Archive for May, 2009

This video tutorial will teach you some basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques that you can utilize in order to drive traffic to your Webs.com site. From submitting your site to Google, Yahoo! and DMOZ, to adding relevant keywords, this video includes it all. Brought to you by Webs.com. Video originally posted at webshowto.webs.com

Search Engine Optimization is all about hitting the bull’s eye, to be top ranker in the search engine results and gain top priority on the popularity lists among the web visitors. SEO is a door, which has no single key, but at the same time, it has many keys to get in to the SEO.

SEO strategies include submission services like Search Engine Submission, directory submission, articles, Press Release etc and other stuff like the one Title tags, Meta Tags, content etc. These SEO techniques are keys to get better SEO for any website and to perform it in a better way. For achieving better search engine visibility there are certain SEO applied, which helps a website to perform better. SEO techniques applied for being a top ranker in search engines are as follows:

Search Engine Submission

All the major search engines have this facility to submit websites to them so that they can display websites more efficiently in their result pages. It is very simple process, in which a site owner adopts to get its site listed with a search engine. Submission to search engines is often known as search engine registration and the terms are interchangeable.

Directory Submission

Directory submission is the recent way of web promotion. Web directories are the websites containing links to different websites and classified according to various categories and subcategories. Websites needed to submit to the most specific category.

Article Writing

Article submission is the latest buzz in the SEO world to get more promotion for your website. These articles work as most effective promotional tool for your targeted website. Writing promotional articles and submitting them to a reputed article directory is the best option for website promotion.

Quality of the Content

Content matters when it comes to online business. Content is the real SEO king from the beginning of SEO. If content of a website is up to date and relevant no one can stop the website to top the popularity charts. Good content also helps you to get better links and your website promotion.

Link Building

Being friendly online is best way to get links from other websites and exchange useful links from other websites.

Press Release

Press release writing and submission is also a better way to promote your website. A well-written website with a specific goal and market strategy works as no other website promotional tool. Press releases are the best tools for website publicity and promotion.

Title Tags

Well-written strategic title tags can perform magic for your business and boost up your sales. The title tags tell users, what exactly the summary of the web page is.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are important for web promotion. Their role in search engine optimization is often times misunderstood by members of the webmaster community. SEO is not only stuffing keywords in the content, but keyword meta tags, description meta tags, are some important SEO factors to be considered.

USA TODAY’s Jefferson Graham interviews Google engineer Matt Cutts on how to get your site to the top of Google with 5 basic, common sense SEO tips. Matt Cutts guests on the USA TODAY Talking Tech web video show. New episodes air weekly at tech.usatoday.com

Product Description
Tips, tricks, and little-known methods used by professional SEO consultants to rank in some of the most competitive search phrases Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of creating, formatting and promoting web pages in a manner that ensures that they are ranked highly for chosen keyword phrases after a user performs a Web search. This unique book taps the relatively unknown market of advanced SEO knowledge, and reveals secrets used by only the best… More >>

Search Engine Optimization Secrets

Link building is an essential ingredient in ranking your website highly on the major search engines.  There, now that we’ve got that brilliant grasp of the obvious out of the way let’s move on to what you can do to actually create them.  Before we launch into the nitty-gritty of link building, no beginners guide would be complete without a brief explanation as to why links are important and the different elements of them.  Being a beginners guide this won’t be an entirely complete list but it will be enough to get you going on the right path.  Understanding what you’re trying to do will help you do it better and more importantly, understanding the “why” of the situation will help you stretch your tactics outside of this and other articles on link building.

Why Are Links Important?

To put it simply: a link is a vote.  Every link pointing to your site from another website tells the search engines that the other site finds your resource valuable and thus, the engines read this as a vote for your site.  So it must be about getting tons of links and you’re done right?  Wrong.  This is incorrect as …

Not All Votes Are Created Equal

Unlike your own vote in an election, some votes are worth more than others and some votes are worth SIGNIFICANTLY more than yours (unless of course you’re a content writer for the Google.com domain in which case you obviously have the top vote).  The basic factors that affect a link’s value to your website are:

The site strength – the strength of the site that is pointing to yours is a significant (and historically abused) factor in the valuation of links.  In the absence of other easily-visible criteria let’s look at PageRank as a key valuation of a site’s strength.  If a site with a PageRank 8 links to your site, this vote is worth significantly more than a link from a PageRank 3 site.  This is because a PageRank 8 site is, in Google’s eyes, a more important site than the PageRank 3 site.

Relevance – the relevance of a site linking to you is, if anything, more important than a site’s strength. If you run a bed a breakfast in Utah a link from a PageRank 3 bed and breakfast will be worth more than a link from a PageRank 5 web design site.  This area is a bit grey in that it relies on the engine’s ability to determine what is relevant and what is not however we’ve seen evidence that this area is strong at this stage in the game and is only becoming more important over time.

Anchor text – the actual text used to link to your site is extremely important.  I’ve seen extremely strong sites get beaten out by weak ones simply due to the poor use of anchor test.  If you’re building links to your site be sure to include your keywords in the text that links back and, if possible, the exact phrase you are trying to rank for.  At the same time, you can’t make all your anchor text exactly the same – how can that possibly look natural?

Position – the position of a link on a page and the number of other links on that page impacts the value of a link.  A link in the footer of a page is given less weight than a link near the top, a link in the content of a page is given more weight than a link in a list of links and a link on a page with 50 other links is given less weight than a link on a page with only a few other links.  If we think about it – this makes sense.  All of these things indicate whether the site with the outbound links actually intends for one of their visitors to click the link or not.  From an engine’s perspective – the more it appears that a site wants a link to be clicked on, the higher the weight that link (or vote) is given.

Admittedly there are a number of other factors but this is a beginners guide.  Following the considerations above will insure that as you make each link decision – you’re odds of making the right choices will be significantly higher than if you ignore them.  Ignoring them may not get you penalized or banned but it will make your task far more time consuming as you secure less valuable links and thus need to build far more than following he right methods.

