If your company has selected or will select an SEO vendor to optimize your corporate website for natural search, I offer you kudos for embarking on a process that can generate tremendous revenue for your business. Now, the fun part begins. You’ll need to oversee and evaluate a process that is hard to comprehend, has somewhat intangible deliverables, and where the "timing of results" can’t be precisely defined. Given this scenario, how can you best work with an SEO to achieve the best outcome for your website?

Make SEO a Marketing Priority. On some engagements, the SEO is almost entirely self-sufficient. On others, he or she might depend on the director of marketing, the president, the web designer or IT support to help facilitate the SEO effort. Some of these folks might not see the value of the optimization and don’t view SEO related efforts as a priority. If you can let your team know the critical nature of the work (and your SEO should be willing to help in this effort), the expected results should be achieved that much faster.

Learn enough about SEO in order to ask good questions. Over time, the talented stable of Search Engine Marketing writers at Search Engine Guide have produced a large number of articles covering almost every aspect of the SEO process. Read up. Become familiar with the terminology and concepts. At minimum, you need to be conversant enough to evaluate the metrics of the campaign.

But don’t tell your SEO how to do the work. Too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing for some clients because they lack the experience to place their knowledge within the context of the whole SEO process. Such clients may even feel empowered enough to tell their SEO vendor to take a course of action that will damage their efforts to obtain targeted natural search traffic. But if you have done proper due diligence in choosing a knowledgeable and ethical SEO expert, you shouldn’t have any trouble staying on the right track. Your chosen professional will probably be appreciative that you’ve educated yourself about the process and will be glad to answer your "tough" questions. All reputable SEO vendors should be open and transparent about their methods and work process…don’t work with any that aren’t. And if you are comfortable with your SEO expert, the value of his or her experience should be easily discernible.

Good SEO advice can smell funny. Bad SEO advice stinks. Sometimes it has been a challenge explaining the merits of link-exchange or RSS feeds to SEO novices. Many marketing professionals have cringed when I’ve recommended having at least 250 words on the website home page. Fortunately, I’ve been able to rely upon my own SEO experiences to demonstrate the value of my advice and, if necessary, I can seek out the authority of other experts in the field to support my views. But, "rogue SEO’s" have damaged many websites by convincing site owners to allow them to engage in practices such as link farms, hidden text, and cloaking that violate search engine guidelines. If you have educated yourself enough about SEO to be conversant in the terminology and techniques, you should be able to smell the odor before you step in the poop.

Well-run SEO campaigns still have hiccups. Search engines periodically change their algorithms which can be a boon or a bust for clients. Most recently, Google’s "Jagger" update hurt many websites that followed SEO best practices. I have a client who had an 18-month-old domain that lost excellent Google rankings that I helped achieve in a very competitive field. I explained that based upon my research (and reported by many other SEO’s through articles and forums) that Google has algorithmically implemented the following precepts: 1) It is very difficult for new domains to rank well for competitive terms and 2) Many inbound links must age for 6-12 months before they become effective. Now, it is incumbent upon me to chart a new course to help the client regain what was lost. Conversely, Jagger gave some of my clients excellent results far more quickly than I could have expected.

Measure results. A high-level web analytics solution like Clicktracks 6 (which I use and highly recommend) is essential to measure the success of your campaign. If you are spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on SEO, don’t rely on a $10 per month web stats package. Your SEO vendor should offer advanced web analytics as part of the service…shy away from an SEO who doesn’t use advanced analytics because the optimization decisions on your website will be made based upon incomplete information.

As a client, you need to view SEO as a long-term strategy that has peaks and valleys. Educating yourself about the SEO process will eliminate the "surprises" that are inherent in the process and will make for a far more efficient and productive vendor/client relationship.

About Cube Management: Cube Management provides sales acceleration services to emerging growth and mid-market companies in the technology, manufacturing, healthcare and business service sectors. The experts at Cube Management work across the entire spectrum of marketing, sales and business development to provide customized solutions that drive revenue and profit growth. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process & People to produce winning results.

Being listed in search engines and ranked high on searches is the overall goal a webmaster is trying to achieve when dealing with search engines. Search engine optimization is probably one of the most commonly used words among webmasters. In the Internet market becoming much more critical to business success this is almost natural.

While the professionals know how to verify search engine rankings and listings, the normal user or startup webmaster might not know how to verify these things. The often just type their domain name into the search engine of choice and are happy if they get a result back that includes their domain name. But there is a little more these startup webmasters should know about.

