perhaps a better use of this type of unique keyword list would be to target the treatment/cure style keywords.

This would not look unnatural:

alternative
Care
cure
cures
doctor
drugs
herbal
herbs
holistic
Laser
med
natural
symptoms
treat
treating
treatment
treatments

Add these into your content, together with a couple of alternative spellings, and you can have a page that can potentially rank well for large numbers of hemorrhoid treatment related phrases.

Imagine if you were a search engines, and after analysing your page for theme, you found the above words (and one or two spellings of hemorrhoid).

Would you have any difficulty deciding which theme the page was about?

For a free Wordtracker Tutorial (and several other free reports), sign up for Andy's free ezSEO Newsletter. No BS advice and tips for affiliate markete

Would You Let A Dog Or A Butler Market Your Website

Writen by Michael Cheney

The latest news to hit the Internet's 'water cooler' is that Lycos and Ask Jeeves are to begin their own SEO services..

Search engine optimisation (or SEO) is any practice related to the end goal of improving your website's positioning in the search engines.

The brief history of SEO is that it first started out solely as the remit of the developers themselves. This was back in the day when one person designed, built, maintained, hosted and marketed a website.

The Ever-Changing Internet Landscape

During the past few years, however, the entire Internet industry has divided up into a myriad divisions to such an extent that SEO is now a booming sector in its own right. Entering the term "seo" on Google returns nearly 20 million results!

Now businesses recognise that it is no longer possible to expect one individual or company to possess all the necessary skills 'under one roof' to be able to achieve great results on the graphic design, technical construction AND marketing of their website.

This has led to the trend of bringing in specialist search engine marketing consultants or companies to assist.

As Google and the like are spending millions every year on developing their tools to accurately sift through the billions of web pages that exist it really is a full time occupation just keeping track of what has an effect on search engine ranking and which strategies work best.

Everyone Wants 'Organic' Nowadays!

Ask Jeeves and Lycos are now offering their SEO service to help companies get found in the 'organic' results of search engines.

'Organic' results are those results in a search engine listing that are non-paid. Almost all search engines now offer businesses the shortcut of simply paying to get an ad listed whereas as a latest study indicates that only 28% of searchers will click on an advertisement as opposed to one of the 'organic' results (on Google).

This is the reason we're all fighting for high rankings in the 'organic' results. This demand from businesses is also presumably the main driving factor behind Ask Jeeves and Lycos starting to offer their own Search Engine Optimisation services.

Money Well Spent?

In short - I'm not sure.

If you have a 50 page website, getting Lycos to provide you with SEO services will cost you a tidy $10,000. They also include the questionable tactic of re-submitting your website over and over to search engines which is both pointless and risky as some will act against those that submit more than once.

$10,000 sounds like a lot to me for a service that is only dealing with search engines and which talks of 'recommendations' that you then have to implement yourself.

Really though - it comes down to what you are trying to achieve with your website.

My two cents on this is that the Lycos service doesn't devote enough attention to links - your money may be better spent on getting more high quality in-bound links or on a well-managed Pay Per Click Campaign.

Ask Jeeves http://www.askjeeves.com

Lycos' SEO Service http://ranking.lycos.com/sitesidemore.html

Search Engine Users Survey http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/software/article.php/3348071

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

Website Optimization A Seo Specialist Reveals All

Writen by Robert Fuess

Website optimization is the first step in promoting your website. Those with foresight and deeper pockets will have a SEO-savvy webmaster (such as myself) build the website that is optimized from the start. Otherwise, a website may need a SEO-facelift later to help it be digestible to the search engines - and to make it obvious to the search engines that the keywords you are trying to be found under are truly relevant to your website. Like any specialty, performing website optimization involves skills, special tools, and a willingness to keep up with current changes in the market.

Unfortunately, hiring an SEO expert can be quite expensive. For those who want to do it themselves, here are the steps.

BOOKMARK THESE TOOLS! YOU WILL need them!

The first step in website optimization is to make sure you have well-formatted HTML. I would encourage you to use the following tool to check this: http://validator.w3.org/ Do your best to get your website as close to conformance as possible.

If you use CSS, then use a CSS validator at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator-uri.html There is rarely an excuse for having invalid CSS.

If you follow most of the suggestions for having valid HTML code, your web pages will be more digestible for the search engines, as well as being much more cross-browser compliant. You should also do this after any significant edit of the web page - to ensure that it is still compliant.

