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SiteProNews Blogs

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• Titus Hoskins

How To “Big Brother” Your Own Website

By Titus Hoskins in Featured

How Well Do You Really Know Your Website?
If you’re like most webmasters, you have probably spent years building your site. You have spent years adding content, building links and cultivating traffic - but how well do you really know your website?

How well do you know the intricate details of your website’s traffic? Where do your site’s visitors come from? How long do they stay on your site? Just where do they go to on your site and how well do they convert into buyers or subscribers?

Do you know your site’s rankings in the major search engines? What are your site’s top keywords? What’s your site’s Google PageRank? Who are your IP neighbors? What your site looks like in other browsers? How much is your site worth?

These are just some of the questions you should know, mainly because the more knowledge you possess about your site, the better equipped you will be at improving it. So here’s a simple list of free site checking tools/sites that will let you “Big Brother” (monitor and watch) your site.

1. Google Analytics

Perhaps one of the most helpful analytical tools you can use on your site. Google Analytics will give you a wealth of information about your site’s traffic. Where it comes from, how long it stays on your site, where it goes on your site, how well your content converts… invaluable information every webmaster should have in their possession. ( www.google.com/analytics )

2. NetMechanic Toolbox

Check your site’s mechanics - find broken links, check browser compatibility, find bad HTML code, spot slow-loading pages, and check your spelling… all by using the NetMechanic Toolbox: ( www.netmechanic.com )

3. Keyword Suggestion Tool

This free keyword suggestion tool will tell you how many searches are done in WordTracker and Overture for your site’s keywords. Extremely valuable information since much of web’s traffic and ecommerce is keyword driven. ( www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/)

4. Iwebtool

This is another free site which offers many valuable webmaster’s tools that will give you information about your/any site. Google PageRank, PageRank Prediction, Link Popularity, Search Engine Positions for Keywords, Backlink Checker… also Visual PageRank where you can see all the PR values of all the links on a given page - both internal and external. ( www.iwebtool.com )

5. Alexa Traffic Rankings

Alexa tracks the web’s traffic by using the Alexa bar in a surfer’s browser. Most people know it is not an accurate assessment of the traffic on the net but is a handy measuring stick, nonetheless. It is also a handy tool for comparing sites and seeing the long-tern traffic trends of different sites, including your own. ( www.alexa.com )

6. Your Site’s Traffic Logs

Most webmasters know your raw traffic logs are worth checking and reading. It contains valuable information about your site. Especially helpful if you’re checking for broken links on your site, you don’t want to see those 302’s everywhere. Close examination and regular checking of your traffic logs and stats will point out the profitable keywords on your site.

7. BetterWhois

You can use this site to find out the domain information about your site. Do you have control of your domain? Many webmasters buy their domain name thru their web hosting company, while this is not a problem in itself, however, if any dispute should arise who has administrative control of your domain; you or your hosting company? Can you change hosting companies? ( www.betterwhois.com )

8. Google Alerts

Another valuable tool from Google which notifies you by email when your link or site is found anywhere on the web. Great for keeping track of any new links your site is getting. Many webmasters also use this handy tool to keep track of their competitor’s sites. They also use Google Alerts to keep track of whenever their own name is mentioned anywhere on the web. This one would even make Orwell proud. ( www.google.com/alerts )

9. IP Neighbors

Many webmasters have their site hosted on shared hosting plans, which means there can be hundreds of sites sharing the same IP address. This site lets you discover who your IP neighbors are. Why would you want to know your IP neighbors? Well like neighbors everywhere; there are good ones and there are bad ones. For example, if you have a neighboring site that uses email to spam, it could get your IP address blocked or shut down. ( www.myipneighbors.com )

10. Any Browser

Use to this handy site to discover what your site looks like in different browsers; you could be in for a real shock. ( www.anybrowser.com )

11. Google Toolbar

The Google Toolbar can be placed on your browser so that when you’re surfing you can see the Google PageRank of each page/site you’re visiting. Many SEO experts believe Google is not giving us the true PR of a page and this bar is rather useless. However, like the Alexa rankings it is a handy measuring stick, nonetheless. ( www.toolbar.google.com )

12. What Is Your Site Worth?

Please take this last analyzing tool with “a large grain of salt”, but it is fun to use and to see how much your site is worth. Measurement here is done largely by the amount of links you have coming into your site. ( directory.sootle.com/website-worth )

In conclusion, all of these free handy tools/sites will give you a better, more complete picture of your own site. Remember, the more knowledge you acquire about your own site and your competitor’s sites, the more equipped you will be to succeed. This is one case where being a “Big Brother” can truly benefit your site.

Author:  The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites, including two sites on Internet marketing. For the latest web marketing tools try: Internet Marketing Tools Or why not try these: Free Marketing Courses.

Top 5 Ways to Send Boats Loads Of Traffic to Your Authority Site

By Corey Threlfall in Featured

With increasing competition in online visibility it is imperative that you employ the right methods to list your site on the top ranks of search engines. An authority site status will give you a definite edge over others in your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.

Following are the five important tips as how to get the best traffic for the authority sites.

Traffic Tactic #1. Article Syndication

With article syndication the authority sites can easily increase their traffic. Always keep in mind that the article syndication most often attracts the visitors and generates brand consciousness.

