Is Content Important For Search Engines

Writen by Vladimir Ghetau

As we all know, information is what attracts visitors. A friend of mine told me something interesting and I would like to share it with you: "Content, Vladimir, is the KING!"- Right you are, mate!

Reality, go and check! Type something in a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or whatever. Search on a specific topic. Search engines count on content when displaying results. Again... "Content is the King!".

That's why, the next thing you should do is to start thinking of the topic of your website when you want a new one. Let's concentrate on the topic, by asking you a simple question... "What's the main topic which BEST describes your website?"

Here's the John example: John is selling gardening tools. Well ...for John, the main topic of his website is "gardening". The reason I'm asking you to find a word which best describes your website is because search engines nead a reason to read the content, index it, and display it in their search results.

We'll try together to provide a good reason for each search engine, like John did. When people search for the "gardening" topic, they find John's website. Isn't that clever?

The content will directly relate to your topic. That's why the search engines will need a main keyword to show your website in search results. Let's give 'em a good reason to list your website on their first page of search results!

Our John, has chosen his main keyword: gardening. You should think of a good one, too, which best resembles your website's content. Let me give you an example...

Google declared last year that they had over 250-300 million searches per day. Well, don't belive them, other experts suspect the number is much higher.

If you come up with a good keyword for your website, you'll get a lot more visitors considering those big numbers from statistics. So, now you have the topic. John had one too - "gardening".

Let's say someone wants to find some articles about gardening. Because John was smart, he put some articles about gardening too. He wanted to share his knowledge with his visitors. It's a powerfull marketing strategy which attracts visitors. Now

John promotes his gardening tools inside his articles. But, in the same time, search engines consider that John's web site is about gardening, and because of those articles, they give more importance to this particular website and display it higher in search results.

The importance of your website for any search engine will increase if you put a little bit more information about your chosen topic.

Simply put, it's important to find a keyword which describes your business.I'll give you a bonus before the ending of this article... you'll thank me later.

Yahoo, a respectful search engine provides us a tool to see how many searches were made last month, here is the link:

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

By using this tool you can find a list with the number of searches during last month on a particular topic.

Google, the most "en-vogue" search engine these days, also has a unique keyword study and research tool, you can find it here:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

This is a "real time" application which displays keyword suggestions and the number of web pages regarding the topic you're interested in.

Before closing: today's homework is thinking about few important keywords for your web site. When you're completely satisfied with your choices, write them down. It will be a lot easier to choose the best one from your list.

All the best... Vladimir Ghetau

Vladimir Ghetau is specialized in professional Web Designing. He wrote the book "How To Advertise Your Business Like A PRO" which helps improving your web site traffic up to 378%. You can see work results on his web design and development website at http://www.PixelTomorrow.com.

Choosing A Good Domain Name Isnt Always So Simple

Writen by Joe Duchesne

So you need a domain name for your brand new internet business. You may even have some cool ideas for a new domain name combination that will really impress your friends. Question is, is your new domain name going to help your business or hurt it?

What could be simpler than choosing a domain name right? Wrong. There are a number of things you need to consider and research before you register your favorite domain name.

First off, what is a domain name and why would I want one?

A domain name makes our lives much easier when surfing the internet. You see, all computers on the internet are actually referenced with what is called IP addresses. On the internet, IP addresses are four sets of numbers that serve like street addresses allowing two computers to talk over a network. An example of an IP address is the one for Google.com. It is 216.239.39.99. If you enter this IP address into the address bar of your browser it will bring you to Google's home page in that very same way that typing www.google.com would get you there. Unfortunately, we humans have difficulty remembering our phone numbers let alone so many digits for all kinds of sites. That's one of the main reasons domain names were invented.

Domain names make it easy for us humans to remember how to find a site. Most people know Google.com and anyone familiar with the internet knows that to reach Google, you simply type www.google.com in your address bar and you are transported to their website. The same goes for Disney.com, Microsoft.com, CNN.com, etc…

Now you would think that choosing a domain name would simply be a matter of choosing something that is unique and that people would remember. The problem with that approach is that most of us don't have the money needed to turn our name into a brand name on the mass market. Most of us need to rely on our prospects reaching our website through other means. The best of these are search engines.

Choosing a good domain name for your site starts with the main keywords you have chosen to focus on for your website. Before you launch your business, you should conduct some preliminary research online to determine which keywords have the most traffic and the least number of other websites competing for that particular keyword. Some tools that help in this are the Overture keyword suggestion tool and Wordtracker.com. Both of these tools will give you a rough idea of how much traffic each of your chosen keywords will likely get each month. This helps to determine which keywords to focus on.

Should you choose a domain name that includes your main keywords?

In most cases, the answer is yes. Google and to some degree Yahoo both give you a small boost for your domain name. If your domain name happens to contain your targeted keywords, your domain name will help you in your quest for higher search engine rankings. Now if you do everything else wrong, having your main keywords in your domain name will not magically catapult you to the top of the listings. Many other parts of your site must be working for you as well. Other things you can do to improve rankings are beyond the scope of this article.

Choosing a keyword rich domain is a smart business move.

For some sites, it could be the edge they need to move up a few spots in the search engines. When choosing a keyword rich domain name, you may want to consider hyphens between your keywords. An example is cheap-airline-tickets.com. Current research trends for Google and Yahoo suggest that hyphens are the only way to separate keywords within a URL that will give you a rankings boost.

Why not simply choose your company name? Simple. Is your company a household name? Are you so dominant in a category that people have stopped referring to the generic name of your category and use your brand name like Kleenex has for tissue paper? If so, register your company name. If not, register a keyword rich domain wherever possible.

You may be thinking, "But I already own a domain name that is my company name. Should I go and register a new domain and point it to the same site? The short answer is no. Years ago, you could improve your rankings on search engines simply by setting up lots of doorway pages and having them all link back to your home page with all kinds of domain names. That tactic nowadays can backfire. You are better off optimizing individual pages within your existing website than you are creating a whole bunch of "fluff" sites just to increase rankings.

The technique I suggest above is really best suited for brand new business ventures. If you still have not registered your domain name for that special online business you are about to start, then make it keyword rich wherever possible. If you have already launched your business, you'll just have to take advantage of this information next time you start another online venture.

This article was written by Joe Duchesne, president of http://www.yowling.com/ , a budget web hosting company that specializes in helping online business owners increase their website traffic. Copyright 2004 Yowling. Reprint Freely.

Great News Into Link Popularity

Writen by Grayson Bell

When it comes to Link popularity and its relevance into getting better traffic, we all know that it is a necessary thing. Link popularity is one of the ways that search engines like google and yahoo give your site better rankings. You can search through different sites advertising about link popularity that say they can increase it overnight with thousands of links directing to your site.

Let me tell you something, this is a bad decision to make if you are thinking about any of these services. I have experience in this field and thousands of links are not going to help your site out any!

One of the best ways to approach link popularity is to think about the relevance of your site to one you would like to link to. It is better for you to have a small amount of links to your site than having a large amount if the relevance is high! The higher the relevance, the less links you need to have to increase your popularity. Google and Yahoo do not only look at the amount of links, but the quality of links. The better quality, the better positioning and page rank. So do yourself a favor and work on getting your links on quality relevant websites and you will reap the rewards of doing this right!

Grayson is the current owner and operator of Overdrive Electronics and is certified for SE Optimization and online marketing techniques.

Grab Your Back Links And Come With Me

Writen by Shawn Hickman

How do you get links to your web site? When you ask another web site to place your link on their site, it's like asking them to do business with you. If your link is not worth trading in the subject of their business, then don't even bother requesting a link trade with them.

Links are one of the most valuable commodities on the web today. Search engines back links as credit to your site from another site. The more quality back links pointing to your web site the more likely the search engines will see your information as valuable to their customers searching the internet.

Requesting link trades has become some what of an art to most web experts. The company you request a link from needs to know what's in it for them. Is it going to be beneficial to have their link on your site. Will it bring them added traffic.

You also need to be aware of the benefits of a link exchange. Are they going to let you put a quality text link on their site with your keywords and subject information in it? There is no point in putting a link on a site that won't get any recognition.

There is a standard rule in search engine indexing that you should have less than 50 text links on one web page. When adding a link to another site, request where your link will go. It is also known that the link should not be placed on a site more than three sub-folders back in the site.

Look for quality link partners and make a case for the benefits of their link being on your site. Do a search for add url "subject" in Google. You will find many web sites have a link page where you can request a link exchange directly through their web site.

Add the Google tool bar and Alexa tool bar to your internet browser, then when you visit their site you will see their page rank. Page rank gives you a good idea of how the search engines view their site.

