Google Contest Nigritude Ultramarine

Writen by S. Housley

Search engine optimization experts are having fun with Google. Experts, with DarkBlue.com at the helm, are holding a contest to determine how Google really works. Experts are competing, with the goal of optimizing a webpage for a non-sensical phrase: 'nigritude ultramarine'.

On May 7th, the day the terms 'nigritude ultramarine' was announced, typing the phrase into Google generated no search listings. Search engine optimizers hoping to define themselves as industry leaders are all vying for the number one spot. Others see the contest as an opportunity to test theories and experiment without jeopardizing existing traffic. Some webmasters are leery at staking their professional reputation on a contest with an undefined number of participants.

As an added incentive for search engine experts and webmasters to participate and work their magic, DarkBlue.com is giving away an Apple Mini iPod™ and a Sony Flat Screen Monitor to anyone who can take their page to #1 for the phrase 'nigritude ultramarine'. The contest is scheduled to run for two months and will conclude on July 7th, 2004.

Magical Phrase

The phrase generating the frenzy, 'nigritude ultramarine', is likely to bring out the best and the worst in optimization tactics. The black magic optimization techniques that are suspected in having sites banned from Google are likely to be exercised, along with tried and true optimization practices. Immediately after the contest was announced experts snapped up hyphenated domain names and began tweaking their text. Many experts were surprised to see how quickly 'nigritude ultramarine' made its way into the Google's listings, with new listings appearing daily it is clear that the contest is well underway.

The experts will be at the mercy of Google and any new algorithms implemented over the course of the next two months. Experts will have to anticipate and update on a regular basis, to ensure that they are able to obtain and retain a strong listings.

Results

The results of the contest are unlikely to have any lasting effects, as Google will likely implement filters that will prevent search engine experts from reaping the rewards of any tactics that are found to be effective. Regardless the sense of adventure and a method of testing Google are intriguing.

About The Author

Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc. http://www.notepage.net a company specializing in alphanumeric paging, SMS and wireless messaging software solutions. Other sites by Sharon can be found at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com, and http://www.small-business-software.net

Making The Most Of An Seo Competitive Analysis

Writen by Michael Murray

If you're ready to embark on a search engine optimization campaign, you'll want to take a close look at your competitors. Either they'll be ahead of you in the SEO world or you'll detect their deficiencies and rush right past them in terms of search engine visibility.

Here are 8 key considerations.

1. Page Titles
See what kind of page titles competitors use. Do they only include their name or a page name? How much do they vary? Is there a different page title for every page? Do they seem to contain reasonable search terms? Are they dominated by keywords or marketing messages?

2. META Data
Do they do a good job of providing keyword-rich META descriptions? What balance do they strike between mentioning the company's value or special offers and conveying core keywords?

3. Quality of Content
How much copy is apparent in each page? Is there any emphasis on the visible text? Can you even count 250 keywords on critical pages? How are the headers organized? Does the company take advantage of text navigation?

4. Robots.Text File
See what the Web site owners are telling the search engines. Are search engine spiders encouraged or discouraged by the directions listed in the robots.txt file?

5. Link Building
Find out how many places are linking to the competitor. You may not have time to determine the quality of all of the links, but see how many they have compared to your Web site.

6. Saturation
Determine how many pages of the Web site have been indexed by the major search engines. How does each competitor compare to your efforts to provide relevant content that can be crawled by search engines?

7. Site Design, Architecture and Technology
Is it professional? How would you describe the design? Is it SEO-friendly? Does the site rely on static pages or dynamic content? Are there frames or Flash with the familiar "skip intro" button?

8. Rankings
As best you can, select 10 keywords and phrases and find out how well they're ranking on the major search engines. Do they rank well? Can you catch up?

If you need help with the assessment or whether SEO even makes sense for you, start with our complimentary Keyword Marketplace Activity Report.

Michael Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, a search engine optimization firm in Cleveland, Ohio. A member of SEMPO and OSEOP, the firm specializes in organic search engine marketing campaigns, permission-based marketing and other SEO services for clients across the US. michael@fathomseo.com

The Five Ways You Should Be Using Keywords

Writen by George Peirson

We have all read lots of articles on how to gather keywords, how to compile a huge keyword list, how to make these keywords relevant to our web site. But exactly what do we do with all these keywords once we have them?

Knowing where and how you can use your keywords will greatly improve the efficiency of your search engine optimization.

There are 5 places in a web page where you can use keywords:

The Title Tag The Keyword Meta Tag The Description Meta Tag Alt Tags for images Body copy on the page

Of these the page Body Copy, the readable text on the page, is the single most important place for your keywords. More about this later.

