A Comprehensive Guide for beginners to Content Writing for Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Copywriting

Copywriting is an art of writing information for various forms of media. It has evolved through time from its early forms in books, magazines and newspapers, Copywriting has again transcended from its usual form and practices into the new internet era; Copywriting as utilized by the Search Engine Optimization business is also known as Internet Content Writing, Web Content Writing, amongst other terms. The various terms of Copywriting shall be used interchangeably throughout this text.

This article will try to tell you about the basics of copywriting and its advanced application on the SEO aspect. This article aims to provide the beginners in the Search Engine Optimization industry, an in-depth but friendly guide to seo content writing, as well as providing the more advanced copywriters with a guide to remind them of the several tricks they might have forgotten about the craft.

This guide shall be divided into the three parts of the copywriting process: the before, during, and after. This is the first part of the guide dealing with the things a copywriter must do BEFORE writing the copy. Succeeding parts shall be posted separately.

Before Writing

Before doing any writing you should first know the purpose why you’re writing that content. Your purpose should be clear and definite so no equivocation of ideas will exist that might confound your readers. Is the writing for sports? Is it for entertainment? Is it educational? These things should be clear on your mind before you write your copy, so a natural flow will exist as you write.

Another thing to consider is to know whom are you writing for and who are the people you wish to convey the message to? Knowledge of your audience will give you many benefits: people with different cultures only respond to a specific approach you use, technical terms would be very trivial when talking to beginners while spelled out and explained details would be very time consuming for experts. The internet is used by a vast network of people and your target may only comprise a very small minority. It is important that you address your target effectively if you want more conversions (making site visitors into customers) on your web site.

About the resources

Knowing the right information will certainly give you the right results. Knowing what people want and what they are searching for will be one of the keys to make it big in this business. One of the things that can help you acquire this information is through case studies, surveys and polls that can be found all over the internet. Most of these studies provide general demographic information about internet users. If you’re lucky enough (since it is discouraged), you might even stumble with information regarding the searching habits of different demographics.

Once you have decided to use particular information from the internet, make sure that it is from a reliable author or source. Incorrect and inaccurate data proliferates all over the internet and it happens that you may be misled by others to use them, so, see to it that the articles or studies you are about to use are made and conducted by certified educational institutions or known private companies so you will not have any problems about their authenticity.

Another effective source of information from the internet are pages which rank high among search engines especially those that are related to yours. Analyze and learn the effective things they have done to increase their PageRank and apply them to your work. You could also check out the pages of your top competitors, you might learn a lot from them but be careful not to copy their stuff as it is since they will be constantly checking out their competition. Copyright guidelines are finally catching up with those who replicate content, ending blacklisted by major search engines.

SEO forums are also helpful in guiding you about the latest trends in the Search Engine Optimization business. Experts usually crowd in these forums to discuss the tricks and trends of the business. Moreover, new updates and trends about Search Engine Algorithms and Technology can be found on these forums so it is highly advisable that you check out those forums. However, the forums might be a little too complicated for beginners as terms often become too technical to understand even by seasoned users.

About the words

Now let us go down to business! It is time to know what are the keywords and keyphrases you will use for your copy! The key words and phrases would be the ones that you will use and try to integrate throughout the whole copy. It would be the bait you place in the hook in order to attract and hopefully catch your potential customers.

First of all, you and your client should brainstorm together (face to face if possible) about the keywords and keyphrases you want to use for the copy. It is important that you brainstorm together so that you will be able to stay true to the brand and have an effective choice for use in the search engine optimization efforts. You could make use of different keyword tools found in the web such as Keyword Discovery, GoodKeywords, WordTracker, Overture, etc. (issues regarding their usability and effectiveness will be discussed separately). These tools can be downloaded or used directly over the internet should you choose to utilize it.

In choosing keyphrases or keywords remember to start with and use popular but “not-so-competitive” terms since it would be very difficult to compete with more established websites if you have just been starting. The above-mentioned tools will help you determine which key words or phrases you could use.

One word keywords are very difficult if not impossible to compete with as it would have a more general scope compared with keyphrases. For example, if you are trying to write content for a company selling educational toys, choosing a keyword like “toys” would be a stupid idea since search engines would give around one hundred million hits for that particular keyword, while changing it into keyphrase like “toys for students” or “educational toys” would only have hits of around five million. This means that the chance that a web searcher would actually go to your website would be 100,000,000:1 under the keyword “toys” while choosing the keyphrase “educational toys” means a chance of 5,000,000:1, greatly increasing your chance of being visited. Besides, customers are more likely to refine their searches since using or typing just one word searches would mean being bombarded with a lot of unwanted information than they need, costing more time and effort.

Your keywords should specifically target (1) the product or service that you are offering and (2) what people actually type whenever they use the search engines in looking for products and services like yours. A good example would be when writing content for a company selling kilns for bricks, you should not optimize for the keyword “kiln for bricks” if most people actually type “oven for bricks” when they are looking for such equipment. It is useless to optimize for the term kiln when most people opt to type oven since a few if none will be looking for the term kiln.

You should also identify and discover various words and terms which are closely related to your keyword or keyphrases. Some key-terms and keyphrases are so intimately intertwined with others that one group associates it with a particular field while another choose to associate it with something else. One good example would be Cosmetic Surgery. Cosmetic Surgery is a medical procedure, so, it can be regarded as something related with medicine and surgery, while it is also correct to say that it is related with cosmetics and beauty. Since the fields of medicine, surgery, cosmetics and beauty are popular fields, optimizing for both the cosmetic and the surgical aspect of the keyphrase Cosmetic Surgery would bring more keyword hits for searches from individuals of both parts of the spectrum.

Another thing to consider is to integrate local terminologies or equivalents of your products or services when optimizing with key words or phrases. An “elevator” in the US would be a “lift” in the UK, a “truck” in the US would be a “lorry” in the UK, and the list goes on. When trying to sell products or services for a huge demographically different society, you should optimize for both of the groups as each would tend to search for the more familiar local term. Better yet, you could create different sites for different demographic groups, replacing particular key words and phrases; enabling you to cater to both.

Moreover, it would be wise to consider placing regional information or regional key words or phrases. Integrating regional information along with keywords and keyphrases enables users who prefer more specified searches to visit your website. You would also benefit from the limited competition because of the more specified search. Most people looking for products and services in the internet would certainly prefer to find what they need locally, so adding local regional information would definitely be of great help to you and your potential client. Another benefit is that you could add another keyword, which is the regional information to your existing key word or key phrase. For example, instead of having just “plumbing services” add “Atlanta” before ‘plumbing services’. This would give you an edge over competitors as it would profoundly decrease your competition.

About the content

Now that you have the key words and phrases you would need its time to plan about the general thrust of the content, on what the content should be like.

Generally, the main idea of writing content is for it to be able to provide useful information for visitors in your site. You are primarily writing for the readers, the human visitors of your site, and about the products and services that you have to offer. Secondary to that idea is to provide the search engines information so they could properly and accurately index your site according to its proper category, so anyone who wants to look for something in particular, through the use of search engines, would eventually find what he needs. In other words, your content should be both customer-oriented and search engine friendly.

In order to do that, you need to plan properly on how to do your copywriting. The whole text should be able to give them what they need and want to know about the products and services you have. Hence, it is highly advisable that you read a lot of information about the subject product or service before you write the actual copy. The goal is to become extremely knowledgeable about the product, so you can explore all the possibilities and play with its strengths and weaknesses and write everything that is needed.

One important thing to remember is to write content that is unique. Copying content is not only plagiarism and cheating but is also a serious offense that could cause painful penalties under existing Copyright laws. More and more Intellectual Property Rights watch dogs are reporting cases of content stealing and have gained some grounds over the years. Major search engines are now penalizing sites which illegally acquire content from other sources. Penalties include permanently putting sites under a blacklist, sort of a “permanent not to contact sites” for crawlers. Lawsuits and cases about web content writing are now increasing day by day, with more countries enacting laws on Intellectual Property Rights. The risks are just too great if you plagiarize and copy content. So make sure that you quote or place endnotes when you choose to use parts of other’s content.

And lastly, your content should be written in plain, simple, and natural language so as not to destroy the natural flow of words as you write. Highly technical words and terms should be reserved for highly technical discussions, and should be discouraged for everyday internet use.

About the mood

You might be wondering what a section about mood is doing in a seo copywriting article, well, it certainly has a LOT to do about content writing. The mood of the reader would certainly affect the way he views a certain product or service. If you did not properly take care of the emotional side of your customer with your writing, consider him gone. Individual moods are affected by a lot of factors; although primarily it is internal, external factors could also affect his mood significantly and luckily what that individual reads is one of them.

First of all, you should be ‘in the mood’ for writing. Good copies are mostly written by writers who are either inspired or enlightened with what they are about to write. Content writers should make sure that they are in this special mood because the consequence of the opposite would be a very bad copy. A reader is also likely to be ‘drawn’ by an emphatic copy written superbly which would eventually end up making the reader get what you are offering.

One thing you could do to achieve that is to utilize emotional appeal to the reader. Try to integrate personal articles like “you”, “we”, and “us” more often; try to get your visitors as involved as possible. Avoid being too passive as it would prevent you from establishing a connection or a relationship with your target reader.

Keep your readers or customers engaged with your site. Make them think and interact by asking questions, giving riddles or trivia. All these create an air of friendliness for potential customers, and once you’ve made them comfortable reading, they are more likely to respond positively to you. As much as possible make them do all their transactions within your site, give out all the details about what you are offering so that can know everything they need to know. Trying to get online visitors ask questions and product or service information offline will be too cumbersome for them so be as accessible as possible.

Liam Anthony,Ghost Writer/Copy Writer,www.seoglobalpro.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Liam_Anthony

Search Engine Optimisation Copywriting – the Top Ten Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

In the last few years, search engine optimisation copywriting in the UK and around the world has changed beyond recognition, as has the way sites are optimised by their design, coding and links. However, the biggest changes have been with SEO copywriting. Some of the same old mistakes are being made, and with all the changes to the ways search engines rank sites, fresh pitfalls are appearing. This article looks at some of the most common mistakes and omissions in SEO copywriting – and how to avoid them.

1. Too much time on the look, not enough on the content. If, like me, you’re in the business of SEO copywriting, this is a perennial bugbear. The content of your website is more important than its design, and it’s going to be even more key in the future. Search engines rank websites for what’s in them. You’re almost certainly paying your site design people a great deal of money – but you’re wasting it if your copy is an afterthought and few people visit your website. Invest time and money in copywriting. Better still, talk to your copywriter while the site is being designed, rather than ask him or her to fill in the empty spaces afterwards.

2. Lack of keywords. Keyword selection is the most critical single factor in search engine optimisation. Yet all too often businesses ignore it. If you’re a blue chip company it rarely matters – people are going to come to your site anyway. But any small or mid-size company ignores it at their peril. If your site isn’t optimised in the way it’s written (not just in the way it’s coded) then you’re losing out on customers – big time.

3. Optimising keywords that no-one is searching for. Your company may pride itself on its great service, but it’s pointless to optimise ‘great service’ or anything along those lines, as no-one will be searching for it. (In fact it can be positively counter-productive, as some search engines treat ‘service’ as a stop word and mark down accordingly.) You can find a free search engine query tool at www.overture.com, or you can pay for a more detailed and comprehensive one at www.wordtracker.com. These will tell you which terms have been searched for recently and how often.

4. Optimising keywords that everyone is searching for. You need to be specific in what you optimise. If you’re selling jewelry (or ‘jewellery’, as it’s spelled in the UK), then it’s no use simply optimising for the word ‘jewelry’. Be more specific. Even phrases like ‘antique jewelry’ or ‘beaded jewelry’ are searched for many thousands of times a month. Find out what people are searching for and see what you’re up against by going to a couple of search engines and entering those terms. If your competitors are all optimising for a specific term, it’s probably best to avoid it if you can find an alternative that will still bring in the traffic.

4. Alternate spellings and endings. Think laterally, think creatively, think how others would spell or term something. Are you going to optimise for ‘jewelry’ or ‘jewellery’ – or both? How about ‘website’ or ‘web site’? – both versions are common. And so on. Don’t try and cover all the bases – but do try and check them against what’s being searched for and how many times and in what context you’ll find that keyword on the internet. That way you’re more likely to make the best choices.

5. Keyword density. The general rule of thumb is to try and get them in headings or subheads, and early on in the copy. Two to five times overall on a page, with an absolute maximum of three different keywords per page is what to aim for. Some pundits recommend keyword density of up to 5%. This is almost certainly too much, and some search engines will actually penalise you for it.

6. Clumsy use of keywords. Beware of your copy becoming awkward if you try and repeat your keywords too often:

If you’re looking for wonderful widgets, this is the best place for wonderful widgets. Our wonderful widgets are better than any other wonderful widgets you’ve heard of…”

Copy like that puts off anyone reading your website. And nowadays, when keywords are crowded in like that, it’s putting off the search engines as well.

7. The amount of text. Opinions vary as to exactly how long a page should be. Your homepage should be no longer than around 250 - 300 words, but you can easily double that if needs be for other pages. All pages should have clear headings, subheads, and short paragraphs. A page could be as little as 100 words. What it won’t be, if it’s optimised correctly, is a single paragraph of 30 -50 words.

8. Missing the extras. Text links within your site and anchor text pointing to it are important elements of search engine optimisation copywriting. Text links between pages in your site make it easier for search engine spiders to travel across the whole site. You should therefore always look to include them within your site, unless your site is too complex for it to be practicable, in which case your site needs a hierarchical structure. Anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink – as in the following:

“Effective search engine optimisation copywriting is essential for getting the most out of your website.”

Of course, the anchor text that helps your site up the rankings is actually on a hyperlink from an outside site – but good anchor text is text that’s written in the right way, with the correct keyword. So get your copywriter to suggest anchor text with which outside sites can link to yours.

9. Doorway pages that aren’t proper pages. Doorway pages are – or were – simply pages within your site that were optimised so that very often they were the first pages that visitors reached. However, the phrase ‘doorway page’ nowadays tends to refer a page that has very little to do with a site, but is merely optimised for a couple of key phrases and aims to immediately redirect the visitor to the site proper. There’s nothing wrong with optimising several pages on your site – in fact it’s generally an excellent idea, as it allows you to cover many keywords. Just make sure that each optimised page has original content, is a genuine part of your site, and is shown on your sitemap.

10. Resting on your laurels. This is perhaps the most common failing of all. A properly optimised site should get you up near the top of the rankings. But you’ll need to keep working on it if you want to stay there. Every day around 7 million items – documents, pages whatever – are added to the internet. Your competitors are going to be choosing keywords and optimising websites of their own. One way to develop and keep high rankings is with relevant links. Another is by adding original content, such as articles or newsletters – so keep your copywriter busy.

Peter Wise is an advertising copywriter, website copywriter and SEO copywriter based in London, UK. He also writes direct mail, brochures, newsletter articles and press releases. You can reach him at +44 (0) 7767 687524. For further information, please visit http://ideaswise.com/.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Pete_Wise

Using Free-Reprint Articles as a One-Way Link Back Strategy

UNDERSTANDING THE IMPORTANCE & CHALLENGE OF GETTING INBOUND LINKS

With the advent of Google's Link Popularity algorythms, people began to aggressively hunt for the almighty inbound links.

It is hard to get links back to one's site using freebie strategies unless you want to spend your days posting comments on guestbooks and setting up your own doorway pages on alternate sites.

Google made this a bit tougher. Google started using a second algorythm called PageRank. PageRank is a system that has been designed with the intent of valuing the importance of a page in the Link Popularity calculations. No longer does the sheer number of links to a site matter. Instead, one must look at the quality of the websites that link to their site.

This is the reason why posting comments on guestbooks barely gets noticed. These are not quality links.

In this age of multiple domains on a single webserver, Google has taken this into account too. If one has a hundred domains on the same server, pointing back and forth to each other, this is of no real value either as far as Google is concerned.

What is important to them is when sites that have been given a PageRank of at least 4, and those sites point to another site that does not reside on the same I.P. address or webserver. As far as Google is concerned, this is usually another unrelated person who is pointing to a valuable resource. That is why this type of link has a better overall value to Google.

Anything else is looked upon as an attempt to skew the search results without good cause.

Google realizes that we all have the need to promote ourselves, and that we will do so with our own selfish interests at heart. Our own selfish interests do not necessarily reflect the interests of Google's search users. So, Google works hard to weed out our selfish attempts at shoddy self-promotion.

THE CONCEPT OF RECIPROCAL LINKING

When webmasters realized the complexities of the Google ranking systems, they began to understand that they needed to go off of their own server to find those all-important inbound links.

Always looking for the easy way, many webmasters turned to reciprocal linking strategies. Those who are selling these concepts are doing so on the premise that it is an easy and inexpensive way to build inbound links.

To get the reciprocal link, you are supposed to go to the search engines and find a site that looks like it has content similar to yours, but not a direct competitor.

Next, you should check to see that the site you are looking at has a PageRank of 4 or higher.

Then, you are to put a link to that site on your own domain.

Once you have completed the above steps, you are to contact the webmaster that owns the site you just linked to and to tell them nicely that you have placed a link to their site, and would they be kind enough to put your link on their website?

TIP: My site clearly states that "I do not do reciprocal linking, so do not ask." Believe it or not, I get a half dozen requests every week for reciprocal links. Not only do I know that they did not read my policy on reciprocal links which is linked to from my contact page, I also know that they did not look at my site when they are telling me that my site is related to theirs. ;-)

Read the site policies at the web sites you visit, and you might be able to save yourself some time.

A week after you have done your linking campaign, you must go back to the sites you contacted to see if your link is on their site. If it is not, then you take their link off of your site.

THE LIE OF RECIPROCAL LINKING STRATEGIES

The people who sold you on reciprocal linking policies have usually done so in order to sell you an ebook or their services. Often, they will tell you that it is a simple and inexpensive way to improve your inbound links and link popularity.

They are selling a lie, and let me tell you why.

Most sites that will agree to exchange links with you will do so only if they have a PageRank of less than 4, or if your PageRank is equal to or higher than theirs.

If your site or their site has a PageRank of less than 4, then the other has not really gained any real value from the exchange.

It takes a lot of time to find people who will link to you, and it takes even more time to validate that the link remains active.

Google has caught onto the reciprocal linking schemes too and has started to penalize sites that provide two-way links to each other, although the penalty is not as drastic as other penalties can be.

