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.

Chasing Down The Bogus Leads

These are some of the keywords that led you to this page. This is something any online communication manager or web strategist learns first. But what's often overlooked is the importance of knowing which keywords to avoid to keep unwanted traffic away.

The subject of this article is keywords search relevancy. Most online communicators understand search relevancy as how a search engine determines whether a Web page or site is important for a particular search query. But I'm looking at it from an online business perspective.

These days, with the numerous online tools available, most business websites can quickly figure out the basic set of keywords that will drive traffic towards them. Once regular traffic has been established, the next step is in ensuring that a higher percentage of traffic results in sales. This means focusing on the quality of your traffic, rather than quantity.

As always, the first step is measurement. Which of your keywords are resulting in sales and which are not? Most good web analytical tools will tell you this, once you've set your conversion goals. But they won't tell you what percentage of each keyword is bringing in people who have no interest in your product or offering.

For example, if you're selling the Volkswagen Beetle, you may be driving a large number of naturalists to your site, who may be more than happy to fill a form for a free-test drive. But as a target they are unlikely, if ever to make a purchase. And if you're paying for every naturalist who clicks on your Beetle ad, that's just money down the drain. This gets further compounded when multiple teams are involved in following each lead up.

You will therefore need to track backwards (from your sales team, registration page or whatever your conversion goal), every bogus lead based on the keyword search. And then identify which keywords are resulting in the highest misses.

This is basically the opposite of lead conversion. By tracing bogus conversions and knowing which keywords are resulting in high misses, you can then take action.

Unfortunately, once you find the problem there's really no single way to solve it. It's often a combination of trial, error, fine-tuning and getting specific with negative keywords.

f you know of another way, do let me know.

6 Key Ways to SEO

Content – Content is one of the ways to SEO. For best SEO you will need best content. Your content should be keyword rich. All the keywords should be used after proper research. Use the related keywords in your content. Keep the content relevant and make it informative.

Link – Links are very necessary for SEO. Both inbound an outbound links are useful in making the best SEO. Links will help you to get a better rank in the search engines. You should try to get more and more inbound links from other websites. Try to get quality links because the link quality also matters. Try to reduce your outbound links as less outbound links are better for better ranks.

Search Engine submission – Submit your website to the search engines available. Use only the best search engines. There are some free and there are some paid search engines submissions.

Directory submission- It is also needed for the best SEO. You should submit to the related directories only. Use both the free and paid directory submission services. Good directories will improve the search engines ranks for your website.

Site Map – Create a correct and complete sitemap and submit it to the search engines. Correct all the broken links and get the sitemap reworked.

Meta tag – Meta tag can be another great tool for the best SEO. It is a way for SEO on your pages. Use meta tags to get the search engine attention by adding keywords to the meta tag. In the description, use related and well searched keywords.

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.

Promoting your website – The Guru's Mantra

Well, so you have decided that you are going to develop a website and want to do business with it. And the questions which are tinkling in your mind are how you can promote it? Or how people will know about your website?

The first step obviously your decision to go for it, which you already have taken. The next step is to build your website and here these things you must consider. If you are developing it of your own, you must take care of these. Or if you are developing it through any vendor, you must specifically ask for these features.

1. Website title: Your website title must be dynamic, so that it can address the content of the page. Or in other words in every page a part of page title should change. Like the contact us page can have title like your 'company name – contact us' while about us page can have title like 'company name – about us'.
2. Website URL: All URL shall be search engine friendly. Avoid query string in URL. If you are using Linux-Apache, then a simple htaccess file can do the trick. It is called mod rewrite. If you are hosting in windows server, the same thing exists there too. I must give you an example for better understanding. Say you have a product listing page and when anybody clicks on the product listing page then the detail page appears and the URL which carries the product number for the identification of product. Using mod rewrite you can easily omit the query string part to pass it internally.
3. Try to make the URL always in lower case.
4. Put as much as text content as you can. All images of the page must have descriptive alternative names.
5. Avoid flash as much as you can.
6. Try to minimize number of images.
7. Avoid background pictures.
8. Use Meta tags and Meta keywords and Meta description should have higher density keywords. You can judge the keyword density using many online keyword selector tools.
9. And last but not the least. The content of your website should be rich enough to address the context. Mind it, content is what will help you to retain potential customer.

