Local Search Engine Optimization

As the fastest growing vertical in search, many people are now starting to recognize the value of local search engine optimization can have on their site traffic. Also known as regional search, it's basically geo-targeting your audience when they search.

Local search works best for the service provider, or a retailer that has numerous locations. While the search volume won't be as great as a non-regional phrase, the person who reaches your site will be a more targeted visit and most likely ready to convert.

Another happy accident in local search is that for sites that are well optimized may also pick up rankings in mobile search.

So, here's what you need to do in order to rank for local seo:

• Be sure to have your location(s) full address
• If you have a regional number, list that as well since some people start with an area code
• Be sure to include driving directions to your location
• Use a mapping service to display your location
• Have pictures of your locations and name them with your street address
• Make sure your site appears in any regional directory that might be online
• If you can afford it, get listed in your local yellow pages
• Place the regions you want to rank for in your page titles
• Get text links that contain the regional phrase

Most of these techniques are not only common sense, but also good web design. If you're in business, you want people to be able to find you, right?

How to Create a Google Site Map

Officially announced on June 6th, 2005 at Google'e Blog, Google Site Map allows you to submit a listing of all your urls for Google to crawl.

There have been many questions concerning the procedure of creating a Google Site Map. Below is the non-Python way of creating one. (Note: Google has further documentation at their site)

First, create a file named sitemap.xml

Use the following code in any HTML editor:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<url>
<loc>http://www.yourwebsitename.com/
<lastmod>2005-06-30T14:12:14+00:00
<changefreq>daily
<priority>1.0

<url>
<loc>http://www.yourwebsitename.com/glossary.cfm
<lastmod>2005-06-30T14:12:14+00:00
<changefreq>weekly
<priority>1.0

Here's a breakdown of those properties:

lastmod -
This is the date the document was last modified and uses the following formats:
dd.mm.yyyy
dd.mm.yyyy hh:mm
dd/mm/yyyy
dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm

changefreq -
Tells Google Sitemaps the frequently that content of a particular URL will change.

Your options are "always", "hourly", "daily", "weekly", "monthly", "yearly" or "never".

The value "always" should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value "never" should be used to describe archived URLs.

priority -
The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on your site.
You may select between 0.0 and 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s) on your website and 1.0 identifies the highest priority page(s) on your website.

Add as many pages as there are in your website.

Google Sitemap supports up to 50,000 pages per XML file.

Once you've completed all of those steps, you'll need to submit your site map page.

Submit to: (requires gmail account)

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Collateral Benefits of Search Engine Marketing

Many times a client only looks at the bottom line when it comes to the performance they are getting for their investment into Search Engine Marketing.

They often only look at the selected keyword phrases that they are paying for, without fully realizing what other residual effects they are receiving.

When a site gets properly optimized, (SEO) it is being transformed into a thought-out navigational pattern to information. This is the same pattern a search engine spider looks for. Don't forget, the easier you make it for a spider to index your site, the better your chances are for getting your site a higher placement in the search engine results page (SERP's).

While W3C validation is something all sites should strive for, it is not required for better rankings. Does it help? Probably. Yahoo engineers have stated that whether a site is W3C compliant or not makes no difference to how it ranks. If it has relevant content, it will get ranked.

Another element when optimizing a site is that through proper naming of page titles, file names and placement of content make the site all the more relevant to the spider. Although Google places less value on Meta Tags, they are still used as part of the algorithm, and should not be overlooked.

After the site has coded properly, the game then goes up to the next level. Search Engine Marketing is used to drive traffic to the site through various means. Press releases, articles, blogs, RSS/XML feeds, Directory Submissions and User Groups all can bring targeted traffic to a site.

Here is where the collateral benefits of SEM begin to appear. Let's say that you have been doing a series of press releases where once a week, you talk about a new color of widget. In each press release you also list the other colors of widgets that you have for sale. Even after only the first release gets sent, you've already created a valuable In-Bound Link to your site for your Red Widget, but since you included the other colors of the widgets as well, they all pick up IBL's as well.

An even greater demonstration of a collateral benefit is ranking for keywords and phrases that you aren't targeting. Keeping to our widget example, if your site copy talks about the different uses of widgets, the available colors that they come in and the best way to preserve your widget, you've just created a multitude of various phrases that your site can get ranked on.

Example site copy:

We sell the highest-quality widget available. Our color selection ranges from red to purple, black to white and can be used in your home or for industrial needs. The widget is the most versatile tool on the market. Pick one up today!

From this one paragraph, here are the possible phrases your site could get ranked on:

• high quality widget
• red widget
• purple widget
• black widget
• white widget
• home widget
• industrial widget
• widget tool
• widget

This is only a tiny sampling of the potential your site has. Remember, each page gets ranked on it's own, so that's why it is so important to make sure every page you have on your site is optimized.

Even your contact/about page is critical because if you have a brick-and-mortar business, by listing your street address, you help the search engines geo target your site. Most search engines are already trying to focus your search results regionally. While it's not a major factor yet, it is something to be aware of.

In conclusion, the next time you start checking Google to see where your site ranks for it's keyword phrases, don't forget about all of the hidden keywords/phrases that are embedded in your site's copy. You would be surprised at how many of those forgotten about terms end up at the top of the pile....

Press Release Power

I'm sure by now you've heard about how Press Releases can help your marketing campaigns on the Internet. But besides from people telling you, do you have any quantitative evidence that it's worth the time to craft a newsworthy release?

From a search marketing perspective, this is one of the best ways of killing two birds with one stone. Besides getting exposure for your site, you are also creating web saturation. By having the possibility of your release getting picked up by multiple media outlets, you quickly and cheaply get eyeballs looking at your product or service, and ultimately, traffic to your site.

Being that the Internet has grown to being a social environment with the ultimate goal of personalization for each user, how can anyone get their message out?

