Basic SEO Strategies for Newbies

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process getting your website ready to be found in organic web searches. Organic searches, refers to web searches that appear naturally as the result of a search for a particular keyword or phrase, rather than appearing in the sponsored links (pay-per-click advertising) section of a search page.

Here are the 11 strategies that you can regularly implement on your sites for better SEO positioning:

1.Page title tags: This refers to the page information that you see in the blue bar of your browser in the upper left-hand corner when you visit a website. For best SEO, use your top 2 keywords in your title tag. The best way to do that is separated with a bar, as illustrated in this example: Internet Marketing | Web Marketing.

2. Domain name: as much as possible, use one primary keyword in your domain name. You will have a slight edge over your competition by doing so. If you already have a domain that you have used for some time, include a keyword in the name of files for your website pages. Example: http://www.yoursite.com/internet-marketing.htm if your keyword is Internet marketing.

3. Meta tags: These are descriptions on a web page that are not seen by most visitors except when looking at the page source code in their browser. While the keyword and description metatags used to be the primary way that search engines indexed sites, that is no longer the case. However, you shouldn't ignore them entirely, as it is still worthwhile to include them as a part of your page description. For optimal SEO, your meta description and keyword tags should be no more than 150 characters each.

4. Header tags: Header tags are the HTML code that indicate a headline, like H1, H2 and H3 and show up as bolded headlines in your page content. The first 3 header tags are the only ones you need to be concerned about, and the primary header tag, H1, is the most important. Use your primary keyword once in the H1 tag, 2-3 times in your H2 tags, and multiple times in your H3 tags.

5.Alt image tag: The alt tag typically describes an image in a floating text window when you put your mouse over the image if the image isn't able to be displayed. The best use of any tag is to use your keywords in your image descriptions.

6. Content formatting: Search engines pay attention to formatted content, as in when text is bolded, italicized, and underlined. Make sure that you are bolding your keywords in the content of your website.

7. Keyword density: Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears on a web page. Rather than trying to focus on the number of times a keyword appears in the content of your page, aim for a more natural density by keeping your keyword phrases in mind as you write the copy for your page. Optimally, keyword density should be between 2% - 7%. There are a number of keyword density checkers available online to assist you with determining the keyword density of a page.

8. Anchor text: Anchor text refer to links on a page that connect your visitor to other pages. So, rather than telling someone to "click here" in the content of your page, include a keyword in your anchor text, as in "click here for dog training tips."

9. Inbound links: Reciprocal link exchange (you link to my site and I'll link to yours) used to be a great way to attract the attention of search engines to your site. Now, search engines pay attention only to the quality and popularity of the site providing you with an inbound link that is not a reciprocal link. One of the best ways to get quality inbound links back to your site is to submít articles to high traffic article directoríes and submit press releases to paid press release services.

A second way to gain high quality inbound links is by listíng your site in search engine-friendly directoríes in which humans review the listings. Google and other search engines place more credibility in the directories in which the listings are reviewed by real people than they do other kinds of directories. Consequently, these links are weighted more heavily and favorably in the inbound link evaluation process.

10. New content: Content is still king, so one way to improve your page rank for a search term is to write high quality articles containing one or two of your keywords in the title and posting those regularly (weekly is best) to your site. Search engines are always seeking good, fresh, content, so your goal should be to make your site into an information-rich resource for your industry.

11. Site maps: There are sitemaps that help a visitor navigate a site, and sitemaps that are expressly designed for the search engines. The two are not the same. To enhance your site, submit an xml sitemap to Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer. Use XML Sitemaps to build search engine-friendly sitemaps on your sites. You can refer to my previous post on how to make an XML sitemap.

Search engine optimization strategy is not as difficult as it appears. Take some time to do some keyword research for your site, and then spend another 15 minutes a day employing a few of these strategies until you have a well-optimized site. Why pay for visitors through pay-per-click advertising if you don't have to?

Proper Website Submission To Search Engines

If you have a business website then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting your website to a search engines.

It is still the best option for promotion.No amount of press releases, newspaper or radio ads, banner ads, spam emails or newsletters will achieve the same results, although it may be effective in a small proportion.

Automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines are a bad thing to do so beware of SEO companies providing such services. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

Researching or referrals from other companies that have had great success with an SEO company is always the safest way to ensure that your website is going to be in genuinely good hands. There are so many SEO services on the internet trying to make a quick buck by any means necessary.

Business dealings with the wrong types of people can be very hard if you're not careful in considering and researching where you decide to go in finding your marketing partners for life.

Before website submission to search engines, it is best to ensure that your websites are thoroughly designed, having professional quality using the right keywords, good graphics and pictures and appropriate, relevant content. Don't submit websites that are incomplete.

While submitting to search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

New and fresh website in the early stages are always going to come with many great challenges. But once you have overcome those challenges and beaten the odds, you will most likely be able to repeat this pattern over and over if you wanted to do so.

You could also decide to become a consultant and help others to become better with their dealings online. They could learn from your mistakes and discoveries just as you had with your wonderful guide.

Mere submissions alone to search engines will not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be at the very top. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite some time before they take up your site for review by human editors.

One important factor to remember while submitting your website is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like Google hardly consider submissions without sitemaps.

You will need to do everything that you can think of to make the robot's job in crawling your website as easy as it can possibly be from your end. It can also be referred to as optimizing your website to just flow very smoothly without hardly any interruption at all from the search engine programs that hit all kinds of dead ends and errors as people place businesses online.

You will hear from many users online that you should stay as far away as you can get from these automatic submission companies. This is very much the case in most of what you may stumble onto online.

There are a few good, solid and dependable SEO companies that you can find by knowing the right people and being associated with a good network of business minded people.

Hitting Top 3 Spots on MSN

MSN is the simplest search engine to dominate rankings on. Below is one amazingly simple formula to hit the top three spots nine out of ten times of MSN Search Engine.

Here's the formula, step by step:

Step 1: Target just one keyword per Website (don't worry it's just a one page Website anyway.) And don't even bother with long tail keywords. Go for the ones that are impossible on Google. This formula nails them on MSN.

Step 1a: If you want to see exactly how much traffic potential each keyword has on MSN you can use their keyword tool at https://adcenter.microsoft.com/Research/KeywordResearcher.aspx. But unfortunately you need to be an AdCenter member to access it. But on the plus side, it only costs five dollars to join up. Clicking the above link will redirect you to the signup page if you are not a member.

Step 1b: If you don't want to bother you can just use Google's free keyword tool at as a max estimate and do a little guesstimating as to what MSN's searches for the same keyword might be. There is no hard and fast rule but I find that dividing Google's search volume by a number between four and seven is usually close to MSN's numbers.

Step 2: Register a new domain name that is as close as possible to your keyword. Use hyphens as much as you like. If your keyword is a single word there is a 99.9 percent chance it is taken as a domain name so add a hyphen between each letter or add a double hyphen between two words. Be original.

Step 2a: Do not bother with any domains that do not end in .com, .net, or .org. Those are the ones MSN likes best (the original big three TLD's.)

Step 3: Build a one page Website as follows...

Step 3a: Put your title at the top of the page and use your keyword once. Don't bother with H1 and H2 tags. Just bold, underline or italicize it.

Step 3b: Write 250 to 350 words, broken out into three or more paragraphs. Use your keyword once in each paragraph (no more than four uses on the page.)

Step 3c: Use at least two instances of your keyword as anchor text linking back to the same (home) page.

Step 3d: Use as many images as you like but make sure at least one third of your text is above the first image. And if you find 350 words is not enough to say all you want, make images of your offer text and post those on the page as well. Just keep the actual text (search engine readable) to 350 words or less and have no more than four mentions of your keyword.

Step 3e: Limit your outbound links to one that leaves the site. This should go to your main offer page, payment processor, etc. All other links should simply link back to the same page. By the way, if you need to post a privacy policy or disclaímer, create an image of it and post it as an image if possible to cut down on page text.

Step 4: Use your Title and Description META tags. MSN still likes them. Here's how...

Step 4a: Make your title tag in two parts with a separator between. First is the keyword. Then place a separator like a pipe (above enter key) or colon. Then add a few words that complement the keyword. Try not to go over seven words in the title.

