How To Become an SEO Expert - 5 Secrets That Will Allow You to Outperform 95% of All Webmasters

Author: Michael Turner

Becoming an SEO expert, or a search engine optimization expert, is something that is worth your while if you are interested in getting your web page noticed and increasing your traffic. It is not hard to become an SEO expert if you simply know what steps you need follow to take you there. As long as you follow these steps and are diligent, you will become the SEO expert you want to be. Read the following topics, then research them more to learn exactly what will put you above the majority of all webmasters.

Topic #1 Keywords

Keywords are a huge part of becoming a search engine optimization expert. The reason for this is that keywords are used by the search engines to find and rank their results. You must become an expert at using keywords that apply to your products and services in order to become a search engine optimization expert.

Topic #2 Links

Developing a link campaign is another important aspect of becoming an SEO expert. The reason for this is that links play an important role in how web pages are ranked by the search engines. The more links a website has present on the Internet, the higher weight and ultimate ranking it will be given by the search engine. If you want to be an SEO expert, you need to learn all you can about links and the role they play in the search engines.

Topic #3 Pay per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising is another important topic that relates to an SEO expert. This type of advertising is used on search pages when particular keywords are searched for. Your website only pays for this type of advertising when someone clicks on your ad, hence the name ""pay per click"". The PPC advertising element is important to the success of many websites and results in increased traffic. As an SEO expert, you need to know all there is to know about pay per click advertising.

Topic #4 Directories

Directories are another aspect of getting websites optimized for search engines. Submitting your site to directories not only provides valuable incoming links to your website, it also sends you targeted visitors from those particular directories. To become an expert on search engine optimization, you will need to study and learn everything about directories and how they can be used by a website to build business and drive traffic.

Topic #5 Expert

You should strive to be an expert on something. It is fine to learn all about the different tools to become a search engine optimization expert, however you will also need to be an expert on specific topics and have certain niche topics where you are viewed as an expert.

About the author: Michael Turner reveals his foolproof way to increase website traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it free right now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

If you build it, they will come?

Author: Phillip Harrison

Building a new website can be a lengthy task. From scratch to the clients specification and then implement additional features and/or changes the client usually has. Sometimes far too much attention is put to the development of building the website and then on launch day expect the massess of visitors to flood in. This simply is not the case, unless you have traffic from another of your sites streaming over to the new one.

Time and again i see decent looking websites with no traffic. Even when the designer offers to promote the website, the client most likely refuses on the grounds of cost. In my opinion for a website to succeed in bringing in the masses, a effective promotion and search engine optimisation has to be in force. This costs money, but if you dont get the visitors, you dont get the sales. Making the site pointless and something for the client to look at now and again and admire how nice it looks.

Search engine optimisation, although vital, is only one step to the road to success. Once the website is complete, the site promotion should begin. Infact this stage should be considered while the designer is building the site. Creating the site with search engine optimisation in mind.

Far too many times does a designer create a site, only for the client to go elsewhere for the site promotion. Falling into the trap of paying someone who claims to submit their site to a ridiculous high number of directories and search engines, for instance eight hundred thousand. Fact is, there isnt that many decent search engines and directories. In my opinion only google, yahoo and msn are the only good search engines to get any traffic from.

For a site promotion to work, a plan is required to maximise the best places to get traffic. This would not only involve submitting manually to the top search engines but also advertising in the best and most appropriate places. Also gaining links to your site from popular sites is important. This all takes time and money.

About the author: http://www.onestop-webdesign.com One Stop Web Site Design uk specialises in creating the complete web site without the buyer having to understand all the jargon. Simply sign up to our low cost monthly plan, and give us an outline of what your website should be about and what products to sell. You can then sit back as we organise everything from hosting, web site development to setting up your shop and web site ready for going live.

Can Someone Please Define Internet Marketing!

Author: Melih Oztalay

Back in 1994 after you created a website for your business, marketing was fairly simple. Generally you would make changes to your HTML code for search engine optimization and for the most part promoted your website through offline methods. These may have included business cards, letterhead, print advertising and other such methods. Whether or not your site was listed on the only search engine, Yahoo, at the time was purely based on how well you optimized our web pages. If you did a good job then multiple pages of your site would be listed consecutively for a search.

Twelve years later in 2006 the entire perspective of marketing your site on the web has become a science requiring a degree. Although, we are all eager to market our website on the web we are somewhat unclear how to accomplish this task through a maze of policies set by the Big 3 search engines - Google, MSN and Yahoo. Most businesses would first seek out professional advice. In the process of seeking professional Internet Marketing advice, your story may look something like this.

""By now I had heard about pay-per-click, something called Ad Sense, link exchanges, banner advertising and it all sounds quite confusing. After all as a business owner, my forte is to run my company, not try and figure out how to market a website on the Internet. As I seek out professional advice I get quite a variety of different stories. One person calls themselves Internet marketer and the only thing they provide is Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns. The next person I speak to also consider their business to be in Internet Marketing, yet the only service provided is Search Engine Optimization. Even that term was somewhat vaguely defined to me. I continue to hear about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but it seems to vary from changes to our website to advertising on the web. I am most definitely puzzled at this point. Can anyone describe what Internet Marketing is actually about?""

Advertising and Marketing has always been handled by professional firms that have college educated individuals and understand the difference between Advertising and Marketing. In case you are wondering, here are the definitions of Advertising and Marketing.

- Marketing is the process or technique of promotion, selling and distributing a product or service.

- Advertising is to make your product or service publicly known; an announcement to call public attention by emphasizing qualities to arouse a desire to purchase.

One of the primary issues of advertising and marketing on the Internet is that you may not necessarily reach someone educated in the field of advertising and marketing. Instead it is someone that has educated themselves about a particular area of Internet Marketing. For instance they may have specialized in Affiliate Marketing or Pay-Per-Click campaigns while another individual may know more about making changes to your website for search engine optimization. Currently these types of services are fragmented and they do require someone with the appropriate skills to manage an entire Internet marketing campaign.

If we take a look at all the different areas of Internet marketing you will find the following in your list:

Research, Analysis, Planning and Strategy We need to research key phrases and look at the data to determine our title and description.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) I believe it is safe to say that SEO is not advertising on the web. SEO is strictly modifications to your HTML code and website. Making sure your website is HTML validated, density checks, the keywords, phrases, content, alt descriptions, anchor titles and so on are in place for the entire website.

Internet Marketing This is the actual process of promotion as the definition of marketing was described earlier. Some would call this Natural Propagation Marketing, others will call it Organic marketing. With this form of marketing you can rest assured the shelf life of the efforts put forth can be measured in years.

Internet Advertising Although, the shelf life of Internet advertising can be measured in seconds and can hemorrhage a business financially, there are three areas of Internet advertising. The first would be to utilize an Internet Advertising Network (IAN) to submit a variety of banners through out a variety of websites in order to narrow your advertising to an area with the most response. Another area is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns such as Google Ad Sense or Yahoo Search Marketing. Lastly, you may consider direct advertising on websites that you have found to be of value to your business with high page ranking.

Management & Reporting It is necessary to monitor all the various activities you are pursuing on the web. Internet marketing gives us the ability to measure almost all aspects of our advertising and marketing campaigns with the push of a button. You will want to keep an eye on your website statistics, check your Google page rank, your Alexa traffic ranking, and your link popularity overall to name a few.

If we consider all the various parts that are required for proper business Internet marketing, you will find the industry moving towards consolidation in the future. Equally, we will find that advertising and marketing on the web will eventually fall back to educated professionals who not only understand advertising and marketing, but will now include their education in Internet marketing as well.

About the author: Melih Oztalay is the CEO of SmartFinds Internet Marketing. Internet marketing is not only about knowledge and experience, but also about imagination. Visit SmartFinds Internet Marketing.

World Domination-Get The Facts...

Author: DocStuey

""Being an achiever in anything you do, is little more than the focussed execution of a learned skill set. Achieving dominance, requires the achiever to have passion, perseverance, an open minded willingness to learn and adapt, as well as the ability to have and hold on to a vision.""

H.Brett, 2005

Dominating the World Wide Web, is not as difficult, costly, and nerve racking as many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts and self proclaimed ""Web Marketing Gurus"" would lead you to believe. It does however require the ""focussed execution of a learned skill set"", combined with ""an open minded willingness to learn and adapt, as well as the ability to have and hold on to a vision."" If you don't have the latter, STOP... go no further... this article is not going to help you! If you have the ""open minded willingness to learn and adapt, as well as the ability to have and hold on to a vision"", and would like to add a few tools to your skill set, keep reading...

First step on the path to dominance is to become an achiever. To become an achiever, requires learning a skill set, applying it daily in an effort to perfect it. ""Perfection is an ongoing process which never ceases... there is always a better, more efficient method of executing any skill set... Evolution is the living proof.""

