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Google’s First Page… Guaranteed! – A SPN Exclusive Article

By David Jackson in Featured

A couple of weeks ago, I visited one of the Internet Marketing/Small Business forums that I’m a member of, and noticed a new member had posted a typical newbie question in the SEO forum. The member wanted to know how she could be guaranteed to get her website on the first page of Google. As usual, members came crawling out of the woodwork with advice – including members who didn’t even own a website.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty typical on Internet Marketing/Small Business forums… members who don’t own a website instructing other members how to get on the first page of Google… members who don’t own a business dispensing business advice. So be careful where you get your advice from… but I digress.

Not surprisingly, not a single member responded with the correct answer. And what is the correct answer? The correct answer is there is NO magic bullet that will assure a first page ranking on Google. Never has been, never will be. By the same token, NO reputable SEO company will promise first page rankings.

By the way, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about this topic. In my article How to Choose a Reputable SEO Company ), I wrote the following:

“No SEO company can guarantee you a first page or top 10 ranking. I repeat: NO SEO company can guarantee you a first page or top 10 ranking. Here’s why: There are far too many variables involved in the ranking of a website – not the least of which are the age of the domain, relevancy and quantity of content, number and quality of inbound links, competition, and of course Google’s ever-changing algorithms. That’s why legitimate SEO companies don’t make those kinds of outlandish promises.”

Don’t Drop the Ball with Your Google Ranking

By Resource Nation in Featured

For anyone who is anyone on the Internet, their Google ranking is of importance to them. So, what are you doing to improve or unfortunately diminish your Google ranking when you stop and think about it?

While this isn’t brain surgery, obtaining and maintaining a positive Google ranking can be tricky if you’re not careful.

The site engine looks out for a number of red flags when assigning rankings, so compile a list of what to do and what not to do in order to make your site’s ranking keep increasing and not declining.

Here are some no-no’s to avoid as you look to ascend the Google rankings:

First, it is never a good idea to put too much duplicate content on your Website, as this can lead to penalties or even a ban. Don’t copy and paste large volumes of text from your pages, and especially avoid violating copyright issues by grabbing content from other sites.

It is important to produce your own content and if you’re having someone write a large amount of text for you, make sure they’re not just cutting and pasting from another venue. This is especially true in that you do not utilize trademarked names of products produced by the competition in your keywords. Doing so not only causes headaches, but can also lead to lawsuits.

Secondly, having mentioned keywords, it is important to use keywords that relate only to your site, making sure not to repeat the same term over and over again. If you’re looking to drop in the Google rankings, spam every keyword possible and watch your status plummet.

Another no-no is to improperly use links in an effort to get more views to your site. Keep in mind that Google is not a big fan of things like link exchanging programs, paid link placement and other tactics to try and maneuver your current ranking. If you or someone tied to your Website puts together an artificial web of links, expect to pay the price for it in more ways than one.

Website owners can improve their Google page rankings by swapping text links with other related sites, and by being sure their Website is noted on key directories.

Another faux pas is having your site deliver a virus or Trojan around the Internet. The penalty for doing so is having Google delete you from their index in order to protect other Internet users.

The best line of protection here is to review any software you may be distributing to be sure it doesn’t have any issues; along with making sure your server is secure. The worst case scenario is that your server is not secure and can be hijacked by hackers who will pass along bad software in your name.

Now don’t get discouraged by reading this and thinking there is no true way to improve your Google ranking. The first step here is to find out if your web page has indeed been indexed by Google.

There is a good chance that the site’s Googlebots have indeed crawled your spot without your knowledge. In the case where one of Google’s spiders indexes your site, it will record a snapshot of each page and then place it in its cache.

The goal from the start is to have a clean and useful Website that will ascend and not descend when it comes to Google rankings.

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Dave Thomas is an expert writer on voip phone systems based in San Diego, California. He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as voip phones at Resource Nation.

Is Page Rank Still the Key to Good Link Building?

By Alex Johnson in Featured

Ever since the dawn of Google there has been a single constant of SEO and that is that we must build links. Quite simply, when you put all the other minutiae aside, links are what make the difference between a #1 ranking and search engine obscurity.

Naturally, then, when Google first pioneered this thing that we call “Page Rank,” the world of SEO quickly adopted it as the litmus against which all potential link prospects should be measured…

Today

The thing is, Google has gotten a little more sophisticated these days. Links still matter, no doubt about it, but how much each link matters has become a complex thing indeed. So, the question arises then: Is page rank still the best thing to consider when doing your own link building? I say perhaps not.