Every page indexed by a search engine is a possible landing page for visitors to enter the website. As more pages get indexed the higher number of possible entry points to the website. But how can a webmaster verify how many pages are currently in the index of a search engine?

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3DomainName.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3DomainName.com

Replace "DomainName.com" with the actual domain name that needs to be verified. A webmaster should also run the following variation to get an impression of what is really out there.

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Awww.DomainName.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.DomainName.com

The next thing a webmaster should check is to see how many other websites are linking to his/her website at all. As almost everyone knows nowadays - the higher the number of links pointing to a website (incoming links) as higher the possible search engine ranking on search can be (and we all want that number 1 spot, right?!). The problem is that Google will never show you all incoming links to a website. But even a ball park number can be helpful in finding out if the SEO work of the past paid off. So, how does a webmaster can get this ball park number of incoming links?

http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Awww.DomainName.com

This command will show the ‘ball park’ number mentioned above. It will give the webmaster a hint how successful the website is and how many people/websites are linking to it.

By researching the information of how many pages and how many links to/for a website are registered/indexed in a search engine a webmaster can gain important knowledge. This knowledge makes it easier to see what works and what does not work when it comes to search engine success for a website.

About the Author

Christoph Puetz is a successful entrepreneur and international book author. Examples of his search engine optimization work can be found at Web Hosting Tutorials, Highlands Ranch and at Credit Repair.

This article can be published by anyone as long as the resource box (About the Author) is posted on the website including the links. These links must be clickable.

Anyone that deals with marketing and advertising on the Internet knows that link popularity is one of the main causes for high rankings. And as we all know, high rankings lead to more traffic, which in turn leads to higher sales. The biggest problem with doing link exchanges and using programs that automate the process is that you run the risk of gaining bad links on your site. Bad links lead to reduced link popularity and in turn can eventually lead to being banned on search engines. Everyone can agree that if you are banned from a large search engine like Google or Yahoo, then your website is in trouble. I have come across a few places that allow you to grad good reciprocal links from ranking sites. You want to do more reciprocal linking because it provides an incentive for both sites to keep the links up.

If you already have a large link directory on your site, you might want to think about using the program Arelis. This gives you the power to control all your links and make sure they are still linking back to you. It also gives you the control to find more targeted links for your website. If you want to find more links for your website, then you should check out www.Link2me.com. This site allows you to search for websites and then the company gets in touch with that website asking for a link exchange with you. It is very easy and hassle free, which I know will help everyone that is spending 60+ hours on Internet marketing. Any little bit helps. This link exchange program is growing and with the more websites that sign up, which is free, the more potential links for the members. Check it out and increase your link popularity the ethical way!

Grayson is the current owner and operator of Overdrive Electronics and is certified for SE Optimization and online marketing techniques.

When you first realize that internet businesses are quite successful, then you want to jump into the Search Engine Marketing train as too… good decision!

After that important conclusion, you will need to think if your company, whether for the type of business, number of employees or for the turnover, may hire an SEM – SEO Company to take care of your search marketing venture or if it’s wiser to have an in-house team to take care of it.

Of course, if you decide to have an external SEO and SEM provider, it’s clear that you will not have to worry about the day-by-day of the internet efforts, as there will be professionals taking care of that for you.

Say you have a Marketing team into your company, but none of them is a Search Engine Marketing Expert, and even they heard –perhaps as much as you– what SEO, PPC and Press Releases are, probably they have not experience on the SEM arena to take important decisions or to understand how, when and what for each internet tool, channel and media work better for. In that case you will find appropriate to take into service an SEM - SEO Consultant Company and guide your team through the best SEM practices.

Search Engine Marketing & SEO Consultant Selection

Be very careful to choose a SEM Consultant who works with White Hat techniques, who is recognized by important entities, and most important: find an SEM Consultant whose renowned clients are pleased working with.

Mr. Daniel Katz is the Business Development Manager at Compucall Web Marketing Ltd - http://www.compucall-usa.com/ - experts in International Web Marketing and Marketing Strategies.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become one of the biggest internet buzz-words recently. Everyone is talking about it. These days it seems there’s an "expert" around every corner promising all kinds of wonderful things to online business owners. Beware! If you are interested in building a long term successful online business, there are few things you should know when it comes to search engine optimization.

Before we move too far along we need to understand a little about the economics of search engines. This will give us a better understanding of why they behave the way they do and why common Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices will continue to provide diminishing returns, eventually into obscurity.