With blogs, RSS readers and news aggregators becoming more popular, the user is becoming more selective to what they want to see. This is something every marketer should embrace.

Now, instead of spending thousands to blast an add that may only be relevant to 10 percent of your audience, you can now selectively target your audience and deliver your message.

Since the majority of us do not have Google's bankroll, we are left to find less expensive ways to drive visitors to your site. This is where one can get onto a level playing field with the big spenders.

To demonstrate the power of the press release, take a moment to review some stats on a campaign that was conducted in early December.

PR Service: PRWeb.com

Price: $80.00 USD
(Note: - you can submit free press releases, but you won't have access to any tracking stats, and you lose some services.)

For the above mentioned fee, the $80.00 includes:

Properly Optimized, RSS/XML Feed, Next Day Distribution, ability to attach files, featured, listing appears on: Google News, Overture, eMediaWire, Yahoo News, Excite News, DogPile, MetaCrawler, Inktomi, MSN News, Lycos News, AskJeeves News, Feedster and Topix News

Quite the bang for your buck, eh?

The Press Release in question was for a free service, and it was geared for Christmas use, so keep that in mind as you review the information.

Reads: 88,380

(This number indicates how many times the press release was accessed from the PRWeb site and other distribution points where they have the ability to measure a click through. This number does not include the number of journalists that have received the release through email.)

Estimated Pickup: 3,908

(This number estimates the number of times the press release was picked up by a media outlet. This does not indicate how many times the story appeared in the media. It simply attempts to estimate media interest in the release.)

Now how many places on the Internet can give you those type of numbers for getting traffic to your site?

To try and get an accurate number for a "typical" Press Release, another release was submitted in March of 2005, for a new paid-for service.

Reads: 80,375

Estimated Pickup: 1,362

Still pretty impressive, even if it's just to get some traffic, or brand name exposure.

If you're serious about your business, $80.00 is easily worth the investment for this type of return.

SEO Facts

There are a lot of rumors that go around the net that all you need to do is submit your website to thousands of search engines and traffic will immediately start avalanching to your website like never before. The problem with those rumors is that they simply are not true.
Ranking high in the search engines and collecting traffic as a result is a fairly complicated and time consuming process. It will take some work and dedication, but the end result can be rewarding. I will attempt to summarize the concepts of search engine marketing and help you get your start today.

I think it is safe to say we all know what search engines are. Just go to Google.com for an example. You type words, it finds related web sites.

As an advertiser, you should instantly see the potential in using search engines as a tool to get traffic to your own site. And in fact search engines are a very powerful marketing tool that can prove very helpful if properly utilized.

The first mistake most newbie marketers make is to submit their site to search engines without ever optimizing their web page. Now in order to be able to optimize your web page, you must first own the web page.

Search engine optimization is a detailed, lengthy process that would be to difficult for me to get into complete detail here, so I’ll leave it up to you to do a little research of your own to learn how.

I will still leave you with the most crucial tips to get you on your way and to keep you from making fatal mistakes.

What is more important to optimize?
a) Meta tags
b) content
c) both are important

In my opinion, both are important to attend to, but even more important than optimizing your meta tags is optimizing your content. Most of today’s search engines (especially the largest -- Google), focus more on your content as a guide to relevancy than your meta tags. It is not bad to optimize your Meta tags with a good description and keywords, but just remember that even more important is your content optimization.

Review your web site content and look for creative ways to strategically add into your content the keywords which you are focusing on reaching. For example, if you are targeting the keyword “Internet marketing,” you will want to ensure that the phrase “Internet marketing” appears frequently within your sites ad copy. The more it appears, the greater your chances of being listed high are. Yet be sure to do this within reason. Your website is made primarily to read by humans, not search engines.

Of course, as I said meta tags are still an important issue to attend to as well. While Google may not use meta tags much at all as a guide to relevancy, some other popular search engines still do.
Meta tags are the html tags in between the tags of your html, found at the top html of your web page.

For example…


[meta content="" name="description"]
[meta content="Your Keywords go here" name="keywords"]
[meta content="" name="author"]

Note: The [] tags are used instead of the <> tags.

In the above example the [title] tag is a description of your site that will appear on the browser taskbar at the top of browser. This description should accurately explain your site, but it should also be rich with your most important keywords.

In the [meta name=”description”] tag, you will want to include a short description of your web site. This is what appears as your description when you appear in the search results on some search engines. While this description should be rich in your targeted keywords, it should more importantly accurately describe your site. If you write a description optimized with keywords, but that doesn’t make sense to humans, no one will click through to your site.

The [meta name="keywords"] tag is where you will type your targeted keywords, separated by a comma.

In the [meta name="author"] tag, you will want to include a short description about yourself, the author. Make it accurately describe you, but also don’t be afraid go ahead and puff yourself up a little bit.

Let me guess what you’re thinking now?

You’re wondering what keywords you should use and how you should choose them.

Well, the best advice is to keep your keywords targeted and narrow, rather than broad.

For example, rather than using the broad search term, “network marketing,” try using a less searched, more targeted keyword like “network marketing training.” Even while narrow, targeted keywords get searched less, you will be competing with less people for the top spots and will end up with a higher position under that keyword and ultimately more traffic in the end.

Go to http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ for a cool tool to help you choose your keywords. You type in a broad search term, and it suggests narrow search terms.

The other optimization tip to keep in mind is link popularity. Again, this is especially a factor with Google, but since Google is by far the most used and accounts for about 70% of all Internet searches, it is wise to focus on being optimized for Google most of all.

Link popularity has to do with how many other pages there are on the Internet with links to your pages. The more pages linking to you and the greater the link popularity of the pages linking to you, the greater your link popularity will become.