Step 4b: Make your description up to 250 characters long (or longer if you wish but anything beyond 250 will likely not count.) Use your keyword within the first five words of your description if possible and do not use it more than twice at most.

Step 5: Get links from other Web sites. This is important! GPR or Google PageRank does not matter at all and neither does the site theme matching yours. Just get plenty of links. Here's how I did it before buying a software tool...

Step 5a: Submít your site to as many directories as possible. DMOZ.org and Yahoo.com are the largest.

Step 5b: Do relevant blog and user group postings with a link back to your site.

Step 5c: Write and submit articles. The resource box from a single article can bring in dozens or even hundreds of links. It's easiest to use an article submission service like SubmitYourArticle.us or another with similar advanced distribution features.

Step 6: Consider investing in a software tool. I spent $167 for SE0elite.com and it does all I need and more. Of course, there are dozens of choices out there so shop around.

That’s it. Don’t forget to come back here to post your success.

Building A Better Business Website

A look of a website can make or break your business. First impressions always count. Here are ten tips to building a better business website.

1. Colour - A black background is not recommended. It's hard on the eyes. I don't know how many people have problems reading white or coloured text on a black background and with that said, don't go neon pink or glaring orange either. Generally black text on white background is best. Ideally you can choose two colours, but make sure they match and use it consistently on all your pages to maintain fluidity and continuity.

For example: Reds and oranges which stimulates appetite works well on a food site while warm pastel colours matches a baby site.

2. Layout - Don't cram everything into one page. Cluttered websites overwhelms the visitors. Keep it clean, crisp and concise. I had a CMS style website before and although it looked organized because there were three columns, there were also a lot of text. Navigation wasn't as plain as day and it overloaded the senses. Take these three words to heart, less is more.

3. Navigation - The more user-friendly the better and your visitors are bound to stay longer. You don't want your visitors to be jumping through hoops to find what they are looking for. Make shopping carts or payment buttons visible and easily accessible. Everything should be just a click away. Make sure all your links are working. Finding broken links becomes frustrating and annoying.

4. Proper spelling and grammar - There's nothing good about visiting a website to find loads of misspelled words and poor grammar. It's unprofessional and you can bet your visitors will leave.

5. Speed - When it comes to website loading, no one likes to be kept waiting. They will definitely leave a site if it won't load properly. People's time is precious; don't make them wait.

6. Graphics - Be careful of using big flashy graphics or banners. Too many animated and too many big banners take away a site's credibility. It also slows down the loading time of your site considerably. Not everyone uses high speed Internet. Remember people don't wait around for slow loading sites.

7. Audio - If you like it and want it, change the default setting to give the visitor control if they want to hear audio or not. Make sure it's visibly accessible to the visitor. The last time I landed on a site, I couldn't find the button to disable the audio so I immediately X'ed out.

8. Pop-up anything - Although many people now have pop-up blockers, it may not be so much of a nuisance, but a pop-up of anything is intrusive, unwanted and annoying. Adding a form to your page in a highly visible spot is much more effective and non-intrusive.

9. Content - Informative, resourceful content will keep a visitor coming back. No one wants to visit a site that hasn't been updated in a long time. You can add a small graphic or a simple text in red with the word "NEW" or a "What's New?" page to inform your visitors you have made updates.

10. AdSense ads - Too many AdSense ads on any page looks scammy and it downgrades the quality of your site. If you can handle honest opinions, have someone critique your website. It really all comes down to personal preference and you will never be able to please everyone and that's okay.

The main goal is building a functioning, well laid out website that is successful and prosperous to you for many years to come.

Keyword Explained Part II

This is the second part of our keyword article. I hope you have learned something on the first part. So here's the second part.

Where and how to look for keywords

In order to find the best keywords for our website we need to gather information from a variety of resources. Some of these resources may include:

Brainstorming: Getting your brain to go on a magic carpet ride is one of the best ways to find relevant keywords for your website. Don't just settle for asking the obvious question, what does my website sell? Ask questions such as: "What is this product made up of?" or "Who is using my services?" or "What problems do my products solve?"

Finding the main and secondary keyword phrases should take less than a month for even 2 or 3 websites. This does not mean your keyword research has ended forever, but finding the 4-5 word long secondary key phrases can be done with the free keyword research tools if your budget is tight.

Free keyword research tools: You can gain access to the powerful and free Google external keyword tool to expand your keyword list. Unfortunately the Google external keyword tool only gives a search volume indicator instead of the actual search numbers. Another very valuable feature in Google external keyword tool is the "Site-Related Keywords" finder. By simply entering the website URL of your competitors, you can find out in seconds which keywords they target on their web pages.

Another free keyword research tool available without creating an account is the Overture keyword inventory . As of now, August 2007, this tool only shows the January 2007 search volumes as it's being phased out, but Yahoo! is promising a replacement. If you have a Yahoo! Search Marketing account you can still gain access to their keyword tool albeit without the search volume numbers.

Related search terms suggestion tools: One of the fastest ways you can find hundreds of related keywords is to use online lexical or thesaurus tools.

Creating a large initial keyword list that includes a large number of synonyms and acronyms is essential to effective keyword research. Discovering related phrases that are not simply stemming from the original keyword term is a cornerstone of semantic latent indexing . Semantic indexing can be described as the grouping of related documents based on not only direct relationship between words, but the meaning of the words as well.

Some of the search engines provide a related search command list in their search results. Try Clusty by entering a search command and take a look at the "clusters" side bar. You can get dozens of ideas from the keyword clusters by playing with different combination of keywords. You can also visit Technorati a well known blog aggregator and social media tagging site to help unlocked your brain and generate new keywords. Enter a search term and observe the "Related tags" section directly under the search results.


Visitor statistic reports: These can be generated from web server log files or from script based visitor statistic programs. This can help you uncover new keywords for your website by discovering what the visitors are typing into the search engines to find your websites. In some cases, you'll find keywords you didn't expect to come up for in the search results. You should further research those keywords and uncover new keyword niches.

Site search engines: This can be a great source of new keywords and a potential data mining source. As well as further analysis of the average number of keywords, keyword length and other important keyword metrics.

Top ranking competitors: These websites are already well optimized and contain keyword rich web pages. Why not leverage their efforts and harvest the best keywords for your own website? With the help of the SEO Studio keyword analyzer you can extract hundreds of keywords from their META keywords and HTML page content in seconds.

A few examples of good keyword selection practices

Selecting the best keyword takes experience and a little know how, but it's always helpful to see how the pros do it, so here are a few basic steps for keyword selection.

Using your favorite keyword research tool Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or the Keywords Analyzer, type in the main keyword phrase. Start with the broadest possible search terms, this way there is less chance of missing keywords that might otherwise be overlooked.

Look for 2-4 word key phrases that have at least a daily search volume of 200 or more. Since the top 3 sites will receive 60 of all searches, it follows you can expect at least 120 or more unique visitors for those keywords phrases. In some cases, you may want to lower the minimum search volume threshold to as low as 50 if the search term is well targeted for your business.

At this point you should have at least 20-30 really good secondary keywords in your basket.

Hopefully most of the keywords you have selected will have little competition. Some of the keyword tools we have recommended will also tell you the amount of competition for each keyword, but you can also verify these numbers manually by typing the search terms into the search engines with quotes.

It's very important that you use quotes around the keywords to let the engines know you are looking for an exact match. The rule of thumb we use to assess keyword competitiveness is around "100,000" websites. Anything above a hundred thousand results is fairly competitive and requires a fair amount of optimization and link building.

Keyword Explained

What is a keyword? It's anything people type into a search engine. It could be made up of one word or several keyword phrases joined together. Every person uses their own method of searching, and that makes researching those keywords that will connect their websites with the right visitors very difficult. Keyword research starts with the understanding that finding lots of related keywords that deliver targeted traffic is the ultimate goal of any keyword research.

Sending thousands of visitors to a site who have no interest in your product, let alone in buying it, is just wasted effort and doesn't do any good for your business. If possible, we want to find the customer who has a clear knowledge of what they want and is close to buying something soon.

