Everything - and I mean EVERYTHING you want to know about SEO

Free complete guide to SEO

If you only ever read one article on SEO, make sure it's this one! (or get a free printable PDF version here)

How search engines work

A search engine operates, in the following order: 1) Crawling; 2) Deep Crawling Depth-first search (DFS); 3) Fresh Crawling Breadth-first search (BFS); 4) Indexing; 5) Searching.

Web search engines work by storing information about a large number of web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a web crawler (also known as a spider) — an automated web browser which follows every link it sees, exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed. Data about web pages is stored in an index database for use in later queries. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas some store every word of every page it finds, such as AltaVista. This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it. This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google's handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned web page. This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages. Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.

When a user comes to the search engine and makes a query, typically by giving keywords, the engine looks up the index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document's title and sometimes parts of the text. Most search engines support the use of the boolean terms AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. An advanced feature is proximity search, which allows you to define the distance between keywords.

The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the results it gives back. While there may be millions of Web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the "best" results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve.

Most web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and, as a result, some employ the controversial practice of allowing advertisers to pay money to have their listings ranked higher in search results.

The vast majority of search engines are run by private companies using proprietary algorithms and closed databases, the most popular currently being Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Search. However, Open source search engine technology does exist, such as ht://Dig, Nutch, Senas, Egothor, OpenFTS, DataparkSearch and many others.

Basic SEO Wisdom

This is a story about a poor guy with an inept domain that wanted to build a site geared for a very competitive keyword and his long, agonizing journey toward the true light of SEO wisdom.

Here's a little foundation for what I'm about to cover here. A while back I bought a stupid domain name. It was one of those fairly useless domain names that might have been good for maybe selling cell-phones or something. The thing is, though, I'm a poor guy. I don't have time to taylor a site for cellphones with the pitiful amount of money I have. This was my thinking not long ago at least.

After sitting on this domain name forever I decided to put a site up there and give myself to the study of SEO or search engine optimization. It seemed like an interesting subject and I knew to those that managed to learn SEO, marketing, and some web design would fall infinite riches. It really sounded good to me.

So I went for the throat so to speak. More precisely I picked out some search terms that I will probably never be able to get traffic for in my lifetime. Smart I know. This had the grand side effect of having the site sandboxed by Yahoo and Google until pigs flew.

Recently they flew, however, and I've come out of the sandbox altogether and hit face to face with a few SEO surprises. I did manage to get a tiny trickle of traffic but not from the terms I tried to get it from. After trying to optimize those pages for the key terms I received traffic from I got more traffic. This of course started me down a long road of speculation and hair pulling.

After many a night of such I've come up with a few things that I believe will give anyone the power to eventually pull traffic off the net and covert it into a good decent living. I'll probably write an e-book and make millions one of these days.

Optimize by the page
Don't fall into the trap of focusing totally on building this far flung and far reaching site that will rule the world or make you millions instantly. Unless you have lots of money you're going to need to work for your traffic. Plan your site out carefully and make sure each page is a precision crafted piece of art.

I love server-side scripting and dynamic websites but I've come to realize there is a danger that people will overuse it. I know I have. If your site is dynamically generted, make sure every page isn't a total cookie cutter image of every other page. It's good to have the same navigation and same general layout but each page also needs to be special. Each page should have careful, proven SEO techniques applied to maybe a single key phrase.

Don't try to optimize one page for a handful of phrases. Just focus on one phrase. Do your keyword research and, whatever you do, don't haul off and pick a key phrase with 2 billion wealthy competitors in Google. Pick something that can be attained and can get you some traffic relatively fast. Select a phrase that is as specific as possible to your particular niche and still gets a couple thousand or so searches per month from Yahoo.

Whatever you do, make sure that one web page has good, solid, desirable content that is keyword rich and one of a kind. This will help make it special. At the same time your content obviously needs to lead the customer toward your intended goal for monetizing your traffic.

Keep it simple
I've found to my dismay that building a complex web site with all the content management stuff and all the database thrills isn't exactly what really gets the attention of search engines. Weirdly enough this can be true for internet surfers too. A nice, clean layout with very accessible content and intuitive navigation will be recognized by both search engines and surfers alike. If you can figure that part out you've just pinned down about 90% of SEO in my opinion.

Engineer your site for your traffic
When you start getting search engine traffic to your site take a very close look at what they are searching for. I assume you have some kind of statistics program and can mostly see what search terms people are using to get to your site. When someone comes in on a keyword or phrase you haven't optimized for do a little research. Does the page they are coming to need touched up to include the search term or would this search term merit its own search engine optimized page to handle the traffic.

Conclusion
With every page you add you are gaining another potentially valuable piece of internet real estate. If you're doing your job right then eventaully each page should get its own traffic and you should begin to attain your goals. Patience and learning are the name of the SEO game.

Black & White - The Philosophies of SEO

Search engine optimization otherwise known as SEO is a popular form of search engine marketing. The main goal of which (as its name would suggest) is to improve the ranking of the site in various search engines. An entire industry of consultants has sprung up around the idea of search engine optimization. However, it’s important to note that there are two distinct and disparate methodologies at work when it comes to optimization. In fact the SEO consultants themselves as well as their methods can be subdivided further into two different groups. The categories are best known as "white hat SEO" (which is aimed at improving overall site quality, and increasing the site’s ranking through approved methods), or "black hat SEO" (often use methods such as cloaking and spamdexing to increase rankings. However, using such methods can lead to your site to being removed from search engine listings). Those in the white hat camp charge that black hat methods are not only giving SEO a bad name but are also attempting to manipulate and undermine the search rankings. The black hatters counter that argument by saying that in truth all SEO is an attempt to manipulate rankings, and therefore the particular methods one uses to increase rankings are irrelevant. In other words they take the more Machiavellian approach of using the end results to justify the means they use.

So what more specifically are the methods being employed by the two camps?

White hat methods:

These methods typically involve following the search engines' published guidelines as to what is and what isn't acceptable. The advice typically given by the white hat SEO experts is to create more user-friendly content, and not focus so much on the search engines. That is if your site is well put together and presents something users need it will naturally climb in the rankings. Also by making content that is easily accessible to the search engines spiders it will be properly read and therefore properly indexed in the search engines. The white hatters are needed most often because a webmaster has made critical mistakes in either the design or the set-up of their websites, inadvertently "poisoning" them so that they will not rank well. The SEOs then attempt to discover and correct these mistakes, which may include unreadable menus, broken links, temporary redirects, or simply a poor navigation structure.

Here are a few examples of SEO activities which the search engines find acceptable:

• Using a reasonably-sized, accurate description meta tag without excessive use of keywords, exclamation marks or off topic terms.

• Optimizing tags, titles and other parts of the code as necessary

• Using WordTracker or a similar database to find popular and relevant keywords and phrases to use for your site.

• Monitoring the various search engines to ensure that your URL gets indexed

• Increasing the amount of unique content on the site.

• Writing quality content for the website visitors instead of the search engines.

Black hat methods:

Whereas the white hat methods follow search engine guidelines "Black hat" SEO methods to try to improve rankings by any means necessary. Most of these methods are disapproved of by the search engines, typically because of their deceptive nature, but also hamper the ability of the search engines to provide quality content to site visitors. Search engines often penalize the sites they discover using black hat methods, by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from the search engine results altogether. These penalties are usually applied automatically by the search engines' algorithms, because the Internet is too large to make manual policing of websites feasible. However once they are discovered, search engines may take action against those found to be using unethical SEO methods. Take for example Google’s removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany in February 2006 for use of these practices.
One common black hat method is known as Spamdexing. Spamdexing is the promotion of irrelevant, chiefly commercial, pages through various deceptive techniques and the abuse of the search algorithms. Unfortunately it often gets confused with white hat search engine optimization techniques, which do not involve deceit. Spamming involves getting websites more exposure than they deserve for their keywords, leading to unsatisfactory search results. Optimization involves getting websites the rank they deserve on the most targeted keywords, leading to satisfactory search experiences.

One example of spamdexing is link farming. Link farming can be basically defined as any group of web pages that all link to every other page in the group. Another common practice is listing popular keywords in fine print or in the same color as the background so they can’t be seen by users.

So how can you tell the difference between Black and White SEO practices?

A very easy way to distinguish between the two is though the amount of time involved in getting the desired results. White hat SEOs use methods that produce results slowly over time and only after a good deal of effort has been put into the site. Black hat SEOs offer you quick and easy results most, if not all, of which will obtained through deceptive practices.

3 Things Search Engines Want To See - Using Links The Engines Will Like

Search engine companies are constantly changing their algorithms to keep their results up-to-date. Optimization used to be the primary factor search engines used to determine a website’s ranking. However, it currently makes up only about 10% of their total algorithms. What carries the most weight with search engines now is linking.

Linking is the process of connecting to other sites that are relevant to your target market and that are highly ranked, and of getting them to connect to you. Google has, by far, the largest percentage of the search engine market, and they’re link-driven. The other search engines tend to follow Google’s lead, so the market is moving faster in that direction.

3 Tips for Building Smart Links

When choosing which sites you want to link to, keep in mind what the search engines want to see:

• Search engines are looking for organic results. According to Bruce Chapman of http://Linkateer.com, the number one search engine positioning firm on the web, “One of the things we try to do is make sure every single one of our links is pertinent to that particular type of business.” If your website sells makeup, a natural link would be to a site that gives makeup application techniques. An unnatural link would be to an actor’s fan club site. Says Chapman, “If it’s not natural, it’s going to be a problem.”

• Search engines are looking for consistent results. More links aren’t necessarily better. In fact, getting too many links at once, such as by joining a link farm, can actually hurt your rankings. Gaining 20,000 links this month and 13 links next month is going to trip their filters and, for all your work, you’re going to find yourself dropping in the rankings. With links, the search engines are more concerned with quality than quantity.

• Search engines are looking for one-way links. Reciprocal links are often just people exchanging links to mutually increase their link counts. The search engines have grown wise to this practice and adapted their algorithms. Says Chapman, “When one website wants to link to another website, that’s showing that the second website has got something of value… The one-way link is probably worth 20 times as much as a reciprocal link.”

Achieving Natural Results

It takes time to achieve good positioning in the search engines, especially with the more competitive keywords. Any attempts to trick the engines may work for a while; but they’re getting more and more sophisticated, and they’ll eventually catch up with you. Not only will your trick no longer work, but you may get blackballed or be penalized in your rankings. The best way to achieve high rankings is to give the search engines what they’re looking for—good fresh content and relevant links.

Tips For Raising Your Search Engine Rankings

Search engine rankings are an important factor to consider when you have a web site that needs more traffic. If your web site doesn’t have a good position in the rankings then it will be hard to find.

Since most searchers click on the first few results, you need to make sure that your web site is ranked highly enough so that people can easily find it on the first page of search engine results. Although no search engine optimization company can guarantee a high rankings for your site permanently, often times hiring a web marketing company will pay off many times over. For those of you doing it yourself or those of you that want to ensure your marketing company is doing a good job, here are some tips for raising the search engine rankings of your web site.

1. Content

Content is an important factor in high search engine rankings. Make sure that you have plenty of content throughout your site with your target keywords in the articles. It’s also worth doing a search for web sites similar to yours and taking a look at their articles for ideas. Keywords are an important factor and they should be used throughout the content of your website.

2. Web Site URL

Your web site’s URL can help you rank higher with the search engines if it contains your keywords. However, don’t think that naming your site after your keywords will always help your rankings – you need to do more than just that. But still, it is one of the factors in improving a search engine ranking.

3. Search Terms

Search terms should be written out in text, instead of graphics. If you use pictures, be sure to give them alt tags. If you want a good rank in search engines then these things that may seem small should be considered, as search engines can read the text but not the graphics.

4. Page Title

The title of your page is very important, and if you choose the title properly then it can surely make a big difference in search engine ranking. Terms such ‘free article on safe children's toys’, or ‘contact the children's toy expert today’ are good to use as titles on pages containing such content. The titles themselves are very specific to the page and also may not have much competition being as specific as they are. The title area is the most important place to include your keyword phrases, so make sure that you utilize it.

Master these four tips and you’ll be on your way to getting free traffic. Look for other tips to keep your site moving up.

3 Key Off-Page Search Engine Optimization Methods

If you are not into the nerve-wracking tasks of on-page SEO, here the three major ways to accomplish off-page SEO.

