Search Engine Optimization Blog

There are a wealth of search engine optimization tips available free on the web to assist internet marketers in improving their page rank. Beware! Many of them are outdated and can destroy your carefully cultivated ranking.

When you are reading information on how to make your site more search friendly, always check the date it was posted. It is important to remember that the entire history of the internet as the average person has experienced it spans only a decade or so. Because of the amazing collective memory of the internet, a lot of old info is still floating around.

We’ve come a long way in that decade - especially in terms of how information on the internet is indexed, or as you think of it, how your website’s search engine ranking is determined. All “tricks” to getting a higher search ranking have a lifespan. At first they may be wildly successful, pulling in traffic by playing to flaws in the search engines’ logic. When the technique becomes common enough, the search engine programmers take note and adjust their algorithms.

Back in the distant, foggy past (1996 or so) that process could take quite a while and thus the “trick” would stay useful. Nowadays the window between discovery of an exploit and correction by the search engines is much smaller. What’s more, the search engines have become vindictive and may very well ban you for using the wrong method of getting traffic. If you rely on Google and other engines for your livelihood, that could spell complete disaster!

Be wise and avoid any technique that feels “scammy” to you. Commonly repeated techniques to avoid include: multiple domains that point to one site or multiple sites with exactly the same content; ”invisible” keywords using text the same color as the background; listing the same keyword multiple times in a row; immediately redirecting to a different domain; and many, many more.

Let your conscience be your guide. Before trying a new way to improve your ranking, ask yourself if it feels like cheating. Even if the answer is no, make sure the information is up to date, or you may be wasting time changing your page to please a search ranking algorithm that doesn’t exist anymore.

Google uses an algorithm to determine the search engine results (SERPS). The algorithm is based upon certain factors that include keyword density, Meta Tags, anchor tags, image tags, back links, etc etc etc.

If your site is optimized for specific keywords than you will rank better in the search engines. There are many factors but onsite optimization is a must. You can research and fine out the information yourself or hire and SEO. I have put together some Free Basics on www.seo4dummies.com

Overture shows you the bid price of certain keywords. Wordtracker show you the amount the term is searched. You can use www.nichebot.com a free tool to see all this at once.

You can research keywords free online with these various tools.

www.nichebot.com ( my personal SEO Favorite)

http://www.webmasterautomation.com/cgi-bin/keywordtool.cgi

http://www.keyworddensity.com ( Keyword density analyzer )

Adsense / Adwords.

Google Adwords have a bid price to display certain “keyword terms”. Think of Adwords as TV commercials. Webmasters can put Adsense on there websites. Think of Adsense as the TV Program. If a viewer of your webpage clicks on one of your ads, you get a commission. That commission is based upon the price of the Adword. Google keeps about 60% of the bid price and passes about 40% to the webmaster or Adsense account.

The way the Adsense ads are displayed is determined by the Keyword Density of your individual sites. If you site is prominently about “say Dogs” then the Adsense will display ads about Dogs. However, Google in its new business model is now tracking IP numbers and providing more local ads. Think of the local TV commercials. They are not as expensive as the National Ads. Therefore you may have local ads that are displayed on your site that have only a$0.03 payout rather than a $5.00 payout.

If you optimize you site for your theme, or content, then you can generate more traffic to you sites based upon your keywords. The Google Adsense, will display ads relevant to your topics. If they are not displaying ads to our topic, then you must adjust your Density of your keywords in the body of text of the page.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of changing your website, so that it is spider friendly. If your site is brand new it will take a few months for Google to index your site and be visible in the SERPs. This is known as the “Google sandbox theory”. Aged sites should already be indexed as long as the site has something for the spiders to grab. Excessive graphics, java scripts, PHP sessions are all not spider friendly.

To get spiders to come to your site often and grab your data, you must have links from outside websites to your site. This is the Coveted Page Rank factor. Page rank is only a factor of the amount of incoming and outgoing links to your site. Only a small percentage of Page Rank is attributed to the Google Algorithm for Search Engine Results at this time.