Many people believe they can solve this problem by simply submitting to thousands of Free For All (FFA) link sites and instantly have thousands of sites linking to them. But the unfortunate truth is that Google and most other search engines can recognize and ignore the links to your site which reside on FFA sites. So the point here is, don’t bother wasting your time submitting to thousands of FFA sites because it doesn’t help you.

What does help your link popularity is taking the time to submit your site to all the major web directories (such as www.dmoz.org).

These sites are credible and have a high link popularity rating, which will only help your link popularity rating in the end. A good site to go to for a listing of all the biggest and best directories to submit to for traffic and increased link popularity

Developing key partnerships with other web sites is the other way to increase link popularity. You can find other web pages that you would like to be linked to and swap links. You create a page on your site with links to only a select few web sites and they do the same There are many other optimization tricks and the more tricks you use the better your chances of ranking higher will be, but just remind yourself not to get to obsessed with search engine ranking and remind yourself that there are other advertising methods to attend to.

Get your site basically optimized and submitted to start off, then come back and tweak it over time. After you have finished your optimization, you are now ready to submit to the search engines.

Although you may be dazzled by the chance to submit your site to 400,000+ search engines (or other such offers) with one click, please remember one thing… That although there are thousands of search engines out there, only a handful really matter.

The truth is that a handful of the major search engines account for about 96% of all search engine traffic. So it is quite obviously more beneficial to focus on getting submitted to the major players, rather than all the thousands of little ones. With that said, let me suggest that you throw automated search engine submission tools out the window right now and submit manually.

After all, only a handful of the top engines even matter and you will almost always see better results with your rankings when submitting manually. In addition, when you submit manually, you know it’s really getting done. So what are the top search engines that power thousands of other search engines and account for about 96% of all search engine traffic?

1) Google (http://www.google.com/addurl.html)
2) FAST (http://searchservices.lycos.com/...)
3) Inktomi (http://searchservices.lycos.com/...)
4) Teoma (http://ask.ineedhits.com)
5) AltaVista (http://av.ineedhits.com/)

While Google may be free to submit to, others like Inktomi, FAST, Teoma and AltaVista cost money to submit to. My advice would be that unless you have spent some time on optimization and know that your site is going to do well on the search engines; don’t spend the money on paid submission engines.

The only advantage to the paid submission engines is that there is usually not as much competition on them because they aren’t free. However, you can use a little known trick to get on the paid submission engines free. What you do is find someone else with a website already listed on these engines and get them to list a link to your site on their site. Then, when the Inktomi, FAST, Teoma and AltaVista spiders come to crawl their sites, it will find your link, go to your site, and add your site to their index.

What is Internet Marketing? Introduction & Information

This article is for the people who don’t know much of Internet Marketing. Let me introduce this powerful source of marketing in my words.

Web has been always evolving, changing, searching & indexing with Time. But the new trend of Marketing / Promoting through Internet as primary medium is quickly catching on, in the present dynamic world. In comparison with traditional Advertising, Online promotions tend to offer best deals to consumers / customers since they can attract large number of target audience / visitors to their websites if they have Search Engine Friendly site with good mix of Marketing and Optimization. This helped the overall market of Online Advertising very much.

Internet Marketing is also referred as Online / Web Marketing also. It has many components. Some of them are as follows:

· Search Engine Marketing
· Search Engine Optimization
· Social Media Optimization and Marketing
· Viral Marketing
· Banner Advertisement
· Including in Comparison Shopping Sites
· E-mailers / Email Marketing

SEO Tools - QTP to Automate SEM Tasks

Anytime did you have any idea to automate some of the tedious, time taking SEO tasks?

I got it today and here is the solution for it.

QTP ( Quick Test Professional ) is an excellent Automation Tool which would solve the manual work which is repetitive. It is actually an automated testing solution which provides functional test and regression test automation.

Search Engine Optimizers ( SEO ) and Search Engine Marketers ( SEM ) can use QTP to full advantage by automating the Pay Per Click ( PPC ) campaign Management, Search reports generation for Analysis, keyword optimization in Bulk and can even manage campaign bid optimization.

QTP works in two modes

1) Context Sensitive Depending on the clicks and
2) Low Level will considers mouse movements such as X and Y co-ordinates

QTP has two View options

1) Keyword View: In this view, we can see the Screens.
2) Expert view: This view is where the Code is written. Coding will also include scripting

QTP also has the following Check Points

1. Standard - Used for Text
2. Page - Can be used to check page download time
3. Bitmap - may be used to check the images
4. Database Checkpoint
5. XML Checkpoint
6. Accessibility Checkpoint
7. Text Checkpoint

All the QTP is working based on the macros saved in Object Repository Manager.
- - - Here the activities are recorded
- - - Macros can be defined and analyzed

QTP also has feature called Exception Handling. This is used in Recovery Scenarios.
This option would handle run-time errors. Hence the process will flow smoothly.

Use Quick Test Professional as a Search Engine Optimization Tool and enjoy Automated SEO Tasks.

Fast Optimization Techniques for websites

Below are the set of optimization tips all can try for really quick results in Search Engines.

1) Use Blog optimization. You will achieve it.

2) Create a blog, attach to your site and ping all the major blog search, technorati websites.

3) Use web 2.0 websites to promote your website. Have articles, post in forums, comment in others blogs and reach Top 50, 100 of web 2.0 sites.

These all can be achieved in hours...

Last but not least, traditional option. Create Google sitemap in XML and submit it to Google, sitemap.html to your homepage and urllist.txt (sitemap with only URLs, save it with that name) submit it to yahoo. MSN accepts all of above.

Latest Technique is

Have link to your website from very high PR value sites. This is the best form of creating instant worth to your site and traffic flows. It Works. 100%.

Optimize pages for Social Media Sites - SMM - SMO

Social Media optimization and Marketing could give you traffic (yes, targeted traffic) in long term without bothering of spending for clicks/visits.