The Dreaded Panda

If you know anything at all about SEO then I will assume you have heard of the recent “Panda Update.” In simple terms Google has declared a new effort in the war against spam.

Video: http://videos.sitepronews.com/video/4652/Google-FarmerPanda-Update-Whitelists

Content farms are the primary targets, and for this reason, many big sites with less than great content have been slapped back down the rankings. But the real casualties as far as I can see are not restricted just to these “farmers”…

For every content farm that’s been all but eradicated from the index, there are probably hundreds or even thousands of links which effectively don’t even count anymore.

That’s right, if you have been overdoing it on the article submissions etc… there’s a good chance that many of your links are almost worthless now. It’s the link builders equivalent of a stock market crash.

What Google Wants

The simplest way to figure out what Google really looks for in a link is to think about what Google wants to achieve. After all, as Matt Cutts put it in one of his videos on webmaster help:

“Webmasters should be chasing after what the user wants (rather than just chasing the algorithm).”

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdmzKzuXurY

The Ideal Scenario

What Google really dreams of (I wonder if it has started to dream
yet…?) is that we, as web masters, simply focus on building better sites and focusing our marketing efforts on our users and not on what the algorithm wants.

Logically then, Google is going to try to single out the pages which are popular with the humans who are viewing them. As a corollary to this, wouldn’t it make sense that Google would also care more about links which are more important to the user too?

So if not page rank…

How can you tell then which links you should and shouldn’t bother with? If you can’t chase after that old idol of page rank, then what should you look for in a link?

The answer is simple: Imagine for a minute that Google didn’t exist (scary thought right?), and for that matter search engines in general were unheard of… How are you going to get free traffic to your website now?

That’s right, logically, shouldn’t the most important links be the ones which you would build even if you didn’t care about SEO? i.e. the ones which will bring you the most traffic?

Summary

Link building has been heading this way for a while, and OK we’re not quite there yet, but logically; if a link gets you oodles of relevant traffic, that has to be considered a good link right?

Let’s stop chasing this silly algorithm and adding more and more useless content and poor quality links to the internet. Let’s start focusing on getting more traffic and happier users – Google is bound to catch up with us before too long!

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This guest post was written by Alex from WhoIsHostingThis.com. Alex is an SEO fanatic, a coder and all round tech geek. Come visit our site for hosting reviews and other webmaster tips and tools.

Reviews Can Help You Rank

By Aliza Earnshaw in Featured

If you’re running a business that depends on local traffic, you probably know that good reviews can bring more customers through the door.

But did you know that getting reviews – and not necessarily just good ones – can help your business rank better in search results?

It’s true. Getting customers to review your company on your Google Places listing, in Yahoo! Local, Bing, CitySearch, Yelp and other review sites helps you in a couple of ways:

- Ninety percent of consumers consult the Web before they head out of the house to make a local purchase. Yes, you read that right – 90 percent, according to digital marketing analysis firm eMarketer Inc. If your business has plenty of reviews for people to read – and most are enthusiastic, or at least positive – you’re likely to get some new customers. That’s because 70 percent of people believe in the validity of reviews written by strangers, according to The Nielsen Co.

On-Page Optimization Tactics You Don’t Hear About – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Ben Jackson in Featured

Backlinking, backlinking, backlinking – it seems to be the only part of SEO anyone ever talks about these days! Let’s get our noses out of everyone else’s sites and back into ours.

On-page optimization is often overlooked and neglected, but your on-page SEO builds the foundation for all of your off-page optimization efforts. We’re going to cover some of the basics here: domain names and title tags, but we’re also going to get to topics less discussed when dealing with on-page optimization. I’m talking about things like stemming, your outbound links, your use of synonyms and more. Let’s get to it!

Domain Name

Your domain name has a powerful effect on how you rank. Having an EMD (exact match domain) for your keyword is going to do a lot for your ranking. However, this is not crucial to your ranking success. Many people, such as myself, choose to have a domain name that they can brand. It depends on what you’re looking to do with your site. If you want to make a small niche site targeting a single keyword, then clearly you will want to get an EMD.

But what if the EMD is not available?

How To Check Search Engine Ranking Strategies

By Anthony Harris in Featured

Your search engine ranking is the position of your website on any particular search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc).

Because search engines favor the high-ranking sites, you need to check your search engine ranking continuously and find ways to improve your ranking. There are many free tools that can allow you to do this. Page ranks range from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest (and virtually impossible to achieve). Even a rank of 1 on Google is considered high.