An easy way to have a new or non-existent site indexed quickly by Yahoo, Google, and MSN is to get on a web site with a page rank of 3 or higher. Being on a home page of a site with a rank of 3 or greater will allow your web site to be indexed almost immediately. A page rank 5 or greater is indexed at least once a day and many several times a day for new content. If your link is on a high ranking web site home page you will surely be indexed immediately.

DO research on your competition by searching the keywords you use. Go to linkpopularity.com and type in their url. You will see the back links pointing to their site indexed by Yahoo, Google, and MSN. Request link trades with the companies listed in the search results. Remember to explain the benefit they will receive when adding their link to your site.

Another way to get great back links is to have great unique content. Write original articles that emphasize the subject of your service of expertise. If you are not a writer, you can higher a freelancer for next to nothing to write the articles for you.

Freelance article writers charge an average of 3-10 dollars an article and most contain 300-500 words specific to the keywords your web site is competing to be indexed with. Once the articles are written, you can submit them through article submissions services like Ezine and GoArticle. Make sure you put your web site link at the bottom of your articles before submitting as they are only beneficial to you if they point to your site once published.

Press releases are another great source of back link production as they can be picked up by thousands of journalist and used on many news sites around the world. The same technique applies to press releases as to article writing. Make sure they are written for quick pick up and indexing and have your web site url at the bottom with your company information.

Above all make sure your web site is optimized for indexing, as having many back links are great but if you don't have the right meta tags, keywords, and content available for the search engines when they come crawling your site, you may have well not even built the site in the first place.

Good luck and Happy link trading!

Find more articles at http://www.searchengineoptimizationworld.com

Search Engines The Dominant Factor

Writen by Michael Fowler

Let's face facts - Search engines are starting to rule and dominate the way people advertise their products and services.

Gone are the days of low-cost, no-cost advertising. Now it's all about how much the major search engines can take from your wallet, without you noticing that your advertising costs are far outweighing your sales.

Let's be honest - It's all about greed. They know you need the advertising, so they place it at a premium and hold an auction on their keywords. So where and how does the 'little guy' fit in? After all, isn't this the land of milk and honey? Isn't the Internet business option the cheap solution to owning a franchise?

What's going on?

Well, I can certainly tell you one thing - Whatever is going on, it's not being done for your benefit! After struggling with Google Adwords and getting billed for not conforming to their stupid policies, (which by the way, were their own guidelines and resources used), I simply halted the account, never to return.

Now there's something else going on. I call it an inversion of the Google/Yahoo syndrome. The first peoples search engine. That's right. Now you can actually own your own piece of Internet Real Estate and charge others for advertising on the space that you grow and own. OK, so I was doubtful. I did the best thing ... I talked with the CEO.

Asking awkward questions concerning any Internet startup program or business model, is just one of the things that I do best. I crack most of these things wide open, expose the weaknesses and desecrate the very foundations that most are not built upon. In several years, just three have passed my stringent evaluation.

After an exhausting hour with the CEO, he actually showed me how he can guarantee top placements in the major search engines and described exactly how this new baby would integrate with the likes of Yahoo and Google. But it does more than that... You own your own portal and that means even more exposure!

I can only welcome this sort of activity, in the face of the adversity that the major search engines are causing the small business owner. Is this an Internet advertising solution?

I believe it is. I also think that in years to come, the rightful owners of the Internet, (the users), will take back their inheritance, as the greed of the major search engines will devour themselves.

Michael A Fowler, M.B.A. Author and Developer of 'The MBA Way' system. Group Trainer and Coach for FFSI. You can contact Michael at: Goldcard43@aol.com Website: http://www.the-mba-way.com

Do Most Recent Google Updates Shake The Web Industry

Writen by Paras Yadav

Google's recent "Jagger" update alarmed many companies and website owners who lost its high search engine rankings. Jagger has resulted chaos for Google search results across significant industries. Companies are in dilemma concerning this update for the future natural engine marketing.

Jagger is one of the most significant updates from a major search engine. Following the first round of Jagger update, thousands of websites that formerly received an abundance of traffic from Google's search results are no longer ranking.

So, do we have to consider that this is just a beginning of a review that has put many companies in danger zone? What about the fine websites that got swept off after Jagger rolled out? The search engines have no compulsion to provide rankings that will drag in free website traffic. After-all, Search engines are businesses whose target is to boost revenue through paid advertising and Pay Per Click (PPC). Natural search is a considerable component of a search engine's value; however, it doesn't generate earnings for them.

It seems to be a pre-planned update that happen just right before the holidays. Probably, this result that companies who recently lost rankings and resulting traffic will strive hard and pay significantly for Pay Per Click ads this holidays to cover up their lost natural search engine traffic.

As this update is not yet fully accomplished, websites still got a chance in its hands to getting back into the Google index. Site owners should plan for long term search engine optimization targets.

Keep in mind that search engines frequently alter and bring up to date their ranking algorithms. To sustain top positions, site owners are recommended to hire professional and SEO strategies.

Its time, for website owners to revise and dress up to strive for their website's top. Only this way the can retain traffic to their respective websites.

To read related articles please visit:
http://web-content-writing.blogapot.com or
http://seoservices-website-promotion.blogspot.com

Paras Yadav is freelance website area content and article writer since two years. Please visit http://web-content-writing.blogapot.com or http://seoservices-website-promotion.blogspot.com to find more enlightening and free-reprint articles.

How To Avoid The Google Duplicate Content Filter

Writen by Christoph Puetz

More and more webmasters are building websites with publicly available content (data feeds, news feeds, articles). This results in websites with duplicate content on the Internet. In cases of websites build on news feeds or data feeds you can even find websites that match each other 100% (except for the design). Several copies of the same content in a search engine does not really do any good and so Google apparently decided to weed out some of this duplicate content to be able to deliver cleaner and better search results.

Plain copies of websites were hit hardest. If a webmaster was publishing the exact same content on more than one domain, all domains in question were eventually removed from Google's index. Many websites based on affiliate programs suddenly took a big hit in loss of traffic from Google.com. Shortly after this started some webmaster forums saw the same complaints and stories again and if 1 + 1 was put together a clear picture of the situation was available: a duplicate content filter was applied.

Duplicate content is not always bad and will always exist in one way or the other. News websites are the best example of duplicate content. Nobody expects those to be dropped from Google's index.

So, how can webmasters avoid the duplicate content filter? There are quite a few things webmasters can do when using duplicate content of any sort and still create unique pages and content from it. Let's see some of these options explained here.

1) Unique content on pages with duplicate content.

On pages where duplicate content is being used, unique content should be added. I do not mean like just a few different words or a link/navigation menu. If you (the webmaster) can add 15% - 30% unique content to pages where you display duplicate content the overall ratio of duplicate content compared to the overall content of that page goes down. This will reduce the risk of having a page flagged as duplicate content.

2) Randomization of content

Ever seen those "Quote of the Day" thingies on some websites? It adds a random quote of the day to a page at any given time. Every time you come back the page will look different. Those scripts can be used for many more things than just displaying a quote of the day with just a few code changes. With some creativity a webmaster can use such a script to create the impression pages are always updated and always different. This can be a great tool to prevent Google to apply the duplicate content filter.

3) Unique content

Yes, unique content is still king. But sometimes you just cannot work around using duplicate content at all. That is alright. But how about adding unique content to your website, too. If the overall ratio of unique content and duplicate content is well-balanced chances that the duplicate content filter applies to your website are much lower. I personally recommend that a website has at least 30% of unique content to offer (I admit - I am sometimes having difficulties myself to reach that level but I try).

Will this guarantee that your website stays in Google's index? I don't know. To be most successful a website should be completely unique. Unique content is what draws visitors to a website. Everything else can be found somewhere else, too and visitors have no reason to just visit one particular website if they can get the same thing somewhere else.

About The Author

Christoph Puetz is a successful Entrepreneur and international book author. Websites currently operated by Christoph are Credit Problems Help and Highlands Ranch Colorado. PPC and SEO Services provided by the author can be found at Net Services USA LLC.

Note: This article can be published by anyone as long as the resource box (About the Author) is posted on the website including the links and that these links must be clickable. This last paragraph in italic font informing about the author resource box does not need to be ublished.

Seo Myths Value Of Page Rank

Writen by Jermaine Tabor

Much ado about nothing! Gooogle's Page Rank is probably the most hyped non issue that has taken the webmaster down the slippery slope of misinformation I have seen in a long time.

The Google Page Rank is a value that is seen in Googles toolbar that evaluates a website based upon the amount of incoming links.

The actual formula is a little bit more intensive and capitalizes on each pages value based upon inbound versus outbound links via a standard deviation and algorithmic equation.

Much has been assumed that the higher the Page Rank, the better the Search Engine Results ( SERPS) and related traffic benefits. This is absolutely wrong.

Page Rank has the smallest if any value toward the Google algorithm calculations for SERPs.