Promote your website in web 2.0 sites and try to make them popular by asking all of our friends to add the website to their online bookmarking accounts. Write Articles and post your signature, comment in popular blogs, Answer in Yahoo Questions, reply in Forums, be a part of all happening web 2.0 sites.

One of my site had 258 sources of traffic. Many of them, honestly speaking I too don’t know... It happens and it happens when you are having success in the above said SMO (Social Media Optimization) and SMM (Social Media Marketing)

Social Media Optimization / Marketing - SMO & SMM - Online Networking

What is Social Media optimization (SMM) and Social Meda Marketing (SMM)?

The concept is, With your Social Network, Create your Brand or promote through Word-of-Mouth on internet.

You need good networking / communication skills for this. And also copywriting...

Have a profile in Facebook, myspace and orkut.... try to add yourself into communities / Groups - connnect to people and message / scrap / ping them.

hi5, ringo and some others too are good social netwrking sites.

Then gofor online Bookmarking sites.
Digg, Del.icio.us and reditt are cool.

Then write articles / post and digg them, add them to these bookmarking sites.
Same day, have ur friends too add ur page to their online bookmarking acccounts.

Then go for Article submission directories / Press Release websites.
Write about your website/blog - what services/products you provide or just give info.

This all, if you can do it for the next 3-4 weeks, u would start SMO and SMM.

PPC Campaign Management - Google Adwords - Pay Per Click Tips

I came across an interesting conversation regarding PPC Campaign management.
Hope this will help you all to manage you Pay Per Click Campaigns.

Q: How to do keyword price adjustments in ppc?
A: check your landing page - your keyword and adcopy, all these 3 should contain the keyword. Add ur keywords in meta tags too. This all will make the ad quality score GREAT but not OK or POOR. Hence u can adjust PPC value.

Q: How to Lower CPC (Cost Per Click) by increasing CTR (Click Thru Rate)?
A: First of all, try to identify the ideal position for your ad in the ranking page as its displayed on search engine. You have position preference in Adwords, where your ad will be shown only if the position you specified is guaranteed for your keyword at a certain CPC. Enabling this feature will result in increase your CTR very much, but be careful it may reduce your number of impressions and hence clicks.


Q: What are Longtail Keywords?
A: Longtail refers to additional keywords which could surround your main product/service and make sense (Actually the whole combination of general words with your main keyword which can be queried by users on search engines)

Q: How to get more longtail keywords?
A: Try to use thesaurus and have keyword research on wordtracker or Google sandbox keyword tool. Check for your referral log (really a Gold Mine) on your server. This too gives you keywords which are getting you visitors to your website.

Q: Suppose I am using one landing page for 40 keywords, can I put 40 keywords in meta tag of landing page?
A: yes, u have to.... otherwise whats the use of a page - u put pen on meta tags and sell shoes in that page?
Your relevancy will increase if u use keywords in meta tags.

Q: How to create and manage an ideal PPC Campaign?
A: Simple - create campaigns then Adgroups with a Relevant Adcopy and insert Keywords.
You will need to group similar landing page keywords into 1 adgroup.
Campaign name and adgroups should also contain keywords.
We need to put all keywords of adgroup into landing page.
You have advanced options for keyword insertion at adcopy level and destination url level too

Ex: If shoes is campaign then walking and running should be adgroups. shoes/Product names should be the keywords.

Back Links Creation without Link Exchange

Follow the below points and it would be very easy to create lots of non-reciprocal Link backs from other websites/web pages.

1. Directory Submission: To have more Backlinks, submit your website for free web directories. Dmoz is the first directory to be submitted, as Google prefers it. In Paid directories, Yahoo Directory listing with $299 is worth a try.
There are hundreds of free directories and some of the others take nominal fees to include your website in their directories.
Only caution is submit into right and relevant category in those directories and also change the linking text (Famously called as Anchor Text). Have 4-5 variations of Linking Text and also Descriptions.
If its possible try to include Inner page (deeper webpage) of your website into the directories which helps in getting visitors directly to the Product/Service page than to the homepage.

2. Blog Promotion: Try to promote your website in blogs. Search for high ranking, most famous blogs in your field and Comment in those blogs. Try to actively participate in others blogs and keep intouch with popular blog writers. With good rapport from your side, someday they may write about your website. You never know, what goodness can bring to you in your life...

3. Signature: Have your signature with web address in your emails and in messages which you respond in forums. This will increase your websites traffic.

4. Promote by Publishing: Try to give Press Releases (Many free services are available on net) and create Articles and submit to all article websites. When they are published, you will get free back links from good places.

Manual directory submissions

Every website owner want to know that how to increase the traffic in his site & also search engine rankings. Tow factors that play important role to increase the traffic of any website and search engines ranking are high-quality original content and the number and quality of links to the site. This improves and supports your rankings on the major search engines like Google, AltaVista and Yahoo.

Submit site in SEO friendly Directories

Submitting website to SEO directories one method for obtaining more links. Directory submission is of two types, first is Manual directory Submission and second one is Automated directory submission. Automated directory submission submits your website quickly to thousand of directories. But Manual directory Submission is advisable.

Manual directory Submission

Manual directory Submission is time eating labor intensive and cost effective way to build inbound one way links, but it definitely gives great flexibility in the submissions process. It also helps in building a brand image and also increases traffic and promotion to your website.

The time taken for approval of your listing is depending upon the policies of that web directory. Manual submission requires lots of patience but for this effort you get the required results.

Every web directory has some submission form. You only need to full fill that form to get listed. It’s recommended that read the guidelines before filling the form. Be careful while choosing the category for your website. Submit your website to correct category. Like if your website is bout SEO then submits it to SEO/Search engine optimization/Internet marketing category. Use your business for your anchor text. Your description should be proper written and there should no grammatical mistake in your description. Don’t use your anchor text in your keywords.

What is Link Building?

