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.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

The Evolution and Revolution of Search Engines

By: steve bis

Search engines, where would we be without them? Within the past 10-15 years the internet has become a huge part of every day American life. Many people nowadays cannot remember the time prior to having this wonderful information highway we call the internet. The internet has really revolutionized the way people live their lives; for example, you can bank online, buy just about anything you want online, meet new people online, and even find local movie times. However, one of the biggest benefits of the internet is the use of search engines. At any moment in time you may have a question, or an urge to get more information about a certain topic and that information can be easily attained through a search engine. In this article I am going to give you a brief history on the evolution of the search engine, and show you how they truly have revolutionized our lifestyles.

The history of search engines is the story of university students' projects evolving into commercial enterprises and revolutionizing the field as they went. The first attempt at creating a search engine was called Archie, and it was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University. This very primitive search engine did not use any robot technology. All Archie really did was just become a database of archived filenames, which it would try to match with users' queries.

The next evolutionary step of the search engine was the introduction of "robots." The first use of robot technology was in the search engine World Wide Web Wanderer. Simply what robots would do is scan the internet for URL's, starting at one site and using the links in the previous site to find more sites. The problems with these first robots were that if they were not written properly they would cause too many hits on a server decaying the systems performance.

To combat these initial problems Martjin Koster came out with the first web directory called "Aliweb" in October 1993. Web directories are different than search engines because the sites listed in them are not from automated robots, but rather from human editors reviewing sites and placing them in the directory.

However, shortly after, in December 1993, a new robot was born. This was called the "spider." Spiders added a much further degree of accuracy by indexing the entire text of a webpage. The older robots only indexed the URL and titles of a page, which meant that some pertinent keywords might not be indexed. This greatly improved the relevancy rankings of their results, and thus was the first major step in forming the major search engines that we have all become so used to using today.

Not long after the spider, we saw the emergence of some of the big guns. In 1994, out of Stanford University came the extremely famous Yahoo. The two guys who started Yahoo were students, David Filo and JerryYang. Basically, at first Yahoo was just a list of these guys' favorite websites. But soon, due to its easy user-friendly interface, became the most popular web directory. Due to the fact that its websites were all human reviewed, Yahoo was only able to index about 1% of the web. At this time, Altavista became the fastest growing search engines using the spider technology and was indexing up to 10 million pages a day.

By this time there are two different types of search engines, "author controlled" such as Altavista and Excite, in which results were ranked by keyword relevancy, and "editor controlled" such as Yahoo, in which humans manually placed websites into their index.
Then in late 1997 out of Stanford University was born the most popular and well-known search engine to date: GOOGLE Google has a different way of ranking its websites. It used a Pagerank system. Simply what they did was list websites higher in their results based on how many links were pointing to a particular site. Of course, the content on the page had to be relevant to the keyword typed into the search box. But basically, Google invented what you could call a system of voting. So a site with numerous backlinks or votes would rank higher. A backlink is just when someone else puts a link on their site that points to another outside site. Jump forward to today and Google has more than 80% of the websites on the internet in their index, which is pretty impressive.

Search engines have had a huge impact on the American lifestyle. They basically will grant you just about any information you want, all you have to do is type into the search box the topic you want to find more information about. Human beings are natural born information junkies, we always want to know more and find out more and search engines have made this urge of ours extremely easy to cure. Just think about it, maybe you need to fix a simple problem you have with your car. By using a search engine to do some research you may very easily figure the problem out, saving you a very costly trip to the car repair shop. They are just great educational tools, before search engines emerged if you really wanted to learn something you would go to your library and check out a book. Now before making that trip you may find out what you wanted by just sitting at your desktop and surfing through Google. The list goes on about the many benefits of this great new technology we call the search engine. I'm sure you can recall a time when you found some very good information by using one. If you're anything like me and find yourself addicted to this easily accessible information highway then your making uses of them daily.

Search engines by nature were made very easy to use. However, with a little extra knowledge about how they work you can really take advantage of them and find great information very quickly. With the right knowledge of search engines and the use of specialized tools you can literally find anything you want. And when I mean anything, I mean ANYTHING. For me personally I am excited to see what search engines will evolve into in the future. The sky is the limit. Who knows what type of search spiders the future will spawn, but one thing is for sure there will be newer and newer search technology it's just our human nature to keep trying to top ourselves.

Author Bio
Search engine specialist Steve Bis, is the author of the free search secrets newsletter and owns a unique web search tool that will help you find anything on the internet in 60 seconds, eliminating your search frustrations.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

SEO Services, What To Look For

By: James Day

Search engine optimization has evolved into a competitive, growing industry. There are plenty of hoaxes and scams on the web. It seems that as the Internet grows more complex, so do the scams. Choosing an effective company can be quite a challenge. There are many factors to consider when hiring an SEO service. This article gives advice on how to select a credible website optimization service.

Assess the services and credibility of the SEO company. Customer service is always the key factor that one should look at. There are many ways of assessing an SEO service. One can try to inquire by placing a call or by sending an email to the company. Depending on the courtesy and time of response, you can initially assess its customer service. Does the company provide an "about us" page on their website? A reputable online business will provide an informative look at the personal side of their company and who they are. Look for other company details such as, the company address and location.

Avoid a guarantee of instant results or the #1 position. There are many factors to consider when optimizing a webpage. Search engines use different algorithms and their spiders can vary. Any SEO company that guarantees the #1 position in the search results should be avoided. A legitimate company will be straight forward and honest and will tell its clients that no single company can give a guarantee of the top positions in the search results. A desireable SEO service should also provide reports and details regarding the standing of a client's website. They will be able to track the developments of their clients website in terms of keywords, links and their rankings in the major search engines.

A customer testimonial can provide a valuable insight when assessing a company's credibility. A satisfied customer is always a good indication of the effectiveness of a company's operations and will always be the most valuable piece of information about its integrity. If possible try to locate and contact people who have received benefits from hiring an optimization service or at least try to validate the testimonials.

