Search Engine Optimization Success: 12/11/06

Monday, December 11, 2006

Are You Wasting Money By Paying Your Web Designer For SEO?

Web site designers know that keeping the client happy is the most
important thing; however, this approach often backfires when one
of the client"(tm)s goals is to gain top search engine rankings.
Good SEO web site design delivers a beautiful and functional
website, a pleasant experience for those who use it, and a search
engine-friendly design. But what happens when a web designer has
a client who wants esthetics or navigation that takes away from
the site"(tm)s ability to gain top search engine rankings? Do web
developers go along with their client"(tm)s wishes at the expense
of search engine rankings, or do they politely guide the client
toward achieving all of their goals?

The biggest difference between web designers and SEO
professionals is what motivates them: creativity versus strategic
thinking. A web designer is ultimately motivated by making a
website look good to the client, thus satisfying them visually.
An SEO professional is ultimately motivated to gain top search
engine rankings for competitive keywords, thus gaining
visibility. More business owners are now waking up to the fact
that web designers are more artists than online marketers. So it
is vital to have the SEO professional and web designer work
together cooperatively on web site design.

"We do search engine optimization, too."
Often, a web site design company does a few aspects of search
engine optimization but does not really do what it takes to gain
top rankings. Companies can get roped in on this claim because a
firm does a great job at web site design or because the client
has "one-stop shop" syndrome, and so assumes a design firm is
equally skilled at SEO.

Most web developers do not consider the implications of search
engine optimization during the design phase. For example, to gain
top rankings for competitive keywords requires outranking
hundreds or even thousands of other websites that have already
been optimized for that keyword. Simply updating the meta tags
will rank the site at the bottom of the "optimized" heap and
will require ongoing work to gain a top ranking.

The client wants to keep costs down, so the web developer
compromises the SEO to stay within budget. The client needs to
know from his advisors (designers and SEO professional) what is
and is not practical, so he can reassess the budget and design
based on information supplied by an SEO expert. Because budget is
important, developers often shortcut past this advisory
checkpoint "" at the expense of gaining top rankings for the
client"(tm)s site.

It"(tm)s important to find a good web developer who will listen
to your requests, and who also will advise you on the best way to
implement the design and SEO. He needs to talk realistically with
you if the amount of work involved is not within your budget. Too
often, web developers simply implement a client"(tm)s wishes
without addressing the limitations and problems that come with
that solution. Ethical and knowledgeable web developers can
explain why you want the opinion of an SEO professional.

There are a number of issues that web designers might not handle
correctly when top search engine rankings are important,
including:

Search engine-friendly design
Obviously, you want visitors to have a good experience on your
site. But you also want search engine spiders to find all the
pages and content that will rank your site for a particular
keyword. If your site isn"(tm)t spider-friendly, it will never be
top ranked. Here are some of the search engine-friendly web
design issues we deal with regularly:

* JavaScript drop-down or slide-out menus can prevent search
engine spiders from following navigation links in web pages.
There are several design alternatives that involve text links and
don"(tm)t cause this problem.
* Requiring cookies on your website also prevents spiders from
indexing your content.
* Web pages that require users to input any type of
information in order to access the content blocks search engines
from your pages.
* Shopping cart systems that invoke session IDs. All shopping
cart systems utilize session IDs, but the further along a shopper
is in the buying process, the more search engine-friendly the
system.
* Unique title tags for each page of the site. Many automated
web design programs and dynamic database systems do not allow for
more than one title tag for every page of the site. Using a
design that describes the uniqueness of each page of your site in
the title tag achieves better results.

Navigation structure
Search engines don"(tm)t notice if your site has creative
navigation, but do notice if the navigation is cluttered.
Depending on how many pages your site contains, tightly focused
content organized by topic can pay off with higher search engine
rankings. Design navigation to optimize themes and internal
linking.

Website redesign etiquette
After a redesign, there are usually old pages that are no longer
used and might have been removed from the web server, but which
are still listed in the search engines. Don"(tm)t miss out on
search engine traffic because your web developer didn"(tm)t
redirect those old URLs to the new ones. There are various
protocols, depending on the web server, to handle URL redirects
and maintain search engine rankings. A custom error page is also
useful for visitors who click on a broken link or an address that
is no longer available.

Copywriting and duplicate content issues
If your web page contains the same wording as another page on the
Internet, it could be filtered by the search engines because it
is considered duplicate content. Search engines use a filter to
remove duplicate content pages and spam from the results they
provide. Unfortunately, many good web developers"(tm) work has
fallen victim to the duplicate content filter. These developers
unknowingly do a disservice to their clients when there are
things they could do to avoid their pages"(tm) being filtered out
of the results. Common causes of duplicate content include:

* Identical web pages "" whether affiliate sites, copied pages
or doorway pages "" that have the exact same content on them.
* Product description pages with the exact same description as
pages on the manufacturer"(tm)s website.
* Improperly hosting multiple domain names for the same
website.

Without question, original content is the best content for
websites. Always use a quality copywriter to make your web
writing unique and compelling for your particular audience.

Conclusion
Resist the temptation of the one-stop shopping experience. If you
give in, you will likely be sacrificing one or more of your goals
for the convenience. When the business owner forges a cooperative
relationship between the web site designer and SEO professional,
everyone wins. This means thinking through the SEO issues at the
beginning of the web site design plan.

Would you prefer to have the site that looks good and keeps the
customers happy or the one that also gets 40 e-mail requests and
new customers every day? This is reality for businesses that will
not settle for anything less than experts in SEO and web site
development.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom Shivers is a search engine optimization
professional and President of Capture Commerce,
Inc. (http://www.capturecommerce.com), which he
founded in 2000 to help businesses leverage the
Internet for growth and profit. Capture Commerce
specializes in search engine marketing and conversion
rate marketing, and currently serves clients across
several industries including travel, automotive,
industrial, education, and the arts. Learn more at
http://www.capturecommerce.com

SEO - Article Marketing Is Out - Link Baiting Is In

Article marketing is yesterday, Link Baiting is tomorrow, this is the
future.

The majority of SEO campaigns have involved article marketing , this was
okay until recently. The problem with article marketing is that it produces
links quickly. However, the links fall into the "Link Spam" category and too
many article links will actually do your site more harm than good.

Link Baiting on the other hand, is far easier, quicker and more effective
than article marketing.

So what is Link Baiting?

Link Baiting is simply..Link Building. However, you get your links by word
of mouth rather than by asking for them.
You get people to link to your site by offering funny, subjective or
otherwise link worthy material.

How do you Link Bait then?

You publish you new content on the web and if it is interesting enough, word
will spread and many people will link to it.
The principal is similar to joke emails going around, how many times have
you had a funny joke arrive in your inbox by five of your fiends all on the
same day?

Link baiting comes in a few different flavours and they are:

News: This is where you give some breaking news that is link worthy

Contrary: This is where to contradict a main stream idea

Attack: This is where you actually launch a personal attach on someone's
idea. Beware, this can be dangerous.

Resource: This is where you offer a useful resource

Humour: This is where you offer something funny that is link worthy.

Link baiting requires far less work that than article marketing because one
good piece of link worthy content can produce hundreds if not thousands if
back links across many different types of IP addresses.
This gives a strong SEO angle because of the number of back links and
because the linking profile seems more natural.

Whereby, article marketing only produces back links where you have posted
the article.
Therefore if you post one article you will probably only get one back link.
Also, the back links are all coming from the same place. This is NOT good
for SEO.

Chris Angus is a SEO and website promoter:

He can be contacted at sales(at)brilliantseo.com

SEO Company UK
Asbestos Management
Kitchens Oxford

About The Author: Chris Angus is a SEO and website promoter: He can be
contacted at sales(at)brilliantseo.com http://www.seocompanyuk.com
http://www.mdhsasbestosconsultants.com
http://www.everest-oxfordshire.co.uk

A Few Search Engine Optimization Techniques

You completed a web site for your business about three months ago, but you
are still not seeing very many people visiting your web site. You do a
little research and find that your web site is buried about ten pages deep
on all of the major search engines. It seems that you have created a very
nice web site, but it is not optimized for search engines, so your page rank
is very low. Search engine optimization has become a very large field for
many different consultants all over the internet.
However the techniques needed to optimize your web site for search engines
are not very hard to implement on your web site all by yourself. Here are a
few of the most important things that you can do for search engine
optimization:

Use keywords throughout your web site. - Many people do a good job putting a
good description and group of keywords in their meta tags, but they do not
use these same keywords throughout the rest of their web site. You must
continue to use your keywords throughout the content on the rest of your web
site if you would like to get high search engine rankings.