It’s very important for your website to get competitive position on the search engines. So, now many questions arise like How this can be possible? How can I increase the traffic to my website? How to increase the website rank in search engines? and many more....

Link building is answer to these questions. Link building is procedure to get quality inbound links to own website with the intention to get the answer of all above questions.

Link building can be proved as mile stone to get your site to rank high in the major search engines. Link building camping helps you to attract your target audience in addition it also increases the website importance. Link building helps your site to score high Google page rank and increase the chance of your website rank high in search engines with relevant keywords.

Quality than Quantity of Links:

Quality always preferred than quantity. Similarly if your website has quality inbound links then definitely your website will perform well in search engines. Link building is time consuming, difficult and some time boring process. But it helps to improve the visibility of your website on search engines.

It doesn’t mean that post your link everywhere. Suppose your website is about cell phones and your posting your link on footwear website will you get benefit of that? Absolutely no. because that website has visitors which are interested to buy shoes and your website is all about cell phone so you will not get any benefit of that.

So try to target only those websites that have similar concept/content as yours. This will help you to get meaningful traffic on your website.

Conclusion

Link building is effective way to gain traffic and of course rankings in search engines too. Moreover it also helps to attract real customers and improves search engine performance.

Tips For Keyword Selection

The most common mistake that is maid by almost all beginner webmasters is targeting keywords which are too viable. You can’t compete or place for extremely competitive keywords. High rank websites and well established business use their keywords properly that is the reason that they are on top.

Go for medium competitive keywords these keywords will give you batter results.

Follow these steps to achieve Top 10 Rankings in Google

1. Make the list of keywords: First step is preparing the list of the keywords you wish to target. Obviously these keywords should relate to the theme of your business. Check the keyword competition to see how many sites are already listed on Google for that keyword. Also check the page rank and keywords of the website that are listed on first page of Google search results. If those entire website have PR6 and above page rank it is difficult to get high ranked for that keyword.

2. Choose Keywords related to your website: once you have prepared the list of your keywords then next step is filter out the keywords that are more beneficial for your business and used by your targeted audience. Also check the daily searches and keyword competition before finalizing the keywords.

3. Quality Content: Create quality content for your keywords. Write content for your visitors. Your content should be in proper flow. Incorporate your keywords in content section.

4. Keyword in Domain Name, Title and URL: Having your keyword in your domain name will score big points from search engines. Also include your business keywords in the title and Meta tag of each page. Use keywords to name the web page like if your web page is about SEO then use www.@@@.com/SEO.html. If the keyword is lengthy use hyphens or underscore as separator like search-engine-optimization or search_engine_optimization.

Make Money From Adsense

Google Adsense is a fast and effective way to earn good bucks from the website. Google Adsense is beneficial for both advertiser and publisher. Where advertiser get targeted audience on their website on the other hand publisher earns money when somebody clicks on these ads. Google display the ads that match with the content of the publisher’s website like if publisher has website on SEO then the ads will be search engine optimization, link building, SEO guide, SEO help etc. depends upon the content of the website where these ads are put up.

Adsense program is free anybody who has webpage can join this. But remember your Adsense income will depend upon the number of clicks you will get. If you don’t have website you can create blog(www.blogger.com) like mine or create a webpage using “pages.Google.com” these are also free.

If you don’t want to put ads on your website/webpage then you can add Google search on your website. This will help your visitors to find the required content on your page as well as if they click on sponsored ads you will get paid for that.

Why Backlinks?

Search engine optimization for online business is very crucial factor that should consider properly. At present time and in future also search engines play important role to get free traffic. If you are on the first page of any popular search engine like Google or Yahoo for any specific keyword you will definitely get streams of traffic everyday.

Quality backlinks always helps your website to perform well on search engine results. While link exchanging or directory submission use you business keywords as anchor text. The best backlink strategy is find website and directories similar to yours. This will surely helpful to get meaning traffic.

Don’t ignore SEO, it could make or break your business. Read as much as possible about this topic. On internet there are many free website like mine who will help you to take deep knowledge of this subject. It’s little bit time consuming but effective way to get meaningful free traffic to your website. Spend your time to get quality backlinks.

An Overview Of Big Players

Google

Google’s search results are shown on Google.com, AOL/Netscape and Earthlink. They’re also available through many “metasearch” engines, and Google is one of the options on Hotbot. Add it all up, and Google results are probably displayed on 75% of all searches.

Google Adwords:

Google’s Adwords is a “pay per click” program, displaying text ads alongside search results on many search portals. The order in which they are displayed is based on the advertiser’s bid as well as the user response for each ad. Adwords ads are displayd on Google.com, AOL/Netscape, Ask Jeeves and many smaller portals. ADD it all up, and Adwords ads are probably displayed on 65% of all searches. Adwords is not limited to search results, though, so the actual reach of this program is much greater than that.

Overture.com

Overture is a “pay per click” model. They provide the primary search result for MSN, and provide search result through their own Looksmart.com portal. Looksmart also has a volunteer edited directory called Zeal, Whose results are mixed in with the paid listings.

Inktomi Search

Inktomi provides search results to multiple search portals, but they do not operate a search portal their own. Inktomi provides secondary search results to MSN and primary results for Hotbot as well as several small portals. All together, lnktomi results are probably shown on 6% of all searches.

Altavista Search

Altavista’s Search engine provides search results at Altavista.com, and is therefore shown on about 2% of searches. Altavista was once the king of search engine jungle. Acquired first by Overture and now owned by Yahoo, their days are probably numbered.

FAST/ALLTheWeb Search

Results from FAST are displayed on Lycos, and the “ALLTHeWeb” search portal. All together, probably less than 1% of all searches. Yahoo owns the ALLTHEWeb search portal now, but it’s unlikely that FAST result are going to grow significantly beyond the Lycos portal, and Lycos May make a switch at some point. FAST’s main business is corporate search solutions, so it’s unlikely that they will make significantly effort to retain market share in the public search market.

