Very new ideas for the old internet

Important Update On Our Link Building Experiment

If you have read the post on 10th June 2009, you already know that we’ve started an aggressive link building campaign on one of our test sites.

That site was removed from search engine results for about 1 month, but the return is impressive!

The site was not even in the first 1000 of Google results in United States before we started. I can not disclose the site name or the targeted keyword, but the keyword has about

35 million search results on Google Search.

Today, the site ranks #10 (yes, first page!). I checked my notes, and it’s been about 26 days since we started the campaign. And we spent less than $100. The site is running CPA offers, and with a correct network, that $100 can easily make $1000 just with the organic traffic from Google.

But there’s a major flaw in our campaign which we’re trying to figure out. Our keyword consist of couple of keywords (something like “earn a free degree”). If we search for the exact keyword, the site is #10, but if we make a very small change like removing the “a” from the keyword structure, the site is not even in the first 1000 results.

We’ll be working on this and the optimization of some new keywords. Let’s see what difficulties we’ll face this time.

10th position in 35 million results is success!

Decrease in SERPs After Building Links

Webmaster forums are full of  “quick link building ban”  myths and novice webmasters are well afraid to push to the limits during their link building campaigns.

In fact the decrease in SERPs are true, but this is not any kind of  “banning”. Search engines, especially the big “G” use very complicated formulas to rank sites on the search results, considering many aspects.  This means that temporary de-indexing or sharp decrease in SERPs is perfectly normal if you’re putting in more than you already have.

Uh? What does that mean?

Well, think that you’re a kid being selected for a one of 10  basketball teams that are separated according to the average heights of the players. Team 1 has the tallest players and team 10 has the shortest. If your height do not change much over time and your height fits into the 7th team, then it’s easy for the coach to say “go train with the 7th team players”. But what if you gain 1 inch per day? Today you belong to the 7th team, tomorrow to the sixth and so on. The Coach is rather lazy and he does not want to deal with you everyday. So he puts you in a team where you’re surely over-qualified and waits until the increase in your height is in logical limits.  And finally he places you to the team where you actually belong.

The analogy may be stupid : ) but the fact is true. If your site has 1000 inbound links and you’re building 5 links per day that will probably won’t do any harm. But if your site has 300 inbound links and you’re building 100 links per day then prepare to get a decrease in SERPs.  Google waits until “incremental increase in links/total links” value to be logical until it re-ranks your site – probably to a much higher position.

The biggest evidence to this theory is that if the decrease was just about number of links created, then most of the giant sites would fluctuate in SERPs since they gain tons of inbound links every second. They don’t undergo a decrease in SERPs because the incremental increase is low enough compared to their overall link count.

We’re currently conducting an experiment on this. We’ve bought a  new domain and started a very aggressive link building campaign. Most of the 7th-8th page rankings suddenly dissappeared as the number of inbound links increased which is totally in accordance with our theory. We’ll be posting the proceedings of the experiment.

Please check back soon. Or better, subscribe to our RSS Feed.

Tags: decrease in SERPS, hazards of building links quickly, quick link building harm, seo

The Forgotten Fundamentals of SEO

Introduction:
Firstly, thank you for taking the time to view my SEO hints and tips e-book on the often forgotten aspects of SEO. This book was written from the collective knowledge and information gathered by Chris Diprose, owner and manager of Kanga Internet. Kanga Internet are located in Melbourne, Australia and they focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Web Development for the Joomla Content Management System (CMS).

With Search Engine Optimization there are lots of unknowns, educated guesses and knowledge gained from personal and associative experience. Google, Yahoo and MSN keep their cards close to their chest when it comes to revealing how their ranking systems actually work. They tell the community trickles of information on what things can affect search engine results, how they can be improved and what to do in certain situations, but mostly knowing what to do to achieve good results is achieved by studying and hard work. Much alike other SEO consultants I have gathered information from various sources and worked constantly on improving results for customers. I am always looking for new intelligent ways to improve search engine results. I believe in “White Hat” (or more appropriately, “Grey Hat”) principles.