There are several ways to acquire and perfect any chosen skill set. Well, there is the obvious method of accumulating theoretical knowledge through reading and having a somewhat experienced textbook teacher sharing their experiences, which for you equate to additional theory. Then there is the most important part of actually doing, repeating, improving, and so on... Ideally, for this part you'll get a coach, or better yet, a mentor. Easier said than done. Truly successful SEO masters, are too pre-occupied with learning and practicing, perfecting their skills, and becoming more successful, to donate their time to you. Most publicly proclaimed so called SEO ""Gurus"" are better at taking your money than they are at SEO... they are just out to sell you a $37, $97 or $147 course on SEO, offering a 30-90 day satisfaction guarantee, knowing full well, over 95% of customers don't end up requesting refunds even when they feel like they've been had. Well I have no interest in marketing SEO courses. And to be totally honest, I don't have the time to mentor anyone on any topic... and frankly, if it were not beneficial to me, I wouldn't even be sharing this info... so appreciate the fact that this is therefore truly of mutual benefit... I will explain.

Now before I get you to blindly invest anymore of your valuable time, let me give you a quick background on how and where I developed the skill set I am about to share with you... this way you can judge whether or not you wish to continue along this path.

My name is Howard Brett, this for the record, is my real name, not a stage name to hide behind. I am a real person, sharing real results... No BS. Please note, I am publishing this article on the DocStuey account, because I am legally entitled to do so, although I am not DocStuey. A good friend of mine recently required my services to help launch a monumental project. Part of this effort required developing a grass roots web presence.

""DocStuey "", For Diets Health and Wellness Facts You Can Trust , born out of the need to dispel the half truths, false promises, and downright lies, perpetrated by the diet/ weight loss, nutritional supplement, fitness and food industries.

Without a single web site submission to any of the Search Engines, DocStuey achieved indexing on all the major search engines within weeks of launching (actually, Google and MSN found us within days).

Although being a new site and likely sitting in what seems to be known as the ""Google Sandbox"", preventing first page appearances on most of our important (or the most competitive) keywords, most of our pages have a page rank of 3 or 4 and we have many times more relevant inbound links than outbound or reciprocal links.

MSN has given us first page listings on most of our primary keywords, as well several rank #1. Even our secondary keywords and phrases rank well, often on the first or second page.

All 5 articles published on GoArticles.com have been wildly successful, achieving The Top 5 Most Downloaded Articles in a 30 day period... this one will be the next to top the charts... I know this will happen, and I will explain in detail how to achieve these results, and the benefit to doing so.

Ok, so you've made it this far... you're still with me... so here we go. Let's start with a little ""warm up"" exercise.

Think for a moment... Why do we optimize web sites and web pages for Search Engines? What importance should be placed on meta tags? Why do we calculate keyword density? Why do we, or should we, perform ""back flips"" to entertain Google? How important is page rank anyway? What importance should be placed on reciprocal links, inbound links, overall link structure? Do doorway pages work for or against us? Are RSS feeds the answer? What's in a ""Blog""? How about press releases? Article submission sites? Is there anything else? ...Yes, there are so many new software programs designed to give us the edge... to ""trick"" the Search Engines, or simplify the process of adding or modifying RSS Feeds, or exchanging links... But, do these tactics really work? I've tried them all on different sites over the last few months...

Now, before I reveal what I have confirmed has created the best results for DocStuey, as well as several other sites that I have worked on, I'll give you the definitive answer to all the ""What"" and ""Why"" questions, then we'll review the ""How"" and ""Do"" questions in more detail. ""Targeted Traffic"".

SEO is all about getting ""targeted traffic"" to flow to your web sites, without incurring costs. If you have to pay an SEO company excessive or ongoing (monthly) fees to supposedly assure you first page listings for your keywords, you may as well use ""pay per click"" advertising (perhaps I'll get into this some other time). A one time nominal fee to optimize your web site for meta tags, overall linking structure or ""flow"", and incorporation of an automated ""content page"" using ""RSS feeds"" or ""web logs"" (""Blogs""), is prudent and money well spent.

Don't waste time or money submitting to Search Engines... Don't buy or pay for software, or pay others to submit to Search Engines on your behalf either... Any Search Engines worth your time, will find your web site if it is worth finding. Make your web site worth finding and it will be found. How? Content!

Content rules... content is king! Relevant, keyword dense content articles will get your site noticed by the Search Engine spiders. Regularly updated content will get your site crawled often by the Search Engine spiders, this will get you indexed quickly. You are not a writer. You don't have enough expertise on the topics needed to sell the kinds of products you wish to sell on your web site, etc... How do you get the kind of Content you need on a regular basis? ""RSS Feeds"" to professionally written articles, that's how.

RSS Feeds will get you the quantity and quality of content you require on any topic available on the World Wide Web and it is content that won't cost you a dime. Sounds like a quick and simple fix? It is, although unless using one of these new software programs to automate the procedure, it still requires some work on your part. One of my preferred recommendations is "" RSS Equalizer "", I've included a live link in my resource box below, in case the ""anchor text"" link in this article has been turned off by the webmaster of this web site on which you are reading my article. I'd appreciate you using my links within this article or my resource box, as this is one ""benefit to me"" as mentioned earlier... remember? ...I get paid an affiliate fee on the sale of the programs that I recommend... please remember, I only recommend the programs that I have tested and benefited from. My blatant advertisement of an ""affiliate program"" was not the intent of writing this article however, and the true benefit has yet to be revealed...

Ok, ever heard of ""saving the best for last""? Well that is exactly what I've done...

Before I take you there, we'll need to review Google page rank, links, reciprocal links, inbound links, overall link structure, and what role RSS feeds play in this relationship. Once I tie this all together for you, I'll drop the ""domination bomb"" right in your plate!

Without going into a full discussion of Google page rank, there are numerous quality articles you can find on the web, here is a quick detailed summary...

Page rank is a value Google attributes on a page by page basis to every page the Search Engine indexes. Page rank is a measure of importance Google attributes to a page based on the quantity and quality of votes the page receives from other web sites. A link from any other page equals a vote in favour of the page being ranked. The weight, or importance (number of points) carried by this vote, depends on the quality and/or relevance of the vote. Relevance is determined by ""content"" to ""content"" relationship, as well as the relevance of the anchor text used in the link to the page being ranked. Relevance as well as the page rank of the page linking to the page being ranked, determines the overall points bestowed on the page being ranked. All inbound links whether relevant, or not, still count as a vote in favour of. Internal links from one page of a web site to another page on the same site, count as a vote in favour of, as well as share page rank. Outbound links to completely unrelated sites seem to ""bleed"" page rank, although not confirmed. What is of concern though is code within Googles page rank algorithms that penalizes web sites for massive link exchanges with completely unrelated sites in an attempt to boost page rank by fooling the search engine into thinking a site is important because it has a large number of links, or votes. This penalty seems to also affect web sites using outbound links to link exchange or link farm pages hosted on a server other than that of the web site itself.

With this summary of page rank, please head these words of caution...

Don't waste your money and time on any service providing access to link farms, link exchanges, link clubs, link hosting, FFA (Fr** For All) pages.

If you want to do any link exchanges, although too time consuming for my liking, this does offer mutual benefit to the sites involved, visit sites on page 1 or 2 of Google for the keyword searches that are important and related or complimentary to what you do... write to the webmaster respectfully requesting to exchange links with them, once you have already posted a link to them from your site. This method doesn't cost you anything, and is the most effective way of building a relevant reciprocal link structure.

So what is the relationship created with using RRS feeds to get your content? Simple, you win as you get relevant content, the author wins as he/she gets your vote, which equates to a non reciprocated inbound link... there are no penalties to you, and there is obvious benefit to the author. Wow! A win/win situation. What could be better?

Ok, you've been patient long enough... time to drop the ""domination bomb"" right in your plate!

The single most efficient way to create exposure, importance, targeted traffic, unlimited non reciprocal inbound links and consequently Google page rank, followed by regular page one placements in the major Search Engines for all your keywords is... Become a highly published ""Web Author"" Sounds so simple... NOT!

Ok, settle down... I know you feel you can't write... most people can't... that's why RSS feeds to content articles are such valuable tools. If you can write professionally, you are ""home fr**"". Bottom line is the greatest rewards are reaped by the authors, provided they become highly published (we'll get to that in a moment). First let's deal with your lack of literary skills, if you can't be a writer, how do you become one? Once again, a simple no BS answer... go to your favourite major Search Engine, I find MSN to produce the most relevant results, and type ""ghost writer"", this should produce over 2 million solutions on ""Any Given Sunday"".

A ghost writer creates professionally written original copyright literary works with your name or any trade mark or given name which you hold title to, for a fee. Now we've turned you into a professional author. So, how do we get you highly published? Again... simple... Sorry, I've reached the space limit for this article. You can find many of our most successful resources at

http://hit-fre nzy.v-forceinternational.com/ .

