Against Closed Eyes In Marketing

Not many web master take the time to use a robots.txt file for their website. For search engine spiders that use the robots.txt to see what directories to search through, the robots.txt file can be very helpful in keeping the spiders indexing your actual pages and not other information, such as looking through your stats!

The robots.txt file is useful in keeping your spiders from accessing parts folders and files in your hosting directory that are totally unrelated to your actual web site content. You can choose to have the spiders kept out of areas that contain programming that search engines cannot parse properly, and to keep them out of the web stats portion of your site.

Many search engines cannot view dynamically generated content properly, mainly created by programming languages, such as PHP or ASP. If you have an online store programmed in your hosting account, and it is in a seperate directory, you would be wise to block out the spiders from this directory so it only finds relevant information.

The robots.txt file should be placed in the directory where your main files for your hosting are located. So you would be advised to create a blank text file, and save it as robots.txt, and then upload it to your web hosting to the same directory your index.htm file is located.

Here is examples of the use of the robots.txt file:

To block out a directory in a robots.txt file, such as a subdirectory for your online store called /store/ you would do the following:
Disallow: /store/

Another example to block out your stats directory:
Disallow: /stats/

You may also want to disallow individual files that you do not want searched by the search engines. For example you dont want search.php to be parsed by the Search Engines. To do this you type in the following on its own line:

Disallow: /search.php

Following the rules outlined and creating the robots.txt file, you will keep search engine spiders out of unwanted files and directories, and letting them go through the important files to see what your web site is all about!

Michael Kralj is owner of Emenki Web Solutions and Domains at Retail. Emenki Web Solutions are web site designers and programmers based in Hamilton, Ontario, providing businesses with an informative and strategic approach to establishing an online presence on the web.

Please visit Emenki Web Solutions & Web Design in Hamilton, Ontario on the web http://www.emenki.com

Please visit Domains at Retail - Cheap Domain Name Registration on the web: http://www.domainsatretail.com

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Building links is one of the necessary tasks of a webmaster.
This task can be done in much way, but not all ways work the
same way or are effective as it should be.

Wrong Way #1: Building all your links at one time then stopping

Perhaps you’ve heard the discussion about the so-called
“sandboxing” of new sites on Google.

What is sandboxing? Google is trying to create a fair rating
system for every website in their index. Let’s imagine a website
selling shoes. A guy called “Competitor Chris” started the
website in 1998, and he’s kept it updated over time with a
constant flow of new content and inbound links. His site is
ranking very well in the search engines. Now YOU decide to build
a website, selling another type of shoes which are similar to
the ones sold by Competitor Chris. You are clever, and you have
some cash to invest in your site. You buy all the latest SEO
tricks, and you hire an SEO company to build 1000 links in one
month and to optimize your site to the max. After only one month
in the business, you have double the amount of links that
Competitor Chris has, and you are beating him in the search
results.

Not for long! Google says that’s not fair. Why should Competitor
Chris’s site be penalized, just because you came along with a
lot of cash and built links like crazy over a short period of
time? Nobody knows if you are even serious about your business,
but Competitor Chris has proven to constantly update his site
for the last 7 years. So Google puts you in a “sandbox”; they
cut you out of the indexing process for 3, 6 or even 9 months to
find out how you develop your site over time. It’s kind of like
putting cold water on a hot engine, to make it slow down and to
see if it still works after an undefined time. After the time is
over, Google sees that you had little or no development
whatsoever. No new links, no new content, no nothing, so they
rank you FAR FAR behind Competitor Chris in the search results.
You’re buried in the search results, you’re getting no free
traffic, and all that money you paid to the SEO company was a
waste. Build your links the right way: If you want long term
success, you need to build your links consistently over a long
period of time.

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Finally, after the hard-core efforts that are directly related to generating traffic to your website, you next step is to develop a strategy that creates follow-on, long-term traffic. Several methods exist for this Tier III strategy:

- Taking the large list of ancillary keywords that relate directly or indirectly to your website, begin purchasing keyword related domain names that will be used to create traffic driving websites that point to your money site.

- Setup satellite pages using the keyword domain names with the idea of capturing traffic geared toward those specific keywords, developing niche market traffic. As you develop niche markets for those new customers, you are going to be able to capitalize on those customers for the other products and/or services that your company offers when these sites link back to your money site as a result of informing and attracting these new customers through the niche sites.