Edition 1 of this e-book is intended for people looking to improve their websites from the ground up. I address SEO design fundamentals; the things you need to consider before embarking on any text and keyword analysis. I hope you find these hints and tips useful.

Enjoy the readings herein.
- Chris Diprose

The Website Revelation – What owning a website actually means.
As a Web Developer and SEO consultant I deal with many existing website owners who are looking to modify or improve their website. I also deal with many people who are looking to start their web presence with a new website. Through both of these interactions there is often a common theme; a misunderstanding or an attitude. I call this a misconception of reality, as often the reality of what the Internet can actually do for the persons business and what they think it can do differ massively.

Often it is presumed that by simply owning a domain and having a website built and published on the Internet, thousands of people will magically find the website, visit it and buy their products. “If you build it, they will come” should be removed from the vocabulary as soon as possible if you are to adjust attitudes to the underlying search technology. As a businessman in the real World, it is obvious that it would not happen outside of the Internet ether, so what is so different online? Maybe it was the Technology boom 10 years ago that caused a rift in understanding or maybe the buzz that caused the meteoric rise in the stock prices of Tech Companies, I can hear the thoughts of the small businessman, “surely this can be replicated for my business” – in answer I would say, “well, it is unlikely, but you should be able to achieve some results over time”.

It is most important when taking on a project like Search Engine Optimization for a website, to know that it is important to be committed for the long haul. It is no small task and sufficient funds need to be allocated to the project. Delivery deadlines need to be correctly scoped against required changes, in order to meet client expectations. The key points of responsibility to the SEO project are in knowing that there are big changes near the start and during setup but the changes do not stop after setup, there are a continuous ongoing refinements to the design and system over time. In this regard I find it important to manage expectations and set realistic long term goals on what a website can be expected to achieve and in what time frames those goals hope to be met.

So what should your goal be when you are delving into SEO for your website? Well, everyone’s goal is exactly the same; improve page rankings, improve page visits and hits and finally gain more sales through the website.

When it comes to SEO and achieving these goals you have to have principles and my main principle is, “Good websites get good ratings and bad websites get bad ratings or none at all.” As time goes on with the improvement of search engine technology and the refinement of search engine results this statement becomes truer and truer. I believe in results through “white hat”(reads; “Grey Hat”) principles and methodologies.

What are “white hat” principles? I guess I would compare it to doing things the honest way and the right way without risk. So develop a good site, promote good linking, have good informative content and keep working on it and then you are on the road to good rankings through “White Hat” principles.

So, why should you do things the “white hat” way? Well, search engines do have some kind of understanding, an artificial intelligence. They soon catch on to websites spamming or linking to websites with no relevance and bad cross linking. It’s about being smart, in for the long term and wanting your business to grow organically, naturally.

So how do I go about improving my site and making it optimized for search engines naturally? Well, that’s why you’re here! So let’s run through few of the things you should be doing in your websites from a fundamental level.

Domain names:
When choosing a domain name, choose one that is relevant to the product or service you are going to provide and that is as simple as possible. There are considerations of branding and product/service provided that should go into this choice. Involvement of marketing personal and product understanding is required but also consultation with your SEO professional is advantageous. In this step I would say, take some time and choose wisely. Keep it simple and easy to remember, often saying it out loud will make it clear whether it can be understood by a simple man.

It is a strongly held belief by many SEO professionals that buying a domain which is older, and that has been around for a while, means it will not be sand boxed by Google. What’s the sandbox effect? Well, it refers to what Google does to a website or domain that is new or is relatively unknown by Google. In many instances Google’s Sandbox effect relegates the new domain to sub-optimal inclusion in search results. Regardless of the sites optimization it lowers the websites relevance and ranking to the term searched upon. If you can use your old business domain name, then consider this very important.

