Search Engine Listing And Optimization

In the world of website marketing, search engines are an essential key to success. They are the most important way to bring traffic to your website. Understanding how search engines work and what they require is an important first step to harnessing their marketing power.

The two types of search engines can be characterized as active and passive. An active engine utilizes crawl technology that constantly searches out websites, adds them to its database and creates listings automatically with what it finds. Passive engines require registration of your website directly with them and rely on editors to add your site to their directory. As search engines have evolved, many have adopted a combination of passive and active strategies.

Search engine optimization is the utilization of techniques that will assure that search engines find and include your website in their databases. There are proven methods to search engine marketing involving website design and content adaptation, and keyword strategy. The primary goal of these methods is to bring traffic to your site. The secondary goal is for that traffic to be targeted to your product. In the internet marketing game, exposure is essential. But marketing efficiency requires effective exposure to the right prospects.

Customer Delivery By Search Engine

Valiss’s knowledge of search engines and how to position your website for optimal exposure can help your website top its market. Search engine optimization must be a central part of your internet marketing plan. By refining your website, Valiss will enable search engines to deliver more of your prospective customers to your site.

Ted Prodromou spent over 25 years in the computer industry working for IBM, Digital, and Cellular one. Today he’s the owner of Valiss IT, a consulting firm that provides small business coaching and marketing help. He’s also a certified personal and professional coach.

Ted has created and led many coaching workshops and today is helping small businesses automate their marketing with his latest coaching program, "Attract Clients While You Sleep". For more information visit http://www.valiss.com/specials.

If you would like to download his free report "How To Attract Clients While You Sleep" visit http://www.valiss.com.

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The first step in getting your site noticed is to have a site that is designed in a way that is search engine friendly. That is called SEO (search engine optimized). This is mostly a web designing issue. We will assume that you are starting with an SEO optimized site. But that alone won’t give your site high rankings.

To get the search engines to notice you, you need to understand them. The search engines’ whole purpose is to find quality content– that is what the internet is all about. Information. And the more content (related to your site’s most important keywords) that you have, the more that search engines will like you. They like to see sites that grow with quality content at a steady rate. They also like to see a lot of quality links from other sites on the Internet going to your site.

This is where article marketing comes in. Let’s say you have a website that sells cameras. First you would want to expand your site beyond several pages. You could do that by adding lots of related products. Or you could review products. If you don’t want to do that yourself, look for free articles that review products for you. You could add other related free articles, such as how to use the product, where to display your photos, etc. Maybe start a blog on the topic. Blogs are great for promotion because they are constantly updated with fresh material.

Where do you get all this fresh material? From article directories and article list servers. Because of the rapidly growing need for people to find and submit articles, the number of article directories sites are increasing.

You can take advantage of this fact. You could write an article about you website’s subject (or take the material from what you have already written for your website). For example, how to find a quality camera or how to take great photos. Then you submit this article to article directories. I like to personally add my articles to a new directory every day. By doing this, you now have links all over the Internet leading to your site– links from the article directory, as well as links from everyone who publishes your article for free on their website, ezine or blog.

Article marketing is now considered the method of choice for web marketing. It is the best way to get top placement with the search engines and to drive traffic to your site.

It takes some time and effort to find and/or write and submit articles, but it is free. You can also pay a submission service to send your articles out to more directories than you would have time to do yourself. So, start thinking "content" if you want the search engines to notice you.

If you are interested in submitting an article to an article directory, visit 1st Choice Article Directory at http://free-article-submission.com 1st Choice Article Directory always accepts unlimited free quality article submissions.

If you are looking for a great article submission service, 1st Choice Article Directory has information at http://www.free-article-submission.com/pages/Article-Distribution

This article may be freely copied as long as it is not modified and the resource box accompanies the article, together with working hyperlinks.

There are a lot of mysteries as to what exactly a search engine optimization specialist does. Given the importance of search engine optimization, this is not a good thing. Thus, let me give you an idea of what optimization entails.

First, a search engine optimization specialist analyzes your site. The specialist is mostly concerned with a few lines of code: the meta-tags, the title, and image tags. They are also interested in the text of the site. He compares the text and the tags, which tells him where he needs to do the most work. Comments are also checked, as some search engines look at those as well as the rest.

The search engine optimization specialist will then revise the code, checking each keyword used to determine if there are more effective substitutes and then changing the text and images to reflect that investigation. He then either submits it to a programmer or uploads it himself.

The easy stuff is over; now begins the real work. He first submits the site to the most used search engines, as well as some of the more obscure sites. He will also submit it to a number of directories, which the search engines are known to rifle through every so often. Also, he submits it to sites of a like mind, so that he can build up the links to site. He will also check out sites that are similar so, compiling a list of sites that allow for links, either because they are mini-directories themselves, or they offer advertising. As he’s doing this, he also notes the page rank of the sites, as a potentially useful site is either of the same page rank or one or two steps higher than the site itself.

