SEO Services - Guide to Basic Internet Marketing That Deliver Traffic

SEO Services:

Search engine optimization or SEO has become one of the most important components of Internet marketing strategies. It is a tool that enhances the process of increasing the quality and quantity of web traffic improving and provides organic search results. The normal trend is that the higher a website is ranked on the search result page, the more traffic it will get. SEO services can vary from website to website depending on the requirement but is used on website headings, in text or body copy, design and even on images.

There are many people who have a website that displays some of the best products, has some well written content and offer great service and yet these sites don't receive even half the desired traffic. This is simply because they didn't understand the importance of SEO nor did they realize its potential in driving the targeted traffic. Great products, excellent services and a site that is very well written. To enhance your website, you will require the services of a SEO consultant or an SEO copywriter who knows his/her job very well.

A SEO copywriter will add more depth to your existing website copy by adding singular or plural keywords, synonyms and keyword phrases. Now that you have understood the common practices, let us take a look at the two broad categories of SEO services. They are:

• On-Page Optimization
• Off-Page Optimization

On-page optimization SEO services :

Well researched keywords

Correct use of Meta tags

Keyword density optimization

On-page optimization is the most commonly applied category within the SEO services and it focuses on two elements namely, your webpage content and the website structure or architecture. The key element is your web page content and you need to take special care while writing the content. Your web page content has to be relevant and in sync with the product or services you are selling or promoting. The best way to get your website on the top of the page ranking is by using various SEO techniques. Effective use of SEO techniques can actually bring results within a short period of time.

Off-Page Optimization SEO services:

Increasing link exchange/link building/ link popularity: You can exchange your website links with another website and thus gain mileage without spending money. You can even display your link on various article directories

Using keyword rich anchor text

Submission to article directory: This is a cost free method of gaining mileage or promoting your website. There are hundreds of article directories available today for submission purposes. Most of them won't charge you anything but there are a few who would charge you a membership fee. You can do this yourself but a well optimized article will increase your relevancy thus its effectiveness.

SEO services or SEO techniques are based on certain common practices and these include:

Well researched keywords: SEO services are actually aimed at getting your site a higher rank in all search engines. To get the higher ranking, your website content needs to be keyword rich and hence you need to select the right keywords. This research for the right keywords or keyword phrase is an integral part of the entire search engine optimization process. The keyword phrase research is a process of selecting those keyword phrases, which are optimized and will help visitors to find your website. The important thing is to follow the right approach to find these keywords. If you are selling camping tents, then your keyword needs to be associated with the product and the activity for which it is used.

Heading of the web page: The heading is the most important part of any web page as it always catches the eye due to its positioning. Hence, you can always use catchy copy or tag lines to draw attention or create curiosity. Hence to create a higher visibility, you can use a primary keyword in the heading. There are two types of keywords: primary and secondary. Let's take an example: If you are offering web design, then your primary keyword will be web site design, graphic design, banner design etc. The search engines always give higher priority to the primary keyword or the keyword used in the heading. One more thing to remember is the length of text in single page. The ideal word limit is 500 because this helps to understand the keyword relevance. Not all the search engines will read through the entire page hence, try to keep the primary keywords in the beginning.

Meta tags: Meta tags, one of the SEO services, can't really be seen like the text. It is normally embedded in the code or the html. Meta tags help in letting the search engine crawler's index your website in an accurate manner. There are different types of Meta tags like the title tags, Meta description tags, Meta keyword tags and body tags.

What to avoid from a SEO company:

Make sure that the SEO firm you hire does not practice black hat techniques that can get your site banned completely from the search engine… why would they do that? To get you the unrealistic goals they set and once they have "fulfilled" their end of the contract they leave you hanging with a banned site.

Create Your Own RSS Feed And Add Fresh Content To Your Website Daily

RSS enables people to have the latest information delivered directly to them. You can get the latest news, articles, photos, and videos all in one place and as soon as they are made available.

RSS feeds allow people to choose the content that they wish to view. RSS is a way of syndicating content, which means having all the information that you are interested in together in one central location.

To create an RSS feed you have two choices. First, you can code your own feed by using XML or you can consider using a software application that creates the XML for you.

You can create an RSS Feed without coding it yourself by using an easy to use software applications that can format your XML.

One example is FeedForAll.

You can also code your own RSS Feed.

Just like HTML code XML code contains open and close tags to designate the title, description and link. They are enclosed in brackets just like standard html. The close tag contains a forward slash.

The Item will contain information for each one of your listings. They contain the individual information that you are distributing, such as articles, etc.

For each item in your feed you will have:

a title

a description

a link

The title and description should describe the content of that particular item or link. The link will reference the webpage that contains all of the actual content.

