Straight Talk on Search Engine Optimization

Author: Andrew Kalinen

""Straight Talk on Search Engine Optimization"" The complete article including helpful links can also be found at GetYouPaid.com *This article contains no advertising. Any links are to useful, non-affiliated websites or GetYouPaid.com. To get your website listed well in the major search engines, you have to perform search engine optimization (SEO). If your website was built without search engine optimization ""in mind"", it will probably not appear in any search results. SEO can seem complicated. This article attempts to make SEO easy. This is a basic SEO plan with tips for doing SEO and getting results within 1 month. Google is the primary target of this overall plan.

I. - Choose Your Weapons (keywords) - You need to choose WHICH keywords you want your website to focus on for potential search engine listings. It can be better to focus on achievable high rankings (moderately searched specific terms), than for high rankings for keywords that are ultra-competitive or too general. Focus on getting ""some"" high ranking results and then shoot for more popular terms over time.

II. - Lock and Load. Prepare Your Site - SEO on your website is mainly about putting a high concentration of your target keywords in strategic places on your pages.

III. - Party Invitations. Get Your Site Listed on High Pagerank Websites - If you want Google to recognize your website, it must be ""mentioned"" in good places on the Internet, which builds your sites' Pagerank. A high Pagerank link in a directory or on another similar website can make all the difference in the world with getting good search engine listings. Getting ""reciprocal links"" is free and builds your Pagerank. One-way links are even better.

** - Bear in mind that Google search results can vary from day-to-day

Note: The target of this SEO plan is Google. If you can get your website listed in Google, other major search engines will tend to follow.

----------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------

Tools You'll Need for Your Own SEO Solution Project:

1. A website in which you have CONTROL over its contents (the html). An affiliate web page that you can't change can't be optimized for you. You'd have to start your own website and put the affiliate contents on it. 2. You need to get the Google Toolbar if you don't already have it installed. Enable the Pagerank display feature. 3. You'll need some type of website tracking (your host may have possibly provided it already) that can identify search engine spider hits (primarily Googlebot hits). 4. You'll need a basic understanding of Google Pagerank and crawls (search engine spiders). If you don't know about them, read below, otherwise you can skip this part.

Google Pagerank

The Pagerank system, in short, is basically Google's system on a 1-10 scale of measuring a website's importance. Google.com has the highest Pagerank (PR) of 10. A brand new website domain has a PR 0. There are other websites that discuss how it's calculated. Here is a quick gauge: 0 - new website, 1-2 a ""drop"" of popularity, 3 - popularity is beginning, 4 - an established web presence with periodic attention from Google, 5 - a stronger presence, 6 - a semi-powerful website that gets crawled daily, 7 - a powerful, frequently visited website, 8 - a very, very powerful website, 9 - 10 - Off the charts in power.

The Pagerank of a website influences a. How often it gets crawled for future search listings, b. How high those search listings will be listed. The Pagerank of a website will appear in the Google toolbar (with Pagerank enabled) when your browser is on the page of that website. This plan will show you how to increase your Pagerank and the frequency of crawls by Google.

Spiders and Crawls

For the search engines to ""index"" your website, it will send its ""spider"" robot program to ""crawl"" your homepage and any other pages it ""sees"" on your domain. Visits by a spider are erratic, at best. Spiders will visit your website more frequently if it thinks ""your website is important"". With Google, importancy is measured by Pagerank. I discuss raising your Pagerank is Part 3.

----------------------------------------------------------------- --------------- I. - Choose Your Weapons (keywords) Obviously, some keywords are searched more than others. In nearly the same proportion, more websites will optimize for the more popular keywords over the less popular ones. This means that you have a higher chance of success (less competition) if you target the ""moderately"" searched keywords, instead of going straight after ""the big ones"". I'm not trying to underestimate or limit your success. My strategy for anyone is to achieve ""some"" success first, and then increase it over time. Many webmasters will ""swing for the fences"" and after not having any success for so long, bow out of the race entirely.