It's important to consider the cost of website optimization. Keep in mind a higher price does not necessarily mean the expensive services are more effective than the less expensive ones. The optimization rates companies charge may vary greatly. Search engine optimization is a trial and error process which requires research, hard work and dedication. Make sure the SEO service is primarily involved in search engine optimization and does not treat it as a sideline.

Author Bio
Article written by the CEO of: www.submit-site.org

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

SEO Optimization -Get Key word Density Just Right

By: Aaron Brooks

It has always been about being noticed. People dress well or do something bizarre in order to be noticed or make a statement. To get ahead in life or business one needs to be at the top, first in line. Now more often than not, the World Wide Web to functions along the same principles.

With tough competition between websites, articles, and e-commerce sites what makes one more successful than others is the position a site gets on search engines. The higher the ranking the larger the number of hits or traffic to the site. To achieve a higher position websites use the strategy of SEO optimization and content is written such that it is key word dense.

It is not as simple as using words repeatedly you need to know which keywords are relevant to your website and pages. Once you have a master list ensure that :

• Match keyword tag with content. Ensure that the keyword meta tag has around 900 characters or 25 words.

• Ensure that the keyword density in between 3-10% . And, avoid using the same word more than once in a sentence. Check keyword validators to determine the exact density percentage.

• Try and maximize use in the top half of the page. Many search engine spiders do not go beyond 25-50%.

• Be smart and spell your keywords with variations and also include plurals.

Go one step ahead and make use of a keyword density checker. This is an automated system that will comb through your web content and highlight words used in higher density. The system will enable you to perfect your pages and provide what search engines or spiders want.

A Keyword Density Cloud see http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php can be used effectively to crawl selected URLs, analyze word density, and remove common stop words. The tool can be added to your website and fulfil a vital role in SEO optimization.

It is all about knowing how to gather your audience or customers and the keyword density checker or cloud can help you through several stumbling blocks. The golden rules of SEO are: keyword density, keyword frequency, keyword prominence, and keyword proximity.

The basic rule of thumb is to know "what are the keywords your potential customers are likely to use." Key words must not be random but relevant to your line of business. The trick is to strike a balance neither too many nor too little. Too many can get your site banned and too little means you get lower rankings and your wonderful site goes unnoticed.

So, while sticking to your marketing plan and focus take a moment to take care of web content and its many nuances. Make content meaningful and relevant, find out the most important words that will be used to find what your site has to offer (put yourself in the user's shoes). And construct content using all the golden rules and keys mentioned above.
If you tread the right path success in the World Wide Web will be yours.

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 Submit Free Press Release site http://www.1888pressrelease.com

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

SEO Elite - Search Engine Optimization Revolution or Waste of Money?

By: Charles Essmeier

The Internet used to be a small community with thousands, rather than millions of sites devoted to products and information. Ten years ago, all it took to have a successful Internet business was to have a presence. If you were there, you could be successful. Those days are gone, and the competition is now fierce with companies struggling to be found when people use the search engines to find them. A new science has been created to help with this dilemma - search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization, sometimes known as SEO, is the science of creating a Website in such a way that the major search engines, such as Google, or MSN, see it and "think" that your site is more about a particular topic than the sites run by your competitors. If your site is about widgets, you want to design your site in such a way that when someone types "widgets" into a search engine, your site comes up first. This is known as relevance, and search engine optimization specialists charge thousands of dollars to consult with Website owners to help them create "relevant" sites that the search engines will like.

Not surprisingly, software products have been developed that claim to help with the search engine optimization process with a lot more ease and a lot less money than the consultants charge. One of the most heavily promoted of these products is SEO Elite. This is a software program that claims to do a lot of things quickly and easily that will help you get a higher ranking in the search engines and, as a byproduct, get a lot more traffic to your site.

An important measure of a site's importance is the number of other sites that link to it. The more links, the more important the search engines think a site may be. Provided, that is, that the links are quality links. SEO Elite claims that it can find hundreds of quality link partners to your site in mere minutes, and that it has an easy to use interface that can allow most anyone to learn to use it in no time. Furthermore, SEO Elite says that it can actually let you see how your high ranking competitors have designed their sites so that you can copy their model and move up the search engine listings the same way they did.

Can SEO Elite do all of that? Yes, it can do all of that and more. Plus, it's easy to use. You don't have to be a "computer geek" to use it. The instructions are easy to understand and the product is easy to use. You actually can find other sites that are suitable link partners in minutes, and you can easily contact them using the software. Once you are done, you can use the program to see if these sites are still linking to you and you can monitor your progress as you make changes to your site and as it climbs up the search engine ladder.

There is no magic solution that will provide thousands of quality visitors to a Website with an hour or two of work. Those sorts of claim are pure bunk. Like any other project, search engine optimization requires some time and effort. But SEO Elite goes a long way towards relieving you of the effort and time involved in building a highly ranked site. It's a good product, and well worth the expense.

Author Bio
Copyright 2006 by Retro Marketing. Charles Essmeier is the owner of Retro Marketing, a firm devoted to informational Websites, including www.seoelite-exposed.com, a site devoted to search engine optimization.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

SEO- 9 Ridiculously Easy Steps to the Top 10

By: Murry Daniels

Search Engine Optimization companies are making a fortune by doing the menial work that is overlooked by many designers. It is ridiculously easy to do most of the work done by most SEO companies, all you have to do is create good habits.

There are 9 main points you should focus on:

• Keywords
• URL Text
• Description, Meta tags
• Title tags
• Image Names
• ALT tags
• Heading tags
• Content
• Hyperlinks

The focus of these 8 steps is to load your pages with as many "keywords" as possible.

Keywords
Keywords are the most important aspect of good SEO, this is where you tell the Search Engines what your site is about. Search Engines use an algorithm to determine the "Keyword Density" of your site, this formula is:

Total Words ? Keywords= Keyword Density

Use this formula on your competitors web site and see how they score, then aim to beat that score.

Choose keywords that best relate to the information, products or services that you are offering. For instance, if I am designing a site about "Web Design", I want my site to include the words "Web Design" as many times as possible.

