A Simple & Effective Keyword Strategy for Ecommerce Sites

By Karon Thackston

When it comes to ecommerce sites, there are plenty of keywords to choose from. Because sites typically follow a fairly set format, numerous pages are created between the home page and the order confirmation page. Those pages all need keywords and phrases if they are going to rank high in the search engines. So, how exactly do you choose the best keywords for each page? Here's an easy strategy to follow. (Please keep in mind that all keyphrases used in this article are for example only and have not been researched.)

Home Page - Broad Keywords

When you start out, use keywords and phrases that are descriptive of your overall site. For example, if you sold clothing for the entire family, you might opt for phrases such as "ladies clothing," "men's clothing" or "kids clothing." Those would be expressive, but could also be worked easily into the home page copy.

Think of the sales process as a funnel. It's broad at the lip and gets more narrow as you move closer to the spout. The same goes for the keyword strategy: broad keyphrases at first and more specific ones as the subject matter gets more specific.

Category Page - Specific Keywords

Once you move to the category pages, you'll want to select keyphrases that work well with what you're trying to describe in your copy. If your visitor clicks on the women's shoes category, she'll want to read about and see pictures of women's shoes. Perhaps you'll use phrases such as "fabric ballet flats" or "leather peep-toe pumps."

I typically create a paragraph at the top of the page, then add a descriptive sentence or two under each image. Sometimes, I'll also add a paragraph of copy at the bottom of the page. This helps guide your visitors through the sales process.

Product Descriptions - Long-Tail Keywords

The product description pages should incorporate long tail keywords that are laser specific. If your visitor clicked on a link for "Bermuda shorts" on the category page, you'll want to get as detailed as possible, so your customer can make the decision to buy.

For instance, a keyphrase such as "Liz Claiborne pastel plaid Bermuda shorts" would be perfect for a product description because it is. well. descriptive. Long? Yes, it is a long phrase. Most long-tail keywords will be. But the further into the sales process a customer gets, the more specific their searches will be. Chances are, someone who has decided she wants pastel plaid shorts will use a phrase like the one above instead of something like "Bermuda shorts."

Here's a plus: Because long-tail phrases are much less competitive than broader terms, you stand a better shot at getting ranked highly for them.

A Word on Linking

Here's where some copywriters get confused. When you use links in anchor text, you're giving credit to the page being linked to. For instance, if you have a category page for shorts, you would want to use the keyphrase "Bermuda shorts" in the anchor text of a link that pointed to the Bermuda shorts page. That way, the Bermuda shorts page gets credit for the link. The link would be of no (or very little) value to the general shorts page.

When you take note of the navigation and purchase cycle of your visitors, you begin to see why this simple strategy for keyword placement works so well. Using more specific terms as you write more specific copy helps usher visitors from the front door to the checkout counter with ease while also boosting your search engine rankings.

About the Author:

Get the latest release of Karon's popular ebook Writing With Keywords (formerly titled How to Increase Keyword Saturation). This new 4th edition includes 11 clever strategies for keyword optimization as well as the latest information about changes with how stop words and punctuation affect SEO copywriting. Order today at http://www.writingwithkeywords.com.

SEO For Local Markets

By Michael Francis

Many brick and mortar companies that are catering to their local clientele find it hard to SEO for local markets despite targeting the best keywords. Quite naturally this is not a surprising matter as many of them, although efficient in running their off line businesses, typically stumble over two critical blocks.

Stumbling Blocks and SEO for Local Markets

When local businesses set to do SEO for local markets, many of them invariably ignore the need to think rationally because they are advised by SEO experts to target the big three search engine users and sometimes get confused and tackle this feat on a global level resulting in global traffic. The direct fall out of this step is exposing your business offers, products or services
to the world at large only to dilute all other local online SEO efforts. If your product is not global you are in trouble. So here is the stumbling block number one.

1. Not using localized target keywords, however good they are, will leave your new websites way down the SERP's locally. Actual localized keywords you should be targeting in which will bring you a steady stream of natural traffic.

The second block where you might probably stumble, especially if you are new to web and optimization is wrongfully assuming internet marketing techniques as something radically different and for removed from the earthly- worldly affairs that we all do by trial and errors over and again. The crux of the matter here is SEO for local markets is only a small part of larger marketing exercises, with certain twists, to get exposure with local locations. Here is the second stumbling point in SEO for local markets.

2. SEO for local markets is not a marketing technique but a sophisticated local technique of optimizing websites on a local basis. Obviously, the one who knows the pulse of the market is not the SEO expert but can contribute his knowledge to SEO expert.

So, What Is Actually SEO For Local Markets?

Let me dash you through steps involved in SEO for local markets in short.

1. Localize your target keywords. This includes prefixing or suffixing local terms, names, and names of areas, cities or zip codes with target keywords. Example: "remodeling contractors Orange County", not "remodeling contractors".

2. Submit to local search engines (find one, if you don't know already), directories and web based yellow pages.

3. Display your mailing address with street address, zip code and complete. Once your site is indexed, these words gain prominence as a part of content.

4. Submit to local listing sections of Yahoo and DMOZ which is in addition to generalized listing.

5. Don't leave out general SEO techniques because you want to SEO for local markets which the power of link building which can be done globally as there might not be enough local sites to beat you competition.

6. Get on the local maps of Google, Yahoo, as this generally puts you on front of the local search engines.

7. Exchange links and banners with local businesses as the local traffic exchange will bring you new business. Avoid changing banners or links with competitors but exchange them with businesses that will complement you. Verify there traffic so it's a almost even exchange.

Dominating local SEO can be done fairly easy you just have to either hire a professional with a proven track record or take time to learn local SEO. The main concern is to be patent as it takes at least 3 months to start seeing results.

About The Author:

Michael S. Francis the author is a SEO expert for local businesses. Michael S. Francis is the owner of http://www.seovida.com a search engine optimization company that has worked with fortune 500 companies optimizing their sites. Go to the site now to freely subscribe to a free local SEO class.

What Is Organic SEO?

By David Odgen,

Before we can understand what organic SEO is, we first need to understand just what search engine optimization is itself. When many people hear the words "Search Engine Optimization", the phrase is enough to scare them off. In the next paragraph we will try to put those people's minds at ease with a simple explanation.

Search Engine Optimization is a process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site highly in search engines so that when someone searches for specific phrases it returns your site on tops. It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags and also involves appropriate link building process.

The most popular search engines are known as "The Big Three". These search engines include Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search. Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine uses tons of different factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine.

Brand new sites don't necessarily need to be submitted to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. This is itself, a form of Organic SEO. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.

If you are unable to research and choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with you on these issues. One of the most important factors in gaining very good results with Organic SEO is in the keyword research itself. Some people tend to think that this crucial part of the process doesn't matter that much, but, if you end up competing with millions or even billions of other search results you will had wished you learned more about this important step

Search engine marketing and promotion companies, will look at the plan for your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. If you wish, they will also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high. Normally your search engine optimization experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the
same time.

For the most part, the companies that provide work for their clients only participate in getting the sites good ranking with Organic SEO practices. It's really not worth it for these companies to be using what are know as "Black Hat" practices, as it would only hurt the reputation of their business in the long run.

About The Author:

Davin Ogden runs several successful web sites on the internet. It you would like to learn more about Organic SEO and more helpful information please visit his site at
http://www.davinatorbiz.com.

Optimizing For The Masses

By Dan Mercurio

You write your content effectively, you follow what you believe are the "Golden Rules", you watch how and where the content is placed on pages and yet you seem to not be able to get your web site ranked highly enough no matter what you do. You do your research and find yet more information that you feel may be attributing to the issue and start all over once more trying
ever more to overcome the problem without success.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies have been trying for years to figure out the magic behind what the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN are looking for when determining whether your content and what you are doing with your web site merits moving you up in the ranks to allow your website to show anywhere close to the top 10 or 20 spots that are valued so highly.

If we look back over the years, we find that there were specific search engine optimization techniques and practices specific to each of the major search engine players. For one it might be something as simple as, placing two repetitions of every keyword side-by-side in your meta keywords tag. In another it might have been something as simple as place your text on the
page in a font size and color that was overly readable and started in the upper left of the page.

Today, there has been some consistency brought to the table and the majority of SEO can be done with the same rules and standards in mind. A few easy to remember techniques such as
using keywords appropriately, adding more static and easily crawled text, and promoting sites through social networks, and directory services have made things much easier across the board
for everyone. A lot of people still have questions and concerns about which engines they should target and why some search engines seem to work better for them than others.

What has been found is that beyond the obvious (on page content and web site design), other factors too can effect if and how you may get ranked. The age or newness of a site as an example can keep a site from being ranked at all, let alone moving up in the ranks. The type of content and the relevancy to the business or services being promoted will play a large part in this as well.

Most recently, due to the acceptance of Blogs, social networking sites such as MySpace and other sites that promote online interaction and postings, the avenues and approaches for getting a web site noticed has changed. Utilizing some industry accepted and search engine friendly techniques, one can very quickly get their web site noticed, indexed by the major search
engine players and ultimately starting the ever sought after goal of being ranked high on the board.

So as the times change and lifestyles and social networking and blogs grow even more, the job of search optimization will always need to be reviewed, but staying in touch with these changes will allow this process to work in a very positive way and to the benefit of everyone concerned.

About The Author:

Elite Search Engine Marketing is an http://www.elite-searchenginemarketing.com SEO company. We can administer a quality search engine marketing campaign for you as we have for http://www.doverhonda.com Southern Maine Honda and http://www.autoservtilton.com Nissan New Hampshire.

Blackhat SEO: Protect Yourself by Recognizing The Bad Guys

By Bill Platt

Over the years, webmasters have been told that they should want to avoid Blackhat SEO techniques in connection with their own websites. In general, I agree with this statement. But, by obtaining a deeper understanding of Blackhat search engine optimization, one could actually learn a bit about how to better his or her own positioning in the search engine results.

White Hat vs. Black Hat Search Optimization

Whitehat and Blackhat SEO is a comparison that is a take-off from the old cowboy westerns, where the good guys always wore white hats and the bad guys always wore black hats. So, in theory, we can assume that Whitehat practitioners are the good guys of SEO, and Blackhat practitioners are the bad guys of the industry.

But, the truth is a little bit more opaque than this. SEO is never a pure "white vs. black" issue. Just as in Mad Magazine's "Spy vs. Spy" series, sometimes the white spy whipped the black spy, and vice versa, sometimes the black spy was victorious.

In theory, Blackhat SEO is the type of search optimization that will eventually get your website banned in the search engines. And sometimes it will.

But, it is truly fascinating to me when I visit a website such as http://www.blackhatseo.com/ and discover the world-renowned SEO expert Aaron Wall owns the website. In case you were not aware of it, Aaron Wall is the owner of the SEO Blog at http://www.seobook.com/ and is recognized as one of the world's foremost leaders in SEO technique.

Blackhat SEO Is A Learning Opportunity

To me, the study of opposites offers a greater understanding to mankind.

* One cannot know "altruism", until one learns about "selfishness".

* One cannot truly appreciate "wealth", until they have experienced "poverty".

* One can never declare something "easy", until they have faced something truly "difficult".

* A "slow" driver will seldom be noticed, until which time the "fast" driver passes them by.

These are the philosophical ramblings of Bill. ;-)

I have always argued that in order to see the light, one must be able to recognize the darkness. And that is why when I am told to avoid something; I go right to it, so that I can see what it looks like, for the sake of being able to recognize it.

So, whenever I am in the mood to learn more about SEO, I search out Black Hat SEO forums and websites to learn how to recognize the dark, when I am in the light.

After all, if you cannot recognize the dark side, how do you expect that can you protect yourself from it?

There Are Always Two Sides To Every Story

Remember when your grandmother always told you that there were always two sides to every story? Well, my grandmother did, and I like to believe that everyone had a wise old grandma to help them find their way in life.

White Hatters teach us how to do things the right way. Black Hatters teach us the wrong way to do things. And as my grandmother used to be fond of saying, "the truth is somewhere in the middle."

For example, White Hat web programmers teach us how to install Captcha scripts on our websites to keep the spammers at bay. Then the Black Hat web programmers come along and teach the spammers how to break Captcha software (http://www.blackhat-seo.com/2008/how-to-break-captchas/). And as Grandma used to say, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

The White Hatters try to teach us good programming technique and to present us with safe protection from spammers. And the Black Hatters teach us how to break the coding. You and I are in the middle, and by seeing the world through two sets of eyes (white and black); we can find better ways to protect our websites. Our websites are only as safe as the intelligence level of the programmers who try to protect us. If the bad guys are smarter, we lose. If the good guys are smarter, we rest safe in our protection schemes.

Some Black Hatters even call what they do Grey Hat SEO. One that I really like is called http://www.SlightlyShadySEO.com They did a post about the little fun pill and the folks who push it. They referred to it as a keyword that will give a lot of insight into how Google is combating the spammers online: http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/index.php/some-insights-from-the-buy-viagra-results/

The previously mentioned post spoke at great length about the people who spam forums. We all despise these guys who trash up our favorite forums, and Slightly Shady exposes why our forums are always on the spammer's target list.

As my grandmother said, "the truth is somewhere in the middle." The little pill Black Hatters play an expensive game with the Google results, but at $2 commission per little pill, no wonder.
But now that we understand what is going on, we know that we need to make sure that we keep our own forums clean of this trash, to protect our Trust Rank. We also know that one slam is not the end of the world for us, if we are quick to clean our own houses. But, if we cannot keep our houses clean, the Google will stop coming by to visit, for the exact same reasons why most girls
avoid visiting bachelor pads.

Light Sources Are Always Brighter When We Stand In The Dark

One of my favorite television personalities, Carl Sagan said, "The exploration of the cosmos is a voyage of self discovery."

This quote reflects the reason for my voyages into the light side and dark side of SEO. I study Whitehat SEO and practice the same. I also study Blackhat SEO to understand what is defined as the opposite of Whitehat SEO practices. By seeing what is dark, I can better see what is in the light.

I am comforted in knowing that I will never be pulled blindly into the dark side with Darth Vader. ;-) To quote from the Bible, "The blind will lead the blind into a ditch." Now that my eyes have been opened to Blackhat SEO, I will never stumble and fall as I fish for better rankings in Google and the other primary search engines.

About the Author:

Bill Platt has been providing article marketing to his clients since 2001 at: http://www.thephantomwriters.com/ He offers ghost writing and article distribution services. With lots of experience writing articles that attract publishers, readers, traffic and sales to his website, Bill wrote an ebook to share the secrets of his article writing success that can be found at: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-traffic.html

Read his blog at: http://article-blog.thephantomwriters.com/

SEO ROI vs Other Marketing Mediums

By Toronto SEO Guru

Every type of business needs to showcase their product or service to their discerning customers in order to induce or motivate purchase. Purchase yields profit, and profit produce Return on Investment or ROI. The core objective of any business is to achieve the best return on their investment.

To obtain the best results, businesses should have a well-defined business plan supported by an appropriate budget. Having these tools put in place, the next question will be the venture to employ the available budget for optimal results. Do you choose SEO as your primary medium or would other more traditional mediums yield better results?

The purposes of marketing are diverse. These include revenue generation, increasing market share, influencing preference over other brands, building brand equity and building brand awareness among other things. Studying competition from all its angles including the marketing communication strategy adopted by them will guide you through the process of investing your marketing budget into the right medium.

Your prospective customers face a bombardment of advertisements through various media in their daily lives. They are naturally inclined to filter out most of it before arriving at the buying decision. To really stand out from the crowd, you need to be extremely different and of course have a huge advertising budget.

Why not make things easier on yourself and follow the logical step of placing your marketing message where the customer is already looking for it? This is the logic that racks up huge points for SEO versus traditional marketing mediums.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO scores over almost every other medium in terms of ROI. To understand the reason, it is essential to have an overview of how search engines work and how to get the best out of them.

When a customer decides to buy goods or services, he or she uses the Internet search engines to provide the customer with the information on the quality, pricing, warranty, after sales service etc, of the particular product. More often than not, the customer will be provided with a list of several thousand web sites with the information he or she needs.

In effect, most individuals will look at the first ten or 15 sites for the information they need. When they are finished with the 10-15 sites, their buying decision would have been finalized. Getting into the first 10 to 15 positions is what SEO is about and several tools are available to achieve this.

The global character of the Search Engines affords you the opportunity of your product/service being accessible to customers round the clock all through the year. The numbers that an SE optimized website can provide in terms of sales and profit will naturally be several times higher than any other media or perhaps all of them put together.

The limitations of time zones, language, overbearing influences (like positioning in a magazine) are absent in the case of search engines. You will no doubt have to spend a decent sum of money to get your marketing message optimized for search engines. This would not only be an investment for a very long time to come. Rather, it would also bring you the best Return on Investment at a fraction of the cost of traditional mediums.

About The Author:

Toronto SEO http://www.searchengineoptimizationtoronto.com/ SEO services provider in Toronto Ccanada

The Mythical Google Sandbox And How To Escape It

By Bill Platt

With an article title like this, it almost seems like I am playing the fool, by telling you something doesn't exist and then telling you that I will show you how to beat that thing I said does not exist. Maybe I am the fool, or maybe, I have something valuable to share with you today. You be the judge.

I Don't Believe In The Google Sandbox, Dragons or Unicorns...

I was browsing the Digital Point forums earlier, when I came across this quote:

"The Google Sandbox is something that people either believe or don't believe. It usually means that within the first 6 months - 1 year you won't get a lot of love from Google." -
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=8286280

I saw the quote shown above and I had a good laugh. Yes, many people believe in the existence of the Google Sandbox, and I am not one of those people. I place the "Google Sandbox" in the same category as the leprechaun... they both make a neat children's story, but I see no truth in either.

What Is Google Love?

Google love is the imaginary "feeling" that Google has for the websites in its index. The more Google loves a website, the higher that website will rank in the Google search results.

No matter how many search results Google shows for a particular search term, Google will only show a maximum of 1,000 website listing in its search engine result pages (SERPs). However, few people, except nuts like me know that as you go to each consecutive page in Google's SERPs, the actual number that Google is willing to show you gets smaller with each additional page visited.

For example, I just did a search on the keyword phrase "Google Love". My default Google settings are set to 100 results. When I first typed the search phrase, Google showed 68,300,000 results, and Google shows me that I can look at ten pages of results. But, when I get to the tenth page in Google's results, there are only three listings. Google only loves 903 web pages for the search term "Google Love".

Google has told us that they attribute value to a web page, based on the number of inbound links that page might have. Google Love primarily comes from link popularity, which is derived from inbound links.

The Suggested Lifespan Of The Google Sandbox

I see the "sandbox" as being a term that some person working in SEO derived to explain why so many of his client's new pages appeared in Google's search results for about one month, before the pages disappeared into the deep recesses of the Google index.

In absence of a better explanation, some SEO person coined the term "Google Sandbox" to explain to his or her customers why a page disappears from the Google index and stays missing for months or years.

According to those who preach the Google Sandbox theory, the lifespan of the Sandbox is six months to one year. That is a lifetime when you are running an online business.

The Life Curve Of A Web Page

Google's algorithms rely heavily on inbound links to determine the value of a web page. But a brand new web page has not had the opportunity to attract any inbound links, because after all, it is a brand new web page. So Google gives new web pages the benefit of a doubt.

News stories are a good example of web pages that may very well be important to the world-at-large, but its importance cannot be determined by the number of inbound links available to that page.

As a result, all brand new web pages on the Internet are given an intrinsic value by Google, as if the pages housed a news story. But what was important thirty days ago, will not necessarily be important today. So news stories are given early value and then their value fades with time.

Once the news cycle is completed, the web page will slide down to where it deserves to be according to the normal Google algorithms. This often means that a new web page will disappear
into Google oblivion (or the theoretical Google Sandbox), if after 30 days the page has not generated any link popularity of its own.

After The News Cycle, All Normal Rules Apply

We have all heard it before. The way to get a web page to rank in Google is to build link popularity for the web page.

And how do you build link popularity for a web page? Build inbound links to that web page, of course.

Once the news cycle is done, a new web page must compete with every other web page, based on Google's normal algorithm.

What If A Page Could Develop Link Popularity In 30 Days?

What if you were able to build inbound links and therefore link popularity for a web page, before the news cycle runs out? That would be a twist, wouldn't it?

Personally, I know for a fact that if you can build link popularity on a page, within the news cycle window, that this new page will not fall into the dreaded and mythical Google Sandbox. The page will not fall into the Google Sandbox at the end of the news cycle, because the page will have already accrued some link popularity within Google's primary algorithm.

You Are The Master Of Your Own Domain

As the master of your domain, you get to choose how long a page is sandboxed. Most people don't realize they have that kind of control, but with smart link building, one can prevent a web page from entering the sandbox. Or, if the web page does slip into the sandbox, the smart online marketer can bring a web page out of the mythical sandbox in days or weeks, instead of months or years. The beauty of this truth is that you define the time line for when a web page exits the sandbox, not Google.

I Boast That I Can Prove It To You

I built a new page 16 days ago (June 10th, 2008) that is holding page one results in Google against 200,000+ websites, with my Blackhat Fish SEO Contest entry.
(http://article-blog.thephantomwriters.com/whitehat-vs-blackhat-fish- for-links-or-die-trying/2008/06/10/)

Now, one could argue that I am still in the news cycle for this web page, so in another two weeks, my page could disappear from the Google results. But, I have built so many inbound links to this page that I fully expect that when the news cycle is done, my page will remain outside of Google's mythical sandbox.

I Challenge You To Test My Results

Test my proof by checking back here in a couple weeks, or even in four weeks or six. If I am right, you will be able to click this link to Google's search results for the keyword phrase Blackhat Fish (http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=blackhat+fish), and you will be able to see my page title on page one or two of Google's search results: "Whitehat vs. Blackhat: Fish For Links or Die Trying".

I say page one or page two of Google's search results, because I would be surprised if I actually won the competition. However, if I am still in the top20 results for the search key term after July 10, 2008, then I will have proved to you that anyone can beat the sandbox, if only they exercised the right strategy for escaping the sandbox ahead of the end of the news cycle.

I have actually pulled this off with three web pages in the last 60 days. The above listed example is just one of many examples I could show you as proof of concept here. But for brevity's sake, I am only including the one example here.

In Conclusion...

You can accept my analysis as sound, or you can call me the fool. It does not matter to me which you choose. If you want to believe that the Google Sandbox really exists to thwart your online business, then more power to your fears.

For those of you who have found my words worthwhile, let's meet next Saint Patrick's' Day to share a green beer and a laugh.

About the Author:

Bill Platt has been providing article marketing to his clients since 2001 at: http://www.thephantomwriters.com/ He offers ghost writing and article distribution services. With lots of experience writing articles that attract publishers, readers, traffic and sales to his website, Bill wrote an ebook to share the secrets of his article marketing strategies at: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-traffic.html

Read Bill's blog at: http://article-blog.thephantomwriters.com/

Keywords Are King For A Home Based Business

By Kelly Walker

There are many diverse sales tactics that people use in the promotion of their online business, but there is virtually always one thing that ties all of these tactics together. Every single successful home based business is successful primarily because somewhere in that method there are keywords that make the approach work. When it comes down to it keywords determine almost everything possible on the internet and that is exactly why when it comes to the land of online internet marketing and home based business keywords are king.

The Significance of Keywords

Why are keywords significant to a home based business? Well it all has to do with internet search engines. Try to think about how many times you have been interested in a particular topic, and as a result you have gone online and used a particular search engine like Google, Yahoo or MSN? If you are like the majority of people that have used the internet, the answer is quite frequently. Although there are some people might exclusively search the online encyclopaedias and other similar products, the vast majority of internet users will use search engines to look over the millions and millions of online sites. When you take into account the amount of internet users all over the world this amounts to hundreds of millions of people conducting billions of searches each day. The phrases that people submit to search engines when looking for items that relate to your online business should be the same as the keywords that you use on your website. If your keyword placement has been done correctly it will ensure that your website is directly linked to search engine results. It is for this exact reason that when it comes to home based business success, keywords are king.

Plan of Attack

It is always a good idea to have an implementation plan for your keywords before you begin to set up your home business website. The best way to put together the plan is to first think of all the keywords that are directly related to the website that you are building.

For example, an all inclusive website on affiliate marketing would greatly benefit from keywords like "work from home" and "make money online". Once you have compiled your list the next
thing you need to do is run those keywords through keyword tools to ascertain the volume of searches per month conducted on each keyword set and rank them accordingly. Then, brainstorm a list of synonyms for your keywords and search for those. It is preferable to have at least 100 keywords that relate to your website before you formulate your plan of attack. By carefully following this process you will most likely find that you will end up with a lot more.

Search Engine Optimization

An important segment of your attack plan has to revolve around placing your chosen keywords into places on your website where they will attract the attention of the search engines. The procedure for doing this is known as search engine optimization. In essence Search engine optimization means getting important keywords that relate to your home based business into the titles and sub-titles of the website pages that you have as well as making sure that keywords are sprinkled throughout the text in appropriate percentages. This process, although easy to learn the basics of, is very difficult to master. If you are putting together your own website, it is a very good idea to learn the basics of search engine optimization.

About The Author:

Kelly Walker is a successful internet marketer and the owner of http://reklaws.com. Kelly writes on a variety of topics on buisness and marketing. To learn more about this topic and other ways to make money online Kelly recommends you subscribe to her free newsletter at: http://www.reklaws.com.

SEO Basics in 45 Minutes

By Kalena Jordan

As most people who read this newsletter will know, Jill Whalen is a pioneer in search engine optimization. Nicknamed the First Lady of Search, Jill founded the site HighRankings.com in 1995. Today High Rankings has grown to be one of the pre-eminent SEO companies in the US. Jill's company is dedicated to educating its clients and sharing its knowledge with the industry at large through the High Rankings Advisor newsletter, the High Rankings Forum and her in-house seminars.

In her presentation for Webstock 2008, Jill gave the audience a 45 minute tutorial in SEO Basics. First up, Jill discussed what SEO isn't. Some of the most common SEO myths she exposed included:

PPC Myths:

• PPC ads will help organic rankings


• PPC ads will hurt organic rankings

Tag Myths:

• you must have a keyword-rich domain


• you must have keyword-rich page URLs


• heading tags are necessary (H1, H2 etc.)


• you need to use keywords in meta keyword tags, in particular you need to use keywords that are included in your page content. Jill says that it's actually better to use the keyword tag to include misspellings and other keyword varieties that you don't have in your pages.


• using keywords in comment tags will hurt your rankings.

Content Myths:

• page copy must be a certain percentage of words. Jill actually made up the 250 word limit a few years ago and it's stuck, but there is really no set limit to please search engines.


• that you need to bold/italicize your target keywords.


• that you must use a specific keyword density. Jill says that keyword density tools are ridiculous.


• that you must optimize a page for a single keyword or phrase per page. Instead, try to optimize each page for 3-5 phrases that are related, so that your copy reads better than repeating one phrase over and over.


• that you need to optimize for the long-tail searches. You don't generally need to optimize for these - engines will find them on their own.


• duplicate content will get your site penalized. There is not a penalty as such, but engines will filter out duplicates in lieu of the original copy (or what they think is the original).

Design Myths:

• your HTML code must validate to W3C. Not even Google.com validates!


• your navigation must be text links not images. Surprisingly, graphical navigation is fine as long as you use ALT tags.


• you can't use Flash. It's fine to use Flash, as long as it is one element of your page, not a complete Flash site. Use a text-based site too if using a Flash site.


• certain design techniques are black hat. Javascript code is legitimate, not just used by black hats.

Link Building Myths:

• that Google's link: command is accurate. It's not a useful tool. Use Google Webmaster Tools or the Yahoo link command instead.


• that reciprocal links won't count. From the right site, reciprocal links are fine, even very helpful.


• that pages are ranked in PageRank order in the search results. They're not. Google Toolbar PageRank is not accurate anyway so ignore it.


• you must be in DMOZ or Yahoo Directory to get good Google rankings. In Jill’s opinion, the Yahoo Directory is not worth the money these days.

Submitting, Crawling and Indexing Myths:

• that you need to submit URLs to engines. Provided you have a link to your site, you will be found and indexed.


• that you need a Google Sitemap. Not needed for the average site. It won't change your site rank.


• that you need to update your site frequently.


• frequent spidering helps rankings. Not true


• that you need multiple sites. This won't help in the engines and creates more maintenance work.


• that you need doorway pages. Jill says this is so 1995!

SEO Company Myths:

• that a #1 ranking will always lead to more traffic or sales. The good rankings need to be for keywords and phrases that people are actually searching for.


• that the company can place pages in certain positions. Not possible, unless they're using Pay Per Click or sponsored spots.


• that your rankings will tank if you stop paying the company. Rubbish!


• that they have a "proprietary method" of SEO. They're lying!


• that they have a "special relationship" with Google. Again, they're lying. Google has no relationships with organic SEO companies that Jill is aware of.


• that they can increase your rankings without doing any on-page work. Run away!