I'll give a rule-of-thumb way to gauge your competition for optimized keywords. With the Google toolbar on, search Google for the broadest keyword term that describes your website. For this website, I chose ""small business"". You'll probably see a bunch of high-powered PR7 and PR6 websites that have your term in title. Observe their Pagerank (PR) rankings. Getting listed on the front page for a popular broad term is a tough battle and a long process that may be too high to reach for a new website.

Next, search for less-popular, but more specific keyword terms that describe your website. For this website, I chose ""low risk business"". Depending on the keyword term, you'll eventually find one that is specific to your site, but the competition doesn't have those scary-high PR rankings. You should be able to find terms that only have PR4 and PR3 sites listed for them. This is the target for YOUR website. If you're finding that you can't find keyword terms with lesser competition, you may seriously consider altering your website's theme to make it more specific for a particular ""niche"" of the market.

----------------------------------------------------------------- --------------- II. - Lock and Load. Prepare Your Site The bottom line is, you will need to concentrate and stuff your target keywords throughout your website, whenever possible, until they are actually 7% or so of all the words on the page itself (If you go higher than 7%, its at ""your own risk"". Google and other search engines have ""spam alerts"" that detect overzealous practices). Repeating keywords too many times on a page can look ""funny"" to your customers even though Google may like it, so you have to balance your SEO goals with common sense.

This is a brief list of SEO tips you should do to your website in order to focus on a particular set of keywords:

The TITLE tag of your html should include your target keywords

The META TITLE tag of your html should include your target keywords

The META DESCRIPTION tag of your html should include your target keywords

The META KEYWORDS tag of your html should include ALL of your keywords, with the most targeted ones listed first, and separated by commas. Last time I checked, Google doesn't read Meta Tags, but its good to do this anyway for the other search engines.

If you have a domain which also includes your keywords within the name itself (www.my-keywords-are-here.com), you'll get ""brownie"" points from Google that will help.

Your header tags (H1, H2, etc.) should include your targeted keywords if you use them.

The first major sentence on your page should include your target keywords and concentrate on the overall theme of your website.

The overall ""density"" of your page, should be high (7% or so of all the words on the page) for your target keywords. I use an online density checker to help with this.

If you ""bold"" your target keywords on the page (sometimes), you'll get brownie points from Google. Link and image ALT tags are good places to ""stuff"" with target keywords if you need to build your density.

Other pages on your website that link back to your homepage should have the target keywords within the anchor text (displayed text) of the link. The more pages on your site that practice the step above, the better

----------------------------------------------------------------- --------------- III. - Party Invitations. Get Your Site Listed on High PageRank Websites

This may be the most important SEO step and that's why I listed it in red. The heart of the Google Pagerank system scores your site based on the quality of links that OTHER sites have pointing to yours, known as incoming links. By quality, I mean other sites with a high Pagerank score. My personal opinion is that the Pagerank system has turned the Internet into a ""country club"" in some ways. If you run with the ""in crowd"", you get points for it. Regardless of what I think about the system, I decided to ""play ball"" in order to get my websites listed well in the directories.

One of the easiest ways to get incoming links is to participate in a common Internet practice called reciprocal linking. This is where you agree with another website that ""if you link to me, I'll link to you"". What matters here is the Pagerank of the other site. If your site starts out at PR 0, it can be hard to find a PR6 site that wants to link to you! This is also because OUTgoing links actually cost the sponsoring website a few points. One type of site that lives to list other websites and aren't so PR-conscious are the web directories. All most require is a reciprocal link.

Search on Google.com for web directories that have a good PR ranking. Reciprocal links are good and will get spiders to recognize your site, but one-way links are even better. Google doesn't score reciprocal links between two sites ""as high"" because it's ""an arrangement"" between the sites. Google will score your site much higher if you have a one-way link on another site that points to your site, even though your site does not link back to that site. When I learned this, I thought ""Great, but where can I get one-way links?""

I discovered that because of the rising demand of links with high Pagerank, there is now an auction specifically made for auctioning off high-PR one-way links (search for it on Google). PR7 one-way links are auctioned off there for about $50. The rule-of-thumb is that the highest incoming PR link you have should make your site 2 PR less (a PR8 link should at least create a new PR6 site). I highly recommend the site as a source for high PR links. One link can set your website on the fast track to great search engine listings.

