Archive for May, 2008
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
There are always do-it-yourselfers in any business, so it should be no surprise that many successful web promoters are doing their own SEO. Many web guru’s started by fumbling around the internet until they found the right formula for success. The web itself has evolved as a result of individual experimentation and the sharing their knowledge.
SEO is a moving target, what worked well in the past may be less effective now. Social bookmarking is a new form of promotion that is becoming more important. If you know the basics of good SEO, then you can promote your site without becoming an expert in SEO. So, if you are looking to start “doing it yourself” keep these points in mind as you develop your plan.
1.Unique Search Engine-Friendly Content
One of the most important aspects is your unique web content that is laid out in a search engine friendly way. Search engines don’t read Flash, or the text embedded in images. Use alt image tags with your most important keywords on the site for your images. Use these important keywords in your titles, headings and links to highlight them. Use your keywords as anchor text in links rather than using images. Never try to stuff keywords on your site by making them too small to read, or making it the same color as the background. Instead use your SEO keywords frequently in the page copy, but keep it to 3-5% on the page.
After you have created your copy, find out if it is getting crawled by the search engines. On Google enter “site:://www.yourwebaddress” to verify if your page has been indexed. Brand new sites may take some time to get indexed by the major search engines. There are many factors that play into being indexed including age of the site, duplicate content (copy and pasting content, or cookie cutter affiliate websites), Java script rather than HTML links, bad site layout (too many sub-directories),long dynamic URL’s with special characters (question marks or any other database characters, #, &, *, !, %) known as “spider traps,” or orphaned pages.
2. Do Your Keywords Homework Thoroughly
Keyword research is the most important step in the process. If you get this wrong you could be wasting all of your time and effort promoting your site. In your research start with very broad terms that describe your product or service. Narrow the terms and find alternate terms by using one of the keyword research services. I like to use Google AdWords, Keyword Discovery, and Wordtracker.
The goal would be to find highly searched keyword phrases and to optimize your site like the top sites in that keyword do. If a keyword is not popular, then it will not draw very much traffic. Remember to optimize the most focused keywords; because, it is much harder to gain rank with a general term and the traffic generated will be less targeted.
3. Get In-bound Links to Your Site
There are many ways to get links to your site, some traditional and others not so traditional. This is very important for SEO and PageRank, even though it may be intimidating at first. When Google calculates PageRank, they cout each link as a “vote” for your site. The more links you have, the more votes you have, and the higher your PageRank. Not all votes are created equal, a link from a higher ranking site will count more than a lower ranking site, sort of like a popularity contest.
When you take the time to create unique content, then you will be miles ahead of the pack. Most sites wont link to you for no reason, however, if you are lucky and create some unique and original content, you might get many links.
Trading links is an option, but link exchange power is dwindling, and in the more competitive markets wont help much. Paid links have fallen out of favor with Google recently. Volumes could be written on linking strategies, but for the beginner, stick to these techniques to start.
Issue a press release with a link to your site.
Leave comments on blogs, public forums and articles with related content.
Put links on your other sites leading to your new site, or have a friend link to your site.
Write articles about your niche and be sure to include a link in the resource box.
Utilize any of the bookmarking or social media sites that are popular to link to your site.
4. Ride The Social Media Wave
Online communities developed for networking and socializing is at an all time high. Social bookmarking sites, such as,StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Technorati and others allow members to store their favorite sites and share them with others online. “Buzz” can be created about a site by these sites too.
If you are trying to generate sales from your efforts, then you should avoid promotional hype on these sites. The power of the social networking sites comes from public interest and participation. In order for theses sites to work well, you must have something unique or interesting to share.
Don’t be shy on the social sites about the site you are promoting. Network with other members, post relevant content, get creative with bookmark titles ant let people in the real world know about your links. Sharing high quality content with others on these sites will lead to your success.
Use the following when planning your SEO. Whether you are well established or just starting with SEO the advice can be helpful, but keep in mind that perseverance and patience are the biggest assets in promoting your site.