In order to obtain a high search engine rank, you need to employ SEO (search engine optimization) techniques. And this can take a significant amount of time and/or money depending on whether or not you do it yourself of hire someone else to do it. SEO software is also a viable option to consider.

If you’ve decided that you want to be the one to check your search engine ranking yourself, and to take care of the SEO for your website, you’ll need to make a daily habit of performing activities that build incoming links to your website and using the right keywords. Incoming links greatly influence your page ranking. If you can get a high-ranking site to link to your website, you will bypass a great deal of your competition.

However, obtaining these links can often take quite a bit of time and patience. There are several ways to go about this. You can write to other webmasters and ask them to link to you. You can submit your site to online directories. You can do article marketing. You can use a social bookmarking strategy. The list goes on and on. But the most important concept of all is that the information you offer on your site must be valuable. It is much easier to obtain links to your site when you are offering information that your visitors (or other webmasters) find valuable.

Keyword optimizing your site is also part of the SEO strategy, although less important than incoming links. The best ways to go about using the right keywords is to use the free keyword tools offered by all of the search engines. These free keyword tools tell you exactly what people are searching for on the internet.

Check out the words that pertain to the industry and use these words on your website. If you’re just starting out, go with very detailed keywords and not the general highly-searched and highly competitive ones. It’s estimated that about 60% of searches online consist of two to three keywords so try to stick with phrases that fit that. Make sure you use your keyword phrases in important places on your website like titles, headings, sub-headings, etc.

Whether you manage to optimize your website on your own, with the help of a consultant or agency, or with software programs to check search engine ranking, you will see that your position continues to climb and this will bring in more traffic to your website.

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Anthony Harris is an expert online marketer, trainer, and teacher. Head here to www.theheavyhitters.info to discover how to get up to 19 checks per month, earn upwards of $519.17 per day, make more than a full time income in your online home business in 60 days or less.

To Get A Better Page Rank In Google

By Design By Pixel in Featured

Getting your website to rank high in Google searches is a daunting task to say the least. There are hundreds of different factors that will determine how well your site ranks. In this article I will go over the most important factors in SEO (search engine optimization) to help you reach the number one spot!

Before we begin, please note that SEO takes a long time! Anything you do today, wont actually be visible for up to 6 months depending on how much work is needed. This is why the techniques in this article are so important; you want the best results at the end.

On Page Optimization

On Page optimizations include everything and anything that involves changing the layout and code of your site. Generally speaking, the layout and coding of your site has little effect on how Google decides to rank your site’s position, but it does however effect how Google will determine what your site is all about. A properly formatted and coded site makes it easier for the search giant to determine the importance rating of any content on your site. So lets start with the basics.

Tags: I’m including both meta tags, as well as other HTML tags such as title and heading tags, and even bold or italics. I’m not going to go over meta tags here as that topic has been beaten to death by every SEO article ever written!

View your site as a report or textbook. I’m sure your website is beautiful and full of artsy design and cutting edge CSS, but that’s NOT how Google sees it. Google only sees the text. So how does it determine which text is the important text? Heading tags!

Just like a school textbook, the most important information is ‘coded’ with clues. The title of the textbook gives the reader the first and most important clue on what is inside. Each chapter or unit of the book has it’s own heading (h1 tag), with subheadings (h2, h3, h4). The most important key terms of the chapter are almost always in bold. Your site should follow this format! To follow through with my textbook analogy, the table of contents would be your sitemap.xml file.

Link Building

Now for what really matters in SEO. If it was as simple as optimizing some meta tags and formatting the site properly, then everyone would be on the first page. For the short story, Link Popularity is what determines how well your site will rank for your chosen keywords. This means that the more sites linking to you, the more awesome you seem in the eyes of Google.

Now for the long story. Google ranks every page on every website with a rating from 0 to 10. This rating is called a PR rating, or Page Rank. To put things in perspective, Google has a PR of 10, Digg has 8, and Zakk Wylde has a PR of 4. 4 is considered a respectable PR rating, with only power houses reaching 6+.

So why’s this important? Well no one knows the actual math as Google keeps it’s secrets well, but ultimately, if a site with a PR of 4 or 5 links to you, that one link is worth more that a hundred links from PR 0 sites.

There are also many other factors that change a link’s worth. The two most important are site relevance, and the anchor text in the link. That’s right, each independent link to your site is also assigned its own value. Generally speaking, links in the footer of a site are worth far less than one in the content. The site’s relevance is important as well. If you have a site about dentistry, and a guitar store links to you, then Google will assign it less importance. However, if it was Crest linking to your site!