On-page search engine optimization is definitely one of the key methods if a website owner would like to improve the results for his or her website's searchability. However, on-page SEO often entails technical skills. Why? Not a lot of people are HTML enthusiasts. This is often what needs to be tweaked to do an excellent job in optimizing web pages.

What if a geek friend already did the on-page optimization and now you want to know how you can contribute to the "search engine goodness" of your website? Off-page optimization is the next step. And the results you will have to pine for are one-way backlinks. Why? This is how many of the major search engines such Google, Yahoo! and MSN rank websites. The more backlinks from relevant sites with good page rank, the merrier.

So how exactly do you gather backlinks? It's not an easy task but it's definitely less nerve-wracking than HTML if you are not the techie type. Here are some off-page SEO tips:

1. Article Marketing

Quality content has been discovered to be real king. Everyone is hungry for fresh and quality info and providing it will make backlinks go pouring in. It helps a lot to be a keen writer to be successful on this endeavor. Also, practise the proper way of using a resource box. It should only include a website that contains information relevant to the article you submit to article directories.

2. Forum Participation

Look for forums that are relevant to your website's content and keep on sharing information that will be indispensable for the members of the forums. Your signature or that tag-along message at the last part of each of your posts is what will work for your off-page SEO campaign. Keep it simple and make sure that it conveys something about your website. Learn how to hyperlink to make it easy for the people who want to visit your site.

3. Blogging

Blogs or web logs are now the most popular weapons of SEO experts. Aside from being easy-to-update, they don't require a too formal tone, which is what many readers are into. Informal dialog which can be accomplished through readers leaving comments and the blog author replying to the comments is what also keeps blogs fresh and search engine friendly. Maintaining a blog that's again relevant to your website's content will keep the search engines in touch with your site. Don't forget to have a link on your main website from your blog.

The secret to be successful in carrying out these off-page SEO methods is to be consistent. Submitting quality articles to websites at least two to three times a week and regularly producing content for your personalized blog is a surefire way to make your website stand out. Forum participation should also be something done more frequently since it will not only help you up your website's popularity with the search engines but also make you learn new stuff from other forum members' participation. Also, if you discover that you don't enjoy these stuff, there's always a plan B - hire someone to do them for you!

5 SEO Tasks You Should Do Every Day

Article Body:
There are five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top. Here they are:

1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you don’t know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they aren’t getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled to reflect the page that they link to.

2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you don’t have much reason to keep a link if you aren’t getting the backlink that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).

3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common curtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.

4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.

5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure it’s still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at misopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.

Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.

Never agree to link to someone’s site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you – even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your site’s content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.

Basic Link Checks.

Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says ‘Disallow’ and has the URL of their links page, then they’re not letting spiders index that page. Don’t exchange links with that site.

You should also check to see if the website is being ‘cloaked’, and report it to the search engines if it is. You don’t want to get involved with these people – better to have them banned and out of the way.

Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR0 doesn’t necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.

Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldn’t be more than 20 links – if the site breaks this rule, don’t even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking they’re helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them don’t even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. There’s no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.

10 Costly Search Engine Mistakes to Avoid

If you have a website then you already know the importance of traffic. Traffic is to Internet marketing as location is to real estate. It's the only thing that really matters. If you cannot generate targeted visitors to your site, you will not make any sales.
Usually the owner or designer of the website is the person designated to drive traffic to the site. The chief ingredient in generating traffic is the search engine. Of coarse, you can use advertising, but it's going to cost you. Using the search engines to generate targeted (interested in your product) traffic is the least expensive method known.

Unfortunately, many website owners do not understand the importance of search engine visibility, which leads to traffic. They place more importance on producing a "pretty" website. Not that this is bad, but it is really secondary to search engine placement. Hopefully, the following list of common mistakes, made by many website owners, will help you generate more targeted traffic to your site...after all, isn't that what you want.

1. Not using keywords effectively.

This is probably one of the most critical area of site design. Choose the right keywords and potential customers will find your site. Use the wrong ones and your site will see little, if any, traffic.

2. Repeating the same keywords.

When you use the same keywords over and over again (called keyword stacking) the search engines may downgrade (or skip) the page or site.

3. Robbing pages from other websites.

How many times have you heard or read that "this is the Internet and it's ok" to steal icons and text from websites to use on your site. Don't do it. Its one thing to learn from others who have been there and another to outright copy their work. The search engines are very smart and usually detect page duplication. They may even prevent you from ever being listed by them.

4. Using keywords that are not related to your website.

Many unethical website owners try to gain search engine visibility by using keywords that have nothing at all to do with their website. They place unrelated keywords in a page (such as "sex", the name of a known celebrity, the hot search topic of the day, etc.) inside a meta tag for a page. The keyword doesn't have anything to do with the page topic. However, since the keyword is popular, they think this will boost their visibility. This technique is considered spam by the search engines and may cause the page (or sometimes the whole site) to be removed from the search engine listing.

5. Keyword stuffing.

Somewhat like keyword stacking listed above, this means to assign multiple keywords to the description of a graphic or layer that appears on your website by using the "alt=" HTML parameter. If the search engines find that this text does not really describe the graphic or layer it will be considered spam.

6. Relying on hidden text.

You might be inclined to think that if you cannot see it, it doesn't hurt. Wrong.... Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them invisible. For example, some unethical designers my set the keywords to the same color as the background of the web page; thereby, making it invisible.

7. Relying on tiny text.

This is another version of the item above (relying on hidden text). Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them tiny. Setting the text size of the keywords so small that it can barely be seen does this.

8. Assuming all search engines are the same.

Many people assume that each search engine plays by the same rules. This is not so. Each has their own rule base and is subject to change anytime they so desire. Make it a point to learn what each major search engine requires for high visibility.

9. Using free web hosting.

Do not use free web hosting if you are really serious about increasing site traffic via search engine visibility. Many times the search engines will eliminate content from these free hosts.

10. Forgetting to check for missing web page elements.

Make sure to check every page in your website for completeness, like missing links, graphics, etc. There are sites on the web that will do this for free.

This is just a few of the methods and techniques that you should avoid. Do not give in to the temptation that these methods will work for you. They will do more harm than good for your website.

Not only will you spend weeks of wasted effort, you may have your site banned from the search engines forever. Invest a little time to learn the proper techniques for increasing search engine visibility and your net traffic will increase.

Free Search Engine Optimization and Writing Tools

Below are some of the best sites I have found for optimizing my sites.

1. Check your site.
Before you start tweaking your site, you need to make sure that it's either in Google or not banned by Google.

The truth is, you want to optimize your site for Google, which is now the number one search engine in the world.

It won't do you any good to optimize your site if Google won't accept it.

Use this tool to check your site.

Google Banned - http://www.googlebanned.com

2. Toolkits
If you can find the tools you need in a collection, this will save you a lot of time, as well as frustration because you will know exactly what you need to do to properly optimize your site.

You'll want to check different aspects of your site like page rank, metatag information, and links. Nothing will drive your potential customers away faster than broken links.

This site, in addition to offering a forum on search engine optimization, also offers a nice collection of tools for helping you optimize your site.

SEO Chat - http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools

These two sites also offer search engine optimization tools. It's really a matter of preference, as well as what tools you need to optimize your site.

Add Me - http://www.addme.com
Evrsoft - http://www.evrsoft.com

3. SEO Software
You can also use software to help you optimize your site. Where software will help you the most is to actually help you optimize your site for the keywords you are trying to target. It's a waste of time to optimize your site if you haven't optimized for the right keywords.

This is the software I use, and it's free. It works for both MAC and PC, and it has some of the best documentation I've ever seen on search engine optimization because it's written for the average person. It also includes a basic search engine optimization training course, a 50 page manual, and excellent, step by step directions for preparing your website for the search engines.

Web CEO - http://www.webceo.com

4. ROR Generator/Robots Text Generator
A what?

ROR is similar to a robots.txt file in that it gives information about your site. The difference is that an ROR file is in XML format.

You can use this generator to create an ROR file for your site, and then paste a button to the main page of your website. When the search engines spider your site, they'll spider this file and have a better description of what your site is about.

I would also recommend that you create a robots.txt file because this will tell the search engines what not to spider on your site. If you own a members' area, or you sell anything, you don't want the search engines spidering your download pages.

ROR Generator - http://www.rorweb.com/rorgenerator.php

Robots Text Generator - http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/robots-text-creator/simple-robots-creator.php

5. Site Map
A site map is not only a great tool for letting your customers know where everything is located on your site, it can also help you with the search engines.

By creating a site map, you will have an index of all the pages on your website. When the search engines spider your site, they'll find all of the pages. This will help you with your rankings.

Creating a site map, especially if you have hundreds, or even thousands of pages on your site, can be very time consuming. This generator will speed up the process.

Spider Map Creator - http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/spider-map/creator.php

6. XML Site Generator
Google is now offering webmasters a chance to submit an XML site map.

An XML sitemap is a search engine friendly sitemap of your site. This isn't written for your visitors though. It's written for the search engines so that they can find all of the pages on your website.

Even if you include a sitemap on your site for your visitors, I would still recommend that you use an XML sitemap. This can speed the process of getting your site indexed by Google. This is an easy way to make sure that all of your pages get indexed.

Creating a sitemap is easy. You can use the generator listed below. Once you've created your sitemap, submit it to Google.

XML Site Maps - http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/index.php

Submit your sitemap to Google - https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

7. Linking
There's been a lot of talk about linking because linking is one of the most important strategies for getting high ranking in the search engines.

The more links you have pointing back to your site, the higher the page rank you will get, as well as creating a way for others to find you. You can use this strategy to get referrals from other sites, which is free traffic. It's targeted, and you are being recommended by another site.

Before building your linking strategy though, you should check your popularity. See who you are linked to first.

Link Popularity Checker - http://www.marketleap.com/siteindex/default.htm

Once you have checked your link popularity, begin by building links back to your site. Below are two sites that offer directories you can submit your site to.

Directory Manager - http://www.123promotion.co.uk/directorymanager/

Free directories that don't require a link back - http://www.directoriezsubmission.com/free-web-directories.htm

Linking can drive a lot of traffic to your site. The more backlinks you have pointing back to your site, the more popular it will be. You'll also get a lot more traffic.

Before you start to market, complete your site. Optimize it for the search engines, and use these tools to help you get higher rankings.

5 Tips to Ranking Well at Search Engines

Do you have a product or service that you want to sell on the Internet? If so, there are a few fundamental components that you must know. Putting your product or service up for sale is easy. You can find a cheap hosting plan and get a 1-5 page site up within a few hours. But what happens next?

Unfortunately, most businesses will never sell their product successfully on the Internet. Their sites may be flashy, but they are not receiving visitors. To receive an endless supply of free, targeted, leads from the search engines you should consider a few of the 5 tips below.

Tip #1- Provide High Quality Content

Providing content does more than give out generic information. Providing content builds trust between you and your visitor. The more content you give, the bigger the bond. Your content should focus around very specific keywords. Each page on your website should be optimized and focused on one keyword.

Finding keywords is a task in and of itself. I will be the first to admit that hunting down keywords with a high demand and low supply is not the easiest task in the world. It can be boring and repetitive. After awhile the numbers will blend together and you will feel a bit dazed. But do not stop now! Keywords are the foundation for your content pages and for your business.

Tip #2- Find Relevant Linking Partners

The days of trading links with any old site are gone. There was a period in time when search engines counted how many links in you had to your site. They factored that and determined if your site was good or not. So if your site had 300 other sites linking to it, search engines would have probably considered it a better site than one with only 10 incoming links.

Search engines have wised up since those days. Now search engines place more emphasis on relevant links. Your site should only link to other sites that are high quality and relevant. If your site is about cookies then you should not be linking to a site about gambling. It doesn't make sense for your site visitors, and it doesn't make sense to the search engines.

When you trade links with a relevant, high quality site be sure you specify where your link should be placed, for how long, and what it should say. I often see people exchange links and within a few days the linking partner has taken down the link. Only do business with trusted webmasters.

Tip #3- Submit Your Site to Site Directories

This is a great way to get high quality and high ranked sites to link to you. Think of a link to your site as a vote of confidence. Site directories are less popular than search engines, but their link to you helps you increase in search engine rankings. Be wary of any site directory that makes you pay for submission. There are plenty of great directories that allow you to submit your site for free.

Getting as specific as possible with site directories is a great idea. If your site is about cookies, you should try to find a site directory that only deals with desserts or foods. General directories are fine, but be sure you submit your site to the appropriate category. General directories tend to have a category for almost any topic.