Contact me for these final words of wisdom. You'll find my contact info in the resource box following this article. If it is missing, the webmaster of this site is in violation of the Terms of Use Agreement with GoArticles.com. Please report this to ""webmaster@goarticles.com"". You can find me at GoArticles.com by doing a search by author, type in ""DocStuey"".

Here is an example of what we've done with DocStuey over a 6 week period... every single article has dominated the Top 5. I can do this for you as well if you need a Ghost Writer that knows how to get results. GhostWriter@V-ForceInternational.com

About the author: H.Brett is a veteran web marketing consultant, author/publisher. Current assigment, ""DocStuey"". Producing Top Ranking results consistantly. Offering Ghost Writing services: GhostWriter@V-ForceInternational.com. Recomended resources ""http://rss-equalizer.v-forceinternational.com/"" and http://hit-fre nzy.v-forceinternational.com/

Ten Critical Website and Search Engine Promotion Mistakes

Author: Michael Turner

When it comes to promoting your website, you might think that anything you can do to get people to your website is worthwhile. However, you should think again because some shady practices will actually hurt you. Also, other SEO tactics could reduce the amount of potential visitors simply because you do not have a clear understanding of how the Internet and search engines work. Read the following tips on what not to do when promoting your website and if you are doing some of these things stop immediately and learn how to effectively promote your site.

1. Too Many Images

Search engines search for text, so if your website is composed mostly of photographs your results will be significantly lower if ranked at all. It’s ok to have good photos, just make sure you have really good content as well.

2. Keyword Phrases

Keywords phrases are a great way to get more traffic. However, if you are unaware of the importance of keyword phrases or unsure how to use them effectively then you might be doing yourself in. Learn about the importance of keyword phrases and how to get them to work for you.

3. Excessive Keywords

Using too many keywords with no clear understanding of how those keywords influence search engine rankings can also cause you problems. Before you start listing hundreds of keywords in your content, learn how to properly utilize this tool to get it to work for you and not against you.

4. Links are Difficult to Find

Make sure your website is clearly laid out and any links to other pages are obvious and easy to get to. Too many times links are hidden and people cannot find them, so they simply leave.

5. Information is hard to find

Another significant problem is if information on your products or how to buy them is obscured or difficult to find. Make sure everything is out in the open and obvious.

6. Frames

Search engines do not return websites with frames very well because all of the pages link to one URL. If your website has frames, remove them as they'll certainly have a negative impact on your search engine ranking efforts.

7. Spamming Search Engines

This is a very bad idea because if you are trying to trick the search engines regarding the true content on your page, you may be doing yourself more harm than good because the search engines may blacklist your site. Avoid doing this at all costs, especially on a domain that is important to you.

8. Website Should Work In all Browsers

Not everyone uses Internet Explorer, so make sure the web page opens in any browser. If not, you will be eliminating a lot of potential users.

9. Wrong Optimization

Often times people work hard on optimizing their web pages using certain keywords. However, you must be sure the keywords you are using are relevant to your market and your products. There are programs that will help you make sure you are choosing the right keywords for your web page. If you optimize wrong, you won’t get visitors.

10. Over-submitting Pages

Do not submit too many pages to the search engines in one day. The reason for this is if you submit too many pages they may be simply ignored, and in fact many search engines only accept one page per day. So, submit one page per day and be patient. An even better idea than submitting is building up your incoming links as search engines will find these and follow them to your website.

About the author: Michael Turner reveals his foolproof way to increase website traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it free right now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

Search Engine Optimization Strategies Guaranteed to Skyrocket your Rankings

Author: Michael Turner

The point of optimizing your website is so that you will get ranked higher in the search engines and receive more visitors to your site. As a result, you will increase sales and revenue. Consider the following tips so that you will be able to optimize your site and be returned as a higher result in the search engines.

Strategy #1 - Keywords

Finding the appropriate keywords for your website and market is very important. Fortunately, there are a wide variety of software programs that will help you determine the appropriate keywords for your industry so that you will be able to include them on your website. All search engines take keywords into account when crawling the web and ranking results, so if you utilize your keywords effectively it will help you get higher positioning. However, you can misuse keywords as well which will ultimately only cause you problems. Make sure you know the correct keywords for your market as well as how to use them correctly on your website.

Strategy #2 - Links

Links are another very important aspect of increasing your rankings. The reason for this is many search engines are crawling the web and looking for the amount of sites that are on the Internet linking to your website. The more links you have, the more weight is given to your website. So, you should put a lot of effort into getting links to your website distributed throughout the Internet. Not only will your traffic increase because more people will be exposed to your site via links, but your search engine rankings will be increase as well.

Strategy #3 - No Frames

If you want to skyrocket your rankings you need to be sure you are not using frames. The reason for this is that frames cause problems with a lot of search engines and if you are using frames, you may not get indexed. Obviously, achieving top search engine rankings is pretty difficult if your website isn't even listed!

Strategy #4 - No Spamming

Another important tip is to be sure you do not spam the search engines. The reason for this is that the majority of all search engines do not support spammers, so if you are doing anything that can possibly be considered as SE spamming you should stop immediately to avoid being blacklisted by the search engines.

There are many other things you can do as well to focus on increasing your rankings with the search engines, but the best advice is to follow the above tips and also research online what different search engines are looking for. Doing so will give you a better chance of meeting the search engines expectations.

About the author: Michael Turner shows you exactly how to increase web site traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it today at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

Targeted Traffic for Your Website - 3 Guaranteed Ways to Create Lift-Off

Author: Michael Turner

Targeting traffic for your website is as easy as knowing how to simply direct traffic to your website rather than another one. The information web surfers are looking for is usually available on hundreds if not thousands of websites, so you have to make sure you are extremely diligent about keeping your website high in the search engine rankings. There are several ways you can do this which include links, keywords, and pay per click advertising.

#1 - Get Links

Getting other web pages to link to your website is very important and something you should focus on heavily. There are software programs you can install that will help you with this, but there is nothing like the personal touch. So, do some research and find the top sites that you are interested in having a link to your website. Then, contact them personally noting the good qualities of their website and how you believe a link from them would help your business and vice versa. If you are willing to link as well, then the other sites will likely respond positively. This is the best way to go and you certainly you will gain more links and higher rankings in the search engines.

#2 - Include Keywords

Make sure you do some research regarding the main keywords that pertain to your website. Then, include these words in your content, especially in titles and in the beginnings of paragraphs. Search engines rely heavily on keywords, so make sure you have your page optimized for specific keywords so you will get returned high in the rankings. You can easily do a search for your keywords and see where you rank and also find out if your rankings need work. However, one thing you should definitely not do is try and trick the search engines with invisible keywords as this could get you blacklisted. This is the worst case scenario, but it happens frequently to people who try to trick the search engines. Don’t let this happen to you and simply find out what search engines look for and then optimize your page accordingly.

#3 - Pay per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising is another way for you to generate traffic to your website and you only have to pay when someone clicks on your advertisiment. The way this works is you bid on specific keywords so that when these keywords are searched for, your ad shows up on the web page along with the search results. The higher you bid on ad placement, the higher your ad is displayed. Generally, no more than 10 ads are displayed on a page and you'll want to be within the top four ads for optimal exposure.

These three tools are great ways for you to increase your traffic as well as target the visitors that you want to come to your website. By implementing these suggestions in your marketing plan you will quickly realize more sales.

About the author: Michael Turner shows you exactly how to increase web site traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it today at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

SEO Quickstart - 3 Things You can do to Improve Search Engine Rankings Right Now

Author: Michael Turner

Increasing your search engine rankings should certainly be one of your main goals if you are looking to increase your targeted traffic. The reason for this is if you improve your search engine rankings, you'll increase the amount of visitors your website receives, and when you increase traffic to your site you are going to increase customers and sales. All of this potential has webmasters spending a lot of time and money getting their pages in the top 10 results on large, popular search engines like Google. There are only 10 spots on the first page of a search and thousands upon thousands of web pages are competing for these top spots. You have to put together an SEO marketing plan and include some of the proven ways to increase your search engine rankings today. Read the following suggestions, implement them in your marketing plan, and watch your traffic increase!

#1 - Get Links

If you do not have links to your website on other sites, you can forget getting a top rating. The reason for this is that many of the top search engines, and even some of the smaller ones, are searching for the amount of links on the Internet that are linked to your website. The more you have means the more popular your website and the higher weight it will be given. However, if you do not have links to your website, it is not the end of the world because it is fairly easy to get links via reciprocal linking. Start today and watch your website rise in the search results.