All About Alexa

What is Alexa?

Alexa is website which provides traffic information for website. “Alexa Rank” is unit used by this website to indicate the number of users who have visited the website with Alexa toolbar installed.

Why it is important?

Advertisers and Webmasters use Alexa rank as a measuring tool to determine the value your web site. If your website has good Alexa rank that means you will get high ad pricing.

How to start?

The first step to start with Alexa is install toolbar on your machine. If you are using Internet Explorer for browsing then download and simply install Alexa toolbar(http://www.alexa.com/site/download/) and if you are using Mozilla Firefox then SearchStatus(http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/) extension. This will display Alexa rank as well as Google Page rank.

Increase Alexa Rank but How?

I know at this point of time you are very curious to know the secretes to increase the Alexa rank of your website. First thing that I always repeat in my articles is “Unique and Quality content” which will automatically attract large pool of audience without the need of artificial method to increase the traffic.

1. Install Alexa tool bar or SearchStatus extension and set your website as your homepage.
2. Add Alexa rank widget on your website. Each click is count as a new visit if alexa toolbar is not installed on visitor’s browser.
3. Promote Alexa toolbar in your friend circle and ask them to use your website as home page.
4. Write some artcles and blog about Alexa and include the link to your website within the content section.
5. Post your link in the discussion forums; this is one of the effective way to get good Alexa rank.
6. Use Alexa redirects on your website URL like this http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.freeseohelp.blogspot.com
7. Create Alexa category on your website/blog and use it to post articles and news about Alexa.

Why a site goes into the supplemental index in Google ?

Some of the reasons why a site goes into the supplemental index of Google are:

1. Duplicate content: One of the main reasons why site goes into the supplemental index of Google .So try and make your content as unique as possible.

2. Same Title and Description in a page: Make sure you have separate title and description in each page.

3. Canonical Issues: Use 301 redirect to redirect your site from without www to www (e.g http://www.domain name .com/)

4. Lack of content: Build a site with good combination of text and images.

5. Lack of PR: Concentrate on link exchange and get as many quality backlinks as possible.

6. Orphan Pages: Pages that no one links to. So make sure you have clear navigation in your site.

7. Dynamic URLs: Pages with too many query strings in the URL. Search engines don't like them so always use static URL.

Follow these points and surely its going to help your site come out of the supplemental index of Google.

1. Eliminate the duplicate content issues on your pages. Page TITLE and Meta Description tags should be unique (and Meta Keywords, too, if you use it). Try to limit as much duplicate content as possible. It's okay to have a common header, footer, and site menu on your pages as long as your pages have enough other content to offset the common stuff. It's not okay for your red widget and blue widget product pages to have the same exact product description and page content, with the exception of the color.
   
   2. Improve the content on the supplemental pages. As mentioned in #1, pages with little or no content are strong candidates to land in the supplemental index. That's especially true if the amount of duplicate content (header, footer, etc.) is substantially more than the non-duplicate content.
   
   3. Improve your site architecture. If you have pages that are 4-5 levels deep (i.e., below or away from the home page), redo that structure so the pages aren't buried like that. Make it easier for the crawler to reach all your pages.
   
   4. Improve your internal linking. Have a site map that includes links to all your pages. This'll help make sure pages don't get orphaned. Be sure to link to the site map from your home page so the crawlers can find all those links easily.
   
   5. Fix your link profile. Who you link to and who links to you impacts the level of trust Google gives you, and less trust often equals more supplemental pages.
   
   6. Fix your URLs. Do you really need to pass 3-4 variables in the URL? Cut down on the parameters. Keep your URLs as simple as possible.
   
   7. Are you a theft victim? If someone has stolen your content, it's possible Google is ranking the stolen content on the other site instead of yours. Use a service like Copyscape to check for content theft. “Plagiarism Today” is another good resource to learn about stopping content theft, with specific instructions for contacting the offending party/parties.
   
   8. If all else fails, take drastic measures. Rename/save all the supplemental pages with a new URL and link to the "new" pages somewhat prominently on your site. The site map idea mentioned above would be a good start. And then do a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones. (This is obviously a lot of work if you have a lot of pages in the supplemental index.)
   
   9. And finally, tell Google what's going on. When you're convinced you've exhausted all of these issues, use Google's Webmaster Central to submit your URLs directly into Google's brain.

Google Guidelines says that.....

Rich content: - This is applicable for all search engines. If your website has quality content your website will perform awesome on search engines.

Title tag: - Google give high priority to title tag of your web page. Make unique and descriptive title and include important keywords in your title tag. Remember one thing that the keywords which you are using in your title tag should also present in the content of that page.

Description tag: - After the title tag next tag that garbs the Google attention is “description” tag. So try to make unique description for each page of your web site. Also include your important keywords in the description tag.

Note: Description of different pages shouldn’t be same.

Broken links: - As I told in previous articles, broken links in your website can create a problem for search engine spiders to crawl your website. So its batter to check all the links and fix if you find any broken link.

Alt Tag: - Alt tag should be explanatory and accurate that best express your product and services. Alt tag should not be stuffed with keywords.

Static and Dynamic: - Static web sites are easily crawled and indexed by all the search engine spiders. The problem in dynamic website comes when comes at url which contain symbols like? instead of text. For spider it is difficult to keep it in its database.

Limit year link less than 100:- According to one of the Google guideline a given web page should not contain more than 100 links.

Search Engine Guidelines

Every Search engine has its own search algorithm and guidelines some guidelines are common among search engines but some are different also. To well rank a web site in particular search engine, it is required to have good knowledge of their prescribed guidelines.

According to Yahoo Guidelines.....