Let's first take a look at the Title Tag. This is one of the tags in the head section of the html code of your web page and lists the title that is displayed in the web browser. For instance, Internet Explorer displays this tag in the top bar of the browser window. But there are other uses for the Title Tag as well. Most search engines will index this tag for information about your site and many search engines will use this tag as the title of your listing.

In general you can use from 60 to 115 characters in a Title Tag. The Tag can include the company name, especially if it is a well known company, and should include your most important keywords. Consider this a short description of your web page. One more thing, the Title Tag is also used as the link when the URL is saved into a web browser favorites list.

The Keyword Meta Tag used to be the main way search engines indexed your page. Now-a-days many search engines will simply ignore this tag, but that may not always stay the case. Some search engines still take s look at this tag to help categorize your site. There is no reason not to have this tag on your page, just in case. You are not penalized for including a Keyword Meta Tag.

The keywords should be separated by a comma. Put more specific keywords first then put the less important and general keywords later on. Search engines no longer pay attention to the case of a keyword, so the keywords can all be lower case. I have seen recommendations of 25 keywords or 1000 characters in the list. In general Keyword pairs or triplets are better than single keywords. I try to have one or two lines of keywords if I use this tag.

The Description Meta Tag is slowly joining the Keywords Meta Tag on the lack of support list. But right now it is still a valuable place to use your keywords. Many search engines will look at the description Meta tag for keywords to compare against your body copy. Yahoo goes one step further and will use your description tag as the description of your site in their listings.

Consider the description tag just like it is named, a concise description of your site. Keep it to a short paragraph, under 50 words.

Alt tags are text descriptions that are included with the code used to display images on a page. Basically an Alt tag is the Alternate Text version of the image in case the image is not displayed. Alt tags are important for creating a fully accessible site for people who use screen reader technology that reads the page out loud through their computer speakers. Obviously an image cannot be read aloud, but the Alt tag can.

Alt tags are also displayed as a quick popup when you "hover" your mouse pointer over an image. Many search engines, including Google, will index the Alt tags along with the rest of the body copy, making these ideal places to slip in a few more keywords. Just keep in mind that the text should accurately reflect the content of the image. Plus don't use Alt tags on images that would not normally be read out loud, such as separator lines or bullets.

This brings us to the main place to use your keywords, the body copy on the page, the text that your visitors are reading when they visit your site. The major search engines will no longer give you a top placement just for having the most instances of a particular keyword on your page. They will give top listing to what they believe is the most relevant page on a topic.

Your job is to work your keyword into the text frequently, but appropriately. Select one or two keywords and make the page specifically about those keywords. Think of yourself giving a PowerPoint presentation to an audience of your best customers. Your PowerPoint slides will be your paragraphs. They should be concise and to the point, using your keywords to drive home your point. And, just like in a PowerPoint presentation, you can use bulleted lists to call out the several benefits of your site or product, each time relating it to your selected keyword.

So use your keywords appropriately on your site and use them where you can. This will greatly increase your search engine effectiveness.

George Peirson is the CEO of How To Gurus. He is the author of over 30 multimedia based tutorial training titles. To see training sets and other articles by George Peirson visit http://www.howtogurus.com Article copyright 2005 George Peirson

What Is Good Seo Search Engine Optimization Anyway

Writen by James Lewis

There's been much fuss lately as to the need for Search Engine Optimization of the right kind; some will tell you that to be effective SEO has to be "organic"; others will swear by the power of using the right software, coincidentally, their software. Then there are those who say that if you find the right "niche market", the world will beat a path to your door and leave their money when they get there. I even spoke with a fellow yesterday who claimed that if you only launched new sites when the moon was full... well, that's a whole other story.

Where there is less conjecture is in the dire consequences possible as a result of using the wrong kind of optimization. Horror stories abound of the million dollar investments that have simply gone down the drain when Google and the rest decided that the optimizers had cheated in their enthusiastic rush for the top. The early techniques of getting a website to the top of the search engine results (link farms, cross linking, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, and all the rest) have slowly been made ineffectual by the steadily rising sophistication of the search engine administrators,(and the algorithms they employ to keep the race fair and assure relevant search results).

So what is good SEO?

We could, perhaps, define SEO by function; we could talk about the actions which bring about the optimization. First there's research, hour upon hour of research must be performed for each account. With such items as industry research (what's the competition up to?), keyword research (how big is the market for this product/service?), competition research (how many others are already vying for this market?), marketing research (who else has already done this before and what did they discover that I better know about too?) Many hours, days, and sometimes weeks can be spent getting a clear visualization of a plan before the actual project can ever begin.