Contrary to a very common belief, internet users searching the web are not the search engine’s customers. Advertiser’s are. Just follow the trail of money and you’ll see what I mean. Internet users are the "product" that the search engines "deliver" to advertisers. Specifically they are selling highly targeted traffic to their advertising clients. When a user types in search criteria, they are expressing their desire for information (or products) related to those search terms. By delivering ads that are directly relevant to the search results, search engines are in a unique position to capitalize on the concept of targeted traffic. For advertisers, search engine users are a gold mine of pre-qualified potential customers and they are quite happy to pay a premium to get their products in front of them.

So now that that’s out of the way, how do search engines (SEs) compete with each other for those advertising dollars? The answer is two-fold and closely resembles the way any marketer goes about increasing sales. The first is obviously to get more traffic to the search engine. The second is to increase the conversion rate of that traffic. In other words the percentage of traffic that results in sales for the advertising clients. So if you own a search engine how do you accomplish these two things? The answer lies in delivering the best search results for any given search criteria. The more relevant the results that a search engine can deliver consistently, the more people will rely on it. This translates into more overall traffic and better targeting of ads to that traffic. Simple in concept… very complex in practice!

A little history lesson

In the beginning, search engines employed some rather primitive methods of determining a web page’s relevance to a search query. These methods proved to be quite simple to reverse engineer and as a result "Search Engine Optimizers" (SEOers) where able to use techniques to manipulate the search results in their favor. This abuse, often referred to as SE spam undermined the search engine’s main commodity, the quality and relevancy of it’s contextual search results. To combat the problem, the SEs developed increasingly complex mathematical algorithms to evaluate pages for possible inclusion in search engine result pages (SERPs). In addition to the traditional "on-page" information that was so easy to manipulate, many SEs began looking at a multitude of "off-page" criteria and giving them an increasing amount of weight in their overall equations.

On-page vs. off-page criteria

There are many different items that a SE looks at "on-page" when it evaluates it. The page’s title, how many occurrences of a searched word or phrase (keywords and key phrases) are on the page and their proximity to one other, what the headings on the page describe, etc. all come into play. The chief disadvantage of using only this information (aside from the ease of which it can be manipulated by clever SEOers), is that it tells nothing about the quality of the information on the page. Until the day comes (and it is coming) when search technology and computing power are sufficient to take advantage of "artificial intelligence" to make sound judgements about the quality of a page by evaluating the page alone, SEs will continue to rely heavily on "off-page" criteria. The reason for this is simple. Nothing compares to human intelligence when judging a page’s importance. Computers running even the most complex algorithms simply can’t do it.

So instead, the bright people who develop search engine technology have realized that by tracking how humans behave and interact with a web page, they can get a fairly good idea of how humans rate that page and the quality of it’s information. This is the "off-page" criteria that we are talking about. There are hundreds if not thousands of different things that are tracked and evaluated "off-page". We know, or at least can make some pretty educated guesses as to what some of these things are. For instance, it is obvious from the collective experiences of many web professionals that SEs keep track of how many links come into a site from pages on other sites with high quality, relevant information. A link from such a source tells the SE that the information on the site that is being linked to is likely to be credible and of high quality as well. A human with related quality information on their site did link to it after all. It’s also widely accepted that search engines monitor their own search engine result pages (SERPs) to determine such things as which results are getting the most clicks (it’s not always the top ones) and how long it is before the searcher returns to the SERPs to continue searching. Obviously if the fifth site on the list is getting more clicks, it’s probable that it appears to more closely match what the searcher is looking for than the ones above it. Furthermore, if the user stays on that site for an hour rather than five seconds it’s likely that they found what they were looking for and the SE will take these things into account.

There are perhaps a handful of individuals in the world who know the whole picture of how all of this happens and if they want to keep their high paying jobs at the major SEs, they’re not about to tell you or me. But it has led to a lot of speculation among SEOers. In fact the SEO industry has evolved into a world-wide phenomena with "professional SEO consultants" charging companies tens of thousand of dollars to "get their web site into the top 10". Some SEOers are continuously dreaming up ways of tricking the engines without getting "sandboxed" (having the engine penalize a web site by dropping it’s rank). The SEs in turn regularly update and change the algorithms that they use to rank pages so that what worked yesterday in SEO may not apply today. The SEOers scramble to catch up and the continuous cycle of "algorithm chasing" continues.