However, most people don't just search for just one word, they type phrases, so you should consider the phrases that best suit your sites target market. For example, if I am creating a site about "Web Design" in New Orleans, I would include "New Orleans web design" in my keywords. Another way around this is to not separate my keywords with commas, just use spaces, and the Search Engines will make the phrases for you. The most important thing to remember is that the content of each page is different, so only use keywords pertaining to that page.

URL Text
When you name a new page you have the option to call it anything you could possibly think of, why not se a keyword? After all, the URL address is the first things a search engine comes across when indexing your pages. You have to remember content doesn't come easy to everyone, so you gotta slip in your keywords when the process gives you an easy one.

Description Meta tags
These tags are dwindling in importance since Search Engines are now looking at content, but every little bit counts.

Optimize your meta tags to match your content, products, and services, and the Search Engines that still look at meta data will reward your efforts.

Title Tags
Title tags are the tags that tell the Search Engine the title, or formal description of the document or page. This is the word or phrase that is seen at the top of the browser window. The most important rule about title tags is, don't put anything in the title tags but keywords. Once again this is an easy time to slip in your keywords, so don't miss out.

Image Names
As I said before, content doesn't come easy to everyone, so slip in your keywords whenever possible, this applies to image names. If you are saving a picture of a guy working on a computer for your web design web site, don't call it "some_dude.jpg", call it "web_site_design.jpg". The Search engine will look at the code for the site and see the image pertains to the content of the site and this will be another relevant element on that particular page. You have to take the easy ones when you are given a chance.

ALT tags
Alt tags are keywords that you can attach to images, giving more weight to the image since Search Engines can't analyze the content of the image itself. Here is a chance to slip in more keywords without writing great content, use it.

Heading tags
Heading tags are associated with the bold font that leads into a section of text. Like this:

Web Design
Web Design Inc. offers custom web site designs...

Your heading tags should only be keywords, and should be presented in the order that your Meta tags follow.

H1= first meta tag, H2= second meta tag...

Try to utilize all 6 heading tags on each page to ensure maximum page optimization.

Content
As every expert will tell you, "Content is King." Each web page should have at least 350 words on it, and the more the better, but keep in mind the formula for keyword density. You don't want to fill a page with 1500 words of jibba-jabba and only 5 keywords in it. Some people get hung-up on how browsers display text, and use images with text in them because they want a cool font, but browsers can't read the text embedded in images, so this content ads no weight to the page in a Search Engines eyes.

Linkbaiting is the new trend among high ranking sites. Linkbaiting means writing quality content, or articles that other web sites can display on their pages as long as they give credit, and a link to your site.

You don't have to be a vi or emac expert to write good web content, just be thoughtful of how you word things and incorporate your keywords.

Hyperlinks
Hyperlinks are text links to other pages on your site. The rules of SEO and hyperlinks are easy:

• Use hyperlinks so the Search Engine will have a text link to follow to the next page
• Don't use one word links, use long link phrases, preferably keyword phrases
• Use bullets, or some sort of small image that you can attach an ALT tag to, this will ad more importance to the link, and throw in a couple of free keywords for you.

Keep these 9 aspects in mid when designing a site, and you are sure to have a leg up on the competition.

Author Bio
Murry Daniels is the owner of Goatsmilktavern Studios, www.goatsmilktavern.com, a web design and internet marketing company in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

Search Wars! Battle of the Major Search Engines

By: steve bis

It's pretty safe to say that anyone who has a computer has at some point or another used a search engine. Search engines are extremely useful creatures. They have had a major impact on our society, I mean its pretty amazing that you can just go type in anything you want into a search box and get back information about it in about two seconds. Before search engines came along you pretty much had to rely on going to the library to get more information. With that being said the popularity of search has created quite a huge market. The advent of paid advertising has sprung search engines into a multi-billion dollar a year industry, thus creating some pretty stiff competition. Right now we are in the midst of a major war on the internet, with the major players being Yahoo, MSN, Google, and an upcoming strong contender in Ask. So you may ask who is winning this war right now? And why? And who will take the lead in the future? One thing is for sure the reward of being the king of the search mountain will reap billions and billions of dollars annually.

So what are these top gun search engines competing over? The answer is clicks, on the paid advertisements they present every time someone uses their search engine. If you notice when you use Google for example that at the very top of the page and on the right hand side it says sponsored sites. This is where people trying to make money online pay to advertise for their company. These prices range from nickels and dimes per click, all the way up to hundreds of dollars per click, depending on the keyword. So the main objective for a search engine is to get as many people as possible using them to search the internet. Just think about it for a second, the more searches they get, the more chance of people clicking on their paid ads, which is where they make their money. Now of course not everyone is going to click on the paid ads, only a small percentage of the searches they receive ever actually make the search engine money. However, with millions of searches a day it only takes a small percentage to really make a big monetary difference.

So who are the warlords going to battle here? And who is in the lead? The three major competitors are MSN, Google, and Yahoo, and Ask is fighting its way back into the mix of things with some pretty sweet search features.

As of right now Google is in the lead, they receive somewhere in the ballpark of 80% of all search queries on the internet. Google is estimated to gross around 3 billion dollars in 2006, all from just paid advertisement. Now you may ask why is it that Google is so far ahead? Well there are a few reasons. First, Google has the most advanced algorithm, which is the mind boggling mathematical equation that ranks and lists sites depending on the keyword. Trying to understand their algorithm is extremely complicated, Google only hires absolute geniuses to work for them. Second, is the brilliance of Google.com itself, which is their homepage.

Take a look at Google's homepage, all you can do is type your keyword in the search box and hit search. There's really nothing else going on it's pretty clean cut and user friendly, with absolutely no distractions from getting people to do what they want. Which is search

Now take a look at MSN, or Yahoo's homepage. It is just jam packed with all sorts of stuff to do from playing games to reading articles about the news. This stuff is great and all, however it does distract people from typing into the search box and inevitably clicking on a paid ad putting money in their pocket. I believe this is a major part in why Google has such a gigantic lead in the volume of searches they receive compared to the other top guns. .