Ideally, every webmaster wants visitors who are seriously looking to buy in the near future. In order to achieve this, you need to find the least competitive keywords with the highest number of searches that are the most relevant to your website.
If you are just starting out, it definitely would be to your advantage to target lower competition terms. Having success with low competition terms will lead to increased confidence to target more competitive terms with higher search volumes.

Thinking like your customers

Thinking like your customers is easier said than done.

All merchants are guilty of thinking in terms of features and specs of the products and not thinking in terms of benefits it can provide to the customers.
You know your business and market too well. The industry terms and words are in your every day language. No wonder when you start your keyword research you have a very narrow keyword focus. You become your own worst enemy in exploring other ideas.

Here is an example: what is the most popular search term, "cheap flights," "cheap seats," "low fares" or "discount fares"?

As you can see it's not that simple to pick the best keywords, is it? The hardest part of keyword research is to keep an open mind about all possible search methods people might use to look for the same thing. Keyword research is part science, part intuition, and imagination. Since we can't get into the heads of every possible potential visitor to your site who may be interested in your products or services, we have to rely on keyword research tools to tell us what people actually search for and how often.

There are a handful of very powerful keyword research tools that are worth using, but the amount of information you can mine from them is mind-boggling.
Another great resource for proven keywords is to look at your competitor's website. We are talking about finding the highest ranking competitors on the search engines using your target keywords. Once you find the top 5-10 competitor sites, perform a quick review of their keywords on the web pages.

This can be a lengthy and slow process, but luckily there are free Keyword Analyzer tools that can dig up keywords from your competitor's sites in a snap. We'll cover in detail how the Keyword Analyzer can be used to add hundreds of keywords to your keyword research project.

Keyword research is like a job interview process

In order to find the right candidate you may need to interview hundreds of applicants to find the perfect fit for the job. Well, the keyword research process is very similar; you have to radiate a wide net first to capture all the possible combinations of keywords known to man. Even then, it's almost guaranteed you will discover new keywords you have missed in the original research only a few weeks earlier.

What this tells us is the keyword selection and refinement process never ends, or at least it should not end until you are happy with the number of visitors you are receiving to your site.

Tune in for Part II of keyword research.

SEO Crash Course

SEO stands for search engine optimization. You probably already know this, but it pays to be safe so let’s take a quick look at what this acronym is really all about. SEO is the art and science of identifying the right markets to promote via Web search, and then helping the search engines rank your sites highly within their results.

Good and effective SEO involves creating pages and sites that are easily indexed and reviewed by the special software used by Google and other search engines.

These special software programs are referred to as spiders or robots, and they
literally crawl the entire Web (thousands of links per second) in a never-ending
effort to index and rank all files within the search results listings.

SEO also includes generating a large number of quality back links to your
website and individual pages, as doing so will increase the number of “votes”
the search engines see when they index your sites.

These two areas of SEO are called on-site and off-site SEO respectively. This
article is about offsite SEO, or link generation.

Keyword Selection

Choosing the right keywords for your site is important. Obviously your keywords and keyword phrases need to be targeted and descriptive, but you also want to select a number of phrases that are not being used by all the competition.

Online, as elsewhere, most people go for the low hanging fruit. Most of your
competitors will be trying hard to get traffic using the simplest, most obvious
keywords that come to mind.

The trouble is, this usually means thousands of people are optimizing for the
same search terms. What you need to do is find good keywords that are being
ignored by most webmasters.

For instance, the key term “Web Design” is wildly competitive. On the other hand “affordable we design” and “cheap web design” are much less competitive, while still being queried by many people every month.

Keyword Usage On-site

You’ve probably heard that your site, in order to be search engine friendly, needs
to have a solid keyword density and properly optimized tags. This is true, but
none of these elements are as important as the back linking strategies and
tactics you’ll learn in this article.

Making your sites search engine happy:

Good Title Tag - Your HTML Title tag for every page needs to be your top keyword phrase(s). It’s ok to use two or three keyword phrases and separate these with the | pipe character.

Keep your title short and to the point. If your site is about Web Design your title needs to be simply < TITLE >Web Design | Affordable Web Design Service< /TITLE >

Correct Use Of Heading Tags - Most of us use < H1 > tags to create big, bold headlines for our sales pages. This is great, but you also need to understand that search engine spiders read anything between < H1 >. < H2 >, etc. as important keyword content; it’s a good idea to add one or more of your top keyword
phrases here.

Smart Keyword Density - Be sure your main keywords are used often but naturally within your content. Should you use a 2% keyword density, 5%, or what? I have no idea and this has never stopped me from nailing top search engine rankings virtually at will.

If you want to study keyword density that’s great, but for now the least you should
know is to be sure and include your keywords within your page content. Be sure
not to “stuff” your pages with ridiculous, unnatural use of any terms as doing so
could get you penalized by Google and other engines.

Take good care of these basics and you can literally spend the rest of your
time building the right kinds of back links.

Watch out for the next part of our SEO Crash Course.

SEO and Link Building

Not All Links Are Created Equal:

Every website or blog owners want their site to rank high in search engines and a very popular way of doing this is by building links. But you need to know that not all links are created equal.

Many links are more valuable for your site rankings than others, and certain types of links can even pull your website’s rankings down. So to make sure we are getting those valuable links we need to know more about the links we are getting.

Inbound | Outbound Links

When it comes to links there are a few different types, some which you may be aware of and others to which you probably have not given a lot of consideration. So, before we start talking about the types of links you want and the ones you don’t, let's dig deeper into our links.

Outbound links

Outbound links are links that you have on your site which lead to other sites. For example, if you were writing about directories and you linked to the directory site so your readers can access the directory or get more detailed information about it, that would be an outbound link from your site.

Inbound links

An inbound link is a link to your site from another site. To give you an idea, if you have a friend who has a site of their own, and they find a useful article or page on your site and link to it, this is an inbound link.

General links
A general link is a link to your main home page or your site's index page.

Specific links

This is generally a link to a specific section or posting on your site. For example, if you run a blog and someone links to the URL of a specific blog posting, in order to use your site as an example, reference or to provide information, then they have given you a specific link to your site. It should be noted, of course, that both general and specific links can be either inbound or outbound.

Low ranking versus high ranking sites

It is important to know that not all sites worry about the places where your inbound links come from, but some do. Just to be fair.

*Low ranking sites - This are sites that has linked to you but does not have a high traffic flow. This will be the bulk of sites.
*High ranking sites - These are sites with generally high traffic flow, and high rankings in search engines. These sites are usually also very well known.

Each of the search engines has an algorithm that determines how a site will be ranked. It is important to know that there are two main types of algorithms: those that count your inbound links and those that do not.

The theory behind the ones that do count your inbound links is that these links shows your popularity, and therefore your relevance to readers. The non-inbound links counters have the philosophy that, as a site administrator, you have no control over who, if anyone, can link to your site, and you should not be penalized for that.

Link Building No NO!

*Hire a link building service. At first, this seems like it would be a great idea; after all, you are guaranteed links to your site. But you should know that most search engines have a method in place to recognize when a site is link spamming, which is what these services are actually offering you. When you turn the work over to a third party, you lose control of the situation, and that is a problem because you are unable to control the quality and relevance of the links to your site.

*Doing it Yourself. Build links with every site you can get to agree or make a comment on. Well, this idea is great. You have the ability to exercise control, but you just aren’t doing it. Before you go off half-cocked you should think about why we practice SEO in the first place. We do it because higher rankings draw in readers, which brings in advertisers and revenue. Linking to or from an irrelevant site will not help you in the long run, and may even cause search engines to mark you off as surely as if you had paid a service.

Doing It the Right Way

Build your links wisely; worry about the long term and not immediate results. The path to doing this is surprisingly straightforward.

First make two lists. The first list should be of sites that you can build links to by yourself. The first list will include blogs in which you can post comments (and links), and the second will be sites with which you want to build a linking relationship in the content that the site publishes. Now choose your top 10 from each list.

On your self link building list, be sure that your comments or postings are not spam-like in nature; be relevant and thoughtful. For your second list, get the contact information and send polite and professional emails suggesting a shared linking arrangement. You have to be able to give as well as take here.

