Where is the need to worry? Who needs a PR Tool Bar Anyway!Everywhere its the same topic. Its getting stale and beginning to stink already. When it first disappeared all of us thought we were penalized for something we had not done. Some of us were informed by stranger webmasters that we were black listed and soon all of us realized, it had little to do with us and more to do with Google and their software and engineers. And the forums overflowed with information and assumptions!(they still are!).
Google PR Tool Bar is down. Accepted. Why? Nobody knows! Some of us feel they have done away with it, for good, while others feel Google is into some major overhauling. For all you know there might be a third interesting angle to it! We will have to watch out for it. I am sure its going to beat all the logics and assumptions people are coming up with. But the phase is interesting nevertheless.
All of us who have been working on the net for several months or more already know, PR is a mindset. We have become habitual to checking out the green line, that’s all. It hardly serves our purpose. We all know sites with PR3 and even PR2 show on the first page of SE for certain Keywords we are breaking our heads on while we are nowhere with PR4 and sometimes PR5!! Link popularity is the most important aspect of a website. How many link backs do we have is an important consideration.
Coming to dealing with it - PR Tool Bar comes in most handy while exchanging or accepting links exchanges. Now since we do not have PR Tool bar let us check the link backs. The more teh back links better the site. simple! Some webmasters are already taking advantage of it. They simply send us requests saying “we are PR5 (not even PR4! straight PR5!!) trying to attain PR6 request to exchange links with you” And when we go and check the back links they barely have 15 links-backs! Such is life! We don’t know whether it takes all kinds to make this world, but we do have them!
Lets not worry bout Pr tol bar not being there. Lets simply, ignore it. This is a better way to deal with a link exchange offer anyway. MOre sensible, mor advanced and more mature. Don’t we want to get serious abotu our work at hoem based business and join the ranks of net-enterprnuers who are doing very well for themselves that’s because they realised things faster than us. for them Tool Bar or no tool bar - its all thes same!
The author is Purva Mewar webmaster of two Work at Home Business websites http://www.yesearnfromhome.com and http://www.work-at-home-earn-extra-income.com
Written by SEO Tipster on October 27th, 2006 with no comments.
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In this third article, we continue to dig into the patent application of Google regarding the method used to rank sites in search results. Interestingly, Google asserts in the application that it “might” consider user data as a factor in organizing search results.What Is User Data?
Without being rude, you should already know what user data is as part of your site evaluation. Any owner of a site on the web should be constantly looking at user data found on site servers.
The site server should have an administrative program telling you what searches are being used to reach the site, better known as “search strings.” The program should also be telling you how many pages the user looks at on each visit and where in the site they go. By reviewing these statistics, you can identify the sections of your site that appeal to potential customers. If clients are leaving after visiting only one or two pages, such statistics should tell you that you have an abandonment problem. The new information from the Google patent should motivate you to closely monitor your site.
Essentially, Google is also looking at your server statistics to determine the value of your content and factoring it into the rankings. Specifically, Google claims in the patent application that it tracks the amount of time that users spend accessing a page on your site. Having filed a few patent applications in my time, what this really means is Google is looking at how long a user spends on your site and how “deep” they go into it.
Expanding on this subject, Google details an additional factor. As with the Adwords program, Google is monitoring the click through rate on search results. The more click-throughs to your site from its listings in Google, the higher it will be moved in the search results.
Every Little Bit Helps
Google claims that it looks at what users are bookmarking. The apparent jist is that Google considers a site with a lot of bookmarks to be “worthy” of a higher ranking. In short, get out there and bookmark your sites!
Conclusion
The effort of Google to look for depth in a site should be commended. There is nothing worse then clicking onto a promising search result to find one crappy page full of links. With this new policy, Google rewards sites with healthy amounts of relevant pages. In short, content is king again.
Halstatt Pires is with http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing and advertising company comprised of a search engine optimization specialist providing meta tag optimization services and Internet marketing consultant providing internet marketing solutions through integrated design and programming services.
Written by SEO Tipster on October 27th, 2006 with no comments.
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The recent patent application filed by Google details numerous items the search engine uses to rank web pages. The specific application is summarized as:”A method for scoring a document, comprising: identifying a document; obtaining one or more types of history data associated with the document; and generating a score for the document based on the one or more types of history data.”
The patent application sheds significant light for those pursuing search engine optimization with Google. Patent applications can be difficult to understand, so following are highlights for those that don’t speak lawyer.