Check the page ranks of any top ten search results, I am sure you will see several sites that have lower page rank but Higher SERP ( closer to #1).

Links are important to increasing traffic, Keyword Rich Anchor links are an important factor in the Search Engine Results, but generic links that create Page Rank, not a major be all end all Issue. So if you are buying links or selling links for Links Sake, you are being taken advantage of, and are selling and buying into miss-information.

Do the tests yourself. "Allinanchor" or "inanchor" meaning Keyword related links are important. Straight Links for Page Rank Values and the ranking of a site. Not a Major issue.

Save you money going for Page Rank. Concentrate on fresh content, and improving the site, as well as linking with keyword anchor links.

Look for more information about SEO and Linking in the next article. Proper Links

Jermaine Tabor an SEO Specialist provide advanced Seo Training via his newsletter that you can apply to your site/s right now to boost your rankings in major search engines .

Seo Site Marketing And Web Analytics Digital Dream Team

Writen by Cherie Davidson

Does your business have an active digital pulse? Or is it in need of a pacemaker? Important questions. Here is another … how do your site visitors and potential customers view your site?

A Website presence has become standard operating procedure for any business seeking to reach a wider audience, enhance marketing and advertising efforts, stretch marketing budgets, make strategic affiliations, or network and interact on a national or global scale. Once your business site has been designed, built and set in motion, the fun begins. And the name of this game is SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

SEO is a vital part of Website marketing. Think of it as the foundation on which to build your promotion and advertising campaigns. Without effective SEO, your site will be buried in the obscurity of distant search engine listings. With a good SEO foundation and practices, your site will gain important rank position in the big search engines and your customers, new and old, will find you with minimal searching.

As good as rank position may sound, keep in mind that the search industry is always evolving, and listings/rankings have to be watched and worked regularly. Online marketing and SEO experts all agree that submitting a site to search engines for listing is only the beginning.

Once the Meta data has been completed (the development and placement of keywords in the HTML Meta tags on your site page files), you can begin a regular marketing plan. Part of this plan should include staying aware of any changes that the major search players are going through.

A solid marketing plan will be different things to different people. There are low cost Web-only strategies that utilize press releases, link or banner exchanges, affiliate programs and providing free content, such as e-books or industry information. These can take a little longer to get results, so where money is saved, time involvement becomes crucial. For faster results, there are pay-per-click programs and various online paid advertising. And for those businesses that seek local and offline clientele, there are magazine, newspaper, radio and TV ads. But whatever the methods chosen, all marketing comes back to your Website. The ideal scenario allows you to keep close and accurate track of all your efforts, know the success or failure of campaigns, and learn user response through the activity on your Website. Too many businesses underutilize their Websites, wasting a highly valuable tool.

Basically there are two avenues of marketing, and they should both lead back to your Website -- site-specific online advertising, and outside advertising that brings people to your site. Therefore, successful marketing requires that you really know your site visitors.

What do your potential customers see when they visit your Website? What invites them to move through your site? What compels them to make a purchase, or sign up for the newsletter? To be successful with your marketing, you MUST know your audience.

It really is not as difficult as it sounds. With the growing awareness of Web analytics, business owners are finding that their site traffic data can yield valuable and detailed data on their visitors' habits, usage… and their response to advertising.

Web analytics reports, until very recently, were generated from a cumbersome, time-consuming log-based system that was very difficult to understand by anyone who was not tech-savvy. Many sites still labor through this method for their data reports. However, this is no longer necessary.

Today's analytics and site tracking services are striving to be more useful and available. As with anything on the Internet, it either evolves or disappears. Web analytics have become recognized as a critical business component and, as a result, we are seeing the evolution of a new age heading toward a warmer, more sociable and approachable Web analytics industry.

Owning a business today means you must have an online presence. It is a valuable tool, too often overlooked. With some good, solid SEO, you have a firm marketing foundation for your business; a global calling card. With an aggressive marketing and advertising strategy, you will have a tool to enhance your company's bottom line. And with this next generation of analytics, you have all the power you need to turn your Website into a one-stop marketing center, where you can keep your virtual fingers on the vivid pulse of your business ad campaigns, your visitors, your customers and your success.

Cherie' Davidson is contracted copywriter and site content editor for VisiStat, an energetic young company leading the next generation of "friendlier" Website analysis services. VisiStat is the first to make analytics reports speak directly to the site and business owner, and online marketer, in a language that is easily understood and used. It offers a unique type of reporting that provides maximum feedback for marketing and advertising campaigns. Learn more about VisiStat at http://www.visistat.com or contact Cherie at cherie@visistat.com.

Bunny Killers Rewarded For Their Bad Behavior

Writen by James Briggs

SaveToby.com, a web-site made famous for its promotion for "cruelty" to animals, is ranked a PR 6 site by google's algorithm. PR (Page Rank) is the ranking given to sites on the internet based on their importance (Ranked from 0 to 10) and with a higher page rank you can get more visitors coming to your site. SaveToby.com has about 38 pages in google all with a PR of 5 or above. Why is that so important? People are willing to pay at least $30 bucks for a small link on each page on the text link market. Why? The search engines will read those text links on Savetoby.com and give their page a higher rank in the search engines even if their site isn't related to killing bunny rabbits. All they have to do is add a small description next to the link with their keywords in it.

To make a long story short, with 38 pages you can fit 10 links on each page for a discount price of $20 each. This means that the savetoby.com site can easily generate $7,000 per month after 6 months of finding partners. So Google says that Savetoby.com is worth $7,000 a month and more than $80,000 a year because it is a PR 6 site.

Who would buy links from savetoby.com. Anyone interested in making money on the internet via Keyword phrases like "Adware Removal" or anything else.

This and other weird sites have caused a buzz in the SEO industry. If you have a crazy site that will get you a lot of attention then it will be easy for you to get Page Rank from Google and other search engines based on link popularity. Why make a legit site when you can make money selling wadded up pieces of paper? (origamiboulder.com). Now you can make a site that will be worth $7,000 a month by simply making it a buzz worthy train wreck.

So how did SaveToby.com get so popular? TV! Even a small mention on National Tv (CNN, Fox News etc.) is enough to sky rocket your site into a higher Page Rank. The site probably got more than 50,000 hits just from a 2 minute story on CNN.

Scam Seo Services Revealed

Using The Big Three Search Engines For Maximizing Your Seo Results

Writen by Mark Nenadic

When it comes to getting the very most out of your SEO efforts, you need to make sure that you're search engine optimizing with the right search engines in mind. This means that you need to cater to the Big Three. What search engines make up this ever-important trio? The answer is Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The following techniques will help you create both a long and short term SEO strategy for success, with the Big Three search engines in mind.

Google is the clear leader among search engines, so this should be your primary focus, however, Yahoo! and MSN do hold a substantial part of the internet using community's attention, so they should not be ignored. It should be remembered that while Google does get the most traffic, Yahoo! and MSN can provide better results when it comes to certain specific categories of interest. This is why it is so very important that you cater to all three of the major search engines for your SEO and not just Google.

Since ranking is such a lengthy process, it is important that you continuously monitor and improve your site and its keywords with tracking in order to keep ahead of your competitors, and to ensure that your site keeps its high ranks. This requires continuous optimization through growth and updating.

When it comes to the Big Three, the SEO techniques that matter are as follows.

Google:

• Whenever you launch a website, submit it to a search engine, or update a site, a spider from one or all three of the big search engines may crawl your site. However, unless you provide that spider with significant keywords for ranking your site, you'll never actually achieve rankings that are anywhere near where you want them to be, other than your business name itself. Therefore, make sure that when you are building or adding to your website, it has keywords within its text and in its coding to allow the spiders to index and rank in a way that is favorable to you.

• Use keywords that will ensure better rankings. To best complete your SEO, you need to understand that some keywords will provide you with better results than others. However, if these "best" keywords are already being used by quite a high number of other sites, since the market in your industry is competitive, then it is unlikely that the best keywords will ensure the best ranking. The only time that the ideal keywords will ensure the best results for you is if your service or product is extremely unique or new so that the keyword has not already been used extensively throughout the world wide web. In fact, if you are supplying a new product or service, then you will almost certainly receive great search engine ranking, since the Top Three adore fresh new content. In extremely competitive markets, it may take up to six months for you to see the results you want from your desired keywords. In such cases, a pay-per-click campaign may be required.

The reason that the search engines give such preference to websites offering things that are new and unique are as follows:

• It gives them the opportunity to provide something new

• There is less competition against something new or unique, so as long as the website has proper SEO, then great rankings are almost automatic.

MSN:

• MSN is typically much faster for crawling, indexing, and listing sites. In fact, if you have done your SEO properly, you can achieve a high MSN ranking within a month, even within the most competitive markets. Therefore, while Google may be your long term SEO goal, MSN can provide for you on the short term.

