While Search Engine Optimization and Advertising are specific tasks to engage, Search Engine Marketing is the key component that actually determines hXow you will optimize and advertise on the web. It is the research, analysis, strategy planning that will determine the execution methods.

There is a distinct difference between SEM and SEO.

* SEO is the process of making changes to the HTML code of your web pages to be content rich in your specific niche and key phrase. This would include such tasks like modifications to your keywords, description, title tags, comment tags, alt descriptions, and title descriptions of anchors and the actual text of your web page.

* SEM on the other had is the process of integrating a variety of methods to insure the SEO work is successful. These methods will include research for your business, competitor analysis, link exchanges, articles, news, newsletters, audience analysis, and ultimately the method employed to generate traffic to your website.

It is the same distinction between the words "marketing" and "advertising".

* Marketing is the process or technique of promotion, selling and distributing a product or service.

* Advertising is to make your product or service publicly known; an announcement to call public attention by emphasizing qualities to arouse a desire to purchase.

There are two words that are feared in the SEM world: Patience and Change!

You will need ongoing commitment to making search-engine ranking a long-term investment in your website. You will need to give it time and energy - it isn’t a quick fix.

Considerations with search engine patience:

* Search engines often change their ranking formula.

* Each search engine has its own algorithm (formula) to determine site ranking.

* META tag keywords are not a magic bullet to improve your ranking.

* Search engines can take many months to index new information, so patience…patience.

Search engine spiders can be extremely slow to index new information, so be patient! It may take months to see your changes affect your search engine ranking. Remember, a website is a dynamic marketing tool that you are building over time. Treat it well, give it a little love and attention, and your long-term rewards will be well worth your efforts!

If you thought nowadays search engine marketing can still be done by acquiring (and using) an auto-submission software, drop this thought immediately. This brings us to the other feared word, "change"! It is inevitable for technological changes to take effect with search engine algorithms. Websites drop rankings from 8 to zero over night. Because things keep changing, search engine marketers need to devote a good deal of time staying on top of the SEO industry and its trends. Watch your page ranking, your website statistics, your Alexa traffic ranking. All of these tools will allow you to find out if there are any significant changes occurring on the web.

Melih Oztalay is the CEO of SmartFinds Internet Marketing providing businesses with turn key marketing solutions on the web. Please visit SmartFinds at http://www.hsfideas.com

Google is the undisputed heavyweight champion of search engines. Most SEO (search engine optimization) companies pitch their tent around Google. Apart from being the king of search engines, unlike Yahoo and MSN, Google does not serve sponsored results on top of its search results, drawing away considerable attention/traffic away from the search results. Hence ranking high with Google is worth all the trouble it takes to get there. Little wonder then, that most SEO revolves round Google. When Google sneezes, the SEO world catches cold. When Google tweaks its search algorithms, SEO experts scamper back to the trenches to gaze at their crystal ball, to figure out what Google is up to.

What makes Google tick is simply because they serve the most relevant results for most search engine queries. They do this through their secret formula (algorithms), propounded by eggheads from academia and the industry, to rank sites according to its relevance to the search phrase. To continue to do that, they constantly tweak their magic portion, knowing fully well that SEO gurus are at their tail, trying to crack their secret code and beat the system. Before Yahoo and MSN went solo, they sourced for search engine results from Google.

It then makes simple common sense that to come tops in Google, you have to deliver unique valuable content, since that is what they are looking for. It is a simple win-win scenario. Google needs links to excellent content sites, so that they serve it to searchers, pull in traffic and drive up advert revenues. Searchers come to Google, and Google sends them to you. You end up with free highly targeted traffic to your site. Every one smiles to the bank.

This seems too simple for most webmasters to comprehend. There must be a shorter more convoluted way. Crack the secret code, and you are in business. So they try to figure out how Google ranks sites, and then go ahead to tweak their pages to suit. Much effort is put into trying to optimize the few pages they have, instead of adding more unique content. They play around with keyword density at the title, meta and alt tags, body, columns etc. They take their focus completely away from growing their site/business, and become fixated on tweaking the few pages they have to death.

There is nothing wrong with getting your keywords in the right places. The simple fact is, the Google Algorithm is very complex, and takes into account so many factors, that optimizing your pages alone will not do. Google is no fool.