Article Source: http://www.articlegoldmine.com
Rob Emmerson is a leading expert in SEO and has written extensivly on the subject in articles and eBooks. He offers a free step-by-step SEO Course. In addition he writes a daily SEO Blog where he shares tips and tricks to improve your SEO.
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Monday, May 19th, 2008
Search engine marketing is the process of using search engine optimization to make sure that your webpage consistently is at the top of the heap when customers and client do an Internet search for terms that are related to your product or service. When search engines send out spiders or bots to collect information about different websites that is then used to decide which web pages show up first in search listings these spiders and bots are looking for search engine optimized content, or SEO content. SEO content drives search engine marketing by repeating certain keywords or key phrases a certain number of times.
When the search engine spiders and bots pick up those keywords or key phrases then they put that webpage higher in the search listings then pages that don’t have SEO content. SEO has become very important to businesses in the last decade because no matter how much you spend on advertising when you’re doing business on the Web your webpage needs to be at the top of the search listings page. Search engine marketing can target the major search tools that people use like Google or Yahoo so that you can be sure your webpage will show up somewhere near the top whenever anyone searches for a keyword or key phrase that is found on your website.
SEO content needs to be original though, just copying and pasting the same paragraph over and over won’t help you with SEP. The spiders and bots are programmed to not list sites that repeat the same word or the same phrase over and over. So if you were planning on taking one paragraph or one page of content and using that for search engine marketing it won’t work. For effective search engine optimization you need to have original SEO content.
If you want your website to really be successful good SEM is the key. Lots of companies place online ads and online ads can be effective at reaching particular target markets but when it comes to sheer numbers the highest number of hits that you will get to your site will come from SEO content and using search engine optimization in creative ways to get your webpage listed higher up in the search rankings.
Studies have shown that a majority of people will never click past the first page of search results when they search for a certain keyword or phrase so you have to make sure that your webpage is at the top of the search results page in order to get the most visitors to you site who are looking for the product that you sell. Using search engine optimization can be tricky until you get the hang of writing SEO content and using search engine marketing but once you figure out how it all works or hire a professional to show how it all works you’ll be amazed at the increase in traffic to your website that you will see.
Article Source: http://www.articlegoldmine.com
Before you do anything go to Terry Stanfield’s site for information on Search Engine Marketing and related info about Search Engine Optimization .
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Sunday, May 11th, 2008
When you are developing a backlink strategy for your website, keep in mind that there is more than one way to get links. One way is to do what is called a link exchange.
A link exchange is done with a similar site, and both sites place a link to the other. Link exchanges have been penalized by search engines because of heavy spam but there still benefits to doing a link exchange, so don’t be afraid to try.
The best links to get our inbound one way links. These links are sometimes difficult to get because there is no exchange. It requires the other web site to link to you without you linking to them. Building one way, inbound links should be a top priority in your off-page optimizing strategy.
In order to get one way links you have to get noticed. Gaining attention online is not much different from getting attention off-line.
To gain links, you need to provide content that is unique and original to entice other sites to link to you. One way to develop this content is to add a blog, Forum, or other method to regularly add content to your site. If you have a static web site it will be much more difficult to gain links.
Applying SEO techniques such as the above can bring great benefits. As an example if you are trying to optimize a site that sells vitamins. The first step would be researching highly ranked competitors. After analyzing their sites you can use their blog or forum to determine what topics are hot. Typically in these community sites hot topics will draw quite a bit of traffic and comments from readers.
One method of gaining their attention is to look at the topics on their site that are creating the most commotion. After you determine the hot topic, go to your own blog and do a review of that site. In your review concentrate on the hot topic, but don’t just talk about their services. Remember you’re trying to gain attention so argue about what they’re missing or things they don’t have. The key is you’re not trying to advertise for them rather you want to establish yourself as an expert.
Many times your review via a blog will be noticed by the other site. It’s not automatic, so you may have to bring it to their attention. One way to visualize this is to imagine that you’re in a crowd of people and everyone is talking to each other. If you enter the conversation you must make sure to say something relevant. If you speak up and say something unrelated or meaningless people in the crowd will quickly dismiss you.