Some site directories will ask you to link to them first. This is your choice. I do not link or pay to get into any site directory. There are too many free ones that do not require a link back. Remember to place only relevant links on your site. Would your cookie site visitors want to click on a link for a site directory?

Tip #4- Add a Site Map

A site map is a single webpage that contains links to all the other pages on your site. Adding a map will help your visitors find information quickly. Besides being a helpful tool for visitors a site map also helps search engines find pages. When a search engine spider visits your site it crawls through a page. It visits all the links on your page and it checks for keywords. This is why keywords and relevant linking partners are recommended above.

Once the search engine spider finds the site map it will find all of your other pages. Search engine spiders do not like to dig very deep into sites. They like to search through 2 or 3 'levels' of information. So pages that are hard to find will not rank well or they will take much longer to rank well. A site map helps the engines find all your pages at once.

Tip #5- Be Patient and Find Other Means of Traffic

Waiting for the search engines to scour your site and rank it could take a bit of time. I recommend a lot of patience. When I post a new content page on my website, it takes a few weeks to get noticed. Some search engines are fast and rank the page immediately. Others are a bit slower.

While you wait for your pages to rank well I recommend finding alternative ways to drive traffic to your site. You can look into PPC (pay-per-click advertising), article writing, off-line ads, buying ad space in newsletters, doing a joint venture with a fellow webmaster or post in relevant forums.

These 5 tips to ranking well at the search engines are tried and true methods. I have built a site using these 5 tips and can personally attest to their sheer power. Patience is the hardest part. Keep building relevant content, link to relevant partners, submit to site directories, add a site map and then keep going.

Persistence pays off. Building a web business takes time. Your business needs to develop and mature. Using some or all of the above tips can ensure a big payoff down the road.

3 Steps To Getting Hundreds Of Backlinks To Your Website Absolutely FREE

Link Popularity as you know plays a BIG part in your websites ranking within the Search Engines.

So, the basic breakdown is, the more links pointing to your website, the higher up the search engines will rank your website.

More importantly though is getting those High PR websites linking back to yours.

The question at hand is... "How can I get those High PR links without having to buy High PR links and/or spend countless hours surfing the web for link partners with the possible potential of being denied?"

And as webmasters, we can not afford to waste time, especially if your starting out on a part time basis.

We must utilize every minute we can to getting the most out of our efforts.

So with that being said, I'm going to reveal to you the 'Back Door' strategy I use for getting those High PR links to your website Absolutely FREE and have them begging you to come back.

And the cool thing is this can be done following these 3 steps I'm about to mention so pay attention because if you do just this, you will not only get hundreds of backlinks to your website, you'll also get hundreds, if not thousands of Targeted visitors to your website at the same time...

...all for FREE!

Are you ready?

Good, because I am.

Step #1. First you must write or find an Article you can use

The first step is to write an related article about your Product or Service that draws the reader in and gets them to click through to your website once they finish reading it to find out more about you and your Product or Service.

Now, your probably wondering why you have to write an article.

Well, it's real simple actually because what do you get to put at the end of your article?

Your 'Resource Box' with your website information and most important of all... your URL pointing back to your website.

So when someone chooses to publish your article in their newsletter or on their website, blog or article directory, they MUST add your 'Resource Box' with your website information and URL.

I know some of you are saying... "I don't know how to write an article" ... well, your not alone.

Here are a few resources I've put together for you so you can get the basic idea of How-To structure your articles with ease or get someone else to write them for you.

The first is an article I wrote called... THE 7 Step Formula For Writing POWERFUL Articles In Less Than An Hour.

It will show you How-To structure your articles for easy writing. http://www.internetwondersezine.com/article_11.html

The second resource is Elance.com - http://www.elance.com - which is basically a place where you can go and submit a project by category and freelance writers, etc. will then bid on your project. You pick the winner and you set the budget.

This will get you started in the right direction.

Remember, your article is the Nuts and Bolts of this 'Back Linking' strategy, so make sure you put some effort into it to get it as much exposure as possible.

Step #2. Submit your article to Article Directories.

This is the next step and an important one at that because this is where your article or articles are going to get picked up by website owners and/or ezine publishers who are in constant need of fresh, quality information to feed their audiences hunger for information.

There are literally hundreds of Article Directories out there and thousands of ezine publishers looking for quality content on a daily basis. And if they choose your article for publication, they must include your 'Resource Box' with your websites information and URL.

It's all about the numbers. The more Article Directories and websites you submit your articles to, the more potential Backlinks you'll get to your website.

And since Article Directories have recently adopted RSS(Real Simple Syndication) technology into the mix your articles will even get More mileage without you lifting a finger, creating even more Backlinks to your website.

More on RSS in a minute.

Are you starting to see the Power behind writing your own articles.

I hope so.

Step #3. Create your own RSS Feed for your articles.

This last step is a very Powerful step as well.

What you need to do is set up your own RSS Feed for your articles.

Now, if you don't know what RSS is here's the basic definition...

RSS is by definition - an acronym for 'Real Simple Syndication' or 'Rich Site Summary', and the .XML extension is the format used for distributing your news headlines via the Web, which is known as 'Syndication.

'Syndication' is where the TRUE power of RSS is unleashed, getting your message or information across the web in an INSTANT to websites, subscribers and/or readers who subscribed to your RSS Feed.

The easiest way for you to do this is to set up your own Blog either through...

Wordpress.org - http://www.wordpress.org

Or through...

Blogger.com - http://www.blogger.com

Wordpress is a little more advanced so I recommend if you don't have alot of experience with Blogs or installing scripts that you go set up a Blogger blog which will only take you less than 5 minutes to do.

I'm just giving you some options, that's all.

Once you've set up your Blog the only thing left for you to do is add you articles.

TIP: Make sure you hyperlink your URL and use Anchor Text with your most targeted keywords. By doing this the Search Engine spiders will rank your website higher under that keyword term you specify in your Anchor Text.

After you've added your articles all you have to do now is submit your new RSS Feed to RSS Directories and RSS Search Engines.

Here's a few resources for you to get started with.

Ping-O-Matic - http://pingomatic.com

RSS Top 55 - http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55

That's it.

Now I know I dumped alot of information on you within this article so just take it Step-By-Step because once you implement it properly it will benefit you for years to come with Backlinks to your website and FREE targeted traffic via the Search Engines, Website Owners and eZine Publishers.

3 Steps To Getting Listed In The Search Engines

You've just finished putting in all kinds of effort towards getting your website online. You're ready to take orders and make sales. The only problem is... No one can find your website! You need to get listed in the major search engines in order to get visitors to visit your website. What can you do? Follow these 3 steps and the search engines will know about your site in no time at all.

1. Write an article related to the main topic of your website.

Not sure if you know enough about writing to write an article? Don't worry about being perfect. Write about what you know. Keep the article short, between 300-600 words long. When you write the article, give out general information that anyone would gladly post on their site as valuable content. Don't try to sell your product or service in this article.

Remember the goal of the article is for you to get a valuable link back to your website, not to make a sale. In fact, if you try to make a sale in the article, most webmasters will not want to publish your article on their site. The whole goal of writing articles is to get your articles on as many websites as possible with a link pointing back to your site.

2. Include a resource box at the end of the article with your website link in it.

If you've created a good general information article that is relevant to the topic of your website, you are ready to create your resource box. Keep in mind here to get to the point quickly. It is usually considered fine to promote your product or service in this resource box but it is necessary to keep it short. You should remember that the main point of including this resource box is to get a link going back to your website. The secondary purpose of the resource box is to get readers of your article to click through and visit your website.

When including a link in your resource box, make sure that one of your links includes the main keywords of your home page. Keywords are a fancy term for the phrase or words a visitor will type in to find your website. Make the keyword the clickable portion of the link instead of your web address. Put this keyword text in between your html anchor link.

3. Submit your article to the major article directories.

Once you've created your article, submit it to the major article directories to get the article distributed on as many websites as possible. Some major article directories include EzineArticles, ArticleCity, <a href="http://www.zapcontent.com">ZapContent.com</a> and Isnare. Some services like Isnare will even distribute your article for you for a fee.

Do these three steps and search engines will find, crawl, then list your website in their listings. It's as simple as that!

12 Months Without SEO

It is more than a year now since I concluded that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was, or was soon going to become, a waste of time. I had already, 6 months before then, said farewell to spending an hour a day working on getting reciprocal links.

What led, at the time, to what many would have said were very rash moves? After all, reciprocal linking was still being expounded, by all and sundry, as an essential way to get a good ranking, and the software tools were being actively marketed still. Search engine positioning software was still being heavily marketed and is still today; keyword density was a buzz term being branded around as if it were an essential science to be practised by all good SEO conscious webmasters.

What I did was to go back to marketing basics. I had received my marketing training back in the 1980's and had practical marketing experience with my own business from the mid 1990's. I was not born into internet marketing alone, so could still see outside the blinkers and the hype.

A very basic but important aspect of marketing is to know your market place. When it comes to search engine rankings, then clearly a major part of that market was the major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN, with Google being the clear leader then, and a year later today.

I started to think 18 months ago that as far as reciprocal linking went, it was becoming a spammers' zone. Surely, I argued with myself, Google did not really want to rank a web site highly just because the web master had the tools and the time to chase around getting reciprocal links? It just did not make sense. And the same was true of buying links. Why should a web site rank highly because they have splashed out on buying links?

What Google, and the others, really wanted was to rank the best web sites for a particular search term, and it seemed only a matter of time before they sniffed out and extinguished the abuses such as blatantly artificial link building, Blog spam, scraping and extreme SEO'ing.

A year ago, I started two new web sites without any real thought of SEO. As a writer, I was happy to try to provide what search engines wanted: original content on what people were searching for. While I did provide title and description tags, everything else was just written on a go with the flow basis. The keyword phrase for any page would come out in the natural flow. I could just write to my heart's content without using any tools checking keyword density.

The first of those new web sites 13 months ago was in the self improvement niche, which is highly competitive. I was expecting to be “Sandboxed” by Google because of that, and so it proved. But I just kept plugging away, sticking to my no-SEO principle. Of course, none of us outside Google knows for sure if there is such a thing as a sandbox, but there is undoubtedly a waiting time before a new site is thrown fully into the ranking melting pot.

In the self improvement case, the last Google update saw my site emerge from the sandbox after about 12 months. So, at last, I was able see whether my no SEO approach was to yield any positive results. Thankfully, a few high rankings were immediately apparent, including a few #1 positions. On one of those terms, Yahoo followed a few weeks later to the #1 position, while the site was #2 (now 1) at MSN.

Now, this is early days for that particular site, and there is much to do to get more high rankings. However, I am confident that SEO is infinitely more simple than some experts, especially those selling ranking tools, tend to have you believe.

Since I started that particular site, I have only made one major change, and that is convert all my web sites to CSS. Providing a content rich site that is easy to crawl for search engine robots is the most important aspect of the new, simplified SEO. In fact, following Google's advice to webmasters is about all you need to do, and that is free.

Of course, those with software products to peddle will argue that I could do even better with their software. But if Google decides to blacklist that software as a manipulating tool, then all my hard work could be undone. So I will leave the others to chase shadows with ranking software, and just enjoy writing content. After all, that is what basic marketing told me to do.

Advanced SEO Optimization Process

Given the razor-sharp competition in the internet marketing today, it takes the help of an intelligent SEO company India to beat the competition and sustain one’s India website rankings. Search engine optimization specialists can tell you how to improve your ranking in popular search engines which is crucial to boosting the volume of traffic to your website. An SEO marketing company would tell you that it is not enough if you rank higher only in a specific search engine. A comprehensive search engine optimization strategy comprises of techniques that ensure higher ranking in all popular search engines enhancing your chance to augment the volume of your online traffic.

So how to find the right SEO partnership to join the hands with for a holistic search engine optimization? If you are aiming at finding the right SEO services India from an experienced SEO company India to increase website rankings then there are a number of factors which you have to take into consideration.

We have a team of SEO experts India who understand the search engine dynamics inside out. Our SEO India Company consists of talented search engine optimization specialists who are immensely experienced to handle SEO campaigns for the most competitive keywords and key phrases in any specialized business domain. Being a leading SEO company India, we believe that succeeding in any SEO marketing campaign requires impeccable and in-depth keyword analysis which is the cornerstone of the entire SEO process and one of the most crucial factors in boosting your website rankings. Our search engine optimization specialists analyze keywords and keyword phrases using cutting-edge keyword analysis tools to arrive at the keywords and key phrases that are not only less competitive but also highly searchable on the web.