#2 - Do Keyword Research

You need a keyword campaign if you want to compete with other websites for the top search results. The reason for this is many of the top search engines base their results on the keywords searched for and the existence of these keywords in your website copy. However, it is very important to understand how keywords work and how to incorporate them into your website effectively. The best thing to do is research keywords and how to use them online to adequately incorporate this element into your marketing campaign.

#3 - Submit Your URL

This might sound obvious, but too many people never submit their URL to the big search engines, then they just sit back and wait and hope the search engine spiders pick up their site and index it. Do not waste time waiting for this when you can submit your URL and get indexed much quicker. However, read the rules and regulations for submitting your URL to search engines and know what they are looking for so you'll be sure to meet all of the requirements.

Once you do these three simple tasks, which really will not take you much time and no money, you'll increase your website traffic and start enjoying more sales. Don’t wait to increase the popularity of your website, go ahead and start today!

About the author: Michael Turner shows you exactly how to increase web site traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it today at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

Using Robots.txt Files To Feed The Spiderbots

Author: Christian Whiting

It's a Thursday evening. You are looking at your website logs to determine where your hits are coming from. You notice you are getting a ton of 404 errors records for a robots.txt file.

You might not even know what a robots.txt file is, let alone why it is missing from your website. Let take a look at this mysterious file that seems to be missing and why it's important to have it.

Search engines like Google cruise the internet by sending out their spidering software. These are commonly known as spiderbots. The spiderbots visit websites all around the internet to include them in their index listings. The first thing they look for when they visit is a file called the robots.txt file. This file normally is found in the root directory of hosted website.

This file contains a set of rules that the spiders are programmed to obey based on standard protocol. These rules help the visiting spider determine what part of your website to include or to ignore all together.

The most common rule used in the robots.txt file is to deny the search engine spiders access to restricted areas of your website that you don't want them visiting and indexing for the whole internet to view.

These restricted areas normally contain your downloads, images, or a cgi-bin directory that are used only by your website visitors or for the normal daily operations of you website.

What A robots.txt file is not....

Keep in mind that a robots.txt file is not a method to keep your information secure and safe from prying eyes. It simply is used to lock visiting spiders from indexing areas of your website.

Note that using a robots.txt file does not speed up the process of search engines indexing and getting your website in their search directories. Also, a robots.txt file is not used to tell search engine spiders what to do, only what not to do.

Benefits of using a robots.txt file:

- If you have parts of your website that are very similar you can block them from being crawled to avoid being flagged as a spammer. This is especially useful if you have similar pages optimized for different website browsers or website connection speeds.

- You eliminate 404 errors for missing robots.txt from your server logs by using a robots.txt file. Just create a blank robots.txt file in a basic text file editing program and upload it to your root directory.

- Can be used to block search engine spiders from indexing part or all of your website saving valuable bandwidth

Creating A robots.xt

Creating a robots.txt file is not complicated but you should be sure to do it correctly. If your file contains incorrect rules it can completely block all spiders and prevent them from indexing your website.

You can create a robots.txt file using a simple text editing program like NotePad or you can generate a file automatically using several software programs or online website resources.

For information and rules on how to manually create a robots.txt file visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#robotstxt

To create a robots.txt file online visit: http://searchbliss.com/webmaster_tools/robots-txt-text-generator. htm

Once you have a robots.txt file created upload it to your root directory of your website. Now you will be ready the next time the spiderbots come around.

About the author: Christian Whiting is the publisher of Internet Profits. Dedicated to bringing you the best tips, tools and resources to help you make more money online. http://internetprofits.bushido.net

Search Engine Optimisation: Why Not a Flash Website?

Author: David Touri

Yeah why not! They look good and can be very creative with a lot of visual effects. But the truth is they are not very search engine friendly. For those who have just spent a lot of bucks on creating a flash masterpiece, no need to panic, there are a few ways to help improve your website's search engine visibility.

To give you a quick rundown as to why flash websites are not favoured by search engines, they are seen as a one page image file with no text based content. You will notice that when you navigate through a flash website, the URL address will always remain the same. So here you have a website with no text based content, is a one page image file and has no internal link structure, translating into a search engine's enemy.

Unless you have an extremely popular name within your industry or have an enormous amount of relevant incoming links, then you will get away with having a flash website for the obvious keyword phrases i.e. company name. Who would fall into this category? An example would be Coca Cola, ever heard of them? So for those who fall into the other category, and that would be about 90% of us, fortunately there are alternatives to help boost your rankings.

There are three suitable methods that I would recommend. The first method is by far the easiest and cost efficient. It involves optimising your Title and Meta tags for the single page to the best of your ability and then including optimised text information beneath the flash image. Some may see this as a form of spam, but given the scenario, I would recommend this method provided that the text is written accordingly and avoids keyword stuffing.

The second method can be quite costly and might not be favoured given the fact that you have spent a lot of cash on your flash website. It involves developing a second site designed in HTML. When a visitor visits your site, they would be presented with two links, one to your flash site and one to your HTML site. That way search engine crawlers will access all the content and pages via the HTML website.

The third method is by far the most preferred. It works by developing an HTML website with your flash images embedded on the page, and all content is written in text based form. This allows you to have multiple HTML pages which will give you more Title and Meta tags to work with, as well as keyword rich content to write for each page.

To sum up, depending on your time and budget constraints, there are ways to help you avoid the search engine pitfalls of having a flash website. Any of the methods I have discussed, along with a strong incoming link structure, will help you get that extra exposure in the search engines. If are thinking of designing a flash website, make sure you look at implementing a search engine friendly strategy to avoid complications in the future.

About the author: About the Author: David Touri works for SEO Sydney , the SEO Consultants . He has worked on various projects and offers

search engine optimisation in Australia .

HTML and Search Engine Optimization - What You Don't Know Can Kill You

Author: Michael Turner

When it comes to search engine optimization there is a lot of information available, some accurate, some not. If you really want to know what is going on regarding your website and how to best optimize it for good results with the search engines, you need to do some SEO research. Review the following suggestions and above all get your information verified from a variety of sites, don’t just take one site’s information as the truth and run with it because you could be running in the wrong direction.

-Frames Equal Death

If you are using frames on your website then your website is dead in the water when it comes to search engines. Frames cannot be indexed by the majority of search engines. Obviously this is bad because you want to be indexed by the search engines so eliminating frames from your website or building a new website without frames should be one of your major goals.

-No HTML Links

If you do not have HTML links on your site, but rather are using an image map from your homepage to your other pages then you might simply be asking the search engines to ignore these other web pages and these more than likely have some of your website’s most important information. If you are not using HTML links, start doing so, and bring your web page rankings in the search engines back to life.

-URL

Your URL is important and it is what will direct people to your website. However, if you include a ""?"" in your URL you are causing problems for many search engines. By using ""?"" in your URL formatting, you may be ignored and not indexed by the search engines. Do your best to keep the ""?"" symbol out of your URL and use keywords instead.

-No Links

If you do not have links to your website throughout the Internet, you are not maximizing your website's true potential. To solve this problem, all you have to do is simply get other websites to link to your site. This can easily be done through reciprocal linking and the search engines will pick up your webpages and index them.

-No Keywords

If you do not optimize your website with keywords you will have some major problems when it comes to getting targeted search engine traffic. Search engines use keywords as a method to weigh your website against others so be sure to know your important keywords and include them in the content of your website.

Now that you have some information on search engine optimization and what you need to do to increase your targeted search engine traffic, get started optimizing you website so you can enjoy being ranked higher in the search results and ultimately boost your income.

About the author: Michael Turner reveals step-by-step how you can increase search engine traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

Shopping Carts and SEO

Author: Ross MacIver

Shopping and the Web. They go together like Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Well, maybe not quite, but Internet shopping is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world.

It's fairly easy to set up shop and sell almost anything from bananas to banana boats on the Internet. Browse through the shopping section of Google ( Froogle ) or Yahoo and you can see the amazing variety of products that are available.

Click on a few of those links and take a look at the address bar on your browser. Many online stores use some kind of dynamic system for generating their pages. This means their product information is drawn from a database and dynamically displayed.

Dynamically displayed pages look something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=shopping+cart&btnG=Searc h

You will notice that there is no extension which would indicate a static page.

Is there a problem with dynamic pages? From SEO perspective there is a real problem. Search engines have trouble indexing dynamic pages, especially with multiple variables.

Here is what Google has to say about dynamic pages:

""If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a ""?"" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few"".

Shopping carts that use a lot of parameters will have trouble getting indexed by search engines.

The Solution?

A client recently approached me to provide a shopping cart that would allow his products to be indexed properly. In addition, he had special requirements for the size and the cost of the shopping cart. The cart needed to be as inexpensive and as small as possible.

My client had previously been using PayPal “Buy it Now” buttons but disliked the way the customer was immediately taken to the PayPal site. He felt that would discourage people from making additional purchases before checking out.