The anchor text is what the text of the link actually says. If someone links to your site like this “click here to read more” then Google doesn’t have any content to determine what the link is about. If the link read more like this “Dentistry Information” then Google can better determine it’s relevance.

Getting Links

So how do you get people to link to you? This is where the real life value of your site matters. You need to have content that people want to link to!

You can also comment on blogs and forums, but this isn’t very effective and can be time consuming. You can write articles and submit them to differing sites on the web. Also time consuming. What about social media? Facebook and twitter are huge right? Depending on your site, this might be a great way to get your link out there, but your site has to be ‘buzz’ worthy. I don’t see people re-tweeting or Facebooking a site on dentistry. Unless you have the best friends ever who are willing to take the hit. Lastly you can contact webmasters of other websites in your category and ask them to place a link to you on their site.

Ultimately, you need to have valuable content on your site that people will want to link to by themselves. Good luck!

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If you are looking for a great blog to read then look no farther than designbypixel.ca. We write about anything from world events to website design to movie and game reviews! You can also visit harmonicdesign.ca for premium website design.

How To Improve Page Rank Fast

By Dele Ojewumi in Featured

How do you improve page rank fast?

You must have heard it said many times over that traffic is the lifeblood of any internet business. Of all traffic sources, search engine optimization (SEO) is about the most enduring and effectively, cheapest means in the long run. In comparison with pay per click for example, the traffic the marketer generates from search engine optimization (SEO) recurs unlike pay per click where the traffic generated virtually grinds to a halt as soon as the marketer’s expenditure on his advertisement stops. This makes search engine optimization a much sought after means of traffic generation by most marketers.

However, “if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Search engine optimization is a very painstaking and relatively long term method of generating traffic. In brief, search engine optimization involves on page and off page site optimization. This again can be looked at from the angle of content creation and optimizing as well as generation of backlinks. All these enable the small business owner to improve page rank of his site.

The question now arises as to which approach is best for the marketer to achieve effective search engine optimization for his site such that he obtains reasonable volume of traffic to enable sales and profit within the shortest possible time?

Some marketers would say just more and more content published on your website or blog will achieve the objective. Others would say, emphasis should be on gaining as many backlinks as possible. Let us be practical. Can any small business marketer hope to effectively compete with the relatively larger companies in terms of content generation? These companies can afford to employ freelance writers on a permanent basis to regularly churn out relevant and unique articles for their website’s use. Some of these companies even go to the extent of utilizing bots to generate articles for their blogs/sites.

The alternative to generating huge content left for the small business marketer is duplication of content which may not favor the marketer as a lot of his duplicated content may end up not being indexed by Google and other search engines.

The other approach is in regards to gaining backlinks. Hitherto, this could also effectively be dominated by relatively bigger companies who could afford to finance the use of bots to spam many sites with a view to gaining backlinks. The possibility of this is however now curtailed with the introduction of captcha by many websites.

Combined with this is the fact that here, the “river is very wide and available for all to swim”. A small business owner can effectively research his own set of keywords which may not be in use by the relatively bigger business marketer and so optimize for these and begin to point massive backlinks towards these set of keywords.

The small business marketer can even create very few high quality unique content in form of “link bait” which can attract backlinks on its own merit.

In summary, the best approach for the small business marketer to improve page rank and achieve search engine optimization (SEO) for his website within the shortest possible time and thus reap the relatively free targeted traffic therefrom, is through relatively much more focus on backlinking, possibly self-generating, through link baiting as opposed to massive original content generation which can take ages.

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Dele Ojewumi is the webmaster of => homebiz-supermarket.com/profitable-business-ideas/ where you can find home business ideas and opportunities to begin working from home. He is the author of the popular internet’s most-up-to-date-list of 165 top-article directories => homebiz-supermarket.com/profitable-business-ideas/2010/10/top-article-directories/ with clickable links, classified into dofollow and nofollow.

How do I Easily Get My New Site to Page 1

By Neil Holley-Williams in Featured

If you have a small business website, or if you are planning to set up a website, you might not yet realize how difficult it is to actually get visitors to your site.

Many small businesses naively enter the web assuming that they will miraculously end up on search engines. All of them quickly find out that isn’t the case.

To get on those engines, you have to go through a process called search engine optimization (SEO).

For years now, there have been tons of people researching just how SEO works and how they could use it to their advantage. If you want your business to pick up, you have to do the same.

