Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Is SEO important of Home Based Internet Entrepreneurs?

Running an online business from home means that we have to develop a wide variety of skills. We have to undertake Internet research, understand statistics, so we can monitor our success, know some basic programming, be an author, manipulate graphics, develop our marketing skills, understand market trends and so on and so on.

Before we know it we are managing a hectic schedule and start to take short cuts and forget some of the basics. One of the things that often slips is paying attention to Search Engine Optimisation. In any case aren't the rules for SEO changing all the time. If you mess too much with it don't we run the risk of having our sites banned by Google. Isn't it better to concentrate on other things, like bringing visitors to our sites using articles, or pay per click ads?

The other thing is it all seems too scientific. Complex algorithms measuring key word densities and LSI's (whatever they are). And, in any case, how can we compete on SEO with the big boys with their mega sites and massive budgets.

Well, first, as professional Internet Entrepreneurs, or budding ones, it should be a normal part of our work routine to ensure proper professional personal development. This should include aiming to enhance all of our skills. Therefore a good knowledge of the basics can only stand us in good stead. No, of course we cannot match the massive SEO efforts of our larger and more resourced neighbours on the Internet. But, even the simple basics can make a difference.

A well written web page prepared according to sound SEO principles will contribute to your efforts to get visitors from other efforts, PPC costs will be lower and Adsense revenues higher. The impact of your article marketing campaign will also be enhanced. And, in the longer run, anything you do to get more visitors to your site also contributes to your Search Engine Optimisation. It's like a vicious circle.

So how do we implement the basic principles. Research on the Internet will soon yield the basic steps you need to take. There are plenty of sound authorities on the subject. Implementing good SEO is best done at the early design stage of your website and web pages and will inevitably affect the overall design. What is more difficult is to retrofit an existing website where no or little consideration is given to SEO. In this case it might be an idea to consider a complete rebuild and give that site a whole fresh start.

We also need to make sure that in our quest to get to the top of the google rankings we don't do anything which can lead to being banned. Going over the top in implementing your SEO strategy can have the opposite of the intended effect.

The important thing is to concentrate on that which is easier to implement and don't let too much concentration of stuffing your site with keywords and key phrases detract from the visitors experience when they go to the site. It is all about striking a balance between content, structure and attention to some of the finer points of SEO.

Want to know more? Go to www.e-bookcountry.com website where you can find more great and easy tips for SEO

What is Search Engine Optimization

Many people ,still now believe that search engine optimization is some thing which is cheating the major search engines and manipulate their result. So they treated it as a black art in web technology. The advertisement of many SEO firms sounds like the above concept is correct as they claim be indexed in google with in 24 hours. A normal web master can never see his web site in google search index even with in a week. So ultimately he thinks like the SEO firm is doing some thing to manipulate the search result.

Search Engine Optimization is not a black art to manipulate search results. It is an art of giving perfection to a web site which is developed by a web master. There might be many things in a web site which block search engine spiders from accessing the site and thus the site will not be indexed in search result. If search engine spider cannot crawl the site it may think like the site doesn't exist. So the search engine will not index the site. So the primary duty of a search engine optimizer is to make sure that the site is search engine friendly and there is no settings which can block search engine spiders.

A good search engine optimizer should think like an average net user and spiders of search engine. The first preference should go to the user. The web site should be designed for a user not for search engine. What thing user expects by searching on the net, by providing some key words, that things should be in our site. So the point is our web site should be a user friendly one and he find it as a useful one. The highly graphic oriented site is not so worthy in SEO point of view as there is nothing for a search engine crawler. So it is better to reduce the flash oriented designs on our site. I always recommend to view our site in text only browsers. Because the search engine spiders always see the page as look like in text only browsers.

The difficult job of an SEO is achieving inbound links to his web site. It will take time to get references from other sites to our site as it will take to get audience to our site. So in a nut shell an SEO should be very patient as the result for his hard work will take time. But slowly gaining reputation will last for a long time.