Next, Jill defined what SEO is. Her definition of SEO is "making your site the best it can be for your site visitors AND the search engines". She made the point that search engines need to:

• Find


• Crawl


• Index


• Determine relevancy


• show results

So you should keep these top of mind when designing and SEOing your site.

Jill also made the point that search engines don't know you. So you should disclose what you sell and who you are in plain language that naturally incorporates the keyword phrases. Dumb down your pages for users. What search engines want is good content. If you're not getting good traffic from your pages, they're broken, she says. In a nutshell, make sure your pages speak to your target audience and solve their problems.

Jill then discussed how to choose keywords to target on your site. She recommended brainstorming with friends, family and business colleagues and creating a seed list of keywords. Then take that list and run it through keyword research tools such as WordTracker or Keyword Discovery and even Google AdWords to determine the best keywords and phrases to target.

Jill says there are three types of keyword phrases:

1. General and highly competitive terms - not good choices.


2. Long tail - uncompetitive terms - generally no need to SEO for.


3. Relevant and specific terms, which are the best to choose because they highly searched, yet are targeted enough to bring qualified traffic.

Next, Jill explained where to put your keywords. She recommended putting them in:

• anchor text


• clickable image alt attributes (alt tags)


• headlines


• body text copy


• title tags (Don't make your titles less than 10 words, she says.)


• meta description tags

Jill finished up by teaching the group how to measure SEO success. She said that high rankings are not the best measure of success because you might be ranking for phrases nobody is searching on. Instead you should be looking for increased targeted traffic to your site and more conversions. Use your web stats to give you the clues as to whether your site and your SEO is working.

As for the future of SEO, well despite the rumors that SEO is dead, Jill doesn't think that the big engines will switch to exclusively paid listings any time soon. In her opinion, there will always be some free ways to get listed so there will always be a need for SEO. In the same vein, a crawler-friendly site will always get good results and off page criteria (e.g. links) will always be important.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Should You Change Your Copy When Rankings Fall?

Article By Karon Thackston

I've been on a seesaw for the last year. I have a client who, for almost 12 months, has been asking me to rewrite their home-page copy because they dropped from the top 10 to position #11 (the dreaded second page!). My question to her was always, "Is your copy still converting the way you want it to?" She answered yes every time, to which I advised, "Leave the copy alone."

"But what about my rankings?"

"Is business suffering?"

"No, we're swamped."

"Leave the copy alone."

"But it's over a year old. Don't you think it needs to be refreshed?"

"Is your copy still converting the way you want it to?"

"Yes."

"Leave the copy alone."

We'd have this same discussion every 3 or 4 months. Some people just get hung up on being in the top 10, and their tunnel vision can cause them to make decisions they otherwise would not make. Others think that, because they are tired of seeing their website copy, others are too. This is usually not true.

My suggestion was to enhance her linking campaign with some quality articles through an article distribution campaign, but to leave the copy alone since it was still doing its job. Search engine positioning isn't the whole ball of wax. Getting top 10 rankings shouldn't be your primary goal. Attracting and keeping more business is what it's all about. If that means using search engine optimization as one tool, so be it. But too many times, website owners bow to the SEO gods and sacrifice conversions and their best business sense all for the sake of saying they are #1. Not advisable, if you ask me.

I am happy to report that, after holding at #11 for many months, this company's site is now back in spot #5. While we can't say with any certainty that it has driven any more business to their site than being at #11, the managers are quite pleased.

Never Change Your Copy?

Is this my advice in every case where rankings drop? No. There are instances where you do need to change your copy if your rankings decrease. Ask yourself (or your client) these questions:

1) Are conversions suffering?

If you're experiencing a decline in conversions, by all means take a look at your copy. It might need some help. But keep in mind that decreasing conversions may also be due to a new and more complicated shopping cart, recent design changes that impaired usability for your visitors or a dozen other reasons.

2) Have products or services changed?

If you have products or services to add or remove, certainly you'll want to change your copy to reflect that.

3) Has business fallen off?

If, due to the decrease in search engine positioning, you've tracked a definite lag in business, then yes, you'll want to make an effort to gain the lost rankings back. But, changing the copy isn't the only way to do this. If you answer no to the other questions, I'd leave the copy as-is and opt for an article distribution campaign first.

4) Other than hoping to appease the SEO gods, is there any other reason that the copy mandates changing?

If the answer is no, don't change the copy.

With all of the above, if the answer to each question is no, leave the copy alone.

There are as many reasons for your positioning to change as there are days in the month. Guessing at and trying to adjust for mysterious shifts usually does little good. Plus, while you're chasing the golden ring, you may be losing sales.

About the Author:

Learn to write emotionally driven SEO copywriting with Karon's Step-by-Step Copywriting Course at http://www.copywritingcourse.com. Read Karon's copywriting blog at http://www.marketingwords.com/blog.

What To Do When Your Website Does Not Rank Well In Google

Article by Bill Platt

Online marketers frequently struggle with the question of how to compete when Google fails to look positively upon a particular website. In this article, I will focus on how to build rankings and drive traffic to your website, using Google and the other search engines.

What Motivates Google's Algorithm

Over the years, many have tried to claim, even in court, that Google was unfairly keeping their website out of the top of Google's search results. But, the truth is that Google is not beholden to the needs and desires of the webmasters who want to be on page one of Google's natural search results.

Instead, Google is beholden to its stockholders and its need to earn profits. Google has determined that the best way to keep profits high is to keep Internet users flocking to its websites. Google accomplishes that by giving its users the kind of information they are looking to find, and Google weights its search algorithm towards what Google believes its search audience wants to see in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

It is important for online marketers to understand that it is not always in Google's best interest for our websites to rank well in Google.

How Important Is Google In Search?

Worldwide, Google is currently providing 78% of all searches
(http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=4).

But in 2007, Google only provided 52% of my website's total search traffic. Yahoo, Windows Live, Ask, and MSN provided the next 42%. The remaining 6% of my website's search traffic came from another 55 smaller search engines.

On my website, only 48.8% of my 2007 traffic actually came from search engines. The remaining 51.2% of my website's quarter million visitors came directly from article placements on other websites, recommendations from other people, forum posts, and from people who have bookmarks for my website.

Tips For Ranking Well For Specific Keywords

It has been my experience that it is easier to rank in 1) MSN / Windows Live, 2) Yahoo, and then 3) Google, in that order. Quite frankly, I have always ignored the role of Ask in the search market. While MSN is the easiest search engine to rank in, it only delivered 4.6% of my total search traffic in 2007.

I read a question in a forum, where the poster was asking how he could get his website to rank well in Google for the search term, "software".

The truth is that it is nearly impossible in nearly every search engine to rank well in the natural results for such a singular keyword, such as "software". In a nutshell, if you want to rank well in Google, you need to build inbound links (IBLs) to your website with your targeted keywords in the links.

But, you don't want to put all of your links together with one keyword phrase. One of Google's red flags is when they notice a link to a particular website appearing more than 60% of the time with one specific keyword phrase.

Utilizing a variety of long-tail keywords will actually serve you better in the search-engine ranking puzzle, in more ways than one. After all, when I do a search for software, I don't type in the search word, "software". I type in search phrases like: "accounting software", "small business accounting software", "windows software accounting small business", "windows image
editing software", "windows software image editor", "window xp photo album manager", etc.

People searching the keyword "software" have yet to figure out that they are looking for specific kinds of software. Once they do an initial search, they are going to type in more specific search terms to find what they actually want. So, once you start targeting a variety of long-tail keyword phrases, then you will start seeing more success in your search marketing efforts.

How To Start Your Search Engine Optimization Journey

If you are wanting to get into the natural search results of Google and the other search engines, you must know before you dive into the project that getting good rankings in the search engines for your chosen keywords can take a really long time, before you begin seeing results.

While inbound links to your website, targeted to your chosen keywords, will help your website climb in the search results of your favorite search engines, it may be a frustrating journey.

Your competitors want to rank well for the same search terms you do. And since only ten of you can be on page one of the search results, you may have to work really hard to topple those guys already on page one of the results, and you will have to fight to keep your ranking once you get it.

There are some keyword phrases that are nearly impossible to rank for, even if you have really deep pockets. For example, most every keyword phrase for the financial industry will be extremely difficult to rank for in Google. Competition in this industry is fierce, so achieving top search rankings will be tough to say the least.

This is the reason why so many SEO experts encourage marketers to target "low-hanging fruit". It may be fairly easy to rank well for a four- or five-word search phrase, and extremely expensive to target a two- or three-word search phrase.

My personal approach has always been to rotate through a list of more than 100 target keyword phrases, over a longer period of time. In doing so, I capture a lot of low-hanging fruit quickly, and at the end of the loop, I am a bit closer to snagging the fruit in the upper branches of the tree. At the end of my list, I analyze my keywords again to see where I am strong and to see where I am still weak, and then I begin the process again. (According to SEOdigger.com, I have better than 950 keyword phrases in the top twenty results of Google.)

How To Get Links

The challenge most people face when they begin building links to a website is where to get those essential links.

Article marketing is my chosen method for getting inbound links.

Because of Google's news feed strategy, the initial placement of your article might appear immediately in the SERPs, but then it will disappear. During the news cycle phase of the Google algorithm, new materials are given an added boost in ranking. Once the news cycle is done, any new pages will sink back down to where they would be based on the general Google algorithm.

If you are honest with yourself, you know that every page on the Internet started life with a PageRank Zero, but given enough time, many pages will gain in PageRank, as they begin to be linked. For a more detailed look at the process of how reprint articles gain value for a website in Google's search index, see my article about "Fishing for Links in Google" at:
http://article-blog.thephantomwriters.com/whitehat-vs-blackhat-fish- for-links-or-die-trying/2008/06/10/

Utilizing article marketing as a link building method, I have put one website on the map in as little as eight weeks, with only three articles. This website has one #1, one #2, eight results on page one, and twelve results in the top twenty listings of Google. Most of those keywords also rank well in Yahoo and MSN.

On the other hand, on my main website, I started looking at the keyword phrase "article marketing" just eighteen months ago, when my website sat at #79. Today, my website sits at #12 in Google for that keyword phrase.

I believe that given enough time, investment and commitment, I can use article marketing to elevate any web page on the Internet to multiple page-one listings in Google. But, not everyone is willing to make the kind of investment and commitment one needs to get to the top of Google's search results...

What To Do When You Need Results Now

If you simply cannot wait as long as it takes to build top rankings naturally, then you need to look seriously at Pay-Per-Click advertising models, such those offered through Google Adwords (http://adwords.google.com) and Yahoo Search Marketing (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com).

About the Author:

Bill Platt offers Article Distribution and Article Ghost Writing services through his website at: http://www.thephantomwriters.com He has written an ebook that has been designed to help people create more effective articles. One customer said of his ebook, "I've read almost every ebook out there on article writing and article marketing and this one tops it all." To learn more about Bill's ebook or to get your own copy, please click this link: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-traffic.html

Write For Robots Write For People

Article by Andy Crestodina

Without good web copy, the best team of designers andprogrammers in the world can't help you. The goal is good writing and a clear, concise message that speaks to the target audience.

But let's assume that you already have that: Maybe you're re-purposing some amazing copy that you've used for another medium—a print piece, perhaps. How can you adapt it to work well online?

If you want people to find you, you have to speak to search engines. But if you want them to stay, you have to speak to people. Writing for search and writing for visitors are often competing endeavors.

Write for people

Think of how you look at a newspaper: skim headlines, take inthe first few sentences of interesting articles, and if anopening captures you, read on to get to the meat of the piece.

Feature journalists and copywriters often strive to evoke emotion and pique your curiosity early on. Once they've captured your attention, they develop the central themes of the story.

Web writers, on the other hand, structure content in a sort of inverted triangle: meat first, details later. Why the stark contrast?

Well, think of how you look at web sites: Click, glance, click, scan, read a little, click, next page, click, click. Your eyes quickly gather an idea of what the page is about, your brain decides if you're interested, and then you read a bit or move on. The entire process takes only a few seconds.

To support this quick-to-click behavior, web copy should be easy to scan and understand at a glance. It should include plenty of:

* Bulleted lists (like this one)
* Captions
* Headings and sub-headings
* Bolding
* Short paragraphs
* Links

Write for robots

If you're concerned with your rank in search engines, this next part's for you. Targeted web content is one of the keys to successful search-engine optimization (SEO) . There are 3 basic steps for creating web copy that will boost your search position:

1. Research the optimal phrases for your business
2. Select your keywords through careful analysis
3. Show your relevance with optimized copy

Let's look at an example: Say you're creating a site for your Chicago-based knitting store. To show search engines that you're relevant, you'll have to boost your keyword frequency — which means that you might have to bend the rules of writing for people.

Ideally, your key phrase will appear 5 – 7 times in the body text of the page (links and headers don't count here—although your keyword should definitely appear there as well). So you start with this:

"Learning to knit is easy. Just sign up for our convenient classes."

But, since "knitting classes" is the target phrase, you change it to this:

"Knitting is easy to learn when you sign up for our convenient knitting classes."

In the first case, "knitting classes" never appeared as acomplete phrase. In fact, the word "knitting" didn't show up at all. As a bonus, "knitting" appears twice in the revised sentence.

True, the first example sounds better. But if you're competing for search-engine ranking, you're better off with the second version.

Ready for a real challenge? Work the word "Chicago" into the page 5 – 7 times—and keep it next to "knitting classes" if you can. This is where it gets tricky. After all, you might lose visitors if your copy is too clunky and repetitive, like this:

"It's easy to learn knitting in Chicago if you sign up for Chicago knitting classes."

Or even worse: "A new class of Chicago knitting classes is now available in Chicago for those interested in a knitting class."

This is called keyword stuffing, and I don't recommend it. It goes too far. Instead, spread out your phrases so the text makes sense for humans. This is easier to achieve if you have a few hundred words on the page. (After all, search engines love text-heavy sites.)

It's all about striking a balance. Don't sacrifice your message for your rank. Instead, focus on getting people to your page and keeping them there with targeted, concise content.


About The Author:

As a principal and strategic director at Orbit Media Studios, Andy draws on his knowledge of marketing, usability, and interactive design to lead strategic planning for the firm and its clients. Orbit specializes in web, print, and video design & development http://www.orbitmedia.com .

Usability and SEO - Red Light, Green Light

By Kim Krause Berg

Another article has appeared on the topic of SEO and Usability and how these two different skill sets benefit each other. The latest, Usability and SEO. Which comes First?, written for Search Engine Watch by Eric Enge, caught my eye because he wrote:
"What I want to emphasize here is one key point: Usability comes first, and SEO comes second."
It's funny to hear that statement coming from a professional SEO.

In the late 1990's, when I offered search engine optimization services, I didn't get the call for help until the web site was launched and swimming for dear life in the search engine pool. In those days, there were lots of search engines. SEO came last, after the design and after people were intended to use it. If they ever found it, that is.

During the past ten years, acceptance by companies to work search engine marketing techniques into their web site pages has vastly improved. User centered, persuasive design, on the other hand, are still whispers in the wind. Will it take another ten years for usability and accessibility to be as justified as marketing a web site property?

What opened my eyes was working in user interface design and discovering that usability came last, AFTER SEO. It was always a pleasant surprise to hear someone on the design team inquire about image alt attributes or fuss over page title tags. Unfortunately, I realized they only knew these things mattered because some of my design team mates owned their own personal web site businesses on the side. It wasn't something the company demanded for itself. They were just lucky the web site designers had their acts together.

User centered design still gets shoved around. As it makes its way into the world of search engine marketing, the experience reminds me of the game "Red Light, Green Light". The caller yells, "Green light!" and everybody runs forward, willy nilly, confident, trying to get to the finish line first. Then, the caller shouts, "Red light!" and suddenly everyone stops. Frozen. They have to hold their position. They can't breathe or giggle, as they wait for their next instruction.

Corporate Blinders

I was recently part of a conversation whereby a man was describing his company's future plans. Presently, they sell products online locally and are now moving into a neighboring country. After this, they plan on going global.

As he describes it, they have no usability person in the entire company. They have search engine marketers. But, they have no idea how to sell online internationally. They don't understand what browsers are popular outside the USA. They don't know how to make forms usable for global customers. User behavior and habits vary by culture, even down to how web pages are read. They assume their present website will work everywhere. I see this constantly and wonder how some corporations survive with such tunnel vision.

Usability is misunderstood and therefore, not even considered a worthwhile investment until sales stop or worse, a lawsuit appears by someone unable to use the site.

It's Not Who Goes First

Whenever I see phrases like "Usability is first, SEO is second" or "SEO is first, usability is second", or "SEO doesn’t need usability", I don't agree with the competition this sets up.
Both disciplines are vital to the air your web site breathes. They are equal sides of the same lung.

Usability, accessibility and search engine marketing practices are united partners because they're focused on the web site visitor. We can all walk up to these customers and shake their hand together.

About the Author:

Usability Consultant, Kimberly Krause Berg, is the owner of UsabilityEffect.com (www.usabilityeffect.com), Cre8pc.com (www.cre8pc.com), and Cre8asiteForums (www.cre8asiteforums.com/). Her background in organic search engine optimization, combined with web site usability consulting, offers unique insight into web site development. Copyright 2007 Cre8pc.com. All Rights Reserved. Reprint rights by Permission of the Author

Using Differentiators in Keyphrases: What Every Search Engine Optimization Company Needs to Know

As any good search engine optimization company knows, in search, more so than any other medium, you have a very short window of opportunity in which to engage your prospect. The only way to get a solid competitive advantage in this arena is to utilize various techniques in order to make sure that you are giving a prospect exactly what it is that he or she is looking for. Otherwise, your prospect will simply click the back button and visit one of your competitors – a process that only takes seconds.

One way to gain a competitive advantage, of course, is to work on the website itself. Any search engine optimization company worth its salt will also be involved in conversion testing on your website – in other words, making certain that the visitors who arrive on your site are likely to take a point of action that eventually leads to a sale. Split tests, modifications in content, different color schemes, and numerous other variable elements can all have a measurable impact.

There is also another way that a quality search engine optimization company will seek to maximize the value of the prospects that find your website through search engines. In this case, however, it is using your company differentiators in the keyphrases that they target to make sure that the traffic that comes to your site is of a very high quality.

Gaining a Competitive Advantage with Differentiators

As more and more companies turn to organic search to gain a competitive advantage while promoting their products and services, it can be increasingly difficult to achieve high rankings for the generic terms that everyone in your industry is pursuing. While any ranking is ultimately attainable, eventually a search engine optimization company has to decide whether the effort involved is worth it, especially when it recognizes that you can get overall better results from the campaign by making sure that a very high percentage of people that are typing keyphrases into search engines are looking for exactly what you offer.

This is why your search engine optimization company should be able to leverage differentiators in your keyphrases to give you the best competitive advantage available.

What Keyphrases Will Work Best for Your Business?

Suppose that you are in an industry where companies can have a wide array of prices, approaches, customer service levels, and so on. Instead of targeting, from the outset, the general keyphrase that defines the industry (for example "email marketing"), a good search engine optimization company will take the time to help you gain a competitive advantage by realizing what is different about your company in order to a.) attract very highly targeted prospects who know what they are seeking and b.) reduce the competitiveness of the keyphrases they are choosing.

Let's take a look at a high-end provider of email marketing that has advanced web-based functionality and focuses on the B2B market. This fictional business is seeking a competitive advantage by working with a search engine optimization company. We can safely assume that the percentage of people that type "email marketing" into a search engine who are looking for this exact type of company is anywhere from between 0 and 100%.

By looking into the popularity of other variations, however, we can see that it is nowhere near 100%. Phrases like "cheap email marketing" or "free email marketing" are very popular, demonstrating that many people seeking "email marketing" are not looking for exactly the service that the provider is offering.

Imagine that instead of targeting "email marketing", a daunting task (that, even if achieved, assures that a high percentage of visitors that come to the site are not looking for the provider's particular type of solution), the search engine optimization company takes advantage of the provider's differentiators. In this case, the search engine optimization company would instead target phrases such as "business to business email marketing" and "web-based email marketing". Suddenly the two objectives have been achieved - the provider knows that a much higher percentage of visitors that are typing these terms are actually looking for the right kind of company and the competitiveness of the phrases has also been reduced, leading to faster and higher rankings.

Using Modifiers to Give You the Edge

There are hundreds of modifiers that can give a competitive advantage by reflecting a company's differentiators, including words such as "free", "affordable", "high-end", "full service", "proven", "turnkey", etc. The point is that by making use of your unique differentiators in the search terms you target, your search engine optimization company is already setting the table for your prospect before he or she even clicks over to your website. When the message that is seen on your site then supports the keyphrase that was typed, you now have an engaged visitor. This can mean more leads, less site abandonment, and better overall website performance.

Conclusion

Remember, your company is better than the others out there. Ask yourself why, and then tell your search engine optimization company to take advantage of these differences in your keyphrases to give you a competitive advantage in your industry. The subtle addition of a few seemingly minor modifiers can have a huge impact on your bottom line.


About the Author

Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was named the number one organic search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld in 2006 and 2007. Scott has contributed content to many publications including The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Brown, 2008), Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

How to Start Your Own SEO Business

This article is for those of you who are learning search engine optimization (SEO) or working in the field with a view to starting your own SEO business or on-selling your services as an SEO contractor or freelancer.
Planning and Preparation

First up, you need to think about what type of SEO services you are going to provide and what type of goals you would like your business to achieve. You’ll need to prepare a business plan and answer questions such as the following:

· Will I require finance?
· What are my long and short term goals?
· How will I market my business?
· Who are my potential customers?
· Who are my competitors?
· What services will I offer?
· What should my business / trading name be?

Getting Started

Next, you need to decide how to set up your business structure. You’ll need to answer questions like:

· How will I structure my business? Will I be a sole trader? A partnership? A company?
· Will I need to hire staff?
· What taxes will I be liable for?
· Do I need to create a business bank account?
· What type of business stationery/marketing materials do I need?

Your Workplace

A key component of your new business is its location. Ask yourself questions such as:

· Do I need to rent commercial office space or serviced offices?
· Can I work from home?
· Can I claim home office expenses?
· Do I have a dedicated workspace?
· Can clients access my workplace easily?
· Do I need to purchase equipment or furniture?
· Should I buy a desktop or laptop computer?
· Do I have adequate room for extra staff?
· Can I set and stick to reasonable working hours?

Tools of the Trade

In the SEO business, there are quite a few “must have” tools of the trade that you will find indispensable. Some of these are huge time-savers and others are vital if you run an online business. These include:

Hardware

· At least one desktop computer with plenty of memory and hard drive capacity
· Broadband, ISDN or Wireless Internet connection
· Separate phone/fax lines
· A cell phone and/or palmtop
· A reliable fax machine or PC fax software*
· An answering machine*
· A printer / scanner / copier*
· A file cabinet / desktop filing system
· A large desk with drawers
· A comfortable, ergonomic office chair

* There are a large number of product manufacturers that offer a combination of all these elements in the one machine.

Software / Tools

There’s plenty of tools and software available to help the busy SEO / SEM operator. Here are some of my favorites:

· Freshbooks Invoicing and Timesheets
· Keyword Discovery
· Proposal Kit Proposal Creation Software
· ClickTracks Log File Analysis Software

You’ll find other tools and software in my articles 20 Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools and 20 MORE Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools.

Subscriptions

· Search Engine Watch
· The Search Light
· Search Engine Marketing News
· High Ranking's Advisor
· Search Engine Report
· Search Day
· Marketing Pilgrim
· Pandia


Books / E-books

· Search Engine Visibility
· The Nitty Gritty of Writing for the Search Engines
· Ring Bell For Service Usability Report


Memberships

· SEO Consultants
· SEO Pros
· SEMPO


Open for Business!

When you’re ready to start business, you need to spread the word about your business and start dealing with clients. You’ll need to address things like:

· What domain name should I buy?
· Can I design my own web site?
· How will I market my business online?
· How will I promote my business offline?
· What are my short and long term marketing goals?
· What clients do I want to attract?
· How will I invoice clients?
· How do I want clients to contact me?
· What type of client contract do I need?

Getting Clients

Finding clients can be difficult for new business start-ups. You haven’t yet developed a reputation and you have no clients to vouch for the quality of your services. Here are a couple of suggestions for attracting new clients:

· Ask friends and family if they need or know of anyone seeking SEO services.
· Approach your favorite charities and offer to do some pro-bono work in return for publicity and use of their case studies.
· Join SEO industry organizations like the SEO Consultants Directory.
· Spread the word you are open for business.
· Hang out at SEO forums and chat rooms offering free advice.
· Commence a PPC campaign targeting persons seeking SEO services.
· Optimize your own site so you rank high for SEO related searches!

Other Considerations

· Having a watertight contract
· Having a professional services proposal (e.g. Proposal Kit)
· Business and indemnity insurance

Keeping Clients

Once you have your clients, keep them happy. Try to address these issues:

· How can I provide the best customer service?
· How can I solicit client feedback on my services?
· Should I offer a satisfaction guarantee?
· Is my contract client-friendly?
· How can I reward my best clients?
· What can I on-sell to my clients? (Would you like fries with that?)
· Do I want to give my clients corporate gifts?
· How should I regularly keep in touch with clients?

Working in the SEO Industry

The SEO industry is a strange beast. It’s growing enormously fast, due to the boom in search and so the demand for search engine optimization services is huge. However it is also plagued with a bad reputation, thanks to a handful of fast-talking, money-grabbing companies claiming to be SEO experts and taking advantage of web site owners with little knowledge of how search engines work.

For this reason, if you choose to work in the SEO industry, you may come across some skepticism and doubt from clients who have been burned by shoddy operators in the past. You’ll need to work extra hard at overcoming client fears and proving the value of your services.

But as long as you truly know what you are doing, can prove the ROI on your services, educate your clients about the SEO process, use ethical business practices and follow the guidelines set down by the search engines, you should build up a good reputation quickly.

Here are some resources that will help you in this direction:

· Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008
· Writing Useful Articles That Readers Will Love (Finding Your SEO Niche)
· Google Information for Webmasters: SEOs
· Questions to Ask Before Hiring a SEO Company
· Selecting a Search Engine Optimization Company
· What SEOs Expect From Their Clients
· Working Well With Your Search Engine Optimization Firm
· Let Your Trusted SEO Do Their Job
· Search Engine Optimization

Getting Help

Even if you’re a seasoned pro at search engine optimization, there’s always something more to learn. Occasionally, there will be times when something has you completely baffled or you don’t quite know how to handle a particular client situation. That’s when you need a little advice or guidance from your peers.

The following forums are popular hang-outs for persons in the SEO industry. Whether you’re a novice or veteran, you’ll always learn something new, make new friends and possibly even get new clients by visiting regularly and contributing your time to the webmaster community:

· Cre8asite Forums
· SEO-News Forum
· High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum
· SearchEngineWatch Forums
· Webmaster World
· Search Engine Forums
· SitePoint Forums

Growing Your Business

After you’ve been in business for a while, there comes a time when you’ll need to decide whether to expand and take on more and more clients or to cap your growth capacity and turn down new projects. Here are some things to consider when that time comes:

· Do I want to expand my business?
· Do I really need more clients?
· Can I hire more staff?
· Should I take on an admin person or virtual assistant?
· Should I take on temporary or contract staff?
· Can I outsource some aspects to specialists?

Pitfalls to Avoid

Here are a few common pitfalls to avoid when running your own business:

· Don’t fail to create a business plan and update it regularly. Small businesses don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.
· Don’t let bad creditors get away with it – always chase overdue invoices before they cause a cash-flow problem and make sure your Terms of Trade are clearly available on your site, on your invoice and in your proposals.
· Don’t get caught up on administrative tasks. Delegate them where possible so you can concentrate on your clients and your business.
· Don’t forget to communicate with your staff regularly. Make use of collaboration software to manage your client projects effectively.
· Don’t take on more clients than you can handle.
· Don’t discount your services if you can help it – recognize the value of your knowledge, time and services.
· Don’t lose sight of your goals – spend at least one day per week on marketing and business development.
· Don’t spread yourself too thin. It’s better to let someone else handle a client than do a poor job of it yourself.
· Don’t become a workaholic, make sure you work reasonable hours and take regular vacations with your family.
· Don’t burn-out. Keep asking: Am I enjoying myself? Remember to have fun!!


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Using Differentiators in Keyphrases: What Every Search Engine Optimization Company Needs to Know

By Scott Buresh

As any good search engine optimization company knows, in search, more so than any other medium, you have a very short window of opportunity in which to engage your prospect. The only way to get a solid competitive advantage in this arena is to utilize various techniques in order to make sure that you are giving a prospect exactly what it is that he or she is looking for. Otherwise, your prospect will simply click the back button and visit one of your competitors – a process that only takes seconds.

One way to gain a competitive advantage, of course, is to work on the website itself. Any search engine optimization company worth its salt will also be involved in conversion testing on your website – in other words, making certain that the visitors who arrive on your site are likely to take a point of action that eventually leads to a sale. Split tests, modifications in content, different color schemes, and numerous other variable elements can all have a measurable impact.