The following is what an item in a xml file will look like once you remove the asterisks:

Title Here

Description Here

linkhere

It is very important that your links are fully qualified. If someone syndicates your feed then you want to make sure your links are working if your code is on another site or server.

So, an RSS feed is simply a series of items which are all chained together to create a Channel. When you need to update your feed you just add another item at the bottom of your XML code.

The Channel tag is found at the top of the XML file and explains how all the items are related. A Channel tag also contains a title, description and link tag. The open channel tag appears before the first item and the close channel tag appears after the last one.

The Channel Title Here

The explanation of how the items are related goes here

linkhere

Title Here

Description Here

linkhere

Another Title Here

Description Here

linkhere

Once you have all your items set up you then need to designate it as an XML file by inserting specific tags at the beginning and at the very end of your code.

The Channel Title Here

The explanation of how the items are related goes here

linkhere

Title Here

Description Here

linkhere

Another Title Here

Description Here

linkhere

You MUST save your file with an extension of .XML, for example UcanTo dot com/articles.xml

Do Not forget to remove all the asterisks from the code above before using it!

TIP: There is a free XML editor that will help you with creating RSS Feeds. Just Google First Object Editor.

When you have finished your RSS Feed the next step is to upload it to your server and then validate it. This step is very important, it will make sure your RSS Feed is working correctly and can be accessed. Visit Feed Validator and enter the URL for your RSS Feed, which should end in XML.

If you made it this far, congratulations! You should now let everyone know about your RSS Feed. Go to RSS Specifications for a list of sites where you can submit your new feed. Take the time to do this. I think it is much better to manually submit your feed then to use any of the free services.

One Last Tip! Now that you have your own RSS Feed you need to update it regularly. To do this just add another item to your XML file and upload! Then go to Ping-O-Matic and enter your RSS feed. Ping-O-Matic is a service that updates different feed specific search engines when your Feed has been updated. So, every time you add new content to your feed go to Ping-O-Matic and let everyone know!

The Top Ten SEO Techniques and Page Design Elements That Will Get You Blacklisted From Google

The biggest search engine of them all is without a doubt Google. What they say goes, and most website owners just have to put up with it. It is always good to know what SEO techniques that Google will allow, but most of all, what they will not allow. They can blacklist your site for as long as they want, and you will never be able to get a high ranking again if you cross them once.

Knowing how important a great ranking is for your web site or blog site, here is a list of six SEO techniques you SHOULD NOT do for any reason:

1. YOUR WEB PAGE TEXT IS IN GRAPHICS FORM ONLY


Google considers "burying" text in your HTML code hides the text from their spiders that are trying to detect all of your relevant content. They feel this is manipulating their search engines and they don't like that one bit.

2. YOUR SITE HAS A BLACKLISTED WEB PAGE LINKED TO IT


A good rule of thumb regarding this issue is never to link to a "link farm" or a "Free for ALL" link page. These websites deal in every under-handed cheap trick they can find to bypass Google's strict submission rules, thereby bringing every other website linked to them down in the gutter. Make sure that all of your links lead Google and your site visitors to reputable pages at all times.

3. BAD LANGUAGE ON YOUR MAIN PAGES


This also includes using ethnic slurs of all types, as Google really looks down on racist sites that result in hate crimes or other controversial events.

4. LINK BUYING


Google really hates when you have to pay another site just to link with yours. If your site is worthy of being included in Google's main pages, why on earth would you have to buy a link? It does not make much sense from a business standpoint either, because you should put your promotion budget somewhere else entirely.

5. CLOAKING


When you present one web page to your readers and another page just for the spiders from Google to search for relevant keywords, this is known as "cloaking". If an SEO specialist says it's OK to do it his way, tell him firmly "No way!" and go with another SEO company that is more reputable.

6. YOUR SERVER IS DOWN DURING A GOOGLE SEARCH


You say that this is not your fault, but in a way it is. You cannot afford any down time as far as your main web pages are concerned, because that eats into your profits on a weekly basis if it happens too much. So always find the best server possible for your site, no matter the cost. And when Google sends out their spiders to your main pages for ranking purposes it is a HUGE error if your server is down and Google comes back with an error message. Big problem time!

7. ZERO LINKS

Your website must have a least one back link coming in from a reputable website for Google to recognize you as worth their time. So before you submit your web pages, make sure you link to somebody first.

8. KEYWORD STUFFING


I went over this is another recent article, but it is a very important technique to remember to avoid. If Google thinks your pages are filled with certain keywords that you have included over 10% in the content's overall body, you will be heavily penalized by Google for keyword stuffing that will be hard for your site to recover from.