Thinks to Do Besides Directory Submissions

After you have finish developing the layout and content of your blog. There are other things that you must also do in order to promote your blog. It is not likely for search engines or internet users to know your blog even if your blog is interesting or the content is powerful as ever. There are other stuff that you should put in your schedule and this other stuff may consume time longer than the time you used to build the content or layout of the blog.

Try searching for your blog in a search engine, example for blogger, type in http://yourblogname.blogspot.com and see whether the results contain your blog address or not. If it doesn't, this means that your blog isn't listed in the search engine yet, and search engine bots haven't crawled your blog. If this is the case, you will have to submit your blog url to search engine in order to be listed. How to do this? It's easy, if your blog have good content that is. We'll talk about that later in this article, because first, you have to add Meta Elements to your blog.

Meta elements is some code that you have to put in your blog, but it is not for your visitors to read. It is for the search engine results and search engine bots. This is important, as the meta element will be shown on behalf of your blog in search engines result. If you didn't add any meta tags, then bots will just take any content from your blog, and sometimes, it is inappropriate. So, the question now, how does meta elements look like? Look at the example below, change it according to your blog title, keywords, and description and put it on your blog.

The most important tags are 'Title', 'Keywords', and 'Description'. Title will be shown on the top part of search engine results, keywords determine what keyword search you want your blog to be listed, and description will be below your title in the results. Where to place this codes? Well then, look for the layout section, click edit html, and paste it just below the section. You can also see other blogs for example. To do this, open the blog in your browser, click 'view' tab (on top of your browser), and click 'source'(for Internet Explorer). A note pad will open showing the html code of the page you are currently viewing. Look for the meta elements just like the above for your example, if the blog owner had placed any that is.

After adding the meta elements, you are ready to submit your blog to directories, but preferably, before that, add your blog to search engines so that your blog will be crawled by their bot. Your site will be listed only after they did this. The major search engine submission url is http://www.google.com/addurl/, http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html, and http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx. Submitting to this major three is usually enough as when your site is listed in them, other search engines will start to list yours to. Sometimes it takes until 3 weeks for your blog or site to be listed, so be patient.

While waiting for your site to appear in search engine results, you can proceed to build back links to your blog. Back links is also important as it determines the ranking of your blog besides content. The higher your ranking, higher will your blog be shown in search engines results which means higher amount of visitors. To do this, you can submit your blog to blog directory, submit articles, advertise, or make reciprocal link exchange. The easiest method is to submit to blog directory as you wouldn't have to prepare anything along for the submission, you just have to submit and wait for approval, besides, there are so many free blog directories that you can submit to. Unlike article submission or advertising, you will have to prepare articles or pay an amount of fee.

After doing all this, then your blog is already on the road to success, keep updating and promoting your blog from time to time. Don't stop building back links, put your blog url anywhere you can on the net, just don't spam other peoples sites.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

SEO Tips and Tricks - Drive Your Site to the Top

Do you expend your time looking for SEO tips online? How do you identify which SEO tips to trust? The truth SEO changes so fast that yesterday's SEO tips are old news by today. To be an expert search engine optimizer you must be one step ahead. Always looking for optimization tips that improve your sites efficiency.

There are some SEO tips that will never alter and will always be applicable to your SEO efforts. These free tips will take time but will act as a magnificent investment in your business. The SEO tips that I am going to share with you today are based on linking strategy and keywords integration.

Linking Strategy:

You see lot of search engine optimizers or site owners that are new to the industry that focus all their labors on building inbound links to their home pages. This is not correct and will decline your link building effectiveness.

Before I go into how you are supposed to build links and where those links should be pointing, I want to make clear about what an effective link is. An effective link should come from a relevant page, a page that is based on a theme of a page you are linking to. The link must also come from a page with high Page Rank, this may be difficult at first but will improve as your site builds credibility. Finally a link should also be anchored with your targeted keywords, this will increase your keyword authority.

So where these links should be pointing. Well you be supposed to create a page based on one or two targeted keywords. Then you should effort to create quality links to each page that you create. So if you had 30 keywords you wanted to target you would have to create 20 - 30 pages with links going back to all of them. This is what is known as deep linking and will immensely improve your search engine marketing campaign.

