SEO Informer

2005-12-04T17:40:00.000-08:00

KEYWORD POWER! Stop Fumbling Around In the Dark! Get Qualified Traffic Now! by Jeff Smith

KEYWORD POWER!
Stop Fumbling Around In the Dark! Get Qualified Traffic Now!

If you had to take a stress test right now - while someone
asks you how effective you are at selling a product online?

Would you show moderate frustration?

Register an "above average" score on the liklihood you will
strangle the next person who mentions getting rich online?

Or are you ready to pull the plug on the who freaking thing,
and start your own meat carving business?

You want to sell a product online, and everyone wants to tell
you HOW to sell a product online....BUT....

What they DON'T tell you is that it all depends on 2 simple
factors -- knowing what people want to buy AND what they
search for when they are looking.

Listen: it's taken me over 1-year to learn the TRUE meaning
of this one single word.

Everyone say KEYWORD.

Say it again -- KEYWORD.

Ok - with that out of our systems, let's look at the way that
keywords can make your life simpler, massively increase your
ability to sell products online AND...provide a formula you
can repeat again and again -- until you're tired of making
money.

KEYWORD Tip #1: Your Product Idea

Keywords tell you what people search for on the internet.
Lots of searches for information means you can provide
answers to urgent

Study keyword combinations, discover demand and supply
ratios -- made faster with a tool like Adword Analyzer --
http://www.infoproductcreator.com/part/adwanalyze
and you will have a window into product demand online.

KEYWORD Tip #2: Product Names and Titles That Sell

You know what people are looking for with keywords.

Figure out WHY they are using the keywords and you have
the perfect high-demand title that will sell you a ton
of products.

KEYWORD Tip #3 Sales Pages That Sell Products Online

Your sales page is only converting 1 in 1,000 visitors
into buyers?

Usually two main reasons - your copy sucks, or you are
attracting the wrong people to your website.

Guess what?

Either way - KEYWORDS come to the rescue.

Optimize your site for keywords that make sense for your
product or service. Don't go general here, get really
specific -- you want less traffic but more sales, not
a TON of traffic and virtually no sales.

Here's a little known secret.

People look for information online - they don't look
for products.

So - what you need to do is attract your visitors with
content, the content they are looking for AND THEN have
links and a menu that lead them to your products.

If you need help converting visitors into buyers - look
no further than the Hypnotic Marketer himself --
http://www.infoproductcreator.com/hypnotic.html

KEYWORD Tip #4: Keywords Help You Find Super Affiliates

When you arm yourself with the list of most popular
keywords your most qualified visitors use to find
information related to your products -- you can use
that information to form SUPER affiliate joint ventures
which will let you sit back and watch the money roll in.

Seek out those sites that are performing best and
optimized best for your target market's most searched
keywords - then make really good friends FAST!

Because they can make you a truckload of sales in next
to no time.

KEYWORD Tip #5 It's the ONLY Thing We Really Know About
Online.

Keywords don't lie.

The fact that "travel book" gets roughly double the
searches as "travel information" tells you exactly
how people are searching for your information (assuming
you've written a travel book)

When it comes right down to it - the comings and goings
of people on the internet is far from an exact science,
no matter what the "guru's" tell you.

But...KEYWORDS put you back in the driver seat, give you
the tools to sell products online and bring your stress
level down to a level where you may not even know who
you are anymore.

-------------------------------------------------------
WARNING! Not All Infoproducts Are Created Equal. With
These 7 Simple Lessons, You Really Can Turn Your Knowledge
Into Income-Generating eBooks, Books, Special Reports or
Any Infoproduct Fast! Find Out How In This Complimentary
Minicourse --
http://www.infoproductcreator.com/minicoursenew.html

About the Author
Jeff Smith is the author of too many articles to list on the topic of Creating eBooks, Special Reports and Internet Marketing. Visit his site at:
http://www.infoproductcreator.com

2005-11-08T17:40:00.000-08:00

Search Engines & Optimization by Anthony Parsons

Search engines, search engines, search engines....Who knows which one to optimize for? Why does everyone behave so silly when it comes to search engines and optimization for a particular engine or keyword even? As most know, Google is the flavour of the month. It appears that everyone is excited about it. What about the other engines? Did someone forget that they exist?

Because Google is the leading engine, this years "in engine" , word of mouth spreads, more people use it, website owners begin optimizing for it and SEO goes nuts. How easily we forget, that only a year or so ago, Yahoo was the leading search engine. Which one next I wonder?

I think it is quite humorous that people have become strung up about one particular engine and one method of advertisement because they do well for a short period. By a short period, I mean a year or two. This is short when your running a business over decades. Google changed their algorithm end 2003 and sent the world a shockwave. Someone forget to tell these many upset businesses and website do it yourselvers, that relying upon one method of advertisement is not good business practice. If that's the extent of business knowledge , then some businesses are in lots of trouble.

Florida (Google HQ) decided to change their system. As a result, many website owners, who had paid thousands of dollars or suffered thousands of man hours building a website came unstuck. Why? Because all of their efforts were built around the characteristics of one system. Who did they blame? SEO's, Experts, Copywriters, Link Building Companies, Google or anyone who would listen - often the media. Someone forgot to tell them that Google is a business, and if your manipulating a website within their search engine rankings, your messing with their business. Keeping this in perspective, only those negatively affected are crying to the press. Those businesses or individuals who gained rankings as a result of this change, strangely enough, don't have anything negative to say.

I think the moral of the story is, people need to stop attempting to over optimize a website and never concentrate on only one source for rankings. Website owners need to focus on reality and market their websites across as many engines as possible. It is also necessary to keep a focus on what you are trying to achieve. Essentially, a website to attract visitors and stimulate their attention for your information and products.
About the Author
Anthony Parsons has been performing search engine optimization since 1998. In late 2003 I decided to fly solo and opened my own SEO business to service the global community. With my wife being an acknowledged copywriter, anthonyparsons.com as a business will continue stepping forward breaking the boundaries of conventional SEO techniques. Making a winning husband and wife team, we make SEO affordable for all budgets.

2005-11-05T17:39:00.000-08:00

Why Purchase Search Engine Optimization? by Anthony Parsons

Well thats easy, so your website can actually be seen by users within search engines when relevant key terms to your website, business or product are being searched. If your website is not ranking in the top 20 for actual keywords being searched on the engines, then you definitely require search engine optimisation immediately.

It is fact that 85% of visitors to a website will come from search engines. It is also fact that over 90% of users rarely go past the first twenty results, first two pages, from search engines. It has been statistically proven that users will generally change search engines before sifting past the first two pages.

From this you can start to imagine the lost revenue and exposure that your business and website is suffering. Search engine optimisation is like a well-marketed television advertisement, your business is placed in front of the most appropriate maturity audience at a given time to achieve the best return on investment. You would not place your television advertisement about "house renovations" in the morning during the cartoons for example. This type of advertisement would be marketed during programs that are relevant to that subject. The same is achieved through professional website optimisation. A professional SEO will ensure your website appears where it can be seen at the most appropriate times. For example, when a search for "home renovation" or similar is searched, your website would then appear on the front page of a search engine. Your website will not appear when "cartoon" is entered into a search engine for example.

You have to look at Internet advertisement like this, with Billions of Websites floating aimlessly, thousands or hundreds of which are in direct competition with your website, all fighting for the front two pages of a search engine. Only a professional SEO will know how to gain that extra advantage to ensure your website can maintain a constant high ranking. Ensure you utilise a professional SEO, and I mean shop around, as a hit and miss job is no good when all your competition are continually attempting to rank over the top of your business.

I achieve steady top 20 ranking for my clients as most professional SEO do. It always depends on the market your targeting to how many visitors you will see, but try not to look at optimisation as just improving your throughput, as the actual aim is to achieve targeted throughput that will buy your products or service. The numbers game is not really for any website on the Internet, even though many play that angle, as each website is unique in content which is only required to be viewed when searched for that type of information, product or service.
About the Author
Anthony Parsons has been performing search engine optimization since 1998. In late 2003 I decided to fly solo and opened my own SEO business to service the global community. With my wife being an acknowledged copywriter, anthonyparsons.com as a business will continue stepping forward breaking the boundaries of conventional SEO techniques. Making a winning husband and wife team, we make SEO affordable for all budgets. http://search-engine-optimisation.anthonyparsons.com

2005-11-04T17:40:00.000-08:00

The Marketing Secret To Page Rank (PR) by Anthony Parsons

Since Google implemented PR, the link popularity consortiums have gone crazy. PR, PR, PR, that's all that anyone seems to be focused upon. Did someone forget about what makes the WWW? Freedom of information, not how big my PR is. So, what is the big secret about PR and just how do you obtain that high six and above? Its called, a great website! That's it, no more, no less. Anyone who has a great website, with information that others find useful, exciting and refreshing, will generally have a high PR. Why? Because its an informative website that people like and will happily spend their time browsing. Often, browsing leads to spending.

If people like your website, simply because the information and content appeals, users will link to your website just because they like it; not because it is made from flash or has some unbelievable design to it. That should be your focus with any website. So, what is marketing then? Stay with me for a second. Definition of marketing is; the promotion and selling of products and services! The definition of marketeer is; a person who sells goods or services in a market. Now with that in hand, your website is a MARKETPLACE. The definition of marketplace is; a competitive or commercial arena. How does that grab you? A competitive or commercial arena is why you need to have a website that stands out from the crowd.

Everyone is providing something; whether for free or with some cost involved. All are exchanging information, or selling products or services. They are all aimed to appeal to your senses, keep you browsing or finally buying, well some anyway. If your competition has a very informative website, then you need to have more information and something new that enhances the product, service or information. The free thing is well overdone on the Internet and doesn't appeal to many anymore. People are not stupid. They want quality information and value for money. That is the bottom line of any successful business focus these days, not just dollars and cents.

If you can make a website that attracts interest, then you will gain a good PR. You can reciprocate links and pay for inclusion until the cows come home, but if nobody is visiting, then all of your efforts are for nothing. You can have the best PR and still not rank well. On the other hand, you can have very little PR, and still rank like a champion within the search engines because people are staying upon your website and visiting often for more information. It must be said, that a high PR will not happen overnight. With lots of work, exposure and time it will happen. Good information and good marketing will bring many visitors, converting into sales and/or a quality website sustaining a great Page Rank.
About the Author
Anthony Parsons has been performing search engine optimization since 1998. In late 2003 I decided to fly solo and opened my own SEO business to service the global community. With my wife being an acknowledged copywriter, anthonyparsons.com as a business will continue stepping forward breaking the boundaries of conventional SEO techniques. Making a winning husband and wife team, we make SEO affordable for all budgets. http://search-engine-optimisation.anthonyparsons.com

2005-11-03T17:39:00.000-08:00

Dispelling the Myths - Will WebPosition Get My Site Banned from Google? by Matt Paolini

Dispelling the Myths - Will WebPosition Get My Site Banned from Google?
by Matt Paolini

In mid November of 2003, Google seriously revamped their ranking algorithm. As a result, many sites were dropped from their index, or fell dramatically in rank. This infuriated many Web site owners at the height of the holiday buying season.