As a top-notch SEO services India provider we are renowned for offering SEO content writing services that will potentially boost your page rank. Our content writers bring their creativity and experience together to write keyword rich content with an amazingly assertive, appealing and marketing punch making the page a must-read for your classified audience. We know that content is the soul of any webpage and play a crucial role in getting you good search engine ranking in all popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Before you go for a full-fledged SEO campaign, don’t underestimate the importance of the right SEO partnership. The right kind of Seo Company India can make or break the very purpose of your SEO campaign. If not handled properly or if you choose the wrong SEO partnership, then you will stand to lose money as well as your precious time. On the top of it, you will end up subjecting your website to mal-optimization which again will add to your injury.

We adopt white-hat SEO techniques for better India website rankings. With us, you stand to gain standardized, customized and cost-effective SEO packages that meet all your needs. Here is a lowdown on what we offer in our SEO services India.
1. We offer a campaign specific module for each of our clients. We allow them the privilege of specifying their own keywords (unless they want us to carryout a comprehensive keyword analysis), their targeted demography and the list of competitors. Our search engine optimization specialists then examine and optimize them which is then sent to our customers for their approval. The final list is drafted after the clients’ approval.
2. Our search engine optimizations specialists do a lot for boosting the website ranking of our clients. They follow a strategic on-page optimization process by enhancing the keyword density, keyword positioning, URL structure guidelines, meta-tags content, relevance of visible text and so forth.
3. Link popularity is the most crucial factor of search engine optimization which boosts the popularity of your website. We have a dedicated team of link builders who do the job for strategic link building to improve the popularity of our clients’ websites.
4. We carry out the optimization services with an LSI based SEO approach. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is the technique that gives you a crucial edge over your competitors for attracting high volume of traffic as well as potential clients. This ensures better results for your clients and higher profits for you.

Algorithms-The Foundation of Search Engine Optimization

In the ninth century Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a Persian mathematician, introduced algebrac concepts and Arabic numerals while he was working in Baghdad. During the time Baghdad was the international center for scientific study. Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi's process of performing arithmetic with Arabic numerals was called algorism. In the eighteenth century the name evolved into algorithm. Algorithms are a finite set of carefully defined instruction. Algorithms are procedures that are used for accomplishing some task which will end in a defined end-state. Algorithms are used in linguistics, computers, and mathematics.

Many people like to think of algorithms as steps in a well written recipe. Provided you follow each step of the recipe to the letter you will have an edible dinner. As long as you follow each step of the algorithm you will find the proper solution. Simple algorithms can be used to design complex algorithms.

Computers use algorithms as a way to process information. All computer programs are created with algorithms (or series of algorithms) that give the computer a list of instructions to follow. Computers usually read data from an input device when using an algorithm to process information. In order to be successful algorithms need to be carefully defined for a computer to read them. Program designers need to consider every possible scenario that could arise and set up a series of algorithms to resolve the problem. Designers have to be very careful not to change the order of the instructions; computers cannot cope with an algorithm that is in the wrong place. Flow of control refers to how the list of algorithms must start at the top and go all the way to the bottom, following every single step on the way.

Some terms that are used to describe algorithms include natural languages, flowcharts, psudocode, and programming languages. Natural expression algorithms are generally only seen in simple algorithms. Computers generally use programming languages that are intended for expressing algorithms.

There are different ways to classify algorithms. The first is by the specific type of algorithm. Types of algorithms include recursive and interative algorithms, deterministic and non-deterministic algorithms, and approximation algorithms. The second method used to classify algorithms is by their design methodology or their paradigm. Typical paradigm is are divide and conquer, the greedy method, linear programming, dynamic programming, search and enumeration, reduction, and probalictic and heuristic paradigms. Different fields of scientific study have different ways of classifying algorithms, classified to make their field as efficient as possible. Some different types of algorithms different scientific fields use include; search algorithms, merge algorithms, string algorithms, combinatorial algorithms, cryptography, sorting algorithms, numerical algorithms, graph algorithms, computational geometric algorithms, data compression algorithms, and parsing techniques.

ALL ABOUT LINKS FOR SEO

The natural one-way links.
This one is solely based in good content and resources. This is the safest method of link building available as far as search engines, which look at the “intent” of links. But it is also the slowest. If your site is new, then as part of its launch, submit it to niche web directories. Start with a few highly trusted directories, but do not have more than 10-15% of your overall links coming from them. Don't overlook industry-specific directories that may be paid or unpaid. These usually send highly qualified traffic and can be a real bargain. Directories will get you site many natural one-way links, at a natural speed of growth. This combination of type and speed is very beneficial. Look for sites that would benefit from offering users your content.

Linkbaiting, or link bait.
This one is not easy, and involves creativity. But it is worth every effort. Linkbaiting refers to content, videos, images or anything on your site that is created with the intention of increasing links to it. It is highly effective in getting links, probably the cheapest too, based on the cost of the “bait” you use, has no negative effects from the search engines, at least not for the moment, since all links generated look natural. When complemented by social bookmarking, the networks associated with these links will add even more value to them.

Paying for links, or paid links.
These links can have great short-term search benefits. These are good mainly for sites that have tons of pages with content, and have been well established online for years. In addition, these sites also have tons of natural links to them, again because they had been well established online for years. These are not recommended for new sites. Look for sites that are highly on topic with yours, and in complementary niches. A very important factor in the evaluation of these links, like any other, is age. And the latest “Google Slap” effect were sites fall pass the top 30 in the listings, is affecting primarily those which do heavy link buying.

Bad links and their effects.
Outbound links play a big role in the way search engines determine who your “neighborhood” is. Bad neighborhoods will affect your search engine rankings. Things like FFA (Free For All) link pages, links farms, etc, fall in this category. Note that this has nothing to do with your pages going into the supplemental index. That is not the kind of penalty these links cause for your site. And the amount of bad links considered is a big one. A small amount of them would not trigger a penalty, but make sure that your site is not related in any way to those link patterns.

Articles versus Blog and Ping - Which is more effective at building your sites search engine position?

I think it’s time for many Affiliate Marketers (AM) to reconsider their methods for building their web sites Search Engine position. I have been using Blog and Ping techniques for about a year now, but blog and ping is slowing loosing its effectiveness because so many AM’s are using the method.

If you’ve been living on the dark side of the moon, then you may not know what Blog and Ping is all about. Well, in a nutshell, blog and ping is a technique for increasing your websites position by creating blogs and using software that automatically posts to those blogs along with links back to your main website. The blogs then ping Blog services to notify them that some new content is available. The ping services then attract Search Engine spiders and before to long, you’re website is spidered.

This solution worked like wonders about a year ago (2005), but is loosing its effectiveness because all the blog and ping tools create mediocre content that is all based on Search Engine scrapes or RSS feeds. You end up getting a blog site full of useless information with links back to your web page. The Search Engines have caught on and they are able to filter out the bad content. In fact, it may actually be hurting your website. There’s no proof yet, but I would expect that all the SE’s will soon start penalizing websites that are trying to boost their position through blog and ping techniques.

That brings me to articles. About four months ago, I wrote an article and posted it to ArticleCity. After I submitted it, I forgot about it. Just yesterday, during a moment of boredom, I thought about that article and decided to do some research. Had anyone picked it up? A quick search on Google showed that the article has been published on 802 different websites! I also noticed that after Google’s last update, the Page Rank (PR) of my affiliate marketing website went up nicely from 3 to 5.

This was with just ONE ARTICLE submitted to just ONE ARTICLE SITE that I put together in :30 minutes. I was floored.

Considering how much time I’ve spent configuring blog and ping software, how many unneeded domains I’ve purchased to make traffic all look like it’s coming from different directions, how hard I’ve worked trying to find content for the B&P software, etc…. I would have been much better off just writing good, informative articles.

Another huge reason to go with Articles over Blog and Ping is content longevity. Your article will be posted onto many websites. Perhaps hundreds of websites. That content is real and meaty, just like what Google and the others are looking for. It’s not bogus content that will get yanked by the SEs. This means that algorithm update after algorithm update, the articles that point back to your website will remain within the search engines. This is HUGE.

Over the last few months, Google has made several updates to their algorithm which resulted in TONS of websites loosing their rankings. My site, which relied on ONE ARTICLE and no blog and ping actually went up in the rankings.

So if you’ve been using Blog and Ping to promote your site and you’ve been unhappy with the results, now is the time to consider writing articles and publishing them on the Article websites.

Writing an article and posting it to one article submission site is easy. Writing an article and posting it to hundreds of article sites is time consuming and difficult. For this reason, I recently purchased some software called Article Submitter Pro which automates the entire process. Article Submitter Pro can submit to over 700 article directories and is a snap to set up. If you want to try articles to promote your web page and you want to make the process as simple as possible, then I highly recommend that you check out Article Submitter Pro to make the whole process as simple as possible.

Here’s to a successful and profitable day!

An Easy Guide to Building Links to your Website

Link Building is vital for a good placement in any search engine and most website owners are unaware of this or don't really understand how it actually works.

Apart from good Keyword research and the right meta tags, linking building is an absolutely must for the success of any website and is an on going process, so make sure your put some time aside for this on a weekly basis or pay some one with experience to do it for you.

Without it your website will certainly get no traffic.

There are 4 different types of Linking involved and each one is as important as the other.

If they are done correctly, they most certainly will give you a good ranking in the search engines.

They are :

Reciprocal Links
Oneway Links
MultiSite Links
Directory Listings
Reciprocal Linking

Quite simply - this is a link from your site to another and they link back to you. A bit of advise here is to only link to sites that are relevant to yours. i.e - If you are selling Cars - only link to Car websites, a link to a Health website will really do you no justice, and trust me I have seen hundreds of website owners make this mistake.

What's important here is not number of the links you have, but the quality and relevancy of the site your are linking back to. Be Selective and also take a good look at the sites linking to the site you want to link. It's really no good if this Car Site you want to link to has 40 reciprocal Links from Online Pharmacies.

How to Do this :

1. Pay a SEO Company to do it for you. ( recommended - but can be quite expensive )

2. Buy Them

3. Link Exchange Sites.

4. Search for them on your own

Important : Do not add to many reciprocal links to quickly, build it up gradually otherwise you will be penalised by the search engines, as it will be seen as un-natural. A good way to start is not more than 10 to 20 in one month. As your site gets older you can start adding more.

One Way Links

This is what the search engines call a natural link, and these links are given a far better ranking than a reciprocal link. The easiest way to do this is to write articles on what you are selling and then submit them to article directories with a link back to your website.

Website owners are always looking for content for their sites, and Article Directories are the easiest way for them to get content, with out them having to write them on their own. There are hundreds of these directories around and the more you submit to the quicker you will build up your one way links. It also is less time consuming than reciprocal linking and you will get far better results.

MultiSite Links

For this to be effective you need at least 3 to 4 websites to be involved in this. It is also seen as a natural link by the search engines and can be quite difficult to do if you only have one website. Although it can be done. You will just need to find 3 other websites that are interested.

How it works is this :

You link to site B, Site B links to site C, Site C links to site D and site D links back to you. This way all the sites get a link with out any of them creating a reciprocal link.

Directory Listings

This is also seen as a natural link as most directories don't require a link back. It's very simple and all you need to do is submit your site to as many directories as possible. There are thousand's of them on the Internet, so all it requires is a little bit of time and hard work. If you make it your goal to submit to one a day, the process won't become a tiresome.

Ethical Search Engine Optimisation and SEO Spam Mass

Link development & Spam mass

09 Nov 05: Four extremely intelligent Californians, Zoltan Gyongyi, Pavel Berkhin, Hector Garcia-Molina, and Jan Pedersen, released a whitepaper discussing a possible method to identify links from spam domains. Their method sheds light on some very interesting ideas on how Google might judge the quality of inbound links.

Good links Vs Bad links

Since the Jagger update, Google seems to be emphasizing link relevance and link quality a lot more. While relevance is pretty straight forward to understand, quality of an inbound link may be a foreign subject to those not involved in search engine marketing as part of their daily lives. So let's first discuss good links versus bad links. Not all links are equal. Links from popular sites carry more weight than links from virtually unknown sites.
It is a well-known fact that Google's initial success lay in their ability to find websites and rank them based on links from other websites. As Google's popularity grew, some webmasters tried to outsmart the Google algorithm by falsely inflating the importance of their website with unnatural inbound link development. Links that are developed in such a way, with the mere intention of fooling Google's algorithm to gain higher rankings are considered to be bad links.