Keyword Integration:

Integrate your keyword phrases into each page's unique Title tag. Title tags are important because they're given a lot of power to every search engine. Make sure that it precisely reflects the content of the page it's on, while also using the keyword phrases people might be using at a search engine to find your stuff.

These SEO tips and tricks are those tips and tricks that will never change and tips that if completed right will leave you in advance of most competition. The main thing to remember is relevancy. The more relevant your link and keywords the more useful it will be.

As I said at the start of the article, most SEO tips will change and modify as time goes on but relevant, high quality, anchored links deep linking to your site and integrate keyword phrases into each page's unique Title tag is something that will not be changing anytime soon.

Top SEO Services - How To Get On Page 1 Of Google And Receive Massive Web Traffic

o be honest, I don't think you can beat a good old fashioned SEO campaign, one that is carefully thought out, one that targets your chosen keywords and your carefully designed landing pages.

Simply unbeatable. But all that takes time and there are some times when you just want to 'bully' your way onto page 1 of Google. You might want to test a new product or idea or maybe you've spotted a growing trend and you just want to get on it quick, before the curve has peaked.

Sometimes you might just want to 'bully' your competitors off the page (now you wouldn't want to do that, would you?). Whatever the reason, here are my top 7 ways of getting ahead of the pack and onto page 1 of Google (for your chosen keyword term):

1. RSS Feeds - Google loves RSS Feeds. Google loves RSS aggregators, such as feedagg.com. Give Google Girl what she wants. Create a RSS feed, submit your RSS feed to as many RSS aggregators as you can find. Make sure that your RSS feeds contain your targeted keyword in the title of the posts.

You can even name the feed as your target keyword. Within days, sometimes hours, you will often see your feed on page 1 of Google. Of course, this isn't your page, but that page does contain many links to your page and you know that you now have a far better chance of getting that all important visitor click than the person who previously owned that spot.

2. Blog - Google loves a blog, especially blogger.com, Squidoo and Wordpress. You can add HubPages to that list too. Create a target keyword focused page on your target keyword focused blog, update with a few similar posts, maybe mention the other blogs with a link or two (vary target keyword hyper link a little) and you are almost there. Create at least one RSS feed from each of them and submit them as in 1.

3. Yahoo Answers - Google loves Yahoo Answers. Go in and answer a few related to your target keyword. Why not ask a question about your target keyword? Of course, you need to leave a link to your target site. Be careful! Don't over commercialize, be helpful, be useful, good things will follow.

4. Forums - Google loves a forum. Especially well populated and active forums. Search for forums related to your targeted keyword. Go in and answer a few questions related to your target keyword. Why not ask a question about your target keyword? Of course, you need to leave a link to your target site. Be careful! Don't over commercialize, be helpful, be useful, good things will follow.

So there you have it, a few of my SEO secrets that will help you generate more web traffic.

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The head section of a webpage's code can contain a vast array of of elements from robots meta tags to author tags and distribution tags. Most of these are now redundant and only a few can have any effect on search engine ranking. In fact, many people consider the keywords tag to now be redundant and the only two tags that really make a difference to SEO are the title and description tags, and these are the focus of today's blog.

The title element is extremely powerful and any changes to it can significantly affect a site's. Site owners with a basic understanding of SEO will realise that a keyword is generally required to be included in a page title in order for the page to rank highly in the search engines. A common mistake is to then assume that in order to maximise exposure, it is helpful to include as many search terms as possible.

In reality, targeting too many terms will spread your SEO efforts too thinly because the search engines will give less weight to each of the words. Another fact that is not as well known is that the order of the words in the title is important. The first few words are given the most weight and should contain the most important search term. Companies who place their name at the beginning of the page title are generally missing a trick.

The description tag is important and should include instances of keywords. However, this tag is typically displayed in the search engine results pages, so it is vital that it contains a clear and relevant message. A common mistake is to treat it like a keywords list, stuffing it with key terms at the cost of readability. Although it will help to ensure keywords are contained within the description, the primary purpose of this tag should be to display an informative and compelling ad to attract potential visitors to your site.