To even start a website without the proper research is a guarantee that:

1. nobody will ever link to your site (World's Worst Web Sites, excluded);
2. nobody, except maybe your mother, will likely see your website;
3. your investment and business venture will fail-miserably;
4. you will never be found in the major search engines; and
5. your results will match your research (0=0).

We could approach the question of SEO from the perspective of form. Every site is constructed differently, designed differently, laid out differently, has a unique way with which it interacts with visitors, and targets those visitors differently. These are all factors that are considered during the research performed prior to laying out a raison d'être for optimization. Architect Louis Sullivan, argued that a building's purpose should determine its design, stating emphatically that "Form follows function." Shortly after, his student, Frank Lloyd Wright argued, "Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union." Although Sullivan and Wright were speaking of architecture as it relates to concrete and steel buildings, there's an architecture which goes into the design of a website that, when done well, echoes Wright's observation very nicely.

Good SEO will see to the writing or rewriting of the content on each page to effectively work in all targeted keyword phrases. A professional web-copywriter will be able to take the SEO recommendations for keyword usage and incorporate them into existing content in a way that reads naturally (i.e. does not look like you jammed keywords here and there) and has the ability to convert your visitors into paying customers. This is no small order and if it is not performed well, the site will remain just another pretty page that nobody ever sees. Or, worse yet, your site will attract lots of visitors but they will become confused by the copy and fly off to the next site without ever taking the desired actions (sign up, buy, make contact).

Another function of SEO, and one not often spoken of, is cleaning up all extraneous code on the pages. Code bloat removal, as it's so poetically referred to, is an art form in itself. It requires a thorough understanding of html along with all the rest of the coding and scripting languages which make up a modern web page, as well as the ability to move it to a separate file and importing it, when feasible, or trimming it to it's bare essentials without changing the look and/or function of the page itself. Eliminating page code bloat can be an incredibly arduous task. Moving styles and JavaScripts is only part of the puzzle. Many times, a page has to be almost completely rebuilt due to the excess amount of junk code that gets added in with the use of popular "WYSIWYG" page editing software.

To see what a search engine spider bot "sees" when it visits a web page, go to the View button on your browser toolbar. Move your cursor down to Source (PageSource in Mozilla Firefox), and left click. What you are looking at is what Backrub (Google), Sidewinder (Infoseek), T-Rex (Lycos), Gulliver (Northern Lights), and all the others "look" at when they spider a site. They read it the same way you do, from top to bottom. Notice how much code and formatting are at the top of the page and scroll down to find the content (this article). Taking all of the code and paring it down to just what's needed and then finding ways to trim that is part of what good SEO is about. Try this on other sites you visit and you will soon understand the situation.

OK, time out! I tried not to mention specific software in this article but, hey! Have you ever wondered why Microsoft doesn't use FrontPage to create pages on Microsoft.com — even the pages that deal with the FrontPage software? Perhaps, they're trying to tell us something. I've spent literally months of my life removing and rewriting the loopy code and nonessential tags that have been produced by FrontPage editors. From an optimization standpoint using FrontPage to produce a website is akin to shooting yourself in both feet before you start to run a marathon. If Microsoft doesn't use it, why should you?

Now that that's out of the way . . .

After the code bloat removal process, good SEO will address getting all pages on the site to validate to the professional standards set by the W3C. Validation is simply a process of ensuring that the right coding elements are used and used correctly. This isn't a good guy - bad guy question or even a matter of not breaking the rules, it's about being accessible to everyone who uses the web. There is a growing number of the blind and visually impaired who use Voice Readers or text-to-speech software which "speak" the text on the web page. Many of the old tricks and shortcuts that web designers used in the past don't work with these or any of the growing number of other software designed to make a level playing field of the Internet. While many validation issues are not a big problem in and of themselves, if you find it on one page, it will likely run all through the site (and can take many hours of head scratching and work to clean up affectively).

META what?

Everyone has heard about meta tags, alt and title tags, and making them all search engine-friendly, but there are few sites that actually use them to full advantage. There's so much already written that I hate to add to the plethora of information, (real and misinformation) on the subject, but I will say that the purpose of the "alt" tag is to provide an "alternative" to a graphic and not, as widely believed, to go on and on about what a superior product you have or how wonderful your business is. <img alt="picture of DoDo bird"> Nuff said!