So far we’ve covered briefly the why of link building, now let’s get into the real-life, here’s-how-to-do-it side of things.  Below I’m going to cover three of my favorite link building tactics.  These are tactics that apply to virtually every scenario.  The number of ways to build links is only limited by your imagination however and this should not be viewed as a comprehensive list.  This is, after all, a beginners guide and I’m trying to list the tactics that apply to virtually every scenario.

Side Note: Reciprocal Link Building

I’m not going to count this as one of my favorite and so it won’t count as one of the three noted above and I’ll only touch on it briefly.  There have been a number of assertions that reciprocal link building is dead.  This is simply not the case.  I have seen and competed against sites that were very successful with reciprocal links as their primary link source.

The problem with reciprocal links isn’t so much in their value which does seem to be a bit lower than non-reciprocal links however often more easily attained.  No, my problem with reciprocal links is in the management.  Unethical webmasters’ removing links after you’ve put the link up to them, sites expiring and not being renewed, sites getting penalties of their own due to their bad tactics are all inconveniences the reciprocal link manager must deal with.

As an SEO company, a huge issue we faced was leaving our clients with this task after a campaign was over if they decided not to go on a maintenance package.  Non-reciprocal links may be a bit harder to attain in some cases however that issue is much easier to overcome than the sum of all these issues.

And now on to the top three …

Articles

If you’re paying attention as you read this you’ll probably have guessed that I’m a fan of article writing as a link building method.  If you look to the “about the author” section you’ll notice a link to the Beanstalk site (and if you don’t, well … let me know as somebody’s stealing it without permission).  While I genuinely enjoy writing and sharing my experiences with others – the purpose of getting the article distributed is primarily as a link building tactic, secondarily as a great source of qualified traffic and thirdly for my own enjoyment.

You are an expert in your field.  Who knows more about your business than you?  So share.  Writing an article may not be easy but it is rewarding.  If you can’t think of a topic, think of what you get asked.  If you’re asked common questions repeatedly then chances are, it’s a good topic for an article.  I often get asked about link building, and you’re reading the result.

Once the article is completed you need to get it syndicated.  Using an article submission service is a simple way to get your article out to a large number of publishers quickly.  On top of this you’d do well to seek out specific sites in your field using one or all of the major search engines to find highly relevant sites that accept articles and submit to them.

And oh, don’t forget an “about the author” section.

Directory Submissions

Directory submissions are likely the most painful of the link building tactics you’ll employ. Why?  Because it’s tedious and time-consuming work.

To be done right directory submissions must be done manually, the titles and descriptions must be tailored to the specifications of the directory in question and often, you’ll have to decide if a review fee is worth it.

While there are a good many directories that accept free submissions there are also a large number that’s require a review fee.  The fee can range from a  few dollars to a few hundred.  If you see that a directory has a low PageRank, is general in it’s nature (i.e. it isn’t about your specific field) then it likely isn’t worth more than a couple dollars if that.  If the site is strong, and strongly related to your site then it’s obviously worth more.

There is no hard-and-fast set of rules for how much a listing is worth.  I’d recommend to start your hunt for directories (don’t forget the topic and/or region specific ones), submit to all the free ones and make a list of all the ones that require a fee.  After you’ve gotten a solid number in you “needs to be paid list” you can get a general idea as to what’s out there and what you can get and for how much.  This will enable you to make solid choices knowing what all your options are.

Forum Posting

I just know I’m going to get a couple comments and/or emails for listing this as a link building tactic but if it’s done right there’s nothing wrong with it.  Forum and blog posting got a bad reputation as a link building tactic when it came under huge abuse by unethical webmasters spamming forums with useless garbage just for a link.  They even went so far (and still do) as sending out spiders to automatically submit posts.  To this end, I have to agree that it’s a bad tactic however …

If you’re seeking out forums related to your site, reading the threads and responding with solid advice or with questions and not just firing off some sales-pitch then you’re doing what you’re supposed to be.  Another perk to this is that, like articles, if you do this right you’re gong to see traffic as well and what more can you ask from a link building tactic than traffic as well as links.

Conclusion

Above we’ve covered the basics of link building.  As I’ve noted repeatedly, once you’re done reading this and applying some of what you’ve read you’d do well to read other articles, forums and blogs.  This isn’t a complete breakdown of everything link-related (that would be a full book) but it will keep you out of trouble and save you countless hours of wasted time getting poor links that haven’t held value since 2003.

Product Description
SEO For 2010:Search Engine Optimization Secrets are strategies for 2010 to help you optimize your website and dominate the world’s leading search engines. The Internet is now the telephone book. So as a business you have to adapt and not only adapt well, you have to do one better than your competitors so your name comes up at the top of the list on any keyword search. No longer can you just buy a full page ad in a telephone book to stand out. You have to do the equi… More >>

SEO For 2010:Search Engine Optimization Secrets – Kindle Bestseller

There’s a lot of questions about how to build links into web sites and blogs. Do you need thousands upon thousands of links? What about those email link building scams – do they really work? Maybe if I make something viral, that will work? These three strategies presented by Liana Li Evans of KeyRelevance & Search Marketing Gurus will help you get your link building campaign off to the right start. Full transcript at: www.searchmarketinggurus.com

So, if you are looking forward to improve the quality as well as volume of the traffic on your website with the help of natural, algorithmic or organic search results, what can be better than the Search Engine Optimization?

There are a few techniques of search engine optimization (SEO) that can serve as the sure shot way to have that top position on the major and popular search engines like MSN, Yahoo and Google. Some of the effective SEO or search engine optimization techniques include:

Domain names:
It is imperative to select a website domain name which includes the words from main keyword phrase. The domain name needs to be easy to recall and spell. The domain name can also highlight the services offered by the business.