Google’s ultimate aim is to judge pages through the human eye. Since that is not feasible, having to contend with close to nine billion odd pages or so, they have to develop their own artificial intelligence to judge sites based on users response. To remain on top, they have to constantly improve on their algorithms. For Google algorithm chasers, that means constantly chasing after the wind. Google can afford to pay for the best brains in the world to develop its algorithms. Most SEO experts are managing to make a living. They are out numbered, out-classed, out-maneuvered and out-brained (if there is term like that). There is close to zero chance of catching up with Google. If you manage to, it is only for a season. At the next algorithm upgrade, you are left behind, yet again. It is a waste of time, energy and resources.

Commonsense makes the most sense, ultimately. Google is looking for unique content. Give it to them. You give them content and they send you traffic. Looks like a fair deal. This means you build your site for human visitors, not search engine spiders. Ultimately, human visitors determine the success of your site. If your content is not of much use to humans, there is nothing much search engine spiders can do for you. If you manage to get high rankings for a season, you will simply end up with window shoppers: they land in your home page, and off they go. To make it worse, by the next database update, your site will simply disappear from the radar. Your fifteen minutes fame is over. You are back to the trenches.

You have to decide upfront who you want to focus on, your customers/visitors or the engines. Decide who pays your bills, visitors or spiders. After you have decided, remain focused and stick with it. The search engines are looking for content. If you have a valuable content site, they are looking for you. Keep providing valuable content. Someday soon, they will recognize your efforts, and put you where you belong, at the very top. It is only a matter of time.

Usiere Uko is the webmaster of the Financial Freedom Inspiration website and editor of the monthly Financial Freedom Inspiration Newsletter, a free ezine to inspire you to exit the rat race and fulfill your God given dreams. To subscribe or visit the site, please visit http://www.financial-freedom-inspiration.com. He is also webmaster of http://www.newdawninspiration.com

Don’t you just hate the process of exchanging web site links? Finding sites that are relevant, placing a link on our site, contacting the web master to request a link swap, waiting for a response, that may never come… you know the routine.

Of course no one wants to exchange links, not really. Yes, we want lots of links from important sites pointing to our webs, but we aren’t all that keen on having links pointing out again. We have worked hard to get visitors - why would we want to send them away again, and not just away, but maybe into the arms of a competitor? Not only that, but links pointing out take some of your web page’s PR with them. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a better way to increase link popularity?

In the last couple of months I have found such a way and it works like a charm. Oh I have done the hard yards trying to find high PR sites that wanted to exchange links with a low PR site. There aren’t many altruists in this game unfortunately! Most of the sites I exchanged with were not doing much better than me. Those that invited me to exchange links with them were either totally unrelated to my topic or were link farms.

I was spending a lot of time trying to figure out a new way to get links in. I bought link exchange software, which made it easier and quicker to find relevant sites, but the results were mediocre. You need a lot of links pointing in to make a difference to your ranking, and its hard to get more than a couple of dozen by link exchange alone.

Like all good ideas its so obvious when you discover it that you can’t think why it took so long. What do web masters running information sites need, apart from lots of links? New content of course! They have to keep their sites lively so that visitors will return. If they have an ezine it has to be filled with fresh content each time it goes out. Offering relevant content for free solves the web master’s problem. That’s right, there is a great market for articles to feed this ever hungry machine.

When you write an article and syndicate it all you ask in return is that whoever uses it includes your links. This means that you get links coming in from a lot of sites, many with high PR and you don’t have to reciprocate. If your article is published in an ezine it may reach thousands of people, after which the ezine is frequently archived, together with your links.

This isn’t the only easy way to get links that I have discovered, there are others and if article writing doesn’t appeal there is bound to be one tactic that does. If you would like to learn more about article writing and other ways to raise your link popularity I can highly recommend a downloadable video tutorial by Louis Allport. He teaches 7 fast ways to get links and ultimately increase traffic to your site. Most of them are free. Take a look: http://www.net-abargain.com/. This course is new and is being sold for a low introductory price of $24.95 for the month of December.

About The Author

Liz Beresford is a writer who also manages several web sites, one of which is http://www.net-abargain.com/.

Search Engine Optimization is one way in which you can get your website in front of the search engines. But what do you need to do in the Search Engine Optimization process? And is it worth it? I will give a quick overview of some of the factors involved and I’ll let you determine for yourself if it is worth it.