Build your self posted links slowly, focusing on one or two comments a day over a few weeks or months. For the second list, once you have sent out the emails, all you can do is wait. After a few weeks have gone by you can move on down your list to the next 10. Just be sure to honor your prior agreements or you may find yourself with angry link partners on your hands.

SEO: 10 Ways To Get More Website Traffic

Having a website means a need for traffic. This traffic needs to be as targeted as possible to the website you are promoting, whether it is your own web site or an affiliate program. This is the core of the business.

No traffic means No business, More traffic means More sales

But the question is - How do you get this highly targeted web site traffic?

Below are some of the most popular methods.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Of all the pay per click search engines, Google Adwords is the largest and most popular.

This method, when done properly, will increase your exposure, and give fast results. You must keep up to date with Google's rules, so be sure to read them. You pay a one off fee when you register and set up your campaign. You can have your campaign up and running in minutes. There is a minimum bid, but of course you will have to pay more than this. But the beauty of Adwords is you can set a daily budget of how much you are willing to spend.

You can create as many campaigns as you want, and then test your ads (changing the headline for example).

Google provide tools to help you with your campaigns, and have exellent tutorials that will walk you through everything from signing up to creating your Adwords campaigns.

Link popularity
Link popularity is achieved when other sites have links to your site. If a high traffic site has links, the search engines perceive both sites must be popular. The important thing is to have quality web sites linking back to your site.

Why should anyone want to link to your site? If you have quality content, this adds apparent value and makes your site popular, so others will want to link to you.
The popular type of content could be:
  • Free downloads
  • Free reports, articles, ezine or newsletter
  • Video
  • Links to other good sites
Reciprocal Links
This means exchanging links with other quality sites. You can create a links page on your site. This creates a resource that visitors will want to return to. Find quality web sites related to your niche and contact the webmaster about exchanging links.

Ezine advertising
Most ezines accept advertising. Ezines are online or email newsletters. They are used to build a relationship between a webmaster and a web site visitor, with news, updates, special offers etc. But as always they should have quality content. You place an ad in ezines that are highly targeted towards your niche. Prices depend on the ezine, and also the position of the ad. The most expensive is the solo ad, where yours is the only ad.

Article Submissions
Submitting articles is a great way to build back links and web site visitors. Your articles can become 'viral' when others want to re-publish them on their sites, or use them in their newsletters and ezines. You include links to your site in the author resource box offering more free information. The resource box is your chance to convince the reader to visit your web site.

Here are the list of the most popular Article Submission Sites:

EzineArticles.com
GoArticles.com
ArticleDashboard.com
SearchWarp.com
ArticlesBase.com
iSnare.com
SelfGrowth.com
Buzzle.com
ArticleCity.com
IdeaMarketers.com
ArticleAlley.com
Web-Source.net
SelfSEO.com
Amazines.com
ArticleTrader.com
SearchGuild.com
WebWorldIndex.com
ArticleSphere.com
BusinessKnowHow.com
PromotionWorld.com
ArticlesFactory.com
ExcellentGuide.com/article
ContentDesk.com
ArticleCube.com
AfroArticles.com
ArticleBiz.com

Forum Posting
In order to be successful using forums there are some things that are required. Do Your Homework: Prior to joining any forum, you must do some research. Join relevant forums that are in some way related to the promotion's primary sales market. Choose popular forums. There is no point in wasting your time and energy on forums that few members and few posts. Page raking and the amount of active members are two good ways to check for this. Choose forums that allow sig tags. Read the rules before joining and pay attention to them.

You've Joined: now what?

Keep your sig tag short and update it regularly. The ideal thing is to limit yourself to one link, preferably to your main website. Never create posts that are nothing more than an advertisement. This is a universal rule. At best this kind of post will be deleted by the monitors, at worst, you will be banned. Be an active member on the forum. Plan to spend at least an hour each day there. Get to know the users. Introduce yourself with intelligent questions depending upon the forum's topic.

Use Your Sig file to the best advantage and within the rules. Some Forums have places where you can advertise and give special deals to members.

Social Bookmarking
In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are both accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

Social Bookmarking can bring immediate traffic to your website, as web 2.0 community websites such as Technorati, Digg, Reddit and Tailrank provide almost immediate information on various topics. These type of Bookmarking sites index and categorize content usually faster than the major search engines. People looking for the latest information on certain topics usually refer to these types of services.

Here are some of the most popular Social Bookmarking Sites:

  1. Backflip

  2. barksbookmarks

  3. BibSonomy

  4. Blinklist

  5. Blipoo

  6. BlogBookMark

  7. BlueDot

  8. blurpalicious

  9. Bmaccess

  10. Bookkit

  11. BookMarkAll

  12. Bookmark-manager .

  13. bookmarktracker

  14. Bookmax

  15. Buddymarks

  16. Bukmark

  17. Chipmark

  18. Citeulike

  19. Claimid

  20. Clipclip

  21. Cloudytags

  22. Complore

  23. Connectedy

  24. Connotea

  25. Contentpop

  26. coRank

  27. Crowdfound

  28. de.lirio.us

  29. del.icio.us

  30. Diigo

  31. Digg

  32. Dropjack

  33. Easybm

  34. Enroll

  35. ez4u

  36. Favoor

  37. Folkd

  38. Freelink

  39. Freezilla

  40. Fungow

  41. Furl

  42. Gather

  43. Getboo

  44. Google

  45. Hanzoweb

  46. Hyperlinkomatic

  47. i89.us

  48. Icio

  49. Ikeepbookmarks

  50. Iloggo

  51. Jigg

  52. Kaboodle

  53. Kinja

  54. Lifelogger

  55. Lilsto

  56. Linkagogo

  57. Linkarena

  58. Linksnarf

  59. Listerlister

  60. Ma.gnolia.com

  61. Markaboo

  62. Marktd

  63. Memfrag

  64. Memotoo

  65. Mister Wong

  66. Mixx

  67. Mobleo

  68. Multiply

  69. Murl

  70. MyBookmarks

  71. Myhq

  72. MyLinkVault

  73. mySiteVote

  74. MyWebDesktop

  75. Newsvine

  76. Newsweight

  77. Oyax

  78. Philoi

  79. PlugIM

  80. Propeller

  81. QuickieClick

  82. Rambhai

  83. RawSugar

  84. Reddit

  85. Searchles

  86. Segnalo

  87. Simpy

  88. Sitebar

  89. Sitejot

  90. Sk*rt

  91. Slashdot

  92. SocialDanger

  93. Socialogs

  94. Sphinn

  95. Spotback

  96. Spurl

  97. Squidoo

  98. Startaid

  99. StumbleUpon

  100. Stylehive

  101. Syncone

  102. Tagfacts

  103. Taggly

  104. Tagne

  105. Tagtooga

  106. Tagza

  107. Technorati

  108. Tedigo

  109. Thinkpocket

  110. Thoof

  111. Totalpad

  112. Urlex

  113. Uvouch

  114. Vmark

  115. Voteboat

  116. Votelists

  117. Vuju

  118. WeTogether

  119. Whitelinks

  120. Wink

  121. Wirefan

  122. Xilinus

  123. Xlmark

  124. Yahoo! Bookmarks

  125. Yattle

  126. Zlitt

  127. Zurpy

If you don't have a Bookmark Account for the ones listed go and sign up.
Viral Traffic using free reports - ebooks etc.

Directory Submissions
Submit your website url's to the search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization, (SEO), is making web pages attractive to the search engines. The better optimized your web page is, the higher a ranking it will achieve in the search engines. Most people searching the internet only look at the first couple of search results.

So optimizing for the search engines focuses on techniques such as making sure that each web page is using the appropriate title tags and meta tags, and that the keyword or key phrases for the particular pages are distributed throughout the content. Search engines find and catalog web pages using spidering software.

Getting Indexed By Google

While Google delivering so much traffic, it is only normal to be eager to submit your page and have it indexed as soon as possible. Yet, submitting your page is not your only option, and it's not the best one.