Since that time, many accusations have been thrown at Google as to the reasons why this happened. Some say its a plot to encourage people to buy Adwords listings. Others have even theorized WebPosition is somehow to blame. Still others cite more traditional causes.

As soon as Google changed their algorithm, many WebPosition Gold customers whose sites had dropped contacted me demanding an explanation. They wanted to make sure their sites were not dropped because they had used WebPosition Gold. I reassured them that this was not the case. I went on to explain that many thousands of sites were dropped that don't even use WebPosition Gold.

Many of our customers even saw their rank increase. In addition, most of the time the site had not actually been banned from the index. It had simply dropped in rank.

In this article, I will attempt to dispel many of the pervasive myths regarding WebPosition Gold and Google. Ive used WebPosition for years on my own site and for clients. Ive also helped provide technical support to others using the product. Therefore, Ive been on both sides of the fence, and thereby feel uniquely qualified to address the most common questions that tend to come up:

1. Will running automated Reporter Missions on Google get my site banned?

No. Despite repeated rumors, when running a Reporter Mission, WebPosition Gold does not pass personal information, such as your name, address, email, Web site URL or domain name to Google. Instead, it conducts queries as a normal browser would, and then examines the results offline. With that in mind, Google cannot determine if you're running a query relating to a specific domain. The only information that is passed to Google is your "IP" address. In most cases, your Web site's IP address is different than the IP address of your ISP (Internet Service Provider). So, how can Google connect the two? Simply put, it can't.

Google states on their FAQ page that they do not recommend automated queries to be run on their service because it utilizes server resources. Yet, most businesses find it impractical not to measure their search engine rankings at least occasionally. Its also hardly reasonable to check ranking by hand in Internet Explorer, which for the same keyword list, would yield the same number of queries on Google anyway. Therefore, most businesses optimizing their Web sites find it impractical not to use some kind of automated tool to monitor their progress and to measure their visibility.
Working as a search engine marketer myself for many years, Ive found that the best policy is to simply be sensitive to the needs of the search engines. Avoid being abusive in your practices, whether it is your optimization strategies, your submissions, or your rank management.
Therefore, when using WebPosition, I often recommend the following strategies:
1.Avoid excessive numbers of queries if you choose to check your rankings on Google. Most people do not have time to improve their rankings on hundreds of keywords. Therefore, theres no need to rank check on hundreds of keywords if you don't have the time to do anything about that many different rankings anyway. While your site wont be banned from excessive queries, Google could block your IP address that you use to connect to Google, if it found your query volume to be excessive. This is true regardless of what tool you may use, even if its a browser.

It has been my experience that a blocked IP is extremely rare even among consultants conducting rank checks for dozens of clients. Presumably, Google would not want to accidentally block an IP that does a large volume of queries simply because its shared by many different users. Even so, its always a good idea to practice a little common sense.

2. If you choose to run queries, try to run most of your queries at night and during off-peak periods, which is something Google has suggested in the past. This is when many of their servers are presumably standing idle, waiting to handle the increased volume during peak periods. The WebPosition Scheduler makes this easy to do.

3. Do not run your queries more often than is really necessary. Since Google normally doesn't update their entire index more than once a month, there's limited benefit to checking your rankings more often than that.

4. As an alternative to Google, consider checking your Google rankings using Yahoo Web Matches or another Google clone engine in the Reporter. Although these rankings can vary slightly from Google.com, they're normally close enough to give you a very good idea of your actual Google rankings without checking Google directly.

5. With WebPosition Gold 2, you can also use the "Be courteous to the search engines" feature on the Options tab of the Reporter so you dont query their service so quickly. This gives you added peace of mind not found in many other automated tools, assuming you don't mind your missions taking longer to run. The Submitter has a similar feature to submit randomly at various time intervals.

2. Can I use WebPosition Gold to get my competitors' banned from Google?
No. If running automated queries on Google with WebPosition Gold would result in your site being banned, you could use it to get your competitors' banned from Google. However this is not the case.

Google even verifies this on their web site. They don't specifically name WebPosition Gold in this section; however, they do mention that there is nothing you can do to get your competitors' banned from Google. For more information on this, please see the "Google Facts and Fiction" document at Google's site. http://www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html

3. Will over submitting my site get me banned?

No. Many people think that Google will ban your site if your submissions exceed the recommended daily limits. If this were the case, we could over submit our competitors' sites and easily get them banned from Google.
Google is very clear on this and even states that over submitting will not get you banned. Even though over submitting will not get you banned, some of your submissions might still be ignored or discarded if they break the rules. Therefore, I recommend using the "Slow Submit" option in WebPosition Gold's Submitter and staying within WebPositions recommended daily limits. Some people argue that manual submissions are best. However, manual submissions cant warn you if you inadvertently over-submit, make a typo in your submission, or forget what you submitted and when.

For achieving top rankings, and staying indexed long-term, the best submission technique may be to not submit at all. Instead, try to establish third party links to your Web site and wait for Googles spider to find you on its own. WebPositions Page Critic offers numerous strategies for doing this.

4. Will Doorway or Entrance pages get me banned from Google?

That depends on whether these pages contain spam. If your definition of a doorway page is a page full of irrelevant or duplicate content, and excessive keyword use, then yes, you could find your site banned. Thats how Google often defines a doorway page. Consequently, the term doorway has developed a negative connotation over the years.

If your optimized page is nothing more than an extension of your main web site that happens to contain search engine friendly content, then youll be fine. In fact, youll be rewarded for the effort through top rankings. The key is not whether you label a page a doorway, entrance, optimized, informational, or whatever page. The key is whether the page contains quality, relevant content that provides the search engine with what it wants to see.

Google mentions that they discourage the use of doorway pages because they fear that webmasters will optimize for keywords that are not relevant to the pages content. This is a legitimate fear as they are in the business to provide relevant results to their visitors. However, if you create pages that contain what Google is looking for, then obviously Google will not penalize this page, or view it differently from any other page on your site.

With this in mind, here are a few of my tips on creating Google-friendly pages:

1. Always Include Relevant Content - Make sure that the content on each of your pages is relevant to your site. Many sites have various resources on a number of different topics. This is fine, as long as the overall theme for your Web site is solid. I would also suggest that you organize your related content into individual directories. Some businesses find it beneficial to organize each sub-theme of their site into a separate domain so they can cross-link the domains. If you do this, make sure you have links from other sites as well.

2. Avoid Duplicate Content - Create each page with unique content. If you are targeting different search engines for the same keyword, then you may find that you have some very similar content between certain pages. If this is the case, you can always create a robot.txt file to tell each search engine crawler not to index a page or directory that was created for another search engine. See the October 2000 issue (http://www.marketposition.com/mp-1000.htm#THREE) of MarketPosition for more information on creating a robot.txt file.

3. Avoid Keyword Stuffing - Creating pages that excessively repeat your keyword phrase is definitely not a good idea. This almost always will throw up a red flag to the search engine and is one of the most common forms of "spamming." How many keywords is too many? See WebPositions Page Critic for up to date, specific recommendations regarding how many words and keywords are recommended in each area of your page.

4. Design Good Looking Pages - Although Google cannot tell if your page is aesthetically pleasing, it is recommended that you create pages that look good and fit the theme of your Web site. This will definitely increase the click through rate from the arrival page to the rest of your Web site.

5. Avoid Using Hidden Image Links - Many site owners think they can fool Google by including transparent 1x1 pixel image links on their home page that point to their optimized pages. These are very small images contained in a hyperlink that are not visible to the naked eye. This can get your page dropped from Google's index.

6. Avoid using links that have the same color as the background on your page - Many site owners try to hide the links on their home page by making the text color the same as the background color of the page. As with the scenario above, this can also get your page banned from Google.

7. Avoiding using Javascript Redirection Techniques - Many Web site owners have implemented the use of Javascript to redirect a user to another page while allowing Google to crawl the page that includes the Javascript code. This did work for a while, but Google eventually caught on. Other forms of redirection, like IP cloaking are also frowned upon by Google.

In Summary:

The rules regarding each search engine change routinely. Thats why WebPositions Page Critic is updated monthly to keep pace. As a search engine marketer, its critical that you keep informed as to the latest search engine rules and strategies.
It's also important to understand that WebPosition Gold is only a tool. When used properly, it will not get you banned or blocked, and will in fact improve your rankings dramatically. However, as with any tool, you can choose to ignore its recommendations and to go your own way. For example, you can use a hammer to build a fine house, or you can take that same hammer to knock a bunch of holes in someones wall. Ultimately, this call is up to you, the user of the tool.

This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from Matt Paolini. Matt Paolini is a Webmaster and support specialist for FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition Gold (http://www.webposition.com). He's also an experienced freelance Search Engine Optimization Specialist and Cold Fusion/ASP.NET/SQL Server Developer/Designer. For more information on his services, please visit http://www.webtemplatestore.net/ or send him an email at webmaster@webtemplatestore.net

Interested in reprinting the above article?

When reprinting the above article, you must include the final credit paragraph which physically links to my Web site. If you'd like to rephrase the credit line or change the wording of the article for your audience, then I will try to accommodate you. I ask that you email me at webmaster@webtemplatestore.net with a copy of your proposed revisions for approval before reprinting it.

We simply require two things:

1. You must maintain the accuracy and general intent of the content.

2. We need to obtain an appropriate credit and link in exchange for your use of the article.

Thank you and we wish you the best of luck in your business!

About the Author
Matt Paolini is a Webmaster and support specialist for FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition Gold. He's also an experienced freelance Search Engine Optimization Specialist and Cold Fusion/ASP.NET/SQL Server Developer/Designer.

2005-11-02T17:39:00.000-08:00

PPC For Dummies - Part Two Of Two by Scott Van Achte

Two of the most important factors of any Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign are creating successful ads and deciding how much to pay per click. There are many PPC options out there to choose from, I am going to focus on the two most popular, Google AdWords and Overture.

Creating your ads for AdWords
Creating your ad copy is the single most important part of any ad campaign. You want your ad to stand out amongst the others and scream out click me!' If your add looks and says the same thing as everyone else users will simply pass it by.

Before creating your ads you need to determine your target market and keyword selections. If your company focuses on a specific market niche try to target your ads in regards to that niche. Properly targeted ads will almost always out-perform those directed at a general audience.