KEYWORDS

First and foremost, search engines look for keywords and keyword phases in which to index your webpages. So you must prepare each page for the search engines. Thus, when you are writing copy for your website, keep four or five keywords that you want to emphasize for that webpage — then weave the words into the copy.

However, don’t blatantly use the keywords over and over again — or as they say — use keyword stuffing — or the search engines will penalize you for it. And, needless to say, your readers will click away, if the flow of the copy is so obviously stuffed with your keywords that it jeopardizes the quality of the copy. Quality of copy first, keywords second.

META-TAGS

There are several meta-tags that the search engines look at. The two most important are:

1. Title
2. Description

Both the Title and the Description Tags should have your most relevant keywords. Now, the keywords meta-tags is not used by Google, but the other search engines may utilize them. Are they important? It really depends who you are talking too. Some say, by putting the keywords into your webpage you are giving your competitors the edge. Others, feel that if your competitors want to know what keywords you are using they will find a way. (I’m of the latter’s thinking.)

LINKING

Linking is another important factor in Search Engine Optimization. Without proper linking — or establishing a linking campaign — your great site may not be found by the search engines. You need to find ways in which to allow human visitors, beside yourself, to find you.

INBOUND LINKS

Inbound links — links pointing to your website is very good for search engine rankings, and gives more ways for human visitors to find your website.

How do you get inbound links? Write articles and place them on article directories for ezine publishers, newsletter publishers, or bloggers to pick up.

Blogs is another way in which you can get one-way links to your site. Again, that same article you wrote for the article directories can be put in your blog and then submitted to a Blog Directory. Just do a search on Goggle for "Blog Directory" and you should find enough to keep you busy.

OUTBOUND LINKS

An outbound link is a url that you have on your site that points to another website. An outbound link on your site means that you feel the link has quality content for your readers — and you are redirecting them to it from your site.

So, what does outbound linking offer you? You can see what an outbound link can do for another website, right? Well, by carefully linking to other sites– relevant sites — you can increase your own relevancy.

So be careful who you link too — because outbound links figures into the entire ranking algorithm process — or restated — your page ranking.

To conclude, this overview is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO. It’s not an easy task, and it is time-comsuming. Will you see a quick return moneywise. No, but SEO will eventually give you the money you seek, as well as, offer you longevity. And isn’t that what you want–longevity? I know I sure do. I would rather be the tortoise, and not the hare — and slowly, but methodically move in the direction of my dream of a home career. If you take the wrong shortcuts, you can lose your dream and your home career. So, is SEO worth it? I think so. How about you.

Vickie J Scanlon has a BBA degree in Administrative Management and Marketing. Visit her site at: http://www.myaffiliateplace.biz for free tools, articles related to affiliate marketing, ebooks, how to info, affiliate opportunities – all aimed toward the affiliate marketer and the marketing process.

Targeted traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. The best source of free-targeted traffic to your site is the search engines. To be visible at the search engines, you have to appear in the first three or so pages of the search engine result pages (SERPS). The quest for attaining high rankings at the search engines has spawned a whole industry, the search engine optimization (SEO) world.

The long-term strategy to succeed at the search engines is to focus on adding unique content to your site, consistently. Visitors to search engines are looking for content, and if you provide it, you drive considerable traffic to your site.

There are a lot of factors that come into play in attaining high rankings at the search engines. Your domain name, title, meta and alt tags play a role as well as incoming links etc. The weight of Page Rank (PR) in Google algorithms has been a matter of ongoing debate and speculation in the SEO world. Studies have reported low PR sites getting high rankings in SERPS while high PR sites pant at the bottom.

While the weight of other factors in overall site rankings are debatable, there is no controversy as to the role of content. It wins the marathon. Google rode to the top on the wings of content, serving relevant content to searchers. To remain at the top, Google is constantly tweaking its ultra secret algorithms that ensure that relevant content sites rank high in its SERPS.

Some webmasters fall into the trap of focusing on a few major keywords, and going to war with them, instead of diversifying their keyword base by constantly adding new unique content. As thousand of sites go up everyday around the world, it becomes increasingly difficult to win the search engine war for your favorite but highly competitive keywords. Instead of dissipating energy over winning in highly competitive keywords, as you add more content, your keyword base increases and you begin to show up tops for non-competitive keywords.