- Create links, backlinks and cross-links between the satellite pages and your money site, improving your link popularity for all websites, especially your money site.

- Display articles or e-books related to your industry and place these articles on your websites being aware of the best location based on keyword dominance.

- For long-term, viral marketing results, create articles or e-books that you will either sell on your website or offer to public domain websites where your link information must be retained for use by anyone else on the internet; these articles will create links that go back to your money site or your niche sites.

- Follow the same steps in Tier I and II for all the niche sites as you did for your original money site; that is, design a SEO-optimized website and follow Tier II strategy to create the necessary link popularity to drive traffic to these sites.

Monitoring

In order to determine if the SEO efforts are successful, you must monitor results of for number and quality of backlinks, PR and web trend statistics. There are many sources for generating this data as well as programs that will assist in these analyses. Whatever method you choose, whether it is using specific programs or setting up a spreadsheet for entry of data, be consistent in tracking the data. There will be fluctuations from day-to-day that you should expect. You are looking for general, overall upward trends, not short-term blips. Upward progress followed by maintenance of a strong position with slow, steady growth would indicate a successful SEO campaign.

This 3-Tiered approach to SEO Strategy is very effective when implemented with the patience it takes for long-term results. Short-term “fixes” and “tricks” may have an effect in the short-run, but as the search engines change and adapt their algorithms — as they doing almost monthly — what worked today for quick results may actually get you banned tomorrow. This strategy is based on search engine directives: Well-designed websites, free of bad code, offering information, services or products of interest to the internet community will create their own base of popularity — for which you will be rewarded by strong, growing traffic. When you are in it for the long haul, your strategy must utilize long-term efforts.

(c)2005. TAO Consultants, Inc. All rights reserved.

Chesa Keane of TAO Consultants has been involved with the internet for 10 years through internet consulting, web development and search engine optimization. Go to http://www.computergoddess.com for a free Search Engine Optimization Checklist.

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Think you know everything about searching with Google? Think again. Believe it or not, there are many tools and features available on Google that can be useful for marketing research as well as wasting time. Learn more below about Google’s coolest features.

What are people saying about your site?

Find out what people say about your site or anything else with Google WebQuotes. A Google Lab experiment, Google WebQuotes annotates the results of your Google search with comments from other websites. This offers a convenient way to get a third party’s opinion about each of the returns for your search, providing you with more information about that site’s credibility and reputation. Try your site name and variations, such as “Big Oak”, “www.bigoakinc.com” and “http://www.bigoakinc.com” to see what results they bring up.

Google Suggest

As you type your keywords into the search box, Google Suggest offers keyword suggestions in real time. It will provide a list of suggestions as you type in your search criteria, ranked by the number of occurrences that the suggestions appear in Google’s index.

Google Sets

Google Sets automatically create sets of items from a few examples - in essence, it determines other items in a set based on similarity. Here is an example of what we mean. Say you like certain authors such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz, both horror writers, but you don’t know who else to try? Well, Google Sets can recommend a host of authors who write horror novels or other people in the horror field. Imagine how it could help when scouring for keywords and phrases that you may not think of. Ah, the power of Google.
Google Alerts

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

* monitoring a developing news story

* keeping current on a competitor or industry

* getting the latest on a celebrity or event

* keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

Website Backgrounds

If you type in “info:(your website’s URL)”, Google will provide you background information about any site on the Internet. For instance, “info:www.bigoakinc.com” will show information about our homepage. Note there can be no space between info: and the web page URL.

Google can show you the following information for a URL:

* Show Google’s cache of the URL

* Find web pages that are similar the URL

* Find web pages that link to the URL

* Find web pages that the URL links to

* Find web pages that contain the term “(your website’s URL)”

View indexed pages

If you use [site:(your website’s URL)] as your query, Google will restrict the results to those websites in the given domain. For instance, [site:www.bigoakinc.com] will find pages within www.bigoakinc.com. Note there can be no space between the “site:” and the web page URL.

More than a Search Engine

As you can see, Google can be much more than a simple search engine. It can be a creative marketing and research tool as well. Many other features are available on Google’s site so take some time and look around next time you visit Google.