Create a sitemap - Many search engines will try to index your site's pages
by following links to all of the different pages.
However if a search engine is unable to follow a link, then a page might not
get included in the search engine's results. To make sure all of your pages
get indexed, make sure that you have a text-based sitemap that includes all
of the major pages of your web site.

Use Flash sparingly - Flash is a very neat technology and it has its place
on the web. However you do not want to overuse Flash, because a search
engine will not be able to read the text that is embedded in the Flash
elements, which could hurt your ranking if you have keywords in that area.

Get inbound links - One of the best things that you can do for search engine
optimization is to get inbound links to your web site. If you are able to
get high quality web sites that relate to your business to link to your web
site, then your search engine ranking is sure to climb.

About The Author: Discover a unique, powerful way to get inbound links at
Link A Tag: http://www.linkatag.com/

Use Pay Per Click (PPC) During The Holiday Shopping Season

The holiday shopping season has a beginning, middle, and end.
You can argue it begins in September and ends in January. No matter what
timeframe you have it's still a finite period of time during which a very
large percentage of yearly retail sales are made. You have to strike while
the iron is hot. It is unrealistic to expect users to locate your online
presence by directly entering your website address. More than 75 percent of
Internet consumers use search engines and directories to look for products,
services and information.

The problem is it takes time to optimize your website and for spiders to
magically index your site in relation to the billions and billions and
billions of other websites. Well maybe not that many. The question is how do
you get people to your website for that brief three or four month selling
season.
Answer: you buy your way in.

Pay per click (PPC) search engines, also known as pay-for-performance, are
engines which allow website owners to determine their sites ranking in that
particular search engines results by bidding on keywords. Usually the first
three to five search results are used by a network of partner search sites.
The result for the site owner or webmaster is a lot more highly targeted
traffic and a lot more sales.

PPC has a small setup fee, and higher recurring costs than Search Engine
Optimization (SEO). However, while SEO can take months or longer to build
traffic, PPC will immediately send targeted traffic to your website. You may
pay more for the convenience of instantly turning your traffic on and off,
but to many it is worthwhile.

Pay Per Click search allows you to effectively connect with customers
searching online for your products and services. You select words that
relate to your business and your website appears in search results on
selected sites when search users enter those words. You pay for each sales
lead, not each impression, leading to a high return on your advertising
investment. You also control your costs by determining the price you are
willing to pay per lead - the more you pay, the higher your listings appear
within the search results and the greater the number of potential customers
that see your listing. The underlying idea to pay per click search engines
is that you find keywords related to your website and then you bid on these
keywords and buy high positions on your chosen engine.
Your bid amount is the amount you're willing to pay for each visitor that
visits your site through the search results.

The more times a word or phrase has been searched for the higher you'll have
to bid to get high rankings. The only limitation is that your site must be
at least vaguely relevant to the keyword you want to bid on (if you bid for
terms that weren't really directly related to your website, people would
come to your site, not buy anything, and you'd still pay for the visit. It's
like giving the PPC search engines free money, therefore it's vital to
always stay relevant). These engines allow you to skip all the search engine
optimization stuff and simply pay for visitors.

PPC is perfect for a finite period of time because you can start and stop it
when necessary. Benefits of PPC are:

* You only pay for visitors. Unlike banner advertising where you pay each
time someone sees your ad, pay-per-click engines only charge you when
someone actually clicks on your listing.
This means you're getting guaranteed visits.

* Pay-per-click engines provide highly targeted cheap visitors.
Often you can buy a good ranking on a decent keyword for as little as 1 cent
or 2 cents per click. Overture has of late installed $.05 as the minimum bid
however. Popular search terms can cost much more on the big pay per click
search engines most notably Google Adwords, Overture.com and Findwhat.com.
Even still PPC engines are one of the most cost effective way of driving
targeted people to your site. Google Adwords, Overture.com and Findwhat.com
are the pay-per-click engines most often recommended.

BizAtomic Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Management allows your site to be
advertised on various keywords optimized for your business. Using a bidding
mechanism, you purchase the right to have your business listed in a set
position for your keywords.
This process provides instant gratification as your site can be listed at
the top of searches instantly.
The BizAtomic PPC campaign is aimed at delivering the maximum ROI for your
PPC budget with an eye on high conversions, higher CTR and lower cost of
customer acquisition.

The Advantages of PPC (Pay-Per-Click):

* Control: you always know who you are reaching, what keywords you want to
run your PPC campaign on, what countries or even what city you want your PPC
ads to appear for and what language should they be displayed in. You also
control how much you bid for each advertisement and how much you want to
spend in total.

* Targeted Traffic: You get to target the right audience without worrying
about irrelevant traffic. If you sell blue shoes, you can select your ad to
appear only when a search engine user types "Buy Blue Shoes". Of course
people need to be searching for the particular keyword.

* Instant: Another big advantage of PPC is that it is instant.
The PPC ads appear almost instantly and respond to the changes or
modification made instantly.

* Branding: You can choose the words in which you want to describe your
business and also have the freedom of having the visitor visit the exact
page you want them to see.

* Site Architecture Independent: No architectural changes need to be made to
sites to rank on PPC keywords. For example, flash websites can run PPC
campaigns without having to worry about search engine crawlers.

If your objective is to increase traffic to your website or increase brand
awareness, PPC is one of the most important and safest bets on the search
engines.

About The Author: BizAtomic - http://www.bizatomic.com -
800-942-9475

Benefits Of Rss In Ecommerce

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an XML-based format for content
distribution. News, information, enterprise applications and weblogs (blogs)
can all be published in RSS.
When a new article is posted or a change is made to an application, RSS
feeds can automatically notify the user. Text, images, audio (including
podcasts) and video can be incorporated into RSS feeds.

RSS feeds can help keep you up-to-date on news, information and blog posts,
making you more knowledgeable and productive, both at work and at home.
According to Technorati as of March 2006, there are more than 30 million RSS
feeds available. Most mainstream news and information sites publish RSS
feeds.

There are a number of different use cases for RSS since both internal
(enterprise applications, blogs, reports) and external (industry news,
competitive information, blogs) content can be delivered as feeds. In
particular, many businesses see benefits by not having to periodically check
Web sites for key updates or wade through traffic on e-mail distribution
lists. In addition to increasing knowledge and productivity, RSS feeds can
also be used for brand monitoring, crisis communications, internal/executive
communications and competitive intelligence.

Media Companies and Other Content/Information Providers, RSS feeds offer
readers, visitors and customers a convenient way to read and access their
information. RSS feeds can also be incorporated into Web sites to offer a
more personalized and rich user experience, strengthen the brand and
maximize revenue opportunities.

To view RSS feeds, you will need an RSS reader or aggregator.
There are a number of free or low-cost online, desktop, mobile and
Outlook--based readers available. To leverage RSS for a large number of
users inside of a company, you will likely need an RSS server to handle
security and scalability issues, centrally manage users and groups and
present a common interface. To aggregate RSS into an external Web site, you
will also need a server-based solution, either hosted or customer-premise
based.

RSS and ECOMMERCE

Many online retailers like NewEgg.com are utilizing R.S.S.
feeds to keep there customers coming back. If you visit NewEgg.com you will
see R.S.S. icons near the sites' products, with messages offering users
regular updates on those products.
Once a user has indicated a preference for, say, LCD monitors or daily
specials, he clicks on the icon telling the company to send the alerts to
his personalized page.

If the user directs NewEgg.com to deliver alerts to a My Yahoo page,
NewEgg.com will send the alert, typically an item description with a photo,
only when it has a new product or a promotion relevant to the specified
items.

Customers might not expend the energy to surf through all the merchandise to
find items of interest each time they visit. But R.S.S. is a way to
basically position highly relevant interest in front of consumers.

Retailers who are employing R.S.S. feeds are ahead of the curve, but not
unreasonably so. It's still a little too early for this to catch on widely,
but as something for the future, it can be incredibly rewarding and
potentially very lucrative for retailers.

If you are interested in more information about RSS for your company,
Bizatomic boosts your site optimization by creating RSS feeds containing top
search engine keywords and adding them to your website. Placing
"keyword-targeted" feeds on your webpages will greatly enhance your ability
to achieve optimum keyword density. A news feed is preferable to a search
engine feed for SEO because news feeds are updated more frequently.