As you continue to add more content, the trickle of visitors becomes a flood and before you know it, your inner pages begin to draw in considerable traffic. Instead of becoming fixated by the front door (home page), you begin to get hundreds and eventually thousands of visitors that land at your site through your content pages, and eventually get to visit your home page. If you look at your content pages a fish net, the more unique content you add, the more you spread the net, and the more fish you catch.

Developing excellent content for your site does not only bring in visitors, but webmasters too, looking for valuable content to complement their site themes. Quite a number of them will link to you without asking for a link back. This boosts your link popularity and PR, for what it is worth, and enhances your search engine rankings.

By creating an excellent content site, you are creating a valuable resource for surfers and search engines, and they will reward you appropriately. Surfers will reward you by delivering your most wanted response (MWR), be it to place an order, click through to your affiliate merchant sites etc. Search engines reward you with high rankings, which mean more traffic. On the whole, you end up building an online brand and become recognized as an expert in your field. This opens other doors: speaking engagements, partnerships, adverts and endless possibilities.

It all started with focusing on your visitors, and consistently adding valuable content until your site becomes a one-stop resource center for your area of interest.

To win with content, you have to be very patient. It does not happen overnight. Low content well-optimized sites will initially overtake you. It may take anything from three months to one year or more, before you begin to see results, especially if you factor in Google’s sandbox effect. If you keep at it and never give up or lose focus, you will begin to see visitors from search engines begin to show up in your traffic logs. It starts as a trickle and builds up gradually. If you check out the search engine for your rankings for that keyword, you will be pleasantly surprised to see that you begin to show up in the SERPS, maybe attain page one.

Your days of obscurity are over. This is not the time to go to sleep. Keep doing justice to your subject matter. Continue adding unique valuable content. Become the preferred destination for surfers looking for content on that subject matter. The world will make a beaten path to your door.

Stay focused.

Usiere Uko is the webmaster of the Financial Freedom Inspiration website and editor of the monthly Financial Freedom Inspiration Newsletter, a free ezine to inspire you to exit the rat race and fulfill your God given dreams. To subscribe or visit the site, please visit http://www.financial-freedom-inspiration.com. He is also webmaster of http://www.newdawninspiration.com

The Web is constantly growing and changing. The key issue for users of the Web is to know what is there that might help them, or inform them, or entertain them, and to find out in a timely fashion without spending all their time looking. There are two main ways to do this, searches and summaries.

The most common way that users today find the information they want on the Web is by doing a search using one of the many search engines such a Google (www.google.com). You enter keywords and the search engine sorts through all the pages that it has indexed and tries to give you the most relevant results. Even with this a search often returns thousands of hits. Also, since new pages are being added every day and many pages are constantly changing to reflect the current news or information, the search results may change over time. And slight changes in the keywords can also result in very different search results. Even with these limitations though, searches often provide the quickest and easiest way to find what you want.

If you think of the Web as one huge, constantly changing book, search is like looking up words in an index and then going to the pages indicated to see if they contain what you are looking for. Another way we find what we want in books is the table of contents. This provides a summary outline of what is in the book. It is hard to imagine a table of contents for the whole Web though. For one thing, the Web is different than a book in that the pages are not intended to be read in sequence. You enter and leave pages on the Web following links.

But there is something like a table of contents for the Web in that it organizes the Web’s contents into a high level summary view, and that is a Web directory. Yahoo provides one of the oldest of these (http://dir.yahoo.com) and there is a public domain Web directory that is available many places including the Google Directory (http://www.google.com/dirhp). A directory is a hierarchy of knowledge categories or subjects with links and descriptions provided under the categories. The general directories are huge themselves, so in turn it is useful to search them.

A variation on this is a personal Web directory or knowledge base. This has the same structure as these large public directories but is more focused on the particular interests of a person or group. Whole subtrees of the personal Web directory can be shared with others. A rather limited version of this is the bookmarks or favorites that we keep in our Web browsers, but the personal Web directory allows for better visualization of the information and adding more related information.