I still have a few two-way links on my own domains, but that is fine, as they are not for the benefit of the search engines, but for the benefit of my visitors.

Personally, my time is much too valuable to play the reciprocal linking game. That is something that you should consider as well.

How long does it take you to score one reciprocal link of any real value? How much is your time worth to you? How many dollars do those link exchanges add to your bottom line?

In the end, it is about money, and how much money you are generating for the time spent. After all, your time is worth something too, right?

Treat yourself right. How much is your time worth? $10 an hour? $20 an hour? $50 an hour? Now, calculate how many hours you have spent on getting one reciprocal link that actually sent you one visitor.

Let's suppose that your time is worth $20 an hour. And let us further suppose that it takes you 3 hours to get one quality link to your website. That link has cost you $60. Now how much traffic does that link send you?

If your reciprocal linking efforts cost more than they return, then they are a fool-hearty adventure.

THERE IS A BETTER WAY

You should not be wasting your time generating reciprocal links. Instead, you should be expending your time and resources generating one-way inbound links.

Imagine this. Suppose you could send out an advertisement for your business that had a link back to your website included in it. And suppose you would not have to beg or pay big bucks to get your ad published in ezines or on websites. And then suppose that the publishers and webmasters who saw your ad would be clammoring to put it into their ezines or on their websites, at no additional cost to you.

Can you imagine that being possible?

Well, it is possible. And it happens everyday.

Consider this. You are reading this article right now because you are hoping that I can teach you something about how to make your business more profitable.

And, you are reading this article in an ezine or on a website right now.

Here is the deal. I am attempting to teach you how to do something or about something. It does not matter what I am teaching, so long as the topic of the article appeals to your interests right now, and it is of interest to the people who, like you, are most likely to visit my site and buy my services.

The ezine publisher or the webmaster read this article and felt that it could be helpful to you and your goals. So, they published it and made it available to you for your review.

When you reach the end of this article, you will see a nine line by 65 character wide advertisement for my own business. In short, it is called the "Resource Box" or the "About the Author Information".

If I did my job well by attracting the interest of publishers and webmasters and selling them on the idea of publishing my article, and then attracted your attention to this article, I will see the benefits of this endeavor.

If at the conclusion of this article, you feel educated or entertained, then you will be more likely to read my Resource Box and visit my website. Perhaps, you might even decide that you would like to use my services to promote your own business. ;-)

If the publisher or webmaster who printed this article is following the rules of publication, then you will be able to click on the link to my website in the Resource Box.

Please note that I have not included a single link in the body of the article. Links inside an article should be directed only to third-party websites that provide a resource that will support the context of your article.

For example, my favorite location to be published is: http://www.YourMembership.net It is one of the few ezines I read weekly, and boy howdy, I am tickled everytime they publish an article of mine. Especially when you stop and realize that their subscriber base consists of more than 700,000 web marketers and that it costs over $2800 to buy a full-run ad there. I was published there again in April of 2005. ;-)

YOU CAN DO THIS TOO

I tell people all of the time that they can write articles too. Many don't believe me, but it is true. Everyone has something that they can teach to someone else.

If you honestly feel that you cannot write your own articles, then pay someone to write them for you. If you can write your own basic and specialized knowledge down on paper, you can hire others to edit it into an article that will be published.

When you have an article of good quality, you can either submit it yourself to publishers and webmasters as a free-reprint article, or you can pay someone who specializes in that activity to do it for you.

IN THE END...

In the end, you will have your own articles in circulation that will be published in ezines and on websites. Ezines can send you a sudden flood of traffic, and websites can deliver the all- important one-way inbound links that you need to grow your link popularity and to bring potential customers to your website.

And guess what else? Once your article gets into circulation as a free-reprint article, it can continue to be republished for years to come, generating new traffic and sales for years to come.

Contrary to the results that are being generated from reciprocal linking, free-reprint articles will actually permit you to earn more money from your promotions than it will cost you to run your promotions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Bill Platt is the owner of http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com
When you are tired of the struggle of the link building process, it might be time to consider our "Links And Traffic" services.
When you are ready to employ more Natural Linking Strategies in increasing your link popularity, "Links And Traffic" can help.
When you are ready for your links to actually generate click-through traffic, we are here.
This is not a link rental system or a reciprocal linking scam. We Guarantee our results.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bill_Platt

What's RSS and How Can It Help You

RSS is a very important tool that lets you easily syndicate the content on your website to readers all over the world. It can help you drive visitors to your website, increase ad revenue, expand your website's reach, and move to the top of the search engines.

First of all, what is RSS? RSS was developed in 1997, and originally stood as an acronym for Rich Site Summary, although it is now known as Really Simple Syndication. It is coded in XML format, and allows you to publish the information on your website in a format that usually includes a headline, a short description of the article, and then a link to the article on your website.

There are a few formats in which your RSS feed can be published. People who use an RSS reader can subscribe to your feed through a software program on their computer. They will be notified when there is a new article, and they can read the headline and a short description, and then they can click the link to your site to read the rest. This can also be done online, and is supported on websites such as My Yahoo, Google, MSN, and AOL, just to name a few. Anybody with a website can also publish your content, by using a RSS feed aggregator. An aggregator can be in the format of PHP, or Javascript, which are just two of the most popular. Then the headline and short description will be display on the website, and then their visitors will click through onto your website.

RSS is coded in XML format. This is the type of coding that it is done in. But do not worry, you do not need to be familiar with XML in order to publish an RSS feed. You simply need to look at a template, and then base your own off of it. On XML.com there is a sample RSS feed which you can use: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html.

So now once you have your RSS feed created, you will need to promote it. The easiest way is through your website. You've probably seen little orange buttons that say RSS or XML on them, and then if you click on them you get a page filled with code. The code that you see is the XML of an RSS feed. You can use these buttons on your website to link to your RSS feed. There are also other buttons that can be used to automatically add your RSS feed to websites such as My Yahoo, Google, etc. You can find most of these buttons at this website: http://www.twistermc.com/shake/RSS-index.php. You can search the web to find out how to properly link these graphics to sites such as My Yahoo.

While linking to your feed off of your website will get your regular visitors to subscribe to your feed, you will not be able to reach out to a larger audience and help people find your website that otherwise wouldn't have. A great way to reach out to larger audiences is by submitting your feed to RSS directories. There are many RSS directories on the web where people can add their feed for free, and then people looking for them can find them quickly and easily. You can search for "RSS directory" on Google, and manually submit to each individual directory, which will work but can be very tedious. There is a program that I use, however, called RSS Feeds Submit. It will automatically submit your feed to over 80 directories and RSS search engines. It costs $29.95, but if you feel that you can afford it, I'd recommend it to you. Click here to go to their website.

RSS is great, but how can it help you in the search engines? While it would usually take weeks and weeks to get indexed and crawled by Yahoo, there is a secret using RSS that can get you indexed in under 48 hours. It is actually quite simple to do. You must have a Yahoo account, which you probably already have. Sign in, and go to my.yahoo.com. Once you see the My Yahoo page, find and click on "Add Content" right under the search box. Once you are on the next page, find and click on "Add RSS by URL." Then type in the URL directly to your RSS feed, so it should probably end in .xml. A page should come up confirming that it was added, and previewing what it looks like. This will add your site to the top of Yahoo's spider's queue. Every time that you update your RSS feed, you should ping Yahoo to let them know that is has been updated, and then they will recrawl it. You can ping Yahoo by typing the following address into your address bar, replacing URL-TO-YOUR-FEED to the URL you used to add the feed originally: http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=URL-TO-YOUR-FEED. From my own experience, I have learned that frequently updating your feed and pinging Yahoo will result in your site moving up in the rankings.

Now you know the wonderful ways that RSS can benefit your website. I wish you the best of luck in implementing RSS into your website, and hope that you are successful.

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About the author
David Amherst has created and authored many websites, including:SEO Resources and Information

6WY Web Directory

Daily Web Hosting News

Affiliate Marketing Tips and Information

What Are Doorway Pages?

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com
Author: Danny Sullivan

Webmasters are sometimes told to submit "bridge" pages or "doorway" pages to search engines to improve their traffic. Doorway pages are created to do well for particular phrases. They are also known as portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names.

Doorway pages are easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. This page explains how these pages are delivered technically, and some of the problems they pose.

Low Tech Delivery

There are various ways to deliver doorway pages. The low-tech way is to create and submit a page that is targeted toward a particular phrase. Some people take this a step further and create a page for each phrase and for each search engine.

One problem with this is that these pages tend to be very generic. It's easy for people to copy them, make minor changes, and submit the revised page from their own site in hopes of mimicking any success. Also, the pages may be so similar to each other that they are considered duplicates and automatically excluded by the search engine from its listings.

Another problem is that users don't arrive at the goal page. Say they did a search for "golf clubs," and the doorway page appears. They click through, but that page probably lacks detail about the clubs you sell. To get them to that content, webmasters usually propel visitors forward with a prominent "Click Here" link or with a fast meta refresh command.

By the way, this gap between the entry and the goal page is where the names "bridge pages" and "jump pages" come from. These pages either "bridge" or "jump" visitors across the gap.

Some search engines no longer accept pages using fast meta refresh, to curb abuses of doorway pages. To get around that, some webmasters submit a page, then swap it on the server with the "real" page once a position has been achieved.

This is "code-swapping," which is also sometimes done to keep others from learning exactly how the page ranked well. It's also called "bait-and-switch." The downside is that a search engine may revisit at any time, and if it indexes the "real" page, the position may drop.

Another note here: simply taking meta tags from a page ("meta jacking," as Infoseek calls it), does not guarantee a page will do well. In fact, sometimes resubmitting the exact page from another location does not gain the same position as the original page.

There are various reason why this occurs which go beyond this article, but the key thing to understand is that you aren't necessarily finding any "secrets" by viewing source code, nor are you necessarily giving any away.

Agent Delivery

The next step up is to deliver a doorway page that only the search engine sees. Each search engine reports an "agent" name, just as each browser reports a name.

The advantage to agent name delivery is that you can send the search engine to a tailored page yet direct users to the actual content you want them to see. This eliminates the entire "bridge" problem altogether. It also has the added benefit of "cloaking" your code from prying eyes.

Well, not quite. Someone can telnet to your web server and report their agent name as being from a particular search engine. Then they see exactly what you are delivering. Additionally, some search engines may not always report the exact same agent name, specifically to help keep people honest.

IP Delivery / Page Cloaking

Time for one more step up. Instead of delivering by agent name, you can also deliver pages to the search engines by IP address, assuming you've compiled a list of them and maintain it.

Everyone and everything that accesses a site reports an IP address, which is often resolved into a host name. For example, I might come into a site while connected to AOL, which in turn reports an IP of 199.204.222.123 (FYI, that's not real, just an example). The web server may resolve the IP address into an address: ww-tb03.proxy.aol.com, for example.

If you deliver via IP address, you guarantee that only something coming from that exact address sees your page. Another term for this is page cloaking, with the idea that you have cloaked your page from being seen by anyone but the search engine spiders.

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How To Avoid Search Engine Spamming?

Search Engine Spamming also known as Spamdexing (spamming and indexing) is the practice of deliberately manipulating web pages to obtain high search engine rankings. Spamdexing is used to mislead search engines indexing program and to gain ranking position which they do not deserve.

Search Engine Optimisers are always on the look out for techniques to make their site rank well. They end up using spam techniques either knowingly or unknowingly simply to boost their search engine rankings. Improper use of SEO will sometimes result in site's getting penalised. With Google's pilot program now on, most webmasters are redefining their SEO methods followed so far.

The spam tactics mentioned below could either block search engine robots form crawling your site properly or get your site penalized in certain search engines/directories. Make sure you are well aware of these tactics before designing or optimising your website.

10 Search Engine Spam tactics known -

1. Hidden keywords

2. Keyword stuffing

3. Use of unrelated keywords

4. Hidden Links

5. Redirects

6. Doorway Pages

7. Unreadable tiny texts

8. Link farms

9. Cloaking

10. Mirror sites

Hidden Keywords

Hidden keyword also known as invisible text is the most common form of spam practised on websites. Hidden text or content will not be seen by human visitors and are only meant for the search engines spiders. The purpose of using hidden text is to increase the keyword density of the webpage and also to trick the search engines into indexing the text on the page. Hidden texts are used through HTML format and also using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Invisible text through HTML is done by stuffing in keywords which have the text colour same as that of the background colour, therefore making it invisible to visitors eyes. Hidden text through HTML is easily detectable by search engines these days with the help of search engine filters.
Hidden text through CSS is slightly different compared to method used through HTML, in CSS the colour of the text is stored in external CSS file. Search Engines find it difficult to crawl external files, but are in the process of enhancing their filters to identify CSS spam.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword Stuffing is implemented by adding block of keywords/keyphrases onto the webpage. Keyword stuffing is practised to increase the density of targeted keywords, thereby tricking the search engine robots into considering the page to be more relevant for the search phrase.

Search Engines easily detect keyword stuffing and therefore it would be wise to refrain from using keyword stuffing. On practising keyword stuffing your site will be blacklisted and banned from the search engine index.

Use of Unrelated Keywords

Unrelated keywords is the practice of using keywords on the webpage which are not related to sites content. This method is followed to trick a few people searching for such words into clicking at their sites link.

Generally people will quickly leave such sites when they do not find the information they were searching for.

Hidden Links

Hidden links are used to increase the link popularity of the site. These links are hidden from the reach of visitors and are used to fool the search engines. They are usually in the form of small hyperlinked dots.

Redirects

Redirection is the process of taking the user to another page without his or her intervention by using META refresh tags, CGI scripts, Java, JavaScript, Server side redirects or server side techniques.

Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are low quality web pages that contain very little content, stuffed with targeted keywords and keyphrases. Doorway pages are designed to rank highly within the search results. A doorway page will generally have "click here to enter" in the middle of it.

Unreadable Tiny Text

Tiny text spam consists of placing keywords and phrases in the tiniest text imaginable all over site/webpage. Most people can't see them, but spiders can and will ban such sites eventually.

Link Farms

Link farms are webpages created solely for search engine ranking purpose that consist of long list of unrelated weblinks on page.

These type of pages/sites are penalised by most search engines.

Cloaking

Cloaking is the practice of dynamically generating keyword rich content to the search engine robots, while providing different content to the actual visitors. By cloaking the user will not be able to see the code of the page shown to the search engines.

Most search engines have devised methods to detect cloaking and have banned sites which have followed such an activity.

Mirror Sites

Mirror sites are identical sites hosted on different domains/website address. By mirroring sites one can build hundreds of duplicate pages with entirely different urls. Intention of adopting mirror sites is to quickly populate your sites pages and also to increase inbound links.

Large websites often provide mirror sites in different countries so that their users can download from a closer server in hopes of achieving faster download speeds. While this is a perfectly legitimate practice, many search engines consider it “spam” because the number of pages is doubled, the content being identical.

Most Search Engines do not appreciate duplication of sites, but some of them are vulnerable to such technique as yet.

How to avoid Spam ?

Search Engine marketeers are forced to follow spam techniques due to many reasons, there maybe branding restrictions, site navigation demands, immediate sales increase, style guidelines and more. With thousands of seo providers out there, the competition to get high rankings in search engines has become intense. For many of these Search engine optimisation providers quality is a secondary issues, empty promises are made to win the trust of clients.

Search Engines value content rich sites and that is the only key to success. The much needed resources for good Search Engine optimisations are developers, content writers and skilled SEO's. In most cases the company cannot afford to provide these resources due to financial deficiencies, resulting in Search Engine Spam. Unethical SEO or search engine spam originates due to mixture of greedy website owners and search engine spammers.

Each Search Engine has its own distinctive Spam penalties. Google greys out the page rank of the penalised site, providing a zero page rank. Sometimes the entire site is banned from the search engines. Once you are banned you may have to apologise and resubmit your site for re-inclusion in search engine directories. It will take a couple of months before you see your site listed again in the search engines.

The only way to avoid this is to hire a good SEO who does not offer top 5 search engine rankings, but optimise your site with well written content and user navigation. With good optimisation practice you will find your site eventually listed in the top search engine positions and gain long lasting quality traffic.

Prema S is Search Engine Optimisation Executive for UK-based internet marketing company, Star Internet Ltd. Cients of Star Internet benefit from a range of services designed to maximise ROI from internet marketing activities. To find out more, visit http://www.affordable-seo.co.uk

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Prema_Sunder

What is a Robots.txt File?

Search engines look at millions of web pages to come up with search results. They do this with what we call "search engine spiders." This makes sense - spiders crawling around on the Web. But another word for them is "robots" because they are simply unmanned programs gathering data automatically. I can't help but picture them as the characters in the new animated movie "Robots."

In the beginning, these robots spidered every page, every file, attached to the Web. This caused problems for both the search engines and the people using them. Pages that really aren't worth looking at, such as, say, header files to be included in all pages on a site, were being spidered and showed up in search results. Have you ever searched on Google and gotten a partial page as a result?

The solution was for Google and other search engines to begin looking for a robots.txt file in the root folder of each site (http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt) to determine what should and shouldn't be searched. This is named, "The Robots Exclusion Standard." This simple text file, created with Notepad or other simple text editor gives you complete control by telling the robots not to spider certain folders in your site. The result is happier visitors who come to your site from search engines and get only full pages that you want them to see, not partial, test or script pages you don't want them to see.

Let's look at some examples to get started:

This allows all spiders to spider all pages on your site. The * is a wildcard that means “all spiders.”

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This is the opposite of the above example. This one tells all spiders to NOT spider your whole site. You might want this if you have a test site, for example, that is not live yet.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This example tells all robots to stay out of the cgi-bin and images folders.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/

This example tells only the WebFerret robot to not spider the page ferret.htm. It’s only an example. I have nothing against WebFerret. The user agent code for Google is googlebot.

User-agent: WebFerret
Disallow: ferret.htm 

It is important that the file is a simple text file – do not use Microsoft Word to create it. And be careful of how you type – it must look exactly like the above examples, with caps only for the first letter, just the right spacing, etc. A poorly done robots.txt file could harm your site more than help it. For a cool online robots.txt file validator, go to http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi.

