Writing for People and for Search Engines

Author: Jennifer Ryan

So you've decided to get a website that's optimized for search engines. You're no dummy. You want your website to show up any time a search is conducted in your area of expertise. Who can blame you? But wait. Be prepared for twists and turns ahead.

The Bible says, ""My people perish from lack of knowledge."" This is also true in the technical world of search engine marketing. Your lack of understanding of how search engines find websites can be detrimental to your success. In effect, you could lose your website investment, and lose again by not being at the top of the engines later. If your website is built and written correctly, you will experience a positive return on your website investment that pays dividends for years to come.

Before you start correcting the website content created for you by The Marketing Shop, or any webmaster experienced in SEO, make sure you have a firm grasp of search engine optimization. If you have a question about something that looks peculiar, ask your designer before you spend too much time fretting. Chances are--if it's on your website--it's there for a purpose.

Writing a website is a delicate balance between pleasing people and computers. Strike the right balance and you'll find your website at the top of the search engines, converting your website traffic into loyal clients. Miss the mark and your site will be in no man's land without a word to say.

Here's a few things to know about search engine optimization before reading your website content for the first time:

Keywords are Paramount. If your website does not have the keyword content that people are using for search, it will not show up in search results, period. This is not quantum physics. Computers are machines. They can only pick up text. It's crucial that we analyze what people are typing into the search engines and build your website content accordingly.

Keyword Research is Necessary. The Marketing Shop performs extensive keyword research for all our web marketing clients. We want to know exactly what people are typing in what into the search engines to find products and services like yours. Based upon our expertise in search engine optimization, we determine the best keywords and phrases to optimize on your site. We have many different calculations that we use to determine which keywords to optimize for and rest assured we've done our homework on the best keywords for the current development phase of your website.

Headings Must Be Search Engine Optimized. The headings of your website impact your website search engine optimization. It is important that they read in a precise way in order for you to ""score points"" with the search engines and rank higher in search results. There are at least three levels of headings (h1, h2 and h3). If you're keywords aren't here, your page won't be optimized.

We try to maintain a balance by writing headings that are search engine optimized, and compelling for the reader. A headline sets up the structure of the page and entices people to read further. We try to do both wherever possible.

Your Page Layout Must Be Search Engine Optimized. Everything about your website must be optimized for search or you may loose valuable opportunities to gain new customers. Our websites have generally the same layout because our research has shown the layout to be most effective for SEO. While there are probably many better ways to layout your website, we prefer the way that the search engines prefer in effort to attract website traffic.

Your Navigation Will Make or Break Your Search Rankings. The navigation on your website is integral to your website for a variety of reasons. First, it contains links that help the search engine spiders get to where they need to go on your site. Second, it contains keywords that help your website get indexed for search queries.

We strive to create intuitive and easy to use navigation systems that are search engine optimized. Much thought goes into the creation of your navigation. Though it may see strange, your navigation is built for search engines and people. Whenever possible, we will add keywords and key phrases to each and every link of your navigation. Here's some bizarre things you may encounter on your SEO navigation:

Repetition Keywords: It's important to put keywords everywhere, including the navigation system. Not only do the keywords score points for being there, but the link itself scores double points for linking to the page it's linking to. Re-Phrasing of Terminology: Sometimes we will need to breakdown the way you phrase something in order to make it match with what people are searching for in the search engines. If our research shows that people are not searching for a given term, we will change it to suit the search queries of the customers you want to win. Localization is A Sticky Situation. Many of The Marketing Shop website clients are those seeking web marketing in a local vicinity. We do our best to bring you customers only from the area you request. However, there are times when our keyword research concludes that people are just not searching for your local area and we have to optimize more broadly. If this is the case, rest assured that targeting the broader area will still render results in your local area due to our expertise in local web marketing.

Each Page is Only Optimized for One or Two Phrases. The most successful web pages for search engines are optimized for only one or two keyword phrases. That means the title is about one thing and the page contains the same keywords sprinkled throughout with plenty of links reflecting the same keywords too.

Images are Invisible to Search Engines. If you were expecting a website to be a lead-generator that has more visual appeal and aesthetic stimulation, please reconsider. Images are invisible to search engines. Studies also show that people want information when they come on the web as opposed to a colorful ""website brochure.""

Content is King. Content is king for a variety of reasons including for search engine optimization, for website conversion enhancement and for inclusion into Google.

Search Engines: Search engines can read only text. It makes sense to keep fresh, relevant content on your site for search engine crawlers. Website Conversion Enhancement: People are on the web to get information, not to read brochures. The more information you provide for them, the ""stickier"" your website becomes and the more people will bookmark your site and rely on it for pertinent information. (See article on web content.)

Also, people who get free and valuable information from your website are more likely to rely and depend upon you when they're ready to purchase goods and services. It's a ""give before you get"" mentality that really works. Offer information and your website visitors will reward you with loyalty.

Another way good web content affects your website's conversion capabilities is by showing your clients how you operate. Your web content is very telling as to the goods and services you provide. If you skimp on your content and your competitor does not, your competitor will win the business. Your prospects may wonder why you're not offering adequate information. Do you not know what you're doing? Do you have something to hide? Will you skimp later? It's best to just ante up the info immediately. Google has strict requirements for it's top search result contenders, including inclusion in the DMOZ. The DMOZ is a human edited directory that requires unique and informative content as a barrier to entry. We're in the Information Age, time to step it up and provide useful information. The World is Changing and Your Customer is Well Informed. Why bother creating websites that are valuable to our website visitors? Because your customer is different today than ever before. Information is readily available to everyone. The person who gives out information most efficiently is the one people will rely on to do business with in the future. Customers are well informed, savvy and able to get information at the click of a mouse. We need to step out of the box and cater to the new consumer.

SEO Sites Can be Tacky. There are websites out there that try to capitalize on knowledge of search engine optimization by adding keywords flagrantly and abusing the system. The Marketing Shop will never do that as we rely only on ethical search engine optimization techniques. We care more about people than we do about search engine rankings. The only time we'll put machines over people is when it's very important to the overall SEO success of your website. Other times, we try to appeal human visitors most of all.

Conclusion Before you get started, make sure you understand what it takes to get to the top of the search engines. Good foundational knowledge in SEO will help your site be more successful, and save your web designer and SEO professional a ton of headaches in trying to get you to understand what's what. Please understand that The Marketing Shop will do nothing to your website without having a good reason for doing so. Please ask questions before you get frustrated.

About the author: Jennifer Ryan is the CEO of Dallas web design firm, The Marketing Shop. She is a web promotions and sales expert as well as a successful published author and copywriter. Jennifer holds her bachelors degree in Christian Ministry and Business Management from Dallas Baptist University. Having earned numerous awards, recognition and financial success in sales, Jennifer now sells Dallas web design services to businesses worldwide. Visit http://w

Link Vault Review

Author: Thomas Höfter

Link Vault is a new free reciprocal link exchange system, which can help you build hundreds of links to your site in a ""natural"" way and therefore greatly improve your search engine rankings. In this review I will explain how the program works, how it's features helped me and how you can benefit from them as well.

1. What Do I Need? Since Link Vault is free in it's basic version (a paid option is available as well but the most important things are all included in the free basic package) you only need a web host who either supports PHP4 or ASP. Your website may also not contain any pharmacy, gambling or adult content and has to get approved by the human reviewers, who will check every submitted site to assure that only high quality sites get into the network.

2. How Does It Work? The principle of Link Vault is as simple as logical: First you add a little PHP or ASP code to all the pages of your website (so your host has to support one of those languages to use Link Vault) which will place a small number of links (the maximum is 5 per page) on your website. For those placed links you get assigned a certain number of points, called Vaultage, which is based on the value of the placed links and the Google Pagerank of your site.

You can now use your Vaultage to build links pointing to your own websites and this is where Link Vault really offers great controls and functionality. You can specify nearly everything from the url to target, different anchor texts to the number of links that will be placed every day.

3. How Does It Help? Since Link Vault builds backlinks to your websites slowly over time (some every day) and allows many different anchor texts your link growth will seem more ""natural"" to search engines. Those will give your incoming links more value in return which will in the end help your search engine rankings more than any other link exchange program available. Of course, beside the search engine optimization benefits, the many links themselves will also increase your visitors.