Keywords:
The keywords added in the content of the site should be totally related to the nature or type of business and services offered. This will not only help the potential customers to easily remember your services, it will also help to have a top ranking on the search engine results. With the help of targeted keyword phrases and accurate keyword density, the search engine crawlers or spiders will be able to crawl on the web pages of your site and rank it in the top positions thereby increasing your web popularity.

Meta and Title tags:
The title and Meta tags should be crafted in such a manner that they highlight the targeted keywords.

Quality content:
It is really crucial to add qualitative, informative and keyword rich content on the web pages of one’s site. Apart from being informational and relevant, the content needs to be original and distinct as well.

Site submission
It is a great SEO technique to submit the website or pages of the website in top or popular directories. Search engines serve as the source to travel to the customers. By submitting the website or web pages of the site or articles in open and article directories like the Ezine can help a lot in getting the targeted traffic to your site. One can even add the URL link of the site in the resource box of every article in order drive the attention of the targeted customers.

Other beneficial SEO techniques that can take your website to the top most position in search engines include link exchange, avoiding common anchor texts, installing a site map and updating the website contents regularly.

Two of the three big search engines (Google and Yahoo) place a large importance on one way links to determine rankings. Each link to your site is like a vote and the more votes you have, the higher you will rank.

In this article I will be sharing with you some important info on link building and some strategies to help your one way link building.

We will start by giving you an understanding of the basics…

Beginning with the very basics, a link is a way of navigating from one webpage to another. To have a link within the same website is called an ‘internal link’. An ‘external link’ takes you from a webpage in one website to a webpage in another website. The meaning of ‘backlink’ is that your site is being linked to from another website.

There are 4 different types of links:

* URL Link – This is simply a website url that is a link.

* Text Links (aka static links) – This is the most common type of link (when you click on a word or phrase and it is a link)

* Image Links – An image link is simply an image that you click on to navigate to another webpage.

* Dynamic Links – These types of links are in another programming language called Javascript and while they also take you from one webpage to another, they have ‘extra codes’ to perform special functions.

(these types of links can appear in many different forms)

It is important to be able to recognize these types of links, even if you are not familiar with web design and programming. You don’t have to memorize the codes, just learn to identify each type of link.

What links does is to provide navigation for human visitors and for ‘spiders’(aka: crawlers, robots, bots). Simply put, a spider is a computer program that goes to websites and gathers information. Search engines use spiders to visit and ‘index’ your website. This means that they gather information about your site in order to list it in their search results.

When the search engine spiders index your website, they follow the links to get from one webpage to another. It’s important to know that search engines cannot follow ‘dynamic links’ and do not follow html links that have a special code in them that says ‘no follow’.

The place where ‘no follow’ is commonly found is in the “meta tags” section of the website. Meta tags are basically information that only the spiders see and not for the human visitor. You can see the code for any website in your browser by choosing ‘view source’. (From Internet Explorer, choose Page » View Source. From Firefox choose View » Page Source)

If a search engine spider cannot follow a link from another website to yours, you can still receive visitors but the link will not have any value from a search engine optimization perspective.

What different kind of links could you get?

There are 2 types of links that you can get:

* One-way links – A one-way link is when another website links to you and you don’t link back to them.

* Reciprocal links – A reciprocal link is when a website links to you and you link back to them.

To search engines one-way links are usually much more valuable than reciprocal links. However, each link has its own individual value based on: how relevant it is to your site, the text in and around the link, how much authority the website that links to you has, etc.

However, there are links that the search enginges rates as ‘no value’ links, even though they are bringing you boatloads of targeted visitors every day…

Generally speaking, the more websites that link to you the better. However, building links takes time and energy and if you focus on getting ‘high-quality links’, you will get a bigger return on your investment. 50 high quality links can be much more valuable from a search engine optimization perspective than 1000 ‘low quality links’.

What’s a high quality link? – Links that brings you Page Reputation (which shows the search engines that other related websites consider you to be important), and links that give you PageRank. Sometimes both together and sometimes not…

To get high rankings on your website, you want to obtain links for targeted keywords. That is why it is important to start with keyword Research.

If your website is about “bird watching”, the first step is to ‘do keyword research’ and find out which keyword you should aim for. While you could just start getting text links for the keyword phrase “bird watching”, if no one is searching for that – you won’t get any visitors. There’s no sense in ranking on the first page for a keyword that no one is looking for.

Or, if there is a lot of competition for that keyword, you might want to pick a “lower hanging fruit”.

This is an excellent free keyword research tool. (The numbers you see are searches/day.)

Another important part is making sure your page is optimized for the keyword you are targeting. If you are focussed on building one way links to your site but the links have anchor text which doesn’t even appear on your page, you will likely be wasting your time. (I say likely assuming that you have some competition for your targeted keywords, if there is no competition then it doesn’t matter).

In this case a site that has fewer one way links but much better on-page optimization is likely to rank higher. Or maybe you are building one way links to your site but they are just url links and not anchor-text links. A site that has more high-quality(anchor text) links than yours is more likely to get a higher ranking.

Ideally, you want to build a lot of one way links that have anchor text which includes the primary and secondary keywords that your page is optimized for. Google also uses Latent Semantic Indexing which (in a nutshell) means that they study the synonyms of the keywords on your page. This is to prevent spammers from just loading every second word with their keywords. The relation between all the words on your site is what their algoritm looks for.

So to make one way link building worth the effort the content has to be. The first thing you want to do is to optimize your sites for you visitors. Then, you can go through and “sprinkle” your keywords. Then, go out and get one way links with the anchor-text of your targeted keywords, ideally getting most of these links from websites that are related to yours.

Yes, Google also looks at the relationship between your website’s content and the websites that links to you’s content. Fewer links to your business site from other business sites will be more valuable link-wise than more links coming to you from a site about video games..

Don’t make these link building mistakes:

* Don’t spend all your time getting one way links from sites with no Page Rank. One or two links from related Page Rank 5+ sites can be worth more than 100 links from sites with no PR.