Spiders follow links, once there are links established the spiders will Crawl, your sites. They will gather minimal information. Several Weeks to months later, the spiders will Deep crawl you site and index all that is available. To speed this process along, back links or links to other sites is a must. The more links the spider can travel to get to your site the better. Linking to like minded topics is always best. You don’t need to buy LINKS. You can acquire links via posts in forums, writing and submitting articles, using a Blog post, submitting to SEO friendly directories.

To view the spider activity on your site, first go to your traffic stats. Look for the googlebots. See how often they come and the amount of data they have “grabbed”. You can also go to Google itself and if you are indexed view the Cache of your page. That cache date is a good indication of the last true crawl of your site.

To see if you are indexed go to Google and type in the search box, site:www.yourwebsite.com ( make sure the word site is not Capitalized and you replace he words your website with your actual URL). View the results. You should also repeat the process and this time leave out the www. , and just enter the site:yourwebsite.com

Sometime webmasters leave out the www., but then look for Google using the www. Or link to sites using the www. Either way is fine, just pick one version and be consistent with www. Or non www throughout your website career.

As the spiders come to your site they will start to grab information, that information is sorted and returns the SERPS. Did you know that there are different DataCenters throughout the world that Hold that information? If you ask a friend on the say East Cost to search for a term and tell you where you site is in the SERPS, they result on the West cost may be completely different. As much as 5-10 or more positions depending on the activity of that keyword.

Ok that’s enough for today.

Attention adult site webmasters: you are in need of quality exchange link reciprocal action if you aim to grow your business. There are literally hundreds of thousands of website owners in cyberspace looking for mutually beneficial link swapping relationships. They want you, but do you want them? The fact is that there are far fewer good-quality adult websites out there than their commonly inferior counterparts.

In a highly saturated market like the internet porn industry, you have to be selective in the individual components of your overall advertising campaign. Also saturated to drenched levels is the market of service provision geared towards the promotion of your adult website. When you select the providers, you should be sure that they address the following concerns.

Firstly, you must remember that link volume, the number of links that point consumers to your website, is an important factor. Not only are you actually receiving targeted, juicy traffic to your site, you are also improving your search engine popularity rank. This generally true as long as you are not linked with poor-quality sites, or sites that contain a lot of advertisements in the form of pop-ups, pop-unders, or especially redirects. The smart search engines are looking for that, and they don’t like it.

You will also need to select a service that understands the inherit difficulties of porn site promotion. To find promotion sites is very simple. To find quality promotion sites that actually care about the service they provide past the point of sale is a slightly more involved undertaking.

The real bottom line is to stay personally involved in the overseeing of your business. Choose quality over quantity when building link reciprocal.

I think that Jagger has outsmarted us all. The reason for this view lies deep behind this update: to make AdWords flourish, thus pushing their stock market value through the roof for revenue generation, is their real agenda.

To quote CNN on Jan. 9, 2005: “Google closed last Monday, the first trading day of the year, at $202.71, the first time the company closed above $200 during its brief history as a publicly

traded firm…Moreover, Google is trading at about 60 times 2005 earnings estimates and a stock split isn’t going to make that valuation any cheaper, either.”

Now, to quote NEWS.COM almost a year later, on November 17, 2005: “Google’s share price got a dose of high octane in the past four weeks, soaring from $300 a share to hitting in excess of $400 on Thursday. Does zero to 60 come to mind? And the messages boards that track the sentiment of Google investors have been a buzz, with some predicting a further run up to $500 a share.”

But have they got it wrong? I think this update, disguised as an attempt to bring in ‘relevancy’, is truly a market manipulation intended to push up revenues but through limited relevency, with blogs becoming the tour de force of internet search, forcing users to use AdWords.

One client recently complained that his ad spend is almost 100% up against a year ago. He halved the price and still gets the same volume of hits. It is interesting to note that in this period Google’s share price has witnessed an unprecedented but identical percentage uplift.