When creating your first ad be sure to fit in your main keywords either in the title or near the beginning of the body text. Say something to draw attention by using call to action phrases and words that provoke enthusiasm and response. Things likeSave on DVDs," "Get cheap stereos," or "Join now for 20% discount, etc. Just be cautious, if you advertise something that you don't offer, Google will pull your ad. If your ad says you have something for free, you better have something for free listed on your landing page! Always be sure to follow Google's Guidelines .

Once you are happy with your first ad, create 3 more ads that are radically different from the first. After 3 or 4 days take a look at how your ads are doing. (If you are using less frequently searched terms you may have to wait 1-2 weeks for better results.) Check the click through rate (CTR) of each ad. In most cases one of the 4 will show to be out-performing the rest. If this is the case, delete the poorly performing ads and create 3 new ads that closely resemble the successful one, each with subtle differences in the title and body text.

Again wait 3 or 4 days to see which of the ads is out performing the rest. If you again notice that one stands out, repeat the process. Eventually you will end up with 4 quality ads that are performing equally. Once the ads have leveled out, continue to keep an eye on them, I recommend daily. If one begins to slip, slightly tweak the wording. You must always keep an eye on your ads if you wish for them to continually perform well.

Determining your Max Cost Per Click with AdWords
With AdWords when you enter your MAX CPC, it will then show you what Google estimates your average position will be for each keyword. ( The position predictions provided by Google are based on historical data from previous advertisers and are not 100% accurate, but it will give you an idea what to expect.)

Unfortunately there is no way to see what the competition is paying, so in most cases it's a bit of a duck hunt in the beginning. I suggest starting out with a MAX CPC slightly higher than you would normally, this will give you a slightly higher ranking and increase your chances of accumulating clicks. If your ad performs really well your rank will increase. As you begin to establish a good click through rate (CTR) you can adjust your max CPC to reflect the position you wish to obtain. (See part one of this article to find out how Google ranks ads.)

Creating your ads for Overture
With Overture, writing the perfect ad is slightly different than with AdWords. Overture only allows you to create one ad per keyword, so this takes away the option of trying out various ads and going with the obvious winner, however, the basis for creating your initial ad remains virtually the same. After you have selected your target market and main keywords, write a specific ad targeting each individual keyword and be sure to include the keyword in the title or beginning of the main body text along with a call to action phrase or something that is sure to draw attention. Remember to check the status of your ads on a weekly basis, and tweak as needed. Keep and eye on your click through rate and regularly tweak poorly performing ads

Determining your Max Cost Per Click with Overture
Deciding how much to spend on Overture is simple. Take a look at what the competition is spending, and out bid them. With Overture you should always try to be in the top 3 if you wish to have your ad dispersed among partner sites. (Yahoo, Lycos, MSN, etc). If the number 1 spot is currently paying 25 cents per click you need only bid 26 cents to grab the number 1 spot. If you want the number one spot, but are also willing to pay more, you can bid 40 cents, and will only be charged the 26 cents. One penny above the competition. Keep in mind though, if someone else increases their bid, your actual cost will also increase up to the max CPC you have entered.

Managing an AdWords or Overture PPC campaign can be confusing at first, but it doesn't take long to get a handle on what works. Creating a highly successful ad the first time around with either AdWords or Overture is a rare occurrence, but with a bit of regular maintenance and a well targeted campaign it won't take long to start seeing results.
About the Author
Scott Van Achte is a Search Engine Optimization Professional and PPC Manager at StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada. You can read more of Scott's articles and those of the StepForth team at http://news.stepforth.com or contact us at http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel - 250-385-1190 Toll Free - 877-385-5526 Fax - 250-385-1198

2005-11-01T17:39:00.000-08:00

Keyword Density by Kristy Meghreblian

We can't emphasize enough the importance of including keyword-rich content on your site to increase your ranking potential. Simply put, keywords are the words and/or word phrases people use when searching. As we've mentioned throughout the site, search engine spiders love content. Therefore, the more keyword-rich content you have, the better. When a search engine spider crawls your site, it won't recognize pictures or images. So, if you have limited amounts of text (or none at all) and you've got a lot of beautiful pictures or Flash animation, the spider may deem your site unworthy of listing.What Is Keyword Density? Keyword density is the ratio of a keyword or key phrases to the total number of words on that page. It is one of the most critical aspects of successful search engine optimization. To improve your search engine ranking potential, your keyword density must be just right. To calculate your keyword density, divide the total number of words on your page by the number of times your primary keyword or key phrase appears. Keyword density is critical when outlining the keyword portion of your search engine optimization strategy.Naturally, there is a fine line between strategically scattering these keywords throughout your content versus grouping them all together, separated by commas. The latter is known as spamming and you will get penalized for doing it. Don't think you can fool the search engines -- they have the technology to figure out these little tricks.Using Keyword Density To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking The best way to increase your search engine ranking potential is to develop your keyword strategy by researching the most relevant (and most searched for) keywords or keyword phrases before you even begin building your site. So, you've already built your site? No worries -- you should still consider reviewing the keywords you have selected and make any necessary changes to your meta tags and site content. No matter how nice your site looks, you won't get high search engine rankings without the right keywords. And remember, if your site has a lot of graphics or Flash animation with little content, we encourage you to consider a redesign. We understand that most site owners who fit into this category have spent a lot of money for these beautiful sites, but what is the purpose if they aren't getting the high rankings?That being said, here are a few tips on using keyword density to maximize your search engine ranking potential:1. Use our Search Term Suggestion Tool (powered by Overture) to research your keywords. This powerful tool will direct you to the most popular keywords for your specific business based on how many times that keyword or keyword phrase is searched for each month. You can then take that information and develop your keyword strategy based on those results.2. Incorporate these keywords or keyword phrases in your meta tags as well as your site content. People often forget that search engines will spider the heading meta tags first because they preceed and stand out from your main site content.3. Write keyword-rich content that not only satisfies the search engine algorithms but is equally informative for customers visiting your site. This is the most difficult part of writing your content - but also the most critical.4. Try to write at least 300 words for each page on your site. Again, the more content you have the better chance you will have to include those all-important keywords you diligently researched and ultimately selected. 5. Too often we see content saturated with too many keywords that, as popular as they may be, just don't relate to the site itself. Avoid doing this - it will only irritate potential customers. 6. Web sites should be updated on a regular basis -- don't let them go stale. Add new products/services, update users with new information and tools, do what you can to change your content (keyword-rich content, that is!) and keep users coming back for more.
About the Author
As Submit Todays copywriter and editor, Kristy Meghreblian has written online content for many successful companies, including Monster.com. She has successfully combined her excellence in journalism with the delicate art of keyword density as it relates to search engine optimization. As a result, she has helped many Submit Today clients achieve top ranking. Submit Today is a leading search engine optimization, submission and ranking company located in Naples, Florida.

2005-10-31T17:40:00.000-08:00

How to Optimize Your Website for Both Google & Inktomi by Jim Hedger

The search engine environment continues to evolve rapidly, easily outpacing the ability of consumers and SEO practitioners to quickly adapt to the new landscape. With the ascension of Inktomi to the level of importance that until recently was held solely by Google, SEO practitioners need to rethink several strategies, tactics and, perhaps even the ethics of technique. Assuming this debate will unfold over the coming months, how does an "ethical SEO firm" work to optimize websites for two remarkably unique search engines without falling back on old-fashioned spammy tactics of leader-pages or portal-sites? Recently, another SEO unrelated to StepForth told me that he was starting to re-optimize his websites to meet what he thought were Inktomi's standards as a way of beating his competition to what looks to be the new main driver. That shouldn't be necessary if you are careful and follow all the "best practices" developed over the years.

The answer to our puzzle is less than obvious but it lies in the typical behaviors of the two search tools. While there are a number of similarities between the two engines, most notably in behaviors of their spiders, there are also significant differences in the way each engine treats websites. For the most part, Google and Inktomi place the greatest weight on radically different site elements when determining eventual site placement. For Google, strong and relevant link-popularity is still one of the most important factors in achieving strong placements. For Inktomi, titles, meta tags and text are the most important factors in getting good rankings. Both engines consider the number and arrangement of keywords, incoming links, and the anchor text used in links (though Google puts far more weight on anchor text than Inktomi tends to). That seems to be where the similarities end and, the point where SEO tactics need revision. Once Inktomi is adopted as Yahoo's main listing provider, both Google and Inktomi will drive relativity similar levels of search engine traffic. Each will be as important as the other with the caveat that Inktomi powers two of the big three while Google will only power itself.

2004 - The Year of the Spider-Monkey
The first important factor to think about is how does each spider work?

Entry to Inktomi Does Not Mean Full-Indexing
Getting your site spidered by Inktomi's bot "Slurp" is essential. Like "Google-bot", "Slurp" will follow every link it comes across, reading and recording all information. A major difference between Google and Inktomi is that, when Google spiders a new site, there is a good chance of getting placements for an internal page without paying for that specific page to appear in the index. As far as we can tell, that inexpensive rule of thumb does not apply to Inktomi. While it is entirely possible to get entire sites indexed by Inktomi, we have yet to determine if Inktomi will allow all pages within a site to achieve placements without paying for these sites to appear in the search engine returns pages, (SERPs). Remember, Inktomi is a paid-inclusion service which charges webmasters an admission fee based on the number of pages in a site they wish to have spidered. From the information we have gathered, Slurp will follow each link in a site and, if provided a clear path, will spider every page in the site but, pages within that site that are paid-for during the submission will be spidered far more frequently and will appear in the indexes months before non-paid pages. We noted this when examining how many pages Inktomi lists from newer clients versus how many from old clients. We have noticed the older the site, the more pages appear in Inktomi's database and on SERPs on search engines using the Inktomi database. (This is assuming the webmaster only paid for inclusion of their INDEX page) Based on Inktomi's pricing, an average sized site of 50 pages could cost up to $1289 per year to have each page added to the paid-inclusion database so it is safer then not to assume that most small-business webmasters won't want to pay that much.

Google's Gonna Get You
Google-bot is like the Borg in Star Trek. If you exist on the web and have a link coming to your site from another site in Google's index, Google-bot will find you and assimilate all your information. As the best known and most prolific spider on the web, Google-bot and its cousin Fresh-bot visit sites extremely frequently. This means that most websites with effective links will get into Google's database without needing to manually submit the site. As Google currently does not have a paid-inclusion model, every page in a site can be expected to appear somewhere on Google produced SERPs. By providing a way of finding each page in the site (effective internal links), website designers should see their sites appearing in Google's database within two months of publishing.