If, however, you are buying a new domain name then keep it relevant to the product or service being sold or offered on the website. Keep it close, relevant and simple. Relevance is primary.

Location specific domain or international domain ( .com or com.au)? Personally I think dot com’s are better, mainly because they appeal Internationally but if you want to you can keep it location specific and to your region then consider purchasing all similar higher level domains, yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com.au, if you can.

Choosing a Host:
Fast, reliable and gives you all you that you need and want. Preferably gives a unique IP. Again some SEO professionals believe this can also have a detrimental affect in Google rankings but from my experience it sometimes does and it sometimes doesn’t. I have had some sites come in with high PR rankings on shared IP’s and others when I shifted to a new IP the PR of the site jumped, so this is still a bit of a mystery when it comes to Google rankings. I guess a consideration

Traffic considerations: When choosing your host ensure the plan you are on can be expanded so that any new increases in traffic can be accommodated accordingly.

Site Design:
There are several fundamental things to consider when you are modifying or designing a website.

Flash:
Flash is has been popular for a few years now and I truly believe it has its place. It is a great way of showing many products or services in a small area, has great visual impact if done properly and can set a good friendly tone to the website visitor. Having said that, I also hate flash; it can be an absolute nightmare when it comes to search engine optimization.

What you should know about flash; it cannot be read by a search engine as the search engine cannot read the text or the images contained within it nor can it interpret what is in the pictures being shown.

When it comes to flash I would suggest, not making your whole website flash. If you are designing a new website and you want to use flash then use it in high impact areas to capture the attention of your intended audience but use it sparingly. It is important to ensure that as much text content(to a maximum discussed in my next book, generally 300-500 characters) is available on the webpage and in simple HTML.

Frames:
Many older websites were designed with frames. Frames are where the main home page is actually a frameset page that includes several other pages into it. This makes the page hard to index in search engines and should be avoided. While Google do now index framed sites, it is important to note that most of the other top search engines still cannot follow frame links. They only see the frameset page and ignore the rest of the inner frames. This presents an SEO problem to us because it is highly likely those inner pages contain our content keywords.

Nowadays this is not really a huge issue as it is so uncommon for a designer to actually use frames but the easiest way to resolve the issue would be to enforce a no use policy on frames.

Page Layout:
According to research the Googlebot trawls web pages from left to right and top to bottom. So given this little tidbit of information it is clear that you should be putting our most valuable keywords and information on the left and near the top. Of course this is a blanket statement and does not take into account design principles and beautification. Just keep it in mind during design of page layout. Position your move relevant keywords to the left of the page and near the top.

Good HTML Coding:
A lot of HTML generator programs out there bloat HTML to the point it is 3-4 times larger than what it would be if you hand coded it. Keep it simple, use a text editor, edit your HTML the old school way; until there is a HTML generator tool worthy of use. If you can’t code HTML then do a search on the Internet and find a decent, free, e-book and learn how to do it.

Javascript:
This is very popular among many web development professionals for menu’s, popups, scollers etc etc. It would be my suggestion to use simple plain HTML menu’s or as little Javascript as possible in web pages. There are many small JavaScript menu’s out there that are slim on JavaScript code to reduce this issue and make it almost negligible. Don’t over clutter your site with JavaScript as it increases page size, page load times and the search engines won’t understand it.

Image Sizes:
Keep them small and use only what you need to. This is essential for decreasing page loading times and getting information onto the users screen as soon as possible.

Overall page size and loading:
The overall page size is an important factor. It should load quickly and be easily trawled. If you have followed the HTML hand coding, used minimal javascript, used simple table layouts and good image sizing then you should be fine. There is much evidence that supports the fact that Google and probably the other search engines also, do not like to scan huge files, so keeping your overall HTML page size below 25k is my suggestion.