Yahoo!:

• Though Yahoo! can provide you with a steady traffic flow, actually getting listed can present quite a challenge. While some websites will be crawled as early as a month from their submission, this is a rare occasion, with the standard being closer to three or four months. Once the site is crawled, however, it doesn't take long for it to be indexed and ranked. As long as your SEO is good, then you may achieve a good rank and see results before Google has even thought about sending a spider your way.

Though there are practically countless search engines out there, it is the Big Three that have you covered for both the short term and the long term for your SEO.

Copyright 2006 Mark Nenadic

Mark is the director and face behind FifteenDegrees-North http://www.15dn.com, where you will find articles and resources to help with SEO, marketing and Web design.

How Do I Submit My Site To Search Engines

Writen by Vinu Thomas

You've built up a good site, put in a lot of content, but none of the search engines lists your site? If you'd like to know how to go ahead with Search Engine Submission the right way, read on.

How do I get my site to be included in search-engines? That's a question a lot of people ask me. My question back to them is "Is your Site Search-engine ready?". A lot of sites don't get spidered into search engine results just because the pages are not search-engine friendly. Search engines like to see a lot of text on your site. This means that if your site is filled with Flash animations and graphics, instead of text for content, your site probably not show up in search-engine results. Another reason your site might be loosing out in search engine rankings could be the lack of meta-tags.

So what are meta-tags? Metatags are small pieces of code which you embed into your pages which informs your search engines about your site's contents, how to spider your site, and other such instructions.

Most search engines look at your page's meta-tags and title tag to get the relevant information to index your site. So you should make sure that all your pages have the relevant details in meta-tags. The three most important tags for your site are 'DESCRIPTION' and 'KEYWORDS' meta-tags and the 'Title' tag on all pages.

• The 'DESCRIPTION' tag is used to describe the contents of the page. You should enter a short description of the page in this tag. Here's how the tag will look when you enter the description of the page:

• The 'KEYWORDS' tag is used to tell the search engine which keywords words you feel are important in the page. This helps in the ranking process of search engines. In your keywords tag, use as many combinations of your search term as you can, without repeating the same terms too many times. Some search engines penalize a site for repeating keywords. Here's how a keywords tag would look :

• Every page you have on your site should have a Title tag. All search engines use the content of your title tag to index the content of your site. So make sure you've got a Title tag and the Title has some relevance to the content in your page. An example of the title tag :

How to submit your site

So once you've entered your tags properly, your start of the HTML code for the page should look like this :

How to submit your site

These three tags by themselves should give a boost to your ranking once the search engine crawls your site. If you want a tool to make the tags for you, check out my Meta-Tag Generator Script at: http://www.vinuthomas.com/gate.html?name=MetaMaker. This online tool helps you generate the basic and some advanced meta-tags for your pages.

Now how do you get the search engine to crawl your site? You'll have to start submitting your site to the search-engines for them to start crawling your site. Here are the Submission URL's for some of the major search engines:

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Exact Seek: http://www.exactseek.com/add.html

All The Web: http://addurl.alltheweb.com/add_url

MSN Search : http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

Altavista : http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new

Scrub The Web: http://www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html

Sympatico : http://pre.sympatico.ca/en/search/submit.html

True Search : http://www.truesearch.com/addurl/

Lycos : http://insite.lycos.com/

Ask Jeeves/Teoma : http://ask.ineedhits.com/sitesubmit.asp

About The Author

Vinu Thomas is a consultant on Webdesign and Internet Technologies. His website is http://www.vinuthomas.com. You can read more articles on Search Engine Tips @ http://www.vinuthomas.com/sections-listarticles-8.html

vinu@despammed.com

Website Optimization Good Overall Optimization Is Key

Writen by Michael Klasno

Good overall optimization, the right keyword phrases and quality content play the key roles in the success of any web design project. Link Popularity and Google PageRank are almost secondary for the overall success of a website.

Here is an example. I recently took advantage of a free service offered by a competing SEO firm. It was for a Free Keyword Analysis. Sounds like a great deal, we charge $129 for the service and it's almost a give-away. I wanted to see what they were offering for free so I inserted the URL of one of our clients, fkpfishing.net in the form, added my personal e-mail address and hit enter.

When I received the e-mail results a couple days later (quick by any standard) I was told that the site's link popularity is very low and that it is not optimized for the keyword "float tube" as well as it should be. They also informed me that the site's Google PageRank is only 4/10.

Link popularity of course refers to the amount of links that are around the web that point back to your site. I was told "there are only 192 sites that link to yours, according to Google's database" and they searched for "float tube" and it did not bring any top 10 results on Google search or Yahoo Search. Actually it is #16 on Google for that keyword.

First off I know a top 10 listing is every ones goal The major search engines drive over 85% of traffic to web sites, and only 7% of search engine users go past the first page of results, so properly optimizing a site for a top ten ranking on the search engines for your keyword phrase is essential to a business' online success.

Now the reason I bring this up first is to point out how easy it is to make a mistake. While I appreciate the effort put in by this firm, wasted as it was, they didn't do there job, free or otherwise. When you offer "keyword analysis" The first thing you should do is check the "keywords" meta tag on the assigned site to see what the site owner perceives to be important. You should also take at least a few minutes to look over the site and see what it offers the viewers and who the target audience is.

Had they done so it would have been obvious that the keyword phrase "float tube fishing" was the optimum target and they would have found top 10 ratings on both search sites. (#6 and #2 respectively) In fact the second key word phrase in the meta tags "floattube fishing" (one of the most common misspelled fishing term on the internet) also comes in as #2 on Google and #1 on Yahoo. This misspelling was a mistake made by a typo a few years ago but fortunately it is a spelling error made by 1000's of fishermen on a regular basis and our client has been able to capitalize on it.

The overall optimization of the entire FKP Fishing website for those two keyword phrases was the #1 goal of the project.

Secondly, while we try very hard to get a high PageRank by Google for our clients it is only part of the Net Performance Group "Equation of Success." Remember, Google is the only search engine that puts so high a value on page rank. Yahoo & MSN use page content. That is why we believe Content is King! Google may someday change its algorithms and drop page rank all together or lessen its impact on the equation but content will always be included in the formula.

Quality content can do more for a sites success than 10,000 Mickey Mouse links and a PageRank of 7/10. If a viewer does not stay on your site long enough to look at more than 2 or 3 pages either your navigation is bad or your content is not what it should be and your site is in trouble. Search engines may direct them to your site but your page layout and content will keep them there longer and bring them back!

Overall website optimization is what we call the Net Performance "Equation of Success". The four part equation is simple. Good website design + good title, discription and keyword meta tags + quality content + "old Fashion" hand search engine submission = more repeat visitors. Which in turn will bring the good link partners looking for you and ultimately result in a successful overall search engine ranking and your success.

In conclusion, while luck may have played a small part in the keyword placement for FKP Fishing.net search rankings, good overall optimization and quality content played the key roles in the success of the project.

Note: A year ago I corrected what I perceived as a mistake in FKP's keywords and got back on track with the correct spelling and have achieved good results. FKPFishing now has a Google PageRank of 6/10 and is in the top 5 of all major search engines results for its targeted keywords. Ironically the misspelled "word phrase" continues to bring a good 25% of that sites search traffic. To this day we continue to include the misspelling scattered in articles and always include it in the meta tags.

Michael Klasno is an Assisted SEO Marketing Specialist and CEO of Net Performance Group Inc. Net Performance specializes in fishing and outdoor website design and marketing. For more internet marketing articles by this author please visit: http://www.netperformancegroup.com/Articles/articles.htm

Search Engine Marketing The Past The Present And The Future

Writen by Carmen Jackson

1997 – 1999 were the early years of search engine era. Internet Marketing and more specifically search engine marketing mainly consisted of submitting your sites to the search engines. These "voices from the past" are still heard today when this or that Search Engine Optimization company and / or automatic submitting software will claim to do search engine promotion for you by submitting your site to hundreds and thousands engines and directories. The search engines' indexing programs, called "robots" or "spiders", looked through all of the HTML code of a page and used some page ranking algorithms that they kept in secret.

Those days were spammers' Heaven: it was rather easy to get your site ranked high. You could just use your keywords lots of times on the page, in the META tags, HTML comments etc. and hide it from the human visitors by making the text tiny or completely invisible with the help of HTML tricks. The search engines didn't have any sophisticated technique to recognize this kind of spam, and such sites usually got high rankings very easily. Today, you still can find some samples of this primitive optimization (however you will have to give it a hard try, because nowadays most of such Web projects have been banned by the search engines for excessive keyword usage).