Now you have your website ready and you are ready for promoting it. Here you must know how search engine works? A search engine crawl or spiders your page and the based on site content it indexes your website against the keyword. Like if its gets any keyword mobile phone then it puts your website URL, title against the keyword mobile phone in its database. Some search engine like google, MSN crawls automatically where some needs manual submission. It is important for you to get higher ranking in search engine as generally people psychology never lets them to search more than twenty results at a time. So, if any body types the keyword mobile phone in any search engine, you must end in top twenty results in order to get him visit your website. Now search engine ranking depends on mainly two factors, namely inbound links and outbound links. That is the number of links are directing to your domain and the number of links present in your domain. With search friendly URLs you already created as many links as possible in your own website. The next step is to create inbound links. Here are the steps you follow.

1. Start visiting forums regularly and place your website URL in your comment and post. As the forum will be crawled by search engines they will get links which directs it to your website.
2. You can advertise your website there too.
3. Visit various directories listing website and submit your website URL.
4. Submit your website to all manual search engines.
5. Start writing article on your website in various article publishing websites.

You are almost done. Now the next step is for promotion. First add google analytics code at the bottom of all your pages. This will help to invite google spider on regular basis. If possible try google adsense. Try to place affiliate links if it's not harming your interest directly. If you are selling any products then I will advise you to create your own affiliate program.

Once you complete all these steps, it's the time to sit back and relax. The only job that now needs to be done on regular basis is to monitor and control. Try adding new pages, new content. Replace old content with new one. I am sure with such finer proceedings you will be able to hit the bull's eyes.

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.

SEO Trends for Industrial Business - The Digg Effect

What is Digg?

Digg is a community-powered news and content website with a strong focus on science and technology. Huh? What that means is that all content is submitted by everyday users such as you and me.

How does Digg work?

After submitting content such as news, videos and humor, other users browse and read your submission and Digg what they like best. If your content receives enough Diggs, it is pushed to the front page for over one million users to see and comment on.

Definition: Power to the people Web 2.0 style.

What is "The Digg Effect"?

Digg is a global 100 site currently ranked as the 86th most popular website in the world according to Alexa.com. This means one thing; if your site hits the front page of Digg, prepare for a quick surge in traffic that reaches into the thousands.

Defined by Wikipedia.com, "The Digg Effect" is the phenomenon of a popular website linking to a smaller site, causing the smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close due to the increased traffic.

A close friend of mine works as a Web Analytics Manager for a company that has had content hit the front page of Digg on multiple occasions. According to him, you should expect at least 10,000 visitors when on the front page, and approximately 3,000 - 5,000 over the next 5 days.

That sounds manageable, right? Well that is just half of "The Digg Effect." Since making the front page of Digg most likely means that you have provided some sort of unique and interesting content; there are people that are willing and ready to share the content with the world.

And how do they share it with the world?

They share it through their blogs, social bookmarking, and even through some of Digg's competitors. My Web Analytics buddy said that they receive just as much traffic from the "sharing" on sites such as del.icio.us, reddit.com, and online blogs.

Will it help my Industrial Business?

This is the big question. And the answer is… maybe! Before attempting to hit Digg, research and answer the following questions:

1. Are people within my industry users of Digg?

2. Is content related to my industry popular on Digg?

If not, answer the following questions:

1. Is there something within my industry that will or has had an affect the mainstream?

2. Is there anything within my industry that people may find humorous?

3. Is there anything controversial within my industry that may have a mass appeal?

Remember, reaching the front page of Digg can't hurt your Industrial Search Engine Optimization.