Google’s Link Evaluation
It is well known that Google uses links as a significant ranking element. Although the patent application doesn’t dispute the value of linking, it does highlight the best method for pursuing a linking strategy. Simply put, consistently adding links will have a much better effect than adding links in bunches.
Google notes in the patent application that it looks at links from a historical perspective. The search engine notes the discovery date of links, the life span of the link and the speed at which a new web site obtains links. This approach reveals that Google is discounting quick link exchange strategies such as buying bulk links for your site. Instead, Google appears to consider a natural linking evolution as a sign that a site is “legitimate.”
The specifics of a good linking strategy are a bit difficult to nail down. In the patent application, Google tries to hide the evaluation method by listing factors that “might” go into evaluating links to a site. Factors that “might” be considered include:
1. The anchor text of the link.
2. The discovery date of the link.
3. The growth rate of links to your site.
4. The rate at which links to a page appear and disappear.
5. The age of links with older links carrying more value.
6. Numerous links to a new site will be looked at as spam, unless some of the links are from highly valued sites.
7. Link growth that is constant is optimal.
8. Sudden bunches of new links will be devalued as spam.
A general theme becomes clear as one reads the Google patent application. Google values sites that are in it for the long term, update regularly and consistently grow in link popularity. Taking this theme into account, it is easy to understand why the Google sandbox exists.
A steady approach is the key if you intention is to gain top rankings in Google. While the delay can be aggravating, the results are certainly worth it.
Halstatt Pires is with http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing and advertising company comprised of a search engine optimization specialist providing meta tag optimization services and Internet marketing consultant providing internet marketing solutions through integrated design and programming services.
Written by SEO Tipster on October 27th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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I am ranked #1 for that silly phrase at Google. So What?Here’s a secret. You can be ranked #1 at Google for the phrase “Waterfall Watches” if you put the phrase on your page 4 times and in metatags twice. How do I know that? I did it in 2001 and still rank number one in Google for the phrase in 2005. On another of my sites I rank #1 for the phrase “Screeching Camels” by simply putting it on the page once in a comment about silly SEO guarantees.
I’ll wager that many phrases you’ve targeted for your business are almost as silly and deliver NO traffic to your pages from the search engines. Don’t take that too personally. Simply look at your traffic statistics to see what phrases are bringing visitors to your web site. If your logs show no delivered traffic for keywords you thought were golden, you’ve targeted the wrong phrases.
I’m always fascinated when discussions of search engines focus excessively on ranking of a particular site in one particular search engine without checking corresponding statistics about referred traffic delivered to the site from the targeted keyword phrase. Referred search visits from engines is not taken into account. Anyone who looks at their rankings without looking at how much traffic is referred and DELIVERED to your site through the rankings is missing the most important part of the story!
When you check your site traffic statistics for where visitors are coming from and in what numbers, for which keyword searches and from which search engines, you will be astonished to see that things you think are important are sometimes not so important. I’ve struggled for years to gain top rankings for “Small Business Ecommerce” and have achieved #1 at Google #5 at MSN and #13 at Yahoo (at this writing).
But guess what? Nobody searches for that phrase in significant enough numbers to deliver any traffic from it! I’m not saying that this was wasted effort, because in the over 1000 pages at WebSite101 we have enough related phrases that the targeted phrase contributes to the rank of hundreds of related phrases. “Open Source Ecommerce” gets huge traffic for one single page, ranked at # 29 in Yahoo, #7 at MSN and #1 in Google (as of this writing).
But the really interesting thing is that even on phrases that rank equally well across all three major engines, Google delivers referred traffic at a rate of 65% compared to MSN at less than 1% and Yahoo about 5% of all referred visitor traffic. In NO case does Yahoo or MSN refer any clickthroughs at higher than 10% of all referred traffic.
Referred traffic being visitors that clicked on your link from search results or links. This applies both in single instances for specific keywords and cumulatively for all referred traffic.
Hear this very clearly - it has nothing to do with ranking! There are dozens of search phrases that visitors have searched on all three of those engines that deliver traffic to my site that I can’t find my own site for in the top 100 results at ANY search engine. In every case, Google delivers more than twice the traffic for every keyword combination than does MSN or Yahoo!. In many cases, I rank HIGHER on both Yahoo and MSN for many of those phrases, yet Google delivers far more referred traffic for those phrases ranked higher at MSN and Yahoo! Does that make any sense?
