So how do you get a top listing in Google and how do you get into Google quickly.Lets begin with the latter. You can submit your site using Googles submit site tool but amazingly enough this is NOT the fastest way to get listed.
Here’s the secret to getting listed in Google like lightening PRESS RELEASE’S
Yep issue a press release relating to your website you will see your site in all the major search engines in 3 or 4 days. Here’s a link to one of my press releases http://pressreleases.newspad.com/pr/20054/pr224817.html
To issue a press release go to http://prweb.com
It’s free to do.
Ok now that your sites in Google how are we going to get a top spot for keywords related to our site. Well I’m afraid to tell you this is no easy process it could possibly take months even years! But with some luck and the right tools it is achievable.
There are two keys to getting a high ranking
1) Keywords
2) High Page Rank Websites Linking To Your Website
Lets look at keywords first. So to go about finding these keywords we are going to use some free tools
1) Overture Keyword Tool -
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
2) Wordtracker - http://wordtracker.com
Using these two tools you can search keywords related to your product/website & find out which ones are searched a lot and which ones have very little competition.
What you want are keywords middle of the road i.e. not as much competition & not as much searches.
Once you have decided on your keywords, try & get 40 or 50. You need to make sure these keywords feature all over the body of you website.
Make sure to put the most searched keywords in your title & headings.
Now you need to go about getting other websites to link to yours. You need to find websites related to yours but sites that are not in competition with you and email the webmasters of these sites and ask them for a link.
To help you do this more quickly and easily there is a great piece of software available. Here’s the link http://www.axandra-link-popularity-tool.com/index.htm
I hope this information will help you achieve your search engine goals.
Mark Flavin is the creator and editor of http://www.nicetodobusiness.com and is a specialist in free web site promotion. View his members area at http://www.nicetodobusiness.com/members.htm
Written by SEO Tipster on October 13th, 2006 with no comments.
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I am a Search Engine Optimization newbie. I have read a little on various forums, browsed a few articles, and read through The Affiliate Masters Course (Ken Evoy) a couple of times.Eleven days ago I invested a little of my affiliate earnings in a new product that was being launched.
The Dowser Professional is a keyword research tool on steroids, and has allowed me to improve the returns from the few existing niche websites I already have, and find a number of new niches very quickly.
I was so impressed with The Dowser Professional that I decided it was a key product I wanted to promote as an affiliate, even to the extent of developing a product specific niche website.
I am very much a believer in Ken Evoy’s technique of “pre-selling”. If you provide a customer with proof that a product works, and what they could do with the product, you can maximise your sales potential.
So I set out to prove that The Dowser Professional was an insanely powerful tool, and that anyone could easily use it to improve their website(s) and find rich new niches.
I set myself what I believe is the ultimate challenge, to target SEO experts on their own turf.
I picked an initial keyword to research, “keyword”.
Within a few minutes I had a good list of related keywords, and within 20 minutes had completed my keyword research. Yes the whole process was that fast.
I then setup a Blogger.com blog based around the keywords I selected.
http://keyword-report.blogspot.com
The primary keywords for the site are “keyword position report” (KEI approx 6K) and “keyword ranking report” (KEI approx 3K). It is amazing that such large holes can be found in a very competitive niche with only a few minutes work, but that is the power of The Dowser.
I set myself a very strict rule. No seeking links until the site was indexed and had achieved ranking based purely on keywords.
Today (July 28th 2005) the site was picked up by Yahoo. It ranks 1st and 5th for it’s primary keywords, and has already received traffic from both Yahoo and Technorati.
The site is not yet listed in MSN and Google. I expect it to rank well on MSN and poorly on Google until it has some incoming links.
The site contains maybe 30% original content, and any articles used were carefully “wrapped” with specific keyword heavy text both before and after.
Andy Beard has worked in Sales, Marketing and Localization for the last 15 years, primarily in the computer games industry. His blog Exploring Niche Websites gives insights into creating profitable websites on the internet.
Additional related information including screenshots of example Yahoo ranking are available on his Niche Website Blog
Reporting on the success or failure of Keyword Position Report will appear in future articles
Written by SEO Tipster on October 12th, 2006 with no comments.
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News broke this week that Yahoo has purchased the Inktomi search engine for around US$235 million. This is an interesting development in the search engine industry that may impact greatly on exactly where sites get their traffic from. Another new development in the past few weeks is the change to the HotBot service but first, I’d like to look at the ramifications of the Yahoo/Inktomi deal.Here’s a bit of background information on how the Yahoo and Inktomi search engines work. I’m sure everyone knows Yahoo but not everyone may be completely aware of how their search engine works. Yahoo is a directory. This means that it is a categorised list of sites that are listed by human editors. Getting listed in the Yahoo directory requires a yearly payment for commercial sites. You can get listed for free if you have a non-commercial site but it is very hard to do and can take months. Yahoo provides additional results when you use their search function that come from Google. In the past, Yahoo has used other search engines to provide these results (including Inktomi) but has used Google for the last couple of years.