All very well for the shareholders but are internet users going to accept the return of useless blog sites instead of relevant companies and products in their searches? I think not. A growing

number will migrate to Yahoo, leaving Google’s shareholders, in the very near future, wondering why the share price has plummeted.

There is a quite brilliant stock advisor in Austria that believes this to be the real rationale behind the update. I now concur with his words.

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is simply adding certain design and content elements to your web site, blog, and/or RSS feed to make it more attractive to search engines.

If you are interested in generating traffic for your web site, blog, or RSS feed then you must spend some time working on SEO. Of course, you can ignore SEO and depend on other methods of traffic generation but this can be very expensive and time-consuming. Of course, SEO can be expensive and time consuming as well but if it is done right it will not only enhance the appearance, usability, and usefulness of your site, blog or feed in the short run it will also increase traffic and revenue in the long run.

Search engine traffic is the best source of long-term free traffic. If you are looking to attract visitors to your new online store featuring dog sweaters then obtaining a good listing on Yahoo could deliver 1800 visitors searching for dog sweaters and another 2000 searching for some other variation of key words including dog sweater. Google could deliver even more and MSN could make a healthy contribution as well.

If you ignore SEO then you will still get some search engine traffic, especially if you employ other marketing efforts, but it will be a paltry trickle compared to the flood of visits you could receive from proper SEO. Taking some time to ensure your site is properly optimized for search engines will eventually result in higher rankings for the search terms you target with your SEO efforts. The higher your site appears in search engine listings then the more visitors you will receive.

All search engines have a set of rules, often referred to as algorithms, that are used to judge the importance, also known as rank, of a web page for a specific word or phrase, also known as keyword. Software robots called spiders continually “crawl” the web and report back to search engines with the results. Once your site has been crawled by a search engine, the site will be included in that engine’s index of web sites and eventually ranked according to the individual search engine’s rules.

Obviously you want your site, blog or feed to be spidered, indexed, and ranked quickly but it is best to have your site optimized before it is spidered as once it is indexed and ranked you may need to wait for a return visit to register the improvements. It is OK, and even desirable, to continue to add to and improve your site after it is spidered but you should wait to attract the spiders until after your site is ready.

There is a great deal of misinformation regarding how to get your pages spidered and indexed quickly by the search engines. You could spend a great deal of time and money chasing down the secret tools and tips that abound, but there really isn’t a secret. Some search engines provide a facility that you can use to submit your site details to them, but this method often takes a lot of time to work. The fastest and most effective way is to have a highly ranked website, preferably one related to your site’s topic, provide a link back to your site. When the spiders crawl the highly ranked site, which may happen every day or at least within a week, they will find your link. Spiders discovering your link on a prominent site will temporarily classify your site as important and follow the link to crawl your site.

The factors that influence a web site’s rank within a search engine index are closely guarded secrets and the rules frequently change. Just to make things even more complicated the factors vary from search engine to search engine.While you can spend a great deal of time and money studying SEO there are many free articles and discussion groups available but concentrating on a few simple issues will likely produce the results you need without further investigation.

Content is king when it comes to search engine optimization. Your site should have several pages of original content centered around the primary topic of your site. Pages or blog posts should have at least 200 words. Regularly adding pages or posts will keep your site relevant and interesting to search engines as well as visitors.

Don’t overlook the use of tags within your site as well. These tags include meta tags, title, header and anchor tags. Your key words and phrases should be reflected in these tags as well as the content you place on your site.

Search engine optimization is an important part of internet marketing but it doesn’t have to as complex and expensive as some folks make it out to be. If you generate a clean, attractive site with unique and relevant content then the search engines will like it. If the search engines like it then they will tell their visitors and your traffic will rise.

Want to drive more targeted traffic to your web site?

Want to do it for free?

If you answered “yes” you’re in for a treat. Use the search engine optimization and ranking techniques in this article and you will be well on your way to a front page listing in the major search engines.