There is also another way that a quality search engine optimization company will seek to maximize the value of the prospects that find your website through search engines. In this case, however, it is using your company differentiators in the keyphrases that they target to make sure that the traffic that comes to your site is of a very high quality.

Gaining a Competitive Advantage with Differentiators

As more and more companies turn to organic search to gain a competitive advantage while promoting their products and services, it can be increasingly difficult to achieve high rankings for the generic terms that everyone in your industry is pursuing. While any ranking is ultimately attainable, eventually a search engine optimization company has to decide whether the effort involved is worth it, especially when it recognizes that you can get overall better results from the campaign by making sure that a very high percentage of people that are typing keyphrases into search engines are looking for exactly what you offer.

This is why your search engine optimization company should be able to leverage differentiators in your keyphrases to give you the best competitive advantage available.

What Keyphrases Will Work Best for Your Business?

Suppose that you are in an industry where companies can have a wide array of prices, approaches, customer service levels, and so on. Instead of targeting, from the outset, the general keyphrase that defines the industry (for example "email marketing"), a good search engine optimization company will take the time to help you gain a competitive advantage by realizing what is different about your company in order to a.) attract very highly targeted prospects who know what they are seeking and b.) reduce the competitiveness of the keyphrases they are choosing.

Let's take a look at a high-end provider of email marketing that has advanced web-based functionality and focuses on the B2B market. This fictional business is seeking a competitive advantage by working with a search engine optimization company. We can safely assume that the percentage of people that type "email marketing" into a search engine who are looking for this exact type of company is anywhere from between 0 and 100%.

By looking into the popularity of other variations, however, we can see that it is nowhere near 100%. Phrases like "cheap email marketing" or "free email marketing" are very popular, demonstrating that many people seeking "email marketing" are not looking for exactly the service that the provider is offering.

Imagine that instead of targeting "email marketing", a daunting task (that, even if achieved, assures that a high percentage of visitors that come to the site are not looking for the provider's particular type of solution), the search engine optimization company takes advantage of the provider's differentiators. In this case, the search engine optimization company would instead target phrases such as "business to business email marketing" and "web-based email marketing". Suddenly the two objectives have been achieved - the provider knows that a much higher percentage of visitors that are typing these terms are actually looking for the right kind of company and the competitiveness of the phrases has also been reduced, leading to faster and higher rankings.

Using Modifiers to Give You the Edge

There are hundreds of modifiers that can give a competitive advantage by reflecting a company's differentiators, including words such as "free", "affordable", "high-end", "full service", "proven", "turnkey", etc. The point is that by making use of your unique differentiators in the search terms you target, your search engine optimization company is already setting the table for your prospect before he or she even clicks over to your website. When the message that is seen on your site then supports the keyphrase that was typed, you now have an engaged visitor. This can mean more leads, less site abandonment, and better overall website performance.

Conclusion

Remember, your company is better than the others out there. Ask yourself why, and then tell your search engine optimization company to take advantage of these differences in your keyphrases to give you a competitive advantage in your industry. The subtle addition of a few seemingly minor modifiers can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

© Medium Blue 2008


About the Author

Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was named the number one organic search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld in 2006 and 2007. Scott has contributed content to many publications including The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Brown, 2008), Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

All Search Engines Love Spiders: How Meta Commands Can Help You Love Them Too

By Scott Buresh

Nearly all search engines utilize spiders (which are also known by their original name, robots) to go out and scour the web looking for web pages. These search engine spiders then bring the data back to be indexed by the engine.

Since roughly 1996, individual meta commands have existed that can be used on individual web pages to modify how these search engine spiders behave. The most useful of these commands are fairly universal and respected by almost all search engines. What follows is a list of some of the more popular spider commands and instances in which you might want to use them. (Please note all <> have been replaced with [] for publishing purposes).

[meta name="robots" content="index"]

This meta command is one of the most common ones used – and it is also the least necessary. It tells search engine spiders to come on in and put the page in their indexes. However, all search engines do this by default anyway. Basically, if you want to put it in there for fun, be my guest, but this command is not giving you any special treatment. All search engines are going to index your page, unless you specifically tell them otherwise.

[meta name="robots" content="follow"]

The follow command is different from the index command. It basically requests that the search engine spiders follow the links that are on a particular page. Again, however, this piece of code is completely unnecessary because all search engines are going to follow the links on a page, unless otherwise directed.

[meta name="robots" content="noindex"]

The noindex command, the opposite of the index command, tells search engine spiders not to index the content of a page. It’s important to note, however, that search engine spiders will still follow the links on a page that uses only this command.

When not used for legitimate purposes, this tag can be dangerous because it can put you at risk for penalization by most, if not all search engines. This is because you can use a noindex tag to hide pages with multiple links that you don’t want visitors to see but that you do want all search engines to index.

There are, however, some legitimate uses for the noindex command. For example, if you have a dynamic site, and you’ve created static pages to replace some of your dynamic pages, which can make them easier for search engine spiders to access, you could put a noindex tag on the dynamic version.

As Google mentions in its Webmaster Help Center:

"Consider creating static copies of dynamic pages. Although the Google index includes dynamic pages."

About the Author:

Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was recently named the number one search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld. Scott has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, Organic Rankings, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

Advanced Link Checks

By James Mahony

You should be able to find several indispensable facts about SEO in the following paragraphs. If there's at least one fact you didn't know before, imagine the difference it might make.

View the source of each and every page: is there JavaScript and CSS on the page? Remember that spiders may not index pages that have more than 10k or so of JavaScript or CSS embedded in them. Spiders don't enjoy getting tangled up in JavaScript. So as a general rule you should avoid putting out prompts and alerts using JavaScript every time that a page loads. Because of this rule, it is also wise to avoid link partners who do so on the pages that they link to you from. If anything looks fishy, it probably is.

CSS won't give you many problems. If you are going to use CSS, it is best to link to it from another source. Create a separate CSS page and use the tag to work it into the head of your HTML. This method will keep your file size down considerably, and since you will probably be using the same CSS on several pages, decrease your bandwidth usage. Normally a large quantity of CSS within the document isn't indicative of any suspicious behavior on the part of the linker. If you feel that you are, indeed, suffering from the fact that the site uses such an excessive proportion of CSS on the page itself, suggest to the webmaster that he/she may want to create an external CSS document and link to it in his/her header.

Check that you're still on the domain you clicked on a link to, and you haven't moved to another site or a subdomain. Some people will move you to another domain while telling that's their site and your link is there, relying on you not checking the address bar. This trick is all too common and happens to folks who are new to SEO every single day. This sad fact will continue until people begin to catch it every time.

If you don't have accurate details regarding SEO, then you might make a bad choice on the subject. Don't let that happen: keep reading.

If the domain has changed, delete your backlink to the site in question immediately and then email the webmaster with your complaint. If the webmaster does not fix the problem you may
even want to request that they remove the link as the site may wind up discredited as a link farm or some such thing that you do not want to be associated with for fear of being banned from many popular search engines with technology used to combat link farms.

On a related subject, when you check your back links, make sure that these links appear in legitimate places. If the site is completely dedicated to linking to other sites and doesn't seem to be a directory or something similar you will want to get your link removed as soon as possible. There is no time when one link is worth the risk of being permanently banned from any popular search engine. Aside from the traffic that you will lose from that one search engine, you may wind up "red flagged" so to speak. It seems to be common practice among search engines that
if one finds faulty activity the rest seem to find out soon afterwards.

Overall, if it seems dodgy, leave it alone. It's better to sacrifice one link in caution than to destroy your site's rankings by accepting one you're not sure of. There are hundreds of situations aside from link farms that can and will give you trouble. It would be impossible to list every scam as there are people who make their living (or seem to anyway) in creating and executing these scams. Whenever there is a new form of "SEO" technology that "can't fail," you should watch out because it is almost guaranteed to blow up in your face. The only truly powerful and guaranteed method of SEO is to make your site valuable to your visitors and then let it fall where it may in the realm of the search engine.

It is difficult, after you have optimized your pages and submitted them to search engines and directories, to sit back and wait, but there is not much that can be done aside from attempting to accumulate links from good, solid places. The work that you have done is bound to pay off sooner or later as long as you stay honest. When it comes to the world of SEO, honesty is, indeed, the best policy.

When word gets around about your command of SEO facts, others who need to know about SEO will start to actively seek you out.

About The Author:

James Mahony is the founder of http://www.searchmama.com - A site dedicated to Search Engine Optimization SEO Tips http://www.thedomaintycoons.com
http://www.articlesforwebsitecontent.com

What Is Black Hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

By Dana Goldberg

SEO has been very useful and famous in internet marketing. There are many techniques that make boosting your site a success through different seo strategies. But despite the success of SEO, there are some black practitioners who tend to see the field of search engine optimization as war, and the search engines are doing anything to beat the competition whether it is fair or foul. Those white hatters market with the other search engines as associates or partners who can help them drive links and business to their client's sites.

Cloaking happens when a website or a web page displays different content for a certain search engine spider in opposition to a human user. Cloaking is the one that delivers a version of a page to an Internet user and a different description to a search engine. You will notice a cloaked page is filled with keywords and phrases that the site wants to make them rank high.

This is done by cloaking the programs that weigh the IP address of the other party to a database of the known IP address which comes from a definite search engine spider. If there is a match in the IP address on the list, it serves a page which is particularly written for the search engines.

Cloaking has several good reasons which include increasing advertising and promotion. If you are trying to control your rankings in the different search engines, it might result to penalize your site or it might be banned.

Spamming or the keyword stuffing is a long list of keywords placed in the content and also the code on the page which makes it unreadable. Have you seen a page that repeatedly displays an ad with certain words? It is obvious that the site is trying to rank its page. This is known as keyword spamming but it is just one tip that most SEO companies are trying to do to increase page rank.

You might not notice the page may have invisible text, title tags, meta tags and comment tags. If a page repeats a certain keyword repeatedly, google might place a filter to lessen the ranking or much worse, ban the site. Keyword density can be quite tricky but following the general rule, 3% t0 12 % is the percentage to which a site can use the targeted keywords.

You will notice there are some hidden texts in SEO strategies. This happens when a text or link is invisible to the website visitor but can still be seen by the search engines. If this happens it is considered hidden. Before, people used small fonts to hide the text or they would even use the same color for the background.

This makes them able to put some links which are unseen, but has long been noticed by the search engines that is why they have come up with another strategy this time. Spammers are using the cascading style sheets in order to hide the text. Some are also using tags which are set to hide the text on the page. These strategies are considered hidden if they are left unseen but search engines have their own technique of spotting invisible links so better not do it at all.

The doorway pages are those that exclusively exist to rank well in the different search engines. You may notice some of the pages being ugly and some contain paragraphs which do not have any relation to the topic. Most of the time these doorway pages are not part of the regular navigation of the site which are called orphaned pages.

A black hat SEO can use very good software to filter or generate the doorway pages. This happens when they plug a few keywords and search the page.

You may notice some sites linking to other sites which are have no relation at all. Some sites just link to other sites which is part of their strategy. Now, you will find this truly spamming.

If you are going to put up your own website, make sure that you will avoid these things and keep SEO marketing fair and do not think of competition. Think of how you can increase your site ranking fairly.

About The Author:

D. Goldberg is editor of Make More Money Easily. Insider tips on creating wealth online.
http://www.makemoremoneyeasily.info

Top Seven Ways How Writing Articles Can Explode Your Business

By Nikki Mhlanga

The importance of attracting highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be overemphasized. Routing web traffic to your site can be your only means of survival, especially in the very competitive ecommerce world. Getting a high search engine ranking can be very difficult. Fortunately, there is plethora of website promotion strategies you can use to drive traffic to your website.

There is a wide variety of strategies you can adapt, from paid advertising to affiliate marketing. However, most of these techniques require payment. Nevertheless, there are ways to promote your website and increase your web traffic without spending anything.

Writing articles is one of the best web site promotion strategies you can use, and they can be very effective. How, you may ask, can writing articles help improve your web traffic? Here are the top seven ways in which it can help explode your business.

1. Reach more people When you write good articles, you must share them with other people, and attract traffic to your site in the process. You can post your articles in your website or you can submit them to other sites such as e-zines and online publishers. By submitting your articles to these sites, you give exposure not only to your ideas but also to your website. Simply include a link back to your site or include your information in the resource box. With this, you get exposure and free advertising as well.

2. Free Advertising Submitting your articles to other websites presents an opportunity to advertise your website without paying exorbitant fees. Although you should avoid marketing language in your articles and make it informative and useful to your readers, you can always include your site's link in the resource box. In addition, by making your article relevant and helpful to your readers, you are making a good impression for your website, which could ultimately lead to a visit and hopefully a purchase. Good quality content in an article is far better and more effective than a few lines of ad space.

3. Gain High Search Engine Ranking Create a new web page for your article in your website. Optimize your article to make it search-engine friendly. Use top-ranked keywords and Meta tags that can give your website a high search engine ranking. As soon as you upload your new webpage to your server, search engines will spider through it and you can gain an increase in search engine ranking. Remember that search engine optimized content is a very effective strategy to gain a high ranking in search results.

4. Increases Link Popularity

Instead of looking for other sites who would want to establish reciprocal links with your site, you can simply submit an article to other sites. Just do not forget to include a link to your site in your resource box. When these websites pick up and publishes your article, you automatically get a link partner. Link popularity is one of the factors used by search engines in determining search engine rankings. Make your article especially useful and appealing, so that more websites will be encouraged to publish it.

5. Optimizes your site for improved search engine ranking

By making your site keyword rich, you can greatly improve the search engine ranking of your site. Remember that keyword density is one of the most important factors that search engines use when determining the search engine ranking of site. However, you should always provide relevant, useful and pertinent information. Avoid the temptation of overusing keywords just to gain a high ranking as this may turn off most web surfers. Relevance and quality is still the most important things to consider when writing articles and it will be doubly useful to your site if you make these articles search-engine optimized.

6. Establishes a Good Impression and Reputation

By writing excellent, original and relevant articles, you not only give your site exposure, you are also creating a good impression on your prospects. Encourage more people to visit your site and do business with you by establishing an impressive reputation through your articles. Be seen as an expert in the field and your will ultimately gain more customers eager to do business with you.

7. Enhances your credibility through references and testimonies

Certainly, your articles are going to receive feedbacks and testimonies when you publish them in e-zines and free article sites. Record these positive feedbacks and comments and use them as promotional material in your website or in any of your advertising efforts. Your credibility will be greatly enhanced by these feedbacks, as it will create a good impression on your prospects as well as your existing customers.

Original, relevant, useful and pertinent articles are important tools you should utilize to improve and explode your business.

About the Author:

For 3 Easy Steps To Make Money Online, Visit: http://www.smart-homebiz.com/pips.html

Branding, Branding, Brand-Ing? :: MSN Fails To Keep It Straight

By Rob Sullivan

Sometimes you see promotions come along and you wonder - did they just do that? The current MSN promotion - msnsearchandwin is a prime example of this.

Not only do they use "black hat" or at least "questionable" tactics on the site, but the messaging is inconsistent.

In this article I look at the new MSN promotion and ask the question: Why bother?

By now you've probably heard about the new MSN promotion where you can win prizes simply by using MSN search.

They did do something right by registering a domain name that implies that message. If you go to http://www.msnsearchandwin.com/ you will see the familiar MSN search box.

Wait a minute...Why is this search box blue? Didn't MSN just rebrand with a nicer, cleaner silver grey look?

That, my friends, is mistake number one. It's as if the technical team and the marketing team didn't get together to discuss this program.

I mean, when you go through something as complex and massive as a rebranding, you should make sure the messaging is consistent across the various media. Especially when the promotion and the rebranding launch within days of each other.

This is eerily similar to the article I wrote about Superbowl Ads:
http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/blogs/comments/329_0_1_0_C/. In that article I talked about how advertisers spend millions on a 30 second or 1 minute TV commercial yet they fail to carry that messaging over onto their website effectively if at all.

And here we have MSN - probably one of the most recognized brands on the web and subsidiary to the company with one of the most effective and ruthless marketing arms in the world - and it can't seem to communicate it's message that MSN is rebranding.

I mean, how hard would it have been for someone in Tech to phone up someone in Marketing and say, "By the way, you know that search and win promotion you are doing? Be sure that the colors match the new look of MSN that's launching in a few days."

But wait, it gets better.

First spotted by http://www.kerrydean.com/blog/, if you view source of the msnsearchandwin home page what do you see?

That's right, about a million keywords stuffed into the keywords tag. (OK maybe not a million but there are 256 keywords in the meta keywords tag).

It gets worse. Immediately below the overstuffed keywords tag you will see a bunch of keywords stuffed into a comments tag. Again the same 256 words used in the meta keywords tag.

So tell me, is it OK for a search engine to spam itself?

Perhaps we could all learn a little something from MSN's marketing mistake: Keep it consistent!

About The Author:

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for http://www.textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is a link building company. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

Google Sitemaps :: Are They Or Aren't They Lucrative SEO Tools?

By Rob Sullivan

Google has had a feature out for some time which allows webmasters to create a sitemap file to help Google's crawlers find and index content.

It sounds like a great idea. After all, it's much easier to feed the crawler the content then hope it finds it on it's own.

But is a Google sitemap worthwhile? Is it even necessary?

When the Google Sitemap program first started my thought was "That's kinda cool but what's the real benefit?"

So, I thought I'd try it out and submit sitemaps for a few sites that I own.

When Google Sitemaps first came out it was very difficult to figure out what all the entries meant as well as how to actually create the sitemap.

Sure, it was XML based, and I could plainly see what they expected but when you have a large site, how do you go about creating this?

Then Google came out with http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html, a sitemap generator which is a program intended to help you create a sitemap for your site. This does help speed up the process but unless you are a developer it is a little difficult to implement.

Also, you need access to your server to run the script required to generate the sitemap. If you are unsure you should check with your web host to see if you have terminal access to execute Python scripts.

Personally, I've never tried the Google Sitemapper tool but I have used others. For example, on my personal blog which uses Moveable Type, I found a blog post which shows How to build a Movable Type Google sitemap template http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2005/06/google_sitemaps.html. And I've used Xenu and an Excel spreadsheet http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=199253 which works great as well.

Now that the sitemap creation is covered, let's get into the question at hand. Is a Google sitemap really worth the effort?

A few months ago I would have said no, but lately Google has been adding features that make me think otherwise.

For example, if you've gone through the verification process (which is really just placing a blank HTML file on the site and having Google find it) and ensured your 404 errors are properly configured you can get access to a wealth of additional intel.

One such feature is the "Top Search Queries." This tells you which queries were used when your pages appeared in the search results but may not have been clicked on.

In other words, these are actual searcher queries that were performed on Google where your site may have appeared but not had click-through's.

From a keyword research point of view, this is a huge advantage to you. By monitoring your sitemap stats you can easily see some of the terms people are using and perhaps determine what you need to do to rank higher for those terms so you too can get the clicks that your competitors are receiving.

If you don't have ready access to log analysis or other stats, the Google sitemap can also tell you what terms actually drove traffic to your site.

In other words, these were searches performed on Google that actually generated clicks for your site.

There's also a wealth of other information. For example, "Crawl Stats" shows you how Googlebot sees your site, errors generated by it, and even a PageRank distribution chart detailing how well PageRank is distributed.

So, if you are like me and wondering if a Google sitemap is worth it I'd say yes, it is. The information provided, while mostly technical, can help you troubleshoot problems as well as provide ideas to help you improve your positioning.

About The Author:

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for http://www.textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is a link building company. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

How To Choose Right Keywords To Market Your Website

By Daniel Smith

Anyone who knows anything about how search engines work will tell you that you need to choose the perfect keywords in order to improve your search engine ranking. Yet, if you are relatively new to the website creation scene, you may have very little knowledge about what keywords are, what they do and how they enhance search engine optimization (SEO). Nevertheless, understanding what keywords are and how they work is critical to your websites success and the amount of traffic you will receive at your website. Let's take a look at what keywords are and how to choose the right keywords to improve your SEO techniques. In doing so, you will immediately be able to put such knowledge to use and improve your page ranking in search engines.

Keywords are used by search engines to determine whether or not your web pages will address the needs of Internet users that are conducting a search. The more keywords that are found on your web pages, the more likely your webpage will be listed as a response to a user's query. Yet, a webmaster must bear in mind that not enough keywords on a webpage will have little to no affect on a web page's search engine ranking, while a web page with too many keywords may also have little affect. Why? Quite frankly, an obvious attempt to sway a search engines listing actually reduces the quality factor of a web page and a search engine will rate it lower than it would a web page that contains quality information.

Therefore, choosing keywords is part of the website marketing process: having the right keywords appear on a webpage will result in increased traffic to your site. There are a number of web resources that will help you determine what keywords are frequently used, like keyword generators and the like, but the problem with such tools is they don't necessarily identify the right keywords that will ultimately draw traffic to your site. Instead, you need to be choosy about what keywords you use. First, you can go with the most popular keywords suggested, but the most popular keywords don't always necessarily work in drawing traffic to your site, nor do they always help you improve your SEO and page ranking within major search engines.

First, you will want to try and use truly specific keywords when generating keyword enriched web pages. Try not to be too vast in your descriptions-if a keyword generates 20,000 pages in a search engine, chances are your keyword enriched page isn't going to make a huge difference in you web traffic. Yet, if you are using keywords that few than a hundred sites use you may find that your search engine ranking is increased because so few sites use the specific keywords you have chosen. Obviously then, it serves to tell you that one keyword enriched webpage may not make a huge difference in your overall web traffic, but several keyword enriched pages will. Just be sure to use uniquely defined, themed keywords within your web pages and watch your ranking improve in the major search engines.

Another unique way of selecting keywords can be found in viewing similar websites to your own. Find out what other webmasters are using to draw traffic to their website. How do you do this? First, review many websites that are similar to yours. Watch for repeated themes within websites-do you see a pattern? Take that pattern and use it to your advantage, using a keyword generator determines which keywords are most unique that fit the pattern that other websites are using. Next, generate a few web pages that are keyword enriched with your selected keywords. Conversely, if you are familiar with html, you can view a webmasters source codes and see what Meta Tags they are utilizing. Meta Tags reveal the keywords of a page and can give you a good clue as to how the competition is approaching the keyword enrichment process, if at all.

Whatever you do, when in the process of searching for keywords, don't just throw your best guess out there and go with it. Although it is possible that you may get lucky and actually improve your website traffic and search engine ranking, it is unlikely. Most keywords that are the product of a webmaster's guess are far too broad to make any kind of difference in search engine ranking or web traffic.

There are a lot of little tricks one can use to make the best of the keyword enrichment process. You can write articles that focus solely on the keywords you have selected or you can hire freelance writers to do the work for you. You can make use of a variety of free and subscription web tools to improve the type of keywords you choose. Either way, once you have found the right keywords you will immediately note an increase in your web traffic-an increase that undoubtedly accompanies your improved search engine ranking-an improvement that is the direct result of your improve SEO techniques.

About The Author:

Daniel Smith writes about directory text links http://www.linksattack.com

Search Engine Optimization: Four Vital Steps For Optimizing Your Website

By Donald Nelson

There is a bit of confusion about search engine optimization. Some people think that SEO (the abbreviated form) is nothing more than tricking search engines into giving a high ranking for a particular site. Others think that search engine optimization is so complex that they could not possibly understand it. Neither of these views are correct. Search engine optimization is best defined as the art and science of building web pages that are both search engine friendly and
user friendly. Below are four basic steps that you should take when optimizing your web pages.

1. Your web design should emphasize text and not graphics.

"Search engine friendly" means that search engines should be able to find data on your site that they can put in their data bases. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a search engine is trying to classify pages by text and not by images. If you have an opening page with a beautiful picture of the sea and only two words of text saying "enter here" then this page will not rank high in searches for Florida Vacations. Similarly if you have a headline with important text containing your site's keywords it should not be displayed as a gif or jpeg image. Pages that are all flash or all images are not search engine friendly, and often are not user friendly as well.

2. Links to your interior pages should be easily found by search engines

An important thing to remember is that you want not only your main page, but all of your interior pages to be included in the search engine index. While most people will probably enter your site through the main page, many will enter after doing searches which lead them to your inner pages. The best way to make sure that search engines will find and index your inner pages is to include text links to these pages. If you have navigation system which uses Java script or images, then it is best to add an additional text link navigation bar at the bottom of the site to ensure that the robot follows the links to your inner pages.

3. Your pages should be built around specific keywords or keyword phrases

Robotic search engines and human users have one thing in common: they are trying to figure out what your site or your particular web page is all about. It is not possible to get high rankings for thirty different search terms with only one web page. However it is possible to build separate web pages which explain and give importance to various aspects of your organization's activity. These sub pages can be optimized so that they perform well in searches for your various keywords.

4. Once your material is organized, then your keywords should appear in strategic portions of your web pages

If your site is about Florida Vacations, then these words should appear in the following places of your html pages:

a. In the file name or the url.

If your site is called www.floridavacations.com then this will give you a head start in any searches for this term. Similarly if your company is called XYZ Travels you may have a web page with this url: www.xyztravels.com/floridavacations.html

The url or file name is an important indicator to a search engine, so don't miss the opportunity to put your important term either in your main domain name or in your file names.

b. In the title tag

The text that is displayed in the blue line at the top of your browser is your title tag. The title tag is located in the section of the document. If your main phrase is "Florida Vacations" then the title tag in your html document should look something like this: Florida Vacations: Florida Vacation Information by XYZ travel

c. In the Description tag

The description tag is not seen on the web page but search engines often display it as the text which gives the searcher an idea of what your page is about. The description tag should be compelling, and make someone want to click and see your page, while also containing the keywords that are in your url and your title tag. A description tag for this site might look as follows:

d. In the headlines

Just as someone reading a newspaper looks at headlines to find out what is important, a search engine robot looks at the headlines of a web page in order to pick up the essential feature of that page. Put your main phrase in a headline and place it near the top of the page. Your headline text should be enclosed with special header tags such as , , . A headline tag for our hypothetical page could be written as follows: Florida Vacations: Plan Your Vacation Now And Save Money or Accommodations, Entertainment and Transport in Florida

If you don't like the look of the h1 tag, then use a smaller tag, h2 or h3, or adjust your site's style sheet so that the h1 tag is displayed in a small font which better matches your body text.

e. In the body text of your page

Your main keywords or key phrase should appear in the first paragraph of text and in a natural way throughout the text and also at the end of the page. In normal writing you would first introduce your subject, then explain what it is about and then summarize at the end. Follow this same procedure when you start writing your web page. Pages written in this style will automatically have correct keyword density and distribution.

f. In anchor text on your page

Anchor text is the clickable portion of links on your web page. Suppose you are describing your Florida Vacations and you want to direct your web visitors to an inside page with more information about this subject. Instead of making a link that says "click here," it would be better to have a link that says "Click here for more information about Florida Vacations" or even better, the link text will only be "Florida Vacations" and the "click here" will be rendered as normal text.

If you follow these search-engine-optimization steps when building your website you will end up with web pages that are easily understood by your visitors, and easily classified and indexed by search engines.

About The Author:

Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He is the proprietor of A1-Optimization http://www.a1-optimization.com and provides search engine optimization, copywriting, reciprocal linking and article marketing services. He recently launched a new reprint article directory located at http://www.a1-articledirectory.com

Setting Up An Art Affiliate Site - Part 3

By Jeremy Zongker

The phrase "If you build it they will come" definitely does not pertain to websites. Getting visitors to your site is easy; doing it in a way that is profitable is very difficult and takes a lot of work. This is the most difficult and most critical phase to operating a profitable art affiliate site or any website for that matter. There's no magic formula to follow, but in the sections below you'll find some key pieces of advice that will greatly increase your odds of succeeding.

Step 8 - Monitoring Your Traffic

This is very important. Random odds dictates in part the number of sales you make, so if you do not monitor your traffic you will have no idea how well your efforts in getting traffic to your site are working. Your stats can provide a lot of valuable information such as how many visitors come to your site each day, how many pages they view, how long they spend on each page, where they came from, what path they followed from your site, etc. You can use this information to make changes to your site to help improve your traffic.

The good news is your host most likely provides a free utility for monitoring your stats, but you may have to turn on the stats monitoring or request that your host do this for you. If your host does not provide a tool for doing this or the tool they provide doesn't provide much information then you can visit StatCounter for a free one.

Step 9 - Build Links

To be successful it's important to have a fair percentage of your traffic to be "free traffic". The primary source of this free traffic is going to be from search engines and other sites. We already discussed how to optimize your pages to increase your search engine ranking, but that's only half the equation the other half is links to your site.

To get links to your site the easiest way to start is by submitting to directories. There are hundreds if not thousands of these directories that will accept your website for free. It's important when you submit to these directories or do any link building that you use your keywords as the link text such as Tropical Art. This helps your rankings by having other sites
affirm that your site is about the keywords you selected.