The only exception was Yahoo which has always been indexed by humans who could in most cases identify and ban spamming pages. Gradually, search engines started recognizing spam and applying corresponding penalties to Web pages using spam methods. However, search engine optimizers were always one step behind the search engines in finding new ways of cheating the indexing algorithms. Hence each search engine is committed to delivering only relevant results to its visitors, the engines needed to take control away from the spammers and auto-submitters. Many began to try different ways of indexing.

The Rise of Google

If someone is asked today about the first search engine to remember, the answer will be Google in 100% cases. Google has started its way to be the King of search engines in 2000 and in 2002 its right for this title has been firmly established, with around 70% of searches done on the Internet. While other search engines were focusing on transforming to universal portals, Google kept a simple and – which has become its distinctive feature – fast interface that solely targeted delivering relevant search results.

Google also developed advanced features such as indexing and searching PDF (portable document format) and SWF (shockwave flash) files. Additionally, Google's sophisticated techniques to use the "off-the-page" factors made it extremely spam-resistant. Google's dominance has become steady in 2000 with Yahoo having switched from Inktomi to Google as secondary search result provider. Now, Yahoo uses the combination of Overture's and own search software and index repository, thus being fully independent on Google, however, without any slightest impact on the dominance of the latter.

Global Consolidation

By 2001, the results of all major engines were produced from a number of mixed / hybrid sources. Yahoo search results combined Yahoo-directory listings, Overture (PPC) results, and Google results. MSN provided results from Overture (PPC), LookSmart , and Inktomi.

The years 2002 and 2003 brought major reshuffles among search engines: in this period, Google purchased Blogger.com, Yahoo bought Inktomi, and AltaVista and AllTheWeb became a part of Overture. Also, there were many shifts caused by emerging search engine partnerships. Further in this course we will give you a complete and actual chart of relationships between the contemporary search engines.

Search Engine Marketing Today

If you thought nowadays search engine marketing can still be done by acquiring (and using) an auto-submission software, drop this idea since now on. Search engine marketing requires an integrated approach to improving site content, quality and popularity. For a Web site to reach its top potential, it must incorporate target audience analysis, competitive analysis, cost per click optimization, and - last but not least - copywriting and copyediting. And, because things keep changing, search engine marketers need to devote a good deal of time staying on top of the SEO industry and its trends.

Today very few (and mostly inexperienced) optimizers / marketers would use spam methods to achieve high ranking. In many cases, spamming and the so-called "black-hat" SEO is recognized by automatic spiders, for these become more and more intelligent. Even though we describe major spamming methods in the end of this course, we do it only in the sake of your awareness. We do NOT recommend using them, as there's no guarantee at all they can help, whereas it's very possible that your Web visibility can be seriously damaged as a result.

The Future of Search Engine Marketing

Search engines have already developed into sophisticated systems, and no doubt they will continue to enhance their technical aspect, with improved capabilities to index pages that are located deeply within the site (many links away from the initial page). Also, their abilities to handle dynamically generated pages (e.g. shopping carts) can be expected to grow. Among other perspective trends are advanced non-HTML content indexing (such as PDF and graphics), improved ability to rapidly integrate new content such as news using XML feeds or other technology, organization of search results into logical categories (sometimes referred to as clustering), and other advanced features. For insights into the future of search, you could visit Google Labs ( http://labs.google.com). This is the beta area where Google showcases some of its upcoming technologies.

However, the traditional "highest-bidder" approach makes SEM feel more and more like traditional print advertising. The Integrated Approach to SEM anticipates that in future, best marketing efforts will aim to leverage the three components: paid advertising and analytics, all-sided site and content optimization and qualitative off-the-page factors enhancement. That is why we prefer to call the functions provided by Web CEO "Search Engine Marketing" rather than "Search Engine Optimization". When all is said and done, it is the traffic you get and the way this traffic converts that matters – not even your site rank on a search engine. You can rank worse than your competitor, yet the percentage of your visitors that turn into buyers will be so high that you actually outperform your competitor several times.

About the Author

Carmen is the VP Client Relations of Ms. SEO Inc., a Calgary based Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing Company. Ms. Seo Inc. works with their sister company Ms. Hype Inc., a Calgary Website Design Company, and their parent company Cre8 Hype Solutions Inc., a Calgary based Internet Marketing Company, to offer their clients a powerful online presence.

The Seo Snowball Effect

Writen by James Anderson

SEO can seem like a long hard slog with little or no reward at times. Your mind often racing, constantly thinking about keyword phrases, H1 tags and links, as you lay trying to catch a few winks. Six months down the line your SEO efforts are nowhere to be seen, not even a trace, except in the redness of what used to be the whites of your eyes. But what if, it didn't have to be this way. What if, there was a method of seeing results sooner rather than later.

I still remember when I first set out on my path of SEO enlightenment, vividly. If I knew some of things I know now, it would have been a completely different journey and a much shorter one to arrive at the place I'm at now (slightly further up a never ending path). The sleepless nights as my brain churned through the new chunks of information learnt that day. The eureka moments when you learn the most simplistic of things like anchor text and emphasising keywords with bold tags. Learning how to perform keyword research was one of the most enjoyable and undervalued aspects of SEO. And did I mention the sleepless nights.

Anyway enough reminiscing and back to topic of this article. The SEO snowball effect is a simple an analogy. Remember those cartoons where a character would role down a snow covered hill, gathering more snow and increasing in size until they crashed into something like a tree. Well that is the SEO snowball effect, minus the crash at the end (hopefully).

You see, if you drew a chart that measured the effort put into SEO and the traffic it produces, you get something very much similar to that snowball. At first the effort you put in yields very little traffic if any at all. But putting the same amount of effort in again results in slightly more traffic, until further along the chart, the same amount of effort yields a much greater output of traffic.

The problem with this, is the time it can take to see the first initial traffic from your efforts. Many webmasters will give up because of this, while others carry on but only see little reward in the first year or so. However, there is a way of optimising the initial stages of this snowball and it all comes down to keyword selection.

In brief, many webmasters focus on keywords they believe are worth the effort in terms of traffic and rightly so. After all, what's the point of chasing keywords that no one uses or only have a very small number of impressions? So we go after the big boys, the keywords with lots and lots of traffic. But this contributes to the snowball effect because the effort required to obtain a top hundred ranking can be a lot on keywords with higher traffic levels. While the traffic gained from being listed in position 67 will be insignificant. So maybe there is a reason to gun for those keywords with fewer impressions?

If you conduct you keyword research intelligently you should be able to find quite a few keyword phrases with small amounts of traffic but more importantly, phrases that contain your main keywords. By optimising these phrases you are contributing to the SEO of your main keywords, simply because the main keyword is part of phrase. These lesser phrases in terms of traffic are much easier to reach traffic generating results and therefore can be done much quicker. Once you're happy with the rankings of that phrase, simply move onto the next until all small traffic phrases are optimised. In a lot of cases the combined traffic from sub-primary keyword phrases can be more than the primary keyword it self, not to mention more targeted.

When all sub-primary phrases are optimised, the chances are your site will rank well for the primary keyword with little or work left at all to get the top spot. The best thing is you have targeted the best keywords but received highly targeted traffic earlier in the campaign. Turning the snowball effect from an annoying symptom into a competitive advantage.

James Anderson is an SEO Consultant at Podium Solutions, a web design and internet marketing company based Manchester, UK.

©2005 James Anderson. Author bio box, links and copyright notice must be included in all reproductions of this article.

Table Structures For Top Search Engine Positioning

Writen by Mary Davies

So you have a beautiful website that you paid a pretty penny for and you are completely happy with it … except no one can find it. Many web designers do not understand search engine positioning, so when they design your website little or no thought is given to the elements of design that may affect your rankings on search engines. On the other hand some search engine positioning companies offer services that will boost your rankings but at the expense of your design. A good search engine positioning company can get your website ranking for key phrases without affecting the overall design and navigation of your site. You can make small changes to your website on your own as well utilizing the tips noted in this article. There is a happy medium, you can "have your cake and eat it too."

The first step in designing a website that will rank well on search engines is to build the proper table structure. This framework for your website will easily guide the search engine spiders through your site taking the route you want them to. A good table structure is essentially a map to the spiders, it guides the way as they travel through your website.

This table structure is very beneficial to your website ranking as it guides the spiders to the text rich, most important content of your site as quickly as possible. The spiders will enter your site at the first table, the header, and then travel through to the empty cell in row 1 of the second table, the next stop is your content area, the "meat" of your website. After going through your content the spiders will then continue onto row 2 where you have inserted a table holding your navigation, if your navigation is image based, as most is, it holds very little content that matters from the spider's perspective. The spiders will then follow through to row 3 where you have your footer, a place to add in valuable text links rich in targeted keywords.

