To get better search engine rankings you need to keep it simple, natural and use your common sense. Don’t try to trick the search engines as this can often result in getting your site banned or dropped from the index.

Remember, it can takes month for your optimization efforts to pay off, but when they do you will enjoy better search engine rankings!

© 2005 Tanya Beaudoin o/a Office on Demand, All rights reserved. You are free to use this article in its entirety, as long as you include complete attribution, including live web site link. Please also notify Mrs. Beaudoin as to where the material will appear.

The attribution should read:
"Tanya Beaudoin, B.A. owns and operates a Web Design Company ? OOD Web & Graphic Design Studio - that specializes in e-solutions and graphic design (including web design, search engine optimization and internet marketing products like e-stationary and newsletters). To learn more about getting better search engine rankings, please visit Tanya’s web site at http://www.officeondemand.ca

1. Include your keywords in the domain name
2. Include them also in the page title
3. Use “h1″ and “h2″ header tags
4. Type some keywords in bold, italic and underline
5. Put your keywords at the beginning and end of your webpage
6. Named all the images or graphics after your keywords

A wrong thing to do is performing unnecessary keyword-filling! This could make your site banned by search engines. An example of unnecessary keyword-filling is by putting hidden texts all over your webpage. Did it ever cross your mind? Well don’t do that silly thing!

Also don’t fill your meta tag, alt image tag, or title tag with keywords. You will get caught and your site will be banned for this!

After all, there is another important factor that has a huge impact on your site’s ranking in search engines. It’s the OffPage Optimization. I’ll write about it in another article!

Copyright 2005 Farid Aziz.

Farid Aziz is a full-time Internet Marketer. Reveal more of his FREE tips and strategies on Internet Marketing and get a FREE Course on How to Make Money Online with Your Hobby at Internet Marketer Sells

Google’s new patent indicates some of the point clearly why many sites are thrown into sandbox for long. By keeping below points into consideration, you could shorten the time span of sandbox for your site.

# Go for everlasting link exchange. Don’t buy links, which will evaporate once you stop payments.

# Have a slow and steady enlargement of links. Don’t do it fast.

# Have a permanent anchor text in your links. Think well before you make use of one.

# Use multiple anchor text

# Have links from the pages, which are updated regularly

Start a PPC campaign

Get traffic from PPC campaign starting from Google Adwords and you could get instant traffic from the day you launched your site. You could work on your budget and come up with a figure where you could make some money after spending on Pay per click. In the mean time, you could make the list of keywords, which works, for you in the Adwords campaign and incorporate them into your site.

Add new pages

Get into habit of adding minimum of 1 content rich page to your site every day. This will not only prepare your site for higher traffic but also get your site crawled by search engines regularly. This could bring your site out of sandbox faster.

Amitabh Shukla, Personal blog for the author is at Seo Expert India

While all webmasters would like more traffic, and often have the goal of obtaining more visitors from directory submissions, the truth of the matter is that most directories don’t bring in very many visitors. Even DMOZ, one of the largest and most popular directories on the web, brings in few surfers for many sites listed there. And other directories that spend several thousand dollars each month on advertising may only bring a few visitors.

Now don’t get me wrong, sites in popular directories listed in a good spot near the top of popular categories many indeed see a nice amount of visitors, but this is the exception rather than the rule. But even one visitor a month is better than none.

SEO

The top search engines build rankings to a lesser degree based from on-page factors, like how many times your keyword appears on your page, or if the keyword is used with bolding, italics, H1 or H2 tags, etc. To a larger degree, search engines rank pages based on what the rest of the web has to say about them. This means that links to your website count as positive votes, and the anchor text in these links helps categorize the content of your page. If the rest of the web says a webpage is about a “miserable failure”, search engines will take that strongly into consideration, regardless of what the webpage in question says it is about.

The main point being that directories provide webmasters with a way to vote for their own website by getting a new link. With respect to categorization, the downside with most directories is that instead of linking to your site with your keyphrase as the anchor text, they link to your site through the title which only provides some categorization depending on the title. Worse, directories sometime use the URL as the anchor text which provides no categorization benefit at all. But the absolute worst way that a directory can link out to your site is through a tracking-script URL which allows the directory software to count hits to your site, but provides no SEO benefit at all. The ideal case would be a directory that used a direct link with your selected keyphrase as the anchor text, but this is very rare.

One final SEO factor to consider, is the difference between floating text links and links that are naturally embedded within content. Search engines understand that natural in-content links may provide more accurate anchor text, and that floating links are often used with links purchased for SEO benefit. If you can get your anchor text link from within surrounding content text, that is the ideal case.

