I have been to many forums and found that people like to do their own SEO initially and then give up later after they do not find reasonable results. I would suggest that they should keep on trying, until they really feel that their sales is directly dependent on their ranking in the search engines.

I have high respect for all the people who have achieved success using in-house/personal SEO and still are able to maintain there top spot for highly competitive keywords like digital camera software or photo software. The world of SEO has changed rapidly and so have the techniques. Now lets start with main subject that is "Making money online with SEO".

The first well-known fact: Higher the traffic better the sales

It is a proven fact that among the billions of pages that are searched by search engines only a few make it to the top and these top 30 websites make the most business. Type in digital camera software for instance and you will understand what I mean. Do you remember how many times have you gone beyond the 3-4th page of your search page results? I would expect the same behavior from 99.9% of the Internet surfers as no one has the time to go beyond the top 30 listed pages. I am exaggerating when I say top 30 because mostly the top 10 get 75% of the hits. So if you are not at the top you are losing on a huge chunk of sales, unless you are advertising locally and are limited to a local business.

Google adwords is worth a mention at this point as millions use them and know their importance. The users of google adwords know that they will get listed at the top page (sponsored listing) for the specified keywords. However, they do not estimate the sales that they will make. They can easily do it in a month and then change their bid amount to be paying less in advertising on google. Being listed in the top page does not mean that you will end up with guaranteed sales. You need to have a real good sales page that will make the "buyer" feel the need to buy it. Remember it is all about making him feel that he needs it.

Search engine optimization will propel your page to the top 10 without having to pay for the adwords campaign that is a pay per click campaign and you might end up paying far more than your sales. Having said this if you choose the niche keywords for your campaign and have a good sales copy you are bound to make a lot out of the campaign. Out of thousands who click to your page at least 50 should buy your product.

The million-dollar question

How will you benefit from SEO? How much should you spend?

If you have a good product and at a reasonable price compared to competition and feel that you can garner enough sales once your website receives traffic SEO will benefit you by providing you with exposure for the chosen keywords ( a proper keyword analysis for searches per month for that chosen keyword) will be conducted by the SEO expert. Depending on the competition you have for those keywords the plan will be chalked out by him. Sometimes only on-page SEO may take you to the top however, nowadays SEO has become a popular career with many top websites spending huge amounts on SEO to be listed in the top.

Your expense should depend on how much sale you are bound to make. A proper estimation of this can be drawn after the first month that you are listed in the top 10. Your expense can range from any where between $250-$2500 depending on the competition you face.

Be careful while choosing an SEO firm or person as they can use spammed techniques that can get you banned from search engines.

About the Author: Mahesh Mhatre is a SEO pioneer in India. Make Money Online with advice from xpertcoders. Outsourcing projects is easy at Lanceboard. Easy to use photo software photolightning.

When I started my e-business, I ask my web-designer friend to make a site which is really brainstorming. He did me a great favor and really made an excellent site. My site’s design is fabulous, it’s graphics are mind blowing and coding is superb. But now what? What I seen in the coming days, I am not earning a single penny because no one is visiting my site.

I think for a while that why all this is happening, then I make a search on Yahoo and see the first site which is coming on the top. It doesn’t have a good design like mine but still he is making good money. Then I came to know that the site’s design is meaningless if site’s ranking on search engines is not good.

When it comes to search engine every ear just not hears it but listens it’s every aspect and try to locate it’s presence in his site. Well why not it be done as it is the place from where all of us get our business.

Every search engine has it’s own criterion of ranking and it’s clear from the fact that when you do a search on Yahoo or Google or any other search engines there results vary. Here is the listing of some of the Top Search Engines and a few noteworthy points about all of them. Know which engines get you more bangs for the buck?

Google

Google has increased in popularity tenfold the past several years. They have gone from beta testing, to becoming the Internet’s largest index of web pages in a very short time. Their spider, affectionately named "Googlebot", crawls the web and provides updates to Google’s index about once a month.

Google.com began as an academic search engine. Google, by far, has a very good algorithm of ranking pages returned from a result, probably one of the main reasons it has become so popular over the years. Google has several methods which determine page rank in returned searches.

Yahoo

Yahoo! is one of the oldest web directories and portals on the Internet today, and the site went live in August of 1994. Yahoo! is a 100% human edited directory, and provides secondary search results using Google.

Yahoo! is also one of the largest traffic generators around, as far as web directories and search engines go. Unfortunately, however, it is also one of the most difficult to get listed in, unless of course you pay to submit your site. Even if you pay it doesn’t guarantee you will get listed.