If your referred traffic from top rankings at MSN and Yahoo send you no traffic, why be concerned that you rank well with either of them? This same scenario has played out across dozens of client sites I’ve reviewed traffic statistics for. No matter how the site is structured, no matter how many pages they have, no matter what keywords they are targeting.
Search engine referred traffic from Google is always ALWAYS 2 times higher than the other two and very often as much as 10 times. If we ranked engines, NOT on number of searches performed, but on how much traffic they refer, then Google would be more than twice as highly ranked in all cases.
If Google disappeared tomorrow, there would be some dramatically reduced visitor numbers for ALL sites across the web. We would, every single one of us, lose over half of our (organic) search engine referred traffic. Look at your traffic statistics for natural search engine referred traffic (not PPC) volume and which keywords are currently working to deliver that traffic as far more important than your specific # keyword ranking on those search engines.
Avoid the practice of “Keyword Voodoo” to rank for words that nobody searches. Google “Keyword Voodoo” and you’ll find me ranked 5 times for that phrase on page one of the search engine results page. “Reciprocal Linking Turkey” will give you the same result, showing my article on several web sites. Each of those does me no good at all and brings no more search engine referred traffic than does my number one ranking for “Invisible Entrepreneurs” used in the title of this article.
Target the wrong keywords and you will become one of those Invisible Entrepreneurs.
copyright ?July 14, 2005 by Mike Banks Valentine
Mike Banks Valentine practices ethical search optimization through content aggregation and creation for your website Optimizing press releases for keyword density - distributed online for visibility & more effective link building
Contact Mike at: http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm
Download Free link popularity software - check inbound links http://website101.com/download/link-popularity-software.html
Check your link popularity at major search engines and Alexa
Written by SEO Tipster on October 25th, 2006 with no comments.
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Back when I was starting out with my first internet venture, I did a crazy thing. I subscribed to a Search Engine Optimization newsletter. These guys send a weekly email with their bundle of latest tips. For the first few months, I actually followed what they said. Now, I just keep my subscription to get a few laughs.You see, their basic advice hasn’t changed a bit. It is still about keyword laden content, back links to your site, et cetera, et cetera. Of course, every time the search engines change their algorithm a bit, there is a huge new update on how best to beat this algorithm and remain on top. And you know what? Some of the things these guys say actually work! But here I am, telling you to stop writing for the search engines. I must be really crazy, right?
Not quite. Just like you and probably everybody else, I used to believe that getting the top position on a major search engine would make me rich. It would open floodgates of money, floodgates that I will never be able to close. And to be completely truthful, that is exactly what it did too. Well, actually they were the floodgates of bandwidth bill? but they were floodgates alright!
That is when I realized that I was making the biggest mistake a salesman could make in his lifetime. Instead of creating a website to sell to and satisfy my customers, I had created a traffic portal for the search engines. Unfortunately for me, search engines don’t buy things that I want to sell. Rather, they want to sell their own advertisement around my content. After all, what content do Google and Yahoo produce? Zilch! They live of our content and yet, whatever we do, we have the search engines on the top of our head.
So I told myself, to hell with search engines. I will create a website that is for my customers. Sure, I will receive fewer customers, but then I was certain that the guy who is going to sift through the garbage a normal search engine throws up; to come to my site, will be really looking for something specific. And you know what? I will trade such a surfer for a thousand surfers that major websites receive on a daily basis.
And this is exactly what I did. I had two different websites competing for the same keyword. The first website was made just for the search engines (MSN in particular) and was ranked 1 on MSN, 5 on Yahoo and 3 on Google for that particular keyword. On an average day, it received anywhere between 5 to 6 thousand visitors. I made 3 to 5 sales daily from the website.
The second website, on the other hand, made an extensive use of images (I even used an image file for my headline because I didn’t like the way various browsers treated text). The day Google indexed my website (Google is always the first to index my sites, god knows why!) I was placed 44th for the term. I received a lowly 40 visitors for my effort and made no sale. For a week, it continued to be so and then Google dropped my website for some reason or the other.
The website was again picked up a week later. This time, Google put it on the 38th position. I received 55 visitors a day for nearly a week and made two sales in the entire week. Now, it was time to push the website a bit. I made a nice little press release, wrote a couple of articles related to the product I was selling and sent them to various article databases and press release sites. A month later, Google had pushed me up to 18th on the search term. I currently rank 15th for that term and receive around 1500 visitors from various search engines for 6 average sales a day. My articles still bring me visitors, around 150 to 200 visitors a day for another couple of sales on an average.