They initially used results from other search engines to just compliment their own. So, if someone searched for something that wasn’t in their directory, they could still get results. The way it worked was that they would provide results from their own directory first and then a user would click on “web pages” to get more results. Strangely, Yahoo actually changed the way this worked during the year so that the results from a search were a mix of listings from their own directory and Google with the Google results being the more prominent of the two. This has essentially made the payment of the US$299 per year for a directory listing an unnecessary expense. Many people still use the directory to browse for sites but, in my experience, more people use the search function.
Inktomi is a full crawler based search engine that provides results for other search engines. They do have a web site but no-one uses it to actually search - it’s more of an informational site. Inktomi’s results formerly appeared in many search engines but in the last few years, their popularity has declined. The main site that currently uses Inktomi is MSN but Inktomi only provides the fifth level of results. MSN provides sponsored listings from Overture, their own Microsoft sites, their own human edited directory results, LookSmart listings and then Inktomi. So, Inktomi does drive traffic to sites but far less than a search engine like Google.
So, what does all this mean to us? It’s hard to say at the moment but there are three options. Either nothing will change (which is unlikely), Yahoo will use Inktomi together with Google on it’s site or it will dump Google and use Inktomi for it’s search results. Yahoo actually owns part of Google, maybe 5%, so there is a chance that they will keep using their results for this reason. Also, Google provide far better results for searchers than Inktomi so Yahoo would be making a mistake to replace Google. But, apparently Yahoo is annoyed that Google has become competition to them through Google’s own site and that Google’s news search service is also providing competition.
Without a crystal ball, it’s very difficult to know what is going to happen but it’s worth making sure that you are prepared for all occurrences. There is really very little that you need to do because it is only the popularity of Inktomi that may change. Even without the searches from Yahoo, Google will still be the biggest search engine in the world due to the fact that it’s own site is very popular and it’s results are also used by AOL (amongst others). So, what can you do to get the most from Inktomi?
Inktomi is the only major search engine that uses meta tags. This is actually the reason that it is not as popular as before because meta tags allow webmasters to “trick” Inktomi into thinking a page has more relevant content than there really is. Therefore, Inktomi’s search results are not very good. However, as there is a good chance that Inktomi will now become popular again, you need to make sure that you have your meta keyword and meta description tags in place. Make sure they are relevant to the page that they are on - you don’t want to be caught “spamming” their search engine. The other thing that will probably make a difference is to get other sites to link to you. Link popularity makes a difference on all search engines except possibly AllTheWeb.
I’ll keep you updated here with any news on what Yahoo decides to do and any changes that I find out about the way the Inktomi generates results.
As I mentioned above, the other major search engine news in the last month is that HotBot has finally updated their site. HotBot is owned by Lycos and was quite a popular search engine a few years ago. It has become far less popular lately - since it was purchased by Lycos and was just left to “die”. It’s results largely came from a mix of the ODP, DirectHit and Inktomi. DirectHit has since become Teoma which is owned by AskJeeves but HotBot went for months after DirectHit ceased to exist saying that it’s results were coming from them.
So, HotBot has essentially become another meta search engine - like DogPile or Excite. It now works pretty much like Netscape does. A searcher can choose which search engine they would like their results to come from. The search engines that you can choose from are Fast (AllTheWeb), Google, Inktomi and Teoma. This may mean that HotBot starts to get some of it’s market share back but as webmasters, there is nothing that we can do to target HotBot. All we can do is target the search engines which provide it’s results.
About The Author
Sean Burns is the author of the WebmastersReference.com Newsletter - http://www.webmastersreference.com/newsletter. More than five years of experience in site design, marketing, income generation, search engine optimisation and more is passed on to subscribers - hype free. Sign up today to get real information of real value to webmasters.
seanb@webmastersreference.com
Written by SEO Tipster on October 9th, 2006 with no comments.
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According to the recent release of the Google Patent Application, many of the things you’re doing to get better page rank and increase your position in natural search are about to be history. It’s frightening how much things are going to change.All of those folks trying to “beat the system” with doorway pages and invisible text are about to be (or have already been) punished by the Google Algorithm.
Why are things changing? Because Google wants to remain the premier search engine, which means returning content that matters to people doing the searches. It’s true, marketers are not Google’s primary customer. People using search engines to find information will always remain Google’s #1 priority.
Think about people using search engines for a moment. Wait, forget about them ? think about yourself for a moment. When you turn to the internet for answers, what do you want? I may be an oddball, but when I’m looking for an answer to my question, I want, yes - an answer to my question. Your prospective customers are no different. To quote Dr. Phil, “People want what they want when they want it.” Are you giving it to them?
If you’re not giving them what they want, they probably won’t give you what you want ( their attention, their contact information, and their money.) But there is one thing you can do that will inspire them to visit your site, make them open your offer, and improve your search engine positioning all at the same time.