So I firmly believe that in this case the giant will not be taken down. Even though you see commercials for Yahoo and Ask, you know the ones with the cheesy guy screaming Yahoooo and the monkey that Ask is featuring. The bottom line is Google has the best algorithm right now and their site doesn't distract people from searching, which will yield many more search queries. Who knows though just as Google basically came from no where and took over the market, there may be a new kid on the block that will topple them. However as of now though they are the reigning champions.

Author Bio
Search engine specialist Steve Bis, is the author of the free search secrets newsletter and owns a unique web search tool that will help you find anything on the internet in 60 seconds, eliminating your search frustrations.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

Search Engine Marketing Optimization Products Reviewed

By: Gilbert Traifalgar

Most books and software ever sold online have-in one form or another-something to do with Search Engine Optimization. Why is this such a sought after service? Because... getting a good spot on major search engines can be the difference between $0 in profit per day versus $500 to $150,000 in profits per day (depending on the product you are promoting). Now there are many books and programs out there... and trust me, I've tried nearly all of them. Here are my personal recommendations:

1 - The SEO Elite Software is by far the best of the best in software out there. It is a bit pricey to start off with, but it will literally save you thousands of dollars in promotions. The advantage you have is that you can create instant back-links to your site whenever you choose to, and on more sites then you could ever dream of. To have access to tools with a 1/4 of these abilities you would pay about $239 a year somewhere else. In short... you get more than you pay for. I'd rate it 10/10

2 - Search Engine Optimization is another great, great tool. The price is a fraction of what you would pay on the previous software, but you are also more limited as to what you can or cannot do with this system. Still a super program, but remember: You Get What You Pay For.

3 - Links Master is a program different from the previous two in the sense that you get someone else to blast your text ads out onto hundreds of sites. Problem? You have limited control over the kind of sites and the amount of sites linking to your site. Again... a great service, but it does tend to go hard on the wallet of those starting out.

Believe it or not-there is no secret to getting your site listed number 1 on major search engines. You read that right! Search Engine Marketing is always spoken of as though it is hard to do. And gaining a number 1 spot on Google, well, that is just plain impossible. If done right, YOU can prove all those assumptions wrong.

Using software number 1 it is easy and fast as lightning to get top ranking on major search engines and, as previously stated, it takes very little effort on your part. Go to the site, read the testimonials-and if you are serious about getting that number 1 spot... I trust you will purchase the software. The SEO software is to the online marketer today as a machine gun would have been to a warrior in medieval times: It literally blows all Search Engine Marketing competitors to pieces!

Search engines can be an effective method of driving highly targeted visitors to a web site. Our search engine marketing page provides access to the collective wisdom of all the top search engine marketing experts with regularly updated articles, links to resources, and announcements of new tools and services available to the search engine marketing industry.

Do you want your site to rank number 1 on Google?

Then use the number 1 Search Engine Marketing tool, which is currently being used by thousands of search engine marketers around the world. Gain YOUR #1 spot on Google, Yahoo, and MSN in record time!

Send this page to:

Author Bio
My name is Gilbert Traifalgar, I am the webmaster of www.searchenginemarketingpro.biz

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

Robocops

By: Philip Nicosia

The Robots.txt protocol, also called the "robots exclusion standard" is designed to lock out web spiders from accessing part of a website. It is a security or privacy measure, the equivalent of hanging a "Keep Out" sign on your door.

This protocol is used by web site administrators when there are sections or files that they would rather not be accessed by the rest of the world. This could include employee lists, or files that they are circulating internally. For example, the White House website uses robots.txt to block any inquiries on speeches by the Vice President, a photo essay of the First Lady, and profiles of the 911 victims.

How does the protocol work? It lists the files that shouldn't be scanned, and places it in the top-level directory of the website. The robots.txt protocol was created by consensus in June 1994 by members of the robots mailing list (robots-request@nexor.co.uk). There is no official standards body or RFC for the protocol, so it's difficult to legislate or mandate that the protocol be followed. In fact, the file is treated as strictly advisory, and does not have absolute guarantee that those contents won't be read.

In effect, robot.txt requires cooperation by the web spider and even the reader, since anything that is uploaded into the internet becomes publicly available. You aren't locking them out of those pages, you are just making it harder for them to get in. But it takes very little for them to ignore these instructions. Computer hackers can also easily penetrate the files and retrieve information. So the rule of thumb is-if it's that sensitive, it shouldn't be on your website to begin with.

Care, however, should be taken to ensure that the Robots.txt protocol doesn't block the website robots from other areas of the website. This will dramatically affect your search engine ranking, as the crawlers rely on the robots to count the keywords, review metatags, titles and crossheads, and even register the hyperlinks.

One misplaced hyphen or dash can have catastrophic effects. For example, the robots.txt patterns are matched by simple substring comparisons, so care should be taken to make sure that patterns matching directories have the final '/' character appended: otherwise all files with names starting with that substring will match, rather than just those in the directory intended.

To avoid these problems, consider submitting your site to a search engine spider simulator, also called search engine robot simulator. These simulators-which can be bought or downloaded from the internet- use the same processes and strategies of different search engines and give you a "dry run" of how they will read your site. They will tell you which pages are skipped, which links are ignored, and which errors are encountered. Since the simulators will also reenact how the bots will follow your hyperlinks, you'll see if your robot.txt protocol is interfering with the search engine's ability to read through all the necessary pages.

It's also important to review your robot.txt files, which will enable you to spot any problems and correct them before you submit them to real search engines.

Author Bio

XML-Sitemaps.com provides free online tools for webmasters including a search engine spider simulator and a Google sitemaps XML validator.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

Paid Directory Submission Checklist

By: Lakhya Phukan

Every online business needs traffic, which comes with increased visibility on the web. One great way to get noticed is to get listed in the major directories. Links from good directories increases your site's visibility many fold.

There are thousands of web directories on the net and selecting the good ones to submit your site can be a time consuming task. Also there are free directories and paid directories. You need to submit to both types of directories.

The following checklist is for paid directory submission only. This checklist will help you choose the best and worthwhile paid directories on the net.