The second step in website optimization is to work on the Meta tags and the title tag for each page in your site. These are in the header of your web page document and need to be tailored to attract users who type in one of a select group of keywords. There are sevaral free meta-tag generator tools available for those who need them. Just do a search on "HTML Meta Tag Generator".

The title tag:

The title tag is, of the three, the most important for the major search engines. Don't make this too long - normally no more than 6 words. But have your most important keywords here. Some SEO specialists advise that even the order of the text here is significant. They suggest that if you place your company name in the title, that it should be placed last so the other keywords are being considered with greater weight.

The meta-keywords tag:

This is now of lesser importance than before, due to abuse by webmasters to achieve high rankings. However, it is still important and is required by many of the smaller search engines. Make sure that you don't repeat any keyword or keyword phrase more than three times. That would be considered Spam (bad SEO tactics) by the search engines. Remember, your visitors will see the title of the web page. Make it useful to them as well.

The meta-description tag:

This is of higher importance than the keywords tag. Several search engines use it when they show your listing. It needs to encourage your potential visitors to visit your website. Of course, having keywords in here is important. But keep the primary purpose in mind as you write it. Here too, you should make sure that you don't repeat any keyword or keyword phrase more than three times.

Each page in your website needs its own tailored title, meta-description, and meta-keywords tag. These need to be focused on the keywords you are trying for. (These are the words or phrases you want to be found at when people are doing searches.) These shouldn't normally be the same on every page. They should be customized to the content that is on that page. You should also keep your visitors in mind as you write them.

The third step is to work on your content - especially on your home page. Ideally you would have between 800 - 1200 words of text. It should have your most important keywords at the top, middle and the bottom of the text. If possible, use an "h1" tag at the top for your title - and have your most important keyword imbedded in it. Also, have some of your keywords in a sentence or phrase that is bolded. Keep it natural for your visitors to read. If it doesn't look natural, you will loose any visitors you have attracted.

The fourth step in website optimization is to edit your links and your images to make full use of the "title" and "alt" attributes.

Text links can have a "title" attribute. The content is to more fully describe your link. When you put your mouse over the link, the content of the "title" attribute is displayed. I would encourage you to tailor the description so that it contains at least one of your keywords - but keep it accurate - that it really does describe the link. It must make sense to the common user.

Images HTML tags can have an "alt" attribute. It is used to describe an image when you put a mouse over it. It is also used for different devices for seeing impaired. Also, it is used when the user decides not to show images with the web site. They will see this text instead. (It is the "Alternate Text" for the image.) Try to incorporate some keywords here too - but keep with the spirit of being the "alternate text" for the image.

If you are using tables, you may even include a table "summary" attribute. The purpose of this attribute is to assist for those with disabilities to understand the contents and structure of a table. Keep all summary comments within that purpose - and add keywords only where appropriate. Note that these summary attributes may cause your web page validator to spit up an error - but this is newer item that is encouraged.

The fifth step is to have a good menu system or a site map. Search engines follow links to find the different pages in your site. If your navigation is one of those JavaScript drop-down menus or Flash menus, the search engines may not find all of your pages unless you have an alternative non-JavaScript link path that they can follow. If you use the fancy JavaScript links, you should have a hard link to a site map on every page. The site map should have a real non-JavaScript list of links that the search engines can follow to map out your whole site. As a standard policy I tend to avoid the JavaScript links in the menus.

OPTIONAL: If you haven't chosen a domain name yet, you may strongly consider having your top keyword phrase in the domain name, with the words separated by dashes. This is an excellent idea, but not always feasible. Many companies already have a domain name selected, or prefer to use their company name as the domain name. This is a business decision left up to the customer.

THINGS NOT TO DO: Don't create and market mirror sites though to accomplish this trick either. Sites that are identical in content, but have a different domain name are considered SPAM (bad/taboo) by the search engines. They don't appreciate such tricks, and the ranking of both websites will suffer for it.

Also, don't get too crazy with stuffing keywords where they don't belong or by repeating keywords or by having keywords in hidden layers. Search engines don't like that and will ban your site.

SEO SOFTWARE TO BUY: I have used SEO Studio to do website analysis during my optimization. This has been an invaluable tool for analyzing how saturated my keywords are in a particular web page. It is reasonably priced and I have been very satisfied with the performance. It is easy to see such things as keyword density relevance for the whole web page. It also is helpful in showing where the keywords are not (and can be). You will learn a lot about website optimization just by using this tool!