So what is the one thing thing?
Provide content. Content is King and content means articles. Content means the information that addresses that web searcher’s issues and needs.
And it’s what Google expressly wants from you. It’s what Google needs in order to remain the premier search engine. It’s what Google will return in the very top positions of search results, even for the most popular keywords. The Patent Application makes it clear that doing this one thing is going to have a bigger impact than all the keyword stuffing and optimization you can do.
All you have to do is write a short (400-800 words) article on any topic that might be of interest to your target market. If you sell computers, write a review of some recently released technology. If you are a consultant, explain how companies can improve using some of the handy tips and tricks you know.
Your tips and tricks don’t have to be the “magic” of your offering. You don’t have to give away the store. There are some things that you consider quite fundamental in your industry - and there are thousands of newcomers who don’t yet know the fundamentals. Through your articles, you will be the expert who shows them the ropes. Imagine how much this elevates their opinion of you. You become an instant guru.
You become known as an expert in your field, someone who really knows what’s going on in your space. What kinds of problems might your target market be trying to solve online? Write an article to explain a solution to them.
For instance:
I use Article Marketer (www.articlemarketer.com) to distribute my articles to thousands of newsletter editors for publication. It costs me $39.95 to distribute as many articles as I want for three full months. It’s a great bargain.
I use a hosted service from Sales Force (www.salesforce.com) to manage my leads. It costs me $65 per month for a full-featured sales force automation and lead management system that I can get to from any computer with internet access. Like my American Express card, I don’t leave home without it.
I use the free service from PRWeb (www.prweb.com) to send out press releases to the media for my clients. Their paid service is about $400, but I’ve always been happy with the results from their free version.
Can you see how telling people about these tools takes nothing away from my own service offering? Giving away this information does one very important thing: it makes my target market happy.
After all, how many people don’t even know that www.articlemarketer.com is a tool they should be using or that salesforce.com offers a web based lead management SFA offering? When they read my article, they get valuable information about something they can use right now to get more traffic, find more prospects, and increase their sales volume. They are satisfied.
Then the magic happens.
When they get to the end of my article, if they like the free information I’ve provided, they will want to know more. I put my website address in the resource box (yep, see below) and I get a flood of traffic to my site. Not just any old traffic though. The people coming to my website are pre-qualified. It’s what Ken Evoy says is crucial in selling online, these visitors are “open to an offer” from me.
They have already proven to have an interest in what I’m talking about, and they already feel somewhat comfortable with me, my style, my approach, etc. When they arrive at my web site, they get a lot of information absolutely free. They can also purchase things I have for sale.
I’ve seen dramatic spikes in my Simplified Selling book sales after distributing an article. The conversion rate is better too ? meaning I get more sales “per capita” than using pay-per-click or buying ads in newsletters.
Of course, it’s not that expensive to buy an ad in a newsletter ? but does anyone have enough money to pay for advertising in every newsletter that reaches a particular target market? Of course not, there are hundreds of thousands of ezines published on the web and in print.
However, publishers need content and they are willing to publish your free reprint article (meaning they don’t have to pay you for your writing) and in exchange they provide a link to your website.
That link shows up in newsletters to be seen by your prospective customers. You also get permanent links on websites - something else that the Google Patent identifies as important when ranking sites.
So sit down, draft out an article on some topic you like, and get it published. Watch as the world beats a path to your door.
Chris Ellington gives effective and easy to implement marketing strategies to small business owners and home business entrepreneurs. His Simplified Selling System has been a favorite of salespeople around the world. Get your free marketing strategies at http://www.simplifiedselling.com.
Written by SEO Tipster on October 9th, 2006 with no comments.
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The date: 29th July 2005. The time: early morning. I got out of bed and fired up my PC. Opened my browser to check my site. Had a look at the third-party Google toolbar plugin (http://toolbar.google.com/) on said browser (FireFox). It showed grey.Ice formed in my stomach. I opened my bugged version of Internet Explorer: my PageRank was 0. By now I was frantic. I went to http://www.google.com and typed in ’site:www.tigertom.com’: no pages listed. I did this for two other satellite sites of mine: ditto.
What had happened?
TigerTom.Com (http://www.tigertom.com) had been banned by Google. I went to the WebmasterWorld forum (http://www.webmasterworld.com), and found out the awful truth. Google was doing one of its periodic updates of its algorithm, and had filtered out my sites completely.
Further research there, and a bit of soul-searching, revealed why. I had too many pseudo-directory pages with auto-generated external links. Snippets from search engine results were used as descriptions of said links. Said links were run though a redirect script. These are hallmarks of pseudo-directories and ‘AdSense scraper’* sites. Google is reportedly trying to filter these from its ‘SERPs’**. I say reportedly, because Google doesn’t announce these purges. They are inferred.
To compound my sins, these pages were also effectively doorway pages?.