* Be careful about buying links or you can get banned. Site Wide links is something you should be extra careful about. If your website only has a few backlinks one day and the next day you have hundreds Google will see this and penalize you.

* Don’t spend all your time building one way links that are url-links, you want to get anchor-text links.

*Important is to NOT get “No-Follow” links, since they don’t bring any value to your site.

Happy Link Building!

www.theseomethod.com Looking for simply SEO techniques proven to get #1 rankings on google? No spamming, no cloaking, no blog farms, no link exchange networks, no ‘black-hat’ methods that will get your websites banned – just the best kept SEO secrets, guaranteed to generate an avalanche of free search engine traffic. You can literally create traffic and money on demand if you follow this easy system. These SEO techniques Aren’t Not Rocket Science… Anyone Can Do it… www.theseomethod.com

This short overview of the Web 2 Chaos Evaluate will offer you helpful information to this amazing SEO maze; the design that would transform your past Search engine optimization efforts as well as send them flying up to crazy heights and cause havoc inside your accountants business when you begin producing insane amounts of cash.

The Web 2.0 Mayhem Evaluate system started after some duration back once the preliminary idea came to exist. It really is the very first of its type and the numerous sensational benefits it may provide your internet Business need to be seen, to be believed. The Web 2 Chaos Evaluate product is a member’s just membership, which has the actual influence to generate tremendous amounts of traffic to your own websites quite simply by having a comprehensive step-by-step method as well as the strength of traditional SEO techniques, almost all used in order to sophisticate amounts.

This technique far and away beats comparable increasing visitor count systems such as TrafficBug, Datapresser, Stompernet, SEnuke as well as Unique Article Wizard build.

Just like a Laser-guided Missile you can follow-through from the groundbreaking begin to an amazing money-making-finish with easy to follow tutorials provided both in Pdf file as well as video structure, together with an on-hand support system to reply to any kind of queries as well as look into any kind of issues; pronto.

This awe-inspiring method, is placed to change the way in which Online marketers execute their own traffic generation techniques and if you want set for a piece of this mouth watering cake, you have to be advantage of the seat fast to take part in the actual Web 2 . 0 Chaos Evaluate release; the second the doors open on the 8th Dec 2009.

Using the Web 2.0 Chaos review method you get a variety associated with important resources for important keyword sourcing, that will then enable you to develop a money-making website as well as go on to advertise that site, by way of carrying out a three message method, to consider more than in the top three search engines like google; Google, Google and Msn inside a couple of days.

Depending on the period, effort plus your prior knowledge you’ve ready to put in the Web2Mayhem method, you will be amazed by how quickly your position outcomes will speak on their own. I was lucky sufficient to become listed on the Web2Mayhem Evaluate Method like a beta-tester in September 09. This was a amazing chance and something i will end up being eternally thankful with regard to.

Now talking from personal experience, we examined out the Web 2.0 Mayhem Evaluate System through diving into the acai fruit niche and marketing a highly known acai weight loss product. I have right now been in online marketing for a while and admit in order to trying my great amount associated with ineffective products. With this however, I immediately knew I was on to some thing different. Right after a little research, a bit of studying and also the time invested following a three stages of the Web 2.0 Chaos Evaluate Guide Guides We experienced a confidence which i had never formerly experienced in all my Online marketing times.

We experienced self-assured in the understanding which my personal selected key-word had been definitely a good one, I was good it might begin selling whatever We promoted and my personal belief soon turned out to be true. Inside a few days associated with beta testing Web2Mayhem I’d created my personal very first purchase and a week later I had been ranking from number three in Google for my chosen term. By the conclusion associated with the first month I’d hit # 1 as well as was consistently produce revenue?

These outcomes totally overtake anything I had formerly used and for me joining the Web 2 Chaos Evaluate method was the very best action I have designed to date in my Internet marketing career.

What Web 2 Chaos does, is actually swiftly enables you to dominate the various search engines for the precise key-word through taking advantage of an enormous quantity of Movie, Post Service, Free of charge Weblog Services, Web 2 . 0., Centre Websites, Rss and Social bookmarking sites in the Search results, which is something that had been formerly Never even thought feasible without hours upon hours associated with guide evaluation and data entry work.

There is no reason for you not to check out the actual Web2Mayhem System.Web 2 Chaos is the show item inside your internet marketing display drawer, which will radically make positive changes to SEO initiatives and spawn traffic to your own profit generating web site within troops. Don’t miss out and end up being kicking your self for ever much more. Take note your interest in the Web 2 Mayhem Evaluate Structure and you’ll be 1st in collection to receive an official request, before the Membership Doors to become officially opened to the public, about the 8th Dec 2009.

Introduction

Search Engines have developed into the Internet’s most popular and powerful source of information, accounting for an estimated 80% of the Internet’s traffic (Heche, 2007, p. 1). As a result, website owners are realizing the power in such devises and are shifting marketing budgets into the optimization of their sites specifically for search engines. During the toddler years of search engine optimization (SEO), crafty developers took advantage of weak search engine algorithms to display their websites in top results, regardless of their site’s relevance. However, as more advanced Internet search engine technologies emerged to solve such exploits, new SEO methods were pursued (Boykin, 2007, p. 1). With the growth in search engine popularity and accuracy, and with newly emerging techniques used to target such engines, SEO has become a cut-throat competitive industry that is quickly being dominated in its utilization by big-business corporations (Murray, 2007, p. 1). Regardless of a company size and status, however, company webmasters with basic knowledge of HTML and blogging can establish top search engine rankings for websites that target niche markets with great efficiency by employing specific on-page and off-page SEO techniques.

A Search Engine Primer

Search engines did not become popular overnight. In fact, it took half a decade for the general public to catch on to the power of them. Search engines have become a woven part of society only because of their brilliant architecture; systems with frameworks so complex, yet so simple in user utilization that a novice can operate it. Concisely, the modern search engine is an intricate tool formulated to minimize the discovery time of information by minimizing result digression and maximizing result accuracy based on hundreds of relative factors. The basic functionality of a search engine includes content discovery, indexing, querying, and ranking (Fishkin, 2007, p. 4).