You can join the Link Vault through this link.

About the author: Thomas Höfter is the webmaster and publisher of the Metal Music Portal Metally.net, the Metal Blog and the Smartphone Software Directory Smartphony. You can find more of his articles and tutorials at his personal website Lunatic Studios .

How To Climb To The Top Of Yahoo And MSN

Author: Thomas Höfter

Are you fed up with Google? No good positions there even after months of work? Well, maybe you should start a little smaller and try to optimize your website for the MSN and Yahoo search engines first. Although they are a lot smaller than Google they still can send much valuable traffic and, the most important thing is, they are much easier to manipulate with some clever SEO work. In this article I will show you exactly which steps are needed to probably (of course I can't promise you results) greatly improve your rankings on the ""2nd-tier"" search engines.

On Page Optimization

So called ""On Page Optimization"" is the part of SEO you can change directly on your website (in the html code) like the title and headings. And although Google hardly cares for them they are very important if you want to rank well in Yahoo and MSN because those search engines lay much more weight on these factors. ere is a little overview over the most important ones:

The title: You should use your most important keywords in your tag as it's probably weighted the most. The best thing is to leave out any other words here. h1, h2, h3: The headings are nearly as important, Use your keywords here again, but in a sentence structure. alt, title, strong, b: It's not proven that those help with your rankings, but many people claim it, and using them can certainly not hurt.

Off Page Optimization

Like with Google, the most important thing to rank well in Yahoo and MSN are also incoming links. The difference however seems to be that those two care much more for quantity than for quality of the links. This knowledge can be easily used for your advantage, for example by using one of the link exchange programs I have reviewed in

this article, such as Link Vault or the Coop Ad Network . Those will build very many links to your site in no time and therefore fool Yahoo and MSN.

If you did both things, optimized your webpages and built links to your site using one of the mentioned tools you can probably expect increased rankings on the search engines. At least it always worked for me and my websites this way.

About the author: Thomas Höfter is the webmaster and publisher of the Metal Music Portal Metally.net, the Metal Blog and the Smartphone Software Directory Smartphony. You can find more of his articles and tutorials at his personal website Lunatic Studios .

Should I Use META Tags for Search Engine Optimization?

Author: Shell Harris

I deal with many questions from curious website owners everyday. One question I have a new answer for is, ""Should I use META tags on my site when do search engine optimization?"" Old Answer: It couldn't hurt, but don't worry about them, the search engines ignore them for the most part. New answer? Read on...

Should I really use a META tag? Really?

The new answer is yes, you should use META tags on your site. The keyword META tag is still not used by search engines but when submitting to directories, a valuable use of time by the way, the META keywords are used in many cases to automatically fill in the keywords for your site in that directory.

Even more amazingly, the META description tag has soared in importance. How so you ask? Google has started showing the META description in its search results when certain criteria are met.

The criteria being used appears to be very simple, unlike many of the other things Google does. When the keyword or search terms appear in the META description, the META description is used instead of the snippet of text containing the keyword on your page.

For example, if you do a search in Google for 'Big Oak SEO' you will see our site in the first listing and the description used is our META description tag. All three words being searched for are also in our META description.

If you do a search for 'big oak client' you will see the first listing is pulling a snippet of text from the page itself. Since 'client' is not in our META description, it uses a snippet of text from the page where all three words can be found.

Where should you use a META description tag?

Every website should use a META description tag on the home page at the very least. This way you can say exactly what you want and not worry the snippet of text being used is not best choice for your message. What this really means is Google is giving us some measure of control.

And now that we have this knowledge and control, how best to use it? This allows us to take off our search engine optimizer hats and don our search engine marketer hats. Think of what you can say in the brief sentence that will entice a user to click your link rather than the one above or below. You can put your phone number in the META description for starters or how about being really creative and offer a discount or advertise a sale. Tell them your unique selling proposition. It should be a one sentence phrase already in your head. The only caveat to remember is that your META description will only show if the search term is in the META description. While this can be tricky, it can be done with some forethought. You can do this for all of your targeted pages and have dozens of marketing messages.

Use the META description wisely: target your market and entice your customers. Do not abuse this control and put outlandish, untrue or slanderous statements as I am sure Google will be watching; and if this technique is abused the META description may have seen it last search result this time.

About the author:

Shell Harris is an Search Engine Marketing Consultant and an SEO Specialist . He provides proven results for Website promotion. More articles can be found at htt p://www.bigoakinc.com/

This article may be freely reprinted as long as all links and author information remain.

Power of Articles

Author: xStylezx

Articles can be a very useful tool for search engine optimization and backlinks.

You can use your creativity to your advantage and write about a niche that you know quite a bit about.This could be anything from Pet Grooming to Gardening Tips and these articles will gain targeted visitors as who would read these tidbits of information unless they were genuinely interested and then they are likely to check out the short bio info that is listed on most article sites that you can submit to and follow the link to your homepage.

Even if you lose out on picking up a targeted visitor from the article youve wrote,you will still get backlinks for your hardwork and thats certainly ok by me.

My suggestion is to find a fairly good html editor or some software that youre used to using already to compose your articles.Do a google search for ""html editor"" or a note taking software for further info on this.Having a software that youre accustomed to by your side will make writing your articles alot easier and dare i say orderly.haha Always make sure to fill your articles with useful keywords and bold them.Be careful not to spam it up a whole lot as this will just lose you the respect of valuable readers who may come to find you as sort of a leader in your niche some day.If you were selling a great viable product but were spamming it everywhere,you would get some sales but eventually you would reap what youve sewn in more ways than one.Getting banned from google is a horrible scenario.

Just keep your articles readable by humans but also highlighting key terms in bold and linking with anchor text.

Do a search on Google or drop by my forums for a better explanation of anchor text linking .

Just dont go overboard.Use your preview before you post and you should be able to tell if youve went overboard with it.At this point youre on your own for writing articles.I hope i have shed some light on this subject for you.Please drop by my forums and register so you can post your own tips.

Po wer of Articles

About the author: xStylezx is Webadmin of SEORecruit.com .An SEO forum for webmasters with tutorials and advice from fellow SEO Enthusiasts .Join and post your SEO Tips today.

Flash, SEO and Optimization - How to properly use flash on your websites

Author: Rob Sullivan

Flash movies can be a great thing. They can help catch eyes that are otherwise bored with static looking pages, and they can help tell a story better than plain text. However the use of flash must be tempered with the ability to rank in search engines. This article describes some of the considerations and recommendations when using flash on a website.

Disney does it. And so does Oprah. Even my favorite pizza place does it. That is embed their primary navigation and important content inside a flash movie. In fact in all these cases, a good part of the sites home page is flash, rendering that section of the page invisible to search engine crawlers.

Granted these are extreme cases of sites which use flash extensively, but there are other cases where even a little flash can be improperly used. There are also cases where flash is not only appropriate, it is recommended. The question then becomes how to best use flash without affecting search engine rankings.

Much like the early settlers of the Wild Wild West we are the frontiersman (and women) of a new community - the World Wide Web community (notice the WWW analogy) - which has seen its birth in the past couple decades and has really experienced its growth happen in the last 10 years or so.

And throughout that time there have been many ways to display a website and its content. Some were more successful than others. But there is one aspect of web development which has been hotly contested between designers of websites and those who position them. That is the use of Flash.

Flash has been around for some time now and while it is pretty (for lack of a better word) it can seriously hinder a websites ability to position well in the search engines. This is because most search crawlers can not see nor effectively index flash or its contents. Therefore anything contained within the flash, including page content or more importantly site navigation, is invisible to them.

Yet flash does have it's good points as well. As I mentioned above, it can turn an otherwise bland looking site into something unique and refreshing. So the question becomes - where does one balance the need for search engine indexability with the need for impressing customers?

Well here's a rule of thumb for you - less is better.

Less flash occupying the page is better, as well as having as little content embedded within it as possible. Further, where the flash appears on the page can have an impact on its ability to deliver the intended message.

Let's have a quick survey - how many of you, upon coming to a site, tune out the top 1/5 of the page, and even a couple inches on the right of the page - especially if you see flashing or movement?