Here’s the trick to this technique, when you comment about a site or bring up a controversial point they have to link to you to reply to your review. Remember to position yourself as an expert when you do this. Don’t be rude or obnoxious, but make meaningful comments and reviews and you’re bound to get noticed.
Most Blogs track links to the site, so rest assured that if the blogger read something that needs to be addressed by them they will comment.
Don’t just leave it up to the whims of fate, after doing your review leave a comment on the site. You could excerpt a small portion of the review, just enough to draw attention and raise interest. This will serve two purposes, first it helps establish you as an expert, second you will benefit from their readers following the link in your comment to your site. The key is to do this on popular active sites. If the site doesn’t have an active community, reading and commenting, you will get the benefit.
In time you will build links and increase traffic to your site. If you do it right you’ll see the numbers jump in your traffic from other readers visiting your site to get the rest of the story.
Article Source: http://www.articlegoldmine.com
Rob Emmerson now offers a free Step-By-Step SEO course online. In addition he writes a daily SEO Blog, where he shares the latest tips and tricks to improve your SEO.
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Sunday, May 11th, 2008
When promoting your web site or online business most webmasters are looking for more targeted visitors. Search engine optimization otherwise known as SEO can help you accomplish that goal. Sometimes small changes in SEO can bring your website a tremendous amount of traffic by bringing your website closer to the top of search engine results.
A search engine searches the web for information on relevant topics found on web sites. Searches on the internet are done using keywords. The search engines keep an index of keywords and where they found them. For instance, if you search for the keyword vitamin, the search engine will return a list of sites that contain the word vitamin. Search engines sort through the endless data so searchers can find whatever it is they are searching for.
The search engine needs to find the information to be able to provide users with relevant results. This is done using what are called web robots or spiders. These spiders constantly “crawl” the Internet looking for new content. After locating some information, it gets organized into a list. In looking for new information the web spiders generally begin on popular sites. Then they follow each link on the site. The words on the website are indexed along with the links on the site to keep track of where they were found.
At optimal levels the spiders are very fast covering about 100 pages per second. The spiders review web pages behind the scenes from left to right top to bottom just like we do. Keywords close to the top of the page are given more weight. As are keywords in bold, title text, underlined, italicized or highlighted in some way.
Spiders read the Meta tags, not just the text you can see. Meta Tags allow you to chose keywords to help in indexing your site.
After the information is located and indexed, it is organized for the use of searchers. Included in the index is the keyword or phrase, URL, and the number of times the keyword appears on the site. Giving searchers the most relevant result is the search engines job, so keyword density is important on the site.
The exact methodology used by the search engines is a highly guarded secret. In order to optimize your page, you must know some of the basics of how the search engines work.
If you want more traffic from search engines, then you must practice good SEO. There are many resources and information available like articles, eBooks and even free SEO courses.
Article Source: http://www.articlegoldmine.com
Rob Emmerson is a leading expert in SEO and has written extensivly on the subject in articles and eBooks. He offers a free SEO Course to anyone interested in learning SEO . in addition he writes an SEO Blog where he shares tips and tricks to help improve your SEO
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Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
SEO has been around about as long as search engines have. It makes sense. Who doesn’t love free publicity? I fell into it back in 1999, becoming what would eventually be known as an “accidental” SEO specialist (someone who got great rankings, without knowing exactly why, who took the time to figure it out.) Of course, times have changed and search engines are a lot less forgiving than they used to be and there are plenty of experts willing to share their knowledge.
Today there are a lot of resources out there to assist in your SEO efforts. But there’s a lot more competition too so it isn’t any easier than it was ten years ago. In fact, it’s harder than ever without the right information. You see, unfortunately for each piece of great optimization advice there are dozens of obsolete tactics and just plain bad information floating around.
If you really want to succeed in your search engine optimization campaign you only need to focus on three simple facts…
1.) You are not competing against search engines or even Web sites. You are competing against individual Web pages. Too many people focus on beating search engines or whole sites. Don’t bother. You never win that way. Focus on beating the competing Web pages. Once you hear it, its common sense but of 250 pre-optimization client interviews I’ve performed over that past decade, 93% state they need to “beat the search engines.”