The importance of incoming links to your SEO strategy is something to keep in mind when it comes to "The Digg Effect." If you in fact want your website to succeed with the chief search engines, a key component of your SEO strategy must focus on the importance of incoming links. Assuming that Digg users find your content unique and interesting, you will receive incoming links from a variety of sites around the web. Link building can be one of the most difficult aspects to any SEO strategy, which in my opinion, makes "The Digg Effect" a sweet deal!

Digg Competitors

Reddit.com

Slashdot.com

Netscape.com

Note: Your primary focus should be offering unique and valuable content to Digg users. The hits and links you receive in return are just gravy. If you do attempt to Spam Digg, users will recognize it and immediately "Digg Down" your submission.

Ecreativeworks is a Minnesota Web Design Firm offering SEO Services.

Writing Good Content

Anyone that has been doing business online for any amount of time, or who has been involved in search engine optimization (or marketing online) in any form knows the importance of good content. You will never get a site ranked without unique, creative, great and amazing keyword dense content - period.

So what do you do when you are into a business that's hard to create good content for? How many different ways can I describe this DVD player? This is the problem that most new to Internet businesses find when it comes to the "setting up of the website" part of their business.

I do have some suggestions that could make ranking on the search engines easier for you based on the content alone on your site:

* Research the Competition (Competition Analysis) I know it sounds elementary, but you want to see what the top players in your field are doing because you are not going to re-invent the wheel. You are not going to copy (thats not what I am saying) but you are going to get good ideas as to what the top players in your area are doing. This could give you some ideas to find topics you normally would not have thought about through information from your supplier.

* Resist the urge to copy and paste the product information from your suppliers site to yours. If you do this, you have done what probably 100 other websites (you are going up against) has done and eventually someone is going to get hit with duplicate content issues when it comes to Google. So rewrite you product descriptions using the keywords you have researched out and try to add a twist and a flavor that makes it yours. We want the search engines to think that it is original so we don't get hit with any kind of penalties.

* Using Article sites to see what people are talking about. There are so many article submission sites out there, just do a Google search for "whatever product + article" and you will see a list of ideas and topics. If I had a site selling Mattresses I can learn (from these article sites) that a lot of people are wondering the proper memory foam mattress care. Then I can create a page talking about that adding great content and value to my site.

* What are bloggers talking about when it comes to your products? You can do a search on places like Google Blog Search or SERPH.com to find the "hot" topics in your field and stay up to date.

* Pay a free lance writer to do it for you! You can find many affordable quality writers on places like elance.com, guru.com or getafreelancer.com. I have had content written for me for as little as five dollars a page. You give them keywords they need to focus on, and they can do the rest!

It really is not that hard to find interesting topics on almost anything if you put a little work into it. It will make all of the difference in the world when it comes to your sites visibility on the search engines and how you do in business long term. I just read a great article this morning talking about the better the content you have the better rankings you get on the search engines - especially Google. Now, content alone will not do it for you, but its a good place to start and one of many of the most important pieces of the Internet marketing puzzle that people miss!

Why Surfers Coming From Search Engines Still Won't Buy From You!

You've given your web site a rigorous SEO. You know you've done well because you've got some good search engine listings. People are coming to you site – but they are still not buying. What is happening?

Whilst this is very important to completely optimize your web site for the search engines, please don't forget that you can get a #1 listing in the search engines and still not get a sale! The reason for that is that when someone comes over to your web site they are looking for what they have just searched for.

1) Does your search engine listing lead to the product or service that they were looking for? Check your web stats and find out what search engine terms are being used and then what page they are landing on. Make changes to your pages so that they find what they are looking for where they land. If this is not feasible then put a link on these pages to the correct page and review the keywords you are using for the offending page.

2) Can people get around your web site and find out about you, your business and what you sell? Again get someone to check this out for you by visiting your web site and following all the instructions and menus on your web site.