Most of the time, visitors examine the articles on the websites and then click on the link to the authority sites in order to find further related information on that very topic. Once they enter into the authority site, the quality of the content of the articles should be fit their demand fervor.

Brand consciousness is another important expression for the authority sites and article syndication can no doubt boost that up. Don’t forget that once the impending customers take notice of your site on various websites, your profile will be elevated and gradually your site will be regarded as an authority on that very subject matter. You can also add point scores along with the search engines. This will further improve your site rank. These points will help raise more links in your site along with the increased number of visitors.

Traffic Tactic #2. Press Releases

Press releases are excellent methods of advertising for an authority sites. You can keep a news section in your site beginning with the press release of the initiation of your site. This can be regularly updated whenever you add certain new features to your authority site. These releases can be easily submitted to various news sites like the PRWeb which will act as organic feeds to advertise your site.

Traffic Tactic #3. Viral Marketing

Link building, which is very important to the ranking of the authority sites, now gets easier with viral marketing. The links are normally found in the content of the relevant articles, stories or even in the blog posts. Link building market has now been taken over by the optimizing viral marketing. These links are of soaring quality as these can not be spammed. The more links made, the more traffic you get in your authority sites.

Traffic Tactic #4. RSS Syndication

RSS syndication is an expertise that dispenses the content throughout the web, where the same very thing gets repeatedly published by the third party web sites. With RSS Syndication you can posit your site’s content in all corners of the web. This will result in thousands of links from applicable sites to your content and shall raise the traffic of your site. When RSS syndication is made on a site, other sites are then entitled to organize the contents and the visitors can also subscribe to the site. This subscription is no doubt a positive vote for your content.

Traffic Tactic #5. SEO and Page rank

Most of the chief search engines use links to verify the importance of the website. Whereas Google uses the links to establish the Page Rank. The more the number of related links to your site and vice versa, the better are your chances of getting slotted in the top rankings of Google. The basic aim of all search engines is to get the appropriate results to a search request. A good page rank will increase your chances of being the top contender immensely.

Of course, you also need to make sure that your links with these other sites are with similar authority sites so that there is no devaluation in the quality and content of your site by association.

Author:  Cory Threlfall is an Internet Marketer and website developer. He publishes a blog called Strategic Online Business and Marketing Tactics on a weekly basis at - http://www.corythrelfall.com . If your looking for a service that builds Authority Sites go to - http://www.corythrelfall.com/recommends/ASC.html

8 Steps To Facebook Adventure

By Deepak Dutta in Featured

Once a social platform for college students, the 40 million active membership site facebook is the latest buzzword in social media marketing. However, most members are extremely online savvy and they smell blatant advertisements from miles away. It is important to know some basics and gain experiences in utilizing the site and interacting with its members before you start planning your facebook marketing adventure.

1. Create a profile. The first step is to create a profile. Sign up using your real name and upload some pictures. If you do not have an email with a top-level edu domain, by default you join a regional network based on your zip code or international address. Later, you have the option to join your company’s network and change your regional networks. You can change your networks twice in a 60-day period.

Always upload a profile picture. If you don’t upload a picture, facebook places a default question mark icon. It is a good strategy to show your face in facebook. Don’t use group pictures for your profile because others may have difficulty identifying you in the group pictures. Don’t use logos, your cute cat or dogs’ pictures, or a picture of your expensive car and boat.

You don’t have to fill all the profile information. Fill only the information you are comfortable sharing with others. If you want to find dates using facebook, fill up the relationship status feature of your profile accordingly. Don’t change the status often because others will notice it and doubt your trustworthiness.

2. Make friends. The site can find active facebook friends for you using emails in your address books of a few free web email providers like yahoo, hotmail, gmail, etc. Once you get a few friends, new friend requests will pour in from your friends of friends. You can also search for friends and send requests. Work on creating a network of 100 to 200 friends. Don’t make friends with celebrities because in most cases these are fake profiles setup for marketing purposes.

3. Upload pictures and videos. Start uploading some interesting pictures and group them in albums of travel pictures, baby shower photos, bachelor party scenes, etc. Pictures help people connect with your life without meeting you face to face. Always upload a number of related pictures or themes.

Create a random albums and put all your random pictures in the random album. Tag your pictures to identify people on the pictures. When you tag your friends in your pictures, they show up in their wall. You can also share your albums with others outside facebook. You can upload personal videos using your browser or mobile phone and directly record videos to facebook.

4. Use friends’ walls and never post on your own wall. You have a wall in facebook for others to write notes. Don’t write in your own wall. Write in your friends’ walls. Your friends will write notes, share videos or links in your wall. You do the same in your friends’ walls. When a friend posts something on your wall, reply to the post. If you find the posting annoying, politely ask them to back off and clean up your wall.

5. Join a few groups. There are all sorts of organic groups in facebook. These are groups of people with similar interests. Find a few that interest you and join them. You can create your own group but first find out if one exists on the same topic. This is an excellent place to be creative and get support from a bunch of people for your cause.

6. Create events and invite people. If you want to host a party, this is the feature you will use. Create your events and invite others to join. You can make an event public for your friends to see or private for the invitees to browse. Under my event, you can browse your friends’ public events. You will immediately know who are your fake friends because they did not invite you to their gala dinner they are hosting.