About The Author: BizAtomic - http://www.bizatomic.com

How To Make Your Site Successful Without Doing Seo

Many people believe in the premise of: "Build it and they will come". Well,
this is totally untrue when it comes to the internet.

Just building a brush strokes website and then hosting your site will not
bring visitors to your site, nor will it bring any sales.

The biggest and best tip to developing a successful website is content,
search engines love it. Without content your website is doomed to failure
before it even starts.

Your website also has to include your keywords for which you would like your
site to rank.

Example: If you owned a printing site, your keyword selection would be:
Colour printing, Colour Book Printing, Colour Brochure Printing in Texas

Your site should have many keywords spread naturally though-out your
content.

Choose 3 - 4 of the most competitive keywords you would like to rank for and
have them on your home page. Repeat them 4 -5 times each, at least. I have
seen keywords repeated on successful websites over twenty times.

I suggest you choose between 50 - 100 keywords searches altogether and have
those repeated throughout your home page copy too.

Your site should also have at least ten pages of content rich copy;
successful sites have thousands of pages that are rich with good
information.

You need to update your site as frequently as possible, if your site is news
based you need to update it as soon as a new story breaks, this will keep
your site fresh and will keep website visitors loyal to you and your site.

The best tip I can pass on is building good link worthy content, what I mean
by that is information that people will want to link to. It may be that you
can offer good information on your site or your site has useful tools that
may be handy to people in the industry.

You then need to promote your site, this is usually the tricky part but if
your site is full of useful information it should be no trouble at all.

Write a number of press releases, Write Articles and post them in major
article directories. Do a bit of offline campaigning - once your fantastic
site has some momentum your site will be a success.

About The Author: Chris Angus is a SEO and Website Marketer. He is also a
White Hat SEO. He can be contacted at sales (at) brilliantseo.com
http://www.illustratemyname.com http://www.mdhsasbestosconsultants.com
http://www.everest-oxfordshire.co.uk

Reciprocal Linking Strategy

If you want to get serious about driving more traffic to your website and
improving your search engine rankings you need to develop a linking
strategy. There are three primary linking
strategies:

1. Reciprocal Linking
2. Purchasing text links
3. Employing a link finding service

This month's issue of BizAtomic Advisor focuses on Reciprocal Linking - How
it can help. When a trusted site links to yours, people follow that
recommendation.

Reciprocal link means your website links to another website and that website
links back to you. Search engines use link popularity to rank websites.
Exchanging reciprocal links with other sites will build a great link
directory that will motivate visitors to bookmark your website to get access
to your link directory.

One of the factors search engine's use to determine your relevancy to a
search term is the number of websites linking to your website. This is an
effective way to increase your search engine rankings.

Three key success factors for a reciprocal linking strategy
are:

1. Quality of links should outweigh quantity 2. Link partners must relate to
your site content 3. Partners should link to you from pages listing as few
links as possible

Linking is what the web is all about. It helps you move from one document to
another and from site to site while maintaining your focus on a particular
subject. The ideal situation is to have one way links from related sites
without you pointing back to them. However, you would have to have a lot of
valuable information, tips, tools, articles, resources, etc. in order to
motivate people to link to your website. Unfortunately most sites don't fall
into this category and reciprocal linking is a requirement.

Step 1 - Get people to want to link to your website. Generating quality
inbound links to your website requires a systematic approach and hard work.
But the payoff is worth it. To begin with you must have good content on your
website. Step one is to analyze the value of your content in relation to
competitors.
You will also need a page of outbound links on your website that visitors
will find valuable.

Step 2 -Research websites that are worth linking to and that will bring
relevant traffic to you. You need to identify the portals, directories, news
sites, ezines, blogs, and other information sources specific to your
industry. You can let your fingers do the walking across the keyboard or you
can purchase one of the many software tools on the market designed to locate
relevant sites. They also help collect email addresses and even prepare
letters requesting that a site add a link to your site.
Without making any recommendations you may want to look into the following
tools:

* Arelis Reciprocal Link Solution
* Zeus Internet Marketing Robot
* Linking 101 Linking Management Script
* Duncan Carver's Link Management System
* Hot Links SQL V2.3
* LinkMaster Pro
* Links Manager
* Links4Trade
* PowerLinks.com

Make sure you at least visit the sites these tools generate.
However, the best way to build long-term link popularity is to offer good
content and features providing real value to your visitors. People will
discover your website.

Google is a great help with your research because it ensure your partners
are properly indexed. Look for sites closely related to you in terms of
theme and keywords. Google's ranking algorithm takes into account each
link's importance along with other factors like the proximity of your search
keywords in the documents. In other words, it's not just about the number of
sites that link to a given page, but also the importance of those sites
(measured by the links to each of them). Google has given a name to its
ranking algorithm for determining a web page's importance; it's called
PageRank(TM).

Human based directories like Yahoo and the Open Directory project have a lot
of influence over search results. List your site in the correct category
with a good description.

Next make sure you are linked to and from topic specific and niche directory
websites. These are sites that provide information that is an exact match
for what you provide.

Don't forget partners and vendors from your business. Since you already have
a relationship you are more likely to be able to request and receive a link
from their website.

Step 3 - Implementing your strategy. Like any marketing campaign you need a
plan.

* Set business benefit objectives for your Linking strategy.
Think about what you are trying to achieve and write it down on paper.
* Develop a content plan for populating your website with valuable content.
* Set linking policies, pages, and linking code you can give to link
partners for your site.
* Monitor the progress of your linking strategy so that you can see what
results have been achieved and adapt or tweak what you are doing to improve
results.
* Benchmark your site's link popularity against competitors

A Reciprocal Linking Program will require that you manage the
following:

1.The name of the site

2.The URL

3.The name and email address of the person who runs the site

4.The date you contact the person who runs the site and the date he or she
responds

5.The resulting deal (Some will say yes, some will say no, others will not
reply at all, others will want a link back from you, some may want money for
links, some will be out of town and take weeks to reply, etc.)

6.The status of the deal

7.Verifying that the link is in place

8.Checking the site periodically for the link (Yes, some folks swap links
and then pull yours for odd reasons.)

Remember the most important benefit of a link exchange is the traffic
resulting directly from these links. Search engines are highly
unpredictable. They keep changing their algorithms every now and then. Your
site is on the top 10 results today but it may not be so tomorrow. Of
course, you don't want to exclude search engine optimization but your main
concern should be getting traffic from direct links.

About The Author: BizAtomic - http://www.bizatomic.com -
800-942-9475

Writing for the Web:Nourish the spider, engage the human

When you're writing for the Web, you answer to two masters:
humans and spiders.

For your website to reach its full potential, your web writing
needs to appeal to the emotional needs of your target audience as
well as the logical needs of search engine spiders.

Nourish the spider

Search engines, such as Google, identify relevant web writing for
their search results by sending spiders (or robots) to 'crawl'
and index websites. Complex sets of rules called algorithms are
then employed to determine how useful your site is and where it
should rank in the search engine results.

Given the facts that more than 500 million world-wide searches
are made daily, and search engines account for more than 85 per
cent of all new visitors to a website, Search Engine Optimization
(SEO) is by far the single most effective marketing strategy you
can use to gain online presence.

But before your webpage can be optimized, you must determine
which keywords to target. This involves:

* Finding relevant keywords
* Determining their popularity
* Assessing the amount of competition
* Deciding which keywords can be best supported with quality web
writing

The selected keywords must then be tactfully integrated into your
web writing. Search engines reward sites with well-written,
relevant and content-rich copy, so your web writing should
comprise a keyword density ratio of three to seven per cent. This
is calculated by dividing the keywords by the total number of
words on a page.

Engage the human

Once you drive traffic to your website, your web writing must
connect with visitors on an emotional level to engage them and
ultimately convert sales.

What's the quickest and most effective way to achieve this? Give
people what they want: relevant web writing!

When you're writing for the Web, recognize and address the real
needs of your visitors, and make it easy for them to find what
they need or want to know.

Do:
Engage, inform, influence and convert online visitors into
customers with clear, concise and relevant web writing.

Don't:
Bore or irritate visitors with company-centered, self-absorbed
messages, which will only guide cursors to the 'back' button.

Ignite readers' emotions by clearly communicating the benefits
of your products or services. It's amazing how many businesses,
large and small, overlook this all-important aspect, and instead
focus exclusively on features. Promoting benefits will help
visitors envision themselves experiencing your product or
service.