Either way, if you suggest a URL, it is "reviewed" by a Yahoo! editor, and if approved will appear in the next index update.

AltaVista

Many who have access to web logs may have seen a spider named ’scooter’ accessing their pages. Scooter used to be AltaVista’s robot. However, since the Feb 2001 site update, a newer form of Scooter is now crawling the web. Whichever spider AltaVista uses, it is one of the largest search engines on the net today, next to Google.

It will usually take several months for AltaVista to index your entire site, although the past few months scooter hasn’t been deep crawling too well. Unlike Google, AltaVista will only crawl and index 1 link deep, so it takes a good amount of time to index your site depending on how large your site is.

AltaVista gets most of its results from its own index, however they do pull the top 5 results of each search from Overture (formerly Goto).

Inktomi

Inktomi’s popularity grew several years ago as they powered the secondary search database that had driven Yahoo. Since then, Yahoo as switched to using Google as their secondary search and backend database, however Inktomi is just as popular now, as they were several years ago, if not more so.

Their spiders are named "Slurp", and different versions of Slurp crawls the web many different times throughout the month, as Inktomi powers many sites search results. There isn’t much more to Inktomi then that. Slurp puts heavy weight on Title and description tags, and will rarely deep crawl a site. Slurp usually only spider’s pages that are submitted to its index.

Inktomi provides results to a number of sites. Some of these are America Online, MSN, Hotbot, Looksmart, About, Goto, CNet, Geocities, NBCi, ICQ and many more.

Lycos

Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the Internet today, next to Altavista and Yahoo. Their spider, named "T-Rex", crawls the web and provides updates to the Lycos index from time to time. The FAST crawler provides results for Lycos in addition to its own database.

The Lycos crawler does not weigh META tags too heavily, instead it relies on its own ranking algorithm to rank pages returned in results. The URL, META title, text headings, and word frequency are just a few of the methods Lycos uses to rank pages. Lycos does support pages with Frame content. However, any page that isn’t at least 75 words in content is not indexed.

Excite

Excite has been around the web for many years now. Much more of a portal than just simply a search engine, Excite used to be a fairly popular search engine, until companies such as Google seemed to have dominated the search engine market. As of recently, Excite no longer accepts submissions of URL’s, and appears to no longer spider. To get into the Excite search results, you need to be either listed with Overture or Inktomi.

Looksmart

Getting a listed with Looksmart could mean getting a good amount of traffic to your site. Looksmart’s results appear in many search engines, including AltaVista, MSN, CNN, and many others.

Looksmart has two options to submit your site. If your site is generally non-business related, you can submit your site to Zeal (Looksmart’s sister site), or if you are a business, you can pay a fee to have your site listed. Either method will get you listed in Looksmart and its partner sites if you are approved.

Once you have submitted your site, and it is approved for listing it will take up to about 7 days for your site to be listed on Looksmart and its partner sites.

AOL Search

America Online signed a multiyear pact with Google for Web search results and accompanying ad-sponsored links, ending relationships with pay-for-performance service Overture Services and Inktomi, its algorithmic search provider of nearly three years.

Ok, now you have got a better understanding of search engine’s game and finally you come to know which search engine is best for you and which one is leading in today’s Internet World. In nutshell, the thing which every e-entrepreneur wants is Top Search Engine Ranking. Isn’t it right? So take some time to register with these search engines as soon as possible and watch the traffic grow.

Raamakant S. is Author of "The e Success Code". An "entire Internet Marketing Encyclopedia" covers almost every topic of Internet marketing. If you’ve ever dreamed of having your own Internet Business that produces thousands of dollars each and every month, visit: http://www.theesuccesscode.com/

Welcome to part three of our series of articles on search engine optimization. In the third and final part of our series of articles on search engine optimization we cover the topic of links, the types of links and what makes them so important.

Links
Links, links, links. Everybody wants people to link to their websites. Why? The truth is that high quality links to your website are important as regards search engine popularity. The question everbody asks though is "… yeah that’s great but how do I get people to link to my site?"

Well firstly there are three different types of links:

Reciprocal
A reciprocal link is when you find a site that you want to get a link from. You place a link to this website on your resources page. You then email the webmaster of the other site and ask for a link in return. The webmaster can then either accept or decline your request.

This is a very hit-and-miss process. If you make 100 reciprocal link requests you may only get 5 links. It’s also very time consuming but can be worthwhile if you get a few strong links from it. These links can "lead" the search engines directly to your site and get you indexed faster.

One note is to never name your links page "links". Call it resources. Call it related sites but never call the page "links". Some search engines frown on this. Also try to avoid the automated reciprocal linking software packages - personally I delete any request received from users of these packages without even reading it. Most other website owners will too.