Content discovery is often referred to as “Web crawling”. The analogy of the “Web” is an important concept to grasp, since its analogy will act as a backbone to understanding the search engine discovery process and the terminology involved. The internet can be generally referred to as the World Wide Web, or just Web for short, because the structure of the internet most resembles the structure of a spider web (Davis, 2005, p. 1). Each of the billions of pages of content are linked together in some way or another to create an incomprehensibly large network of connections. Consequently, search engines have called their automated programs that crawl this web “bots” or “spiders”. Modern crawlers revisit indexed sites on a regular basis to look for changes or revisions. Sites are normally updated by the crawler between a one or two months time. In estimation, search engines have only crawled about half of the Web’s content pages, accounting for between eight to ten billion pages (Fishkin, 2007, p. 4).

Every page that is crawled on the Web by a search engine is placed into a gigantic database called an index or sometimes a catalogue. Massive organization is applied to the index in a way that requests can sort through billions of pages and find relevant matches within just fractions of a second. Sometimes it can take a considerable amount of time for a search engine to actually index a site after crawling it. During this time, the site will not be available on index to those searching (Fishkin, 2007, p. 4).

Content querying is the provision of an interface or gateway connecting the human user and the results waiting inside the search engine database. The results vary in type from web pages to online published word processor documents, and are returned to the user based on the criteria they indicate. The method a user might use to indicate criterion varies based on the search engine. Search engines normally provide a blank text input field in which the user can type terms or phrases into then press a button to send the query to the search engine for processing. Many modern search engines incorporate exclusive input syntaxes that a user might learn to take full advantage of the search engine’s power. Natural language searches, however, allow a user to input full sentence-structured questions instead of requiring the user to learn query syntaxes (Sullivan, 2007, p. 1). An example of syntax is placing terms in quotations. Google, the most commonly used search engine of today, uses quotations to specify results that return exact matches to all the terms in the order they are listed in quotations. Google includes ten other operators used to better define a query and home in on the target results (Google Cheat Sheet, 2007, p. 1).

Ranking becomes a search engine’s most distinguishing process, as this will determine what and how information is displayed to the user. A commonality all search engines share by nature is the organization of pages by relevancy starting first with most relevant and ending with least. The higher a page’s rank is, the higher the site’s probable relevance will be as perceived by the engine. Every search engine uses its own unique method of determining how pages rank in relation to one another, and these are called algorithms. An algorithm is a mathematical formula that will take into consideration dozens of factors that have positive and negative effects on page rank. Think of it as a set of rules that a judge uses to determine which girl wins in a beauty pageant. The winner will always showcase more than just beauty alone, but instead, indicate a deeper purpose like the reputation, talents, and even life intentions. The many factors involved in judging contestants in a beauty pageant are very much like the factors used to rank a webpage (Sisson, 2006, p. 12).

Brief History of the Search Engine

The earliest breeds of search engines were not actually search engines at all, but rather massive directories of content pages manually submitted by their authors. It was not until spiders and bots came to the scene that people began to see the power behind such tools (Wall, n.d., p. 8). Archie appeared in 1990 as the very first tool used to search pages of the Internet. It was named Archie to resemble the word “archive” without the “v”. Built by Alan Emtage, the program indexed directory listings from public FTP sites. An alternative tool emerged a year later called Gopher, which indexed solely text files instead of all computer files. Two other index systems called Veronica and Jughead searched the Gopher index servers and provided more targeted keyword search (Wall, n.d., p. 2). By 1993, a new generation of search engine emerged from a student at MIT: automated web crawling. Initially used for counting and measuring the size of the Web, the first web crawling bot on the Internet was named the World Wide Web Wanderer by its creator Matthew Gray. ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing of the Web) was introduced in the same year with the capability to collect page meta-data and allow page authors to submit their own content. Search engines and crawling technology wasn’t yet seen as having any true significance for society until further university experiments were done (Wall, n.d., p. 1).

As the Internet gained popularity and started appearing as a business opportunity to investors, college students began getting large funding opportunities. This boom in funding caused break-through developments such as relevancy-based indexing to occur. Corporations like Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Yahoo, and Google in turn met at the search engine scene, each bringing their own new innovations to the table. Altavista offered a brand new method of searching for the end-user known as natural language inquiry (Wall, n.d., p. 1). Ask Jeeves was quick to mimic this technique, but also focused on building its index from web communities. A few years later, Altervista was bought by Yahoo! for 235 million dollars, which was just one of that many small steps taken toward the multi-billion dollar establishment Yahoo! is today (Olsen, 2003, p. 1). Lycos contained the largest index of any search engine of its time with more than 60 million documents in 1996, but eventually evolved into the fifth most popular web portal in the world (Sherman, 2002, p. 1). Lycos abandoned its own search engine algorithm, and began powering its search feature by Ask in 2006, which is former Ask Jeeves (O’Reilly, 2006, p. 1).

Although Google entered the scene relatively late in 1998, it still managed to ultimately come out on top from its tough search engine competitors (Google Milestones, 2007, p. 1) Through collaboration, Larry Page and Sergey Brin babied their creation until receiving more than 25 million dollars in funding in just a year’s time from its initial launch (Google Milestones, 2007, p. 3). Google partnered with AOL and Yahoo! by early 2000, which also marked the release year of the renowned Google toolbar (Google Milestones, 2007, p. 4). In 2007, Colvin of CNN reported that “Google’s figure is $149 billion and rising fast, pushing the company past most of America’s biggest, most successful, most respected corporations” (Colvin, 2007, p. 1). It is clear that Google has conquered the search engine war, rendering it as the most valuable search engine webmasters can optimize for their websites. Google has practically set the standard for other search engines that have followed the leader’s footsteps. Because of this, Google-specific page ranking factors are currently the most significant for any SEO venture because of competing search engines’ inherent similarities (Ryan, 2006, p. 1).