Dynamic URL’s & page/file names:
Dynamic pages are roadblocks to high search engine positioning. Especially those that end in “?” or “&”. In a dynamic site, variables are passed to the URL and the page is generated dynamically, often from information stored in a database as is the case with many e-commerce sites. Normal .html pages are static – they are hard-coded, their information does not change, and there are no “?” or “&” characters in the URL.

Pages with dynamic URLs are present in several engines, notably Google and AltaVista, even though publicly AltaVista claims their spider does not crawl dynamic URLs. To a spider a “?” represents a sea of endless possibilities – some pages can automatically generate a potentially massive number of URLs, trapping the spider in a virtually infinite loop.

As a general rule, search engines will not properly index documents that:
• contain a “?” or “&”
• End in the following document types: .cfm, .asp, .shtml, .php, .stm, .jsp, .cgi, .pl
• Could potentially generate a large number of URLs.
To avoid complications, consider creating static pages whenever possible, perhaps using the database to update the pages, not to generate them on the fly.

Slightly Off Topic Thoughts:
The topics covered here are not considered completely SEO topics but in terms of overall objective – increasing sales, this section is very important. Take these things on board, consider them, consult with your designer and marketing team. Make educated and informed choices on these topics when considering your audience and what your website objectives are.

Screen Size:
Over 65% of all screens in the World are set to run at the 1024×768 resolution. Of the remaining percentage, 13% are running at 800×600, 20% running at larger sizes and 2% are unknown. So this affects the way you design. It would be my suggestion to always design for the smallest user to visit your site, but often I find 800×600 restrictive so I tend to design for slightly larger. Not large enough to make an 800×600 user angry but large enough to make it look good on larger screens also. I weigh up my target users, my intended amount of content and find some happy medium. I generally design for 1000×620 as this is the perfect amount of real estate for a 1024×768 user when they have the browser top bar and status bar and Windows taskbar.

colors and themes:
One important aspect of marketing – selling – is the use of color. Meanings are attached to colors in the same way meanings are attached to words.

• Gold is the color of wealth and prosperity.
• White is the color of pure innocence and cleanliness.
• Pink is the color of femininity and softness.
• Green is the color of natural things and freshness.
• Red is the color of danger and stress.
• Blue is the color the calmness, intelligence. The majority of the World selects blue as a favorite color. It often represents “trust”

Use of color to establish an image or a brand is common in the marketing community, yet when you visit the websites of many search engine optimization professional’s, it’s obvious that color significance plays no part in their own web optimization. Some of the colors I found on SEO websites:
• Baby Blue, a color which implies weakness.
• Red, a color which implies risk, or danger.
• Orange a color which implies a cheerful “levity”. Orange is one of Americans’ least favorite colors.

Although color selection is off topic for SEO I would consider it a very important factor in what SEO is trying to achieve, in the end, for your website – selling more product, creating loyalty to your brand and customer impact. color research is something you should seriously consider. In summary of color choices I would suggest studying and learning more about your customers, researching color choices and their relevance to your underlying products and making informed choices on these in collaboration. If in doubt then I suggest sticking to safe and trusted colors within safe eye pleasing designs.

Gifs for logos & jpgs for pictures:
Ensure you are using gifs for logos and background placements and jpgs for photos on your website. This helps reduce size and improve clarity of the web site overall.

Browser:
It is vitally important to ensure your web page works in both IE, Firefox and Opera. Testing other browsers is also an advantage but these are the main three in use nowadays. I think quoting stats on the browser breakdown are irrelevant as you need it work in all browsers. W3C cross browser compliance is great for this.

So, this brings us to the end of Volume 1: Fundamentals of SEO Web Design. There are many things to consider when designing a website or modifying a web site to make it more SEO friendly. Clearly I have a few more volumes left in SEO for websites.