Saturation

Another factor to look at is the saturation of a directory. This simply means how full is the directory, or targeted subcategory, with other websites. If you take Google PageRank into consideration the idea of a link as a vote, as discussed above, becomes more complex. Really each page has a certain varying amount of voting power (PageRank), and this voting power is divided between all the links on the page. In practice, this means that if a link to your site is the only one on the page, it will get the most benefit as it gets the full voting power possible from the page. This is rarely the case, as there are usually multiple directory entries which all share the PageRank. If the directory has grown to 100s of links per category it has reached the saturation point and the benefit of being listed is diminished. So, the best time to get into a good new directory is at the beginning!

Free vs. Paid

Some directories are free, some require a reciprocal link and some require a onetime payment or a recurring payment. Yahoo’s directory, for example, requires a recurring annual payment of $299. DMOZ is free, but many sites wait for years to be listed. One of the advantages of paid directories, is that the fact that they are not free, slows down the submissions, which in turn slows down the saturation of the directory. This factor can make a purchased directory entry a very worthwhile investment, these directories are often of higher quality as well, which makes them a better resource for users, which can make them a better source of traffic than junky free directories.

One thing to note here, is that you definately want to avoid FFA link pages. Free-for-all link pages are typically uncategorized lists of links that often require no administrative review for submission, this results in a spammy, uncategorized, saturated list of links that you really don’t want to be associated with. So, in summary, take avantage of the quality free directories, but don’t write off the paid directories if you are seeking to gain high quality backlinks.

Introducing SEOMA

Now that you are aware of some considerations for selecting directories to submit to, I’d like to introduce you to a new directory you may be interested in. SEOMA was designed from the ground-up to maximize the SEO benefit for listed sites. While most directories ask for just your URL, Title and Description, SEOMA also requests your desired anchor text. This anchor text is used exclusively to link out to your site, maximizing the benefit of the new backlink. And another optimized feature of SEOMA, is that if your anchor text appears within your description, it will automatically be hyperlinked on the custom detail page which is provided in addition to the standard directory listing. Your link will be the only outbound link on this page. So, you get a custom anchor text link from an on-topic category page, plus another custom anchor text link from a dedicated detail page for at least two outbound links per site.

Visit SEOMA

Mark is the creator of many popular websites including Money Talk and SEOMA.

While all webmasters would like more traffic, and often have the goal of obtaining more visitors from directory submissions, the truth of the matter is that most directories don’t bring in very many visitors. Even DMOZ, one of the largest and most popular directories on the web, brings in few surfers for many sites listed there. And other directories that spend several thousand dollars each month on advertising may only bring a few visitors.

Now don’t get me wrong, sites in popular directories listed in a good spot near the top of popular categories many indeed see a nice amount of visitors, but this is the exception rather than the rule. But even one visitor a month is better than none.

SEO

The top search engines build rankings to a lesser degree based from on-page factors, like how many times your keyword appears on your page, or if the keyword is used with bolding, italics, H1 or H2 tags, etc. To a larger degree, search engines rank pages based on what the rest of the web has to say about them. This means that links to your website count as positive votes, and the anchor text in these links helps categorize the content of your page. If the rest of the web says a webpage is about a “miserable failure”, search engines will take that strongly into consideration, regardless of what the webpage in question says it is about.

The main point being that directories provide webmasters with a way to vote for their own website by getting a new link. With respect to categorization, the downside with most directories is that instead of linking to your site with your keyphrase as the anchor text, they link to your site through the title which only provides some categorization depending on the title. Worse, directories sometime use the URL as the anchor text which provides no categorization benefit at all. But the absolute worst way that a directory can link out to your site is through a tracking-script URL which allows the directory software to count hits to your site, but provides no SEO benefit at all. The ideal case would be a directory that used a direct link with your selected keyphrase as the anchor text, but this is very rare.

One final SEO factor to consider, is the difference between floating text links and links that are naturally embedded within content. Search engines understand that natural in-content links may provide more accurate anchor text, and that floating links are often used with links purchased for SEO benefit. If you can get your anchor text link from within surrounding content text, that is the ideal case.

Saturation

Another factor to look at is the saturation of a directory. This simply means how full is the directory, or targeted subcategory, with other websites. If you take Google PageRank into consideration the idea of a link as a vote, as discussed above, becomes more complex. Really each page has a certain varying amount of voting power (PageRank), and this voting power is divided between all the links on the page. In practice, this means that if a link to your site is the only one on the page, it will get the most benefit as it gets the full voting power possible from the page. This is rarely the case, as there are usually multiple directory entries which all share the PageRank. If the directory has grown to 100s of links per category it has reached the saturation point and the benefit of being listed is diminished. So, the best time to get into a good new directory is at the beginning!