It needs to be noted that, while the changes are immediate, the effects may take a few months to manifest. Also, minor tweak are being done all the time a search engines change how they do things, or the site itself updates. My doing this, a search engine optimization specialist can help you build your business.

Get expert answers and more information on how a search engine optimization specialist as well as other expert advice the latest Internet Marketing topics at Marketing-Helpers.com.

Marketing-Helpers.com is a resource for business owners, managers, and marketers find the answers and services they need to operate a highly successful Web site. Get advice from experts like Bryan Hornung and we’ll show you how the best way for you to connect with a search engine optimization specialist or search engine optimization company to increase web site traffic with a managed search engine marketing services.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is big business. If you rely on search engines to bring visitors to your business website, you need to rely on more than luck. Your business will lag far short of its potential unless your site is optimized and re-optimized for search engine results.

What is search engine optimization?

SEO is optimizing your website for search engines, acquiring inbound links, and monitoring your traffic and referring links to use them optimally. SEO is also studying and monitoring your competitors’ techniques.

The goal of SEO is to bring in targeted traffic that is organic, i.e., from search results. When people type in a keyword or phrase that you’ve optimized your site for, you want your site to appear on the first page, preferably high on that page. Good SEO results in increased traffic without the cost and time spent on advertising.

The SEO industry

Where there’s a need, there’s an industry ready to help you spend money on that need. SEO firms charge from a few hundred dollars up to six-figure amounts to optimize your site for search engines.

If paying thousands of dollars to an SEO firm isn’t in your budget, consider using SEO packages to optimize your site yourself.

A combination of SEO tools is needed to get the best results. The SEO packages described below offer a variety of tools to help you optimize your site for search engines.

SEO tools compared

While we’ve listed numerous features of each SEO tool, these comparisons are summaries only.

Internet Business Promoter (IBP)

Known for their link popularity tool ARELIS, IBP also produces a three-step suite of tools to help you promote your website:

1. Page optimization
• Generate, analyze, and edit keywords
• Optimize for the top 10 search engine rankings
• Optimize the title, link texts, and other parts of the web page
• Validate the HTML
• View the site via a spider simulator

2. Page promotion
• Submit your site to search engines and directories
• Search for sites that might add a link to your site

3. Results tracking
• Verify search engine positions automatically

Price: $179.95 or $349.95.

LinksManager

Links Manager is designed to help users manage reciprocal linking. It doesn’t require any software downloads, and current links pages can be imported into it. Some of its features:

Link organization and formatting
• Organize your links into multiple categories, subcategories, and “most popular links” lists
• Store the links on your own server
• Highlight newly added and featured links

Link management and tracking
• Remove dead links temporarily via a dead link checker
• Check whether or not reciprocal links at other sites exist
• Rotate links automatically
• Deny link submissions according to the criteria you set via a blacklist
• View the most popular keywords on your links pages

Price: $19.95 a month.

SEO Administrator

SEO Administrator automates website promotion with tools that can do these tasks:

Keywords and site visitors
• Track your site’s position for your keywords in over 30 search engines
• Report on the keyword weight and density of your site as well as of competitors’ sites
• Suggest keywords that are relevant to each page
• Analyze your site logs to find out about site visitors, keywords used, referrers, and more

Search engines and directories
• Check which pages at your site have been indexed by various search engines
• Check Google PR, the number of inbound links, and whether or not the site is listed in the DMOZ and Yahoo directories
• Show the automated descriptions that search engines display for your pages

Price: from $70 to $150, depending on the version.

SEO Elite

With SEO Elite, you can find out exactly what your competitors are doing and copy their strategies. You can find out about your competitors’ web pages:

• Keyword density and prominence
• Their and headings
• Their meta keywords
• Whether their site is listed in the Yahoo directory
• Which websites your competitors are advertising on

Concerning link partners and search engines, SEO Elite can:

• Find thousands of possible link partners
• Track details about pages with inbound links
• Check whether or not reciprocal links at other sites exist
• Indicate which of your pages search engines have indexed
• Keep a record of where your site is ranked for search terms

Price: $167.

SEOToolset

The focus of SEOToolset is to provide data to help with website promotion. The toolset includes:

Your website
• Keyword density analyzer
• Keyword selection tool
• Reports on rankings for keywords, page names, and indexed page counts
• Link partner finder

Search engines and directories
• Engine-specific keyword research
• Traffic checker for keywords
• DMOZ category selector
• Search engine submission tool
• Search engine ranking monitor

Your competition
• Keyword research summary
• Link analysis of inbound links to competitors’ websites

Price: $90.00 per quarter per site.

Web CEO

The 10 tools in the Web CEO package are designed to help you promote and maintain your website, improve search engine results, and analyze site visitors. A summary of these tools:

At your website
• Keyword research
• Website optimization
• Inbound link tracking
• WYSIWYG website editing and file uploading
• Link checking
• Website monitoring
• Stats analysis to track visitors, ad campaigns, transactions, and more

Search engines and competition
• URL submission to search engines
• Search engine rank checking
• Tracking who links to the competition

Price: $295 for one person. A free version is also available.