7. Send notes and share links. You send notes to your friends. Depending on the topic, you can send a note to a few friends or to all friends in your network. Don’t send chain letter notes because people find these repulsive. Your notes show up in your friends’ news feeds or on their walls. A tagged note shows up on the wall, otherwise, it is found in the homepage news feed. Use share for sharing links, even though you can use this feature for sharing notes. Share that link of a cheap travel-booking site you have found while surfing the net with friends planning their upcoming vacations.

8. Visit your homepage everyday. Besides your profile page in facebook, you also have a homepage. You homepage displays collaborative news feeds of all your friends, event and group invitations, friendship requests, friends’ birthdays, etc. If you want to know what is going on in your facebook friend circle, visit your homepage everyday.

The other features of facebook are poke, marketplace, facebook mobile, and hundreds of applications that enhance the facebook experience. As the facebook awareness grows, online marketers have started pounding the facebook door to gain a foothold. Future articles will discuss different ways to market your products and services to facebook members without insulting their intelligence.

Author:  Dr Deepak Dutta, creator of oldest online free classified site, has launched DigMyPage to help website owners build links and increase traffic using MySpace type free pages and Digg style free submissions.

SEO And Blogging

By Peter Nisbet in Featured

SEO and blogging can be used together to provide you with an almost unbeatable combination, not only for free advertising, but also to make money.

If the objective of your website or your blog is to provide information, or to operate a website on a non profit-making basis, then both search engine optimization and blogging can work together to improve your current traffic level. If your aim is to make money, either for a bit extra to pay the credit cards each month or as your main or sole means of income, you can use a blog and a properly designed website to improve your traffic flow.

So let’s cut to the chase as they say, or hang out the baby and see what drips off, or put out the mat and see what it collects from your feet! How can people be serious about these things at so-called serious business meetings? Beats me! Anyhow, lets open the refrigerator and see what’s fresh.

SEO – THE QUICK WAY

If your website looks good to the search engines then it will have a good chance of being listed. But let’s be realistic: the best is Google, so keep Google sweet and the rest will follow. Design each web page, including your home page, round one keyword or keyphrase. Don’t try to optimize any page for more that one keyword or you will fail.

Forget the Meta tags. Put them in if you have the time, but not for the quick way. Put your page title in …. tags and include your page keyword in it. It must not be only your keyword, but that should be part of it. For example, if your keyword is ‘Using Blogs’ the your title could be:
Using Blogs and SEO to make Money’

That’s a good sized title, and a good way to use the keyword ‘using blogs’ for your page. Now, the first heading or headline should be ‘Using Blogs’ Just that, and put it in H1 html tags. Don’t worry about the purity of your html because Google doesn’t give a toss as long it can understand your H1 tags and Title.

If you have any graphics, even a payment graphic such as the one that Clickbank provides, add an alt relation to it: < img= . . . alt=”using blogs Image 1”>. This reinforces the information to the spider that the theme of the page is ‘using blogs’.

Use your keyword in the first 100 characters of your body html, for example, title:

“Using Blogs”

“Using blogs in combination with good webpage SEO has been proved time and again an extremely effective technique in the science of making money. The secret is to understand the needs of bloggers and of search engine users, and how to combine the two into a single money-generating machine that you can design to work on autopilot while you work on your next money-spinning project.”

Look at that again: I have used the keyword in the heading, and all the words in the Page title in the first 100 characters. The keyword is used immediately and the rest of the title also in the first sentence. If you also use the keyword once more in the last paragraph the crawlers will love it and you will have a head start on your competitors.

You could then continue on the theme of blogs, and have another section on the same page with the heading: “Using Blogs and SEO” contained within H2 tags that expands on the theme of blogs and SEO while introducing the concept of using blogs and web pages together to their mutual benefit.

INTERNAL LINKING STRATEGY

That is all you need do on each page, but do it on EVERY page that should be optimized for every different keyword that you have identified as being worth while to use on your website. However, there is one more thing you must do and that is to design your internal linking strategy to your best advantage. It should allow your visitors to easily navigate between pages, and also reach pages that they want to see such as your Privacy Policy and Contact details.

However, it is more that that. It is also a means of leading the search engine spider to dance your dance, and not Google’s Dance, as it were. Lead the spider to the pages you want it to see when you want it to see them, and bar it from seeing those it doesn’t have to see. You can allow humans to see pages that you have barred from spiders. Simply place a big ‘Humans Only’ sign above each door, and spider cannot get in.

BLOGGING

Your blogs should be updated to show every change you make to your website, but be optimized for different keywords to those your website is using. I have tested blogs with and without the same keywords and my web pages, and they generally work best when not competing.

For some reason that I cannot apply logic to, I get better results from my website when linked to blogs that have different keywords, that the same. However, that’s unimportant. What is important is that, unlike article directories, the articles in your blogs can advertise as many websites or products as you want. That is one of their major benefits when used in conjunction with websites. You can use one to advertise the other without fear of losing anything because they both belong to you. You cannot have a net loss with links between two of your own sites.

If you ping your blog to every web2 site that you are registered with then you can get a lot more traffic than if you had only used SEO for your free traffic. Blogs, too, are free, so use them.

CONCLUSION

If you use easy SEO and worry only about the elements I have mentioned above, you will have a great chance of your webpage home page being listed high on Google and the other search engines. If you use your blogs to advertise your site, not only to other bloggers but also to the many social bookmarking and Web2 sites that you can join, then you can achieve success in much less time than you might have imagined.