SE’s employ some of the most brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists on the planet and the unfortunate truth is that SEOers will always be at least one step behind them. Next time someone tells you that they can guarantee you a spot in the "top ten" with the major search engines ask yourself this one question. "Are they trying to sell me something?" Then walk away.

Now don’t get me wrong here. I’m not against SEO or anyone who does it. I fact, I firmly believe that a certain amount of optimization is vital to any online marketing effort, particularly at the outset of a campaign. It serves to give a site that little push in the right direction towards building traffic. But I caution anyone not to take it too far. It’s very easy to misplace too much emphasis on it.

So what do we do instead?

This one’s easy. Rather that playing the SEO numbers game with the SEs, we instead give them exactly what they’re looking for in the first place. If you recall from earlier, SEs are trying to learn from and indeed relying heavily on human behavior patterns to rate search results. The are on a mission to provide results and information that are highly relevant and real to searchers (in other words, human beings). So, provide information that is highly relevant to humans and the rest will fall into place naturally and organically. It may take a little longer, but the results will be worth it. Believe me!

Let me illustrate with a couple of examples

John decides that he would like to build a web site and make some money online. He builds a rather elaborately designed site and proceeds to optimize it to death. John’s been reading all about optimization strategies and he pulls out all the stops on this one. He has a page title that’s twenty-five words long (most of which have nothing to do with each other). He’s packed the text of his pages full of his favorite keywords to the point that they are nearly incomprehensible to a normal reader (but the search engines "love them"). He’s cross linked every page so many times that people are actually getting lost on his little 5 page site because they’re clicking on every second word which is underlined. But it doesn’t stop there. He then goes out and submits to every search engine and directory known to man regardless of locale of relevancy to his topic. He joins a few link exchanges and starts trading links with anyone who will reciprocate no matter how poor their site is. Maybe he even pays for a few "high rank links". You get the idea. Before he knows it his site is showing up on the first page of the SERPs of all the major search engines and he’s sitting back patting himself on the back for a job well done.

Mary on the other hand comes up with and idea for an online business web site based on her area of expertise and after researching and identifying a niche in the market. She goes about building a nice simple cleanly designed web site that is logical an easy to use. She puts a lot of time and effort drawing on her experience and skills to write high quality content that is helpful to her visitors (or rather will be when she has some). After writing fifteen or twenty pages of original article content, she decides that she too should do some "optimizing". At this point she’s realizes that the "on-page" SOE is already more or less done. Her keywords and key phrases (which she carefully researched from day one) are appearing naturally though out her articles, her page titles are reflective of the content of the pages, her headings are also aptly descriptive, and her pages navigate with function and simplicity. So, she moves on to the "off-page" optimization. She submits her site to the major search engines and directories. She then researches local and industry related directories and submits to them as well. Finally she identifies several well ranked important sites with in-demand content that is complimentary to her own and will be of use to her visitors (or rather will be when she has some). She drops a friendly e-mail to the owners of these sites outlining the possible benefits of a reciprocal link arrangement. Most, sadly, don’t reply but a couple of enlightened ones do. After reviewing her site they agree that it could be beneficial to their users as well and set up a link to her site. Mary spends the next several months occasionally checking her traffic stats, her rank in the search engines etc., but finds she is still way down on the SERPs if she’s on them at all. Not one to be discouraged though, she continues to churn out several solid articles a week and add them to her site.

Now remember John? He’s been sitting back riding the wave of initial success for the last few months. He’s even made a few sales. But then he starts to notice a disturbing trend. His site is slowly falling in the SERPs and his traffic is dropping off. People are visiting but they aren’t staying long and they’re certainly not buying anything. He also begins to notice that the large number of links he had pointing to his site are disappearing at an alarming rate. Try as he might, he just can’t seem to turn it around…

Mary’s spent the last few months patiently waiting for traffic and continuing to add excellent content to her site. And then it happens. First, a trickle of visitors come. She can see from her server logs that they are being referred from those well-chosen link partners she made agreements with. The search engines have also discovered those links and noticed the high quality sources that they are coming from. They represent a pretty good endorsement and the SE’s are starting to realize that Mary’s site must have something useful to offer. Consequently Mary’s rank starts to improve. Now people begin to find her in the SEs. Even though her site is still a page or two down in the SERPs people seem to like the description and they’re visiting. They’re also staying on her site for long periods of time reading all of her superb content, The search engines once again conclude (and quite rightly) from tracking this behavior that Mary’s site is worth even more rank. Finally the day comes when Mary find’s her site at the top of the SERPs for her chosen keywords and she has a large amount of targeted traffic coming in. She doesn’t quit though. She continues to create new and interesting content and her business continues to grow and prosper. Why? Because she continues to provide exactly what the SEs want. The same high quality content that human searchers are looking for.