As an e-commerce consultant for over three years, and Web designer for over ten, Chuck Lasker has been helping individuals and organizations utilize the Internet in almost every arena. Chuck's e-newsletter and blog, The MerchantHowTo.com Report, at http://www.MerchantHowTo.com, is free and popular amongst e-store owners.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Chuck_Lasker

How to Prevent Duplicate Content with Effective Use of the Robots.txt and Robots Meta Tag

Duplicate content is one of the problems that we regularly come across as part of the search engine optimization services we offer. If the search engines determine your site contains similar content, this may result in penalties and even exclusion from the search engines. Fortunately it’s a problem that is easily rectified.

Your primary weapon of choice against duplicate content can be found within “The Robot Exclusion Protocol” which has now been adopted by all the major search engines.

There are two ways to control how the search engine spiders index your site.

1. The Robot Exclusion File or “robots.txt” and

2. The Robots <> Tag

The Robots Exclusion File (Robots.txt)

This is a simple text file that can be created in Notepad. Once created you must upload the file into the root directory of your website e.g. www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. Before a search engine spider indexes your website they look for this file which tells them exactly how to index your site’s content.

The use of the robots.txt file is most suited to static html sites or for excluding certain files in dynamic sites. If the majority of your site is dynamically created then consider using the Robots meta Tag.

Creating your robots.txt file

Example 1 Scenario

If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to all search engine spiders and make the entire site available for indexing. The robots.txt file would look like this:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

Explanation

The use of the asterisk with the “User-agent” means this robots.txt file applies to all search engine spiders. By leaving the “Disallow” blank all parts of the site are suitable for indexing.

Example 2 Scenario

If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to all search engine spiders and to stop the spiders from indexing the faq, cgi-bin the images directories and a specific page called faqs.html contained within the root directory, the robots.txt file would look like this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /faq/

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /faqs.html

Explanation

The use of the asterisk with the “User-agent” means this robots.txt file applies to all search engine spiders. Preventing access to the directories is achieved by naming them, and the specific page is referenced directly. The named files & directories will now not be indexed by any search engine spiders.

Example 3 Scenario

If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to the Google spider, googlebot and stop it from indexing the faq, cgi-bin, images directories and a specific html page called faqs.html contained within the root directory, the robots.txt file would look like this:

User-agent: googlebot

Disallow: /faq/

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /faqs.html

Explanation

By naming the particular search spider in the “User-agent” you prevent it from indexing the content you specify. Preventing access to the directories is achieved by simply naming them, and the specific page is referenced directly. The named files & directories will not be indexed by Google.

That’s all there is to it!

As mentioned earlier the robots.txt file can be difficult to implement in the case of dynamic sites and in this case it’s probably necessary to use a combination of the robots.txt and the robots tag.

The Robots Tag

This alternative way of telling the search engines what to do with site content appears in the section of a web page. A simple example would be as follows;

In this example we are telling all search engines not to index the page or to follow any of the links contained within the page.

In this second example I don’t want Google to cache the page, because the site contains time sensitive information. This can be achieved simply by adding the “noarchive” directive.

What could be simpler!

Although there are other ways of preventing duplicate content from appearing in the Search Engines this is the simplest to implement and all websites should operate either a robots.txt file and or a Robot tag combination.

Should you require further information about our search engine marketing or optimization services please visit us at http://www.e-prominence.co.uk – The search marketing company

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andrew_Allfrey

Stuck In the Google Sandbox? The Sandbox Solution

What is the Google Sandbox?

It’s the mysterious, possibly non-existent web purgatory where millions of sites languish without rankings, visibility, or traffic.

How Do You Know if You’re Stuck in the Sandbox?

Here’s a rough set of criteria for you.

• Your site is indexed and appears with the proper title, snippet, and url (www, or no www whichever you picked) – type site:www.yoursite.com into Google to check this.
  
• Your site has PageRank (use the google toolbar, or nichebot.com to find this)
  
• It is regularly crawled, and the cache dates are newer than 10 days
  
• On your keyword, you rank in the top 20 for allinanchor, allintext, and allintitle. To check this, type, e.g. allinanchor: and see if you’re in the top 20.
  
• You do not rank within the first 1000 places for the keyword the site was designed for

Does the Sandbox Really Exist, or is it Just the Google Algorithm?

This is a big controversy. Everyone has a different opinions.

Don’t listen to guys who handle bluechip companies - they optimize older, high PR sites. It’s your everyday mainly-new-sites webmaster who knows this problem intimately. In fact, all the big sites need to do is place the keyword in the title and they're on the first page. This gives them an unfair advantage not unlike what the “media elite” has enjoyed for decades.

Regardless of whether the sandbox is a separate phenomenon from the algorithm, the degree of prejudice against new sites has hurt quality of Google’s search results. This is especially true with products and topics both new and urgent. The bigger sites may not be covering it, but searchers end up there without high quality answers.

The common wisdom now is that if you’re looking for new websites, go to MSN or Yahoo instead. Neither of these sites is using this kind of filter. Many websites rank in the top 10 (for their targeted keywords) on these two search engines, yet are nowhere to be found in Google.

Why Would Google Do This?

Google frowns upon SEOs who try to overly influence ranking, so they needed to find a way around SEO factors to deliver quality results. So they’d look for signs of SEO in websites, e.g. how consistent the addition of backlinks is, and how repetitive (vs. natural) the anchor text of backlinks is, and they consider the age of the site and its backlinks.

Redesign Penalties

Similarly, websites that have made the mistake of too comprehensively redesigning their look, content, or navigation have been shocked to find that they get penalized for this updating. Google seems to prefer a “frozen in time” or “moving like molasses” kind of internet. But to be fair, this is something that had to be included to beat spammers who were buying old websites and refueling them with keyword spam.

Why Do You Get Sandboxed?

Some sites have gotten out of the sandbox in a week, while others can take up to a year or more. No one knows if any one contributing factor gets you out sooner rather than later. Some point to the age of inbound links, or the frequency with which your site acquires them. Some say that getting too many inbound links too quickly appears artificial, and is flagged as spam. But others argue that Google can’t know how fast a site should acquire links. A website that received national news coverage, for example, could acquire hundreds or thousands of links in a day.

It’s likely that no one outside of Google fully understands how the sandbox works. The problem has been noticed and discussed for nearly 2 years, and no one has given a satisfactory answer. What’s crystal clear is that Google has made it so complex that it cannot be reverse engineered.

How Long Will You Be Making Sand Castles?

The delay seems to vary anywhere from four to 11 months. Since we don’t know exactly upon what and to what degree the filter depends, it’s likely a different magic combination for every site- and this fits with webmasters’ experience. So keep your head down, develop content, get inbound links, and eventually you’ll get out.

Some suggest that when you come out of the sandbox, you are not fully free. They notice a “rationing” or gradual increase in traffic from Google. In the meantime, older sites may rank better than you, regardless of the quality of their look, feel, and content. Deal with it. Keep your head down and keep working.

Another wrinkle: some webmasters suggest that sandboxing can occur at the page level, not simply at the site level, and that it is the bigger money/traffic keywords that get sandboxed. Again, this could simply be due to the level of competition on that keyword, as the entire site is not sandboxed if you’re getting rankings and traffic from other keywords.

Is There a Way to Trick the Sandbox Filter?

Some webmasters have talked about finding cracks in the algorithm… and they mainly involve backlinks. For a while, there was a lot of linkspam on blogs, but everyone – Google, bloggers, and blog providers – have cracked down on that exploit.

The real sandbox solution is not a trick - unless you define everything done by the SEO-aware as “tricky”. The answer is to grow your content and backlinks naturally over time. Don’t look for the quick buck, the quick ranking, or the easy way out. Go back to basics and build websites that people can use and enjoy. Exchange links with quality websites.

To avoid frustration, I’d suggest, if web building is what you do full time, that you begin a new site every month or two – eventually, if you’ve worked consistently on all of them, you’ll have one after another emerging from purgatory and flourishing in the rankings.

Since 1999, San Diego SEO Consultant Brian B. Carter, MS, has reached more than 2 million readers online. His most popular site ranks in the top 1% of all major websites. Brian's second book, "How I Made $78,024.44 in Six Months Using the Newest Secrets of AdSense and Overlooked Keywords" will be available in October, 2005 from his website, Ranking High on Search Engines

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brian_Carter

Strategies For Submitting Your website to web Directories

Webmasters like you and me are always on the lookout to enhance the link popularity of their sites. One method of doing so is to seek out authority sites in your niche – sites that are widely known on the Internet (through the sheer number of back links) and have been around for some time (think more in terms of several years). Unfortunately, such websites are often at a Page Rank of 6+ and as such, link exchange or text link ad placement is very, very expensive.

Luckily, there is a cheaper alternative. You can use web directories to not only enhance your search engine visibility (through increased link popularity), but by targeting niche categories and using sponsored listings where necessary, you can get a big jump in your traffic as well.
So, let's get started.

What is a Web Directory?

A web directory is a collection of links broken down into relevant categories. Think Yahoo! and their directory, the Open Directory Project or even the Google Directory (which, incidentally, is pulled from the ODP). At its most basic level, a web directory is a collection of bookmarks made available to the public. In other cases, like Yahoo, it is a professional resource for people actively looking for information.

To get listed in such a directory, you can either get listed for free (which might take a while), or in many cases, pay a one-time fee to have your website reviewed and entered in the directory. One major exception is Yahoo, which charges a recurring fee for its commercial listings, and we'll look at that later.

The Benefits of Being Listed in a Web Directory

In theory, there are two main benefits of being listed in a web directory:

- Increased link-popularity due to a one-way link from a highly-respected resource.
- Increased traffic due to being listed in a directory that is searched by many people every day.

In reality though, these benefits are directly related to how popular the directory is itself, and how much money you have paid for your listing. Of course, if the link is for free, there is nothing to worry about.

But if you are paying for submission, you need to know some very important facts.

Link Popularity
As far as link-popularity is concerned, you need to factor in several variables:
- The Page Rank of the directory
- The Page Rank of the category page on which you are listed
- Where you are listed on the page
- The number of competing websites on that page
- If there are other websites in your niche that can offer you the same conditions for the same price or less (very, very important).

The last point is very important from the cost/benefit angle. A web directory, while being a hub itself, is NOT a niche website or an authority site. Even within categories and sub-categories, the lack of valuable content means that web directories are, at the end of the day, link pages and nothing more.

Where directories win out is the fact that they require one-time fees. In contrast, authority sites (or most websites with a Page Rank greater than 5 or 6) tend to use text links as a source of revenue, and thus charge monthly fees. A directory listing then becomes a much better option (but only for link popularity).

More Traffic

Directory listings are also used as traffic building opportunities. How this works is that many directories are searchable for their visitors, so that users can look for information. In theory this is great – you can get lifetime traffic for just a nominal payment, but you should not expect a sudden deluge of traffic from just one directory listing. Here's why:

Most directories, apart from the top twenty or so, are usually used for link-building and not pure searching. This means that while people may use GoGuides or Yahoo for regular searches, you should expect that the smaller directories are mainly for link-popularity, and plan your investment as such.

Many directories offer listings based on an alphabetical ordering, or a first-come, first-serve ordering. In both cases, your website has quite a big chance of being lost out in the noise.
Directory-search algorithms differ greatly. Some directories, like JoeAnt, base their search on keyword relevancy (which makes it more of an exercise of stuffing your directory listing with keywords rather than making a good website), while others take a more "editorial" approach by factoring in editor ratings. And still, many directories display sponsored listings first, reinforcing the adage that even on the Internet, it's your advertising budget that talks, and not necessarily the quality of your website.

After you factor in the above points, you realize that there are only a handful of web directories where it is a definite benefit to "pay" to be listed. And even then, you cannot just rely on just being listed – sponsor listings get much more exposure. But before we discuss these dozen or so web directories, I'd like to tell you how you can make sure your website is accepted.

How To Get Listed – An Overview

Getting listed in a web directory is a function of three things:

Time

It takes a certain amount of time before an editor can review your website and approve (or reject) your request. This is usually anywhere between a week to almost never (in huge web directories like Yahoo and Dmoz). You can reduce this to within a week by using the paid listing option.
Money

Apart from Dmoz, the big directories usually require a nominal payment for your website to be listed. While you can calculate the benefit of such a listing from reading the previous section, know that usually there are several listing options, which for the better services (that give your website more directory visibility) obviously cost more.

Quality

In some cases (very rarely nowadays), directory inclusions can be rejected due to the poor quality of a website. Maybe the editor considered that your website was not 'useful' enough (meaning it had little or no useful / original / any content), or sometimes, there may be moral issues (although editors are urged to abide by directory guidelines and not personal beliefs). If rejected, you will almost always receive feedback (you might have to ask for it) on how to improve your website.

In earlier days, quality was a big issue. Today, it is still a major concern for top directories like Yahoo, but this is more to separate the truly atrocious from the rest rather than to separate the best from the rest.

Each web directory has their personalized criteria, but there are two crucial elements to getting listed:

Paid Inclusions – Apart from Dmoz, and some directories where you can sign-up to be an editor, the top directories require payment – anywhere from $15 to $299.
Website Quality – By this I don't mean design; I'm talking about having truly useful information – even if your website is a commercial website, simply putting up a bunch of affiliate links will not count as a quality website.

The Big Guns
Yahoo and Dmoz are the two biggest directories on the Internet, and it's only fair that I talk about how to get listed on them individually.
Yahoo
A listing in Yahoo's directory has direct benefits:
Google – and perhaps other search engines as well – give your website an added importance if your website is listed in the Yahoo directory.

Yahoo is the portal of choice for millions of users. This makes your potential target market at least in the hundreds of thousands, even for obscure niches.

To get listed in the Yahoo directory, you have to access Yahoo Directory Submit and work from there. You will be required to open a Yahoo account, if you don't have one already. The review process will cost $299, and is no guarantee that your website will be listed.

However, if you have a useful website, and follow the guidelines detailed by Yahoo, there is no reason for your website to be rejected.

The Open Directory Project

Dmoz, or the open directory project, is a directory that rivals the reach of Yahoo. Why? Because directories like the Google Directory and many others are powered by the results from Dmoz. This gives a listing in the ODP a very high premium.

However, because a listing in Dmoz is essentially free, there is very little you can do about the time factor. Many websites that are submitted are never indexed, and that happens mainly due to a lack of time.

On the other hand, quality websites that are added into their relevant categories are almost always accepted, so make sure you follow their guidelines.

Instructions for submitting the Open Directory Project can be found here: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

Resources
Getting listed in Yahoo and Dmoz is the bare minimum for any website looking to establish themselves at the top of their niche. And if you're looking to move beyond the big two and move on to second-tier directories, here's a quick list.

Directories
Editorial Note: The author failed to provide links to the directories below so we took the liberty of adding them. Hopefully, we got them right.

Find Web Designers - multiple paid options
Portal Boost Directory - non-profit website – free, commercial website - $15
Around The Web - $15
Index Unlimited - multiple paid options from free to $99.
GoGuides - $39.99 or $69.95
Data Spear - $39.99
This Is Our Year - $19.95
Browse8 - $35
Uncover The Net - Multiple paid options, $39 one-time to $29/month
Rubber Stamped - $25
Joe Ant - $39.99
Best Of The Web - $39.95

Directories of Directories

In addition, there are several directories that are focused completely on directories (you can find similar listings by looking through Yahoo or Dmoz).
Directory Archives
Complete Planet

A directory listing is, in most cases, useful only for the link popularity. In such scenarios, if you can find better deals on authority sites in your niche, then you should go for them. However, a directory listing is cheaper (one-time versus monthly payment), and with the big directories like Yahoo, Dmoz and GoGuides, it can also bring you reasonable traffic.

As always, remember that directory listings form a small part of your overall online marketing strategy. If you don't have the budget for a Yahoo listing, don't sweat it – focus on other forms of marketing, and come back to it when you can afford it. Directory listings are important, but only when you are looking to squeeze every possible drop of search engine placement out of your links and your website.
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About The AuthorArticle by Brad Callen. Get your free guide on getting top search engine rankings! http://www.seoelite.com/7DaysToMassiveWebsiteTraffic.htm

Beginner SEO Checklist

Every webmaster is concerned as to what SEO techniques should be followed to gain a maximum search engine rating and exposure. Wouldn't it be nice to have a concrete checklist of such items? The following is my effort to create a comprehensive system of simple SEO techniques that with time will guarantee a top ranking for your site.

1. Select a list of realistic keywords

First, let me explain how the keyword selection process works. The tool I highly recommend on using is a Keyword Selector Tool from Overture, notable feature of which is ability to see keywords or keyword phrases that are most popular and bring the largest number of visitors. When selecting your keywords, keep the following in mind:

• Highly ranked keywords are already taken

A search for SEO as a keyword returns 74002 as an estimated number of times keyword SEO was searched last month. SEO Company is second with 14271. Googling SEO returns 30,000,000 URLs with SEO Chat and SEO Today ranking first and second. You can imagine number of Google referrals these two sites get!

• Target low-medium traffic keywords

Performing the same Overture link analysis, I can see that at the bottom of the list are keywords such as web site seo and web seo with 562 and 536 searches respectfully. This tells me that these keywords are not yet competitive and it would make sense to optimize for them.

As you can see, less competitive keywords have a greater potential of bringing more traffic. So be smart about picking your keywords, avoid highly competitive ones, but also don't settle for the rock bottom.

• Be specific when selecting keywords

If possible, select keywords that are specific to your site. As an example, select Honolulu SEO company as a keyword phrase rather than SEO company. This will greatly narrow down your site's focus and will contribute to a higher Search Engine relevance.

2. Incorporate keywords in your Title tags

Search Engines place high importance on what you have in your Title tags. In fact it's so important, that Google lists search results by Title tags. You can see your search queue bolded in each item. It's very important that every page on your site contains a title, every title contains a keyword or a keyword phrase, and your content matches the idea behind your Title. More on that last one to follow.

3. Optimize your content for selected keywords

Content is king on the Net and Google prides itself for bringing you the most relevant results. So here's a list of must-do content optimization techniques.

• Place keywords in H1, H2,... tags

This is the next important item search engines like to take a peek at after your Title tag. Obviously all headers should be enclosed by H1 tags and all sub headers by H2 tags. Ideal situation is to have keywords in your Title tag match those in H1 or H2 tags. H3, H4, and so on are also relevant, but they are not as highly stressed as their lower-numbered brothers.

• Use keywords in your anchor text

When linking to a different page, use a phrase with your keywords as anchor text for a link. For best results, I highly recommend using keywords that appear in Title and Header tags of the page you are linking to.