WebPosition

WebPosition, one of the oldest and most popular SEO tools, offers a five-step SEO process:

1. Determine your position in search engines
• Create search engine ranking reports
• Monitor your site’s placement in search engine results

2. Research and choose keywords
• Identify the most searched and least competitive keywords

3. Optimize your pages
• Compare your pages to those of top-performing sites and specific competitors
• Detect when your competitors’ pages have changed
• Be alerted to changes that could affect your site rankings

4. Design and submit your pages
• Use Page Builder and Upload Manager to design and maintain your site
• Submit your site to search engines with the Submitter tool

5. Analyze your results
• Track the correlation between search rankings and revenue
• Import top-performing keywords

Price: $149 or $349.

How to hire an SEO firm

If you’d prefer to hire an SEO firm instead, do your research. You’ll be spending a minimum of a few hundred dollars, more likely thousands of dollars for a medium-sized or larger website.

While many SEO firms are good at what they do, the field unfortunately has its share of scammers as well. They may tell you that a variety of tricks such as hidden text or cloaking will improve your site’s position in search engines. In reality, these techniques may get your site banned from search engines. More information is at these pages at Google.com:

• Webmaster Guidelines
href=”http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

• Search Engine Optimizers
href=”http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

If you’re considering an SEO firm, ask how they measure success. Will your site hits be organic? Look at the sites of SEO firms’ clients and the site for the SEO firm itself. Do the sites rank well for keywords at these sites? The search engine results for relevant keywords will indicate how successful an SEO firm is.

Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for http://www.websitesource.com and http://www.lowpricedomains.com with experience in the website hosting industry.

Every now and again, people come to my site and complain about the high price of ghostwriting. Then they run off to Elance to hire a writer for $5, $10 or $15 an article.

Sometimes they try to stand me down and push my prices down to that of another ghost writer. I don’t play along. My ghostwriting prices are as low as they are going to go.

I understand that a business person must try to keep their costs down, but there is another side to this.

Writers are skilled professionals. Other skilled professionals such as plumbers, electricians, etc. are paid a minimum of $55 an HOUR for their time. They charge $55 just to knock on your front door, then they charge $55 an hour after the first hour.

You pay it because you have to get the work done… Either that or you have to crawl under the house yourself.

A well-written article can take anywhere from one hour to two hours to write. Depending on the topic and the necessity for research on the topic, a well-written article on some topics will require 3-4 hours to research and write.

Good writers know their worth. I know of a professional copywriter who writes only sales materials. He knows his worth and he charges accordingly. Through him, a five-page sales letter will cost a cool 10 grand. And, he is worth every penny he charges for his services. His sales copy produces lots of sales. http://www.instantwebprofitsmentoring.com

With the constant pressure to push our prices down, some writers have decided to take the work that has been offered to them. After all, they have bills to pay and families to feed.

Now, they write articles for $5, $10 and $15 an article. But, when they compromised their prices, they also made a compromise with their integrity. They still believe that they should be paid $100 or $150 for an article, so what they have done is to take the jobs at a lower rate to get some income, then they turn around and sell that same article to ten or twenty people.

Their justification is simple. "The person who bought this from me screwed me, so I will screw him back."

Once the first person has pushed the writer to compromise his or her integrity, there is no going back. It is all about the money now. The writer is going to make his or her money one way or another. And the market has forced them to do it in a way that they may not like to do.

It is a mindset. If you pay a writer what he or she thinks they are worth, then they will not feel inclined to screw you over.

If you treat your writers right, they will treat you right.

All of us are skilled at something. Do you bring your best skill to the table and then accept being paid peanuts for your skill?

Yeah. And you expect others to behave differently?

Instead of telling your writer what you are willing to pay, ask your writer how much they need from you in order to GUARANTEE that they will not sell your material to anyone else. Then pay your writer what he or she asks from you.

To do otherwise is inviting trouble.

EzineArticles.com and Isnare.com are not the only article directories putting the brakes on duplicate content, offered by several "writers". Directory managers everywhere are putting the brakes on this practice.

What it is coming to is if you do not pay the fee required to Guarantee exclusive content, then you are flushing your dollar bills down the toilet. People are going to know that you are using non-exclusive articles and they will penalize you for doing so.

Here you are, you are trying to pass off content as materials that you wrote youself, and everyone knows that you did not. If you wrote it yourself, how come others are saying they wrote the same content themselves? You couldn’t both have written it!

Through my own ghost writing business, I personally guarantee that we will not resell your articles to anyone else. My competitor, Allwomencentral.com does the same for their clients.

We both still have our integrity, and we do not discount our prices to match other ghost writers. We know our worth, and you should too.