Since that little experiment succeeded for me, I have stopped writing my sales copy to suit the search engines. Rather, I write my sales copy to sell. Even if one person comes to my website, I want him interested and ready to take out his credit card to buy from me. However, visitors are important. So I create content for search engines through articles about the product, press releases and blogs. The whole idea of each of these is to bring the visitor down to my sales site. In addition, once the PR of my site has reached a reasonable number, I start exchanging links with other similar websites. And frankly, that is the kind of search engine optimization you should be working for.
Since all articles must end with advice, here is my advice to you. Separate your sales page from the pages you create for search engines. Use large banners, innovative techniques to get your visitors from these pages to your sales page. Never, ever mix search engine optimization with your sales copy. Sure, for some people, it may reap awards. But for most of us, a page optimized for search engines almost never sells. On the other hand, a page made for the customers actually ends up getting a decent position in the search engines!
Pankaj Saini has just started a new internet publication called Learn and Do It to help fellow internet marketeers to make a better living online. For more of his articles, please visit, http://www.learnanddoit.com/
Written by SEO Tipster on October 24th, 2006 with no comments.
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How to use Simple designs and layouts to improve your Search Engine rankings
Ok, your web designer has just shown you the latest design he has just created for your new website. Yes, it is superb looking, with the flash content and interactive games, very cool looking menus which explodes with a stereo amplified mp3 when your mouse hovers on it and tons of other whoop-ass javascripts running around. Cool right? This will certainly draw tons and tons of customers to your site. But will it? A question that comes into mind is how will your customers find your site in the first place?
I would recommend you to rethink on choosing such a design. The best thing you can do for your new site is to use a simple design. A clean simple layout can help you get the rankings first. Even if your site is not new, I would too recommend you to choose a simple and less complicated design. Why? Simple, good content rank well with Search Engines. Search Engines such love these content but ONLY IF they are readable by the Search Engine(SE) spiders that index your site. And nowdays, simple designs are all the rage too in the web community. Simple designs can look elegant too, both to SE spiders and to your visitors. And ranking well in Search Engines can get you the visitors you crave.
I have complied a list of tips(onpage optimization) to get you started on getting your simple site up in Search Engine rankings.
1. HTML - Use HTML to create your webpage. You won’t go wrong with HTML or XHTML compliant sites. Although using other languages such as php or asp will not be harming your rankings, they are more complicated and require a lot of coding skills. If you are good in php, I would say go for it. If not, try HTML first. One more thing, you can use HTML to create Search Engine friendly static urls for your internal links. Internal links are the cornerstone in getting your site indexed. Sure, php has it’s own mod-rewrite feature, but that requires a lot of time and effort to do. If you don’t need to create a dynamic site, why go for php or asp?
2. Use CSS - Use CSS to design your site. Easy to learn, very Search Engine friendly and doesn’t trap Search Engine(SE) spiders like frames do. And CSS can create very beautiful and elegant webpages, which can attract your human visitors. This is perhaps the only thing that webmasters and web designers can agree on, CSS scores on both counts.
3. Text based menu/navigation - Not as good looking as graphics but using a text based navigation menu will make your site very appealing to SEs. SE spiders can’t read graphics (they don’t know what it is), so it will not rank. If you need to use graphics for your menus, have a small text based footer menu at the bottom of your page to make it easier for SE spiders to navigate your site. They need to index your site first before you can rank. Use the alt tag for your graphics as well.
4. Avoid Javascripts - Although there are some evidence that googlebot can now read some types of javascripts, they are still best avoided because you can never know whether they can follow your links or navigate your site at all. If you need to use javscript, don’t use them with your navigation links, especially internal one.
4. No Frames - Frames trap SE spiders, again avoid them at all cost. This is Search Engine Optimization(SEO) 101.
5. Avoid Flash - SE spiders cannot read flash, so they can’t index flash content. If you need to use flash, make sure they are not for your main content, use them for your logo or some eye candy only. And never create a site based completely on flash. Flash menus too should be avoided. They are a bane to getting good rankings . 6. Minimalist - Having a simple layout with minimal graphics/audio/flash/scripts can help speed up loading of yoursite. Your visitors don’t like to wait for your site to load when there is a back button handy. And neither do SE spiders.
I also need to mention that simple sites are easy to debug/troubleshoot/modify. Complex sites have tons of code to debug. Simple sites have less. Which is easy for a programmer to debug or modify when there are problems or when you need to do some changes to your site. And more importantly, which is easier for SE spiders to index?