Tags: Fundamentals, Howto, Important SEO Steps, Principles, search engine optimisation, Start, Understanding, Web Design, Websites

The Myth of Search Engine Optimization

There are only 10 spots in the top 10 spots. This might seem like a repetitive statement, but it is making a point. For companies to be selling the availability of 10 spots to thousands of companies makes for a mathematical anomaly that all the keyword buying in the world won’t be able to solve. The danger of all this madness is that, like with the original internet boom, the SEO (search engine optimization) boom will go bust as more and more companies get tired of spending money for results that somehow always seem to get replaced by excuses.
There are ways to naturally secure a reasonable position on search engines. They include:
Embed Keywords in Your Content – the placement of keywords (words you want your website to be categorized as and words you want the search engines to pick up on) in your page title and throughout your content will allow the search engine spiders to identify your site as you wish to be identified and place your site as part of searches for the words you select. The placement of the most critical keywords in the title tag will result in a higher search placement because the search engines place the title as the clickable link on the search engine results page. Once upon a time meta tags and meta keywords were used by search engines to evaluate content and search relevancy. This is not done anymore, partly because spammers abused it, and partly because the search engines could not figure out a way to monetize it (as they have with keyword purchases). The use of meta tags and keywords within your content is still helpful though in that they are often what is used in the description of your company on the search engine results page. By the way, make sure that while you are creating content that will be noticed by the search engines you don’t wind up creating content that is either incomprehensible or irrelevant to your readers. It makes no sense putting all this effort into getting people to visit your site if they can’t understand a word of what you’ve written once they get there.
Have a Proper Architecture – search engines cannot index pages that are more than two clicks away from your homepage, which is about the same distance the average web user is willing to travel to get at your information. It is therefore necessary to make certain that the structure of your website is constructed to maximize both search engine indexing and userability. In this case the two converge, so it is an easy condition to agree to execute.
Generate Link Relationships – to some extent, search engines rank according to some estimation of your site’s popularity. One of the parameters they use is how many other sites are linked to yours. So you need to develop affiliate and other relationships that link their website to yours. This too is consistent with general good web marketing, and therefore should not arouse too much resistance.
Search engine placement cannot come at the expense of your traditional and online marketing programs. It could, perhaps, be a component of your integrated plan, but you need to make certain it does not take over your other activities. The lure of the search engine – this idea that leads are generated by the lead itself – is very seductive, and the reason why so many companies have forsaken much of their other marketing activity for the full time management of their keyword purchasing and search engine optimization activities.
There have always been preferred places to advertise and there have always been preferred ways to generate leads – and often the only companies able to avail themselves of these top-tier opportunities were those with the financial resources to do so. Just as Time magazine has but one back cover to sell, Google has but 10 top spots for the keywords you want. If you have the means to purchase your place on that page, and you deem it to be a productive use of your marketing dollars, then you should do it. However, if you do not have the resources, and you are nonetheless spending money because some web marketing firm is promising you better placement, you are most likely throwing your good money away. Even with the pay-per-click model, which serves to reduce some of your risk, you are still paying for keyword purchase services and most likely other related services. Without spending real money you are either getting sub-par keywords or you are being placed well after the first three pages – and very few people bother searching after the third search engine results page.
If you don’t believe us, google it. You’ll see.

Tags: search engine optimization, seo

The role of the robots.txt file to improve site ranking!

Not many web master take the time to use a robots.txt file for their website. For search engine spiders that use the robots.txt to see what directories to search through, the robots.txt file can be very helpful in keeping the spiders indexing your actual pages and not other information, such as looking through your stats!

The robots.txt file is useful in keeping your spiders from accessing parts folders and files in your hosting directory that are totally unrelated to your actual web site content. You can choose to have the spiders kept out of areas that contain programming that search engines cannot parse properly, and to keep them out of the web stats portion of your site.

Many search engines cannot view dynamically generated content properly, mainly created by programming languages, such as PHP or ASP. If you have an online store programmed in your hosting account, and it is in a seperate directory, you would be wise to block out the spiders from this directory so it only finds relevant information.

The robots.txt file should be placed in the directory where your main files for your hosting are located. So you would be advised to create a blank text file, and save it as robots.txt, and then upload it to your web hosting to the same directory your index.htm file is located.