9. COPYRIGHT VIOLATION


If somebody has reported your site as having stolen their exact wording on content pages, or have accused your website of stealing images and graphics from their own pages, Google will come after you and make sure that you eliminate the text and images from your site immediately. But just to make sure that Google never has to do this, ALWAYS refrain from plagiarizing anybody else's website for any reason whatsoever.

10. USAGE OF FLASH PAGE AS MAIN PAGE


If you really want to make your visitors pay attention to your main page, just get creative with an animated logo or put some very nice HTML coding on your front page for some really nice graphics. In other words, use every other "flashy" technique to get a web surfers attention except for using a flash page. Google's spiders cannot read the text in a flash page, so Google thinks that you are manipulating that page for their search engine rankings.

Stay away from all of these SEO techniques and page re-designs and you should be OK in climbing up the much-coveted rankings of Google's main category web page.

No Frills Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Practitioners of the esoteric science and art of search engine optimization will often make it all sound like a combination of rocket science and brain surgery. But, the fact is that principles of search engine optimization, also referred to as SEO for short, are quite simple.

The basic idea is to get search engines to understand your site and to like it. This will lead to your site ranking high in the result pages that search engines dish out in response to a query. Here is the basic low down on what this is all about.

There are primarily two categories of techniques involved in search engine optimization. The first is called on-page SEO and deals with stuff that you do on your own site to make it rank well. The second is called off-page SEO which deals with stuff that other sites do related to your site. Let us look at the basic search engine optimization methodology involved in both these categories.

On-page SEO used to be all about stuffing keywords and keyphrases. For example, if you wanted a page to rank high for the term "red widget," you would make it a point to mention "red widget" many times on the page. However, search engines have become much smarter than they were in the late 90s. Mentioning the keyphrase continues to remain a good idea, but you need to make sure that the rest of the content on the page is also relevant to the keyphrase. Search engines can understand words, phrases, expressions and their correlations. Other forms of on-site SEO involve setting the correct "Title" tag in the code of the webpage. Further, if the page is relevant to the overall topic of the site, it has a higher likelihood of ranking well.

Off-page SEO is all about links. Links to your site from other sites. When talking about links, there are primarily four factors to consider: Anchor Text, Quantity, Importance, and Relevance. Anchor text is the word / phrase that you click to reach a site. In case of a clickable picture, the anchor text is the alt-text that is associated with the image. Having relevant anchor text is pivotal to search engine success. Quantity plays a role too -- the more the merrier. But do not forget importance -- one link from a terrific site (such as a famous news site) might be worth much more than a thousand links from lesser sites. And finally we have relevance. If the site that is linking to you is relevant to the theme of your site, the link will quite likely be worth more.

Rising in Google's Search Results

The Googlebot has found your site, you and Google are becoming fast friends, and your site has just entered the PageRank popularity contest. How do you become a rising search-engine star, reaching one of the coveted top spots on the first page of search results?

The secret to pleasing Google turns out to be rather straightforward: please your visitors. Happy visitors lead to inbound links, because when people like a site, they link to it from their own site. And where there are links, Google rankings follow. That’s it.

Here are some suggestions for pleasing your visitors:

• Keep things fresh, focusing and fascinating. Outdated material can be a real turnoff, while nothing keeps visitors coming back like fresh, hot-off-the-keyboard prose and links.
• So take the time to update your site when appropriate. And when you’ve got fresh reading material available, make it immediately obvious by maintaining a ‘What’s New page’, adding new items to the top of the home page, or listing the latest additions in a sidebar. You can’t expect your visitors to remember what they read last time and hunt around for the new stuff.
• Also, provide new links whenever you can. While some Web sites believe that every link provided to other websites offer another reason for visitors to leave, in practice the opposite is true. If your site is a rich resource of what’s happening on the Web, your readers will come to see you as a trusted friend, putting you on their virtual speed-dial and visiting more frequently.

Be responsive. Keep watchful on your server logs to learn what’s popular. If you discover certain sections of your site or particular articles draw the most visitors, consider filling out those parts of your site with more stories. If you find that a lot of people are coming to you through certain search engine queries, you have some great hints about what they’re looking for and whether they’re finding it on your site – or finding something close at least. And if you know they’re searching on your site itself and not finding what they want, respond to their wishes by providing just what they were looking for. Give each page, article or product its own permanent URL. When people want to send their best friend the URL for your page about family eggplant recipes, they really hate adding: “Click on the third link don in the What’s New section, below the picture of Barney’. They hate it so much that they stop bothering with your site at all.

