Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

How To REALLY Profit From SEO

Monday, June 30th, 2008
by: John Alexander

I want to give you a few more things to think about as you excel and grow in the craft of search engine marketing. If you are anything like me, you were hooked the first time you really made a difference to someone else’s success. I soon realized that being able to help business owners to get results from these optimization methods and strategies could also be amazingly profitable. I found out that customers are your greatest resources and many of them are quite generous when you make an impact on their business. So the topic here is for those who want to profit from their skills (if you are not already doing very well and having an awesome time already).

It may seem like a strange thing to talk about but before I begin, I’ll say this. There are many folks out there offering various SEO services and they are still not getting the profits that they would like to make. They are not REALLY profiting the way they might if they took a little different approach. The solutions that business owners need to really make a difference in the bottom line, require more than just bringing volumes of traffic to a site. You need targeted traffic mixed with a web strategy to compel response.

Then another group that seems to be doing well at first but the truth is they are making lots of promises and sales but they are not able to hang on to clients very long because they are not delivering long term results.

Many of my SEO clients have been with me 5 years plus. (I am still taking on new ones too.)

Let’s talk about the benefits of SEO to you as a search engine marketer, then we’ll give you 5 ways to profit:

Here are just a few legitimate benefits of offering SEO services to your clients.

–Increase your sales There’s no telling how many sales you can make when you not only can talk the talk but you can walk the walk and REALLY deliver results. Prospects can sense there is something different about you and your services. You are known as the one who fixes up Web sites that don’t work.

–Increase your repeat business I learned that just because someone buys a web site, it does not mean that they are happy with it. But if you can turn that Web site around and make it work, then that same client may even BUY a second or a third Web site, not to mention, buy various promotional services. All they need to see is, that what you do… really does work!

–Increase your referral business What can I say, but word gets around quick! Business owners talk to other business owners and every time you help someone out and make them successful on the net, it’s like they tell everyone else they know. Referral business is wonderful!

–Increase your credibility With the right training and talent, your client comes to think of you as simply brilliant. This is not because you are REALLY brilliant, but you just look after your client’s business as if it were your own. If your client insists that they have the best web marketer and SEO on the planet, why burst their bubble? You make them prosper and they make you prosper.

–Increase your confidence There is a difference your client notices in you…right down to your body language and that inner knowing that if I’ve gotten other folks awesome results last week, I can do it again no problem this week.

–Increase your authority I can not say enough about solid communication and managing client’s expectations honestly.

–Build Client loyalty Let the competitor just try and steal your clients with false promises or tricky claims. You’ve done a great job of educating your client and making them web wise. Now these things are quite profitable sounding but honestly, they are really just fringe benefits. Lets move on to talk about real profit options.

5 Ways to Profit from SEO: Here’s how it starts:

1. Stop focusing on sales and start focusing on your clients success!

There are so many “webmasters”, web designers, graphic artists in this business. Does it not just scare you a little bit? Don’t we have to enter into competition with other web developers and does it not become a rat race?

Start focusing on your client’s success.

Do all that you can do to make them successful. Pour all of your talents into making their projects work. So many folks I talk to can never stop thinking about where they will make their next sale instead of delivering results to the clients they ALREADY have and in so doing, you establish lifetime residuals.

Make your client successful and they will literally become part of YOUR sales team.

2. If you’re not up to speed, you better catch up fast. A difference in your performance is a difference in your profits!

If you are not up to speed on solid SEO marketing techniques and methods, start learning now. Take a course or study at a live workshop, but however you do it, get your SEO skills up to speed so you can really help people. If you can show them a strategy that really puts dollars in their pocket, they’ll put dollars in YOUR pocket!

 

3. How’s your batting average? How about profit sharing?

If your skills are medium to above average, why not share in the profits yourself. I am referring to offering someone a vertical contract. This would be a deal where you own part of the company in return for making it successful with your SEO skills. Don’t brush this off. There are some exceptional deals to be had if you start thinking laterally.