…And where did things fall apart for poor John? Well, most of his "link exchange" partners suffered the same fate he did. The SEs noticed the irrelevancy of the links and dropped their weight to zero. His visitors coming in through his first page SERP placement where hitting the back button on their browsers as soon as they realized that John’s site was of absolutely no use to them (even if they could read it or figure out how to use it). Eventually people stopped clicking those links altogether. Additionally, one of the major SEs went through an algorithm change during that time period causing John’s site to lose some additional rank. Things just kind of slid downhill. Did John not work hard enough on his business? Actually in the beginning John worked very hard and the short-term results proved it. The problem is that he concentrated way too much of his effort in the wrong areas. In the long run instead of building a viable online business, all he ended up doing was playing a complex game of "chase the algorithm" with the SEs for a short time (and big surprise, he lost). Oh well, it was fun while it lasted…

I realize that the above examples are a bit of a simplification. But the bottom line is that as search engines become increasingly sophisticated and try harder than ever to deliver results that are real and relevant to humans, you can make your life and theirs much more lucrative by just giving them what they want from the start. Leave the math to the mathematicians and the tricky SEO to the SEOers and go about creating compelling content that humans and search engines alike will love.

Colin Plant is the owner of AtHomeBusinessNetwork.com a resource and community web site for people who have an interest in developing and running successful online home based businesses. He is also the principal of Concept Dynamics Interactive, a full service web design and multimedia firm.

http://www.AtHomeBusinessNetwork.com
http://www.conceptdynamics.ca

Reciprocal linking has been a widely used strategy for web promotion, in spite of requiring significant effort from us webmasters. First you need to evaluate the convenience of every exchange, then do the actual link publishing and finally, it is necessary a periodical check-up of the corresponding link prevalence.

Trying to make things easier for busy webmasters, a wide number of Link Exchange Managers have appeared. These tools are now a very competitive field in the e-Marketing arena. As a result, links in the web have grown much faster than quality contents.

The main purpose of current reciprocal linking is to earn link popularity in the search engines, which means better ranking. However, it ads very little value to the Web, and takes away traffic in the same way as it brings it in.

For the search engines, telling good from bad links is getting more and more difficult, and it makes sense for them to penalize such links.

We have found several evidences showing that reciprocal links are outmoded.

“Google has started to penalize sites that provide two-way links to each other” http://www.ezgenerator.com/blog/180_blog.php?action=frontpage&entry_id=1134567055&comments=comments

“As of October 2005, Google appears to have implemented a new penalty on sites which are excessive with their reciprocal link exchanging”. http://www.ringjohn.com/reciprocal_link_building.html

“Having too many reciprocal links eventually works against you.” http://affiliatetip.com/news/article00368.php

Are Reciprocal Links Dead? http://www.webstatsgold.com/are-reciprocal-links-dead.htm

To verify it, we selected the first 100 websites found in the Google SERP under “SEO”, and ran Back Link Analyzer version 2, which simplifies the analysis task. This tool is free and anyone can check our results.

Reciprocal link exchange can be hard to detect, because it might require complete spidering of both sites. We established a 3-level limit in our crawling.

Some of our findings:

• There was no correlation between ranking and incoming links.

• There was no correlation between ranking and PageRank.

• Keyword density in the domain was a weak indicator of better ranking

• Keyword density inside the home page was irrelevant.

• Keyword density inside the incoming links (anchor text) was relevant. This is the single most valuable ranking factor publicly known, so far.

• Reciprocal linking, either in absolute or relative terms, was found to have a weak negative correlation with ranking.

This facts confirm our perception that more and more sites are now focusing on non-reciprocal inbound links. However, those must be earned with quality content or plainly purchased.

Much easier is a new mode of link exchange, involving triangulation or better yet, quadrangulation.

Triangulation is more difficult to detect than 2-way linking, and quadrangulation even harder. Both techniques are useful for webmasters who manage several websites, since they can use some domains for outgoing links and some for incoming links. Quadrangulation makes easier to compensate the value of incoming vs. outcoming links.