3) Can people easily buy your stuff? Is it easily explained, logical and appears safe to use? Use a good and recognized payment processor and explain all of the payment and deliver processes and what will happen next. People are still confused when buying things so spell it out very clearly.

4) Can people contact you if there are problems? This makes people feel much safer, able to contact you about questions they have and also allows you to sell your product or service directly to them. Nothing like the personal touch to open a wallet!

If you get these things right - then you are getting closer to making your business profitable! Good luck.

Earn Free Money Online With SEO

When I first started out with my internet home business, I spent lots of money on solo ezine ads, ppc ads, and so-called leads. Results were pretty average and not worth the money spent, so I began to look for ways to earn free money online. The idea is to utilize free methods of marketing your web site, such as blogging, article marketing and SEO (or search engine optimization). This means a greater profit yield and often better traffic rates in the long term. So, let's look more closely at SEO.

SEO is simply optimizing your site with the effective placement of relevant keywords and undertaking a linking campaign to increase the number of back-links pointing back to your site. This increases your ranking in the search engines, with the aim being to get on page 1 for your keyword phrase. If you can get on page 1 for your keyword, you will have lots of people clicking on your listing and visiting your site. Provided that you maintain this position, you can earn free money online indefinitely.

The first step in your SEO campaign is keyword research. Grab a pen and paper and write down all the keyword phrases you can think of, that visitors might type into a search engine to get information on your niche. Once you have your list, go to your favorite keyword suggestion tool and start entering your phrases into the tool. Each time you enter a phrase, it will give you a heap of other related keyword phrases as possible options.

I always target low-competition phrases that have had about 1000 searches in the past month. I then enter this phrase into the main three search engines, within inverted commas, to see how many other competing sites there are for this term. I try to aim for less than 100,000 results per phrase.

My strategy is to build a web page around each low-competition keyword phrase (and have lots of phrases). That way, if I can get just 20 visitors from the search engines per day for each page, and have at least 50 pages, this is a total of 1000 visitors per day to my site. To me, this is more achievable than targeting a highly-competitive phrase and working my butt off constantly to maintain a high ranking for that phrase. Now, let's look at on-page and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the work that you do on the actual web page itself. What you need to do is place your keyword phrase in your URL (if possible), in the title tag of the page, in the description tag and in the keywords tag, Then, sprinkle your keywords in the body of the text, in the first and last paragraphs, and make sure that you bold, underline or italicize the keyword phrase to give it more emphasis in the search engines. Don't over-do it though. I aim for about 1 to 2% keyword density on my pages.

Off-page optimization is basically your linking strategy. The more back links you have pointing to your site, generally the higher your ranking with the search engines. Two great ways to increase your links are by submitting your URL to the link directories (preferably with a high PR), and to write and submit articles (with a link pointing back to your site) to quality article directories.

Once you have implemented all the steps of your SEO campaign, you need to keep the momentum going. Keep adding more and more pages to your web site, targeting good keyword phrases, and continue getting more links pointing back to your site. The results and the pay-off are definitely worth it. There's nothing better than getting highly-targeted, free traffic from the search engines and earning free money online.

Search Engine Optimization - How Can You Stay On The Cutting Edge With SEO?

There are a number of articles around that proudly proclaim their prowess with different
topics relating to search engine optimization and these articles all discuss the different
ways to make search engine optimization work.

While these articles do serve a somewhat useful purpose there are other topics within the
greatest umbrella of search engine optimization that really need to be fully addressed and
one of those topics is the evolution of the field.

Search engine optimization is one of the most dynamic fields within the internet simply
because the search engines are always making changes to their ranking algorithms and
unless you are able to keep up with these changes you might end up seeing your website
suddenly disappears from the search engine results.

So how can you stay on the cutting edge and keep free, targeted traffic from the search
engines? Simple, make sure you keep up with the search engine news! Subscribe to all of
the different news groups that give out news about the internet and make sure you
frequently browse all of the search engine optimization forums.