By providing relevant web writing, you empower visitors to make
informed decisions. This gains you instant credibility and trust,
increasing your chances to turn them into full-fledged customers.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Rick Sloboda is a Senior Web Copywriter at
http://www.webcopyplus.com Put your web writing
to the test with a free, easy-to-use keyword
density tool More Webcopyplus web writing tips

Seo - Why Link Building Is Your Biggest Mistake

Most webmasters will attempt some form of Search Engine Optimisation during
their career as website owner. They will do this because they want to
increase their website traffic and in turn increase their website sales.
Most will fail; this article will do into depth on how to build a good
backlinking campaign correctly which will in turn increase ranking and
sales.

People who are novices at SEO and read a few books or try to learn about SEO
always seem to hear the same three words:
backlinks, backlinks, and backlinks.
To some extent building backlinks will help your SEO project BUT it needs to
be done correctly.

The correct way to build backlinks is as follows:

1) Get relevant websites with good Page Rank (PR) to link to your website
2) Get a Few Solid Directory Backlinks. From DMOZ, Yahoo and
Business(dot)com.
3) Get a Good Link Baiting campaign going

The Incorrect way to build backlinks is as follows:

1) Write hundreds of articles (This produces low value, spammy links from
the same block of IP addresses).
2) Write Hundreds of Press Releases about your site and how great it is.
3) Get unrelated sites with poor PR to link to you.
4) Participate in some sort of Link Farm

The most important point you can take away from this article is that you
shouldn't get most or all of your links from the same source.

The search engines weight the quality of the backlinks and unfortunately,
article backlinks are in the most part very low quality.

Therefore, having thousands of low quality backlinks will have very little
positive effect on your SEO campaign.

Try to get backlinks from many different sources but keep the backlinks in
the same genre.

Another important aspect to link building is to control the anchor text.
Using the correct anchor text will get your site to the top of the search
engines ten times faster than if you did not use anchor text.

About The Author: Chris Angus is a SEO and website promoter: He can be
contacted at sales(at)http://brilliantseo.com Mobility Scooters Asbestos
Management Doors Oxford

Work Smarter, Not Harder - The 4 Keys To A Lower Maintenance And More Productive Online Business.

Here's something that most online business owners struggle with - Working
too hard for not enough return. Eve when the return's are good, the hours
can be grueling.

As an Internet marketing mother, I can't afford to be sitting at my computer
24/7. I chose to run an online business because I want to be home with my
kids, but at home glued to a computer screen isn't like being at home.

Even if you don't have a kid or a spouse, a business should not become your
entire life.
It's a recipe for burn out and a dismal life that revolves around a
computer. At first, building your business and working really may seem
exciting, but then you look up and realize there's nothing else in your
life.

So, how do you work smarter and not harder? In other words, how do you make
more money with less personal time invested in your business.

To me, in comes down to 4 key points:

. Value your time
. Leverage the strengths and time of others . Implement Passive Income
Models into your Business . Don't be afraid of technology

Here's some more thoughts on each of those:

1. Value Your Time:

You need to set and limit your working hours. You probably run your
business, so you can stay home with your family&/or have more freedom. Well,
being a prisoner to your computer doesn't do either of those things for you.

In addition, when you limit your work time, you are more productive. If you
have only 3 hours to get work done, you're more likely to stay focused and
do what you need to do. If you have set aside the whole day to work, you'll
probably slack off and hang out at forums, check your stats endlessly or
find other distractions. Sorry to say - that's NOT working.

2. Leverage The Strength & Time of Others:

Don't think of yourself as a solo entrepreneur...think of yourself as a
team. You can leverage the strength and time of others by:

- Outsourcing: Never try to do it all yourself!

- Partnering with others reaching the same target market as
you: Your competition doesn't need to be your enemy. Make them your partners
instead!

- Recruiting and training an affiliate force: Just setting up the script for
your affiliate program isn't enough...set up a stellar program instead.

- Being part of mastermind group that shares business strategies and
experiences.

3. Implement Passive Income Models Into Your Business:

Outsourcing and having your own well-managed affiliate program are ways to
generate passive income. Other ways to add more passive income to your
online business are:

- Join affiliate programs: You don't have to fulfill all the orders and
provide customer support.

- Learn search engine optimization (SEO): Search engine optimization is an
excellent source of highly-targeted traffic for your website. Just think,
people enter a keyword phrase for something they want and voila, they find
you.

- Implement pay-per-click strategies: Just like with search engines, you can
get highly-targeted traffic to your website, but you have to pay for it. But
setting up a cost-effective and profitable campaign can do wonders for your
business. Try Adwords of Yahoo Search Marketing.

- Use autoresponders: Effectively automate your follow-up process with our
prospect and customers.

- Backend Sales & Upsells: When someone is already going to buy from you
once, they're more likely to buy more. Make sure you make extra offers.

4. Embracing Technology:

This one might be tough for some non-technical people.
Honestly, I'm not very technical and I get intimidated by technology...but I
do know that if I can automate something in my business, it saves me time
and money. That's why I have a programmer on hand to help me with stuff like
this. I don't have to implement the technology myself. I just use it to my
advantage in my business.

Some uses of technology can include...but the possibilities are ENDLESS

* Autoresponders
* Shopping carts
* Membership sites
* Automating content addition to your sites
* Making customer/prospect management easier and more profitable
* Customer feedback, comments, reviews
* Affiliate program
* Tracking advertising and split testing

So please, stop doing so much work! Your business, family and friends will
thank you for it!

About The Author: Alice Seba is a full-time online business owner that
thrives on helping others say good-bye to their J-O-Bs forever. Sign up for
her "Internet Marketing Prescriptions" to cure what ails your online
business:
http://www.InternetMarketingPrescriptions.com

The Truth About Google Supplemental Results

So you have a slick, eye-catching web site with lots of fancy graphics and
flash animation, congratulations! You excitedly type in your site's url in
Google's search engine.and your site shows up in Google's supplemental
results.

What's going on? What exactly are Google supplemental results and why would
you not want your web site to appear in them?

According to Google's FAQ page, supplemental results are part of Google's
auxiliary index (main results are drawn from the main index) and pages,
which appear on the supplemental listing, have "fewer restrictions" than
those that appear on the main results page. They further say that the
inclusion of sites on the main or supplemental index is purely automated and
does not affect page rank at all.

In truth however, pages that appear on the main index will almost always
show up first in a search. Supplemental search results will only show up if
there are very few or no results at all in the main index. Plenty of older
web sites also tend to populate the supplemental results page. Needless to
say the supplemental results page is not where you want your site to end up.
Ironically several people have emailed Google asking that their sites be
included in the supplemental index!

So how does a site end up in the supplemental results page? And more
importantly how does one get out or even avoid inclusion in the first place?

Several factors may affect your inclusion in supplemental results but keep
in mind it is best to avoid these factors at the outset, as it is easier to
stay out of supplemental results than to get out.

One of the most crucial factors to consider is the text content of your web
page; whether it is in the title tag, description tag or actual web page
content.

In the title tag, take care that you don't use the same title for more than
one page. Make sure that the title is actually related to the page contents
and that is not very long or "spammy". Google will almost always send pages
that it thinks spam-ridden to the supplemental index. Another common error
in title tags is the use of too many or identical keywords. These
considerations also apply to the description tags as well; take care that
text here is not too long, repetitive, spammy or unrelated to the page's
content. Another thing to watch out for in the description tag is the use of
undecipherable language or using a different language than the contents'.

Just like in the title and description tags, using duplicate content text in
several different pages will probably result in inclusion in the
supplemental index. Web pages with little or no text content is another
candidate for the supplemental index; image tags, prices and small
descriptive text do not normally count as Google generally considers these
as commercial page contents, destined for.you guessed it: the supplemental
index.
Long url's or url's with lots of dashes are also generally thought of as
spam by Google which is the reason why many pages hosted by free sites end
up in the supplemental index.

Aside from your web page's text content, another important factor is the
actual structure of your website; an orphaned page (one that is not linked
from your site or others) and pages with poor or no backlinks may be
relegated to the supplemental index, along with pages that are nested
several pages deep in your web site. Pages such as these are thought by
Google to be of lesser importance than better-designed sites, so off to the
supplemental index they go.

Okay, so you didn't take all these factors into consideration and now your
beautiful web site is on the supplemental results page.what now?