4. Don’t forget your community and charitable work.

When’s the last time you helped promoting a charitable work at NO cost. Build a site and promote it for the Literacy counsel or the Easter Seals Society or your Local Rotary Group or your Chamber of Commerce. Don’t forget that this work will often open unusual and even surprising doors. Help make others successful and you will not fail. Many important leaders within your local community will be serving on these committees right next to you! A great way to network and meet new people and help the cause.

5. Watch the latest SEO trends and position yourself to take advantage.

The study and practice of SEO has been very good to me. Five years ago, I never dreamed that my study of Optimization would lead to the Internet lifestyle. I look after my clients well and sometimes go a little beyond what some might do in the call of duty. I have clients that pay me well for my services and demonstrate that they care about my business. As a result of the work I have done, I have enjoyed wonderful repeat business and client loyalty. Referral business is the best type of business going because it does not really involve a lot of preparation or hard work. You know that when you arrive, that they really want YOU to do the job because of your track record. It’s wonderful business.

I could write a lot more but I hope you get the picture. If you have not been enjoying good profits, a rewarding lifestyle and being appreciated by your clients your need a plan of action.

SUGGESTIONS:

1. You MUST be able to “deliver” and really make a difference. Do whatever it takes to get your SEO skills and lateral thinking skills up to speed.

2. Run a balanced business. Are you charging for what your services are worth?

There are some folks who charge steeply and don’t know how to get the results. For gosh sakes, if you’re good at what you do, make sure you are charging well for your services. You DESERVE fair reward if your considerable skills are helping other business owners to prosper. (some people are afraid to charge for their work)

Note: The ones that charge steeply but DON’T deliver may make a few dollars initially, but they won’t enjoy the customer loyalty, the referral business, repeat business that you do and they won’t have a “customer for life” like you will.

3. Don’t forget to recognize and be thankful for the progress you’ve already made. Be sure to benchmark your victories but even more important, celebrate your CLIENT’S VICTORIES too! After all, you helped bring them about.

4. Give something back to your community (with gladness). Look for opportunities to help others who genuinely need help and avoid those who are only after your talents to exploit them. (Trust me, when your SEO talents and success stories increase, you’ll have strangers coming out of the woodwork to take you to dinner and pick your brain). Proceed with wisdom.

5. You must be willing to change and take action! Performing the way you perform now has delivered a certain result. So if your happy with that result, carry on exactly the same way and you should get very similar results. If you are not happy with your results now, then you must change the way you do things.

  • Same action = same result

  • Different action = new results

  • Are you looking for new results?

  • Is it a time for a change of action?

  • Here’s wishing you the ultimate success.

 

About The Author:
ohn Alexander is the Co-Director of Training of Search Engine Workshops with Robin Nobles. Together, they teach 2-day beginner, 3-day advanced, and 5-day all-inclusive “hands on” http://www.searchengineworkshops.com in locations across the globe. John also teaches online search engine marketing courses through http://www.onlinewebtraining.com, and he’s a member of Wordtracker’s official question support team at http://www.wordtracker.com/moreinfo.html.

Getting One Way SEO Links - The Easy & FREE Way

Monday, June 30th, 2008
by: Bob Frazer

What we are hunting for?

  • Unique Domains,

  • One Way Links,

  • Text Link copy of our choice,

  • The ability to change those links,

  • Sites that have PR and cover our choice topic ….

  • Enter the Free Hosting Sites

One of the easiest and most often overlooked resources on the net today are the free hosting companies. Free hosting companies make money by upgrading accounts into paying accounts or selling services to you.

One of the huge advantages to a free hosted account and your SEO efforts is that search engines are more and more looking at the number of unique inbound one way links that are pointing to your website.

So what is a aspiring SEO junkie to do? Well luckily my link addicted friend there is an answer..FREE and ME rhyme for a good reason. There are 100’s if not 1000’s of free hosting companies dying to give you 50 - 100 MB accounts for your email address. I am going to give you a step by step way of building as many inbound links as your little (or big) SEO heart desires.

Step 1: Find the Freebies!

First start by going to our friends the search engines and search for “free web hosting”, “free web site” or any other permutation of the free hosting terminology.