Some of the best give and take on all of these topics is available through these online
communities and if you are able to keep up with them you will be giving yourself a very
good chance at keeping your ranking and therefore keeping all of that vital and free
targeted traffic.

The great things about using SEO forums is that you will be talking about these
concepts directly with people that are in the same business as you.

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.

Search Engine Ranking-How To Increase Your Search Engine Ranking With Keywords Rich Page Content

It is the fervent wish of every website owner that his or her website attains a position
of prominence with regard to search engine rankings. It is easier said than done and this
is why so many website owners are giving up with search engine optimization and turning
to SEO consultant to increase their search engine rankings.

One of the main aspect of SEO is creating keywords rich page content. Search engine
optimization with keywords rich page content involve rearrangement or addition of
keyword rich web content to specific location on your web site.

You should start by positioning the keywords and a good place where to start is the page
title, and at the very least, in the first paragraphs. It pays to have the keyword
appearing frequently on your page body. Keeping your keywords frequency between three
and five percent is recommended. More than that is considered ''Spamming'' By the
search engines.

Try to find targeted keyword phrases that your competitors are missing. Combinations of
two and three word phrases are often overlooked by your competitors when searching for
the top competitive search terms. Doing a proper keyword research is a must!

Make sure to spread your main keywords and keywords phrases in a natural manner.
Also, using sub-topics will effectively make the keywords work well together.

Making use of keyword rich content on your site will increase both your relevancy and
search engine rankings leading to more traffic that convert in more sales.

Because that's all want you want don't you?

Maximizing Inbound Links Using RSS and Atom Feeds

Publishing an RSS or Atom feed for your blog or other website and allowing others to syndicate it (ie. post its content on their websites in HTML format) can boost your search engine position by getting inbound links from related websites.

If you've studied search engine optimization, you know that there's only so much you can accomplish by optimizing the content of your webpages. That's because, while on-page optimization can tell the search engines what your site is about, only inbound links tell them how important your site is. Unless you have the only site in the world covering your particular topic, it needs to be both relevant to the topic and important (as evidenced by many inbound links) to rank high in search results.

Inbound links are SEO silver, and inbound links from related sites are pure SEO gold.

How do you maximize the number and value of inbound links generated by your feeds? Here are nine key tips:

Tip #1: Keep your feed focused on one topic.

If someone is looking for a feed use to add content to their site and your feed covers exactly the topic they're interested in, you'll have a better chance of getting syndicated than if your feed contains information irrelevant to their site. If you publish information on a variety of topics, publish multiple feeds, each covering one topic area, either instead of or in addition to a monolithic feed containing everything.

Tip #2: Publish only interesting information.

You might think that goes without saying, but the temptation may arise to go for volume over quality. If someone syndicating your feed decides that the signal to noise ratio is too high, they may go looking for a better source.

Tip #3: Publish often.

You'll have to figure out for yourself the optimal balance between this and the previous tip. But keep in mind that if someone is syndicating your feed in order to get regularly updated content, they'll be less likely to look for a different feed if you provide new content regularly. If you can't always publish regularly, publish anyway, but if you can publish regularly, by all means, do.

Tip #4: Write well.

"Well" is, of course, defined in relation to your subject matter and target audience. If your target audience uses lots of slang, write with lots of slang. Just don't let your writing style stand between you and your target audience. Webmasters want content that speaks to their target audience.

Tip #5: Publish summary feeds instead of full content feeds.

There are two reasons for doing this. First, most people who syndicate only want to display a summary of each item, and some webmasters won't know how to make their RSS to HTML converter truncate the content. Second, there are those who want to rip off the full content of your site and use it as the sole content of their site. A summary-only feed won't help them do that.

Tip #6: Tell people how to syndicate your feed.

Provide a link from your website or feed to an RSS to HTML converter like CaRP with a brief note about what it's for.

Tip #7: Give explicit permission to syndicate your feed.