What is Spam Mass?

The research team from California devised a term - spam mass - to denote the ratio of good links to bad links for any website. Simplisticly speaking, if 60% of the inbound links to a website originate from spam domains - domains identified to be built solely for the purpose of artifically inflating a website's popularity - then the spam mass of the site would be 60%
Ranking is not that simple, though, and variables such as PageRank, relevance, age etc creep in to complicate such a calculation. However, the idea bears a lot of potential from which further ideas can be developed.

Applying Spam Mass to Search Engine Marketing
- Why reciprocal link exchanges can pull down your site rank

When optimising a site for better search engine ranking, most webmasters and search engine optimisers will actively seek inbound links from third party websites to their site. A very simple way to get these inbound links, in the past, was to exchange links with other site owners. The problem arises when most of your inbound links are from sites whose own PageRank is also influenced by link exchanges.
Google is getting better at recognizing when search engine optimisation relies on spammy link development to improve rank. The principles Google uses to do so, are likely to be based on concepts similar to spam mass. For example the Google system can differentiate links from good domains and spam domains. If the PageRank of your site is mostly due to links from spam sites, Google will accordingly devalue your PageRank, discount any effect from inbound links from the spam domains and, in extreme cases, label your domain as a spam domain too! All of this can lead to a reduction in your site's rank on the search results.

How to avoid Google penalties for spam links

The easy answer to this is always "build your site for people, not for search engines". That doesn't mean you do not carry out the necessary search engine optimisation. It just means that you should not indulge in unnatural practices to artificially influence rank. Ideally, let your site and rank grow as if it were a natural progression.
• Do not indulge in reciprocal link exchanges with spam type domains
• Stay away from link farms
• Exchange links with your suppliers and customers
• Get links from trade bodies, governing organisations
• Exchange links with competitors, other related sites
• Provide links to relevant authority sites
• Strive to obtain as many high PageRank relevant inbound links as possible

Good And Bad SEO Practices

Search Engine Optimizing is a set of practices developed to help you get a high traffic and PageRank, while simultaneously building a useful and functional website that will respond to the needs of your potential users. While some website owners are getting their site indexed by following and enhancing these guidelines, others are looking for a way to sneak in and crawl up search engines by developing various strategies to cheat spiders.

Most search engines have their specific rules on which SEO practices are legitimate and which are not. While they disagree on some borderline issues, they do have a set of basic principles in common.

Good SEO Practices

• creating logically-structured pages
• logical paragraph use
• including a site map
• providing clear links to each page
• using descriptive and not too long meta-tags
• validating you code
• providing information-rich content that visitors would find useful
• creating your website content based on the users' needs as if search engines didn't exist
• using spell-check
• avoiding duplicate content

Bad SEO Practices

• using invisible text and links to create false keyword density
• using non-compliant HTML to manipulate relevancy (e.g.: a title that doesn't have anything to do with the page content)
• using CSS to manipulate relevancy (e.g.: using hidden elements by executing code to reveal them)
• sending automated requests to search engines
• using doorway pages created just for search engines
• using machine generated code to produce keyword-rich content
• cloaking - presenting a different content to users than to search engine spiders
• linking to spammers and other bad websites
• participating in linking schemes to increase PageRank
• creating pages that install viruses and other badware
• using unauthorized software to submit pages, check ranking etc.
• re-submitting the website without any reason

Borderline Issues

• inserting comments in the HTML code
• using invisible form elements to hold keyword values
• using HTML elements for keyword stacking (e.g.: image alts)
• using machine generated code for usability reasons (e.g.: in order to check for browser versions)

These borderline issues are controverted and ambiguous techniques. Most of the time it is very difficult to say whether these techniques were used to trick the spiders or only for usability purposes. The search engine is the one who has to make the ultimate decision.

Major search engines are constantly fighting against illicit techniques to get your website indexed and increase your PageRank and developing new and improved automated solutions to detect them. They even encourage users to report any website that is trying to abuse SEO guidelines. Thus using illegitimate ways to crawl up search engines may result in your website being banned. Once it's been removed from the search engine index, it will no longer appear in search results.

Google, as well as other search engines, are trying to develop a pro-active attitude among website owners and convince them it's more efficient to make use of legitimate SEO practices. One thing you should always ask yourself when building new features and writing content is whether you would be doing it even if search engines weren't there at all. This is the best way to drive traffic to your website and get better ranking.

How To Not Get Lost In The SEO World

The ever-increasing level of competition in the Web these days is like a mad scramble for most businesses, with thousands of sites and affiliates boxing-out each other for niche markets, increased traffic, and higher sales.

Website and business owners who spend money on optimizing their websites in the search engines want to know they are getting a good return on their investments. SEO firms and experts need concrete numbers to show that the campaign is working, and that they should continue to invest in optimization.

According to the experts, there are several good reasons why you should measure your SEO efforts, so that you wouldn’t get astray in terms of direction or investment. First, you need to justify how much you're spending to management, your client, or whoever holds you responsible for getting traffic to your website. Second, is to make sure that all the time and funds you're spending on SEO is actually working. Third, to enable you to secure more money for next year's SEO budget. And lastly, to enable you to stay competitive always.

It is also notable to take note that you should understand industry averages, such as how much the average website owner spends on outsourcing SEO, and this could range from $100 to $500 per web page for example, and what sort of return you can expect to receive for paying premium cash. In finding out these spending averages, you are fully equipped with the knowledge when formulating a plan that will convince yourself, or the higher-ups, to spend the money on SEO.

It is far better to get started on your SEO journey of learning and make a couple mistakes, than to let months go by, never make a mistake and never get started. Here are a few tips on succeeding, and in preventing yourself from getting lost in the wide, and sometimes tricky world of SEO.

* Make a firm decision to get started. There are a lot of people who will buy a program or purchase a product, but for some reason have difficulty in getting to know how to use it: as a result, they never do.

* Gain self-confidence through experience and constant practice. Far too many people hesitate to try out their ideas. The sooner you strengthen your confidence, the sooner you will realize the potential for what you can achieve and do. In the beginning, start with a few of your own sites where you have full creative liberty without encountering the demands or pressures that come from a client.

* Gather advice from the SEO community by visiting respected forums and discussion groups. Although at times you may not get leading edge stuff, since most of that costs a lot of money, however you will get an awesome amount of pertinent information. Plus, you'll also hear both sides of a story, both the pros and cons, from the debates that seethe within the community.

* Subscribe to reputable newsletters and learn from what the experts say. Many of them are free to sign up to and they can be a wonderful venue to start learning.

Keyword Elite

In order to find the right tools to research high paying AdSense keywords, it is important to know what information you want to know about keywords. It would be just great if there were a tool that told everyone exactly what Google pays for each keyword, but that doesn't exist and anyone who creates such a tool is certain to be barred from Google forever because it is a clear violation of the terms and conditions of having an AdSense account to reveal any income information to anyone else.

You can use Adwords keyword tool to select keywords and you'll get some information. But there are many, many great tools out there that will help you select the right keywords for your AdSense campaign focus. Look for only those tools that provide information about the number of searches performed, the number of competing websites and a "guestimate" of profitability.

Keyword elite will do all of that and a lot more. Keyword elite allows you to create keyword lists with the most profitable keywords and thousands of variations. Keyword elite let's you spy on your competitors adword campaigns so you can do better.
With keyword Elite you can find the highest paying keywords for adsense publishing.

WordTracker is probably the best known and most popular tool for finding keywords that are profitable and that have little competition. However, it does entail a subscription fee so that you want to subscribe for the period that you will actually use the tool and no longer. You can subscribe for a day, a week or a month, or indefinitely. Only those people who use the tool frequently should consider an indefinite subscription due to the high cost.

NicheBot is a free tool that is really handy for this. Unlike WordTracker which costs quite a bit for a subscription, this tool has just about everything you need or want and it is absolutely free to use. It is web-based and perhaps not quite as fast as WordTracker, but it works just great. And it is being upgraded all the time with new features.

KeyWordDiscovery offers a free trial period, after which there is a subscription fee. However, it is a reasonably popular tool for keyword researching.

Overture Keyword Research Tool is another free tool that you can use. It gives you the information you need but the output is based on Overture search engines and you would do much better to get Google search engine results.

To find the right tools for you, try several of the free tools you'll find with a simple Internet search. You may find one that meets your needs very well. If not, then it is time to begin using some of the subscription services.

Long Tail Search Engine Optimization

What is long tail search engine optimization? And how will it help your internet business?

The theory is simple really. You can make just as much money or maybe more out of the less clicked keywords than the more popular keywords for your given product or service.

Although this may have not been feasible some years ago, with the advance in many keyword and analytical software programs, it is now possible.

So lets examine the theory a little more.

The premise is that by knowing many or even all of the keywords and phrases that bring in say 20 to 30 percent of your traffic, you can capitalize on this by meshing or organizing these keywords together which then leads to a snowball effect on the search engines and creates many more rankings.

As you build more and more of these keyword pages or blog postings, your incoming traffic will start to climb and within a given period of time, 50 or 60 percent of your traffic can be supplied through these many additional higher rankings or “long tail” optimized keywords and phrases.

Such a shift away from having to “compete” with many other websites in your business field does and will bring many benefits.

1. The option of removing the use of some advertising completely.
2. The option of minimizing some advertising and campaigns.
3. The option of scaling down search engine optimization campaigns.
4. Due to the expansion of keywords and phrases, the option to add additional and or up-sell products.
5. With more pages, the use or larger use of monetized advertising could be used. i.e. Google Adsense.

This is by far a minimum list of all the benefits that such a “long tail” campaign may bring however the main points being reduction in costs and increase in profits.

Combine this with the current low prices of placing new material online and the minimal fees required to have new content written in economically growing countries, you have a very cost effective marketing plan.

Lastly, one of the main focal points or benefits of such a campaign would be the major search engines themselves.

Constantly scrapping over high targeted keywords, is off course accepted by the search engines, as long as you always stay within their rules and requirements.

What the search engines do actually love… is on topic, keyword rich content pages and lots of them!

Submitting many of these “long tail" keyword pages will then lead to many first page rankings, thus helping your whole website via the downward flow of a higher ranking score. In turn, this helps all pages, even those that have a high level of competition and may have previously required search engine optimization.

At the end of the day, a very well thought out SEO marketing campaign is about utilizing all options available for maximum return. For your business, “long tail” search engine optimization may just be one of those options.

A Little Change That Gave My Website 1st Page In Google, Yahoo, Msn, Aol, Bing And Other Top Search Engines!

Today even 6 year old kids know that content is the king of Internet. If you have good and relevant content, search engines will find your site faster, people will visit this site more often, and you will be enjoying targeted traffic.

The most popular strategy to get a wider publicity for your web site content is article submission. Perhaps you already tried this. If not, go to any search engine and submit keyword 'article' or 'article submission', and you will see tons of pages dedicated to articles and their submission.

Like many others, I also tried article submission for my web site, and was effective. But under the harsh article flood on the market today, it is not that easy to get your web site to the top of search engines. I already started to feel blue about article submission, and then it struck my mind...

I can use anchor text with my keywords in the submitted articles!

I tried it, and now I am on the 1st page in Google with over 71,600,000 competing pages!!

For those who do not know what is anchor text I will give a brief explanation.

If you put web site URL in the text, this URL will be clickable. This means when your point mouse to this URL, you can click it and get forwarded to the site page indicated in URL. Perhaps you noticed that sometimes you can see a simple text which is linked to a special URL. The text does not have any http://... in its body, but when you point your mouse to this text, you see that it's linked to URL. Clicking on this text will get you to the page indicated in the URL to which this text is linked.

So, anchor text is a simple text that is linked to URL with the help of HTML code. In other words, anchor text is hyperlinked text.

Anchor text isn't new to Internet marketing at all, and I was really amazed why changing simple http://... in my articles to anchor text got me to the Google top. After asking some questions on Internet marketing forums I got the explanation.

Today most of the search engines count heavily towards ranking of your web site using anchor text. If you use the keyword or keyphrase of your web site as the anchor text and link this text to your web site URL, search engines will gulp this info faster and will rank you higher on this keyword/keyphrase. And now imagine that you have submitted your article with proper anchor text and URL to some article engines - they will distribute it worldwide. You will get hundreds of pages where the anchor text will be increasing your rank for any keyword you put in this anchor text.