About the Author
Boon Leong is the admin for Simple Sites. A forum/directory promoting the use of simple layouts & designs to create elegant & stylish sites for the web. This article is also published at High PR Directories
Written by SEO Tipster on October 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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If you want to develop a successful search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, go out of your way to avoid blunders that limit rankings.Here are 10 to keep in mind:
1. Don’t use frames.
Why would you want to use frames if SEO is important? Don’t risk confusing the search engine spiders. Sure, you might write some scripts or adjust the content to work with frames, but you have better things to do with that energy.
2. Don’t use Flash.
Flash looks awesome, but is slows down the user experience and it makes it tough to get ranked. The Flash future is bright for search engines ability to read some keywords, but what good will that do if pages lack visible text?
3. Don’t skimp on titles.
Why would you possibly call a page About Us in the title since it’s prime SEO real estate? Include search phrases that reflect the content.
4. Don’t overstuff titles.
Limit titles to 70 characters with commas between phrases on EVERY page; use fewer characters on pages with limited content.
5. Don’t bury text.
Design often gets in the way of text. Make sure your visible text appears high on the page.
6. Don’t use graphics as page headers.
Graphic headers are a waste of time. Use text page headers and support them with strategic keywords - in the header, after the header or below the header.
7. Don’t use the wrong words.
Website owners love one-word search terms because they seem to get a lot of traffic. The reality is that only a fraction of Internet users entering a broad search word want what you offer. Go for search terms with two, three or four words that help visitors qualify their interests.
8. Don’t ignore link building.
Hunt down links from other websites that have content and categories that relate to what you offer. If you sell sweaters, find a specialty guide about sweaters or a portal about clothing.
9. Don’t overwhelm your pages with keywords.
You might not write the same keyword in succession 10 times, but you can make the mistake of too much repetition. Mention your strategic search term several times throughout the page; promise yourself not to force it in too much.
10. Don’t use long URLs.
If you use a database to maintain the website, you may end up with long URLs with several session IDs and parameters that produce many question marks and equal signs. They can hinder search engines from properly indexing pages. Work with your developer to limit them or remove them as much as possible.
Any questions?
Michael Murray
Fathom SEO
216.861.5951 ext. 111
Michael Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, an Ohio-based SEO firm. A member of Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), he also authored the white paper, “Search Engine Marketing: Get in the Game.”
Written by SEO Tipster on October 20th, 2006 with no comments.
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Below are what I call the “10 Commandments” for Keywords.To start with select “keyword phrases” NOT keywords. This is very important. After all, the keyword itself is included in the keyword phrase.
Consider select different endings for your keywords, (ing, ed, s and es).
Rack your brain and brainstorm with your friends to come up with a list of 25 to 50 keywords or keyword phrases.
Find out what keywords and keyword phrases your competitors are using. Do this by going to your competitor’s Web sites and click on “View” in the top toolbar and then click on “Source.” Scroll down to the “Keywords Meta Tag” and you will see the keywords this competitor thinks are important. Repeat this with all of your important competitors.
Go to http://www.overture.com. Go to the “Term Suggestion Tool” and type in your keywords and keyword phrases. (Keep in mind that Overture groups singular and plural words together.)
Words with a count of 300 to 500 are good. Words with counts of 500 to 1,000 are great (maybe). It depends on a term called KEI that we will talk about later in this article.
Use Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool at http://www.adwords.google.com.
The best place to get help with keywords is http://www.wordtracker.com. You can get a lot of free information here or pay about $7 and get even more information. The reason this site is so great is that it tells you how many times a keyword phrase is searched for, but it also tells you how many other sites are competing with you for the keyword or keyword phrase.
This information is combined into a term called a “Keyword Effectiveness Index” or KEI. A keyword phrase with a KEI of 0 to 10 usually should not be selected. 10 to 100 is good. 100 to 400 is great and above 400 is a gift from heaven.
All of this is explained completely on the WordTacker Web site so I won’t repeat it here. Take time to read all of the instructions and information.
You can only optimize a page for 2 to 5 keywords or 2 to 3 keyword phrases. Don’t try to do everything on your home page. Decide how many pages you are going to have (3 to 5 are the minimum number of pages for high search engine rankings). Then use all of the above techniques to come up with your list of keyword phrases.
After you have selected your list of keywords and keyword phrases another good test to run is to find out the keywords that people are actually spending their money on. How do you do this? It’s simple. Go to http://www.Amazon.com and search for book titles with your selected keywords or keyword phrases. Then check to see how the books rank in sales for Amazon. The lower the number the better.
