Practical Advice For Developing Your Seo Strategy

Writen by Christopher J Enders

Search engine optimization (seo) is a process of manipulating a website for the purpose of achieving desirable search engine rankings through the use of an seo strategy.

Search engine optimization is really the way to go if you can actually craft a strategy that will effectively boost your search engine ranking in search results that are displayed for internet users who are seeking what you have to offer.

The reason that search engine optimization is so important is that the majority of internet users use the search engines when looking for products, services or information on the internet.

Also, if you achieve a good ranking through the process of search engine optimization, it is said to be an "organic" listing in the search engine.

In layman's terms, that means that your website is listed in the search engine results for free and you are not paying for the listing. Thus, organic placement in the search engines is truly free advertising.

Because search engine results are based on keywords and keyword phrases that the internet user uses to find websites they are interested in, the traffic that is generated to a website from the search engines is usually highly-targeted traffic which is extremely beneficial to a website operator because they will receive website visitors from their target market who, in many cases, are ready, willing and able to make purchases from the website or to take other actions that result in revenue generation from the website.

In order to take advantage of these benefits of search engine optimization, an effective seo strategy is necessary.

While there are many things that contribute to an effective seo strategy, it should definitely take into consideration the techniques that are constantly productive in the search engines.

You see, the search engines change their rules about how websites are ranked in the search engine results quite frequently.

However, there are a few techniques that remain constant in producing positive results and these techniques should most definitely be part of every seo strategy.

The techniques include the use of appropriate keywords and keyword phrases that are relative to what the website provides and are popular in terms of their use by your target audience.

The keywords and keyword phrases need to be strategically placed in your website's html and meta tags as well as being included in your website content.

Keyword research can be conducted using tools provides by pay- per-click advertising services such as Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing, or by using independent keyword research tools like WordTracker.

These tools will enlighten you as to the popularity of certain keywords or keyword phrases as well as letting you know what people are paying for the use of them in the pay-per-click programs.

The tools also make suggestions for alternative keywords and keyword phrases that may be easier for you to optimize.

Another continually effective search engine optimization technique that should be included in an seo strategy is a linking campaign.

The number of links coming into a website from other websites, and the relevance of those websites to your website has an impact on your website's potential for getting listed in the top of the search engine results.

Trading links with websites who offer products, services or information that is related to the content of your website is one way to increase your link popularity and link relevance at the same time.

Another strategy that is effective for increasing link popularity and link relevance is to write expert articles which contain a link to your website and distribute them as free content giving other website owners the right to republish your article.

Copyright Christopher J. Enders. Are you at the end of your rope, fed up and confused by all the scrambled internet marketing advice you're getting? Whether you are new to internet marketing, or a website owner who wants to make more money from your website, learn the proven strategies that will sky-rocket your internet business at http://BiznessTips.com

Been Banned By Yahoo

Writen by Shawn Hickman

It is interesting to watch the varied reactions to the new Yahoo! search. As a spectator I can sit back and take it all in and form my own opinions. I can then apply my ideas to my clients and watch them succeed. One such topic of interest of late is Yahoo!'s policy on spam in the index.

To quote what Yahoo! considers unwanted:

"Some, but not all, examples of the more common types of pages that Yahoo! does not want included:

Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results

Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page

Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages

Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames

Pages in great quantity, automatically generated or of little value

Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking

The use of text that is hidden from the user

Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees

Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity

Pages built primarily for the search engines

Misuse of competitor names

Multiple sites offering the same content

Pages that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation

Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience

Yahoo!'s Site Guidelines are designed to ensure that poor-quality pages do not degrade the user experience in any way."

As you can see, there is a lot of grey area here. While most points are pretty straight forward, some like "Pages in great quantity, automatically generated or of little value" could include dynamically generated database driven pages (like a storefront or e-commerce site) while "Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity" could include sites which use legitimate link building strategies to help their rankings.

So what do you do? How do you know if your site falls into these categories? In other words, how do you determine if your site may be considered spam?

I would suggest taking a critical look at your site. Does it follow the guidelines listed in their help section on pages which Yahoo! does want included in its index? For example, are they original? Built for humans primarily? Contain useful information? These are all questions you need to keep in the back of your mind as you assess your site.

If you have concerns that perhaps you could be violating some of these rules, perhaps you need to look at what is needed to ensure you are in full compliance with Yahoo!'s recommendations. I would strongly suggest you do this review. If you do get removed from the index because of the spam policy it could be very difficult to get re-indexed according to Yahoo!'s own spam police.

So should you convert your dynamic site to static?

The simple answer is no. There is no need to scrap that content management system you've likely spent months and years developing. Perhaps simply adding more useful content to some of the pages is all that is needed. By following Yahoo!'s own rules you should be able to reconstruct some of your pages to ensure they don't get banned.