Bill Platt is the owner of http://thePhantomWriters.com Bill specializes in the distribution of reprint articles for the promotion of his client’s business websites. Articles distributed by Bill reach tens of thousands of publishers and webmasters. While most of his clients write their own articles, some of them engage Bill and his ghost writers to create Exclusive Content for their own promotional use. All ghost-written articles purchased from thePhantomWriters.com are GUARANTEED to be sold ONLY to the client who has purchased it. In business since 2001.

The idea behind this article arose from a simple observation: joining with my web page fattori arcani (in English arcane factors ) a Seo national contest, I have been able to explode doubts and gossips about Google that have been going around for a long time in the SEO sphere and had the chance to test in a good lab what really affect Google spider (Googlebot) and what leaves it totally indifferent.

The reason why this experience revealed itself so much fruitful is very simple: normally when you work as a SEO you find yourself in a competitive and confused scenery, competitors’ pages can be studied and analysed, thus giving you a hint of what worked and what did not. Nevertheless, you must deal with a silent speaker since the competing Seos are anonymous names hidden behind their company’s logo.

The backlinks have been accumulated in years and it is difficult to state with certainty what really revealed itself effective and what did not. You go through the page code trying to grasp its secrets, but often you end up crediting some elements with an enormous weight though their influence is nearly irrelevant.

Joining a contest like this, however, a dialogue is established among opponents which work together to learn which factors produce a serp rise. They assist to the sudden expansion of the serp to thousand of results in few days where first had been only desert, and, at the same time, check the creation of new backlinks thus controlling their actual influence on the serp.

This long premise is necessary to understand the scenery in which my web site was developed: the home page has been created in just twenty minutes (as can be seen by the particularly raw look of the page) with the single purpose of conducting a test on search engines, particularly Google,which is a reference point to the positioning studies for any website because of the enormous share it draws. The result of the tests and studies has been a progressive and continuous review of the pages in the semantics and in the structure, a surgical job that slowly took it to the highest rankings on the serp of Google.

A successful experiment hence, from which arose the idea behind this article: the idea of sharing with others my conclusions, in accordance with the principle of “community” behind the contest and the net. I will try to unfold in this article the stage and the factors that have brought this site to be top ranked in Google (and other search engines).

When the contest began Google only returned a handful of results for the combination of keywords fattori arcani (arcane factors): few results in the serp and mainly pages devoted to the topics magic and tarots. It was obvious that the search engine had associated the query to the thematic (and semantic) area of occultism. Immediately, in a sort of mass hysteria, the competitors rushed to record dominions composed with the words arcane and factors. As far as my experiences are concerned, I made a false start since I was too slow to register the best dominions and had to choose a second-choice dominion.

In a couple of days the trend of the contest (and the doom of the new pages, mine included) seemed to be already set: Google showed in its serp only pages with a high degree of "seniority" and/or backlinked by high-PR-websites (obviously of ownership of the competitors), most of them related with the occultism topic. If it had all came to an end this way, there would not have been any article and in this moment I would be in some SEO forum complaining about the faulty working of Google. Fact is, in the following days the scenery changed completely and brand new pages began to climb serp: among these pages there was also my own…

But a technical digression is highly needed: what happened behind the scenes of the websites and of Google to cause such a revolution? Two essential things happened:

1) Google started expanding its queries associating the combination of the keys arcane factors to the topic of positioning and optimization as well.

2) Competitors’ pages had been slowly reviewed and edited along these two thematic and semantics areas, magic and SEO positioning.

But the main question is: How was it possible that my web page was shifting from the status of search engine ghost to the highest positions of the Google serp? We have to keep in mind that I did not have any backlinks from own web sites because I did not want to soil clients and corporate pages for a personal, playful contest. Furthermore I had a brand new dominion and I had to pay attention to another issue: contents. It is very difficult to create interesting subjects in so few time, in order to induce other websites and directories spontaneously to backlink to your website. Who could take an interest in recommending a nearly empty page, featuring just a recurring and obsessive use of the words factors and arcane. I had to develop a double strategy: one for backlinks, the other one for optimization.

Studying my (visually poor) own web page I almost immediately noticed that it had a potential element of interest for the visitor: it represented, indeed, a sort of real-time surgery operation on search engines, as it was itself an experimental web page created for the only purpose to climb the serp, I could take advantage of this element, taking updated records of what had been changed. It was itself a page that can be also a storyteller producing itself information about the contest, explaining the techniques while using them. This simple idea gave me the opportunity me to create interest ( which means backlinks) from pages and directories that would have otherwise overlooked my webpage. It is a simple lesson: the cleverness of a SEO can neither be measured by his networks of connections nor by the extension of his promotional only sites. The imagination of a SEO is also of high importance, showing thus how much he is skilled in coming up with elements of real interest for pages which, originally, had nothing really captivating. I could come up with many other examples but the most important thing is to grasp the concept of creative web marketing and to keep it always in your mind.