If you are not willing to put the blogging and Web2 work in, then you will not be so successful, and do not deserve to be.

Author:  SEO and blogging are specialist fields in internet marketing, and for more information on how to use them check out Pete’s websites Improved Search Engine Rank and Create A Blog where he shows you how he attains success.

Social Bookmarking Quiz

By Sharon Housley in Featured

Take this Social Bookmarking Quiz and determine how much you know about the collective voice!

What Is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is a web 2.0 fad where users indicate that a specific web page, article, podcast, video, or other content is of particular value. The “bookmark” is seen as a vote for that item. The more users who bookmark an item, the more pronounced (popular) the item becomes within the social bookmarking network.

What Are The Major Social Networks?

Different social networks appeal to different demographics. For example, “Digg” is a relatively technical social network, so the focus of most resources found in Digg are technical in nature. “Delicious” contains a wider variety of materials, and is easier for the average user to manage. Here are a few of the most popular networks:

Digg - http://www.digg.com - technical users del.icio.us - http://del.icio.us StumbleUpon - http://www.stumbleupon.com Reddit - http://www.reddit.com Furl - http://www.furl.com

What Are Social Bookmarking Chicklets?

Social bookmarking “chicklets” are icons that webmasters place on their web pages, which identify the various social bookmarking networks. Typically when they are included on a web page, the visitor can click the icon and it will automatically bookmark that page within the social network that the chicklet represents.

What Are The Benefits Of Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is a grassroots process that allows users to establish the value of a specific web page, article, podcast, or video. By bookmarking an item, individuals are casting a vote to endorse that specific resource. The idea is that social bookmarking gives a resource credibility; the more users who bookmark a specific item, the more valuable the resource is considered to be. Social bookmarking is all about the collective voice. Most of the social bookmarking networks increase the profile of items that receive numerous bookmarks. It probably won’t be long before the major search engines begin to include social bookmarks as a part of their ranking algorithms.

What Is Social Bookmark Tagging?

Tagging is used as a way to categorize related bookmarks. The tags are keywords that relate to the resource. In most cases, users can search on specific tags to locate similar bookmarked items.

How Is Social Bookmarking “User-Generated Content”?

Social bookmarking is all about people power. “Users” enter their favorites, and the social bookmarking networks manage all of the user information, provide aggregate data by keeping score, and manage social bookmark tags. Essentially, without “users” the social bookmarking websites would not have any content.

What Are Some Of The Popular Uses For Social Bookmarking?

Scholars and researchers often use social bookmarking to share research material and information. News headlines often find their way into social bookmarking networks, and users determine the popularity of a story with their voting power.

Is Social Bookmarking A Good Search Engine Optimization Technique?

While social bookmarking may generate some marginal attention for you, the content quality must be decent in order for others to endorse the site. The power of the collective voice and multiple bookmarks is what will really draw attention to your website. Social bookmarking will certainly not hurt your search engine optimization efforts, but social bookmarking alone will not result in a top search engine ranking.

Are Social Bookmarks Currently A Factor In Search Engine Ranking?

At this time it does not appear that any of the major search engines use social bookmarking as part of their ranking algorithms. That said, the incoming links for social bookmarking sites certainly do not hurt a website’s search ranking. It is likely only a matter of time before the major search engines begin to use the collective voice as part of their ranking algorithms, as it is becoming too loud to ignore.

Author:  Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com audio recording and editing software.

One Way Link Building, Stop Doing It Wrong

By Adrienne DeVita in Featured

You can have the best looking site on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean you will get customers. If you are a business person who has a web site on the world wide web, then you need to get serious about link building.

What IS link building?

I can tell you right now, it’s not a place you find on the web where you join a link exchange program to get some links to your web site. I made that mistake already. You don’t have to.

It’s not a web site on the Internet you find and hit “submit link” and think your rankings will get you on the first page of Google and thousands of people will come flocking to your site because they can finally find you.

And it’s definitely not an automated link exchange program you found to get you automatic links while you sleep.

What about a free link exchange? Don’t do it if it’s an FFA (free for all) web site. Period. Just do not submit your web site link there, ever.

So what CAN you do to get started on some serious link building techniques that will get you listed on the first page of Google?

1. Do your homework.
2. Find out what keywords people are actually typing into the search engines, not which ones you “think” you want to rank for that people “might” be typing into a Google or Yahoo search engine box.
3. If you merely “guesstimate” which keywords you want to build links for, you just wasted one valuable year of your life. If you want to know the # 1 Keyword Research Tool is that I use, please go to my web site and view item 3 of this article.
4. Check your competition’s web sites. Type a keyword you want to rank for on Google, then look at the first two organic (free) web sites’ source code. What keywords are in their title tag? Grab them. Start making a list on a piece of paper of these keywords.
5. Repeat step 4 for any keywords you’ve researched that actually GET searches, then, and only then, can you start some serious, one way link building efforts.
6. There is quite a bit more research I can tell you to implement regarding your competition, and you can find out how many links you will need to beat your competition, but that will have to be for another day. You’re already 99 per cent ahead of the game with the steps I’ve outlined for you in this free link building article.
7. Start writing articles. Not just any articles, either. Make sure the title of your articles start with one of the keywords you just spent time reasearching. If you want to rank for SEO Services, then make sure your article title is something like, SEO Services for Less. Always try and make the first words in your title tag and article titles your primary keywords. The search engines read from left to right.
8. Place the primary keywords in the first sentence or paragraph of your article, then again in the last sentence or paragraph of your article.
9. Make sure you place other secondary keywords you have researched that are in direct relation and highly relevant to your article and product–place these secondary keywords throughout your article. Make sure they flow for the reader. It must make sense.
10. Once you have an article with at least 500, preferable 750, words, post it on article directory site in the related category to your product or service. Make sure you choose an article directory site that lets you make your primary keyword an anchor text link. If they only let you place your web site in the article, or only under the author’s information, I wouldn’t waste my time submitting my unique, original article on their site. (Do not submit the article on more than one article directory site.)
11. You are trying to get one way links with anchor text primary keywords to your relevant landing page.
12. Do not send every article to your home page. Send it to an article or page you have written that has the article and title keywords in the URL. This will then be highly relevant anchor text link, and you will rank easier for that keyword.
13. We all want to outsource. But you will get seriously burned if you hire someone who has no idea how to get you one way link building correctly. Hire an extreme SEO expert. Everyone says they are an expert though. It takes more effort for an SEO professional to undo the damage done by uneducated link builders all over the Internet who seriously do not have a clue how to optimize for true, one way link building.