Here are a few to get started:

  • http://www.topfreewebhosting.com

  • http://www.fateback.com

  • http://www.50m.com

Step 2: Get Ready to Track

With so many free hosting companies in existence it will be a challenge to keep track of all the data, so we will use our friend excel to help us along. Make a handy dandy spreadsheet of all the sites you find. On this spreadsheet have the following columns “Name” “URL” “Login Page” “My Username” “My Password” “My URL” “Content Type”.

Step 3: Decide the content Type and Get It

After you have cataloged all of your prospects we will need to create content, luckily this is the easy part as there are 1000’s of articles out there free for the copying (as long as you mention the author). So, choose a topic that is relevant to your website and go forth and copy…

Step 4: Sign up and Publish

Ok so we now have where we will get hosting, we have the content and a way to track it all…YAY! So what we need to do now is get started. Now, the real trick is getting your pieces of real estate and not being marketed to death. Setup a Yahoo, MSN or GMail account (if you can) to use for registering all of these accounts. Once you get your free email account, head to number one on your list and get registered, make sure you document all of your information as it will make your life that much easier in the long run.

Lets talk briefly about registering. When signing up you will usually need to create a “Sub Domain”, this will be XYZ.whatever.com. Try and find a Sub Domain that matched the type of content you will be creating. So lets say you are making content about Real Estate, so you would try to include that keyword “Real Estate” in your Sub Domain (ie. realestate1.whatever.com.

After you have signed up it is time to publish. Using their free website builder or your favorite tool, create a 4 - 10 page site (using your articles and a home page). On each article look for keywords that are relevant to your site and hotlink each page at least once to your site that you are SEO’ing. Or, go the cheap route and create a footer link to your site (bah that’s too easy and does not look very natural :P )

Well you get the picture - rinse and Repeat this process as many times as your heart desires and we are now started.

Step 5: Getting Indexed

So, we took all this time to create 1 Million (ok a little less) itty bitty micro sites, now what? Well you need to get the Search Engines to actually notice you..right? So lets go over 2 proven methods of achieving this goal.

Method 1. - Submit and wait…pretty easy method, submit your site to the crawlers and wait for them to come along.

Or if you are focusing on Google, hook up each site with AdSense and submit the site (this is unproven, but has worked for me)

Method 2. - Create the inevitable Link Chain (or PR chain I like to call it)

This is actually slightly complicated, but with our handy dandy spreadsheet, should not be too hard. First we will assume you have a site, If not go buy a link to get started :P. Either way we need to point a link at at least one, if not 3, of our free hosted account to get the link ball rolling.

After we have pointed a link at one site, we need to expand our chain of links. So our next step is on this target domain is to link from the home page to 2 or 3 of our other free hosted domains. The important factors here are to not link back and forth within the free hosted accounts but to link one to another one way only, and not do it in large noticeable quantities. The best method of this is to actually embed the links within the text of articles.

Now, if done correctly you will never trip an algo alert because or a few factors.

1. We are linking to sites not owned by you or on the same IP address.

2. The content of each site you link to should not have any of the same content (so no duplicate content filter trip)

3. Each site will have up to 10 pages but not less than 3 (so it is not a link page only)

So to recap What exactly have we done? We have created micro sites that have good content, and is on topic to what we do. We have created a possible income source with Adsense on our micro sites and we have assisted our SEO efforts at no cost except for time.

 

About The Author:
Bob is part of Top Free Web Hosting, ( http://www.topfreewebhosting.com )a free web hosting provider that offers 100MB web hosting accounts at no charge.

Are Your SEO Efforts Going To Waste?

Monday, June 30th, 2008

by: Derek Croote

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a long and complicated process that can be highly rewarding if done correctly. SEO is not a waste of time, but can be if your site doesn’t appeal to visitors or function properly. Your potential customer will be turned off if your site lacks trustworthiness, an eye pleasing color scheme and easy to use navigation. Why lose visitors and possible sales because of a small design flaw or unappealing color scheme? Those visitors could have resulted in sales if those small imperfections were fixed.

As I arrive from your high position in the search engines looking for your product, I want to be able to trust the company I am buying from. People are very leery with making purchases on the Internet, and even more so from sites they don’t know a great deal about. You want to gain trust from the visitor with guarantees, a professional design and color scheme, testimonials and by any other way. If your site doesn’t boast its trustworthiness and make me feel secure, do you think I will purchase your product? No. Visitors are especially leery when they are required to give credit card information. Make them feel protected, boast about your privacy policy, encrypted servers and whatever else you have set up. Be enthusiastic about your site’s security.