• Separate your keywords from the rest of content

A great technique to keep in mind is to have keywords bolded and/or have them in larger font, and/or even a different color. Perhaps employ all three together. Think of how you can do that with your Header tags.

• Move more important keywords toward the top of the page

Google loves this one. Since most hotspots of a site are located at the top, this tells search engines that your website is in fact about ideas behind keywords and not spam. Utilizing this technique together with the one right before will be a pretty powerful SEO move on your part.

• Interlink pages like crazy

Not only will this technique allow Search Engine robots to index your site properly, it will also contribute to your relevance. Don't forget to keep anchor text and keywords in mind when doing so.

4. Create a robots.txt file

Robots such as Googlebot come to your page and the first thing they look for is a robots.txt file that contains a list of instructions. Robots.txt should be located in the root directory of your site and using it, you can specify which pages you want indexed, which ones you don't, which robots you want indexing your content, which ones you don't. The list goes on. In this article I will assume that your goal is to have all bots index all your pages. Open up that Notepad and begin writing some code.

<span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;"><div style="text-align: center"><i>User-agent: *</span>

<span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;">Disallow:</i></div></span>

This code snippet allows all bots to index your entire site. If you want to take full control of robots.txt, I highly recommend reading a full set of instructions at SearchEngine World.

If you don't feel like writing a robots.txt file, you can use the following meta tag:

This tells robots to follow the links from this page to get more pages.

5. Create a Sitemap

Sitemaps are great for letting Search Engines know where to look for new pages. You should make sure that every page is reachable via links on your site and you'll have no troubles getting indexed by robots. Remember that content is food for robots and they are pretty hungry. If you haven't done so already, you should take advantage of Google's Sitemaps program where you manually tell Googlebot which pages are indexable and how often they are updated, which brings me to my next point

6. Keep your content fresh all the time

You will not get indexed if Search Engines stop visiting you and you will not rank highly if you stop getting indexed. Google and other Search Engines love fresh content. This is part of the reason why certain blogs are outperforming major websites. Keeping content fresh can be as easy as incorporating RSS headlines on your pages or as time consuming as adding a blog to a corporate website.

7. Acquire relevant backlinks

To gain importance, you need important sites to link to you. Of coarse to have that done, you need to be useful enough to get a backlink. In either case, .gov or .edu backlinks are jackpot. Google boosts you up the rankings in a matter of days, depending on how often Googlebot crawls your site. There are a few black-hat SEO techniques to get .gov and .edu backlinks, but I won't get into them here. This is purely white-hat SEO. If you are interested though, shoot me an e-mail and I'll do my best to educate you.

Anyway, try to get sites in your niche to link to you. They should be optimized for similar keywords as yourself, and links should have anchor text that contains your site's keywords.

8. Get older and wiser

Google naturally ranks older pages higher than their younger competitors. Reasoning behind that is obvious I think. There are techniques such as purchasing an older domain name, but I don't recommend spending your money on that. Google's current algorithm also monitors the number of times domain name has changed owners and incorporates that into determining rank. My best recommendation is

9. Be patient

When it comes to Google or any other Search Engine, patience is the key. Factors like Sandbox have some part in webmasters' irritations. It all boils down to determining how trusted your site is. Backlinks play a major role. In this case, you might acquire a single backlink from a well ranked site and fly up the rankings, while tens of backlinks from lower ranked dot-com's will barely wiggle your toes.

Most importantly remember, it takes time for Google to index the Web. Billions of sites are updated daily and they all need to be crawled. A few extra incoming links can shorten the wait period by a lot, so that should be your goal for the next few months while you patiently wait. Now on to the final point.

10. Don't cheat the bots

You worked so hard on building content, optimizing your pages, researching keywords, and reading SEO techniques. Don't go on and waste all of this just by spaming sites with links (comment spam on blogs), over-stuffing content with keywords (please, people are actually reading you!), or hiding text (blending your keywords into the background just for bots sakes). I don't want to go into all black-hat techniques here, you get the idea. The point is that simple misdemeanors like that can get you banned from Google or any other Search Engine. After spending so much time trying to get in, it would suck to get kicked out, wouldn’t it?

Ignat Drozdov is an SEO working in Washington DC, specializing in new business launches in Europe and Asia. Ignat is also an editor of BlogSEO.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ignat_Drozdov

Get a top 10 ranking without paying a cent

If there's one thing that Google loves, it's content. Done right, a content rich website is almost guaranteed to rank highly. But how to get that content? You can write it yourself, but that takes a lot of time. You can pay an SEO copywriter to write it for you, but that takes a lot of money. If only there was another option...



What if you could get your content for free? And not just a little bit of content; a lot! What if you could get an almost unlimited supply of keyword rich, expertly written content, specific to your subject matter, absolutely free of charge? Would you snap it up and upload to your site in an instant? Of course you would! Well here's the good news: you can! Read on to find out how you can get a top ten ranking in the search engines without paying a single cent...

Yes, content gives you a great ranking

Content is king. This is widely acknowledged as fact, but if you need further convincing, consider the following two points:

• Point 1 - In Google's own words, one of the keys to a high ranking is to "create a useful, information-rich site" (from "Google Information for Webmasters").



• Point 2 - Google insider, codenamed 'Google Guy', advocates a list 26 steps to building a high ranking site. Step 5 of the list says, "build one page of content and put online per day at 200-500 words" (from Brett Tabke's "26 steps to 15k a Day", advocated by Google Guy in a WebMasterWorld QA session).

But why does content give you a great ranking?

I won't go into any further detail about IF Google loves content. I will, however, briefly explain WHY. Google's love affair with content is based on two key attractions:

1. Google loves sites with a lot of content because it assumes they provide a lot of useful information. And remember, that's the whole reason Google exists - to help people find useful information. The more helpful Google's results, the more traffic (and revenue) it gets.



2. Google loves sites that have a lot of links pointing to them because this means other webmasters hold your site in high regard, and Google assumes this means the content is useful. And naturally, if you create a useful site, other webmasters will link to it because this makes them useful to their visitors (thereby developing site loyalty), and they gain credibility and authority because they're associated with you.

So how can you get free content for your website?

Three words: 'free reprint articles'. There are hundreds of thousands of people out there writing high quality, helpful, informative articles on virtually every topic imaginable, then giving these article away to any webmaster who wants to publish them on a website. In exchange for the article, the author asks only that you retain the author bio at the end, complete with all links (e.g. "Glenn Murray is an SEO Copywriter and Article Submission Specialist...).



To find free content for your website, simply visit any one of hundreds of 'article banks' on the Internet such as Ezine Articles, Go Articles, or Article Blast. Browse or search for the subject you're interested in, then take the article(s) for free. There is absolutely no charge. Some of these sites will even send a regular stream of articles direct to your website (using RSS).



Alternatively, you can sign up to any number of article distribution lists and get articles delivered direct to your email inbox. Again, it's absolutely free! Some of the better known distribution lists include Article Announce, Free-Content, and Free-Reprint-Articles.



TIP: The article banks and distribution lists mentioned above are just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds more - just do a search for "free reprint articles", "article submission", "article submission site", "submit article", "article submit site", "free articles", or "free content". You may even find a site or list which only deals in articles relating to your particular subject matter.

Why is it free?

Why are these authors giving their articles away? Because it helps the author's own search engine ranking. It's a promotional activity known as 'article PR'. As explained above, Google loves sites with lots of links pointing to them. Every time their article submission is published, the author gets another link to their website. In fact, if the article is really good, it may be published hundreds of times. And each time, it's another link to the author's website. Put simply, article submission is a writer's free pass to the top of the search engines. (In this sense, the "PR" in article PR stands for PageRank.)



Furthermore, like traditional public relations, article PR also conveys a sense of authority because your articles are widely published. And because you're proving your expertise and freely dispensing knowledge, your readers will trust you and will be more likely to remain loyal to you. (In this sense, the "PR" in article PR stands for Public Relations.)

How do I know if the quality is good?

It's a process of natural selection. The better the article submission, the more often it will be published, so it's in the author's interest to write and submit articles of the highest quality. Of course, this doesn't always happen, but in most cases, you'll be reviewing the articles before you post them anyway, so if you discover one that's not up to scratch, don't use it.



In time, you'll become familiar with the authors who consistently put out good quality content - you may even find enough of them that you don't need to go looking for content from anyone else...

Where do I put the free content?

Most people put the articles in an 'Articles' or 'Resources' section on their website, but you can put them anywhere you like.

How much free content should I use?

As much as you want or as little as you want. It all depends on your needs and the needs of your audience. If your audience expects that at least some of your site is original content, then give it to them.

But what about the duplicate content issue?

It's not an issue!



There's a lot of a talk about how Google penalizes duplicate content. The theory is that when the majority of the content on two separate webpages (on different sites) is the same, the one with the higher PR will be shown and the other one will not.



Whether or not this theory is true is still a hot topic in search engine circles, but regardless, it doesn't affect people publishing free-reprint articles. When you publish the article, just make sure you have unique content around it. Generally, it's enough to have your own unique introduction to the page (which may be common to all pages), and your own navigation elements, headers, footers, sidebars, logos, images, etc.

Conclusion

Free reprint articles are a great way for you to achieve a high ranking. And you don't have to pay a cent! So what are you waiting for?


Happy reprinting!

* Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter, website copywriter, SEO copywriter, and article submission and article PR specialist. He heads copywriting studio, Divine Write, and is a director of article PR company, Article PR. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.DivineWrite.com or http://www.ArticlePR.com for further details, a FREE SEO eBook, or more FREE reprint articles.

How to use keywords to improve your ranking in search engines.

The importance of keywords
Keywords or key phrases you choose will determine how your site is positioned in the search engines. It is always better to have lots of pages each focusing on a small group of keywords. This will give them more relevance to each individual page.

For example if your site is about shoes you may have lots of different types of shoes.
Your index page should have a menu leading into each of the different categories of shoes.
You might have a page for sandals, one for platform shoes as well as stilettos, court shoes and flat heel shoes.

Choosing keywords

First you have to think like your customer. What would they type into a search engine if they wanted to find the products you are selling.
Use phrases as well as single words. Often someone looking for a product or service will type in several words. For example a customer may want to buy a shoe with stiletto heels. They may type in "stiletto heel shoe", "black stiletto" "stiletto heel","stiletto high heel" or "high heel shoe"

Brainstorming keywords.

Start by thinking of as many keywords associated with your site as you can. To make it easier there is a free tool for this which can be found at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
It will give you the number of times this word has been searched for in the last month. This will also give you a guide to the popularity of the keyword.
Try looking for similar sites to your own and viewing the source code. This will give you ideas for keywords that your competitors are using. Viewing the source code is easy, just right click the mouse somewhere on the page and click on view source.

A good idea is to open a file in wordpad or other text editor and call it "keywords" then if you find words or phrases relevant to your site copy and paste them into your file. You can then view them offline and even print the page out to study it. This can give you ideas for keywords you may not have thought of.

When you have made a list of keywords relevant to each page you will then need to check the supply and demand if you want an edge over your competitor.
You will already know the demand of each keyword the next thing you need to do is to take a sheet of paper or use a spreadsheet on the computer and make 3 columns naming them keyword, supply, and demand.

In the first column list the keywords that have the highest demand. Then in the supply column type how many times it has been searched for.
Lastly in http://www.Altavista.com or http://www.Google.com type in your keyword surrounded by quotation marks like this "stiletto shoes" and see how many sites come up. They will list the number of sites with that keyword in it.

Go through your list, and see how many have a large demand and lower supply. Of course the idea is to have as many large demand and low supply keywords as possible.
Optimise your site by creating theme based,keyword focused pages for each category of shoes or whatever it is that you are selling.

This will greatly increase your chances of getting a higher ranking in the search engines.
Just concentrate on a couple of keywords in each page.

The title meta tag

The title tag is THE most important part of your webpage. It must appeal to the search engines and also the visitor to your site. The title of your page is used as the link to your site by the search engines and is visible to the reader.

Use your most important keywords in the title. Make the title between 15-20 words in length.
The title must be compelling for people to want to click through to your site.
Dont ever make the mistake of leaving the title tag blank.
Not a good idea if you want an edge over your competition!!
Every page on your site must have a keyword focused title.

The description meta tag

The description tag is also very important and some search engines display it as a summary of your site. Use some important keywords here but dont repeat them more than 3 or 4 times as it could be seen as spamming.

Keyword tag

This tag is not as important to search engines as it once was, but you should still use it to list your keywords.

The alt tag

This tag is used to describe images and is useful to the visually impaired.
If an image takes a long time to load the alt tag will appear first.
Add keywords to this tag as part of the description.

The main body of text

Place emphasis on your keywords in the first paragraph of the main text, and repeat them several times in the rest of the page. As each page is theme based the keywords will be relevant,and will appear naturally in the body of the text.
You will greatly increase your chances of getting your site in the top positions of search engines if you follow these ideas.

You must however regularly register all your pages with each of the main search engines to make sure the pages are still there as they can suddenly disappear, or drop down from a number 1 position to number 201!!
Normally about once a month is enough.
You can use a site submitter to make this a lot easier.
A good one that I use is http://selfpromotion.com or another one is http://www.submit-it.com
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About The Author
Kathy is an artist and webdesigner for small businesses. She has designed sites for other artists to showcase their work, and has her own online business. Kathy has written several articles on promoting an online business. Visit her site at http://www.healthandbeautytowealth.co.uk. healthytowealth@aol.com

7 Powerful Ways to Get One-Way Inbound Links

It’s no secret that having links pointing to your website is very good for search engine rankings, and gives more ways for human visitors to find your website. So, how do you get one-way inbound links to your website? Well, there are numerous ways, and I am going to focus on seven of the most effective techniques.

You probably already know about link exchanges as great way for getting links to your website. However, with link exchanges, you have to give a reciprocal link back to the website that is linking to you. In this article I am going to show you how to get links to your website without giving a link back.

Ok, here are seven powerful ways for getting one-way inbound links:

1) Content – Packing your website full of useful content is one of the best ways to get inbound links. When you have a lot of content other webmasters will naturally link to you because your site will be valuable to them and their visitors.

Some examples of good content to add to your website would be; free articles, tools, tips, and resources related to your website theme. You could also have a blog that you update regularly with fresh content.

2) Testimonials – A big trend on the internet right now is adding testimonials to websites. The site owners typically get the testimonials from their site visitors and business customers. In exchange for the testimonial they usually give a link back to your website.

Every time you come across a great website, or have a good experience with a purchase, send a testimonial to the website owner. If they decide to publish your testimonial you will get a link to your website. After a while these links will add up to a significant amount.

3) Online Directories – There are hundreds of online directories that accept website submissions. This is a very good technique for getting one way inbound links. Many of the top directories require you to pay for inclusion or provide a link back to their directory. You can give the link back if you want, or pay if you have the extra money. However, there are also numerous directories that will accept your website without payment or a link back.

All you have to do is find the ones that accept free submissions and you will get your one way inbound links. You can find quite a few directories, and some other great information about submitting to directories at http://www.directory-pages.com/

4) Articles – Writing articles is one of the best techniques for getting one-way inbound links to your website. Many webmasters are looking for more content for their websites and Ezines. You can provide them with that content by writing articles and submitting them to websites, Ezines, and article directories.

In return for your effort you can put a little blurb about yourself and/or your business, with a link to your website, at the end of the article. You will rack up a very high amount of inbound links to your website by utilizing this technique. I have done it many times with a lot of success.

5) Free E-book – You can write an e-book and offer it for free in exchange for a link to your website. You can also put links to your website and other affiliate links in the e-book. Putting the links in the e-book will increase your website traffic and affiliate profits.

You are probably thinking that you can’t write an e-book. Well, yes you can! It doesn’t have to be some killer piece of work that you spend months writing. Instead, you can just make it a collection of your favorite articles, resources, and tools related to your website theme. As long as it is useful to your visitors they will gladly link to you in order to get it.

6) Blogs – There are actually a few ways to get one-way inbound links with blogs. The first way is simply to host a blog on your website and update it frequently. People tend to link to blogs because they provide content that is constantly being updated.

The second way you can get one-way inbound links with your blog is to submit it to blog directories. Just like website directories, there are tons of blog directories on the internet that you can submit to for free. Just do a search on Google for "blog directory" and you will find many of them to submit too.

The third way of getting inbound links with a blog is to host it somewhere other than on your website. Then, provide a link from your blog to your website. After you have done that, you can submit your blog to directories for the extra page rank and added exposure. Use this third technique with as many blogs as you have time to update regularly with quality content.

7) Free Article Directory – Create an article directory on your website and allow your visitors to submit articles to it. Ask for a link back to your website in exchange for the article submission. This will build your inbound links and create free content for your website. I have successfully used this technique for quite a while. You can see one of my article directories at http://www.work-at-home-jobs-iowa.com/article

Alright, there you go, you now have seven very effective techniques for getting one-way inbound links to your website. Get started on them right away and you should see your search engine rankings rise, your website traffic increase, and your profits explode. If you have any questions about any of these linking techniques just let me know, I will be happy to help. You can find my "contact me" link at the bottom of my website.
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Trent Brownrigg is a successful internet marketer and home business mentor. Visit his website at http://www.work-at-home-jobs-iowa.com and he will personally help you succeed with your own home business. You can subscribe to his “Biz Tips Newsletter” by sending a blank email to: workathomebiz@aweber.com

For Newer Sites, Web Marketing Depends On "Titles" & "Links"!

We all start out the same. Some have budgets, some dont. The one true factor out there is that we all want to expose our business. For 99% of us, starting out in the world of web marketing means a few things:

- A huge learning curve
- Endless nights working
- Trial & Error
- Learning the ropes

Compared to older more established sites out there, a brand new site without a network of well established web sites to back it up will need to depend on good quality links pointing to it. This will commence the search engine ranking strategy.

See most "grand father" sites out there have already gone through the trials and tribulations of getting recognized. Since this is true, they dont always have to depend on the "Title" of the link pointing to their site, nor do they have to depend on the "Title" tag within their site.

Most older sites get ranked for search terms that dont even show up on their listing, this is because search engines already know the content is there and is good.

For a newer web site, great search engine rankings rely on those "Titles". This helps search engines to better determine the content of the site.

For Example: "Joe" has a site about "Web Marketing". Joe knows that he needs to get his link on other quality sites and he also wants to get a good ranking for "Web Marketing". So Joe creates a link exchange program on his site and submits his link titled "Web Marketing" to as many content related web sites as he can.

