19 ธันวาคม 2550

Why should one use Search Engine Optimization

By: Razvan Marian Jr

It's morning and John wakes up, same as he does everyday. He starts the computer and begins checking his email and reviewing his website's stats. " $15 in Adsense and 1 sale .. good, good... but still I'd wish those were $500 and 10 sales ". He closes the stats and goes to work in order to get the payment that helps him live a good life.

Mark is also waking up, making a cup of coffee and then sitting comfortably at his laptop. He opens his website's stats and his heart starts beating a bit faster while he reads on the screen " $399 in Adsense and 5 sales last night... good, but I WANT IT BETTER" ". He closes the stats, eats a quick breakfast and then sits back again at his laptop and starts working on his websites in order to improve the stats. He doesn't need to go to work as his websites bring enough income to help him live very well.

Now the question is simple: who would you prefer to be? John or Mark? Do you like to go and work for your boss and help him make money so you can earn your living ? Or do you want to be your own boss and have your own business? Because yes, these days, having a good site IS a business. If your answer is "John" then you'd better stop reading this article and get to more serious things. But if instead you would prefer to be Mark then it may be useful to continue reading. Ok, ok but what does "having a good site" mean? I have a great design, I have great online support, great products and offers, great site functionality... but still I don't get the expected income? If you ask yourself this than take 2 minutes to think about: "Who am I receiving money from? The design? The functionality of the site? No, what really brings the money is, in fact, the traffic, the people who visit the site and order the services/products or who simply click on the Google ads."

Now that we found out that the traffic is what makes the webmaster happy, we should ask ourselves how we can get this traffic to our sites. Well, there are several methods of doing this, but nowadays, search engine optimization (SEO) is the method that brings the best targeted traffic. If you want to build a strong business which could provide you more than a decent income, than you should use SEO.

To succeed with a SEO campaign, one must follow three major steps: keywords analysis, on page SEO and off page SEO. The keywords analysis part has to be done in order to assure that you have picked the best keywords ( the ones that will get you the highest number of visitors in the shortest time ).

On page SEO is the step where changes are done directly on your site by modifying it's files. You have to sort out the titles, metatags, images, text, page structure, internal linking, proper tags and much more things related to your site. In all this process you will use the keywords you found during the keywords analysis part. This will ensure you'll have a well optimized site focused on those keywords.

Last but not least, off page SEO - considered by all the great SEO specialists out there the most important part of a SEO campaign - related to the external links you can point toward your site. As each link toward your site is considered "a vote" the more votes you have the more "powerful" your site will become.

If you do all these correctly then your site will end up in the tops of the search engines and start getting the best-targeted organic traffic that exists at the moment. So what are you waiting for? Go out there and start doing SEO... . Because SEO it's the future.

Author Bio
Razvan Marian Jr is a SEO specialist with more years of experience in the field. He is also the leading manager of http://www.cheapsubmissions.eu , developing services such as cheap web site submissions and cheap articles submissions.

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While Planning or Designing a Website wear the Shoes of a Crawl Spider

By: Aaron Brooks

The World Wide Web is similar to tests of strength knights of yesteryears went through. To taste success a website needs to be more than functional or great looking. It is a complicated business and webmasters are now kept on their toes trying to get higher rankings on search engines.

The secret lies in appealing to search engine spiders and so you need to know in detail how a spider works before you build a site.

• Spiders read text and cannot comprehend images, colours or graphics. So, any page that is design friendly with little or no content it will receive a low rank. Unless, you include in text format information contained in graphic images; submit only URLs of main content pages and not splash pages; include ALT descriptions of all pictures and include keywords that pertain to them.

• Know that the components that attract spiders are: TITLE tags, META tags, Header tags, keywords, and links. Many spiders score entire sites based on the overall scheme.

• Spiders read algorithms and do not take in whole pages. So, be news savvy and like newspapers place the most important information first. Titles, headers, and the introductory paragraphs must present the essentials.