If you have a website, and you would like to help me out by putting my web site link on your home page, it would mean a lot to me.

Or, perhaps you can grab my RSS feed and share my new articles with others when I publish them. Hey, it doesn’t hurt to ask for help, because I enjoy helping others, too.

Keep up on link building, because it is an ongoing effort. Your competition will keep adding more links for your primary keywords, so you have to keep building yours to get higher search engine rankings, too.

Author:  Adrienne DeVita, Author for One Way Link Building

Ten Seo Tips To Get You Higher Yahoo And Google Listings

By Peter Nisbet in Featured

SEO tips can help you to get higher Yahoo or Google listings, but only if you use them. Most people think that they know better, even so called SEO professionals who have to use PPC advertising to get their websites listed highly enough to be seen. Who are they to tell us what to do, when they cannot it themselves?

I have had some of them write to me criticizing my ‘crap’ HTML and also my ‘useless’ linking strategies. My site has ‘only a Page Rank of 3’. So what? It is sitting at between #1 on #5 on Google from day to day, at # 1 to #4 on Yahoo from day to day and at #1 on MSN. I will gladly accept their criticism of my HTML and linking when they achieve the same. Till then, perhaps they would be better buying my book that complaining about my websites!

I would feel more predisposed to them if they stopped criticizing me – I only started to do the same to them when I got sick of their comments when they could not emulate my results. Who am I, a rank amateur, to beat them in the SEO stakes!! In fact, I have been at this for many years.

So, SEO tip #1
Don’t believe anything you are told unless those telling you it have at least one of their websites in the top 5 on all the major search engines for a competitive keyword. Mine has >800 million other results on Google.

Tip #2
Uuse classical search engine optimization. Use Meta tags because some search engines still use them. The main one is the Description Meta tag, the Keywords is not so important but use it anyway. It does not hurt you, so use them.

Tip #3
The third tip relates to the title of your website. There are two points that relate to this. The first is that it should be the best keyword that you can find that relates to your niche or website. That means a good demand and low supply, though too much is sometimes written about this since such keywords are not easy to find. If you can’t something with low supply, just use what you want and decide to compete against them. Somebody has to be top, and why can’t it be you? Too many people give up in SEO too quickly. Probably because we are told not to compete against the big boys - by these big boys!

The second point is that the title of your site need not be stated on every web page. My web page titles are those of the page, not the site. The graphics are the same, but the title is the keyword that the page is optimized for. Why do otherwise? Yet 99.99% do (just a guess!).

Tip #4
Then fourth of my SEO tips is related to the headings on each page. The main title of the page should be in H1 tags, and the heading in H2 tags. Any subheadings can go into H3 tags as well, but should contain text that could be construed as minor keywords.

I might be wrong, but who says? I have found that if you ignore the big guys, and compete against them, they can be beat. Check out what they are trying to sell you and you will notice that much of it is obsolete. Such as site generation and article generation software. That’s not an SEO tip, just a word to the wise, from the not so wise. I have no pretensions, but I know where my home page is on Google – and Yahoo – and MSN. Just search for ‘article services’.

Tip #5
The fifth SEO tip is to use your keywords sparingly. Most people still think that 1% - 3% keyword density is ideal, yet it is actually too much. There is an optimum keyword density that has little to do with the keyword itself, but more to do with contextual relevance of the page content to the topic in hand.

Tip #6
Which leads to the sixth of the SEO tips: write naturally and honestly. If you know about your subject, write about it in your own language and don’t try to meet any perceived need for a specific number of so-called keywords within your page content.

Tip #7
Seventh, don’t forget about your links. You can get a higher search engine listing if you have lots of links back to your website from other sites. In fact, the links are from page to page, and you get a proportion of the Google PageRank of the page linking to you, relative to the number of other links leaving that page, and also give the page that you link to a proportion of your PageRank, calculated in the same way. The problem with reciprocal links is that most pages are linked to and from pages with a PageRank of zero, even though the website home page can have a PR of 6 or 7.

Tip #8
Use your internal linking to maximise the PageRank of a selected page on your website. You don’t need every page on your site listed in the top 10 of Google or Yahoo: you only need one. So maximise your efforts on that one page. Visitors that page will then visit the rest of the pages on your website, and so will search engine spiders, so you know that every page on your site will be listed and with a chance of being found in a search.