A number of 5,000 means it is in the top 5% (assuming Amazon has one million books. They actually have many more.). If people are spending money buying books (on the Internet) about your keywords, it tells me that you have a good chance of selling your goods or services on the Internet also.
The last point to consider is how many times do you use your keyword phrases on each page? I have seen #1 ranking with a keyword phrase density of only 0.5% to over 20%. Google doesn’t like high keyword densities any more. A good range to shoot for now is about 1% to 2%. Maybe a little higher, but not much. Google may increase this number in the future, but for now, keep your keyword phrase density low. Google calls a high keyword density “over optimization” and they can penalize a site for this.
That means if you have 300 words on your page, you would need to have about 6 to 21 keyword phrases on your page. Don’t over do it and make your page sound silly. Read your page out loud and see if sounds alright. Be creative and you can get a lot of keyword phrases into your page and still make it sound reasonable. Also, it’s important to have a high keyword density in the first 150 words on the page, but remember that if your page is in columns, the first word is the first word in your LEFT Nav. panel . . . NOT the first word in your center panel.
Use your keywords and keyword phrases in a sentence. Search engines define a sentence as a group of three or more words that start with a capital letter and end with a period or other acceptable puncation mark. This also means you should put a period or question mark at the end of each heading or headline to make them look like a sentence and NOT like a group of keyowrds.
This means you should NEVER have just a list of keywords. Keywords that are not used in a sentence have very little (if any) value to increase your search engine ranking. In fact, if you go overboard, it could be labeled as keyword spamming by the search engines. This also means that keywords listed in your left Nav. panel will NOT help your rankings. The search engines cops are not stupid. They know what you are trying to do if you insert lists of keywords.
In summary, be creative, take your time and find the very best keywords and keyword phrases. After all, what good would it do you to get #1 rankings for keyword phrases that no one actually searches for.
The above information does not tell you everything about keywords and keyword phrases, but it points you in the right direction. I didn’t repeat the instructions that are included in the Web sites I referred you to.
Make sure your keywords or keyword phrases are used in all of your outbound links and try to get sites that are linking to you to use your keywords or keyword phrases in their links to your site. Otherwise, the links would not be very valuable to you.
Craige Stacey has been studying search engines optimization as a hobby and has achieved some very good search engine positions in the past for membership software
Written by SEO Tipster on October 18th, 2006 with no comments.
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We’ve all heard about it-it seems like all the buzz right now in the search engine marketing industry is RSS. If you’re a website owner, than there are two ways your website can benefit from using RSS on your website-you can provide an RSS feed or, for the not-so-technically-inclined folks like me, you can use an RSS feed to keep your site’s content fresh.RSS is a way to syndicate website content. According to Wikipedia, “RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by (amongst other things) news websites and weblogs…the RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data.” Wikipedia goes on to say that “A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled web pages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major web sites, as well as many smaller ones.”
If you’re a website owner, you can use RSS to your advantage in two ways: use someone else’s RSS feed or produce your own RSS feed. 1. Install a script on your website-whenever a web page on your website is loaded the script automatically loads data from an RSS feed. If the RSS feed you choose to use is the latest news, then the latest news will appear on your website. This is fairly easy to set up and is good for search engine optimization purposes. I’ll discuss installing an RSS feed script on your website later on in this article.
2. Provide an RSS feed of your website’s content so others can use it. By providing an RSS feed of your website’s content, you’re essentially allowing people to use the content on their website or through their feed reader. In either case, you’re also providing links back to your website, which is good for search engine optimization purposes-it will also get visitors to visit your website. Providing an RSS feed of your site’s content can be tricky to set up-or it may not be appropriate if you don’t have a lot of content on your website. I’ll discuss your options later on in this article.
If you’re a website owner, then chances are you want to keep your website’s content fresh. By updating the content on a regular basis, the search engine spiders will take notice-they’ll visit your website more often and index the new content and new web pages-which can ultimately bring more visitors to your website. For example, if your website is about real estate, you might consider including the latest real estate news on your website. Users typically search for topics that are related to items in the news, so if those topics and keywords are included on your website you can typically be found in the search engines for those terms. It’s like having your own real estate news staff on hand, 24 hours a day, adding the latest news on your website.