This is work is something anyone can do but is also time consuming. If you don't have the time, once again you can use a site such as RentACoder to hire someone to do this for you. Let me just point out two things you do not need to do and shouldn't do. The first is submit to search engines. Once you have some other sites linking to yours they will find it, and you're better off if they find it on their own instead of you having to tell them about your site. The second is submitting to link farms or free for all (FFA) sites. This will gain you nothing and is a waste of time and money.

Step 10 - Pay for Traffic

Some directories such as Yahoo Directory and other websites require you to pay for inclusion. Some are worth it, others are not. It's going to be up to you to decide. One benefit of paying for this type of traffic versus pay per click is it will also help your sites ranking by providing you with extra back links.

Another option is to use Pay Per Click (PPC) programs such as Google Adwords. With these programs you pay for each visitor that comes to your site. This can be a great way to gain traffic but you also have to be careful with it in order to be profitable. What you need to know is how much you earn per average user. For example if last month you had 500 visitors and made $75 in commission, then on average each visitor made you $0.15. Knowing that you can bid below $0.15 per click and will most likely make a profit on the visitors referred to you from the PPC program.

Step 11 - Wait, Analyze and Revise

It takes time to get your site to rank with search engines. Usually you'll be able to find first on MSN within weeks, then Yahoo within a few months and finally Google possibly up to a year or more later. At the time of writing this MSN gets about 5% of search traffic, Yahoo gets about 15% and Google gets a whopping 75%. Your traffic will come in phases and it will take a long time to see the large payoffs.

Each month you need to analyze your stats again and determine what adjustments need to be made. You may need to increase or decrease how much you are paying per click on PPC sites, adjust your site layout to get more visitors to purchase or perform more link building to improve your sites rank. Just keep with it, continue to read and learn more and not give up and eventually your efforts will pay off. Good luck with your site!

About The Author:

This article has been provided courtesy of Art Affiliate, http://www.artaffiliate.com .

Control The Success Of Your Internet Business With One Simple Step

By Larry Potter

Motivational speaker Anthony Robbins once said, "If you want to be successful, find someone who achieved the results you want and copy what they do, and you'll achieve the same results."

It's an idea I became familiar with many years ago.

When I was first getting started online, I made a lot of mistakes. Not because I wasn't trying to model successful businesses, but because there simply weren't businesses online to model. (In 1996, I was among the first handful of people to actually start selling products over the Internet.)

So I gathered as much information as I could from successful offline marketing experts like Jay Abraham; however, the challenge was adjusting their techniques to work in the online world. I'm sure it will come as no surprise to you that many of the techniques used to market and sell in the "real world" either.

a) Didn't work at all on the Internet.
Or
b) Needed to be seriously adjusted, tested, tweaked, and adjusted some more to really get results online.

The point that I'm trying to make here is that it literally took me years of testing and hundreds of thousands of dollars to discover the same techniques that you'll now see commonly used online today. Fortunately, there is no reason for things to be nearly this difficult for you. Today, modeling the Internet "successes" is relatively easy. (Though, be careful that you separate the phonies and fakes from the "true experts" -- look for those who honestly practice what they preach and who can prove it!)

The biggest investment that you'll need to make is your time.

If you're interested in long-term, life-changing success, then a few extra days of reading and researching shouldn't matter. It's the success of your business that we're talking about here, so don't make the fatal mistake of thinking that you're "wasting time." Remember that what you learn today could be the technique or strategy that saves you not only wasted time and effort, but thousands of dollars in "could have been" profits.

It's an extremely simple concept.

Guarantee Your Success By Modeling The Successful

1) What Should My Web Site Look Like?

Why spend thousands of dollars having a flashy site designed that's loaded with theme music and spinning graphics? Some of the most successful web sites online today have extremely sleek, simple designs.

Of course, before I tell you to model proven successful web sites, I want you to be aware of "the catch".

When researching web sites to model, the ones you should be paying closest attention to are your competitors' and sites that have a profit model similar to your own (i.e. look for sites that make money in a similar way).

For example, if you sell cotton balls on your web site, you shouldn't be modeling your site design after Amazon.com. First off, they sell books (among other things). You sell cotton balls. They offer a wide variety of titles and choices. You offer one product -- cotton balls. Finally, let's face it -- their advertising budget is out of this world! If you're a small or home-based business, you likely don't have the same kind of luxury to experiment and make expensive mistakes.

So think practical -- be realistic -- and start looking for other sites that are successfully selling their cotton balls online (or one, similar product), and model your site after theirs. Your site doesn't need to be the next Yahoo! or eBay for you to be earning a significant 6 figure income.

2) How Do I Write Sales Copy That Really Sells?

Writing sales copy that really sells takes practice -- and education! I have yet to meet someone who just has a "natural gift" for writing award-winning copy without any education whatsoever.

Sure, some people might get "lucky" and stumble onto bits and pieces of the proven approach -- but I can guarantee you that anyone who hasn't studied the "art & science of sales copy" is missing key elements that could increase their sales by 400% - 1,200%. I'm not kidding here.

So rather than playing a "hit or miss" guessing game with your copy, I highly recommend looking for sales copy that makes YOU want to buy and studying it. After you've read enough quality copy, you'll start to notice a distinct pattern that you can apply to your own writing.

3) How Do I Rank At The Top Of The Search Engines?

If you plan on ranking at the top of the search engines, then I can't stress enough the importance of educating yourself. The search engines are a highly competitive arena where only those who have taken the time to "learn the rules" claim a top 10 spot.

Very rarely these days will you hear of someone "getting lucky" and just magically sliding into a top ranking.

So if you want a top 10 listing under your best keywords and phrases (i.e. you want your site to appear in the top 10 listings when someone searches the key phrase "cotton balls" in MSN, Yahoo!, Google, etc.), then you need to do two things.

a) Examine the web sites that already rank in the top 10 under your best keywords and phrases -- and look for patterns.

b) Use the proven know-how of the search engine experts to learn the ropes. If you want a top ranking, then you'll want the experience and advice of someone who makes it their mission to keep up with the constantly changing rules of each search engine and directory.

In fact, before you spend a lot of time examining the sites of your competition for clues as to why they are listed among the top 10, I recommend seeking out these search engine gurus. With their advice, you'll be better prepared to critically examine your competitors' web sites for clues that explain why they're at the top of the ranks.

4) How Do I Drive Targeted Traffic To My Web Site?

If you want to increase the number of targeted potential customers who are arriving at your web site each day, then a listing in the search engines is a good start, but it's also exactly that -- a start.

Again, take some time to research your competition. How are they attracting their visitors? Do they have a lot of links on other sites? Do they have their own Affiliate Program? Do they participate heavily in newsgroups? Do they have an established viral marketing campaign?

Use the experience of your competition to your advantage by learning their secrets -- and then tweaking and improving on their approach to do them one better!

Work Smarter -- Not Harder -- And See Bigger Rewards And Profits

Even now, I still scour the Web to see how others are creating their own success. I analyze my competition. I read everything that I can get my hands on. and I remain open to new ideas and new approaches.

Today, it's relatively cheap and easy to get a solid education in what Internet marketing techniques work, which to avoid, and how to build guaranteed success the first time around! So why would you waste your valuable (and limited) time and money by stubbornly insisting on making mistakes that you could easily avoid with a little education?

Model the success of others and you'll not only guarantee your success, you'll achieve your goals in less time with less expense than you could on your own.

About The Author:

For More Great Tips, Vist: http://homebusiness.kim-lar.com And if you would like to compare your site with the top 10 in your area of interest and see what their keywords are, then download this free program at: http://www.Axandra.com/go.to/wallmann/4

Search Engine Optimization for the Rest of Us

By Nowshade Kabir

When you have launched your website, whether it is an eCommerce store or a corporate promotional site, you must have set certain goals regarding the quantity of traffic you are expecting to have on your site. If you did not pursue your goal with specific web promotional marketing strategies, chances are there you are not very happy with the results you have achieved so far. Although, there are numerous web promotional methods available to your
disposal, optimization of your webpages for search engines is the uncontested leader in this field. If you sell products or services through your website, it is even more so for you. Consider this. Out of various possibilities which include: going to a shop, calling a shop, etc. the prospective buyer decided to search for the product online. Then he or she used certain key-phrase to make a query on a search engine and then among other sites, he or she chose yours to click in. As a seller this is the kind of visitors you need for your site! Search engines have more than twice the e-commerce conversion rate of other traffic acquisition sources. You can get these results for your site with the help of search engine optimization.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is a set of actions carried out with a webpage to improve visibility of that webpage in search engines. The goal is to ensure top places in the search engine results for a specific query.

How important are the search engines? Data show 81 percent of Internet users find the sites they're looking for through search engines. Over 57% of Internet users search the Internet everyday. Up to 500 Million searches take place in a day. 55% of all Internet purchases originate at a search engine as oppose to 9 percent from banners. These statistics are pretty convincing, but surprisingly, according to StatMarket.com only 7 percent of websites are visible by search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can really bring amazing results. Our page http://trade-leads.rusbiz.com recently started to show on the first page of Google for the search phrase "trade leads". Within the last month we have noticed almost 30 percent increase of traffic to this page which is pretty much inline with the available statistics. If your optimization efforts started to bear fruits and you ended up on the second or third page of Google search, you can expect a dramatic increase of almost 5 times more traffic than before and after two months it can be over 9 times! An upward move from 2nd and 3rd pages to the much coveted first page will bring an increase of around 30 percent. Along with the traffic the conversion rate - the quantity of actual purchases - also goes up significantly.

Your position within the first page also makes a lot of difference. The top positioned web page in the sponsored - paid advertisement - receives 50 percent of all clicks and first three top ranked web pages garner 60 percent of all clicks.

Once you have decided to go for search engine optimization, your next step is to figure out for which search engine you should work on optimizing your site. After all there are so many search engines out there!

If you look at the latest statistics available for the month of November, 2005 compiled by Nielsen/NetRatings it, probably, won't be any surprise to you that Google at present has the most search market share. There were 5.1 billion searches done in November. Out of 60 search engines monitored, Google had a share of 46.3 percent,Yahoo - 23.4 percent, MSN - 11.4 percent, AOL - 6.9 percent, Ask Jeeves with its other affiliations MyWay, Teoma, Iwon and search sites of Excite Network has a combined share of around 6 percent, etc. This clearly shows that Google is the undisputed leader among search engines at this moment. That's why in your quest of getting more traffic to your site, you have to emphasize on Google. Other key indicators which favor Google as well are:

. Google is most favored by business people - 82.9 percent of all business users make their queries through Google.

. The Google users are more educated. They are more likely to have a college degree.

. The Google users are from higher income groups.

As mentioned earlier search engine optimization is a set of actions that you have to take regarding your web pages. Here are the key steps of the process:

Select keywords for search engine ranking
1. Make a list of keywords that you think buyers might use to search for products and services you sell.
2. Use a Thesaurus to check synonyms of the words and phrases that you have chosen. You may come up with additional keywords.
3. Eliminate all single words from the list!
4. Go to several of your competitors' websites and check out what keywords they are focusing on by viewing the HTML source of the pages.
5. Now go to Yahoo! pay per click search marketing site Overture, which has an excellent keyword selection tool. Google also has a similar tool located at
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox.
6. Get the search phrases or terms that are popular enough and fall into your criteria from above mentioned lists.
7. Check where you stand with these keywords or key phrases in main search engines. Find the needed tool for this here. http://www.marketleap.com/verify/default.htm.
8. Now try to find whether you should use your keyword in singular or plural, or which one of the two similar search terms or phrases are more desirable by going to the following page:
http://www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp. Remember, studies show that conversion rate for plural words are in general higher than singular!
9. Now that you have a number of keywords, cluster two to three of them for one single page. Remember, every page of your site should be built surrounding one single theme and focused on
maximum two to three keywords.

Optimize the pages for keywords

Place keywords in Title tag, Meta description, Alt tags, Heading tags, Comment tags. Here is an example:

<title>Search Engine Optimization for the Rest of Us</title>
<meta name="description" content="Article about search engine ranking at ezine.rusbiz.com">
<meta name="keywords" content="search engine ranking, optimizing web pages for keywords, SEO steps">
<meta name="author" content="Nowshade Kabir">
<meta name="copyright" content="Nowshade Kabir">
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

Create content

Now develop informative content using these keywords. Use your key words in headlines and alt tag of the pictures. Make sure that you don't over do it! If you stuff keywords more than
necessary for a normal text, search engines can ban your site for keyword spamming. Here is a tool for checking density of keywords on a page: http://www.gorank.com/seotools/. Maximum
preferable density is 3-5 percent.

Submit to search tools

Effective promotion of a website starts with submission of the site to various search tools available on the Internet. There are two different types of search tools - search engines and
directories. Search engines index their listings based on the information retrieved by their spiders which crawl through the hyper links constantly looking for new websites. The directory
listings are compiled by human editors from the URLs submitted to the directory. If your website is listed in the directories you can be sure that the spiders of different search engines
sooner or later will index your site. That's why you should start submitting your website to the directories. The major directories are GMOZ, Yahoo!, LookSmart, etc.

Link popularity

The quantity of links in different websites pointing to your sites is called link popularity of your website. The more popular is your site the more links you get from other websites and vice
versa. Link popularity is one of the key factors that search engines consider in their search algorithm while indexing a website. What would be the rank of a website in a search result
depends on its link popularity in a very big way. Work on getting as many backward links as possible, preferably from the web pages with higher page ranking than yours.

Track ranking

Search engine optimization requires constant monitoring and updating. Don't forget that the competitors are working relentlessly on achieving high positions. The search algorithms are also constantly changing and improving. That's why every now and then you should check out how your site is doing.

Track traffic

If your work started to bring good results and you are getting more traffic, but the visitors are not taking expected actions, this means, you probably have selected wrong keywords. Start all
over again with keywords analysis.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing web pages for natural or organic - as they are also called - searches. Once you are certain that you have done everything possible to
achieve maximum results in this sphere, you should consider pay per click marketing with Google, Yahoo and MSN. Effective web promotion requires a combination of both of these two search engine marketing strategies.

About the author:

Nowshade Kabir is the CEO of Rusbiz.com, a global B2B Portal, which helps companies build web store, buy and sell products and services using eMarketplace, eCatalog and other features. Rusbiz also offers website development packages: http://www.rusbiz.com/design_package.html

How Keywords Affect Your Rankings

By James Mahony

This article explains a few things about SEO, and if you're interested, then this is worth reading, because you can never tell what you don't know.

We all want to know how keywords affect our rankings, but to find out we'll need to do a little work. Many say keywords are the key to good search engine rankings, although they aren't at
all the only factor.

If you need a tool to help you decide on your keywords, try Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool - it allows you to test your keyword rankings by showing you statistics on recent searches for them. It's a great tool when you have no clue which keyword you should choose, as it can give you a list of terms that were recently searched on.

Keyword Density.

Keyword density refers to the number of the keywords contained within your text relative to the amount of text there is. Preferred keyword density ratios vary between search engines, but you should generally try to keep them between two and eight percent (major search engines prefer the lower end). Keyword analysis tools can help to optimize a web page's keyword density. These tools are good if you're not sure of what you're doing, as they're very intuitive and explain things as you go.

Counting the Keywords.

Many SEO experts will tell you that the keyword density of your text isn't a very important factor, and that you should be careful not to overdo it. So is there a limit? How many times should you use your keywords? SEO experts won't be able to answer these questions for you, because no-one's really sure of the answer. The best answer is that it changes regularly, and you can never be sure - you have to experiment to see what works for you.

Location of Keywords.

When testing the effects of keyword location, we found that pages with the keywords at the top and bottom of the page ranked higher on Google than pages with the keywords in the middle.

I trust that what you've read so far has been informative. The following section should go a long way toward clearing up any uncertainty that may remain.

Many other search engines also give keywords more or less weight based on their location, but keep in mind that each search engine's algorithm is different. Here's a list of how most search engines prioritize keyword positions, from most to least:

1. Domain name.

2. Page title.

3. Headings (i.e. H1, H2, etc.).

4. Body text (the first 2 to 3 KB usually counts more).

5. Meta tags (especially description).

6. Links (including keywords in the URL or link text of links to you).

7. Alt text (the 'alt' descriptions for your pictures).

Really, though, keyword density is one of those areas where you'll have trouble on your hands if you try to second guess the search engines. Be cautious.

As your knowledge about SEO continues to grow, you will begin to see how SEO fits into the overall scheme of things. Knowing how something relates to the rest of the world is important
too.

About The Author:

James Mahony is the founder of http://www.searchmama.com - A site dedicated to Search Engine Optimization http://www.searchmama.com
http://www.thedomaintycoons.com
http://www.articlesforwebsitecontent.com

Improving Conversion Rates

By David Andrew Smith

You have optimised your website and attracted a large number of inbound links by one means or another. The results of this are that your site now appears on the first page of the top three
search engines, Google, MSN and Yahoo, for your chosen keywords or phrases. You have cracked it! Now you are getting hundreds of visitors a day to your website. Unfortunately very few are staying to browse your site and even fewer are purchasing your products or enquiring after the services you offer.

You must look closely at your site to find the reason behind this if you wish to improve your conversion rates. There are two immediate actions you can take. Have you optimised your site for the search engines or your visitors? You should always optimise your site for your visitors as they will provide you with your income not the search engines. The search engines are simply a means to an ends.

It is better to have twenty visitors to your site 15 of whom purchase a product or service than it is to have 500 of whom only 5 make a purchase. When developing your site keep in mind your potential customers and put text into the site that they will appreciate, like and find informative. Never write your copy with the search engines in mind and those omnipotent algorithms. Algorithms do not make enquiries or purchases people do.

If your copy is attractive and readable and encourages real people to contact you or buy a product then it is highly likely to be equally attractive to the search engines. When writing your copy you should not be trying to 'sell' your product or service with blatant over the top advertising. Be more subtle. You are fulfilling a wish or a need or solving a problem so be
informative. People have carried out a specific search so the need is already there you have to now give them the information they need to convince them to purchase of you. So as always the
content is the key to making sales as well as attracting the attention of the search engines.

You must work hard at getting this content right. The second line of investigation is to analyse your sites visitor statistics carefully Look at each visitor and how they arrived at your site. That is what search terms did they use? What page did they land on? What pages did they navigate through? What page did they exit on? What area of the World or country did they come from? If they made no enquiry or purchase, look at their search phrase, and where on your site they went, and attempt to calculate why they left without making that enquiry or purchase. Was it because their search was not appropriate for ypour actual product or service? Do you not perhaps provide your service to their particular area? Did they miss or could not find exactly what they wanted on your site because of badly designed navigation paths? Or is it perhaps because the text is simply not up to standard?

If you think it is a structural problem then you can alter this so that people find it easier to navigate to places on the site that they actually want. It may also be a matter of your content so you can change this.

By constantly monitoring your site's statistics you can dramatically increase your conversion rates, that is, convert more of your visitors into paying customers. Finally do keep note of what you do so that you can accurately monitor the changes you make to find out if and by how much they are making a difference.

About The Author:

David Andrew Smith runs a successful contract cleaning company http://www.wesparkle.co.uk for both commercial and domestic customers in the UK. He has devoloped and maintains the company's website.

4 Ways To Generate A Stampede Of Traffic To Your Website

By Jeff Smith

Whether building or growing your online business, you need 3 basic elements to succeed: something to sell, copy that sells it and traffic generation to drive visitors that will buy.

Weakness in any one of these areas can very severely impact your results frustrating you beyond belief.

These 3 building blocks may not be new for you, but I bet that you have tended to think about them as islands, each of which you must master in order to achieve online business success?

ONLINE BUSINESS SUCCESS ECOSYSTEM

Suppose you have spent thousands having a bang-on sales letter written for your business, and you are able to draw some significant traffic to your site.

You'll sell products won't you?

Of course, however, what happens if your product (or the product you are selling) is not of high quality or is not significantly percieved as offering value?

First, you will get many returns resulting in lower profits, additional service fees, additional support costs and possibly losing your ability to take payment online.

Second, a bad sale, even if not returned, will not gain you additional word-of-mouth sales. In a niche market, this means you will certainly miss out on capturing your market. In a mass market, this means you have significantly hurt your chances for successful press, reviews, interviews and low or no cost advertising opportunities.

Third, you hurt your reputation for all other business you want to capture within your market. High equity business build customer value over time by continuing to market additional products and services - typically higher-end over time. By releasing a less than stellar product, you stop your progress dead in its tracks.

So, as you can see, marketing strong, in-demand and differentiated products IS critical to your overall marketing campaign.

To truly move into advanced traffic generation territory, we have to think about techniques that will consistently build momentum and traffic month after month, rather than one-time traffic spikes that cannot be sustained.

This is important background to these 4 leading traffic generation techniques.

GENERATING A STAMPEDE OF TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE

1. Writing Content

There is no better way to virally spread your thoughts, brand, products and services to a wide audience than developing content. Writing articles, audios, podcasts, blogs, ezines, special reports, rebrandable products, content-rich web pages, are just some of the opportunities that will both bring in new traffic as well as build relationships with your market resulting in more sales and higher value in long-run.

2. Affiliate Program

When I launched my online business back in 2000 little did I realize that within 1-year, over 75% of my traffic and more than 50% of my sales would be generated through affiliates and joint venture partners. Now with over 1,000 affiliates generating consistent, targeted traffic,
my business largely operates in a completely automated fashion. I could literally disappear off the face of the earth for the next 6-months and still see very little impact on sales. Obviously, to build an affiliate army, you must own the rights to your own products.

3. Develop Your Own Quality Unique Products

What does product creation have to do with generating traffic? Actually, quite allot. Even if you plan a business model around selling someone else's products, wholesale selling, or advertising revenue, creating your own product is a MAJOR traffic building technique. Creating high-demand products will build your brand, gain you lots of no cost publicity, attract partners and joint venture your way, build word-of-mouth marketing, open up many new channels to generate traffic (Try Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and eBay to start) and can act as a leveraged stream of income for your business

4. Take Your Message To The Street.

Generating a stampede of traffic often rests on your ability to convince the market that you are someone that needs to be checked out and followed. So, focus on building your visibility through Press releases, joint ventures, keynote speaking opportunities, local presentations, teleseminars, seminars, courses, workshops, bootcamps, book reviews, trade shows, podcasts, radio shows and more...

While these are certainly ADVANCED techniques for generating a traffic stampede to your web business, they are not difficult, require no special skills and well within the reach of anyone looking to break out with their web business this year.

About the Author:

Discover how to create your own best-selling eBooks, Special reports or books to sell online ...AND keep 100% of the profits. Limited time complimentary access to 7-Part Minicourse will get you started quickly and easily. Visit: http://www.highertrustmarketing.com/

Optimising Your Framed Site For Search Engines

By Craig Broadbent

One method that web designers can use to design and structure a website is to use frames. However, if your web site utilises frames then you could have major problems getting indexed in the search engines. Although site design using frames has become less prominent with the rise in popularity of CSS, there are still sites out there utilising framesets. But there are ways to sidestep the problem.

In the past, frames were considered a great way for site designers to quickly and easily display content whilst maintaining a structure throughout the site (e.g. by having a title, or navigation bar). They allow more than one HTML document to be shown on a page by displaying each one within its own "frame", which are defined by the "frameset" HTML tag. This tag defines which pages to show and the size and position of the frame it should appear in. Although this sounds great in theory, it creates problems with both navigation (and therefore search engine indexing) and usability.

As web usability expert Jakob Nielsen has documented on his site, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html, there are several usability issues associated with frames:

They can be disorientating to users - if they click within one frame and this affects another frame it can make navigation confusing.

The address bar doesn't change as the user navigates between pages, because the pages load inside the frameset. Again, this can confuse and disorient users.

The loading time increases because there is more than one page to load. If the site takes too long to load then visitors are going to go elsewhere instead.

If a user bookmarks a page within the site, they will be sent to the default frameset when they revisit rather than the bookmarked page.

On top of this, there are also issues with search engines finding and indexing all of a framed site's pages. The most fundamental problem is that search engines find and index pages by following HTML links in a document, and because framesets reference a page rather than linking to it, the pages within the framed site cannot be reached. Ultimately, this means that
no matter how large a site is there's a possibility that only the frameset page will be indexed.

There is a way round this problem. You can place a "noframes" tag in the body of your frameset page to provide alternative content that will be displayed if the browser is not frames compatible. Fortunately, search engines can also read this tag, so if you include normal links within this tag the search engines can spider them like a normal site. Visit
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_noframes.asp for more information on the noframes tag.

So now the search engines can find your pages, but what happens when your visitors find them?

Because the frameset dictates which pages should be loaded, if an internal page is accessed directly through a search engine then it will be loaded outside the context of the frameset. This means that the page will be viewed on its own without any of the intended accompanying pages specified by the frameset, such as a navigation bar. This type of page is known as an "orphan" page. They are confusing for visitors because once they find the page they may not be able to navigate the site, meaning you may end up losing the visitor, or worse, a customer.

Again, there is a way around this issue. You can use JavaScript to force the page into its framed context, and although this causes problems with JavaScript incompatible browsers it does neatly avoid the orphaned page issue. There is a great tutorial available at
http://www.webreference.com/js/column36/forcing.html showing how this is done.

There are alternatives to frames that allow for similar functionality, the most popular would be to position elements on a page using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), or if you are designing a dynamic site then utilising Server Side Includes (SSI) would be a good option. Although the above shows how to avoid the complications caused by frames, for the various stated reasons it would be better to avoid them altogether.

About The Author:

Craig Broadbent is Search Engine Optimisation Executive for UK-based internet marketing company, WebEvents Ltd. WebEvents offers a range of ROI focussed internet marketing solutions http://www.webeventseurope.com.

Choosing The Right Directory

By Adrian Lawrence

When you're looking for the right directory to list in or to use for research, it can be a nightmare. Everyone thinks of Yahoo!, of course, but there are quite literally thousands of other directories out there, many specialized, others not. How can you tell the difference?

By being educated on what you're looking for. When you're looking for the right directories to list in, use the following guidelines.

1. Everyone lists in free directories. Why not? You can list in as many as you want, and you're not losing anything by doing so. Free directories include Yahoo! and Dmoz, as well as hundreds of others who either use their own listings or license listings from Yahoo! and Dmoz. You shouldn't stop here, though, especially if you're running a commercial website.
2. The more directories you're listed in, the more inbound links to your website you've got. And the more inbound links your website has, the higher the search engines will rank your page. Make sure when you create your directory listing to use your keywords in the text; in some search engines, this will help your ranking as well.
3. Some of the free directories are not being listed well by Google and other standard search engines. This is not because of some nefarious competitive advantage, but because the free directories often look like search engine spam or because they don't optimize their sites well. The paid directories are careful to watch for this; after all, the more hits they get, the more they can charge for their services.
4. After listing in all the free directories - which you should, as it costs you nothing but a little time - you should start listing in the better paid directories. Even though you have to pay to get in them, they give you an edge that the free ones don't. For one thing, they're more exclusive, and customers won't be looking at your competitors as much. For another, as noted above, the directory will probably place higher in a search engine. And they tend to be specialized. If you sell medical equipment, listing in a medical equipment directory will almost certainly be a worthwhile investment.
5. If you list in really good and specific directories with proven traffic from customers you want to draw, you're investing your money in the right place. A few good quality links will draw the perfect customers for your business. Finding the right directory is hard, but search for directories that specialize in your industry and in industries that cross into yours; for instance, if you provide medical equipment, don't overlook listings for scientific and laboratory equipment.
6. The next generation of directories is here now. With sites like MSN's Small Business Directory, targeted searching for exactly what you want is easier than ever before. In addition,
   many of the newer directories offer you additional small business tools, more information, specialized content for your industry, and many other services. You'll only find these with paid directories.

About The Author:

Adrian Lawrence is the webmaster of Indexplex a leading web directory http://www.indexplex.com . Please feel free to republish this article provided this resource box remains together with a working hyperlink.

Using Keyword Research To Improve Web Traffic

By Ben Anton

The use of appropriate key words is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. Selecting and targeting pertinent key words and phrases is crucial for building web traffic and getting the audience you want for your web pages. Like any other type of advertisement, your key words must be carefully chosen to ensure that you achieve both high page rankings and relevant traffic. Achieving high page ranks is useless if the traffic it brings you is not the right audience. For this reason, many experts believe that the target key word list used for a site can mean either success or failure for a web site or online business.

It is no longer enough to simply choose a relevant domain name for an online business or web site. Choosing the right key words for the site is now equally if not more important. The majority of people who visit a site get there by using a search engine. They will type in two or three words that describe what they're looking for, scan the resulting list generated and pick one that seems relevant until they get the answer or product they need. This is where target key words are utilized. Key words are what enable people to find your site; choosing the right key words for your site will ensure the right people find you.