The important point of that tip is to concentrate on getting one page in the top 10. That’s all you need. You will have links to all your other pages once somebody reaches that page in the top 10.

Tip #9
Once you get visitors keep them there. Give them useful content and something to do, even if just to click from page to page. Offer them a free gift for completing a quiz on your topic, or free vacation certificates for certain actions: these are easily found on the internet in a form that you can either post or email for them to print their own. Offer them an opt-in form so that you can keep in touch.

That is the most important tip of all – if you can keep in touch with your visitors after they have left your site, then you can offer them new products as they come along without having to seduce them to visit your website again.

Tip #10
Finally, the SEO tip number 10. Enjoy what you are doing, and don’t look upon it so much as a job as something to enjoy, and to do as best as you can. I wish you the best of success since it is very sweet when it comes – as it will come with you.

Author:  If you want to find out how I do it by getting free advertising through high listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN, check out my website Improved Search Engine Rank where you will find some good offers and even better advice.

Search Engine Optimization And How To Use It

By Peter Nisbet in Featured

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a means of designing a website, and its individual pages, so that you meet the requirements of a mathematical equation called an algorithm that is designed to apply statistical analysis to determine how it relates to the search terms used by the search engine customers.

That is a long sentence, so let us look at the various elements that it contains. First designing a website. There is more to designing a website than making it pretty, and unfortunately there are a lot of website designers who do not appear to understand that. Before you can even start on design a site, you have to consider what the purpose of the website is. Usually to provide information to visitors on the search term that they use to reach you.

Web Pages Should Load Quickly

When you click to visit a website what do you want to happen? Do you want to see lovely flash graphics that take several minutes (or seem to) to load up, or do you want to be taken immediately to the home page. We both know the answer yet they still insist on the fancy stuff. That is ego, not practical web design.

Once you actually manage to get onto the home page, do you want some good information and easy navigation to well explained web pages, or do you want loads of graphics, pictures and nothing but line after line of adverts with some links to other pages on the site that you have to search for? We also both know the answer to that, but how often do you see pages full of adverts and graphics and little else? These pages are designed by self-professed SEO experts!

I recently had one of my customers ask to me run my eye over her home page that she had just had revamped by a professional developer but seemed not have been listed in Google. Because I look after my customers I agreed to do so free of charge, and do you know what I found? A web page that the spiders would have left the second they visited because the first text they would find would be line upon line of navigation away from the home page. When I checked the target pages, guess what? Same thing. The spiders would have been running round in circles, seeing nothing. Also no worth while titles and no headings except one in a H2 tag – no H1 tags at all.

Nobody can Guarantee a Google Position

All that from a ‘professional web developer’!! What do you need to be a professional these days? Don’t get me wrong, there are some good ones, though please take a piece of advice from me. Don’t hire anybody that has to pay for advertising. If they can’t get their own website into the top 10 for their main keyword, then how can they be qualified to do it for you? Forget the promises and guarantees. I can get anybody’s website into the top 10: even to number 1! All I need do is find a unique keyword or phrase that nobody is using, such as “Top website developers in Blaenavon South Wales”. I have checked that and nobody is using it! The only problem is that neither will any Google customers use it. Nobody can guarantee a Google listing position.

Incidentally, search engine customers are those that use them to find information that they are seeking. They are not advertisers on Google or people that use any of the Google services other that the search engine itself.

Keyword Density is a Thing of the Past

All SEO experts can get you in the top 10, but not for any keywords worth having. You are better doing it yourself. All you need worry about are having your keyword as part of your title (not all of it) and in TITLE tags, and use your page keyword in H1 tags as the main heading. Use it again as part of an H2 sub-heading. Use your keyword once in the first 100 characters and again in the last paragraph. Once more for every 500 words and that will do. Forget 1% -3% keyword density. Use lots of related text, but be careful of synonyms because few word mean exactly the same as others. Make sure that you make it clear in what context you are using a particular word.

Write naturally about your topic and you will be fine. Make sure that the spiders see your page title first, then the heading next. That will tell them what the most important text on your page is, and hence the topic of the page. The sub-headings will reinforce that, but only if they are in H2 – H3 tags. Forget anything more than H3.

The spiders should come across links leading from your page until it has read all your text. The lead t to where you want it do next. Attach a lead to it and guide it through your website, page by page, and avoid leading it from page to page haphazardly before it has seen the content on each page. Any website designed like the one I described at the beginning, with nothing but links at the start of every page, will be lucky to be listed at all unless it has hundreds of thousands of links coming into it.

Page Rank Might Lose its Influence

However, Google appear to be reconsidering how it views links, and perhaps web page content will be viewed as it should be – as more important than incoming links that can be contrived artificially. Follow my advice and do your own SEO. It is as easy as I have described. If you fail to get listed within two weeks you are doing something wrong, and then you might need help, but make sure you get help from somebody who wants to help you and not simply boost his or her ego.

There is more to search engine optimization than flashy pages. Spiders see in black and white, and are impatient creatures, so don’t lead them a merry dance. Be obvious, tell them what your page is about and let them read your content before sending them on to the next page.