There are varying opinions about what should and shouldn't be included in a title tag. What is agreed upon is that all of the major search engines give the content of the title tag significant weight in determining what the page is all about. It's my practice to only write a title after everything else on the page has been written, and then with an eye to using at least two (better 3) of the keyword phrases that apply to the page. Unless you're "GE" or "Maxwell House," or intend to spend the kind of money they spent getting to be a well known brand, there is simply no reason to place your company name in the title tag. Save it for the terms that people will use to find your services/products. I know, you wanted mama to see your company name right up there in the Title Bar. It's ok with me, but it will cost you.

We Don't Need No Stinking Map

Site maps help both search engines and visitors quickly and easily get to the information that is important. It's amazing how simple a matter the design and implementation of a usable site map is, and how many websites either don't have one, or have an incomplete or obscure site map - an even worse scenario. If you're not sure you need one, build one anyway. Trust me on this one. If I come to your site and can't find what I'm looking for, I'll look for a site map. If I can't find a site map, I'll look somewhere else. Oh yeah, that's how 95% of website visitors are. Get a site map.

The robots.txt file is useful to communicate with the search engine spiders about content they should or should not index. This allows the "bot" to focus its time on the good stuff and not the irrelevant portions of your site.

Good SEO is all of these things and more. Your site will be off to a great start by following the suggestions mentioned here. And hopefully, this article will get you thinking that just maybe those "seo firms" which offer "Complete SEO $100." or "Get Your Site To #1 In Google" $295, aren't talking about the same things that we've been discussing here. After years in the business, I've yet to give even a "ballpark" figure for an optimization campaign without thoroughly researching the needs of the client, the structure of the site, and the competition for the target keywords. Every situation is different. Be wary of anyone offering a la carte SEO; without research, an individualized plan of attack, and careful implementation, you might as well wait for the next full moon.

James Doc Lewis spends much of his professional time as SEO for Emerald Coast Entrepreneur a professional search marketing firm. Doc started practicing his search engine majic long before the term SEO was coined. Introduced by a friend, at the University of California at Berkeley, to the Usenet some time in 1982, when the idea of a world wide network was just starting to make a buz, he quickly realized that this was what he had been looking for. "I haven't been without a computer and a way to get connected since." Doc was on the design team of the graphical user interface (GUI) for "Veronica", the second database of web documents, and forerunner of our modern search engines, a topic to which he gives constant study and receives numerous requests for consultation from around the world. To find out more about Doc and his unique style of SEM/SEO check him out at ECE, an integrated search engine optimisation firm

Copyright © 2005 Emerald Coast Entrepreneur

Search Engine Marketing On Demand

Writen by Daniel Katz

Search Engine Marketing, or simply SEM, has been one of the most used and discussed subjects the last years by web marketing pros. Suggestions, theories, complaints and success stories are constantly on the scene.

The field of SEM started just a few years ago and it has become impressively important for those who intend to succeed doing internet businesses.

Having a successful web site involves many aspects; each one of them closely related to the other in what will be the denominated a Web Marketing Strategy - the essential part of a marketing campaign.

To build the proper strategy is necessary to prepare an exhaustive market research, understand which our niche market is, and create a plan to reach our audience the best possible way, avoiding unnecessary risks and expensive costs, expecting a secure and profitable ROI.

Once the SEM strategy is ready, we may start working on the selected optimization tools as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay Per Click - paid advertising), Link Development, Press Releases, Affiliate Marketing programs, email marketing, and many other ways of boosting traffic and sales, as long as it's required and fits the project's budget.

A smart web marketing strategy should perform different tools on each stage, in order to gain particular success parameters according to its real possibilities.

SEO uses to be the base of Search Engine Marketing campaigns as it involves the web site's organic traffic generation and in-site performance, while other techniques assist and support the SE optimization work; nevertheless I want to remark that as each campaign is a world apart and unique Marketing objectives should be taken into consideration to decide the correct tools to implement.

After the web marketing campaign starts, a regular evaluation process is a mandatory stage to review and correct whatever needs to be improved, as well as to know how profitable each single campaign/ad/keyword is. After reviewing the web analytics results and understanding our audience's behavior, we are ready to proceed to a new phase into the recurring web marketing process.

Answering the core question, what makes us go over Search Engine Marketing once and again?

Simple, the world is always changing and so we must do to keep having a competitive web sites and attractive content to offer.

Mr. Daniel Katz is the Business Development Manager at Compucall Web Marketing Ltd - experts in International Web Marketing and Marketing Strategies.