On-Page Search Engine Optimization

Jumping straight into SEO, it is imperative to understand that success relies heavily on the keywords that are chosen for the optimization venture. Because keyword terms can be found inside content, titles, headers, and images of a webpage, these are all considered on-page objects and therefore contribute to the optimization of the page itself. Keywords can be thought of as the foundation upon which SEO is built on, when if removed from the equation it leaves a broken structure. In relation to SEO, keywords are terms used to define the purpose of a webpage in its entirety (Fishkin, 2007, p. 9).

Commonly, there is confusion between metadata keywords and content keywords. metadata entries, which are code strings placed in the code heading of pages, are no longer used for relevancy because they were taken advantage of by having irrelevant keywords that attracted undeserved attention. For this metadata keywords are no longer used, while metadata descriptions are only used as snapshots for a few rare search engine directory page entries. Because of all this, metadata entries are very insignificant to SEO. In the world of keywords, content is king. When a search query is sent, the search engine will try to return with pages that match best to the inquiry keywords found within a page’s content (Sisson, 2006, p. 8). Since so much relies on keywords, it is common practice to conduct research to seek the right related keywords or keyword combinations that are optimizable for a given scenario. There are several free online tools available for keyword research, such as the tool suite found at http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools (Callen, 2005, p. 32)

Keywords that are too popular will actually have a negative impact on search rankings because of the overcoming competition. Instead of seeking popular solo keywords like “insurance” or “games”, it is much more effective to find a niche (Callen, 2005, p. 12). A niche homes in on the specific product, idea, or service that is attempting to be displayed in search results. When optimizing for a focused target audience, the competition is easier to outsource, and in turn will always promise high rankings when page optimization is established. Instead of seeking a single magic keyword, it is best to seek a keyword combination or a phrase that will best describe a niche specifically. Most people enter 2-5 word phrases into search queries, which ensures security with multi-keyword niches (Sisson, 2006, p. 13).

Some webmasters have tried repeating their keywords excessively on their pages to boost frequency. What these webmasters might not understand is that excessive keywording is like playing with fire, where if they get too close they will get burned. If a search engine notices an unusually excessive repetition of keywords, the engine will demote the site and may even ban it from its index completely. In contrast to this, search engines are now intelligently seeking common relationships between terms on the Web, so when keywords are used throughout a document with fluency and in good context, this can quickly benefit a site’s ranking (Fishkin, 2007, p. 9).

Keywords should be strategically placed on a webpage to maximize keyword frequency without running the risk of being seen as a keyword spammer by the search engine. If more than one keyword combination is being targeted by your site, it is important not to strand keywords together in an attempt to increase keyword relevance. In page content, header code tags will emphasize keywords for users as well as search engine spiders. Placing keywords naturally in the alt tags of content relating images will also boost page relevance, and return your site in image search results. Most importantly, naturally mentioning keywords in body paragraph text will increase keyword frequency. To reiterate however, it is important not to overuse keywords in body paragraphs, since some search engines might suspect a site with that sort of ‘keyword juicing’ as spam (Sisson, 2006, p. 13).

Linking is another imperative factor of page rankings which will be covered in greater detail in off-page techniques, but is also a part of on-page optimization. Internal linking generates a hierarchy of synonymous page rank based upon which pages are linked most. Many webmasters often do not realize they are making a mistake when chain-linking content more than two levels away from the homepage, or mesh linking. Mesh linking occurs when every page contains a link to every other page in the site, giving every page with equal importance. This means a contact or form page will rank just as high as the actual meat of the site. To solve this issue and direct the search engines’ focus towards pages of importance, a hierarchical linking system should be established. To create linking hierarchy, not all pages are cross linked, and important pages are linked to by the largest number of pages on the site (Sisson, 2006, p. 37).

Off Page Search Engine Optimization

While on-page optimization provides a solid basis for a website being recognized by spiders, it is the links from other websites that determine the rank of the recognized page. Off-page search engine optimization is mostly concerned with this establishment of inbound links to the focus website. The process is known as link building, and is by far the most strenuous aspect of SEO. A site’s page rank is determined by both the quantity and quality of its incoming links. The quality of a link is the most weighted factor, which is based upon the page rank of the site making the link. If the linked site has relevance to the site being optimized, then this is a positive detail (Fishkin, 2007, p. 26). Relevancy is determined by comparing keywords in website titles, the anchor text of the link, and even its IP address. The IP address or number value that the domain name refers to may have less weighted effect on page ranking if it shares a common third octet (Sisson, 2006, p. 43). Sites that have very high page ranks are referred to as ‘authoritative’ and will almost automatically boost the page rank of a site it links to. Two forms of linking exist: two-way and one-way.

Two-way linking is also known as reciprocal linking because it is a mutual establishment between site owners. This method is essentially a link swap. Some webmasters carry the misconception that paying for well known link exchange services will guarantee site visits, but this is only true on a temporary degree (Sisson, 2006, p. 54). Also, link exchanges are considered manipulative and have a record of incurring removal of sites from search engine indexes.

One-way link building can sometimes be considered a science and art, since many techniques are nothing short of brilliant. One scheme often used to build massive amounts of inbound links is to produce a gadget or banner that appeals to other site owners, and encourages them to take a code snippet for the gadget or personalized banner and place it on their own site. An example of this method is evident at www.nerdtests.com. This site offers a free and fun online quiz that ranks the user’s nerdiness in percent relation to everyone else who took the quiz and awards an ‘official title’ banner code based on the outcome. These banners can be found floating all around the net in user signatures of online community forum boards or even on personal blogs and provides www.nerdtests.com with an endless link base (Spencer, 2007, p. 1).