There are two ways you can make your site harder for people to use. First, if you put a lot of articles on one page, you force people to say, “It’s the fifth story on the page”. It also forces you to keep the article in that slot if you want people to find it. Second, using frames for whole pages causes your visitors to see the same URL in their address bar no mater what page of your site they’re on, which means they can’t send friends a link without also providing a roadmap to find the page in question. Yet another excellent reason to eschew frames.

Let them share. Go a step better and let them hang a hot on your site through forums, feedback forms and customisation. Read the feedback channels on a regular basis and become an active participant in discussions of your site.

Plain and simple wins the race. Keep your web pages as lightweight as possible. Just because you’re at the end of a high-speed broadband connection doesn’t mean your visitors are. In fact, the majority of web surfers still poke along at 56K, not to mention those visiting from their mobile phones and PDAs, who often have very slow connections.

Don’t annoy your visitors. Nothing screams “Go Away” like in-your face Flash animations, ads strewn all over the place, pages that link to nothing, and dopey gimmicks. It’s all right to have a long article span multiple linked pages, but be careful about how much content is on each page, and avoid click-through pages set up solely for advertising impressions. Whilst you’re at it, provide a Print view for those who want a story all on one page for a manageable print job.

Keep busy trying to please your visitors, and don’t spend time trying to fool Google. The Google folks are smart, and they have set up all manner of checks and balances to make sure the sites they index are on the up-and-up. Indeed, Google considers the following practices unfair – so much so that if they discover you engaging in them, the Googlebot may stop visiting and including you in the index. Google doesn’t say how it’ll keep you out in the cold, but anecdotal evidence suggests the icy treatment may be permanent.

Don’t misrepresent your site to Google by feeding different content to the Googlebot than you do your regular human visitors. This trick is known among web-masters as cloaking. It entails manipulating your site in response to User-Agent identifiers, which are signatures associated with every request from a web browser or robot to view a site. Some sites use this identifier to show different content to a bot than to your garden-variety web browser. It’s a nasty business, and a good way to draw Google’s ire.

• Stay away from HTML shenanigans intended to confuse the Googlebot These tricks include: giving your page multiple titles, embedding enticing though inappropriate keywords, stuffing your page with repetitive keywords and so forth.
• Steer well clear of so-called link farms and link-exchanges that exist to boost your Google ranking. They’re an investment in trouble.

List Yourself Everywhere

While Google is the undisputed champion of search engines, people will find you most readily if you’re listed everywhere – on Web directors, on the other search engines and on other sites related to yours. If your site sells specialty knitting needles, for example, you want knitting resource sites to include you.

First and foremost, be sure to get yourself into the two grandfather’s of directories, the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), which is the directory behind the Google Directory, and Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) . Not only do these directories help people find you when they’re browsing the listings, but they increase your chances of being spotted and indexed by Google in a timely manner.

A large number of other search engines live on the Web. AltaVista, Hotbot and Ask are among the most popular. Introduce yourself to each by finding and filling out their respective URL-submission forms. You can also use a service that goes around listing you anywhere and everywhere you’d like to be found. These services, which can be a good timesaver, range from free to rather costly, depending on breadth and depth of feature.

For sites you want to exchange links with that aren’t directories or other types of search engines, choose wisely. Linking randomly so that lots of other sites will link to you can decrease your PageRank (because PageRank evaluates the quality of sites linking to you). On the other hand, exchanging links with rich sources of information is actually useful to readers and beneficial to your PageRank.

In short, list yourself only on good, clean, well-known, legitimate sites – both general and specific to your topic of interest – where you think it’ll do some good. Then stop.

Web 2.0 The Art of Long Tail SEO

In the two previous "Long Tail" articles, I wrote about how the principals of Chris Anderson' book "The Long Tail" can be applied to SEO. In this installment I'll go into some the tactics that are actually working today –these are the things I'm using to get free targeted traffic to my sites.

1. All of my sites are now blog based. Blogs are cheap, very simple to deploy and once they're configured with the appropriate plug-ins, very user-friendly to post content to. Blogs are also inherently spider-able, the search engines love to see organized content, and this is very easy to create with a blog.

2. I take full advantage of the Social Bookmarking sites. Sites like Technorati and ice-rocket will pick up "tags" from your pages. These tags will then become links to your site. This helps in getting spiders to your site and to help categorize what your pages are about —plus, many of these sites pass page rank. On the flip site, I use a plugin that gives readers easy access to several of these bookmarking sites —from an end-user point of view, posting any of my articles to some of the most popular bookmarking sites is as simple as clicking an icon below the post.

3. I post frequently. I try to post five or six days per week, often I post several times per day. This "teaches" the search engines that my site has fresh content – engines love fresh content.