The easiest way to do this when you’re just starting out is to hire someone to help you with SEO.

This won’t cost you a lot of money, and it will help you get an insight on just how the internet actually works, and it will be valuable knowledge that you can take forward; perhaps quite soon you won’t need to pay at all because you’ll also be an expert.

Techniques for search engine marketing change all the time, so much so that it literally takes full time attention for anyone to understand everything out there. Seeing that you probably don’t have that kind of time, hiring someone that does SEO for a living would be quite logical. You can really benefit from their experience.

One of the first things that you will do with your SEO consultant is to determine who your target audience is and how they operate the internet. One integral part of this process is keyword research.

During that time, you will work out what words people are using to find your site and others like it. That way you can put those words on your site and in your marketing material, providing associations with you and the words. You will also use these keywords with the inbound links you put for your site on other sites so people click on them and already know what to expect from your services.

However, you should be aware that keywords are not the be all and end all as most amateur web builders think. The search engines use over 200 different scoring pointers to determine the ranking of your site; you need to get a lot of these right to be page 1 for your industry. Of course if you are a local business, you are competing against a smaller market, and so your chances are better, and the SEO is slightly easier, but just as finely balanced.

Don’t be fooled into thinking you are successful at SEO if you are on Page 1 for your own particular web address (URL). A URL is unique so it’s hardly surprising! (However, that does raise another point that could fill a whole day’s seminar, choosing a good URL!)

If you are planning on building your own website because it’s FREE. Think again. A website designer will be able to optimize your site right from the start. The chances are you won’t be able to without lots of research.

Your SEO expert will show you that SEO is not just about what is on your website, but also how you put the word out about your website. It’s not all technical, and it can be a lot of fun, especially if you are a budding author!

As your traffic begins to improve, you and your SEO chap will be able to monitor where you’re getting the most success so you can direct your search engine marketing down that route. The consultant will draft monthly reports for you so you can see just what is happening with your website. It may take some time for things to pick up initially, but after a few months of work, you should see a great deal of benefits for your small business.

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Neil Holley-Williams runs HW marketing, a Chichester web design company providing very affordable websites and SEO for small and medium sized businesses. Neil has worked in the IT industry for over 25 years for companies such as IBM, Carnival UK, Invesco Perpetual and Skandia Life. www.hwmarketing.co.uk/seo

How to Increase Google Page Rank

By Suzanne Morrison in Featured

Visit any internet marketing forum and you are bound to find at least a few discussions on Google page rank. But what exactly is Google Page Rank and what do you need to do to increase it?

First of all Page Rank is a value that Google assigns to a web page based on the importance of the page. It is determined by the number of incoming links to that web page and few other factors including the page rank of the page giving the link to you.

There has been discussion recently asked to the importance of page rank. However one thing to consider is this, if Google thinks page rank is important than page rank is important.

Remember Google gets over 65% of all the search traffic on the Internet every day. If you were to take 10 websites that were all optimized for the same keywords, typically you would find that the page with the highest page rank would rank higher in the search engine results than the other pages.

So what are the best ways to increase your Google Page Rank?

1. One of the first things you should do is aim to increase the numnber of backlinks that you have pointing to your website. This fact alone can increase your link popularity and ultimately increase your page rank. Combined with that is the fact that the more back links you have pointing back your website for more potential traffic you will get from it.
2. As well as increasing the quantity of links to your website you should also try to get your links on high quality web pages. This means getting your link on pages that are ranked as high or higher than yours. When you do this some of their page rank can be transferred to you which ultimately helps increase the page rank of your site.

There are lots of ways to increase your page rank, but the most common methods are posting in discussion forums that have a high page rank, article marketing, submitting your site to directories, commenting on blogs and distributing press releases.

You should also try to get some deep links in addition to the links to your home page. Deep linking means linking to internal pages on your website as opposed to always linking to your homepage.

There are many other methods that you can use to improve your page rank, but any time you spend on getting links is well spent!

It is worth noting that the page rank displayed on the Google toolbar is not up to date. Although Google is always internally updating the page rank of web pages, the toolbar page rank is only updated every few months.

You should also be aware that just because a web page has a low page rank it doesn’t mean that getting a link on that page isn’t worthwhile. The page rank could increase on the next toolbar update.

Finally, it is worth remembering that a good Google Page Rank on its own is not necessarily going to mean lots of traffic. You also want to ensure that you have chosen good keyword phrases and have optimized your website.

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Visit Suzanne Morrison’s Higher Search Engine Ranking website and download her SEO EBook for more SEO tips

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