I’ve been reading about SEO for a couple of months now and been stuffed with tricks and tweaks about keywords and key strings. I have read all about black and white hat SEO and all recommended guidelines and I’ve started to think more and more about what everybody is screaming about in their articles. "Content is king" or "Content rules" they say. But why on earth do the search engines put so much weight on all the SEO tricks and tweaks? Isnt it time to get back to basics?

I’m talking about the vast importance of getting incoming links from high rank websites, the importance of the page title, the keywords, the keywords in the URL and so on. When people are searching for something on the internet, they are usually looking for information, looking for products they want or services they need. The content of a site should answer for the ranking of the results, not sites with tons of incoming links or tweaked websites. When I search for ”swedish computer forum” I really want to find computer forums where they speak swedish and only forums for that matter, not high page ranked websites that frequently contain the words computer, forum or swedish.

I know that it was first meant for the title, the meta keywords and meta description to summon up the content of a site, but today its only used and taken advantage of by skillfull webmasters to make their sites climb the ranks. I know what I’m talking about because I’ve tested alot of tweaks on a website of mine and with anly two rows of content I reached many top 5 rankings in only three weeks using keywords and key strings that had tough competition.

Now that the Internet is full of skillful SEO marketeers, wouldnt it be better if the ”search engine owners” put less effort in fiddling with formulas that include url, titles, meta tags, incoming links and all the other stuff we know about, and instead using content as the only ranking factor? Or at least make the distance between the importance of content and importance of all the SEO tricks, alot greater than it is today.

This takes me closer to the point I want to make. Why do web directories even exist on the internet? Arent the search engines enough? Well, the web directories exist simply because the search engines are not doing their job. People use web directories, mainly because they have already tried finding what they are looking for through ordinary searches, but havent found it. The reason for not finding what they are looking for could of course be that people dont know how to use search engines, but this only brings me to another existing problem which I’m not going to talk anymore about, namely that people learn how to use search engines when it should be the search engines that should learn how people are searching. This has alot to do with semantics so I’m leaving this subject to people who know more about it.

A search engine should be a huge single directory. What I mean by this is that when spiders crawl the web, the spiders should not only categorize the websites. They should be able to understand the essence of the content on a specific website in order to categorize the site. Only when this has become reality, the webdirectories would be obsolete and a search engine would be perfect. How come we havent reached this milestone yet? I bet there are people who have thought of this long before me. I believe I’ve found the answer to that but first….

think of all the advantages a perfect search engine would bring:

• Webmasters wont waste time on SEO, instead they would emphasize on the site’s content, bringing more quality to the Internet.
• There wont be millions of sites about SEO, because it would be useless information. (Unless the sites would be about the history of SEO)
• It would be easier to find what one is looking for, since search engines ”know” how people search for information.

Overall the Internet would consist of more quality sites instead of what we have now - millions of pages with advertising, link directories and other useless information.

The only disadvantage I find is:

• Less money for people who prosper on the Internet…

Well, what do you know? We’re back to square one…

Habil Kantur M.Sc. Computer Science.
Currently working as a salesman in Sweden.
Been running the website Perfekt Syn - lasik ögonlaser och ögonoperationer since October 2005.
Bli rik och tjäna pengar på internet. Gratis online skola.

Your website is ready. Your content is in place, you have optimized your pages. What is the last thing you should do before uploading your hard work? Validate. It is surprising how many people do not validate the source code of their web pages before putting them online.

Search engine robots are automated programs that traverse the web, indexing page content and following links. Robots are basic, and robots are definitely not smart. Robots have the functionality of early generation browsers: they don’t understand frames; they can’t do client-side image maps; many types of dynamic pages are beyond them; they know nothing of JavaScript. Robots can’t really interact with your pages: they can’t click on buttons, and they can’t enter passwords. In fact, they can only do the simplest of things on your website: look at text and follow links. Your human visitors need clear, easy-to-understand content and navigation on your pages; search engine robots need that same kind of clarity.