The theory was that legitimate sites had been hit as ‘collateral damage’. I say theory, in that Google rarely comments on individual cases. It won’t tell you exactly why your site was banned. I guess this is for reasons of time, and to give no clues to spammers.
In my case the ban was justified for my two satellite sites; while not looking like spam, they were effectively doorway sites.
My main site was different. It had offending pages, but was mostly a diverse labour of seven years; a personal site on steroids.
Google bans sites algorithmically: a site that fits their ’spammer’ profile gets dropped via software from their index automatically. Real spammers shrug their shoulders and move on; honest webmasters write emails begging for mercy.
Like me.
I did some searching via Google, to find out how to do a re-inclusion request. Here’s how:
1. First, you check your site is truly gone, by going to http://www.google.com, typing ’site:www.yourdomain.com’ without the apostrophes. If it returns no pages at all …
2. You check Google’s webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. These are not really guidelines; you should treat them as iron-clad rules.
3. You stop the offending content from being web-accessible, permanently.
If you’re familiar with Apache web-server mod_rewrite you can:
- Send a 410 ‘Gone’ response to requests for the offending pages, or
- CHMOD them to 600, which will return a 403 ‘Forbidden’ response, or
- Move them to a different directory if you need to keep them, or
- Just delete them.
Don’t try to be clever. Just get rid of them.
4. You go to http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py, tick the relevant boxes, and type ‘Re-inclusion request’ in the subject box of the form.
4a. You add the complete URL of your site i.e. http://www.naughtydomain.com,
4b. You state that you have read the webmaster guidelines above,
4c. You admit what you did wrong; simply, succinctly, with no carping or special pleading.
Don’t try to be clever. Don’t argue. Don’t lie. Don’t waffle.
Google has cached copies of your site. When an engineer checks your site, he’ll look for the offending content, and compare it against their cache. He’ll spend about two minutes on it; don’t give him a reason to continue to exclude you.
4d. You ask for re-inclusion.
5. You wait.
In my case, it took about a week; a long, unpleasant, fretful week. I sent follow up emails saying what I was doing, and a fax, and I was going to write letters if that didn’t work. That was probably excessive. Once you have a ticket number, that’s all that should be necessary.
They emailed a standard reply saying “the problem had been passed to their engineers”. That’s good. I understand they send no reply to spammers.
A week later my site was back in. Lesson learnt. To make sure I’m not so vulnerable again, I’m splitting my content to different sites, on the principle of ‘best not to have all your eggs in one basket’.
Have I learnt anything from this? Yes. Have more than one site as your ‘money-maker’. Spend less time on search engine optimisation and more on traditional marketing. Come up with a unique selling proposition that compels people to link to your site. Easy(!)
——
* A site specifically set up to host Google Adsense advertisements (http://www.google.com/adsense). Usually of low quality, consisting of pages of links to other web sites, text copied from free-print articles, and a big Google ad block ‘above the fold’.
** Search Engine Result Pages
? Doorway pages are low-quality keyword-rich web pages whose sole purpose is to lead the viewer to the ‘real’ content, usually whatever the site is selling.
About the author: T. O’ Donnell (http://www.ttfreeware.co.uk/) is an ecommerce consultant and curmudgeon living in London, UK. His latest project is an ebook on buying property in Spain (http://www.tigertom.com/spanish-property-for-sale.shtml). His blog can be read at http://www.ttblog.co.uk/.
Written by SEO Tipster on October 9th, 2006 with no comments.
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Search engines love content. Graphics may make your site look great, but a nice picture does not attract a search engine. Or a searcher for that matter. Good, relevant content does.Search engines aren’t all that different from people. When faced with a ton of choices, they want to know which sites are the best. And, the best sites are the ones that give the most accurate and relevant information.
Good content serves three main purposes:
1. Search engines will rank your site higher for keywords and phrases included within your content.
2. Users will return to your site, and recommend it to others
3. Other sites will link to you, which will improve your linking popularity and make your web site visible to the spiders.
But, how do you get good content? Simple. You write it, or get someone else to write it for you, using keywords and phrases your visitors will actually use on a search query.
Feeling a little hot under the collar? Relax. It’s not as difficult as it sounds. Anyone can learn to write for crawler search engines. It just takes a little planning, detective work and focus. Ready to begin? Follow the steps below and you’ll be writing like a pro in no time.
1. Determine which keywords and phrases you want to target
Before you sit down to write anything, you’ll need to decide which keywords and keyphrases are relevant to your site. One of the best ways to do this is to use the Word Tracker keyword tracking service at www.wordtracker.com. Word Tracker receives its data from the Dogpile and Metacrawler search engines and estimates search counts for all other search engines based on its market share. You can sign up for a day, a week, a month or a year.
Another good way to find keywords your visitors are using is to look at your site’s server logs. These will tell you what phrases people are using to find your site. Some keywords will be too competitive. For example, the keywords “real estate” will return hundreds, if not thousands of search results, and may not place your site near the top, but “Houston Real Estate” or is more focused and targeted to a particular query.