Another type of summary that is becoming very widely used is RSS feeds. These are a list of headlines with summary descriptions. The user can then click on a link to see the details. This is especially useful for sites such as news sites or Web logs where information is changing frequently. But they are by no means limited to that. Individual users can read just the feeds they are interested in using an RSS reader (http://blogspace.com/rss/readers). Web site owners provide these useful summaries in hopes that people will want to see the details and click through to their site.

Another variation on this theme of providing useful summary content in hope that users will click through is the proliferation of free content that can be added to Web sites. For example, a weather site might provide a weather sticker that shows a summary of the weather in a town. This is useful in itself. The users then may be more likely to click through to see details. Much of this is intended for Web site developers (for example, see http://freesticky.com), but it could also be used by individual users with the appropriate tool.

Another useful form of summary is a personal portal such as My Yahoo (http://my.yahoo.com) or My Way (http://my.myway.com). These allow the user to select from a collection of information modules and arrange them in different ways on a page that they can view to get a summary view. These portals are typically restricted to the specific content modules that they provide and are oriented toward a generic audience.

One more form of summary is an alert or vital sign. These provide timely notifications, perhaps using an icon that changes colors, of an important event. This approach has been used for years for network and operations management and is now starting to come into use for individuals.

These examples of summaries all fall within a category of tools called information aggregators. Information aggregators provide a summary view of what information is available and allow the user to go to the information source for the details. At this point these different types of summary tools are not usually well integrated.

The next generation of information aggregators will support much greater integration, a wider variety of information modules, and narrowcasting to more specific information communities. For example, see Personal Watchkeeper (http://www.sugarloafsw.com).

So the two most important tools for getting the most out of the Web are search engines and information aggregators. These provide searches and summaries, which are really the way we have always tried to make the best use of large collections of information. Search engines are well developed and widely used. Information aggregators are coming on fast.

About The Author

Ron Tower is the President of Sugarloaf Software and is the developer of Personal Watchkeeper, an information aggregator supporting a variety of ways to summarize the Web.

http://www.sugarloafsw.com

META tags are a way for you to define your web page and web site to the outside world. You can declare the keywords and description, which help your placement in search engines. In addition, you can specify who owns the copyright, how often the page is to be visited by search engines and many other useful pieces of information.

Please understand that META tags are just notes, little snippets of information that you chose to put into a page, for informational purposes. META tags are not necessarily recognized by search engines as vehicles for ranking, although some still do read them and use them. Also, search engines (especially Google) constantly change their views on META tags and constantly make decisions whether to even read them, or totally disregard them.

Important side note: Many make the mistake of putting the TITLE tag into the META category. Folks, the TITLE tag is not a META tag, but a crucial element of every web page. If your page does not have a title, it becomes one of the 30 million meaningless Untitled Documents.

So are there any tags that make a difference in terms of search engine placement?

The misuse of META tags was the main reason for which search engines do not rely on them so heavily any more. Unscrupulous webmasters used META tags to mislead the search, in order to artificially inflate the number of visitors. In the past, META tag optimization was the key-point in any search engine optimization strategy. Today, other factors (like link popularity) are far more important. Many SEO (Search Engine Optimization) gurus tell you not to ever again bother with META tags, totally forget they ever existed and focus on links.

My personal opinion is, if it matters only 0.05%, then why not use them, since it’s just a simple "type and forget" deal anyway and does not require that much work? Similarly to the stock market and investing strategies, a tiny 0.05% can actually help in the long run. In today’s competitive internet, where your site is just one out of billions, every bit helps.

Several Web search engines, such as InfoSeek and AltaVista, still recognize META elements with NAME values "description" and "keywords". The words listed in a "keywords" tag might be used (and perhaps emphasized) when indexing documents. However, generally such keywords are useful only if they occur in the normal text of the document too, and in that case you can expect the keywords extracted from your page’s text to be used in indexing anyway!

This is exactly why, you will see an increasing amount of SEO community folks telling you to stop even thinking that the "keywords" tag ever existed.

I am more of a conservative nature when it comes to SEO and my philosophy is that whatever page element is not known for sure to penalize your search engine ranking, should be left, just in case things change, or even just for some smaller and less important or known search engines (the entire world seems to be concerned solely with Google today) might actually help you in the long run. Basically, all I’m saying is don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Keywords are separated by commas and may be considered case sensitive by search engines. If the same keywords are repeated too often in the META element, some search engines will not index the document. Search engines typically only process the first 1000 characters of the keywords list. So, if you use keywords, do it carefully, as this is one element that can actually get you penalized.