One more quick tip: The anchor text in your incoming links should contain your target keywords for maximum effect with Google.

----------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------

Conclusion:

After you've done Steps I. - III., you should see some spider hits within a few days of your directory listings. Google may then list some or all of your website pages. You can check your listings in Google by going there and searching for ""allinurl:www.yourdomain.com"". After 6-8 weeks, you should see the full effects of your efforts, and your Pagerank should rise. If you've ""reached for the skies"" and targeted very popular keywords and aren't seeing any results, alter your website so that it targets keywords whose listings in Google are more attainable. Be patient. This process takes monitoring and fine-tuning.

That's all I have on search engine optimization for today. It's a challenge that takes effort, but it's nice to actually see some results after a few weeks. That's more than I can say for some of the other ""advertising magic wands"" that are sold all over the Internet.

Good Luck!

About the author: The author of this article, Andrew Kalinen, is an Internet Entrepenuer who lives in New England. Apart from constantly updating GetYouPaid.com, Andrew enjoys hiking, snowboarding, and making home videos. GetYouPaid.com is a free site dedicated to providing small business advice to anyone interested in starting their own Internet-based business. GetYouPaid.com

Ethical Search Engine Optimisation Services: Are You Selecting the Right Keywords?

Author: David Touri

Selecting keywords to drive website traffic to your site is a very crucial point in search engine optimisation. Many people believe selecting keywords with the most searches will get them the desired ranks and traffic they wish to have. Unless you already have a well established website within the search engine ranks, selecting keywords with a high number of searches should be avoided. These sorts of keywords will usually mean that there is a large number of competing pages, which in turn means it will be extremely difficult to achieve high ranks.

Due to a large number of competing pages for generic terms, optimisers should focus on selecting keywords that have a reasonable amount of searches and a minimal amount of competing pages. The key is to focus on a small list of keywords, say 20 to 30, and then once a strong presence has been made for those keywords the list can be expanded to include slightly more generic terms.

Having said that, selecting keywords with less search numbers doesn't necessarily result in less visitors to your website. Search engine users these days tend to refine their searches to more specific keywords since they are given a broad range of websites when they use the generic terms. For example, if you have people wanting to buy a car, most search engine users will enter the phrase ""buy car"". Once they are given a wide range of websites to choose from, they will in most cases change their search to include a car model type. For those who have optimised for the more refined phrases, the more likely they are going to get an interested buyer.

For those of you who are looking for a good keyword tool, Wordtracker and Overture is a good place to start. To determine the number of competing pages for a keyword phrase, enter that phrase into a search engine and look at the number of pages indexed. As a rule of thumb, I always tend to select keyword phrases that have less than a million pages indexed in Google or Yahoo.

With all that in mind, provided you target selected keywords that have a reasonable amount of search numbers and a minimal amount of competing pages along with proper optimisation practices, you should be able to achieve a strong presences in search engines over a period of time.

About the author: David Touri is a search engine optimisation specialist working for SEO Sydney . He offers

ethical search engine optimisation services to companies in Australia. For further information, please visit http://www.seosydney.com.au

You Cannot Hide From Public Record Search Engines

Author: Mike Banks Valentine ? copyright March 9, 2005

http://PrivacyNotes.com/privacy_blog/

As a search engine optimization specialist, I often run across search engines of different sorts than most people are aware of. This week I stumbled across a free site that is used by journal- ists to do background checks and fact checking on sources of news stories. I am also an advocate for personal and financial privacy and find privacy invasion particularly offensive, so this search engine offends me.

The http://www.pretrieve.com/ Free Public Record Search Engine - Person Search is an example of the databasification of all public records. It's instructive to take a look at the results of a search for yourself in this free people search engine that is apparently used often by journalists. The linked page above takes you to the site home page which is a form allowing you to search for a person, business, address or phone number and the results pages can be frightening.