Just as I suspected, most of you. I do it too. And we do this because these are the places we typically see banner ads, therefore we associate that space on many sites with advertising and tune it out.

But there are cases when sites place important messages, via flash, in these locations. But if many people tune out these locations, they are also tuning out that important message. Hence the reason the flash doesn't do so well on the page.

So there's tip number one: Don't place your flash where it will be ignored - namely those spots on the page normally associated with advertising.

My second flash tip - don' t take up most of the screen with it. Keep the screen real estate it occupies to less than ½ the screen, preferably on the left side. There are many reasons for this:

Too often, as people are orienting themselves to the page, their eyes scan the page and are all over it for a few seconds, and then fixate on the top left of the page. If you have a flash movie running (and especially if its one without controls) they have missed a few seconds of that message. And we all know what good a message is that's incomplete?

Another reason for minimizing flash usage: While more and more people are adopting broadband every day, still close to half of the US uses dial up. Which means everything takes longer to load. And if these users are waiting for a flash movie to load, they could navigate away from your site in frustration because the page is taking so long to load.

Some other recommendations:

Don't use the flash to tell the story, use it to enhance the story. If you are trying to sell a product, leave the important information in the HTML of the page, but use the flash to emphasize the product by either displaying it, or pointing out the benefits. your flash should be complementary and not too overwhelming.

Finally, did you know you can also externalize the code required to display the flash? This is something that can help improve page load times which could improve spiderability.

Using a technique similar to one I described in the externalizing JavaScript article, you can externalize the code used to render the flash. You can use the same code used to create a drop down box via JavaScript to externalize the flash code (using the document.write code and embedding the HTML needed to display the flash there).

As you can see, based on this article, is that flash isn't all that bad, provided its used properly. That means it shouldn't be too overpowering or occupy too much of the page. It should be complementary to the message the page is intending to give, and should be located in places that people will look at, and not in places normally associated with advertising.

If you follow these simple rules, your flash can become an essential selling point to your site. One which could provide your customers the little push they need to move from browsers to buyers.

About the author: Rob Sullivan - SEO Specialist and Internet Marketing Consultant. Any reproduction of this article needs to have an html link pointing to http://www.textlinkbrokers.com

5 Simple Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques

Author: Noah Ulrich

The lifeblood of any website/ecommerce business is traffic, and every webmaster knows the best type of traffic is natural, organic search engine traffic. There are two very important reasons for this: (1) it is extremely targeted, and (2) It is FREE! The hard part is getting top ranking for your sites keywords... or is it? The purpose of this article is to provide a few simple, effective, and most important, search engine friendly strategies to help boost your websites' ranking and ultimately your traffic.

1. We will start with the Meta Tags. I know you have already heard of, and are probably currently using meta tags on your site. This is great. I just want to make sure you are using them effectively. We will only go over 2 tags: the ""title"" tag, and the ""description"" tag. We will not go over the ""keywords"" tag, as the major search engines have placed less and less weight on this one, and some would argue this tag has no weight at all. I still use this tag however, as I feel there is some merit and no drawbacks to using this tag.

I have found it effective to use similar text in the ""title"" and ""description"" tags, and to place your keywords prominently in these tags (near the beginning and more than once). I have seen sites with ""sitename.com"", ""New Page 1"", or ""Welcome to my site"" in the ""title"" tag, which really does not help in their quest for higher rankings for their particular keyword. Also, try not to use words such as ""and"", ""or"", or ""the"" in these tags.

**Important note about your keywords. Search engines evaluate keyword prominence, keyword weight, and keyword density when determining a site's ranking. All three are calculated individually for the page, the title tag, the description tag, as well as other areas on a page. Keyword prominence means how close the keyword is to the beginning of your page. Keyword weight refers to how many times a particular keyword or phrase can be found on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of the keyword to the other words on the page. You do not want the keyword weight or density to be too high, as this can appear to the search engine as ""keyword stuffing"" and most search engines penalize sites that stuff their keywords.

2. Place your navigational links (and JavaScript) at the right or at the bottom, but not on the left, of the page. When the search engines ""read"" your site, they read from the top left to the bottom right. Search engines place an emphasis on the first 100 words or text on the site. You do not want these words to be navigational links or Javascript. Ideally, you want to have your ""heading"" tags with your keywords in the beginning of your page. This being said, placing your links/JavaScript on the right or bottom of your page ensures the search engine spiders get to the text first, giving more weight to what's important on your page.

3. Place alt tags on all of your images. Search engine spiders cannot ""read"" pictures or images. The only way a spider knows what an image is about is by reading the alt tag. This is also another chance to place more of your keywords in your HTML, improving your page's keyword weight/density. Alt tags are easy to make and they can make a big difference in your sites keyword ranking. A simple alt tag looks like this: alt=""put your keyword phrase here."" Search engines separately calculate keyword prominence, density, and weight in alt tags as well, so optimize your tags.

4. Place your keywords at the bottom of your page. Just as search engines place more weight on the first words of your page, they also do the same to the last words. The general thinking is this, if your site is about a certain subject, then the main points, or keywords, should, appear at the beginning, be spread throughout the page, and be prominent at the conclusion. But if you have all of your navigational links and JavaScript at the bottom, your relevant page text could end well before the HTML does. An easy way to have your keywords at the bottom of your page is to include them in the copyright information. For example, if you have a dog food website, you could have something like this at the very bottom of the page:

copyright 2005 yoursite.com World's best dog food

Search engines are not (as of this writing), penalizing sites using this technique, and it wouldn't really make much sense for them to do so.

5. The Anchor Text of your links. Anchor text is the actual linking text on a site. It is what the user clicks on to navigate to that particular site or page. If a search engine finds many links to your site using the term ""dog food"", then the search engine concludes your site is about ""dog food"". This is overlooked quite often, but it seems to have a very large impact on your search engine rankings for a particular keyword. Your anchor text needs to be the keyword or phrase you are trying to target. Try to avoid anchor text such as ""Click Here"" or ""www.yoursite.com""

Also, if you're running a reciprocal link campaign, be sure to use variations of your text. If an engine notices every link to your site is identical, it could place less weight on these links or potentially penalize your site. This is because search engines generally give more weight to ""naturally occurring"" links, and less to ""reciprocal link exchange campaigns"". Using different, but relevant anchor text can dramatically affect your targeted keyword rankings, by making your links appear more natural.

Effective SEO may seem difficult at first, but as you have read above, little tricks that require little or no programming knowledge, can make a huge impact on your website's keyword ranking.

About the author: Noah Ulrich is webmaster of

http://www.informativeresources.com His site provides top quality resale rights ,

guaranteed signups , and web traffic.

7 Ways to Know that Search Engine Optimization Isn't for You

Author: Michael Murray, VP of Fathom SEO

Truth be told, search engine optimization (SEO) may not be for you.

Regardless of the product or service and company size, SEO just may not be something you can handle - at least for now. If you fall into one of these areas, you may want to just skip the online marketing rage.

1. You don't want to edit your content.

If you're not willing to change your content, an SEO consultant really can't do much to help you. Really, the keywords people use need to be in your content. It's that simple.

2. You love graphics - lots of graphics.

Partial to graphics? Excellent. If you have plenty of business and a pretty Web site, SEO may not be in your future. Again, text helps - if you can work it into your Web site. But if you love static graphic or Flash and ""skip"" intro buttons, you may want to save SEO for another day.

3. Pages short on copy.

It's not really a repeat of #2. We've some rather barren Web sites with hardly any graphics and not enough copy. Honestly, it sometimes seems like a hunting expedition may be needed to track down more than a paragraph. How many words do you need? No one knows the magic number. But 25 words usually doesn't help.

4. You change your content a lot.

So you want to keep your home page fresh and exciting? Unfortunately, major changes often conflict with the SEO strategy. In other words, if you keep wiping out the keywords an SEO firm inserts, the program is pointless.

5. You want to wait on the redesign.

Some companies get excited about SEO - high rankings and increased traffic can pay off. But don't get started on a program if you're just going to let your current Web site miss out on search engine optimization. Some businesses just want to gear up keywords for a new design months down the road while neglecting their current Web site.

6. You can't stand the thought of your page titles changing.

The title appears in that blue bar in Internet Explorer - the one way up there above ""Favorites."" If you prefer to say ""About Our Company"" instead of keywords that actually BRING traffic, you might want to put SEO on the back burner.