SEO is about being honest with your visitors and giving them information that is as relevant to your subject as you possibly can, but also using common sense. Look at your home page, and consider what you want to be the most important parts of it. Then think where you would want your visitors eyes to go on your page to be given the best information. You can use HTML to make sure that the search engines crawl your page exactly that way.

Do Not Confuse Your Spiders

You can lead spiders from paragraph to paragraph. Table to table, link to link. Keep in mind that if a spider follows a link it will start crawling the page you sent it to and only come back if you allow it to: i.e. provide another link back to your home page. Theoretically you could send it back and forth the between two pages in an unbreakable loop!

That is the ‘website design’ part, leaving algorithms, statistical analysis and search terms still to cover. These will have to be the subject of another article!

Author:  If you want to learn more about search engine optimization, check out Pete’s website here: Improved Search Engine Rank where he offers a free 7-Part SEO course to help you improve your search engine listing, and also offers advice on getting rapid listings in the top search engines.

How Blogging Affects Mainstream Marketing

By Cliff Posey Jr in Featured

There has been a lot of buzz around blogging lately, and for good reason. Weblogs, or blogs for short, are changing the way people market themselves and their businesses.

If you aren’t familiar with blogging, the concept is relatively easy to grasp. Blogs first began as a shared online journal. A blogger posted diary-like entries about his or her daily life for others to read.

Recently though, blogging has evolved into a new form of business writing and advertising. Many business owners now use blogs to promote their goods and services. Others use blogs to promote their website and get higher search engine rankings. Some politicians even use blogs to reach voters.

The typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media that is somehow related to the blog topic. Though most blogs focus on textual contant, a blogger may include videos, pictures, and even audio in blog posts. A blog comprised of videos is called a vlog and a blog that uses pictures is called a photoblog.

The Benefits of Blogging
By adding blogging to their marketing campaigns, business owners are able to market their product with virtually no out of pocket expense. In some cases, bloggers may even be able to make large sums of money with their published blog. For example, a blogger who employs the Google Ad Sense program can make money from blog readers. The more readers a blogger has, the more money can be made from the Google ad.

A blogger can also be a guide for shoppers who are looking for specific products and services. This makes blogging an excellent tool for retailers or affiliate marketers. Blogs can also be a source of valuable information and niche industry news.

Because there are virtually limitless possibilities provided by blogging, it is easy to see why blogs have begun to have a significant impact on mainstream marketing practices. Many companies have noticed this and have chosen to hire a blogger to write and post up to date information for customers, shareholders, and employees.

Some blogs now get millions of readers every single day. There are so many blog readers out there, that experts speculate that the world of blogging is rivaling the mainstream media. New blog search engines are also being created to make searching for a blog easier than ever before.

If you have not yet established a blog for your business, you may want to consider doing so as soon as possible. Keep in mind though that it will take work to attract readers to your blog. It must be interesting or valuable to them in some way. A blogger must also concentrate on creating informative pieces that are as honest and up to date as possible. Blogging is serious business and if you make a mistake, it will not go unnoticed by your readership.

If you need help developing your blog, there are many different browser-based software programs on the market that can help you get a start. Blogs can also be hosted by dedicated blogging services or regular web hosting services.

Last, but not least, a blogger must remember to optimize blog writing for search engines. Blogging is an Internet medium and needs to be approached with Internet principles in mind.

Blogging Example
A typical blog entry includes a title or headline, a body of text, a permalink or URL for another web page, and a post date, which indicates the date and time that the post was published. A blogger may also choose to include a link at the bottom to allow readers to post comments on the blog.

Author:  Cliff Posey, owner of CRP Marketing, owns and operates http://webbusinesstoolsonline.com. Cliff Posey has also operated several other successful web businesses including Love Song Cards and Radio Career Consultants. The content in this article was developed from his experience in these businesses.

How Google Took Over the Internet and Caused Mass Hysteria with PageRank

By Gennady Lager in Featured

So it finally happened! Google caught everyone that is buying and selling links and dropped their PageRank. The world is over and Google has taken over the internet. The time has come for all SEO’s to hang up their SEO shoes and move on to PPC, right? Or is it?

I have been trying my best to follow the myriad of hoopla going on on message forums and blogs in addition to follow the trends and patterns of sites that I follow in order to draw some educated conclusions on what actually happened and how it will effect websites and the SEO industry. I have composed a series of questions that average Joe Webmaster is asking right now.

What happened?

Good question! I’m glad I asked. Back in early summer (of 2007), Google, through Matt Cutts and other employees publicly declared war on paid links. Specifically, they announced that according to their guidelines, website owners or webmasters cannot sell PageRank for the purposes of improving the organic ranking of other sites. This irked many people on the web who proclaimed that they are advertising to monetize their sites and Google cannot tell them what to do. Conversely, Google requested that such “advertisers” either declare their outbound ad links as paid (sponsored, supported, what have you), edit them with a nofollow attribute, make them JavaScript, or some form of other means of not passing PageRank such as a redirect.

In the meantime, Google was busy promoting their “report paid links” feature and collecting data from Webmasters and SEO’s who have been busy ratting out their competitors (each other).

A few weeks back, new broke that Google has devalued many directories that accept payment for links but offer no real value. They proclaimed that directories with a true editorial review were untouched, while those that simply sell links to anyone and everyone have been devalued.