Google says about its indexing process;
"We add thousands of new sites to our index each time we crawl the Web, but if you like, you may submit your URL as well. Submission is not necessary and does not guarantee inclusion in our index. Given the large number of sites submitting URLs, it's likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the URL submission form."

We can therefore draw two conclusions:

· 1. Submitting your site does not guarantee inclusion.
· 2. Most pages are found and indexed automatically, when Google crawls the web.

Big G have also made it clear that Google gives a page more importance when it is found through an automatic crawl. This can be easily confirmed when considering how Google's PageRank system works: when page A links to page B, part of page A's PageRank trickles down to page B, increasing page B's PageRank (and, therefore, its importance). A manually submitted page will not enjoy this benefit.

Knowing that manual submission is neither necessary nor the best way to go, what can you do to make Google find your pages?

The best way, at least in my personal experience, is to write an article on your area of expertise and submit it to popular article syndication sites. These sites will post your article, so that online publishers can use them for free in exchange for including your resource box at the end of the article. A resource box (a.k.a. bylines) is a small paragraph about yourself, written by you, which contains a link to your homepage.

In very little time, your article will show up in websites and ezines across the web. It will then be just a matter of time (usually days) before Google crawls those pages and finds your links. If you followed good web design practices and have included a link to a site map in your homepage, Google will follow it as soon as it finds your homepage, and all your pages will be indexed. It's as simple as that.
The most popular articles you can write are those that list a collection of tips related to your area of expertise.

Another good way to help Google find your pages is to exchange links with other sites. Google will crawl those sites, find the links to your page, and add it to the index.

Finally, remember to optimize your pages before you try to get them listed, so that you have a better chance of ranking high in the search engine results pages (SERPs). After all, what good would it do to get your pages listed if nobody can find them?

Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Campaign

Many Search Engine Optimization companies unfortunately know what this involves. Many times you will see a "one size fits all" package, link popularity development in the form of submitting to link farms, or even the popular "Submit Your Site to 1000's of Search Engines" scam. While the basic principle of each of these ideas are true, execution is extremely important.

Above of all, your web site needs human attention. A real person should carefully analyze your site before any work is done. Get them on the phone and ask them questions. There should be a clear and concrete process that the Search Engine Optimization company uses and fits to each client’s needs. They should also have a clear idea of what your goals are for your web site.

The first thing that should be done is keyword research. Like any kind of advertising, you need to know where your target market goes and how they are going to find your business. The chosen keywords should apply to the theme of the web site. High rankings for these keywords should also be obtainable on your given budget. If you are a web design company servicing only a particular area, then targeting a term such as "web design service" is overkill. The cost for obtaining high rankings for a term such as that will be far greater than what you will make from the exposure, as much of your web site traffic will not be targeted enough.

Once keywords have been chosen for the web site, the content should be updated to reflect them. This may include slight changes to the meta tags, page titles and text headings; or it could involve adding additional sections to the site, rewriting content and reorganizing the web site's structure. It all depends on the specific requirements of the site and target market.

Once the on-page content optimization is complete, link popularity development needs to be done. A link development campaign should be done to acquire quality incoming links to the web site. This phase of search engine optimization should take place as soon as possible and can be continued as needed. Reciprocal linking is fine as long as some caution is used.

There are many sketchy services out there that use huge networks of gambling and pharmacy sites with no unique content. Always make sure that each incoming link can be interpreted by the search engines as a 'vote' by that site for yours. It is worthless and possibly dangerous if the site links out to link farms and Free-For-All sites (FFA's). Writing articles with a link to your web site, getting people to post on forums and message boards, and advertising or getting links to drive targeted traffic to your site are great methods to use in improving your link popularity.

For the most part, you get what you pay for with Search Engine Optimization. A quick fix rarely works, and if it seems too good to be true it probably is. Talk to the search engine optimization company about your concerns and make sure they understand your goals. Read their site and make sure they seem legitimate. Ask for results they've obtained for previous clients. Methods that not effective and have a chance to get a site banned include hiding text or links, participating in link farms, keyword stuffing, repeat search engine submissions, and copying web sites to multiple domains.

Proper SEO does not involve tricks. Web sites that have well written and well focused content, have been advertised in one way or another (including link popularity development), and overall are a good informational resource will get traffic from the search engines. Search engines are constantly updating ways to weed out the spamming and illegal SEO methods, so think long term with any search engine optimization campaign.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Before creating a site, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something you should be aware of. Make sure you've done careful researches on the best keywords to use. Using the wrong keywords would eliminate your site from search engines forever!

In addition to On-page Optimization, to rank well in search engines you must optimize your Off-Page factors as well. What you have to do is basically creating many links pointing to your site and getting links from different IP Addresses.

Having many links pointing to your site means you have many votes. The more votes you get, the more popular you are to the search engines.

To create many links pointing to your site, the first thing you can do is submit your site to major search engines as well as directories. You can also start blog commenting without spamming which adds links pointing to your site. You can also do minor link exchange with other related sites. But you have to make sure you are linking to good websites!

Additionally, you can also write articles and submit them to major article sites as well as joining online forums and making a post containing your site's URL in the signature.

Improve your Off-Page and the search engines will love you!

Search Engine Crawlers and SEO

When it comes to online or internet marketing and search engine optimization, there’s a lot to learn. That is the reason why a lot of people hire SEO consultants to worry about their internet marketing for them.

Nevertheless, if you do not want to pay SEO experts to help you with your website marketing, then you may want to think about doing it yourself! It's not that hard, it just takes some reading on the internet from trusted sources. Most of the SEO services that are provided online are built around one thing, and that is search engine crawlers.

We are going to discuss today more about search engine crawlers, and what they do. Soon you will find out that pretty much everything that you do, as far as search engine optimization goes, is to make these little crawlers happy. It is no longer as easy as a quick search engine submission and your website becomes popular.

These search engine crawlers are little bots that travel around the internet looking for new websites and ranking them based on an algorithm. When they come across a new website, they rank it in different ways, taking many things in to consideration. These ranks help to determine where the site is going to end up in a search result done by a search engine query.

The first thing that you have to do for these crawlers is to get noticed by them, and that is the hardest part of SEO, or at least that is what SEO consultants want you to think! The fact is, you can get your website noticed by simply visiting different popular search engines and adding your URL to their submission forms.

You also must get links from other web sites pointing to your web site to obtain link popularity and credibility with the search engines. This way the crawlers will know where your site is at, and find it a lot quicker. They will also consider it a relevant source of information if other sites link to you.

Next thing is all about marketing your web site on the internet through search engine optimization techniques. These little crawlers are programmed to look for certain things on your web site, these are things that SEO experts study and have an understanding for.

Using the services of SEO Consultants to help in your marketing, however they can be very costly, so you should hire a service provider that is talented and can provide a portfolio to ensure you get quality work.

Before hiring an SEO consultant to work on your web site you should make sure they use ethical search optimization and marketing tactics and also make sure that they can provide results.

The first thing that crawlers look for is, of course, keywords.

Keywords in your web sites content and keywords in the links pointing to your site. When it comes to search engine optimization, use your keywords wisely. Don't over-saturate your web site with keywords because you can get docked as a spammer. These keywords have to be worked into the web page and not just listed there. You should integrate them in to your content, page titles, meta tags and URL. Also, it will help the marketing of your web site if you work them into the titles of your web page as well.

Also make sure that your main page headings are bigger than that of your normal font so the crawlers can easily pick out what the main focus of your page is.

SEO consultants also worry about how many links there are out there that point back to your website. The more links, the better. However they must also be quality links from popular sites that are credible with the search engines. That is why SEO experts are always looking for different places where they can post links to your website. While crawlers are looking around, if they come across links to your website, then that helps to boost your ranking online.

As you can see, SEO services are very helpful, but if you can learn how to do online marketing by yourself, you don't need to hire anyone.

SEO Affected By Malware

An expert has claimed that search engine optimization technique such as backlinking can go wrong if the site containing the hyperlinks is hosting malware.

Editor of Search Engine Journal Loren Baker said that a website's Google ranking may suffer if it links to or has links from malware-infested sites.