• Keep updated on technical advancements in the way search engines examine materials. Read through guidelines of major search engines, as well as blogs and forum devoted to SEO and spiders.

Once your page is designed think about using a search engine stimulator to evaluate your pages. See: www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php you can add the tool to your website. The report will clarify where you need to make any changes.

A search engine stimulator will also help you determine whether hyperlinks in your pages are "real." Experts recommend using tags instead of java script based menus. Try and limit hyperlinks to less than 100 and check that they do not lead to 403 Forbidden or 404 Page Not Found pages. Spiders do not deal with such errors and your pages will not get indexed.

What any search engine spider does is that is crawls the web and indexes pages in any given database. The spider makes use of algorithms to determine page ranking and relevancy of indexed pages.

Be SEO savvy and select keywords that search engines will find. Tools like Keyword Playground and Website Key Word Suggestions will help greatly. Avoid dynamic pages and if you have them then run them through the spider stimulator to check if dynamic pages are accepted. Get your Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions Right these are the delicacies a spider relishes. They are the cornerstones of page ranking and relevance in the "eyes" of any spider.

When planning a web site and its pages keep in mind at all times " the spider." This will help you develop pages that are search engine friendly.

Author Bio
Aaron Brooks is a freelance writer for www.1888seoservices.com, the premier website to find Seo consulting, link buildings and professionals seo training, online marketing tips, seo tools and more. He also freelances for the premier Web Directory site http://www.1866webdirectory.com

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What Is Page Rank?

By: Kimberly Bodane

Page ranks are defined numerically, from 1 through 10 - 10, being the highest. Very few pages have a page rank of 10, and anything above a 6 is considered very good. There are many factors that determine a page's rank, but the main variable seems to be based on how many websites link to your page. The higher page ranked sites that link to your site, the better. In other words, 10 links to your page from high ranking sites like CNN.com, Yahoo.com, etc, will easily outweigh five times that amount of links from unknown sites with low page ranks. And, just to make it trickier, the amount of "credit" your site gets from incoming links, is also divided by the amount of sites you link OUT to.

Equally important, is your site's actual content. It needs to be information that people can use and take active interest in. Having content that matches your keywords should also go without saying.

Why Is This Important?

Page rank is extremely important, in that it determines how high you get on search engine results. And just as it's helpful to have your incoming links be from reputable, trusted, relevant sites, your outbound links will also be more valuable to those pages you do link out to. This is important when negotiating for link exchanges with other sites. The higher your page ranking, the more desirable a link from your page will be to others - Including those willing to pay for said link.

Are There Ways To Generate Better Page Rank At No Cost?

Absolutely! To follow are some of the simplest steps you can take.

Build more pages: The more pages your site has, the more content it is generally considered to have. If your site only has 3 pages, the maximum page rank would be a 3. Make sure to have at least 8 relevant pages including the main page, in order to have a healthy amount of content.

Avoid Dead-end Links: Let's say you've worked real hard to get 8 good pages. Your page rank ideally has the potential to be a page rank of 8. However, if half those pages are not leading anywhere, you've got a problem. When the search engines "crawl" your site, they want to go from one page to the next. You can have a really great page, but if it has no other link on it to go somewhere new, it will be considered by the spider to be a dead-end page, which will hurt your site's page rank. Make sure every page has a door out, other than a back button (which to the bots, will generate the equivalent of a good old "Nothing more to see here" type statement). Combat this by making sure you at least have a link back to the index - or better yet, a site navigator at the base of each page with choices between the main pages of your site (ie. FAQ, About Us, Contact Us, etc). Again, these are pages that add convenience to your human visitors as well.

Create Internal Links: Remember to make links to yourself whenever relevant. For example, on your About Us page, don't just mention your online ordering system - hyperlink to the page where your visitor would need to go in order to begin an order. Not only are you creating another link for the crawler, you're also making it convenient for your guest to find that page right then and there, if they so desire.