A new generation of Link Exchange Managers with Triangulation and Quadrangulation ability is appearing. Whether Google and Yahoo will start detecting and battling the new schemes is yet too soon to speculate.

John Tello works for http://www.foundfirst.com, a company that makes SEO tools, some within the text processing field like Synonymizer software

There are many question that comes to your mind when one thinks of SEO, In this article I am trying to answer few of those question. If you any question you can ask me at info@varshltech.com

1.) How can I use Robot file; can you give us an example of it?
Ans:- I believe you talking about robots.txt. It’s a file in the main/root directory of a website which informs the crawler/search engine spiders where they are allowed to go, i.e which all pages in the website they should crawl.
A basic structure of robot.txt file is:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
You can disallow folders or files by putting this into the file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /foldername/filename or /foldername
Official guidelines is to keep the number of links per page below 100.

2.) How can I find out how many people have searched for my keywords?
A: There are number of tools available on Internet, but the one that is free and very good is overture, Google for “Overture keyword Toll” and you will find it. The Search Term This Tool will show you number of searches per month on Overture’s network.

3.) What are SERPs?
A: Search Engine Result Pages

4.) What does term "ALGO" implies?
A: An ‘Algo’ is an abbreviation of ‘Algorithm’. (Mathematical formula or calculation that Google uses in order to rank the websites.)

5.) Should I use Google’s Site Map? An example. A: Every site should have a sitemap of some sort. It provides a way for visitors to navigate your website. Google for "sitemap" and you’ll find nice examples, although it would be advisable to follow Google’s

6.)My page is in Top 5 in Yahoo, but not in the top 1,000 in Google. Why is it so?
A. Yahoo and Google use two different algorithms to come up with their SERPs - Yahoo favors on- page optimization such as H1 tags, keyword density, etc whereas Google favors off page with good quality inbound links. If you have put more efforts on page then you will rank higher on Yahoo and vice versa.

7.) How can I find out where I rank on google/yahoo?
A: There are two websites that can help you to find the answer to you question, these are: a) www.googlerankings.com for Google

b) www.yahoosearchrankings.com for Yahoo. (This is for single keywords) If you are looking to track multiple keywords over time then the best (and free) tool is Digital Points Keyword Monitor at http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords (Mind you this is only for Google)

8.) What is Hidden Text?
A: Text that is visible to the search engine spiders/crawlers but not to people who visit your website. Hidden text is primarily used to add extra keywords in the page without actually adding content to a site which may consist of images. Most of the search engines penalize websites which use hidden text to increase keyword density.

Author: Harish co-founded Varshyl Tech in 2005. As director of operations, he oversees the company’s daily operations and develops the strategy for product direction and new product development. Harish has more than five years of experience delivering mission-critical enterprise software solutions for diverse applications such as supply chain management and corporate information delivery systems. Prior to co-founding Varshyl Tech, he was a program analyst with Infosys Technologies Ltd., and also worked as software developer and testing engineer for Microsoft Projects. Harish has significant experience working with Mainframe technology and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University, Karnataka, India. You can also view this and other article by visiting our website http://www.varshyltech.com/home.html

To many websites, webmasters discover that major sources of website traffic come from search engines. Therefore, they are all keen on gaining top search engine placements through search engine optimization.

Based on our several years of SEO experience, we point out some common mistakes and shed some lights to correct it.

1. Cannot Get Indexed by Search Engines, Really?

A garment ERP software solution provider came to me and asked a question: "I have established a new website for 1 year, and found a SEO company to submit my website. However, my website can be found in search engines only when I type my domain name http://www.indigo8-solutions.com in search query box. The SEO company told me

my domain got banned. What can I do?"

Ah, I told them they have been fooled by that SEO company. If you type your domain name in search box and your website can be found, which means your website has not been banned. Interestingly, your SEO company’s domain name is no longer found in Google. Their domain got banned only.

To help them find out their real problems, I found the following in search engines:

a. When typing their domain name in search query box, their site will be displayed in search result. Instead of displaying

Title Tag in the search result, search engine displays their domain name only.

b. Only 1 page is being indexed.

What’s the problem then?

With a closer look to their coding, I found that at the top of their webpage, they heavily use Javascript to present their heading, company name, visible content, and website menu. Actually, many search engines have difficulties in reading Javascript codes.

Solution?

Put those Javascript in external js files and leave the webpages with plain HTML codes. Search engines usually have problems in crawling Javascript. Since their whole site navigation menu is written in Javascript, they should build a sitemap using plain HTML so that search engines can read all of their pages.