He recommended that webmasters use the Safe Browsing Diagnostic Checker from Google to find out whether websites have ever been investigated by the search giant for hosting malware.

'I highly suggest checking out the malware distribution history of a site, especially in the eyes of Google; if Google feels that the site is malicious, chances are linking to these bad sites, or building links from them, can hurt your rankings,' he said.

Google announced this month that it was changing the algorithm which worked out the 'quality score' of adverts on the site.

Specifically, the clickthrough rate (CTR) section of the code was being adjusted, to make it take into account the position of the advert in search results.

Keyword Research

Keyword Research is the first important task in optimizing your web site and pay-per-click(PPC) campaign. You need to know what keywords your target group is using.
Your keywords are the words and phrases that people might use to find your products, brands, services, or information, via search engines.

Keyword Identification

The first step in keyword research is to identify keywords. Keyword identification is about finding the right keywords that your target group is using. You can probably develop a few ideas very quickly. If you run a pet shop, you may identify keywords such as: "dog food" and "cat food".

Find Keywords

The second step in your keyword research is to find keywords that people actually use and to organize your keywords by their popularity.

To find keywords and their popularities use the keyword search box from Aleksika to learn the search behavior of your audience. Find out what they call things, how they identify subjects, how precisely or broadly they generally search.

You can also get good keyword ideas from the top keywords collection that contains the top 100.000 keywords of the year or the keyword directory where you can find keywords organized by subject.

You can also use popular keyword research tool like wordtracker, keyword discovery and the likes.

Choose Keywords

You will have to choose keyword phrases that are most relevant to your Web site - two and three-words keyword phrases that best describe your products and services. Many searchers enter one-word queries into the search form but the chance of competing successfully for one-word search engine keywords is very hard. The number of competing websites is simply too high.

Instead of wasting your efforts on one word keywords, it is best to use or target long tail keywords which is more manageable, less competitive, and will surely provide you with positive results.

Long tail keyword Plus Unique Content Equals to Organic Search Engine Marketing

Organic Search Engine Marketing needs a focus. In order to focus on what to market for, you need to have a solid foundation of the main keywords that best describes your business and/or products that you are selling. These main keywords are one to three phrase keywords (or keyword phrases) generally speaking and are more than likely highly competitive. These keywords are known as "Short Head" keywords. A good example for this is, "car insurance."

After you have decided on your short head keywords, you will want to market directly to more specific, longer keywords related to the main short head keywords. These longer, more specific keywords are known as Long Tail keywords. A god example is, "car insurance discounts in Georgia."

Though the traffic for each long tail keyword is usually much less than its short tail relative, if you sum up all the long tail keywords, they usually provide more traffíc and most importantly, targeted traffíc, than the short tail keywords alone.

Once you have targeted the long tail keywords for your business or niche, then you can start marketing for them.

The cornerstone for organic search engine marketing is unique content creation. Whether it's 500-word articles, blog posts, blog comments, forum posts, social snippets, or videos, you will need to create unique content based on your long tail keywords.

Web 3.0 is a term that refers to the future of the World Wide Web. In my opinion, that future includes the "Semantic Web" or web use affected by artificial intelligence. Semantic Web means that search engines will be able to understand what a web page is all about in a different, more intelligent way. The major idea here is that search engines will take a more encompassing view at a page and understand its meaning rather making a determination based on figuring out which keywords pop up most often. In this new Web 3.0 scenario, a search engine might find a web page on "sun tanning in Florida" to also be quite relevant to "sun tan oil application" and therefore líst this example page in the search engine results pages under both keywords.

What does Web 3.0 mean to you? Basically, when creating unique content, keep the semantic web concept in mind and use synonyms for your target keyword wherever it's natural. Don't stuff keywords in your content, i.e. use a keyword just to use it and not when it should be used naturally...and don't stuff keyword synonyms either!

Good SEO Will Create Traffic to Your Website

To get the most out of your web site, it needs to get good web traffic, which means simply that a lot of people are coming to your web site. By checking your web stats, you can quickly observe how many visitors your web site is getting and even how many people stay long enough to browse the website.

Programs like Awstats, a web-analyzing program found on most Linux based servers will show you how those web visitors came to you. Did they click through from a search engine? If so, what keyword brought them to you? Or, did they come from a particular website that links to yours? Your stats will reveal all.

Are the keywords used by visitors who find your site through the search engines. In the past few years a new science called "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) has evolved into a business model that specializes in making sure your web site gets a strong flow of business from people looking for your niche of goods and services using Google, Yahoo or one of the other big search engines.

The key on getting traffic from search engines is your "search engine ranking". That all sounds very complicated but it isn't. When you search for something on the Internet, Google (or your favorite search engine) provides you with lots of web sites for you to consider. The search result that comes first are called the first page. And usually there are dozens of pages of web sites that the search engine shows you.

Well, experts tell us that the majority of web shoppers use a web site shown on that first page of links that the search engine returns. So if your web site is among that first one or two pages, you have a good search engine ranking and you will see more customers than a business that is way down on page 54 where customers never go. One of the primary ways to get on that first page is by using good SEO.

SEO is the science of effective research and implementation with search engines so your web site gets a good ranking. SEO is also a fairly complicated science because it involves how your web site is programmed, the kind of text you have on each page and a good SEO expert has specialized tools and software to monitor your SEO on a daily basis to see how you are doing.

So how can we improve our web site's SEO? If you go talk to your web programmers, they will be aware of the terms we learned here today but they may not be equipped to do a professional job of improving your SEO. That is why most businesses that do well at improving SEO for their web sites do so using a professional outsourcing company that specializes in this kind of thing. There are good reasons for you to outsource this function as well.

An SEO company will have those specialized tools and software resources to do the job right. They understand how search engines work and they can prepare specific suggestions to your web team to improve your search engine ranking. And they can employ internet traffic specialists who have that expertise to take your web site from where it is and turn it into a successful money maker for you.

By learning the terminology and what SEO is as we have started to talk about today, you are on your way to finding a good SEO contractor who can help your web site find success and get lots of profitable traffic. Use good common sense in finding an SEO company and check references and employ someone who can really do the job. It will cost you a bit to get the best expertise there is to improve your SEO. But when you see the flood of business and sales that come from the effort, you will know you made a wise investment in using them.

You will also want to make sure the articles you purchase from private label sites or ghostwriter services are optimized for your site's keywords as well. If you purchase a set of private label articles, for example, on the subject of weight loss it will be a good idea to re-write them using your own site's keywords.

If, on the other hand, you are outsourcing custom articles to a ghostwriter you can specify the articles be "SEO" ready for your chosen keywords upon delivery. This will ensure your articles will rank well in the search engines. These are just a few ways that using good SEO will create traffic to your website.

On-Page Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something you should be preparing for before creating a site. Make sure you've made extensive researches on the best keywords to use. Using the wrong keywords would eliminate your site from search engines forever!

This keyword-tweaking process for a site is often referred to as On-Page Optimization. In order to rank high in search engines, make sure you execute these tasks:

1. Include your keywords in the domain name
2. Include them also in the page title
3. Use "h1" and "h2" header tags
4. Type some keywords in bold, italic and underline
5. Put your keywords at the beginning and end of your webpage
6. Named all the images or graphics after your keywords

A wrong thing to do is performing unnecessary keyword-filling! This could result to your site getting banned by search engines. An example of unnecessary keyword-filling is by putting hidden texts all over your web page. Also don't fill your meta tag, alt image tag, or title tag with keywords. You will get caught and your site will be banned for this!

Besides, there is another important factor that has a huge impact on your site's ranking in search engines. It is often referred to as Off-Page Optimization. You will find a lot of articles about it from my previous posts.

Creating Killer Keywords to Get FREE Traffic to Your Website

There are several steps to consider in choosing a good keyword. The most important step is putting your self in the shoes of the target customer or visitor. Make a list of the keywords or phrases you think that customer would enter into a search engine or directory when searching for your company or site. A good tool is wordtracker which will help you brainstorm different key phrases. Ask friends and associates which words they would use to search for your site on the internet, if they were looking for a site similar to yours.