4. I post mostly original content. This is the big one. Too many webmasters feel that if they simply buy a product and have tons of content auto-published to their sites, they'll rank high in the engines. A few years ago this worked, but not any longer. The search engines want fresh, original content – those canned content solutions simply recycle old articles that are available elsewhere. The search engines don't want to keep indexing the same content over and over again.

5. I post a variety of content. I don't just post original articles. For example, I post a lot of YouTube videos (videos that I've actually watched). I post these videos along with a brief review, so that you'll have an idea what to expect before you start watching. This allows me to get new content, in less time then it would take to write a full article.

6. I take full advantage of standard blog features like Trackbacks and comments. Yep, so many webmasters either turn these features off or simply don't use them (maybe they don't know how) –but they're a great way to generate traffic to your site. How, well I allow both of these features on all of my Blogs. Find something on my site that interests you or something you disagree with, post a comment and let me know – you'll get a link back to your site! Better yet, post a rebuttal on your own site with a trackback to my post, we'll both benefit with added traffic and the trackbacks will be opening up new paths for the spiders to find us.

7. Find other Blogs within your niche to post comments on and/or create posts about (with trackbacks). The most important thing is make sure your posts are well thought out. In other words, make sure you actually have something to add to the post. A few well written trackbacks can open your site up to a whole new audience.

8. Write (or have written) rich, well rounded content. The days of focusing on a specific keyphrase for an entire webpage are gone (thankfully!). Today, the engines reward content that's not so tightly focused. You don't have to worry about keyword density, just worry that your articles make sense and are compelling to a human readers. Once again, as we saw in the Long Tail, you won't get any "blockbuster keyphrases" this way, what you'll get is the low hanging fruit that you didn't even know existed.

In conclusion, follow this plan in your own niche for several months and you'll start to see high quality traffic. The traffic will be coming not just from the search engines but also from the trackbacks, comments and social bookmarking you've been doing. Remember, what they've been saying for years… Content Is King – well now it's finally true.

Inbound Links and Search Engine Marketing

The World Wide Web has much to offer your business and its website. This article is about using outside sources to better optimize your search engine popularity. It begins with inbound links.

Why You Need Inbound Links

Inbound links are links that bring the viewer to another page. This can be a link from an external site or a link from the same site. Inbound links optimize search engine marketing due to the high traffic linked to the site. The more inbound links the greater "PageRank" it receives.

Google, the world's number one search engine, originated the PageRank idea. Google logarithms calculate the number of votes cast for a page. The more votes casts, or links used to a page, the more votes it receives. Thus increasing its importance on the PageRank scale. If you are not using Google as your main search engine it's recommended that you optimize your page first by listing your site on Googles' engine.

How To Get Inbound Links

There are a number of ways you can get inbound links. Some of them are through directories, forums, and email requests.

When submitting to a directory you will more than likely be asked to reciprocate the request. The forum will ask that you place their link on your site as well. This is cost effective, but it appears more useful than it actually is. You are optimizing another site that is not specific to your subject/ category, leaving little credibility.

Forums are helpful because you can make posts and add links after your signature or about author line. Make sure that the link lines are visible to the search engines spider or crawler; checking the robots.txt file can do this. Ensure that the forum is a member only; this will keep desirable searchers in and floaters out.

Email requests are as simple as searching your main phrases and keywords in Google search engine. This will bring up your competitors and then search "www.cometitor-domain.com" and find which sites link to them. Email them and ask for a link exchange.

Also use Google again to search for sites that relate to your topic but are not direct competitors. Email them and ask for a link exchange.

Competition is getting tight and search engines are using different logarithm techniques to develop more credible search engine marketing strategies. Inbound links will open new communication waves and broaden your audience.

SEO New York is an Innovative Promotion Method

SEO is the acronym for search engine optimization. The term SEO is very popular these days all thanks to the popularity of the World Wide Web. Traditional media has undergone a vast change and more and more people are opening up to newer forms of communication. This in no way suggests the traditional media is losing its hold over the public; it is just that people have more alternatives now. They do not need to stick to the traditional medium to find information about anything. Search engine optimization or SEO is a simple method through which an online site can be made popular on the web. Publicity is required for everything and SEO is the publicity method which can be used for online sites. You can have a huge advantage of using SEO services if your company is set up in New York City.

The reason for this being the fact that a numerous companies are operating there and you will easily be able to find out a good SEO New York company for this. If you have a web presence of your business your first goal will surely be to promote the site. Well if no one has any knowledge about your web presence then what is the use of having an online presence. Remember that promotion on the web is very different from the traditional methods of promotion which are used for other media. First you need to understand the different aspects associated with this process. There are different methods that can be used for doing search engine optimization for a site on the web. The first thing which a sit owner must take care for this is to make the site flawless.