On the other hand, a "description" tag should be used, since many (but not all) search engines show this info as the abstract for the document when returning query results. But you should also take into account that many search engines just take the first few words of the document, so you might include a short summary into the document body right after the main heading.

To avoid being truncated (that is, cut) by search engines, the description should be brief - no more than 200 characters.

Let’s clear one more common confusion: The META tags affect the way your document is indexed when it is included into a data base of a search engine. However, it will not make a robot find the document when it searches candidates for inclusion into a data base. Therefore, if you think the document is important, and especially if there are not several links to it in other documents, consider submitting those pages to the search engines manually.

When I first started studying META tags and took a closer look, my first question was why some pages use the META NAME format, while others use META HTTP-EQUIV for the same stuff.

Here is the technical explanation of the difference between the two formats. Afterwards, I’ll try to translate this into English.

Begin technical explanation:

The difference between NAME and HTTP-EQUIV is that the latter has a special significance when documents are retrieved via HTTP, whereas the interpretation of NAME attributes is up to each particular browser or other program which processes HTML files (although some common practices may emerge and might be standardized later). HTTP servers may use the property name specified by the HTTP-EQUIV attribute to create an RFC 822 style header in the HTTP response. (RFC 822 is the electronic mail protocol used on the Internet.) The header name (which is case insensitive) is taken from the HTTP-EQUIV attribute value, and the header value is taken from the value of the content attribute.

The HTTP-EQUIV attribute may be used in place of the NAME attribute to indicate that the property is an HTTP header. Some servers will send the HTTP header specified in the META element, and browsers often recognize the header even when it is not sent by the server.

Note: While HTTP-EQUIV META tag appears to work properly with some browsers, other browsers may ignore them, and they are ignored by Web proxies, which are becoming more widespread. Use of the equivalent HTTP header, as supported by e.g. Apache server, is more reliable and is recommended wherever possible.

HTTP headers may be generated by CGI scripts, and in Apache and CERN httpd by using a side file containing metadata. Other servers may have other mechanisms to generate headers. Note that certain server-generated headers may not be overridden (such as Date), and that others are only meaningful with a non-200 status code. Using an HTTP header is preferable to using META tags, since the header will be understood by cache agents and proxies in addition to browsers, and metadata (such as PICS data) may be associated with image files, sound files, etc.

End of technical explanation.

Ok, if you read the above and got it, then you should be building rocket ships or playing with nanobots and not be reading silly articles! For the rest of us, here is a very basic translation:

The HTTP-EQUIV is for headers sent to your browser by the server after a request for a page/file has been made. In plain English, this information may direct/control how your page will be displayed in a browser.

The NAME attribute is there to provide additional information about the document (such as keywords, description, author information, copyright information and so on).

There is still a disagreement between many people about with which attribute the keywords and the description should go.

My personal advice is to use both! Be careful, because if you use a design tool, it will generate the tags only in one format. In that case, I would just copy the generated block of info, duplicate it on the page (do it just after the original, so you don’t mess up the page’s coding), then change NAME to HTTP-EQUIV on the duplicates if the originals were NAME, or HTTP-EQUIV to META, if the originals were HTTP-EQUIV. Again, you don’t get penalized for doing this, and until the world comes to an agreement, you are covered both ways!

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Andrei co-owns Bsleek - a company that specializes in web design, hosting, promotional items, printing, tradeshow displays, logos, CD presentations, SEO and more. Andrei has amassed an extensive technical knowledge and experience through his career as the CIO for a major travel management company and through his past careers in military research, data acquisition and airspace engineering. He also consults for Trinity Investigations, a New York based PI firm.

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Bsleek - Redefining cheap web hosting

You have heard the phrase LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION. But wait, this is online! You don’t have to worry about location… or do you??!! Location is everything! Let’s take a moment to really think about this. You need to find something. What do you do? Most people will go to their favorite search engine and input what they are searching for. They will type in a few words that describe what they are looking for. The Search Engines come back with the most relevant websites for your search. However, your search for a keyword can result in thousands of links (if not millions).