Utilize Free Directory Listings: They may not always be big high ranking sites, but they are an easy way to get your name out there. You never know when someone might end up using one, and thus find you in the most unexpected of ways!

How To Generate More At Cost: Getting a high ranking site to link to you isn't always the easiest thing to do. Sometimes it is necessary to buy that privilege via ads. There are literally 100's of different options to choose from, however the most effective method these days is by purchasing text based links to your site. For the largest comprehensive list of quality paid link directories along with page rank statistical information visit: http://www.helpmyhits.com/paid-web-directories.php Some tips to stretch you advertising dollar as far as it will go would be linking to different pages of your website (not just the index) and also using different keywords in those links.

As you can see, page rank is a very real and vital aspect of web development that should always be kept in mind. Without it, your chances of being found easily on search engines is compromised. With it, you'll be on your way to a highly successful website.

Author Bio
Kimberly Bodane - www.helpmyhits.com

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Ultimate SEO Plan for Internet Marketers

By: Doug Purcell

How to optimize your site
I don't like doing seo, but its very much needed. Search engine optimization for your website should be one of a webmaster's main goals. Getting traffic from the search engines is not only free but is also constant (depending on what keywords that you are targeting) traffic. Below is a plan that web masters should follow when they decide that they will start optimizing their websites, you should include a combination of onsite and offsite search engine optimization.

Step one: What keywords your going to optimize for
Think of what keywords that you want to target. If you target the wrong keywords then you may never see any results for them, just some common sense. And if you target overly competive keywords then it may take too much time to see results but once you do it will be well worth it. I would recommend targeting in the middle when selecting keywords to optimize your site for when you're starting out.

Here is a free keyword tool that you can use to get an idea of what keywords are popular: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/.

Just a quick tip when selecting keywords, i usually use the plural version for keywords or keyword phrases because the plural version includes the single one. For example if you have a keyword "shoe" try making it "shoes" because the keyword "shoes" include the keyword "shoe" but its not the same in reverse.

Step two: Start onsite optimization
This is one layer of search engine optimization and this process includes manipulating the source code of your website with keywords. The places to put keywords in your website includes the title tags, meta tags, within the text of your website, and within links (anchor text).

Title tags: This is the most important part to place keywords in your website and surprisingly a lot of web masters just leave this area blank. Search engine bots show the most prominence (importance) to keywords within the title tag which is why its critical to include keywords here.

Place keywords here

Text of document

Meta tags: Place keywords here but be careful not to place too many here or else you will be viewed as spamming the search engines "keyword stuffing." These use to be an easy way to score top rankings in the search engines but the search engines have evolved overtime and this is no longer possible to score high rankings with stuffing the meta tags. You will need a proper combination of onsite and off site optimization which i will explain later. Meta tags goes between the head tags in your source code.

Description Meta:
This should be a description of your website and always put important keywords in the beginning of the sentence if applicable."

Meta Keywords:
Some quick tips. Try to use the plural form of your keywords here and to also see if there are common misspellings for popular keywords and lace them here. DO NOT repeat keywords.

Heading tags:
Heading Size 1
Make sure to place your keywords here because this helps tells search engines related content on your website.

Keywords in the anchor text:
This is important, whenever you are linking within your website make sure to place keywords in the links, search engine algorithms like this. For example, if your selling a weight loss product instead of having a link that simply says "click here" have the anchor text say "click here to get the ultimate guide to weight loss." Anchor text code=Keywords go here

Alt tag
If you have a lot of graphics on your site there are a couple of things you want to do. First, you want to make it small as possible without losing none of the quality if possible. Websites that are bombarded with graphics usually take some time to load which can cause visitors to get impatient and leave so this is important to keep in mind. Also, make sure to place keywords in the image alt tags:

Make sure to actually describe the image, just don't use this as an extra means to stuff keywords, and use the keywords here that you have in your title and meta tags. Make sure to spell correctly (unlike what I'm doing) when your working on the on site optimization for your website. NEVER EVER copy and paste text from word into your html text editor, that can cause all types of complications. Write your keywords up in word and the copy and paste your text into a text editor like notepad or wordpad and then paste it into your html editor.