Submission Check List:

1. Check out if the directory is indexed in major search engines.

2. Check the robots.txt file. Make sure that search engine bots are allowed to crawl the pages where you intend to put your listing. Check the Meta tags to make sure that search engine spiders are not prevented from following links in it. A Meta tag with noindex/nofollow will not be indexed or spidered and links in that page are not followed by bots.

3. Check if the directory is being maintained regularly. Visit the directory from time to time to see if errors are getting corrected, site information is getting updated and the like. In short, look for positive activity on the directory.

4. Check if the listings in category pages match in theme and content or not. Directories with tight focus on relevant grouping of web sites are useful for visitors and tend to show up frequently in SERPs for keyword searches.

5. Check out the age of the directory. Do a whois search (http://www.whois.net) to get this information. Many new directories vanish after a few months due to lack of maintenance and promotion. With older directories you can at least be sure that your listing will remain visible for a reasonable period.

6. Check if the directory consists of too many empty categories - it is not useful for visitors and also does not send a too good signal to the SEs about the directory. Think twice before submitting to such directories.

7. Check if the contact information is available on the site. Proper businesses will provide you with some kind of contact information.

8. Check the Alexa rank of the directory - it is not accurate, yet you can get an idea of traffic the directory receives. Look for directories with decreasing Alexa Rank as it indicates that the directory is getting popular.

9. Check if the directory provides SE friendly urls. No JavaScript link or redirection. Also watch out for dynamic urls. Sometimes search engines find it difficult indexing or recognizing dynamic urls with parameters like http://www.&;lt;examplesite>.com/index.html?cat=1&p=12...
An example of SE friendly URL is http://www.hedir.com/business.html

10. Check whether category pages have too many outgoing links. If your link is one of 100 links on a page, visitors will find it difficult to locate your site.

Author Bio
Lakhya Phukan is the webmaster of Hedir Web Directory. You can submit your site at hedir www.hedir.com

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com

Meta tag optimization results in high search engine ranking

By: James Day

I was compelled to publish this article after noticing several SEO specialists writing in reference to meta tags being dead or obsolite. Meta tags are not dead. I will be the first to say, meta tags are utilized by all major search engines and are very much in use and extremely important to search engine ranking. If you need proof of how important meta tags are, try removing your meta tags and watch what happens to your search engine positioning. Your site will plummet to the depths of the unvisited web. Meta tags are frequently an overlooked factor which can improve the ranking of most any website.

This is an example of how vital meta tags are to your webpage and to your search engine ranking. Our website ranks #6 and #7 consistantly on MSN for the keyword submit site. To test the dead meta tag theory, our source code editor changed one word in the meta description tag and we dropped to #15 in the search results. Our rankings on Google and several other search engines suffered even more so. Needless to say we made changes accordingly. All major search engines definitely utilize meta tags for a description of the webpage and for indexing within the search results.

The title tag is one of the most important on page factors to consider. This is because search engine spiders read this tag first and place a high level of importance on the keywords found there. The title tag is also used for the title of your listing in the search results. The contents of your title tag will also appear in the top left corner of the browser bar. Correct title tag optimization is essiential and will result in a dramatic increase in your search engine ranking. The title tag should contain at least one or more keywords to be of any relevance to the webpage.

Search engine spiders read the description meta tag next. This tag is often used as a website description in the search results. The description tag should also contain a few keywords. The keyword meta tag is also vital to search engine ranking giving search engine spiders a sample of relevant text and content within a webpage. Other meta tags include robots, resource, author, copyright etc. These tags are not as important as the title, description and keyword tag, however they should be included if possible. To acheive high search engine ranking optimize your meta data. Proper onpage optimization will greatly improve your search engine placement.

Author Bio
Article written by the CEO of www.submit-site.org

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

Link building for effective search engine optimization

By: James Day

When you begin the task of acquiring quality and relevant backlinks to your website there are many factors that can increase or decrease your search engine rankings. This article outlines the difference between good and bad backlinks.

A quality backlink pointing to your site should be in the same category and relevant in content to your website. The page where your link is located should be indexed by Google and the page should also have a Google page rank. The webpage where your link is located should also contain no more than 30 other out-going links to other websites. Link pages with more than 30 out-going links are less relevant to the search engines. Having your link posted on this type of webpage can affect your search engine rankings in a negative way. Other excellent techniques of acquiring backlinks are directory submissions, posting articles, blogs and forums.

For directory submissions select the proper directory category and take a look at how many other websites are contained in the category where your link would be posted, if you can manage to get on the first or second page of the listings, this is a quality backlink. Also look at the Google page rank of the landing page for your link. If the page has a Google page rank this is also a quality backlink.

Stay within your category, relevant content is very important to the search engines. Write an article preferably relevant in content to your website and submit the article to high quality article directories. Blogs are an excellent way to get quality one-way backlinks, Blog sites also receive tons of traffic, which in turn give your site more exposure. Posting your link on forum pages is also an efficient method of aquiring backlinks instantly.

Backlinks to avoid would be a zero page ranked webpage, especially if the home page has a zero page rank. Links posted within framed webpages which will also steal your traffic. Especially avoid link farms, webpages which contain more than 100 unrelated outgoing links, This type of link page is frowned upon by many major search engines. Avoid Webpages with mirror sites containing the exact same content with a different URL, also pages that utilize redirects and URL cloaking. Never post your link on a webpage that contains a "no follow" or "no index" robots meta tag within the source code. Dynamic websites with question marks in the URL should be avoided because they are not always indexed by the search engines.

Avoid posting your link on a page that opens very slow or contains mostly ads and flash banners. Try not to aquire or purchase great numbers of backlinks in a short period of time, backlinks should be accumulated gradually. Also avoid webpages and directories that list their results in alphabetical order, as their database increases your link could be moved to a less relevant page with less pagerank. Quality backlinks are one of the most important factors involved in the process of acheiving high search engine ranking.

Author Bio
Article written by the CEO of www.submit-site.org

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Internet Traffic and SEO Techniques

By: Roberto Sedycias

You might be wandering the reasons your web site is not getting much internet traffic. After all your web site took lots of financial and human resources, but unfortunately like so many web sites, it is quite unknown and as a result it does not get enough internet traffic to make it financially viable.