So now you begin the task of clicking one by one on these links to find the information or service you need. You may go through page one to find what you are searching for, you may go through all of page two, but did you get to the website on page 10? If you are shaking your head No (who has that kind of time?) then you have realized how important LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION is to your website. We need to get your site located on the first page.

The quick and easy answer to this problem is of course PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising such as Google Adwords or Overture). But this is not the smartest way to solve your problem and the cost can put my small business owners of out business. We have found that most website owners state their largest expense is advertising. Imagine if you could cut your advertising in half! Imaging if you could eliminate your advertising cost all together and still achieve the same sales (if not more)!

Search Engine Optimization for your site is the answer.

Everyone wants to be listed in the number 1 spot. But most companies do not get listed under any of their keywords because they do not know how to implement search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is really not as hard as it sounds and most will find that once they understand how it works, it is actually quite simple.

A few things to keep in mind when starting your SEO Journey:

1. Make sure you use HTML Links. Some designers want to use beautiful image map links from their home page. Although this looks great, it does not help you with the search engines. Place links on your pages to the various pages to help not only the search engines find your pages but your visitors as well.

2. Frames…Well this is a hard one. Not only can some people not see frames, the search engines have a hard time with them as well. Also, what if your customer stumbles into one of the pages and does not see the frames? Just stay away from them all together.

3. DO NOT SPAM. Let me repeat this again. DO NOT SPAM. Spamming in any form is wrong. Most people consider spam as only used with emails. Wrong again unfortunately. Spamming will backfire on you. If search engines pick up on the fact that you are spamming, they have and will penalize your site.

Here are two examples of spam. a. Content Spam Data within a part of a Web resource designed for humans where that data is designed only for search engines to see b. Meta Spam Data within a Web resource that describes that resource or another Web resource inaccurately or (when the data should be readable by humans) incoherently

Take your time when it comes to your websites SEO. Make small changes and watch your rankings. If you move up, great! Make more changes. If you move down, undo undo undo. Always keep records of the changes you make so you can easily track what worked and what did not work for your site. Remember, we are in this for the long haul. Do it right the first time and make it last.

Shawna Fennell is the owner of 1 Choice 4 YStore. A company dedicated to helping Online Stores. Please visit http://store.1choice4ystore.com - for free advice and tips on SEO, Marketing, Design, and much more. You can also sign up for daily tips at http://blog.1choice4ystore.com

I took a look at a new Website recently in response to a request for a site review on one of my favorite forums. And, while the appearance was pleasing, there wasn’t really much there. Too often, new folks to the Internet marketing world make this crucial mistake. They think that if they build a stay at home job website, customers will automaically show up and start buying stuff. When those customers don’t materialize, the site owner often gives up and quits.

In order for any stay at home jobsite to attract quality visitors, there are some things that need to be done. In this article, I will give you a small list of objectives, along with brief hints on how to go about meeting them. If you follow through, your site will advance in the search engine rankings, and before you know it the visitors will be showing up faster than you can count them.

Search Engines Love Content

Involve yourself in an ongoing process of collecting and/or producing articles for inclusion on your site. There are many sources of articles on the Internet. Some of them charge a small fee, while others are free. Look for articles that are relevant to the subject of your site, and add them. If these articles are rich with the keywords that you wish to target, so much the better.

You can also write your own articles. This allows you to concentrate on the keywords that you wish to target, and establishes you as an expert in your field.

By adding your resource box, with your URL, to the end of your articles and then submitting them to other sites and Ezines, you can generate additional traffic to your site. More about this later.

Invite your visitors to submit articles to your site for publication. This helps to build visitor loyalty, because eveybody likes to see their name in print;)

Search Engines Love Links.

The second thing that you need to do is exchange links with other websites. Search Engines look to see how many links point to your site and use this information to gauge the importance of your site. The more links you have, the better, but look for links that add value for your visitors. Make sure that you link to quality sites that are somehow related to what your visitors are looking for. In this way, you will get traffic that is targeted to what you are trying to sell. This will increase your chances of making sales or signing up affiliates who have a good chance of being successful in your business.

There are two basic types of links; reciprocal links and one way links. Reciprocal links occur when you trade links with another website. These are important because not only do they help in your rankings, they also generate traffic from the sites that you link to. One way links are a bit different. These are links that point people to your site, but do not point your visitors away from your site. As a result, they are more valuable. Not too many webmasters are willing to give away one way links, but there are a couple of good techniques that you can use to get them.