I had found a solution for the backlinking problem (external optimization), yet I had to deal with the internal optimization of the webpage. This is a main issue when your goal is to meet the ranking standards of Google and other search engines. I had to make my best effort to optimize the page, beyond the well-known principles of the SEO’s science. The quality in the optimization of a web page is not only determined by the meta structure or by keyword stuffing. We are dealing with advanced search engines, capable, such as Google, to quickly expand the thematic area of a query deducing by the ”supply” (the web pages) associated with that keywords what the navigators’ demand should be.

Even if it is possible, at least theoretically, to deceive the search engines with technical trickeries as spam and keyword stuffing (dizzy repetition of key words), it is advisable to do more and better than that: You should present the text in a readable and grammatically correct form and, above all, you should identify the topics and semantics that fit best the search engine query .We should always keep in mind, as we tweak our page for internal optimization, that Google uses thesaurus to find synonyms and create term classes that fit the combination of keywords. In the example of arcane factors the thematic areas are two: positioning and magic. Starting from this observation I decided to get the most out of this idea and to exasperate it, playing with the synonyms and the semantic areas to positively impress Google. There is another lesson in this experiment: instead of stuffing your webpages with endlessly repeated keywords, try to understand what is the true question asked by Google, what thematic (and semantics) area it associates to your keywords.

The most peculiar thing about this test is that it exposes a lot of common beliefs such as that a webpage cannot climb or even appear in the serp of Google before a period of at least three months, that Google rewards the advertisers, that a backlink from a Pr5 page will necessarily bring you on top of the ranking.

There is, at last, another important lesson, perhaps the most important one, that can be drawn from the experiment of the contest arcane factors, a thing that should be obvious but that even the best SEO often forgets: Google has become the internet colossus that is now thanks to a good algorithm and to excellent ranking criteria that are held more secret than the Coke recipe, that in the turn of a few years revealed themselves superior to those of the competitors. It is evident that the years elapsed have not been wasted and the algorithm has grown in complexity and effectiveness. Let us write it on the computer, let us pin it on our clipboard, the important thing to keep always in mind is: It is nonsense treating Google as a antediluvian search engine degrading ourselves to childish and naive tricks. Instead we have to learn to treat Google as a serious and sophisticated engine: certainly it will reward our efforts.

Antonio De Gio is a webmaster and seo operator : he lately joined a national seo contest with the website http://www.fattori-arcani-faq.com and founded his personal web agency : http://www.webdesigngenova.com

The advent of Internet has affected lives of almost the entire world and websites, e-mails and chating on net none need any introduction even for young kids. There is an outpour of websites throughout the Internet all offering numerous services to attract the potential visitors online. The question actually matters is what’s the foolproof way to keep visitors glued to a particular site and not jump to other numerous sites that are upcoming each new day. What makes one of the web pages much more popular than the other when both are based on almost similar theme. The answer lies in the way of presenting the information and the simplicity with which the users can avail services offered.

One site that has proved to rise at a highest pace in the web world in a shortest span of time is unarguably the google. It’s been a hot favorite amongst the search engines on web and the one that is most preferred by web users. It’s simple design targeting only the specific service that it intends to provide and a very efficient scripting language behind the scene has won a top position among the most popular sites in the web world. Google the name actually does not require any introduction it’s already headed on top of the list for advertisers and regular or casual visitors on net.

Some time back the Google team started the service of e-mail even that caught the fancy of online visitors in a very short time. It offers its users with lots of free space on Internet around more than 2000 MB and still amount of space is increasing each day. One more aspect that makes it different from its counterparts is membership-acquiring process, which is possible only through invitation by anyone already using Google.

Next, good news is that the Google team is shortly coming up with its new venture for offering instant messaging services for its users. Just as the earlier performances by Google this too promises to be a messaging service with a difference. It definitely would offer newer facilities and opportunities for its visitors something quite better than what the existing chatting services offer. The facility would be readily available for existing users of gmail account and others can also avail this opportunity to create a gmail account and register themselves at the Google site.

Just as e-mail has been popular around the globe similarly the instant messaging system captured the hearts of frequent visitors on web. A client “Gaim” in required to be installed on the computer that wants to use the Google instant messaging services. This client program is capable of performing various tasks required by its users. Apart from the new registrations pouring in by the advent of Google talk current gmail members would also be more than happy as now they would not need two id’s on their computer one for e-mails and the other for instant messages. Google talk makes it easy for all its members to manage their entire Internet requirements at one single place i.e. the Google site and to add flavor to already existing recipe is the news that all of this is free

Mansi aggarwal writes about google talk. Learn more at http://www.ugfc.org/2005/08/google_talk.html

Choosing your domain name is a no-brainer, right? Not so fast. Your domain name, or URL, can have vast consequences in both the online and offline marketing arena. Long or difficult to spell domain names can be the death toll for any website, long before its even been given a chance at success. Short or clever domain names can make people remember where to go more easily, while keyword domain names can often bring in unintentional, yet quality, traffic as people type in whatever.com.