In my case, I had many articles that were already submitted to article directories. These articles got indexed by Google, having some PR. I just changed the info in article resource box, i.e. put anchor text instead of simple http://... You see: one little change gave me lots of pages with PR that had my keyword and my URL! Within few days I got on the 1st page in Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, AllTheWeb and AltaVista for my keyword.

It worked for me, it will work for you too.

Surely there are more tiny tips how to squeeze more from anchor text, but disclosing everything in one article isn't smart. Search on this topic, and you will find many useful things to get ranked higher with anchor text strategies.

Low Cost SEO

Search engine optimization or SEO is the hottest way to drive targeted traffic to your website. Maximizing the benefits of a well optimized website will yield lots of earnings for the marketer. However, optimizing your site might cost you thousands of dollars if you are not skilled in this area.

But to tell you the truth, you can essentially get information on low cost SEO anywhere in the Internet. A really good resource is available at http://www.seosuperb.com where you will find over 900 pages of tips, advice and information. But only several really show you how to work out an affordable search engine optimization endeavor. And those few that really inform include this article.

1. Link exchanges

One cheap SEO method that can get you best results is through link exchanges or linking to and from other web sites. Depending on the websites that you would like to exchange links with, this tool could even cost you nothing at all. Contact the author or owner of the web site you want to have a link exchange with. You will be surprised with the eventual spiking up of your page ranking using this means of getting your website optimized.

2. Write or acquire key word rich articles

Writing truly informative and keyword-rich articles is one surefire way to make your Internet business more visible than ever. It's either you write your own articles or you get them from article directories that allow you to post these articles on your website as long as you keep the resource box or the author's byline in tact. Just don't stuff your articles with keywords that even idiots would get bore of reading them. The readability and freshness of your articles will still be the basis of whether your writers will keep on coming back to your website or not. In my opinion, this method is the best way to advertise and promote you web site.

3. Catchy Domain Name

What better will make your target visitors remember your website but with a very easy-to-recall domain name. Something sweet and short will prove to be very invaluable. Registering your domain name is not for free. But creativity is.

4. Organize your site navigation

Providing easy steps in navigating your site is one way to make your visitors become at ease with your site. This, in turn, will improve the flow of traffic to your website.

Low cost SEO is always evolving like any other approach in information technology. There are many methods that can very well land you on the top ten rankings of Google or on any other search engines. Some may cost a lot but there are methods that can give you the same results at a low price or you can even do on your own such as those mentioned above.

Broken Links Are Bad News For Webmasters

A webmaster or website owner’s role or responsibilities do not end when the website he operates goes “live” and is now accessible by visitors online. There are a whole new set of responsibilities and functions that a website owner has to assume in order to make sure that his website continuously works perfectly and is able to fulfill its intended functions. Some of the responsibilities he has to assume include providing fresh content as much as possible, submitting the website to search engines and actively looking for reciprocal links in order to raise the ranking in search engines.

One of the most crucial responsibilities of a website owner is to check for broken links to his website. Broken links can be considered as one of the worst things that can happen to a website. A lot of not so good perceptions and negative effects arise from having a site that is riddled with broken links.

In fact, broken links are plaguing so many websites that it is being considered as a serious problem on the web. Many reasons can be cited for the spread of broken hyperlinks, the general causes of broken links include: Websites not being maintained with the appropriate degree of dedication, the architecture of the website and how information is placed within the site constantly changes, and the large incidence of websites that are closing down.

Hyperlinks are a very important component of websites because it aids in the navigation around the webpages and points to directions outside of the site. A website without links is like a ton of documents that are piled one on top of the other with no rhyme or reason and no intelligent way for you to get to the information that you need.

Link management is a very important and absolutely essential part of maintaining a website. As previously mentioned, broken links bring with it very negative perceptions about the website and these can have very detrimental effects on the traffic generated by the website.

From a technical perspective, broken links can stop search engine robots dead in its tracks, effectively preventing it from completely mapping out a website for submission to search engines. In addition, a website that is riddled with numerous broken hyperlinks gives visitors the idea that the site is unprofessional and that the website owner or owners have a dubious reputation – very costly image problems that are hard to change once it is established. Moreover, visitors who encounter many difficulties in a website will most likely not go back for a return visit, this is almost tantamount to losing prospective clients. They will be turned off because they won’t get the page that they are looking for, thinking that it is not really in the site when in reality the page is there only that an error in coding made the page inaccessible.

With internet users becoming more and more sophisticated as time goes by, it will take website owners more effort to entice these users to visit their websites and broken hyperlinks will not help this very difficult process in any way.

Website owners and webmasters should be very aware of the bad effects of having broken links in their websites. They should diligently weed out and fix any broken links. Fortunately, there are now a growing number of handy utilities that can help webmasters located broken links. With these utilities, managing a website becomes relatively easier.

For example, xml-sitemaps.com has programmed a standalone script that will not only create sitemaps but also looks for broken links in a website and then informs webmasters or website owners what links they are and to which pages the links are associated with. This automation of the task of checking broken links is a great time saver for webmasters and website owners.

Conflicting SEO Expectations

SEO is undisputedly the best method for generating traffic and profits. That being said, you need to understand the inherent conflict that can arise with SEO.

Conflicting SEO Expectations

SEO is both the technical effort and art of getting your site ranked highly in search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are two competing factors in the effort, time and volume of traffic, which can lead to clients having unreasonable expectations.

The conflict giving rise to misunderstood SEO expectations deal with keywords. Obviously, an optimization program is designed to get you high in the rankings on various keywords. The problem, of course, is the more traffic a keyword produces, the higher the number of sites competing for rankings under the phrase. Inevitably, this translates to a longer period of time required to get top rankings.

Obviously, most clients want to obtain top rankings as quickly as possible. The best way to do this is identify those keywords that have decent traffic, but few sites competing for rankings. In such a campaign, clients see results relatively quickly, but they have fallen into a trap. Even if they go into the number one position across the top three search engines, they have limited the amount of traffic they can receive. This leads to frustration as revenues are effectively capped.

A proper optimization plan should focus on both short and long term rankings. When laying out the site, the home page and other centralized pages should be devoted to keywords with monstrous amounts of traffic that will require a lot of time to obtain top rankings on. To counterbalance this, additional pages should be built focusing on keywords for which there is less traffic, but for which high rankings can be acquired relatively quickly.

The exact time periods on this approach are entirely dependent on the subject matter of the site and the keywords involved. For a brand new site, one can expect to see rankings on MSN within a month, Yahoo in four to six months and Google in six to nine months. For an established site, the figures will be shorter but it is dependent upon the results of the keyword research in the specific field.

Understanding optimization is the key to having reasonable SEO expectations. A mix of short and long term goals is the best method of attack in nearly every situation.

Easy Ways To Get Your Web Site Noticed by Search Engines.

Almost everyone knows that when a person wants to know something on the Internet they turn to search engines like MSN, and Google to find what they are looking for. This makes it very important for web site owners to know how to get their web sites ranked well on search engines, so that the people doing the searching can find their web site.

The first thing you should know is that the job of a search engine is to bring up the web page, that is most relevant to the search.

Search Engine Optimization isn't rocket science!

The job of the web site owner is to make their web site more relevant than other sites. The other job they need to do is make sure the web site gets submitted to search engines. Do those two things and you are getting some attention well needed from the search engines, the reward is free targeted traffic.

I wrote an my first article titled "The plug-in Profit Home Business Review." Now I didn't know too much about writing articles at the time so this happened to be dumb luck. After a few weeks I did a search to find that my article got placed on the first pages of MSN, GOOGLE and Yahoo, when I searched for "plug-in profit site"( E-Commerce business). Surprised to see that the article was ranked higher than hundreds of thousands of possible sites, I looked into the reason for my article's great success.

When you read the article you'll see that the article is extremely related to the plug-in profit home business site. The title after all was called "The Plug-in Profit Home Business Review." The content is all about the program and mentions the name of the program several times. To sum things up this is what made my article step in front of my competitors.

I soon applied my new found knowledge into my own web site. I built my web site around the keyword, "plug-in Profit site. I made the title of my home page "plug-in profit home business site" Now days you will see somewhere on the first pages of the search engines internet5kincome.com when a search for "plug-in profit" is done. You may even find my first article hanging around. This proves that content is still king when it comes to search engines! I will also add the title helps out a great deal too!

In my efforts I made a mistake on my web page, I created a link titled :"Can taking on-line serveys really make you money? Click here to find out".

Notice the misspelled word serveys. While the rest of the world spells surveys with a "U". I spelled this one word with an "E".

I am embarrassed to say it, but that mistake placed my site on page 1 when a person searched for "on-line serveys" this winning mistake brought a surprising number of free traffic.

I am amazed at how many people spell surveys with an "E"! (The mistake has been corrected, but it is something you should know!)

When experimenting with search engine optimization, or SEO for short. Track your web site's performance with a tracking service. I use opentracker.net for my web site's tracking. This service will show you where all your visitors come from.

If a visitor was referred by a search engine, obviously the visitor did a search. The tracker will tell you what keyword the visitor searched for. That keyword is something you should know, so that you can build on it, to bring in even more traffic. You may be surprised at what you find out from the web site tracker. I was surprised that so many people spelled surveys wrong, but I would have never found out if it wasn't for the web site tracker.

Experimenting with SEO is well worth the time. Set your sites on what people are searching for, and build your web site around those keywords, and you might find your web site on the first page.

Understand that not all search engines will rank your web site the same, try different search engines to see where your site shows up. MSN.com is one of my favorite engines to use because this site indexes web pages more often than others. This will help you to see if your experiments work a little faster that using the other top named search engines.

Google Page Rank

Page Rank is Googles way of showing the user a basic ranking of a webpage. The ranking is from 0 to 10 with 10 being the highest. To calculate page rank there are numerous variables involved but the most important in link popularity. So the more incoming links you have to that webpage the higher Page Rank you will have.

Page Rank is updated all the time but not visible to users. The visible Page Rank on the Google toolbar is only updated a few times a year. Normally every 3 months. There are a few ways that you can get a general idea of your Page Rank at all times. One way requires the site to be listed in the Google directory. It has become known that the directory lists in order of Page Rank. The directory uses current Page Rank data and not the visible one that only updates every 3 months. So if you have a site in the Google directory you can always get a general idea on what your current Page Rank is.

There are also Page Rank predictor tools out there. Now these tools used to be somewhat accurate but they have been shutdown with Google changing the PK parameters to all 0s. This may change again in the future but as of right now it simply does not work.

One thing that gets me is how Page Rank consumes people that are new to the SEO world. To get a few things straight here is what Page Rank does for your. NOTHING! You do not rank higher in the SERPs, make more money, get more traffic, or look cooler. This number is just a basic guideline of how many incoming links you have to your site.

But Page Rank is good for a few things at the same time. Most webmasters base link exchanges primarily based off of Page Rank. So the higher Page Rank you have the better chance of getting a good link exchange. Also it is good for selling links on your site. The price pretty much always reflects what the Page Rank is on the page.

Google Ranking WITHOUT submitting to Google

A while back, I read an article that explained how to get a good google rating without ever submitting your site to their submission forms. Like you, I was kind of shocked by this statement so I decided to give it a try.

In the beginning, I used to submit my site all the time to Google but soon realized the magnitude of my failure. Of course, it's a known fact that Google relies solely on your link popularity and content.

Link Popularity?

What that means is the amount of links (yousite.com) listed on other sites that are related to yours! The more sites that link to you, the greater your popularity!

So again, Google depends on your link popularity! If you don't have a google rating (In other words, is your link found on google?) some sites WILL NOT link to yours. There are many sites that have a great google rating and have specific regulations to whom they will accept within their resource sections. They will specify that your site must be listed within Google and if they type in your site in the google search bar, your site should be listed within the top 5 sites.

Here's The Theory:

Of course you want all sites to link to you, especially the ones who already have a great google rating because that means that your site will be picked up by google. Some people only try to get links from those sites but just remember, we all had to start somewhere.

My suggestion is to do as many link exchanges as possible and especially make sure that each site is specifically categorized by their content. You will get penalized for having one page full of links to sites that do not relate to each other.

Another little tip, try to keep your pages to 1-20 links within each page. Once you have 20 links, add a button to a (PAGE 2) and continue your resources that way.