Looking at what your visitors and the robots need, you can easily see how making your website "search engine friendly", also makes the website visitor friendly.

For example, one project I worked on had many validation problems. Because of the huge number of errors generated by problems in the source code, the search engine robots were unable to index the web page, and in particular, a section of text with keyword phrases identified specifically for this page. Ironically, human users had problems with the page as well. Since humans are smart, they could work around the problem, but the robots could not. Fixing the source code corrected the situation for human and automated visitors.

There are several tools available to check your HTML code. One of the easiest to use is published by the W3C (http://validator.w3.org/). While you’re there, you can also validate your CSS code at W3C’s page for CSS (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/). The reports will tell you what source code needs to be fixed on your web page. One extra or unclosed tag can cause problems. With valid code, you make it easier for your human visitors and search engine robots can travel through your website and index your pages without source code errors stopping them in their tracks. How many times have you visited a website, only to find something broken when going through the web pages? Too many too count, I’m sure. Validating your pages makes everything easier for your website to get noticed.

As I said before, what works for your website visitors works for the search engine robots. Usability is the key for both your human visitors and automated robots. Why not provide the best chance for optimum viewing by both?

Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Marketing company serving small businesses. She has specialized in Search Engine Optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O’Reilly Media, Inc., a technical book publishing company.

Copyright © 2002-2005 Search Innovation Marketing (http://www.searchinnovation.com) - All Rights Reserved.

Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without modification, including the bio information. Please include a hyperlink to http://www.searchinnovation.com when using this article in newsletters or online.

Let’s face it, advertising is extremely expensive. Fortunately, there are some simple and free ways to promote your website without paying through the nose.

1. Join an Online Discussion Group

There are any number of discussion groups and bulleting boards on the Internet. Find one that interests you and is likely to attract the type of people who fit into your target market, join it and participate. Be as helpful as possible to the other members of the group, and don’t forget to put a link to your website in your signature line.

2. Place Your URL on All of Your Existing Stationary and Advertising

Your existing clients may not know that you have a website, and won’t use it unless you constantly remind them. Place your URL on all invoices, receipts, envelopes, letterheads and business cards. By the same token, if you are running an existing advertising campaign, ALWAYS include a reference to your URL. Prospective clients will appreciate checking you out before contacting you.

3. Talk it Up!

Mention your website in every conversation. Mention it on the phone, mention it at social functions, mention it to the clerk at the grocery store. This strategy works best if you have an easy to remember domain name. The more you talk about it, the more visitors you’ll get.

John Pierce is the Customer Support Manager for Gold Zero Web Hosting and the Webmaster of Article Beam.

Ah, the meta keywords tag…

I’m surprised to see how many webmasters, still to this day, stuff dozens (and more) keywords into the meta tag in hopes of delivering visitors to a site. Surely, they know by now that this only hurts the chances of qualified visitors finding their site on the search engines.

It is debatable whether the meta keywords tag should be used at all anymore. Google reportedly no longer uses the meta keywords tag in determining a site’s ranking. Yahoo does still use the meta keywords tag; albeit reportedly places little weight on it.

Search engines used to rely heavily on the meta keywords tag in an attempt to determine which keywords were relevant to a web page. Unfortunately, this practice eventually lead to the misuse of the tag. The sophisticated search engines of today are able to examine the actual keywords in the body of a web page–rendering the keyword meta tag much less significant.

The risks associated with using the meta keywords tag may out way the benefits.

Risks

• Using keywords that are not relevant to (or not used in the content of) your web page can decrease your rankings in the major search engines
• Your competitors can easily view your targeted keywords and use them to build a competitive SEO or PPC campaign against you

Benefit

• A small advantage in positioning with some of the major search engines

Should you use it or loose it? You decide…

Mary E. Archer is president and founder of Strategic Ranking LLC, a national search engine marketing consulting company based in Richmond, Virginia. Learn more about Strategic Ranking’s search engine optimization, search advertising and news search engine promotion solutions at http://www.strategic-ranking.com

Good Content: The Key To Search Engine Ranking

What drives visitors to your website and keeps them there? Good content.