Non-Reciprocal
A non-reciprocal link is where you ask another website to link to yours but you don’t offer to link to them in return. Unless you have a truly massive and popular website this is not a request you can make very often . Don’t expect website owners to fall over themselves offering free links to your brand new site. Very few people can ask for a non-reciprocal link and make it happen. One possible way of getting this type of link is to offer some kind of freebie in return. A free ebook or some other incentive might just work.

Organic
An organic link is a non-reciprocal link that you never ask for. Organic links happen when webmasters link to your site simply because it’s a great resource and it offers value to their visitors too. This all ties in with the point made earlier of writing useful content. Give people a reason to come back to your site and they will. Not only will they come back but they’ll link to your site for free without being asked. These are the best possible kind of links because you don’t need to go looking for them.

Having other sites linking to yours proves the importance of your site to the search engines. If the content on your site is so valuable that other site owners want to link to it then it must be important. That’s the foundation of Googles approach to website popularity and let’s face facts Google know what they’re doing.

There are other methods to get links to your site but that again goes beyond the scope of this article.

Well I hope you enjoyed what you’ve read in Parts 1, 2 and 3. These articles will provide you with the basic knowledge you need but there’s lots more to learn if you want to be truly successful in the search engines.

(c) Niall Roche - All Rights Reserved

This article was provided courtesy of Search Engine Fuel where you’ll find tons of information on getting affordable search engine optimization.

Objective: To use the spiders on the Internet to monitor information for you and save you the time.

Strategy: Use Google’s Alerts system to be your “watch dog” and do the work for you.

Who needs this strategy? People who want to have an ear-to-the wall on the Internet. People who want to save time researching. Anyone who wants or needs the latest information available online on a given topic in the shortest possible time.

What is Google Alerts? Google Alerts is an email notification update service sponsored by Google, set up by you, on a topic important to you, your business, or your profession.

How can I use this to my advantage?

* To monitor a news story
* To keep current on a competitor or vendor on the Internet
* To be notified whenever a favorite author writes something (such as myself, chuckle)
* To receive the latest news on a
…A movie star
…A particular movie
…A particular event
…A favorite sports team
…(My favorite) - To keep track of where your name appears on the Internet, or even your web site address (URL). Who is chatting about Catherine Franz?

How frequent will the notification emails from Google appear in your in-box? You have a choice to receive the email once a day, as-it-happens, or once a week. You can set up the process to come all in one email or in separate emails.

I understand all this is well and good, but you need examples. I thoroughly understand; I operate the same way. So, let me share with you how I have set up Google Alert to be my babysitter on the Internet.

A few examples of my notifications include:

My name: “Catherine Franz”
Web site URL: www.AbundanceCenter.com < http://www.AbundanceCenter.com >
Radio show web site: www.LetsTalkMarketingShow.com
< http://www.LetsTalkMarketingShow.com >
My blog: < http://abundance.blogs.com >

Quotes are important. Without them around my name, I would receive all the notifications of when Catherine or Franz appears. Trust me; I made this mistake for the first week until I figured this out, that it works in Google Alerts as well.

You will want to begin by making a list of phrases, events, web information, or proper names that you to receive notifications about.

Next, decide on the frequency of your notification for each item on your list. Do you want the alert once a day, as it happens, or once a week? I choose once a day. (Note: You do not receive one if your choices do not appear.)

When your email arrives, click and follow the hyperlink. Visit the sites where your choice appears. Since I write many Internet marketing articles, I also monitor who is publishing my articles and where (and who is not telling me).

Last, make adjustments to the phrases when needed either to refine or to expand.

Ready?

Go ahead, visit www.google.com/alerts http://www.google.com/alerts It is a painless and easy process once you know what you want to follow - or at least the first item. If you are not sure, just set up one, and then return later to make adjustments. You can always begin with your name of course, that is if it isn’t John Smith.

© Copyright 2006, Catherine Franz. All International rights reserved.

Catherine Franz, business and writing coach, resides in Virginia and is a syndicated columnist, radio producer and host of the "Let’s Talk Marketing" show, International speaker, and author. Ezines and other articles: http://www.abundancecenter.com
http://www.LetsTalkMarketingShow.com

TIP ONE: THE IMPORTANCE OF KEYWORDS

This is the good news. The bad news is that the process is slow, and it can take months (and months and months) of dedicated effort to achieve decent rankings (one reason you don’t want to abandon those paid campaigns while optimizing your site). But it is well worth the time and effort in the long run, since it addresses the one issue that is foremost when marketing your product and services online: people use search engines such as Google and MSN to do their looking. And search engine listings that are highly ranked consistently outperform ‘paid listings’.