Ok, so I went a little off topic with respect to this article but you'll see how everything is connected together. Once google starts ranking your site, you don't want to leave any stone left un-turned.

So back to getting a google rank without submitting your site. Once you start performing link exchanges with other sites, just keep on going and going and I promise that eventually, Google will start picking up some of your links on other sites. Once this starts to happen you're google rank will rise.

So just keep doing what you're doing and let Google do it's own thing. When your ready and you're link popularity grows, then you can submit your site to Google and reap the rewards.

So many companies do this process backwards and wonder why they don't get listed in Google. Or like what happened to me, Google lists your site right away but then in a couple of weeks, presto, your site is gone from their listing and your left confused as to why!

Google SERPs experiment shows amazing results

Can we take a banned site - No pages indexed in google, yahoo or live and can we give it life and PR rank?

That is what is being attempted over at www.omg-1-com and the big question is can it be done?

Google, Yahoo and MSN Live are such big players in providing traffic the question is can a website survive if the big engines have banned it?

Many sites get banned and even some deserve it. Yet there are many sites who receive a penalty or even a banning and they just dont know why. Most just receive a penalty and that means their site is still in the index but just not ranking well. The site owner just needs to seach for his url and if it is found you are not banned. If you cannot even find your url, well simply put "you're out!"

But don't fret as there are ways to get back in, but first you have to appologise to the big G and others and file a reinclusion request. But first I would remove the tactics that got you banned in the first place, remove your hidden text and keyword stuffing.

Back to the experiment

A ten point plan has been placed in effect and it involves the basics like good hosting, good SEO in title and description with good keyword density etc. The big news here is the link building! The plan is that numbers of links will force the engines to take note of the banned domain and push it back into the indexes.

Here are the ten steps:

19 September 2007 -

1. http://www.omg-1-com/ taken off domain parking and hosted at dreamhost-com

2. Site built and Sitemap created and uploaded to google webmaster tools

3. http://www.omg-1-com Creation Date: 01-feb-2007 | 0 links in Google, Yahoo or Live. | 0 indexed pages in Google, Yahoo or Live.

4. As you can see no pages are indexed in any of the search engines. It is a banned domain!

5. Reinclusion request made to google.

6. Write a title and description.

TITLE: That is only 10c for a permanent link pointing to your website!
DESCRIPTION: We will hand submit YOUR Website into 2000 FREE DIRECTORIES with multiple anchor text in both the title and the description for $200 US.

7. Add URL Google | Add URL Yahoo | Add URL MSN Live

8. Add some small blended adsense blocks.

9. Place this information into Website Submitter and start submitting.

10. Be patient!

Expectation? We would like to see the site indexed and in all engines by 19 Nov 2007 | December at latest!

Summary

The most interesting point to check back on is the results of the Website Directory Submission Experiment because the number of indexed pages and numbers of backlinks for the site are fully presented on the site and could be a real testimonial for this type of directory marketing.

Another amazing part of this approach is that it can be done free using all the free website directories. You just need to semi-automate the process a little.

Well good luck with your website SEO development

A Banned Site Re-indexed By Google and MSN Live within 24 hours - EASY!

So it seems it is possible and over at http://www.omg-1-com the experiment is proving itself.

The question was 'Can we take a banned site - No pages indexed in google, yahoo or live and can we give it life and PR rank?'

Well it took 2 days for a banned domain to enter the MSN Live and the Google Indexes. Now thats fast.

But how was it done

Actually the website is set up as a tutorial on how to succeed with SEO seach engine optimization. It is a step by step guild to soring in the SERPs ranking.

Just take a look at all the free tools offered all over the internet that practically force the search engines to index you. Take a hint and follow the links on this site, they take you to amazing free optimization tools.

So here are the basic steps that got this domain re-indexed after being banned.

20 September 2007 -

1. Added content- index.php | experiment.html | report.html | paid-directories.html

2. Put together an article about the 'Website Directory Submission Experiment'

3. Submit the article to digg-com, please if you are a member please then digg this story!

3. Wait as long as I can to submit our article below to 640 Article Directories with Article Submitter.

    I want this website submission experiment webpage to be indexed by google first! This will secure that http://www.omg-1-com is the original source article and then we will not go into the googles suplimentals index. We do not want google to assume an articles site which we submitted to is the article source. Make sure you get your articles into the big article directories!

4. Continue to submit to the web directory database, placing the site into eg. http://ww.webdirectory.za/business/internet/promotions/

    5. SEO TECHNIQUES

    - Placed TARGET="BLANK" on all outgoing links I have so many outlinks to very reputable sources. It is smart to keep people on your site, so let them view your suggested outgoing urls, but always leave your site page open. I even placed TARGET="BLANK" on affiliate links such as

    Website Submitter | Article Submitter

    Then I went ahead and placed up meta tags with an off beat title to the site

    <.title>That is only 10c for a permanent link pointing to your website!<.title>

    its actually a one line sales pitch. In the description i just cut a block of text out of my main body

    <.meta name="Description" content="We will hand submit YOUR site to 2000 FREE DIRECTORIES for $200 US That is only 10c for a permant link pointing to your website! Compare that with adwords | SEO search engine optimization is link building." /.>

    and pasted it straight in as the meta description. I also use this description across all directory site submissions and acticle site submissions.

    Also FORCE GOOGLE to visit your site in everyway possible

    1. Reinclusion request.
    2. ADD URL.
    3. Place Adsense.
    4. Place a google search form on your site.
    5. Set-up adwords campaign and force google to scan your sites keywords! How?

    Use the campaign keywords tool and select the option 'Site Related Keywords'

    Here is what Google scanned, so we can see an insight into what Google thinks about this site, and it's a perfect result!

    5. Setup an Adwords Campaign using the suggested keywords, create some Adwords Adds. I have posted my Adds below!

    6. I added the very important OnlyWire button

    7. Place http://www.omg-1-com to these directories ASAP!

    8. Free email subscription service set up on the site for you to sign up to receive our SEO strategy techniques and discounts.

    9. Placed a free translation script on the site to cater for foreign language visitors. 10 x the pages to index for the engines.

    PS. please note that we are already indexed in Google and MSN Live after one day, 20 September 2007.

    Will it last?

    Probably not as we will be indexed but now categorized and themed and adjusted within the SERPs.
    So we will come and go - but indexed for two major engines within two days is very good!

Google's Duplicate Internet Content Filter In Action

If you don't believe Google's Duplicate Content Filter exists, I have Dramatic Proof their Internet content filter exists and it's very effective.

On July 5, I published an article entitled "7 Top Ways to Avoid Link Theft" which was picked up and included as content on other websites.

Before the article was released I checked on Google whether any results already existed for the exact phrase "7 Top Ways to Avoid Link Theft" and there were no listings for that term.

Over the next few weeks I monitored through a search query on Google how many results appeared in Google for the title of my article. One week after publication there were 6,760 results listed in Google, a week later it was 14,100 and it reached a peak of 17,000 results by July 26.

4 weeks after publication the results in Google had fallen slightly to 16,600.

Almost 6 weeks after publication the results listed in Google had fallen to 44.

In a matter of less than two weeks the number of search results on Google.com for the title of my article had gone from 16,600 to just 44.

In case you're thinking this is because all these other websites dropped by article and replaced it with other content I should add that a search on Yahoo.com on the same day still showed 14,300 results for my article.

What's more of these 44 results on Google, more than half consist of listings from the same websites. In other words some sites have the same article duplicated on different pages on their website.

So Google's Internet Content Filter is not used to remove duplicate listings from the preferred websites it chooses to keep in the search results.

On August 28th, 8 weeks after first publication I distributed the article again to a new list of article sites to repeat the process. After 6 weeks the same article had reached a peak of 5,620 results on Google. Less than 2 weeks later the results had fallen to 217.

For me this was dramatic proof that Google's Duplicate Internet Content Filter is active and very effective. If you're wondering if other major search engines have a duplicate content filter I can confirm that Yahoo certainly does. The same article which was once listed on 14,300 sites on Yahoo, has fallen to 344 over the same time period.

From these results it would seem Google takes about 6 to 8 weeks to remove duplicate content using its Duplicate Internet Content Filter.

But the question remaining is just how does Google decide which out of over 16,000 results does it keep and which does it reject?

I have witnessed situations where my own articles appear in results on other websites, but are not listed in the results for my own website.

So clearly Google does not take into account who the originator and author of the original article was when deciding which sites will remain in its search results.

It also seems to have nothing to do with where Google first finds the article.

Some articles I have published to my website for several weeks before releasing them for distribution to other websites.

In that time the Google spiders have visited my site several times and Google has had enough time to work out that the article was first found on my site.

It would be interesting to see if it's possible to work out what factors Google is using in its Internet Content Filter to decide which results to keep in its listing and which ones to remove.

Jagger Algorithm Updates

Google has recently done a major algorithm update, nick named “Jagger” update series. This article gives an overview of how and why Google needs to update its website ranking algorithms periodically.

If there is one thing Search Engine Marketers and website owners fear - it is a major algorithm update, especially by Google. Well, much as we may like it not to happen, its here. Google has recently done a major algorithm update, nick named “Jagger” update series.

Google does minor algorithm updates almost on a monthly basis and once in a while, it implements a major algorithm update. The last major Google algorithm update happened in November 2003 called the Florida update, which created quite a stir with website rankings. To know more, read our article on Google Florida Algo Update.

Like the Florida update, the Jagger update has done the much feared “blender” act. It has churned the top-ranking websites and turned it into a list of unrecognizable pulp.

Google has been a hot-favorite amongst the web community searching for information. Most feel that the search results have always been highly relevant. It would be therefore safe to assume that whatever algorithm Google has, works just fine. So why does Google need to re-engineer its perfect-looking algo so drastically? Has it not heard the saying don't fix what aint broke”? From Google's standpoint, the reason is simple and valid. Well, for starters, web is ever-evolving and the algo always need to be adjusted in order to provide the best of results. Google engineered an algo, which it believes will reward good sites and rank them well for its viewers.

Google, like most other search engines, keeps this algo a closely guarded secret to prevent it from being exploited. However, the SEO community is constantly at work trying to rank their sites well. Using calculated guesswork, logical thinking, special tests and extensive trial-and-error methods, they gradually figure out what the algorithm likes and dislikes. Armed with this knowledge, it is not difficult to work on websites to rank them high in SERP (Search Engine Result Pages), irrespective of whether the site deserves to rank at the top or not. This kind of algorithm abuse results in ‘less than desirable' websites displacing good sites from the top ranks, contaminating the Google index. Consequently, following the Kaizen philosophy, Google needs to re-engineer its algorithms to keep, what it believes are bad sites, out of its top ranks. Naturally, major algorithm updates upset the current high-ranking websites & sends a lot of SEO professionals back to their work-bench in order to start all over again.

What is interesting to note is the timing of the algorithm update. When Google updated its algorithm in November, there were large scale allegations by website owners that Google intentionally upset the rankings of popular websites just before the Christmas shopping season to force them into buying Google AdWords paid advertising in order to sustain the visitor traffic. While Google claims that the algo update decisions are not influenced by the AdWords team, it is difficult to understand why they would once again choose a critical timing just before Christmas shopping season to update their algorithm.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

1. Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.

2. Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.

3. Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.

4.0 When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

5. Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

Landing Page Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or (SEO) doesn’t rank entire pages but elements of them. Each page is a team working together to produce an overall effect. While each page can produce high rankings and spread to each other is one of the best strategies another is to use a landing page strategy. In this case you can use various techniques to bring traffic to one particular page, usually the home page, and from there direct that pages high ranking to your website’s other pages. When a page points to another page is does not diminish its page ranking. It may not be able to give as high a boost if it points to too many pages but this can be compensated for by a good navigation structure.

For the landing page to have its best effect use whatever techniques you can to drive traffic it. Seeking out sites that will provide links to your landing page is a strong strategy. If you can drive enough quality traffic to your landing page, and I stress quality, you can maximize that pages ranking. A landing page with a high enough page ranking can nearly endow the rest of your website with increasing rankings.

This is where a strong navigation structure is vital. You want the landing pages strong ranking to filter around your website and enhance your pages as much as possible. By keeping the in sight navigation links to a minimum you will ensure maximum ranking increases throughout your site.

By using a combination of affiliates, links from other sites, possibly pay-per-click and awesome SEO skills you can drive your landing page’s rank sky high. Get your site up with good content first and then put forth all of your efforts into the landing page. The landing page will be your ambassador and it will seek out visitors and persuade them to come to your site.