7. You're not willing to address other business problems.

SEO consultants can get you traffic, but they can't make your Web site more user friendly unless you let them. Maybe your product page is too busy or your shopping cart is confusing.

About the author: Michael Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, an Ohio-based search engine marketing firm . We are members of SEMPO, SEO Consultants and OSEOP. Visit our site for our SEO white papers and recent SEO studies on the manufacturing and health care industries. michael@fathomseo.com

Does Website Content Matter?

Author: Daniel Katz

From smart SEO strategies to paid results campaigns, from press releases to targeted emails; everything is valid to increase your exposure and boost your business, however the Full of Aces in this game is called Content.

Many tactics, great products and state-of-the-art technologies can be applied in order to gain traffic and therefore improve your leads generation and sales, but none of the methods can be successfully accomplished if there is not relevant content into your web site.

Content gives body and soul to your site, and there is no other way that Search Engines can understand what your site is for, or how to categorize it and place in a suitable position into your niche market. On the other hand it's true that we can read texts inserted into images, but why should we do that? Sometimes titles or headings need to have a special design or look-n-feel, but even in those cases there are techniques to add meta-text to those images for a satisfactory search engine crawling.

Each search engine gives content a special weight into their formula as there are other parameters that are involved into their algorithms, as link popularity and web site structure for instance, but again: everything is about content: quality links are text based; web structure must have readable content and even pay per click campaigns are created with rich content characteristics!

There is no doubt: it's natural that it happens this way as we humans communicate through content in one or other way, and the richest our content's quality is, the better we will be understood by our friends and niche market audience as well.

Doesn't matter which new methodologies will be developed into the Web Marketing world, textual content will be always leading the list of search engine optimization priorities.

About the author: Daniel Katz is the Business Development Manager at

Compucall Web Marketing Ltd ., experts in International Search Engine Optimization.

The Importance Of Integrating RSS In Your Marketing Campaigns

Author: Sean Felker

Gold is in the list, or more specifically, in the mailing list, as many Internet marketers proclaim. Truly, having a sizable mailing list would only mean good things for your online business. You'd have a pool of actual people whom you could court to give your products or services a try, and this would give you a sustainable flow of income for a good number of years to come.

If they get to read your messages, that is.

The number one problem that confronts Internet marketers when it comes to following up on captured leads in this day and age is the fact that most emails that are sent out by autoresponders end up being filtered as spam. Hence, they never arrive at the targeted recipient's inbox. Also, some subscribers have actually figured out this marketing ploy, as it is not really a novel tactic and a lot of online businessmen have abused this channel throughout the years by sending useless emails that can only be considered as spam.

If the subscribers don't get to receive the emails, they won't get to be exposed to your business message. Hence, the essence of keeping a mailing list would be lost. This is a very real concern that should not be neglected, as it does strike a dagger at the very heart of our marketing plans.

Enter RSS, or Real Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary, depending on your preference. To best describe RSS, we could define it as an email plus and plus. It serves all the purposes of email correspondence, and it boasts of entirely new features to boot! Let's take a look at some of the things that make RSS special.

RSS feeds are delivered straight to your recipient's desktop. There is no danger of your message being filtered out as spam. The recipient must opt to subscribe to your RSS feeds, of course, but this is no different from the system employed for emails, right?

RSS is easy to master. All you need is an RSS feed generator, and all your recipients need is an RSS feed reader. They'd be prompted to download one for free.

RSS feeds can be generated from blogs, and if utilized correctly, can provide one or more websites with regularly updated content, which would most certainly win the favor of the search engine spiders.

RSS feeds can be broadcasted to several websites who also have the option of subscribing to the same, and this would mean more exposure for your business message.

RSS can work the other way, and you could gather new content for your website or websites from RSS feeds generated by others.

With all that's working for RSS, it's easy to understand why this medium is slowly becoming the industry standard for conveying an enterprise's business message. But that's not all... the future does look bright for RSS!

Microsoft has realized the growing significance of RSS in the World Wide Web, and the billion dollar empire has promised to integrate an RSS reader for its future versions of Internet Explorer. This would guarantee that a vast majority of online users would have access to RSS straight from the box.

Additionally, the growing preference for RSS has been acknowledged by two giant search engines, as Yahoo and MSN are now enabling their users to link up with RSS feeds from their generators and their blogs. But the biggest news of all is that Google, the biggest search engine conglomerate of them all, is now beginning to incorporate RSS, as can be evidenced by new Google AdSense advertising methods.

Though the future looks very bright for RSS, it is making a profound impact in the Internet marketing landscape as of late. This only proves that even if RSS is considered as the wave of tomorrow, that tomorrow is beginning right now.

About the author: Sean Felker is the publisher of the very successful and popular Work at Home and Making Money on the Internet blog: Visit him here: http://try-marketing.com/workathome/

W3C Compliance & SEO Article

Author: Dave Davies

From reading the title many of you are probably wondering what W3C compliance has to do with SEO and many more are probably wondering what W3C compliance is at all. Let's begin by shedding some light on the later.

What Is W3C Compliance?

The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and basically, since 1994 the W3C has provided the guidelines by which websites and web pages should be structured and created. The rules they outline are based on the ""best practices"" and while websites don't have to comply to be viewed correctly in Internet Explorer and other popular browsers that cater to incorrect design practices, there are a number of compelling reasons to insure that you or your designer insure that the W3C guidelines are followed and that your site is brought into compliance.

In an interview with Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE Web Design (http://www.w3-edge.com/) he mentioned a number of less SEO-related though very compelling arguments for W3C-complaince. Some non-SEO reasons to take on this important step in the lifecycle of your site are:

·Compliance help insure accessibility for the disabled. ·Compliance helps insure that your website is accessible from a number of devices; from different browsers to the growing number of surfers using PDA's and cellular phones. ·Compliance will also help insure that regardless of the browser, resolution, device, etc. that your website will look and function in the same or at least a very similar fashion.

At this point you may be saying, ""Well that's all well-and-good but what does this have to do with SEO?"" Good question.

We at Beanstalk have seen many examples of sites performing better after we had brought them, or even just their homepage, into compliance with W3C standards. While discussing this with Frederick he explained it very well with:

""Proper use of standards and bleeding edge best practices makes sure that not only is the copy marked up in a semantic fashion which search engines can interpret and weigh without confusion, it also skews the content-to-code ratio in the direction where it needs to be while forcing all of the information in the page to be made accessible, thus favoring the content. We've seen several occasions where the rebuilding of a site with standards, semantics and our proprietary white hat techniques improves the performance of pages site-wide in the SERPs.""

Essentially what he is stating is a fairly logical conclusion, reduce the amount of code on your page and the content (you know, the place where your keywords are) takes a higher priority. Additionally compliance will, by necessity, make your site easily spidered and additionally allow you greater control over which portions of your content are given more weight by the search engines.

Examples

The Beanstalk website and the W3 EDGE site themselves serve as good examples of sites that performed better after complying with W3C standards. With no other changes than those required to bring our site into compliance the Beanstalk site saw instant increases. The biggest jumps were on Yahoo! with lesser though still significant increases being noticed on both Google and MSN.

As we don't give out client URLs I can't personally list off client site examples we've noticed the same effect on, however we can use W3 EDGE as another example of a site that noticed increases in rankings based solely on compliance.

So How Do I Bring My Site In Compliance With W3C Standards?

To be sure, this is easier said than done. Obviously the ideal solution is to have your site designed in compliance to begin with. If you already have a website you have one of two options:

1.Hire a designer familiar with W3C standards and have your site redone, or 2.Prepare yourself for a big learning curve and a bit of frustration (though well worth both).

Resources

Assuming that you've decided to do the work yourself there are a number of great resources out there. By far the best that I've found in my travels is the Web Developer extension for FireFox (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/). You'll have to install the FireFox browser first and then install the extension. Among other great tools for SEO this extension provides a one-click check for compliance and provides a list of where your errors are, what's causing them and links to solutions right from the W3C. The extension provides testing for HTML, XHTML, CSS and Accessibility compliance.