If you already operate a successful business it’s important that you purchase a domain name that will compliment any branding strategy that you have already put in place. The most obvious thing to do is to get your business name as your URL, however if you’re late getting into the game you may find that your business name is already taken by another similarly named business or by a domain name squatter, or possibly a future competitor. Purchasing a business name domain name isn’t always the right way to go, and when left without that option, a keyword domain name might work just as well, if not better.

If you have not yet established your business, you may want to wait on deciding your business name until after you have found an available domain name that is suitable to your marketing efforts. The following are some things that you need to consider in regard to what domain name will best help you achieve your marketing interests.

Build Your Brand

Whether you like it or not, your domain name is an important part of your branding efforts. Your domain name goes on your letterhead, business card, printed materials; it must be spoken verbally over the phone, presented in email communications, and appears in the search results when your site ranks well on important keyword searches. Because of all this, your URL must be able to fit into your long-term branding strategy.

Keep it Short & Memorable: The best domain name is one that is relatively short and memorable. Long domain names or domains with hyphens are often just too cumbersome for someone to remember or even pass along to others. Are you better off telling a potential customer to visit debbies-hair-care-supplies.com or debshaircare.com?

Secure a .com

I strongly recommend purchasing a .com domain name as opposed to a .net, .info, .biz or anything else. If your chosen domain name is not available in a .com, keep looking until you find one that isn’t taken. You’ll find it worth the extra effort as .com domain names are by far the most common and most remembered. When telling a potential customer to go to your website, you may tell them to go to mysite.net, but what they may actually hear is go to mysite.com. If that happens, which is often the case, you’ll be sending someone to a competitor rather than your own site.

Once you secure your .com domain name, you might also consider purchasing the .net and other extensions as well. Securing the alternate extensions, whenever possible, can be a great strategy to keep a competitor from purchasing and building a site with a similar name as yours.

Don’t Hyphenate

Avoid getting stuck with a hyphenated domain name as your main website address. While it may be easier to read in print, it is very difficult to speak it. Try telling someone to go to "window dash coverings dot com" or "window hyphen coverings dot com." See what I mean? Most of the time people will type in windowcoverings.com which would again direct them to a potential competitor.

Spell Words Properly

It is usually not a good idea to use incorrectly spelled words in your domain name, even if you’ve done that to create a clever business name. The exception to this rule is if you have secured both the correctly spelled and incorrectly spelled URLs. You’ll want to make sure you use proper redirects to send visitors from the correctly spelled URL to your main (misspelled) address.

Here is a quick example. Without using a search engine, find a website which would be verbalized as "On Site Graphics." Where did you end up? Did you find onsitegrafix.com? Most people probably won’t, which clearly demonstrates why you want to use proper spellings of words in your domain, at the very least as a redirect to your real domain.

Before going out and buying the first domain name that comes to mind, take a step back so you can think it through first. While you can easily change your domain name before your site goes live, once you’ve begun the work of establishing your web presence changing a domain name is not quite a simple. The best possible domain name is one that is both a keyword domain and your business name such as outdoorsportinggoods.com.

Stoney deGeyter is president of Pole Position Marketing, a search engine optimization / marketing firm providing SEO and website marketing services since 1998. Stoney is also a part-time instructor at Truckee Meadows Community College, as well as a moderator in the Small Business Ideas Forum. He is the author of his E-Marketing Performance eBook and contributes daily to the E-Marketing Performance marketing blog. (ez)

There are literally thousands of online companies brashly promising to generate a “ton of traffic for your website.” Most of them use those exact words to lure in anyone desperate to improve website performance.

Usually, the solution is expensive, and will be at best a flash in the pan, bringing a temporary surge in web stats. At worst those companies can get you banned immediately from one or more search engines, leaving you with the task of building your web presence all over again from scratch.

There is No Instant Solution
The real secret to achieving a satisfying level of web traffic will take a little time, and not a little effort. But it will be worth it because your traffic, and therefore your web presence, will be stable and reliable. Even disturbances in the online community resulting form a Google shakedown shouldn’t affect you. I actually gained a little in my web ranking after Google’s Jagger update in October 2005!

You’re probably wondering by now what the heck I’m talking about, so I’ll get right down to it.

I’m talking about Search Engine Optimization of course. Increasingly referred to as SEO, true SEO is by definition organic, and that’s how many consultants refer to it.

What’s organic? Good question.

If you have employed any gimmicks or fly-by-night techniques to get your site listed with the search engines then you are not organic.

Organic listing comes about with time and effort, doing the following things:

• Carefully select keywords: these will be words or phrases that a searcher would use if he were searching for your site. The better your choices, the more traffic you’ll get.
• Simple web design is best. It loads faster and doesn’t distract the surfer from the business of gathering data and taking action. At the very least, stay away from Flash movies and excessive Java scripts.
• Pick navigation that doesn’t foil the search engine spiders when they come crawling around.
• Come up with some quality content that is interesting, gets your message across, and also let’s the search engines know you’re there.

Now let’s take a look at each of these in turn.