NOW WHAT? After all this "Search Engine Optimization" you need to do a human review your website - is it natural/useful/helpful for the human visitor? Remember, getting website traffic is only half the game. Your site needs to quickly convert them into paying customers.

Once it is "Optimized", then you need to let the search engines know that you exist. Only after it is ready should you tell them about it. But this is a subject for another article. Do a search of different article warehouse or SEO news sources. You will find a lot of information on this.

WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION NEWS SOURCES: Since there are new quirks in the website optimization and website promotion that come out all the time - some that apply to all search engines, and some that apply to a particular one, it is wise to keep up to date. I strongly encourage you to join a couple of relevant mailing lists!

I really like the news sources from Entireweb.com. If you submit a site through them, I would encourage you to accept their free newsletters. They have great content. http://www.entireweb.com/submit_site/

Another place to get really great articles on website optimization or promotion is http://www.SiteProNews.com They also allow you to subscribe to their articles. Do this!

If you are serious about keeping up with your website positioning, keep up with the news. You will find these resources invaluable!

Robert Fuess is a veteran website designer who specializes in making dynamic search engine optimized websites.
http://www.SpiderwebLogic.com | http://www.SchoolAndTeacher.com

Getting Listed In Search Engines

Writen by Sunil Rajan

So you have a website up and running and everything is setup exactly how you want it. Here comes the next step, getting visitors to your site.

The biggest hurdle in having a website is attracting visitors to your site but how do get these visitors find you?

Search engines.
Before a visitor can find your site, a search engine has to find you and list it as one of the websites to crawl or spider. Indexing is when a web crawler or spider goes thru your site and reviews all the relevant keywords, links, and information contained on your site. Some sites are crawled on a daily bases, some on a monthly basis.

Why? Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches.

So how does a web crawler get to your website? Here are a few solutions:

Submit the site for indexing. Fire up your browser and search for "submit website". Browse thru the results and submit your site to these directories to get listed. Make sure you suggest your site to Google, yahoo, msn as they are the key players. There are some sites that will submit to thousands of other directories for a fee.

Link swapping and Back Links. When search engines index a site, they follow the outgoing links. If you have a buddy who has a website and is listed in Google, make sure he adds your link. You can also pay companies to add your link to their site or directory for a fee. If you do pay someone, try to get a relevant site (a site similar in nature as yours. Example: if your site is about the Spiderman movie, try to get a link from another movie site or related to Spiderman) with a high Page Rank.

Press Releases (optional): press releases will bring some hype to your site. If you can afford a press release, then do it. You will get some high PR sites pointing to you. Also people who read the releases will be curious and will visit your site.

Word of mouth is perhaps the strongest form of advertising. As time passes by more and more visitors will find your site and you will gain popularity. Search engines serve the purpose of helping surfers find you; the next step is keeping those visitors to your site. All you need is patience, time and consistently updating your site.

Sunil Rajan offers reviews, advice and assistance for new webmaster interested in making money on the internet. His services are free as he provides assistance as a personal hobby. He enjoys helping those who want to make money thru his website http://www.therichmonkey.com. His site contains information on setting up sites, how to make profits from them and how to keep an edge on the internet. Please include this bio when reprinting.

Using Meta Tags Wisely To Attract Search Engines And Visitors

Writen by Rajesh V. Tavakari

There are certain tricks and techniques in SEO industry, which can fetch you real quick and top ranking in short run and get banned for ever, which I am discussing in this article. Before optimizing any site, always follow code of ethics and never spam.

In this article, I will be discussing about meta tags. How to use the them effectively without spamming. Its not just another article about meta tags. Read on to find out more..

Meta Tags are very important for your website's visibility. Many search engines read them from your site when you submit it to them.

META tags were developed and made a HTML standard for the purpose of addressing specific information about your web page that does not affect the way your page actually looks.

1. Overstuffing Metatags : Believe me or not , there are still many people and web masters around who think that meta tags are magic bullet. Its not anymore.

Mistake No. 1: Stuffing keywords in Title

Mistake No. 2: Stuffing keywords in Description

Mistake No. 3: The keyword tag.

Mistake No. 1 : Stuffing keywords in Title

I agree that its very important to include your main keywords in title tag. But there are certain things, which you should remember, as title tag is the most important tag.