Offsite optimization
Offsite optimization has nothing to do with manipulating the source code of your website and relies heavily on links which brings me to my first tip with optimization, and that is to write articles. The funny thing is by getting links to your site is also a quick way to get indexed in the search engines.

Writing articles:
I like writing articles because the Internet was made for information and when someone is searching for something online they are most likely looking for information that they are searching for, i will assume that you did a good amount of searching today or browsing if your reading this right now. Okay, write and submit articles to website directories. I have tested and founded that a 3% keyword density is usually perfect when writing articles. Always place keywords within the anchor text in the links of your signature.

Classic blog and ping:
Search engines love blogs, and these are an easy way to get backlinks to your sites. Just open up a free blog at blogger and make a post with a link back to your site. You can also try deep linking by linking to other content parts of your site as well in your blog.

Blog comment:
Find the top blogs in your niche and leave a comment, but no spamming... thats just tasteless.

MSN, Google, and Yahoo Homepage:
Make and customize your own personal webpage for each of these search engines and post your articles here with a link back to your website. They also have rss so that you can syndicate your content as well.
Google: pages.google.com
Yahoo! my.yahoo.com/
MSN: my.msn.com

Press release:
Write and syndicate press release, this is a great way to get backlinks as well as also get some media attention about your website.

Extensive list (Link bait)
Take the time to make an extensive list of links to useful resources, this is great ways to make your website ready to get eaten up with links.

Build a 101 list:
These are almost next to impossible to not get linked to and often get dugged often in digg. I wrote an article in a couple of hours titled 101 muscular ways to get more traffic to you website and blogs and this have given me enormous amounts of backlinks and a good amount of traffic from the search engines, blogs it was reposted on, and forums as well.You can also make a separate page on your website for directories. These are great way to link to useful information, but its also a great way to link to pages within your site (if its useful) a process called deep linking.

Sitemap:
Sitemaps are important because not only does it help make your website easier to navigate for a first time user, it also helps spider your site which will help your content get indexed in the search engines. There is no secret, if the pages are not indexed in the search engines then that means they cannot draw any traffic from them. So, this is where sitemaps come in. Sitemaps are written in xml, a language i don't like but a language the search engines love (same languages that blogs are written in). Once you have your sitempap which has to be in .xml format before you submit to Google go here:
www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
Here are some xml sitemap creators:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
http://pingoat.com/goat/google_sitemap
http://www.neuroticweb.com/recursos/sitemap/

Yahoo sitemap
To submit go here:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

MSN sitemap
To my current knowledege, MSN doesn't currently have a particular place to submit sitemaps to, but from my understanding if you submit your sitemap to Google, then MSN will pick it up because it can understand that protocol. Go here for more information if your curious: http://sitemaps.org.
This should work for Yahoo! As well, so thats why its important to always submit your sitemmaps to Google. Also, here is another trick that you can do. You can always ping the search engines so that you will tell them that "hey i updated my content come and visit and spider my website you." Here is the code: http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.YourSiteMapURL

There you have it, a nice summary of what you need to do in order to start an effective search engine optimization plan so quick reading, print this out, and get started working, all the best.

Send this page to:

Author Bio
Doug Purcell
If you are interested in making money online easily then head over here to make money online, seo services today the real way. Learn how to build a profitable online business and create assets for yourself. Post may be copied in full pertaining that the following conditions are met. The link should go to www.imutopia.com.

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The World of Duplicate Content - Use of a Filter

By: Aaron Brooks

The World Wide Web is like a running race or marathon where websites compete to reach the finish line first. In this case the finish line is higher ranking. And in this race for supremacy it is important to avoid duplicate content and its penalties.