One more tips: When you cannot get indexed by search engines, do not blindly believe someone saying that your website get banned. You should firstly look at your website structure and see if your coding are clumsy and make search engines hard to "read" your website.

The problem created by Javascript is not uncommon nowadays. Even a very big Asia Market Research Firm also commits this error. They are now starting to rectify it.

2. Link Building

In many forums, some people are strongly opposed to link exchange and claim that it is a devil and it hurts your search engine ranking and even get you banned.

I personally do not agree. Evidence shows that many top sites are doing link exchange and getting top rankings across all major search engines. In addition, link exchange has been a long used way for traffic building by smaller websites. I do not see why search engines will block people to promote websites using this simple and long used method.

Indeed, link exchange becomes a problem only when you manipulate link text with a pure purpose of tricking search engines, exchange links with link farms, or buy hundreds of domain names and cross-link with your site.

A solution to avoid link exchange hurting you includes:

- Use a wide variety of link text

- Seek link exchange with sites of similar theme

- Emphasize on how many traffic you can get from your link partners instead of search engine ranking

Some webmasters know the importance of link exchange. However, they think that it consumes most of their time and finally give up doing it. A solution is that you can consider using Linkautomate.com to manage your links. This kind of software saves you time in link checking and link page update.

3. Use of Flash Intro

Web design companies try hard to persuade you to use a Flash introduction as your homepage. You think that "Wow! The flash animation is very appealing and it makes your site looks more attractive". However, do you know that it can hurt your website in search engine ranking?

Let me explain..

Search engines analyze website based on text. Flash, unluckily, is not text. According to "How to Design Website Guideline" of Siuchu Suga, search engines are not able to read content presented by Flash. They just treat Flash as an embedded object or graphics only. If you use a Flash Intro as your homepage, you will never get good rankings.

In addition, many Flash intro do not offer additional and meaningful content to visitors. Ask your visitors, how many of them are really interested in reading your Flash Intro before going straight to your website content?

A solution to use Flash or not, please ask yourself whether the Flash intro is really useful and can offer additional information to your visitors? Secondly, instead of a Flash homepage, you may consider making a Flash header together with content at your homepage.

4. Hidden Text and Meta Tags

Webmasters understand that keyword density is a way to improve search engine ranking, and some webmasters use a technique called "keyword stuffing". They will stuff keywords into their webpages repeatedly, e.g. "keyword 1, keyword 2, …. keyword 1, keyword 2…." Well, everyone knows it does not make sense to visitors. Therefore, those "clever" webmasters will make those text invisible. For example, make the text color identical to background color.

Unluckily, this trick no longer works. Search engines are able to detect it, and penalize websites using this nonsense technique. If you do not want your site being penalized, remove those text immediately in case you have adopted this method.

Okay, some webmasters only stuff keywords in Meta Keyword Tags, an area for putting keywords. I am sorry to say that stuffing keywords in Meta keyword tags is also no good. You can only repeat a keyword for 3 times at most. Nowadays, search engines place less emphasis or even no emphasis on Meta keyword tags. So, what is the point of risking yourself by stuffing keywords there?

5. Use of Dynamic Pages

Many websites use content managment system (CMS) to generate their webpages. As generation of dynamic pages are easier for website development, CMS generally use dynamic pages. However, search engines have difficulties to spider and understand them.

To solve the problem, you can consider using Mod Rewrite in case you use Apache server or finding a CMS that can generate static HTML pages.

6. Be a Pagerank Monster

Many search engine marketers are too focused on their website’s pagerank. Everyday, they are talking and checking pagerank.

They perform link building based on pagerank only. In fact, pagerank is only one factor for Google to determine search engine ranking. It also cannot affect your rankings in other search engines like Yahoo and MSN. If you are too concerned about pagerank, you finally will ignore other important optimization criteria.

Therefore, you should repeatedly remind yourself that pagerank is only one of the many factors and you cannot only work on it.

7. Too Believe in Sandbox

Some webmasters propose that a new website will be put into sandbox by Google so that you cannot get any high rankings for highly competitive keywords. Even though their website cannot get any rankings after 1 year, they still believe that it is sandbox effect. Some even says Yahoo has Sandbox, MSN has Sandbox, etc…

From Google’s patent information, there is no clue that such sandbox occurs. From my experience, if your site is new and cannot rank high in highly competitive keywords, it is solely because other websites are more established in search engine world. For example, they have more inbound links, more content, etc. Therefore, webmasters should not focus on finding how to get out from sandbox. Instead, you should put more effort in link building and content optimization. Eventually, you will see your website’s rankings rise.