Your web site should be based on quality: - It means your web site should have unique and quality content. Don’t copy the content form other websites however you can refer websites like “Wikipedia” to write the content. Always try to write content in your own wordings.

Web site should have more pages as it can: - According to yahoo a rich content web site that have more than 100 pages attract the attention of mostly search engines. So its batter to add more web pages in your existing website.

Link exchange: - Link exchange is very compulsory for all major search engines (Google. Yahoo and Msn) in order to improve the search engine visibility of your website. As many as your website have quality links, changes of a well page rank and good ranking will be more.

Update your content: - Search engines like websites that have good quantity of content. This is another reason why the “blogs” perform well on search engine. Updated sites always appreciated by visitors. Keep updating your website continuously.

Keywords: - Yahoo crawlers like keywords. So use good keyword within the content of the page. But remember one thing always avoid keyword stuffing else your web site got banned on Yahoo.

Search Engine Guidelines

Some guidelines are common among google, Yahoo and MSN but some are different also. To well rank a web site in particular search engines, it is required to have good knowledge of their prescribed guidelines.

According to Yahoo Guidelines.....

Your web site should be based on quality: - It means web site should have rich content. Web site content should be original and should no be copied from other sites. Always try to write content in your own wordings.

Web site should have more pages as it can: - According to yahoo a rich content web site that have more that 100 pages fetch the attention of mostly search engines. So try to add more pages as you can in your exiting web site.

Link exchanges: - Link exchanges are very compulsory as per yahoo guidelines. Basically it is required by all most all the search engines. As many as your website have quality links, changes of a well page rank and good ranking will be more.

Update your content: - An updated site keeps have good ranking and get higher page rank provided website content should be continuously updated.

Keywords: - Yahoo still has keywords importance so fill each of your web pages with targeted keywords but not do keyword stuffing.

Make search engines index your site and create traffic

Unique Content: In order to create this targeted traffic, you will need to have original quality content (possibly written from your own) to be displayed, resulting useful to the visitors. Anyway, this is not sufficient to bring you lots of traffic. You need a quality exposure of your website in the major sources of targeted traffic. Nowadays, the major sources from where you can get traffic are search engines and web directories!

There are millions of search engines around here, but the most important ones are Google, Yahoo and MSN in this order. Another important website in which check your popularity is Alexa, that ranks the websites up to their current traffic.


Every Search Engine has got its own indexing algorithm, and every one of them has got different ranking criteria. Furthermore, Search Engines update their algos on a regular basis and a website that was ranking #1 for many keywords, can drop in the ranking the next day. Don't put all your eggs in a basket . If you just point on a single website and for any reason it falls from the rankings, your efforts will be vain. That's why is better to earn $5/day on several websites instead of $50/day on a single one.

These are some tips that will make search engines acknowledge about your website:

1) Get backlinks: That means you must have links pointing to your website from other sites, possibly on a different IP class and from websites whose content is related to yours. The higher Page Rank the other sites will have, the more the Search Engines are indexing their pages and they will note about your link, and the bots will come to your site. Many people obtain links by purchasing them, others by spamming guest books (but DON'T do this, because it's SPAM). The better way to obtain links is to create quality content: if your site is interesting, people will link to your website without need that you ask them to do it. You can get some good links as start putting your website URL in forum signatures, if the forums in which you stay allow this practice.

2) Create a proper robots.txt file in your server: robots.txt is a file frequently picked up by the search engines, letting them to know if you have content you do not want indexed by the bots. I don't need to reinvent the wheel since there are nice tutorials about robots.txt out there.

3) Make your pages correctly linked between them : broken links are penalties for your indexing

4) Use proper meta tags and titles: Once you have got good keywords, select the best 4 among them and make sure they are present (in the same order) in your title and meta tags. Put them also in your page as the first and the last present in the body content. Make them bold or italic if you feel so. This should help your ranking. Currently I am testing this strategy and I will let you know about the results. The most important thing when creating a website is to obtain links to let search engines know that you exist. Search Engines also have a submit feature in which you can directly submit to them your URL, but there are people saying that this will lead to a penalty on your rankings so to be sure don't do it.

5) Don’t Forget to Ping: Another nice thing you should do to improve your traffic is to have a constantly updated blog on your website. Looks like SEs love blogs, and index them often. Once you have updated your blog, ping it using services like Ping-O-Matic and Blog Flux Pinger. Those services will list your blog in their ping pages, which are constantly monitored by the major search engines.

Make your site search engine friendly

Optimizing your pages for the search engines is crucial for a good spidering from the search engine crawlers, and you should avoid the most common errors in which newbie webmaster incur, having their pages filtered for some reason and not showing in the SERPS.

This practice is called on-page SEO and it's the first important step for your success as web publisher.

First of all, remember that all the crawlers read text only pages, so putting your relevant keywords in images (i.e. logos) won't be any good.

These are the most common suggestions about on-page SEO:

1) Optimize your title and meta tags. Make sure that the title, Meta Tag description and keywords are present. They are your website's business card, so you must take care of them. Put relevant keywords only, that make sense together.

2) Use h tags in the correct hierarchy (h1, h2, h3 ..) and put there your relevant keywords.

3) Repeat your most important keywords at the end of the page, as the last words the crawler would see.

4) Stress your relevant keywords using the bold and italic html tags.

5) Write clever paragraphs about your topic, and do the proper in-site linking through your pages.

6) Check your keyword density, and make sure it does not exceed a 25% or you will get most likely banned from the search engines.

7) DO NOT use hidden text, and make sure that your text is all visible and that won't match your background color. This is frowned upon all the major search engines and their bots can detect that kind of cheat.

8) Do not abuse of image alt tags. You can put relevant keywords in tag although it is considered black hat SEO. Just use moderation and common sense.