We Now Serve Two Masters; Google and Inktomi
OK, that said, how to optimize for both without risking placements at one over the other. The basic answer is to give each of them what they want. For almost a year, much of the SEO industry focused on linking strategies in order to please Google's PageRank. Such heavy reliance on linking is likely one of the reasons Google re-ordered its algorithm in November. Relevant incoming links are still be extremely important but can no longer be considered the "clincher" strategy for our clients. Getting back to the basics of site optimization and remembering the lessons learned over the past 12-months should produce Top10 placements. SEOs and webmasters should spend a lot of time thinking about titles, tags and text as well as thinking about linking strategies (both internal and external). Keyword arrangement and densities are back on the table and need to be examined by SEOs and their clients as the new backbone of effective site optimization. While the addition of a text-based sitemap has always been considered an SEO Best Practice, it should now be considered an essential practice. The same goes for unique titles and tags on each page of a site. Another essential practice SEOs will have to start harping on is to only work with sites that have unique, original content. I am willing to bet that within 12-months, Inktomi introduces a rule against duplicate content as a means of controlling both the SEO industry and the affiliate marketing industry. Sites with duplicate content are either mirrors, portals or affiliates, none of which should be necessary for the hard-working SEO. While there are exceptional circumstances where duplicate content is needed, more often than not dupe-content is a waste of bandwidth and will impede a SEO campaign more than it would help.

The last tip for this article is, don't be afraid to pass higher costs on to the clients because if your client wants those placements soon, paid-inclusion of internal pages will be expected. When one really examines the costs of paid inclusion it is not terribly different than other advertising costs, with one major exception. Most paid-advertising is regionally based (or is prohibitively expensive for smaller businesses). Search engine advertising is, by nature, international exposure and that is worth paying for.
About the Author
Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth is the result of the consolidation of BraveArt Website Management, Promotion Experts, and Phoenix Creative Works, and has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel - 250-385-1190 Toll Free - 877-385-5526 Fax - 250-385-1198

2005-10-28T17:40:00.000-07:00

Site Maps: A Force to be Reckoned With by Kristy Meghreblian

Another important component of search engine optimization is the use of site maps. If you want visitors -- and search engine spiders -- to find every page on your Web site, a site map can be your biggest ally especially if you have a lot of content on your site (and if youve been reading all the advice on our site, you should know by now that the more content you have the better your chances are for top ranking).

So, what is a site map? Basically, it is a navigation tool. It lets visitors know what information you have, how it is organized, where it is located with respect to other information, and how to get to that information with the least amount of clicks possible. A good site map is more than a hyperlinked index, which only provides the user with a list of alphabetically arranged terms.

Site maps also provide lots of nutritious spider food for search engine robots that crawl your site and eventually index it. Once the robot gets to the site map, it can visit every page on your entire site because all the information is clearly indicated on that one page. However, in order for your site map to work most effectively, you must include a link to your site map in the navigation on every page of your site.

To make your site map most appealing to both the search engine robots and human visitors, be sure to include descriptive text along with the page URLs and links. Be sure to use your targeted keywords in that text. Remember not to be too repetitive with your keyword phrases, though, or you may be penalized.

When you make it easy for people to navigate your site, they will find what they are looking for and will most likely be a repeat visitor. Likewise, when your site is easily navigable by search engine spiders, you increase your chances of being favorably listed in their search results.

So, if creating a site map isnt part of your current search engine optimization strategy, maybe its time you thought about adding this beneficial -- and fairly simple -- tool to your repertoire.

For an example of Submit Todays site map, go to: http://www.submittoday.com/site_map.htm.
About the Author
As Submit Todays copywriter and editor, Kristy Meghreblian has written online content for many successful companies, including Monster.com. She has successfully combined her excellence in journalism with the delicate art of keyword density as it relates to search engine optimization. As a result, she has helped many Submit Today clients achieve top ranking. Submit Today is a leading search engine optimization, submission and ranking company located in Naples, Florida.

2005-10-27T17:40:00.000-07:00

How Can Search Engines Help You with Your Business? by Dmitry Antonoff, Irina Ponomareva

What Are Search Engines?
Most of us often face the problem of searching the web. Nowadays, the global network is one of the most important sources of information there is, its main goal being to make information easily accessible. That's where the main problem arises: how to find what you need among all those innumerable terabytes of data. The World Wide Web is overloaded with various stuff related to diverse interests and activities of human beings who inhabit the globe. How can you tell what a site is devoted to without visiting it? Besides, the number of resources grew as quickly as the Internets own development, and many of them closely resembled each other (and still do). This situation necessitated finding a reliable (and at the same time fast) way to simplify the search process, otherwise there would be absolutely no point to the World Wide Web. So, development and deployment of the first search engines closely followed the birth of the World Wide Web. *
How It All Began
At the start, search engines developed quite rapidly. The "grandfather" of all modern search engines was Archie, launched in 1990, the creation of Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University, Montreal. Three years later, the University of Nevada System Computing Services deployed Veronica. These search engines created databases and collected information on the files existing in the global network. But they were soon overwhelmed by the fast growth of the net, and others stepped forward.
World Wide Web Wanderer was the first automated Internet robot, whereas ALIWEB, launched in Autumn of 1993, was the first rough model of a modern web directory that is filled up by site owners or editors. At about the same time, the first 'spiders' appeared. These were: JumpStation, World Wide Web Worm, and Repository-Based Software Engineering** starting the new era of World Wide Web search. Google and Yahoo are two of their better-known descendants.
http://galaxy.com/info/history2.html.
Search Engines Today
Modern web searchers are divided into two main groups:
search engines and
directories.
Search engines automatically 'crawl' web pages (by following hyperlinks) and store copies of them in an index, so that they can generate a list of resources according to users' requests (see How Search Engines Work, below). Directories are compiled by site owners or directory editors (in other words, humans) according to categories. In truth, most modern web search combine the two systems to produce their results.
How Search Engines Work
All search engines consist of three main parts:
the spider (or worm);
the index; and
the search algorithm.
The first of these, the spider (or worm), continuously crawls web space, following links that lead both to within the limits of a website and to completely different websites. A spider reads all pages content and passes the data to the index.
The Index is the second part of a search engine. It is a storage area for spidered web pages and can be of a huge magnitude (Googles index, for example is said to consist of three billion pages).
The third part of a search engine system is the most sophisticated. It is the search algorithm, a very complicated mechanism that sorts an immense database within a few seconds and produces the results list. Looking like a web page (or, most often, lots of pages), it contains links to resources that match users' queries (i.e., relevant resources). The most relevant ones (as the search engine sees it) are nearer the top of the list. They are the ones most likely to be clicked by the user of the search engine. A site owner should therefore take heed of the site's relevancy to the keywords it is expected will be used to find it.
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2168031
A Relevancy calculation algorithm is unique for every search engine, and is a trade secret, kept hidden from the public. However, there are some common principles, which will be discussed in the following paragraph.
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167961
What to Do to Have Your Web Site Found through Search Engines
There are some simple rules to make your resource relevant enough to be ranked in the top 10 by the majority of search engines.
Rule 1: Work on the body copy
A search engine determines the topic of your site judging by the textual information (or content) of every page. Of course, it cannot comprehend the content the way humans do, but this is not critical. It is much more important to include keywords, which are found and compared with users' queries by the programme. The more often you use targeted keywords, the better your page will be ranked when a search on those keywords is made.
You can increase the relevancy of your targeted keywords still more if you include them in the HTML title of your page ( tag), in subheaders (- tags), in hyperlinks ( tag), or just emphasize them with bold font ( or tags). Meta tags and were introduced specifically to help search engines. Unfortunately, they are rapidly losing their significance because it is too easy to abuse them. Webmasters should therefore concentrate mainly on body copy, which is the part of textual content placed between the and the tags.
One should take into account the facts that the search engines' algorithms are constantly improving and that index databases are updated. When you have aquired the desired position in the listings, do not rest on your laurels. Site optimisation should become a permanent job for all site owners who regard web presence as an important part of their business.
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2168021
Rule 2: Build links to your site
As we have mentioned before, a spider scans the web following the links placed by site owners onto their pages in order to inform their visitors of where to find something that might be of interest. So, the greater the number of website owners agreeing to list your site, the smaller the time that will pass before all existing search engines will find out about you. What's more, those pages that are linked from multiple sites are considered by crawlers as more important. Google (http://www.google.com/) implements this concept via a so called Page Rank; other engines analyse your site's popularity in different ways. Remember that a link from a site that itself ranks well, is much more valuable than just any link. Also note that content relevancy of the site linking to you further increases the importance of the link.
Rule 3: Play fair
Do not get involved in unfair games with search engines. If you feel that your method is obviously deceptive, do not use it. Here are just some of widespread methods used by unscrupulous webmasters.
Spam
Let's assume that the site owner wishes to make a page very relevant to a certain key phrase. The most obvious course to take is to include this phrase into a page copy as many times as possible. When it starts looking unnatural (that is, the keyword density value becomes excessive), it will be regarded as a kind of spam (so-called keyword damping). This page will look odd both for human visitors and for search engines. Consequently, any WWW user will hardly wish to return to this page after having visited it just once, and search engines will be likely to penalise spam by reducing the page's ranking.
Using colours to hide multiple keywords, as a kind of spam
Some web masters in their vain hope to deceive search engines go a step further. They make the part of body copy, which is intended only for search engines, invisible (that is, of a colour identical or just a shade different from the background color), or tiny enough to be indistinguishable (i.e., 1 or 2 pixels high). Modern search engines have become smart enough to detect such tricks, so we wouldn't advise you to use these methods. You might even win for a short time, but lose afterwards, because some search engines penalise spammers by excluding their web sites from their databases.
Link farms
Many site owners unite in so called link farms in order to artificially increase the link popularity value. These are nothing but networks where everyone links to everyone else, concentrating on the quantity of links and disregarding their quality. Their efficiency is very low. First, a page can deliver just a small part of its value to every page it links to within the farm. If it contains too many links, this part will be worthless. Second, a page that contains links, just links, and nothing else but links, cannot be very authoritative for quite natural reasons. Besides, modern search engines analyse the link quality in terms of web site relevancy, ranking the link highly if it leads to a site devoted to similar issues. So, when you are looking for link exchange partners, choose those whose business is similar to yours. The sites of your partners, or web portals devoted to your business issues, are ideal for this.
Cloaking
This is a widespread technology that aims to deceive search engines . The point is, all known spidering robots recognised by their IP addresses or host names are redirected to a page that is specially polished to meet search engines' requirements, but is unreadable to a human being. In order to detect cloakers, spiders often come from fake IP addresses and under fictitious names. Also, users' feedback is collected, and if people too often find that a page's real content doesn't match its declared description, the page is revised by search engine owners staff and runs the risk of being penalised.
Rule 4: Your site must be interesting
Increasing the number of pages included on your site, and the quality of information you place on those pages, increases the probability of getting good links to your pages. Interesting articles, and actual news concerning your business, will attract visitors' attention, and your site will be well-known and spoken of. If you gain a good reputation on the Internet, your commercial success will be almost certain, and the site will promote itself.
Good site structure is also very important. If your site is created with the basic usability requirements in mind, and is categorised well, the users will enjoy visiting it. Every page should be easily accessed from the home page, and plain text links are preferred. Thus, a search engine robot will experience no difficulties whilst spidering your site content, following the links that lead from one page to another.