Joe also knows that if search engines find his link on other sites and its called "Web Marketing", his site had better be about "Web Marketing"! So Joe adds "Web Marketing Services & Tips" as the title of his main page. He also adds specific content to match it.

Now heres the [kicker]. Lets say Joe has been doing this for 2 years now, 9 times out of 10, if Joes web site is still promoting content about "Web Marketing", he probably doesnt have to add "Web Marketing" to his main title anymore. He can now add it further down within another link on his site.

So the moral is

If your site is new, youll need to depend on the "Titles" of many things to get your rankings up for something specific. If youre site is more mature and has been established, you can work on other search terms youve been longing to get for your site.

Just keep plugging away and try to keep your "titles" the same for new sites and mix it up for older sites!

I hope you enjoyed the article!
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For more of Martins articles go here: http://www.smartads.info/newsletter
About The Author
Martin Lemieux President Smartads - Affordable Web Solutions http://www.smartads.info & http://www.smartads.ca Eye Catching Print Design http://www.3dimentionaldesign.com Powerful Free Web Marketing Tools http://www.thewebclinic.com

Improving your site's link popularity, and search engine ranking

Have you ever wondered why one web site (maybe yours) is buried deep in the search rankings for a particular keyword, while another site (your competitor's) is at the top? Both sites may have similar content and even similar metatags, but one is number one and the other is number 131.

The answer to this disparity may lie in a factor known as link popularity. When search engines determine rankings, many things are taken into consideration and one of them is how many sites are linked to your site. Search engines such as Google give much importance to both the quantity and the quality of these incoming links. If many sites are linked to yours, your site is considered to be an important resource in that particular field and that is why the search engines would like to give such a site a high ranking. Also if the links to your site are coming from "important" or high ranked sites, then your web site is considered still more important.

In this factor of link popularity, new sites are somewhat at a disadvantage as older sites have been around a while and have acquired more links over the years. However, with a bit of "elbow grease" (sustained effort) it is possible to boost your site's link popularity and position in search engine results.

One of the first things that should be done is to submit your site to the Open Web Directory (www.dmoz.org). By doing this you will get one link! But a listing in the Open Web Directory is considered to be an important link, because it comes from a very high-ranking source. It takes a while to be listed in this directory because the directory gets thousands of inclusion requests, and it uses volunteer editors to process them, but sites with good content and design generally get included. Similarly, a single listing in the Yahoo directory will also boosts your site's ranking, but this will cost you $299. So if you have a big advertising budget, a paid listing in Yahoo is an option worth considering.

How can you determine what is a high-ranking site-one which will help your own search engine rank if it links to you? Go to the main page of Google and download the Google Toolbar. It will install itself on your web browser. Every time you visit a web site, look at the Google Toolbar and it will show a section called, Page Ranking. If you see a gray bar, it means the site is not included in Google's index. If the bar is all white or has green, then put your mouse over the bar and you will see a page ranking number on a scale from 0-10. Yahoo has a 10 ranking, while a new site with no links to it may be 0. Average sites are usually 5-6, while very good sites have rankings of 7-9. If any of these high-ranking sites link to you then your own ranking will improve.

If you are wondering where to start or how to find sites that might make good link partners, why not go back to the search engines and look at the competing sites that are in the position where you want to be. Visit one of those sites, and if you have a Google tool bar installed, press the "page info" section of the bar, and then hit the "backward links" button, you will then get all the sites in Google that link to that particular site. If you do not have the tool bar installed you can get the same result by going to Google and making a search for link:http://www.thesiteyouwant.com/ . Now you have the sites that are linking to your competitor.
Many of these sites could also be your link partners.

Another way of getting suitable link partners is to think of your field, for example widget manufacturers, and then make a search "directory, directories, widget manufacturers" You may get sites that list all the widget manufacturers, and this is a perfect place to add your link. You can also go in the Open Web Directory (www.dmoz.org) and search for your category and see what sites are listed there. Finally, as you go into the sites linking to your competitors you may find some sites with excellent lists of links, and you can pursue those possibilities to. If you work at it you will find no shortage of possible link partners.

As you develop a list of sites to contact the next step is to choose which sites you want to link with. First visit the site, and see if they have a links page. Also see if the links page is visible, that is, linked to their main site. If it is not very visible then the site will not generate any traffic for you. Also, if you have the Google Toolbar installed see what the page ranking of that site is and the page ranking of its links page. If it is zero then it will not help you very much. And finally consider, how will this site fit on your site. Though you are not responsible for what happens to your visitors after they leave you, if you give them a list of bad resources it does not create a good impression. So, skip the sites that are questionable.

Once you have a good site write them a short letter and explain that you would like to exchange links. If you have seen something on their site that strikes you it is good to mention it so they can see that you are real human and not a robot, as there are some annoying robotic programs trying to do this kind of work. Mention your site’s name, its URL and a description so that they can easily make a link for you. If they have categories on their links page, then mention the category where you want your link to be placed.

Also, if you really want to get your link placed quickly, you can publish a link to that site before you write to them, explaining that you have made a link, telling them the URL where the link can be found, and that you would like a reciprocal link. If eventually they do not link to you, then you can either take down the link, or if it is a particularly good resource, leave it up (a bit of magnanimity never hurts!)

Another important element of your link building process is your own links page and how you maintain it. It is best if you will make some categories, as people do not like to go through a long list of random links. Make sure that there is a short description for each link, and also if necessary edit the descriptions so that they do not take up too much space, and also edit with an eye to quality. A well-maintained links page can become a resource in itself and a valuable contribution to your own content.

You may be thinking that this sounds like a lot of work. Yes it takes some time, but if you devote an hour per day, or per week, or whatever the time you can allot and keep at it on a regular basis you can improve your link popularity, generate new traffic to your site, and in the process learn a lot about how the Internet works.
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Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He has been working on the Internet since 1995, and is currently the director of A1-Optimization (http://www.a1-optimization.com), a firm providing low cost search engine optimization, submission and web promotion services.

Reciprocal Links: Quality is as important as Quantity

Link popularity, the number of incoming links to your website, plays an important part in determining your site’s ranking in a search engine. But, before you rush off to try and get any and all sites to link to you there are a few things to consider, and one of them is that the quality of the links are as important as the quantity.

If you get a link to your site from Yahoo, then your own site’s ranking in various search engines will be enhanced, as Yahoo is one of the most popular sites on the Internet. Ranking of course is not a precise term, and varies from search engine to search engine. But if you want to be consistent, you can use the Google Toolbar, and the Google page ranking, shown in the toolbar, as way of judging how well you are doing. Google ranks a page from 0-10, and a site with a 0 ranking will not do well in searches, especially in very competitive categories. So when it comes to finding link partners one guideline is to find sites that have a Google ranking that is equal to or higher than yours.

A site with a 0 ranking will not help you. Also, sometimes a site has a relatively good page ranking but its links page is 0, and this is the page that links to you, thus it is very important. So the question is why is the links page 0 when the rest of the site is OK? Some sites use robotic tools to create what are known as "link farms. Link farms are huge collections of links, a giant directory that dwarfs the original web site. These were set up by people hoping to increase their link popularity very fast. However search engines got wise to this, and do not give any importance to such directories, hence you will see a 0 ranking for them.

So, if it is a link farm, don’t participate in a link exchange with that site. It will not help you, and some observers say that a link from a "link farm" will actually harm your standing. I am not sure if it will harm you, but it is definitely not going to help you.

Another important thing to consider is whether the links page or directory on the other site is visible to the public. This might seem elementary, but some people like to get reciprocal links but don’t really display them fairly, because they don’t want people leaving their site through the reciprocal links. The links page should be linked to at least one of the major pages of the site, if it is not, then don’t puruse the link. One time, I noticed this on another site and objected. The webmaster acknowledged my point and changed the site to properly display the links page.
Similarly, if your link on the other site will be in sea of hundreds of unsorted links, like on the free-for-all links pages, this is not valuable to you, because such a site has little chance of sending you any traffic.

What are the best sites to link to? A site that has good content, a site that your web visitors will think is a valuable resource. While you can’t take responsibility for everything that is on the other person’s website, you shouldn’t knowingly send your web visitors to a low-quality website. So be selective in pursuing reciprocal links, and in responding to requests for links. Visit the other site and see what it is all about before jumping to link with them.

The ideal link partner should be a site thematically related to yours, with the kind of visitors who will also be interested in your site. It should give your link the kind of prominence that will enable you to get some traffic, and finally, the site should have a decent page ranking. If you get all of these factors together, you can be sure that it is a quality link and worth your effort in making the contact and setting up the link exchange. Check your logs from time to time and see which links are performing well, and then try to find similar link partners.

Reciprocal linking takes time if you want to do it correctly, but the targeted traffic that it can generate coupled with the enhancement of your page ranking that it can provide, makes it an important part of overall website promotion.
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Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He has been working on the Internet since 1995, and is currently the director of A1-Optimization (http://www.a1-optimization.com), a firm providing low cost search engine optimization, submission and web promotion services.

Building your site link popularity

What is Link Popularity?

Link Popularity refers to the number of links pointing to your site, from other sites on the web. The Search Engines consider your site important and rank it higher if several other sites link to your site.

Type in your domain name in the box below and hit the 'search' button, to find out the link popularity of your site.

You can also search for this on Google by typing in the following command -

link:www.yourdomain.com

The above command gives you a selective list of links, usually from PR4+ link pages. For a more extensive list, you may search the following syntax -

"yourdomain.com" -site:www.yourdomain.com

For a detailed Link Popularity report, you can use our Link Popularity Analyzer Tool, which checks the link popularity of your site across various search engines like Google, MSN, AltaVista, HotBot, Yahoo and AlltheWeb.

History behind Link Popularity and Google PageRank

Web, by its very nature is based on hyperlinks, where sites link to other prominent sites. If you take the logic that you would tend to link to sites that you consider important, in essence, you are casting a vote in favor of the sites that you link to. When hundreds or thousands of sites link to a site, it is logical to assume that such a site would be good and important.

Taking this logic further the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page formulated a Search Engine algorithm that shifted the ranking weight to off-page factors. They evolved a formula called PageRank (named after its founder Larry Page) where the algorithm would count the number of sites that link to a page and assign it an importance score on a scale of 1-10. More the number of sites that link to a page, higher its PageRank.

Google’s PageRank is important because it is one of the primary off-page factors that influences your page’s ranking in the search engine result pages.

PageRank in Google's own Words

Google explains PageRank as follows (http://www.google.com/technology/):

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

For more information on Google PageRank, go to

http://www.google.com/technology/

http://www.google.com/webmasters/4.phpl

Benefits of Building Link Popularity

Building Link Popularity is one of the most important and critical aspects of any effective Search Engine Optimization campaign today. The ‘off-page’ factors such as link popularity, PageRank and Anchor Text in incoming links play a major role in your site’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERP).

Search Engines consider your site more important if more links point to your site. Building link popularity improves the PageRank of your web pages (Read more about PageRank). The higher the PageRank of your website, the higher its importance for search engines and higher it gets ranked in the search engine result pages. Search engines also take into account the PageRank of the pages that link to your site and its industry relevance to your own industry. Links from higher PageRank pages and industry relevant sites give your site a higher value.

Types of Links

There are two types of links you can establish on the web. One way is to trade links (Link Exchange), where you give a link from the links Page on your site to the partner sites. The second method is to establish ‘only-incoming’ links also called ‘one-way links’ or ‘Non-Reciprocal links’.

Only-Incoming Links

Only incoming links are the links established on the other websites where you do not need to link back to them.

There are various compelling reasons and methods to establish such one-way links which include linking back from a different website that you may own, publishing articles on sites, content syndication, listing in trade directories and giving out press releases in news networks.

Link Exchange

Link exchange is an easier way to establish links from other websites to your website. In link exchange process, you trade links with prospective partner sites by offering a link to their site from your own site. This method is a fast way to establish several hundred links to your website. However, it may not get you great benefits.

Only Incoming Links vs. Link Exchange

Google developed the PageRank algorithm to provide authentic and quality information while making it difficult for webmasters and site owners to contaminate the search results by artificially inflating their PageRank.

The new algorithm came into effect with the launch of Google in 1998. Google’s PageRank was based on the logic that more the number of sites that link to a page, higher its PageRank.

As Webmasters realized the importance of PageRank, they found ways to artificially inflate their PageRank by manipulating direct link exchanges. This defeated the very essence on which the Google PageRank algorithm was build. To counter this, Google has constantly been fine-tuning and updating its algorithms. Read about Google’s latest algo updates.

The search engines are aware that a large number of sites are deploying link exchange campaigns to boost their site’s PR. Search engines are working towards fine-tuning their algos to discount direct link exchanges in order to preserve the effect of their link popularity related algorithms and rationalize artificially inflated links popularity of sites.

While the algos are yet to reflect this change, we believe that it may happen soon enough. In the long run, we recommend investing your resources in an ‘only-incoming links’ campaign for your website which is likely to benefit your site more as opposed to a direct link exchange campaign.

Important Parameters to Consider while Building Link Popularity

Some of the important parameters that you need to consider while establishing links with any website are discussed below:


PageRank or PR of the Linking Page

PR of the linking page is one of the most important factors. PR of the linking page determines how much value of importance is passed on to your page. Higher the PR of the linking page, higher the value you get. The home page PR is not as important, but it is an indicator of how much PR a linking page may jump to, in due course of time. For instance, if the PR of the site’s link page is 0, but the home page PR is 6, then, there is a bright possibility that in a month or two, the link page PR may also jump to a PR of 4 or even 5 due to the internal linking structure of the partner site. While sites would be happy to give out links from a PR 0 page, you can estimate that in two months time, this link page can jump to a high PR, giving you great value in the future.

Identifying Total Number of Links on the Link Page

The value your web page gets from a linking page is equal to the total PR value of that page divided by the total number of outgoing links on that page. Getting a link from a PR4 page that has only 20 outgoing links is much better than getting a link from a PR4 page that has 60 outgoing links. With the same philosophy, it is better to get a link from a PR2 link page that has only 10 outgoing links than getting a link from a PR4 page that has over 100 outgoing links. It is therefore as important to evaluate the total number of outgoing links on a links page, as it is, to evaluate the PR of the linking page. This is where many people often falter, as they usually insist on getting a link from a high PR page, but if that page has 100 outgoing links, your page would only get 1/100th of that value.

Industry Relevance

Search engines give high importance to links pointing to your site from your own industry segment as opposed to those from an un-related industry. For instance, a hotels and reservations website is likely to benefit more from links pointing from a related industry site like travel, vacation packages or cruises, than those from an unrelated industry like a drug site.

Industry relevance also needs to be given a high weight while creating resource directories. For example, if you have a site related to hotels, then you can create a resource directory related to your business that could be pertaining to travel, tourism, cruises, vacation rentals, vacation packages, car rentals, food and beverages etc.

Page Relevance

Most sites offering links have several categories listed on their sites. Try and get a link from a category that closely matches your own industry. For instance, if you have a site related to hotels, then, on your partner site, a tickets site for example, try and identify a resource directory pertaining to hotels, resorts, reservations, vacation packages, travel, tourism, food and beverages etc. If the concerned site has a directory on hotels, you should request a link in that category, as a link from that page would be relevant to a hotels site, thus getting you more benefits. An algorithm called "Applied Semantics" determines the industry relevance of a page within a site. Applied Semantics algorithm studies various keywords on a web page and tries to determine the industry or business segment of each page. Applied Semantics estimates the industry segments that are relevant to a particular page. If the link to your page is coming from your business specific segment, then you are likely to draw more benefit.

Anchor Text

Anchor Text is the visible hyperlinked text on a web page. Since anchor text is very important, make sure that your most important keywords appear in anchor text from the link pointing to your site. You should try and work with at-least 10-20 keyword and link text options. If you are creating a large number of links using only one standard link text, then the search engines are likely to detect a pattern. It is possible that future algo updates may do away with all repetitive and similar looking links to your site.

You can also refer to our article on Anchor Text Optimization for more details.

Pre-Indexed Pages

Try and find link partners in Search Engines like Google and Yahoo, and check if the links page is already indexed in the search engines. Search Engines frequently re-index the pages in its database. They are likely to detect your link faster on a page already existing in their database as compared to a ‘yet-to-be indexed’ page. The safest way to check is to copy the prospective link page URL and paste it into Google Search. If the page is indexed, Google would show a result in response to your search, otherwise it would respond with a ‘no result found’.

The robots.txt file

robots.txt is an exclusion file that contains specific instructions for search engine robots regarding the content they are not allowed to index. Links placed on a page that the search engines robots are not allowed to index, would not benefit your site. Considering the importance of robots.txt file, it is a good idea to study a site’s robots.txt file to identify the excluded pages before approaching a site for establishing links with your site. Read our article on Working with robots.txt file.

Dynamic Link Pages

You should also watch out for any link pages that are generated dynamically. Chances are that such pages would not get indexed soon enough, which means that a link from such a page would not benefit you. Some dynamic link pages are intentionally generated in such a way so as to prevent them from getting indexed. Some unscrupulous webmasters do this to trick you to prevent any PageRank leaking from their site to yours. Links from such pages therefore do not give you any benefit.

Java Script Link Pages

It is also important to identify pages that are generated through Flash or a Java Script, as Search Engines cannot read flash pages or the links embedded within flash. These are some of the tricks unethical webmasters use. While a site can claim to have placed a link to your web page, in effect they are not giving you any benefit.

Re-Directed Links

A link that is first re-directed to another page within your partner site before pointing to your site is a re-directed link. You should watch out for such links, as search engines do not give weight to re-directed links. It is very unlikely that your site would draw any benefit from a re-directed link.

Frame Sites

Avoid getting links from framed sites as search engines cannot read texts within frames. A link placed on a frame site would not get your site any benefit, as search engines would not be able to recognize such a link.

Directory Depth

It is important to evaluate the depth of the directory of the linking page. Avoid getting links from pages that are embedded in a very deep directory or pages that are more than two directories deep (e.g. www.domain.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/linkpage.php is not a good link page). Deep directories seldom earn high PR. They are also slow in getting indexed, if at all.


Building Link Popularity is a great way to help your site gain competitive PR. Links from other sites also sends direct human traffic to your site. Observing a little care in developing links will go a long way in getting your site rank high in search engines.