Imagine what would happen to your reputation if some visitors wants go visit your site and for some reason or the reason the site is not accessible. Yes, your reputation will be in tatters, so the first thing is to put up a site that is easily accessible and available to anyone. Another thing which can help you in the process of search engine optimization is to put up some great contents in the site. Just make sure that the content is keyword rich as this can help you in getting good rankings from search engines. It is only through major search engines like Google, yahoo, MSN and Alta Vista that site owners can reach out to their target audience. Search engines give high priority to sites that have good content written regularly.

Being the site owner you will surely like to have content about all the things that you are providing to clients. Otherwise how would you attract customers to visit your site? Another thing which you can do for the purpose of search engine optimization is to exchange links with other sites. Exchanging of links can be done manually as this yields more results. Link exchange can be of three types, first is one way link exchange, second is two way linking or reciprocal linking and the last is three way link exchange. Depending in your requirement, you can use whichever you want.

Guaranteed Search Engine Optimization

At first, you might think that this is an odd subject for a search engine optimization company to be writing on. Should you use a search engine optimization company that takes your money and guarantees nothing? No!

Search engine optimization is simply relevant content, fresh content, and link population. It is a science. If the proposed services will enhance ALL of the three pillars of optimization, then your search engine optimization company should guarantee you that they will perform all of these task. That is imperative. Make sure there is this guarantee that exists in your service agreement and not just the proposal. Furthermore, make sure that you are entitled to a report of some kind to show evidence of your search engine optimization company performing the tasks which were guaranteed.

The guarantees to be wary of are those which guarantee top placement in a short amount of time, discontinue billing should the guarantee not be met, or give you the opportunity to close your contract. Wow, we have a lot to discuss.

First, if your search engine optimization company is promising a short turnaround of less than three months, ask them how. Do not buy into "proprietary process" or "snake oil" like mysteries. Also, if the specialist has pricing that is incredibly low, this is a sign that they are not the group to work with.

A popular offer made by many solid white hat search engine optimization companies is the time frame guarantee with discontinued billing should that time frame not be met. Another words, if you pay them $500 a month for 10 months and you are not on the first page of Google for (example only) "pet shop" then they will continue to work for free until you are number one.

Sounds good, right? Well, not really. Check with your lawyer on this one. Once you discontinue paying a company, they do not work for you any longer. So if they stop performing search engine optimization, you are out (in this scenario) $5,000.00 for the 10 months without any means of ramification because they don't legally work for you. (Once again, confirm this with your legal council.)

Another marketing offer made by search engine optimization companies is easier to identify as a bad idea. First, they require that you enter into a contract. Then, they guarantee a term to be ranked in a high position in a certain amount of time. Should they fail, you get to close the contract.

This one is easy to avoid…never sign a contract. Not having a contract is much stronger motivation for your search engine optimization company to perform. If you are guaranteeing them income for a year, they will not respond with as much vigor, generally speaking. However, keeping a relationship "month to month" will allow you and your search engine optimization company to maintain a stronger relationship which is kept together by the best business formula around. That formula being: good company providing good service keeps happy customer which is seeing results.

So lets review. Don't work with search engine optimization companies that are cheap and guarantee quick "unrealistic" results. Next, read your agreement vary carefully should you go with a company that offers free SEO services after failing to meet a deadline. Finally, do not sign a contract. Only sign a service agreement which outlines BOTH parties' responsibilities and make sure that your billing is monthly and on a 30 day term period.

Promoting Your Website Online

I started my online venture back in August of 2006, since then I have been able to optimize my site to achieve top standings with MSN and Yahoo and some of their partner search engines. My website is a mortgage website and as we all know the mortgage industry is a very competitive industry. Search engine rankings change daily but if you go to either of these search engines and type in the keyword Minnesota mortgage or Minnesota mortgage broker you will see my website on the first page, normally in the top 5 spots. Thanks to the search engine optimization tool I use, which only cost $15 a month, I have picked up "exclusive" leads that have turned into sales.

This optimization tool can do the same for you, no matter what your business is. You get all the information you need to track your websites progression. It will search the internet to find how many links you have coming in to your website, this is a major factor in how the major search engines rank your website. This also allows you to track the honest website owners who actually link back to you.

Also included is a tool that allows you to find out a websites Google page rank and Alexa traffic rank. You will learn all about link relevancy and how this is used to achieve a high ranking with Google. Another important factor is the keyword density of your website compared to how the search engines determine what your website is about.