A page's title and description tags play a significant role in on-page Search engine optimisation. However, it is all too common to see poorly written tags. Hopefully, this brief post will shed a bit of light hoping to successfully optimise their own sites.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Does Your Site Have Traffic "Overload"?

What would you do with all of the extra money you'll make from a 30% increase in traffic to your sites? How about a 45% increase???

Whether you have Affiliate sites, Online stores, Marketing sites, Social networking sites, Blogs, or anything else that needs Traffic "Overload", Traffic Secret Handbook is your Market-Proven, Real Business Blue print to Emotionally Attaching visitors to your site!

Everyone knows, you can have the most beautiful website, with the most comprehensive content in the world but if no one sees it...it is worthless!

Now if you have 10 beautiful sites that no one sees, that becomes not only worthless but VERY COSTLY!!!

If you are serious about your Web Wealth Acquisition Plan, you knowthat you need to "overload" your sites with traffic.

That doesn't come from crossing your fingers and hoping.

Traffic "Overload" only comes from years of experience in how to make people go to your sites by using proven techniques andtechnology that will make your visitors acquire an Emotional Attachment to your site upon the first glance!

The "perfect" traffic is traffic that MUST go to your site for more invaluable guidance, information, and a product or service that they can't live without.

They must have an uncontrollable need to go to your website!

That is exactly where Dan Jeffreys, creator of TrafficSecretHandbook.com, comes in to teach you what Real Business People do to drive customers "through the front door" of your Web Wealth Empire!

Just a few of the Secrets that should NEVER leave your mind when you are creating your Web Traffic "Emotional Attachment Campaign" are:

- Link Popularity Reference Point - Web Traffic Analysis Shortcuts - Keyword Analysis Engineering...

Dan will teach you how to re-engineer your current Pay Per Click, Banner, Peel-away, Pop-up, etc. advertising campaign to fit his easy to use Blueprint of "Emotional Attachment" to generate Web Traffic "Overload".

Dan Jefferys has become known for his "Middle aged Non-Guru" style of Web Traffic Generation Techniques that teach you the Real World of Traffic Generation, not some "one- off trick" that will get shut down next week.

His goal is to empower Web Newbies to evolve beyond the "one-hit wonder gurus".

His years of testing and perfecting the Emotional Attachment based "Traffic Secret Handbook" will have you on "web traffic overload" faster than you could imagine!

It doesn't matter if you're making millions a year online or if you're just an affiliate "weekend" warrior, the secrets of Emotionally Driving and Attaching Traffic to your sites will raise your Web Wealth Empire to new heights.

When you're ready to solve the web traffic question...Check out www.TrafficSecretHandbook.com

Get Your Website Ranked High In The Search Engines

Trying to make money on the internet? Attracting readers to your website is the most important task you will have to do in order to be successful. Probably the best way to do this is to get your website ranked on the first page of search results for the major search engines.

You may be thinking, "But why?" Well, because this ranking on the first page of results will give you the ability to get quality, hungry people to your website, (and money-making offers), without costing you a dime!

The result? Any sales you make off of your free website ranking will be 100% profit. That's PURE profit! But of course, the golden question is "But how do I do this?"

As we know, search engines are confusing and even intimidating. They always seem to be changing, and they rely on these top secret, super high tech algorithms that are best left to the Einsteins of the world. These mathematical equations try to deliver the most relevant results for their searchers.

But if you break it down into nuts and bolts, search engines are not that complicated in regards to your website rankings. It just takes some effort to learn and understand how they work. And it's reasonable to assume that if you know how they work, you can get your website ranked in the top 10 results of any search engine you want! Once you obtain this ranking, you'll notice the money starting to roll in!

The nuts and bolts of search engine rankings comprise a recipe of several factors. These factors tell the search engines what to look for in determining the relevancy of your website for a particular keyword. Some of these important factors are: Page Title, File Name, and Contextual Links. There are other factors in this recipe but these three are the easiest to understand.