With this in mind, identifying your target audience is the first step in creating relevant key words and phrases. Again, this is not dissimilar to targeting television advertisements. Consider location when you are developing your target market. For example, if you own a used car dealership in Hayward, California, any traffic you get from outside a very specific area is virtually useless to you. Similarly, if you operate an online business that does not ship outside the USA, generating traffic from other countries will not help you make sales. By adding key words that are specific to your location as well as your product, you will better hone into your target audience, improve your rankings, and achieve a better conversion rate, which will help increase your site's page ranking, in turn.

Keyword competition should also be taken into consideration when developing a site's key word list. Going back to the used car dealership example, let's say a potential customer types in the word "cars" into a search engine. They'll never find what they need, because it's far too general-generating around 500,000,000 different sites to choose from. Typing in "used cars" generates almost 70,000,000. That's still too many to deal with effectively. Using "used cars Hayward" generates almost 900,000 hits, and narrowing the focus even further by using the zip code rather than the city name reduces it to less than 25,000.

Choosing key words for your web site works the same way. If your key words are too general, your target audience will never find your site, because the search terms generate so many web sites that it is impossible to look through them all. However, if you go too far in the opposite direction and use too many key words, or key words which are too specific, you risk losing business as well. The best key word phrases are no more than three words in length.

So how do you choose the right key words? The first step is brainstorming with colleagues, friends or an SEO professional, to come up with a list of 20 or more appropriate key words. The Google Keyword Tool is an excellent place to research key words. By entering key words into this tool it will give you an idea of the popularity of certain words and offers you alternative key words and phrases.

Once you have a good list of terms, you may want to refine it to call out the strongest terms that have the best potential for sales or traffic conversion. There are several good online research tools available, which can help you decide which words will be most effective for you. Some good examples are WordTracker and Keyword Discovery. These sites may charge a fee for using their database. After reviewing the terms, eliminate the key words that rank poorly or are very unpopular, then prioritize the remaining terms according to search popularity. These terms will become the keywords you will want to focus your initial SEO campaign on.

Always remember that when it comes to key words, you are focusing on optimizing your traffic rather than maximizing it. Setting up the right keyword list for optimization is the cornerstone to a successful web site.

~Ben Anton, 2007

About The Author:

Ben invites you to read more about key word research and PPC campaigns at Mad Fish Info's web site - http://www.madfish.info.

Title Tags: The Forgotten Secret To Search Engine Success

By Tom Trush

You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who isn't looking for a quick fix to place their website atop the search engine rankings. In fact, many people are spending big bucks just for a shot at securing prime placements on sites such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL.

But while most of that financial focus is concentrated on creating keyword-rich content and building incoming links, one forgotten element of a search engine-friendly website often receives little attention: title tags.

So what are title tags? They are the descriptive text that displays at the top of your browser on every website you visit.

Not only are title tags important for telling visitors what's on each page of your website, they're essential to high search engine placement. A simple adjustment to your title tags will often result in a rise in your rankings.

Why?

All major search engines, including Google, examine title tags because they offer information about your web page. In a way, your title tags - because of their position at the top of each
page - serve as an introduction to your website. If the description on your title tags doesn't match the content on your web page, you run the risk of receiving a low ranking ... or, worse yet, no ranking at all.

However, when you incorporate keyword phrases that match your web page content and correspond with the terms your prospects search, you'll take a significant step closer to your desired position in the search engines.

To test this concept, I encourage you do a Google search. Type in any term or key phrase you want. Then, once the search is complete, open whatever website is in the #1 position (not one of the Sponsored Links). Once it's displayed, take a look at the browser bar at the top of the page. Do you see your keywords?

When creating the content for my new website at www.writewaysolutions.com, I focused on the key phrase "Phoenix copywriting." As a result, that is one of the terms I used on my home page title tag. Today, if you search Google for "Phoenix copywriting," you'll see my website in the #1 position. And on Yahoo! it's #2.

Frequently, many companies only display their names on the home page title tags. The problem is that, unless you're a well-known brand, your prospects aren't likely to search by your company name. Instead, they will use terms that describe the product or service they need.

To choose the most effective key terms or phrases for your title tags, begin by selecting words relating to what's described on your page. The trick is determining the phrases your prospects are searching, while avoiding broad terms with a lot of competition. You can use a free service such as Digital Point's Keyword Suggestion Tool at http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ to help select your keywords

One additional tip is to include your geographic area as part of your title tag phrases. By adding your city and/or state, you'll narrow down the number of websites competing for your desired search engine placement.

By now, I'm sure you're wondering what's in your website's title tags. So go ahead, take a look and start incorporating these suggestions. In no time at all, you could soon see your website soaring to the top of the search engine rankings.

About The Author:

Tom Trush is a commercial copywriter based in Phoenix, Arizona. His eBook, "Do-It-Yourself Mortgage Marketing Made Easy: How to Profitably Promote Your Mortgage Services Using Simple Writing ... Even on a Limited Budget!," is available by visiting http://www.diymortgagemarketing.com.

20 MORE Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools

By Kalena Jordan

My recent article 20 Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools listed 20 of the most popular time-saving tools you can use to help you with your search engine marketing efforts.

The article proved quite popular with both search engine marketers and webmasters, some of whom decided to send me their favorites that weren't included in the list. I also discovered a few more of my own since I wrote the original article, so I decided to add to the list by reviewing another 20 tools.

So here is a list of 20 MORE must-have search engine marketing tools:

1) SEO Toolbox

The SEO Toolbox is a collection of 11 free SEO tools developed by the team at SEOmoz, including a backlink checker, URL inclusion checker, an outbound link checker, domain age detection and a PageRank checker.

Price: Free

2) EditPlus

EditPlus is a 32-bit text editor, HTML editor and programmers editor for Windows. While it can serve as a good replacement for Notepad, it also offers many powerful features for Web page authors and programmers.

Price: Shareware (Registration fee encouraged)

3) WordPress

Like Blogger, WordPress offers hosted blogging and blog templates. Unlike Blogger WordPress also offers a stand-alone publishing platform to enable you to host and fully manage your own blogs.

Price: Free

4) Marketing Experiments

MarketingExperiments is an online laboratory engaged in research publishing and education. Their mission is to test and document every conceivable marketing method on the Internet.

Price: Free

5) Web Page Analyzer

Web Page Analyzer is a free web page analysis tool and web page speed tester to help your improve web site's performance. Enter a URL and the tool will calculate page size, composition, and download time.

Price: Free

6) Web Accessibility Toolbar

The Web Accessibility Toolbar has been developed by the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium to aid manual examination of web pages for a variety of aspects of accessibility. It's particularly helpful for site usability testing and there are versions for both Opera and Internet Explorer users.

Price: Free

7) Search Engine Friendly Layouts

SearchEngineFriendlyLayouts offers CSS-based layouts that are known to be search engine friendly (easier for search engine robots to index). All of the XHTML, CSS and Javascript code used in the layouts are provided for use free of charge.

Price: Free

8) The Interactive HTML Tutorial

Dave's Interactive HTML Tutorial is a tutorial is for anyone who is serious about learning HTML code or who just wants to brush up on some of the basics. It includes code descriptions and integration examples.

Price: Free

9) Indextools

Indextools is another popular web site analytics program that also offers built-in PPC bid management tools.

Price: From USD 49.95 per month

10) WordTracker

WordTracker was one of the very first keyword research tools available on the Internet. It helps you pinpoint the most popular keywords for your product and services, generate thousands of relevant keywords to improve your organic and PPC search campaigns, research your online markets and find niche opportunities to exploit.

Price: From USD 30.00 per week

11) CSS Layout Techniques

CSS Layout Techniques catalogs search engine friendly web site templates based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). All code is made freely available for download. The site also includes links to various online CSS resources and tutorials, appropriate for both the novice and the seasoned CSS veteran.

Price: Free

12) RSS Feeds Submit

RSS Feeds Submit is automatic RSS and blog submission software that submits your feed to over 80 search engines and directories automatically. The creators claim it's the quickest way to submit your feeds to the most popular RSS directories and blog search engines. You can also choose to submit your site manually to directories that require more detailed information about your feed.

Price: USD 29.95

13) iBusinessPromoter (IBP)

iBusiness Promoter (IBP) is a suite of professional web promotion tools created by Axandra.com that helps you with all aspects of website promotion and search engine optimization. It includes tools for optimizing your pages and links, researching keywords, submitting your site to search engines and directories and search position querying to determine how your site pages are ranking for particular keywords.
Disclaimer: Some of the functions performed by this tool (e.g. automatic submissions and search rank querying) are discouraged by Google in their Webmaster Guidelines.

Price: From USD 249.95

14) Bid Rank

BidRank is a desktop application that you run on your PC to help you manage your PPC campaigns and automate the keyword bidding process. There are two versions of the product available: BidRank for Yahoo! which is a Yahoo! approved third party bid management tool to help you manage Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns. Then there's BidRank Plus which works with multiple pay-per-click search engines, including Google AdWords, to help you manage multiple PPC keyword accounts.

Price: From USD 14.90 per month

15) Hot Banana Web CMS

Hot Banana is an easy-to-use Web Content Management System (Web CMS) that helps marketers build and manage SEO-friendly Web sites that can be automated and optimized for maximum lead generation and conversion performance. Content Management Systems are notorious for being SEO unfriendly but this one is purpose built to avoid such problems.
Price: From USD 329.00 per month

16) WebPosition

WebPosition is a powerful suite of tools aimed at improving your web site's search engine positioning and monitoring performance. WebPosition allows you to check your search engine rankings, target your keywords, optimize pages using built-in expertise, submit URLs to search engines and analyze conversions using WebTrends site metrics.

Disclaimer: Some of the functions performed by this tool (e.g. automatic submissions and search rank querying) are discouraged by Google in their Webmaster Guidelines.

Price: From USD 149.00

17) Competitive Intelligence

Trellian's Competitive Intelligence provides the means to monitor your competitor's web sites to identify their major traffic sources. You can find out which sites are responsible for sending traffic to their pages, including search engines and the search keywords used.

Price: From USD 99.95 per month

18) HTML Toolbox

The HTML Toolbox from NetMechanic is an online tool that helps you discover HTML errors and syntax that prevents browsers from processing your HTML and prevents visitors (both humans and spiders) from reading your site. HTML Toolbox automatically fixes html problems upon request with one quick click. The Toolbox includes several tools in one, including a HTML Check and Repair, a Spell Checker, HTML Validator, Browser Compatibility Check and a Load Time Checker.

Price: Free for up to 5 pages

19) Web CEO

Web CEO claims to be the most complete SEO software package on the planet. The latest version of this SEO/SEM software provides the ability to research keywords and keyphrases that will bring most targeted visitors to your site; optimize your Web pages for better search engine visibility; submit your site to search engines; research, analyze and build links; manage pay-per-click campaigns; track your positions in search engines; review site traffic statistics; get rid of errors on your sites; find bad links before your visitors do; edit your Web pages; upload any file or folder to your site and monitor the availability of your web site.

Disclaimer: Some of the functions performed by this tool (e.g. automatic submissions and search rank querying) are discouraged by Google in their Webmaster Guidelines.

Price: From USD 199

20) AdWatcher

AdWatcher is a suite of tools designed to help you receive the maximum ROI for every advertising dollar you spend from online marketing campaigns, be it Google AdWords, banners, text links, or email marketing. It detects and combats click fraud and allows you to manage all of your ad campaigns from one easy-to-use interface. Essentially, it provides click fraud monitoring and ad tracking.

Price: From USD 29.95 per month

So there you have ANOTHER 20 time-saving tools to help you with your search engine marketing efforts. Now there's no excuse for avoiding SEM. Happy site marketing!


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena is Director of Studies at Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

20 Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools

By Kalena Jordan

Anyone working in Search Engine Marketing knows that this industry travels at warp speed. If you're trying to market your web site or the web sites of your clients via search engines, chances are your time is limited - severely limited.

To squeeze as much into my schedule as possible without resorting to self-cloning, my daily routine involves the use of a range of time-saving tools and software. I use such tools on a daily basis and I truly don't know how I'd function without them. I'm not the only one. I've talked to other SEM experts and they also rely on various tools to help them through their hectic schedules.

Here is a list of 20 must-have tools used by busy SEM professionals:

1) Freshbooks Invoicing and Timesheets

Freshbooks is an online estimating, invoicing, project management and time tracking service that gives your business a professional image, no matter how small. I use it to invoice all my clients online and it can even be set up to automatically bill and debit the credit cards of recurring clients every month. It also has built in staff timesheets and project management tools for online collaboration.

Price: Free for 3 clients or less

2) XML Sitemaps Generator

The XML Sitemap Generator trawls through all levels of your site to generate an XML sitemap. It also gives you a running count of pages, provides a text-based URL list and a HTML sitemap you can import straight into your site. The online version of the generator is free for sites of less than 500 pages, but there's also a low-cost script-based version for larger sites that can be set up to automatically index your site, upload an updated XML file to your server and ping Google and Yahoo when done.

Price: Free for sites of 500 pages or less

3) Proposal Kit

ProposalKit takes the chore out of creating and tailoring client estimates and proposal contracts. With over 200 pre-designed self-guiding templates ready to fill in the blanks with your company, project/product/service and client information, ProposalKit has already half completed your proposal for you.

Price: From USD 47.00

4) ClickTracks

As far as site analytics goes, the depth and accuracy of data provided by ClickTracks just can't be beaten, in my opinion. The visual analysis ClickTracks provides is probably its best known feature, with statistical data overlaying actual screenshots of your web site pages. The ability to flag individual visitors or groups of visitors based on unique identifiers (such as all persons who visited page x or all persons who bought product d) provides a level of analysis that other analytical packages can't compete with.

Price: From USD 79.00 per month

5) AWeber

AWeber is a multiple auto responder and mailing list management service rolled into one. Members can send an unlimited number of campaigns, follow up messages, and newsletters to an unlimited number of approved opt-in lists. For newsletter purposes, a wide range of templates are provided, as are free training guides and videos to help you create campaigns.

Price: From USD 19.95 per month

6) JROX

JROX Affiliate Manager software (JAM) is a super powerful affiliate program that includes follow up email tools, mass email broadcasting, custom URLs and the ability to create up to 10 affiliate downlink levels. It offers affiliates groovy 3d Flash-based graphs and charts displaying their referrals and commissions and an organized marketing tools area for storage of banners, links and promotional materials.

Price: Free for 50 affiliates or less

7) Keyword Discovery

Keyword Discovery is an advanced keyword research and search term suggestion tool produced by Trellian.

Price: From USD 69.95 per month

8) Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free web-based site metrics/analytics software hosted by Google. After you insert tracking code on all desired pages of your site, Google collects data regarding visitor activity and then you are able to log into an Analytics interface and view site activity and produce reports.

Price: Free

9) Backlinkwatch.com

Type your URL into Backlink Watch and get complete detailed information about the quality and quantity of backward links pointing to your website. It will show you anchor text, Google Toolbar PageRank, total outbound links on that page and nofollow flag for each of your inbound links available.

Price: Free

10) Jim Boykin's tools

A collection of 17 free SEO tools developed by Jim Boykin and his staff, including a cache analyzer, Backlink checker, keyword density tool and multiple inbound and outbound link checking tools.

Price: Free

11) Google Webmaster Central

Google Webmaster Central is Google's one-stop shop for webmaster resources. It contains answers to common questions about Google crawling and indexing and guidelines for webmasters to follow when publishing their content. It also provides statistics, diagnostics and management of Google's indexing of your website, including Sitemap submission and reporting.

Price: Free

12) Yahoo! Site Explorer

Yahoo! Site Explorer is Yahoo's version of Google Webmaster Tools. It allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search, view the most popular pages from any site, view a comprehensive site map and find pages that link to that site or any page.

Price: Free

13) Ranks.nl

Ranks.nl is a keyword density and page prominence indicator. Type in a URL and target keywords to determine the page density and prominence for certain keywords within the page text and/or HTML tags.

Price: Free

14) Rex Swain's Tools

Rex Swain is an independent software developer who has uploaded a range of his custom server tools and demos to his web site. Tools include an RGB color sampler, HTTP Cookie Demo, a HTML sampler and an email form demo.

Price: Free

15) SearchStatus for Firefox

SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla that allows you to see how any and every website in the world is performing in the search engines.

Price: Free

16) Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is probably the world's most popular spreadsheet application. Apart from it's powerful formulas for financial reporting, Excel charts and spreadsheets are great for site analytics analysis and sharing, sitemap creation, SEO/PPC campaign reporting and tracking link building campaigns.

Price: Bundled with MS Office from USD 180.00

17) Google Reader

Google Reader is a RSS and XML feed reader that constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for new content and presents them to you in one interface. It also allows you to share sites/pages of interest with others.

Price: Free

18) Blogger

Blogger is a popular online blog hosting and templating service owned by Google, where you can quickly set up a blog of your own to post thoughts, interact with people, and more.

Price: Free

19) The Lynx Viewer

The Lynx Viewer developed by YellowPipe allows webmasters to see what their pages will look like when viewed with Lynx, a text-mode web browser. This view is very similar to how search engine robots see your site.

Price: Free

20) Basecamp

Basecamp is an online collaboration and project management service designed for staff and clients to manage internal and client projects from multiple locations.

Price: Free for 1 project

So there you have it. 20 of the most popular time-saving tools to help you with your search engine marketing efforts.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena is Director of Studies at Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

How to Find Free Content for your Web Site

By Kalena Jordan

I see a lot of webmasters complain in forums and chat rooms that they don't have enough content on their web sites but they don't have the means or the knowledge to find more.

There are actually many ways to obtain more web site content. You could hire someone to write it for you. You could purchase some ready made content about your site topic or you could spend some time and write content yourself. But did you know that there is a way you can get hundreds of pages worth of high quality, fresh content every day without paying a cent? There is. It's called article syndication.

Article Syndication

Articles relating to thousands of topics are freely available for syndication on web sites. Authors provide them for this purpose to gain a wider audience and achieve more back links. Generally, the only requirement for webmasters is that the author's by-line, resource box and link is included with the published article. In terms of copyright, you simply need to follow the author's publishing guidelines when republishing their article. This usually involves an "About the Author" paragraph at the bottom of each article with a sentence and link to the author's site. These syndication requirements are generally specified in the article itself.

How to do it:

1) Browse the Internet to find articles you can syndicate. I use the article announcement groups at Yahoo Groups but you can also find them at sources such as Submit Your Articles.

2) View the articles being distributed by the group and check their freshness and quality.

3) Join the email list or subscribe to the RSS feed of any article groups that seem to be distributing content relevant to your web site.

4) Check your email or feed reader regularly to browse and select new articles.

5) Cut, paste and publish the articles into your web pages, giving credit to the author as requested in their syndication guidelines.

6) Voila! Fresh, daily content.

Articles for Blogs

If the article content is to be used on a blog, there is an even quicker way to publish it. Depending on what blog software you use, you can simply forward the email containing the article directly to your blog control panel using the publish via email option and then edit the post to correct any formatting issues. The other advantage of this method is that search engines LOVE blogs and tend to index them more often than regular web pages.

I use blog article syndication quite successfully for a couple of my clients. One is in the travel industry and the other has a large wedding portal. I simply subscribe to articles on travel and wedding related topics and publish them to the blogs belonging to each client. My clients supplement these with articles and blog posts written by their own staff or hired writers.

Advantages

There are a number of advantages to using article syndication:

Relevant, Timely Content - You can choose content that is closely geared to your existing content and of interest to your audience. For example, if you sell airline tickets, publish travel articles about exotic destinations. The idea there is that persons reading travel articles might be thinking about traveling themselves and need to be reminded to book their plane tickets.

Cross Promotion - You can choose content that gives you the opportunity to up sell to your own products or affiliate products. For example, if you sell scented candles online, you could choose to publish articles about increasing the romance in your marriage and then include a link at the end of the article to your candle sales catalog (would you like fries with that?).

SEO Value - Apart from the obvious value of having fresh content regularly available for indexing, there are other SEO advantages to article syndication. Most articles are keyword-rich, meaning that they contain a lot of keywords and phrases that people might use in search queries. Publishing these articles means that your site has a better chance of being found for related search queries. One of my clients noticed their syndicated article pages ranking in the top 10 Google SERPs for target keywords within two days of publishing! You can also embed links within the articles or at the end of articles to related areas of your site using keyword-rich anchor text.

Increased Traffic & Sticky Content - It's not only search engines that love fresh content. You'll find that you'll attract more visitors when you publish relevant articles. Provided you find ways to interact with your new visitors such as allowing them to comment or sign up for your article feed, your site will become stickier and retain those visitors more easily.

Disadvantages

There are really only two disadvantages that I can think of about using article syndication. One is that the same article published on various web sites can sometimes be treated by search engines as duplicate content. So generally, a search engine will try to determine the original source of the article and index/rank that page while ignoring all other versions. If you publish a fresh article quickly enough, you can sometimes be lucky and have your version of the article picked up and treated as the *original*. The other disadvantage is that it can be time-consuming to trawl through the hundreds of new articles announced daily and choose the ones you want. You also have to scan them carefully to ensure accuracy of facts and to check if the author has used correct spelling and grammar usage. But compared to the costs of paying somebody to write articles from scratch, I think this is a very minor inconvenience.

Want to get the jump on your competition and increase your traffic? Use article syndication to publish fresh, relevant content on your site every day.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Back to the Future SEO

By Kalena Jordan

Recently I took on a new SEO client who had a major problem. They had a very popular portal site in a competitive industry but for 3 months running, their Top 10 search engine rankings for major keywords had taken a consistent dive. The position drops ranged from 1 or 2 places up to 20 places. They hired me to try and address the issue quickly because their advertising revenue relied on the top 10 visibility of their brand in the SERPs.

I looked for the usual suspects, a Google penalty, dodgy code, hidden text, new competitors, 404 errors, keyword stuffing, fast acquisition of links, domain issues, major hosting outages, over-optimization and code bloat. Nothing - the site checked out clean. There had been a major Google algorithm update in the past 6 months, but that had occurred weeks earlier to the downward trend. So then I asked about the design history and if any major changes had been made a week or so prior to the sudden ranking drop. The client couldn't recall any major changes so I went about the business of improving the site as best I could and integrating a link building campaign to obtain links from high quality sites in the same industry.

But I couldn't shake the idea that there must have been some major change to the site that impacted its previously ideal search engine compatibility. So I asked for the site's log files for the past 6 months and imported them into ClickTracks for a closer look. I discovered that the site showed a solid growth in traffic starting in February and continuing until April. It was attracting the most traffic on April 5 and then it suddenly plummeted. The logs didn't reveal much else, except record keyword referrals for the period, followed by record lows.

It was then that the little light bulb above my head switched on. I could use the Internet Archive to see what the site looked like on those dates! If you aren't already familiar with the Internet Archive (affectionately known as the Wayback Machine), it's an online repository of web sites in historical timeline format so you can see what web sites looked like on different dates in their history. Check out Wikipedia's front page design from 2001. It's fun, and a little embarrassing, to see what certain web sites looked like many years ago.

So I pulled copies of the client's home page from the archive for the date range that coincided with the major spike and fall and studied the HTML code of each carefully. When I compared them, I saw one glaring difference. The older version contained keyword-rich link titles for the main navigation area while the later version didn't. The links were still there, but the link title attributes were not and a quick check of the client's current home page HTML showed they were still missing. It turns out that the web designer had inadvertently removed them during an update without realizing and never replaced them.

Because the navigation area consisted of a large number of untitled links, the result was a drop in the home page keyword density for the client's major target keywords, allowing their competitors with higher density to push them down the SERPs. I presented my discovery to the client and they were somewhat relieved to have an explanation at last. The link titles were reinstated and the client's rankings have been climbing back ever since.

The whole experience got me thinking: the Wayback Machine is really the SEOs secret weapon. It's Back to the Future SEO! Here are just some ways SEOs could use it:

1. To spot major HTML coding changes on your own sites or client sites that may have impacted rankings (as per my case study).


2. To study the design and HTML history of your client's sites and their competitors.


3. To spot if a web site has been optimized in the past.


4. To study the design and HTML history of the web sites belonging to your major SEO competitors.


5. To spot if a web site has used dodgy optimization tactics in the past.


6. To see what keywords your competitors targeted in the past versus the ones they now target.


7. To compare design and usability changes made over the years by big brand sites (and imitate them).


8. To rescue HTML code and images for sites that have been hacked or wiped without back-ups in place.


9. To track content duplication or copyright violations where the site owner has already removed the offending material.


10. To check the true age of a web site and see if it has been used for a different purpose or company in the past.

These are just uses I came up with from the top of my head, but I'm sure there are plenty more. Some of these uses are not SEO specific, but useful to webmasters in general and particularly to persons looking to buy an existing domain.

Then there are the fun uses – embarrassing your mates by emailing them a copy of their old site complete with frames and blinking graphics. Having a laugh at the first designs rolled out by some of the major search engines. This is what Yahoo looked like in 1996. Here's Google in 1998. The possibilities are endless.

So what are you waiting for? Use the Wayback Machine and Get Back to the Future!


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

What Do Busy SEM Professionals Keep in Their Toolkit?

By Kalena Jordan

As a busy professional in the hectic Search Engine Marketing industry, my time is limited. Severely limited. Sometimes I feel like I need to travel at warp speed just to keep up with the demands of this industry!

To squeeze as much into my schedule as possible without resorting to self-cloning, my daily routine involves the use of a range of time-saving tools and software. Here are a few of my favorites:

Freshbooks Invoicing and Timesheets

This little gem is an online estimating, invoicing, project management and time tracking service that gives your business a professional image, no matter how small. I use it to invoice all my clients online and it can even be set up to automatically bill and debit the credit cards of recurring clients every month. It also has built in staff timesheets and project management tools for online collaboration.

Staff can use the stop-watch to time the various tasks they do for certain clients and then press a button to bill those clients automatically, based on the hours logged in the timesheet. Freshbooks offers plug-ins for a wide range of third-party tools such as BaseCamp, PayPal and 2Checkout and provides the option of email or ground-mail invoicing. I've raved about this product so much that they put my testimonial on their home page!
Price: Free for 3 clients or less

Link: http://www.freshbooks.com/

XML Sitemaps Generator

For fast and easy XML sitemap creation, the free generator from XML-Sitemaps.com can't be beaten. It not only trawls through all levels of your site, but it gives you a running count of pages, provides a text-based URL list and a HTML sitemap you can import straight into your site, plus it generates the XML file for you in both compressed and un-compressed versions.

The online generator is free for sites of less than 500 pages, but there's also a low-cost script-based version for larger sites. It can be set up to automatically index your site, upload an updated XML file to your server and ping Google and Yahoo when done. The XML Sitemaps Generator also gets endorsement from Google by being included in their List of 3rd Party Plugins for Google Sitemaps.
Price: Free for sites of 500 pages or less

Link: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Proposal Kit

I discovered ProposalKit when I was searching for a sample contract for my SEO business. Basically, ProposalKit takes the chore out of creating and tailoring client estimates and proposal contracts. With over 200 pre-designed self-guiding templates ready to fill in the blanks with your company, project/product/service and client information, ProposalKit has already half completed your proposal for you.

You simply flesh out the templates with your own data and contact details. Templates are particularly suited to online businesses and include documents for the initial sales pitch, the planning stage, estimating, contracting, project timelines, analysis and even invoicing. For SEO consultants, ProposalKit's Contract Kit even includes a Search Engine Optimization Services contract.

Creating a proposal from scratch can be a real pain. ProposalKit provide the structure, layout, design, instructions and examples to get you well on your way before you even get started. What I like best about this tool is the range of ProposalPack templates and ready-made contracts you can buy as add-ons to suit certain industries, such as Web Design, SEO, Hosting and the like. The smartly designed, colorful templates also give your proposals a slick and professional edge, regardless of your business size.

Price: From USD 47.00

Link: http://www.proposalkit.com/kits/pkhelp.htm

ClickTracks

I use ClickTracks Optimizer exclusively to track the visitor metrics of my sites and those of my clients. Many in this industry claim that Google Analytics is just as good as ClickTracks, but I disagree. While it's good that Google Analytics is free and the depth of data is impressive, I personally find the interface clunky to use and not very intuitive. The reports and graphs also seem to take a long time to load, even on broadband.

While ClickTracks Optimizer is a bit on the expensive side, the depth and accuracy of data just can't be beaten, in my opinion. The ability to flag individual visitors or groups of visitors based on unique identifiers (such as all persons who visited page x or all persons who bought product d) provides a level of analysis that other analytical packages can't compete with.

The visual analysis ClickTracks provides is probably its best known feature, with statistical data overlaying actual screenshots of your web site pages. While many of my clients find web site statistics a bore, this visual display can impress even the most skeptical. The depth of referrer data is superb, with the ability to drill down to IP address and the precise keyword search that triggered the referral. The WYSIWYG interface is simple to use and gives you true "at a glance" stats. The ability to export reports into Word, PDF or Excel is another plus.

Every time I use ClickTracks, I shake my head in wonder at how I ever managed with the far inferior analytics packages I used before.