As you can see, merely having a website or running a company does not guarantee success. The demands of promotion, catering for conditions of your web site or brand recognition, popularity and attracting still more clients must be of prime importance.
We have introduced you to the majority of tools used for the promotion of your business on the Internet. These tools apply the technologies that facilitate searching for desired resources. Evidently, website owners can be discouraged by the multiplicity of web searching algorithms as this demands search engine optimisation and comprehensive spadework. So if you dont think you can cope with this job, it is probably worth seeking a qualified Internet promoter or an Internet promotion company in order to gain good results at affordable costs. You will surely stand high in directories and search engines results and therefore increase traffic and the number of potential clients your business has access to.

________________________________________
* Before HTTP protocol was invented (around 1989-1991) the Internet was just a huge network consisting of FTP servers, and was used as a means of file exchange. There were no websites at all. the first search engines mentioned in the article ran via FTP and similar protocols. Only after Tim Burners-Lee had created HTTP protocol, did we get the World Wide Web, and the Internet acquired its actual shape.
http://gsdtc.org/labhist.htm
http://ieee.cincinnati.fuse.net/reiman/03_2000.html
** The first search robots that supported HTTP.

About the Author
Dmitry Antonoff, 28. I've been with Magic Web Solutions ltd. (UK), Dartford, Kent, as a marketer and an SEO consuntant, since May 2003. I specialise in website promotion, and copywriting. I'm eager to share my experience with the Internet community.
Irina, Ponomareva, 32. I joined Magic Web Solutions ltd. (UK), Dartford, Kent, on March 2003. I've been working as a web master, a developer, and an SEO specialist ever since.

2005-10-26T17:40:00.000-07:00

Appropriate Website Promotion Methods by Irina Ponomareva

Why would you want a site?
Why indeed? The unceasing growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in an enormous number of sites, and new ones show up daily. Why would you want to create more? And what do you think about the widespread opinion that the Internet has been made for evil, and that people may get permanently lost there, breaking their connections with real life and all its virtues?
There is only one way to reply to this. Good or evil dwells inside us, not in the tools intended for everyday use. If the Internet is evil then so is the car, since people meet their deaths under its wheels. Fire, knives, pills and even water find uses in good and bad. It depends entirely on context. So how should we use this phenomenon, still pretty new for the majority of us, to make it work for people, not against them? What can it do for the hypothetical site owner described below?
You are a site owner. What next?
It is by no means hard to become a site owner. A person just has to register his or her domain at any free web hosting service. Respectable enterprise owners prefer a paid hosting, since the domain name will not be a mixture of the trade name of the business and the hosting companys name. Your web site is your virtual business card. From the look and feel of it your visitors will judge how much you respect yourself.
Lets say you have registered a domain: www.myowncompany.co.uk. Youve uploaded some HTML pages presenting your business (lets assume, it is selling mobile phones, second-hand office equipment and labour-saving devices). Your site has been available online for several months, yet nobody calls your office, and nobody sends emails to you to enquire about your goods. Web statistics show that during the last week your site was visited just three times (two of those visits being, most likely, your own). What is going wrong?
Most probably, you have not paved the way to your site. People know nothing about it, so what could induce them to type its URL in the address field of their browsers?
The route to your site runs through search engines. First of all, you will need to inform all the major search engines about your domain nameevery search engine has a web interface intended for this purpose. (We are planning to discuss this aspect in detail in one of our future articles.)
The site must be easily found
Lets assume that all the major search engines have found your site and indexed itwill it guarantee crowds of new visitors coming to your site? Not necessarily. Of one thing you can be sure: your site has lots of competitors, and each of them wants the top position.
That puts forward your next task. Every time the search engine user carries out a search for the keywords for which you want to be found, your site should appear on the list as close to the first line as possible. Thats where search engine optimisation (SEO) comes into play. SEO is a new skill for a new century.
SEO starts from a few simple rules.
Work on your site copy; pick up keywords and key phrases with the utmost care
The visible content of every page on your site (also known as the site copy) is used by the search engine to define the main topic of your page. Your visitor will see the same text, read it (or refuse to waste time reading it!) and decide if it is worthwhile coming again. Your site needs to be helpful for customers. It is important that a pages copy:
clearly describes what the page is dedicated to;
is easily understood; and
is interesting for the target audience.
Of course, the search engine is incapable of estimating how interesting the page is. The nature of your business and the quality of language are not for a search engine to judge. It is, however, capable of detecting the relevancy of the content to one or another keyword or phrase. Thats why you should very carefully pick up words and phrases to optimise your pages for.
The key phrases selected with the use of WordTracker or similar tools should be included in the page copy as often as possible. It is desirable to target not very competitive but comparatively popular key phrases. It is agreed that one page should be optimised for one, two, or at most three key phrases, otherwise all the optimisation efforts will be wasted. The key phrase density will drop, and the search engine will not know which key phrase is the most important one.
Yet it is even more important not to go too far (this rule is general for SEO) and not to yield to a temptation to include the targeted keywords in your copy too many times. Your copy should remain readable and sound natural when read out loud. If your key phrase sounds importunate, then there is a chance that people will not read your page, and that search engines will penalise it for abuse.
Let us get back to our example: www.myowncompany.co.uk. The main topic: selling mobile phones, second-hand office equipment and labour-saving devices. One of the SEO rules reads that you should not describe all these goods on the same page. In each case, there must be a separate page optimised for its own key phrase. And do not forget to find out how popular your key phrase is. You might spend months polishing your content up for second-hand office equipment, and then suddenly discover that people much more often prefer to search for used printers.
http://www.highrankings.com/makingkeyphraseswork.htm
There is no commonly acknowledged opinion as to the optimum page size (in terms of SEO). Some 200 to 250 words is the value accepted by some experienced SEO experts and disputed by others. Your own experience might some day lead you to the right solution. One thing is known for sure: keywords located nearer to the top of the page are considered more relevant (and, consequently, affect the ranking more noticeably) than those found in the last paragraph (the so-called keyword prominence concept).
The importance of your keywords can be increased. Words can be made important by placing them in the title of an HTML page ( tag), in section subheaders ( tags), in hyperlinks ( tag), or simply by highlighting them in bold font ( or tags). The tag is the most important thing to consider. It is worth noting that meta tags such as and , that were specially introduced to help search engines, long ago lost their value as SEO tools. They appeared to be too easy a means of deceiving search engines. For example, Google, the king of search engines now ignores keywords meta tags completely and does not give the description tag much credit. It has been suggested that Google does read them, but only to detect and penalise over-optimised pages.
Build links to your site
Spiders crawl all over the Internet, following the links they find on web pages, and indexing the whole web bit by bit. The more sites link to you, the more big, medium and small spiders will visit your site on a daily basis, and the more authority your site will get from a spiders point of view. Yet it is important to remember that a link from a site that has a high rank on the net and is similar to yours in theme is much more valuable than just any link.
In order to achieve the result, you can choose the simplest way that exists. Lets imagine that you wish your site to have a good position in search results for high quality coffee-grinders, mixers and toasters. Visit the search engine you are targeting and perform a search for the keywords of your choice. You will get an enormous list of sites that match the query. Choose those with better rankings (positioning). Contact the webmaster of a site you have picked up and try to compile an interesting, convincing letter that will explain why your site should be interesting to the visitors of that other site. Offer a link exchange. Your offer might be rejected, especially if the other site belongs to a competitor. But some site owners will agree. It is better still if the anchor text of the link matches (completely or partly) the targeted query. But be careful of that, and do not overuse the anchor text.
Although the reciprocal linking method is now considered obsolete and not very effective, many webmasters still find it useful. So pay attention to the content of your site, and make sure the inbound links appear to be natural. This will be covered in the next section.
Work hard to make your site interesting
The more pages your site contains, the easier it will be to apply to it the main SEO rules and techniques. The more interesting the information on those pages, the more likely it will be that other site owners or webmasters will link to them. Interesting articles, your businesss latest news, FAQ pages and forums will attract a good audience to your site, especially if you actively publish your articles on the Net. Such publications should always contain links to your site. If your articles are informative enough, the information you give is trustworthy, and suggested solutions are reliable, your resource will soon be well known by web surfers. Your business will be talked about and your reputation will benefit as a result.
Make your site intuitive and usable
To be successful on the net, the site should be easily navigated, well structured and categorised and should meet all basic usability requirements. The aim is never to confuse your visitors. Every page should be easily accessed from the home page via plain text links, otherwise a spider will fail to find those pages. If your site has a colourful, funky graphics, rich design, and all the links are implemented via hot images, it is reasonable to duplicate them all as text links (for example, at the bottom of every page). If the styles are handled skilfully, these text links wont ruin the harmony of your design, while your visitors will be grateful for the improved usability, and spiders will find all your pages without trouble. Just make sure you do not yield to the temptation to make those links invisible, as this is one of the commonest SEO errors.

Finally, try to stick to fair competition and not get tempted by unethical, unfair methods that might cause discomfort to Internet users. Let us build the Net together and make it user-friendly, so that it will remain a source of free information that is reliable and easy to access, as well as being the best means for self-education, communication and business promotion.

About the Author
Irina, Ponomareva, 32. I joined Magic Web Solutions ltd. (UK), Dartford, Kent, on March 2003. I've been working as a web master, a developer, and an SEO specialist ever since.