• Title tag length should be within 70 characters or 8 words

• Title tag should be meaning full and attract visitors

• Use one to two keywords in title tag

• Use plurals & concentrate on keyword phrases rather than just keyword.

• Make sure that title tag is grammatically correct

Syntax of Title Tag :

Your site title goes here

Now, lets me show you live demo on Title tag. Please search for "Office furniture uk" in Google, without double quotes. See the results. This is the first site listed under Google.

Office Furniture Home UK, Home Office Furniture London, Home ...

Office Furniture UK Online Home Office and Small Office Shopping England,

London, UK. Furniture, Office, Seat, Seating, Desk, Desks ...

Description: Uses full screen flash with exit button. Offering bespoke office furniture solutions for businesses....

Welcome to furniture123 - Bedroom furniture, Office furniture, ...

.. desk uk, child bed, home office furniture, child furniture, dining furniture, coffee table, office chair, furniture retailer, upholstery uk, bathroom furniture ...

Welcome to - Blueline Furniture - Ergonomic furniture, Custom ...

.. has pioneered the manufacture of office furniture using timber ... FIRA GOLD Quality Award as its furniture hire, minimum ... dealer network across the UK and Channel ...

MFI.co.uk

UK's leading furniture retailer offering an extensive range of quality furniture, including home office furniture, bedroom furniture, dining furniture, beds ...

These are the above first 4 results arrived for the term "Office furniture UK" in google. Now have a look over title and description. The first title does not make any sense and its stuffed with keywords, though its ranking no.1 it would have less click thorough as compared to no 2 and no 3.

A fair and attractive title would be something like :

Offers quality office furniture at discount price in UK ( Short title )

UK's leading furniture retailer offering office furniture at discount ( Perfect one )

Look at the above two titles. It conveys some message with a perfect sense. The best possible keywords have been used and its catchy too. Just by crafting a good title you can increase your click through, even though you are not listed in top 1 or 2 positions. I hope now you must have got some idea about crafting good title. Now lets jump to next step. Yeah. Description Tag.

Description Tag :

Description tag is still important as most of the search engines still give importance to it. Sometimes even google picks up description tag. An ideal description should be somewhere within 150 to 200 characters, which correctly describes the content of the page. Make sure to place 2 to 3 important keyword phrases within first 100 characters.

Tip 1 : Make sure that description tag comes immediately after title tag.

Tip 2. Make sure that the first paragraph or the heading of the page contains 2 to 3 important keyword phrase.

Tip 3. If possible you the targeted keyword phrase in text links to get boost.

Things to avoid :

1. Do not stuff the description tag with keywords.

2. Do not use generic keywords, use keyword phrases

3. Do not repeat the title in description

Keyword Tag :

The keyword tag is almost dead. Most of the web masters try to flood the key word tag with all sorts of keywords. Hardly couple of search engines gives a bit of importance to it.

Please note that, directories like Yahoo, Dmoz & About does not consider keyword tag or meta tags. I do not recommend using keyword tag. If you use the keyword tag, do not include more than 8 keyword phrases.

Do's

1. Include only important long keyword phrases.

2. Don't use generic / general terms. Be specific

3. Use Word tracker to find good keyword phrases

Don'ts

1. Do not spam by stuffing all the possible keywords.

2. Do not include the keywords, which are not related to your website

3. Do not repeat any tag ( title, description, keyword tag ) you might get boost by repeating, but never know when you will be banned.

Other important things to remember :

1. Meta tags ( Title & Description ) should reflect the content the page. Do not put your company name in title.

2. Do not try to target more than 2 to 3 keyword phrases per page

3. Try to include your important keyword phrases in h1 to h6 tag.

4. Include your important keyword phrases in tag, bold tag.

5. You will get boost if you include your important keyword phrases in anchor tag.

6. Do not forget to Include your important keyword phrases in first paragraph of your web page.

7. Try to put your important keyword phrases in alt text. ( for images )

8. Make sure that title and description is crafted neatly and attracts both visitors and search engines.

Robots (Recommended)

See the workshop report at W3 for the full text.

default = empty = "ALL"

"NONE" = "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"

The filler is a comma separated list of terms:

ALL, NONE, INDEX, NOINDEX, FOLLOW, NOFOLLOW.

Discussion: This tag is meant to provide users who cannot control the robots.txt file at their sites. It provides a last chance to keep their content out of search services. It was decided not to add syntax to allow robot specific permissions within the meta-tag.

INDEX means that robots are welcome to include this page in search services.