Other resources you'll definitely want to check into are:

·CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/) ·A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/) ·Holy CSS ZeldMan! (http://www.dezwozhere.com/links.html) (Frederick lists this one as one of the best resources for the novice to find answers. I have to agree.)

Where Do I Get Started?

The first place to start would be to download FireFox (count this as reason #47 to do so as it's a great browser) and install the Web Developer extension. This will give you easy access to testing tools.

The next step is to bookmark the resources above.

Once you've done these you'd do well to run the tests on your own site while at the same time keeping up an example site that already complies so you can look at their code if need be.

To give you a less frustrating start I would recommend beginning with your CSS validation. Generally CSS validation is easier and faster than the other forms. In my humble opinion it's always best to start with something you'll be able to accomplish quickly to reinforce that you can in fact do it.

After CSS you'll need to move on to HTML or XHTML validation. Be prepared to set aside a couple hours if you're a novice with a standard site. More if you have a large site of course.

Once you have your CSS and HTML/XHTML validated its time to comply with Accessibility standards. What you will be doing is cleaning up a ton of your code and moving a lot into CSS, which means you'll be further adding to your style sheet. If you're not comfortable with CSS you'll want to revisit the resources above. CSS is not a big mystery though it can be challenging in the beginning. As a pleasant by-product you are sure to find a number of interesting effects and formats that are possible with CSS that you didn't even know were so easily added to your site.

But What Do I Get From All This?

Once you're done you'll be left with a compliant site that not only will be available on a much larger number of browsers (increasingly important as browsers such as FireFox gain more and users) but you'll have a site with far less code that will rank higher on the search engines because of it.

To be sure, W3C validation is not the ""magic bullet"" to top rankings. In the current SEO world there is no one thing that is, however as more and more website are born and the competition for top positioning gets more fierce it's important to take every advantage you can to not only get to the first page but to hold your position against those who want to take it from you as you took it from someone else.

Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc. (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com) He writes with years of experience in SEO and Internet Marketing. A special thanks go out to Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE for his help with this article. W3 EDGE (http://www.w3-edge.com/) provides W3C-compliant web site design for their clients. To keep update on new SEO article be sure to visit the Beanstalk blog (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/blog/) regularly for up-to-date SEO news.

About the author: Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc. He writes with years of experience in SEO and Internet Marketing. A special thanks go out to Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE for his help with this article. W3 EDGE provides W3C-compliant web site design for their clients. To keep update on new SEO article be sure to visit the Be

Better results by spending less money on your PPC campaign

Author: Robin Dary

Finding the right keywords to choose for your pay-per-click campaign sounds easy, doesn't it? My site sells hiking boots I'll buy the phrase hiking boots or my site focuses on computer repair I'll buy the term computer repair.

Well, those are two very popular search terms. You could be competing for thousands of searches per day. What does that mean to you? That means those phrases are going to be expensive.

And because these phrases are so broad you may get visitors to your site but your conversion may not be good. A conversion is a purchase, click, subscription to your newsletter or some positive action by your site visitor.

Now let's say you define it further. And look at Merrell hiking boots, comfortable hiking boots, computer repair in Denver, Colorado, or spyware removal as your search terms. These terms will be cheaper and much more defined.

If your term is hiking boots and someone goes to your site looking for Nike and you don't sell it - you've just paid for a wasted click. However, if you buy Merrell hiking boots someone coming to your site is specifically looking for that brand.

The same holds true for the computer example. If you offer spyware removal the person who clicks on your PPC campaign link to spyware removal will get exactly what they are looking for.

Google and Yahoo offer suggestions for search terms and wordtracker.com also offers help with selecting search terms. This site, http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/, will also help you select key words for your PPC campaign.

You may get fewer clicks in to our site this way but they will be more targeted. And more targeted clicks convert better.

About the author: Robin Dary, is a marketing professional with experience in online and offline marketing. Her current project is www.ParkerComputerGuy.com

Advanced Keyword Optimization

Author: Martin Burrow

When you're choosing the keywords your website will target you should always bear in mind the adage ""less is more"". Sometimes selecting the keyword that will bring you the most traffic is not always the best option, in fact if you have a new website it could be a big mistake. Also, if you optimize your website for just one keyword, not only are you narrowing your market but you're also waving a big flag to the search engines saying, ""Please Penalize Me"". Remember, search engines don't like SEO - they don't like the idea of people manipulating the results. If you target only one keyword it will be very obvious that you are performing SEO on your website and chances are you'll be penalized as a result.

If you have a new website then the chances are your website will be ""sandboxed"" for eight months for any popular keywords. So if you target your website solely for the most popular keyword then a) your website won't even appear in Google's search results (due to being sandboxed) and b) the competition for such a popular keyword will be very tough so getting a good raking will be difficult. It is always better to have some traffic as supposed to no traffic. The key to successful keyword optimization is to optimize your pages for a relevant keyword pattern, not just a single keyphrase. So how do we decide upon these 'Keyword Patterns'? Lets assume you want to rank highly for the terms ""Debt"" and ""Consolidation Loan"" - both of which are highly competitive terms as these keywords generate the most traffic. How would I combine these to maximize my success using a single pattern on a single page? Easy, I combine the unique patterns into one: ""Debt Consolidation Loans Lender"".

These important pattern words should be used in my title, in my description, in my keyword phrases, and in my body text. Using a combination of this phrase in some form within the title/meta tags is good because they are the most competitive for the industry I have chosen and require prominence in my site.

So I now have the potential to rank well for a wide variety of phrases such as Debt, Debt Lender, Consolidation Loan, Consolidation Loans, Consolidation Lender, Debt Loan, Debt Loan, Debt Loans Lender.... and any other combinations of these phrases that you (or people using the search engines) can string together.

So now what we need to do is create page content and an internal linking structure that will compliment my keyword patterns. Remember, I'm not targeting the phrase ""Debt Consolidation Loans Lender"", but different variations of the words that make up this phrase, so all I need to do is create pages that are optimized to contain these words. Because I'm not targeting one specific phrase there is no chance of the website appearing to be ""spammy"". Instead, it will make my website appear to be entirely natural to the search engines without any blatant SEO taking place. To do this I must create pages that contain a mixture of these words in the Title, Meta keyword/description tags and the body of the page and also in the anchor text that I use in my internal linking. This will ensure my website is extremely well optimized for any combination of my keyword pattern. In many instances, simply having a good linking structure and well-written content will be enough to get a good ranking for some niche keywords that will bring traffic to your website.

Keyword patterning should not only take place on-page, it should also be off-page as well, primarily in the anchor text of the links that point to your website. As I've already said, the search engines don't like SEO, they want natural results, so if they see that 90% of all anchor text is exactly the same, e.g. ""debt consolidation"" then it's pretty obvious SEO is taken place.

So, just as you've done with the text on your pages, you need to vary the anchor text of your backlinks using different variations of your keyword pattern. So for example we could use these different anchor texts for our backlinks:

Debt Lender, Debt Management Consolidation Loan, Consolidation Loans, Consolidation Lender, Debt Loan, Debt Loan, Debt Loans Lender ... Etc. Etc.

and we'd still be targeting our initial key phrases of ""Debt"" but also our secondary patterns of ""lender"", ""loans"", ""debt lender"", ""debt management"", ""consolidation loans"", ""debt loan"". These are natural patterns that you would expect a website to receive from natural linking and are extremely powerful for getting better search engine results. Ideally, try to create a different, unique anchor text variation for every link you create that will point to your website.

By applying natural linking to your web pages you will avoid many of the pitfalls that websites often fall in to, such as, ""why am I ranked 384th when I am 1st for allinanchor?"", the reason - unnatural linking, the solution: linking patterns. The reason why a particular website might rank at #1 for a variety of popular search terms is not just a fluke, it's because they use keyword patterns extensively when optimizing their website.

About the author: Martin Burrow has been an SEO professional for several years, working both as a freelance SEO consultant, and also working as a Webmaster within large blue-chip corporations. He now produces a new SEO Software package called WebLink SEO (http://www.weblinkseo.com)

How To Select The Best Keywords for Search Engine Optimization

Author: Anita van Wyk

Search engines are the vehicles that drive potential customers to your websites. But in order for visitors to reach their destination - your website - you need to provide them with specific and effective signs that will direct them right to your site. You do this by creating carefully chosen keywords.