The results are listed as questions on the Pretrieve.com site in a row of tabs labeled ""Property Info, Criminal, Court, Professional, Local Info, Miscellaneous"" and the ""Criminal"" tab (Criminal) inserts your name or that of the person you are searching for in each possible source of criminal information under a link labeled ""Registered Sex Offender Search"" then a question with the searched name and state inserted: ""Is anyone named (your name here) a registered sex offender in ""your state here""? If you searched for your own name, it appears in that frightening position and startles you quite handily.

The arrangement of tabs with criminal info first must be done for the dramatic effect it has on what would otherwise be a rather mundane search of bland information. But when I went ahead and pressed that frightening link, I got a gratifying ""no information could be found"" result page. Whew! Then again on the link leading to the ""Federal Inmate Search"" I got a gratifying ""Sorry. No Inmate Named (Your name here) Race: unspecified Sex: unspecified found."" on the new window launched on the Federal ""Bureau of Prisons"" site search.

Since I write frequently online, there are hundreds of sources of information on me available in one of the results tabs labled ""professional"", I was happy to see that my occupation was correctly listed as ""Search Engine Optimization Specialist"" with sources coming mainly from resource boxes of my articles appearing across the web.

The interface of the Pretrieve.com result page also links you to organizations that have published information about you and fills in the name information, going directly to a search on the name entered at the new site. The interface of Pretrieve.com links you to their sources by launching new windows at different web sites and prepopulating the search forms with the name and state info.

The ""professional"" affiliations are tracked by a site called ""Eliyon.com Business People Search"" where links to web mentions are tied to the byline of my articles. Seems their forte is finding business mentions to connect with names. OK. But I was surprised to see that one company that I work with was incorrectly listed as being in Northern California, when they are in fact in Southern California. Oh, and they incorrectly named, but correctly linked to the web site of that company.

This type of error is probably common in online databases and is one of the biggest problems with this type of data aggregation. It is not kept current or accurate by all sources and there are others with the same name, etc. There is a prominent link on the Eliyon.com site labeled ""Log in to Update your Profile"" or the Didn't find yourself? Add your profile!"" link is ridiculous. Why give them info they don't have so they give it to everyone else?

The Property Info tab is truly offensive as it gives you a link to the county tax assessors office record of any property owned by someone you've searched for. Plus their home address, square footage of their house, how much it is worth and amount of taxes owed on it. Oh, and phone number, street address, zip code.

The multiple other options take you to financial records such as bankruptcy filings, political contributions, defaulted loans and dozens of other possible financial records you don't want the world to see. Why is this acceptable - and the bigger question - why is this legal?

A very interesting note comes from the Pretrieve.com privacy page where they make this curious statement: ""It may seem contrary for a company dedicated to making public information more easily accessible to be an ardent supporter of information privacy, but the fact is we take information privacy rights extremely seriously. We believe public information should be open and made available to everyone as adamantly as we believe private information should remain private.""

But doesn't making all sources of public information easily available, make possible private information easily available along with it? Actually, this only applies to informaiton directly available on the pretrieve site, which is nothing other than your computer and connection info as they don't require registration to use their service. They do place cookies on your hard drive so the site will not work if you turn off that option in your browser. The information business seems to be full of contradictions.

About the author: http://PrivacyNotes.com/privacy_blog/ Web Privacy Tutorial at: http://privacynotes.com/P hone_number_privacy.html And Performs Ethical Search Engine Optimization http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm Press Release Optimization & Distribution Online If you've got news you can

Are You in for a Safe Landing? - PPC Landing Pages

Author: Shawn Campbell

You've paid for your ticket and your ads are up on Google AdWords and Yahoo's Overture, but have you set up a safe landing for your clients?

Run a test landing. Do a search and find your Pay Per Click (PPC) ad in Yahoo or Google. Click on it. Where does it bring you? Your home page? I hope not. You should create a specific landing page for your PPC ads. A landing page is the page you create to convert your PPC traffic into sales. This page should get your potential customers (that you have already paid for!) to go exactly where you think they want to go.

Here are some tips to create a good landing page:

1) Focus! Focus! Focus!

