You are only as good as your PR!! by Mark Thrope

You are only as good as your PR!! by Mark Thrope

You are only as good as your PR!!

Imagine a situation where you have started a great site with exceptional design and high quality content. Your pagerank of course is zero and you alexa traffic rank is somewhere in the 18th lack or perhaps more. You want to bring visitors to your site and hence want it included in the search results but the search bots are taking their own time caching your site. Finally the googlebot caches your site and you say, what the heck, I am through. But to your dismay you find your site way deep down even for a non competitive keyword.

You feel a bit down but have the belief that getting some quality inbound links will solve the issue. You start reaching sites with your link request but alas no one seems to be answering. Of course they want a link from a site having a good PR and not with a site having a PR of zero irrespective of the quality. In fact quality just doesn't seem to matter in today's internet which is all but pagerank. If your site has a good page rank you are the king or else no one is ever going to bother about you.

So the only option left before you now is to get links from directories, blogs, forums etc. and hope for the best. You do your best and wait for a PR update. After months of waiting the PR updates do happen but your pages get no more than PR3. You feel great about it though thinking 'something is better than nothing'. Now again you approach sites for a link exchange but to your sheer disappointment find that good sites never respond to you. All you seem to be getting are links from relatively unknown and low quality sites. You develop hundreds of low quality links and wait for the next PR update which seems an eternity to arrive. You have strong faith that for all those links you established your site will surely get a higer PR, but nothing of that sort happens. Your PR increases but not more than PR4. Then you realize that PR is exponential in nature. God forbid, you feel like cursing the PR system but you are left with no choice but to continue racing against the odds to get links. You become a link maniac getting links from all corners of the internet; after some time you realize that you are spending considerable amount of time getting inbound links and almost negligible amount of time on your website. You have not updated content for months now and your visitors are starting to turn away from your site.

One fine day you read an article that google has started penalzing sites that resort to getting unnatural links with an objective to cheat its ranking system. A few sweat drops escape from your face as you realize you have been spamming guestbooks and giving links to link farms. You also find you have cross linked with many sites actively taking part in link farms. You also find that you have got links from free for all sites. All these can lead you into trouble so in a frenzy you start removing links to those sites after mailing them and explaining them the reason. Finally the PR update happens and you get a PR of 5. You have entered the land of the lords now and you escaped getting penalized. You think, 'what a heap load of hardwork getting a quality site to rank, I wonder how these junk sites make it to the top?'. And ask yourself a question, 'Is a site only as good as its PR??' or 'Is the internet only meant for big shots who can invest considerable amount of time and money on optimization?'. The answer to this is probably yes which you gulp down with a pinch of salt.


About the Author
About the Author:

The author is the webmaster of http://www.infodizz.com which offers quality information and resources related to the internet and networking technologies including CCNA tutorials.

Search Engine Optimization Tips (part 1) by Jimmy Whisenhunt

Search Engine Optimization Tips (part 1) by Jimmy Whisenhunt

Search engine optimization (seo) can be a freighting and daunting experience. We have put together some tips to make this task much more pleasant. We are going to go over some tips to help your search engine rankings. Here is what we are going to cover in this article.

1)Design and Setup Problems
2)Selecting the correct keywords
3)The Title Tag
4)Your Page Copy
5)Meta Tags
6)Images alt tags
7)What you should not do

1)Design and Setup Problems
Unfortunately, some webmasters have lost the ballgame before they even get started with search engine optimization with design problems. We are going to go over five of the most common design problems and there work around or solutions.

a)Sites that use Frames:
Search engines do not index frames well. In fact search engine do such a poor job we recommend no to use frames at all. Here is the problem a frame page is like the name conveys it is a page in side of another page in a frame. The HTML code is like this:


Framed Site







As you can see, there is no real content on in the page so search engines do not have anything to index. The work around is to use the tag to add content to the page manually. You would place the tag before the then add your optimized content between . An easy way to do this is to create a new regular (not framed) home page for your site that describes your site, products & services.
Then copy everything from between the tags and insert it in the tag.


Example Framed Site





Optimized page content goes here for best results.




Keep it simple search engines like it that way and no one will every see it. Do not for get about the Title and Meta tags more on that later in the article.

b)Dynamic URLs
Most search engine cannot or will not index dynamic URLs. A dynamic URL is a URL that contains any of the following characters: ?, &, %, +, =, $, cgi-bin, .cgi
Dynamic URLs are most common on database driven sites. If your URL contains any of the above characters it is very unlikely that you will get listed with the major search engines. Solution is to make a static page that has a static URL on that does not contain any of the above characters.

c)Sites That Use Flash
Sites that use flash as a splash screen spiders cannot index them. A general rule is not to use flash as a home page splash screen. If you just have to use as much of your page copy as you can and remember to use your title and meta tags. Another note about flash is menu items. Spiders follows HTML links with flash menu spiders cannot follow them. Work around use a site map to link all of your pages together so the spiders will have HTML links to follow.

d)Image Maps
Image maps are similar to Flash most spiders cannot follow links in image maps. To be on the safe side build a site map of your entire site so the spiders have HTML links to crawl.

e)Javascript for Navigation
Search engines cannot follow links written in Javascript. If Javascript navigation is all you have on your site, you are in trouble. The solution is to add a HTML navigation menu some where on the home page and to add a site map of the entire site to make sure the spiders index your site completely.