Content is Key

Good content is key to website promotion success. All the bells and whistles in the world will not hold an audience like compelling information. Ask yourself: Why would a visitor stay at my website? What are they looking for? What do I have that they need? What holds them there once I’ve got them visiting? You have to tell your story in a way that will keep your visitors interested and coming back for more.

Get Those Visitors

The first part of the process is getting visitors to your site through search engine promotion and other traditional marketing methods. As you increase your visibility, more visitors will come to see what the commotion is all about.

Keep Those Visitors

The second part of the process is keeping them there. If you provide quality information that is easy to access, you are giving the visitor what they are looking for. Don’t give your visitors a reason to click away. Quality content means happy visitors, and with enough happy visitors, you become an "authority" on your topic. Having a site recognized as an authority means good ranking in the search engines.

Know Your Audience

So how do you get your visitors to stay on your site, and to return to it? First, you need to understand your audience. Who are you trying to reach? Create your pages with them in mind. Do you want to reach a narrow audience, or will you try to reach all levels of readers? Buzz words may make sense to you in your business, but will they reach your target audience? If you are a high-powered underwater basketweaving consultant, focused only on serious underwater basketweavers, you can keep the discussion on your site fairly technical. If, however, you really want to spread the joy of underwater basketweaving to a wider audience, you may want to keep the tone more general, giving newcomers to underwater basketweaving the information they need to become as enthralled by basketweaving as you are.

Get Your Visitors Involved

So what kind of content do you need to provide for your visitors? If you have a site selling gardening books, you will have lists of the titles you have for sale, an order form, and contact information. Everybody else selling gardening books will have these pages too. How do you rise above the crowd? How do you stand out as the definitive gardening book website?

Write Articles

One technique that you can use to good effect is that of writing articles pertaining to your site’s topic. After all, who knows more about gardening and gardening books than you? Not only does this give your visitors yet another reason to keep coming back to your site, but it also allows you to reach out beyond your site. There are many other websites out there looking for authoritative information on your topic. Find those sites and submit your articles to them. This creates a "win-win" situation: the other web site gains the benefit of your knowledge, while you are further recognized as an authority in the field. Getting a link from that site back to yours brings more visitors to your site, and increases your site’s link popularity.

Keeping an archive of articles on your website builds your knowledge base. You can refer visitors to your articles when answering their questions. People searching for information on the topics you have written about will find your articles listed in their search results. Once they arrive at your site, maybe they will buy something from you: if you know so much about planting bulbs, maybe your site is the place I should buy my bulb-planting books.

Other Offerings

What else can you add to this mix? Think about adding professional gardening book reviews, a gardening book club, FAQ’s about gardening, gardening articles, a rating system for books, audience book reviews, and other gardening-related topics. Adding this type of information gives your visitors more reasons to keep coming back to your site. Offer free tools, create a forum. Set up a newsletter for your audience with your topic, adding in a discount for your product for newsletter readers. Give your audience a reason to come back to your website.

What Results Can I Expect: Google PageRank

A primary example of how this works is Google’s PageRank. One of the most important aspects of ranking for Google and other search engines is good content. Google wants their search engine users to find what they are looking for, a successful search experience for their users. The keywords included in your site are important; after all, those are the terms your potential visitors are searching for. Now not only do you have your catalog pages and ordering information, but you also have a more in-depth treatment of the topics you have addressed in your articles, book reviews, and other materials. More keywords in more places means you have a better chance of matching a potential visitor’s search.