Price: From USD 76.00 per month

Link: http://www.clicktracks.com/

AWeber

This is a recent discover of mine. I was tired of using two different tools to manage my autoresponders and newsletter subscriptions lists when a friend pointed out the fact that I could use AWeber to manage both.

The beauty of AWeber is that they manage ALL your mailing lists on your behalf and make it simple to send campaigns and emails to each list individually, or broadcast to all your lists at once. Members can send an unlimited number of campaigns, follow up messages, and newsletters to an unlimited number of approved opt-in lists. For newsletter purposes, a wide range of templates are provided, as are free training guides and videos to help you create campaigns. Various types of subscription web forms are created at the press of a button and you have a central control panel to access statistics so you know at a glance which sign-up forms are more effective. They even offer split testing for this specific purpose.

AWeber also have a very diligent verification and opt-in process, which weeds out drive-bys from genuine subscribers and ensures your subscribers know exactly why they are receiving correspondence from you. AWeber claim to have 99.34% email deliverability rates and I can understand why. All messages have personalization features and can be run through CAN-SPAM compliance testing prior to sending to ensure higher deliverability.

Probably the biggest advantage of AWeber is that their service is very affordable with free unlimited customer support.

Price: From USD 19.95 per month

Link: http://www.aweber.com/

JROX

After months of searching for the perfect affiliate software that did everything we wanted it to for our Search Engine College affiliate program, we finally chose JROX Affiliate Manager software (JAM) for the job. We first heard good things about it via webmaster forums and then read user reviews on Tucows. After a couple of days integrating it into our site, testing, tweaking and testing some more, it pretty much runs itself.

JAM is a super powerful affiliate program that includes follow up email tools, mass email broadcasting, custom URLs and the ability to create up to 10 affiliate downline levels. It offers affiliates groovy 3d Flash-based graphs and charts displaying their referrals and commissions and an organized marketing tools area for storage of banners, links and promotional materials. What's particularly useful is that it integrates with both PayPal and our 3rd party payment gateway 2Checkout, meaning that whenever a course sale is made via one of our affiliate links, the commission is automatically calculated and communicated from the payment gateway to JAM. Overall, the features of JAM are very impressive compared to similar products on the market.

Price: Free for 50 affiliates or less

Link: http://jam.jrox.com/


I use all of these tools on a daily basis and I truly don't know how I'd function without them. Which got me to thinking, what 'must have' tools do other busy SEM professionals keep in their toolkit?

To find out, I surveyed a few of the busiest industry rock stars that I know and asked them to share their favorite tools. I sent my request to:

1) Andy Beal, Owner of Marketing Pilgrim
2) Jennifer Laycock, Editor of Search Engine Guide
3) Jill Whalen, Owner of HighRankings.com
4) Karon Thackston, Owner of Marketing Words
5) Kim Krause-Berg, Founder of Cre8asite Forums
6) Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder of SEOMoz

Here's what they came back with:

Andy Beal

Owner, Marketing Pilgrim - http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/


Andy likes:

1) KeywordDiscovery - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

2) Google Analytics - http://www.google-analytics.com/

3) Backlinkwatch.com - http://www.backlinkwatch.com/

4) All of Jim Boykin's tools - http://www.webuildpages.com/tools

5) QuickBooks for accounting - http://quickbooks.intuit.com/

6) Ranks.nl for density checking - http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

7) Rex Swain for checking server stuff - http://www.rexswain.com/

8) FireFox plugin - http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

"This is not all, but just some quick picks…"


Jennifer Laycock

Editor, Search Engine Guide - http://www.searchengineguide.com/


Jennifer likes:

1) ClickTracks - http://www.clicktracks.com/

2) KeywordDiscovery - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

3) EditPlus - http://www.editplus.com/

4) Microsoft Excel - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

5) GoogleReader - http://www.google.com/reader/view/


"Then of course Blogger, WordPress and Movable Type since those are the three blog platforms I use…"

Jill Whalen

Owner, HighRankings.com - http://www.highrankings.com/


Jill likes:

1) KeywordDiscovery - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

2) Basecamp for project management - http://www.basecamphq.com/

"Plus a bunch of Firefox extensions that come in really handy…"


Karon Thackston

Owner, Marketing Words, Inc. - http://www.marketingwords.com/


Karon likes:

1) Marketing Experiments – http://www.marketingexperiments.com/

"All the rest of my favorites are books..."


Kim Krause-Berg

Owner and Founder, Cre8asite Forums - http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/


Kim likes:

1) BaseCamp for project management - http://www.basecamphq.com/

For accessibility testing:

2) Web Page Analyzer - http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

3) Colorblind Web Page Filter - http://colorfilter.wickline.org/

4) Web Accessibility Toolbar - http://www.wat-c.org/tools/

5) Opera Mini for mobile web browsing - http://www.operamini.com/

6) Sizer for resolution testing - http://www.brianapps.net/sizer.html

"My tools are a bit different because I no longer do SEO and for my own sites…"


Rand Fishkin

CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz http://www.seomoz.org/


Rand likes:

1) Indextools for analytics - http://www.indextools.com/

2) Wordtracker for keyword research - http://www.wordtracker.com/

3) Keyword Discovery for keyword research - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

4) Google Webmaster Central for all sorts of yummy data - http://www.google.com/webmasters/

5) Yahoo! Site Explorer - possibly my number one tool; I love the link & URL information they provide - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

"In terms of tools, at SEOmoz we almost exclusively use our own stuff…"


So there you have it; a few old favorites and a few new time-saving tools to try. Warp speed, here we come!


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena is Director of Studies at Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Get A Free Google Friendly Website

By Raymond Noud

Squidoo is a free website service. They provide you with a tag based webpage that you can use for just about whatever you choose. It can be a list of your grandmothers cooking recipes, a family tree website, a collection of pictures of your house pets or whatever you want. You just cannot post porn or hate related stuff of course.

The site is set up is such that many different areas of the squidoo site link back to your page via tags and other group links ect. The overall sitewide pagerank on squidoo actually helps each individual site's pagerank improve if the site content is kept fresh by it's owner. This creates good backlinks immediately upon publishing your first page or as they call it: a Lens. Squidoo pages are used for virtually anything. Some Squidoo pages are used for business opportunities and some are used to list grama's favorite recipes and anything in between.

Squidoo also puts Adsense ads on all lenses sitewide and splits the proceeds with the lens owner that the click came from! And remember this website site is free!

Squidoo also has pre-made modules for Amazon Ebay and others that you can add to your site and you can make money from those sales as well.

The site allows HTML in all fields of the setup process. You can see your Squidoo lens in Google within two weeks without even submitting it to a single search engine! And my site showed up in Google the second day after I made it! I just followed the prompts, and put in what I wanted to say and it was not complicated at all.

The site administrators at squidoo work hard to ensure this is a friendly community for everyone. This is very important and I must say, they do it very well.

In my case I created a site to sell products but you can use this site for almost anything. Long story short, you just cant go wrong with a Squidoo page so get yours free today!
http://www.squidoo.com/raysgroup

About The Author:

Raymond Noud, network marketer, musician and Gutiar builder. I Also build websites. See mine here: http://www.makemoneyteam.com

Do You Need A Google Specialist?

By Ben Norman

If you are putting your business out there, how are you ensuring that people look at what you have to offer. Having an excellent website is just part of working with internet marketing; the other half is getting the right people there to see it! When you are thinking about the best ways to promote your site, take a look at what a Google specialist can do for you.

There are over 30,000 search engines currently in use on the internet, but 90% of all searches go through the top three Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google is at the very top of that list, and you'll find that having a website that pops up at the top of a list of natural search results is one of the best ways to get traffic to your site. One of the reasons that Google is so popular however, is because it has mechanisms in place for making sure that the search results it produces are relevant to what the searcher is looking for. The Google search engine will take things like keyword density and context into account. With all of this in mind, it is easy to see why a Google specialist might be employed to get your site to the top of the rankings!

A Google specialist help you make your site a great deal more accessible; many new sites have found that there is something about their text or their layout that makes them unattractive to search engines. When you think about the fact that 50 percent of purchases made online are preceded by a search engine query, you can see that this is a valuable source of traffic that you cannot afford to lose.

When you are looking for a Google specialist, there are few things that you should keep in mind. First take a look around for any testimonials that you find or any examples of his work. Take a look at some of his credentials; Google offers certification for competence in the use of their AdWords program, and this can tell you if your specialist is serious about what he does. Similarly, when you speak to him or her, make sure that you feel comfortable with them; this is a person who will be affecting the way that you present to the world and that is the best reason to make sure that you can trust them.

Finding a good Google specialist can help you change your company's fortune. Today, people use search engines to find everything from good toy shops to local restaurants, so make sure that when they search, they can find you!

About The Author:

Ben Norman is a UK based Google SEO Specialist (http://www.ben-norman.co.uk), published author and specialist in organic search engine optimisation. Ben works with a wide range of businesses helping them to make more money from utilising the search engines natural listings.

Finding A Search Engine Optimisation Consultant

By Ben Norman

Whether you've decided to invest in an online component to your business or you've been looking up ways to get traffic on your existing site up, there are plenty of options that are open to you in terms of search engine optimization. One thing that you have to keep in mind, however, is that search engines have gotten "smarter," or at least the people who have been programming them have. The same tactics that earlier web designers could use to bring traffic to their sites are no longer valid, and if you want your site to remain at the top of the search list, you will need to employ increasingly original tactics. One strategy used by more and more online businesses is employing search engine optimization consultants otherwise known as SEO consultants.

A seo consultant will be able to help you modify your site in a way that is very attractive to search engines, bringing your more business. He or she will also ensure that the traffic that comes to your site is more relevant. If your site is optimised for the wrong crowd, you will soon discover that you get plenty of hits but that your sales and your contacts list will not go up at all.

There are many ways to find a search engine optimization consultant online. Because so much of their business is conducted over the internet, you may have the option of purchasing the expertise of someone in an entirely different country. With this in mind, it becomes extremely important to check out their credentials and their testimonials. While many of them will have testimonial pages, you should also check to see if they have some third-party reviews that attest to their expertise. If you have any friends who have employed one, ask them; word of mouth is generally a good way to get information on good people who provide reliable services.

One way to find a search engine consultant is to go to a site where they are recommended. Before you decide which one you want to go with, keep in mind that some of them will optimize your site through methods which are not necessarily beneficial to you. Be aware that some sites will hire people to go to your site and drive the traffic up. Ask about how they intend to do what they promise, what kind of changes they want to make to your site and where those hits they are promising are coming from! Make sure that they are not using techniques like hidden text and links to drive up your business; while giving your more traffic, this is an inherently dishonest and, at the end of the day, a futile attempt at getting better business.

Essentially, finding an SEO consultant is just like entering into any other business arrangement. You will want to look for someone who has experience, good references and who you feel that you can trust. Ask if they have any references you could contact, or at least an example of some of their work.

When you are looking for a good search engine optimization consultant, remember that they are going to be affecting the way that you present to your customers, so make sure that you pick someone who will take your business seriously!

About The Author:

Ben Norman is a UK based SEO Consultant (http://www.ben-norman.co.uk), published author and specialist in organic search engine optimization. Ben works with a wide range of businesses helping them to make more money from utilizing the search engines natural listings.

SEO - Get Your Website On The First Page In One Week

By Chris Angus

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is something of a black art, many people know about it but many people don't know exactly how to do it.

Performing SEO quickly and doing it well enough so that a site appears on the first page of the search results are very important when it comes to a sites success.

The most important aspect and the easiest way of getting a site up the rankings very quickly is by having keywords in the URL.

Should you register a new domain, try and get one with the keywords included.

I noticed a great SEO domain was up for grabs, so I registered it, built the site and within 4 days it was on the first page in position 6 in Google.

The Second most important aspect in quick SEO is keeping your keywords in your sub pages. If you had a site that sold wheelchairs you should have the word "Wheelchairs" in the name of your sub pages.

This will help your site rank a lot faster.

The Third most important aspect is having your home page content displaying your keyword phrases. I would suggest having your keyword phrases repeated on your home page at least ten times thoughout your copy.

The next important aspect is building links with your keywords in the anchor text. Have about three variations here. I once had a client and actually did not do ANY changes to his site. All I did was build hundreds of links from articles with his keywords in his anchor text. Within a matter of weeks he was on the first page of Google for a number of keywords.

Lastly, the age of your domain counts for a lot. If you have an aged domain that is over 2 years old you stand a chance of getting onto the first page of the search results within a week if you work hard at it and build links with your keywords in the anchor text.

About The Author:

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

SE Optimization For Article Writing is So Last Year

By Matthew Bredel

So, you wanna be an SEO guru. Things change at a rapid pace online. As soon as Web 2.0 was here, talk of Web 3.0 ensued. SEO was dead and then no wait! It was alive and kicking, according to the pundits. There were black hat marketers, white hat marketers, grey hat seo and the Long Tail. Did you change hats at some point in a panic? Is keyword density really that important? Is content still king? One day it's PPC campaigns, another day it's organic ranking through blogging links and then articles. Aargh! How do I keep it all straight?

Today, it can be hard to keep up with the buzz words. Once you've optimized your website, you can find out a minute later that Google has changed the rules again. What do you do? If you get too wrapped up in all the rules and jargon of seo marketing, you will actually take your eye too far off the ball and lose business and page rank anyway.

First of all, content always has and always will be king. Writing strictly for SEO is not going to get you very far for very long. Trying too hard to "not" write for seo isn't going to get you very far either. If you're worried about overdoing it with your keyword density and don't use your keywords enough, you can end up with content that doesn't come across naturally. Good, organic content is going to help you in more ways than one. First, it's going to help you get real human traffic. Secondly, it'll get the Google and Yahoo spiders stopping by.

Keeping updated on how things work with the search engine spider bots is going to help you keep your website on either page one or page two. If you can't manage this on your own, hire a pro, enrol in a course or buy a book. If you are past page two for your target keywords, your target audience probably won't find you. You also need to focus on the Long Tail and target more than just the top three keywords.

If you get your audience visiting but don't offer them valuable content, they won't stay and won't click on their "checkout" button. You have to please the robots and the humans. If you
overdo SEO you won't please the humans. You could also tick off the robots and get blacklisted. If you try to be an underachiever and ignore SEO, you could miss out and be stuck on page seven.

For those who have done a lot of seo articles, it's a great idea to stop writing seo articles for a while and focus on something else. Did you know that forum participation and blogging can be really effective at helping you with your PR? Diversify your seo strategy a little! Social book marking and tagging are another area of seo strategy that can truly help you bring up your readership and ranking of your site and increase your sales.

About The Author:

Matthew is the creator of TheWebReviewer: http://www.thewebreviewer.com - Work at Home Reviews, & NetWebVideo: http://www.netwebvideo.com - Home Based Business Free Membership. Matt currently resides in Southern California & is married with two children and has been an internet marketer since 2006.

Blog Optimization 101

By Nick Stamoulis

Getting your blog out there and seen is the point, right? You want visitors to see your blog so that they can either click on the ads or click through and buy from your site, otherwise whats the point of the blog, right?

So how to get the blog out there. First is to make sure that blog directories and the blog search engines are picking it up. Also link or claim your blog at the social bookmarking sites. To give all fo this a jump start take a look at the following check up list. If your new to blogging and just setting up a blog these are good starting points. if your blog is not performing the ways it should be then the following tips are good for giving your blog a check up.

• It is extremely important that RSS auto-discovery tags be placed in the header of every page within a website that has feeds available. By doing so you will provide users and search engines alike with a simple method of being notified that you have RSS feed(s) and it will allow immediate subscription without fuss. In contrast simply having a RSS logo hyperlinked with a feed provides little or no benefit and does not provide auto-notification that a feed is available.

Furthermore it is recommended to create a unique auto-discovery tag for each available RSS feed and place them all in the header. If you think you have too many then I would recommend choosing the feeds that are most relevant to the page content.

• A WordPress plugin was noted called the "SEO Title Tag Plugin". This plugin really impressed me because it allows WordPress users to see and individually customize the title tags of every post within the associated blog; without a doubt a powerful capability since title tags play a significant role in rankings.
• If you use paid Press Release services to disseminate your latest company news then it also works to your advantage to create a separate blog specifically used for your press releases. In this regard you can use the associated RSS feed to get some free publicity by submitting it to blog directories and other blog-syndicating properties.
• If you are finding it difficult to get the word out about a particular piece of news then Greg Jarboe has a great idea for you: track down the key bloggers that appear to be driving the news in your industry and contact them with your story.

If your story interests even one of the bloggers and gets published then you could get a massive amount of publicity for zero dollars.

During the presentation of this concept Greg Jarboe utilized a powerful online tool called BuzzLogic to identify which people drove the latest news in key topics. Unfortunately BuzzLogic
appears to be priced well out of the capabilities of many small businesses (at $12,000/yr minimum) so I will provide a very basic free alternative to determining the leaders of a particular topic.

Step 1) Search in your favorite search engine for the particular topic. Within the results separate the blogs from the other content. If you do not find at least 10 bloggers then try search again with different wording for the same topic.

Step 2) Look at each blog individually and look for indications of readership or popularity. For example perhaps one of the website has a Feedburner subscription counter with the blog's current readership OR take the URL of the blog and conduct a backlink check on Yahoo using "linkdomain:www. .com" (without the quotes) to see which blogs have the most inbound links. Sort these blogs according to their popularity.

Step 3) Find contact information on each site and then contact the writer(s) starting with the most trafficked blogs and pitch your news/idea/story.

Note: I am not saying the steps above have anywhere near the quality of results that a full-fledge program like BuzzLogic has but it is certainly a great place to start.

• Promote your latest blog posting by taking advantage of a popular blogger's vanity. Compliment them within your key article (somehow) using their full name and perhaps provide a link back to their website. Chances are that the blogger often keeps an eye on blog postings or sites that utilize their name. When they visit your posting there is a good chance they will read it.

General Blog and Feed Optimization Tips:

1. Providing full text feeds was noted regularly throughout the presentation as a far superior method for creating backlinks and getting found online.
2. Your blog feed should have 20 or more items never the minimum 10.
3. Provide a feed for every category your site/blog offers.
4. Ensure that you create keyword rich blog posts and ensure that your brand is well represented within the text.
5. Ensure the most important keyword/phrase is listed in the blog title.

Optimize Your Blog's Linking Structure For Best Results

1. Provide a listing of the top 10 posts within your site so the stories do not get buried in archives or category pages. If the articles are performing well it is just logical to keep them in plain view to get more mileage from them.
2. Use Tag Clouds and Tag Pages to increase the possible routes to your valuable past content.
3. If you are using WordPress as your blogging tool it is a great idea to install the "Sticky Posts" plugin which allows you to 'stick' an introduction or key post at the top of each category page.

About The Author:

Nick Stamoulis and experts at Brick Marketing provide companies with Internet Marketing services. Nick Stamoulis writes daily in his blog the Search Engine Optimization Journal. Call 877-295-0620 or visit: http://www.brickmarketing.com

Search Engine Optimization - Do You Really Need It?

By Nick Stamoulis

Search Engine optimization.SEO for short is the art of making both the reader and the search engines happy with your webpage. Now how do I do that? Well simply put you want to have a set of keywords or phrases that appear on a certain page a number of times.

No sweat right, well yes it can be. Those words have to appear in such a way that they are conversational and balance against the amount of code that is on your page. Keeping the code to the needed amount and not extraneous is no short task. But having your keywords balance it and appear to be natural in the text can be a challenge.

One easy way to do this is to keep each page focused on one or two keywords. Remember that search engines rank pages, not sites. Its always better to have one page rank number 1 than to have 25 pages rank 250th in the search engines...

Stay online for long and you're sure to get conflicting messages:

"Learn everything you can about search engine optimization," the experts will say, "because without your website will die."

"Don't worry about search engine optimization," others will tell you. "It's just a myth to get your money because the search engines will crawl your site anyway and you want to write your copy for your customers, not the search engines."

The problem with both of these messages is that they are both correct. Yes, I said that's a problem. Both statements are true.

Search engine optimization is the science of studying the search engines and how they rank web pages so that you can build a website that gets crawled quicker and ranked better for your important keywords. The issue with putting too much stock in it is when you think there is an automatic formula or panacea for all your lack of traffic or sales. Search engine optimization wasn't designed to cure all of your problems, but it can cure some of them.

The first thing you need to know for excellent search engine optimization is research. You MUST conduct the proper keyword research. That's a starting point. Then, you need to narrow down your niche. Do this before you build your website. In future posts on this blog we will show how and why this is important and give you all the details in performing the proper search engine optimization without wasting your time on useless activities. Stay tuned in. More to come.

About The Author:

Nick Stamoulis and experts at Brick Marketing provide companies with Internet Marketing services. Nick Stamoulis writes daily in his blog the Search Engine Optimization Journal. Call 877-295-0620 or visit: http://www.brickmarketing.com

5 SEO Myths Debunked

By Gabriel Adams

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is extremely important for any internet company but also important for web sites from brick and mortar businesses. SEO is important to bring the right targeted audience to your website. There are many myths about SEO, some are true, some were valid a few years ago, and many have no basis.

Myth 1: Multiple Domains

One SEO tactic involves etting up multiple domain names to bring more traffic to your business. This can be helpful, but often is not. Not only would this be expensive (yearly fees for domain name and maintenance) but would be very time consuming to maintain all the websites.

Myth 2: Search Engine Submission

Resubmitting your information every few weeks is not necessary, but could even reduce your priority ranking. Once your website is in the database of the search engines, there is no need to update your information.

Myth 3: Meta Tags

Another myth is that meta tags increase visitors. These might have been true five - ten years ago years ago, but current search engines do not place priority with the inclusion or absence of meta tags on a website. One important thing to remember is that the search engines do use the meta description tags when displaying your site in the SERPS. So while the meta tags may not affect your rankings, well written meta tags can increase the number of searchers who visit your site.

Myth 4: SEO Is Too Costly

Other myths include the value of SEO. They feel SEO experts are a costly, unnecessary expense. Marketing efforts are very costly. Direct mail, banner ads, radio or TV ad time, print advertisement, e-mails lists and trade fairs can all be more expense than SEO. Some companies believe an in house SEO effort can be as effective as an SEO company. This is a myth too, and SEO is a function that should be outsourced to ensure the company is aware of the latest trends. Traffic on you your website can be increased drastically by a SEO professional.

Myth 5: SEO Doesn't Matter

The other major myth is that when people are looking for a specific company, they type in the website url. Since the exact name of the website is rarely known, many people (estimated at close to 90%) save time by using a search engine to quickly and easily locate a website. For example, even for major websites like http://msn.com/ or http://amazon.com/, people use a search engine to locate the website instead of going directly to the site. SEO is important so that your business may be found on the search engines.

About The Author:

Need search engine optimization Philadelphia PA services? Visit us at http://www.goseopro.com/

Dallas SEO: Example Of Successful Local Sem

By Moe Tamani

SEO or search engine optimization is an integral part of Internet promotions today. Businesses have started to look more and more at the local market like businesses in Dallas are looking at focusing on Dallas SEO.

With competition and cutting edge technology, it is important for businesses to promote themselves and create a high visibility in their local area. This recent development can also been seen in Dallas as a research indicates that 95% of traffic are directed by the top 10 search engines. Hence Dallas SEO as a keyword and strategy is necessary.

It doesn't really matter whether your business is targeting a global audience or local audience. Even if you are promoting your services or product to a worldwide audience, you can still reach out to Dallas customers. At the end of the day, this will help in achieving two objectives:

1. A good brand positioning in the local and International market


2. Local market capture

According to search engine experts, 70% consumers in the last couple of months have searched the Internet for local service providers or businesses selling products. So it is important to make sure that your business gets the required amount of visibility through Dallas SEO, but the question is how?

Some of the top search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo display local businesses on the main results page as well as in the local results page. But then there are local search engines, which are basically Internet Yellow Pages (IYP's), review sites and business data aggregators.

Some of the best Dallas search engines include dalseek.com, hitsphere.com, metroplexdirectory.com, dallasweb.com etc. These are IYP's as well as highly effective Dallas search engines that can take care of your Internet advertising needs. These local search engine directories can help businesses to advertise on the Internet for a monthly fee, quarterly or annual fee.

Let's take an example. dallasweb.com has different types of local listings like superpages.com, where you can list your Dallas SEO advertisement for free. In the Business/Yellow page listings, you can add your email address and url for free while some other yellow pages will list Dallas SEO advertisement for a cost that can be anywhere between $110 to $300 depending on how much space you are looking to advertise in, the placement of the advertisement and the Dallas SEO content.

Most people search the yellow pages while searching for products or services available locally. So if you provide Dallas SEO information regarding your business, service or products, then the chances of getting the right traffic to your website will increase multifold.

Most of the users who are looking for local information will visit a local search engines first (IYP's) and then a global search engine like Google or Yahoo. It is more of a habit than anything else and this habit can do wonders for your business while a Dallas SEO company can do justice to your advertisement, or business profile.

But we are not just talking about SEO advertisements; we are also talking about SEO website. So before you put your website on the Internet, you need to choose a Dallas SEO company to work on your website contain and make it optimized for local and global search engines.

If you use keywords like Dallas products, Dallas services, Dallas business, then there is a high probability that your business will feature among the top ten on the global search engines and anyone looking for a product or service in Dallas will get to see your website. Some users search for local information with subject matter keyword coupled with the locality.

A user looking for car spares in Dallas will search the internet or local pages using Dallas car spares, car spares in Dallas, Dallas car repair etc. Some users who are already aware of your area code may search as: Car spares, Dallas 75212. The local search engines will pull out all the car spare companies in the 75212 zip code including your company.

This is a type of Dallas SEO information that will enhance the search option and help a user to find your website or business information with ease. So, you will need to specify locality parameters within the website content. You can even have your full address displayed on your website to enhance search engine optimization and drive traffic.

About The Author:

Moe Tamani is an senior SEO expert for SEO 1 Services (http://www.seo-1-marketing-services.com) based in dallas,TX. Expertize includes Local Dallas SEO Services.

Domain Name Promotion And Web Site Design/SEO

By Jay Johnson

If you do not have one million dollars in your pocket, you might find reading what I have to say worth a moment of your time.

I've bought my Domain Name. Now What?

First a transfer of Domain into your free account takes place on sellers end at no cost, money, time or frustration to you.

After a successful transfer (usually 12 to 24 hours) it will be up to the new owner of Domain to set the DNS (Domain Name Servers). This process usually takes less than five minutes and if purchased from 11J.com I'll be happy to help buyer with DNS or anything else for a smooth installing of a new Domain Name.

The obviously next step after purchasing a Domain Name is to build a web site for your new Domain. Easier said than done? Maybe so, but I'm about to give to you a little of my experience
to iron out any bumps on this road ahead of you to web design/development. In fact, if you will take the time to carefully review the steps below you will find earnings far greater than a miserly one million dollars and this I personally Guarantee!

The Art of Web Design

There are two rules that you absolutely must strictly adhere to for success with your new web site:

1. You must have an idea for your new web site from the ground up. This means from the beginning while sitting directly in front of a blank Notepad screen, to the successful completion.

2. You must enjoy the topic of your new web site to the point of money having absolutely no bearing on the intensity of your passion for that topic.

So you don't have the foggiest idea for your new web site? Not a problem in the least, please allow me to share a piece of my experience to guide you to conquering rule #1.

Being brand new to the Internet I did not have a clue what the difference was between HTML and a web site was. Source Code? Are you kidding me?? And yet, from scratch I built not one, but three huge multi-page web sites that I am positive could have sold from anywhere between $500 and $3000! Total cost: $100 per site. Of course, not having the foggiest idea what SEO meant all three web sites flopped. Domains expired and those web sites floated off into cyberspace.

I'll get to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in just a moment, but first for those that don't have an idea to pursue for web site design please allow me to share the two simple steps to a potential $3000 web site for your chosen topic/passion. And at a cost of no more than $100 for your new web site.

1. Go to http://www.scriptlance.com/.

2. Scroll through all projects listed. (I have no affiliation with scriptlance, merely sharing my experience to help others succeed).

To steal another's idea is not only ridiculous but also will put one on a path to collapse. But what can be done for those with no idea for a profitable web site is to closely glance through all projects requesting assistance to find a web site to mold around whatever ideas might come to mind. After the merging of your idea into a potential web site possibly found on scriptlance or anywhere else, a Free account must be opened to place your idea in the hands of a designer/developer.

Are you still with me? If so, it is important to realize that most designers on Scriptlance are from overseas living in third world countries. The importance of keeping this in mind is due to the fact that the US dollar has a completely different value in other countries. How much does the common laborer in China make? $0.70 per day? I've worked with the Russians, the Romainians and Indians and call tell you those I've worked with speak better English than me! Communication is not an issue and the value of money takes on a whole new meaning.

(Should I condense this into a cheap free e-book? Maybe so. But hold on, the best part is yet to come!)

If you are interested in success with your new web site, please believe me when I say utilizing Scriptlance will be a mind blowing, mind boggling, and an absolutely wonderful pleasant and enlightening experience!