2)Selecting the Correct Keywords
The first step in the optimization process is selecting to correct keywords for your targeted market. The keywords step is the most important step in the optimization process because your will use them throughout the entire optimization process. It is also how other people will find you on the search engines. Optimize for the wrong keywords and all your efforts will be wasted. The first thing you want to do if write down on a piece of paper what the theme of your site is. For instance your site is about golf. You would write down 10 keywords or phrases about golf. Think specific keyword phrases not keywords. Why? Because keyword competition is so extreme for general terms such as golf. You would need to be more specific golf clubs, golf shoes, golf courses, golf equipment, etc. to rank well in the search engines than for a more general term. Then you would need to use a tool like Word Tracker to see if that is a well searched for phrase. Get outside opinions ask family members and friends what they would search for making a note of them. Then go back to Word Tracker and check the new key phrases adding the best ones to your keyword list. Also check out your competition for ideas. Do a search on a search engine and check out some of the sites. View the source HTML of the page and look at the meta tags. This should give you some more ideas. Only use keyword that relate to your site . You should develop a list of keyword phrases for each page that you optimize for the search engines.

3)The Title Tag
Without a question the title tag is the most important process of optimizing your web page. I cant stress enough how important this tag is. This is because most search engines & directories place a high level of importance on keywords that are found in your title tag. We recommend using 1-2 of your keywords in the title near the front. Do not use just keyword in the title search engine may blacklist your is. Make your title enticing! The title tag is what most search engines show in there search engine results page (SERP) as the clickable link. Each page in your site should have its own title with its own keywords.

The Format: Your optimized title tag goes here
Where to place it: The correct place to place the title tag is between the tag. It should be the first tag after .
Tag length: We recommend that your title tag be between 50-80 characters long - including spaces! Staying at about 60 characters will be optimum.

In the next article we will go over Your Page Copy, Meta Tags, Images alt tags and what you should not do.

About the Author
Jimmy Whisenhunt is the webmaster at Article Zone. Article Zone is a new web site for free articles that you can use on your web site or in your newsletter. http://articlezone.vipenterprises.org

Keep Your Web Site Content Relevant by John Metzler

Keep Your Web Site Content Relevant by John Metzler

Visitors and search engines love content-rich web sites, but just having a lot of content on your web site is not enough. It all has to be relevant to a main topic with each page or section of the web site having a specific theme (And yes, this includes any resource or links pages the site may have). Each page should have its own topic and content should not stray to a different topic.

If you are promoting your graphic design business and have a page on business card design, stay on the topic and refrain from using a page title such as "Graphic Design company in Vancouver, Canada - business cards, logos, letterheads". Your want the business card design to be the most important key phrase.

There are two main reasons for content relevancy. The first is so that visitors have an easy time understanding the flow of your web site. Visitors who have to search through multiple pages to find the information they're looking for won't be visitors much longer. The average web site user takes about three seconds to decide whether or not stay on a site. A clear idea of what your site is about should be apparent immediately, followed by easy navigation to other pages that display further topics in more detail.

The second reason for keeping content relevant throughout your web site is for search engine algorithms. Keyword relevancy is an important part of search engine optimization. The more relevant your web site's content is for a specific term, the more likely the site is to show up near the top of search results for the term.

Keyword density is another big deal with search engines. There is an optimal ratio of key terms to the overall amount of text that must be used for search engine optimization purposes. The more unrelated terms that are used consistently throughout the content will bring down the percentage of more important keywords. Keyword density matters throughout an entire web site, not just on certain pages.

Other areas to keep an eye on are the contact page, about us page, and any other pages that you may not think are important to have optimized for search engines such as advertising info, privacy policy, etc. For instance, some web sites have pages devoted to reciprocal links. There's nothing wrong with them unless you link out to a lot of unrelated web sites. The keywords that are used in the anchor text and surrounding description text will detract from your overall site content if they are not related. Incoming links from unrelated sites are fine, but keep in mind that the links page counts as part of your web site as a whole.

Consider using a reciprocal links page as more of a resource for visitors instead of a long list of irrelevant sites. This not only appeases search engines but your visitors as well. And as mentioned before, both visitors and search engines should be kept in mind when creating web site content.
About the Author
John Metzler is the co-creator of Abalone Designs, Inc. - http://www.abalone.ca, a Search Engine Optimization company in Vancouver, Canada. He has been involved in web design and web marketing since 1999 and has helped turn Abalone Designs into one of the top SEO companies in the world.