FOLLOW means that robots are welcome to follow links from this page to find other pages.

So a value of "NOINDEX" allows the subsidiary links to be explored, even though the page is not indexed. A value of "NOFOLLOW" allows the page to be indexed, but no links from the page are explored (this may be useful if the page is a free entry point into pay-per-view content, for example. A value of "NONE" tells the robot to ignore the page.

Conclusion

There are other meta tags like, Author, language, Copyright, Re-visit, classification etc. which are ignored by most of the search engines. Experience says, use the three tags wisely ( title, description & keywords ). You will be attracting both visitors and search engines. You can also use our free meta tag generator at http://www.website-promotion-ranking-services.com/meta_tag_generator.htm

For more information or any comments / suggestion on this article please EMail me. I will be glad to clarify the doubts / queries with live examples.

About The Author

Author: Rajesh V. Tavakari is SEO Specialist of Website Promotion & Ranking Services, an Internet Marketing firm specializing in

Website promotion & Website optimization.

URL: http://www.website-promotion-ranking-services.com

rajesh@website-promotion-ranking-services.com

You may freely reprint this article on your website or in your newsletter provided this courtesy notice and the author name and URL remain intact.

Link Popularity Explained And How To Build Links

Writen by Frank Kilkelly

Link popularity is the single most influential factor for determining how well a web site will perform in search engine rankings. A web site's link popularity is computed from the number and more importantly, the quality of links pointing to a web site.

Link Popularity history

To gain a better understanding of link popularity it is useful to know why it became so crucial for search engine rankings. In the past a web page's ranking was determined, amongst other factors, by the number of keyword occurences within 'on-page' elements i.e. in page text, META tags, title tag.

When web developers learned that they could trick a search engine to return their web pages by cramming keywords into their pages the search engines had to get a bit smarter. They were using 'on-page' elements to determine relevance so it was only natural that they would look to elements out of direct control of the web page creator i.e. 'off-page' elements. Search engines made the assumption that the greater the number of links from other sites pointing to a web site, the more popular the web site is and therefore a more quality resource. This worked nicely in theory but in practice it was also to be abused.

Web site owners figured out many ways to get links pointing to their web sites one example of which was through the use of link farms, pages the contained nothing more than a collection of links, Quantity of links was being abused so the search engines made use of the old saying "quality not quantity" and began to assign a quality factor to each of the links pointing to a web site. Now web sites that had a higher number of high quality links were looked upon favourably by the search engines. Building link popularity became a science in itself and today is still the most time-consuming and frustrating activity for a search engine optimizer.

Main classes of links

Note: In the following examples SiteA is our web site and SiteB is an outside site (i.e. a web site under a different domain name than SiteA).

Inbound links:

Inbound links to a web site are links that originate from an outside web site. An example would be a link on SiteB pointing into a page on SiteA.

SiteA (----- SiteB

Outbound links:

Outbound links from a web site are links pointing to a page on an outside web site. An example would be a link on SiteA pointing out to a page on SiteB.

SiteA -----) SiteB

There are two further classifications of links:

Reciprocal links:

An example of a reciprocal link is when SiteA links to SiteB AND SiteB links to SiteA, the link is reciprocated by both parties.

SiteA -----) SiteB

AND

SiteA (----- SiteB

To achieve a high link popularity the type of links to build are inbound one-way links. This simulates how natural links are created i.e. links that people create to point to your site because they found it worth linking to.

For outbound links it is natural to assume that they might decrease link popularity of a web site but this is not true. You do not give away your link popularity when you link to another site. They do not add to your link popularity though.

Reciprocal links can add to your link popularity if the web site that you exchange links with has a higher link popularity than your site. However they are not as powerful as inbound, one-way links as they are quite artificial in nature i.e. most probably created by communication between the owners of both sites.

How to build link popularity

So it is quite obvious that to help build up a nice link popularity many inbound, one-way links need to be created. This can be achieved in a number of different (and most importantly, legal) ways:

Directories:

Directories are categorized listings of links from around the web. Many, many directories exist and vary in their methods of getting your link posted on them. They provide a great source of quality inbound, one-way links. Getting listed in quality directories such as DMOZ or Yahoo can be more beneficial for your link popularity than a lot of links from smaller, newer directories.