I need to be able to find what I want and navigate to where I need to go FAST after I arrive at your site via the search engines. Some visitors get lost and frustrated with poor navigation and will leave your site without a second thought. Do not leave your visitor with a bad taste in their mouth! Allow them to flow through your site with ease and comfort.

If your navigation is confusing your potential customer will likely leave and travel to one of the other three billion web sites on the Internet. Speed is also a factor in navigation. Visitors don’t want to sit there for twenty or thirty seconds while your page loads. Don’t make them wait. Cut down on the size of your pages and graphics.

The colors you choose for your site also impact on whether the visitor will make a purchase. A color scheme that hurts the eye will turn visitors off which will lead to lost sales. Visitors may also question how accountable your site is. You cannot have a black background with white, yellow or neon green text. It hurts the eyes. Color schemes such as that scare visitors away. With professional colors visitors will likely feel more secure and relaxed while surfing your site, which will lead to more sales.

A top position in the search engines can provide huge amounts of sales, if your site can be trusted and appeal to visitors. With a defective design and color scheme, slow loading pages or lack of trustworthiness all of the time spent performing SEO could go to waste. So get out, fix those flaws and discover more sales!

 

About The Author:
Derek Croote is a SEO, web design and usability enthusiast. He practices ethical search engine optimization and strives to make sites across the web better for visitors. Derek is the webmaster of the http://www.saratogalakesideacresassociation.org/, a small homeowners association. You can reach him at dcroote@gmail.com

Do It Yourself SEO

Monday, June 30th, 2008

by: Matt Colyer

Internet surfers use search engines more than any other tool to find things online. Search engines rank their results using a complex formula that considers web page content, link popularity and other details. This is why you should Search Engine Optimization (SEO) your web site.

First before you start you need to identify your keywords. It is critical that you know and understand the search terms surfers will use to find your web site with. If your not sure yet try thinking of search terms you would use to find your site. After you find your keywords make a list of about 50 (If you can find that many) keywords and target them.

Next you need to identify your competition. Start searching with your site’s targeted keywords and research the top ranked competing sites. Create a list of the top 10 to 15 sites and review each one of these web sites. While reviewing each of the competing sites look at the SEO methods that they use.

Meta tags are thought by most to have little impact, If any at all, on your site’s ranking, but is still recommend to use. It’s better to be safe than sorry! The meta description tag is used to describe a web page’s content to the search engines. Most search engines (Google, Yahoo!, etc) get the web site’s description from the web page’s content and not from the meta description tag. Write a description of your site here and make it short.

The keyword tag tells the search engines what keywords are related to your site. You should place your main keywords here and add no more than 15 keywords. The Title tag is probably one of the most important.

 

About The Author:
Matt Colver

1 Simple SEO Strategy To Get More Visitors To Your Site From Google

Monday, June 30th, 2008

by: Jean Lam

Did you know that you can dramatically increase the number of visitors that come to your site on a daily basis from Google? And it’s not constantly improving your position in Google search engine result pages (SERPs) for your competitive keywords which can take some time after working on your search engine marketing campaigns.

I take this example from Google because I’ve experienced it some time back now. Apart concentrating on getting and maintaining a top 10 ranking in Google, there are lots of easy traffic sources that you haven’t exploited yet. We are still talking about search engine traffic here.

What’s that strategy you ask? The answer might surprise you but it’s a technique that works and is pretty legitimate. It’s not creating stand alone or doorway pages with practically no content, overly optimized with keywords and a link back to the homepage. Doorway pages work but only if you know how to do it well. And this article will talk a bit about this topic as well.

The strategy is to search for overlooked keyword phrases which are not too competitive and create effective doorway pages related to these keyword phrases. These pages can be promoting a product for instance.

Just by adding a few effective doorway pages, I managed to make 9 sales in just a few short weeks and earned $364.59.