If you want your site to be included in local and regional searches you may want to design your site with local searches in mind, even if you also market globally. How do you do this? Just include local keywords such as address, city, state, province and zip code in the header or footer of your web pages. For example:
XYZ Business Consultant, 3657 Acacia Avenue, Santa Cruz, California 95067. Tel: 408 746 8954. Located close to San Jose, CA.
That way you have a much better chance of getting a first page listing on a localized search.
2. Scatter your chosen keywords and phrases throughout your text.
Let’s say one of the keyphrases you want to target is “cotton duvets”. You’ll want to weave this phrase throughout your copy without making it sound stilted or contrived. Remember, you still need to persuade your prospects to buy your product, so don’t be tempted to write paragraphs like this:
“Our cotton duvets are the softest cotton duvets around. Check out our affordable cotton duvets in our online cotton duvet store now.” While it’s obvious what your keyphrases are, the two sentences don’t exactly encourage your visitor to place an order. Be subtle. Use your keywords to emphasize your point and insert them where they naturally fit, without compromising flow and readability.
3. Review your headings, titles and hyperlinks
Use your keywords in headings, subtitles, page titles (found in the blue bar at the top of your Web browser), bold face and hyperlinks, because these stand out to the search engines. For example, returning to the cotton duvets you may want to change your “contact us” hyperlink to “contact us now about our luxurious cotton duvets.” Or, “learn more about how our cotton duvets can keep you warm and snug this winter”
4. Post keyphrase-rich, informative articles on your site
Another great way to fill your site up with keyword-laden content is to post relevant, informative articles. Every article you post on your site adds more content–content that the search engines thrive on. And, if you write each article as if you are giving the spider a good, healthy meal full of essential keywords, they’ll devour every word, and index it for future use.
You can also post your articles on article directories such as GoArticles, Article City or IdeaMarketers that offer free content to ezine publishers and website owners. That way you’ll spread the word about your site, get some great back links and even free publicity.
5. Publish a Newsletter or Ezine
Newsletters and ezines are another way to add content to your site. If you’ve written articles already, you get to reuse them, and you can create a newsletter archive section on your website.
6. Post a blog or weblog
Blogs or Weblogs are frequently updated journals. that point to articles elsewhere on the web, and to existing on-site articles. The popularity of blogs have spawned blog services such as Typepad and Blogger which make it easy for non-techies to update their sites and add them to an existing web site. Because both the search engines and your site’s visitor’s love new, updated information, blogs can be a great way of adding content to your site on a daily basis. You can use a blog to announce company news or comment on industry news, announce new product details or to create a “brand” or “personality” for your company.
Before you begin publishing your blog, think about what you’re customers want to know. Then, answer their questions on a daily basis. It won’t be long before you’ll have them, and the search engines hooked.
About The Author
Julia is an independent copywriter specializing in advertising and search engine marketing services. To learn more about how Julia can help boost your company’s profits visit her site at www.juliahyde.com. You may also like to sign up for Marketing Works! Julia’s monthly ezine. Visit www.juliahyde.com/form.html or email Julia for details.
info@juliahyde.com
Written by SEO Tipster on October 8th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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There are many Black Hat techniques that people use to try and influence Googles ranking of their sites, the simple thing to remember is that THEY DO NOT help your rankings, are simply a waste of your time and sooner or later will lead to a Google ban for your site. Sure there are sites that use these techniques and are getting away with it but they will eventually get penalised as Google always manages to find them eventually.As I said please avoid using these techniques :
Alt Image Tag Stuffing
This is a way that webmasters try to ‘force fill’ keywords into their website, thus the search engines can see these keywords and their site visitors see no difference at all to layout and an excessive use of certain words.
What happens is that webmasters insert graphic’s that relate to their subject and then add an alt image tag to it. The search engines see this but a visitor will only see it if they hover over the graphic and a pop up will appear.
What you tend to find is that mis-informed webmasters add multiple instances of the keywords that they are targetting with a view to increasing key word density when the search bots visit the page.
The real purpose of an alt image tag is if the web site graphic doesn’t load then the text will appear instead of the graphic, this is particularly important if a visually impaired visitor gets to your site.
My advice would be to keep it simple, use your keyword once and use the tags to present an accurate description of the graphic.
Hidden Text
Hidden Text is simply text that visitors to your site cannot see when they visit your webpage(s). Its used for the same reasons as described in the alt tag example. All that is involved is the webmaster adds the text (usually keyword spam) to the page in the same colour as the background and as such it becomes invisible to the human eye but gets picked up by the search engine bots.