Even among those who know that it can be done, not everyone will be comfortable syndicating feeds without the express permission of the publisher. Don't wait for them to ask -- post a note in the feed or on your website giving permission to syndicate your feed. You may wish to include a condition requiring that they preserve links back to your site in a search-engine-visible fashion (eg. no use of JavaScript links or 'rel="nofollow"').

Tip #8: Don't put ads in your feed.

Advertisements, especially banners, are likely to mess up the formatting of sites on which they're syndicated. And obviously, other webmasters don't want to display advertisements on their site if you're going to be the one making money from them. Most webmasters won't know how to filter the ads out of your feed when syndicating it, so if you include ads, they'll probably look for another feed instead.

Tip #9: Consider not offering a JavaScript version of your feed.

A JavaScript feed has no SEO value, because it's not visible to search engines. The tradeoff is that JavaScript feeds are easier for many webmasters to use, so by not offering a JavaScript feed, your feed might get syndicated on less sites, and thus bring in direct traffic from less sites. You'll need to decide which is more important to you: the SEO value of being syndicated, or the clicks from sites that syndicate you.

If you'll follow these 9 tips, you'll increase the number of people who syndicate your feed on their sites, increasing the number of inbound links you receive from sites related to yours. This will boost your search engine position and bring you more traffic, both from the search engines and from the sites that syndicate your content.

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.

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.

SEO Essentials

When Internet marketers are looking nice and hard for essential search engine optimizing tools that supply them with breathtaking results, the first thing they do is learn a few nerve-wrecking strategies about what SEO (Search Engine Optimizing) does and what services are available that can help them rank at the top of the major search engines. See, this is the smart thing to do and if you are not doing it then you cannot be all that smart yet, right? That is why we are writing this article for you, so that you can finally get up to speed on all of this important kind of information.

Few online SEO services offer solutions, such as writing gigs. You have yuppie advisors in SEO copywriting that assist you by giving you the breathtaking results in the highest range of SERP. Sure, this takes you above scores of the prime search engines, specifically the big names that include Google, Yahoo, and AOL, Big 3, MSN and all them other trailers.

The goal for most Internet ramblers is to reach the top rank at the major search engines. SEO or search engine optimizing trade involves written content fully written to meet the demands outlined in Google's algorithms. Findings relevant keywords as well as search engine spotter tools are often beneficial too. The spotters will track the keywords down, hunting them like the dogs they are. This increases Internet dummies odds at reaching the top ranks in the spotlight.

Many of these SEO services on the Data Highway will drive home SEO solutions by offering to write 250-500 or more words in an article-keyword density style. Make sure they give you your money's worth.

Keyword density is crucial to pass algorithms, which are those nasty technical tools embedded in the major search engines who will install these formulas to cutback on cramming or other scandalous acts. The technicality often confuses the Internet idiots.

Much of the articles content written by SEO critters may incorporate other SEO marketing tools, such as header text, H2 Tags, page description, spiders, Meta tags, and often, relevant keywords. The single-most goal these geeks seek is the keyword optimizing, since it fills in relevant details to link one web page to other pages on the Wide SEO Wicked World Cyber. Phone home Dorothy.

SEO Internet marketing facilitates geeks on the Internet by intensifying traffic coming to a web turf. In addition, SEO assists with increasing sales and equipping Internet marketers in having customized copies published on any web post to meet that superior search engine standard laid out by Google's and many others. This increases revenue, which is what marketers want so they can stay away from those ads, "Get out of debt now."

The aim of many Information superhighway traders is to approach the highest rank at the main online search engines. Utilizing relevant links or article-content provides these marketer geeks with SEO marketing solutions in Net, buying, videlicet if the content includes exegetic information. Copywriters frequently try to deliver successful informative SEO content accessorized to appeal to Internet users.

In short, SEO is a form of advertising a web page. Like the slicks, you see on billboards, SEO uses fancy paintings to dress up an advertisement to entice customers to a page.

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.