Does this mean you should quit doing link building or remove your links page?

I don't think you should discontinue link building, but if you are doing reciprocal linking, take a look at the site to which you are linking as well as those sites linking to you. You may need to reassess the quality of your link partners using the same tests you put your own site through.

With regards to your link partners, again, assess them for quality. Are they in related industries? Are they worthy of linking to? That is, do they also follow the Yahoo! guidelines? If not then perhaps you will want to consider temporarily removing their links from your site. You may even go so far as to contact them and suggest they perform their own analysis of their site based on the new Yahoo! rules.

So what if you think you have already been removed for this reason?

There is an email address (webmasterworldfeedback AT yahoo DOT com) to which you can send a request for review. This is only a temporary fix, as they plan on implementing a full review process in the coming months.

Also keep in mind that Yahoo! search is still in its infancy. As time goes on it will get better. Perhaps their filters are over filtering sites which are legitimate, but it should get better with time. They can't anger too many people early on, as they are trying to build a competitive search engine. If they start alienating webmasters or legitimate site owners they risk losing search customers to other engines such as Google or MSN.

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

Understanding The Google Dance

Writen by Lawrence Andrews

What's the Google dance? Well, it's really just a fun phrase for when Google updates its index. This occurs regularly, once a month, and can cause a lot of movement in rankings, meaning that it's come to be feared by many in the SEO industry and anticipated by others. The update isn't just one sudden switch, though, as each index update takes several days to complete. During this update the searches seem to 'dance' between the old index and new index – that's the Google dance.

So why does it happen? Well, Google pulls its results from over ten thousand servers, and they can't all be updated at once – Google would have to go down for the update. Instead, each server is updated with the new index, one at a time. This can cause very strange behavior in the page rank process if two major sites located on separate servers happen to have a close linking bond. These sorts of separations are interesting and can contribute to a great deal of change and motion in page ranks. The most important thing to keep in mind is that eventually Google will get you into your proper place. Generally, if you behave, you will not be thrown down for long by the odd activity that can occur when Google is in the process of updating its index for your server (or for the servers of your favorite link partners.

One common misunderstanding is the idea that Google controls which server each kind of information is coming from, and so stores similar information on the same server. Google's index doesn't work this way – it's a big, disorganized mass of information that Google searches very quickly. This is a blessing in disguise because it allows your site to remain reachable via other sites that are related to it when the index is taking place. Your site generally won't suffer for too long when an update is taking place anyway, but if you are heavily dependent on Google results, you will see a slight drop for a short period of time. This drop is often followed by a slight spike especially if your page rank has increased since the last index.

The 10,000 servers that Google uses are distributed between seven datacenters all over the world. Google doesn't keep all of those eggs in one basket – they want to be able to lose one datacenter and have the rest survive. If part of Google goes down, people can still use the search engine and as I said before, this allows your site to be accessed via related sites if the server holding your sites index happens to go down. The datacenters that Google has put into play are enormous in comparison to most datacenters around the world. Google rivals some of the largest datacenters in the world with each of its datacenters and is probably the largest in the world if all were combined into one.

You see, the 'time-to-live' for www.google.com is only five minutes – that means that Google's IP address can change every five minutes. This allows them to switch between their datacenters regularly, spreading the search load between them intelligently and routing around any damage. If you constantly entered the same datacenter with every search that you placed it would almost certainly fry within twenty four hours. Considering the number of users on Google each and every day, it is surprising that ten thousand servers is enough. A server can only handle so much traffic in a day and Google insures that it can hold more than any other service on the internet.

The datacenters updating their indexes at different times causes Google to do its dance. Unless you're looking for your website's ranking, you'd never notice this as your site is normally available at all times. The unfortunate bit is that often times you will lose your page ranking for a short period of time or your site will seem to have a lower number of pages indexed by Google. If you insure that you have several hundred pages available on Google at all times you will most likely be able to provide all of your content at all times either directly or indirectly.

About The Author:

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

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

Why Articles Are Not The Route To High Search Engine Rankings

Writen by Priya Shah

If you have any interest in getting high search engine rankings for your website (and who doesn't) you've probably been sold the idea that writing and publishing your own articles will do it for you.

Here's why that's not entirely true.

Imagine the following scenario...

You write an article around a keyword or keyphrase you want to rank well for.

You submit that article to all the article submission sites and directories and ezines you can find.

Your article gets published in hundreds of places.

You now have hundreds of links pointing back to your main site...

But your own site never shows up in the top ten results for that particular keyword or keyphrase.

Instead you find that there are lots of other sites carrying your article that rank better than yours.

You've completely missed out on an excellent opportunity to get high rankings for your keyword or keyphrase.

