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6 More Tips For Raising Your Search Engine Rankings

November 28th, 2008 | Comments Off | Posted in General SEO by Brandon

Whether your site is profitable or not with PPC advertising, search engine rankings are an important factor to consider in improving profitability. The higher you are on a variety of search engines, the better off your profitability.

1. Site Navigation

The navigation menu that appears on your website should include your page’s titles if possible. Also, your sites navigation should be consistent and on every page so that not only people may easily navigate your site, but search engine spiders as well.

2. Choose Less Popular Keywords

Don’t just use the most popular keyword phrases – the market is so competitive that you should be sure to include some special keywords relative to your website. This is especially true if you are just starting to market your site on the web.

3. Choose Related Links

Make sure that you don’t have a lot of irrelevant links on your site. The more closely the links on your site are related to your site, the better the chances of being ranked well in search engines.

4. Update Your Content

You need to periodically update the content of your website, even if it’s only a slight change. Search engine spiders give better rankings to sites that update content often.

5. Don’t Oversubmit

You need to consider the fact that many search engines don’t like automatic submissions or multiple submissions. Therefore, submit only once and don’t use a whole slew of submitting software.

6. Subscribe To and Read Search Engine Relevant News.

Always be on a look out for SEO news – staying up to date and using the latest techniques will help you stay one step ahead of your competitors.

When it comes to massive profitability, high search engine rankings can’t be beat. Keep on top of the game and you will be happy you did.

4 Tips For Raising Your Search Engine Rankings

November 23rd, 2008 | Comments Off | Posted in General SEO by Brandon

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

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

1. Content

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

2. Web Site URL

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

3. Search Terms

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

4. Page Title

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

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

5 SEO Tasks You Should Do Every Day

November 22nd, 2008 | Comments Off | Posted in General SEO by Brandon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Basic Link Checks.

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

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

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

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

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

November 21st, 2008 | Comments Off | Posted in Link Building by Marcus

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

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

3 Tips for Building Smart LinksM

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

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

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

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

Achieving Natural Results

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

Key Off-Page Search Engine Optimization Methods

November 8th, 2008 | Comments Off | Posted in Off-Page SEO by Brandon

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

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

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

1. Article Marketing

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

2. Forum Participation

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

3. Blogging

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

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

Note: This article may be freely reproduced as long as the AUTHOR’S resource box at the bottom of this article is included and all links must be Active/Linkable with no syntax changes.

Why Google Sitemaps is a Win-Win Situation for Webmasters

November 2nd, 2008 | Comments Off | Posted in Webmaster Tools by Brandon

The process of informing search engines about new pages in your website or about new websites in your care can be quite a time consuming task. The submissions process is just way too much trouble for its own good that even the search engines have realized that it is a path not worth pursuing and completely stopped using this method a long time ago.

There have been many innovations presented since then as a way of simplifying the submission process and eliminate most of the drudgery that has been associated with this task. With the development Google Sitemaps, the process has indeed been a big help to many webmasters and business owners. In fact, many people contend that Google Sitemaps is probably the most important development on the internet since the RSS, blogs and ping.

RSS, blog and ping had actually been used by webmasters as tools in informing search engines about new additions to their websites even though this function was not the primary purpose of the aforementioned innovations. Of course, Google Sitemaps is so much faster and easier to use compared to the said systems and this is the reason why it has risen in popularity and is now acknowledged as the most effective way of updating a website to search engines. In fact, this new innovation of using sitemaps for the search engine submission process has become a very vital part of operating a website and a webmaster can ignore it at his own risk.

There may still be some sceptics who may still not believe that a sitemap method of submitting new web pages or new content to a website is very effective. One reason why using the sitemap method like Google Sitemaps is that the technology was developed from the ground up with solely one primary goal, which is to alert and direct the Google search engine spiders to the web pages that you have specified. All the other methods are considered as indirect and submissions to search engines are not their primary purpose either.

Clearly, using Google sitemaps provides a win-win situation for webmasters and online business owners.

First, Google sitemaps limits the huge waste of the resources needed to crawl web site that have not changed. The technology allows webmasters to inform Google which pages have changed or if there are new content added to a website and then direct Google’s spiders directly to those pertinent pages.

Google Sitemaps also radically speeds up the process of discovery and addition of pages to Google’s web site index. This can only be achieved if you use the technology and nothing else.

Google Sitemaps offers a level of usability that is different from conventional sitemaps because it offers a directory of all the web pages in the web site that the webmaster or online business owner wants the search engine to visit.

Without the assistance of sitemaps like Google’s, it may become hard for a web page to be found by the search engine crawlers. There is even a chance that the page may not be found at all.