Free vs. Paid

Some directories are free, some require a reciprocal link and some require a onetime payment or a recurring payment. Yahoo’s directory, for example, requires a recurring annual payment of $299. DMOZ is free, but many sites wait for years to be listed. One of the advantages of paid directories, is that the fact that they are not free, slows down the submissions, which in turn slows down the saturation of the directory. This factor can make a purchased directory entry a very worthwhile investment, these directories are often of higher quality as well, which makes them a better resource for users, which can make them a better source of traffic than junky free directories.

One thing to note here, is that you definately want to avoid FFA link pages. Free-for-all link pages are typically uncategorized lists of links that often require no administrative review for submission, this results in a spammy, uncategorized, saturated list of links that you really don’t want to be associated with. So, in summary, take avantage of the quality free directories, but don’t write off the paid directories if you are seeking to gain high quality backlinks.

Introducing SEOMA

Now that you are aware of some considerations for selecting directories to submit to, I’d like to introduce you to a new directory you may be interested in. SEOMA was designed from the ground-up to maximize the SEO benefit for listed sites. While most directories ask for just your URL, Title and Description, SEOMA also requests your desired anchor text. This anchor text is used exclusively to link out to your site, maximizing the benefit of the new backlink. And another optimized feature of SEOMA, is that if your anchor text appears within your description, it will automatically be hyperlinked on the custom detail page which is provided in addition to the standard directory listing. Your link will be the only outbound link on this page. So, you get a custom anchor text link from an on-topic category page, plus another custom anchor text link from a dedicated detail page for at least two outbound links per site.

Visit SEOMA

Mark is the creator of many popular websites including Money Talk and SEOMA.

Optimizing your site to get it ranked highly on the search engines can be a complicated subject. To simplify things, it’s helpful to first understand how search engines add sites to their database. Then we’ll cover some tips that you can put on your own website that will help you to get listed on search engines and get a higher ranking.

The Major Players

Let’s start off with the major search engines, the ones that most people use. Google is the most widely used search engine with Yahoo and MSN searches following close behind. While there are thousands of search engines, it’s always a good idea to start with submitting your website to the three largest. Why? Because 95% of all searches go through either Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Who Is Powered by Whom?

Many search engines do not have their own database, but rely instead upon data supplied by someone else. This is important to know so that you can submit your site to the most popular search engine databases first. For example, AOL Search and Yahoo Search get data from Google, while MSN and HotBot get some data from Inktomi.

How Search Engines Read Your Site

There are two ways search engines read your site: automated (crawlers) and human-entered (directories). Crawlers follow the links found on your site and enter your site into their search database based on text they find on your pages. This text is either found on your public pages, or the text keywords found in behind-the-scenes “meta tags”. The amount of your keywords found on your page, the more weight it has with the search engines and the higher your ranking. But in case you think you can load your page with keywords in order to fool the search engine, think again. Search engines are smart and you can be penalized for “spamming” keywords on your website. Major crawlers include Google, AltaVista and Inktomi.

Human Directories are few and far between. Just imagine hiring enough people to research the millions of website on the Internet! It’s no wonder they’re steadily being replaced by automated crawlers. Yahoo is one of the most famous human directories, where real people actually evaluate your site and categorize it in their database directory. More and more these search engines are relying on partial automation for categorizing and listing new sites in the search engine database. In addition, getting your listing in a Directory for free can take months. Some human directories are charging a fee for business sites to be included in their directory.

How Search Engines Index and Rank Your Site

Search engines use several techniques to determine which category your site belongs in and what keywords or key phrases people will use to find your site when using the search engine.

When submitting your site to search engines, they will ask you four things: the title of your site, a short description of your site, your keywords or key phrases (what words or phrases people typically use to search for sites like yours) and what category your site belongs in. Then they will often crawl your site, checking to see if the keywords/key phrases you supplied match the text on your website. And remember, you will be penalized for spamming your keywords and rank LOWER because of it. Also it’s important to note that search engines can not read the text in graphics, so if you are using a graphic-based navigation or have your keywords on a graphic next to your logo, the search engine will not notice it.

Some search engines will rank your site based on your title, description and keywords that are supplied behind-the-scenes in special coding called “meta tags.” While not every search engine will read meta tags, it certainly can’t hurt to use them. Again, there are rules: your Title meta tag can’t be more than 100 characters, your Description meta tag can’t be more than 250 characters, and your Keyword meta tag can’t be more than 1,000 characters. And anti-spamming of keywords applies to meta tags as well ? no more than six instances of the same word in your Keyword meta tag or you’ll be penalized by the search engine. For example, if my key phrases include “business coach,” “starting a business,” and “small business coach,” that counts as two uses of the word “coach” and three uses of the word “business”.