To facilitate the efficient functioning of directories search engines have been armed with content filters. This removes or filters duplicate content from pages it's indexing. And the most hurtful penalty is lower rankings.

Unfortunately, these filters not only catch rogues but web pages that are genuine too. What webmasters need to do is understand how filters function and know what action is to be taken to avoid being filtered out.

When a search engine sends out spiders the filters leave out or sieve:

• Websites that feature identical content. And when within a site the webmaster includes many copies or versions of pages to cheat the search engines. Filters are also extremely sensitive to "doorway" pages.

• Content masked by different packaging. Known as "scraped content" this duplication of pages with little or no relevant changes falls prey to filters.

• Product descriptions featured by e-commerce sites. Most e-commerce sites publish alongside a product the manufacturer's description of the product and this content then appears on zillions of e-commerce sites falling victim to filters.

• Articles distributed widely over the net. While some engines are programmed to find the origin of the article there are others who may not be able to source the origins.

• Pages that are not duplicates but contain the same core material written by different people.

To get the better of filters you need to:

• Use a tool like the Similar Page Checker http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php to ensure that the pages in your site are not mirroring content from elsewhere. In case there are other URLS with similar or identical content the tool will reveal them to you and you will be able to make changes in your pages.

• Be vigilant and know who has "helped" themselves to your content. By using www.copyscape.com you can determine which websites have stolen or copied your work.

• Even if you do use distributed content you can add a commentary or make changes to the page focusing on its relevance to your site. By making any content your own you are making it unique and different and this will ensure that the pages are not filtered by search engines.

• Even if you are running an e-commerce site you must include product descriptions that are distinctively yours and not run of the mill.

Lean as much as you can about duplicate content and its dangers. Read the issues that were discussed at the SES 2006 New York Session and other forums. Remember most search engines, Google, Yahoo, or Open Directory Project do not want to be flooded by duplicate content and web pages.

Jake Baillie, President of TrueLocal listed the duplicate content mistakes to be: circular navigation; printer friendly pages; inconsistent linking; product only pages; transparent serving domains; and bad cloaking.

It is important for sites to get high ranking through fair and not foul means.

Author Bio
Aaron Brooks is a freelance writer for http://www.1888seoservices.com, the premier website to find Seo consulting, link buildings and professionals seo training, online marketing tips, seo tools and more. He also freelances for the premier REVENUE SHARING Discussion Forum Site http://www.1888discuss.com

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The Steps Before Website Traffic

By: Mike Burke

By now, you probably already have the theme of your website established, your keywords picked and your website ready to go live. You're thinking that you'll submit your site to the search engines, sit back and see how much traffic the search engines will send you, right?

STOP! There are many different avenues you can take to drive traffic to your site but they should only be taken after you make the search engines your first priority. The search engines should be your foundation. They'll always send you a certain amount of traffic if you have a high page rank.

IMPORTANT!

Your website must be 'set up' for a high page rank in the search engines and it's important to do it 'before' you submit your site for the first time. Here's the reason why:

Usually, after you submit your website to the search engines for the first time, your website will be 'spidered' fairly quickly and hopefully your site will be listed on one of the top pages.

Your website may not get 'spidered' again for months so if you make changes to optimize your site, you may not see your changes take effect for quite a while. You could be stuck on a back page, if any page at all, for a very long time.

Without getting into the mechanics of designing your website, here are the basics of setting up your website to be search engine friendly.

THE FIRST STEP is to establish the main keyword for your site. This is the word or phrase that you want people to type into the search engines to find your website. It's important to have your site focused around your main keyword.

Let's say you have a site dedicated to 'building your own home' so we'll use 'home building' as our main keyword example.

THE NEXT STEP is to create a title for your website and to place it in the 'title tag' of your site. The 'title tag' should be the first tag in the 'head' of your site and it's important because many search engines use the contents of the 'title tag' as the title of the listing. They also look for keywords in the title and your main keyword should be the first words in the title.