Think of the right keywords as the Open Sesame! of the Internet. Find the exactly right words or phrases, and presto! hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site - or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive - decreases dramatically.

Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven't followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It's hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network, which is the reason that you may not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source.

Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers' understanding is significantly different.

The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By ""quality visitors"" I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise around your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation.

Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL.

You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases. The higher the number this software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only fallacy with this concept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will probably never scroll down to find you.

Popularity isn't enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.

Let's look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword ""automobile companies."" However, you company specializes in bodywork only. The keyword ""automobile body shops"" would rank lower on the popularity scale than ""automobile companies,"" but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of getting a slew of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get only those consumers with trashed front ends or crumpled fenders being directed to your site. In other words, consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.

The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer rather than the seller to figure out what motivation prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a particular word or phrase. Let's look at another example, such as a consumer who is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between ""Seattle job listings"" and ""Seattle IT recruiters"" which do you think will benefit the consumer more? If you were looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would you type in? The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties. You want to find people who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to you site.

Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually made a purchase.

Luckily, some new tools have been invented to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.

This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be the sword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better profits.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work - and it is! But the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your business' rewards.

This article may be freely reprinted as long as all links and author information remain.

About the author: Receive $719 worth of ** FREE** bonuses for choosing the best site building, hosting and marketing solution for your business. No HTML skills needed. Less than $25 p/m -all inclusive. Proven success rate. Unconditional lifetime money back guarantee.

Visit http://www.small-biz -web-solution.com today.

Tourism and SEO: A Match Made in Heaven

Author: Peter Sickles www.alphasearch.ca

In 2004, 33 million US and Canadian Leisure Travel Hotel and Hospitality consumers bought, booked, or found their trip online for a total of 65 billion $ in travel revenues through the Internet. This represents a full 59% of the total $120 billion Leisure Travel market. (These numbers are not exaggerations: the source for these numbers is online research leader Forrester Research.) These numbers are, quite simply, amazing and may come as a surprise to many people. The Internet is not the wave of the future... it's here now. Failure to tap into its potential represents a huge loss of opportunity.

About 65% of all travelers did at least some of their travel planning online. For example, the 'young adult' age group (19-25 yrs) spent $2.5 billion on on-line video gaming, yet that same age group spent a truly astounding $25 billion on on-line travel. The reason for the huge number of people researching their trips online is simple: online travel planning makes sense.

Online travel planners are wealthy consumers who like to travel. They travel more frequently, and they spend more than the average consumer. Average spending is $3,400 per trip and on average they do this 4.9 times per year. Even better - these travel planners that find you online are inclined to be NEW customers who would not have found you otherwise. These customers are looking for you, but based on our research, they are not finding you. A full 98% of web users use search engines (iprospect.com), and 65% of North Americans use search engines to come to a purchasing decision (Enquiro.com).

Most people are drawn to regular search engine results rather than to paid placements (Enquiro.com) which is why search engine optimization is the best form of search marketing. Consider how you use searches and you will know that the value of showing up on the top of Google's first pages when someone looks for a hotel, resort, or other facility in your region is huge.

Forecasts show that the Strongest Online Sales Growth areas for the Leisure Travel industry include the following:

1 Hotels (represents 1/3 of all leisure/travel dollars spent online!) 2 Vacation Package Sales 3 Resort and Convention sales.

These revenues are there for the taking: showing up on top of searches in your area is the way to capture them. But you need to show up on top because 70% ""rarely or never"" look past the first results page, and 91% of users modify their search criteria if the first 3 results don't meet their needs (iProspect.com).

What does it cost to bring in these visitors? The cost of a strong search marketing campaign will surprise you. It can be as little as $1,500-$2,500 for a campaign that will bring in literally hundreds of new guests. Search optimization is simply the most cost effective way to reach a wide audience. Consider how much money is spent on traditional advertising (which often produce questionable results) and compare the results. Shifting some of this purchasing to the Internet will bring a much larger return.

Critical Success Factors: based on consumer stages:

1. The ability for customers to find a website. 2. The ability for customers to find information/functionality within a website. 3. The content offered by a website. 4. The functionality offered by a website. 5. The overall look and feel of a website. 6. The ability for a customer to join into a relationship with a website.

A focused combination of efforts that will produce positive results:

1. Content. 2. Links from other websites. 3. Paid placements. 4. Website submissions. 5. Titles and metatags.

It takes time and a consistent effort to achieve good results. As with anything truly worthwhile, there are no quick fixes, no magic bullets.

About the author: Owner of AlphaSearch Internet Marketing (www.alphasearch.ca)in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Peter holds Arts and PR degrees from Saint Mary's and Mount Saint Vincent Universities. After freelance writing for many years,he adapted his skills to the Internet some seven years ago. He founded AlphaSearch just over one year ago.

Google Loves Natural Methods

Author: Hamid Reza Soroush Zand

It all began as of January when some newly optimized and boosted websites were shocked to see a dramatic change in their Google search rankings. Thousands of websites were unchanged, some went drastically down and some, up.

Admins of such online companies shocked about what had happened consulted their beloved SEO companies and thousands of online experts were analyzing the case.

It was clear that Google had become smarter, changing the search algorithm and would realize the usual artificial seo techniques such as overnight link building strategies and other tricks.

Well, a large number of old websites are happy about all this cause Google has started to create a longer period for newbies to get to top of search engines.

It was usual that before the latest makeover if you wanted to get listed in first three pages of Google and other websites, you had to be famous either normally through natural links from other websites or through buying link ads.

To some extent this has changed, now if you register a domain name and set up your website and are in need of high search engine rankings, you should be patient and exercise legitimate, natural methods to be indexed higher.

For example it's not recommended to buy several high pagerank links in a week, cause your newly established website might not even be indexed or start getting rankings even for a whole year after registering your domain.

So try to be a friend to Google by 1) Be patient cause hurrying in SEO might be hurting your website as well. 2)It's not the end of the world not being able to get listed in first pages of Google search results, so try Google Adwords and online advertisement. 3)Don't concentrate too much on Google, try to get higher rankings in other major search engines like Yahoo and MSN. 4)Try increasing your Google popularity through natural webmaster link buildings and through blogs, message boards and last but not least through RSS.

Don't worry, if you offer nice web content and competitive services to your customers, you will be in profit even if you are not listed as you like in Google.

About the author: The author is the admin of a design studio and studies web technologies, He can be contacted through info@bannerperfect.com

Don't Put Your Slogan in the Title Tag - Optimize Your Web Pages

Author: Soren Breiting

Don't just put your slogan in the title tag when you formulate the copy of your website. The formulation of the title tag is the most important single aspect when you fine-tune your website:

1. It is what people first read when the listing of your site turns up in Google and other search engines.

2. It is the single element of your website that the search engines pay the highest emphasis on.

If you look up the source code, the title is what is between these tags: title and /title in the hard brackets. You can get the length of your title tag checked here: http://www.scrubtheweb.com/cgi-bin/webtools/meta-check.cgi

A typical slogan isn't stuffed with important keywords. My slogan for my stock photography business is ""Stock photos from most of the World"" and I am quite happy with that. It is honest and catchy which I like. But it isn't a good title for my website of A-Z Fotos: www.azfotos.com . Let us analyze that as an example.

The first two words of the slogan would be fine as the title tag because 'stock photos' are among the main keywords for A-Z Fotos. They are also fine because they are put in front of the title tag. Don't forget this so-called 'keyword prominence' in title tags.

They also function well when people are browsing down the listing after the search button has been activated, because people tend to look for exactly the word they wrote in the search box.

But the words 'from most of the' is absolutely useless. It is the kind of words that the search engines simply ignore because they are too common. The last word 'World' isn't any better. Nobody would search for the 'World'. - To say it mildly, it is too broad!

The alternative to your slogan is to formulate a title which includes your most important keywords for the specific webpage in such a way that it is attractive when the surfer browses down the search result.

For Google the title shouldn't be longer than 62 characters. Include your brand name if it includes keywords. Otherwise avoid it in the title unless it is very well known. As always be careful to choose relevant keywords and combinations of words that are often searched after. I always check at

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ for the relevance of the keywords I have in mind. Be aware that many keywords are to some extent seasonal. Overture offers the frequency of searches in US of last month.