The first factor in the recipe is the page title. When you do a search on Google, the results will show the title of the page as the first big, blue hyperlink. Search engines perceive that if a keyword is in the title of the webpage, then this webpage is relevant to the search query. These pages will get a higher ranking than those pages that don't have a keyword in the page title.

The next factor is the actual file name. This name is the HTML file of the webpage and is important to search engines. Most website homepages have the file name "index.html". But if you change the name of your file to the keyword you want to rank for, then the search engines will pickup on this as being more relevant. So for example, if you want to rank your site for the keyword "dogs", you'd want to name your homepage "dogs.html". This little trick of having your keyword in the actual file name of your page will alert the search engines that your webpage is most likely relevant to that keyword.

The last factor in our discussion is contextual links. These links are hyperlinks within the content of your website. They let the search engines crawl through your entire site. For example, if you link a "dogs" page from your homepage using the keyword "dogs", the search engines can determine the relevancy of that page to that link.

These are just three factors in the complex recipe of factors that the search engines use. You need to learn how to use them in order to get your website ranked for your desired keywords. Once you apply these factors to get a high ranking, you'll be kicking yourself for not learning them sooner!

Sunday, February 1, 2009

FREE Keyword Tool - PPC Web Spy - Reveal Your Competitors Keywords and Ads in Seconds

So Brad Callen has done it again...have you seen this new keyword research tool he has just released. I cannot begn to describe how amazing it is. Imagine for a minute that you could see every keyword your competitor is bidding on, see how much they are paying per click and how many clicks they are getting per day. Oh, and also imagine that you can see every ad they are using for each keyword. How cool would that be? What would be even cooler...is that if you could see all of this from Google. If somehow you could do all of your keyword research without ever leaving the Google search page would be really cool...wouldn't it?

Well....enter PPC Web Spy. This tool does everything mentioned and more. Words cannot describe how easy this tool is to use. I have been looking for a tool like this for years. Brad spent over $127,000 developing this tool and its been years in the making...Guess what he is charging for it? Nothing! Yep, it's absolutely free. A free keyword tool that will let you uncover or "steal" if you will, your competitors keywords in a matter of seconds. The tool is simply amazing and completely FREE!

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If you are stuck in a rut trying to find the right keywords or if you just can't come up with that one killer ad then YOU need this tool. It takes all of the guess work out of keyword research. You can literally copy and paste your keywords into your adwords ads in seconds. You know exactly how many clicks you will get and exactly what you will pay. What can get easier than that?

Well...the second part of Brad's software actually allows you to dominate the #1 and #2 slots on Google for any term...Instantly! I am not kidding. You have got to see it to believe it, but you can dominate the #1 and #2 slots for Google using this tool and you can do it for any keyword you want. This is one powerful tool...and remember you can get it FREE!

If you are at all intrigued by this you owe it to yourself to check it out. I guarantee you will not be disappointed. The best part is that it is FREE. It will not cost you a dime. You can download it today.

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You'll be Glad you did.


The end of search engine marketing?

I want to go back to the turn of the millennium, not for nostalgia's sake but because it all seemed so easy then, at a time when I was first introduced to website structuring and marketing. It seems now that those days were so easy once you had the keys to unlock the mysteries of how search engines placement was attained.

In those days there were two main tools of the trade. First, a review of the volumes on searched keywords from the pioneer of pay-per-click advertising, Overture. With an intelligent structuring of these keywords, we were able to gain high placement. Next, we had bought a copy of Web Position Gold and all one had to do was point it to the site, add the keywords and press go. Simple.

In late 2005, in an attempt to fight the growing influence of spam and other techniques intended to trick Google's search model, the company implemented the Jagger update. Its intent was that of inbound link "relevancy" and other new and unresolved "canonical" issues.