So how can you "rise above" the other online gardening bookstores out there in the search engine listings? Link popularity can be the next important piece that allows you to differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack. All other things being equal, search engines that pay attention to link popularity will list your site higher in their results if you have more links coming back from other sites which have a focus related to yours. In other words, if your gardening bookstore has a number of backlinks pointing to it from the websites of gardening clubs, nurseries, and so forth, your site will be seen as more authoritative. The more authoritative a website looks to Google through link popularity, the higher that site will rank. After all, if all these other gardening-related sites point to your site, they are demonstrating that you have something important to say. That is another reason why it is important to have your material published on other websites.

Conclusion

Maintaining good content is a stepping-stone for your visitors to delve in deeper to your website. Taking the time to build your content and provide for your audience will pay off in good search engine ranking and returning visitors.

Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Marketing company serving small businesses. She has specialized in Search Engine Optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O’Reilly Media, Inc., a technical book publishing company.

Copyright © 2002-2005 Search Innovation Marketing. http://www.searchinnovation.com All Rights Reserved.

Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without modification, including the bio information. Please include a hyperlink to http://www.searchinnovation.com when using this article in newsletters or online.

You’ve just got a new website and it looks beautiful, but unless you take some active steps to promote it, it will just sit there like a new car without any gas and empty tires.

If you are not sure where to begin, here are seven steps that are free or inexpensive. All of them will help you to get your new website rolling.

1. Tell Your Friends – Often we are thinking about reaching the unknown millions of people out there surfing the Internet, but we are forgetting the hundreds of people who we already know. Look at your e-mail address book and get the word out, tell your business contacts, friends, relatives and tel them to tell their friends too. Send an e-mail to all the people who made inquiries or bought products or services from you in the last year.

2. Link to Your Own Site – Once again we are often thinking about getting some unknown people to make a link to our websites and we are forgetting possibilities that are nearby. If you already have one website, make sure that this site is linking to your new site. A website without any incoming links to it will have a very low page ranking in the all-important Google search engine and will face an uphill battle to be seen in Google search results, especially if you are in a very competitive category.

Even when your site is in the construction stage you, or even your web designer can link to the new site from another already well-established site, mentioning that the new site is under construction. If you already have several sites, then link them to your infant site. It will help the new site to be seen in competitive search engine listings even in its debut period.

3. Get a paid inclusion in one of the big search engines. It takes 4-6 weeks to get listed in Google, and other search engines are equally slow. However there are a few fairly important search engines that have inexpensive express inclusion programs. If you join these programs, then your site will be listed in 48 hours. Inktomi, which provides results for MSN and 100 other search services, has an inclusion program which costs $39 for the first URL that you submit, and subsequent ones cost $25. The value of the Inktomi submission is that they revisit your URL every 48 hours and if you make changes on the page you can see the results in the MSN listings very quickly. Thus, you can tweak your pages and see how it affects your position.

Similarly there are paid inclusion systems for Teoma (which feeds the popular Ask Jeeves Search Engine), Alta Vista, and Lycos.

4.Add your site to the Open Web Directory and the major search engines. Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to search engine submission. Forget about the sales hype that tells you to add your URL to 300, 000 search engines. Only a few search engines and directories provide the lion’s share of Internet traffic. If your site is in good shape, no longer under construction, then go to www.dmoz.org. This is the Open Web Directory. Find the category where your site fits, and make a submission. If you are accepted here your site will appear in the many search engines and local directories that use the results from the Open Web Directory. Inclusion in this directory usually takes time but it will help you a lot. Similarly submit your site to Google, Alta Vista and All The Web, these are the remaining giants where you can submit for free.

5. Start a reciprocal links campaign – Once you have given yourself a link from your other sites or from your designer’s page, you can go out and ask other complementary sites for links. As I mentioned, these incoming links will help your page rank in searches but they will also generate traffic. If you can find specialized sites or directories dealing with your particular product or service, then a link on one of these sites can provide a large amount of targeted traffic.

6.Write an article about your product or service – If you have a website the chances are that you are an expert in the field that your site is all about. Write an article about your product or service, or write an article related to the subject matter of your site. Submit the article online to various websites and e-mail lists dealing with your topic. The publication of your article in a big e-zine, or on a popular web site can get your new site off to a roaring start.