Did you know that about 80 percent of all web site traffic originates from search engines? Yes, it is true! Listing near the top page of search engines and obtaining the attention of your target audience should be a main priority for any web site internet promotion.

And the good news about this is that improving a web site position in search engine pages may be done for free. How? Using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

There are many ways to promote a web site. Some promotions are paid and some are free. Among the free ones, the search engine optimization techniques enable web sites to become search engine friendly. In other words, it makes website pages to accept the search engine crawler in a friendly way. These techniques will be some of the steps one will have to use to obtain a better position in search engine's pages, when searching for specific keywords, related to services or products offered by a web site.

Search engine optimization steps for a web page:

Title:

The html Title tag is a very important element and must include the most important keywords or phrases, which best represent the products or services offered by the web page. It should not contain more than 60 characters.

Keywords:

The html meta Keyword tag should have all the keyword phrases which best represents the products or services offered by the web page. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not contain more than 250 characters.

Description:

The html meta Description tag is a description of the web page, which will be displayed by the search engine. Make sure it contains keywords phrases. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not contain more than 200 characters.

Keywords in Headings:

Keywords in Headings tags (h1) will be interpreted by search engines as being an important keyword relevant to the web page, and it should be looked for and indexed by the search engines.

Web page text:

It is a good practice to include informative text one every page, using natural language and appropriate keywords. It should contain more than 200 words. Informative text should be placed in the html Body section of the web page.

Keywords in Alt Tags:

Every html picture "img" tag should contain an ALT tag with an appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when appropriate.

Keywords in Anchor Tags:

Every html hypertext link "a href " should contain a TITLE tag with an appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when appropriate.

Robots.txt file:

Make sure there is a robots.txt file in you web site directory. This is a text file created by the webmaster, which will guide the search engine?s crawler when indexing a web site.

There are some cases in which one might not want to have some web pages indexed. This way thru the use of robots.txt, one will have control over which pages will be indexed and made available to the search engines.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /data/

HTML code validation:

Search engine's crawlers become more efficient when indexing web pages with no html errors. Beware that some html errors can make search engine crawlers to give up indexing web pages. So it is recommended for those web pages to be indexed, there should be no html errors.

Links:

Links are very important to search engines. The quality of links and whether it is reciprocal or not, are important factors in evaluating the importance of a web page. Links from web sites with higher page ranks are a plus.

Registering with Directories and Search Engines:

It is very important the registration of a website with directories and search engine web sites. It is a way of telling the world that your web site exists. Avoid using automatic search engine/directory registration.

Search engine optimization has become a very important set of procedures which helps web sites to become more relevant to search engines. To obtain an increase in internet traffic will take some time. It probably will take some kind of additional promotion too. But anybody in need of higher internet traffic, free search engine optimization might be considered his first option.

Roberto Sedycias
IT Consultant

This article is under GNU FDL license and can be distributed without any previous authorization from the author. However the author?s name and all the URL?s (links) mentioned in the article and biography must be kept.

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Author Bio
This article can also be accessed in portuguese language from the News Article section of page PoloMercantil
Roberto Sedycias works as IT consultant for PoloMercantil.

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Increase Your Leads with Search Engine and Lead Optimization Strategies

By: Tim OKeefe

The most optimal way for an online Real Estate agent to succeed is thru rapid lead generation and follow up. And in order to escalate your leads, you must start off with an acceptance of your current traffic and lead conversion ratio.

Ask yourself "How many visitors does it take to get to a lead?"

In fact, when we initially interview a potential client often times the conversion is close to a dismal 200:1. Depending on design features, you should really get at the most 50:1. And probably 30:1 is more like it.

Conversion comes from on page conversion optimization & Keyword representation.

On Page Factors

Most people have heard of Search Engine Optimization. Few talk about on page conversion optimization.

First of all, this whole concept pre-supposes that you are starting off with a most wanted action (MWA). Sometimes your MWA is Branding, sometimes it is Leads. And many times it is both lead capture and branding that you are asking your website to do.

If Leads are your goal then your call to action is critical. Other features on your page can distract the viewer from your objectives.

On Page factors that may increase or decrease conversion are:

Asking them to sign up (making your call to action clear)
A Johnson Box (these are those tabled boxes that break up your body copy)
Color can attract or distract
Too many buttons
Animation
Offer Placement. Where are you placing your call to action?
Variety of Call to Action
Frequency of your call to action
These are just a few of the attributes that may help your lead count to go way up.

HappyVille Real Estate

There is a reason that studies have found that Pay per Click search engine results often render poor conversion rates. Specificity.

The reason is that you can only use high volume keywords with pay per click (PPC). These high volume keywords are by their nature generalized. They are also the most profitable for the engine. But what may profit the engine does not always profit you. (Thats not to say that PPC doesn't have its place in a search marketing campaign)

9 times out 10, I am asked to "make my site #1 for "My City real estate". While this is a worthy objective, it is at best very short sighted. Words like "City real estate", "city homes", city condos", are all high volume in just about any city you research.

However, a successful marketing campaign must employ search engine click thrus that are made up of general & specific "streams of traffic". This is because traffic is a comprehensive endeavor. You wouldn't just rent out 1 or 2 of your penthouse units and leave the rest of your 150 unit apartment complex empty? You couldn't expect profitability would you?

However, this is exactly what most agents do when they go after a few high volume words.

Traffic is made up of the combined visits that come from various inquiries into a search engine.
Each inquiry represents a finite amount of possible traffic determined by the placement in the engine, for a particular keyword phrase.

So long story short, a few keywords aren't going to make your business. You need a Universe of words in order to get monster traffic and lead conversion.

Additionally, not all keywords or traffic are created equal. Step out of real estate monetarily and imagine yourself as Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com. What would delite you more?

500 visitors that typed in "Books"? Or 500 visitors that typed in "Harry Potter"? Or better yet, "Harry Potter, Sorcerors Stone"? The more specific you get, conversion goes up and the closer you can get to that elusive 1:1 conversion.