2005-10-25T17:40:00.000-07:00

Inappropriate Website Promotion Methods by Dmitry Antonoff, Irina Ponomareva

The list of dubious means of search engine optimisation lengthens year on year. In theory, of course, we could all employ such means, but there are ethical issues to be tackled. And even if we ignore fair-play principles for a moment, its worth pointing out that cheap, scam-like promotion methods usually look cheap and scam-like, annoy Internet users and have a short lifespan because counter-measures are created.
This article describes misleading, illegal and unethical methods of search engine optimisation, explains why they are wrong and highlights the possible adverse results.
Spam
keyword density
In their naive quests for high positions in search engines listings, some web site owners simply cram as many key phrases as possible into the body text of their resources. However, if a key phrase is mentioned too often in the text (so-called keyword damping), the website may be overlooked by the more advanced search engines. Moreover, site content will undoubtedly be unreadable for visitors.
Nevertheless, few people know what keyword density is optimal or at what point keyword damping begins. Unfortunately, this can mean that innocent web site owners or editors can leave an undesirable content by chance, just because of a lack of attention or experience. To help prevent having your resource rejected by search engines, just keep to the following recommendations before launching your web site.
1.Look through your text once again. Do you see certain words and phrases dancing in front of your eyes? If not, you can pass your text through to the next test. If you do, try reducing the number of sentences, writing alternative phrases or even consider starting again from scratch.
2.Read out the text of your web page to co-workers or friends or ask them to read it to you. Does it sound annoying or amateurish because of excessive keyword density? If not, the page is ready for launching.
Hidden text
Hiding text is another means of fooling search engines, but one that is becoming more futile. Body text is hidden when:
the font is exactly the same colour as, or differs very slightly from, a web pages background colour, or
when it is so tiny on the screen (1 or 2 pixels) that visitors dont see it.
The idea behind the scam is that search engine spiders will read the code that makes up the page but human visitors will not notice the text, or will see it as a detail in the graphic design. So the theory goes, webmasters can place commonly searched words in these unseen areas that will hoist their pages up the search engine rankings, even if the true content has nothing to do with the subject searched for. They think that hiding Britney Spears on their mountain resorts web page will cause an avalanche of visitors and increase sales. Life isnt that simple!
If you put yourself in the users position, youll soon see why this wont work. You wont be too pleased about having to scroll through endless pages filled with absolutely useless content when searching for the resource that you need.
Because the best search engines (i.e., the ones that people actually use) can efficiently resist this kind of cheating, dishonest webmasters will have their rankings reduced or be left off indices, even if the penalty is not instant. Remember also that a search entrys very popularity means that a page thus optimised will be just one of millions of others, further reducing any perceived competitive advantage.
Link exchange networks (link farming)
The Web is by nature a network of interconnected sites supporting one another via hyperlinks. Some search engines use the number of links pointing to a site as a factor in the sites popularity and, therefore, its ranking. For example, there are thousands of pages linking to NASAs website, so it ranks highly and is spidered frequently. As with all relevance calculation methods, this one is open to abuse. In the hope of multiple inbound links improving a websites ranking, web pages, called link farms, are created containing nothing but links to other sites.
However, this method of promotion is quite insecure, for three main reasons:
1.as a rule, such pages contain nothing but endless rows and columns of hyperlinks with no description of the resources, therefore the search value of the link farm itself is tiny;
2.such linking is useless, since pages which contain too many links transfer almost no value to the individual sites they link to; and
3.hardly any visitors are going to click on a site from such a page, as the probability of a successful click on a page full of potential clicks is minimal.
Keep away from link farms. Many owners of popular and well-promoted websites have already got sick of daily emails saying things such as: Ive visited your website, I like it, so Ive placed a link to it and Im waiting for you put a link to mine on your page. The point is that it is the quality of links that is of high importance for modern search engines when ranking a website, not the quantity. Relevance is everything, and search engines are getting better at detecting and rewarding it.
So, what are quality links? The simple answer is links to web sites devoted to related issues. Therefore, it is better to exchange links with business partners, sites with common themes or information portals dealing with problems of a similar business sphere. Also, you should insist upon adding short descriptions of your resources to hyperlinks.
The value of simple reciprocal linking in terms of search engine optimisation has diminished over the last few years. We can suggest another method, which tends to be much more promising: publication and wide distribution of articles that may be of interest to visitors. The articles contain links to sites and certainly attract your targeted audience.
Cloaking
Cloaking is another technology that is widely used by dishonest webmasters. Its effectiveness lies in identifying robots, which crawl around the Web, by their IP addresses or host names. A special doorway page, developed beforehand and polished for SEO purposes but unreadable for humans, is shown to the robot and added to the search engines index, while a human visitor will see a very different page.
However, modern search engines are able to unmask those who specialise in such tricks. For example, a robot can come from an unknown IP address or disguise itself as numerous human visitors and come from different addresses. Moreover, sneaking is encouraged by the managers of some search engines, whereby visitors report that the content of a particular web site found by a search engine has nothing in common with its description on the search engine result page. Then, if a search engines staff discover that a webmaster is employing illegal methods, his or her site will instantly be ejected from that index.

Why Cloaking Is Always A Bad Idea
(by Alan Perkins)
Doorway pages
These are pages specially prepared for search engines and contain a number of isolated key phrases which are designed solely to attract search engines and cover issues completely different from those of the site proper. These pages are often concealed from human visitors with the help of cloaking (as mentioned above), because they contain nothing of interest. Since it is necessary to hide the fact that their content is meaningless, these pages need regular updating. However, programmers who are in charge of development of searching algorithms are constantly looking for new means of semantic analysis of a web page content. It is becoming more and more hard to create a really 'smart' doorway page that would successfully deceive those algorithms.
August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web
The Semantic Web
All this results in a waste of the webmasters time and mental energyenergy that could be better spent on good activities such as optimising and polishing existing web pages and creating new ones with attractive, useful and relevant content.
Multi-level marketing (MLM)
The plan looks so simple. A certain web site raises its ranking in search engines listings due to receiving, say, five inbound links from other sites. Each of these sites aims at getting five links from some other sites, and so on. As a result, the site which is on top of the pyramid inherits value from all descending sites. So the main goal of this kind of website promotion is reduced to merely clambering to the top of this accurate and well proportioned structure. So why is it no good?
First, this scheme needs to be well organised and managed by a person who is in charge of looking after the pyramid, drawing new members and tracing their progress. If he or she decides to take fees for this job it may lead to a conflict of interests. Dragged into the fight for reaching the top of the pyramid, webmasters will have less time for polishing web sites. Thus, the pyramid structure destroys the idea of the natural evolution of the Internet, a principle that is widely speculated when discussing issues of web promotion.
Visit Search Engine Watch and use the following principle belonging to the code of honour of search engine specialists: Keep away from schemes.
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3100291
Clickers
False overstating of a websites traffic statistics is another unfair method of web promotion. It suggests that the resource is very popular among Internet users, although it is actually not so. The aim of this trick is to deceive potential buyers of the website, rather than search engines, because site owners can gain maximum profit selling the resource if they demonstrate high traffic for the website.
The so-called clickers are hired and instructed to do this job. They keep visiting the web site several times a day on a regular basis for a modest fee (or free of charge if the site owner is an undisguised cheater), each visit being recorded by a hit counter. A high stated popularity of a web site will increase its perceived value. Then, when the contract is concluded and the web site finds its new owner, the number of visitors will drop, possibly to zero, as the phantom visits will, unsurprisingly, stop.
Indexing of a website on different servers
In an effort to attract extra traffic, many people register several domains linking to one and the same resource. But nowadays it makes no sense to duplicate web pages with different domain names but identical content, for modern search engines have learned to identify them. It can even result in being removed from indexes.
It is difficult to avoid such troubles and stop a search engine robot from doubting the originality of the content at all web pages exposed to indexing. First of all, the robot sees that the resources are linking to each other and compares their headings, key phrases and content. Pages which look suspicious to it are processed by a special algorithm and deemed duplicated if:
1.they hold outbound links which lead to one and the same resource; or
2.these links are equal to or less than 10 per cent different in number.
Some search engines, for instance AltaVista, also employ this program when checking up their indices revealing pages which were entered there by mistake. Therefore, dont be surprised if you find your duplicated web pages expelled from databases.
Placing of duplicated pages on different servers is also regarded as an unethical way to promote a web site and is best avoided. However, if you find the method essential and are not going to take the foregoing advice, we offer these recommendations:
1.alter the content on your web pages so that they look somewhat different;
2.slightly change headings, the list of key phrases, and the description;
3.make sure that at least 10 per cent of the number of links on your pages is not identical.
Conclusion
Even though there are many legitimate and efficient methods of web site promotion, many people find unethical ones more attractive. Disregarding web surfers interests, they attempt to deceive the search engine itself in an effort to make it place their resources nearer the top of a listing. Most of all, they concern themselves with visitors clicks, thus transferring money to a site owners purse.
Left unchecked, such unscrupulous practices will be counterproductive. The reason? The web will be driven into chaos and cheating will prevail, thus making it a battlefield for intellectual confrontation between crafty webmasters and developers of special algorithms to resist their tricks. As the war is fought, both sides will make small gains which will instantly be swallowed up by newer ideas. In no mans land will be the frustrated users of the Internet, gradually losing faith and trust in the medium and starting to switch off.
We are convinced that it is preferable to work towards better quality, more interesting web pages, polished, usable sites and improved services. The result will be well-deserved brand recognition and insistence, and sites will promote themselves.

About the Author
Dmitry Antonoff, 28. I've been with Magic Web Solutions ltd. (UK), Dartford, Kent, as a marketer and an SEO consuntant, since May 2003. I specialise in website promotion, and copywriting. I'm eager to share my experience with the Internet community.

Irina, Ponomareva, 32. I joined Magic Web Solutions ltd. (UK), Dartford, Kent, on March 2003. I've been acting as a web master, a developer, and an SEO specialist ever since.

2005-10-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

A Tip for Finding Willing, Quality Links by TC Thorn

Google might not dominate the search engine world like it did last year, but it's still a big player and can account for a lot of your traffic. It's no secret that acquiring PageRank is a big part of doing well with Google. I've personally seen my own pages receive huge jumps in traffic after PageRank updates. By now, you probably know PageRank comes from the number of incoming links to your web site; the higher the PageRank of the incoming links, the more PageRank your site will receive.

The problem with link building campaigns is you rarely get out of them what you put in. You're doing pretty good if you get responses from one in four people you contact. In order to make things simpler, people often join traffic exchange programs, or simply post forms on their page and wait for link partners to come to them.

The problem with these methods is you often get offers from sites you don't particularly want to link with. Maybe they're selling something you'd rather not be associated with, or their site is brand-new and sloppily put together, and it's not going to be much of a boost to your PageRank. Now, I'm not saying you should never link to a new site, because today's PR-nothing could be tomorrow's PR 6 or 7. Rather, I just want to offer a tip to help you capitalize on your link hunting time.

Step 1: Do a Google search for your target keywords.
Step 2: Visit the highest ranking sites, and use Google Toolbar to check their back links.
Step 3: Ask for links from the sites that appear in the back links.

Simple, hunh? What this does for you is thus: gets you in contact with people who are willing to exchange links with sites in your keyword area, and perhaps more importantly, gets you in contact with sites that have a high enough PageRank to appear in Google's back links (typically, only PageRank 4 sites and above appear here).

This should help you find the links that can truly help you, and it should cut down on your wasted link hunting time. Now, don't you have some links to find?

About the Author
TC Thorn makes a living from advertising and affiliate programs. This article first appeared at Webmaster Articles. It may be reprinted so long as it is not altered and the link is included.

2005-10-22T17:39:00.000-07:00

Working with the robots.txt file by Jagdeep.S.Pannu

Working with the robots.txt file

What is the robots.txt file?

Working with the robots.txt file

Advantages of robots.txt

Disadvantages of the robots.txt file

Optimization of the robots.txt file

Using the robots.txt file

What is the robots.txt file?