Up until now, you’ve been led to believe that search engine optimization and search engine ranking strategies were something better left to an expert. But that’s not true. Any serious marketer can and should learn the simple search engine optimization and ranking techniques that can get his site listed on the first page of the search engines.

Before I begin I want to point out that search engine optimization and ranking strategies fall into two catagories. On page factors and off page factors.

On page factors you have a lot of control over. Things like content, good keywords, and the proper use of anchor text.

Off page factors, like page rank, you’ll have less control over. But it’s important that you exercise as much control as you can over the off page factors as well. These will be discussed in another article.

To get your search engine optimization and ranking strategies right you will need some tools. Some free, some payed. But regardless, if you want your site listed in the top ten results you need these tools.

Search Engine Optimization and Ranking - Tools of the Trade

To begin with, I’m not a big believer in throwing money after unnecessary tools or ebooks. After all, if you bought all the tools some gurus recommend it could easily run into hundreds and even thousands of dollars. So rest assurred, what I recommend are the bare essentials of what you will need to get it right.

The first tool you need is free. At least for now. It’s the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool. You can find it at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

You will use this tool for your keyword research. Let’s say you plan to build a site on dog grooming. Type dog grooming in the suggestion box, click the arrow, and a list of related keywords come up. It also tells you how many searches were conducted on Overture and it’s related sites for the past month. This is valuable information as it tells you which keywords are worth persuing and which don’t get enough searches to be worthwhile. You will want to print out or create a file to store these keywords on your computer because you’re not finished with them yet.

The next tool you need is Wordtracker. Although it’s not free, it is one of the most valuable tools in your arsenal. This tool is not expensive as you can order it for short time frames. Twenty four hours usually runs about $7.00 U.S.

Wordtracker takes your keyword research to the next level. For instance:

find all keywords that bear any relation to your business

tells you how popular the keywords really are in multiple search engines

shows you your chance of making the top ten

shows you the number of times the keyword or phrase has appeared in the data base

shows mispellings on searches that you can capitalize on

shows the number of competing sites

prints out a complete list of selected keywords with KEI analysis, count, hits in 24 hours, and number of competing sites.

This valuable tool will save you countless hours of trial and error trying to find the best keywords and phrases to land you in the top ten.

I once built a site based solely on results from the Overture suggestion tool. To my dismay I had few visitors. When I checked the keywords and phrases with Wordtracker, I found a completly differnt story. Wordtracker showed much lower figures for the keywords I was using from Overture. When I revamped the site using Wordtrackers results I found the search results to be much more accurate.

So use the Overture suggestion tool to get a preliminary set of keywords, then, check them with Wordtracker to identify the best keywords and phrases to build your site around.

Build Your Site Around Search Engine Optimization and Ranking Techniques

When I built my first site I used a cheap software program I purchased from my local office supply store. Needless to say, it was never listed in the search engines. I had little control over the appearance and more than likely it did what it wanted, not what I wanted. So if you intend to build a serious web site to get traffic and make money, stay away from them. I currently use NoteTab Pro. it’s relatively easy to use and gives you a lot of flexibility. Plus it’s relatively inexpensive.

If you are looking for a less expensive way to go I recommend Notetab light. Download a free copy here http://www.notetab.com. Although not as flexible and easy to use as NoteTab Pro, it will get the job done.

Search Engine Optimization and Ranking Power Points

You’ve researched and selected your keywords and phrases. Where do you use them for the best search engine optimization and ranking?

Power Point #1.This is one of the best secrets I can give you. Consider each page of your site to be a doorway into your site. Therefore optimize one keyword or keyword phrase for each page of your site. Many people try to cram multiple keywords into a page. This only confuses the search engines and hurts your rankings.

Power Point#2. Keep your site keywords and pages focused on a common theme. For example: If you have a site about dog grooming, Every page on the site should relate to dog grooming. If you were to ad a page about training your pet snake it wouldn’t fit the theme. So keep all your pages tightly focused on the overall theme of your site. Getting off theme will hurt your rankings.