I investigated the various free shopping carts like Zen Cart, osCommerce, and AgoraCart. They all offered some sort of SEO modifications, but they were too large to fit in my client’s limited hosting account.

Digging a little further, I came across Commerce.cgi -- a compact, fully customizable shopping cart. But free version did not offer the features that my client desired. The pages are dynamically generated, and there is no support for PayPal.

However, for a $50 lifetime membership, he had access to the member’s area which provided extra scripts for PayPal integration. There is also a very interesting script for making dynamic pages appear static.

This script, called Search Engine Advanced, uses the Apache mod_rewrite function to change requested URLs. I checked with my client to see if his Apache server supported mod_rewrite, and that was in luck. All systems go!

Installing the Commerce.cgi script was quite straightforward, and I could easily adapt the templates to match the style of my client's existing web site. Once the cart was installed and running, I tried adding the Search Engine Advanced hack. There were a few complications, but the support staff at Commerce.cgi helped me sort it all out.

The results are very pleasing indeed. All the dynamic pages appear as static, and Google, Yahoo and MSN have started to index the site.

You can see the site up and running at Tea From Taiwan - specializing in hand processed oolong tea.

I would highly recommend Commerce.cgi for anyone looking for a highly configurable shopping cart. It is suitable for small to medium sites and offers great support through their BBS.

About the author: Copyright 2005 by Ross MacIver

This article may be redistributed freely on the Internet or in ezines as long as the resource box and hyperlinks remain intact.

Ross MacIver is the director of Best Online Content . We provide quality content for your web site and offer a full range of design and SEO services.

Tips for SMB Web Site Promotion and Optimization

Author: Dmitry Yakovlev

What is site optimization? Site optimization is a number of actions aimed at enhancing the efficiency of a Web site performance. A Web site’s typical functions include business representation and awareness (PR), sales (B2C), and potential customer leads (B2B). Consequently, the measure of the site’s effectiveness corresponds to its visibility, sales volume and the number of generated leads respectively. Often, site optimization is understood as promotion in search engines for a number of keyword phrases. However, simply getting a higher ranking doesn’t solve a business task as it’s only the first step on the way to a sale. After a user enters the site from a search engine link, you should provide him with a quick access to information sought. Convenient navigation, good content organization, easy search, and other usability issues play an important role. The next step is properly placing contact information. In other words, a Web site should provide several ways to establish a contact with company’s representatives and to allow for feedback. A full-fledged site optimization should include all three components above: 1. Optimization for search engines 2. Effective content organization and clear navigation 3. Intuitive feedback mechanism Metrics: How to measure the effect of optimization? Improving content and navigation should be based on some measurable characteristics (metrics) which allow to asses effect of the changes on the final result. For example, if the site’s primary function is generating business leads, the main metrics would be the number of site visitors who initiated the contact. Analyzing user navigation patterns helps to clarify the reasons why some of them leave the site quickly. It’s clear that only a fraction of the contact forms filled out on the site will result in sales, that’s why it’s difficult to assess the payback based on efforts spent on the site development. However, in most cases these efforts are worth it. For instance, deploying a system for registration and classification of the filled out contact forms and its integration with a corporate CRM system allowed to make conclusion that the site brings contacts requiring a relatively low-cost presales investment. Visitor tracking There are two approaches to tracking site visitors – to use counters or to analyze web-server logs. The first one is easy to implement, provides basic statistics and is acceptable for most of the small sites. The major drawback of this approach is loss of information. The counter requests can be blocked by a browser or a corporate proxy-server. Besides, counters can’t log crawlers. Web-server logs analysis provides more complete and detailed information – errors statistics, traffic, images requests and file downloads; cookies contents, crawlers’ activity, etc. Practice shows that the best results are achieved by using the combination of both methods. The counter provides general information in real time while web-server logs analysis tools deliver the detailed statistics. Analysis and Reporting Tools One of the popular topics for discussions in SEO forums is the choice of a logs analysis system. There is no single solution as every site is unique and its detailed analysis requires very fine tuning of the tools. However, from time to time new analysis tools appear that are claimed to be perfect. One of the most effective and flexible analysis tools is an OLAP cube, as well as a simple SQL client application to run an arbitrary query against the logs database. Apart from the option of creating various kinds of reports, the analysis system should be able to build and deliver a number of reports generated automatically on a regular basis (daily, weekly, etc). This ensures the continuity of the key metrics in the monitoring process. It is also important to track information on the position of your site in search engines and those of your competitors. The analysis of the competitor’s site allows evaluating the level of their expertise in optimization techniques and often brings surprising discoveries and new ideas. Bots Identification Problem One of the problems rarely mentioned by developers of log-analyzers is identifying a crawler. Search bots (chiefly Google bot and MSN crawler) can generate more than half of the overall traffic. So the problem is overstating the overall statistics. A less obvious, but more important problem is a significant distortion of the navigation paths origination from bots’ random walking through the site. This makes off-the-shelf log-analyzers useless for the comprehensive analysis of the navigation paths.

Visitor statistics are gathered with the help of a counter and through the logs analysis. A specially developed application downloads logs from the server on a daily basis via an FTP-protocol, saves them locally, imports into an MSSQL database and runs a post-processing procedure. During the import, the application extracts characteristics of the user agents; splits referrers into domains, paths and query strings; detects the most popular search engines and extract phrases; splits IP addresses into octets and saves sessions IDs into a separate field. After that, an SQL server performs a final data processing procedure to extend the data with client’s geographic location and times spent on every page, plus identify crawlers. Geography To obtain geographical information from an IP address, one can use an existing database or service, priced from $50 to $600 depending on the level of detail. There are also some free databases, providing information only on a country level. Usually, these are reduced versions of complete commercial databases (for example www.MaxMind.com or www.IP2Location.com). The geographical information allows to determine which regions are most interested in your services, so you can make arrangements with local resellers or establish your local representative offices. Bots Identification Some crawlers can be detected on the basis of the user agent information if you keep the corresponding list. Some bots disguise themselves as popular browsers (IE, Mozilla) or actually are those browsers (for example, when IE downloads a site to make it available offline). The latter case can be resolved using adaptive methods which analyze the behavior of a remote client. If many pages are requested from single IP in a very short period of time (for example 50 pages in one minute) most probably this is a robot. Apart from that, you can consider several indirect signs, like an empty referrer field or robots.txt files retrieved. Such a multi-level crawler identification scheme turned out to be highly effective in practice. Feedback Mechanism Designing an effective feedback form is a rather complicated task which requires a detailed analysis of navigation paths and a lot of experiments with the interface. The number and arrangement of the fields, their color scheme, plus presence of various elements and even the name of the Web form – all affect the number of submitted forms. For example, a gaudy design, an abundant number of links to other site sections, and too many pictures distract the visitor from filling out the form and increase the number of exits from the page. The forms and fields which are too small, or a superfluous number of form fields also reduce the efficiency of the feedback mechanism. To avoid the distortion of information, such as misprints in e-mails, it’s useful to perform data validation on the client’s side. Additional data validation on the server side allows to cut off a major amount of spam generated by robots. Make sure that the validation procedure on the server side is not stricter then the one on the client side, otherwise some forms may be lost. As more users have been installing Windows XP SP2, more new problems with pop-ups and cookies have evolved. The first problem is that pop-up windows are simply blocked by the browser without notifications. The second problem is that the site that relies on cookies will not work for users whose browser doesn’t accept cookies. According to our estimates, the number of browsers that don’t accept cookie has grown from 2% to 27% within the first quarter of 2005 and is continues to grow. It is useful to attach some technical information to each submitted form. This information includes the visitor’s IP, geographic location, a site the visitor came from and a detailed path of his browsing through the site. Analysis and reports Once the logs are transferred to an SQL server and processed they are ready for analysis. Separating log analysis from logs processing gives the analyst more freedom in using the most appropriate tools and provides a possibility of custom tools development. As mentioned before, the most flexible and universal tool is an OLAP cube. OLAP cube can be explored via Excel, a web-interface or third-party components. The advantages of this approach are hierarchical views, multidimensional tables, the ability to execute arbitrary queries, fast data retrieval and a convenient interface. The screenshot below demonstrates how an OLAP cube can be used to deduce geographical distribution of traffic generated by search engines for the last three months. Data mining took less than two minutes. Apart from analytical reports that require active participation of an analyst, there is a number of standard reports that can be generated automatically, such as daily reports on the number of visitors, traffic generated from target search engines, number of page loads, number of initiated contacts, etc. The average and total time spent on a particular page by a visitor are very useful metrics demonstrating the interest in a particular part of the site. Pages which trigger extended periods of visitors’ time and attract many visitors constitute so-called “zones of interest” and should be designed with great care. Pages with a smaller number of visitors but longer periods of time spent on them often contribute more to the overall time spent on the site than the pages with a higher number of hits. An important component of any large site is a search subsystem that allows a visitor to find information by-passing the main navigation. Actually, the search subsystem extends the site navigation and therefore must deliver highly relevant results. One of the most effective implementations of the search system is queering GoogleAPI service. When using this approach you have to bear in mind that your site should be regularly indexed by GoogleBot. Otherwise, the results will correspond to an outdated content. For a site with such a search subsystem, one of the most important metrics is a number of pages retrieved by GoogleBot. Knowing what visitors search over the site helps to optimize the content structure and the navigation system by making the most popular pages easily accessible. Standard reports are easily generated by running one or several SQL queries. There is a number of software products that can be used for generating these reports in a variety of formats (Crystal Reports and MSSQL Reporting Services, etc.). DataArt uses MS SQL Reporting Services as it provides an integrated development environment, web-interface access and a scheduled delivery of reports to specified e-mail addresses. Employees responsible for running the web site start their daily duties with reviewing reports for the previous day. These reports usually include: 1. Total number of visitors (number of sessions, distinct IP addresses, pages retrieved by users and crawlers). 2. A list of the most popular pages 3. Full paths of visitors who searched the site 4. Full paths of visitors from particular countries that visited pages with web forms 5. Referrers from search engines and phrases they searched for Metrics and Organization of Site Optimization Activities One of the primary functions of the site is generating business leads. Consequently, the most appropriate metrics is the number of visitors who initiated a contact. In practice, such approach can’t be used directly as a significant part of submitted forms is spam. The problem is solved by marking up the forms as either useful or spam. The number of reasonable requests is considered a measure of the site performance. Another measure is the number of visitors form a particular geographical location directed by a search engine query based on target key words or phrases. The correlation between the number of visitors from a target group and the number of initiated contacts is also a good measure which provides information for usability improvement. The second important function of the site is a proper business presentation, where the site serves as an online “business card”. The measure of the site’s popularity is the total number of site visitors. However, you can distinguish narrower groups by geographical regions. There is an opinion that you don’t need to take into account “accidental” visitors (those who don’t become clients). It’s not true, as the total amount of visitors increases the overall brand recognition. One of the techniques to attract more site visitors is tweaking content so that it appeals to a wider audience, and promoting it in search engines for popular keywords. If the target audience and the keywords were determined correctly, the site will receive a significant flow of visitors. Any relevant content is useful – photographs, whitepapers, images, reference data, clipart, etc. It’s preferable that the content is original and is created by the company’s employees or business consultants. Here is a list of metrics we keep an eye on: 1. Number of initiated contacts 2. Number and volume of initiated sales 3. Number of visitors on the pages with Web forms 4. Number of target visitors 5. Correlation between the number of target visitors and the number of filled forms 6. Total number of visitors 7. Site placement in search engine results 8. Number of pages requested by crawlers of major search engines These metrics are calculated over short and long-term periods of time to evaluate two kinds of changes: local, caused by a particular content alteration, and global, caused by a more profound phenomena. In addition, we track and analyze positions of competitors’ sites in the most popular search engines. The effects caused by these changes might be revealed with a significant time delay. This is especially true for search engine optimization. Moreover, these effects are often unpredictable. That’s why even small changes to the site should be documented.