Generally, your title should be no more than 40 characters and, again, it should begin with your main keyword. Try to avoid using 'stop words' in your title. Stop words are transition words such as - and, but, or, for, with, etc.

Here's a possible title using our example main keyword 'home building' - Home Building - Home Construction Plans

Notice our main keyword is first, the title is less than 40 characters (39), there are no stop words and we managed to sneak in 3 secondary keywords - home construction, construction plans and home construction plans. Clever huh?

THE NEXT STEP is to create a 'keywords meta tag'. This is where you list all the keywords you want to use for your website starting with your 'main keyword'. A good rule of thumb is to use about 20 keywords and your main keyword should be contained in about half of them.

Using our example keyword 'home building' our keywords could be - home building, home construction, home building plans, home building cost, construction plans, etc.

Notice I didn't use our main keyword 'home building' twice in a row. For example - home building, home building plans, etc. Search engines might see this as spam and it could hurt your ranking.

THE NEXT STEP is to create a 'description meta tag'. This is where you describe your website and, again, you should start with your main keyword.

Keep your description to about 150 characters, use as few 'stop words' as you can and sprinkle in as many secondary keywords as possible.
Make your description interesting because search engines often use the contents in your 'description meta tag' as the description of your website in the listing.

THE NEXT STEP is to use your keywords often in the body of your website. Make sure your 'main keyword' is somewhere in the beginning and at the end of the body of your page.

It's a good idea to use your main keyword in an 'h1' tag and a few of your secondary keywords in an 'h2' tag. This tells the search engines that you put importance on your keywords.

It's also a good idea to underline your main keyword no more than once and to use bold text for your main keyword no more than once.

Although there are other factors that determine your position in the search engines, having the basics of what search engines look for will give you a much better chance of making that illusive first page and driving consistent website traffic to your site.

Author Bio
Mike Burke is the author of numerous articles and has an affection for website marketing. Learn how to drive tons of targeted traffic to your site without spending a dime on advertising. Visit us at http://www.starttheprofits.com

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The ROR Advantage: No Spider Discrimination!

By: Philip Nicosia

Search engine optimization is a very complex science, but at its heart is the simple rule: to format your website in such a way that spiders can immediately recognize and index its content. If they can't "see" you, you might as well not exist-and if they can't understand your code, no amount of keywords can get you in the Golden Top 20.

The problem that many website developers used to encounter was that search engines worked differently; so you could end up with a high ranking in Lycos but languish at the bottom of Google. How exactly should you optimize your site so you perform well in all search engines?

Enter ROR (short for Resources for a Resource), an independent XML format that translates your content in a way that all search engines can understand.

Think of it as a web spider's Cliff's Notes. it describes all the objects, services, discounts, images, podcasts, etc. If it's on the site, it's on the ROR feed, but in a format that's easy to process and removes all risks of skipping or ignoring a link.

ROR calls its "magic file" structured feeds, which guide search engines as they scan the text. Unlike Google Sitemaps, it's universally understood-and very easy to process. It's also more detailed. It doesn't just give a map or "table of contents", it actually summarizes what's inside. It's also been in existence far longer than Google, so its reliability has been proven by time.

Though it's been around for a long time, ROR is by no means outdated. The majority of the file formats are already available in ROR, although it is currently being updated to keep up with the growing number of website innovations. But to avoid being too unwieldy, the ROR system tries to re-use existing data structures. It boasts of being very streamlined, a strength that makes it one of the more efficient ways of indexing a site.

Usually the ROR feed is located in the directory, and is named by default ror.xml. It is possible to rename the file, and the search engines will still find it. The only thing it needs to have is a link tag in your main page (between the head tags). Another alternative is to create a smaller ror.xml file which will direct the search engines to the ROR feed. You can create this file in the ROR sitemap generator.

Author Bio
XML-Sitemaps.com has an online sitemap generator that creates XML, HTML, text and ROR sitemaps and also provides some useful SEO tools.

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