The landing page should be about your product or service. No links to other sites, no advertisements, no ""how do you do"". When people arrive at your landing page, they should already be predisposed to buy (since you wrote such an excellent ad to get them here in the first place) and are trying to either: a)Get more information about your product or service b)Find the ""Buy now"" button Use the search term on the page, because searchers will key into the section of the page with their search term. If the search term is ""buy skidoo"" then have a button that says ""Buy Skidoos Here"". Don't distract them - give them what they want.

2) Customize your landing page

Use a different landing page for each group of keyphrases. If you sell seadoos and skidoos, don't use the same landing page for each. Create a new landing page for each product (or each group of products) and send the clients directly to the page they are interested in.

3) Give them information

If they are not yet sold on your product or service, then they are going to be looking for more detailed information when they arrive at your landing page. Give it to them. You have to convince them that you have the perfect product or service to solve their problem. If they run out of information before they make a commitment to buy, then you have lost them. Nobody will spend money until they are convinced that your product or service is the right choice for them. So prove it.

4) Tell the reader what you want them to do

Use calls-to-action. If you want them to buy your product, than tell them often how to do it (""Click here to buy""). If you want them to call you, post the number up with instructions (""Call us now at 1-877-717-3667""). Repeat it throughout the text, then again in big and bold at the end.

5) Use graphics

Use pictures to sell your product or service. Pictures of the product or pictures of satisfied customers sell. Use them - and use them often.

6) Run tests

Set up two landing pages to see which one converts better. Set up two identical ads and send one to each landing page, then compare conversion rates for each page. Figure out why one converts better and try to improve the other one. Then, run more tests until you are completely satisfied with the results.

Set up your landing pages so that your potential customers arrive for a safe landing. If all goes well, they will step out of the plane with their credit cards already in hand - and their money almost in your pocket.

About the author: Shawn Campbell is an enthusiastic player in the ecommerce marketplace, and co-founded Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc . He has been researching and developing marketing strategies to achieve more prominent listings in search engine results since 1998. Shawn is one of the earliest pioneers in the search engine optimization field.

World of Website Promotion

Author: Pushkar Pathak

Website promotion is a big and ongoing process. Every person who has website should have little knowledge about various elements involved in website promotion even if he had hired a SEO. In this series of articles I had tried to give an overview of all the entities of search engine promotion.

Title Add title here The title of an HTML page helps users keep track of what they're viewing as they browse, and it also identifies the page in history and bookmark lists. If you don't title a page, the page will appear in the browser window, bookmark lists, and history lists as Untitled Document.

Search engines also read as a user and identifies the page from its title. Therefore, keywords in title help in getting good ranking in search engines. Title must not contain more than 80 words. It must be limited to 10-15 words with company name, product name and four words brief.

Keywords Many search-engine robots read the contents of the Keywords META tag and use the information to index your pages in their databases. Some search engines put a limit on the number of keywords or characters they will index, and some ignore all keywords if you go beyond the limit. For this reason it's a good idea to limit your keywords to a few well-chosen words.

It is recommended to limit keywords to 255 characters, all followed by a comma with no space after the comma. Put most important keywords first with different variations like capitalized and lowercase.

Description Many search-engine robots read the contents of the Description META tag. Some use the information to index your pages in their databases, and some also display the information below the link to your page in the search results instead of the first few lines of your document. Some search engines put a limit on the number of characters they will index, so it's a good idea to limit your description to 500-700 characters.

Heading Heading tag goes from to . The font size decreases with the number in the heading tag i.e. is larger than . Search engines score keywords and text found in heading tags better than other text on the pages. It is very similar as when we read a book we get an idea of the section from its heading.

Alt Tag Alt Tag specifies alternative text that appears in place of the image for text-only browsers or for browsers that have been set to download images manually. For visually impaired users who use speech synthesizers with text-only browsers, the text is spoken out loud. This text also appears when the pointer is over the image.

The tag can be filled with keywords and some search engines will read and assign points to keywords contained in this tag.

Page size Keep the page size as smaller as possible. Make it under 15k.

Frame Frames provide a good option to designers to keep certain information visible, while other views are scrolled or replaced. But frame creates problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because every page corresponds to a single URL. Therefore it is recommended to avoid use of Frames.

File Name Try for add keywords in file name. The file name should not be too long. Try to limit file name to 26 characters and total URL to 80-90 characters.