Searches in UK can be checked at

http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Remember to make the title tag even more specific for your subpages, i.e. the pages after the home page (index-page).

Avoid having more than one page with the same title.

About the author: Get help from Soren Breiting to find ideas for your online marketing at http://www.ALLeMarketingTips.com and receive the latest really useful tips at http://www.StockPhotoNews.com. Soren has written more than 20 printed books, and countless articles. He is widely published on the web, too. Enjoy Soren's wonderful stock photos at: http://www.azFOTOS.com

SEO Tips For People Who Aren't Dummies!

Author: Philip Lim

TIP ONE: THE IMPORTANCE OF KEY WORDS

In the world of marketing online, one topic comes up over and over with great frequency: site rankings. It can sometimes seem to be the 'holy grail' in the highly competitive world of online marketing, where search engines rule supreme. The reality is that unless you have deep pockets indeed, SEO optimization in the long run will be more affordable than simply buying placement with click campaigns and advertisements.

This is the good news. The bad news is that the process is slow, and it can take months (and months and months) of dedicated effort to achieve decent rankings (one reason you don't want to abandon those paid campaigns while optimizing your site). But it is well worth the time and effort in the long run, since it addresses the one issue that is foremost when marketing your product and services online: people use search engines such as Google and MSN to do their looking. And search engine listings that are highly ranked consistently outperform 'paid listings'.

So how do you get your site listed and ranked highly? Does it take dedicating your life fulltime to this effort, or specialized knowledge? The answer is ""yes"" and ""no"". It can help tremendously to hire the assistance of a firm that specializes in SEO (and, in fact, this is highly recommended). They can give you professional guidance in this arena, and steer you away from common mistakes.

But for those with a limited budget (which is most of us, nowadays, it seems) it's also possible to do your own site optimization, and work on a long-term campaign to help your site rise. It isn't easy (unlike those ads and books online that promise overnight success with no effort), but by rolling up your shirtsleeves and diving in, you can learn a tremendous amount, and help your site get found when people type in your products into a search engine.

TIP TWO: SELECT YOUR KEYWORDS CAREFULLY

Search engine keywords are what lead people (as in potential customers) who type in phrases in their favorite search engine to your site. When they go onto Google, Excite, or other search engines and directories, and are looking for a specific item, keywords are the ones that they type in during their search.

To market effectively to them, you will need to think like them (this is the basis of all excellent marketing). You will want to determine:

What phrases people type in when looking for your product, service, or content during their online searches (including the most common

misspellings, by the way). Not sure? Try looking at your web stats for your site. You should see an extremely valuable area called ""search strings"", with a list of words underneath it.

These search strings are the phrases that actually brought people to your web site. Which ones were the most popular? You'll want to note these. But you'll want to add more.

Sit down for a minute, and think of every possible phrase people might use for searching for your product. At this point, don't edit yourself, just let the words flow and write them down. If you sell used Chevrolets in Alexandria, VA, you might come up with ""used cars, used Chevrolets, vintage cars, reconditioned cars, Chevrolet dealers, Alexandria VA car dealers, Alexandria VA used cars"", as just a start.

By now, you should have a list. Go through it again, and decide which ones seem the most focused for your product or service. You want search engine keywords that will bring targeted customers to your site, who are interested in doing business with you, and the right keywords can help accomplish this. Be specific and relevant in your choices. Then, alphabetize your list, since some search engines and directories list pages alphabetically; so use your best phrases in alphabetical order whenever possible for better optimization.

Next, analyze which keyword phrases are realistic for obtaining high rankings. While you may sell used autos, and want to get top rankings for that term, 'used autos' is an extremely popular and general phrase, and odds are, difficult to get good rankings for. But if you sell used Chevrolets in Alexandria, Virginia, then it's realistic to hope for high rankings for search engine phrases for 'Alexandria used Chevrolets'. You'll also get a more targeted audience (think 'more likely to buy from me'), since most of your customers will probably come from your locale).

At this point, you should have a list of keywords. If you have a very short one, or are having trouble thinking of some, you can gain access to professional software at minimal cost. Just start a Google adwords campaign, or a CPC campaign on Overture. Each of these sites have ""keyword suggestion"" tools that will give you several keywords based on your product or service, and will include the relative popularity of each one.

TIP THREE: PLACE KEYWORDS CAREFULLY

Once you have your keywords, you'll want to use them in the right places. The goal is to help search engines find your site for those phrases, so you will want to place them in spots the engines look closely at. These include the page Title, inside the meta tags, inside the heading tag, in the domain name (more about this in a later lesson), and the keyword tags.

You will also want to sprinkle them liberally throughout the content (text) of your site, with special consideration for the top of your page and its first paragraphs. This is especially important on your home (index page), which is the one that most search engines will cache when spidering through. And please, have some real content on your page, and not just a list of keywords, or your site could go down in its rankings. Search engines do rank according to content relevancy, and the site that says ""Our dealership provides quality used Chevrolet cars, reconditioned to meet our customer's needs,"" (with at least 100 words of good, relevant content) will always rank higher than the site that says, ""cars, cars, cars, buy quality used Chevrolet cars, quality used cars are here"". In addition, you won't drive away customers offended by poor quality writing and obvious over-usage of marketing phrases.

But you do want to maintain a certain ratio of keyword density in your text; a keyword density of 5 to 7% is usually recommended. If you don't feel comfortable writing copy using keywords, a professional copywriter who specializes in online writing can help you.

THREE COMMON MISTAKES TO AVOID

Mistake #1 : One common error that many people make is to forget to place ALT tags for their graphics. You may have a beautiful logo or graphic on your web site, but if you don't have an alt tag, the search engines can't ""read it"". Be sure to place keywords there, and to label graphics with names that reflect keywords.

Mistake #2 : Always have text on your site. When creating your site, search engines depend upon text to decide what your site is about. The more relevant the text, the better. The spiders and bots can't ""read"" graphics as mentioned above. Don't just make the text for the site one big graphic, as some firms do. The search engines will skip over the graphic, and assume you have no content at all.

Mistake #3 : Finally, please don't spam (by trying to 'hide' your keywords by using a font the same color as the background, or repeating keyword phrases over and over in the title and meta tags). Search engines are now excellent at finding those who try to break the rules (and their technology for doing so is getting more sophisticated all the time), and will drop spammers from their indexes like a hot potato. So play by the rules, and when in doubt, ask an ethical SEO firm for advice, or visit one of the many excellent forums online (such as Jill Whalen's High Rankings Search Engine Forums).

Your site will rise more quickly, and enjoy higher rankings, if you follow these tips and their advice. And your traffic will increase, at no cost to you!

About the author: Philip Lim is the editor of www.Catasult.com which provides valuable tips and advice on web promotion and internet marketing from linking strategies to search engine industry news, internet marketing articles and more.

Creating A User-Friendly Website

Author: Karl Ribas

In my last article, I stated several facts about the importance of having a developed search engine friendly website. The website would be visually pleasing and at the same time optimized for high search engine rankings. It stated the differences between a designer and a search engine optimizer. It also stressed the important functions that both vocations respectively have on a website's development. The article even offered some of my own personal design/optimization workarounds that can easily be applied to your current or next project.

What the article had failed to mention or discuss through, was the third party that plays a huge role in whether or not a website stays successful or washes away never to be seen or heard of again; referring to website's users or visitors.

When developing and maintaining a website, one should not only remember to consider a search engine friendly design, but also the users and their interactions within the website. For the most part, your website's usability should be considered equally if not more important than all other aspects of your website... this includes the design, layout, and marketing strategies.

So what exactly is usability? Well, user-ability or usability, in essence, is the degree to which a user can successfully learn and use a product to achieve a goal. In this case, the product would be your website and the goal would be to find what he or she is searching for in a timely manner. As a way of assisting you to create a true user experience, consider adding the following user-friendly design and marketing suggestions into your current or next project.

Use Search Engine Marketing - Actually a very basic principle, yet for some online merchants it's a fairly complicated subject. To break it down, having a website without search engine marketing, for example, can be compared to opening your business out on some back-country road and the road only ties two farm towns together. Sure you may find a few stray consumers that manage to find and walk through your door, but not too many.