This update was disastrous for some and I wrote at the time that "for weeks the returns for 'web site design bangkok' were: - first up is Bangkok hotel and Thailand travel guide. Instead of looking at the title and on-page copy they have used the link url of the designers, Web Design Copyright © 2005 by Asia Web Direct Co., Ltd. - next is Asian Institute of Technology. This site is about advanced education in engineering and science. They do, not too unreasonably, have a web mail link which obviously deserves a high position to compete with the web designers here. - remarkably, following that is Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development with the title HTTP Error 404?. This is the most ludicrous of them all as 'Le serveur Web ne parvient pas à trouver le fichier ou le script demandá. Vérifiez l'URL pour vous assurer que le chemin d'accès est correct, ou bien allez' definately has a certain ring to it when searching for an English-speaking web designer in the metropolis. - then The Peninsula Bangkok. This is one of Bangkok's premier hotels and nowhere on the home page is there even the mention of the word 'web'. The hotel does, however, have a wave-shaped 'design' and therefore should be positioned along with the city's web designers. - and, finally, is Conference on Trade and Development. Here, they have not indexed the title of the page but have seen fit to index 'Free Website Stats and Website counter by WebSTAT'." As I say, it was disastrous.

This update had search engine marketers in a state of disorientation. With Jagger, Google had once again attempted to outsmart huge numbers in the industry who had spent a vast amount of time legitimately but falsely making their websites seem more relevant and important than they really were.

At the time we added value to our placement by swapping links and placing links on free directories but Google said it much preferred it when the linking site "adds value to enhance the value of a site's content or to increase credibility and authority". And that's exactly what Jagger was meant to do -- when it found those sites, it simply adjusted their ranking to more accurately reflect their true importance.

At the same time Google downgraded or eliminating reciprocal linking as a measure of popularity -- and I am remain amazed that I still receive daily requests for this even today. But, in short, Jagger undid the hard work of thousands of SEO professionals and, as a result, hard-won high rankings and revenues plummeted.

Also, around that time, there came to the rescue Web 2.0. This was revolutionary. We could add content, diversify keywords and get listed on a huge range of blogging and RSS directories. The web was no longer about passive reading; it was about sharing content and increasingly websites were disseminating their news via blogs and articles. I wrote at the time that "gone are the days of mailers, link exchanges and non-industry-related links, it now all about writing relevant content."

Later on it was discovered that some of the highly popular blog sites, in my case problogger.com and mattcutts.com, were a sure-fire way of getting "relevant" high PageRank inbound links. This next phase saw the marketers leaving comments on a raft of these blog sites. This worked for a time too.

Then we had domain name domination, where for branded companies not having the search term in your domain name put you at a distinct disadvantage. I launched two sites at the beginning of 2008 with the express intention of proving this point. I was at #1 on the first in seven days and #1 on the other in two. They remain at #1 even though no link building has been undertaken for 11 months.

The other aspect of what we were being told was to submit articles. Fine for those of us who could attempt it but for most companies, except for the larger one with their own in-house PR division, there was rarely anyone who felt qualified and most clients skipped over that option.

As Google went into overdrive in cutting out virtually all links from the directories we had once dutifully but painstakingly subscribed to, and blog comments started to insert "no follow" tags, outside of writing copy where did we go for our links?

The SEO community, mainly based and outsourced from India, put up "packages" where you could buy 100 links, 500 links, 1,000 links. The cost of this seemed exorbitant and almost nowhere did they mention the relevance or the value of these links. Some of the better companies set about on personalised campaigns but to date I have not seen any of the links they provided being indexed. The reason: they are bought.

There may be companies out there providing a legitimate service but I know of none. Every single one of them I have approached will provide linkbacks with anchor text from websites with a maximum PageRank 4, but of all the companies I know they have provided this service for, not one solitary link has been indexed by Google.

So where does this leave the industry? It's possible to look at your competitors and register them yourself, but the essence of this article is what has become of the search engine marketing companies. They are still operating; they are still out there. But what value can they now pass on to their customers where reciprocal linking is dead, forums and directories have been de-indexed, blog comments are no longer available, RSS directories moribund and link buying outlawed?

Search engine marketing is not the business it once was and I am unconvinced that the industry is now able to deliver. People are totally at a loss as to where to go in such a depleted system of non-available options.