The challenge however, is that the more specific you get with our keywords, the less traffic you get. So you need to represent a large amount of these specific keywords that produce low traffic by themselves. But combined, create a large stream of very convertable traffic.

By optimizing your on page factors and your keywords that drive people to your site, you will take your visitor to conversion ratio down to a respectable number.

Author Bio
Tim O'Keefe is President of Spider Juice Technologies. His firm specializes in Search Engine Traffic and Lead Optimization strategies. Tim has always started a project with the fastest path to profitability as his objective for his clients. You can consult with Tim personally, at 310-533-9145. Or email at Tim@spiderjuicetechnologies.com
Tim O'Keefe
www.spiderjuicetechnologies.com
310-533-9145

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Impending Changes in the SEO world

By: Jeremy Knauff

The sky isn't falling chicken little, but your traffic may be in the near future.

There is no question that Google has been a dominating force. There is also no question that Microsoft has both the financial and the manpower resources to give them some serious competition and probably eventually get the upper hand again. As Google has grown to a size comparable to that of Microsoft, it has lost much of the "little guy trying harder" appeal that once helped to create a great deal of it's public support.

Many users don't really care which search engine they use as long as they are getting the results that they're looking for. In this area, Google is falling seriously behind. In an attempt to filter out more of the web sites using artificial means to improve their ranking, they have knocked a large number of legitimate web sites out of the SERPs and often prevented newer web sites from appearing to begin with. While I applaud their effort to combat the web sites using spam techniques to climb above legitimate web sites, I can say with out a doubt that unless they find a better way to do this they will begin loosing market share in a big way. There are several reasons, some of which are not so obvious:

* People want relevant and timely results. If Google continues to delay newer web sites and web pages from ranking for applicable terms, users will go elsewhere to find more up to date results.

* Many web site owners using Google AdSense will begin switching over to competing services from Yahoo and MSN - which they are likely getting traffic from. Since the ads are a source of revenue for these web site owners, they are going to deal with the search engines that are helping them make more money.

* Many web site owners will remove the Google site-search from their web sites since they aren't getting traffic from Google.

* Web savvy people are often asked for advice from those who are not as proficient with computers. It won't take too many bitter web site owners telling these people to use a competing search engine before Google starts to see the effects in their bottom line.

* Microsoft has been developing Windows Vista (www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/default.aspx), in fact, the beta version has already been released. Microsoft will put a serious dent in Google's business with this because they have built a handy little search box right into the operating system.

For those of us that are forward thinking enough to prepare for this shift, the next six to eighteen months should be very rewarding. For everyone else (especially those relying entirely on traffic from Google) it will be somewhat like riding off the edge of a cliff in a Mini Cooper. So, what can be done to prepare?

* Diversify your internet marketing strategy. Search engine optimization (www.wildfiremarketinggroup.com/search-engine-optimization.php) should only be a fragment of your internet marketing. For starters, you could consider advertising on other relevant web sites, utilizing a pay-per-click campaign and publishing articles on other web sites.

* Plan for the adoption of new technology. Blogs are here to stay and RSS is taking hold. Stay on top of new and innovative ways to use technology to multiply the effectiveness of your search engine optimization campaign. You can get a general idea of what technologies to look at by staying up to date with the advances in operating systems, browsers and related software and hardware.

* Avoid using spam techniques to improve your ranking, such as hidden text, keyword stuffing, or link spamming. Most of these questionable techniques don't work and those that do don't work well - and you risk having your web site banned.

* Update your web site on a regular basis. A web site that is constantly growing is viewed by the search engines as more important, a side benefit is that by generating useful content other web site owners will have a reason to link to your web site.

Author Bio
For more marketing tips, vist Wildfire Marketing Group's marketing tips blog.

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If You're Not Linking You're Losing Money

By: Robin Henry

If you have a web site and you're not actively linking to other relevant sites, you're losing a great opportunity to improve your link popularity, get targeted traffic and increase your income. Read on to find out why.

Why Link?
There are only a few ways you can generate traffic to your site. You can pay someone to generate leads, but you have no way of knowing whether your visitors are interested in your product, service or message. Some organisations that promise thousands of visits to your site deliver the goods, but the problem is, the people who visit aren't targeted to match your product, service or message.

You can advertise on or offline to generate leads, you can wait and watch and hope someone finds your site among the many millions, or you can actively generate traffic yourself.

If you create links to other sites with high traffic, some of the people who visit those sites will click on links and visit your site. Let's face it, if no-one visits your site, the chances of selling something or getting your message read, are minimal. So, creating targeted visitors should be one of your key priorities. By targeted visitors I mean people who have bought a similar product or service to yours, or who are predisposed to do so. Consider this example. I sell an ebook titled, "Winning That Government Job" which, as the title suggests, helps job seekers to understand the government recruitment and selection process so they can be competitive when applying.

If I advertise in the employment pages of the Saturday morning newspaper in Sydney (the most populous Australian city) it will cost me $200 for one edition. I usually generate several dozen sales, but as soon as I stop advertising, the sales drop off.

If I link with another organisation having something to do with job seekers, numbers of their visitors visit my site and buy my publication. It costs much less than successive $200 adverts. Imagine what happens when I link to a dozen similar sites? I think you can see the benefit of linking.

Making Links
When I began linking I would place a keyword in a search engine and then look for sites that were suitable to exchange links. I'd find several sites, email them and occasionally get a response. I tried to find link partners for whom my products and services were complementary - so they could add value for their clients while doing me a good turn.

The process worked, but I had to spend an inordinate amount of time doing it, so I looked for a better way and couldn't believe my luck when I found a software program designed specifically for this type of activity. The program automates much of the process so, one evening per week for about two or three hours, I work with it to find and contact potential link partners.

Measuring Progress
At the end of every month I measure my site popularity, links, traffic volume, sales, expenses to sales ratio, pay-for-click search engine placements etc and compare statistics with the previous month. Slowly, but surely, my site is getting a higher position in search engines and I'm getting more referred traffic from sites with which I have exchanged links.