Meta Tag Stuffing
Meta Tags are vital parts of the make up of a web page but again abusing them with a view to influencing the search engine bots can cause you problems. Basically the keyword tag is loaded with hundreds, even thousands, of the exact same keyword into the tag. For example, the tagetted keyword is DVD and the meta tag looks like:
< META NAME = "KEYWORDS" CONTENT="DVD, DVDS, DVD, DVDS DVDS DVD SELLER, DVD, DVDS DVD, DVD, DVD, DVDS, DVD, DVDS DVDS DVD SELLER, DVD, DVDS DVD, DVD, DVD, DVDS, DVD, DVDS DVDS DVD SELLER, DVD, DVDS DVD, DVD, DVD, DVDS, DVD, DVDS DVDS DVD SELLER, DVD, DVDS DVD, DVD">
The important thing to remember is that Google does not use this tag to rank your page due to wide scale abuse so why bother, it is also a pretty rediculous thing to do.
Title Tag Stuffing
The same principle as above but using the title tag, use your keyword once in the title and make it an accurate description of the page and its content, that is sufficient.
If you have to resort to black hat techniques then the set up of your site is wrong and they will eventually lead to the site being panalised. Its a pure waste of effort, they dont work and could kill your site.
Mike - Webmaster and eBay Power Seller at Online Auction Trader
We offer free templates, information and product sourcing to enable you to develop your online auctions into a sustainable, long term income stream.
We also operate a Traders Forum where any advice can be sought on any aspect of Online Trading.
Written by SEO Tipster on October 8th, 2006 with no comments.
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I’ve had several prospects and clients say to me “I want my web site to come up on top in search engines.” And some have been contacted by an SEO company asking for lots of money and claiming that they can guarantee top search engine results, which in many cases is just false promises. There is no quick and easy way to make a web site display in the top 10 on search engines. Getting a web site to come up high in search engines “naturally” can take time and effort. When I say naturally, I mean without paying to be a sponsored link. The content of the web site has to be relevant. By this, I mean the web site content should be very descriptive, and ideally unique, about your business, product or service. This way search engines can rank your site according to this detailed, descriptive and relevant content. Some reasons that a web site will rank high:* Content is relevant to the company or business web site.
* Keyword and keyword phrases are used in important tags such as title, description Meta tag and Header tags.
* Site has been updated with new content regularly.
* Other related businesses web sites have links to your site.
The title of each page needs to be descriptive of the page and not just the web site. So keywords and the site or business name should be built into the title of each page. Avoid using any word more than three times in the title tag.
Make Meta tags keyword-focused. Meta tags are tags in the HTML web page that describe certain things about the page such as the page description, list of keywords, page author, etc. The tags that are important here are the keywords and description Meta tags.
For images on the site, alternate text should be set to keywords as well. Alternate text is the text displayed before an image is completely downloaded and displayed. Alternate text will be displayed in place of the image for text only browsers and if you’ve disabled the show pictures option in your browser settings. A title can also be set for an image, and by hovering your mouse over an image; the title text will be displayed in most browsers.
Header tags should be used in your web pages, where possible. Search engines look for the h1-h6 Header tags as important indicators for what the text of the document will contain.
Here is an example of building keywords into your hierarchical web page to enhance search engine results.
View an example diagram here of building keywords into your hierarchical web page to enhance search engine results.
Prominent tags used are title, description Meta tags, keyword Meta tags and h1 and h2 header tags. Keyword phrases relavent to the business of the web site should exist in the content of the web page as well is in these important HTML tags. Search engines analyze the text for relevant keywords, among other things, and rank the page accordingly. Additional keywords can be used throughout the document. Many experts recommend not using any keyword in excess of 5% of the total text of the page. Doing so may actually lower your ranking.
A site map can help your search engine ranking as well as help your web site visitors find what they’re looking for. For more information on this topic, and other search engine optimization topics, visit google.com.
These are some basic techniques used to achieve higher visibility in search engines, and should help you attain higher results if they are used along with efficient, valid HTML markup. Contact us if you’d like more information on how we can help you achieve high web site visibility.
Norm Euker of NJE Design provides high quality web design, Internet and email marketing to small businesses.
Written by SEO Tipster on October 8th, 2006 with no comments.
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By now you have likely heard that keywords and keyword phrases, are extremely important in having search engines display your website. So how do you choose them? Guess? Ask a friend? Check successful competitors sites? There is a better way!First let’s digress. There are a lot of things that affect your ranking in search engines and ultimately how many sales you make from you website. The quality of the (and amount of) content on your site, how many links point to your site, what keywords are used, how they are used, even the age of your site can play a factor. Large companies spend thousands on getting their companies to the top of the rankings and keeping them there. If you’re a small company trying to compete with these large budgets, you are likely to come up short.
So, how can a small business with a far more moderate budget compete? Niche Marketing! People searching for information on products don’t always use the keywords you would expect them to use. And just because a competitor has a large enough budget to reach the top with a certain keyword or keyword phrase doesn’t mean you will be able to. Niche phrases are sets of keywords that people are using to search in the search engines. If you are able to rate high on these niche phrases you will see an increase of traffic. To find out what words people are using you need to use one of the word tracking sites. These sites find out from the search engines exactly what phrases your potential customers are using.