Shell Harris is an Internet marketing consultant and an SEO Specialist.
He provides proven results for Website promotion. More articles can be found at http://bigoakinc.com/seo-articles/seo-articles.php

This article may be freely reprinted as long as all links and author information remain.

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Sometimes, the search engines act really strange. And this
story will prove how I’ve got top positions (80% on no.1)
into the major search engines - such Google, Yahoo!, MSN -
without lifting a finger! What is REALLY strange? I did not
optimize my page!

But first allow me to give you some backgrounds. Couple of
time ago I buy a domain name and hosted into a very reliable
server. At that time I intended to build a mini-site around
a very powerful service which was released at that period.

I can’t remember why at that time I was very busy. So I just
write a simple page, insert a few links to the program I
promote and upload it. Everything it don’t takes me more
than 1/2 hours.

That was the beginning. The page stays there for around a
month. I remember I post 3-4 messages into some forums and
link them to my newest mini-site. That was ALL I can do at
that time. But one day I decided to make a little change.

I login to my hosting account and take a look at the stats.
Surprise! I saw traffic from Google and Yahoo! What??? I
didn’t submit my website to the search engines!

What the hell is going on?

I open my WebPosition Gold 2 software and check my website.
Geez, my site was there, on no.1 for 3 keyphrases in Google,
Yahoo!, and MSN, and take no.1 through no.5 spots on other 2-3
major search engines.

I couldn’t belive that was happening to my website, but the
evidence was there. It was very hard to believe that I’ve
got no.1 places into the search engine without doing a
little optimization. Because my friend, THAT page was NOT
optimize for the search engines!

So I said to myself: “That won’t last forever. I give one
week and I’ll saw my website going down because it has no
support for all those positions!”. Well, it didn’t last a
week. After only 5 days, my website was vanish. Not a single
position into the top 10, not even found on search engines!

OK, what it was it was. For only couple of days (perhaps
hours) I was on no.1 spots. It means that I can do it again
IF I’ll do everything by the book. Despite of general
opinion, search engine optimization it’s not so hard. If you
know what to do, if you take your time to study the right
stuff and have patience, there’s impossible not to rich the
position you desire.

That was fine, but I also plan to go into vacation with my
family. It was on July, the weather was great, and we plan
this vacation from a long time. My son dream about this
vacation, so I said, “Why not? Let’s do it!” You know the
rest: spend a lot of time for making reservations, baggage,
prepare the car for the trip, etcetera. Less time for me to
build my website.

So I left my mini-site and going to vacation. Two weeks
later when I come back, after settle down the things into
the house, I first check my emails. Oh no! - up to 300
emails waiting for me. Check couple of them, get VERRY angry
(you must read below website hosting story!) and then take a
ride to see my stats.

Total SURPRISE! My website was AGAIN on the no.1 for Google,
Yahoo!, MSN… plus positions between no.1 and no.4 on
others!

This is my real story. If you spent some time on search
engines like I do it, you know this is weird. Not because I
was again on top, it’s weird I’ll get to the top WITHOUT
optimization.

Now let me tell you more about this page:

- total words: 864

- links to the affiliate program I promote: 4 (position them
from middle to the bottom of the page)

- use the keyphrase mainly from middle to the bottom of the
page

- use only a “.gif” picture for my signature (no keywords
for “ALT” tag)

- headers at the top of page: 3 (first use font size no.3,
the next use H1, and the last H4 tag). NO keywords or
keyphrases inside!

- first appear of the keyphrase is on “word” no.100, the
next on no.283 (from 864!)

- number of times my keyphrase appear on the body of page: 5

- number of times my keyphrase appear on the links: 3

- my keyphrase is build on 3 words and a number

- no use of META tags

- layout: use 2 tables to design my page, one in other

- couple of short Java scripts at the bottom of page

- use six bullets on the middle of page, two P.S., and a
line of copyright, address, and contact info at the bottom
of page

- it was uploaded as a home/ index page, NO keywords into my
domain name

- I DID NOT announce this page/ website to the search
engines!

If I’m right, THIS is not an optimized page. And remember:
depending on HOW people will search and what keywords/
keyphrases will use, my competition is between 32 and
2,750,000 and continue to grow!

I hope not a single SEO webmaster will read this issue.
Because, in a way, it’s outrageous! I didn’t do anything to
deserve this position. I know people try harder to get top
positions. They work a lot to optimize pages, to get
relevant links, build content to become search engine
friendly, and many other things.