Last week, news broke that many high profile sites (forbes.com, washingtonpost.com, daily.stanford.edu, searchenginerountable.com, searchenginejournal.com, statscounter.com and many notable bloggers) have had their (toolbar) PageRank value reduced. Some lost 2 points, others lost more.

This week, many others have reported some PageRank fluctuations. Many lost PageRank while some gained, yet others stayed the same—and the panic began.

What did Google really do?

The following is my opinion of what Google did. Over the last few months, I have found Google to be dramatically editing its main ranking algorithm. Search results have been unsteady at best with 2, 3, 4 page shifts from day to day for no apparent reason. Changes like this can usually be attributed to datacenter variances, but I do not believe that was the case. The results were too similar across multiple IP’s.

In case you don’t know, the Google Toolbar PageRank value is only updated every so often. In fact, until this recent one in October, the last one was in May, 2007. That means that the visible PageRank can be one value while the actual PageRank that Google uses is usually different and one that is much more granular than a 0-10 scale. So all of these changes have happened a while ago (and no one was in a panic) but once the visible PageRank started to show, everyone freaked. Why?

Google claims to not perform manual index adjustments, but it has been pretty well documented that they do. I believe they manually “adjusted” some of the more prominent sellers by docking them some PageRank, and thus potentially lowering their income from paid links since so many people buy links according to PageRank. Additionally, I think they used a combination of some algorithmic magic, paid link reports, and manual checks from employing half of China to detect some of the sellers and dock them some PageRank. I do not think buyers were affected.

Additionally, I believe an algorithm tweak has occurred that has devalued and reduced the PageRank of sites that participate in extensive reciprocal linking. I have seen this firsthand on sites that I frequent observe.

So to get back to why you lost PageRank: because the total PageRank on the internet was reduced and this caused a rain down effect on the rest of the sites that those sites link to. Its sort of like 6 degrees of separation: every indexed site is somehow linked to every other site. So when many sites had their PageRank reduced due to selling links and reciprocal linking, this reduction of total PageRank effected every site they are linking to down the line. Less PageRank for them means less PageRank for you—simple as that.

I don’t buy or sell links. Why did I lose my PageRank?

This has been one of the major underlying facets I’ve seen all over the internet this week. Everyone that lost PR thinks they were wrongfully tagged as buying or selling links and there is mass panic. I can bet that Google was flooded with reinclusion requests this week. What is there to reinclude? People have been literally freaking out over the loss of a PageRank point. They come from far and wide asking how to fix it before their house gets repossessed.

What if I sell links—what will happen?

It really depends how you sell them. Is selling links evil? No, in my opinion, it is not evil. I believe it is a form of advertising. Google asks that you declare them as paid links or apply an attribute that will not allow the passing of PageRank. The question everyone wants to know is what will happen if they sell links yet do not declare them as paid? Its hard to say, but it seems that Google has decreased the PageRank of some of them. Also, some sites that do declare their links as paid have also lost PageRank.

What if I buy links—what will happen?

There is a good chance that if they are good links, your positions in search engines will improve! Will you be hurt in any way? Probably not, but I would avoid buying links from sellers that clearly state that their links are all sponsored. I would insure that the link buying is progressive and natural using a variety of natural-sounding anchor texts from a variety of sites over a progressive amount of time. Many notable people in the industry such as Rand Fishkin and Jim Boykin have blatantly proclaimed that they have bought links for their clients in front of a panel of Google Engineers at conferences.

How can Google detect paid links?

They won’t say, nor will they confirm that they can. They have simply said that they may take action against sites that they believe to be selling links. One way I believe it is possible to detect un-proclaimed paid links is to analyze the outbound link neighborhoods. If a blog site has 5 posts on its homepage that are linking to sites about credit counseling, herbal Viagra, online bingo games, SEO India, and mortgages, its pretty easy to tell that those are sponsored reviews. If I can tell by looking at a site for 5 seconds, I’m pretty sure Google has the technical prowess to do this algorithmically.

Does it really matter?

No. I don’t think it does one bit unless you are a major link seller and you base your mortgage payments on that little green bar. In which case, I think it may be a good time for you to develop a new business model because this particular one may be coming to an end.

I do not believe PageRank to be a big ranking factor at all. In fact, I believe its main purpose is public relations (get it, PR?) and being able to get a major industry reaction with such actions. I believe PageRank plays a roll in denoting the importance of a page in order to allocate crawling resources. So in my opinion, PageRank is only important if you sell links or have a huge site with the need to efficiently distribute PageRank across your 450,000 pages.

It has gotten to the point of an obsession. Words like “doomsday” have been thrown around. To add to the hysteria, PageRank fluctuations can occur depending on the datacenter the user has hit. So people reporting a drop from PR5 to PR4 have been frantically removing links and putting nofollow attributes on their paid links to come back in an hour, hit a different datacenter and report a PR5 again. This does nothing but perpetuate the rumor of Google being able to detect all paid links. What is essentially happening is Google is getting all of these Webmasters to admit to selling links by tagging them as nofollow!

I bet Matt Cutts and everyone else are sitting back and having a good old laugh over all this. I know I am. If you think about it, Google has used its influence over the industry through the use of PageRank to send people into fear, panic, and raise their hands in submission by revealing their paid links. I don’t think anyone can really substantiate a drop in rankings or traffic due to this update.

Author:  Gennady helped develop and progress the SendTraffic Search Engine Optimization department and continues to lead the team with SEO, content development, web design, and customer service initiatives.