If this table structure does not fit your design at all there can be work arounds. A good example of this is shown on http://www.far-sited.ca. Notice that the index page upon load has a very simple look, no text, clean, crisp image. This is a good way to present your business with a simple entry page. If you scroll down the page you will see that there is in fact a lot of text below this main image. With a simple 100% x 100% table you can achieve this affect on your website. This table will open the same way in all resolutions giving your index page the look of a text free page when in fact it is not.

100% x 100% table used as mentioned above:

If you choose to use the 100% x 100% table noted above you should still try to stick to the general table structure shown first for your internal pages. There can always be room for adjustments based on the size of your site however most websites use left hand navigation and this table structure is based on left hand navigation. If your navigation is across the top of your page, maybe reconsider it. It can remain at the top, I have designed a few websites that are ranking well with this top navigation, but for the best result, the left hand navigation using the table structure first mentioned in this article is best.

All in all I cannot stress enough that a well designed site will rank higher. Even if you do not have a complete SEO overhaul of your site this table structure will increase your rankings over those that do not have a clean, properly structured website. Though the table structure is not noticed so much by the visitors to your website aside from the look of it, it is very noticed by the spiders and they will go through your website based on it. For an added edge, have your site designed with this table structure, or do it yourself. Make a point of not only giving the visitors to your website the information you want them to have but also the spiders and as quickly and easily as possible.

About The Author

Mary Davies is the search engine friendly design expert for Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/). She works and writes with years of experience in web design and search engine optimization; info@beanstalk-inc.com

Professional Seo In Your Marketing Mix Convincing Your Company

Writen by Scott Buresh

While professional SEO (search engine optimization) is becoming increasingly recognized as an extremely effective component of an overall marketing mix, the SEO industry itself is still very much in its infancy. Because SEO is a relatively new industry, many key decision makers are not even aware that professional SEO exists, or they simply believe that it could not work in their industries or with the existing marketing mix. This is not because these decision makers are ineffective or backward thinking, but rather because, in most companies, marketing efforts are focused upon activities that have already been proven effective as a part of the marketing mix (direct mail, print advertising, trade shows).

Very often, the people who first recognize the potential benefits of professional SEO are not the key decision makers. They are the people on the front lines of the organization – the ones who deal with prospects and customers every day. However, proposing professional SEO as a new marketing initiative to the people higher in the chain of command can be a frustrating process – very often leading to disenchantment and a general sense that the marketing decision maker doesn't "get it". Usually, however, the approach was more flawed than the decision maker.

Reality

Before getting into some ideas for approaching your marketing decision maker, it should be mentioned that if your company does not have a history of trying anything new, you may be better off spending your energies elsewhere. Professional SEO as an addition to your marketing mix can be a hard sell to a company that is still relying on computers that were cutting edge during the Reagan administration, no matter how convincing the argument. If your experience with your company tells you that your efforts will be in vain before you begin, you obviously don't want to waste your time.

Speak on Their Terms

As previously mentioned, your motivation for suggesting professional SEO may not necessarily inspire your marketing decision maker to immediately add it to your company's marketing mix. What will? Most marketing execs have a hot button issue, and they are rarely shy about sharing it. Is he or she concerned with increasing overall revenue? Is he or she always discussing cutting marketing costs? Does he or she talk about reducing the cost per lead? Does he or she always espouse the value of improving your brand recognition? For each of these scenarios (and virtually any other), there are specific studies on SEO that will support your recommendation. If you approach your marketing decision maker without keeping the issues most important to him or her in mind, you will diminish your chances for success.

Use the Competition

While different marketing decision makers can have different hot button issues, few things seem to motivate companies as much as the action (or sometimes the inaction) of the competition. With professional SEO, there are two potential scenarios – either some of your competitors have added it to the marketing mix effectively, or none of them have. If they have, it is fairly easy to demonstrate this fact by taking your marketing manager through a few keyphrase searches on any major search engine and showing him or her that your hated enemy figures prominently in the results while your company does not. This, of course, makes a compelling argument. On the other hand, if your known competitors have clearly not embraced the channel, it is just as easy to show a few searches on keyphrases demonstrating that you can have (for now) a competitive advantage. Such keyphrase searches can also turn up additional competitors – lean, forward-thinking companies that are embracing new marketing tactics. This eye-opening experience can also encourage a decision maker to act.

Use Your Potential Vendors

Talk to some established professional SEO firms before approaching your company with the suggestion that they consider adding SEO to the marketing mix. A good SEO firm has encountered all of the objections that you are likely to face and should be able to help you with your approach by compiling relevant stats and offering compelling case studies. Your time is valuable, and you needn't spend it reinventing the wheel when you can get professional assistance for free. If a firm is unwilling, or unable, to help you to present to your marketing decision maker in a manner that will speak directly to them, perhaps you should look elsewhere. An inexperienced SEO firm might not be able to help you in this specific manner, and an overburdened firm will likely be unwilling to spend the extra time to help you customize your approach. The good news is that asking for this type of assistance can not only help you to sell to your company, it can also help you in the early stages of the all-important vendor selection process.

Offer a Plan

Piquing interest from the decision maker is only the first step. You should be prepared to offer a clear project description, including the price ranges of your proposed professional SEO vendors, how long it will take to see results, and, most importantly, how success will be measured. This is another area where your potential vendors should be more than willing to help – good firms will collect extensive data at the outset to measure success, and will be able to clearly define what "success" will look like.

As many companies are discovering, professional SEO is an incredibly powerful and cost-effective addition to the existing marketing mix. It is a sure bet, however, that the marketing decision makers of many of the companies currently embracing professional SEO did not come up with the idea independently. Some underpaid visionary in their organizations brought it to their attention first!

About the Author

Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing. He has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, SEO Today, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue, an Atlanta search engine marketing company, serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DuPont, and Georgia-Pacific. To receive internet marketing articles and search engine news in your email box each month, register for Medium Blue's newsletter, Out of the Blue.

How To Ensure The Search Engines Find Your Website

Writen by Craig Broadbent

One of the most fundamental aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) is ensuring that the pages within your website are as accessible as possible to the search engines. It's not only the homepage of a website that can be indexed, but also the internal pages within a site's structure. The internal pages of a site often contain important content such as products, services or general information, and therefore can be uniquely optimised for related terms. As a result, easy access to these pages is vital.

There are many do's and don'ts involved in ensuring all of your pages can be found by search engines. However, it is important to first establish how the search engines find and index web pages.

Search engines use "robots" (also known as "bots" or "spiders") to find content on the web for inclusion in their index. A robot is a computer programme that can follow the hyperlinks on a web page, which is known as "crawling". When a robot finds a document it includes the contents within the search engine's index, then follows the next links it can find and continues the process of crawling and indexing. With this in mind, it becomes apparent that the navigational structure of a website is important in getting as many pages as possible indexed.

When considering the navigational structure of your site, the hierarchy of content should be considered. Search engines judge what they feel to be the most important pages of a site when considering rankings and a page's position in the site structure can influence this. The homepage is generally considered the most important page of a site - it is the top level document and usually attracts the most inbound links. From here, search engine robots can normally reach pages that are within three clicks of the homepage. Therefore, your most important pages should be one click away, the next important two clicks away and so forth.

The next thing to consider is how to link the pages together. Search engine robots can only follow generic HTML href links, meaning Flash links, JavaScript links, dropdown menus and submit buttons will all be inaccessible to robots. Links with query strings that have two or more parameters are also typically ignored, so be aware of this if you run a dynamically generated website.

The best links to use from an SEO perspective are generic HTML text links, as not only can they be followed by robots but the text contained in the anchor can also be used to describe the destination page – an optimisation plus point. Image links are also acceptable but the ability to describe the destination page is diminished, as the alt attribute is not given as much ranking weight as anchor text.

The most natural way to organise content on a website is to categorise it. Break down your products, services or information into related categories and then structure this so that the most important aspects are linked to from the homepage. If you have a vast amount of information for each category then again you will want to narrow your content down further. This could involve having articles on a similar topic, different types of product for sale, or content that can be broken down geographically. Categorisation is natural optimisation – the further you break down your information the more content you can provide and the more niche key phrases there are that can be targeted.

If you are still concerned that your important pages may not get indexed, then you can consider adding a sitemap to your website. A sitemap can be best described as an index page – it is a list of links to all of the pages within a site contained on one page. If you link a sitemap from your homepage then it gives a robot easy access to links to all of the pages within your site. Just remember – robots typically can't follow more than 100 links from one page, so if your site is larger than this you may want to consider spreading your sitemap across several pages.

There are many considerations to make when optimising your site for search engines, and making your pages accessible to search engine robots should be the first step of your optimisation process. Following the advice above will help you make your entire site accessible and aid you in gaining multiple rankings and extra traffic.