The robots.txt file is an ASCII text file that has specific instructions for search engine robots about specific content that they are not allowed to index. These instructions are the deciding factor of how a search engine indexes your website's pages. The universal address of the robots.txt file is: www.domain.com/robots.txt . This is the first file that a robot visits. It picks up instructions for indexing the site content and follows them. This file contains two text fields. Lets study this robots.txt example :

User-agent: *
Disallow:

The User-agent field is for specifying robot name for which the access policy follows in the Disallow field. Disallow field specifies URLs which the specified robots have no access to. A robots.txt example :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Here "*" means all robots and "/ " means all URLs. This is read as, " No access for any search engine to any URL" Since all URLs are preceded by "/ " so it bans access to all URLs when nothing follows after "/ ". If partial access has to be given, only the banned URL is specified in the Disallow field. Lets consider this robots.txt example :

# Research access for Googlebot.
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /concepts/new/

Here we see that both the fields have been repeated. Multiple commands can be given for different user agents in different lines. The above commands mean that all user agents are banned access to /concepts/new/ except Googlebot which has full access. Characters following # are ignored up to the line termination as they are considered to be comments.

Working with the robots.txt file : -

The robots.txt file is always named in all lowercase (e.g. Robots.txt or robots.Txt is incorrect)

Wildcards are not supported in both the fields. Only * can be used in the User-agent fields' command syntax because it is a special character denoting "all". Googlebot is the only robot that now supports some wildcard file extensions.
Ref: http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html#12

The robots.txt file is an exclusion file meant for search engine robot reference and not obligatory for a website to function. An empty or absent file simply means that all robots are welcome to index any part of the website.

Only one robots.txt file can be maintained per domain.

Website owners who do not have administrative rights cannot sometimes make a robots.txt file. In such situations, the Robots Meta Tag can be configured which will solve the same purpose. Here we must keep in mind that lately, questions have been raised about robot behavior regarding the Robot Meta Tag. Some robots might skip it altogether. Protocol makes it obligatory for all robots to start with the robots.txt thereby making it the default starting point for all robots.

Separate lines are required for specifying access to different user agents and Disallow field should not carry more than one command in a line in the robots.txt file. There is no limit to the number of lines though i.e. both the User-agent and Disallow fields can be repeated with different commands any number of times. Blank lines will also not work within a single record set of both the commands.

Use lower-case for all robots.txt file content. Please also note that filenames on Unix systems are case sensitive. Be careful about case sensitivity when defining directory or files for Unix hosted domains.
You can use this great tool to check your robots.txt from www.searchengineworld.com:

The robots.txt Validator

Please note that the full path to the robots.txt file must be entered in the field.

Advantages of the robots.txt file : -

Protocol demands that all search engine robots start with the robots.txt file. This is the default entry point for robots if the file is present. Specific instructions can be placed on this file to help index your site on the web. Major search engines will never violate the Standard for Robots Exclusion.

The robots.txt file can be used to keep out unwanted robots like email retrievers, image strippers etc.
The robots.txt file can be used to specify the directories on your server that you don't want robots to access and/or index e.g. temporary, cgi, and private/back-end directories.
An absent robots.txt file could generate a 404 error and redirect the robot to your default 404 error page. Here it was noticed after careful research that sites that do not have a robots.txt file present and had a customized 404-error page, would serve the same to the robots. The robot is bound to treat it as the robots.txt file, which can confuse it's indexing.
The robots.txt file is used to direct select robots to relevant pages to be indexed. This specially comes in handy where the site has multilingual content or where the robot is searching for only specific content.
The need for the robots.txt file was also felt to stop robots from deluging servers with rapid-fire requests or re-indexing the same files repeatedly. If you have duplicate content on your site for any reason, the same can be controlled from getting indexed. This will help you avoid any duplicate content penalties.

Disadvantages of the robots.txt file : -

Careless handling of directory and filenames can lead hackers to snoop around your site by studying the robots.txt file, as you sometimes may also list filenames and directories that have classified content. This is not a serious issue as deploying some effective security checks to the content in question can take care of it. For example if you have your traffic log on your site on a URL such as www.domain.com/stats/index.htm which you do not want robots to index, then you would have to add a command to your robots.txt file. As an example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /stats/

However, it is easy for a snooper to guess what you are trying to hide and simply typing the URL www.domain.com/stats in his browser would enable access to the same. This calls for one of the following remedies -

Change file names:

Change the stats filename from index.htm to something different, such as stats- new.htm so that your stats URL now becomes www.domain.com/stats/stats-new.htm

Place a simple text file containing the text, "Sorry you are not authorized to view this page", and save it as index.htm in your /stats/directory.

This way the snooper cannot guess your actual filename and get to your banned content.

Use login passwords:
Password-protect the sensitive content listed in your robots.txt file.

Optimization of the robots.txt file : -

The right commands in robots.txt : Use correct commands. Most common errors include - putting the command meant for "User-agent" field in the "Disallow field" and vice-versa.
Please also note that there is no "Allow" command. Content not blocked in the "Disallow" field is considered allowed. Currently, only two fields are recognized: "The User-agent field" and the "Disallow field". Experts are considering the addition of more robot recognizable commands to make the robots.txt file more Webmaster and robot friendly.

Bad Syntax: Do not put multiple file URLs in one Disallow line in the robots.txt file. Use a new Disallow line for every directory that you want to block access to. Incorrect Robots.txt
example :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /concepts/ /links/ /images/

Correct robots.txt example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /concepts/
Disallow: /links/
Disallow: /images/

Files and directories: If a specific file has to be disallowed, end it with the file extension and without a forward slash in the end. Study the following Robots.txt example :

For file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /hilltop.html

For Directory:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /concepts/

Remember if you have to block access to all files in the directory, you don't have to specify each and every file in robots.txt . You can simply block the directory as shown above. Another common error is leaving out the slashes altogether. This would leave a very different message than intended.

The right location for the robots.txt file: No robot will access a badly placed robots.txt file. Make sure that the location is www.domain.com/robots.txt.

Capitalization in robots.txt : Never capitalize your syntax commands. Directory and filenames are case sensitive in Unix platforms. The only capitals used per standard are: "User-agent " and "Disallow "

Correct Order for robots.txt : If you want to block access to all but one or more than one robot, then the specific ones should be mentioned first. Lets study this robots.txt example :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow:

In the above case, Googlebot would simply leave the site without indexing
after reading the first command. Correct syntax is:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The robots.txt file : Not having a robots.txt file at all could generate a 404 error for search engine robots, which could redirect the robot to the default 404-error page or your customized 404-error page. If this happens seamlessly, it is up to the robot to decide if the target file is a robots.txt file or an html file. Typically it would not cause many problems but you may not want to risk it. It's always a better idea to put the standard robots.txt file in the root directory, than not having it at all.

The standard robots.txt file for allowing all robots to index all pages is:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Using # Carefully in the robots.txt file: Adding comments after the syntax commands is not a good idea using "#". Some robots might misinterpret the line although it is acceptable as per the robots exclusion standard. New lines are always preferred for comments.

Using the robots.txt file : -

Robots are configured to read text. Too much graphic content could render your pages invisible to the search engine. Use the robots.txt file to block irrelevant and graphic-only content.

Indiscriminate access to all files, it is believed, can dilute relevance to your site content after being indexed by robots. This could seriously affect your site's ranking with search engines. Use the robots.txt file to direct robots to content relevant to your site's theme by blocking the irrelevant files or directories.

The robots.txt file can be used for multilingual websites to direct robots to relevant content for relevant topics for different languages. It ultimately helps the search engines to present relevant results for specific languages. It also helps the search engine in its advanced search options where language is a variable.

Some robots could cause severe server loading problems by rapid firing too many requests at peak hours. This could affect your business. By excluding some robots that might be irrelevant to your site, in the robots.txt file, this problem can be taken care of. It is really not a good idea to let malevolent robots use up precious bandwidth to harvest your emails, images etc.

Use the robots.txt file to block out folders with sensitive information, text content, demo areas or content yet to be approved by your editors before it goes live.
The robots.txt file is an effective tool to address certain issues regarding website ranking. Used in conjunction with other SEO strategies, it can significantly enhance a website's presence on the net.

Related Reading : -

A Standard for Robots Exclusion.

Guide to The Robots Exclusion Protocol

W3C Recommendations

Article last updated : 11th March 2004

(c) Copyright 2004 Jagdeep.S. Pannu, SEORank
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This Article is Copyright protected. If you have comments; or would like to have this article republished on your site, please contact the author here: SEO Articles Feedback. We just require all due credits carried; and text, hyperlinks and headers unaltered. This article must not be used in unsolicited mail.
About the Author
Jagdeep.S.Pannu is Manager-Online Marketing, at www.SEORank.com, a leading Search Engine Optimization Services Company.

2005-10-21T17:39:00.000-07:00

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) by Jeff McIntire-Strasburg, Ph.D.

One means of making sure your site receives maximum visibility is search engine optimization (S.E.O.). You must think in terms of search engine optimization from the earliest stages of planning and design if you want to receive heavy traffic from the major search engines. In order to optimize your site, you need to understand how search engines work, how web surfers search, and what elements of your site contribute to successful search placement. While much information (and misinformation) exists about search engine optimization, experts agree that the elements you must focus on are keywords, meta tags and links from other sites.

How Search Engines Work

Before delving into specific elements, its necessary to understand how search engines work. True search engines (as opposed to directories like Yahoo!) use a program called a robot or spider to crawl the web while gathering and indexing the information they find. A searcher receives the results of these crawls when s/he conducts a search. Sounds simple, right? Unfortunately, every search engine (and literally thousands of engines exist) has its own criteria for indexing sites, and further criteria for determining the ranking of sites. Its easy to see why S.E.O. consultants can make a handsome livingits virtually impossible for a single webmaster to know all of the various rules that will optimize his/her site for every engine.

Feeling Overwhelmed Yet?

While a search engine optimization consultant can provide a greater amount of detailed knowledge for an individual web master, experts tend to agree that there are a few rules that almost anyone can apply to optimize his/her site.

First, while thousands of search engines exist, most surfers do their searching on a handful of sites. Yahoo! generally accounts for half of all web searches. While they charge a fee for simply considering a business listing in their directory (currently $299), many business people may find that a reasonable investment, considering the popularity of this portal. Among true search engines, the most popular by far are Google and Overture. Its important to know that many search engines actually get there results from these giants, so applying the rules that work for these two can help get your site listed in many engines.

Optimizing You Site

In order to make sure your site is listed in searches that directly apply to your type of business, its essential to use the best keywords and phrases. Keywords are the words that searchers use to find web sites that will give them the information they want. In order to take advantage of the power of keywords, you must find out what keywords and key phrases are most popular among the searchers you want to attract to your site, so you may want to consider using a service like Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) to find out the words and phrases that searchers are using. Once youve determined this, you want to place those words and phrases at the points in your page most likely to be noticed by search engines. Experts tend to agree that the best places to use keywords are in your page title, your pages copy, and in the sites meta tags.