The first thing you can do is to write some good content. A few lines of
text won't be enough-make sure it is relevant to your subject and that
potential visitors to your site will enjoy reading it. That goes for all the
pages in your website, try not to have less than 50 words on any page on
your site. And if you have any text content that you "borrowed (copied)"
from another site, now would be a good time to change them.

Rewrite your title and description tags to be as descriptive and relevant to
your site as possible, but take care not to make them too long or contain
repetitive keywords.

At this point you may also want to consider revising the linking structure
of your web site; it is better to send all your back links to all the pages
in your website rather than to just one page. Check to see that not too many
of your pages are nested very deep within your website. You can probably get
away with links three pages deep but two pages deep is much better.
Don't forget to check for any orphaned web pages!

Sometimes in spite of your best efforts in correcting all those common
problems, one or more of your web pages still stubbornly show up in the
supplemental results page. You might consider making some new, more
prominent links to these stubborn pages from your home page. In some cases
more drastic measures may be necessary like a complete reworking of the link
structure of your entire web site, or even publishing them on a new url.

These are only the more common factors to consider if you want to avoid
being relegated to the supplemental index results. As you can see,
rectifying these issues after you're website has already been placed in the
supplemental index does not guarantee relocation to the main index; remember
it is much easier to avoid being placed in the supplemental index than it is
to be taken out. So do it right the first time and design your website
accordingly, and hopefully you can enjoy the benefits of main index listing
and the high result ranking that you wish for.

About The Author: Mikhail Tuknov, http://www.infatex.com/ is founder of
Infatex (Search Engine Marketing Company). With an extensive background in
Internet marketing, Mikhail Tuknov offers SEO, PPC, SEM services.

Learn To Do Effective Seo In Less Than 350 Words

Learning to do Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the easiest skills
to learn when it comes to web marketing.

Virtually anyone who can do a bit of HTML programming can learn to do SEO.

SEO is split into two separate categories: The first is on-page
optimisation; the second is off-page optimisation.

On-page optimisation is what you do to your site to make it rank better and
off-page optimisation is link building.

We'll start with on-page optimisation:

The first step is to find relevant keywords for your website; these keywords
are relevant to your business. For example: If you had a printing business
you would select keywords like:
Colour Printing, Book Printing, Printing Books in the USA etc.

The next step is to integrate these keywords into your website copy; I would
suggest choosing 2 - 3 keywords and repeating them 4 or 5 times each
throughout your home page copy. Try and have the rest of your keywords
repeated in your copy at least once.

Also, have your keywords in the title tag, Meta Tags, H1, H2,
H3 tags and the ALT tags.

Try and have a good number of content rich pages, I would suggest at least
10. These pages must have the keywords scattered though-out the copy.

The second part is off-page optimisation. This is by far the most important
part of getting your website to the top of the Search Engines.

Off page optimisation involves link building, this is the hard part.

You can get links in a number of ways, I will put a * next to the ones that
I think are most important.

- Buy Links
- Ask people for links, either by phone or email
- Write Articles
- Write Press Releases
- Register with Powerful Internet Directories *
- Get people to Blog about your Site (Link Baiting / Viral
Marketing) *

I will cover the basics of link building.

Firstly, register with a number of internet directories, EG:
Yahoo and business(dot)com.

Write a few articles and distribute them around the powerful article
directories.

There are a number of places where you can pay people to blog about your
site, use them to start a viral marketing campaign.
Do get them to include a link back to your site!

Following this advice will give you a massive SEO boost and you should see
good gains within a number of months.

About The Author: Christopher Angus is a SEO and website
promoter: http://www.mobility-direct.co.uk
http://www.mdhsasbestosconsultants.com
http://www.everest-oxfordshire.co.uk available for hire and website
promotion. Chris@brilliantseo.com

Search Engine Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a "Black Hat" technique. Cloaked pages, keyword stuffing
and hidden text are just some of the techniques tried by many webmasters
which are unapproved methods by search engines. One of the most widely used
techniques is what is called keyword stuffing; this is defined by repeating
the same word again and again in the Meta tags or main the main body of the
site.

Sometimes SEO experts go too far in their desire to push their clients'
sites to top positions and resort to questionable practices, like keyword
stuffing. Black hat SEO involves old tricks and some new ones that have
become widely used in search engine optimization. If you choose to hire an
SEO company that is trying to stuff extra keyword phrases into this tag, I
would be concerned about this because in the long run this type of SEO
technique will not hold up. SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for
keywords and key phrases so that they rank highly in the results returned
for search queries. SEO tactics are not always honest this has spawned the
negative aspects of SEO.
Keyword spamming or stuffing is just the tip of the iceberg.

Some firms use methods called invisible keyword stuffing. What is invisible
text? Invisible text is text with the same text color as the background of
the pages. There are many ways to make text invisible. One of the ways of
using invisible keywords is by making the keywords the same color as the
page; if the page is white you make the text white. The text or a link is
invisible to the naked eye on a web page, but are seen by spiders. Since the
invisible text is read by the search engine crawlers the text or keywords
are picked up and indexed.
Invisible keyword-rich text in page code is old news to search-engine
spiders, they are more advanced and can recognize when a page is using
keyword stuffing. The other types of black techniques are content spamming
which includes meta tag stuffing and implementing gateway or doorway pages.

Some older content on websites could be considered keyword stuffing due to
overuse of the keywords. Yet a website's content still plays an enormous and
fairly direct role in search engine ranking. Add new content or webpage's
daily or weekly to increase a search engine spider's frequency. Web content
keyword optimization is one of the most important step in SEO. Make sure
your site is full of unique, high-quality content. Make sure your meta
keywords and meta description tags reflect the true meaning of your site and
is not simply hidden keyword stuffing. When search engines index the
content, the content will be analyzed by the search engine, it could be
interpreted as an unapproved technique which will then get your pages
de-indexed. Content is the most important part of optimizing your web site
for search engines. Try to write the content naturally for the readers
rather than the search engines. Good content brings return visitors who may
eventually link to your site.

If you are going to promote your website you should stick to white hat SEO
methods and recognizing that the black hat SEO tactics which are quick and
dirty techniques will not help your business in the long run.

About The Author: David Marc Fishman is the owner of
http://www.linknetics.com. The Best one way link software.

Article Marketing Does Not Work

Article marketing is the lowest form of SEO for a number of reasons, while
many people will disagree with what I'm writing, the fact of the matter is
that there are much better ways to obtain backlinks and the backlinks
obtained will deliver much better results.

The primary reason so many people write articles today is to create
backlinks to their websites or the websites they are optimising for clients.

This does work to a degree; however, it is really the lowest form of
backlink you can obtain.

Search Engines base the way they rank a website on a number of factors, the
first on the content the site has available and the second on how relevant
the site may be.

If a site has many backlinks, search engines "Think" the site has a high
relevancy and will rank it highly.

Unfortunately, many people doing SEO think that this all they have to do get
their website to the top of the search engines is to obain as many backlinks
as possible.

When they don't see the results they expected they are flummoxed and can't
understand why their SEO efforts are not working.

The reason why this does not work is because search engines know that the
backlinks are not of any quality and will not put any value on them when
ranking a website.

Thus, the site will not rank highly.

To put it bluntly, article backlinks are in the most part rubbish, and
hardly count for anything. Period.

To achieve a good raking in the Search Engine results you would need to
write thousands and thousands of articles, if this was your main way of
gaining backlinks.

There are much better ways of obtaining backlinks while trying to do SEO.

The most effective form of SEO is Viral Marketing also know as link baiting,
this involves people linking to your website usually through their blogs.

The benefit of link baiting is that once it gets some momentum it will grow
itself as opposed to writing articles and submitting them to say ten article
directories.

While your article directories will only give you ten backlinks, people
blogging about your site and the word spreading may give you over a hundred.
The benefit is the backlinks also come from a variety servers as opposed to
the same old ten article directory servers.

The search engines will rank your site much higher if your backlinks come
from many places.

You can create a viral marketing campaign by getting in contact with
individual bloggers and offering them your product for review. Once you get
a number of positive reviews, word will spread and you will have a
successful SEO backlink campaign. If you are too lazy to contact individual
bloggers there are a number of sites out there where you can pay bloggers to
blog about your site.
Always get them to include a backline back to your site though.

