Google’s Page Rank is one of the most important criteria for being recognized as a good web page. Page Rank is one of the innovative ideas started by Google. Mainly the concept was that if a web page gives a link to other web page then that link was calculated as a positive vote for the other web page. PR does not depend on the quality of site but it is the criteria which measures the value ness of a web page only.

Mainly it was thought that a webmaster would only link to pages that they thought were interesting and having some quality information for their visitors. Google generally used the number of inbound links to a web page as the criteria to judge the importance of that particular page.

Simply PR is calculated by distributing the PR from all the back links to your page. Along with these it also depends on the content of your page. Some people say that 85% of your PR is calculated by the content of your page and the rest of the 15% are being calculated by links.

Nobody knows for sure how Google calculates PR, and how we can increase it. Important thing is that make your page as good as possible then automatically rest of the world will link to your page and you will get the PR value from these links.

Alok Vats is active in the field of web from last two years. He has an http://alok-vats.blogspot.com/ ambition, he wanted to create a directory site for the people who are not satisfied with the current lot of directories. His other blog is for http://team-india-performance.blogspot.com/ cricket information and http://aloonpre.blogspot.com/ his personal life.

So, you’ve just paid £300 - £10,000 for a new web site to be designed ‘registered your URL’ and now it’s sitting on the World Wide Web. All your new stationery and Business Cards give the Web Site address quite clearly. The designer assures you that it has been ’submitted’ to all the ‘Search Engines’ and, when you type in the address, there it is.

You’ve told your customers all about it and they visit it occasionally … No-one else seems to find it. No new enquiries and the visitor counter is moving slowly nowhere. Sound familiar?

What could have gone wrong? Was it all a waste of valuable marketing resources? Is the Web a wasteland and has the ‘dot.com’ bubble really burst?

The simple answer is that nothing has gone wrong, all that remains to be done is to ‘market your site’ effectively and the enquiries should come flooding in.

So let’s go back to good, old fashioned, Sales and Marketing basics - AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

Unless you get the customers attention they won’t even know your Web Site exists and, if they don’t know it exists, how can they find it among the 2.6 billion other Sites on the Web!!

Entrusting the ’selling’ of your site to a Web Page designer is a little like expecting a printer to distribute your brochures to your prospective customers and waiting for the orders. The responsibility, therefore, is yours and you, or a member of your marketing team, have to grit your teeth and get on with it.

Interest, Desire and Action should emanate from the design and content of your Web Page, however the first step, Getting Attention, has to be done successfully before any of this can take place. This article focuses on this vital first step

How to get Attention on the Net

To get attention on the World Wide Web you have to get your site listed on the major search engines, and that means within the top 20 places, otherwise your prospective customers will find a similar product, or service, long before they reach you.

Imagine the Internet is like a giant Yellow Pages, with no index, wherever it falls open is where your prospective customer starts to look. It is therefore essential that your site is right at the top of the first page they see.

80% of all traffic to a Web Site is through the major search engines and ‘off-line’ marketing activity currently accounts for only 2% of ‘hits’. This will probably continue into the future, so no amount of advertising will bring the response that a search engine ‘listing’ will bring, particularly if you are using the Internet to reach the International Market.

To achieve a high listing you, or someone in your team, have to understand how search engines work and then adapt the web site to get their attention. Alternatively you could pay a consultancy to achieve the same results - however no-one will understand your customers the way you do therefore the time and effort invested in developing net skills in house would be worth it. In addition it would be more beneficial if the person selected were from a Sales and Marketing background, who knows the products, with a smattering of IT know how, than a ‘techie’ - After all, this is marketing.

However, a mistake often arises from a simple misconception. The customer you are targeting with the web site is not the end user - your product, or service, and the design of the site, once they get there is supposed to do this.

The customer for the web site itself is the search engine and its ‘buyers’

The ‘buyers’ fall into 2 categories Search Engine ’spiders’ or ‘robots’ who are totally logical, electronic and not very clever and Human reviewers who are not so logical, know what they do, and don’t, like and may be influenced by a snappy description. Let’s take each in turn

Search Engine Spiders

Spiders are computer programs that roam the World Wide Web ceaselessly, travelling from page to page of every web site they visit remembering every word on every page. They like pages that change and ignore pages that haven’t changed since the last time they were there.

They can only reach a Web site by one of two methods

1 By being told about it - this you can do by registering your site with the search Engine and, eventually, it will send a spider out to visit it.

2 By visiting a Web Site from a link that has been established from another Web Site that it knows about and regularly visits.

The First Rule, therefore, is to register your Web Site with all the major search engines and to begin to develop reciprocal links with other complimentary web sites. The more links you have coming in to your site the more important it must be in the eyes of the spider!

What do the Spiders look for when they visit a site?

Contrary to popular belief, they do not all look for ‘keywords’ - for instance the Excite, Lycos and Google spiders ignore keywords almost altogether - no amount of conjuring with keywords will get your site to the top 20 in these search engines. What will get your site higher in the ratings is the of the site and the of the site. You can check out what the and of the site are by selecting View, Source in the menu bar of your Web Browser - this shows you what the spider, not the visitor, sees.