This time it’s not my case. But there is a hard lesson here
and I want to shear it with you. These days Netpreneurs
likes a lot to build one page mini-sites. Those things works
and I prove it to you. Beyond the SEO problems and the no.1
spots on major engines, there is something which only a few
people will ask you: “So what if you have a no.1
position(’s)?”

Most people will aspect a hoard of targeted visitors ready
to use their credit cards to buy something they offer,
probably their own product/ services or something from an
affiliate program or joint venture. Sometimes this is
completely wrong! If your keywords are not “hot”, chances
are that your no.1 spots will drive only couple of visitors.
Not to mention sales…

The real Netpreneurs knows that. So if you want to build a
mini-site in the next days, think about how many people will
come and BUY what you promote. To help you, here’s a 6 step
plan to build a profitable mini-site:

–> Step no.1: find a “dream” product or service with an
affiliate program (or joint venture partner) which pay well.

–> Step no.2: determine if you can use “hot” keywords to
promote the program. Use a tool like WordTracker
(http://www.internetmarketingprofitscenter.com/wordtracker/),
the best service on the Internet for such a job.

Find keywords/ keyphrases with low supply (little
competition) but have a higher demand (appear on many
searches around the ‘Net).

–> Step no.3: get a relevant domain name and host it into a
reliable server (try to insert keyword into the name of
domain, or think at something close to the product).

–> Step no.4: start building 3-5 pages (build a theme
around the product), do SEO and announce your site to the
major search engines.

–> Step no.5: concentrate your efforts on getting links
from top related websites.

–> Step no.6: once you rich on top and get back your
initial investment and something more, determine your ROI
and start using pay-per-clicks search engines to boots your
profits.

If you follow EXACTLY these steps, chances are that your
mini-site will jump on top of search engines and will REALLY
drive that particular targeted visitor eager to buy what you
promote! Otherwise, you will lamentably fail.

Final thoughts on my search engine story:

By all odds I regret my page is not what I first intend to
do. Because, I have to tell you this, my page was just throw
away into the cyber-space! The idea was to have something on
my index/ home page until I build my website. Has NOTHING to
do with my theme idea. That’s why I NEVER think at
optimization.

But I don’t regret too much that I’ll have to delete it
soon. I learn something very useful: no matter how many top
positions you have on the search engines, unless you write a
very compelling web page, chances are that you’ll have poor
visitors. And poor visitors means no sales, no ROI.

(Chances are that, at the moment you read this article, my
“magic” web page simply dropped from no.1 positions or I
delete it. So don’t bother to spend time on find it. You
have to believe me! And if you don’t, I’ll have to PROOF on
my computer, as a “.gif” picture.)

Attention Ezine Publishers/ Site Owners
Feel free to reprint this article is its entirety in your
newsletter/ ezine or website as long as you leave all links
in place, do not alterate the content and include our
resource box as listed above. If you do use the material
please send us a note so we can take a look. Thanks!

Valeriu S. Popescu is the editor of the “Internet Marketing
Profits Newsletter”, a gazette dedicated to help new
marketers to drive thousands of targeted visitors to their
websites or affiliate links. Proven tips, tricks, techniques
and strategies revealed every single month!
http://www.internetmarketingprofitscenter.com/archive

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The world of search engine marketing (SEM) is in constant evolution. With increased numbers of search engines, and evolution in the techniques and technologies used, SEM is becoming a tool industries cannot afford to do without. Trends all over the world show that the pressure for SEM services is starting to come from their customers. Indeed, SEM is quickly evolving as the buzzword in a new, technology-driven advertising and on line marketing space. As a result, companies that are serious about their internet presence are making search engine marketing a key component in their advertising campaign.

Google, Yahoo and MSN own the majority of the search engine market share, with Google being the strongest. AOL, Ask Jeeves and Altavista capture smaller shares in the market, while a number of other geographically-specific and market-specific search engines compete in their own niches. In a study conducted in July 2005, Nielson/Netratings reported that the search engine market share was highest for Google at 48%. Yahoo and MSN had the market shares of 22% and 12% respectively.