Selecting Keywords
How should you select keywords? Some SEO copywriters and experts make it all seem so complicated. It really isn’t. You need a free tool for checking on the popularity of the keywords you choose. I love Overture: http://inventory.overture.com/

Also, take a look at the first five or six sites that come up in a search for your products or services. They can usually provide valuable pointers to keywords that you might use. Also, you’ll get a good idea of the standards you’ll need to exceed to surpass those pages.

Minimize Page Loading Time
Keep your web graphics as small as possible. Try and overcome the urge to be flashy: your words are the most important thing on your website, along with a good dash of white space. Too much detail will only distract your visitors anyway. The faster your loading time, the more visitors will stay to read what you have to say.

Navigation
Never use graphics for navigation. The search engines cannot read the words, so you are wasting a valuable opportunity for SEO. Worse than that, the search engines cannot navigate through to your other pages.

Create Catchy Content
It may take some time, or a little investment to get the content you need. If you know you’re not up to the task, then bite the bullet and contact an experienced SEO copywriter. You will consider the cost a highly profitable investment once you begin to see your website climbing the search engines, and the traffic begins to come pouring in.

Whatever style you choose to employ, some rules remain the same. Your sentences should be short, clear and to the point. The words should be skillfully woven around the keywords so that the copy flows, and does not sound stilted.

Remember to add keywords to your page title and links to other pages. This will also help your ranking.

This is basically it, in a nutshell. It’s not rocket science by any means, but you could refer to it as rocket fuel for your website!

Patricia Skinner is an experienced SEO copywriter and published author. Here’s what just one client has to say: "John Hanney recommended you as the best content writer in the game!" Drew Hubbard of DesignPeople. February 6, 2006 http://www.wellwrittenwords.com http://www.seomemo.com

Reciprocal linking scams have increased immensely during the past year. Initially we thought that this problem only related to gambling and casino related websites but an audit of our commercial link partners suggests that it is a serious problem within the broader online community.

Over the past eighteen months, we noticed that our page rank was slowly declining despite the fact that we were continually adding new link partners to our link directory. We had slipped from a five down to a two before we finally identified the exact cause of the problem.

Out of the first 100 links on our anchor site, only seven were still being reciprocated.

We recrawled the sites where no link was found with a second spider and got exactly the same result. Then we started manually checking the sites where no link back was found and started discovering patterns of deliberate link fraud.

The scams in order of popularity amongst the scammers – 1. The link on the home page to the link directory remained but clicking on it or specific directory links produced a template style page with a few casino banners or simply a page with no directory content – This scam was most popular with the owners of multiple domains with the .co.za and .co.uk suffixes

2. The link on the home page to the link directory remained but clicking on gambling or casino related links returned a list of links to sites owned solely by the same person or company. The worst offenders in this group preferred domain extensions of .biz, .us and .md

3. The link directory index page remained but the link directory had been severely pruned and most remaining links were to the site owners other sites or to casinos. This one is common across all suffixes.

4. Links not clickable – links to the directory and various pages within the directory remained intact. At the time of their link exchange campaign, their links were clickable but at some stage after that the code that makes the link clickable was removed and the site name was placed in bold text so at a glance it appeared to be a legitimate clickable link. This scam is most favored by sites that place a miniature screen shot of the index page of your site beside your back link.

5. A variation of the previous scam. When you run your mouse pointer over the page, the ‘links’ change color but no URL displays in the search bar at the bottom of your browser window. Right click has been disabled on the page so that most people looking at the page cannot see the code. If you use Dreamweaver MX or later, highlight the part of the page you want to look at and then using Control C copy it to the clip board and then use Control V to paste it into the design side of a basic Dreamweaver page. When you click on code you can see what they were attempting to stop you seeing. It may work in the later versions of similar authoring programs. Worst offenders are a poker room and a media company operating out of India.

6. One way link exchanges – usually you are contacted by a search engine optimization company or the SEO person for a large group of websites offering you multiple one way link exchanges with half of their sites if you will link back to the other half of their sites. After a few weeks or months the links to your sites are deleted. The worst offender in this group is a prominent search engine optimization company located in India.

7. Your link starts out on a page with fair page rank usually attached to a domain with high page rank. But after a few weeks is moved to a boon docks page with no page rank that will never be indexed. – common amongst higher PR sites.

8. The link directory is on another domain with no page rank. When you click on the link to the directory on the home page, always watch the bar in the bottom of your browser window and see that the link you clicked is in fact on the domain with which you are exchanging links – watch especially for domain names that are very similar e.g. one letter different in the spelling or a .net instead of a .com and link pages that are hosted on the domain of a link management company. Also watch for redirects. If suspicious go back and click the link again. Often the redirected URL flashes up for only an instant or it just takes an inordinate time for the page to load compared to other pages on the site. If in doubt search for a site map - very popular with some owners of multiple bingo sites.

9. Sub domains of domains with no page rank. Sub domains are supposed to always rank lower than the parent domain. (Of late I have found a few sub domains with up to PR3 attached to a domain with no page rank) If the parent domain has a page rank of zero then link pages attached to that sub domain will almost always be zero so why trade a good link for a dud link?