Power Point #3.Content is king. Give the searh engines what they want and they will give you what you want. A good listing. What they want are highly relevant sites for their search customers with good, valuable content. Methods to trick the search engines are abundant. But when they catch up with you, you’ll be penalized or worse, possibly banned. You don’t want that.

Power point #4. Sprinkle your secondary keywords and phrases throughout your content. When you researched your keywords you came up with a list of primary words and phrases to optimize your pages. You should also have an additional 50 - 100 keywords and phrases that I will call secondary keywords. If you sprinkle these throughout your page it will give you a big boost in the search engines. You’ll be amazed at how many visitors you will recieve from these secondary keyword searches.

Where To Use Your Primary Keywords To Get The Most Impact For Your Search Engine Optimization and Ranking Efforts

Keyword placement, density and proximity are the most important factors when it comes to on page search engine optimization and ranking strategies.

Domain name: Although unproven, some search engine optimization experts recommend your site domain name be your primary keyword or phrase. If I can get a domain with my primary keyword fine. If not, i just try to get a good related name. If you do get a domain with your primary phrase, be sure to seperate the individual words with hyphens. Some search engine optimization experts are now saying that Google can read the keywords even if they are not seperated. I prefer to play it safe and use hyphens. For example: doggrooming.com would be dog-grooming.com. Done this way the search engines can read the individual words.

Page title. It’s best to use your keyword or phrase once in the title of your page. Try to keep it short. Google uses a weighting factor based on the number of words in the title. The more words you use, the less weight each word has. A word of caution here. Don’t just use your keyword phrase. Google will likely consider this spamming and penalize you. Using the same keyword more than once is worth testing, but many experts believe it can hurt your rankings. Try to come up with a good title as this is what your prospects will see on the search engines.

The discription: Again, don’t over use your keyword in your discription. Once or twice is enough. Some search engines will use your discription in their listings so try to develop one that will make the searcher want to click on it.

Heading tags: Header tags are the HTML tags used to make text bigger. Typically they are used for headlines and sub heads. Some search engines use them to determine what a page is about. So try to use your keyword or phrase in your header tags.

Anchor text: This is the text used in a link. When you are linking from one page on your site to another make sure you use your keywords in the link. A good example is your home page. Most people simply put the link as “home.” Instead use website promotion strategies home. Get the idea.

Body copy: Try to use your keyword as often as you can in your body copy without sounding repetitive or being obvious. If it doesn’t sound right, it’s probably to much. Work it in wherever it fits. There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to keyword density. Most experts agree that around 7% density is a good figure to shoot for. Avoid continuously repeating the keyword every two or three words. This is considered spamming.

Alt text: This is text used in place of images for those with text only browsers. It also pops up when you hold your mouse over an image. Because search engine spiders can’t read graphics, the alt text tells the spiders what the graphic is. So discribe the graphic but include your keyword.

URL’s: When using URL’s to link your pages together be sure to use your keywords in the link. Just as in the case of domain names, use hyphens to seperate the words so the spiders can read them.

We’ve covered a lot in this article. I’ve given you information that cost me a small fortune to acquire. We covered the tools and editors you will need to do the job right. I gave you power points that most search engine optimization experts don’t want you to know. Then we looked at the on page factors you can control to maximize your search engine optimization and ranking efforts. Keep in mind, this is only half of the equation. There are still off page factors that have a major impact on your search engine optimization strategies.

On the internet, competition is stronger than ever. There was a time where paying a few bucks to get in Yahoo was enough to generate substantial traffic but marketing websites on the internet got much more complex since. Google is now a major player in the search engine industry and any serious internet marketing specialist and seo expert knows how important it is to get a good website ranking in that popular search engine. Understanding Google’s algorythm along with having good html and writing skills can often make the difference between being an amateur or a good internet marketing specialist. Although, many other aspects that we will cover here should be taken into consideration when comes the time to find the right internet marketing specialist for your website.