About The Author: Christopher Angus is a Search Engine Optimiser and writer.
He is available for hire. Please contact him at: Chris (at) brilliantseo.com
He also helps to promote the following sites:
http://www.illustratemyname.com http://www.seocompanyuk.com
http://www.everest-oxfordshire.co.uk

Blogging - Using Blogs To Make Money

There are a number of different ways in which you can use blogs to make
money. Some blog owners constantly put up content-intensive,
frequently-updated material; whereas others simply add a new post every once
in a while. Both models can work reasonably well at generating revenue.

Let's look at the first model and what is required: in order to make money
with a high quality blog, you will want to generate most of your traffic
through word of mouth recommendation, rather than through search engine
optimization, which will not give you any benefits for producing superior
material. This means that you will want to promote your blog through
different avenues.

I personally suggest that you consider two different avenues:
1) using social bookmarking sites to gain steam; and 2) promoting on forums.

Doing well with the first option entails creating something that is
legitimately interesting; and then facilitating its circulation by
submitting that page to social bookmarking sites, such as http://del.icio.us
and http://www.digg.com.
Additionally, on your blog, post a link that brings users to a social
bookmarking site on which they can vote for your video or whatever it is you
created. The more who vote on your blog, the better that blog post will rank
on the social bookmarking system, increasing the amount of people who read
your blog.

Now, if you prefer to take a different approach - to create multiple
profitable, but low-maintenance blogs - you can simply create a blog and
purchase information for it. For instance, you could setup a blog about
dieting; and then purchase a set of 15 articles from a ghostwriter. Every
3-4 days, you could post a new article about dieting. Once you have a blog
running, you can then move to the next one while you wait for the first to
begin getting search again traffic.

With this method, you will want to get natural search engine traffic, rather
than referred traffic, as the content you post will be high-quality, but not
anything that will elicit some type of viral effect from social bookmarking
sites.

Furthermore, when generating traffic, you will want to find ways to recycle
it to ensure that your traffic constantly grows in the future.

Last, you will want to figure out how to monetize your blog or blogs. You
can do this with advertising, by selling products, or by setting up some
type of subscription. I personally suggest that you leave your blog
unmonetized until you begin to build a regular base of visitors; however, if
you are planning to go the multiple blog route, you may simply want to throw
up Adsense ads immediately.

About The Author: Aurelius Tjin is The Publisher of The 'Unstoppable
Internet Marketing' Newsletter. Discover His Secret Strategies To Skyrocket
Your Internet Marketing Business. To Find Out More Go To
http://www.UnstoppableInternetMarketing.com

7 Online Marketing Tools for the Smart Webmaster

As an online marketer, it's hard to wade through all of the
misleading information that is running rampant on the Internet.
Who do you trust? Where do you go for the very best information
in online marketing? Well, this article was written to answer
those very questions. Below I have outlined 7 tools that can
be used to increase your marketing knowledge, improve your
website, increase your website's traffic, and even save time.
Hope you enjoy!

1. Make Your Site Sell

The first of these tools comes from Ken Envoy, who has released
his bestselling internet marketing book to the public for free.
With 100,000+ copies sold, Make Your Site Sell! 2002 can now be
downloaded free of charge.

This internet marketing bible has timeless information to
improve your online business and increase your traffic. Because
it was created in 2002, some of the information is a bit dated,
but if you skip the search engine info, Envoy's book is a gem
from front to back.

This is the book that got me started in internet marketing and
I am forever thankful to Ken Envoy. Inside Make Your Site Sell,
you'll find the three cornerstones of building a successful
online business - developing a great product, building a site
that sells, and attracting targeted traffic to your site.

Check it out at http://myss.sitesell.com

2. Dotcomology (http://www.dotcomology.com)

Another great resource for learning about online marketing is
Dotcomology by Stone Evans. This one is a bit more up-to-date.

Inside you'll learn:

* How to increase your traffic using expired domains
* How to build and maintain your credibility online
* How to increase your profits using back-end and cross-selling
techniques
* How to optimize your site for high rankings in the search
engines
* How to profit with Google Adwords
* How to build a massive opt-in mailing list
* How to set up joint ventures to expand your marketing reach
for free
* How to use press releases for free publicity and....
* How to launch a viral marketing campaign

In addition, you'll also get a number of free tools for all of
your webmaster needs.

Download this book for free at http://www.dotcomology.com

3. Website Translation

Do you know how you can multiply your content by 9 times by
expending just a few minutes of your time? Simply translate your
website into 9 other languages. There are tools out there that
make the process quick and easy.

You don't have to worry about duplicate content issues either.
It's all unique content that the search engines love. More
content equals more traffic. 64.8% of the world is surfing the
Internet in a language other than English. By translating your
website into other languages, you immediately open up a stream
of new markets and increased traffic from foreign search engines.

If you are a seasoned SEO, you'll be happy to hear that the
competition in foreign language search engines is much less
than in the English search engines.

There are a number of tools available that will enable you
to translate your website.

The first one is a Wordpress plugin called Simple Thoughts. This
plugin uses automatic machine translation to translate your blog
into eight languages - Spanish, French, German, Portuguese,
Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.

You can download this plugin at

http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/angsumans-translator-
plugin-pro-for-wordpress-blogs-released/

If you're looking for a higher-end solution, I would suggest you
take a look at http://www.translationgold.com. Translation Gold
can be used on blogs as well as traditional websites to translate
your site into 9 different languages.

4. OnlyWire

Social bookmarking is a great way to increase the exposure to
your articles. However, it can also be quite time consuming.

Fortunately, there is a tool that will automate much of your
social bookmarking for you. It is called OnlyWire
(http://www.onlywire.com) and it allows you to submit links
to 17 social bookmarking sites all at one time. Simply create
an account, give your bookmark a title, type in the URL, add
tags, and send it off.

When using this tool, you must keep in mind that it is not meant
to be abused. This tool is simply a time-saving device to help
you in your social bookmarking efforts.

You must always submit quality content. In addition, you should
also share and submit other sites that you feel would provide a
great resource to these communities.

Social bookmarking is all about community. If you are not
actively involved in the community and submitting links besides
your own, then you are simply wasting your time.

However, if you spend a little bit of time to do things right,
you can reap some enormous benefits.

To find out more about OnlyWire, go to http://www.onlywire.com

5. ROR Sitemaps

Sitemaps are an important tool for making sure your site can be
completely spidered and indexed by the search engines.
Unfortunately, many of today's sitemaps are specific to one
search engine or another. Because of this, there have been a
number of Google and Yahoo sitemap generators produced in
recent years.

However, there is an alternative that presents many benefits
over today's Google and Yahoo sitemaps. In addition, these new
and improved sitemaps are readable by all search engines.

They are called ROR sitemaps (http://www.rorweb.com). They use
XML feeds to describe your web content. These sitemaps are
structured feeds that enable search engines to complement text
search with structured information to better interpret the
meaning of your site. With a ROR sitemap, search engines can
better understand your products, services, images, newsletters,
articles, podcasts, and anything else that you want to describe.

You can create your own ROR sitemap at
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

6. Web Templates

If you are a webmaster, then you know the importance of quality
web design. Good web design can mean the difference between a
paying customer and a confused visitor.

Fortunately, there are a few websites that are providing free,
quality templates. One of these can be found at
http://www.oswd.org, where they offer over 1,600 web designs.

Open Source Web Design is making the web a prettier place, one
template at a time. To find a professional template for your
own site, you can check out some of their favorite designs at
http://www.oswd.org/designs/favorites/ .

If you are looking for a nice blog design, you can go to
http://themes.wordpress.net, where you'll find over 800
themes, free to download.

7. Viral Marketing - PDF Generator

To start your own viral marketing campaign, I suggest that you
look at Viral Publisher (http://www.viralpublisher.com). This
free software allows you to create your own brandable PDF ebooks
and optimize them for the web. Creating your own ebook and
giving it away for free is a great way to increase your
online exposure.

You can offer your ebook to your affiliates, website visitors,
and your customers.

Because it's brandable, the user can customize the ebook with
their own affiliate links, encouraging them to pass it along
even further.

Start your own viral frenzy at http://www.viralpublisher.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews
(http://www.sitepronews.com) & SEO-News (http://www.seo-news.com)
newsletters. You can also find additional tips and news on
webmaster and SEO topics by Kim at the SiteProNews blog
(http://blog.sitepronews.com/). Kim's email is:
kim @ seo-news.com

SEO - Link Building For Beginners

Search Engine Optimization has two distinct area's the first being On-page
optimization and the second, off-page optimization. On-page optimization is
what you can actually do to your website that will affect your ranking on
the search engines. This includes changing your title tags, H1 Tags etc.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) like anything else adheres to the 80/20
rule, whereby on-page optimization accounts for 20% of search engine
rankings.