So how do you get your site listed and ranked highly? Does it take dedicating your life fulltime to this effort, or specialized knowledge? The answer is "yes" and "no". It can help tremendously to hire the assistance of a firm that specializes in SEO (and, in fact, this is highly recommended). They can give you professional guidance in this arena, and steer you away from common mistakes.

But for those with a limited budget (which is most of us, nowadays, it seems) it’s also possible to do your own site optimization, and work on a long-term campaign to help your site rise. It isn’t easy (unlike those ads and books online that promise overnight success with no effort), but by rolling up your shirtsleeves and diving in, you can learn a tremendous amount, and help your site get found when people type in your products into a search engine.

TIP TWO: SELECT YOUR KEYWORDS CAREFULLY

Search engine keywords are what lead people (as in potential customers) who type in phrases in their favorite search engine to your site. When they go onto Google, Excite, or other search engines and directories, and are looking for a specific item, keywords are the ones that they type in during their search.

To market effectively to them, you will need to think like them (this is the basis of all excellent marketing). You will want to determine:

What phrases people type in when looking for your product, service, or content during their online searches (including the most common

misspellings, by the way). Not sure? Try looking at your web stats for your site. You should see an extremely valuable area called "search strings", with a list of words underneath it.

These search strings are the phrases that actually brought people to your web site. Which ones were the most popular? You’ll want to note these. But you’ll want to add more.

Sit down for a minute, and think of every possible phrase people might use for searching for your product. At this point, don’t edit yourself, just let the words flow and write them down. If you sell used Chevrolets in Alexandria, VA, you might come up with "used cars, used Chevrolets, vintage cars, reconditioned cars, Chevrolet dealers, Alexandria VA car dealers, Alexandria VA used cars", as just a start.

By now, you should have a list. Go through it again, and decide which ones seem the most focused for your product or service. You want search engine keywords that will bring targeted customers to your site, who are interested in doing business with you, and the right keywords can help accomplish this. Be specific and relevant in your choices. Then, alphabetize your list, since some search engines and directories list pages alphabetically; so use your best phrases in alphabetical order whenever possible for better optimization.

Next, analyze which keyword phrases are realistic for obtaining high rankings. While you may sell used autos, and want to get top rankings for that term, ‘used autos’ is an extremely popular and general phrase, and odds are, difficult to get good rankings for. But if you sell used Chevrolets in Alexandria, Virginia, then it’s realistic to hope for high rankings for search engine phrases for ‘Alexandria used Chevrolets’. You’ll also get a more targeted audience (think ‘more likely to buy from me’), since most of your customers will probably come from your locale).

At this point, you should have a list of keywords. If you have a very short one, or are having trouble thinking of some, you can gain access to professional software at minimal cost. Just start a Google adwords campaign, or a CPC campaign on Overture. Each of these sites have "keyword suggestion" tools that will give you several keywords based on your product or service, and will include the relative popularity of each one.

TIP THREE: PLACE KEYWORDS CAREFULLY

Once you have your keywords, you’ll want to use them in the right places. The goal is to help search engines find your site for those phrases, so you will want to place them in spots the engines look closely at. These include the page Title, inside the meta tags, inside the heading tag, in the domain name (more about this in a later lesson), and the keyword tags.

You will also want to sprinkle them liberally throughout the content (text) of your site, with special consideration for the top of your page and its first paragraphs. This is especially important on your home (index page), which is the one that most search engines will cache when spidering through. And please, have some real content on your page, and not just a list of keywords, or your site could go down in its rankings. Search engines do rank according to content relevancy, and the site that says "Our dealership provides quality used Chevrolet cars, reconditioned to meet our customer’s needs," (with at least 100 words of good, relevant content) will always rank higher than the site that says, "cars, cars, cars, buy quality used Chevrolet cars, quality used cars are here". In addition, you won’t drive away customers offended by poor quality writing and obvious over-usage of marketing phrases.

But you do want to maintain a certain ratio of keyword density in your text; a keyword density of 5 to 7% is usually recommended. If you don’t feel comfortable writing copy using keywords, a professional copywriter who specializes in online writing can help you.

THREE COMMON MISTAKES TO AVOID

Mistake 1: One common error that many people make is to forget to place ALT tags for their graphics. You may have a beautiful logo or graphic on your web site, but if you don’t have an alt tag, the search engines can’t "read it". Be sure to place keywords there, and to label graphics with names that reflect keywords.