For example using Google, “used cars” turned up 36,900,000 results; if you don’t show up in the first 10-30 results it is very unlikely you will ever have someone click on your site. In this case every major car dealer and thousands of smaller dealers are competing for those same 10-30 spaces. You have a huge amount of competition. Likely though your potential customers also see this huge number and if he or she can’t find what they are looking for they will try to limit the search. If they are looking for a local dealer they may try adding a city. My office is near Redding California. By entering “used cars Redding”, I still receive 205, 000 results. That’s a lot closer and maybe I could optimize my pages to reach near the top, BUT will my efforts really produce the results I want?
So far I have only guessed that my potential customers are really using this search phrase. If I check my competitor’s site I will only be able to see their guesses. That is where word tracking comes to play. There are a number of sites that offer word-tracking services. Some are free, others charge for their service.
The advantage I’ve found of using a paid word-tracking site over the free sites is that at the free sites, you are told how many times a word has been searched for but there is little or no other information provided. These extra features are what help you to make the best decision on your keywords. These features include keyword suggestions based on your starting keyword, and most importantly the ratio of how many people use that phrase verses how many competitors are using the phrase. It takes a little time to learn how to make the best use of word tracking software, but it is well worth the effort. If you are having someone else optimize your site, insist that they find out what phrases are being used.
Using word tracking you will be able to tell how much competition you have for each phrase and how often the phrase gets used, so that you can optimize a website page for phrases that will get clicks to your site. To illustrate the point, would you rather have 0% of the clicks resulting from 1000 searches or 20% of the clicks resulting from 100 searches? If you choose keyword phrases that will put you at the top of the search engines lists you are far more likely to see results you want.
That’s the benefit of choosing your keywords wisely!
Dwayne Goerges is the owner of ADAC Programming of Shasta Lake California Specializing in data driven websites for inventory display and client management. =Auto Mall Website
Written by SEO Tipster on October 6th, 2006 with no comments.
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SEO is a never ending battle!
So is SEO over-rated? I don’t think it is. Some say that Google’s automated PageRank? system and Alexa’s Traffic Rank system are losing ground. This may be may be true to some point but the fact still remains that we want at the top of the search results. And to achieve this we need to educate ourselves and do the work or hire someone else to the work for us.
Search Engine Optimization “SEO” is a term we see all over the net. For those of you that are unsure exactly what is meant by SEO, it’s simply adjusting many characteristics of your website to conform with what the major search engines deem important. That’s where the simple stops. It’s complicated only because no one other than the developers themselves know all the rules and even then the rules are constantly changing.
What I’ll try to do here is cover the basics that have fairly consistent lately. Keep in mind however there will always be inconsistencies when it comes SEO. For example, I recently read an e-book that said to imbed a few of your primary keywords in the “alt” tag of your logo graphic. The same day, I was reading an online article of equal quality and this author cautioned against such a tactic due to possible penalties by the search engines. So which did I do? See for yourself by hovering your mouse over the logo. I don’t mind a little risk as long as the risk is low and there may be nice benefits, but don’t get carried away. We certainly don’t want to get banned by any search engines. I get the heebie-jeebies just saying it. That would simply end many of us. Because Google’s PageRank? and Alexa’s Traffic Rank systems are really two different animals, I will focus primarily on Google’s PageRank? system for now.
So lets get started in no particular order.
Link Popularity: I guess we can start with the hardest part of search engine optimization. Link popularity. The ultimate goal here is to gain the respect of the search engines. And how we do that is by who we know or at least associate with in the spiders eyes. We want as many quality incoming links as possible with as few low-ranked outbound links as possible. We need to consider several factors when we approach any site to request a link exchange.
1. First of all, we want to focus only on sites that compliment ours. By that I mean directly on indirectly are in the same category or field or relating field as our site without necessarily competing with our site. I say not-necessarily because personally I have no problem linking to competitors site as long as we both mutually agree benefits. Some fear they’ll lose some of their site visitors but I feel the best way to keep visitors on your site and get them to return is by providing a high quality site with great original content.
2. Second we want to pay attention to their Google page rank. To do this if you haven’t already done so, download Google free toolbar http://toolbar.google.com/ Once installed, you can see the PageRank? of any site you go to. You want as many sites as possible with high PR’s. Set a goal of getting a few PR6 or PR7 sites. This will do wonders to your rank. In fact one PR7 might do more for you than hundreds on no or very low PR sites.
3. Third, the engines like to see incoming links from what they consider on authoritative site. So aggressively go after well established, high ranking sites that share the some focus as your site.
4. Fourth on our list are the sites to stay away from. Sites that generate artificially created links. Link farms and even huge link exchange sites can even get your site banned. I don’t mean to make anyone nervous here. The fact is, if you are generally doing the right thing for the right reasons, you probably have nothing to worry about. If you find yourself trying to hide something or hoping an search engine doesn’t catch something, then you may want to re-evaluate your strategies.