Submitting Your Site to Search Engines

Once your site is primed and ready for the search engines, then you have to submit it to them. You have two choices: either go to each search engine and submit your site individually, or use a search engine submission tool. Remember that the majority of searchers use either Google, Yahoo or MSN, so consider submitting to those first. You’ll often find a link on their main page where you can add a site to their search engine. If you want to automate the process, use an automated submission tool. Make sure the submission search tool you select will analyze your site to tell you if you’re really ready to submit, then submit your site to the top search engines for you.

Preparing your site for submission to search engines can feel like a daunting task. With these tips in mind, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and frustration when it comes time to submitting your site and rank higher in search results.

See you on the Internet!

About The Author

Karyn Greenstreet is a Small Business Coach and Self Employment Expert with 23 years of self-employment and computer industry experience. She shares tips, techniques and strategies with self-employed people to create and grow their businesses, stay focused and motivated, and perform at their peak. Visit her website at www.PassionForBusiness.com

The delivery of fresh content to your site, in a form that is readable by search engines (i.e. not through the use of javascript, iframes, or the like) requires a dynamic, database driven content management system.

The most cost effective way to achieve this is through the use of a weblog that sits on your server and resides under your domain name. Updating the weblog with rich articles or commentary, broadcasting this information to the internet, and allowing users to post comments, achieves the following:

1) Increases the number of inbound links to your website

2) Increases the frequency at which major search engines will spider or crawl your site

3) Increases interactivity for the web user

4) Improves your search engine ranking

For further information, you may contact ArteWorks toll free at 877-336-8266, or visit http://www.arteworks.biz.

Matt Foster, CEO, Arteworks Business Class - Search Engine Optimization Expert since 1995

http://www.arteworks.biz

To Google your page rank means quality, importance and relevancy. It lets Google know you are a viable resource and a valuable asset. Google takes your Page Rank and combines it with their text-matching techniques. This, combined with a page’s content and the content of the pages linking to it, determines if your site is a good match. So, a higher Page Rank will certainly help you on Google.

As for surfers. Most of them could care less about your Page Rank. In fact, many of them don’t even know what it is. However, those that do use it in a different way. Some use it as a way to unofficially gauge your credibility.

Ok, I am sure you’ve been wondering when I was going to tell you about how to achieve a ranking like I did. I went from a 0 Page Rank to a 5. Now, mind you, I did not purchase any links from high ranking sites, or any sites for that matter. I did not launch a link exchange program. I did exchange links with about five directories related to my site’s topic, but that was it. Actually, 97% of my links are all one-way links (links pointing to my site).

So, how did I do it? Any ideas? If you know SEO you may already know the answer. Link Farms? Of, course not. We know Google will frown on that method. Did I design or optimize sites and add my URL? Hmmm..Yes! However, that is a small percent of the success. SEO companies don’t usually add their URL to sites they have optimized. Ok, so what else?

Content? Yes, content is king as always. Content is what was used to help boost my ranking. But how?

I create articles. These are quality articles, just like the one you are reading now. These articles were not generated from any program. I authored the content from my own knowledge and researched over 100 web sites that accept articles in my area of expertise. SEO happens to be a very popular topic. These sites agree to post my articles on their site, along with my url(s). Many of these sites have a decent Page Rank of their own. Their rank will transfer over to my site. Also, as time goes by, those articles will have a PR effect of their own which will transfer to my site(s). Don’t forget, other people may pick these articles up and use them on their site as well. They will also include my URL(s) on their sites. Now, if I do 100 sites a week times four articles a month, that’s at least 400 articles a month. The last Google update was 86 days, the longest has been 111. That could lead to 1200 or more links between updates. What will Google think about all these links at once? They’ll love it! Content, quality, one way links. I also promoted my blogs and my website in some of my articles. This way, they too have their own PR generating effect. They also link to my site and my site to them. This, in turn, increased the PR to them as well. At the time of this article and the most recent Google update, one of my blogs went from 0 to 3 and the other 0 to 4 all in the same update.

These tips should help you increase your page rank. The hardest part will be creating content related to your field and finding sites that will post your work. You can always hire writers and/or article submission services. Here’s to the next Google update. Cheers!