In the next article I will discuss about the various search engine, directories and other techniques of free website promotion.

About the author: Pushkar Pathak is Operation Head of Excel Solutions (www.excelsolutions.biz). Excel Solutions is providing free website maintenance right now.

How writing and posting free articles impacts on your search engine rankings

Author: Lois S.

In recent times a very worrying trend has emerged of search engines making regular and constant changes in their rules and policies which determine their ranking of websites in search results. This has caused quite a bit of panic and anxiety amongst many webmasters who have been heavily dependent on traffic generated from their search engine optimization efforts.

It is not a pleasant thing to have virtually all your traffic wiped out instantly by a change in your search engine rankings occasioned by changes suddenly made by a search engine. And no matter how mad you get at the search engines, there is little you can do to change the statistics which indicate that well over 75% of the traffic that most sites receive come directly from search engines.

However, there is a secret that an increasing number of webmasters have discovered and are putting to good use. Whatever regular changes search engines instigate, there re some things that never change. For example the number and quality of links to your website or blog still remain a very critical factor in determining your search engine ranking. One of the most effective ways of creating numerous quality links to a website or blog is by using well written, informative articles posted free at various article directories and other relevant sites all over the net.

Admittedly the articles will need to be very well-written and very informative to have a significant impact on the search engine rankings of your website. Still it is not very expensive to even get an online writer to write them for you, if you cannot write them for yourself. Besides it is much less frustrating and much less expensive that the other search engine optimization methods.

You will also need to do a thorough job of posting your articles to various article directories, ezine publishers and announcement lists.

Quality articles usually enjoy a viral effect that will see them quickly get re-posted all over the net from the few sites and directories where you will initially post them. The effect of this is to create even more quality links to your site at a very rapid rate. Done properly, an initial effort will yield a permanent and continuous high growth rate of quality links and traffic for your site for many years to come.

 

About the author: Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for

http://www.websitesource.com and

http://www.lowpricedomains.com with experience in the website hosting industry.

Understanding Search engine optimization and its' real impact on your website

Author: Lois S.

Search engine optimization is something that nobody with an online presence can afford to ignore.

The main reason for this emerges from the fact that well over 75 per cent of the traffic that any website receives will usually come from search engines. Like it or not, search engines are still the favorite method used by most in seeking for information and web.

Research has also clearly shown that most people rarely go beyond the first two pages of search results. What this means is that your raking, or the order in which you appear in most search engine popular searches will make a huge difference in the traffic that you end up receiving at your website or blog.

This is where search engine optimization comes in. It is simply doing various things to ensure that your website or blog features as high up as possible in search engine results in your particular area of interest.

The other important aspect that most people forget is that the search engines themselves are in competition with other search engines to provide the most detailed and informative content in all searches that are done at their sites. Everything the search engines do in determining rankings are driven by their desire to better other competing search engines.

Understanding this motivation in search engines is important because quite often search engines have been portrayed as having taken decisions that are not understandable and which may appear not to make any sense to those whose search engine rankings drop suddenly and seemingly without any warning.

Whatever regular changes search engines instigate, links to your website or blog remain a very critical factor in determining your search engine ranking. One of the most effective ways of creating numerous quality links to a website or blog is by using quality informative articles posted free at various article directories and other relevant sites on the net.

Articles provide valuable information which is what most surfers are looking for and will instantly drive very targeted quality traffic to a website or blog. Some webmasters hold back important key information from articles posted outside their sites and save it all for their sites only. This is a very big mistake mainly because people will judge whether or not it is worth visit your site by the content they read in your articles posted elsewhere. If there is lack of enough information, they will quickly assume that this is also the case at your site and swiftly move elsewhere.

The other thing is that writing articles will not cost you anything except time, if you do it yourself. Done consistently writing articles as an online strategy for search engine optimization will also have the desired effect of increasing traffic to your site, even as you gradually improve on your search engine rankings.

Effective search engine optimization will give any site huge traffic on a daily basis and help sell more products or services at the site.

About the author: Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for

http://www.websitesource.com and

http://www.lowpricedomains.com with experience in the website hosting industry.