About the author: DataArt is a well-established offshore software outsourcing company serving the needs of Small and Mid-size Businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. and Europe. Visit us today online at http://www.dataart.com , or email us at outsourcing@dataart.com. Find out how we can start to help you. We look forward to hearing from you.

Search Engine Traffic Domination - How to Turn the Search Engines into Your 24/7 Salesmen

Author: Michael Turner

Getting your website returned by the search engines as a high result is a significant goal by most webmasters because higher search results means higher traffic and revenues. However, there are some tips you can utilize to help your website gain better rankings by the search engines and ways to turn the search engines into your 24/7 salesmen. The following suggestions, if followed, will help you get better rankings by the search engines and more traffic to your website.

Suggestion #1 - Keywords

Using keywords on your website is vital to your search engine rankings, it is as simple as that. The reason for this is people search the search engines for keywords looking for specific information. If those keywords are present in your Meta tags, titles, and beginnings of paragraphs, then you will have a higher ranking by the search engines than if not. However, you should definitely make sure that you know what keywords are best for your market and your web page because misuse can cause you problems.

Suggestion #2 - Links

The amount of links on the Internet that pointing to your site will greatly enhance the ranking your website receives by the search engines. The reason for this is that search engines search for particular keywords and then the sites with links. The sites with the appropriate keywords and the most links get the best rankings. Because of this you need to be concerned about having links all over the net to improve your rankings, and let the search engines drive traffic to your site for free.

Suggestion #3 - No Frames

Do not use frames on your website if you want the search engine to promote your site. The reason for this is that most search engines do not support frames and even if the first page of your site gets indexed, the others probably won’t. Without all of your web pages indexed the search engines won't be able to appropriately promote your site.

Suggestion #4 - No Spamming

At all costs do not spam, not in any way, shape, or form. All search engines look down upon spamming and do not index spammers. Even worse, search engines ban them or blacklist them for life. You obviously do not want to get your site blacklisted for life because that will ruin a major method for driving traffic to your site. So, simply avoid spamming in any context of the word.

When you follow these basic principles you will allow the search engines to do most of your work for you. When you give the search engines exactly what they want, they will return your site as a high return and you will get more traffic as a result.

About the author: Michael Turner shows you exactly how to increase web site traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it today at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

SEO For Dummies; How to Choose the right Firm for You.

Author: Carrie Haggerty

Ok, so you’ve finished your web site. Now you just submit your web site to a couple of search engines, sit back, relax and wait to see your bank account grow. Yeah, that’s what I thought as well. You wait and wait and wait... nothing. No hits. No growing bank account. You cant even find your web site on the search engines when you searched for your company name. Are you even listed? How do people find you? Finally fed up with all the waiting, you decide to do some research. You go to forums and read article after article, and one acronym keeps popping up. SE What? What’s SEO? You continue to read and find out more about search engine optimization, and come to realize that you’re a “novice” to the World Wide Web and you feel left out in the dark and unavialable to the possibilities that the Internet has to offer small business.

I was like you not so many moons ago, and I had absolutely no idea where to start. What is a meta tag? Key word density? Link development? Isn’t that what we did when we were 3? Connect the links and see how long it goes? As I recall, I believe they were monkeys in a barrel.

It’s not as daunting as you might think. The first step is to figure out whether you have the time to put aside to learn about search engine optimization. What methods should you use? Where should you go to ask for help? But like many businesses on the internet this isn't your full time gig. You actually have a job you have to attend for your bread and butter so to speak. So the decision is made, I’m going to get professional help. Now....who do I go to? This may be the ultimate question when it comes to SEO, who do you go to? I have been working in this industry for quite some time now and the answer is never clear. You don't want to go to a company that’s too cheap - can they produce the results? What are they actually doing for your web site?

What I tell anyone who comes to me is do your homework. Look at what the company has done for previous clients. Look at what the cost is, and what is included in the cost? How did you find them? Can you contact them by phone? Or did they contact you? Look at their rankings. What methods do they use to provide you with your results? Are they one of the good ones? Can you trust them to get the work done? Ask as many questions as you possibly can to find out if what they are saying makes sense to you. Ask them to put it in to terms you can understand and stay away from the fancy computer talk, and last but never least, go to more than one company.

An example of a good SEO campaign is ongoing work, open communication and the willingness to help you understand the optimization itself. Any ethical and honest company wants to have an ongoing relationship with their clients. They want their clients to feel like they are treated well during every step of the process. So when you are looking for your SEO company, make sure they make you feel like you’re going to be included in the process and not just tossed to the dogs once you have signed on the dotted line.

Link development is just one example of ongoing work that should be done on a consistent basis. In simple terms link development is how the search engines find your site. The more links you have coming in, the sooner you will be found.

The web is evolving everyday and search engines are constantly trying to stay one step ahead of SEO companies. The frequent change of search engine algorithms is just one example, so it is a good idea to find an SEO company that will stay on top of SEO methods and practices in case there is a change in algorithm and you get dropped like last weeks potato salad. These two reasons alone is why you should find a company who is looking for long tern relations and not ones who are trying to get you the easy answer and get you up in the search engine rankings fast and dropped even faster.

In this industry, you have to work with blind faith ...a scary thought, and there are many companies out there who have put a bad stigma on SEO. Many people have been burned more than once. If I had a nickel for every time I heard a story about an SEO company that put forth promises and couldn’t deliver I would be retired and living in Tahiti right now. The advice I have for the “newbies” coming in to the e-business is do your research, find out your competition, and make sure you are looking at all your options before you choose your SEO provider, because if something sounds really good, there could be a big, bad wolf behind that red shawl ready to gobble you up.