Before I go any further, there is one web site/school that is an absolute must for web site design/ownership. Memorizing tons and tons of code is just plain stupid! In fact IMOH I really don't believe all those HTML codes even can be memorized! But in order to explain to web designers (those that fix your site when down) problems you may be having, a basic understanding of HTML code truly is necessary. For this education in HTML, please head
over to http://www.w3cschools.org/. A Free internet school to help you understand the basics of HTML code which will prove to be invaluable if you are to own/run a new web site.

Okay, so now I have my Domain Name, and my web site. Can you promise me at least one hundred thousand visitors to my web site daily? I'm glad you asked. Because the answer to that question is a big fat NO. Why? Because I'm about to give to you directions to bringing far more than merely a hundred thousand daily. For those that have taken the time to read though my words of wisdom I'm about to give absolutely free of charge 100+ steps to an unlimited amount of visitors (REPEAT VISITORS) with the potential for an unlimited amount of earned income!

I would find it difficult to believe that anyone can start at step one and move beyond step ten. But the good thing about this list is the ability to pick and choose those steps your feel up to implementing.

I talk too much don't I? Suppose so, so here ya go:

1. Submit articles to article directories.
2. Conduct link exchange activity with other blogs and websites.
3. Run a teleseminar.
4. Be a contributor on Yahoo/MSN Answers
5. Create a blog and join MyBlogLog.com
6. Create a MySpace.com account and make friends with your target market.
7. Create a viral report with links coming back to your website.
8. Generate a software product that you distribute free but advertise your website in it.
9. Build an article directory for a hot niche market
10. Produce a useful web-based software for public use
11. Ask thought-provoking questions
12. Build viral videos and upload them to Youtube.com
13. Buy links from Text-link-ads.com
14. Submit classified ads to USFreeAds.com
15. Publish content based on the latest news or unique items to tap on long tail traffic
16. Optimize your webpages for meta tags, title tags and H1 tags
17. Run online contests with kick-ass prizes
18. Run article exchange campaigns with HTML links in them
19. Generate your own social networking site
20. Produce an unbelievable product and sell it on Clickbank.com
21. Auction off cheap digital items on eBay
22. Write articles for major sites like About.com
23. Create a regular PDF newsletter
24. Talk to 5 people every day about one piece of content on your site
25. Visit online guest books and leave a comment
26. Visit other blogs and contribute actively on a regular basis
27. Use banner advertising on banner exchange programs like BannersgoMLM.com
28. Seek out joint venture partners to promote your site/event
29. Purchase leads from a co-registration service
30. Write an offline book
31. Distribute flyers
32. Sponsor an event with prizes that have your website on it
33. Run a charity event
34. Submit a press release to PRWeb.com
35. Use resell rights promotions
36. Produce a web or blog template using Open Source license
37. Create a community with a community badge/chicklet for identity
38. Look for newsworthy information and syndicate to Digg.com
39. Use your MSN nickname/message
40. Provide a free download on your site with a message on the back of your business card
41. Leave an email signature
42. Have a tell-a-friend form
43. Newspaper advertismenets
44. Direct response mail
45. Regular podcasts
46. Run a "live" seminar
47. Create an affiliate program
48. Get invited to events
49. Run a 24-hour answering service
50. Give people the right to syndicate your content
51. Keep your content fresh
52. Create multiple offers
53. Use ping sites for your blog
54. Use article submission services like ArticleAnnouncer.com to create backlinks
55. Give a DVD out for free that requires opt-insk
56. Car decals with your website on it
57. Generate a member-get-member promotion
58. Offer a 50% sale for products on your site
59. Create an online community of friends
60. Invite 10 people to visit your site on a regular basis
61. Print t-shirts with your URL
62. Advertise in trade magazines
63. Advertise in the main newspapers
64. Radio interviews
65. TV interviews
66. TV advertisements
67. Use Google Adwords
68. Use MSN Adcenter
69. Use Yahoo Search Marketing
70. Use Adbrite
71. Getresponse Co-registration service
72. Optimize your website for a specific, targeted key phrase
73. Use PayPerPost.com to get bloggers to write about your site

74. Run a Web 2.0 community
75. Advertise in the Yellow Pages
76. Directory submissions
77. Affiliate directory submissions
78. Direct email campaigns with list owners
79. Use direct response postcards
80. Build a free software directory
81. Build a free image directory
82. Offer a bonus product during a product launch to JV partners
83. Use well-optimized websites and content
84. Bait providers to visit your website through eLance.com and Scriptlance.com
85. Purchase outdoor advertising space at targeted locations
86. Create an Opt-in mailing list
87. Visit and participate in forums related to your niche.
88. Build more backlinks for popular keywords
89. Narrow your market to a specific niche
90. Build more websites within related niches
91. Attend more seminars to gain connections
92. Use a Feed Reader to subscribe to RSS feeds - comment on targeted posts
93. Have multiple distribution locations for a physical product

94. Create your own products and let affiliates sell them
95. Blog controversially
96. Deliberately start an online war (flaming - not recommended)
97. Look for related websites in #1 position and buy advertising space from them
98. Set up account with Squidoo.com
99. Set up account with Hi5.com
100. Set up account with Multiply.com
101. Set up account with iConnectE.com
102. Set up account with Huminity.com
103. Do a giveaway rights promotion
104. Build a presence on 43 things
105. Create an affiliate promotion with Clickbank
106. Run a Cost-Per-Lead program
107. Find a Cause to support and promote the cause
108. Get people involved in your community
109. Use a tell-a-friend script and place this automatically with people have opted-in
110. Run a blog carnival
111. Use games to "tag" people
112. Encourage article exchanges
113. Request people to submit articles that you will display on your blog for free
114. Build a free online widget that people will use
115. Join discussion groups on Google, Yahoo or MySpace groups
116. Advertise on Alexa.com
117. Use Global SMS service
118. Leverage Craigslist.org

Was this list enough to make you dizzy? If this information is not worth a million dollars then I don't know what is!

Have a Great and Wonderful and Spectacular Day! And remember if any help is needed with DNS or Site Design or anything else please check out my `Links' page or feel free to email me.

About The Author:

Jay Johnson is a full time Internet marketer and has a wide variety of domain names for sale at affordable prices. http://www.11j.com

Simple Steps To Search Engine Success

By Andy Michaels

Let's talk about a method for getting your website recognized and boosted to the top of the search engines.

This method is sometimes referred to as an "online science", but it's an easy way to get more site traffic once you know what to do.

I will be discussing search engine optimization in a series of articles, beginning with some tips today that will amaze you.

First, as you are aware, the Internet is a vast resource for all types of information. If you want to know about something, all you have to do is search for it. And searching of course is very easy. Just type in what you're looking for, and a list that may seem never-ending comes up with every place on the World Wide Web that has information pertaining to that subject.

How can you use this little piece of knowledge and expand upon it to lead people to your website and to the information, products and services that you want to share with the world?

I can show you a way that is absolutely free! By using this information that I am sharing with you, your website hits will increase exponentially, and your online business will not only grow, but grow by leaps and bounds!

With this simple to use information, you can expand your earnings by drawing more and more visitors to your site. All for free!

Keywords are the key to this method. And what are keywords? They are the kinds of words people use in searches that relate directly to a website. Let me explain: If you are interested in learning how to ceramic tile your kitchen counter tops, you will probably type in a search something like "how to tile kitchen counter tops" or "kitchen ceramic tiles". In doing so, you
prompt search engines to go looking for sites that have a lot of the words ceramic, tile, kitchen and so forth in them. And soon you have a listing of sites that will show you how to proceed with tiling your counters.

So, right there is the secret. Keywords will lead people to your website. All you need to do is optimize your site for keywords! A good place to start is by going to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/.

In the keyword search field, type in your product or service. For example, if you make and sell custom Christmas tree decorations, you will type in Christmas tree decorations. A long list of keywords will appear. All you have to do is make a list of them to use in optimizing your website, which is the subject of my next article.

Remember, this information is free for the taking, and I am here to help you make the best use of it. It's not rocket science, in fact, it's quite simple, and once you see for yourself how well it works, you'll find it quite enjoyable!

About The Author:

This is the first of 4 articles from Andy Michaels on the subject of Search Engine Optimization for the niche marketer. To read the next 3 articles in the series please visit http://www.squidoo.com/SimpleNicheSEO/

Common Errors that Kill Search Engine Ranking

By Sharon Housley

Tricking the search engines just does not work. The search engines do not look kindly upon webmasters who attempt to deceive the search engines about the content contained on a webpage.

1. Cloaking

Cloaking a website is a stealth technique used to provide a copy of a web page to search engines while providing an alternate copy to website visitors. The website copy provided to the search engine is optimized and not always reflective of the real content contained on the webpage.

2. Hidden Text

Another deceptive tip that will result in a search engine ban, is done by incorporating text into a website that is not visible to the naked eye, but is visible to search engine spider. There are two ways that underhanded webmasters might attempt this, the first is by changing the font color to match the web page's background color. The second fallacious way of deceiving the search engine using hidden text is by using a single character like a '.' period as a link. Black hat webmasters might attempt this as a way to increase their websites link popularity.

3. Bad Links

While this is not as much a deceptive practice as an indication that the webpage content has been abandoned, links to webpages that no longer exist is an indication to search engines that the content is no longer relevant.

4. Lack of Meta Tags

A website that does not make use of title and description tags, will not result in a ban but could impact the ability for a website to rank well. The title and description of a website should be different on each and every web page.

5. Navigation Mistakes

Navigation should be "spiderable". Do not use javascript or flash navigation, search engines can not spider javascript menus. Adding a site map link is just not good enough, if you do not use conventional navigational techniques, the pages within your website will not always be indexed by the search engines. Navigation should be logically structured, links should not be hidden too deeply within the website or the content contained on the buried pages will not be considered relevant and will not rank well.

6. Valid Code

Observing the conventions of HTML are a necessity, if a webpage's code is invalid, search engines might 'choke' and be unable to follow the links or code. Be sure to properly open and close all HTML code. Valid HTML is critical.

7. Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a technique where a long list of repetitive keywords, sometimes related sometimes unrelated to the webpages content is used to trick search engines into thinking the webpage is relevant. Rarely is this effective and it is unlikely that it will artificially inflate a websites ranking for any length of time.

8. Avoid Session IDs

Webpages within a website that uses session IDs or "ID=" in the links will not always be recognized by search engines. It is assumed by many search engines that when ID= appears in the URL, that the webpage does not contain unique content and that the webpage is not in need of indexing. Avoid using ID= on dynamic or static web pages.

9. Nice Neighbors

Avoid listing the website in link farms. Search engines are firm believers that you are like the company that you keep, links should be solicited from reputable sources. Links from spammy websites will not help a website rank well.

Many will say that there are no rules to search engine optimization, they might be right, but the fact remains that webmasters can influence their search engine ranking through the tips above. Attempting to trick or fool the search engines is a sure fire way to become banned. Search engines have the ability to provide a consistent and steady stream of traffic to websites, that stream can become a trickle if you attempt to deceive.

About the Author:

Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com audio recording and editing software.

Improved Search Engine Ranking With Modernization Of Marketing Strategies

By Markus Skupeika

Maneuvering the business process and ensuring the right proportions of profit earning are the fundamentals of all types of the business, whether it is small business or the large corporate. Internet marketing is no exception. Online businesses employ a number of techniques and strategies to increase the positioning of the website in the improve Search Engine rank.

Search Engine Optimization is also referred as SEO is the process of achieving the best organic ranking with the help of some specified tools in the Search Engine result pages like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista and many more search engines and thus to enhance the web traffic for a website. Search Engine is rather a complex and on going process which normally takes bit time to show off its result of driving the traffic for the website.

As there are enormous numbers of techniques to optimizing the website, web masters use only the uphold techniques for the Search Engine Optimization Management. One of the primary things that business profession takes into account to summarize the tools for achieving the great search engine listing is the keyword which the web spiders use for extracting the related information. Many search engines index a page based on key word phrases and oftentimes add value if the key word appears within a certain concentration range. The caveat here is that many search engines will lower the web page ranking if the keyword appears too many times since this is alleged as an attempt to trick the search engine. Keyword search engine optimization uses not only keyword concentration but also keyword placement. Many search engines place higher emphasis on key word phrases that are placed in web page titles and HTML header tags.

Another method of SEO is to increase the number of links to the website being optimized. Most Internet Marketing companies design their algorithms with the supposition that a page that is highly allied to is more likely to offer quality content then one that has no links to it. Many web masters had taken advantage of this assumption by using link exchange programs to increase the number of links to their site. For this reason, many search engines now bring down two way links in favor of one way links.

Meta tags are one answer for the higher Search Engine rankings. The page title and the actual content are more important for the search engine ranking than the Meta tags. Visitors are also driven by the organic Directory submission services. People often mistake with the Directory submission and Search Engine Optimization being the same. Directories have the exaggerated part in increasing the ranking in the search engine rankings by sending a huge number of traffic.

About The Author:

There are more ways about internet marketing promotion and advertising
http://www.dwenterprise.com/web-seo.html than you know. Discover the secrets to Internet marketing for Online Business http://monopolizingmarketing.com/marketing-mistakes.htm today.

A Few Search Engine Optimization Techniques

By Gabriel Adams

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

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

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

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

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

About The Author:

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

The Importance Of SEO

By Alan Mater

All websites have one thing in common. They all need traffic, and lots of it. Millions of searches are performed every day on the internet for any topic you can think of. Would you like a share of that traffic? Optimizing your site will give you better search engine placement and more traffic. Better yet, "free targeted traffic."

So how do you get this free targeted traffic to your site? First, and most importantly, you must submit the URL of your website to the search engines so that it will be included in search results. After your site has been indexed by the search engines, it is time to implement simple SEO techniques so that your site will get better search engine placement. SEO, known as
Search Engine Optimization, is an important step to take when building a website. When optimizing your site, it is best to make little changes over a period of time. Search engines like
to see improvements to websites, and it keeps them coming back to crawl your site for new content. Making little changes at a time to enhance your optimization strategies will go a long way with the search engines and will give your site better search engine placement as well. When done properly your website will receive traffic from users searching for the topic that is
related to what your site has to offer. This kind of traffic is called "targeted traffic" because the user is already interested in what you are offering and will be more likely to make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter or whatever else you have.

Make SEO a priority when building your website and work hard to achieve better search engine placement. Free targeted traffic will slowly begin to make its way to your site. Remember though it is important that your site has been submitted to the search engines before you tackle SEO strategies.

About The Author:

For more optimization tips visit: http://www.replaceyoursalary.com/search.htm. Don't have a website yet? Get your very own money making website setup for free and earn up to 5 streams of automated income. Visit: http://www.replaceyoursalary.com/pips

How Can You Use Original Content To Market Your Website?

By Chris McElroy AKA NameCritic

Whether you sell a product or a service, whether your business is conducted exclusively online or only partially over the internet, marketing is essential. After all, just because you can reach millions of people online doesn't mean that you will.

After all, how many businesses similar to yours exist online? Without marketing, how will you set your company apart?

The simple answer is that you won't. Therefore, it's important to understand the ways in which marketing a business online is different from marketing a brick and mortar store in the center of town.

In order to market your business online, you need to understand the importance of original content. Original content - in the form of website pages, blogs and articles that you use to market your site - will be what sets you apart.

When your website is created, it's important to use unique, keyword rich, relevant language. In some cases, your web designer may provide this service, however, if content creation is not a part of their package it may benefit you to hire a content writer to create the text of your website.

Keyword rich, relevant text will help search engine spiders to rank your site. However, it's important in terms of search engine marketing to regularly update your site - to keep it relevant. A blog is an effective tool for keeping the content on your website fresh.

Think about this for a moment: a blog - short for weblog - is unique, keyword rich and relevant content that is updated daily. If offering great content on your site initially improves your search engine ranking, wouldn't it benefit you to have content that updates daily?

That content, however, should not exist solely for the search engine spiders; it should also provide information with your current customers as well as to prospective customers. A blog does just that: it opens a dialog, enabling your business to reach out to your customers and clients and to provide them with the information that they're looking for.

Electronic newsletters work in a similar way: with them, you can reach out to those who are interested in learning more about the products or services that your business offers. You can use a newsletter to provide information about upcoming product releases, to offer tips and tools that will save readers time or money, or even to offer discounts and incentives to your subscribers.

Of course, just as you can create keyword rich, relevant articles that reach out to your newsletter subscribers, you can use article marketing to draw in a wider customer base. By
creating articles that focus on keywords and phrases associated with your product or services and publishing those articles in directories online, you will be able to establish your knowledge, experience and expertise in the marketplace.

Those prospective customers who are seeking products and services similar to yours will find you credible and follow links back to your website. They will feel confident that you understand what they are looking for and that your product or service will benefit them.

The important thing to focus on, however, is that your content must be relevant to what current and prospective customers are looking for. Your content must contain the information that these individuals are looking for - and, in order for them to find it, it must be written in a way that draws on your keywords and key phrases.

For many, this seems daunting. Creating fresh, keyword rich, relevant content is not something that everyone is good at - especially when it means creating that content on a regular basis, weekly or daily.

About The Author:

Content providers such as http://www.ArticleContentProvider.com to create this content for you. Creating website content, writing a daily blog, ghostwriting articles, creating ebooks, Article Content Provider makes it easy for business and individuals to use original content to promote their websites.

Link Building & Link Baiting Strategies For A Successful SEO Campaign

By Randy Zlobec

Link building refers to search engine optimization strategies in which one way back links to a website are created. By generating links from related and authoritative sites back to your own website you not only encourage extra web traffic, you increase your page rankings in search engine results pages. Some of the most successful link building techniques are article marketing, blogging, forum posting and paid advertising on related and high traffic websites.

The importance of one way links cannot be over emphasized. Reciprocal linking is now seen for what it is - a deceptive strategy. Also rapid, artificial development of one way links is suspect so it is far better to create your links gradually as one would expect of natural website and back link development. Organic SEO strategies will not trigger any alarms in the search engines and can be used in a focused and accelerated way to expedite the marketing advantages.

Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to build back links to your website. It is better to use a couple of high traffic article directories than to submit your articles to hundreds or even thousands of directories as this will create an enormous amount of duplicate content which is devalued by the search engine algorithms. It is also a mistake to put articles on your website that you have used for article marketing purposes because this would create duplicate content on your website. While you certainly want the benefit of back links to increase your search engine results page (SERP) rank you need to take into account other factors which can affect your SERP position such as duplicate content.

Blogging, forum posting and paid advertising on relevant websites can also provide excellent one way links to your website. You can write blog articles on your own blog as well as writing comments and articles on other people's blogs that link back to your website. Forums will generally not allow you to directly link to your website in the posting itself, however you can use a link to your site as a signature under your post which can be just as effective as an embedded back link. Placing paid ads on high traffic, related and authoritative sites can also provide one way links back to your website which is likely to both increase the number of visitors as well as your SERP position.

Link baiting is an indirect link building strategy in that you do not directly place the links but encourage others to link back to your site or, more specifically, a particular article or page on your site. Link baiting is achieved by writing interesting, informative, humorous or controversial articles that others are likely to link to from their websites or blogs. Ask yourself what information you can offer that will benefit others and tempt them to link back to the information. Controversy and disagreement are always popular, running an online contest is another link bait technique, so too is writing free how-to reports, providing free access to an online software program, or doing something new on the internet that is interesting or helpful and grabs attention. Writing or editing informational articles for online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia can also be an effective link bait technique.

Link building and link baiting are both effective search engine optimization strategies as well as traffic building techniques. If you strategically link one way from relevant websites back to your own, you will gradually improve your SERP rank as well as increase the number of visitors to your site and therefore your profitability. You cannot optimize your website effectively and ignore the importance of back links. It is becoming increasingly difficult to manipulate Google and other search engines by using artificial strategies so it is very important to create natural links in order to gain lasting benefits in terms of search engine results rank. Link building and link baiting are helpful and beneficial SEO strategies. If you use them wisely, they can significantly increase the positioning of your website on the search engines and consequently the ability of your site to be profitable and successful.

About The Author:

Link Building http://www.semgorilla.com & Link Baiting By Randy Zlobec a Search Engine Optimization Specialist and Author of Sem Gorilla

Build Website Linking Through Common Sense And Good Manners

By Gerald Brown

Good manners apply online as well as off. This is especially true when requesting website link exchanges.

Imagine you are at a social gathering where you have the opportunity to meet a lot of interesting executives connected to your line of business or work.

You are talking with a small group of like minded individuals and you are discussing a topic of common interest. Suddenly another guest joins the group and within seconds diverts the conversation to talking about himself, his company and why those in this group should work or do business with his company. The group soon breaks up disinterested at the aggressive individual.

The guy who selfishly butted in now looks for another little group to do the same again, with the same results - no one is interested, as he tries to dominate the conversation!

The better way for this executive would be to respect the others; by not being pushy; contribute to the conversation yet wrap his sales message within what he says. In other words, he is showing he is a good guy to get to know. This way he is building up credibility. The conversation continues and at the appropriate moment, name cards are willingly exchanged.

Requesting Link Exchanges

When you request a link exchange it is a bit like the above scenario -- most requests are similar to the aggressive guy, and just say: "link to my web site and you give me a link in return", without further explanation. That is Selfish.

Put yourself in the recipient's position as they ask themself:

* Do I know you and your site?

* Why should I exchange a link?

* Do we have common interest in our sites' subject matter so that we mutually benefit?

* Are we on equal footing - meaning, is your link page of the same Page Rank as mine? - This is important to know. Why? Because search engines (SE's) gives lesser credibility to links from a lower page rank, especially if the subject of the two pages are not related. On the other hand, SE's give greater weighting when page subjects are the same and highly focused.

All your link exchange requests should include:

- your site's main subject area

- your link page "page rank"

- be polite and cordial in your e-mail request (usually sent to the "webmaster" or as specified on their site, and

- that you have placed the reciprocal link already on your site first before making the request as a goodwill gesture (and remove it if the request is turned down).

About The Author:

Gerald Brown, a long time British expatriate and resident of Crete, heads up "Brits in Crete" -
http://www.britsincrete.net - a comprehensive resource with advice and targeted links for those expatriates who plan to relocate and live in Crete, Greece.

Boosting Your Pagerank With Article Submission

By Prakash Jain

The more links your website receives over time, the higher it's pagerank will prove to be. Since Google puts a lot of value on pagerank when it comes to search engine rankings, having your pagerank as high as possible should be a must-do on your website promotion agenda.

Article submission is a great method of building links back to your website, and thus pagerank. Many SEO professionals use artucle submissions as a strategic weapon in their web marketing campaign. The reason is simple: submitting your article to article directories builds a good amount of inbound links over time.

You'll receive links and traffic not only from the article directories themselves, but other places too. The articles you post can be syndicated by other websites which eventually leads to even more traffic and links for your website.

It's important that you don't copy content from other articles, this will render your article submissions pretty much ineffective. If you write your articles so they are 100% unique, then you'll see much better results.

Take care when creating your "About the Author" or "Author Biography". This small resource box is the path that leads back to your website, so make sure you plan it out well. Include at least two links back to your website and pages within your website. Make sure the anchor text are targeted keywords - they should be keywords people search for when they look for your websites topic. This will build your strength in that keyword, and thus help your search engine rankings and traffic.

If you don't want to write the article and submit it to countless article directories yourself, you can always hire a freelancer that will spend the time to do it for you. Make sure they do a good job though, you'll want quality over quantity. If webmasters pick up your articles to use as content for their own website, then you'll get even more links and thus an even higher pagerank.

Be wary when using article submission software for your article submissions. Compared to hand submissions, automatic submissions aren't as effective unless you are submitting to a massive amount of article directories at once.

Others would recommend a manual article submission strategy, selecting a handful of article directories and submitting their unique articles to them. Select article directories with a decent pagerank, your website will benefit from it. The manual submission strategy I feel is the best, as you can be sure you'll receive the backlinks when you submit the articles yourself.

About The Author:

Prakash Jain Runs a Articles Direcotry - You Can Also Find More Articles on http://www.articles-hub.com

Get The Rankings You Want

By Ayat Shukairy

Where do you rank on the World Wide Web? It's not enough to have a website; you have to get ranked on the first page to get noticed. Otherwise, holding your position at number 28,432 on Google isn't going to do you much good. Check out some easy ways to improve your page rank and get yourself noticed.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures that your website copy is written and structured in a way that improves chances that your website will be found when someone performs a search. For example, if your company sells insurance, you'd use words or phrases such as life insurance, insurance quote, insurance agent, or home insurance.

Content

Write articles that grab the interest of readers right now. Include case studies and whitepapers on your site that will give your visitors are reason to always come back. Or even check out what's going on in the news and be there first to report changes that impact your industry. For example, if you sell mortgages, be the first one to report the drop in mortgage rates. You'll generate a lot of traffic and increase your ranking. Remember, time is of the essence. If you find out something new and hot, you should write about before your competition does!

Search engine spiders are looking for sites that are periodically updated with rich content. Do not offer content that isn't useful. Some people try to place content that is rich in keywords but doesn't offer the oncoming traffic anything beneficial. Low traffic will equal lower rankings with top search engines. The idea behind rich content with specific keywords is that because you keep posting content, soon you will be ranked within the search engines for specific words. So, when I post articles about the different insurance rates and options, etc.; when an on-line visitor is searching for this info they will land on your site and may become potential clients.

Content must be used to provide new and interesting information that your reader wants to know about, offer helpful tips, or solve a problem. This content will get you link-backs which are excellent for driving traffic. You can also post articles through authentic submission sites, and that will also generate a lot of traffic. Many companies publish with different online magazines etc., not only to prove their expertise but also to gain more traffic linking to their sites.

Offer resources

Offer resources that will help your reader. For instance, if you are an insurance agent, and you want to attract new clients, offer a comparison chart of all the insurance agencies in the area so your user can make an objective decision. At first, it seems like the insurance company is driving business away that way. Not so. If you offer your users resources that benefit them, they will come back for more when they are searching again.

Link it up

Linking to other websites is a great way to increase your page ranking. Linking to other websites raises credibility in the eyes of the search engines. Who should you link to? Provide links to websites that offer a similar product or service as you do, or websites that are industry related. A spa can link to its beauty suppliers, for example. Ask them if they will provide a link to your website, and remember to offer to link to theirs in return. You can also submit articles to directories or credible article submission websites to gain links. Good articles and resources will get you bookmarked and potentially linked to by other users.

Include a site map

Generate a site map that links to every page in your site. Search engines like pages that can be accessed easily, so make sure your important pages remain in the first or second level.

Make changes

Every month or two go back and update or make changes to your website. If you let it become stale, the search engines will toss you out like yesterdays news. Update it to generate new interest. Another great way is to add a daily blog. This will ensure that your content is updated daily and stays fresh.

Live bookmarks

Updates happen all the time. A live bookmark keeps track of updates and lets you know that information has changed, rather than you checking to see if websites have made additions. By providing live bookmarks, you are increasing your traffic and ranking because people will come back to you sooner, and more often.

RSS Feeds

Create an RSS Feed. RSS or Rich Site Syndication is a file format used by publishers to make their content available to others in a format that is universal. RSS is a way to publish content and update it in real time. This gives the user the opportunity access information through an RSS reader.

Targeted headlines

A clear, targeted headline will nudge your ranking a little higher. Use large text and words that relate to your website. For example, if you are a content developer, you could write a headline like: "Ten Quick Tips For Killer Copy."

About The Author:

Ayat Shukairy is the creative director at INVESP consulting. Ayat leads enterprise implementations to help clients http://invesp.com/tb increase site traffic, http://invesp.com/cs improve site conversion rates, optimize landing pages and establish customer loyalty.

Local Or Global E-commerce Business

By Mark Walters

One of the first decisions an e-commerce business owner needs to decide is whether they will experience more success as a local or a national business. There are some e-commerce businesses that make millions of dollars in the local market, that would make very little in the global market.

Dating sites, entertainment websites, B2B sites, and Palliative care networks are just a few of the businesses that can reach unimagined success if they keep their business local. One of the biggest mistakes that most e-commerce business owners make is believing that every web based business must be global.

Choosing the wrong arena can destroy a businesses potential.

Choosing the right business can spell unparalleled success.

Marketing

The final primary blunder most ecommerce companies make is poor marketing. The over anxious and ambitious business pours money into all kinds of irrelevant marketing areas. Even down to paid listings in Search engines - which are totally useless because the first time a search engine finds your link, it indexes your site.

Most of this advertising is not even presented to the population of the country to any relevant degree. It is amazing how many Pay Per Click advertisers pay for clicks to China or South America because that owner has an English section on their website. So, an ecommerce site is paying clicks for visitors who can never buy their product, let alone pay the exorbitant shipping fees involved.

Even spamming all the websites with similar content will not help. For example, a website that sells romance books does not want to appear on a romance writing website, or a dating website, but they do. This is because PPC advertising matches websites and advertisers who share keywords, not because they have similar interests.

To a search engine, romance - dating, and romance - novel, are close enough.