The other 80% comes from link building, which is by far the hardest part
when it comes to SEO. Link building is getting other sites to link back to
your own website. Like everything else in the world, links have varying
degrees of quality, you get really poor quality links which can actually
harm your website or you can get excellent links which will help your
rankings tremendously. Obviously, the best quality links are the hardest to
obtain. For your information, the best kind of links to get, are links that
come from Universities or Government websites. Search Engines love these
links and if you do manage to get one your website will almost certainly
help get your website on to the first page within a couple of months.

The worst types of links are backlinks that come from Porn Sites, Pharma
Sites or Gambling Sites.

I will list the ways in which a person can obtain links for their website.

1) Buy Links - The better the link, the more expensive they are.
2) Ask For Links - Either via Phone or Email.
3) Link Exchanges - Swap Links with other webmasters.
4) Register with Directories - Register your site with a number of
directories.
5) Write Articles - Submit your articles to article directories like Ezine.
6) Write Press Releases - Submit to sites like PRweb.
7) Use Viral marketing techniques - Use sites like pay per post (link
baiting).

I would suggest doing all of the above when you first start trying to do SEO
on your own site. A good mix of links is always good, try not to buy too
many "cheap & cheerful" links as these will not do your site much good.

About The Author: Chris Angus is a Master SEO and website promoter. Please
contact him at sales(at)brilliantseo.com http://www.the-printing-company.com
http://www.mdhsasbestosconsultants.com
http://www.everest-oxfordshire.co.uk

Is There a Better Way to Serve Newcomers Who Need Traffic?

Newcomers to Internet Marketing may not be faced with a more daunting task
than trying to figure out search engine rankings.

There seems to be no shortage of sellers who spend a great deal of time and
effort trying to convince newcomers that their particular software program
is the answer to generating improved rankings and more traffic to your web
site.

Another offer arrived yesterday touting a new version of a top-rated Top 10
Optimizer.

I glance at the offer and do not even bother to get excited. I cautiously
glance again at its message like I would confront a hungry wolverine trapped
in a small corner of my attic about to protect her young from my approach.

I have been hyped so many times by sales pages on the Internet that I think
I am developing attention deficit disorder (ADD).

Deep inside I feel a welling up of my inbred caution. My bulldog instinct
suddenly takes over. I put on my helmet and shoulder pads, dust off my
cleats, and work up my steely-eyed look that says, "Not in my house, you
undersized furry punk" (like Clint Eastwood I can occasionally make my day).

And so I take the bait on the sales page, knowing a war for my thought
process and my very soul may well be at stake.
No matter, I am determined to be an Internet Marketer despite my fragile
newcomer status.

It is time for the kick-off, I wait for the first volley, and here it comes:
(Our product) allows you to immediately optimize your web pages . . . in
three easy steps" followed by the more prominent claim of "3 easy steps to
top 10 search engine rankings." I cringe at the words "immediately" and
"easy."

My gut feeling is to run as fast as I can in the other direction, but I
realize that would be poor sportsmanship, and so I assess the damage to my
psyche as I digest the two words. And then I ask myself: Why are they
selling me this software program rather than providing a service to do this
for me?

I mean, really, their business is apparently search engine optimization (I
think the term is SEO).

What makes me, a technically illiterate newcomer, think I have to learn all
about this when it has taken them years to acquire the knowledge and
expertise they have?

Every bloody aspect of making it in Internet Marketing is requiring me to
overcome one learning curve after another.
Anyone who knows anything about Internet Marketing apparently is not about
to tell you squat (too busy raking in the money), even though all of his or
her literature cries out about how they are going to help you by revealing
their "secrets" and "amazing programs" no one knows about.
Do not ask me to give examples.

All right, if you must: How about instant affiliate web sites that do not
cost you a dime?

They tell you about how easily it is going to work (you will develop 4 to 5
streams of income within hours, or sometimes even minutes, without really
doing anything).

They do not tell you that you will be spending your hard-earned money on
advertising to drive traffic to their host server where they add your
prospects to their sales list, allowing them to build a bigger list of
subscribers to whom they sell more products while you continue to subsidize
their success. They get free advertising, free prospects and free sales. You
get experience when you are paying attention.

Sometimes they even steal commissions you might receive by taking the entire
sale as their own. They can do this as they control the server and the
process. If you generate no sales commission (as is most often the case)
then you cannot even cover your advertising costs, much less make a profit.

In your fifth month you drive 825,000+ hits and 35,000+ unique visitors to
their site in 30 days and get not a single sale, for the fifth consecutive
month. You see thousands of dollars in investment flying out the door
without a single affiliate sale and you wonder: is this going to happen in
my lifetime?

Your trusty ad tracking service (another important expense) swears upon pain
of death that there were 10 sales made on the sales page, but you never see
the sales (they somehow disappear in cyberspace). Later, if the sales were
in fact pirated, you will be thanking them for the service they have
provided you (this comment will make more sense later in this article).

Back to this SEO offer, and how I can "benefit from top 10 search engine
rankings on Google & Yahoo!" (The sales page copy proclaims this straight up
in a fit of benevolent excitement).

I call for a timeout, go to Google, and punch in the term "Internet
Marketing" and up pops the first of 94,800,000 (that is 94.8 million)
responses. Now, how is this going to work for a newcomer? I buy their
software, study my head off, and I am going to immediately (their term, not
mine) appear in the top 10 among 94.8 million responses?

What will happen when they sell 1,000 of these software programs to 1,000
Internet Marketers whose key words are Internet Marketing?

When I put in three other keywords important to me, I get 4.4+ million
responses, 17+ million responses and 9.9+ million responses. If it is so
easy, why are they not doing it for me, and charging me for the service?

Logic tells me they are going to have some serious problems with about the
11th customer for each keyword (or keywords) available.

I recognize some tech head may be able to take this software program offer
and do something with it, at least for awhile, but what about newcomers who
have no technical knowledge or interest in learning the technical side of
the business, like me?

The easy answer, of course, is to learn or to get off the Internet so
serious people can do serious business without having to put up with people
like you.

The cost of the software? Just $250 less a nickel for the Standard version
and $450 less a nickel for the Business version. I decide to pass on both.

I guess I should be inordinately concerned about Google, Yahoo, MSN and the
rest, but this is how my mind works: I could buy the software in question,
spend hours and days gaining some ground in the SEO race, and never
effectively compete against a guru in this area because I do not have the
skill set, ability and talent to do so. Bottom line:
why bother?

I need to play my game on a different field with different competitors, and
that is what this newcomer is going to do:
mind my own business and skill set, with the emphasis on "own." I will
invest the $250 I would have spent using my
strength: writing articles.

And, by the way, could that acronym for search engine optimization (SEO)
sometimes stand for scammed every opportunity?

----------------------------------------------------
Ed Bagley is the author of Ed Bagley's Blog, which he publishes daily with
fresh, original writing intended to delight, inform, educate and motivate
readers. Visit Ed at . . .
http://www.edbagleyblog.com

Search Engine Optimisation - The Top Ten Ranking Guide

Search engine optimisation is all about achieving a top ten ranking on the
major search engines. This is a fiercely-contended task and to stand a
chance of succeeding you need an internet marketing agency or SEO
Consultants that can implement an online marketing strategy that will
deliver not only traffic, but targeted traffic to get the results you
require.

In highly-competitive industries such as recruitment, travel and insurance
etc, you would not succeed without a comprehensive search engine marketing
strategy.

Using only proven, ethical methods, an SEO consultant will bring targeted
traffic to your web site and generate leads or sales for your business and
with over 75% of the internet's searches coming from Google, Yahoo and MSN,
your business cannot afford to miss out on the vast numbers of potential
customers looking for your product or service.

One of the key elements for a rock solid internet marketing plan is good
quality content focused on your business and it's industry. Literally the
more quality and unique content there is on your site, the better off your
site will be, in terms of rankings.

Another major factor for your marketing plan is the coding and search engine
optimisation of your site. Whether you have an html, dynamic or a
flash-based website, there are important steps that your SEO consultants
should take to ensure your site is search engine ready.

Flash web design may look good but are notoriously poor for top ten search
engine rankings, thankfully there are steps you can take to still get your
site listed and ranked on the major search engines. The same applies to
dynamic web sites that are written in programming languages such as PHP, ASP
and .NET.