This tool will also help you create the top keywords and meta tags to produce the best results for your website. Tracking you progression has never been easier with the unique Search Engine Coverage reports that you can run at anytime.

Even if most of this does not make sense at the moment, you have a free 3 day trial to find out how this program will encourage your online growth. After that it is only $15 a month which is a lot cheaper then hiring a SEO company who knows nothing about you or your company to do it for you. If you want things done right you have to do it yourself.

Press Release Optimization is the Newest Optimization Method

Press release in simple word means an announcement about specific happenings of a company and about the launch of a new product. In this internet age, more and more people are accepting the idea that they will have to buy goods and services through the web. This is one reason why SEO or search engine optimization and other optimization methods of the web have become very popular with online site owners. Press release optimization is one of the relatively newer methods which is being implemented by many site owners to make their site rank at the top of search engines. Well to do successful business on the web, getting recognized by all the major search engines is important. Well if search engines do not recognize your site well, how do you expect to draw attention of visitors? The basic rule is that you just have to undertake press release optimization in the proper way to get maximum mileage out of this.

For press release optimization to be successful, one needs to take care of many things. The first thing is that the press release must be very well written. Well a newspaper publisher or an online publisher is flooded by press releases everyday. So the fate of most press releases is that they are discarded totally by the publisher without even a second glance. So giving an attractive title to your press release that will be used for press release optimization is half the work done. Once you catch the attention of the publisher this is half the work done. Give an equally interesting intro to your oppress release and make sure that you are talking about something new in your field of operation. Newer things are constantly happening on every field these days and this is the perfect platform for you to get recognized by all and become famous in a short time.

There are some basic errors that you should avoid while writing a press release. The sentences which you use must not be too long. This gives a completely professional look to your write up and makes it very readable. Avoid writing clichés, this is a thing of the past and now you can no longer attract attention from anyone for this. Take note that your writings do not become repetitive. This can be a huge disadvantage for you and you can end up losing on prospective clients. Press release optimization will help your company to become well known due to tall the newsworthy information which will be supplied to customers among many other things. Another important thing which you need to take care of for press release optimization is to write press releases which are keyword based. You want your business to be famous under certain name or categories and for this you can make sure of those keywords for writing the press releases.

Press release optimization needs to be done in the correct perspective to reach to meaningful conclusions. Before you go about doing this work or let a professional do the work, you just have to make sure that that you are well versed about all the different things which are related to press release optimization.

Whats Important for Search Engines?

I recently had a question from someone who was looking for some possible SEO consulting with me. He was in the process of a redesign and wanted to be sure not to make any mistakes along the way, which is super-smart! The time to be looking at SEO is definitely in the beginning stage of any design or redesign project.

The interesting part of the email was this person's misconceptions about what he thought were important factors for the search engines. I'd like to share those points with you, with my comments following each one:

* Little or no Flash.

This is a huge misconception to many who are trying to design search-engine-friendly websites. There's nothing inherently wrong with using Flash and no reason to avoid it altogether. What you do need to avoid is an all-Flash site, as well as Flash navigation. But that's it. And even if you have those things, there are workarounds.

* All scripts should be called from external files.

This is a great idea to keep file size down and make it easy to update your pages, but it's got nothing to do with search engines or how your pages are ranked within them. Search engines have long known how to ignore code that is of no use to them. Whether your scripts are right there in the source code of the page or called up externally will have no bearing on your rankings or search engine relevance.

* The site should be designed using CSS as extensively as possible.

Another myth. CSS doesn't have any special properties that search engines like better than tables or any other HTML code. Again, it may make it easier for you to update your pages, or to use your content for other things, but it's not an SEO technique that will increase rankings or relevance.

* The CSS should be called from external files.

Same as calling up scripts in external files — nice to do, but not a search engine issue in the least.

* There should be no comments in the code. It should be added to an FAQ or Doc-type file.

Why not? I'm not sure where this myth came from, but I suppose if you're thinking that file size is going to affect your search engine rankings, you might also believe this one. It may have also come about because some people used to think that adding keyword phrases to comment tags would help search engine rankings, even though it didn't. Comment tags have long been ignored by the engines, and because of this, you can use them as much or as little in your source code as you would like. I always comment out bits of text and code that I no longer wish to use but that I may want to add back in later. It's absolutely, positively not a problem!

* A large percentage of the code on each page needs to change from page to page so that the search engines don't see the pages as duplicate content.