2.) Get training from professionals whenever possible. Years ago this typically meant paying $1,500 for a weekend crash course or spending weeks buried in books full of big words and complicated theories. There are other alternatives available today like countless Websites, blogs and user groups, which are great avenues. If you’re looking for the full SEO training experience without the cost or hassle of going to a seminar, consider taking a computer based training course (CBT.) SEOcbt.com offers free training modules written by SEO experts who teach seminars and continue to rack up top placements of their own. They recently released “Google Domination”, a free training course available at http://www.SEOcbt.com.
3.) Do the actual optimization work by hand and automate the rest. By “actual optimization work” I mean developing content and making final decisions regarding keywords. Don’t trust this to software. This should always be done manually. Tasks like finding link partners, harvesting contact information and checking your search engine positions, however can easily be done with good software (and should be). And you’re in luck because SEO software is the most affordable it’s ever been, depending on your needs.
I started with Web Position (http://www.WebPosition.com) and loved it for its great position reporting. Unfortunately it doesn’t handle linking, which accounts for about 75% of your Google success so I went shopping for a new tool. On advice from a well respected SEO seminar coach I bought SEO Elite (http://www.SEOeliteWeb.com) and never looked back. It does all the position reporting I need and helps me get an average of 200 new links per month which keeps my sites on top of Google.
Just focus on these 3 simple ideas and your SEO efforts will pay off greater than you thought possible. Best of luck!
Article Source: http://www.articlegoldmine.com
The founder of www.BestSEOcopywriting.com , Scott Jason has been search engine optimization professional since 1999.
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Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
The search engine visibility of a website is very much needed for its maximum exposure and thereby gaining maximum value. SEO services provide us the space to expand the brand value of our website. At first, one can go for optimizing the content of our website for the search engine visibility. One need to be sure that they are in the right way at SEO practices for achieving high site rank. The search engine visibility of our website can be boosted by this. But, one need to be careful because a small mistake in the process can bury our sites by the search engines which will affect us heavily. A simple approach which needs to be there while going for SEO services is that to review the contents of our websites periodically. The content should be rich in relevant keywords searched and also need to be placed in the right areas of the page with correct tags within the website.
Both the internal and external links are very much essential. The back links also have a great value for search engine visibility. Links of high quality from any other sites can be attached to our optimized contents. To make this, one need to have some sort of creativeness in them and reviewing continuously our strategy. It is very much valuable in promoting content online. Placing editorial links of high value from trusted sites can be very much effective. This guarantees us white hat links of hundred percentages.
Usually the members in our family and friends can act as a good link producer. They can be contacted and informed them to post their own comments into the review sites of high quality about the brand of our website. They need to be provided with the keywords and a list of short links which should be used by them.
It’s always better to keep away from paid links. A lot of marketing agencies and SEO websites usually justifies their clients the need of having them. But actually the paid links are doesn’t possess that much purposes.
Word press CMS themes are an important tool to earn money online by just blogging periodically. Word press CMS themes are easy to manage which helps us to post the contents in the websites with a very little effort. It also helps to manage the posts and categories in the best possible way in respect to a website.
Article Source: http://www.articlegoldmine.com
JD Theis is the author of this article on Search Engine Visibility. Find more information about the subject here www.buildpr.com
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Friday, May 2nd, 2008
If you start to panic when you see “HTML” and think that using HTML Meta tags is something that will be too difficult for you don’t panic. Using these tags is a big part of search engine marketing and is very important when it comes to using search engine optimization to help your website get more traffic. These tags are words, usually the same keywords or key phrases that you are using throughout your website in an effort to use search engine marketing and search engine optimization to increase the number of people who find your website.