MSN and Google were also the top destinations for most online purchases, reported a study conducted by comScore Networks (June 2005). The study highlighted that iMSN searchers were 48% more likely to buy online than the average Internet user. Google users were 42% more likely to buy online than the average Internet user. It also came to notice that while Google searches looked for more sophisticated search terms, simple broad term searches occurred for AOL, Yahoo and MSN.

One thing is becoming clearer today: Search engine advertising is not another Internet bubble, it is driven by users and the fact that people, everywhere, need to go somewhere to search and find information. Take China for example - who’s heard of Baidu.com? Not too many people. It’s a Chinese search engine that has been around for 5 years and is the World’s 6th most-visited Internet site, thanks to China’s fast growing internet market, currently with more just over 100 million Web surfers. Baidu is recently went through an initial public offering where is share price when from $27 to $150 in the period of a day. And what about Google? It recently reported quarterly revenues of $1.4 billion. Google’s revenues excluding its payments for other Web sites in its advertising network jumped to $890 million, an increase of 110% from a year before and above the expected $842 million.

US Online Marketing Forecast: 2005 to 2010 by Forrester Research (May 2005) revealed that the arena for search engine marketing is all set to rise and will show growth of 33% in 2005. Forecasts reveal that the figures will reach $11.6 billion by 2010. Display advertising, which includes traditional banners and sponsorships, will grow at the average rate of 11% the next five years to $8 billion by 2010. US online advertising and marketing spending will reach $14.7 billion in 2005, a 23% increase over 2004. Trends also showed that while SEM is set to become more effective than traditional marketing channels, barriers include a lack of online advertising experience. However, search engine marketing firms are embracing this new branch of advertising and their customers are reaping the extremely lucrative rewards.

About the Author

Carmen is the VP Client Relations of Ms. SEO Inc., a Calgary based Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing Company. Ms. Seo Inc. works with their sister company Ms. Hype Inc., a Calgary Web Design Company, and their parent company Cre8 Hype Solutions Inc., a Calgary based Internet Marketing Company, to offer their clients a powerful online presence.

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ahoo got more pages indexed than Google. And an enormous amount more. It seems that the Yahoo index is more than twice the size of the Google index. Recently this was also announced by Yahoo, even though they generally don’t comment on index sizes.

However, a simple search for the word ‘the’ in both engines shows a huge difference. Where Google comes up with approx. 3,320,000,000 results, Yahoo spits out the huge amount of 10,200,000,000 results.

Ungoogle like, a couple of weeks later Google responded. Not by word, but in silence. An enormous crawl of the net was performed and even though it still says ‘Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages’ on the google home page, it is obvious that they have indexed a lot more pages.

These new pages actually were ignored by Google before but it seems that the spider rules of google have been changed in order to increase the index. Obviously this could not happen unnoticed. And noticing it we did. Many sites are seeing reduced traffic since Friday, August 19th, 2005.

Considering that Google has special rules for newly indexed pages, (Simply said: no PR so PR is not taken into account when determining the position of the page*) you can see lots of PR0 pages rank high that weren’t there before. Some of the sites I monitor show a decrease in traffic of about 20 to 30%. If Google indexed about 20 to 30% more pages then this explains the decrease in traffic. These new pages get found, but the number of searches has not increased. In other words, the amount of traffic Google generates now is spread over 20 to 30% more pages. High ranking sites lose traffic (especially content rich sites) to all these new pages that have been indexed. In a next PR update this lost traffic should be recovered partly I believe, though all these new pages also contain new links so it is a swag (Silly Wild Ass Guess) to predict what will happen in the next PR update.

It is interesting to see how Google now made the fairly commercial decision to respond to Yahoo’s increased index. A leader sometimes needs to punch a challenger in the face in order to maintain the respect of the group. They did this, though for now it seems to be just a small punch, which makes me believe we can expect more from Google.

*Controversial, not generally accepted, theory of mine.

Peter Faber is an SEO Consultant and works for TextLinkBrokers. This article may be published only with working links to http://www.textlinkbrokers.com and http://www.i-brane.com

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Google does not accept payment for inclusion in their main index – so anyone that’s at the top is there through hard work and perseverance, or through paying a company such as NikkiPilkington.com to do the hard work for you.
Below I show you 7 great ways to increase your chances of a Google ranking.