To start with, you need to define your goals. Are you planning on building a new website or improving an existing one? To get straight to the point, it is a known fact that an internet marketing specialist will have much more to work with if building a new website than if only improving the search engine ranking of an old one. Look at it as if it was a house. Wouldn’t it be better if you had a strong foundation? In other words, you can expect better results from your internet marketing specialist when building a new website from scratch. In the other hand, it will also cost you more. Of course, you want to know if the investment would be worth it. The truth is that it depends on the products and services you are offering and any serious internet marketing specialist should be able to give you a clear and realistic portrait of the situation. Try avoiding those internet marketing companies offering guaranteed website ranking cause that could be tricky. Unless the guaranty includes keywords of your choice, which would be very surprising, you could end up with keywords such as “upper ny marketing firm” ranking on the first page of Google’s results but who would really search for that exact term? You could also rank well with a decent keyword such as “marketing techniques” and get some traffic from it but sincerely, would you get customers this way or a bunch of students and people trying to learn about marketing techniques?

As mentioned, it is important to first define your goals and evaluate the potential of your website. A good internet marketing specialist should be able to help you go through this process and elaborate a solid strategy. He is the expert, your consultant. This is why you are investing in him. Although, some companies will offer keyword analysis services as a seperate service. There is nothing wrong with this practice and it can actually give you more flexibility in the development of your website. Not having the service at all would be something to worry about!

After elaborating a strategy, your internet marketing specialist will get into the development process. Can he actually build a nice looking website or will he just put a bunch of keywords together along with some html code in order to improve your website ranking? This is an important thing to know before hiring an internet marketing specialist since many of them calling themselves seo (search engine optimizer) don’t have any design skills. In addition to your internet marketing specialist, would you also need to hire a web developper and add this to your bill?

Those are just some basic things you need to know before hiring an internet marketing specialist. After optimizing your website for search engines, many other actions can be taken. Can your internet marketing specialist perform those for you? Developping partnerships and content pages, submitting your url to search engines and directories, trading links, writing articles and advertising on the internet are all among other marketing actions that would help improve your online presence and website ranking. It’s now up to you to find an internet marketing specialist that could work within your budget!

Most discussions about seo focus on getting into the top 10 of the rankings for a particular keyword phrase. In truth, the discussion should be about the fold.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It means the task and art of getting a site ranked highly under appropriate keyword phrases on Google, Yahoo, MSN and smaller search engines. For example, assume you have a site offering cruise ship booking services. With seo, the goal would be to get the site ranked under keyword phrases like “cruise trips”, “cruise bookings”, “cruise packages” and so on. The exact phrases would be determined by your keyword research.

Whatever the subject of your site, the search engine optimization efforts can lead to some dissatisfaction if you don’t understand something. People will slave over their sites or pay someone like myself to do it for them. The seo effort goes on and on for months. One day, your site pops to number 8 on Google for one of your major keyword phrases. Ah, finally! While you are browsing for your new Ferrari, you happen to notice you aren’t seeing massive sales. Furthermore, your traffic is up, but not as much as you had expected. What is the problem? It all has to do with the fold.

The fold is one of those terms that derive from the short attention span of we humans. Simply put, we tend to be lazy. This applies in a particular way when we search for something on the web. Go ahead and open another window next to this article. Now search for something. Now notice that you can only see three to four of the natural rankings returned by the search engine for your search. These rankings are above the fold. Anything you have to scroll down to see is below the fold.

The seo goal of being in the top 10 is somewhat misleading. Yes, a top 10 ranking will result in more traffic to your site. The real goal, however, should be a ranking above the fold. This means you need to be in the top three to four positions. A vast majority of people searching for something on Google, Yahoo and MSN will not scroll down to look at anything below the top three to four listings. If you can get your site listed above the fold, then it is time to start shopping for your Ferrari!