Installing an RSS Feed on Your Website
Installing an RSS feed on your website is not as difficult as it sounds. You simply install a script one time-and then anywhere you want the RSS feed to appear you simply pick a feed and copy and paste some code on your page. The first thing you need to do is figure out which script to use. If your website is using an Unix server and has PHP installed, the the easiest PHP script I’ve found is called CaRP. You will first want to visit the CaRP download page and download the file. CaRP has a free version that you can use on your website. They request that you link back to their website if you use it. Unzip the zip file and upload the files to your website using an FTP program. Then, run the setup file in your web browser, chmod the appropriate files, and continue with the directions given to you in the web browser. Once it’s installed, the script will give you code to copy and paste wherever your want the RSS feed to be displayed on your website. You can even change the font, size, and color of the feed by specifying those attributes before the code.
There are other RSS parser scripts available, but CaRP is the one that I’m more familiar with because its ease of use and ease of installation. To find other RSS parsers, you can search Google for “rss parser script”. CaRP is typically used if you have PHP installed on your website, and RSS parser scripts are available if you’re running a website on a Windows server. If you’re using the PHP version of CaRP then you’ll want to use PHP pages on your website-or you will need to parse your html pages as PHP pages.
Finding an RSS Feed
Once you’ve installed the parser script, you’ll want to find the appropriate RSS feed to use on your website. Keep in mind that a lot of RSS feeds are provided for “non-commercial use only”, so if your website is a for-profit website you’ll need to check the terms of using the RSS feed before you use it.
The best way to find an RSS feed is to search for it. Following my real estate example above, searching for “rss real estate” (without the quotes) finds several feeds. Topix.net provides a real estate rss feed. By copying that URL and pasting it into the CaRP code provided by CaRP, you can add that code to any web page on your website and the latest Real Estate News from Topix will automatically appear. Another way to find a feed is to look for a blog on your site’s topic. Most blog software includes an RSS feed, so searching Google for “keyword blog rss” might also help you find a feed you can use.
Adding an RSS feed on your web page won’t get you high rankings in the search engines. A while back I tested this theory a while back by making three nearly identical web pages-one static page, one with RSS feed content on it, and another with a live RSS feed on it. It turned out that after all three pages were indexed and ranked, the page with the live RSS feed actually ranks third-the static page without the RSS content on it always ranks the best. Search Google for “silly burlywood revenue” and you’ll see what I mean.
Although adding an RSS feed won’t get your page top rankings in Google, there are other benefits. For example, updating your web page’s content on a regular basis gets the page crawled more often-and more active crawling can contribute to other benefits, such as ranking for terms that appear in the feed on your site as well as causing new web pages on your site to get indexed faster than they were before.
Providing an RSS Feed of Your Content
Depending on your website’s content, providing an RSS feed of your content might be appropriate. If your website provides news or contains a blog, then publishing an RSS feed might work well. Most blog software automatically publishes an RSS feed of your blog, so you might want to find its URL and start promoting it. If you sell a lot of products on your website, you might consider making an RSS feed available-perhaps one that includes your top selling products along with their prices. Other websites might be interested in publishing that data for their users, and you would receive more visitors and links back to your website, something that will help your site’s search engine rankings.
Publishing an RSS feed is a little more complicated, perhaps to lengthy a discussion for this article. However, there are many good tutorials out there, including Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Watch article about it, as well as the RSS tutorial at mnot.net.
Whether you use RSS to publish your own feed or you use someone else’s feed on your website, both provide great benefits to website owners-and definitely will continue in the future to be used more and more.
Bill Hartzer is a successful writer and search engine marketing expert who has personally created hundreds of websites over the years. Extended bio info:
Bill created his first website back in 1996 to help promote his former database software business. It was then when he learned about the power of the search engines and web search, which helped potential customers find his business online.
Bill Hartzer has over 15 years of professional writing experience. He has survived stints as a writer for television, as well as a technical writer for several computer software companies in Florida and in Texas. Mr. Hartzer combines his writing and online skills to create compelling and useful websites for corporations worldwide. Mr. Hartzer focuses on the optimization in the business to business arena, but applies these optimization skills to business to consumer websites, as well.
Written by SEO Tipster on October 15th, 2006 with no comments.