About the author: Carrie Haggerty is the General Manager at - Abalone Designs Inc. - one of the world’s leading search engine optimization firms . More of Carrie’s articles can be found at http://www.abalone.ca/res ources/

Search Engine Traffic Myths, Time Wasters, and Pitfalls

Author: Michael Turner

Everyone wants to increase their rankings with the search engines and because of this there is a ton of information available on how to go about it. Unfortunately, while some of this information is real, there is just as much or more information that is outdated, wrong, and a complete waste of time, money and energy on your part. So, you can read the following and learn about a few of the myths and pitfalls people believe about search engines and in the future you can continue to educate yourself from reputable sites that provide accurate and truthful information.

Myth #1 - Permanent Position

It takes a lot of effort to get a top ranking with the big search engines, but for some reason people believe once they reach this level of success it is permanent, almost like a prize they have earned. However, if you want to keep your prize, or top search placement, you will have no time to celebrate because your site can be bumped from the top list in minutes, hours, or it could be days or weeks. If you do not maintain your website and work on optimizing it every day and making it better, you will be eventually knocked off the list.

Myth #2 - All Search Engines

Another funny myth and pitfall many newcomers to the web fall into is that you must get your website submitted to all of the existing search engines in order to optimize your traffic and get more sales. However, the amount of time and effort you would need to put into this will more than likely outweigh its benefits. You want to make sure your page is indexed in Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other similar large and popular search engines. This is where most of your traffic will come from and where you want to be.

Myth #3 - High Rankings are Easy

Getting a high ranking is not easy, it is actually very hard. People want you to think it is easy to get a top ranking, but in actuality it requires a lot of effort, time, money, and dedication to get a top search engine ranking and maintain it. This is because all of the search engines are looking for something different, websites are changing on a daily basis with new sites, new information, and the like. SO, as you can see, all this change makes it difficult and unpredictable to get a high ranking and maintain it without a lot of concerted effort.

There are many pitfalls and myths that are associated with search engines and increasing your traffic. What you need to keep in mind is nothing is automatic or easy. This is a business and it will require you to put forth the effort and time your website needs if you want to be number one or at least among the best.

About the author: Michael Turner reveals his foolproof way to increase website traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it free right now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

PPC Advertising - The First Step In A SEO Marketing Campaign

Author: Halstatt Pires

Often, sites view seo and PPC marketing as exclusive marketing techniques. Each marketing method has its advocates. In reality, both have a place in the Internet marketing process. If you intend to pursue a major seo effort, a PPC campaign is a critical early step.

PPC For Testing

Let’s say you have a site offering a service or product in the travel market. You’ve put together a healthy budget and decided to go for broke. Yep, you’re optimizing and trading links in an effort to go after keyword phrases with major traffic and competition. For instance, you’ve decided to have a go at “Europe travel”, which has roughly 400,000 searches each month and major competition for high rankings. You spend two years trading links, adding content and so on. Miracle of miracles, you pop on to the first page of search results. You start shopping for your private jet only to realize a very disturbing thing. You are getting thousands of visits, but few sales. After running calculations, you find the site is converting at 1 in 10,000.

Houston, we have a problem.

A PPC campaign should be used to test your site against keyword phrases before you spend the time and money on an seo campaign. The best platforms to use for your campaign are Google Adwords and Overture. Yes, click fraud is a problem, but less so on these platforms.

After opening accounts and laying a credit card down at the PPC alter, you need to give some thought at to how you will test your keywords. Here’s a hint. The campaign should be designed to test the keyword phrases, not maximize sales. This may sound like a strange statement, but keep in mind the purpose of the campaign. You are determining whether you have picked appropriate keyword phrases for the seo campaign. So, how does it all go wrong?

With both Overture and Adwords, you have the ability to designate the reach of your keyword phrases. Most pick the “broad match” option, which is terrible for testing. With broad match, your advertisements are going to appear for your keyword phrase AND variations of the phrase. Since the ad is appearing on a variety of keyword phrases, the results can give you a false impression of the value of the primary keyword phrase.

Going back to our example, we start a Google Adwords campaign for “Europe travel” and use the default broad match option. After a month, we are happy to find the ads converting at 1 in 70. Having validated the keyword phrase, we set off on the long seo campaign. But are we really sure about the validity of the keyword phrase. Since Google has been known to seriously expand keyword phrases under the broad match option, how do we know that the true keyword phrase isn’t “European travel”? We don’t unless we take a few additional steps.

The first step is to limit the PPC advertisements by bypassing the broad match option. Instead, you want to limit the appearance of the ad only to searches for the exact keyword phrase. In Adwords, this is known as the “exact phrase” match. To designate it, you simply place brackets “[]” around the keyword phrase. Second, you need to track traffic originating from the ads. This can be done using tracking tools on your server or through the tracking options offered by each PPC platform. Regardless of your choice, the resulting data will give a much truer picture of the value of the particular keyword phrases.

Nothing is more aggravating then getting top rankings, but miserable conversions. The only way to beat this problem is to test, test, test. Using PPC campaigns at the outset of an Internet marketing efforts can save you a lot of headaches later on.

About the author: Halstatt Pires is with MarketingTitan.com - an Internet marketing and advertising company. To read more

marketing articles , visit MarketingTitan.com.

Search Engine Scoring System Revealed

Author: Jon C

http://nerdlib.com/seo_tips.php

This article covers TITLE TAGS, MAIN BODY CONTENT, and META TAGS (which is what you see below).

Well-designed sites make the sales! Take some time to seriously evaluate your website and follow the steps in this article, that will help you for achieving high ranking in all the important search engines to you more visitors. If you can implement the methods decribed in this article, you should have no problem getting a fairly high ranking (but I cannot guarenttee that you will get the highest rank possible). All tips are categorized according to its area.

Search enginges give more importance to some items in their ranking algortithims. Following is a list of what items are given the most importance to items that have the least importance, in search engine rankings.

TITLE . 2.0 LINK POPULARITY . 2.0 THE MAIN BODY TEXT . 1.5 DOMAIN NAME . 1.0 KEYWORD PROMINENCE . 1.0 HEADING TAGS . 0.5 PROXIMITY OF KEYWORDS . 0.5 BOLD or ITALIC . 0.4 FOLDER or FILENAME . 0.3 META DESCRIPTION . 0.3 ALT TAG . 0.2 TITLE ATTRIBUTE . 0.2 META KEYWORDS . 0.1 TOTAL HIGHEST SCORE POSSIBLE = 10

TITLE TAG . 2.0/10 The title tag is an important part of a website. It is basically a short description of the page, and the most important words should go first. Every HTML (web page) should have a title tags and all tags should be unique. It is recommended that you do not use the same tage for multiple documents. Some tips to keep in mind when creating title tags are:

* It should always appear immediately after the opening tag * It should be specific keywords and phrases * If you use the same keyword twice, do not use it right next to each other. (eg. Professional Marketing Tips . Tips On Marketing>), and do not use one word more than twice. * Titles should be between 5 . 12 words (less than 60 characters). * Place primary keyword at the starting of the tag. * Try to minimize/eliminate the use of commas in this tag. * Strive for a keyword density of 25-35% for each keyword. * Always remember to close the tag ( ) * All pages MUST have a unique and descriptive keyword phrase in the title. * Do not change the tag regularly.

THE MAIN BODY TEXT . 1.5/10 Use the following tips to increase the effectiveness of the main body text. These tips also cover Keyword prominience (1.0/10), Heading Tags (0.5/10), Proximity of Keywords (0.5/10), Bold or Italic (0.4/10), and Alt Tag (0.2/10)

* Make sure to put the most important keywords into a carefully crafted paragraph at the beginning of your HTML Page * Keyword Density: If the page contains less than 500 words, keeping 1-3% of those words is better. If the page contains more than 500 words, keep 3-5% of the overall content. * Try to keep the word count of anywhere between 250 . 750 words per page. * Use CSS instead of font tags * Get rid of JavaScript in the code, and instead use an external file. * Keep image buttons as text links, or have image and text links. * Repeat page title in a heading at the top of the page, if possible. * Use heading tags ( , , ., ). You can alter the way these tags look via CSS. * Keyword proximity: It refers to the closeness between two or more keywords, Always try to group words together that might be searched on as a single phrase by a user. * Place some important keywords in Bold or Italic. * Use .Alt. tag to describe images. * Make sure the code of the homepage is not greater than 32k. * Try to keep max font size 11px or 12px. (2 or 3 in most web programs). * Avoid the use of nested loops in structure. * Use W3C technologies and guidelines * Update you body text at regular intervals, as many search engines prefer websites which are updated regularly.