Mistake 2: Always have text on your site. When creating your site, search engines depend upon text to decide what your site is about. The more relevant the text, the better. The spiders and bots can’t "read" graphics as mentioned above. Don’t just make the text for the site one big graphic, as some firms do. The search engines will skip over the graphic, and assume you have no content at all.

Mistake 3: Finally, please don’t spam (by trying to ‘hide’ your keywords by using a font the same color as the background, or repeating keyword phrases over and over in the title and meta tags). Search engines are now excellent at finding those who try to break the rules (and their technology for doing so is getting more sophisticated all the time), and will drop spammers from their indexes like a hot potato. So play by the rules, and when in doubt, ask an ethical SEO firm for advice, or visit one of the many excellent forums online (such as Jill Whalen’s High Rankings Search Engine Forums).

Your site will rise more quickly, and enjoy higher rankings, if you follow these tips and their advice. And your traffic will increase, at no cost to you!

P Lim is the editor of http://www.Catasult.com which provides valuable tips and advice on web promotion and internet marketing from linking strategies to search engine industry news, internet marketing articles and more.

Welcome to the second part of our series of articles on search engine optimization. In the previous article we discussed keywords, domain names, content and keyword density issues. This article moves past that to the nitty gritty of improving your web pages and website for better search engine rankings.

Page Title
It’s truly amazing how many people don’t realize how critical the TITLE tag can be to the success or failure of your website. Your TITLE tag needs to have your most important keyword for that page included in it. This is for the benefit of the search engines.

From a visitors point of view it also needs to entice them to click on your title tag when they see it in the search engine results. If your page is about PDA Accessories don’t just use that phrase in the TITLE tag.

Dress it up a bit. For example "PDA Accessories For The Busy Geek" or "Need Accessories for Your PDA? Come right in!" Those examples took me 10 seconds to come up with. You can do far better with a little more time and effort.

META Keyword Tag
Anybody still using the Meta Keyword tag as their sole search engine optimization method please leave the room. Go on get out and don’t come back.

The Meta Keyword tag is all but dead to the search engines. When building your pages it’s still worth including but simply put in the top 3 or 4 keywords that are relevant to your business and leave it at that. Do not spend hours coming up with hundreds of keywords to stuff into the Meta Keyword tag. It’s a total waste of time and anybody who tells you different has no idea what they’re talking about.

META Description Tag
This still has some limited value for your SEO work. When Google or other search engines display search results they display the contents of the TITLE tag and your Meta Description tag (if present) or a random selection of text from the page. Your Meta Description tag will take priority if present.

The Meta Description tag is still worth using. Your most important keyword should be in there and again you need to work this keyword into an eye catching phrase or sentence. Don’t just copy and paste the main keyword in there.

If the Meta Description tag is used well, in conjunction with the TITLE tag, then it can make your displayed search result more inviting to the potential visitor. Again don’t spend more than a few minutes on your Meta Description tag but do make sure that you include it on each page. One final note - make the Meta Description for each page different; don’t just recycle the same one over and over.

RSS
Stands for Really Simple Syndication and is probably something you’ve heard a lot about over the last few months. RSS allows you to display the news items and/or content from other sites on your website as part of a "news feed". This adds a huge amount of value to your site from a vistors point of view - they don’t need to leave your site to get the latest news on a given topic. The other benefit is that search engines love seeing fresh content on websites.

At the moment there’s a huge upsurge in the use of RSS for search engine optimization. The question is does it work? Yes it does. Using RSS can most definitely encourage the search engines to come back to visit your site more often. How does it work? Well again that goes beyond the scope of this article so please refer to our site for more information.

Blogs
Also called Web Logs are basically online diaries. For a long time these were used solely by… well…. geeks to record their thoughts and as a way of sharing information on Star Trek. Seriously though initially blogs were never seen as anything more than a curiousity.

Recently with the increased visibility of RSS blogs have also seen their profile rise. Why? Well because many RSS feeds feature blog content. Which means what exactly? It means your blog could be included on and linked to from thousands of websites all over the world. Are you seeing the possiblities? There are some other nuances to consider but to mention them here would give the game away completely and certain ebook authors would put a price on my head for giving away their secrets.

(c) Niall Roche - All Rights Reserved

- continued in Part 3

This article was provided courtesy of Search Engine Fuel where you’ll find tons of information on seo training

This year, like many people, I wasn’t able to attend. However, I wanted to keep up with the news, so I found a great source of reports and updates. I will summarize the most important sessions to the best of my ability.

In my opinion, one of the most crucial topics is Vertical Creep.