Craig Broadbent is Search Engine Optimisation Executive for UK-based internet marketing company, WebEvents Ltd. Clients of WebEvents benefit from a range of services designed to maximise ROI from internet marketing activities. To find out more, visit WebEvents Ltd.

The Two Biggies Of Seo

Writen by Jarred Dee

I am not a SEO(search engine optimization) expert but I have done my reading. Like me if you read anything about SEO you will probably come to the same conclusions as I have. While there are a lot of different things you can do to help the ranking of your site, there are two biggies that are usually stressed as the most important. The first of the two is content. That means to get as much relevant, useful, content as possible on your site, and then when you have a substantial amount, add some more everyday. The second biggie of SEO is getting relevant links pointing to your site on other high ranking pages. The articles lead me to believe that doing these two thing may be the difference between success and failure.

Being the skeptic that I am I decided to test what I was reading on the web to see if the amount of content and number of backlinks are in truth important factors in the search engines rankings. The test that I ran is in no way all inclusive and should in now way be considered absolute, but rather hopefully it can give a bit clearer picture of the importance that search engines (specifically Google) give these two "biggies".

First I wanted measure the amount of content that a higher ranking sites contain, and then compare them to the amount found on a lower ranking sites. To do this I choose the fairly broad term "mountain bike" and then filtered out all the non-homepage results (i.e. such as about.com). I then recorded how many pages each site had indexed with Google (using the "site:" operator), The top 10 rankings in the Google results had an average of around 71,732 pages of content. Google rankings 50 through 59 had an average of 6300 indexed pages, and the 100th to 109th averaged 4584 pages per site. True that the amount of pages of a site indexed by Google is not a perfect indication of how much content is actually found on a site, but I assume there has to be at least a little correlation to the amount of content a site has and how many pages it has published.

Now lets take a look at the backlinks for those same pages. Using same basic method as above I recorded the number of backlinks as recorded by Google (using the Link: operator) for the top ten results for the search term "Mountain Bike" The top ten sites on google had an average of 2478 backlinks per site. The 50th through the 59th rank had an average of 162 backlinks per site. and finally the 100th-109th place averages only 57 backlinks.

It would seem to me like all those SEO articles floating around are on to something. On average it does appear that the more content and backlinks your site has the higher rank in Google search listings it will receive. some of you are probably saying well no duh. But alas the skeptic in me now feels better knowing that the hours spent trying to find quality backlinks to my sites are well spent.

Something peculiar with the data I recorder was that one of the sites in the top ten had fewer links than those ranked up near the 100th position. A number of conclusions can be drawn from this but one that seems pretty logical is that Google does not count all backlinks as equal. No real surprise here for if you read what Google has to say about their "Pagerank" technology you would come to the same conclusion. So its seems that it is not necessarily the number of backlinks but also the quality of those links that count.

As you search around looking for a good place to get a quality backlink you might want to stop by www.infobrink.com. I started this site a while back with the idea of providing not only an easy way for users to get a backlink to their site, but also a way that they could make it a "quality" backlink. The Infobrink directory is unique in that it allows you to submit a short article and place your link in the text of the article. It's free and painless and can get a link to your site placed alongside content specifically tailored to your site within minutes.

Business Owner, Graphic Designer, Screen printer, Student, and Webmaster

http://www.infobrink.com
http://www.greensquirrelshirts.com

Search Engine Optimization Seo Fix Your Offpage

Writen by Farid Aziz

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something you should be aware of before creating a site. Make sure you've done careful researches on the best keywords to use. Using the wrong keywords would eliminate your site from search engines forever!

Besides Onpage Optimization, to rank well in search engines you must optimize your OffPage factors too. What you have to do is basically creating many links pointing to your site and getting links from different IP Addresses.

When you have many links pointing to your site, that means you have many votes. The more votes you get, the more popular you are to the search engines.

To create many links pointing to your site, the first thing you can do is exchanging links with other sites. But, make sure you are linking to good websites! There is a free service in the net that will make this task easier. Simply go to: http://www.LinkMetro.com

Here, you can exchange links with related-content sites and you will be notified when a certain website is no longer exist.

Another way to get those links is by buying text links. Or, if you want the free technique, you can always post some articles and comments in online forums containing your site's URL in the signature.

Improve your OffPage and the search engines will love you!

Copyright 2005 Farid Aziz.

Farid Aziz is the author of "How to Make Money Onine with Your Hobby". Visit http://Internet-Marketer.blogspot.com to grab your FREE copy of "Internet-Business-In-A-Box", a kit worth US$ 497.00.

3 Easy Steps To Improve The Search Engine Ranking Of Your Website

Writen by Peter Dobler

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a buzzword that is around for a long time. There are as many misconceptions about SEO as there are webmasters. Some webmasters are afraid of SEO, thinking it is too complex and not worth the effort. Others believe that SEO will get your website banned from the search engines and there are the few that actively practice SEO.

Fact #1: SEO can be complex if you want to compete with the big guys. SEO is all about outperforming your competitors. That means the less competitors the better your success rate will be.

Fact #2: SEO can ban your website from the search engines if you break the rules. I will not tell you the dark tricks of SEO that will ultimately get you on the blacklist of the search engines. This way you will not be able to break any rules and keeps you out of trouble.

Fact #3: SEO can be simple and effective. I will show you a few easy steps to increase the ranking of your website. You will be amazed about its simplicity.

Ok, here we go.

1. Choose your niche keyword phrase

SEO is all about being a little bit better than your competition on a single keyword phrase. You need to focus your website on a single keyword phrase. 2 or 3 words in a keyword phrase work best. Make sure that people are actually searching these phrases as well. Wordtracker and Overture are just two methods out of many to check for usability. If you optimize your website for the wrong keyword phrases you're wasting your time.

2. Set your html tags right

Your keyword phrase has to be in the –title tag. You can ignore the keyword and description meta tags for now. They are not as important anymore as they were a few years ago. Make sure to have an h1 tag with the keyword phrase. Avoid having an h2 tag with the keyword phrase. Take control over the look and feel via cascading style sheets (CSS). This way it is much easier to control your website's appearance and keeps the html code clutter free.

Sprinkle your keyword phrase throughout the webpage. Place your keyword phrase 2-3 times closer to the top, once within the first 25 characters and once in the last 25 characters of your text. Change the style variation of the keyword phrase. Make sure you have at least one underlined, one bold and one italic variation of the keyword phrase.

3. Check for errors

Spell checking is a must. Search engines don't honor spell errors on your webpage very well. Check for broken links as well. Nothing hurts your ranking more than broken hyperlinks.

Well, here you have it. The 5 minute drill to improve your website's search engine rankings. Ok, I admit it, it's not this easy. On-Page SEO is only half the battle, maybe only one third of the battle. To really dominate the search engines you need to practice a well planned and executed linking strategy. This is also called Off-Page SEO. Off-Page SEO is your most important task as a webmaster.

The details of a successful Off-Page SEO strategy are too much for the content of this article. But here's a little example on how effective Off-Page SEO is: Logon to Google and type in the keyword 'click here'. To your surprise you will see that Adobe holds the #1 position for this keyword. Now analyze the Adobe page for a minute. There is no 'click here' anywhere on the page or within the html code. How in the world can they be #1 for 'click here'? Millions of other web pages have a link to Adobe with the title 'click here' to download the Acrobat Reader. That's why.

Nothing makes me happier than if you can improve the search engine ranking of your website by just a few positions by following my simple advice. 90% of all webmasters don't bother and that's the window of opportunity for you. Of course a short article cannot explain the total picture of SEO. However it is meant to give you some ideas on how to approach SEO. Have fun while practicing SEO with your website.

Peter Dobler is an active real estate investor and successful internet business owner. Use the free tools at: http://www.online-business-idea.com to improve your website's search engine ranking.

What Is Search Engine Optimization

Writen by F. Terrence Markle

It is no secret that search engines are the number one traffic generating method for driving visitors to the different web sites. Search engines are very useful in helping people find the relevant information they seek on the Internet. The major search engines develop and maintain their own gigantic database of web sites that can be searched by a user typing in a keyword or keyword phrase in the search box.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of studying the search engines in an effort to determine how to get your web site to rank high on user searches. Depending on the statistical information reviewed, search engines account for over 80% of the visitor traffic to web sites.

Within the search engine category, Google accounts for most of the search engine traffic. The other top search engines include but are not limited to: Yahoo, AOL Search, Overture, AllTheWeb, MSN Search, WiseNut, HotBot, Teoma, and Ask Jeeves. You can register your web site with the various search engines but it is a demanding process and takes time.

Visitor traffic from the search engines can be obtained through organic (natural) or pay-per-click (PPC) search results. The non-paid organic search results are the list of web sites (generally 10 per page) returned when a user searches on a specific keyword or keyword phrase. Keyword is the word or phrase that is typed into the search engine's search box. The PPC items are the paid advertisements for a specific keyword or keyword phrase and listed on the same page as the organic search results.