Joe is owner of http://www.mr-seo.com check out his site for a FREE SEO site Evaluation. You can read the latest SEO news on his blog http://mrseonewz.blogspot.com/ to read more of his articles visit http://mr-seo.blogspot.com/

Sadly, many Google Groups are now spammer hangouts more than anything else. Widely available web access and programs that can automatically post to thousands of newsgroups in just a short while have destroyed much of the original spirit and usefulness of the Usenet groups. And parents need to know that on some sections of Usenet there are some very inappropriate topics that have been started over the years, so they should exercise due caution in protecting their children from those sections.

For those who don’t mind a bit of digging through the virtual trash can, there are still many, many useful and active Google Groups, full of friendly, helpful people, so be sure to check out this often-overlooked resource.

About The Author

Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.com. Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.

Identify your target audience’s “surfing behavior” Is there any greater discovery than having an understanding of a target audience’s “surfing behavior?” It’s like a light coming on in your mind. It’s like flipping on a switch to an idea generator! Wordtracker will give you absolutely AMAZING detail if you take time to think about it laterally and outside of the context of just a “keyword hunt.”

Later in this article, I’ll explain how you can use WordTracker to identify your audience’s surfing behavior.

Move beyond the “keyword universe” function.

In speaking with many search engine optimizers, I have learned that so many seem to get stuck in the “Keyword Universe” feature. The ability to generate lists of keyword phrases using the built in thesaurus is nice, but you must not get stuck there and let it do all the thinking for you. As you move on to discover other features within Wordtracker, you will also have the opportunity to perform a “comprehensive search” or an “exact search” or utilize the “top 1000″ report.

Tips to identify human behavior?

Where you’ll find most of your “revelations” or “insights” are in the “comprehensive search” feature of Wordtracker. Try entering one part of a search phrase and letting “comprehensive search” figure out the best “full use” of the phrase. Another technique I like to use is to examine the top reports for a “high performance” keyword or topic related to my client and then cut and paste it into comprehensive search to get streams of currently “hot topics.” I define a hot topic as a popular topic in high demand, which may also have lists of related keyword phrases also in high demand.

Let’s study a real life example . . .

Now let me give you a recent example of understanding behaviors. I wanted to pull additional traffic into a site selling baby furniture. The site sells strollers, baby furniture, cribs and other baby products. The client explained that they wanted me to find ways to pull in their true audience. Sometimes you’ll discover the true audience is not what it first may seem. By true audience….I mean “targeted audience” or the folks most likely to “BUY” or “respond” to the Web site.

If you just think only in “keywords” mode, you may miss this.

Performing a comprehensive search within Wordtracker by typing in the word “baby,” Wordtracker returns interesting results. Do you know what I learned? The target audience for baby strollers is NOT people who have babies! You heard correct. The “true audience” for those buying strollers and baby cribs ARE NOT “folks who have NEWBORN BABIES!” Here is the catch….if you are targeting folks with newborns, to sell them a stroller….you’re too late! The true audience are people who are “soon to become parents.”

Once Mom and Dad know a new family member is on the way, they start buying BEFORE the baby arrives. Better yet…often it’s not even the parents who are buying…it’s the grandparents. Perhaps you have pages scoring tremendously well for things like babies, strollers, cribs and baby furniture…… but now your client wants even more.

Here’s an example strategy:

One behavior of the true target audience which I discovered by using Wordtracker was as follows. As I entered the term “baby” into “comprehensive search,” the first thing I noticed was the top phrase “baby names” which had been requested on major search engines over 34,350 times in the last 60 days. It became very obvious when I noticed the incredibly high demands on major search engines for the phrase “baby names,” or how about “meanings of baby names.”

This was indeed like a light coming on! I thought, imagine this, “soon to be parents” are researching their unborn child’s name by using the Internet. What better time to connect with folks than before the baby is born.

Finally, build a strategy based on the identified behavior

Suppose we were to build a little library of themed pages right into your client’s site to attract the TARGET audience. They are searching for baby names so it is essential that this is what you MUST give them. Give them lists of baby names to choose from, right? Don’t ever trick your audience or they will simply never buy. Give them exactly what they are looking right up front. In this example, you could create pages that offer baby names and meanings of baby names AND subtly offer a few product listings or links to your client’s store front. It is essential that you always provide content related to their search first, and then you might offer some links to other appropriate products within your client’s site.

Test these unique ways for using Wordtracker yourself, and learn how effective they can be.

Good luck!

About The Author

John Alexander is the Co-Director of Training of Search Engine Workshops with Robin Nobles. Together, they teach 2-day beginner, 3-day advanced, and 5-day all-inclusive “hands on” search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe. John also teaches online search engine marketing courses through http://www.onlinewebtraining.com, and he’s a member of Wordtracker’s official question support team.

john@searchengineworkshops.com