Vertical creep is when non-organic and non-paid results start occupying top spots in search results. Verticals started showing up in search results back when Altavista was popular, and since then have grown into a much more sophisticated part of the overall search engine results page. Greg Jarboe was the first to speak of vertical creep and introduced everyone to verticals.

All the engines have verticals in some form or another nowadays. Google has its famous “OneBox” which is generally the place immediately below the top sponsored ads but immediately above the organic results. This is where you will find news, Froogle, and image results which may match a query.

For example, I wrote a few weeks ago about how, when you searched for Olympics on Google, you were presented with video results at the top of the page. But it doesn’t stop there. Do a search for New Orleans, for example, and in Google you are presented with not only news results but also map results, pushing the organic results down so that only the top 2 or 3 results are showing. Much less than the typical 4 or 5 we are used to seeing.

One of the biggest impacts of Verticals is the “stretching” of the search results page. It is becoming ever clearer that everything but the top 1 or 2 organic is worth less because it could be pushed below the fold, whereas sponsored’s value is increasing because there are less organic results visible.

According to Gord Hotchkiss, however, the impact on verticals, at least on Yahoo! And MSN, isn’t as great. His firm has recently completed research on how users interact with search engines. The Yahoo! MSN research performed by Hotchkiss’ firm is a follow up to Google research the firm completed last year at this time.

According to Hotchkiss, Google does a better job of incorporating Verticals into results. Google users are more accepting of them while Yahoo! and MSN users tend to scan more of the results on a page, thereby negating the impact verticals have on organic results.

This could mean a couple of things. First, as Hotchkiss suggests, Google may have “trained” its users. We are used to seeing the verticals (and hit bolding and inconsistently displayed sponsored results) and are therefore more accepting to the varying page changes, while Yahoo! and MSN users are less forgiving, perhaps because they feel the results displayed are less relevant. This isn’t too hard to believe considering he gave an example of searching for New York Pizza on MSN and NOT getting pizza places but getting news about pizza in New York.

Personally, I too have experienced this, especially with MSN. It seems to have more of a problem determining what types of verticals are relevant to the searcher.

Bob Carilli was up next and presented a case study on how effective verticals have been for one of his clients.

Through some analysis they found that Froogle shopping results were showing up a lot for his clients’ competitive keyword terms, yet the Froogle listings were unoptimized.

They responded by creating a data feed for Froogle which was optimized to target these great phrases which had poor Froogle listings. As a result, his client’s site quickly moved to the top of the Froogle listings for those phrases. While it is unclear, I would assume this would have translated into similar top rankings in the Google area where Froogle is displayed.

This also shows that, as search marketers, we shouldn’t rely solely on SEO or PPC. There are dozens of verticals out there we could tap into if we had an open mind.

If you look at Google alone, there are opportunities in Google News (with properly optimized press releases), Froogle, as mentioned above, Google Local, Google Base, Google Video and more. Similarly, with Yahoo! and MSN there are verticals to research. Both engines also have a shopping portal, as well as news, video and local results.

In the end, verticals could become the “poor man’s” SEO tactic. If you can’t compete organically and can’t pay for top sponsored, perhaps you can optimize your product feed to appear ahead of all your competitors?

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

Comparison of Google SEO vs. Yahoo SEO I’m certain webmasters have been debating Google vs. Yahoo SEO for some time now. It seems - at least to me anyways - that good positions on Yahoo usually net good positions on MSN as well. So one would think their ranking algorithms are somewhat similar.

I’m not sure that keeping good Google positions will benefit you on other engines. I’ve found - I can optimize for Yahoo & MSN - and they will not turn the tables on me at any given point. It may become so that in the future they are as dynamic as Google - but I have found Yahoo & MSN to contain more "static" results. By static, I mean that once you manage to get top positions on Yahoo & MSN (and especially for popular keywords) you usually are able to hold this rank for a while.

Other webmasters will agree, you either know the Google formula or you don’t. I have still not discovered the formula. I have had pages (and ones with good content too) rank well on Google for a short period of time, then disappear completely from those query results. Google is a strange creature indeed, and although I have been into Internet Marketing for over two years now (and it is my only income) I have a very hard time keeping up with Google and trying to optimize for it.

Quite frankly, I gave up after all that jibber-jabber about Update Florida and the "Sandbox Effect." I figured such rapid changes, and such severe penalties for any given site - were uncharacteristic of Google. Google has a tendency to change their algorithms, and consequently their SERPS, almost overnight. If you’re able to hold a top position on Google for certain keywords, all the power to you. I wish I could myself - as I believe Google would supply more traffic to my site then Yahoo can.