7. Promote Your Site Off-line – Now that you have a site, put the URL on your stationary, on your cars and trucks, in your brochures, business cards, your newspaper and TV advertising, and circulars. You can also put it on hats, t-shirts, mugs and other items. The cafepress.com has a program enabling you to put your URL on these items and even sell them online.

If you follow all or some of these steps your new site will definitely receive visitors and within a short period can become an important asset to you.

© Copyright 2003, Donald Nelson, all rights reserved.

Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor, and social worker. He has been working on the Internet since 1995 and is the proprietor of A1-Optimization, http://www.a1-optimization.com, a firm providing search engine optimization, copywriting, reciprocal linking, and other web promotion services. He publishes a monthly ezine, A1-Web Promotion Tips, available at http://www.a1-optimization.com/newsletter.html

This article contains information about SEO (search engine optimization) within you website coding, then later in this article I will say some tips on how to gain more traffic to your website.

So first we all no what not to do on are websites that is classed as illegal to search engines, if you didn’t know well here is a small list of thinks not to do

1. Hidden links (this includes links that have been made to the same colour as its background or made with small text font) 2. Hidden text this also includes what was said in number one

ok they were things that are not aloud to be done here are some things I would say do not do as it will not help you with your rankings in the SE’s (search engines)

1. To many keywords (and un related)

2. Repeating keywords

3. Placing keywords in your description (when I say this I mean in the same layout as the keywords)

4. Placing keywords in the title (when I say this I mean in the same layout as the keywords)

5. Placing all your keywords in the alt aptitude of an image tag.

So what can you place in the code section for a good SEO friendly page well we will start with the title as this is generated from the coding. You should place your main keywords in your title, but lay them out well not like you lay your keywords out

Here is an example:

Wrong:

Computer, gaming, games, website reviews,

Right:

Computer gaming | website reviews | pc game help

The title that was set out the right way is good because this will help you get better search terms (remember that was an example I would not use that term). Now for the description for your site, you should note that the description doesn’t have to read write fully as long as it does the job on you keywords then its fine because it is mainly for the search engines, ok now we have that covered you should write you description of you site keeping it all related and contain all of your keywords know more that 3 times for each keyword and if you do add them 3 times make sure you have plenty of text, do not do the description to long try you best to make it as small as possible and very relevant.

Now for the best bit copy the description and place it in a comment section not far from you Meta description this will help you out with you ranking a lot and is very safe to do.

Gaining more traffic to your website

Here is some simple ways to gain traffic to your website

1. Join webmasters forums and discuses tips always place a link to your website in your sig section people will visit your website if they find you interesting, also this can help with other things like getting your website scanned by search engine robots more, because forums get scanned a lot by search engines as they are getting updated a lot and always remember to place keywords in your text link.

2. Do backlinks at the most ten a day is good to many can look bad to the SE’s (search engines). The best place to add text links to is directories, there are a lot of free ones on the internet and these will send a steady flow of traffic to your website.

3. Get press release done at least once a month will be great, if you know some one that can write you a very good and interesting press release then you could get into google and yahoo news with it, this will send a lot of targeted traffic.

4. Now this one is the best for your site, always update your website at least every two days then the users that you have will come back to your website, so with this traffic you are getting you should be able to keep with a well updated website.

For more articles on SEO please read my other release or you can visit: http://www.mkpitstop.co.uk we have lots of webmaster tips and resources and a great webmaster forum, thank you.

It used to be that designing an attractive website to promote your company and products was fairly straightforward. After you designed your site and built a few keywords into the code, you would simply submit the site to the search engines or a directory, grab an iced tea and wait for the traffic.

That model worked fairly well in 1996 but if you are still following this strategy in 2005, you are effectively non-existent on the internet. Why? There are now dozens of search engines and directories and somewhere in the area of 80 million websites on the www. Still think folks are finding you?