Therefore by including search engine marketing into your website, you have converted your business to a much wider and more populous audience, such as Times Square, New York City contrary to the back-country road. Instantly your business is exposed to several hundred thousand people each day, ensuring your business to be successful. In addition, search engine marketing delivers targeted traffic. Thusly, that is like insinuating that every man, women, or child that stepped onto your equivalent of Time Square, are specifically in search of the products or services that you provide.

In conclusion, by marketing your products and services through search engine marketing, you ensure for your customers a faster and easier solution to their needs that will result in your profit. This is indeed a very important factor in maintaining a true user-friendly experience.

Create Proper Landing Pages - Having just covered ""search engine marketing"", there is something to be learned specifically from Pay Per Click landing pages. A landing page, a page that the searcher lands on when they first enter a website, provides yet another opportunity for you to step up to the plate and deliver a more user-friendly experience.

It is very important to direct your Pay Per Click traffic to a page that clearly outlines the information the searcher was looking to attain. You would only waste their time by sending them through the home page or some other non-related page. Website usability is great when you provide your visitors with the information that they are in search of in a very timely manner. Therefore, the more time that you waste making them search, the greater the chance that they will become annoyed and eventually move on to other search listings.

People that use search engines to find products or services provide you with information about themselves and how far they are in the buying process. For example:

If a person were to do a search by using a very general term such as ""MP3 Players"" than it's probably safe to assume that the person is indeed researching the subject and is not quite sold on any particular brand or style as of yet. My suggestion would be to create a specific landing page that would outline several MP3 players that you carry. This intern would help the customer to find one that best suites their needs.

On the contrary, if a person were to search for ""20GB Dell DJ"" than it's quite obvious that they know exactly what it is that they want to purchase. However, they still would be in search of the right place to make their purchase. In this scenario, I would suggest that you do all you can to convince your visitor that you are worthy of their business. Simply send this type of traffic to a page that highlights elements such as your low price, low shipping rates, shipping options, return policies, privacy policies, and that you maintain a secure shopping environment.

Highlight Shipping Rates - In most competitive industries, shipping options and rates have become just as much of a selling point as the product's actual cost. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to highlight or advertise your shipping rates on your homepage and landing pages. You should even offer specialty savings on shipping rates to entice and retain potential customers to buy from your store.

More and more customers have abandoned their shopping carts. There are instances where website visitors would leave in the middle of the ""check-out"" phase. Some of these lost sales can be contributed to a website's shipping rates. This key fact makes sense because on most websites, the only way you can determine how much your shipping and/or handling fees are going to be would be by going through the actual checkout.

Website owners need to understand that shipping options and rates are very important bits of information to their website's visitors. By highlighting the information up front you, again, can deliver a true user-friendly experience.

Use A Proper Navigation System - One of the most effective ways to help your visitors find the information, products, or services that they desire is to equip your website with a navigation system that is easy to find, understand, and use. It is encouraged that you create a navigation system that resides across the top of the page, or one that flows down the left side of the page. Both instances are quite common, as well as practical.

In addition, your navigation system should not change from one page to another. By doing so it will most-likely create confusion, which is what you are trying to avoid. Therefore, maintain the same layout, link order, and color sequence to prevent any sort of misdirection on your part.

Use A Proper ""Call To Action"" Phrase - After you have helped your website's visitors to find what they are looking for in a timely manner, it becomes your obligation to make them feel as if they were in 100% control of their shopping experience. In general, online shoppers will almost always feel in control as long as they are not pressured in any way. Finally, give this last bit of information half a chance and it will convert more of your website visitors into customers.

The ""call to action"" phrase, the phrase that will direct online shoppers to add an item into their shopping cart, will outwardly reflect on a website sales and conversions. Taking that into consideration, use the phrase ""Add to Cart"" or an ""Add to Cart"" button as your ""call to action"" whenever possible. ""Add to Cart"" is something that is well recognized and understood to be a part of the buying process (both online and offline).

Should you choose to use other phrases, such as ""Buy Now"" or ""Order Now"", you risk that your website visitors will feel pressure. This is what you do not want to happen. Statements such as these will be seen as bold and forceful. Subsequently, your visitors feel as if they MUST buy then, rather than just adding it to the shopping cart. Also, statements such as ""Buy Now"" and ""Order Now"" give finality to the process when possibly not intended. Instead of adding an item to the shopping cart, the statement now suggests that your visitors will be transferred directly to the checkout where they must now make a purchase.

In the offline world, a person would not go into a super-market or a retail store, find the first of many items they want to buy, buy it, and proceed to reenter the store to continue shopping for the rest. This is an un-natural behavior. Instead, people add items into their shopping carts as they find them, and when finished, they then proceed to the checkout. Your website's ""call to action"" phrase should suggest nothing different.

In conclusion, online shoppers have come to expect a few distinct shopping principles which revolve around the few usability suggestions stated within this article. They have come to expect that search engines will outline the most relevant websites on the Internet according to their query, and then by clicking on a listing they will arrive directly at the information they are seeking. They have come to expect a shopping environment where they feel 100% in control. Most of all, online shoppers understand that they do not have to settle for less. In fact, online shoppers are sold by intriguing offers or deals. Ignoring these few shopping principles will be very hazardous to on your online efforts.

Karl Ribas - Search Engine Marketing Consultant

About the author: Karl Ribas, Search Engine Marketing Consultant , provides up-to-date, valuable, and effective SEM services to a wide range of small, medium, and large-size businesses. Besides being the owner and operator of his website, Karl Ribas.com, Ribas is also the Project Manager at All Web Promotion , an industry-leading search engine marketing firm.

Non Reciprocal Links = Top Google Rankings

Author: Mark Dietzel

When I left my day job four years ago I had four website's, today I have forty five sites and a while back I noticed that two of my sites have held their ""Top Three"" positions through all of the trends, fads, search engine updates, even the Florida update did not affect their top positions. To say the least I was perplexed, there was nothing really apparent that made these two sites different in fact I had did a terrible job of keeping them updated, you know too busy with the other site's greasing the squeaky wheels. They were not broken so I did not fix them.

So anyway I needed to figure out why these sites had did so well with so little attention. Now I am thinking if I can just figure out why then I can do the same to the rest of my sites. But like I said earlier I did very little to these sites, they never needed it. It just did not make sense until after days of hair pulling I decided to analyze them just like I would do one of my competitors. First the on page factors had nothing special just very basic SEO, second I looked at the list of inbound links nothing really jumped out at me, so I made a list of my reciprocal partners from my links page then eliminated those from the inbound link list, which left about three dozen links of which six were scraper site's so I eliminated those so now there are 30 links I did not know about, at first I thought no big deal these are just links from site's that wanted a reciprocal link and I never got back to them, like I said I had neglected these two sites. Analyzing the 30 links, six or seven probably were from reciprocal link request that I had ignored, so I was left with 23 unexpected links to analyze and here's what I found

 * None of the links were on a links page.

 * All of the links were either in an article or review.

 * All of the links had text before and after the link text.

 * Almost all of the links had different text in the link.

 * Most of the pages linking to me only had 5 to 10 outbound links.

 * Some of the links were to my home page but the others were to interior pages.

 * Most of the pages linking to me were only one level deep. (1 click from the home page)

Apparently the handful of ""quality non-reciprocal links"" was behind the success of these two sites, which if you look at it from a search engine's point of view it makes perfect sense because an unbiased, non-reciprocal and natural occurring link is the only true vote for the quality of the content on your site. The search engines and especially Google are smart enough to spot reciprocal links and know that a reciprocal link has nothing to do with the quality of the content on your site, they know that its just a trade between two webmasters trying to get better rankings.

Back when Google first started counting inbound links as votes for a site in its algorithms they did not have to worry about whether the link was natural, reciprocal or paid because so few people knew about it, plus unlike today the technology did not exist back then to easily scan and spot reciprocal links. But as more people learned about the power of linking more and more abuse took place, forcing Google to adjust their algorithms.

Next week we'll exam ways to get quality one way links to your site.

Mark Dietzel

About the author: Mark Dietzel is founder of Natural Linking at http://www.naturallinking.com a service providing one way non-reciprocal links.