Imagine you come up with several keyword phrases that generate a few monthly searches, you now have several pages. So each page targeting a specific keyword phrase is worth traffic and not any type of traffic but it will be targeted.

So if you have one page which brings you only 1 visitor per day and you have 50 pages, you can easily receive 50 visitors per day for free. You see the potential now.

Keywords that have about 1000 searches on Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions previously known as Overture at:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion Valuable keywords with lower competition.

If you are using Wordtracker at: http://www.wordtracker.com, a keyword with only 10 searches per day can get you a good ranking and bring you traffic.

If you have already a website which is generating traffic, you can dramatically increase your numbers, simply by adding relevant doorway pages targeting a specific keyword. These pages have content and have your optimized navigation menu on it with their specific keyword phrases. These pages are just an entry to your site nothing more nothing less.

They should not be overly optimized with keywords but they must have some optimized content which is readable by your visitors and friendly for the search engines as well.

If you have a good website which is crawled by Google’s robot called “Googlebot” often, your new pages will get spidered and indexed fast and will start bringing you small loads of targeted traffic.

But be careful when adding pages, don’t go in a frenzy with this and add hundreds or even thousands of pages all of a sudden. For eg if your site has 50 pages already indexed in Google and ranking well and you add 100 new pages at once, your indexed pages might suffer a temporary drop in rankings. The key here is to add pages on a regular basis say 1 or 2 pages daily until you reach the total number of pages to be added.

Why not capitalize on this free source of traffic? The key is to research your keywords well first, work on your content and create these pages afterwards.

Your website will grow bigger and bigger with time and it will attract loads of targeted traffic from multiple keyword phrases.

Good luck and happy research and optimizing.

 

About The Author:
Jean Lam is the author of the highly acclaimed eBook “Top Search Engine Ranking Secrets in Google Revealed”, a concise, step-by-step guide to high search engine ranking for the beginner to intermediate level webmaster - available now at http://www.top-ranking-strategies.com.

Search Engine FAQ

Monday, June 30th, 2008

by: Billy Horner

Why shouldn’t I use a submission service that submits my site to 5000+ search engines?

Some Company’s claim that they submit your website to 5000+ search engines. The majority of these 5000+ so called search engines are free links for all pages, very special interest web pages or, even worse, websites masquerading as search engines. Submitting your web page to these 5000+ search engines means, that you’ll receive 5000 spam e-mail messages. Quality matters so much more than quantity.

Can Visual Orange guarantee top 10 search engine rankings?

Visual Orange helps you to optimize your web pages so that they get the best possible rankings. No one can guarantee a number 1 ranking on Google - Beware of SEO’s that claim to guarantee rankings, or that claim a “special relationship” with Google, or that claim to have a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly, is by using the page at: http://www.google.com/addurl.html. You can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.

Does my web page need to be continually resubmitted to get on and stay on the search engines?

We keep hearing this question and it is around for at least 8 years! Resubmitting dates back to the time when Webcrawler was the biggest search engine and no Pentium yet around! It does not guarantee ranking, but it makes sense to resubmit at some engines every three months, because they simply cancel after this period your web site.

What we can conclude is the following:

Submission is necessary but does not guarantee inclusion in search engines. We do not add all of your pages to search engines, and cannot predict when or if they will appear.” http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/1.html#A2

What is link popularity?

The more other web sites link to your web site, the higher is your link popularity. Link Popularity helps you to increase the search engine ranking results of your web site. Web sites that have many links from other good rated web sites, get much better search engine rankings than web sites with no other sites linking to them.

It’s really easy: you name the category of your web site and Visual Orange searches for web sites that might place a link to your web site. Web sites will link to your web site and the link popularity of your site will be improved. As a result, you’ll get higher search engine rankings, more customers and more sales.

 

About The Author:
Billy Horner is the author of this article,and has many years of experience in the SEO world. He worked for many companies and helped to show the way to succes.He now works for Visual Orange Co., Ltd. based in Ayutthaya Thailand. http://www.visualorange.net

10 Costly Search Engine Mistakes To Avoid

Monday, June 30th, 2008

by: Jeff Casmer

If you have a website then you already know the importance of traffic. Traffic is to Internet marketing as location is to real estate. It’s the only thing that really matters. If you cannot generate targeted visitors to your site, you will not make any sales.