Here is examples of the use of the robots.txt file:

To block out a directory in a robots.txt file, such as a subdirectory for your online store called /store/ you would do the following: Disallow: /store/

Another example to block out your stats directory: Disallow: /stats/

You may also want to disallow individual files that you do not want searched by the search engines. For example you dont want search.php to be parsed by the Search Engines. To do this you type in the following on its own line:

Disallow: /search.php

Following the rules outlined and creating the robots.txt file, you will keep search engine spiders out of unwanted files and directories, and letting them go through the important files to see what your web site is all about!

Tags: higher rankings, robots.txt, search engine optimization, seo

Unethical SEO Practices to Avoid

SEO, or search engine optimization, is how search engines are used to maximize the chances of getting a high ranking.  As most Internet users know, you have to have a high ranking among the search engines if you want to get visitors.  Anyone who is searching for something online isn’t going to waste a lot of time by going through several pages of results before they give up and try a different search.  That second search may not even locate your web site, and your potential visitor becomes a lost visitor.

So, search engine optimization is used to boost page rankings with the search engines.  Search engines look for sites and rate them upon the number of the keywords searched appear within content on pages on the site.  They also look for lots of links.

The desire to have a high ranking with the search engines is great.  As everyone knows, you have to have a high ranking if you want to get visitors.  And let’s face it, the whole point of having a web site is to get visitors!  If you aren’t getting visitors, you aren’t improving business and you aren’t getting customers.  And your web site is totally worthless if no one is looking at it.  Search engine optimization becomes very, very important when you think about it and everything that it means.

Some may be so determined to get those high rankings that they do unethical things with their web sites in order to boost rankings.  These unethical practices are best avoided.  These practices can be changed, these unethical motives turned into ethical ones, and you can boost your site’s rankings the way you’re supposed to.  First, identify the wrong things that you might be doing.

-    Using your keywords improperly
Search engines are very clever, but they aren’t so smart that they can’t be tricked.  Search engines do search sites for content, but they can’t exactly read the content the way that human beings can.  Some web sites bury their keywords around a bunch of other words, in text that has no form and makes no sense.  Long strings of text with random words like “boating fishing hunting outdoor adventure fish boat hunting the great outdoors forestry fishing rock climbing boating water onboard Alaska” come up all the time.  Search engines may only be looking for the words “fish” and “fishing” and since those keywords appear within what seems to be content, a false ranking is given.  But don’t do this!  Customers don’t like this, and in the end “tricking” a search engine is never a good idea.  Your keywords should appear within real content on your web site.  Then you will get a genuinely high ranking.

-    Improper use of META tags
META tags are part of the html code that is used to create a web page.  The META tags are what you use to tell search engines what keywords are on your web site, what keywords you want potential visitors to use when searching for your piece of the Internet.  Some may use META tags to try and “trick” search engines in a similar way as described above.  This won’t work long, however, and search engines do not look by META tags alone.  Search engines always search content.

-    Having false content
“False” content are long strings of text that make no sense, that are only on the site to make use of keywords for search engines.  While it’s important to impress the search engines and get that high ranking that’s so valuable, it’s more important to impress your visitors.  Visitors like great content, too, and they’re going to be put off by a bunch of text that doesn’t make sense and isn’t a good read.  While it’s true that most of the content on web sites is only skimmed over briefly by viewers, you still want that content to make a little bit of sense to them.  Have good content, at least real content, and make the most out of your keywords using that content.  That’s how to get a truly high ranking with a search engine, ethically.