META TAGS . Meta Description (0.3/10), Meta Keywords (0.1/10)

Meta Description

* Write it in sentence structure * Should be relevant to the similat 25-30 words (under 150 characters) description of the first text on the visible page. * Do not repeat keywords more than 3 times in the description tag, or use different forms of the keyword. * Minimize the use of stop words such as .and., .the., .of., etc. * Keyword phrases that appear earliest in the Meta description will generally receive higher ranking value. * Try to include this tag in all pages by describing the content, and try to be unique in all descriptions. * Don.t fill your descriptions with only keywords. * Strive for 5-10% keyword density.

Meta Keywords

* Keep it less than 130 characters for better results. * Start with the most important then least important. * Use keywords/phrases. * Do not repeat any one word more than three (3) times. * Do not place repeated keywords together. * Use keywords that will be actually found on the page, and ones that reflect the essence of your content. * Try to use small case in keyword/phrases

About the author: I am veteran programmer for over 15 years. I have designed over 90+ websites. I currently run a webhosting company http://sustainedhits.com and last June released our Software Development Site http://nerdlib.com.

We have researched search egines for over 6 years and have designed our software according to our research.

Lessons from a Shock Jock Why is Mike Makler the Coolest Guy in the Universe?

Author: Mike Makler The Coolest Guy in the Universe

This Tongue in cheek Article shows how by using 7 Simple Steps Mike Makler Proclaimed and Branded himself The Coolest Guy in the Universe. The steps Mike Makler Used to Brand Himself the Coolest Guy in the Universe and Obtain a Number 1 Page Ranking in Yahoo for the Coolest Guy in the Universe can be used by anyone to create a Brand. just do a Yahoo Search on ""the Coolest Guy in the Universe"" (don't forget the Double Quotes) and see if Mike Makler is still number 1.

A famous New York Based radio show Shock Jock proclaimed himself the King of all Media. Do a Google or Yahoo Search on King of all Media and you will see this Shock Jock's name. Is he the King of All Media? He is now. How did he become the King of All Media and How does it apply to You?

He simply branded himself as the King of All Media. On his Daily radio show he would proclaim to be the King of All Media. Pretty soon everyone was calling him the King of All Media. Now he is the De facto King of all Media.

Having observed this Shock Jock in action Mike Makler wanted to see if he too could create an outrageous brand for himself. Not having a top rated radio show Mike Makler Decided to brand himself on the Internet as the Coolest Guy in the Universe

Mike Makler Simply declared himself the coolest guy in the Universe. Is Mike Makler Really the Coolest Guy in the Universe?. Mike Makler is the Coolest Guy in the Universe if he can get and Maintain a Number 1 Page Ranking in Google or MSN or Yahoo.

Below are the 7 Steps in this Case Study Mike Makler used to Brand himself as the coolest Guy in the Universe

Step 1 - Publicly Proclaim your Brand. The First Thing Mike Makler Did to become the Coolest Guy in the Universe was he created a Web Page Stating that Mike Makler is in fact the Coolest Guy in the Universe http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/Coolest-Guy-in-The-Universe.html.

You will notice that not only does this web page proclaim that Mike Makler is the coolest guy in the universe but it does so over and over. Mike Makler added the Coolest Guy in the Universe web page he created to his Google Site Map

Step 2 - Reinforce Your Claim The Next thing Mike Makler Did to become the Coolest Guy in the Universe was Create a Blog Entry stating that Mike Makler is the coolest Guy in the Universe as if it was a a known and accepted Fact. This Blog entry had a link to Mike Makler Coolest Guy web Page http://ewguru.com/coolguyblog. Don't forget to use ping-o-matic to ping your blog.

Mike then repeated the above two steps 2 or 3 more times to create a stronger branding

Step 3 - Get Others to Publicize your Claim Mike Makler then went on to write this Article to publicize the fact that he was the Coolest Guy in the Universe. Of course this Article is Rich in the Keywords 'Mike Makler' and 'The Coolest Guy in the Universe' Mike didn't forget to submit this article to the popular article directories.

Step 4 - The Details From Now on whenever Mike Creates an Article he will have By Mike Makler (the Coolest Guy in the Universe) as his Byline.

In his Bio for his Article Mike will Put Mike Makler the Self Proclaimed Coolest Guy in the Universe see Why http://ewguru.com/coolguypage

Mike's Copyright now looks like this Copyright © 2005-2006 Mike Makler The Coolest Guy in the Universe:: all rights reserved.

Step 5 - The 2 P's Patience and Persistence Mike will be persistent. He will Create Articles, Blog Posts, Forum Posts, all containing his branding. Mike will never stop Proclaiming that Mike Makler is the Coolest Guy in the Universe. It is all about branding.

Step 6 - Get Some Back Links If you would Like to help with Mike with his Branding Efforts just Link to one of Mike's Coolest Guy Web Pages you will find a list of them here http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/Coolest-Guy-Toc.HTML

Step 7 Check and Tweak He will check the search Engines Once or twice a Week to see if Mike Makler really is the Coolest Guy in the Universe. If Not he will then write an Article Create a Blog Post, do some forum posts to continue to re-enforce his brand. Even if Mike is #1 he will still take action to Re-Enfoirce his hard earned Brand.

Hopefully even this simple example will show you 7 steps you can use to create and maintain a brand for yourself. It does take work and persistence to create a well known brand especially if you are not a Top Rated Shock Jock.

About the author: Mike Makler The Coolest Guy in the Universe (See Why http://ewguru.com/coolguypag e ) has been Marketing Online Since 2001, When he built his first Sales organization of over 100,000 Members.

Copyright © 2005-2006 Mike Makler The Coolest Guy in the Universe - All Rights Reserved

Your Web Page Check List

Author: Dan Brown

1. Easy To Read- You want to make it easy for your visitors to read your text. You don't want to use a light colored text like yellow on a white background and you don't want to use dark blue text on a black back- ground.

2. Create A Mood- You want to use the color of your text to create a mood for the reader. If you want to create excitement, use some red text. If you want to create greed, use a some green text. Use colors that would put you in a mood to buy your product.

3. Grab Their Attention- You can grab your readers attention by using headlines. Make the headline more noticeable by using a different colored headline than your ad copy. This offsets the headline and pulls the reader into the rest of your ad copy.

4. Highlight Keywords- You can emphasize phrases and keywords that are important to your readers. For instance, use super, deluxe, fast, low price, free, new, etc. You could use bolding, underlining, italics, color changing, etc.

5. Sizing It Up- You don't want to use text that is too small or to large. You want to use larger text for your headlines and subheadings. You want to use smaller text for your ad copy. If your grandparents can't read it, it's too small.

6. Don't Use All CAPS!- You don't want to use all capital letters in your ad copy. It looks unprofessional and is hard to read. You may want to use all CAPS in your headlines to offset it.

7. Font Properly- You want to use a text font that relates to the product or services your selling. You don't want to use a comic type font when your selling business books.

8. Spacing Out- It's important to use spaces properly when typing your text. You should indent and bullet key benefits your product or service will give the reader. Your headlines, subheadings, sentences and paragraphs should be consistently spaced throughout your web site.

9. I Need Sunglasses- Don't use all bright text colors and backgrounds on your web site. It will make your text hard to read and actually bother your readers' eyes to the point they just decide to leave your site.

10. Check The Readability- It's important to check your spelling and grammar before you upload your web page. When writing an ad copy you're allowed to break some of those grammar rules to get your point across.

About the author: Author Dan Brown has been active in internet marketing for the past 4 years. Dan currently is working with the Zabang search engine introducing their new affiliate program which is due out Nov, 2005. http://www.zabangaffiliate.com/

Start using Link Exchange methods

Author: SogiHolics

I read some articles about Google Ranks a few months ago, there is a theory how to get high ranks from Google result search. I dont know if this a truth or just issues of the months. :P That is Google rank will be count for how many website/domain/blog that contains your url ? So how to add our url into other websites ? of course we talk about link exchanges.

For weblog we can found a lot of services that give away for free to start using link exchanges services. Not only for weblog, this is global - we can exchange our link with related site or not, depend on you. And not for ranks only, because of this we can get more traffic.

Lets start with Free Link Exchange Services that i recomended for now. A lot of feature you can found with this services. Take a look at http://www.linkmetro.com/ or http://simplylinking.com As a free member you can get alot of feature that will support your website to starting exchanges your links without having difficult. More similiar site serives that provides Link Exchange Services for free. If you like this free services, you will get more feature if you buy for paid mamber.

Ok, now i suggested you to start request other website for exchange their link that related with your website. Use categories menu to search website/blog that related. Take 10 or 20 links to start request, do this actions in 2 or 3 days in future. Mean while you waiting for aprooval from all site/blog that you requested.

I know, im not 100% guarantee to get higher rank at search engine, specially Google. Is so many method to get rank at search engines. But at least you can try to get more traffic using this traffic.

About the author: SogiHolics is Ordinary Netter, you can visit my blogs at

sogiholics.blogspot.com