Usually the owner or designer of the website is the person designated to drive traffic to the site. The chief ingredient in generating traffic is the search engine. Of coarse, you can use advertising, but it’s going to cost you. Using the search engines to generate targeted (interested in your product) traffic is the least expensive method known.

Unfortunately, many website owners do not understand the importance of search engine visibility, which leads to traffic. They place more importance on producing a “pretty” website. Not that this is bad, but it is really secondary to search engine placement. Hopefully, the following list of common mistakes, made by many website owners, will help you generate more targeted traffic to your site…after all, isn’t that what you want.

1. Not using keywords effectively

This is probably one of the most critical area of site design. Choose the right keywords and potential customers will find your site. Use the wrong ones and your site will see little, if any, traffic.

2. Repeating the same keywords

When you use the same keywords over and over again (called keyword stacking) the search engines may downgrade (or skip) the page or site.

3. Robbing pages from other websites

How many times have you heard or read that “this is the Internet and it’s ok” to steal icons and text from websites to use on your site. Don’t do it. Its one thing to learn from others who have been there and another to outright copy their work. The search engines are very smart and usually detect page duplication. They may even prevent you from ever being listed by them.

4. Using keywords that are not related to your website

Many unethical website owners try to gain search engine visibility by using keywords that have nothing at all to do with their website. They place unrelated keywords in a page (such as “sex”, the name of a known celebrity, the hot search topic of the day, etc.) inside a meta tag for a page. The keyword doesn’t have anything to do with the page topic. However, since the keyword is popular, they think this will boost their visibility. This technique is considered spam by the search engines and may cause the page (or sometimes the whole site) to be removed from the search engine listing.

5. Keyword stuffing

Somewhat like keyword stacking listed above, this means to assign multiple keywords to the description of a graphic or layer that appears on your website by using the “alt=” HTML parameter. If the search engines find that this text does not really describe the graphic or layer it will be considered spam.

 

6. Relying on hidden text

You might be inclined to think that if you cannot see it, it doesn’t hurt. Wrong…. Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them invisible. For example, some unethical designers my set the keywords to the same color as the background of the web page; thereby, making it invisible.

7. Relying on tiny text

This is another version of the item above (relying on hidden text). Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them tiny. Setting the text size of the keywords so small that it can barely be seen does this.

8. Assuming all search engines are the same

Many people assume that each search engine plays by the same rules. This is not so. Each has their own rule base and is subject to change anytime they so desire. Make it a point to learn what each major search engine requires for high visibility.

9. Using free web hosting

Do not use free web hosting if you are really serious about increasing site traffic via search engine visibility. Many times the search engines will eliminate content from these free hosts.

10. Forgetting to check for missing web page elements

Make sure to check every page in your website for completeness, like missing links, graphics, etc. There are sites on the web that will do this for free.

About The Author:
Jeff Casmer

8 Essential SEO techniques

Monday, June 30th, 2008

by: Matt Colyer

1) Title Tag - The title tag is the most powerful on-site SEO technique you have, so use it creatively! What you place in the title tag should only be one thing, the exact keyword you used for the web page that you are trying to optimize. Every single web page should have it’s own title tag.

2) ALT Tags - ALT tags were meant to be for text browsers because the images didn’t show in text browsers and the ATL tags would tell the visitor what it’s about. You should put your main keyword(s) in the ALT tags, but don’t over do it because you could get dropped in the results or even worse banned for life!

3) Link Popularity - Link popularity is the most powerful SEO tool out of all them. Most search engines don’t even consider web sites if there is not at least one or two links pointing to the web site. Having another site(s) link to your web site is important when it comes to getting your site a good ranking. Your keywords should be in the links you get and keep the keywords short. When you receive requests for a link exchange, check the site out before linking with them, check for spam (Repeat keywords, hidden text, etc.).

4) Keyword Density - This is also vital and should be used with research. You should use the keyword(s) once in the title tag, once in the heading tag, once in bold text, and get the density between 5% to 20% (Don’t over do it!). Also use your keyword(s) both low and high on the web page, keyword(s) should be in the first sentence and in the last one.