Nope. You certainly do NOT have to change the code in your pages to avoid duplicate-content issues! Website templates have code that is exactly the same from page to page. This is good and normal and certainly fine with the search engines. One would have to think that the search engineers were really dumb if they were going to penalize pages because they used the same design template from page to page! Sure, you don't want the same exact *content* on every page of your site, but even that is not generally a problem if it's a few sentences here and there. (See my recent article at Danny's Search Engine Land site on the Myth of Duplicate Content.)

* All picture links should have text links under the pictures.

No reason for that at all. Image links that make use of the image alt attribute (aka "alt tags") have always been followed easily by the search engines and will always continue to be followed. They're followed even without the alt attribute, but the words you place in there tell the search engines and the site users exactly what they'll be getting when they follow the link. It's essentially the same thing as the anchor text of a text link.

* DO NOT use drop-down or fly-out menus using JavaScript.

This is fairly good advice; however, there are very easy workarounds if you have to use JavaScript menus for some reason. The "noscript" tag is a perfectly legitimate place to recreate your menu for those who (like the search engines) can't do JavaScript. I've been using this technique since 2000 or so when my website was designed with JavaScript menus, and it's definitely not a problem. I just haven't gotten around to redesigning my site with a more crawler-friendly navigation. Certainly these days, a CSS menu would be a better option.

* Must use basic HTML link navigation (textual navigation, no JavaScript mouse-over, and no image map graphical navigation).

Yes and no. JavaScript links are definitely a no-no. But there are plenty of crawler-friendly image maps, and like I mentioned previously, graphical links are A-OK with search engines.

* All pages must be VALIDATED by an HTML validator and all style sheets need to be VALIDATED through a CSS validator.

Why? This has nothing to do with search engines. It's nice to do, though.

* The majority of the site will be static, as static pages are easier for search engines to crawl and rank properly.

Dynamic pages are just as easy to crawl and rank as static pages. Most websites today are dynamic because they're simply easier to maintain. The search engines have figured out how to crawl and rank them just fine for many, many years now. It's true that there are specific things you need to watch out for when creating a dynamic site, but most developers are aware of the worst of the issues. You certainly should consult with an SEO if you're changing content management systems, or if you're having problems getting your dynamic URLs spidered and indexed. But there's no reason to have only static pages on your site because you're worried about the search engines being able to index dynamic pages.

* The site needs to be browser-compatible and screen-resolution-compatible.

This is another thing that's nice to do for your site visitors, but it has no bearing on search engine rankings or relevance.

Phew! I hope this helped clear up a lot of misconceptions that anyone else may have had. Please don't get me wrong — I do agree that most of the things listed here are great design tips that can help you to create an awesome, user-friendly website. I just want to make it very clear that they have nothing to do with SEO, rankings, spidering, indexing, etc.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine optimization is very important if you are looking to expand your internet exposure however, it seems that many people are victim to bad SEO (search Engine Optimization) practices. The major criticism is that a lot of people are paying completely too much for little or no results. In addition, a lot of them fall prey to bad SEO techniques. If you plan to hire an SEO pro in the future, I recommend you to follow the steps below before hiring any SEO firm or individual:

A) Find out how well-known and experienced an SEO firm is before you talk.

Do they have a considerable number of clients list?
Are they available?

B) Examine their portfolio.

What kind of results have they accomplished?
Contact a few of their clients. Were they satisfied with the SEO work that was done?

C) Consider and confirm their methods?

How will they optimize your site in the major search engines to reach your keywords?
Do they use organic methods? Some individuals or companies use doorway pages, hide text in the background, utilize re-directs and other blacklisted methods. Stay away from these because search engines consider these techniques as spam.

D) Get a least three proposals from other SEO companies.

Look at each one carefully. Are there similarities? Proposals will assist you know which companies are honest and which are trying to sell you something that doesn't work.
What is the cost? The cheapest isn't always the best; however, the highest price may not be attached to a complete and feasible course of action. Try to find an individual or a company that will give you what you want within your SEO financial plan.

E) Get everything in writing.

Look over the document carefully. Be sure it covers everything you have discussed, including methods of achieving your desired results. Have the copies signed by both parties. If the job is a large one you may want to consult a lawyer.

F) Clearly state the terms of payment.

While most SEO companies will not do any work for free or agree to a results based pay scale, many knowledgeable SEO professionals will not shy away from a base plus performance incentive package. I am not a firm believer in prepaid contracts. The majority of SEO professionals will abide by the 50% up front, 50% upon completion standard. Make sure all financial terms are as clearly defined in your contract as the actual scope of work. This will protect all parties involved in the event that expectations are not met.

All in all, try to do your best to train yourself on SEO. Have a basic understanding of SEO terminology and SEO methodology. Anyone offering SEO services should not have a problem explaining how they intend to get you results.