Great site content:

The most powerful way to get inbound, one-way links is to have great site content that other web sites will want to link to. This allows you to get links from sites other than directories, which can definitely be better. The best thing about this is that it requires no communication on your part, it just happens naturally. If your site has poor content then others sites may not link, including the directories. Most of the top ranking web sites today got to the top because of great content. Writing interesting and informative articles for your web site is a good way of getting these kind of links.

Emailing web site owners:

If you come across a listing of links on a web site other than a directory e.g. a links page on a somebody's personal web site, it can do no harm to write the web site owner a polite email requesting a link to your site from their page. They may request a reciprocal link in return but sometimes they do not and you can get a quality inbound, one-way link for your efforts. I have got many links in the past using this method. In my email I always ask them to visit my site first before making a decision to link and I personalise each email with a comment or two about their site.

Summary

The best and most effective way of increasing your search engine rankings is working to improve your web site's link popularity. This can be achieved by getting as many inbound, one-way links as you can from quality sites such as directories. Other ways to get these links are having great content on your site and requesting a link to your site from other web sites.

Increasing link popularity is a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process but is definitely worth the time and effort when you see a dramatic increase in traffic.

Frank Kilkelly is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Expert and Webmaster at http://www.seo-ireland.com/, a complete search engine optimization resource. The highlight of the site is an SEO forum http://www.seo-ireland.com/forum/ for discussion of the latest techniques and tips to improve the ranking of your web site.

The Perils Of Web Hosting On Search Engine Placements

Writen by Paul Rudman

Yes indeed, who would have thought it, but your web hosting provider could indirectly be costing you the chance of good placements in the major search engine Google.

How can this be? Well the problem is the physical location of the hosting centre itself. Now, while you may feel you have signed up with a UK hosting company, actually all their hosting centres can be in a different country such as the US or Germany for example.

Now this little quirk doesn't really have many side effects as you may well be getting very good value and good technical support from your host, but what it does mean is that if you do not have a geography specific domain suffix such as .co.uk for the UK and instead you opt for a .org, .net, or .com then Google will use the geographical location of your hosting centre as the method for determining which local index your results should be found in.

By this I mean if you were to search www.google.co.uk with the radio button switched to UK results only, and your .com site was hosted by a UK hosting supplier but in a German datacentre, then you would never appear in the search results. Of course, you would appear in the www.google.de search results, but obviously not many German google users are looking for websites and businesses in English or relevant only to a UK audience.

There are plenty of studies out there suggesting search patterns on Google that say it is approximately 50 : 50 as to the number of people that click the "all the web" results on google.co.uk compared to searching only UK results. However, I personally do not believe this, if I am looking for a business where a product needs to be delivered or a service provided to me that involves phone or person to person support and contact, am I really going to search every website on the Internet? No, I am only going to search across UK specific sites, and if I can't find what I want then I will expand my search to include sites outside the UK.

It is unknown to me at this time whether a .co.uk site hosted outside the UK suffers any form of penalisation from Google in its ranking placements in the google.co.uk index, and is quite difficult to prove either way as search engines are notorious for providing as little information as possible as to how they operate.

Unfortunately there is no real way around this problem if you are already caught up in it other than move your hosting to an ISP that is actually based in the Country that they claim to be on all advertising etc. Always check beforehand if you are looking at a non .co.uk domain name for your site, as you do risk never getting the 100's or 1000's of search engine referrals that www.google.co.uk can provide you.

Below is a link to a tool that is useful for telling you the geographical location of your website, make sure you check it out if you are concerned about your site not being included in your local Google index, because there is nothing your hosting provider or Google can or will do about this situation, so get educated and make sure your website gets seen in your local Google index.

Tools for locating where your website is hosted (http://www.dnsstuff.com/)

Instructions

1) Using the "Ping" tool, type in your domain name and you will be given the IP address of the machine your site is hosted on.

2) Copy and paste that IP address into the "tracert" tool, the final hop is the physical location of your website, so check this against the "Country" information on the right-hand side.

I don't see this problem changing or easing any time in the near future, as the service provided by Google for geographical indexed is fundamentally sound and they have to use some method of discerning which Country group a site is relative to when it has a non-geographical domain suffix, however more and more people are being caught out by this without even realising it, because they believed they were signing up to a hosting provider in their own Country.

I hope this article helps, and please email me any of your stories / problems in this area. Good luck!

Paul Rudman is the director and head of optimisation at Commercetuned (http://www.commercetuned.co.uk/), he's been involved in developing search strategies and search engine optimisation for 7 years.