Brands -

If a brand applies, include more specific brand names that are applicable to your site or type of business. If you offer a service, then try to offer service brand names when ever possible. Legally, you should put a registered trademark (®) or trademark (?) symbol after the names whenever mentioning trademarked names on the page.

Concepts -

Include concept type keywords. A good example would be "Athletic Gear" Since this would be what a sports company might be selling.

Company Names -

If your site offers a product from a well known company with brand recognition, include that company name in your keyword. Ride on the popularity of that company. You're selling their product, correct? If that company has a good reputation and brand loyalty then this would only help in adding consumer confidence in your site even more.

Quality -

Your keywords may only bring up poor quality type web sites that your core audience may have no interest in anyway. Try to focus on words that will bring in quality visitors to your site who will stay long enough to search your site for information regarding your product or service. Unqualified visits are not only a waste of your visitor's time but also a waste of your time. You wouldn't want to be spammed with unqualified emails regarding your product if it's not what your site is trying to sell.

Your Company Name

Unless your company has a well known brand name such as Nike or Ford Motors, it's generally less important to emphasize the company name as a keyword. A go around for this is to create an "About Us" page that focuses on optimizing your company name several times as the keyword on that page. This way if someone searches for your company name it would still come up as a relevant search result.

Target Phrases not Words -

With over a billion pages on the web and millions added each day, it's virtually impossible to achieve to rankings for a common words such as "electronics", "web", "food" etc. Instead, try to focus on target phrases of between two and four words in length.

Test Your Keywords -

Try to see how many web sites match your keywords or phrases before and after you launch your web site. Obviously the few matches found, the easier it will be to obtain high rankings. With a proper strategy your site could be one near the top of that search. There may be phrases that are much easier to achieve for good ranking rather than more common words or phrases. Finding those ambiguous phrases and using this strategy can gain your site unexpected traffic.

Case Sensitivity -

If a user types in the word "Web," many engines will search for "Web" with an uppercase "W" only. If your page has only "Web" in lowercase "w" in it, it won't be found. On the other hand, if a user searches for "web" many engines will search for it in lowercase and uppercase forms. Therefore it helps to have some of your keywords in uppercase or starting with an uppercase letter if the user should search that way. The easiest way to do this is in the title of the page, in Meta tags and at the beginning of sentences. Some engines are not case sensitive like Google at this time. The easiest way to test this is to input your keyword or phrase into different search engines and see if the exact same search results come up.

Bad Spelling -

Some times bad spelling is a good thing. Search for obvious spelling errors and grammatical mistakes people are likely to make and then incorporate them into your pages to pick up unexpected traffic. Also, product names can have a multitude of variations so focus on those too. For example, Ford may have "Ford Motor," "Ford Vehicles," "Ford Auto," or "Ford Cars" etc.
Implement these search engine optimization strategies and you will boost your traffic with higher rankings

The Sandbox Effect

Sandbox Effect is causing new web sites not to rank very well in the search results of Google, not even for the least competitive phrases. It usually means that a filter is being placed on new web sites and cannot rank very high for most words or phrases for a certain amount of time.

There has been a lot of debate as to why Google uses the sandbox filter. However, it is believed that this is an attempt by Google to discourage web site owners that uses SEO Spam techniques or some call it as blackhat technique to rank high fast and make a quick buck before Google discovers it. This is largely because Google uses link popularity so much to rank web sites in it's search engine.

There is no way to know for sure if a new web site is in the Sandbox, but the best way to determine if you are in the Sandbox is if your web site has a good amount of quality backlinks, quality content and a good ranking on other search engines, such as Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves, but still no where in Google's search engine results for your keywords.

It is a common trend that it can take up to 6 months before a new web site can get a high ranking in Google's search engine results and out of the Sandbox, but this varies from web site to web site. It also depends on how competitive your new web site's market and keywords are.

There is no known way of speeding up the amount time a new web site is in the Sandbox. But some new websites tend to get away with it by doing some tagging through social bookmarking sites. Some would even buy links from blogs or sites with high PR and were able to be crawled by SE spiders earlier than expected.

Better Search Engine Rankings with RSS

RSS is the latest trend in online publishing. But what exactly is RSS?RSS or Rich Site Syndication is a file format similar to XML, and is used by publishers to make their content available to others in a format that can be generally understood.

RSS allows publishers to "syndicate" their content through the distribution of lists of hyperlinks.
It has actually been around for a while, but with the introduction of spam filters and online blogging, it is fast becoming the choice of ezine publishers who want to get their message across to their subscribers.

However, not much attention has been given to the advantages RSS provides for search engine optimization.

Search Engines Loves RSS

Many SEO experts believe that sites optimized around themes, or niches, where all pages correspond to a particular subject or set of keywords, rank better in the search engines.
For example, if your website is designed to sell tennis rackets, your entire site content would be focused around tennis and tennis rackets. Search engines like Google seem to prefer tightly-themed pages.

But where does RSS figure in all this?

RSS feeds, usually sourced from newsfeeds or blogs, often correspond to a particular theme or niche.By using highly targeted RSS feeds, you can enhance your site's content without having to write a single line on your own.It's like having your own content writer - writing theme-based articles for you - for free!

How can RSS improve Search Engine Rankings?

There are three powerful reasons why content from RSS Feeds is irresistible bait for search engine spiders.

1. RSS Feeds Provide Instant Themed Content
There are several publishers of RSS feeds that are specific to a particular theme.Since the feed is highly targeted, it could contain several keywords that you want to rank highly for.Adding these keywords to your pages helps Google tag your site as one with relevant content.

2. RSS Feeds Provide Fresh, Updated Content
RSS feeds from large publishers are updated at specific intervals. When the publisher adds a new article to the feed, the oldest article is dropped.These changes are immediately effected on your pages with the RSS feed as well. So you have fresh relevant content for your visitors every hour or day.

3. RSS Feeds Result in More Frequent Spidering
One thing I never anticipated would happen as a result of adding an RSS feed to my site was that the Googlebot visited my site almost daily. To the Googlebot, my page that had the RSS feed incorporated into it was as good as a page that was being updated daily, and in its judgement, was a page that was worth visiting daily.

What this means to you, is that you will have your site being indexed more frequently by the Googlebot and so any new pages that you add to your site will be picked up much faster than your competitors.

How does this benefit you as a marketer?

Well, for example, let's says a top Internet Marketer comes out with a new product that you review and write up a little article on, and that your competitors do the same.

Google generally tends to index pages at the start of the month and if you miss that update, you will probably need to wait till the next month to even see your entry in.But, since your site has RSS feeds, it now gets indexed more frequently. So the chances of getting your page indexed quickly are much higher.

This gives you an advantage over the competition, as your review will show up sooner in the search results than theirs.Imagine what an entire month's advantage could do to your affiliate sales!

Why Javascript Feeds Are Not Effective

Some sites offer javascript code that generates content sourced from RSS feeds for your site. These are of absolutely no value in terms of search engine rankings, as the googlebot cannot read javascript and the content is not interpreted as part of your page.

What you need is code that parses the RSS feed and renders the feed as html content that's part of your page.This is achieved using server side scripting languages like PHP or ASP.Feel free to visit my article in embedding RSS feeds to your websites.

So in conclusion, besides optimizing on page and off page factors, adding RSS feeds to your pages should be an important part of your strategy to boost your search engine rankings.

Search Engine Marketing 101 For Corporate Sites

When most people want to find something on the web, they use a search engine. Millions of searches are conducted every day on search engines such as: google.com, yahoo.com, msn.com and many others. Some people are looking for your website. So how do you capture people searching for what your site has to offer? Through techniques called search engine marketing (SEM).

This tutorial is foundational information for anyone looking to implement search engine marketing. This tutorial will also help you understand how the search engines work, what SEM is, and how it can help you get traffic.

What is a Search Engine?

All search engines start with a "search box", which issometimes the main focus of the site, e.g. google.com, dmoz.org, altavista.com; sometimes the "search box" is just one feature of a portal site, e.g. yahoo.com, msn.com, netscape.com. Just type in your search phrase and click the "search" button, and the search engine will return a listing of search engine result pages (SERPs). To generate SERPs the search engine compared your search phrase with information it has about various web sites and pages in its database and ranks them based on a "relevance" algorithm.