By Jimsun Lui, who is working in Search Engine Optimization division of Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Limited. The company assists clients in both Chinese and English search engine optimization

I have written articles about website promotion in the past, however things on the internet are always changing and my opinions have now changed. This article is all about my new website promotion ideas, ideas which I use on my all of websites.

A good linking campaign is the main priority. Attempting to increase the number of backward links you have pointing to your website is essential. However you have to be careful. Here is a list of do’s and do not’s.

Do:

Increase the number of backward links pointing to your website slowly

Obtain backward links from within the same industry/market as your own

Build up the number of one-way links your website has pointing to it

Write articles and submit them to article directories

Add your website domain on all of your adverts, documentation and e-mails

Offer the visitors to your site the chance to sign up to a monthly newsletter

Offer the visitors to your site a free e-book

Write press releases

Do not:

Join a link building website to automate your linking requirements. These are tempting to join however are frowned upon by the search engines. Always remember hard work pays off.

Increase the number of backward links to quickly

Purchase too many link text ads

Just leave your website without any promotion, it will not grow on its own

Build hidden pages

In my opinion one-way links are vital. These are the most powerful form of backward link and the search engines love them. I can see no way in which they can penalise a site that is only acquiring these type of links.

The best and easiest way of obtaining these one-way links is by writing articles like the one you are reading. Once you have written the article, you then need to submit it to a number of article directories. You are able to add a link to your website on the bottom of the article and the hope is that other webmasters will want to include your article on their website, thus giving you a one-way link.

I have been writing articles for around a year and I must say it has done wonders for my businesses. The number of visitors to my sites have rocketed and the page rank have also steadily increased.

I hope you have found this article interesting to read and beneficial to you.

Good luck with your website promotion campaign

Stephen Hill has a number of websites including:

manual article submission service

anti aging website

debt reduction information

A good SEO consultant will not only know the tricks of the trade but also how to use them best. An SEO consultant is as much an artist as the web designer. Whereas the web designer knows all of the tricks of the trade in creating a masterpiece of the internet the SEO consultant is the promoter that makes sure people travel to see it.

When choosing an SEO consultant make sure to find one that is willing to not only work with your website designer, or you if you are doing your own website, but also understands your needs. The most important factor is to make sure that your SEO consultant can work together with your website designer as to not impede their efforts. Do what you did when you chose your web designer. Tell the SEO consultant what you need. Give them a time frame on when you need their services to work. Let them know what your future goals are and find out what they can do for you. Internet marketing and search engine optimization hinge on knowing what keyword or keywords web search surfers are searching for on the web. By doing extensive keyword analysis you can zero in on the best keyword terms to use when setting up pay per click advertising, writing keyword articles, and optimizing web pages.

There are a number of effective tools available for keyword analysis and keyword suggestion.

Yahoo Search Marketing

Yahoo has an excellent tool for helping webmasters and Internet marketers determine what keywords people are searching for on a monthly basis. This tool, located at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/index.php

Wordtracker

One of the more popular tools for doing keyword research is Wordtracker. WordTracker can be found at http://www.wordtracker.com Simply looking for a great rating among the search results of major search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN? In any case, you must indulge in finding keywords. Yes, by finding keywords, that are apt and according to your niche market, you will certainly be able to improvise on your search engine ranking.

The purpose of searching keywords is to find out the exact phrases that are requested by people in the searches carried in the major search engines. If your website has the relevant information about the most searched terms and keywords, your website would be rated higher by the major search engines. The entire process of improving search engine ranking for a website is a wide process and is called search engine optimization. . Finding keywords is one of the most important parts of search engine optimization.

To start the keyword search for your website, make a list of the keywords related to your website. You can easily find the keywords by using online keyword services. One popular keyword service provider on the web is word tracker. Using word tracker tools and services, all you have to do is to type a keyword and wait for the list to appear on the computer screen. And you will you have a direct access to hundreds of keywords related to the keyword you have typed in the box.

Mehul vyas is a founding partner and Director of Marketing for Vyas Infotch Pvt Ltd. The firm specializes in the development and implementation search engine optimization technologies and solutions for the improvement of web site placement within the Internet’s top search engines. The company is regarded by many to be the world leader in its field, with clients in 57 countries around the world.

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