The most common and reliable method of getting back-links is submitting articles to informative websites, which usually give authors an opportunity to link to their personal site. Social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Propeller all have recently become a hit sensation among frequent internet users. These bookmarking sites provide a portal to sites recommended by other users. If the content on a site is valuable or entertaining enough to people, social bookmarking sites may be the most effective approach to off-page optimization since they are based on popularity and massive viral tendencies (Hagen, 2007, p. 5).

Method

As my primary research, I conducted an interview on October 25, 2007, consisting of ten focused questions about SEO with Bill Slawski. Bill is the President of SEO by the Sea and the Director of Internet Marketing for KeyRelevance Inc., and was directly referred to me by Rand Fishkin, one of the world’s most renowned and authoritative SEO experts. Bill is one of the founders and administrators of Cre8asite Forums, is an active correspondent for Search Engine Land, and writes a weekly column for their small business section. Mr. Slawski’s professional credentials substantiate the validity of his interview responses and provide access to exclusive insider industry knowledge. The interview was completed via electronic mail, in which Bill took full advantage of to respond with in-depth and intuitive answers complete with real-world examples.

Results

As the first question of my interview, I asked Bill how he would define SEO to the average Internet user. Bill responded, “In simplest terms, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is applying knowledge of how search engines work to make sites easier to find on the web for the audiences that those pages were intended to attract. In more complicated terms, SEO is a matter of combining an application of marketing ideas and a knowledge of search engines to help bring the right people to a site so that they will change from visitor to consumer.” This description spells out the fundamental concepts of SEO. It is important to understand SEO, in essence, is limitless in ways of targeting consumer markets. While advertising schemes might be limited to the specific targets the advertising company provides based upon the small amount of information shared with them about your product, SEO delves into your niche and allows for much more targeting flexibility.

My second question for Bill was, “In what ways is SEO more effective or efficient than other online marketing methods?” He responded saying, “Search engine optimization means being aware of how search engines might collect information from the pages of a website, and making it easy for the search engines to index the content of those pages. In effect, it means enabling a search engine to become an index for the pages of a site. It can be less expensive than using the paid contextual ads that you see displayed with search results at a search engine, or the banner ads that show up on other websites that may point to the site advertised.” This cost efficiency is an important component of why business professionals are making the leap away from conventional pay per click advertising as their primary marketing strategy and making the switch to search engine optimization.

The third question pointed towards the public view on this experts own industry. My question was, “Do you think the power of SEO is relatively undermined, or in contrast, do you think it is overplayed as an online marketing method in the industry?” He responded with, “Search is one of the commonest activities that people get involved in when the go online, so making a website easy to be found in a search engine for people who might be looking for what that site has to offer is a good idea. It can make sense to include SEO as one part of a multiple part marketing effort, and to build a strong marketing plan that includes both online and offline parts. Unfortunately, there are differing skill sets amongst people who offer SEO services – some are just better than others.” While my question was meant to explore SEO’s public relation solely, Bill brought up an extremely important reiteration of SEO’s unknown power when combined with an ultimate market plan encompassing offline target markets as well as the ones who exist online. This also adds to the concept of ‘limitless’ SEO possibilities.

I asked for my next question, “Can any website benefit from SEO?” Bill explained, “SEO is only really important to sites that want to increase their visibility on the Web. A game clan site, where everyone who needs to know the address of the site already does has no need for SEO. But, if you hope to attract visitors to your pages, it doesn’t hurt to make them as search friendly as possible. And if you want to attract people to those pages who might be interested in the content of the pages, it doesn’t hurt to try to use words on the pages that those people might try to search with on a search engine, and to do it in a manner that makes it more likely that those words will be found earlier on in search results.” Drawn from his answer is a suggestion of widely conventional use for SEO. Unless meant specifically to be concealed from Internet users, any website seeking visitors can benefit largely from any amount of SEO. Since amateur implementation of SEO is key part of this paper, the next question was very distinctive in terms.

I asked, “Is it possible for webmasters to (with fundamental knowledge of HTML and blogging) implement SEO for themselves with relatively successful results for their small websites?” Unsurprisingly, my prediction was reinforced with his answer. Bill said, “Webmasters with a fundamental knowledge of HTML and blogging can achieve some success with being found on the web, but having a good knowledge of how search engines work can help a webmaster make better choices about how their site is set up for success with search engines.” I asked, “In general, what is the timeline of results returned by SEO?” Bill responded saying, “The amount of time that it may take to achieve results may vary by the site involved and how much work it might need, the competitiveness of the market it is within, and the demand for what the site offers. It’s almost impossible to guarantee success generally, and perhaps even harder to do it within a specified timeline.” While other sources have noted results can be seen in a matter of days in some cases, it seems there is no definitive amount of time that promises results to become evident. In that, the SEO marketing solution may not always suite for website owners seeking instant Web traffic.

This question focused on SEO as a long-term asset. I asked Bill, “Do you believe SEO may become obsolete in the future?” He explained, “I don’t see it becoming obsolete as much as I see it evolving. What we considered SEO in 1998 is different than what we consider it to be now. If you look at a set of search results in Google today, you may see videos, images, news, web pages, product searches, and other results that you wouldn’t have seen even a couple of years ago. The web is changing and search engines are changing, and helping people so that they understand some of these changes and how they might impact their web sites will probably continue to be a need to be filled in the future.” This provides a fairly straight answer indicating that SEO will only continue to progress with changes over time, rendering SEO as a very reasonable long-term asset for any website.

My final and most important question asked, “In what ways might SEO be viable for businesses with niches?” Bill responded saying, “Finding a niche where you can be competitive, and where there’s a demand from consumers can increase your likelihood of success. A small business can often take advantage of working within a niche that a larger business might find to be too much work for too little return. If the smaller business has considerably less overhead in terms of cost and time, they may be able to thrive in one of those niches. By focusing upon a specific market or audience that others aren’t, it may be possible to be found easier if people want to find the service or goods or information that you provide within that niche.” This is a fabulous reverberation of how specific keyword combinations and niches interact. Focusing on smaller markets can provide a better means of success on a smaller, yet more attainable scale.