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Harjot Kaleka is an SEO Copywriter at www.SEOrank.com, a leading Search Engine Optimization services company. She has a Masters degree in Mass Communications and Copywriting.

Keyword Research for Search Engine Optimization

Importance of Keyword Research for Search Engine Optimization

Keyword Research is by far the most important aspect in any Search Engine Optimization initiative. This article shall discuss the important aspects of keyword research process.

Keyword Phrase Research is a process of selecting the most "optimum performance" keyword phrases that can help visitors find your site. You may have spent days and months on fine-tuning your web pages for a better ranking with the major search engines, yet it will all amount to a big waste if the right keyword phrases are not targeted. It’s like not being able to reach your destination even after running your best race because you started out on the wrong road. Even if you achieve high search engine rankings, you may not get relevant traffic if you select the wrong keywords. Therefore, the foremost step in any SEO campaign is identifying your target audience and researching what keyword phrases they might be searching in the search engines to locate a site like yours. they might be searching in the search engines to locate a site like yours.

For any marketing strategy to succeed, it is critical to know your audience and the means to reach them. A certain focus is required which could be location specific, region specific or country specific; it could be business, trade, service, product specific, since we are talking specific audience. For instance, a dentist practicing in a particular town would most likely target people living in the same region, instead of targeting the entire country. Just as a patient searching for a dentist would search for one in his own area. Focus on region would help her get targeted visitors, not just wasted traffic.

Facts, Not Gut Feel

A common pitfall is to start the website optimization exercise with a set of "gut-feel" keyword phrases. Site owners often come up with ‘common sense looking’ key phrases, which though look obvious, may not match with the ones your buyers are using as their search term. Very often, being from within the trade narrows the vision and you tend to assume that trade-specific terms are easily understood and popularly used. Not so. You need to think out of the box.

Doing Keyword Research invariably means departing from one’s gut-feel and going by the facts. ‘Facts are sacred’ in website optimization as they provide the exact data of what people are actually searching for, thus saving you from starting on a wild goose chase. As mentioned earlier, targeting the wrong key phrases might get you a good ranking for keywords that have few or no search requests or just get you irrelevant junk traffic. So, how does one get the facts and the data regarding a particular search term? There are several online keyword research tools like Wordtracker and Overture, which offer data pertaining to your search term. Relying on search tools to analyze keyword phrase data helps you to get a grip on your target audience.

Keyword Research Process

Keyword Research process involves the following important steps. These steps can be described as:

Discovering Keywords
Analyzing Keywords
Selecting Keywords
Deploying Keywords

The Discovering phase should focus on identifying as many keywords as possible that are related to your website and target audience.

The Analysis phase involves adding information about existing competition; PageRank based limitations and potential for ranking.

The Selection process involves objective measurement based shortlisting of keywords keeping the site focus and target audience within the limitations analyzed.

The Deploying phase is about making optimum use of your selected keywords on your website copy , HTML code and tags.

Step 1: Discovering Keyword Phrases

Starting out Keywords

The nature of keyword research tools that help you identify various keywords is such that they need initial starting out keywords. It is important that you identify good 15 starting out keywords, tightly focused on your business. You can brainstorm with your colleagues and clients to identify search phrases that are most likely to get qualified traffic to your site. This brainstorming session is intended at discussing the most relevant keyword phrases to the product or service you offer. An initial list of 15-20 keywords can be compiled at this stage, which can be generic in nature. For wider keyword coverage, you will get better results if you have one or two keywords rather than longer phrases.to the product or service you offer. An initial list of 15-20 keywords can be compiled at this stage, which can be generic in nature. For wider keyword coverage, you will get better results if you have one or two keywords rather than longer phrases.

Using Wordtracker, Overture to Collect a Corpus of Keywords

Keyword Research tools like Wordtracker and Overture can be used to expand on your initial list of starting out keywords. These tools allow you to find the number of searches being made on a particular term and also look for all related terms that include your search term. Wordtracker and Overture are the two most widely used services that give you the ability to research and find out what people are actually searching for on the major search engines along with information on how popular a search term was in the last 30 or 60 days.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is a fee-based service that allows you to look up popular keyword phrases. Wordtracker is most popular in SEO industry, as it offers a good search term database and makes searching for keyword related information easy.

The database is constantly updated, with the oldest data being removed and replaced with the latest information every week. As of writing this article, Wordtracker offers access to a database size of 324 million entries.

Although Wordtracker is a paid service for regular use, it offers the benefit of one-day free trial, which can be used to complete your keyword research if you are fairly organized.
Competition Search can also be made at Wordtracker for your short-listed terms. Competition Search allows you to ascertain how many web pages exist for these search terms on different search engines. This helps you determine your chances of ranking with a particular search engine for your search term. Ideally, lesser number of pages with a search engine means a better ranking chance for your search term.

Overture

Overture Search Term Suggestion tool, although intended to offer keyword popularity information to the PPC (Pay Per Click) advertisers, works fairly well to carry out your keyword research. Enter your main search terms and in response Overture lists out all other popular search terms that contain that particular term or phrase along with the popularity count. Overture lists the search terms in order of their popularity, giving numerical count of past one month.

Being a free tool, Overture is quite useful. However, it has a few downsides and its results cannot be totally relied upon. They are good to be used as a guideline. Some of the drawbacks of Overture are listed below:

- Overture does not make a distinction between singular and plural search terms. Therefore, it can lead you to assume that a keyword is popular in the singular, though it could actually be the plural you should target.

- Related phrases are often collapsed into narrow term listings.

- The different variations of a word are stemmed as one.
- Mis-spellings and punctuation are either ignored or stemmed resulting in stinted data.

Google Adwords: Keyword Suggestion Tool

Search engines like Google offer some keyword recommendation tools, which can be used as a guide. However, Google does not indicate the popularity count of each search phrase.

Coverage of Keyword Phrases

While selecting your key phrases, make an effort to cover each aspect of your service or product that could be searched on stand-alone basis by the users. Each page on your website could be dealing with a different topic (product or service), therefore; the keywords for each page would be different too, depending on which you should try and place unique and relevant key phrases on each page.
For instance, it would not suffice to optimize a dentist’s site only for the terms ‘dentist’ or ‘dental surgeon’, as people are likely to make specific searches on related terms like cosmetic surgery, root canal treatment or RCT, dental crowns, tooth extractions, cavities etc. Hence, it is important that all these keywords are covered.

Step 2: Analyzing Keyword Phrases

The second step is analyzing your keyword phrases. This involves analyzing the competition for the search terms, i.e. how many pages are indexed in a search engine like Google. This gives you an idea of how many pages are competing for the top spot. While most of the time, the optimized sites are ranking high, very often un- Optimized sites show up highly ranked due to the complex nature of the search engine algorithms. It is therefore wise to be conscious of the extent of competition.

This involves analyzing the competition for the search terms, i.e. how many pages are indexed in a search engine like Google. This gives you an idea of how many pages are competing for the top spot. While most of the time, the optimized sites are ranking high, very often un- Optimized sites show up highly ranked due to the complex nature of the search engine algorithms. It is therefore wise to be conscious of the extent of competition.

PageRank

The potential for ranking with a particular keyword depends on several factors. The on-page factors address your optimization efforts while the off-page factors like PageRank affect ranking in a major way. While it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the affect and weight of all the factors, your site’s PageRank is an important parameter in keyword analysis. Thumb rule is that the higher your site’s PageRank, the better the chance of ranking with highly competitive keywords. Choose your keywords keeping your site’s PageRank in mind. For more information, read our detailed article on Google PageRank Algorithm

Adding Information and Measuring Competition for Keywords

After you have made your search on Wordtracker or Overture, and short-listed your key phrases, you need to collect information about their competition as described above. Wordtracker offers an in-built tool to find the number of pages for your keywords indexed in Google. Alternately, you can check the competition for your keywords at: http://www.seorank.com/search-engine-keyword-competition.php

In order to make this task more organized, we recommend making use of Excel Sheets to feed in all the data you have compiled. This will allow you to make comparisons between various search terms and at the same time, do away with all the unrelated junk terms that are irrelevant to your site and also the ones that exceed your site’s PR requirement.

Step 3: Selection of Keyword Phrases

If you have followed the above process of Discovering and Analyzing keywords, you probably have between 50-100 keyword phrases that qualify as "high-yield" given your site’s current PR range. Sorting out which keywords you’re going to gun for, out of the corpus of keywords you have identified is a crucial task. Selection of keyword phrases pertains to finding the most valuable keyword phrases that most accurately describe specific qualities of your website. Though generic keywords are generally searched more, ranking with generic key phrases often brings mediocre Return on Traffic.and , you probably have between 50-100 keyword phrases that qualify as "high-yield" given your site’s current range.

Sorting out which keywords you’re going to gun for, out of the corpus of keywords you have identified is a crucial task. Selection of keyword phrases pertains to finding the most that most accurately describe specific qualities of your website. Though generic keywords are generally searched more, ranking with generic key phrases often brings mediocre Return on Traffic.

Focused Key Phrases

As you may have realized by now the focused key phrases not only give your site a better chance to rank, it gets highly targeted traffic resulting in higher traffic to sales conversion ratios. Since you have used a process, which ensures that you are working with popular keywords, ranking with any of the short listed keywords assures you of incoming traffic. Amongst the 100 odd keywords you have short-listed, keep your eyes on the ones that have a tight focus on what your site’s offering within the parameters of ranking possibilities and competitiveness.

Final Selection of Keyword Phrases

For making your final selection of 15-20 most relevant keywords, we recommend working in the following method:

- Eliminate the keywords, which are difficult to rank with considering the chart given for PR vs. Competition.
- Eliminate very low popularity Keywords where the search traffic for the terms is very low.
- Out of the balance keywords that qualify for ranking with your site’s current PR, select the most popular keywords, which have the right focus for your site.

Step 4: Deploying Keyword Phrases

After you have made a final selection of 15-20 of your most relevant and important keywords, you need to use them on different parts of your website. It is not advisable to use all your keywords on all the pages. A good way to use the selected keywords on your site is to divide them into 5-7 groups of keywords. Each group should have closely related keyword-forming themes. Identify various sections/ parts of your website that closely match with the keyword group themes and optimize your pages using these themes.

Keywords can be used in several portions/ codes of your web pages. The important aspects are listed below:

1. Keywords Per Page

We recommend using your keywords 2-4 times per page. Over-repetition of keywords on a page might be interpreted as spam by the search engines. Make sure you don’t put all your keywords on one page.

2. Where to use the Keywords?

Your important keywords can be used in the following:

Title Tag: A Title Tag of about 90 characters, inclusive of your most important keywords is good enough. For instance, the Title Tag of this article would be written as "Keyword Research : Techniques for keyword research, keyword analysis & keyword optimization". Read our detailed article on Title Tag Optimization.

Meta Description Tag: You should write a Meta Description Tag of about 250 characters with your important keywords. Be careful about over-repetition. For instance, the Description tag of this article would be written as: "Keyword research described: Learn all about keyword research, keyword analysis, keyword optimization and marketing keyword research." Read our detailed article on Meta Description Tag Optimization.

Headlines: Keyword rich headlines and sub-headings placed in and tags, not only give a brief preview of what follows in the body copy, but also pass the most relevant information on the page or the subsequent paragraph. For instance, heading of this article reads: Keyword Research for Search Engine Optimization; followed by a sub-heading: Importance of Keyword Research for Search Engine Optimization

Body Text: Headlines in

and

Tags followed by keyword rich body text can improve your ranking chances.
Alt text / Alt Tag: Important keywords can be used in the text that appears when you bring your mouse over an image on a web page.

Title Attributes: The title attributes, are short descriptions for the hyperlinks telling the users about the content of the landing page. Make use of your important keywords here.

Anchor Text: The words that appear within the hyperlinked portion of the text are called Anchor Text. Keywords appearing in the Anchor Text have a high relevance weight in Search Engines. Read our detailed article on Anchor Text Optimization.

File Name: your page’s file name or URL also makes use of the most important keyword. For example, file name for this article reads: http://www.seorank.com/keyword-research-article.htm

Table Summary: The table summary in HTML code describes the content of each HTML table in your code. Though not visible to a user, it is important for people with disabilities and text to speech applications. It is an important place to use your keyword phrases.

3. Copy Changes

Given below are a few tips for writing keyword rich copy. For detailed information, refer to our article on Search Engine Copywriting.

Keeping your keyword phrases in mind, you might need to make certain changes in the copy of your web page. Therefore, instead of just writing (taking the Dentist example) ‘This procedure involves&ldots;’ one should try and include their keywords by writing ‘ Root Canal Treatment involves&ldots;’

It is important to include both the singular and plural versions of your keywords as most search engines return different sets of results for plural and singular forms of the same word.
Major search engines like Google are not case sensitive. Therefore, headlines and sub-headings can be written in upper or lower case or a combination of both, as it makes no difference in your search engine rankings.

Spelling variations of the same word is another thing you should look out for. Try to include all different forms of the same word that can be spelled differently or commonly mis-spelt. For instance, you can write, ‘ Abscessed Tooth, (commonly mis-spelt as Absessed tooth) is &ldots;’, thus smartly covering the mis-spelling without giving the user a feeling that the site owner does not know the correct spellings.

4. Avoiding Pitfalls

Don’t get swayed by the Keyword Density formula many SEO experts profess, it’s just over hyped. Though you may find a number of articles written on the importance of keyword density, we don’t think it is mission critical. Write your language naturally while leveraging higher use of the keywords in places where it can be used, like substituting keywords in places of articles like ‘it’, ‘this’, etc.

The Title or the Description of your web page should not read like a thesaurus or a collection of keywords, but should be descriptive and enticing enough to make a user click on it and read further. It is important to note that our findings on user behavior have proved that sometimes a site ranking number 5th in Search Engines has drawn more clicks than a poorly titled site ranking number 1 in SERP. For instance, instead of simply writing ‘wisdom tooth extraction’, a title that reads ‘painless wisdom tooth extraction’ which is inclusive of your USP would result in enticing more users to click on your entry.

Place your keywords throughout the page, rather than just at the top, but be very very careful about over-repetition, as search engines would consider that as Spamming.

The whole idea behind the Keyword Research exercise is traffic optimization, not traffic maximization. In a nutshell, a good Keyword Research helps in bringing qualified traffic to your site that leads to high sales conversions, by being focused and targeting specific search terms.
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Article last updated: 3rd December 2004 : A Title Tag of about 90 characters, inclusive of your most important keywords is good enough. For instance, the Title Tag of this article would be written as
Harjot Kaleka is an SEO Copywriter at www.SEOrank.com, a leading Search Engine Optimization services company. She has a Masters degree in Mass Communications and Copywriting.

How Google Indexes Content From Your Web Directory

In a fluke, I was able to notice something about the way Google indexes content from web directories. Excluding your template, the most important line of code is the first title you add to your main body.

Search through Google and see for yourself!

Try searching for "something" in "yourcity","province/state" and look for a web business directory that you recognize. Once you find a directory, take a good look at the description of that particular listing (not the title). It may be a good idea to write it down. Once complete, click on the "cache" of that page within Google to highlight the content and view the web directory page.

9 out of 10 times the description of your website listing within Google is partly taken from the first line of code you have within your main body of content (excluding your header, footer, & sidebar). You will notice that this only applies for a web directory. Any personal or business related website gets indexed differently. If you take a look at the Google directory, we find the same thing: Take a look here: http://www.google.com/dirhp?hl=en
Browse to any sub-category and look at the first line of text. You will find that the title within the main body of content before anything else, is within an H1 tag.
H1 tags & H2 tags are nothing new to the development community but, there may still be many directories online that can increase their search engine rankings by changing a few things.

Here's an example we see very often online; (I am also guilty of this)

You have just developed an impressive web directory and you are very proud of your creation. In the process of organizing your massive directory you were faced with a problem on how to allow people to browse your website and how to let search engines browse through your categories with ease. So with that in mind, you create the "alphabetical solution".

THE ALPHABETICAL SOLUTION IS THIS:

Search Categories By Alphabetical Order: A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z
The problem with this alphabetical solution (I am also guilty as charged) is that we tend to add this development solution to the top of our page so that our visitors and possibly search engines can find these extra categories easily. <<>

1) Your alphabetical solution is probably necessary but instead, you should add it a little lower below some more important page specific content.
2) No matter where you add your ABC's, search engines will find them anyway.
3) You don't want 10,000 pages to be indexed with a description that goes... abcdefg...

The Solution:

If you own a directory and you are faced with this problem, let's get our development hats on and switch a couple of things around. Try adding the main "topic" description to the top of your main body of content and create this description within one of these tags: H1,H2,H3,H4, etc.
2nd: Once you have your main title description, try adding more related content to that specific page within "bold tags" BEFORE you add your alphabetical solution. At least this way, when search engines browse through your massive web directory, they do not leave thinking that you like singing the alphabets.

One Last Thing:

If you are seriously targeting specific local markets on the web, try adding the city, province/state, & country! Being in Canada, we are faced with many brick walls when it comes to promoting certain cities.
Perfect example of this is my home town of "Hamilton, Ontario, Canada". If you don't promote this city properly, you might actually be targeting people from "Hamilton, Ontario, California" ! ! ! Did you say ouch??? As you can see, this can be easily mistaken by many visitors coming to your web directory and probably won't help your conversion rate whatsoever.
Making sure that you target the right industries and the right locations could be crucial for the success of your web directory.
I hope this article helps you out!
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About The Author:
Martin Lemieux is the president of the Smartads Advertising Network. Smartads is here to help small to large companies grow online and offline. Visit the Smartads Network today!
International: http://www.smartads.info Canada: http://www.smartads.ca

Google information for webmaster in choosing seo service provider

Source:http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/seo.html

Search Engine Optimizers

SEO is an abbreviation for "search engine optimizer." Many SEOs provide useful services for website owners, from writing copy to giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be submitted. However, a few unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results.

While Google doesn't have relationships with any SEOs and doesn't offer recommendations, we do have a few tips that may help you distinguish between an SEO that will improve your site and one that will only improve your chances of being dropped from search engine results altogether.

Be wary of SEO firms that send you email out of the blue.

Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:

"Dear google.com,

I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."

Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google,
or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or through the Google Sitemaps (Beta) program, and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.

Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do.

Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content
on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you.

You should never have to link to an SEO.

Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or
submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.

Some SEOs may try to sell you the ability to type keywords directly into the browser address bar.