Link management is a huge topic. If you'd like to read more and download a free software program that will find out within minutes how many sites are linked to yours, visit this page www.dwave.com.au/link-management.html

Author Bio
Robin Henry is a HR specialist who helps businesses improve performance through implementing smart technology and processes. Find him here www.dwave.com.au

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How to Write Title Tags for Your Web Pages

By: Donald Nelson

When it comes to search engine optimization, the single most important sentence that you will write for your website is the title tag of your main page. If you write it properly then you will have taken a big step towards getting your site well placed in search engine queries for your important keywords.

Before I give you a step-by-step guide to writing title tags, let's define what they actually are and see why they are important. When you look at a web page in your browser, the writing in the blue strip above browser's commands (file, edit, view, etc.) is the title tag. On your actual html document the title tag is in the head portion between the notation title tags .

The title tag is important because it "tells" the search engine what the page is about, and in the case of your main page, what your website is all about. I remember back in my school days that we used to take standardized examinations in which we had to read a story and then answer the question: "What would be the best title for this essay?" Choosing a title tag is something like answering this kind of question. You've got to pick out the gist of your enterprise and highlight it in a sentence. So, take a look at your web page and get ready to begin, following these steps:

1. Make sure your three or four most important keywords or keyword phrases appear in the title tag. The most important words should appear near the beginning of the sentence, and they can be repeated within the sentence for added emphasis. For example, if I am offering low-cost web design, then my title tag might look like this: (title tags)Web Design: Affordable, Low Cost Web Design from the Acme Web Design Company
2. Leave your branding and sales pitch for another part of the web page. Although it is a natural tendency to want to put your company name at the beginning of the title tag, you should remember that unless you are very famous like Coca Cola, people are not searching for you. So, put your most important keywords at the front of the title tag, and establish your brand name with your logo and other elements of the web page. If your company name includes your keywords, like our hypothetical Acme Web Design Company, then put it in the title tag, but not necessarily at the beginning.

Similarly, the title tag is no place for your sales pitch, so keep out flowery or extraneous adjectives, unless they are actual terms used in searches for your product or service.
3. Place your geographical or niche-defining term in your title tag. If you are trying for a top ten or top twenty position for a term such as "web design," then you are really in for a difficult struggle. However, suppose the Acme Web Design Company is located in Columbus, Ohio. Then instead of attempting the almost impossible task of getting the top rankings for the term "web design," it would be far better to get a high ranking in the geographical niche using a title tag such "Web Design, Columbus, Ohio: Low Cost Web Design in Columbus, Ohio by The Acme Web Design Company"
4. The title tag can be longer than you think. Some guidelines say that the title tag should be no longer than 70 characters. It is true that only the first 70 characters will show in the top bar of the browser, but search engine robots will read the rest of the tag and the search engines will not penalize you for going over the 70 character mark. Take a look at highly ranked sites in heavily competitive categories and you will see examples of long title tags. Write the tag according to your need to get your important words and phrases included in a sentence that best describes what your product or service is about.
5. Vary the title tags on the inner pages of your website. Even with a long title tag, it is not possible to highlight all the possible terms which someone might use to find your website. This is not a problem if you make use of the other pages of your website. Instead of simply having a title tag that says "services" our web design firm could highlight "low cost, web design services" on that page. The "contact" page could be used to emphasize the geographical location once again, and so on. Many websites make the mistake of repeating the same title tag on each of the inner pages of the site. Avoid this and use each of your page's titles to target important keywords and keyword phrases.

So, take a look at your website's title tags, and see if you can improve them. The effort that you make will be well rewarded.

Author Bio
Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He has been working on the Internet since 1995, and is currently the director of A1-Optimization (http://www.a1-optimization.com), a firm providing low cost search engine optimization, submission and web promotion services.

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How to Raise Your Rankings in Search Engines - Basic SEO

By: Duane Jacobson

I don't know how many times I've been asked. "Many People ask How do I get traffic to my website?"

To best discuss this topic I should break this down into categories

1. Title Tags
The title Should contain keywords and keyword phrases that is important to your site. Our recommended maximum number of characters for this tag is 60.
Also when counting your characters remember that spaces are considered as well.
Titles should appeal to the reader otherwise even a top position will lose a lot of clicks.
For example, "shoes,nike shoes,best shoes,review shoes," is unlikely to induce a click. What may induce a click would be like:
Shoes - Find out the latest styles on name brand shoes.

2. Description
The maximum number of characters I recommend for this Tag is 150. Any longer than this and it will only be cut off and may count against your site being listed high in the search engines. Try to repeat your keywords that you used in your title in a proper sentence and in 3rd party. Advoid I, Me, Myself etc

3. Keywords
keywords My recommended maximum number of characters for this tag is 250. Any more than that may be considered spamming. Keep your keywords focused upon what your site is about.
Don't think that if I use an assortment of different keywords that your site will be a seller. Targeted marketing is associated with your keywords.

4. Keyword Nesting
Description: A term used in searching to indicate the sequence in which operations are to be performed
Enclosing words in parentheses identifies a group or "nest." Groups can be within other groups.
The operations will be performed from the innermost nest to the outmost, and then from left to right.
keyword nesting is nesting your top 5 most important keywords in the html page that the public will see. I would recommend using the keywords that you've used in your title, description.

5. Head Tags not to be confused with (head) tags def.
HEAD or HEADER (of HTML document)
The top portion of the HTML source code behind Web pages, beginning with and ending with . It contains the Title, Description, Keywords fields and others that web page authors may use to describe the page. The title appears in the title bar of most browsers, but the other fields cannot be seen as part of the body of the page. To view the portion of web pages in your browser, click VIEW, Page Source. In Internet Explorer, click VIEW, Source. Some search engines will retrieve based on text in these fields.
Head Tags should be a repeat of your title tag. Most webmasters put their head tag right after the body tag. A head tag will look like this (h1) (/h1) with the ( and ) being replaced with < >

6. Anchor Links
Anchor Links is one of the most important html tags that your site needs to gain search engine page rank
especially in google and msn.

Author Bio
For more information please goto: http://www.newworldproducts.com

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