Discussion

Throughout the extent of my research, SEO had been discovered to be one of, if not the, most effective Internet marketing strategies available today. Statistics have shown that the largest magnitude of online users discover information and merchandise through the use of search engines. SEO channels that majority of Internet traffic directly into a marketable solution, idea, or product with the best cost and time efficiency. By employing on-page and off-page techniques, a webmaster with basic knowledge of HTML and blogging can supply a particular niche website with a top search engine result ranking respective to its niche search keywords. Keywords play an imperative role in the SEO venture by providing the base of the optimized structure. The keyword focus of a pre-optimized website is determined through intense research by identifying competition and analyzing keyword query frequencies using particular keyword research tools. After keywords are determined, on-page content structure and coding is the next priority, seeing as off-page link building logically requires a quality page to link to beforehand. Off-page techniques will utilize link building strategies to launch the rankings already established by on-page SEO past competition.

The product produced as a result from my intense research will enable any adventurous amateur with fundamental HTML and blogging familiarity to pursue SEO with relatively guaranteed success. My product, in the form of a website, guides the pursuer with simple and concise instructions. The website splits the SEO mission between on-page and off-page techniques which have been explained in earlier sections of this paper. Instead of discussing these techniques in non-applicable generality however, the website will demonstrate specific examples of each optimization practice with its own optimized features.

To view my final product website, click here.

For references used in this paper, click here.

Site Indexing – Great Eight Tips

The most effective SEO technique is to index the pages of new website. There are lot of important issues, one should take care. We are providing a simple guide steps to help you in this regard.

1. Just design you website structure, create your content pages (don’t worry if they are not completed yet) and publish them swiftly. Because, the process of indexing, new websites takes about two months. So, this technique helps you saving time.

2. Since, you have already designed your web site structure and contents (may be incomplete or with minimal info) as I said earlier. Now, create a sitemap for the site and submit this to Google Sitemap Service. Yahoo has lately created a similar service to Google Sitemap and so also submits your website to it. There are lots of online free site map generation services available.

Here are few of them, you may use.

* Create your Google Sitemap Online By: XML Sitemaps
* ROR Sitemap Generator By: ROR Web
* Site Map Builder By: sitemapbuilder

3. Third step is to submit your website to some Open Directory Project; DMOZ is good and is used as basis by many search engines like Google, MSN and Alexa. This process again takes several months. So, the first step plays a good here too.

4. There are three major search engines namely Google, Yahoo and MSN. Submit all your pages for inclusion in these three major search engines and keep submitting your site pages to other search engines on a regular basis. Do it manually or you may use some search engine submission software or service which may help you by automatic submission.

5. There are lot of SEO Friendly Directories on the web. Some are paid services and some allows free submissions of URL. Submit your website to these SEO Friendly Directories. All major search engines crawls these Directories frequently. This will help you both a catalyst for the indexing of the web pages and also move a step forward in Page rank Building.

6. You may start Building links using Reciprocal Link exchange programs. The text links should not only point to your website homepage but also to other pages down in the website page structure.

7. Posting on Google Groups advertising for your website is something very helpful in building good Page Rank. The posts should include at least two links to your website.

8. Participate in topic discussion on other sites is also a great technique to make your existence strong and do include your site URL in the reference section.

Higher search engine ranking is necessary to improve the sales of your products and services. But to achieve this objective, you require improving the search engine visibility of your website. It is not so simple to achieve a good rank in this competitive age. The webmasters, who are newly launching their websites, can adopt different SEO techniques to get success in their online business. Among all the SEO techniques followed by webmasters, link building is considered as one of the useful techniques to obtain a good rank.

Quality inbound links are more valuable resource for a website. It plays very important role to improve the search engine ranking of a website. Inbound links have great impact on search engine ranking. Google Page Rank is considered as a standard measure for incoming links. If you follow different advanced SEO Techniques, then it would be easier for you to achieve your objective. Webmasters also follow different advanced techniques to know the quality inbound links for a particular website. External links are important because it shows the popularity of a website.

But you can take all external links as valuable links. Only those links which are relevant to the theme of your website can be considered as having some worth. Before adopting any SEO technique, you need to be fully aware of the methods that can give you better results. If you have been planning for optimizing your website for a higher search engine results position, choose a service provider that provides all the effective SEO Techniques.

Following are some of the important SEO techniques that can help to achieve maximum search engine ranking.

• Article Submission:

Among the advanced SEO Techniques, article submission is the most significant one. Write a large number of quality articles optimizing on your targeted keywords and submit them to different article sites or directories.

• Blog Posting:

Blog posting is considered as one of the valuable techniques to get quality inbound links. Here you can submit your blog to different blog directories and can get link back from different websites. When required, you should link back to those pages of your website which are very relevant to the theme of your content.

• Press Release:

There are different ways to get quality inbound links. Press release is also one effective method to get more targeted visitors for your website. Submit your press release to free PRweb and other PR sites. It is just like distributing your article through different article directories.

• Online Forums:

Through online forum you can participate in ‘Online Question & Answer Session’. While necessary, you can give link back to any targeted page of your website though it is not allowed by some forum sites. To make it more credible, you can also put the URL of your website in your signature.

If you really want to get quality back links for your website, then the points discussed above will definitely be helpful for you.

Product Description
CD-ROM Edition. Not a DVD, not an audio CD. Produced in an Adobe PDF Format for reading, printing or research. Produced unchanged and with all Links intact.*****When I started toying with the idea of developing a Blog Marketing Tool, I didn’t
really know where to begin. What I do know, is that the Blogosphere is filled with
opportunities. There are literally thousands and thousands of blogs on the
Internet. It’s exciting to think that if just a small fraction of blo… More >>

Link Building With Blogs