The difference between Meta tags and the keywords and key phrases scattered throughout the rest of your website is that the these tags are tucked into the HTML coding of your site. No one that visits your site will see these keywords or key phrases. The tags are put into the HTML code of the website so that the spiders or bots that the search engines send out will find your website. The spiders that the search engines use to index and rank web pages will find those tags by following a long series of other words and phrases on other websites. Using Meta tags is important to search engine marketing and search engine optimization. Some search engines will assign a rank to a website based on how many times the keywords or key phrases appear and also where the keywords and key phrases appear on a website. So it’s important to put them at the top of your website so that search engine bots will rank your site higher than other sites.
Even if you are not experienced at creating HTML code or working with HTML code you can put Meta tags for search engine marketing and search engine optimization purposes on your website by yourself. Instead of looking at the normal view of your website you need to look at the source code. Once you are in the source code you can enter in the HTML Meta keywords and key phrases that you want to use. If you are using a website design software the software will usually prompt you to enter some tags and then you can just input the same keywords or key phrases that you have used on the rest of the site.
Search engine marketing and search engine optimization are really the best way to drive traffic to your website so even if you don’t know that much about HTML or don’t feel comfortable with HTML it’s important that you learn how to use these tags because having the keywords and key phrases that are featured on your site as Meta tags can bring in a lot of traffic for your website. The best ways to make your website so popular with consumers that it starts to make a lot of money for you is to use tried and true methods like proper placement of HTML Meta tags, search engine optimization on the website and search engine marketing tools to increase your rank on search engine results pages.
Article Source: http://www.articlegoldmine.com
Before you do anything go to Terry Stanfield’s site for information on Search Engine Marketing and related info about Search Engine Optimization.
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Friday, May 2nd, 2008
The content placed on web pages and websites is unlike any other content in the world. Serving a dual purpose, online content is there for (1) the visitors to a website to find the information they were searching for in the first place and (2) to up the web page or website rankings within the search engine results. This dual purpose requires a special style of writing known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is just what it sounds like. Optimizing the content placed online in order to be viewed in a friendlier, search engine manner. To better understand SEO, one must take a closer look at how the pages of a website are indexed by these search engines.
Web crawlers or robots surf the Internet just as a person would search. They look for websites that are frequently updated with new content first and then trickle down through the Internet reading and indexing the pages of many websites. When the robot reads a specific page, it checks all of the words on that page. Focus remains on the beginning of the page and the end of the page with a quick skim through the middle portions of the content. What the robot is looking for is repetition. Repeating words are at the heart of SEO.
A keyword or a keyphrase that represents the website needs to be placed repeatedly throughout the websites words, articles, meta tags and descriptions. These words are the ones that the robots will pick up on and the basis of SEO. The more the words are “read” the higher the page will appear on search engine rankings.
This may seem like a very easy task to accomplish. Why not just fill an entire page with the same keywords over and over again. Well, according to most search engine robots, content with too high a percentage of keywords can be considered an attempt to manipulate your positioning and red flagged as SPAM. Not a good thing for the web page or website. So how much is enough?
Generally speaking, web content needs to have a keyword density, the number of keywords placed within a written article or piece of writing, ranging from 2 percent to 5 percent. These keywords need to be placed within the wording in a natural manner, while maintaining the informative nature of the article or writing piece.
SEO is an art; there are more rules, tricks and tips to this art than any other on the Internet. One can be sure that everyone who knows about SEO tactics and search engines also know that everyone is trying to optimize their website, which in turn makes the battle fiercer than ever. The more pages on your site with a 2 percent to 5 percent keyword density, the better you will rank with those robots.
Learning how to write SEO content for the web takes time and practice. In order to speed up the process, there are many SEO writers available to outsource any and all web content projects you may have. These outsourced writers are trained in SEO and can provide that perfect keyword density every time.
So whether you decide to outsource to optimize your website or give it a go on your own and learn all about SEO and search engine rankings, this is definitely a strategy that is well worth the efforts and/or cost and will reap you benefits for the duration of your website.
Article Source: http://www.articlegoldmine.com
Andrea Chin surrounds herself with like minded people and learns from the best. Meet her here, to partner with a Team that is already achieving the success you deisre and Willing to show YOU how. Another hot spot that Andrea hangs out at is, TheBuzzAboutMyBiz.
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