Tags: keywords, Meta Tags, page ranking, search engine optimization, seo

Your Online Business Can Grow With SEO

Selling and marketing a product or service in today’s realm does not only reserve itself to actual store presence and sales. In these days, setting up an online storefront is an innovative add-on to and actual store presence, and probably less expensive and more valuable than ever, as more and more people get relaxed shopping online

Putting up an online storefront is an innovative method of starting a business or generating sales by expanding the reach of your current business, and whether you are opening your shop online for the first time or have already started down the path, you can boost your online sales through techniques that are helping today’s online businesses thrive. Any or all, or some of these strategies can be integrated to help increase traffic, and drive more people to your site and make it more attractive to prospective customers.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s relevance, An SEO considers how search algorithms work and know what people are lookingfor. An SEO’s efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could stop search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more helpful stuff may include adding unique content to a site,and making sure that the content is easily indexed by search engine robots, enabling the site to look more appealing to users.

SEO’s Can Help Generate More Sales

An SEO may help generate a return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, so their algorithms may change, and there would be no guarantees of continued referrals. However, due to this portent for the lack of guarantees and certainty, a company that relies much on search engine traffic could suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending or attracting web visitors. According to notable web analysts, operators should liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic. A top ranked SEO blog, Seomoz.org, has analyzed that “Search marketers, in a twist of irony, receive a very small share of their traffic from search engines.” Instead, their main sources of traffic are links from other websites.

Keywords Are Crucial In The Web

Search terms are important. Even one’s most frequent and loyal customers are likely to discover your site by searching. Having relevant keywords in your page titles, product titles and links could make all the difference when one tries to lead customers to your site. For those with established sites, it is imperative not to t forget that keeping your keywords current and relevant is an everyday thing. Ensure that you check your Web logs regularly to see what visitors search for on your site, and identify pages and products appropriately.

Relevant Content Matters

Adding as much relevant content as you can to your site improves your customers’ appreciation an experience, as well as the positioning of your site on the search engines. The important term here is relevant. Content that isn’t related to your products could work against you, as it may confuse the potential customers and gives search bots the impression that you’re tricking them. A better method to add relevant content to your site is to add descriptive paragraphs about each of your products, which are placed next to your photos. Use as much detail as possible and necessary, and be sure to use the terms people are most likely to enter when searching.

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Great free opportunity for website traffic increase

You got your website done and it’s up. But no visitors even if you have the nicest website possible and you spent a lot of money to have it done as you wanted. Everything is in place …your website can be seen in Google, Yahoo and other search engines. You also paid an internet advertising campaign, told all your mates about your website, but still got only few visitors and other sites related to your business are placed much better in search results. Why? Your website is much better and nice looking than others but they still got a lot of visitors every day and their business is growing, company gets a lot of money and they are all very pleased. If you encountered all these problems, here is the right place where you may find answers to solve your problems.

If you didn’t hear about SEO, or you heard but you don’t know anything about it let me start telling you that SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. Is there such thing? …you may ask. Yes, and that’s why other websites are better placed in search engines than your website.

There are many rumors about the search engines and their algorithm which make the calculations for website positioning in the search results, but no one knows for sure the importance (in percentage) for every optimization you do. One thing is for sure: Google and other search engines are looking for your importance and fame in the internet. So, if your website name and link for it doesn’t appear in other websites it means that you have a very low fame and you’ll be given a rank 0 from maximum 10. Ok, maybe you’re right, but how can I have links to my website in other websites? I don’t know anybody who has a website to ask him (if it likes) to have my link in his webpage. Or it may cost a lot of money. There is an answer for this. You can do it free and can have thousands of links to your page in only few days. How? Submitting your website to Web Directories and Article Directories. There are thousands of  directories in the internet and also a lot of tools for submitting your website automatically. Write an article about your business and submit it in the article directories and don’t forget to mention your website there.

Tags: article submission, Internet Marketing, seo, Website Promotion, website traffic increase

Google Page Rank Is Dead – Or Is It?

For a long time now, marketing gurus all over the world have been talking about google page ranking. Page ranking is simply Google’s way of measuring your pages accordingly.

But there is a problem…

More and more we tend to see NO consistency with page ranking at all. Please don’t confuse the difference between “page ranking” & “search engine ranking”. The two are completely different.