Requesting a link. The first thing you should do when requesting a link exchange is little research. Glance over the site in question and consider where your site link might hold the most relevance one their site.
This will benefit both parties. And then don’t be afraid to offer the suggestions when you contact the site administrator. I have had sites accept my link on a suggested page even though they have a section designed just for outside links. I have even accepted links that I would have normally rejected because the fit would have seemed wrong if they hadn’t shown a better fit.
Always add their link to your site before you make the request and include the page url of the link when making contact. Keep track of the contacts you’ve made and if you haven’t received a reply. Do a simple search on there site to see if they added your link and forgot to reply. At most, send one more request and be sure to include the words link exchange in the subject line so they don’t delete your mail as spam. Then if you still don’t get a reply within a week simply remove theirs from your site and move on. Don’t send any more mail. Consider the lack of response as a rejection and accept it. Don’t take things personal and send a negative e-mail. I have actually received a couple of these and there’s really no point. If you do get a reply and a link send a short thank you note.
Always include the exact text of the link you want on their site. Again, before you do this it helps if you look at other links on their site. If they have a 3 or 4 word description with each link, you don’t want to send a whole paragraph in your links description. What you do want to do is include your best key words. In fact, a short description with the right key words can benefit you far better than a watered down version. Keep it short and sweet.
Make things as easy as possible for the webmaster. Include the html code of your link so he/she can just copy and paste if they decide to.
Sample Link Exchange Request Letter
Hi, I am the administrator and site owner of YourSiteHere.com
I would like to apply for a link exchange with your site.
I have already linked to your site, you can view it at:
http://reciprocal.YourSiteHere.com/
Basic exchange information
Site name:
Extreme Site Promotions
URL:
http://www.YourSiteHere.com
Site Description:
Extreme sit promotion techniques for internet marketing campaigns, site promotion and internet advertising.
Category:
Internet marketing/Web promotion
Where our site reciprocates:
http://reciprocal.YourSiteHere.com.com/
Contact information
Name:
Your Name
Email address:
admin@YourSiteHere.com
Extreme promotions techniques for internet marketing campaigns. Site promotion andinternet advertising. Feel Free to download the supplied graphics located at http://www.YourSiteHere.com/graphics and use them to link back to our home page. Our site can only reciprocate with a text link.
Link/ Resource Page- If you decide to dedicate a page or two to link exchanges, stay with the over all theme of your site. And the best way to create a links page is by doing it manually. An automated system can be less affective and can even get you in trouble if not maintained closely.
Organize your links into categories and set a limit of about 50 links or so to a page.
Include on your links page an example of the link you want used linking back to your site. Again, use your key words. It might also be nice to offer a few graphics or banners in case a site would prefer to use a graphic linked back to you. Give them permission to download the images and use them to link to your site. I always include a comment such as,
“Feel Free to download the supplied graphics located at www.YourSiteHere.com/graphics and use them to link back to our home page. Our site can only reciprocate with a text link.”
I think it’s better to provide a link to the graphic page rather than sending attachments. In today’s age of viruses, you risk you email getting deleted right away if it contains an attachment.
I have learned from experience that many sites aren’t going to play fair, and even more of them are not keeping their sites updated. I have a nice link exchange program that I’ve built over a many month period and a couple months ago, a friend of mine let me in on a new link tag: content=”noindex,nofollow” He suggested that I use it for links such as affiliate links and other non-reciprocating links. Why let these sites suck up my page rank with nothing in return? As I was adding the tags, I went to my links page and began checking each site for a reciprocal link. To my amazement, over 50% had no link back to my site. This means that most of the 50% had removed the link after a short period and maybe a few had squeaked by me without ever adding one. Another reason I was surprised by this is that about 75% of the links on that site were requested by the other party. So what can you do? Ireined my system. I added a note at the top of the page and I began making these changes:
For every site that I couldn’t find a like from, I added the word “pending” and I also added the content=”noindex,nofollow” tag. This would reduce one sided benefit until I notify each site and give them a chance to ad mine. I could have deleted these links but this method is better for a few reasons. First, it relays a message to future exchange sites that we’re paying attention. Second, it’s possible that I made a mistake and the link is there. And lastly, they may have a mistake themselves. so each site will be contacted individually before they are removed. A huge project that I’m not looking forward to but it has to be done.
As for the sites that did reciprocate, they get a double benefit. They get the word “confirmed” next to their link with a second link to their site going directly to the page where our links resides. This will make life much easier in the future when it comes to re-checking reciprocal links. All I’ll have to do is click on the ‘confirmed’ link and it should be there.
Brian Hawkins - Entrepreneur, Internet Marketer, Online business consultant, Author. Site owner and administrator of several sites including: http://www.extremesitepromotions.com/ and http://www.csc4u.com/
Written by SEO Tipster on October 6th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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