9) Make sure that every page on your site is properly linked: Check all the links on your web page and fix the broken links because broken links can make difficult for search engine spiders to crawl your webpage. Building a sitemap and submitting it to Google sitemap is a good idea and it will be subject of a future article. We will also speak how to optimize your keywords using databases. Every page must have unique title and Meta tags; otherwise the search engine will take them as duplicate pages and won't consider it in the search.

10) For keyword suggestions, use nice tools like the one in Digital Point: Keyword Suggestion Tool or Google Keyword suggestion tool. If you want a professional tool to do it, then you should consider Word Tracker.

Themes

Today most of the search engines use “Themes” to categories the web sites. There are lots of myths and misunderstanding for themes. Some believes that search engine inspect entire website and determine some searchable items that completely define its content. The truth is search engine always index and rank individual webpage, not entire website.

Themes are next generation in search engine technology. Today all most all search engines use themes to categories the websites. Google, MSN and Yahoo are examples of search engines that use theme technology.

The positive side is if you design your website around theme then your website definitely performs well in current generation search engines as well as in future also.

How Search Engine Rank Your Web Page?

Every search engine follows some algorithm to determine where your pages rank for particular search term. It is not possible to create a web page which satisfies every search engine algorithm completely.

Some search engine notice the keywords density and position of keywords on the page to determine the page rank of web page. If the web page is about “website design”, the density is the number of times that keyword appears on the page. Keyword position is where the phrase appears. If phrase appears in Meta tags and body tag of the web page, search engine will see this web page as more relevant page which has the words “website design” appearing once in the middle of the page.

Other factor that contributes in the page rank is link popularity. Good websites usually have other sites linking to them. Each link is considered as a vote by search engine algorithm. Greater the links means grater the vote which result more traffic and good page rank of the web page.

What Gets Index?

When search engines index the pages of your website, they store the content, image and rich media of the webpage. Some search engines also index the Meta tags of your website. The “description” tag is used to display the brief introduction of your web page when web surfer sees the result of search. Only few search engines also read the “keyword” tag.

Dynamic pages are difficult to index for search engine. To make your dynamic web page search engine friendly you should take care of the content of that page. Use rich keywords in the content to improve the search engine visibility of that page.

Anything that spider can’t read will not be indexed. If your using flash, frames and JavaScript on your webpage then it will difficult for search engine spider to read the content of that page. Instead of using flash use light images and replace JavaScript menus with plain hyperlinks.

How Search Engine Find You?

Search engine follow the links from other websites to find your website. This technique is known as “found pages”. Search engine will rank a web page or website if they found while crawling the website.

The position of your website in search engine result depends upon many factors like number of inward link to your website and page rank of that page. Each inward link is like a vote. Greater the number of votes mean more chance to come in top position of search engine result.

Most of the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Msn etc.) have a “Submit URL” form, where you can request to add you website to their index. You should add your primary URL like http://www.freeseohelp.blogspot.com, and this address is added to their crawl list.

Some websites provide free and paid services to submit your website “automatically” in many search engines. This is worthless because usually many search engines not consider this type of listing and they reject the website submitted by the help of these websites.

In the same way there are many software available on the internet that submit your website to thousand of search engines. In realty they submit your website to free-for-all (FFA) link pages. These pages won’t send you any type of traffic to your website but at the end of the day you will find that your mail box is full with junk e-mails.

Many search engines also offer “paid inclusion”. The benefit of “paid inclusion” is search engine will crawl your website early. But if you’re thinking that you will also get advantage in your website’s ranking using paid inclusion then your wrong here. If your budget permitting you for paid inclusion and you are confident that search engine will deliver significant traffic to you website then you can go for paid inclusion.

What is Spider Food?

Spider food is hyperlinks that are placed on webpage to attract a spider’s attention. These links are not visible to visitor and purpose of these links is to direct the spider to keyword rich “doorway” or “hallway” pages designed to fool the search engines.

When spider visits your site first it looks for a file called “robot.txt”. This file contains instructions for the spider on which part of the web site to index and which to ignore. “robot.txt” is an only way to control the search engine spider.

All spiders follow some set of rules. According to one rule spider can load only one page a minute. Early spider loads entire website at once. The result was bad search result by the search engines. With modern fast web servers a spider might visit your website several times a day.

How Search Engine Works?

It is impossible to understand about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) without the knowledge of search engine itself. The major search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Altavista, ASK and Hotbot. Google is in a much subjugated position in the IT industry. More than 80% users of the internet use Google for their searching purpose. Google loves websites that have rich content and clear structure.

What a “Spider” Does

The first thing that you need to understand is what is what is search engine “spider” and how it works. Spider (“robot” or “crawler”) is software that is used by search engine to find out what’s going on the web. There are various types of spiders hi
ex up-to-date and accurate as possible.

The First type of spider is one that actually “crawls” the web looking for websites and pages. This program starts at a website, loads the pages, and follows the hyperlinks on each page. In this way everything on the web will eventually be found, as the spider crawls from one page to another. Search engines run anywhere from dozens to hundreds of copies of their web-crawling spider programs simultaneously, on multiple servers.

When a “crawler” visits your home page, it loads the page’s contents into a database. Broadly we divide search engine crawling into two types.

1. Shallow Crawling
2. Deep Crawling

1. Shallow Crawling: In this crawling technique search engine only index the home page and few pages that are linked from the home page of the website.

2. Deep Crawling: Today Most of the search engines follow this technique of crawling. Under this technique crawls follow each links from your home page and load that page into the database and successively getting deeper into your website.

“404 spotters” is another type of spider. This spider is used by search engines to websites that are no longer exist online. Theses check search engine index page by page and try to load each page. If page is not found the web server returns a “404 error” which mean pages are not exist or online. When spider not find web page it delete that page from search engine index so keep this thing in mind while selecting any web server to host you website. Your website must be online for 24X7. if your website is down at the wrong, your website may be get deleted form the search engine index and who knows how much time it will take to indexed again.