The Basics

Ensure that your website has a clear navigation system – and by that I man that the reader of your website can get to every main page of your website, from every other page. There’s nothing more annoying as a user of a website than finding yourself lost in the middle of a site with no way to find other information other than using the back button. A search engine spider (the program that the search engine uses to index your site) doesn’t have a back button so will just give up.

Check the links in your site – broken links will also stop a spider in its tracks.

Try not to use text contained in graphics or images – spiders can’t read these either.

Don’t use the front page of your website to automatically redirect the viewer to another page. The spider sees this as spam, and in Google this can get your site banned!

Content Is King

It’s said all the time, but it’s true. Think of the phrases you would like people to type into the search engines to find your site and include them in the copy of the site. At heart, a search engine is just a database and works quite logically – make it easy for the spider to know what your site is about. (However, beware of repeating phrases too often on your page – this is seen as spam and will be detrimental to your listing. Aim for no more than 3 times on a 100 word page)

Headlines

Once you have a list of phrases you would like to use to promote your site, use them as titles on each page of your site. Inside Business Northampton might have pages titled in ways such as ‘Business Promotion Northampton – Inside Business’ and ‘Advertising Northants – Inside Business’.

Choose two or more word phrases to increase your chances of good listings – the less people you’re competing against, the more chance you have in a short amount of time.

The Links Effect

Google is quite unique in that it sees sites with lots of links back to them as quite important. The more links you have from well-trafficked sites, the higher ‘PR’ level it gives you. Although this isn’t the be all and end all of getting high listings, it is helpful.

If you’re a printing company, approach other related businesses (such as companies offering corporate gifts) with websites and ask them to link to you, making the text for your link one of your key phrases (e.g. printers in Northampton)

If you can get links to your site from sites that are already in Google listings, then you have more chance of being indexed quickly.

Directories

Submit your website to the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project – both of these sites directly filter their results into Google and increase your chances of getting into Google listings. For an article on submitting to the Open Directory Project, please click here.

Submission

Don’t forget to submit your site to Google directly! It’s amazing how many people forget this simple thing.

It’s true that Google is great at picking up sites without them being submitted, by following links from other sites, trawling the web, etc, but the sure fire way of making sure that they know about your site is by visiting the Add URL page on Google Itself.

Patience is a Virtue

Results don’t happen overnight. Google can take between 6 and 18 weeks to even LIST your site, and then longer to move it up the listings for the phrases you want.

It’s time consuming and can be hit and miss when you’re learning – but ANYONE can learn to get a site to the top of Google – don’t listen to those that tell you it’s impossible.

I hope that’s helped some of you to make the most of your website and Google – as always, if anyone has any questions please feel free to call me on 07782 543182 or email me at nikki@nikkipilkington.com

Nikki Pilkington is owner of Milton Keynes based Internet Marketing company NikkiPilkington.com, and writes articles, hints and tips to help people looking to promote their website for free. For more of her articles visit http://www.nikkipilkington.com and sign up to the newsletter.

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When people think of search engine optimization, they immediately think of time consuming very tedious tasks that are way beyond their capabilities. That might be true if they put no time and effort into it. I do agree that improving search engine rankings in competitive niche markets require a good deal of knowledge and expertise. It’s TIME to learn the basics of how to improve your search engine rankings. There is huge need for search engine optimization experts, but most websites don’t find themselves in a very competitive niche market. Many websites can achieve top rankings by applying my optimization basics. All you have to do is put in the time learning and applying them.

Let me lay out the basics of search engine optimization. You can find a professional to do it but some professionals charge thousands to even get your foot in the door. Others have you fill out lengthy quote requests and tell you they’ll be back in about three days with a quote. Then you wait for three days, and no email shows up. It might be worthwhile trying these basics out before paying an expert.

Please Note: If you feel you haven’t achieved the results that you want, then try some affordable SEO experts who have more knowledge and expertise in their field.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is the process of coding a website to achieve top rankings in the search engines. You must concentrate on the website’s most relevant keywords. These relevant keywords are the key phrases that people are most likely to type into the search engine to look for websites. These websites must present their products and services within a twenty second period to ensure that the visitor locks into their site. Let me give you a scenario that happens far too many times. Let’s say you are looking for a great hosting company. You type in your favorite search engine and enter a few keywords: cheap hosting. You get thousands upon thousands of websites. What the search engine displays to you makes you decide whether or not to click on it. When you finally decide to click on it, how many times have you seen Google “adwords” throughout the whole left side in no particular format? How many times have you seen affiliate product advertising on the whole right side in no particular format? Goodbye! What could have been an easy sell turned out to be an easy click out of your website. This is not what you are trying to achieve.