10. We have never fallen for any in this group but many novice webmasters do so regularly. Beware of high PR sites offering you a link exchange on one of their inconsequential internal pages with the same PR as your index page in return for you placing a graphic link to their index page on your index page. This is a deliberate attempt to steal your hard earned traffic. A variation of this one is they have a number of new sites listed on their index page each month and visitors are encouraged to vote for the site they consider to be the best and you are asked to ask your visitors to vote for your site at the high ranked domain. The purpose is still the same as in the first example in this group.

11. We no longer trade links with sites using Linksmanager unless the link to our site is to be on a hard coded page. You can search in their search box for their link to your site and if they are still linking to you, your URL and site description will be returned but no information to show which page your link is on. Google usually indexes only a few pages in each category of dynamically generated link directories. If your link has not been added to an indexed page, it is unlikely to ever end up on one. When we had a large number of indexed back links, no link manager links were ever returned in a back link querry.

12. Be wary of link exchange requests from webmasters using anonymous e-mail addresses because when they delete your back link they also delete the anonymous e-mail address.

13. Beware of webmasters with PR 5 or above sites offering you a link exchange with a high PR site and an inspection of their link directory suggests that your link will end up on a non indexed page i.e. a useless link that is unlikely to ever improve. If the link exchange was with a PR 2 or 3 site there is at least reasonable potential for the PR of the page to increase if the link directory has been fairly constructed.

Reduce exposure to link scams

To reduce your exposure to such scams it is essential to carefully vet all potential link partners in the first instance. Enter link back partner details in a database. As an absolute minimum, enter their URL, the location of the link back on their site, the page rank of the page on which your link is located, the date of the link exchange and a real e-mail address for the contact person.

Use a good link checking program monthly and contact offenders as soon as you find your link is missing from their site. This is now essential to keep link partners honest. This problem is a direct consequence of the current page rank system and fierce competition for top rankings. It is easier to retain existing link partners than to continually find new ones.

Points to look for when Assessing Potential Link Partners

Before trading links, look carefully at the other site – 1. If there is no link to the link directory on the index page –Reject. You will get no traffic from that site.

2. Look at the structure of their link directory and count the number of clicks from their index page to where their link to you is likely to be located and then deduct that number from the PR of the site’s index page. If that page is PR3 and there are three clicks to get to the page on which your link will be located, that page will have a PR0. That link will be worthless unless the site gets a minimum of a PR4.

3. If you have not already done so, download Google’s tool bar. If the page rank bar is grayed out, when you are looking at a site, never trade links with that site. The grey bar is said to indicate that the site is banned by Google. I do not know if that is true but I have only ever seen two sites produce grey bars.

4. A growing number of sites with dynamically generated link directories have no page rank on any link pages even though the directories are often constructed in such a way that you would expect the page to rank to be 2 points below the home page. I do not know how most are achieving this. The visible way is to have multiple folders and index pages leading to the links pages and the number of clicks from the home page destroys any potential page rank for the link page. A rare method is to add a no index command for the link directory in their robots.txt file.

Just remember links to such sites are one way links from your site to their site. You give them a good link and they give you a worthless link. A link on a page with a PR0 is a non indexed link and carries no value regardless of the page rank of the index page of the site to which it is attached. When you do a back link check on your domain in Google, you will notice that very few links to your domain that are on Google indexed pages with a PR of less than four are returned in your list of back links. This is why I and others consider that Google now discounts the value of such links.

For indexed pages, count the number of links on the page. The first factor in determining the value of the link is the page rank of the page on which it is located. The second factor is the number of links on the page. The value of the link to you is roughly the page PR divided by the number of links. Of course no one outside of a chosen few at Google knows the actual formula but that is a rough approximation and the reason most webmasters will not trade links with sites with more than 40 links to a page unless the page has a very high PR.

A link on the bottom of a good content page is always better value than a link on a directory page as more people are likely to click on it.

When on the receiving end of a link exchange request, do not hesitate to ask for your link to be placed on a specific page and do not hesitate to reject link requests from sites that do not adhere to basic acceptable linking practices. When considering link requests from new sites, look at any other sites that belong to or have been built by the webmaster proposing the link exchange. Most importantly, look to see if existing link pages have been indexed and the structure of the directory. This will be a good indicator of what to expect for the new site.

When you create your own link directory, consider a hand edited directory with the links at the same level as the rest of the pages on your site. That way your link pages will be only one point below your index page and you will attract more link requests because of that. Many high PR sites will not trade links with you unless you can place their link back on a minimum of a PR4 page. That way you can start shooting for the top once your index page makes a 5 as opposed to a 7 with the way many link directories are set up.

When you are shooting for the top, it helps you get those high pr links you need to make it to the top.

Article by Brian Osborne. Brian is an I.T. professional and the webmaster at http://www.winnersrun.com, a site focusing on gambling strategies that also includes some articles of interest to webmasters.