1. Write articles and offer them for publication. You will be pleasantly surprised by the number of sites and Ezines that are looking for quality articles to use for content. By placing your resource box at the end of the article, and including a link to your site, you can generate dozens, if not hundreds of one way links to your site. To find sites that accept articles, simply do a search for ‘Free Website Content.’ You will find several good sites. Also think about joining the Directory of Ezines. Many of the publications listed there accept articles, and some of them will even invite you to write for them on a regular basis.

2. Visit several forums and bulletin boards that deal with stay at home jobs. Especially, those that are directly related to your field of expertise. Many of these allow you to include your URL in your signature block. By participating in these forums, you will be able to create many more one way links to your site. Just make sure that you offer sound advice, and make relevant posts. If you don’t, you could be considered a nuisance or worse, a spammer.

The addition of content in the form of articles and links to your site should be an ongoing process. If you concentrate on these two things and continually add to your site, you will not only move up in the search engine rankings, but you will end up with a site that has great value to your visitors. Add to your site every day. Remember, you are in competition with a lot of other related websites, and chances are,they are already be doing this.

About The Author

(c)Nov 2004 by Robert Thompson

Robert Thompson is retired from the United States Air Force. Since his retirement, he has operated several successful businesses. He is a proud Team Leader with SFI and operates http://www.stayathomejobs.net Stay at Home Jobs offers a wide variety of informative articles and features for the home business entrepreneur. Membership is free. For a free copy of the Stay at Home Jobs Newsletter, send a blank Email to News@badbobrst.par32.com

badbobrst@aol.com

While many factors influence the rankings of a web site, any search engine optimization effort isn’t worth even a second of your time without one and single unknown: relevant and competitive keywords.

Let’s examine an example: a local moving company decided to optimize its website. It knows (or assumes that it does) that the most popular keywords for their type of business are “movers” and “moving”. At a first glance, looks like everything’s fine: the keywords seem to be relevant, and should produce good results. However, there are two mistakes made here. The first one is keyword relevancy. What’s the use for our local moving company of people that are looking for “movers” or “moving” in Denver, CO, Boston, MA or New York, NY, if they are located and offering services in and around San Francisco only?

Another mistake is keyword effectiveness. It’ll take much more time and effort to get top rankings for such popular and competitive general keywords as “moving” and “movers” than to get same results for something more specific and relevant, such as “movers San Francisco” or “moving San Francisco”. Not only are these keywords more likely to convert visitors to buyers, but also it’s a much easier and less time-consuming task. If the world we live in consists of atoms, the smallest and most important particles in search engine optimization world are keywords. In fact, there’s nothing complicated about them, if one remembers three things about keywords: relevancy, effectiveness and Wordtracker.

Wordtracker.com is an UK based company that offers an irreplaceable search engine marketing service tool: keyword research and analysis. It helps to find and pick keywords that are both relevant and competitive. Relevant mean that the keywords are related to your website, and that these are the words people are typing in Google, Yahoo or MSN in order to find your kind of business. Another important factor in determining a “good” keyword is its effectiveness. Let’s say we have a keyword “movers” which has a record of appearing in Google search list for 1009 times; there are 15400000 different web pages competing for this keyword. This means that this keyword’s effectiveness index is 1009/15400000=0.066. This index shows that the keyword is far too competitive and you’ll probably end up somewhere in the middle of Google’s search results if you try to optimize your webpage for this particular keyword.

A rule of thumb is to find keywords that are quite popular and at the same time have fewer webpages competing for them. A good keyword is considered to have an effectiveness index of over 100, although anything in between 10 and 100 can be targeted as well.

Needless to say, without having the right keywords that are both relevant and competitive it’s impossible to succeed in any search engine optimization campaign. Without knowing your niche words, you’ll probably end up competing against web sites with thousands of inbound links optimized by search engine optimization gurus and will be lost in millions of search results – no one will even ever find out you exist. On the other hand, all it takes to get your web traffic from 0 to couple hundreds a day might be something as simple and cost-effective as Wordtracker.

Marty Pukstys is a co-owner of Search Engine Marketing Service LLC and specializes in search engine optimization services such as meta tags optimization services