With this method of measurement, we could quickly see how much or how little a person has put into promoting their website. A high rank of 6,7,8,9,10 is sometimes held as something honerable to have for your site but does it really matter?

In some aspects it does and in some it doesn’t.

As I mentioned above, page ranking has nothing to do with your search engine success. It (did) have everthing to do with “importance”. The only problem is (like so many marketing ventures online), this measurement method is dying off with the rest of them. People online are very intuitive about these sort of things and tend to over saturate ways to beat them and/or improve on them quickly.

People all over the world are even still wondering how to increase their page rank. Now why would they do this???

Simple, it’s all about prestige. Eventhough marketing experts like myself weigh absolutely no importance on page ranking anymore, there are still literally 1000’s of business people out there that consider a high rank a good thing.

So how do you benefit from increasing your rank?

- You will attract better quality websites to yours
- People will think your website has lasting power
- People will want to mimic what you do
- People will even think highly of you

Even now, many browsing people look for high ranking websites to exchange links with.

So does trying to increase your website page ranking help you? Not really. What you ultimately want to do is promote your website as much as you can in as many “RELATED _ RELATED” places that you can and let search engines do their own thing.

Playing into search engines hands won’t help your company. Building a great web marketing foundation will attract exactly what you’ve been after….. MORE EXPOSURE!

Please take this seriously and always be on the look-out for other ways to promote your business, let Google’s page rank go and look at the future beyond PR ratings

Tags: google pr, search engine strategy

Google Best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Practices – Part 5

The fifth and last part of this article will concentrate on the internal and analysis areas of the optimization for Google. I will review 3 essential areas. Let’s start:

Why do you need to use Google Sitemaps.
If your site has hundreds of pages, then a compressed version of the file can be created. You are required to create an account with Google in order to take advantage of this feature. Two things to consider before uploading the sitemap file are to verify that your robots.txt allows Google to craw the site for this to work in the first place, and that you check for 404 error pages in your site. Now to why you need this: Google will crawl your site more frequently to verify changes in the sitemap file, and index files that normally it wouldn’t. So keep it up to date with your weekly changes. It saves Google time, since it will only concentrate on updated content, and getting new or updated pages indexed as a benefit.

The importance of Web Analytics.
Keep track of your optimization and log results by understanding your analytics. It is essential that you monitor your visitor paths and exit pages. Make all necessary changes through your pages to make sure you are improving those pages that are top exit ones. One way to achieve this is by creating stronger offerings, guarantees, and calls to action among other things. SiteCatalyst is a very robust solution with a lot of features. SiteCatalyst provides data related to navigation, ecommerce, content, and other detailed visitor information. It also has a pretty flexible dashboard and it is very data intensive. One of the great features that it provides is comparison, which allows you to compare different campaigns and groups to see how they are doing so against each other, so that campaigns can be optimized. If you are looking robust features such as customizable dashboards, then Omniture SiteCatalyst might be right for you.

Staying out of the Supplemental Index.
Sites of any age, size, and rank can end up in the supplemental index. For the first 2 factors, it is related to the update ratio or duplicate content. For the last one, because of missing elements. The number one reason to be listed in this index is the update ratio. So how do you fix this? Update the content of the page. Change the body content mostly. Title changes and Heading tags also helps. Number two reason is that the page is no longer internally linked from home or main category pages. So, the fix? Self explanatory. Last reason, your site is online but less than six months old. If this is your case, please read my 2 part article on “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics” were you will be able to find out what to do to get out much quicker.

Closing Statement about Google Optimization.
To recap… Make sure that your site is compliant, stays true, stays natural, and stays organic. Focus on content, and bringing quality traffic to your site. If people are attracted to your site and buy, Google will be attracted to the site too and the site will naturally rank well. Make it easy on Google, and they will make it easy on you.

Tags: search engine optimization blog, search engine optimization firm, seo, seo firm, seo pros