So how does the average consumer find your company? They type in a couple of keywords into a search engine and are then presented with thousands of your competitors’ websites.

Let’s say your company is Walt’s Widgets. You have a pretty website with pictures of your widgets, a nice “about us” page, maybe some employee pictures and a picture of your beautiful building. It all looks good on the website but when Mr. Consumer types “widgets” into Google, poor old Walt’s Widgets is on page 620 of the search results!

How can this be? Your site is not optimized for the search engines and is not being indexed by the search engine spiders and robots so you aren’t being seen!

Research has shown that the average surfer will only review the first three pages of search results and will not drill down any deeper. If you are on page 62 of the search results, you effectively don’t exist!

Surfers and search engines view a website completely differently and for you to appear on the first three pages of search results is critical to your continued profitability. You must know what the search engines are looking for, what relevance they are placing on your keywords, what elements of your site have a “welcome sign” for the spiders and, most importantly, know what keywords the surfer is using in his search. Just because you sell widgets it doesn’t mean that “widgets” is the term being used the most by surfers when looking for your product.

SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is the process of analyzing keywords, reviewing search trends, analyzing link popularity, building code tags, analyzing your competition, optimizing pages within your website to be search engine friendly, editing web pages, submissions to directories and search engines, and reciprocal link building…just to name a few.

What you are after with SEO is not getting the highest number of website visitors. What you are actually seeking are qualified site visitors who have an interest in buying what you’re selling. Professional SEO can help deliver a targeted audience to your business. After all, what would you rather have? 500 site visitors with a 1% conversion rate or 100 site visitors with a 10% conversion rate?

Professional SEO is critical to your company’s web presence so if your site was designed by your summer intern in 2002 or your bookkeeper’s son as part of his high school “media class”, I assure you that you have some work to do.

Start with a good website design featuring good content and navigation. Then, utilize an SEO professional who can wring the most out of your website and deliver dollars to your doorstep.

Allan Gunnneson is the CEO of Gunner Web Group (http://www.gunnerweb.com), an internet marketing, website design, web hosting and search engine optimization company based in Kansas. Republishing this article is permitted if the content is presented in full and all credits to the author are presented on your site along with the originating URL (http://www.gunnerweb.com).

Website Promotion is a varied enterprise. There are several methods of online promotion, and each website owner has to choose the mix of methods that is best for his or her particular website.

The field of Internet promotion n can be divided into two major categories: free promotion and paid advertising. The first category is similar to what is called public relations in the off-line world, but has its own particular style in the world of the Internet.

Free Internet Website Promotion

The common forms of “free” Internet Website Promotion includes search engine submission, search engine optimization, reciprocal linking and placing content on other websites. I put the word free in quotation marks because it is common to pay others to do this work for you, and even if you do it yourself, some of it can be time consuming and thus, costly.

Search engine submission is important. Even if you eventually opt for paid forms of promotion, it never hurts to be included in search engines. A little known fact is that you hardly have to do anything to be listed in search engines. Establish some links to your website from a few other websites that are already listed in search engines. When the search engine robots come to visit those sites they will follow the links, find your website and put your website in their respective indices. Of course you should also submit your site to the big search engines just to make sure.

Submission alone doesn’t guarantee traffic. If your site is buried on page 25 of search results for a query then you will not get visitors. If you implement search engine optimization on your site it will appear higher in the listings, bringing you traffic, and hopefully business.

Another form of free promotion is to get links to your website from other sites around the Internet. Find directories related to your website and look for an “add url” button. Add your website information wherever possible. You may be required to offer a reciprocal link in return for your listing. Speaking of reciprocal links, reciprocal linking is now one of the most vigorously applied promotion methods on the Internet.