Even worse... you just handed your precious keyword-rich content on a platter to possible competitors who happened to publish your article on their website, and may have lost some of your most targeted visitors and sales to them.

So where did you go wrong?

Your mistake lay in using your precious article - the keyword-rich content you toiled for hours to write - for entirely the wrong purpose.

You failed to use the power of the medium of article publishing to give your site an unbeatable advantage over others.

Here's how to use your articles the right way to boost your search engine rankings.

1. Publish Unique Content On Your Website

When you make an article available for reprint, the article, by virtue of it being published on hundreds of other sites, now no longer qualifies as unique content.

In the eyes of search engines, those pages with higher Pagerank (and hence greater importance) than yours will now rank better than you for the keywords your article is optimized for.

Instead of making your article the main course, use it as an appetizer to direct search engines and readers to a UNIQUE, keyword-rich, well-optimized report or white paper on your website, and you'll see dramatically different results.

2. Use Your Article As Spider Bait

Think of your articles as simply the conduit that leads search engines to your website.

Publishing your articles all over the web is like leaving scraps for a puppy (a.k.a. the search engines) that follows them all the way back to the kennel (a.k.a. your website) where it can feast on the main course - your UNIQUE content.

3. Use Keyword-Rich Anchor Text In Your Resource Box

Use your main keyword or keyphrase in the anchor text of the article resource box that contains a link pointing back to your unique content.

This will create hundreds of keyword-rich links pointing back to the well-optimized report on your website, and give your pages a powerful edge over other websites.

Often this factor alone is sufficient to take your website to the top of the search results, especially with search engines like Google and MSN.

The guidelines above include few of the steps you need to take to get high rankings for the keywords of your choice.

 

Copyright 2004 Priya Shah

Priya Shah is author of the search engine optimization ebook, Number One In Your Niche, that shows how to use your articles and content to get long-term, top ten rankings for your website.

How Does Google Rank Web Pages

Writen by Gerrick W

This article discusses how Google rank pages in order of relevance and importance. It is not a secret or sure formula that guarantees good ranking. However, understanding how one of the most popular search engines rank pages will help you to strategize your web pages to rank well. Ranking well on Google need not be a shot in the dark exercise. All you need is to understand Google's scoring system and work on your web pages accordingly.

When someone performs a search query, Google needs to do 2 things before it presents the results according to ranking. Firstly, it finds the pages that contain the search query term and ranks them in order of relevance. Secondly, it determines the importance of each page. The final ranking results are combinations of relevance and importance. Remember the 2 keywords relevance and importance, which form the heart of Google's scoring system.

Relevance

How does Google define relevance and rank pages for a particular search query? Well, if someone do a search query on 'internet marketing, Google will look up its index for pages containing the words 'internet and 'marketing'. Web pages' relevance will be ranked accordingly to the following criteria...

1.Pages that contain the 2 words 'internet' and marketing will rank higher than those that only contain either one of two words.

2.Pages that contain the 2 words 'internet and marketing' right next to one another and discuss internet marketing will be deemed more relevant than pages that discuss marketing in general and only mentioning internet marketing in passing.

3.Page titles that contain 'Internet Marketing' will give Google a hint that they are more relevant than others.

4.Also a page that contains the term internet marketing several times is likely to be more relevant than a page that contains the term once. (However, do not overstaff your web page with your targeted keywords or else you may be penalized for keyword spamming.)

Google uses your page titles, and content to determine the relevance of your web pages for your targeted key phrases.

Importance

After having retrieved pages from its index that contain the search query, Google will now determine the importance of the web pages through its Pagerank algorithm. Pagerank basically evaluates 2 things: The quantity of links to web page from other web pages, and quality of the web pages from which the links originated.

These two factors, quantity and quality determine the importance of a web page. With Pagerank, emphasis is placed on quality over quantity. Four or five quality links from websites like adobe.com or cnn.com would be valued more highly than twice as many links from less reputable websites. And of course, a web page with a lot of quality links will boost its importance significantly.

As a rule of thumb, Google uses relevance and importance to rank pages. It will find pages that are relevant and reputable. If two pages contain the same amount of information that matches a search query, it will give a higher ranking to the page that has more quality links. Still Google has given higher ranking to a page with fewer links or lower Pagerank because of its onpage factors - page title and content. For example a page that focused on 'internet marketing' is more useful than a page in a reputable site like cnn.com that only mentions 'internet marketing' in brief.

Once Google has consolidated a list of web pages with their scores, it will select those with the highest scores as the best matches for a given search query.

Gerrick W mailto:gw@1stinternetmarketingsolution.com Information and Software Tools You Need to Effectively Promote Your Online Business. Visit: http://www.1stinternetmarketingsolution.com