The first step for search engine optimization is to choose the most suitable keywords for your site. Make a list of the most suitable keywords for your site and then split one or two of them to each suitable page within the site. One keyword per page is preferable, but two per page is not so bad. Sometimes it is useful to split a large page into two smaller pages so that a different keyword can be targeted on each page.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Matching keywords to a page’s content is essential. A search engine robot and spider has caught on to all the tricks. Don’t try to outsmart it.

Basic Search Engine Optimization Structure is vital to your success.

An obvious and overlooked aspect of search engine optimization is to make sure that search engine spiders can actually crawl to all of your website’s pages. If the spiders and robots can’t find them, then they won’t get indexed, and we’ve wasted a lot of time on search engine optimization. Make sure that your navigation structure of your website is strong. Would you build a mansion on a one inch foundation? Probably not! Then why build your website mansion on a weak foundation. This means that all of your pages are linked together on every page. When the spider crawls throughout your website, it will crawl to all of the pages and back again. If there is one broken link, this could affect your search engine rankings!

Don’t forget the not so obvious:

•Robots and Spiders can’t see links embedded in Java and most times Flash. When a spider and a robot crawls over your website, it only reads the text, and those embedded links are invisible to the spiders and robots far as search engines are concerned, they don’t exist. Let’s make a promise not to use them.

•How many times have you clicked on a link and looked at the URL, and it contained about 32 extra letters and numbers in it? Google won’t spider any URL that looks like this. Avoid using dynamic URLs.

•Make sure all pages link to at least one other page. Links to pages that don’t link out are called “dangling links”. Google founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, once wrote about Dangling links

“Dangling links are simply links that point to any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet……….Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly.” -

extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

•It is good to structure the internal links so that targeted keywords are reinforced. For example, organize the links so that a topic’s sub-topic pages link to the topic page with the right link text (see below), and vice-versa.

Off-page elements

Link-text ahref=”url”>Type in your link text

This is one of the two most important elements for good rankings. The link text can be on pages within your website or on other websites. Either way, it is essential. Your main keyword should be the text link or included in the text link. When possible, include the target page’s main keywords in the link text, but don’t use the exact same link text for every link that links to a page.

I always use Google as the example since they are the number one search engine today. Google attributes link text to the target page and attributes it as actually being on the target page. It treats its presence as being an important element of the target page. Links carry more weight if the text around them is concerned with the target page’s topic and keywords.

On-page elements

The Title tag
title>Type in your title words here

This is the second of the two most important elements for good rankings. Make sure that the page’s keywords are contained in this tag, and place it near the front. I like taking the actual main keyword and placing it by itself with a period behind it and then explain the Title Tag. For example, let’s say I own Google and I’ve reached the Adwords page. I would title it like this:

“Adwords. Google’s Adwords offers a pay per click solution for all your advertising needs.”

The target keyword is “Adwords”. Each page’s Title tag should be different to the Title tags on the site’s other pages.

The Description tag
meta name=”description” content=”a nice description”

Most search engines display the description of your website so it’s important you write an appealing description for your page and fill it full of the keywords that are contained within your actual site. Remember that list of keywords that you should have listed for your website. A search engine spider should see every one of those keywords in your actual page. Your Description tag should have most of those words. Google doesn’t display the Description like they used to do but that’s what I love about Google. They always keep the SEO’s guessing what’s next? Just when you think the robots and spiders don’t care for the description, Google displays it.

The Keywords tag

meta name=”keywords” content=”some keywords”

I was just reading a popular keyword site that delivers the best possible keywords for your website. Then, they say enter each keyword and separate them with a comma. Do not separate these words with a comma. There is no need to separate them because the search engines ignore the commas. The words in the Keywords tag were never treated as keywords by the search engines; they were treated as text on the page. I keep hearing that the keyword tag is not as effective as it used to be, and then I’ll click a link and it says it’s an absolute. My advice to you is to put plenty of relevant keywords into the tag and include the keyword once at the front, and a second time further along the line. Do me a favor and do yourself a favor? Do not repeat a word more than 5 times. If you do, the search engines will think you are spamming them and they will drop you quick.