The practice of reciprocal linking started at the very beginning of the modern Internet, with website owners casually trading links with other “cool” sites. Now it is no longer casual because link popularity is a huge factor in the algorithms that search engines use to prioritize websites. In theory reciprocal linking is free, but its cost in time is very great, and there are professional companies that handle this function for website owners.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Paid advertising is another area of Internet website Promotion. Banner advertising was the first form of paid advertising that appeared on the early sites, and it is still around. However, click-through-rates for banners are not very high and in recent years there has been a shift to more effective forms of paid promotion.

Pay per click advertising is perhaps the most widely used form of paid advertising. In this model you get a priority text listing on search engines results pages. These are usually labeled as sponsored listings and they appear at the top of the page before the other listings.

In another form of pay per click advertising, such as Google adwords, your add appears as a text box on the side of the search results pages, near the top. What is common to both forms is that you have to pay for every visitor that comes to your website by clicking on the links from these listings. The fee is based on the target keywords that you select. In some programs very competitive keywords cost $12.00 per click-through, but the fees are typically much lower and start from as little as .05 per visit.

Pay Per Click advertising is excellent for a well focused sales oriented site that has a good conversion ratio. If your selling message has been well presented, then your costs for advertising will be compensated by the sales from the steady stream of traffic that will come to your site.

Choose the methods of Website Promotion that are best for your particular website. If you would like some help in choosing your promotion methods, contact a promotion specialist and get a professional opinion.

Copyright 2005

Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor, and social worker. He has been working on the Internet since 1995 and is the proprietor of A1-Optimization, http://www.a1-optimization.com, a firm providing search engine optimization, copywriting, reciprocal linking, and other web promotion services. He publishes a monthly ezine, A1-Web Promotion Tips, available at http://www.a1-optimization.com/newsletter.html

Much has been said in the highly reputable places like Webmasterworld and Digital Point about this particular type of redirecting links, pagerank and most importantly anchor text value - but HOW does it actually work in reality?

I have come to a few conclusions based on a number of successful and unsuccessful redirects.

This has issues though - especially related to the famous SANDBOX filter for brandnew dead-in-the-water domains. However based on 4 previous experinces I came to a conclusion that this is more or less a hit and miss issue - in other words in *might* or *might not* work. Success rate is exactly 50% on that one. I am talking Google of course. Before the redirect those were brutally penalized domains that had no PR assigned despite a number of high PR one-ways and no rankings for a 4-kwd geo search even in top 500. In 2 cases out of 4 a 301 redirect did transfer all backlinks and PR and - whew! - top 10 rankings for keywords with medium competitveness. So the verdict is - a 301 redirect could be the last resort when nothing else works to get your penalized domain out of google marsches It did work with Yahoo as well but MSN still seems to be pretty stubborn with all 301’s when it comes to passing rankings from an old domain to a new one. This also happens with fixing www vs. non-www issue with MSN. Definitely an issue to see to for huge Microsoft brainiacs.

By "old one" I mean a domain that is at least 1.5 yrs old - in most cases a surefire symptom that your domain is out of sandbox already.

A 100% success rate on that one as far as home page links and rankings are concerned. With internal pages it might have issues as well. Internal pages of the domain do not get back to the old rankings that the redirected domain used to have in full - this is my experience after about 4 months and about 25 cache renewals of those new pages. Some of the rankings did come back though but not nearly where they used to be (for instance #9 where it used to be #2 and so on). SE traffic to those internal landing pages decreased by about 50%. My verdict for this is - hold on to your old domains guys! I would think twice if your medium and long term online and offline marketing perspectives caused by the rebranding are worth losing a good share of your websites traffic in the short term and possibly later on. Having problems with that in MSN again but Yahoo seems to behave in the same way as Google here.

I sincerely hope you found this information useful and perhaps managed to weigh out all pros and cons again.

Valery Zamulin is a professional online marketing consultant, media buyer, professional web design and web development consultant, active Webmasterworld.com member, B.Econ and B.Linguistics. Currently working with Skynetix - mobile software development company.

Please email me if you have further questions regarding all that has been said above.