Link Exchange and Search Engine Optimization

Here’s an overview of how exchanging links can improve our search engine ranking.

I believe Exchanging Links is one of, if not “the” best way to market your site online! Read below to see why.

Some people believe that in order to be successful online they have to direct thousands of targeted visitors to their site. TRUE
They also believe that they have to spend all their time adjusting the scripts and contents of their pages, to make the search engines spider them and rank them well. FALSE!

They believe that if they do this it will improve their ranking and automatically drive targeted visitors to their site by the ship load. Partly TRUE, but after viewing some server logs belonging to a top ranking (first 1 – 5 sites on the first page, in his niche)
I saw that only a small number of visitors came from search engines!
And the major majority of clicks came from reciprocal links.

It’s true that there are some quick and easy scripts and txt files etc… that you can place in all your pages, and on your server, that will guide the spiders to keep coming back and also guide them to index your pages, this doesn’t take long to do and I believe it helps a little. But the search engines are smart and always changing there systems so someone could work for weeks, too tweak a site for SEO, only to find out that the rules have changed again and their site is no where to be found! So focusing purely on SEO can be risky!

Should we focus on getting high ranking as a priority? Or should high ranking be seen as the result of other marketing and promotional strategies that bring even more visitors that are even more targeted.
The result of having more visitors being that our ranking will increase.
Not by using strings and mirrors to “fool” the search engines into thinking we have a great site, when really, we don’t have many visitors which is why we’re trying to trick the search engines, and don’t have great content or services, because the visitor has come to our site looking for some that we tricked the search engine into thinking that we had! This is like putting the cart before the horse.

If we focus on building a network of “reciprocal links” (that’s a link from you to someone and a link from them to you) we add valuable content to our users and we have other businesses in our target market niche, sending highly targeted and motivated users to our site.
The search engines like this because there are more sites saying, this is a good site, and every time those sites get spidered the bots find our link and keep on coming back to our site!

So that helps with search engine ranking, and driving targeted traffic, and adding valuable content.

We want our prospects, users, and customers to “bookmark” or save our site in “favorites” they will do this if they are interested in our “Niche” and learn that they can get all the information they ever need from our site. Of course they are more likely to read our newsletters and take notice of our promotions etc, on the home page.

If someone goes to Google and does a search, that person will find that most of the top ranking sites have a “Link Directory” this is a directory of reciprocal links. Doesn’t that tell you something?

Here’s another reason to create a link directory, when you create a directory it is created around sites that are related to your business market niche, therefore, when your site gets crawled by the spiders, they see that you’ve done their job for them, they also like this.

So to summarize:

Search Engine Optimization, is important, and helps to bring more visitors.

Link Exchanging, is important because it can drive more visitors then search engines, once established. Directories ad valuable content for your customers/visitors, and this it improves your SEO.

There are many other free strategies for promoting your online business; this is just an overview of two of them. Obviously another way to promote your business for free, is Article submissions, this is also one of the quickest and most effective free advertising strategies available online.

Optimize For Search Engines And For Visitors

(Copyright Matt Jackson)

The question on webmasters’ lips is whether to optimize their website for search engines or for visitors. There are arguments for both sides of the argument. On the one hand, without good search engine optimization a website may struggle to actually get any visitors but attracting tens of thousands of visitors a day would be of little consequence if the website doesn’t convert those visitors into full paying customers.

Keep Your Website’s Goal In Mind

It’s incredibly easy to get wrapped up in search engine optimization and to forget the ultimate goal of your website. Whether this goal is for visitors to click on links, purchase products or pay for your service you need to encourage your website traffic to do this. The most effective way is to produce exceptionally written and informative content but natural content writing never used to perform well in the search engine result pages.

Is Google Doing Good?

There’s good news for anyone looking to profit from their website and keep their customers happy. Despite being maligned by webmasters and SEO professionals, Google is attempting to update its algorithms for the better. The intention behind recent changes has been to penalize websites that rely on nothing more than search engine optimization. It seems that the major search engines are just as serious about promoting websites that are geared towards visitors as the rest of the Internet is.

Mild Search Engine Optimization And Why It’s Necessary

The problem that search engines face when determining the validity of websites is that they can’t physically crawl every website manually and have someone look over the content. They have to use software and hardware that automates this task. Subsequently, they have to use keyword rules to determine the topics that a website covers. This means it is still necessary to ensure that your website contains the keywords you are targeting and usually more than once in the entire text of the page. However, sites reaching top spot in search engine results because they have crammed their pages with keywords is something that has long been dead.

Natural Keyword Inclusion

The most effective method, then, of writing website content is to write it naturally as though you’d never heard of search engines, and more specifically search engine optimization. Once you’ve written your text with your keywords in mind you will usually find that you have included the important keywords already. Read through the content again and if there are any areas where you can naturally insert these keywords then do so. This will give extra credence to your content in the eyes of search engines but don’t get carried away. In preference to including same keyword over and over again, use several related keywords.

Keep It Fresh, Keep It Popular

One other area that will help your site greatly is the regular introduction of fresh content. By regularly updating your website you will keep visitors returning and ensure that they get value from your website, predisposing them to the idea of purchasing or clicking links. Do this and the search engines will also smile down on you without you having to get heavily involved in search engine optimization practices.

Search Engines And The Gurus

People do not change just because they are on the web. They are still the same people they were before the Internet became a popular phenomenon. Some are arrogant. Some are nice. Some are mean. Others are modest. The list of traits is the same for people everywhere.

The above paragraph is true, except for one breed that was specifically created post-Internet. The Search Engine or Webmaster Guru is the Internet’s equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster.

These are the guys, and in some instances gals, that really believe in their mind that they above all others believe they know everything there is to know about the web and if you ever disagree with them, then you must just be stupid.

You’ve seen this animal. They lurk in webmaster forums and give everyone advice they themselves never use or follow. They are not millionaires and few are even modestly successful at anything on the web besides telling other website owners what to do.

They build websites that give more advice. They write articles. There is nothing wrong with giving out advice. There is nothing wrong with participating in forums. There is nothing wrong with writing articles like I am doing right now.

The Gurus I am talking about are those that do nothing else. They do not contribute to the overall quality of the web by building websites that have content people want to see. They don’t actually run a business, but like to tell others how they should be running theirs.

They make all of their money by charging you to help you run your business. They sell ebooks about how to run an online business, but do not have one themselves, except for selling you their ebook.

They charge you for search engine optimization. I am not saying that there is absolutely no need for search engine optimization. I am telling you that the Gurus simply put way too much emphasis on things like alt tags, metatags, filenames, keyword density percentages, and other things that make them sound smarter than everyone else who doesn’t know exactly how to do those things.

However, all of the information you need is out there on the Internet for free. You too can be a search engine optimization Guru. Spend about two days reading all the free information available about search engine optimization and you will probably have your own ebook for sale tomorrow.

Yes, I said two days. That is all that subject is worth in my honest opinion. You build your website, include keywords in your text without spamming them, use a few words in your alt tags if you want, ignore metatags altogether or limit it to title, keywords and description metatags, and you’re done with that.

You want to really optimize your website for the search engines? Promotion is the key. Getting link popularity, writing articles, adding content to update your website regularly, commenting on forums and blogs about things related to your website, writing articles, those are the things that will help you be successful on the web.

The next time you see one of these search engine optimization gurus posting in a forum, ask them what else they do besides giving advice to other people. Ask them if they have any websites that are about anything else besides giving advice to others about how to run their business or sell their products and services.

Ask them if they have any business websites that sell products and services like your own. If they say yes, ask for links. Check the PR on their business websites. If they do not have better PR than you for websites that sell products other than search engine optimization Guru drivel, then should you really be listening to them?

In general, they want you to believe it takes a specific talent to understand how search engines work and how to build websites that are properly optimized for the search engines. They want you to believe that you should constantly be optimizing that one website for each little change that google or other search engines make.

Spend your time promoting your website. I tell all my clients, spend 30% of your time and money to build your website and 70% on promoting it when they are first starting out. After the website is built, I tell them to spend 10% of their time optimizing their website, and by that I mean adding content to it, and 90% of their time promoting their website.

If you wanted a magic formula, there it is. It is hard work. There are no magic pills or shortcuts. Promotion is the key. Search Engine Optimization Gurus are the dinosaurs of the Internet and soon to be extinct.

Duplicate Web Content Penalty Myth Exploded

The "duplicate content penalty" myth is one of the biggest obstacles I face in getting web professionals to embrace reprint content. The myth is that search engines will penalize a site if much of its content is also on other websites.

Clarification: there is a real duplicate content penalty for content that is duplicated with minor or no variation across the pages of a single site. There is also a "mirror" penalty for a site that is more or less substantially duplicating another single site. What I'm talking about here is the reprint of pages of content individually, rather than in a mass, on multiple sites.

Another clarification: "penalty" is a loaded concept in SEO. "Penalty" means that search engines will punish a website for violations of the engine's terms of service. The punishment can mean making it less likely that the site will appear in search results. Punishment can also mean removal from the search engine's index of web pages ("de-indexing" or "delisting").

How have I exploded the "duplicate content penalty" myth?

* PageRank. Many thousands of high-PageRank sites reprint content and provide content for reprint. The most obvious case is the news wires such as Reuters (PR 8) and the Associated Press (PR 9) that reprint to sites such as http://www.nytimes.com (PR 10).

* The proliferation of content reprint sites. There are now hundreds of websites devoted to reprint content because it's a cheap, easy magnet for web traffic, especially search engine traffic.

* Experience. I've seen significant search engine traffic both from distributing content to be reprinted and from reprinting content on the site.

How I Doubled Search Engine Traffic with Reprint Content

When I first started distributing content for my main site, I was stunned by the highly targeted traffic I got from visitors clicking on the link at the end of the article. Search engine traffic also slowly increased both from the links and from having content on the site.

But I was even more stunned with the search engine traffic I got when I started putting reprint articles on the site in September. I had written quite a number of reprint articles for clients and accumulated a few webmaster "fans" who looked out for my articles to reprint them. I wanted to make it easier for them to find all the reprint articles I had written.

I didn't want to draw too much attention to these articles, which had nothing to do with the main subject of the site, web content. So I secluded the articles in one section of the site.

The articles got a surprising amount of search engine traffic. The traffic was overwhelmingly from Google, and for long multiple-word search strings that just happened to be in the article word for word.

Why was I surprised with all the search engine traffic?

1. The articles had so little link popularity. The link popularity to the articles came primarily from a single link to the "reprint content" page from the homepage, which linked to category pages, which linked to the articles themselves--three clicks from the homepage. The sitemap was enormous, well over 100 links, so its PageRank contribution was minimal. Since these articles were on the site such a short time I strongly doubt they got any links from other sites.

2. The articles had so much competition. These articles had been reprinted far more widely than the average reprint article, which is lucky if it makes it into a few dedicated reprint sites. As part of my service I had done most of the legwork of reprinting my clients' articles for them. In fact, I guarantee at least 100 reprints on Google-indexed web pages either for each article or group of articles. So that's up to 100 web pages, sometimes more, that were competing with my web page to appear in search engine results for the search string.

Why Do Reprint Articles Get Search Engine Traffic?

You would think Google would just pick one web page with the article as the authoritative edition and send all the traffic to it.

But that's not how Google works. All the search engines look at factors beyond just the content on the web page. They look at links. Google, at least, claims to look at 100 factors total. Many of these must relate to the content on the page, but not all of them.

The whole experience has given me great insight into what factors Google uses in addition to what we would consider the page itself, and the relative importance of each.

* Web page titles (the one in the html title tag) are extremely important as tie-breakers between two otherwise equally matched pages. Most reprinters waste the html title, using the article title as the web page title. Set yourself apart by creating unique five-to-ten-word web page titles that include target keywords.

* Content tweaks. You can also introduce the article with a unique, keyword-laden editor's note, and finish the article off with some keyword-laced comments.

* Intra-site link popularity and anchor text (that is, for links to the article page from other web pages on the site) are also important. If you can't link to the page from the homepage, keep it as close to the homepage as possible and weed out extraneous links (try putting all your site policies on a single page).

Reprint articles, like the search engine traffic they bring, cost nothing. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Forget the "duplicate content penalty." Get in on content reprints and share the search engine wealth.
Another mega article compiled from Art Englands PLR content bank - free to PLR use articles for your web site, blog or newsletters.

please visit www.artengland.co.uk