Most such proposals require users to install extra software, and very few users do so.
Evaluate such proposals with extreme care and be skeptical about the self-reported number of users who have downloaded the required applications.

Choose wisely.

While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/

While Google doesn't comment on specific companies, we've encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.

Be sure to understand where the money goes.

While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines
combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.

Talk to many SEOs, and ask other SEOs if they'd recommend the firm you're considering.

References are a good start, but they don't tell the whole story. You should ask how long a
company has been in business and how many full time individuals it employs. If you feel pressured or uneasy, go with your gut feeling and play it safe: hold off until you find a firm that you can trust. Ask your SEO firm if it reports every spam abuse that it finds to Google using our spam complaint form at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html.
Ethical SEO firms report deceptive sites that violate Google's spam guidelines.

Make sure you're protected legally.

For your own safety, you should insist on a full and unconditional money-back guarantee.
Don't be afraid to request a refund if you're unsatisfied for any reason, or if your SEO's actions cause your domain to be removed from a search engine's index. Make sure you have a contract in writing that includes pricing. The contract should also require the SEO to stay within the guidelines recommended by each search engine for site inclusion.

What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?

One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

What are some other things to look out for?

There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It's far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:

- owns shadow domains

- puts links to their other clients on doorway pages

- offers to sell keywords in the address bar

- doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear in search results

- guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway

- operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info

- gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware

- has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google

If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices.
To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on "File a Complaint Online,"
call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:

Federal Trade Commission

CRC-240

Washington, D.C. 20580

If your complaint is against a company in another country, please file it at
http://www.econsumer.gov/.

Search Engine Friendly Design

First of all, you should understand the basic differences between a "spider" and an "indexer".

Spider

Finds pages, follows links, and the page content does not matter. It won't crawl password protected sites, usually avoids dynamic content due to "spider traps", and respects robots.txt and meta tag exclusions.

Indexer

Primary job is to evaluate and score content (text, meta tag info, anchor text of incoming links, etc.). Removes duplicates and aliases and filters spam. When the indexer detects spam, it adds the domain to its "do not crawl list".

Navigation Suggestions

If your navigation is JavaScript, graphics, Flash, etc. make sure you use text links in the footer of your page for the navigation. Spiders love hierarchies and users prefer a search box. Have both. Always, always, always link back to your home page. The reason? So the spider can find the rest of your site and lost visitors can re-orient themselves.

Settings

Don't require cookies or session IDs. Doing so can harm your site's ability to be indexed. Why? Since the spider does not accept either, your content management system may start to feed the spider the same page over and over again with different session IDs. This causes a "spider trap" and an endless loop for the spider which evenutally times out and backs out. A strong warning is if one engine has a page saturation that is out of proportion to the others, that is a red flag that a spider trap occurred. You risk having your site dropped by that search engine within the next 90 days due to "indexing bloat".

If you use a 404 error page, use only one generic paged designed for that purpose, but do not, for any reason, redirect the 404 to your home page. Ensure that the title of this page is named "Error 404" this will alert the spider and it will move on without indexing.
If you have moved your site or moved content, use a permanent 301 to point to the new content/domain. This will inform the spider and it will make note and crawl the site properly on its next visit. Doing so also has benefits as it will transfer all of the link credit from the old site to the new one. User bookmarks still function, as well as all old links. 301s can be left for long periods of time.

Avoid Excessive URL Depth

Having a deep site decreases the chance that the spider will find all of your pages. Very deep URLs tend not to rank as well, and make it difficult for visitors to email to others.
www.mybooks.com/order-of-the-phoenix.html

This would be classified as Depth One. It is NOT suggested here to have all pages on the root of the domain. Having depth of two or three levels would be acceptable.
www.mybooks.com/uk/fiction/childrens/jkrawlings/harry-potter/order-of-the-phoenix
This is six levels and probably would NOT be crawled.

Data-base Driven Sites

Static URLs get crawled, and dymanic pages that have incoming links from static pages will get crawled. However, links between dynamic pages are often problematic and sometimes do not get crawled. Limit the "URL Depth" when using a dynamic-to-static internal linking strategy. It is suggested to use the "Trusted Feed" program for Yahoo! Search. I highly recommend Evelyn Hepner at Position Technologies. Your site will need a minimum of 250 indexable pages. While you do have to pay for every click, by having the XML feed it could be more cost effective to do it this way than to change your entire architecture of your site.

Index Friendly Pages

It is vital that your site has unique content. The titles that you use should be page specific, meaning that the title of each page should be unique to the content on that page. This is also true with your meta tags, specifically with the description and keywords. If you update the page's content in the future, review your title, description and keyword tags to ensure they are still relevant to the content. Only separate pages when there is separate content. Yahoo! would rather see one long page than five small pages.

You should avoid "spam" at all costs. This includes using "doorway pages" and "doorway domains". Keyword stuffing is another area that should be avoided. Hidden text (text that is the same color as the background), hidden links, and even deceptive CSS can be detected by the indexer and viewed as spam. Link Farms, massive domain interlinking, which includes off-topic links (which tend to dilute valuable links), and cloaking are also areas to avoid.

Report "Spam" to Yahoo!

To report Spam sent an email with as much information as possible (the keywords used in the search, offending URL, and why it is considered spam) to: reportsearchspam@yahoo-inc.com.
Review Yahoo! Content Guidelines It would be highly recommended to keep up-to-date on the content guidelines from Yahoo! at least once per quarter.

Designing in Flash

Yahoo! does not currently crack open Flash files to either follow links or extract textual elements. Even with the SDK from Macromedia the extracting text from SWF files provided little, if any, value. It was found that content providers weren't optimizing the content for the search engines.

Test Your Site

You can use programs like Anawave's WebSnake to mimic a "crawl" through your website to determine if a spider could deep crawl your site.
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Jerry West is the Director of Marketing for WebMarketingNow. Visit Web Marketing Now for the latest in marketing tips that are tested and proven.

Finding the Right SEO Company

I often talk to people who have lost faith in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms because of bad experiences. Either they saw no results, felt that they were tricked into subscribing to a service that could not work, or that they wasted money on a firm that did them no good. Although I agree that there are bad SEO firms out there, I know that there are also many good ones. It’s your job to make sure you find an SEO firm that will work for you.

Search engines are the basis of Internet existence and survival. Recent studies have concluded that over 90 percent of all web surfers use search engines to find what they are looking for. Thus, in order to be successful on the Internet, your website must be search engine friendly. If people who search the Internet for your products or services are not finding your Web site, you need search engine optimization (SEO).

Now some of you may take on the task of optimizing your own sites. For those people, there are plenty of “how to” articles on the Internet that can help you. If you need more help, drop me an email and I’ll give you some ideas. However, many webmasters decide instead to let an SEO company handle their marketing. Search Engine Optimization is a full time job, and many companies need to hire someone to do it for them. If this is your intent, you should know what to look for, and what to watch for, when selecting the right SEO company.

1. Make Sure They, and Their Clients, are Successful and Well Optimized

If your SEO company does not rank high on most major search engines under their specific services, then they probably won’t have the ability to get you high ranking on yours. For example, if you’re located in Boston, your SEO company should at least rank on the first page in Google, Yahoo, and MSN under such search terms as “Boston SEO,” “Boston Internet Marketing,” “Boston Web Marketing,” or even “Boston Web Design.” If you found them through pay-per-click or sponsored listings, this only means that they do not have the ability to optimize their own websites and are forced to pay for their clientele.

In addition, it is a good idea to check the success of their clients. All SEO companies have a client listing, if for no other reason than to offer front page links to their big spenders. Take a good look at these clients’ sites. Check for quality of content and keywords. View the source and see how well the meta tags are structured and how well they apply to the content given. And most importantly, go to the major search engines and find where these clients land on the search terms they are targeting. If the SEO company has created a successful marketing campaign for each of its clients, chances are you’re looking at a good SEO firm. However, if neither the SEO company or its listed clients have high rankings, I would recommend you find a firm that does.

2. Make Sure Someone Answers the Phone or Responds to Email

Although this may sound funny, I can’t stress how important it is to find a SEO company that will be there when you need them. Before choosing an SEO company, call them. If they pick up, you’re in good shape. If they don’t pick up, but call back within 2 hours, you’re still looking pretty good. If it takes you a handful of phone calls and emails, or a number of days to get a response, you might be in bad shape.

Say you’ve just received a new product that you would like to market. Say that product is seasonal, only for the holiday season, and your ability to sell it relies on the timeliness with which you can get it seen on the search engines. You need a company that you can contact to put immediate marketing efforts to your new pages and products. If it takes 3 to 4 weeks for your SEO firm to make changes and improvements, you might want to look for a company that can keep up with your fast-paced business and demanding customers.

3. Make Sure They Understand How Search Engines Work

Keeping a website at the top of the search engines has become a science. The best search engines frequently modify the way their databases list Web sites, and constantly change the search criteria used to find and present web pages.
To understand the quality of a company’s search engine optimization services, you must first understand how search engines work. Search engines list websites in two distinct manners: pay per click listings and organically optimized listings.

Pay per click listings are the listings that appear on the top or right side of most search engines under the heading “Sponsored Links”, or some related term. This type of listing is paid for. Web sites that wish to get top search engine placement without optimization can pay a certain cost that is charged to their search engine accounts every time their sponsored link is clicked on by a prospective client. Cost per click rates range anywhere between $0.10 and $10.00 per search. Some bigger-budget eCommerce businesses can spend up to $50,000 a month on pay per click marketing.

Organically optimized listings are the listings that appear at the top of search engine pages without having to pay for these listings. This type of listing is free. However, your website must be properly optimized to appear at the top of all search engines using organic optimization. Search engines use unique programs which send agents referred to as “spiders” and “robots” to your Web site to collect data. Your website must be structured properly to aid these robots in their search for information.

A quality SEO firm will know how to properly structure your website for top organic optimization and, ultimately, top search engine placement. Watch out for SEO firms that take your money and invest in pay-per-click marketing. Although this will get you immediate results, it does nothing to optimize your site in the long run, will not be as profitable as an organic marketing campaign, and will keep you dependent on SEO companies for your success. And pay-per-click marketing is something you can easily do yourself; if that’s the route you wish to take.

4. Make Sure They Follow-Up with Internet Research

In addition to knowing how to optimize correctly, an SEO firm should be constantly investigating the Internet’s most popular search engines in order to stay aware of the latest techniques for promoting a Web site on the Internet. If they are not giving you monthly reports on the status of your listings, the increasing quantity of your links, and the number of unique visitors to your site, you might not be working with the right SEO company. These reports should not only show where your site is ranked on each of the major search engines for each of the major terms you target, but also show you how you have improved from the previous month and where your competitors stand.

5. Make Sure You Constantly Know What They’re Doing

The major problem most people have with internet marketing guys is that they don’t see them everyday. It’s not like these guys come into the office everyday, or even sit down with the boss for a daily conference call. Most of them work out of their homes, spending 12 hours a day on the computer. Now I’m not saying that they will take your money and do nothing for you, but it’s good to keep your eyes on them like you would any employee. On the days that they work for you, have them send you day-end reports detailing the pages they optimized, the content they added, the keywords they marketed, and the links they added. This will allow you a better understanding of what they do on your clock, and allow you to keep your eye on their progress and effectiveness.

Overall, you can find a good SEO company. There are hundreds out there. But it is your responsibility to make sure you find the right one. Don’t just pick the first firm you find, then complain when you see no results. Find your results before you hire any SEO company, and you will put your business on the right track for Internet success.
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Nathaniel Long is an Internet marketing specialist for Allied Internet Productions, a Denver-based web design and marketing company specializing in graphic and flash design, internet marketing and search engine optimization. Visit their site at http://www.alliedinternetproductions.com, or call them toll free at 800-935-1820.

Seach Engine Marketing Campaign Planning

The search engine marketing environment is undergoing enormous changes as the industry and the Internet mature. The changes we've seen over the past six months are only the tip of a much larger iceberg as new technologies and innovations on established ideas radically alter how we look for information and how that information is delivered to us by search engines. For marketers and advertisers in the traditional world of print and broadcast media, change happens slowly, generally with enough warning to allow for long-term decisions and campaign planning. On the Internet however, change happens at light-speed and alterations to search engine algorithms, fees, services and listing distribution can literally happen overnight. These rapid changes present several planning issues for search engine advertisers and the marketers who represent them, especially for those running active campaigns.

"It is a bad plan that admits of no modification." - Publilius Syrus (~100 BC)

Most readers will remember November 16th, the day the Florida Update was implemented at Google. In less than 48-hours, Google's results were radically altered and literally millions of websites which enjoyed prominent placements appeared to vanish from Google's listings. Two months later, Google made another obvious tweak to their algo, resulting in more changes and dislocation of many websites. Last week, Yahoo announced a conglomeration of its paid-inclusion and cost-per-click programs that continues to create buzz in the SEM world. Six days ago, Ask.Com announced the acquisition of the once popular search engine Excite. Today, Yahoo unveiled a local-search feature that combines maps with search results. Sometime in the coming months, MSN is going to unveil its own, proprietary search engine. In short, there is so much going on it is difficult for anyone, even the professional search engine marketers to keep up. Imagine trying to outline a six-month campaign or trying to explain the impact of these changes to a client. While the best laid plans of mice and men often produce unexpected outcomes, it is still very important to map out your plans and intentions for a search engine placement campaign. Here's a glimpse into our planning process as it works today (March 10, 2004).

"If anything is certain, it is that change is certain. The world we are planning for today will not exist in this form tomorrow." - Philip Crosby, Reflections on Quality

Step 1 :: Keyword and Competition Research (2 - 6 hours)

These may seem like separate steps but in our methodology, they must be conducted in conjunction with each other. As search engine marketers, our perceptions of what constitutes a competitive businesses is often slightly different from those of our clients. While ABC Widgets and XYZ Widgets may have a fierce rivallry for clients in the mainstream world one or the other might not have a website or they might not be competing for search engine placements under the exact same keyword phrases. Our idea of competition is found on Google, MSN and Yahoo under the Top10 placements for a specific keyword phrase or a set of phrases. On one hand, we don't really know who the competition is until we research the keywords we are targeting while on the other hand, the companies indicated by our client as important competitors often help us find keyword phrases to research, recommend and target.

Step 2 :: Cost Benefit Analysis (2 - 4 hours)

Every day for the past seven days I have fielded phone calls from concerned clients. This week they are thinking about the new fee structure introduced by Yahoo and the impending costs associated with these new fees. With Yahoo stating they will charge $0.15 to $0.30 per click for sites participating in the Site Match program, and costs between $0.15 to $1.00 per click for much larger sites feeding data to Yahoo through the Site XChange program, businesses need to know the least expensive methods of getting prominent placements. In order to provide the best possible advise, StepForth is now conducting a cost-benefit analysis for all new campaigns and will be applying this analysis to currently existing ones.

The major factors in relation to Yahoo/Overture placements involve the actual costs associated with the new fee structure. Even after signing up for Site Match, paying the review fee and agreeing to the cost-per-click fees that will be charged against the listing, Top20 placements will still depend on good site optimization. As any honest SEO will tell you, search engine optimization is a kin to loading dice. Getting the placement is still a roll of the dice but at least we can help weigh those dice on your behalf. So, SEO is a good bet for front page placement at Yahoo but we know of a 100% sure bet, Overture. There are several examples where the cost-per-click charges that will be imposed by Yahoo will be higher than the third place bid-per-click at Overture. With the top3 bidded listings at Overture displayed on the front page of Yahoo and other Yahoo owned search engines, the best option for our client (in this scenario) would obviously be to pursue Overture advertising and avoid rolling the dice on SEO/Yahoo cost-per-click. Not only will the costs be lower, front page placement is guaranteed as long as Overture and Yahoo retain the distribution agreement that displays Overture ads at Yahoo. We have a general idea of costs existing clients will face by taking their average number of visits per day, dividing it against the approximate 41% market share Yahoo currently enjoys, and multiplying the dividend by $0.15 or $0.30, depending on the client's business sector. Please note, we realize how unscientific this method may be but it does offer our clients at least some approximation of the long-term costs of their campaigns. This is an oversimplified view of our analysis but it does express our basic premise, there is almost always a less expensive option to find for the clients.

Step 3 :: Optimize for Inktomi/Yahoo and Link Build for Google (8 - 24 hours)

Our current SEO methods have us optimizing for Inktomi / Yahoo and link-building for Google. The thinking behind this method is based on the behaviours of Yahoo, MSN and Google. Both Yahoo and MSN are currently drawing from the Inktomi database though we know this will change in April as Yahoo will be drawing from its own database, (which will likely be drawn from sites already included at Inktomi). According to Yahoo spokesperson Jennifer Stephens, Yahoo-Slurp (Yahoo's spider) will act much like its famous cousin Google-bot by crawling sites, following every link found, and incorporating the information found on these pages into its database of spidered sites. Google-bot continues to work the way it always has but the information it gathers is being measured in different ways than it was before. Links are the most important factor (of nearly 100 unique factors) to Google rankings. Assuming the site is well optimized for Yahoo and Inktomi, good, strong links will produce good, strong placements at Google. It is therefore summarized simplest in the phrase "optimize for Yahoo, link-build for Google"

Step 4 :: Submit and Monitor (72 hours - 6 weeks)

After all is said and done, the site needs to be submitted to the search engines and monitored for several months to see what happens. During the second phase we conducted a cost-benefit analysis so we have a plan for how we want to submit the site and can offer reasonable expectations to our clients for the amount of time it will take to be spidered and hopefully appear in the Top20 or Top10. At this point, we begin monitoring the site on a daily basis starting 72-hours after first submission. By that time, we expect to see evidence of search-engine spiders appearing in server logs and may even see a debut placement for the site. One of the greatest benefits of a paid-inclusion program is the increased frequency of spider-visits to a website. Most paid-inclusion programs promise repeat spider visits every 48 - 72 hours, making the SEO job a bit easier as we can see the effects of tweaks in fairly short order.

An important submission note: Most search engines continue to support free-submissions however preference is shown to sites which have paid their inclusion fees with a far greater frequency of visitors. Jennifer Stephenson from Overture said that sites participating in Site Match will be revisited every 48 hours while sites that are found by the Yahoo-Slurp spider and are added to the database will be revisited approximately once each month.