But in the long run, optimizing for MSN & Yahoo is likely in your best interest. Unless you yourself can crack the Google code, or know someone who can/has, I would suggest sticking to optimizing for Inktomi. These old optimization methods posted for optimizing for Inktomi (a simple Google search will find them for you, I know, how ironic) actually still work very well for both Yahoo and MSN engines. I have been using them for a while now and am having no problems getting SERP listings for these keywords.

It does take a little bit of time what with link campaigns and all, but no empire was built overnight. For more information on link building, and other subjects, please read my other articles.

I am a young, aspiring computer engineer into Internet Marketing, hardware, software, web design, SEO and just about anything related to computers. Please come check out my growing PC forum at http://www.markspcforum.com

Anybody who has their own website or is involved in business online understands the importance of SEO or search engine optimization. Higher rankings equal more traffic. More traffic equals more potential sales. Simple, eh? Or is it?

The problem here is that most people think search engine optimization is like magic and that only search engine "gurus" have all the answers.

Forunately, for you, this is far from true. In fact search engine optimization is relatively easy. What stops most people from ranking well in the search engines is misinformation and the promise of quick fixes. Every week there’s a new tool or ebook that promises to solve all your search engine woes. There are no quick fixes folks. Accept that as a truth and move forward.

What follows in the next three articles is a 10 step program for improving your online presence and search engine rankings. Enjoy!

Keywords
Keywords should be the first step in your search engine optimization campaign. People put keywords or phrases into search engines looking for information. The search engines then check their index for pages that contain these keywords. Unless your pages contain keywords relevant to your business or service then do not expect search engines to rank you well. It’s that simple.

For example if you have a website about dating then you’ll find it very difficult to rank well for the keyword "dating" because so many other sites are competing for it. However if you were to target a specific area like gay and lesbian dating then you’re dealing with a smaller, more targetted market. You could even regionalize it by targetting gay and lesbian dating in Toronto. See where we’re going with this?

So what keywords tools are available to you? Describing each of them goes beyond the scope of this article so please refer to our site for more information on this topic.

Content
Make this your motto - Provide Useful Content. DO NOT provide keyword stuffed, spammy, automatically generated pages. Write something useful for your visitors based on keywords which are relevant to your business or service.

Ask yourself one question - do you want your website to last? Yes? Great then provide content that’s actually useful to your visitors. Not only should you provide the initial content but keep adding content to your site. A page a week, a page a month it doesn’t matter. Give your visitors a reason to come back to your website.

You can’t write? Yes you can! Most people just think they can’t write. Most of us send emails every day to friends, colleagues and loved ones. If you can compose an email like that then you’re perfectly capable of writing 200 - 300 words of text for a page of content. The mere thought of writing a page of website content can fill people with terror but if you need help on this please refer to our website for a list of resources.

Keyword Density
This is how often your keyword is used on the the page. For example if you have 100 words of text on a single page and you mention your keyword 5 times then your keyword density is 5%.

So what’s the ideal keyword density? Do yourself a favour and don’t focus on keyword density at all. The forums are full of "experts" with theories on the perfect keyword density percentage. Here’s a wake up call - there is no perfect keyword density.

Mention your keyword towards the top of your page within the body text, in the page title and in the Meta Description tag. Apart from that only ever use the keyword or keywords within the page itself as is contextually appropriate. Forcing a keyword into a page over and over again is going to produce a webpage that’s difficult to read and sounds silly.

Domain Name
You have two choices when choosing a domain name. You can use a branded name that doesn’t relate to your business e.g. Amazon.com have built a hugely successful brand name as an online retailer using the name of a South American river for their company. It just works for some reason.

Your other choice is to use a keyword rich domain name. What this means is that if your website is about baby clothes you’d use a domain name like www.baby-clothes-guide.com. Should you really use hyphens to separate the keywords in the domain? The simple answer is yes because a search engine can read each individual keyword in the domain.

If you were to use www.babyclothesguide.com the major search engines can only read the first word from it which is "baby". Therefore it has no idea that the domain is specifically about baby clothes (targetted) and not just about baby (untargetted).

(c) Niall Roche - All Rights Reserved

- continued in Part 2

This article was provided courtesy of Search Engine Fuel where you’ll find tons of information on getting effective search engine optimization

Yahoo is a tough engine to get your blog into, least if you are trying to get in without paying. I have determined to try to find a way to get listed without paying, but that takes patience. A few weeks have passed since I attempted to submit to Yahoo! Directory and since then I have received nothing in emails from them, nor do I find my site listed in the directory yet. Oddly enough my website is showing up in the yahoo web search sporadically. So I figured its time to resubmit, but this time I think we will try some new things and discuss our methods.