5) Page Size - Your web page’s speed is important to your visitors and the search engines. Why? Because the robots will be able to spider your web page faster and easier. Try your best to keep your web page over 5k and under 15k in size.

6) Rich Theme - Search engines are looking at themes more and more. Build content (Articles, FAQ, tips, etc.) much as possible and keep the web pages around 200 to 500 words. Create content that’s related to your market and link them out toother related content on your site. Try to get 200 web pages or more.

7) Web Site Design - This is also important, if you want to get indexed! Text content should out weigh the HTML content. The pages should validate and be usable in all of today’s leading edge browsers. Stay away from flash and Java Script, search engines dislike them both a lot.

8) In site Cross Linking - This will help you get all of your web pages indexed by the search engines. Your web pages should be no more than three clicks away from the home page. Link to topic related quality content across your site. This will also help build you a better theme through out your web site. On every page you should link back to your home page and your main service(s).

 

About The Author:
Matt Colyer is the owner of the Marhen.com Network which includes www.linkexchangeit.com and is a part-time SEO. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer. You can read more articles like this at www.marhen.com/articles/index.php.

7 Search Engine Optimization Strategies

Monday, June 30th, 2008

by: Jimsun Lui

Search engine optimization refers to the technique of making your web pages search engine friendly so that search engines are more easy to understand and analyze your website. Consequently, your site has a better chance to gain high search engine ranking.

However, please be reminded that high search engine ranking is not your only objective, and your objective should be website traffic and conversion. The following advice helps you to achieve the objectives.

1. Make Sure Your Site Will Not Be Penalized

Webmasters realize the importance of attaining top search engine rankings. Hence, they perform many search engine optimization activities on their sites. However, improper implementation of search engine optimization can get your site heavily penalized by search engines. To avoid your website being penalized, webmasters must not commit to the following practices:

  • Use of hidden texts or hidden links on web pages

  • Use of cloaking

  • Excessive automated queries to search engines like Google Web pages loaded with irrelevant words

  • Keyword stuffing

  • Multiple pages, sub-domains, domains with substantially duplicate content.

2. Select Correct Keyword Phrases

Correct keyword phrases allow you to drive targeted visitors to your website. Therefore, this step determines whether your search engine optimization effort can improve business result or not.

Do not restrict yourself and be open minded in this area. You may think that most of the search is coming from 1 word keyword. However, it is wrong. Most people uses 2-5 words keyword phrases because they are more descriptive and yield precise results from search engines.

In addition, think creatively and perform linguistics research can help you generate useful keyword phrases.

3. Optimize Title and Meta Tags

According to Internet Marketing Articles, One of the important steps in search engine optimization is to optimize Title tag in your web page. Pages with the keywords appearing in the title tag are often assumed to be more relevant to the search query than others. Remember, title tag is the most important location of a web page after the main content of the body tag. Almost all search engines give importance to this tag.

Some search engines also give importance to the presence of the keyword in the meta description and keyword tag. Currently, it does not applicable to Google though.

4. Optimize Website Content

All search engines place emphasis on your body text content. The main content of your web page should contain the keyword a considerable number of times to make the search engine spiders feel that the content is relevant to the search query. The first two paragraphs are extremely important in search engine optimization.

To prevent your site from being regarded as “over optimization”, you should not stuff keywords heavily in your body content. We suggest that you should present the keywords in a natural way. Apart from this, your website copy should have at least 200-250 words.

 

5. Ensure Clean Coding

To allow search engines to index and analyze your website correctly, you must check correctness of HTML coding manually. Webmasters may build webpages from WYSIWYG HTML editors such as Microsoft Frontpage 2003, but these HTML editors may leave some duplicated or unnecessary tags in your copy especially when you edit the pages very often during web design phase.

In addition, search engines are not good at understanding Java Applet and Flash. If you have Flash or Java applet navigation menu, make sure to duplicate somewhere and include HTML links as well.

Please also check whether your website has broken links. They may stop search engine spiders to crawl other web pages in your website, it may result in loss of hundreds or thousands website traffic per month, and waste your search engine optimization effort.