The H tag

Hn>Insert your headings or your titles of your text here

Notice the . The “H” stands for headings throughout your text and the “n” stands for the text size from 1 to 6. The smallest is 6 and the biggest heading size is 1. H tags are given more weight than ordinary text and, the bigger the H size, the more weight it receives. So include the target keyword in H tags at least once on the page, and two or three times if possible. Also, place the first H tag as near to the top of the page as possible.

Bold text

Bold text is given more weight than ordinary text but not as much as H tags. As much as is reasonable, enclose the keyword in bold tags when it appears on the page.

Text

The body should be easy to read with a very clean layout. Remember when I visited the hosting sites, and they have Adwords on the left, and they have the affiliate products on the right, and their actual text or body is 10 inches below. Let’s cut out all the extra stuff. Treat your website as an entity. When you do that, buyers will remain on your website. Perfect! You have achieved your goal of getting traffic to stay.

In your text, use the main keywords as often as you can on the page without messing with this clean user-friendly layout.. Use the term once or twice very early in the page’s body text and as often as possible throughout. Reword small parts and even add sentences to make sure that the keyword is well represented in the text.

In all probability, each word in the keyword will be found on the page separate from the keyword itself. This is good. In fact, if they are not there on their own, add a few of them through the page.

Alt text

img src=”url” alt=”Type in text that will show up on images on mouse over”

Alt-text is simple. Blind people have speech synthesizers that read pictures. The only way the blind person will be able to “hear” the picture is if you included the Alt-text. This is the text you see on pictures when you mouse over it. Guess what? Include the keywords in the alt text of all images on the page. Not to mention that this could definitely help your search engine rankings.

Summary

Make a list of keywords for your site. Rank the popularity of the keywords because that’s what your visitor will type in the Search Engines.

Make sure each page of your website has at least one major keyword and split some pages if necessary

Make sure the links and link text contain your target keywords
If possible, organize links from other sites to suit the target keywords and their pages.

Organize all the on-page elements to suit each page’s target keyword.

Relax and shoot for number one rankings.

Kit Elliott is the author of The Traffic Toolchest. His ethical approach to marketing makes him one of the top experts in his field. His highly anticipated book Super Affiliates Guide to Riches is expected to launch by mid-August 2005 at http://www.superaffiliate.com . Check out The Traffic Toolchest at http://www.thetraffictoolchest.com to get over 70 valuable marketing tools.

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Search Engine Marketing is possibly
the most credible form of advertising!

In the majority of cases, for a search engine user to find your
website they need to go into their favourite search engine and
type in keywords for what they are looking for. Due to the
accuracy of results provided by search engines these days, there
is a very good chance that an internet searcher will find the
type of business they are looking for within the first two pages
of their favourite search engine, especially if they are using
Google, Yahoo or MSN.

When a business uses television advertising, newspaper
advertising, or any other type of form of advertising, they are
targeting a very broad range of consumers, and many viewers of
these mediums have no interest in the product they are viewing.
There are advantages to this; after all if an advertisement is
well designed, it may create a need (or want) in consumers which
will entice them to go out and buy that product or service.
Television advertising is the best medium for creating needs
that weren’t previously there as television stimulates the
consumer through both visual and sound to capture the consumers’
attention; a main reason why television advertising is so
expensive as a marketing option.

Unlike most forms of marketing, the internet gives you the
opportunity to provide considerable information to the consumer.

If your website is well organised and laid out, with out
overwhelming the consumer with too much information, it can
provide the information needed to sell your product or service.

The information on your website should cater both for the people
looking for a brief overview of what you offer, as well as a
more detailed overview for those people that like to drill down
into detail. Unless your website is purely an information
website where people want to spend considerable time reading
through everything, then you should avoid going into lengthy
detail. If you have too much information, people will often lose
interest altogether and will likely close your website and start
looking at your competitors.

I strongly recommend that if your website is not bringing in the
business that you would like, you make it a priority to have a
professional company like Quantum Web Solutions analyse your
website and give you advice on how to improve it, and start
generating more business for you.

Why is this so important? Because in today’s ever evolving
internet market, more and more consumers trust the internet and
search engine results before other advertising mediums to bring
them the product or service they desire. If you are not
positioned well, then you are missing out on valuable business.

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