Once your site is search engine optimised, your internet marketing strategy
will start to work and you can start to work on one of the other more
important factors that search engines look for, which is the trust factor of
your site. This can be achieved by partnering with other web sites that are
regarded as trusted and have a good rank on the search engines already.

After performing all of these steps, your internet marketing agency or SEO
consultants will have your site well under way to achieving a top ten search
engine ranking.

Copyright Utopia Solutions

About The Author: Lee Smith is a London SEO consultant that writes articles
for many agencys and has a passion for search engine optimisation and
Internet marketing. View more articles
at: http://www.utopiawebdesign.co.uk/articles

Google Gets Personalized

Have you ever become overwhelmed by the number of documents
accessible via a search engine? If you're like most people,
then you probably have. There are often millions of results
and not every result is likely to be of equal importance to
you.

In addition to that, there is also ambiguity of language. Words
often have multiple meanings and people can have different
interpretations of the same word. How does a search engine know
the difference? Well, at this point, they don't.

They certainly can't read your mind so the only other
alternative is to track your online activities in order to
custom tailor your search results based on your recorded
preferences.

Google is one of the first major search engines to test this
new technology. They have released a total of 15 new patent
applications this month in relation to this very endeavor.

Actually, I'm not too surprised that Google is taking a closer
look at personalization. Google has already begun testing many
of these new search features in Google's personalized search
(http://www.google.com/psearch), which is currently in beta.

Traditional algorithmic search engines have reached their peak.
Personalized search is a natural and necessary progression for
Google and other search engines as well. Some alternative search
engines have already taken the lead in this endeavor. Eurekster
(http://www.eurekster.com/) is one of the main ones that comes
to mind, using a searchers history to bring them more relevant
results.

Here is an abstract from one of the Google patents entitled,
"Systems and methods for analyzing a user's web history"
(http://tinyurl.com/ycdhxl):

"A user's prior searching and browsing activities are recorded
for subsequent use. A user may examine the user's prior
searching and browsing activities in a number of different ways,
including indications of the user's prior activities related to
advertisements. A set of search results may be modified in
accordance with the user's historical activities. The user's
activities may be examined to identify a set of preferred
locations. The user's set of activities may be shared with one
or more other users. The set of preferred locations presented
to the user may be enhanced to include the preferred locations
of one or more other users. A user's browsing activities may
be monitored from one or more different client devices or
client application. A user's browsing volume may be graphically
displayed."

Now, let's talk about all of that in English. Over time, we
develop a history of search queries, selected results that were
clicked on, advertisements that were clicked on, and a multitude
of other browsing activities. Each of these actions reflect our
preferences and interests. Other examples of user activity
Google may begin tracking include instant messaging, word
processing, particpation in chat rooms, and internet phone calls.

Talk about an invasion of privacy. Unfortunately, we don't have
enough time to get into that issue.

Within the proposed system, users are able to access their past
searching and/or browsing activities to enhance their experience.
Each of their online activities gives clues to what they might
ultimately be looking for or related areas of interests.

In addition, users can also modify their profile information to
better represent their interests. For example, a user may delete
a search query from his/her history or he/she could also provide
updated information as to new areas of interest.

One of the most interesting aspects of the patent filings
involves the re-ranking of search results according to the
user's preferences.

After a query is made and the results are received, they are
then adjusted based upon information from the user's history.

The order of the search results can be adjusted in accordance
with a history score and/or any user modified result score.

Search results can also be ordered based upon the combined
search result score and the history score to come up with
optimal results.

A searcher may also be shown an indication of previously visited
pages among the SERPs, including information such as the date
and time a page was previously visited and the number of times
that the user has visited the site within a certain period of
time.

A certain number of the most highly ranked results that the user
has previously visited may be displayed in a region above the
search results for easy access (kind of like memorized
favorites). They could also be displayed in another section of
the page, or even in a separate window.

These previously visited pages may be ordered based upon a
number of different ranking criteria, including the history
score, pagerank, time of last access, number of accesses, etc.

A user's browsing activities may also play a part in the ranking
of search results. For example, if a website was previously
visited by the user, it could have its score boosted based upon
the number of times the user has visited that particular website.
Google may also track how long a visitor stays at any given
website. A site that is bookmarked and visited frequently will
almost always rank higher.

On the other hand, search results that were previously presented
to searchers but not clicked through could be lowered in the
results.

What does this mean for you as a webmaster and SEO? It means
that your focus should be on quality. In creating your website,
you must emphasize visitor optimization and content optimization
over search engine optimization.

The visitor always comes first and you must create a valuable
experience for them. Allow them to quickly and easily bookmark
your website. Give them a reason to hang out for a while,
whether it be a forum, lots of great content, or fun quizzes.

The future of SEO is about creating quality, authority sites.

Choosing An SEO Expert? The IR Litmus Test, Part I

The online marketing industry is full of purported SEO experts that know
very little about how search engines work or the document indexing process.
What I have come to find is that these 'experts' are always just
regurgitating catch phrases and tactics that they have overheard in blogs
and forums.

This class of search engine optimizers developed their tactics and
portfolios during SEO's infancy. Low competition, low saturation, and with
relatively under-developed search engines.
Remember when all it took to get a client to the top of the search engines
was to edit the Meta tags?

Not that current tactics are all that more complex. Title tags, focused
content, keyword placement, RSS feeds, link exchanges, and blogs are all in
the current expert's repertoire. Not exactly brain surgery.

This haphazard success is soon going to evaporate though, as competition
increases, more companies continue to migrate online, and the search engines
refine their indexing and relevancy algorithms.

So, why are many SEO experts not as qualified as they purport to be?

The answer lies in the skill sets of the individuals who are becoming search
engine optimizers. Up until now, the bulk of the search engine optimization
profession recruited from the ranks of HTML developers. It actually makes
complete sense if we look at the minimum skills necessary to optimize a
website, and the state of the HTML development industry during the rise of
the SEO industry.

HTML developers were the ideal candidates to quickly move into the
profession because they already possessed the minimal skills necessary to go
behind the website and edit the HTML. I think we can safely assume that to
perform the current SEO, the expert needs to have a decent knowledge of web
development.
Although learning a markup language such as HTML is not that difficult, it
would be a significant roadblock to any newcomer who wanted to enter the
field. The common lay person, or nuclear physicist for that matter, would be
forced to first learn remedial coding skills.

Additionally, when the internet bubble burst (along with the web developers
high paying salaries) no other group was better positioned to identify the
new lucrative opportunities that SEO offered. A huge population of domestic
developers found themselves out of work and being undercut by cheap overseas
labor. Its not surprising that they were able to segue their current
knowledge into offering higher-value services that would position clients
more effectively to their consumers.

The problem is that 95% of these experts have no real idea how the search
engines index web pages, or determine relevancy.
They are simply recycling the formulas of previous SEO success, and
following the latest trial and error trends that someone in the chatroom
'swears by'. Continually implementing and testing, without any underlying
comprehension of the science they are up against. Its like someone without a
bio-related degree trying to recreate evolutionary studies after reading a
paper on Darwinism. Its absurd. They are completely flying blind.

A true SEO expert understands the fundamentals of information retrieval.

This includes document indexing, linguistics, and a strong knowledge of
linear algebra, including stochastic matrices, vector space theory, latent
semantic analysis, and singular value decomposition. This is the key
knowledge that is necessary to understand how the search engines view your
client's website, how that information will be received, and what needs to
be done to increase their ranking.

Unfortunately, this knowledge, which does take a considerable amount of
mathematical expertise, is well beyond the scope of your average HTML web
developer. It has become difficult to not only find enterprise-level
experts, but differentiate them from the rest of the masses.

So how are professional service firms expected to identify which SEO experts
they hire are truly professionals?

In my next segment, I will continue my discussion on the survival of the SEO
expert, in correlation to information retrieval. I will also introduce you
to the IR Litmus Test, which are techniques that a firm can utilize to
accurately qualify SEO experts, and differentiate amateurs from
enterprise-level professionals.

If you would like to join the discussion for this topic, please post a
comment at http://www.ProfessionalServiceMarketing.com

Grant

About The Author: Grant L. Aldrich is an editor for the
http://www.ProfessionalServiceMarketing.com blog. Grant has 6 years of
internet marketing experience with professional firms.
He is Director of Client Services at http://www.leadtank.com