Knowing where you are paying for advertising, and who is seeing the advertising, is important for both global and local businesses. However, a local business will experience much less waste.

A business on a budget should consider staying local. The likelihood of every advertising dollar reaching a potential client is much higher with local businesses.

Customer Power

Word of mouth is great marketing. The more global an e-commerce business, the less customer power they have. A local business with a mailing list of 200 clients who are talking about the business is more powerful that the same business with clients in Australia, Canada, China, The United Kingdom, and areas like Malta.

Customer power does have a monetary value. It can launch a business that doesn't have enough money to run a large advertising campaign.

The global business will need to invest an incredible amount of time to build the same customer loyalty base as a local business can build rather easily.

Income Bursts

The net fluctuates. Your business can be the top of the search engines one month, and completely off the scales the next. Your site may have 10 000 inbound links this year, and only 2000 next year.

Your product can be unusual and hot now, and over marketed in five months.

Global businesses also need to deal with shipping costs, slow service, country boundaries, and other concerns can make shipping difficult and slow.

A global business should expect to make money in short bursts. They may make $10 000 this month, but they will only make $1000 next month. The local market is less volatile.

Expanding

An e-commerce presence can expand the potential customer base to several million. This may look attractive, but the competition is vast. The local market may not have any competition, while the global market may have 200 000 competitors fighting for each customer.

That said, global e-commerce markets are less affected by economic climates. Australian e commerce is experiencing above normal financial returns from US and UK orders. China is starting to open up. The US market is loosing its appeal, while the number of phishing and fraud sites in the UK are turning people away in droves. Despite that 85 million dollars are spent on the Internet every day.

Social Network

The biggest mistake that many ecommerce businesses make is by building a 'brochure' style website. The days of a 'web presence' are long gone. Now 'social networking' is the way to succeed. Social networking is the practice of becoming a real person on the net.

It is not selling, or getting your product out there. It is the task of getting on a website or blog like www.communati.com and www.writingup.com and becoming a real person who can be trusted.

Then, let the people in your network find their own way to your buy-now page. It is also about collecting names. The most important aspect of meeting people on the Internet is to collect names that can be used to build a newsletter or marketing campaign.

Do not try to sell these people. Instead, give them information and keep them posted. This will keep them 'connected' until the day when they are ready to buy.

The decision to be local or global depends on the money available for advertising, the time invested into social networking, and whether the business owner needs a steady income or can manage some dry times while they wait for big payouts.

About The Author:

Mark Walters is a third generation entrepreneur and author. He offers free training and investing videos designed to speed you towards financial independence at
http://www.cashflowinstitute.com/videosignup.htm

Three Traffic Tactics that won't Cost You a Dime

By Sean Matteson

Are you constantly banging your head in frustration on not receiving all the internet traffic you would like to get to your web site? Are you tormented from information overload listening to all the latest free website traffic tactics and not being able to understand any of it? Are you dejected of people trying day and night to harassing you to max out your credit card and get loans for Google clicks, and in the process lose your credit score? Are you stupefied by the way your website just dropped out of the Google search results? Or are you just too broke and all you have to rely on is getting some free website traffic tactics? You can employ website traffic tactics without spending dime. However, knowing how is the real deal. Here's the score:

1. Link it

Of all the effective website traffic tactics that can get you best results, linking to and from other websites is the one of the most widely-used methods. Just make sure that the Internet business you are exchanging links with is relatively if not completely related to your own business. And of course, don't overkill as this might ban you from search engines.

2. Meet Meta Tags

Another way of to acquire your desired traffic for your website is through having your Meta tags contain usually used keywords that target your business. Meta tags help search engines in describing your web page. If you're quite adept with the HTML aspect of your web pages, manipulating your meta tags would be a breeze.

3. Keyword-rich AND sensible content

Writing or acquiring articles that provide solid information regarding your business is one of the best ways. Making use of free keyword suggestion tools such as Overture will help you on which keyword or phrases to work on to better lead more traffic to your website. Making these write-ups very readable and genuinely informative will make you many repeat visitors to subsequently become repeat clients.

Submitting these articles to various article directory listings will provide more visibility for your business as long as you keep your resource box in tact to create numerous back links for yourself. There are many services available to help you submit your articles to the thousands of directories available.

These methods, if employed properly, will not only make your web site popular but will make you achieve your most desirable result - higher conversion rate. You'll begin to see the results in no time.

About the Author:

After building a successful insurance practice in the senior market, Sean Matteson is currently building a successful online business to replace his income and spend more time with his family. http://www.xooma.biz

Building Links To Your Site: Vital For Seo Success, Part 1

By Adrian Adams

With any online business, generating traffic to view the products or services you have to offer is essential. Since the World Wide Web is a huge arena, you can bet there is plenty of competition out there. It doesn't matter how great of an item you have to offer if people don't find out about it. To get your business the recognition it deserves, it is vital that you understand the various techniques for building links to your site.

If you want to rank well on the search engines, you have to have quality backlinks from other websites. Without quality backlinks to your site, you will not be able to rank well on the search engines. The good news is that there are lots of ways to build links to your site. Some of the ways to building these links are going to cost you money, but some of the most successful ways really won't cost you anything more than your time.

One of first places you want to start is with submitting your website to the various web directories. There are 100's of web directories that will give you a free listing for your website. The most important thing to do when submitting your site to web directories is to read the instructions. If you don't follow the instructions, your listing will likely be denied.

There are also many places on the internet where you can submit articles for free. The articles can be informational in nature but they can't be a direct advertisement for your business. However, at the bottom of the articles you can add a section that provides information about yourself and a link to your website if they want more information. Article marketing is one of the best ways to get quality one way links to your site.

About The Author:

Our SEO friendly directory helps increase site popularity: http://www.samoris.com/ Submit your site today!

The Process Of Search Engine Optimization

By John Tremblay

Search engine optimization is the process of using natural search methods to take advantage of search engine algorithms. This process allows the web site in question to appear earlier on the results page when the search results page is returned to the person making the query. Those sites with an earlier appearance on the results pages are said to have a higher rank

Specialists in the process of revising web pages so that they will have a higher rank usually work in one of two ways. The first group is known as 'white hat' optimizers and the second group is, of course use 'black hat' methods. The labels put upon the two groups would make the clients think that white hats are always good methods, while black hats are somewhat shady and perhaps even illegal. Actually, this overstates the characteristics on both sides.

Both groups attempt to determine from anecdotal evidence what the secret algorithms of the major search engines are. Interestingly enough, the number one search engine, Google, uses a different premise than that of the next two most popular search engines--MSN and Yahoo. Google's PageRank processes assumes that the web pages in a certain grouping or subject which receives the most links to other pages on the same subject is the one recognized as the 'authority' on the subject. Yahoo and MSN are more inclined to look at how effectively and how often certain search terms, known as 'keywords' are being used in a particular site.

From that starting point in each search engine, the algorithms used vary. For example, one search engine may look at how early in the page the keywords are used. Google theoretically looks at the value of the incoming links to a web site. A web page which has good incoming links and few outgoing links will rank higher than one which has many incoming links and many outgoing links.

So, in practice, both the white hats and the black hats are after the same goal. The differences between the two come down to the approach that is taken and how effective it is in getting past the search engine spiders who 'crawl' the web pages. A white hat optimizer will attempt to write web page content that reads well for humans as well as spiders, but to utilize key words and page links effectively in order to increase the rankings. A black hat optimizer may be less concerned about the way the web page reads to humans, and instead try to circumvent the intention of the search engine in the first place. For example, until it was discovered and taken into account in the algorithms, link farms were used to sell links to web pages. Another favorite 'black hat' technique was to use white font messages which could be read by the search engines, but did not appear visible to humans. Again, as soon as this technique was identified by those who write the algorithms it was blocked.

Search engines sometimes take the drastic step of removing pages which are determined to be using 'black hat' techniques from the search engine results pages.

About The Author:

Please consult http://www.teksteel.ca for all your Web marketing needs in Montreal, Canada. We offer innovative internet marketing solutions focused on performance, such as search engine positioning and optimization, ad placement, viral marketing as well as measuring the performance of Web projects.

SEO - Wearing The White Hat Part # 1

By Scott Lindsay

If you have heard the term "Black Hat SEO" then you know the term is applied negatively to websites that use methods of optimizing their website that are frowned on by search engines. In fact, these search engines will ban these sites from their rankings when they are discovered (and they almost always are).

There is another term used for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) referred to as "White Hat", and just like the movie westerns of yesteryear you get the picture that there is a struggle between good and bad between these optimization approaches.

Newsweek reported in a December 19th, 2005 article, "[Search engines] are increasingly tolerant of ethical or "white hat" [SEOs], who primarily help their clients knock down the virtual walls that prevent search engines from fully indexing their site."

To be clear, search engines view "Black Hat" SEO as spam while "White Hat" SEO is not only accepted, it is encouraged. Matt Cutts from Google has said, "To Google, SEO only becomes spam when it goes against our quality guidelines and moves into things like hidden text, hidden links, cloaking, or sneaky redirects...Truthfully, much of the best SEO is common-sense: making sure that a site's architecture is crawlable, coming up with useful content or services that has the words that people search for, and looking for smart marketing angles so that people find out about your site."

Now imagine a business owner looking for ways to pay the least amount on their income tax. They have every right to do so, but there comes a point when numbers are incorrectly manipulated to reduce the individual tax burden. Chances are pretty good that sometime in the future this individual is going to get caught.

"White Hat" SEO practitioners understand there is acceptable rules and they will frame their strategies within those rules because to `get caught' using unethical SEO practices could mean saying goodbye to your ability to let the most people know about your existence on the web.

"Black Hat" SEO is often a sign of desperation. Because proper SEO techniques can take a while to be recognized and applied to search engine rankings many businesses who may feel their chance at business success is slipping away may resort to "Black Hat" techniques and end up banned from search engines in the process.

I can't fault people for wanting business success sooner, but the moderate use of PPC advertising can help offset that `in-between' time when you are waiting for "White Hat" SEO strategies to kick in.

In our next article we'll answer the question, "What are some SEO strategies that are considered `White Hat'?"

About The Author:

Scott Lindsay is a web developer and entrepreneur. He is the founder of HighPowerSites and many other web projects. Get your own website online in just 5 minutes with HighPowerSites at: http://www.highpowersites.com. Start your own ebook business with BooksWealth at: http://www.bookswealth.com

Seo - Rabbit And Tortoise Web Design

By Scott Lindsay

Once upon a time there were two web designers. One was Tom Tortoise and the other was Harry Rabbit.

Harry was one of the fastest web designers the forest had ever seen. He could churn out a site in no time while Tom consistently worked late into the night trying to get his work done.

One day Harry met Tom at the local Spareducks for coffee.

"I bet I can finish the `Stork Appreciation' site before you can finish the `Stop and Smell the Roses" site," Harry said with a slightly evil chuckle.

"Well, I don't know," Tom said slowly.

"Ah, that's what I thought. You're a chicken," Harry replied.

"OK the first one to reach the top ten with their respective keywords will be the winner," Tom said.

Harry readily agreed and slurped down his Espresso con Panna. Like a shot Harry was off to work on his newest website creation. Tom took his time and finished his Espresso Lungo with just a hint of caramel.

The next morning Tom arrived at work to continue designing his website when Harry called and said, "Silly tortoise, you should never try to outdo a rabbit. I worked late last night and the website is done. I sent you a link. Check your email."

Tom listened to the rabbit cackle as he hung up the phone.

Tom took his time making sure every page, Meta title, photograph and article was SEO friendly. He made sure he submitted information to the main Internet directories and he quietly watched as his finished website rose in the search engine rankings.

Then came the morning when the site was ranked in the top ten. That's when he called Harry, "Did you notice I won the contest?"

"What contest?" the rabbit bellowed.

Tom explained and the rabbit was fit to be tied.

"It's like my dad always said, Harry, `Slow and steady, wins the race,'" Tom replied.

The moral of this fractured fairly tale is that simply building a website is not enough to ensure that people will visit or that search engines will take notice.

Like the children's story, the individual that is methodical and consistent in web development and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will likely do much better in the long run than a hastily prepared site that lacks a cohesive purpose in online marketing.

Do everything you can to optimize your website with specific keywords or phrases and watch your site visitation statistics improve.

About The Author:

Scott Lindsay is a web developer and entrepreneur. He is the founder of HighPowerSites and many other web projects. Get your own website online in just 5 minutes with HighPowerSites at: http://www.highpowersites.com. Start your own ebook business with BooksWealth at: http://www.bookswealth.com

Seo Techniques ~ Increasing Page Rank Through Web Directories

By David Bain

When a typical individual surfs the internet, he or she will more than likely use a search engine like Google or Yahoo!Search to proceed with the search for specific information. After a result is returned by the search engine, this typical individual is likely going to click the link at the top of the page or at least a link found on the first page. The awareness of this leads many web masters to hire search engine optimization professionals to increase their page rank. A higher page rank means more web traffic for a web site.

--- Page rank and search engine algorithms ---

A high page rank is attained if the search engine finds the web site relevant to the specific keyword query made by a web surfer, and search engines have certain criteria for ranking the millions of web sites in their indexes. To be on top of the results page or to have a high page rank therefore, a web site must fulfill the criteria set out by the search engines. Search engine optimization professionals make a study of the search engine's search algorithms and try to incorporate these algorithms into a web site's pages.

--- Link popularity as a criterion for search engine ranking ---

One important criterion that search engines use to rank the pages in their indexes is link popularity. The logic lies in the supposition that the more other relevant sites link back to a web site, the more significant its content would be to the individual initiating the query. Thus, the higher the link popularity of a web site is, the higher the web site's page rank deserves to be.

Link popularity is measured by the volume and quality of one-way links to a web site. A web site attains link popularity when it has many links from other web sites that are related to it. If a web master wishes to increase web site's link popularity, he or she should solicit one-way links from other web sites, and it is better if the web master solicits these links from web sites that are directly related to his or her web site content. Thus, a web master of a travel web site is well advised if he or she seeks one-way links from other travel web sites or other sites that offer travel information. Another means to increase link popularity would be one-way links from web directories.

--- Web directories ---

Web directories are usually industry specific. They are an organized collection of links to web sites that belong in the same field. There are web directories for adult dating sites, there are web directories for travel-related sites and so on and so forth. Web directories also usually have sub directories. The links are typically classified into specific fields within a comprehensive industry; and more often than not, there are sub-categories for states, cities, and/or zip codes.

Web directories are a popular means of obtaining one-way links, and links that come from web directories carry much weight in link popularity, and thus, page ranking.

--- Submitting to web directories ---

To maximize the impact of web directory listings to page rank, the web master must choose the web directory carefully. The bigger and the more reputable the web directory is, the higher is the impact of a listing on page rank. It is also important to ensure that the link is submitted under the most appropriate heading or category of the web directory. Search engines look at the company your link keeps, so the more relevant the links around you in the directory are, the higher your page rank becomes.

About The Author:

David Bain is the founder of the free report "Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Mistakes". Visit http://www.Top10SEOMistakes.com to download the report today.

Search Engine Optimization And The Modern Business Procedure

By Markus Skupeika

The secrets of every business would be attainted at the level where the company or the organization is associated with the branded name or the theme. All the company is the universe has its specific branded tone and it very needful to let them reflected. There lies the importance of Search Engine Optimization for a renowned business firm. The algorithm of the modern day's business has differed from those strategies and tactics than that of previous ones. The term "search engine" is often used generically to describe the both crawler based search engines and the man-powered directories. These two types of search engines gather their listings in radically and different way. For the webmasters, SEO professionals and the business men retrieve the record on the basic of the numbers by which their site have been seen or optimized. The process of retrieving the crawling record and the tackling the traffic or visitors is commonly known as Search Engine Optimization.

Gone are the days where "built it and they will come" for the visitors or the web traffic. There are some several important ways and means to ensure the listing of the web masters' site or the business professional's websites. The process to promote a website with its relevant brand name has now set up a new challenge and trend for the business. Fort Lauderdale SEO Firm abides by all the methods and strategies to improve the site listing.

Site submission: The website submission in a renowned and famous search engines like Google (http://www.google.com), Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com) and the MSN has always been on the superlative position. Creating a search engine friendly web site will sort the things out for the business professionals. When analyzing a site for search engine friendliness it very important to look at four arrears: Architecture, Technology, Source code and Code. Optimization can be accomplished in stages and does not need to be tackled all at once. Some of the Search Engines are always bound to have the facilities Pay-Per-click facilities that do cost bit extra.

Key word and the link: For submitting the site to a renowned Search Engine there should be the unique and authentic type of key words to ensure people or the cyber crawlers have the interest to crawl the site for their related information. According to the some SEO firms the key words must remains to 10 to 90 words limits. That must hold the information of the site. The site must contain the reciprocal or the inbound link with the Search Engine. This will ensure the traffic for the website in quite large number.

Themes of the website: The themes of the website must hold the upper hand. Some search engine advises to select the theme of color or on matter. Google always thrives on the theme on the matter. Some online directory submission services have made the immense impact for the promoting site to be crawled. Online directories bank on the different topics and specified article as well.

About The Author:

There are more ways to achieve successful http://monopolizingmarketing.com/seo-tips/ internet marketing strategies than you know. Discover the secrets to local
http://www.floridaseoguy.com/the_benefits_of_search_engine.html internet marketing promotion and advertising today.

How to Keep Top Search Engine Results Even Though Rankings Fluctuate

By Tinu AbayomiPaul

The Question: How Can Anyone Stay on top of the Search Engines when they keep changing their systems of ranking?

The Short Answer: Stop betting on just one horse and spread your risk around.

The Long Answer:

1- Approach the Search Engines with a strategy that caters to them.

I don't just mean get lots of links and use your keywords in the right places. I'm saying that most people try to build towards gaining one major keyword position, and if they lose that spot in an update, their sales and traffic come tumbling down.

Instead of pinning your hopes to one keyword ranking, target a number of visitors, and adjust your strategy accordingly. Find the places where search engines need your listings to make their databases better and they'll be happy to rank your site.

2- Make all the different parts of your overall traffic strategy beneficial to your search engine strategy.

For example, even though I knew naming a site with the keywords you want in it is out of vogue, that doesn't mean I can't still optimize my site for that area. I keep my keywords in mind when I write articles, create press releases, start new sites, start new companies. always.

I also keep linking in mind in every single point of strategy for a new company. With corporate sites, it's not as easy to get links, or to do link trades. On the other hand, no matter what kind of site you have you can fall back on article marketing and directories.

3- Never stop building your site or your links.

Obviously this is easier if you blog. But if you don't, you can still keep adding new pages to your site. And who says you can't have an RSS feed of your updates, whether you're blogging or not?

For basic, steady link growth, I usually say to submit at least an article a week, and a press release each month. You usually get higher quality links in a faster, more semi-automated way than simply pursuing link trades.

And of course, start out your link pursuit with some of the lesser directories. I started out with a list of about 600 directories - not just for business but for ezines, podcasts, rss feeds, blogging, general web directories, etc.

And I started a specialized directory of my own at that time, with the request that those who submitted link back to me as well. Starting a useful resource is a great way to get links.

Why should you follow my advice? Because I've kept hundreds of first page rankings - not just for easy terms - for three years on Google, Yahoo and MSN simultaneously. That's not so much to brag as it is to say that experience is a good teacher.

About the Author:

Tinu is a website promotion specialist who writes a daily free traffic column. Go to http://www.freetraffictip.com to learn more about all aspects of traffic generation, including blogging, article marketing and get late-breaking search engine news.

3 Ways For Driving Traffic To Your Website

By David Bain

You need targeted internet traffic and sales for your online business to survive. Here are three ways through which you can increase traffic and boost sales to your website.

Your website is ready. It sits there while you wait for anyone to come to your site, check your products, and yes, hopefully, to order something! However, it has been months and you are getting really frustrated. Your products are not selling and you are losing money.

What you need is some internet traffic. Sadly, internet traffic doesn't just come without you working on the advertising and marketing aspect of your e-business. If you would just keep on waiting for any traffic, your website would end up buried by your competitor's websites.

Your ultimate goal is to generate targeted market traffic. You are aiming for gaining your target consumers' interest and drive them to your website. There are many ways that you could use to generate traffic. Below are three ways that you can employ.

Number 1: Search Engine Optimization

If people search through major search engines, type in natural keywords and your website comes up, chances are you could expect more website traffic than you could handle. This is your ultimate goal -- ranking heavily on every search engine in the internet.

However, this does not happen overnight. It takes a lot of time and effort in order to achieve this objective. Your aim is to make your presence felt and known in the internet by becoming
one of the top sites in the results page when a keyword query is made. As such, you could try filling your website with articles reflecting the relevant keywords.

Remember though that SEO takes time. It is advisable, therefore, to employ multiple methods to generate more web traffic. However, you could always try buying traffic from vendors to generate website hits. You could buy traffic with Google's and Yahoo's pay-per-click program. What you do is determine and identify your target market's possible keywords and bid for these words or phrases. This may be costly but it would generate hits. Of course, it doesn't end there. You have to keep your customer's interest with an interesting website to begin with.

Number 2: Syndicate your site

There are many websites that would allow feed burning. You would have to create Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds that would link your content and blog to other websites.

Make sure that you are providing informative and interesting information in your blog, though. RSS feeds may increase website hits but they will not generate profit or sales leads, if in truth, your website is bland and boring

Number 3: Create useful, informative and interesting article content

Again, it doesn't matter if your website is generating thousands of hits. It also doesn't matter if suddenly, your website is generating more traffic than you could handle. What is really important is that you are earning profit out of this traffic.

You need to provide your prospective customers with quality web content. The content should be responsive to their need. Write as many articles as you can or hire someone to write them for you if you want. You must provide your customers information on how to solve their problems. Keep your articles fresh, updated and relevant to your customer's needs or problems.

About The Author:

David Bain is the founder of Purple Internet Marketing(http://www.PurpleInternetMarketing.com) which offers Internet marketing training videos, One-to-one Internet Marketing Training and provides E-Business Strategy Consulting.

SEO - How Pay Per Click Gives You Control

By Chris Angus

Even if you are running a small business you can take advantage of a pay per click program. Pay per click search engine advertising offers any type of business a cheap form of promotion. The beauty is that a pay per click ad campaign is that it can also help bring buying customer not just surfers

A big perk to using Another benefit of using pay per click search engines to advertise your product is that you are in control of how much you want to spend on an advertising campaign. This is not necessarily true of other forms of advertising. You are in control of how much money you want to deposit into your pay per click advertising account and you can also determine where and on what keyword it is actually spent. You also determine how and when the ads were run and just how much you are willing to pay each time an interested surfer clicks on your ad. This is much cheaper than letting an agency do this for you. It also places all accountability for your mistakes into one lap - yours!

If you want to make money on the Internet, then you should be managing a pay per click advertising campaign (or 'sponsored listing' as they are sometimes called) on at least one of the most popular search engines.

Another fantastic benefit to using pay-per-click search engines that cannot be overlooked as a search engine optimization tactic is that you have the ability to deliver your product information only to those who are interested. Thanks to the keyword search system you can automate your ad so that it is targeted to those who are already likely prospects. In essence the search engine itself is creating leads and doing market research for you. Yet another big perk is that this naturally raises your rankings in the search engine pages as well because the search engines love ads and links that are focused!

About The Author:

Christopher Angus is a SEO and Website Marketer. He can be contacted at: Sales (at)Brilliantseo.com
http://www.illustratemyname.com http://www.sbzcorporation.com
http://www.crcwritingservices.com

Would You Like To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking?

By John J Jackson

Get the basics right.

Your first step to making sure your site is search engine friendly is to make sure the search engines can "read" your site easily. This means getting the fundamentals right.

In this article we are going to cover the main building blocks of your site:- HTML, frames, keywords, title, description. Alt and keywords tags. We have assumed a basic understanding of HTML. At the end of this article we will show you how you can check your search engine rankings.

HTML - get it validated.

Make it easy for search engines to "read" your site. Check your HTML code. Search engine spiders are computer programs. They work to a predefined set of rules. The easier you make it for them to crawl your site the more likely it is that you will get your pages crawled without problems. Make sure you check your code for errors and that it is well formatted.

Keywords - take the guesswork out of finding keywords.

It's a good idea to do some brainstorming when choosing your keywords. Try to compile a list of all possible keywords that your potential customers would use to find your product or service. The secret of picking high performance keywords is to aim for those phrases that generate a lot of searches but at the same time have limited competition.

The Title Tag - how to optimize your page title.

When search engine spiders crawl your website they give a lot of weight to your page title. The search engine crawler uses the title to judge what the site is about. You should aim to place your most important keywords at the beginning of your title tag. Remember that the search engines will display your title as part of the search results. Try and make the title attractive to your potential visitors. The Title tag is an essential part of getting a better search engine ranking.

Meta Description Tag

When the search engines return their results it is quite often the contents of the description tag that is displayed on the search engine results page. Use your keywords in the description and make sure it is as appealing as possible. The number of visitors you get will depend to a large extent on how much they are attracted by your description. In other words no point being on page 1 of the search results if nobody clicks on your site.

Meta Keywords Tag

Search engines are putting less and less emphasis on the Meta Keywords tag. The keywords tag has been abused in the past and improved search engine rankings are less likely to be as a result of the keyword tag. Nevertheless it can do your site no harm to enter your top keywords into the Meta Keywords tag.

Body text

Remember that not all search engines use the description tag. This means that the results shown on the search page will be the first few lines of your body text. Try to put your keywords at the beginning of your text and remember to make them as appealing as possible. You are trying to get people to click onto your page rather than your competitors; so give them a reason to visit your site. Try to make use of the heading tags and if possible use some bulleted lists. Place keywords within your text in a natural way and do not spam the engines by cramming your text with keywords.

Alt tag

When you insert an image into your webpage one of the image properties is the Alt tag. In the description of your image mention your keywords. The keywords in your alt tag will not necessarily give you an immediately higher search engine ranking but they will certainly not harm your chances.

How do you check your ranking progress?

How do you know if the changes you have made are working. For a limited time we are offering a free website ranking report. This will show you your position, for your chosen keywords on Google,MSN and Yahoo. Reserve your report today. Visit our website now for full details

About The Author:

For the last 20 years John Jackson has been helping all sizes and types of businesses solve their IT problems. He has a proven track record of providing sound, business focused solutions, that are both reliable and affordable. http://www.computer-support-services.co.uk

3 SEO 'w' Factors To Consider When Marketing Your Business Online

By David Bain

Web analytics provide tools on understanding your market; from their behavioral patterns and purchasing capacity to the probabilities: what your niche market wants, how to make your site visitors keep coming back and ultimately how to convert them into devoted customers.

Today's booming internet marketing has become more challenging and competitive not only with the mushrooming of online businesses, but also because more and more online businesses fold-up just as soon as they have started. This is primarily due to the poor analysis of market trending, demographics; and several qualitative and quantitative factors.

--- Three Factors to Consider in Online Marketing:

There are several factors online businesses take into consideration to determine their success or failure. Hits, or the number of times the site was viewed, used to be one such factor. These primarily say a lot about how web surfers see your site. But then, online marketers wanted to find out more than how many times they were viewed. Web analytics devised a formula that would profile each unique visitor and store their information for future reference so it can likewise be determined when repeat visits occur. From these profiles, the marketer gets an idea of three important W's: Who, What and When.

Who - visits you. Who was interested at first sight, but never looked at any other pages on your site? Whom did you keep engrossed so much so he/she acquired your products/services? Who took the time to fill-out your survey forms or who dropped-out of purchasing something in midstream? When answering these questions, you can now see who are those who can become potential buyers and those who just dropped in your site.

What - were they looking for that led them to you? Did the search engine they used correctly brought them to you? What kind of products/services do they need that you can perhaps provide in the future? This way, you'll know which products or services you can improve to better suit your visitors. What pages did they spend most of their time on? What generated more income? Maybe the search wrongly led them to you but through the web analytic information, you may have found out their specifics and strategize a game plan that would enable you to provide them with what it is they're looking for, in the near future.

When - they viewed your site. This information is a vital part of your formula for success. Determining the peak and off-peak hours you were viewed, you may formulate marketing schemes that could increase site visits, decrease bounce rates and drop-outs.

--- How These Factors Help To Zero in On your Market:

These three W's will help in determining what parts of your website need improving. You can also know how to alter your web design in a way that will cater more to your niche market and influence their purchasing powers or do a general make-over by using the demographics of your audience. You have surely gathered these from the intricate and detailed report of web analytics. These can likewise tell if you're attracting the right traffic. If you have numbers of visits but bounce and drop-out rates are almost in parallel to them, chances are you are very likely attracting the wrong crowd. Since the onset of internet marketing and online businesses, this industry has never had more help than when web analytics came into the picture.

About The Author:

David Bain is the author of the free report Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Mistakes. Visit
http://www.Top10SEOMistakes.com to download the report today.

SEO: What They Don't Know

Scott Lindsay

In marriage you try to learn everythi