Step 5 :: Client/Sector Communication

In times of great change, the one constant will be people wanting to know what the heck is going on. Businesses of every size need to know how their money is being spent and what factors might effect how that money is spent. All humans react better to known quantities than they do to unknown quantities. Clients who feel broad-sided by changes are generally less than happy clients as many of us in the SEO sector found in November. Even though we were broad-sided by Google's Florida Update many clients expected us to KNOW what was going on. One of our saving-graces at StepForth was our level of communication with clients and the fact that we honestly stated that we did now know but would work to find out. Always tell the truth to your clients. They will never accept it if you try to bluff your way through but will almost always accept honest answers, even if they don't particularly like the facts (or lack thereof) presented to them. When major change happens, we write about it here and issue a client-wide bulletin.

Change Happens

The information age has brought about the greatest changes to human interaction since the end of the Dark Ages. The information age, as an era is less than fifty years old. Change happens very quickly these days and that pace of change is quadrupled on the Internet. Even in the midst of rapid change, planning is the best part of execution. Aside from providing a loose road-map, the very act of planning helps perfect your plans.

"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." - Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969)
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Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing expert based in Victoria BC. Jim writes and edits full-time for StepForth and is also an editor for the Internet Search Engine Database. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes the opportunity to share his experience through interviews, articles and speaking engagements. He can be reached at jimhedger@stepforth.com.

SEO Glossary

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become an essential weapon in the arsenal of every online business. Unfortunately, for most business owners and marketing managers (and even many webmasters), it's also somewhat of an enigma. This is partly due to the fact that it's such a new and rapidly changing field, and partly due to the fact that SEO practitioners tend to speak in a language all of their own which, without translation, is virtually impenetrable to the layperson. This glossary seeks to remedy that situation, explaining specialist SEO terms in plain English...

AdWords

See Sponsored Links.

algorithm

A complex mathematical formula used by search engines to assess the relevance and importance of websites and rank them accordingly in their search results. These algorithms are kept tightly under wraps as they are the key to the objectivity of search engines (i.e. the algorithm ensures relevant results, and relevant results bring more users, which in turn brings more advertising revenue).

article PR

The submitting of free reprint articles to many article submission sites and article distribution lists in order to increase your website's search engine ranking and Google PageRank. (In this sense, the "PR" stands for PageRank.) Like traditional public relations, article PR also conveys a sense of authority because your articles are widely published. And because you're proving your expertise and freely dispensing knowledge, your readers will trust you and will be more likely to remain loyal to you. (In this sense, the "PR" stands for Public Relations.)

article submission sites

Websites which act as repositories of free reprint articles. They are sites where authors can submit their articles free of charge, and where webmasters can find articles to use on their websites free of charge. Article submission sites generate revenue by selling advertising space on their websites. See also article PR.

backlink

A text link to your website from another website. See also link.

copy

The words used on your website.

copywriter

A professional writer who specializes in the writing of advertising copy (compelling, engaging words promoting a particular product or service). See also SEO copywriter and web copywriter.

crawl

Google finds pages on the World Wide Web and records their details in its index by sending out ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’. These spiders make their way from page to page and site to site by following text links. To a spider, a text link is like a door.

domain name

The virtual address of your website (normally in the form www.yourbusinessname.com). This is what people will type when they want to visit your site. It is also what you will use as the address in any text links back to your site.

ezine

An electronic magazine. Most publishers of ezines are desperate for content and gladly publish well written, helpful articles and give you full credit as author, including a link to your website.

Flash

A technology used to create animated web pages (and page elements).

free reprint article

An article written by you and made freely available to other webmasters to publish on their websites. See also article PR.

Google

The search engine with the greatest coverage of the World Wide Web, and which is responsible for most search engine-referred traffic. Of approximately 11.5 billion pages on the World Wide Web, it is estimated that Google has indexed around 8.8 billion. This is one reason why it takes so long to increase your ranking!

Google AdWords

See Sponsored Links.

Google PageRank

How Google scores a website’s importance. It gives all sites a mark out of 10. By downloading the Google Toolbar, you can view the PR of any site you visit.

Google Toolbar

A free tool you can download. It becomes part of your browser toolbar. It’s most useful features are it’s PageRank display (which allows you to view the PR of any site you visit) and it’s AutoFill function (when you’re filling out an online form, you can click AutoFill, and it enters all the standard information automatically, including Name, Address, Zip code/Postcode, Phone Number, Email Address, Business Name, Credit Card Number (password protected), etc.) Once you’ve downloaded and installed the toolbar, you may need to set up how you’d like it to look and work by clicking Options (setup is very easy). NOTE: Google does record some information (mostly regarding sites visited).

HTML

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the coding language used to create much of the information on the World Wide Web. Web browsers read the HTML code and display the page that code describes.

Internet

An interconnected network of computers around the world.

JavaScript

A programming language used to create dynamic website pages (e.g. interactivity).

keyword

A word which your customers search for and which you use frequently on your site in order to be relevant to those searches. This use known as targeting a keyword. Most websites actually target ‘keyword phrases’ because single keywords are too generic and it is very difficult to rank highly for them.

keyword density

A measure of the frequency of your keyword in relation to the total wordcount of the page. So if your page has 200 words, and your keyword phrase appears 10 times, its density is 5%.

keyword phrase

A phrase which your customers search for and which you use frequently on your site in order to be relevant to those searches.

link

A word or image on a web page which the reader can click to visit another page. There are normally visual cues to indicate to the reader that the word or image is a link.

link path

Using text links to connect a series of page (i.e. page 1 connects to page 2, page 2 connects to page 3, page 3 connects to page 4, and so on). Search engine ‘spiders’ and ‘robots’ use text links to jump from page to page as they gather information about it, so it’s a good idea to allow them traverse your entire site via text links.

link partner

A webmaster who is willing to put a link to your website on their website. Quite often link partners engage in reciprocal linking.

link popularity

The number of links to your website. Link popularity is the single most important factor in a high search engine ranking. Webmasters use a number of methods to increase their site's link popularity including article PR, link exchange (link partners / reciprocal linking), link buying, and link directories.

link text

The part of a text link that is visible to the reader. When generating links to your own site, they are most effective (in terms of ranking) if they include your keyword.

meta tag

A short note within the header of the HTML of your web page which describes some aspect of that page. These meta tags are read by the search engines and used to help assess the relevance of a site to a particular search.

natural search results

The ‘real’ search results. The results that most users are looking for and which take up most of the window. For most searches, the search engine displays a long list of links to sites with content which is related to the word you searched for. These results are ranked according to how relevant and important they are.

organic search results

See natural search results.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click advertising)

See Sponsored Links.

PageRank

See Google PageRank.

rank

Your position in the search results that display when someone searches for a particular word at a search engine.

reciprocal link

A mutual agreement between two webmasters to exchange links (i.e. they both add a link to the other’s website on their own website). Most search engines (certainly Google) are sophisticated enough to detect reciprocal linking and they don’t view it very favorably because it is clearly a manufactured method of generating links. Websites with reciprocal links risk being penalized.

robot

See spider.

robots.txt file

A file which is used to inform the search engine spider which pages on a site should not be indexed. This file sits in your site’s root directory on the web server. (Alternatively, you can do a similar thing by placing tags in the header section of your HTML for search engine robots/spiders to read.

Sandbox

Many SEO experts believe that Google ‘sandboxes’ new websites. Whenever it detects a new website, it withholds its rightful ranking for a period while it determines whether your site is a genuine, credible, long term site. It does this to discourage the creation of SPAM websites (sites which serve no useful purpose other than to boost the ranking of some other site). Likewise, if Google detects a sudden increase (i.e. many hundreds or thousands) in the number of links back to your site, it may sandbox them for a period (or in fact penalize you by lowering your ranking or blacklisting your site altogether).

SEO

Search Engine Optimization. The art of making your website relevant and important so that it ranks high in the search results for a particular word.

SEO copywriter

A ‘copywriter’ who is not only proficient at web copy, but also experienced in writing copy which is optimized for search engines (and will therefore help you achieve a better search engine ranking for your website).

search engine

A search engine is an online tool which allows you to search for websites which contain a particular word or phrase. The most well known search engines are Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

site map

A single page which contains a list of text links to every page in the site (and every page contains a text link back to the site map). Think of your site map as being at the center of a spider-web.

SPAM

Generally refers to unwanted and unrequested email sent en-masse to private email addresses. Also used to refer to websites which appear high in search results without having any useful content. The creators of these sites set them up simply to cash in on their high ranking by selling advertising space, links to other sites, or by linking to other sites of their own and thereby increasing the ranking of those sites. The search engines are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and already have very efficient ways to detect SPAM websites and penalize them.

spider

Google finds pages on the World Wide Web and records their details in its index by sending out ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’. These spiders make their way from page to page and site to site by following text links.

Sponsored Links

Paid advertising which displays next to the natural search results. Customers can click on the ad to visit the advertiser’s website. This is how the search engines make their money. Advertisers set their ads up to display whenever someone searches for a word which is related to their product or service. These ads look similar to the natural search results, but are normally labeled “Sponsored Links”, and normally take up a smaller portion of the window. These ads work on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) basis (i.e. the advertiser only pays when someone clicks on their ad).

submit

You can submit your domain name to the search engines so that their ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’ will crawl your site. You can also submit articles to ‘article submission sites’ in order to have them published on the Internet.

text link

A word on a web page which the reader can click to visit another page. Text links are normally blue and underlined. Text links are what ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’ use to jump from page to page and website to website.

URL

Uniform Resource Locator. The address of a particular page published on the Internet. Normally in the form http://www.yourbusinessname.com/AWebPage.htm.

web copy

See copy.

web copywriter

A ‘copywriter’ who understands the unique requirements of writing for an online medium.

webmaster

A person responsible for the management of a particular website.

wordcount

The number of words on a particular web page.

World Wide Web (WWW)

The vast array of documents published on the Internet. It is estimated that the World Wide Web now consists of approximately 11.5 billion pages.

* Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter, website copywriter, SEO copywriter, and article submission and article PR specialist. He heads copywriting studio, Divine Write, and is a director of article PR company, Article PR. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.DivineWrite.com or http://www.ArticlePR.com for further details, a FREE SEO eBook, or more FREE reprint articles.

The Basics of SEO - Some FAQs

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a foreign field to a lot of people. Rarely does a day go by when I don't get asked a few questions on the subject. So I've decided to post this FAQ article in the hopes that it will help people understand the basics, and make them a little more comfortable with the whole domain.

Q: Why are search engines important to me?

A: 85% of all website traffic is driven by search engines. The only online activity more popular than search is email. 79.2% of US users don't go to page 2 of search results. 42% of users click on the no.1 result. For the under-40 age-group, the Internet will become the most used media in the next 2-3 years.

Q: How do search engines decide on their rankings?

A: IMPORTANT: You cannot pay a search engine in return for a high ranking in the natural results. You can only get a high ranking if your content is seen as relevant by the search engines.
Search engines identify relevant content for their search results by sending out ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’ which ‘crawl’ (analyze) your site and ‘index’ (record) its details. Complex algorithms are then employed to determine whether your site is useful and should be included in the search engine’s search results.

Q: Can't I just pay for a high ranking?

A: No. The biggest concern for search engine companies like Google and Yahoo is finding content that will bring them more traffic (and thus more advertising revenue). In other words, their results must be relevant. Relevant results makes for a good search engine; irrelevant results makes for a short-lived search engine.

Most search engines these days return two types of results whenever you click Search:

• Natural/Organic – The ‘real’ search results. The results that most users are looking for and which take up most of the window. For most searches, the search engine displays a long list of links to sites with content which is related to the word you searched for. These results are ranked according to how relevant and important they are.


• Paid – Pure advertising. This is how the search engines make their money. Advertisers pay the search engines to display their ad whenever someone searches for a word which is related to their product or service. These ads look similar to the natural search results, but are normally labeled “Sponsored Links”, and normally take up a smaller portion of the window.

Q: How do I get a high ranking?

A: There are four main steps:

Step 1 - Use the right words on your website

Step 2 - Get lots of relevant sites to link to yours

Step 3 - Use the right words in those links

Step 4 - Have lots of content on your site & add more regularly

Q: What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

A: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of creating a website which is search engine-friendly. This means:

• using the right words in your copy


• using the right words in your HTML code


• structuring your site properly


• designing your site properly

For more information on these 4 elements, download our free 'SEO Secrets' eBook.

Many people use SEO to also describe the other ingredient in a high ranking, 'Link Popularity'.

Q: What is link popularity?

A: Think of the search engines as a big election. All the websites in the world are candidates. The links to your website are votes. The more votes (links) a candidate (website) has, the more important it is, and the higher its ranking. Link popularity is all about how many links you have, and how you can get more.

Links to your site tell the search engines how important your site is. They assume that if it’s important enough for a lot of other sites to link to, it’s important enough for them to display at the top of the rankings. Links are the single most important factor in ranking. Generally speaking, the more links you have to your site from other sites, the better your ranking.

Q: How many links to my site are there?

A: Search Google for "www.yourdomain.com". (Don't search for "link:www.yourdomain.com" as this only returns a subset of the links to your site.) Then on the page that displays next, select "Find web pages that contain the term "www.yourdomain.com" ". When you do it this way, you'll see all the pages that contain your URL. In most cases, the URL will be an active link (or at least it should be... if it's not, you should ask the site owner to make it so). There are also some tools you can use.

Q: Are some links better than others?

A: Yes! The ideal kind of links are those that:

• come from relevant sites (sites which use the same keywords);


• come from important sites (have a high ranking);


• include your keyword as part of the visible link text;


• include varying link text (not the same link text each time); and


• come from a page that links to few other sites.

When a search engine sees a link which satisfies most or all of these conditions, it says, “Hey, this site must be credible and important, because others in the same industry are pointing to it.”

Q: How do I get lots of links back to my site?

A: There are many possible ways to generate links. Some are dubious (like auto-generation software, and sites set up by webmasters simply to host links to their other sites) and I won’t be discussing them here. Others, like those discussed below, are legitimate.

• Add your site to DMOZ & Yahoo Directories (and other free directories)


• Check where your competitors’ links are coming from


• Article PR - Write and submit articles for Internet publication


• Swap links


• Partner websites


• Pay for links

For more information on these methods, download our free 'SEO Secrets' eBook.

Q: What do you think is the best way to get lots of links?

A: Article PR. Write helpful articles and let other webmasters publish them for free in exchange for a link in the byline. With article PR, you don't have to pay for the link, you determine the content of the page containing the link, you determine the link text, and the link is more or less permanent. A single article can be reprinted hundreds of times, and each time is another link back to your site!

For more information, read How to Top Google with Article PR or visit www.ArticlePR.com.

Q: How do I write a good article PR piece?

A: See How to Top Google with Article PR

Q: How do I get a high ranking using free reprint content?

A: See Get a top 10 ranking without paying a cent.

Q: How long does it take to get a high search engine ranking?

A: A long time! It’s impossible to say how much time you’ll need to spend generating links, but you can be sure it’ll be a while no matter which method of link generation you use. You just have to keep at it until you have achieved a high ranking. Even then, you’ll still need to dedicate some ongoing time to the task, otherwise your ranking will drop.

Q: What is the Google Sandbox, and is it real?

A: The Google Sandbox theory suggest that whenever Google detects a new website, it withholds its rightful ranking for a period while it determines whether your site is a genuine, credible, long term site. It does this to discourage the creation of SPAM websites (sites which serve no useful purpose other than to boost the ranking of some other site).

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence supporting the theory, but there is also a lot discounting it. No one has categorically proven its existence.

Q: What is the Google Dampening Link Filter, and is it real?

A: The Google Dampening Link Filter theory suggests that if Google detects a sudden increase (i.e. many hundreds or thousands) in the number of links back to your site, it may sandbox them for a period (or in fact penalize you by lowering your ranking or blacklisting your site altogether).

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence supporting the theory, but there is also a lot discounting it. No one has categorically proven its existence.

Q: What SEO companies should I be wary of?

A: Be wary of SEO companies that promise or guarantee results in a given timeframe, especially if they won't expand on their methods for generating links back to your site.

Q: What tools can you recommend?

A: There are many very useful tools to help with your SEO. The following are just selection. All tools are free unless otherwise indicated.

• Backlink checker


• Backlinks by IP address


• Link Popularity Tool


• Number of links required to rank


• Google Alert


• Google Sitemaps


• Google Sitemap Generator


• Google Toolbar


• Indexed Pages


• Keyword Analysis (Nichebot)


• Keyword Analysis (Overture)


• Keyword Analysis (WordTracker - Paid)


• Keyword Difficulty


• Keyword Identifier


• Keyword Density Measurement (Simple)


• Keyword Density Measurement (Complex)


• Plagiarized Copy Search


• Traffic Rank


• Search Engine Rank


• SEO Report


• Top 10 sites for a keyword by no of backlinks and age


• Top 10 sites for a keyword


• Spider Simulator

Q: I'm confused about all the terms used in SEO, can you help?

A: See our SEO Glossary.

Q: What is keyword analysis?

A: The first thing you need to do when you begin chasing a good search engine ranking is decide which words you want to rank well for. This is called performing a keyword analysis. Keyword analysis involves a bit of research and a good knowledge of your business and the benefits you offer your customers.

For more information, download our free 'SEO Secrets' eBook.

Q: Do I need to submit my site to the search engines?

A: Theoretically, no. But I wouldn't risk not doing it - especially as it's free. As soon as you register your domain name, submit it to Google! Even if you haven’t built your site, or thought about your content, submit your domain name to Google. In fact, even if you haven’t fully articulated your business plan and marketing plan, submit your domain name to Google.

For more information, download our free 'SEO Secrets' eBook.

Q: Should I submit my site to the search engines more than once?

A: No need. Although some of the search engines allow you to do this, there's really no need.

Q: What are directories and should I submit my site to them?

A: Directories are websites (or web pages) which simply list lots of website and give a quick description of the website. Some are free and some require you to pay for a listing. Free directories are useful because you get a free link. However, the links aren't worth that much. Paid directories can be good if they're relevant, but they can cost a lot in the long term, so choose wisely.

One essential directories for any website is the DMOZ Open Directory Project.

* Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter, website copywriter, SEO copywriter, and article submission and article PR specialist. He heads copywriting studio, Divine Write, and is a director of article PR company, Article PR. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.DivineWrite.com or http://www.ArticlePR.com for further details, a FREE SEO eBook, or more FREE reprint articles.