Since we submitted our site to Yahoo! via the free submission, then there is a chance that the editor didn’t have time to review it. So we keep trying. Especially since we didn’t receive a email with a announcement to our listing or a denial.

To get listed in the directory, for free, you need to do some research first.

Note: Be sure to read http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/appropriate.html and any other Yahoo! suggest information first. It does help.

Start out with writing down search terms that are the most defining to your site. For oursite the list looks something like this "blogging", "income from blogging", "how to blog", "professional blogging", "blogging tips", "blogging help" etc… So lets start out with searching the directory with our first search term "blogging". First navigate to the http://dir.yahoo.com and plug in the keyword "blogging" and hit search. You should get a wide variety of sites returned but what we want to pay attention to is the "Related Directory Categories", and what you see is "Weblogs" and "Weblogs about Blogging". Jackpot. I think we fit into these categories, one issue though, "Weblogs" category is to broad and is one of the "Top Categories". Our chances of getting listed here is about nil. So lets hit "Weblogs About Blogging". Take note that there is no more sub-categories and there is only 31 sites listed here, that’s a good thing.

Ok, so now we have found our category, lets get to the submission. Click the "Suggest a Site" link on the page. Now you should be brought to a page that is titled appropriately "Suggest a Site to the Yahoo! Directory". On this page you will have one of 2 views; The first gives you a choice to either submit the site via the "Standard" Submit (the free one!) or the "Yahoo! Directory Submit (with the 7 Day Guarantee and $299 us dollar fee!). The second view you may get shows ONLY the paid submit. If you get this, you have 2 choices. Either find another category that fits your site and shows you the "Standard" submit, or Pay. Since we have the option of "Standard" submission, we are going to try that. We click the "Standard Consideration" option and verify that the category is correct and hit continue. You will have to login/register with Yahoo! ID if you haven’t already. The next screen should be the main submission form.

The Yahoo Directory Suggest a Site form is pretty simple to fill out. If you really don’t care, just fill out the appropriate fields and hit submit. But that’s probably not going to help you in your chances nor is it going to help your directory listings if you happen to get accepted. So here we need to pay attention to what we are entering into the form. The title, in my opinion, is just as important or more important than the description. So lets take a moment to focus on the title.

Yahoo does list its directory listings in alphabetical order so you can attempt to use a title that would help your listings in that search type. Keep in mind though, if you are putting something like what you find in your everyday phone book, a title "#1 site for blogging income" or "AAA Professional Blogging Tutorials" you just wasted your time because your not going to get listed. Now if you business name is "AAA Professional Blogging" you can do that. What I recommend for your title, is that it is "Keyword" friendly and highly relevant to your site. Don’t try to pull a fast one on the editors and search users by using a slick title that doesn’t really describe your site. For our title we are going with "theladderproject’s Successful Blogging by Example". Be sure not to make the title in all caps, use exclamation points or use a title that is more of a sales pitch like "Make money from home".

The description is the most difficult item to define corretly. Ideally you want to include as many relevant keywords in the description as possible. You will find that this can be difficult, especially since you do not want to list a bunch of keywords in a row. Our description will look like this "Weblog about blogging as a profession. Learn how to successfully make money by marketing your blog advertising and affiliate income". In our description we have about 10-11 keywords that someone might use to search for our topics and we kept the description under 25 words.

Next you enter in a Email Address and Contact Person for the ability of changes and contacting you about your listings. I suggest a more permanent email address that you will probably not change.

Finally there is the Additional Information box. Here you can put other categories that your site may fit under. I have found that this box is definiatly character limited and cutting and pasting 2 category url’s didn’t work. I suggest you explain briefly your category suggestion and why your site should be there. I don’t think that any suggestions made here will affect your chances for listing, though you may want to type in some sweet nothings or flirtations (you never know!).

Ok, so now you review everything for errors or mistakes and hit submit. Next step is to just wait. If you don’t hear from Yahoo! After 3 weeks (2-4 business days for the paid submission) then it’s time to resubmit. If this fails after 2-3 tries then its time to try some other steps.

Copyright © http://blog.theladderproject.com 2006

John Hamman has been in the internet business for 10 years now and specializes in site usability, accessibility, SEO, and online marketing tactics. He now manages the Ladder Project, a "tell all" weblog about how to make money by blogging, from start to finish. This site gives unprecedented access to the internet’s best kept secrets in website promotion and driving traffic that will produce income.