Search Engine Classes

Targeted audience, number of visitors, quality of search and professionalism is what determines a search engine's class. Each search engine typically target specific audiences based on interest and location. World-class search engines look very professional, include virtually the entire web in their database, and return highly relevant search results quickly.

Most of us are familiar with the major general search engines; google.com, yahoo.com, msn.com. A general search engine includes all types of websites and as such are targeting a general audience. There are also the lesser known 2nd tier general search engines; zeal.com,ask.com,whatyouseek.com. The primary difference is that 2nd tier engines are lesser known and generate significantly less traffic.

There are also several non-general or targeted search engines that limit the types of websites they include in their database. Targeted search engines typically limit by location or by industry / content type or both. Most large metro areas will have local search engines that list local businesses and other sites of interest to people in that area. Some are general and some are industry specific, such as specificallylisting restaurants or art galleries.

Many other targeted search engines list sites from any location but only if they contain specific types of content. Most webmasters are familiar with webmaster tools search engines such as; webmasterworld.com, hotscripts.com, flashkit.com and more. There are niche SEs for practically any industry and interest.

Search Engine Models

There are two fundamentally different types of search engine back ends: site directories and spidering search engines. Site directory databases are built by a person manually inputting data about websites. Most directories include a site's url, title, and description in their database. Some directories include more information, such as keywords, owner's name, visitor rankings and so on. Some directories will allow you to control your website's information yourself others rely on editors that write the information to conform to the directory standards.

It is important to note that most directories include directory listings as an alterative to the search box for finding websites. A directory listing uses hierarchal groupings from general to specific to categorize a site.

Spidering search engines take a very different approach. They automate the updating of information in their database by using robots to continually read web pages. A search engine robot/spider/crawler acts much like a web browser, except that instead of a human looking at the web pages, the robot parses the page and adds the page's content it's database.

Many of the larger search engines will have both a directory and spidering search engine, e.g. yahoo.com, google.com, and allow visitors to select which they want to search. Note that many search engines do not have their own search technology and are contracting services from elsewhere. For example, Google's spider SE is their own, but their directory is and Open Directory; additionally aol.com and netscape.com both use Google's spider SE for their results.

There are a few other search engine models of interest. There are some search engines that combine results from other engines such as dogpile.com and mamma.com. There are also search engines that add extra information to searches such as Amazon's alexa.com, which uses Google's backend but adds data from its search bar regarding tracking traffic to the site.

Getting In

One of the most important things to understand about the SE database models is how to get into their database and keep your listing updated. With a search directory, a submission needs to be done to provide the directory all the information needed for the listing. It is generally recommended that this be done by hand, either by you or a person familiar with directory submissions. There are many submission tools available that advertise they automate the submission process. This may be fine for smaller directories but for the major directories, manual submissions are worth the time.

Not all search directories are free; many charge a one-time or annual fee for review. Many of the free search directories have little quality control. For free directories you may have to submit your site several times before being accepted.

There are three different methods for getting into spidering search engines; free site submission, paid inclusion and links from other sites. Virtually all spidering SEs offer a free site submission. For most, you simply enter your url into a form and submit. Paid inclusion is normally not difficult, except for the credit card payment. For free site submission there is no quality control. The SE may send a spider to your site in the next few weeks, months or never. Typically with paid inclusion you will get a guarantee that the page you submitted will be included within a short amount of time. The other standard way to get included is to have links to your website from other web pages that are already in the SEs database. The SE spiders are always crawling the web and will eventually follow those links to find your site.

Once you are in a search engine database, you might change your site and need the search engine to update their database. Each directory handles this differently; generally each database will have a form for you to submit a change request. Spidering search engines will eventually find the change and add your updates automatically.

Getting High Rankings

Getting into a search engine database is only the first step. Without other factors you will not rank in the top positions, a prerequisite for quality traffic. So how do you get top positions? You can pay for placement with sponsored links that is covered in the next section. To place well in the free, organic SERPs, you will need to perform search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is one of the most complicated aspects of web development. Each search engine uses a different algorithm, using hundreds of factors, that they are constantly changing, and they carefully guard their algorithm as trade secrets. Thus no one outside of the search engines employ knows with 100% certainty the perfect way to optimize a site. However, many individuals called search engine optimizers have studied the art and derived set of techniques that have a track record for success.

In general, there are two areas to focus on for top rankings; on-page factors and linking. On-page factors mean placing your target keywords in the content of your site in the right places. The structure of and technologies used on your website also play a role in on-page factors. Linking, refers to how other website's link to yours and how your site links internally.

Search Engine's Marketing Offerings

Search engines in the early days of the web were focused solely on serving the visiting searcher. They worked to capture as much of the web as possible in their database and provide fast, relevant searches. Many early website owners learned to reverse engineer the relevancy algorithms and to make their sites "search engine friendly" to get top rankings. They were the first search engine optimizers, manipulating the search engine's natural or organic SERPs as a means of generating free web traffic.

Often times these optimized sites compromised the integrity of the SERPs and lowered the quality for the searcher. Search engines fought, and continue to fight, to maintain the quality of their results. Eventually, the search engines embraced the fact that they are an important means for marketing websites. Today most search engines offer an array of tools to balance website's owners need to market while maintaining quality for the searcher.

You can generally break search engine marketing tools into free and for-pay. Realize these classifications are from the search engine's point of view. Effort and expense is required to setup and maintain any search engine marketing campaign.

Organic rankings are still one of the most important ways to drive quality traffic. Search engines now seek to reward ethical, high-quality websites with top rankings and remove inappropriate "spam" websites. While organic rankings can produce continual free traffic, it takes time from an experienced individual to achieve optimum results. Additionally, organic placement offers no guarantees, it generally takes months to get listed and can be unpredictable once listed.

Some search engines offer services that add more control to your organic campaign. Most of these services will list / update your site faster or will guarantee that all essential content is listed. For integrity reasons, no major search engine offers higher organic rankings for a fee.

If you need top rankings quickly, pay-per-positioning (PPP) is the most popular way to go. PPP rankings appear in normal organic SERPs but are usually designated as "sponsored listings". PPP listings use a bidding process to rank sites. If you are the top bidder, e.g. willing to pay the most per click on a given phrase, you will have top placement. The 2nd highest bidder is two; the next is 3 and so on. While most PPP works using this model, some search engines offer modifications such as Google's AdWords where bid price and click-through rates are both factors for positioning.

Search Engines have many other marketing tools, such as search specific banner ads; listings on affiliate sites and more.

Getting Started

The majority of websites have sub-optimal search engine marketing. Most sites have no effective search engine marketing and are continually missing out on valuable leads. Many other websites are too aggressive, wasting money on low value traffic or harming the functionality of their site due to over optimization. Too many sites are even paying money and receiving no results because they have trusted unethical or inexperienced search engine optimizers.

All SEM campaigns should start with a strategic evaluation of SEM opportunities based on return on investment (ROI). You need to assess how much each lead is worth for each keyword phrase and determine which SEM tools will achieve the best ROI for the phrase.

You also have to decide how much you want to do in-house vs. retaining an expert. A qualified expert will typically produce better results faster, but the high expenses may destroy the ROI. Often it is best to work with an expert as a team, the expert to develop the strategy and internal staff to perform implementation and ongoing management.

Google Adwords Tool

Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a free tool offered by Google to help its users to estimate keyword search volume and advertiser competition for their target search terms. The tool uses a relative scale to represent which search terms are more popular than others – what you get is a general idea of which terms get plenty of searches and which terms don’t.

Google Adwords Tool

The Google Keywords Tool also provides a picture of advertiser competition on a similar, relative scale. This is very useful in driving Pay per Click traffic to your website. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool can be a very useful starting step to help you select keywords for your campaign.

However, because you are not seeing any actual numbers, you cannot use the Google tool to predict search volume accurately. But it is an excellent resource for generating keyword lists as it is based on what terms people use to search on Google. And since it has the largest user base compared to all the other keyword research tools, you get a lot of depth when research keywords and building lists.