You are telling the search engines what your web site is about when you employ SEO tactics. Search engine optimization involves the layout of your web page so that it is very easy to navigate and read. In addition, you must skillfully place your keywords in your web page in a manner that conveys the information that is being searched for by your visitor. The keywords should be placed in the Title tag, Meta Description tag and at the beginning of the Body tag sections. Search engines look for relevant and original content in your web page that is relative to the your site's keyword theme.

Search engines find out about your web site through your submission to the search engine or through a link to your site from another web site that has already been indexed. The search engine uses a spider (i.e., a computer program) to index (i.e., classify and include in the search engine database) your individual web site pages. The spider is often referred to as a crawler. These spiders follow links from one site to another site and create an index of information for inclusion in the search engine database on each web page they visit. The spider is more likely to index a static HTML web page higher than one generated dynamically.

You can make your web page more search engine friendly by reducing or eliminating any flash animation or graphics in your home page. Design each page of your web site so that the keyword or keyword phrase information being searched for by your visitors can be easily found. You need to convey the central message or theme of your web page to your visitors.

In addition, your web site should have a site map. A site map displays a visual model of the pages within your web site. It enables your visitors to navigate through your web site that has more than one page. Each listing in your site map should be an active link to enable your visitor to click on the link and move directly to that specific section of your web site.

It will take a lot of concentrated work to achieve a top ranking in any of the search engines. Rank is the position in the search engine results page that a web site appears when someone searches for a specific keyword or keyword phrase. The typical search engine results page has 10 positions for web sites returned as the result of the user's search.

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Copyright (C) 2004 F. Terrence Markle – All Rights Reserved

Get my F.R.E.E multi-part series on generating targeted and quality traffic to your web site. http://www.QuikSystems.com/WST/TrafficSeries.htm Get my F.R.E.E newsletter on building your own targeted mailing list: http://www.QuikSystems.com/EzineSub.htm

About The Author

Copyright (C) 2004 – F. Terrence Markle has worked for over 20 years with public and private companies. He has an MBA in marketing and finance. He has been involved with Internet-related businesses for over 3 years. His primary focus is the marketing of affiliate programs.

tmarkle@quiksystems.com

Search Engine Position Report

Writen by Christian Whiting

Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor. If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally.

Once you achieve a high search engine position, it is essential that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve.

This means you must come up with a strategy create a search engine position report to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions.

Be aware that at first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. What you need to be on the lookout for is the moment that upward climb reaches a plateau. When this happens, your search engine position campaign moves into stage two, the monitoring and protecting stage.

In stage two, do not be concerned about the short-term fluctuations in your positions that you will see in your search engine postion report. These are similar to the subtle rising and falling of stocks in a portfolio. Short-term movement is an integral part of the whole process. It's the long-term changes that you must watch for and prepare to act on immediately.

Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes - many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking - your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings. To prevent this kind of precipitous drop, you must create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis.

Devise a search engine position report to chart to keep tabs on your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch "the market" closely.

Each search engine uses a formula to compute website rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, it may raise or lower your ranking. Some search engines use a number of different formulas, rotating them so that a formula doesn't become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly drop or rise in rank significantly. Therefore, you must check your positions frequently in order to catch when a search engine changes formulas and what effect it has on your positions.

You must also deal with your competition - a crucial factor you must always be vigilant about. Your competitor's position may suddenly rise, automatically lowering your position. Or their position may drop, pushing your position higher. Each month, expect position changes due to the continual changes that are occurring in your competitor's position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings.

Monitoring these fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search results.

Of course, you must discern what the most popular search engines are in order for your monitoring efforts to be effective. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most of Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge you face is that these top ten may change from month to month.

This means that your must not only monitor your search engine positions, but you must also keep track of the ranking popularity of the search engines you are monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently every month and be sure to live in the present!

People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The search engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news in the next few months. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of the Internet users. Check out http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html for a current list of website favorites.

Another factor to monitor carefully is a sudden drop of your positions in all search engines. This is not the same as monthly fluctuations - this is a neon red warning sign! It could mean a number of different things. It all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engines spiders - those sneaky programs that seek out your site and rank their positions - have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become utterly confused and consequently drop your positions disastrously. If a spider creeps up on your website when it is down for adjustments or changes, you may actually disappear from a search engine index entirely.

Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, and suddenly all of your website come up as irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing all of your position to drop in all search engines.

Some search engines rely on the results from other search engines, and it is vital that you know which engines these are and keep track of all the engines they influence. The biggest problem here is that search engines will sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you must not only monitor your own positions, but you must keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet as a whole.

Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they demand individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you have found that a number of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders. Or the competition for that particular keyword or phrase has recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground.

Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. If costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions using your search engine position report from an objective perspective, and monitor your positions on a regular basis. Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture - your long-term marketing campaign.

Christian Whiting is the publisher of Internet Profits. Dedicated to bringing you the best tips, tools, and resources to help you make more money with your online business. http://internetprofits.bushido.net

How To Study Your Websites Competition And Steal Their Spot

Writen by Mark Flavin

Many things can be said about the benefits of having an online business. Inexpensive marketing platforms, a global audience, automation and the likes are just some of the top answers whenever online businessmen are asked why they decided to establish their enterprises in the World Wide Web.

But there's one factor that is often left undisclosed. The online field would also require you to compete with hundreds, if not thousands, of other businesses jockeying for the same market. It's a virtual race for sales, or for clicks if you're engaged in a PPC venture. And since any given market is finite, the number and strength of your competition plays an important role in determining your success in the internet marketing industry.

Competition is said to be at its highest level in the search engine game. As you may very well know, 80% of the traffic that can be generated from any website would come from the search engines. If you are competing with 100 other enterprises, this means that you should try your very best to beat all 100 of them for the top spot in the search engine results page for every relevant query. This is the best way to ensure that you'll get first dibs on a prospect before they could grab a hold of him.

As is usually the case, search engine optimization (SEO) techniques abound to help you gain good position in search engine results. Mastering these techniques would give you a greater chance of succeeding in the online industry.

At least in theory.

In practice, however, things aren't that easy. What remains unsaid is the fact that most of your competitors would be doing the same thing. You'd still have to compete with the tactics that they themselves would employ. And if all of you would be implementing the same strategies, then it's back to square one. If you can't get ahead of them in the search engine positions before, there's no reason why you'd get ahead of them after employing the same tricks that they likewise employ.

So what should you do?

Here's an unorthodox strategy. Instead of competing against your rivals, you could actually learn from them. And in the process, you could steal their spots.

Competition is always about figuring out the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents. The keys to victory lie in replicating what your opponents are doing correctly and correcting what your opponents are doing wrong.

And these can only be achieved by studying their performance.

Let's give it a shot through an example.

Supposing your online business has something to do with dog grooming. A cursory look at Google would reveal that you have around 10,000,000 pages servicing the same subject. An approximation based on averages would tell us that around 2.5 million webmasters are engaged in the same field.

On the number one spot in the search engine results would be petgroomer.com. This website's spot is your aim. Your goal is to dislodge this website from its number one position.

How are you supposed to do that?

Let's try to study the website. On your Internet browser, go to VIEW then select SOURCE. You'll be taken to a text file that would reveal the source code of the said website. Now study this source code and answer the following questions:

* Are you doing the SEO techniques the website is employing?
* What is the website implementing that you're not doing?
* What are you doing that the website is not implementing?

For example, the said website is employing META tags. Are you using the same META tags? Does he have more META tags than you do? The website also hosts a variety of content pieces. Are its content pieces better than yours? Are there any keywords in such pieces that you have failed to capitalize on? The said website is also using ALT tags. Are you using ALT tags for your pages with same level of proficiency?

Again, just as a reminder, the trick is to determine what your competitor is doing right so that you'd know what to imitate, and to determine what your competitor is doing wrong so that you'd know where to beat him.

Now go to www.linkpopularity.com and run a check on that website's URL. You'd know that the said website has 1,927 MSN back links and 2,760 Yahoo back links. The next step is to acquire more back links than what this website has. This is where you should employ off page SEO tactics so that you'd be able to beat the aforementioned number one website. If you will manage to get more back links, then chances are, Google will consider assigning your website a higher page rank.

These are the secrets to studying – and beating – your competition, even if the playing field is fairly built. As Arie De Geus did say, "the ability to learn faster than your competitors may be only sustainable competitive advantage."

Mark Flavin is an online marketing expert. Mark specialises in website traffic generation, affiliate program promotion & email marketing. You can find out his secrets for free at http://www.markflavin.com

Mark recommends The Business Professional for increasing your profits online - http://www.markflavin.com/business.html