6. Link Building

In case you have a little bit knowledge about search engine optimization, you likely know that link popularity is very important to attaining high search engine ranking in major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc..

Yes, search engines use link analysis to determine search engine rankings. The philosophy is that if an inbound link points to your site, your site must have some value. Therefore, the inbound link is regarded as a “positive vote” to your website. The more inbound link you have, the higher is your link popularity. This can boost your search engine ranking.

However, quality of links (link reputation) is also important. If you can get an inbound link from a high popularity website, your site will get more benefit.

There are many methods to perform link building including seeking one-way link, reciprocal links, 3-way links, etc. Because link popularity and link reputation are of great importance to search engine positions, many search engine optimizers spend most of their time in link building.

7. Optimize Dynamic Website Content

Search engines are not good at understanding dynamically generated web pages. Therefore, I suggest you should change your dynamic URL to static URL. If it is not possible, you should consider using some advanced search engine optimization techniques such as Mod-Rewrite to optimize website.

Another simpler way is to create a sitemap and list all dynamic URLs on it. This can help a bit.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is very important to search engine marketing. When it is done properly, it helps you attract many targeted visitors to your website, and can improve your business results.

 

About The Author:
Written by Jimsun Lui from Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Ltd., a company offers Search engine optimization and search engine positioning service, and is developing PHP Shopping Cart Software, visit http://www.agogdigital.com to learn more

Writing Search Engine Friendly Webpages

Monday, June 30th, 2008

by: Michael Lawrence

In order to tap the huge stream of targeted traffic an internet search engine can provide a website you need to master a few common sense principles when crafting your webpages.

You can rest assured no sites receive top search engine rankings by chance in competitive keyword markets. They spend time and money to acquire and maintain their search engine positioning. Targeting your keyword market precisely and applying the principles in this article will help you compete in any keyword marketplace.

When crafting your web pages for the search engines remember that a search engine spider is not human. They only read the html code for your website, they do not actually “see” what your site looks like.

1. Use static html pages not dynamically generated web pages wherever you can. Some dynamically created WebPages are not indexable by the search engines. If they can’t index your pages you might as well not exist no matter how useful your website might be.

2. Use your main keywords in meta “ title ” tag, meta “ description ” tag, and meta “ keywords ” tags. This tells the search engines what you feel the webpage is about.

3. Use your keywords in the first line of your web page “ body ” and within “ header ” tags throughout your html document. Use “ bolding” of keywords where appropriate. Using your keywords within bold and header tags makes them stand out as important. Also having them near the beginning of your web page is also an indicator of importance in the search engine’s eyes.

4. Use your keywords in img ” alt ” and link ” title ” tags. These tags don’t show up as visible text but they can help give a search engine a better idea of what your link is about. Resist the urge to stuff a lot of keywords into these tags but definitely use them to your advantage and place a select few of your most important keywords in there.

5. Don’t use a lot of tables in your html. Use css style sheets to store webpage “style” definitions if you can. Storing style information in Css reduces the overall size of your WebPages considerably allowing them to load much faster.

6. Don’t use a lot of outbound or affiliate links within your webpage. Keep your web pages focused on providing content first, not making money. . Search Engine’s don’t like WebPages that are just filled with affiliate links and banners. These pages have little or no content and do not score well because of this.

7. Maintain a high “visible text: graphics” ratio on your webpage. This is a similar idea to 6 plus your pages will load faster with less graphics on them.

8. Repeat your major keyword phrases near the end of your webpage in a sentence with the keywords bolded. Optionally place a short sentence in a header tag.

After you have created your webpage and applied these principles upload the page to your web host and visit the following URL to analyze your work:

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/web-page-analyser.shtml

I have chosen this tool because it is very easy to understand and it is free. Use the suggestions this site provides and re-edit your webpage. When you have the page optimized to your satisfaction visit:

http://www.submitexpress.com

and submit your webpage URL to the major search engines for Free.

Congratulations, you’re first “optimized” web page is on the internet and submitted to the major search engines. Get some rest, this is only the beginning of your adventure!

 

About The Author:
Michael Lawrence is the webmaster for http://www.cobrasurf.com providing Free Web Traffic and Free Website Promotion.