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I was recently contacted by one of my best clients who asked me what I thought of his decision to make a major change to one of his highly ranked pages. His initial concern was that visitor sales conversion ratio was low. At almost one percent, it was just below normal, but I’m always happy when a client wants to improve. Conversion and rankings though, are very different beasts and his concern was overly focused on the former to the total exclusion of the latter.As his SEO I should have realized that the top rankings of this already optimized page were in danger when his first sentence referred to the existing “Dusty, tired old page, that just isn’t getting enough sales.” That page had just been optimized for search engines about 6 months previously, and went from page 10 (invisible) or so of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) to the top three on the first pages of all three major search engines virtually overnight after a few tweaks to gain traction from a popular movie reference to his product.
The page had been up for several years before the movie release without gaining substantial web sales of that same product, but our optimization six months ago lead to a leap in sales and consistently improving page visits after that theatrical release. But sales plateaued over time and slowly decreased after the movie which had mentioned his product transitioned to DVD sales. Somehow he hadn’t forseen that decrease and wanted to continue the level of sales he had enjoyed while the movie mention was fresh.
To achieve the continued sales though, he wanted to completely replace the page text with new material he’d been given by the manufacturer of the product. As is the case with marketing material provided by many companies, keyword density was non-existent with emphasis was on slick new photos, covered with stylized, graphical text. Text with keywords that couldn’t be repeated in any page text since they had already been embedded in the image graphics several times.
What to do? I suggested creating an entirely NEW page with the manufacturer provided information linked within his site menu links on each page and from the sitemap. While maintaining the old page for it’s top rankings in the search engines we could simply use internal linking to keep the search engines crawling that (old dusty) fully optimized page. That way we would still rank in the top 5 for that page and it’s coveted keywords and provide the new conversion focused page to site visitors from the menu links.
For some reason though, the client insisted on using the existing filename for the new content and moving the old content to a NEW filename! Why? Because he wouldn’t have to have his programmer change a script which loaded a rotating banner to a select few highly trafficked pages. The programmer costs too much to change a few lines of code for a profitable product page?
This tactic meant that we would completely lose the existing rank on the next visit of the search engine crawlers after the new page was posted. I was convinced that we could gain the rank back, but only over time and with substantial extra work. The cost to the client to get a new page into the top five on SERP’s was going to exceed the cost of programming updates of banner rotation scripts. But he insisted we use the new manufacturer provided (image only) content on the old filename. OK, I relent.
The web designer wanted to use the new manufacturer provided page in an iframe and embed the old page text in noframes tags - making it visible to search engines, but not visitors. Silly idea and borderline spam technique that may drop our top five rankings off the charts. I dug my heals in and refused that idea.
The client suggested simply keeping previous metatags and title tag to maintain ranking. Sorry, that simply won’t work. If it did, we’d return to the bad old days of simplistic keyword stuffing in those (no longer) magical metatags. I started to wonder … “Am I here as an SEO only to stop designers from using SE spamming techniques, programmers from having to write new code and clients from doing absurd keyword stuffing in metatags?”
No you actually have to use carefully crafted keyword rich text on the visible page - and NOT embedded in graphics files as text painted across photos with photoshop and illustrator software. Search engines can’t read text on images and that image “Alt” text in the HTML is no longer useful in SEO since it has been so badly abused by simplistic optimizers for ranking gains before the search engines began to ignore it in their ranking algorithm.
The new page may initially see sales increases due to the pretty new photos (there is zero text on that new page) but after a long series of email exchanges with this client and a final phone discussion over ranking issues, he proceeded with this change anyway. I normally don’t hope for poor rankings on client pages, but since this one runs counter to every fiber of my SEO being, I’m actually looking forward to that torpedo striking and the ranking to sink off the charts and the client to pay attention to his SEO’s advice.
The old page is still showing up in cached pages at the search engines, so they haven’t yet crawled the new version. I will dutifully point out the sinking of the venerable “SS Search Engine Ranking” ship next week when Googlebot revisits this client site and finds all that text has disappeared from his previously #1 ranked page and suggest to him that he review his WebTrends traffic reports to see that it has settled to the bottom of the ocean.
I guess I better get busy finding a way to rank the previous (old optimized) page on the brand new shiny filename. Won’t he be surprised to learn that most of his sales come from that (newly named) “old dusty page” within a few weeks?
Copyright ?September 3, 2005
Have you done anything to torpedo and sink your ship “SS Search Engine Rankings” lately? Call me at 562-572-9702 if you need a salvage operation to raise that venerable ship from the bottom of the vast search engine rankings ocean. http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm Mike Banks Valentine operates the article distribution site http://Publish101.com and a Small Business Ecommerce Tutorial for Web Entreprenuers at http://WebSite101.com
Written by SEO Tipster on October 15th, 2006 with no comments.
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