The page title is likely the most important place to use the proper keywords, as all search engine spiders tend to look at it. Precision is keyuse the keywords that are most likely to bring the right visitors to that particular page. While some consultants suggest using many key words, or many slight variations of key words, or repeated key words, search engines have caught on to these strategies and may actually penalize your site for using such tactics. According to Webmonkey.coms Paul Boutin, its best not to include extra words, such as a company name; using only the keywords as site title will generally bring the best results.

Its also important to use those keywords and phrases in the copy of the page, as spiders do look at this also. Note, for instance, how often I use phrases like search engine opitimization and search engine in this article. Thats deliberate. Keep in mind, though, that search engines have caught on to the practice of loading down copy with keywords to achieve higher rankings, and certain high ratios of keywords to overall copy may actually hurt your placement.

The third place to use keywords is in the sites meta tags, which are part of the coding for the page. Again, its best to use only the words that will bring the best resultsrepetition or overuse of variations can hurt your optimization.

Finally, some consultants will suggest that regardless of your sites content, you always include the most popular overall keywords in your title and meta tags. While this may bring more initial traffic to your site, you have to consider whether attracting searches on Eminem or Spiderman will benefit you in any way. Generally, its best to optimize your site so that you attract those searchers that would actually be interested in what you have to offer.

Link popularity

Another criteria that many search engines use for ranking is link popularity. Essentially, is your site linked from other sites, and are those sites ranked well in their engines? This can be a time consuming process for a webmaster, as getting links on other pages generally involves contacting the owner of that page and asking for a listing or agreeing to a link swap: you put a link on your page to their site, and they do the same for you. Again, dont believe that you can fool the search engines through short-cut methods such as FFA pages, as the engine administrators have caught on to these, also. Also keep in mind that links on other reputable pages account for a high percentage of trafficyou really cant lose by having your site listed on other sites Links pages.

Some Final Thoughts

When optimizing your site for the search engines, its also important to remember that a high ranking in a search doesnt necessarily mean more qualified traffic. As in many aspects of life, presentation is everything. If the listing on the search engine appears clear and professional, youre more likely to receive more of the traffic that will benefit you. Boutin notes that the meta name field in the coding is important in this regard, as some engines use the information in this field for their site description. While you want to use keywords and phrases in this field, do so in a manner that still will make sense to a surfer looking for a site like yours.

Ultimately, search engine optimization involves using tried and true methods of design and writing to make your site user-friendly.

More information:

Boutin, Paul. Search Engine Optimization FREE
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/23/index1a.html
About the Author
Jeff McIntire-Strasburg, Ph.D., is an English professor and freelance business writer. You may contact Jeff at mcintirj@lincolnu.edu

2005-10-20T17:39:00.000-07:00

The Failure of the SEO System. by William Cross

The Failure of the SEO System.

I see people daily preaching about how web site owners need
to pay upwards of $7,500.00 or more for a marketing consultant
who also practices search engine optimization. The reason
given for this is that any SEO can get you top rankings, but
that will not help you sell your products. They preach that
searchers have no trust, they say that getting a #1 position
for your relevant keywords will only bring visitors, not sales.

To an extent this is true. But the fact is, this is said so
you will pay the fee they ask. They know their service, they
know their prospect's mindset, and they do a fine job of
turning you into a new customer.

You know your products or services better than they possibly
could. You know your customers better than they ever could.
This stands true of any industry or business model. Make that
work for you!

Instead of shelling out the dinero, why not sit down and lay
out the groundwork for a plan of action based on what you know
about your business and it's customers. What do they want to
see, how much detail do they want to see, and above all, what
does it take to close the sale.

Once you know all of this, the rest is merely laying it all
out on the web site according to your plan. It sounds easy, and
it really is not, it takes hard work on your part. But you are
not relying on someone who claims that they will research your
business and be expert enough in a matter of days to sell your
product line.

Do not fall for the hype.

Once you have a web site that you are confident will convert
searchers into sales, it is time to make sure you have
searchers finding your web site. These same marketing
consultants will tell you that you need them for this also.
They will tell you that you need to concentrate on the lesser
search terms that will bring in lesser amounts of traffic. They
will tell you that this method will bring you better quality
traffic because it targets the visitor better. Bull! The fact
is these marketers know that they do not have the ability or
the means to target the more competitive search terms and
keywords. They use this method so that they can show you good
results using the lesser keywords, to keep you ignorant and
happy in your newfound traffic. I say ignorant, because they
will not tell you that you could in fact have twice to three
times the targeted traffic if you used someone who was a true
professional.

Professionalism

There are different definitions of a marketing professional,
but for this purpose we are talking about search engine
optimization professionals. There are many who call themselves
professionals, but who will not go after the competitive
keywords and phrases. They are the ones who will tell you it is
better to be happy with less traffic, and thus, less sales.
They do not practice search engine optimization, because they
do not know how, or are not willing to do that much work. The
true SEO will make sure that you get the absolute most that you
possibly can for your money spent.

There are some well published so called professional SEO's
out there that are excellent at promoting themselves. They can
make you think their way is God's way with an almost religious
zeal and grand speeches about what is 'ethical'. One SEO in
particular has so riled people that there is even a web site
devoted to showing people that they are not what they purport
to be, using only facts from their own site and email, and an
open challenge to them to dispute anything said there. To date
that challenge has not been accepted according to the site and
it's also well published author. Is this who you want doing
your marketing?

In summary, watch out for self hype, do not think you have
to pay someone $7,500.00 or more to get less than the best
rankings, and do some research on the marketer you choose to
use. Google searches are often an excellent way of seeing the
real story behind marketers.

About the Author
William Cross has founded a number of internet marketing and
search engine related websites for professionals. One of the
forums he frequents is the #1 ranked
http://www.webworkshop.net/seoforum for 'seo forum' on google.

2005-10-19T17:40:00.000-07:00

Yahoo's Back! by Shawn Campbell

I was all set to write an article predicting the future of search engines, when Yahoo dropped Google and replaced it with its own engine. Now that's big news. In less than twenty-four hours, Google went from about 79% of the market share to about 51%, almost overnight. And what a welcome relief it is too! Being #1 in Google was great, but when you had the misfortune of dropping even a couple of positions you really felt it. Now there will be more stability; if you drop in Google today, your hits from Yahoo will remain consistent.

What is the new Yahoo?

Last year, Yahoo bought the AltaVista, Fast, and Inktomi search engines. The new Yahoo results are none of these. Many people are saying that the results come from a new Inktomi because the results are similar; but the results are also similar to all the other search engines out there. In comparing these engines, it seems to me that Yahoo's results are from a brand new engine. Maybe they took parts and ideas from all the search engines they bought - maybe they even took the best parts - , but whatever they did, the result is something completely new.

Which search engine is better?

I will be comparing Google and Yahoo for the terms "music", "art prints and posters", "Bahamas real estate", "mosquito nets", and "liposuction". The other search engines all hold less than 4% of the market share (except for MSN which uses Yahoo's Inktomi), so I won't be considering them. Here is what I found in the top 10 results for each keyphrase:

Music

Yahoo offers a lot of music resource sites. Information about music from different sources such as magazine, TV and other music news sites are found 6 times in the top 10 results. It also offered downloading and file sharing programs 3 times. The 10th result was an audio player program site.

Google has a lot more diversity. There were 3 music resource sites (but no magazines), one downloading program, one CD store, one radio station (Yahoo radio), one music directory, and the 10th result was an audio player program site. Google also had 2 sites in its top ten that were of no value whatsoever; MP3.com which just has one page stating that they no longer offer the services that they used to (with links to their parent company), and music.com, which is nothing more than an email gathering site for a newsletter (not a single link on the entire page).

Google's diversity is a big bonus, but the 2 spam/junk/useless sites really hurt it. The results? Yahoo 1, Google 0.

Art Prints And Posters

Yahoo offers 6 stores, while Google offers 5. The other links are all affiliate spam with no content whatsoever (just links to stores), with the exception of one of Yahoo's links, which has some biographical content about artists. So Google has 5 spam sites, and Yahoo has 3 and a half.

Yet another round goes to Yahoo.

Bahamas Real Estate

For this keyphrase, I found results between Google and Yahoo to be quite similar. The only differences were sites by actual realtors and sites that were simply property listings. Both types of results are useful, with Google having an edge in realtors. Google had some lower quality sites, but the information was just as good even though they did seem less professional. On the other hand, Yahoo did have one site that was nothing more than a links page from another realtor's site. Big boo boo.

This one goes to Google.

Mosquito Nets

It seems to me that someone searching for "mosquito nets" wants either A) to buy them, or B) to learn about them, so I was expecting to find either stores or information about mosquito nets. Yahoo showed me 6 stores and 2 informational pages. The other results were a search result page (not a good result) and an inner page from a previous result (also not a good result).

Google gave me 7 stores and 3 charitable organizations (one of which was a store as well). The other 2 charitable organizations were a news article outlining what they had done regarding mosquito nets and information about mosquito nets.

So even though I didn't necessarily want the latest news about what a charity did regarding mosquito nets, I think getting the same site twice from Yahoo (not to mention the search result page) is the bigger no-no. Google wins this round.

Liposuction

I expected to find information about liposuction, liposuction organizations and either doctors or centers where you can have liposuction done. What I got was a lot of "how to find a doctor" sites, with a lot of good information.

Yahoo results included 3 sites doubled. This is a problem that killed AltaVista in the late 90's. Hopefully they will have it fixed soon. Other than the 3 doubled sites, the results included 4 informational sites, 2 sites for finding doctors and one poorly written article about the history of liposuction.

Google gave me 4 good informational sites, 2 good "find a doctor" sites, one recent article about liposuction for people in the industry, one site with very poor information one written by a single doctor and one site that was nothing more than a directory.

Google gets this round as well. Overall, it looks like Yahoo needs to fix its doubling of sites and Google needs to clean out some spam (poor sites).

And The Winner Is...

You! Having two good search engines to choose from makes searching that much better for everyone. It also makes getting listings better. It also makes marketing better. It also makes traffic to your site steadier. The only way this could have been worse is if Yahoo's results sucked, and they don't. They seem just as good, if not better, than Google's.

So rejoice, and enjoy a more dynamic world of online searching!

About the Author
Shawn Campbell is an enthusiastic player in the ecommerce marketplace, and co-founded Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc. He has been researching and developing marketing strategies to achieve more prominent listings in search engine results since 1998. Shawn is one of the earliest pioneers in the search engine optimization field.

2005-10-18T17:40:00.000-07:00