The Second Rule, therefore, is not to call your site by the name of the company ( as most businesses do) unless your company name is so well known that everyone will search for it, or the name of your company says what you do quite clearly and unambiguously. No-one cares who you are, it’s what you do for them, that counts. If this sounds a little like ’selling the benefits, not the features’ it’s meant to.

For example - imagine your company is called ABC Electronics and that you manufacture electric vehicles in the UK. Then the of your site could be ‘Electric Cars and Vehicles UK, ABC Electronics’

Anyone searching for electric cars and vehicles would find your site at the top of the list, or very close. Whereas if the site were called ‘ABC Electronics Limited’ it would come much lower in the Search Engine listings, if at all, unless someone searched for ‘ABC Electronics Limited’ and, bear in mind, the intention of the Internet is to reach a wider audience - if they knew who you were, wouldn’t they have already contacted you by other means?

Therefore the single most important part of marketing your site is getting the right. However the preceding sentence is written in invisible ink and most businesses will continue to ignore this simple fact.

The Third Rule is to beware of ‘frames’ within your web site, particularly the first page, since some of the spiders can only index what is inside the top frame and not the links you would like it to in the main frame.

If you need to use frames as a navigation tool then consider using a ‘portal’ , or ‘doorway’, page, or one without a frame, as the first, or entry, page of your site. This, at least, should be identified by all the relevant search engines. You would then link this page to the framed pages on your main site. This may result in some of the Search engines only listing one of the pages on your site, however that is a price you may have to pay.

The Fourth Rule is to ensure that the of the site, in particular the first paragraph of text on the page, contains some of the keywords and / or phrases that your prospective customer will be searching for.

There are some technicalities to observe, such as repeating the keywords within the between 3 and 7 times is optimum. Any more than that and the spiders will penalise you and possibly ignore your site altogether, any less than that and you are not taking full advantage of the spiders totally logical process.

Avoid having repetitive text the same colour as the background in the hope of fooling the spider - this is a myth and will result in the spider banning you from the search engine!

So, for the Electronics Company example above. If the text was to the effect ‘Formed in 1985 ABC Electronics is based in Andover, Hampshire, close to the M5, etc. etc.’ the spider will not find the words Electric Cars and Vehicles in the and therefore reduce your rating.

However if the said

‘Electric Cars and Vehicles (as a headline) - Formed in 1985 ABC Electronics is a world leader in the design and development of Electric Cars and Vehicles for the Armed Forces, Electric Vehicles for the Ambulance Service, etc, etc’ the spider would find a high ‘density’ of keywords in the and improve your sites’ rating.

The Fifth Rule is to understand and develop the sites Tags.

Tags are not as important, to some search engines, as the and keyword density of the , but they do include a variety of different items that some search engines and all human reviewers may see which include , , etc. If you employ a range of tactics it will increase your overall success.

This is now the place for on the site - these would be the words that your prospective customers would search for through the search engine. In doing this try to think the way the customer would think - in other words sell benefits, solve problems, anticipate the questions they would be asking. AltaVista and Mirago operate almost exclusively on and tend to ignore .

List all your keywords on a word processing page then prioritise them. What do you think will be the order that people will type in keywords to search for your service or product? Remember, try to think like your customers think, so, for instance, if you produce massage oil is it possible that they will type in sports injury (or injuries)? What does your product do, or solve, not just what is it.

The next step is to pluralise your key words, as in the example above if someone typed in sports injury and your keyword was injuries they would miss you. If you make orange, oranges then searching on either word will find you.

Consider putting in mis-spelt keywords if those words are commonly mis-spelt or mistyped for instance ’servcie’. This is to ensure that people who mis spell or mis type can also find you.

However, a word of warning, the market leader in a particular product range is very low in the ratings on most search engines because their designer mis-spelt a keyword in the design of the web site. If you’re not sure whether or not this is true go to www.google.com and search for ‘veleting’ or the word Barnaley (for Barnsley) - It’s amazing what some people do

Also, it may be useful to include a ridiculous such as ‘agriptanch’, why? Because when you need to find out if your site is registered with a based search engine you simply search on ‘agriptanch’ and if your site is registered up it comes. If not you may have to re-register it.

The next step is to take a calculated gamble and opt for one of the following methods of using the keywords:

Target vs. Blanket

This is deciding whether or not to use a series of keywords that will cover everything anyone could possibly type in when looking for your product or service, or taking the gamble and knowing what he or she will type in and just put that as a keyword or phrase.

So, for example, if you dealt with a specific subject such as Sea Fishing then you may use just that phrase knowing that the majority of people who were searching for you would type that in as their query.

Target will bring you higher on a search engine listing but you have to be certain that people will search for exactly that word, or phrase.

Blanket covers a larger list of key words you will therefore be listed in more categories but lower on the listings for each, since the density is lower.

You are allowed approximately 200 per page, of course, if you choose to target the prospective customer you may only use 2 or 3 of these. Nevertheless the correct format for is word, comma, space e.g. "cleaning, upholstery, upholstery cleaning, etc"

The Sixth rule is possibly the most misunderstood rule of all : Spiders cannot follow graphically embedded links. This means that when your web page designer has put all those buttons and GIFS and animations on the page, if there are no text links to other pages then the search engine will only see one page. This means that if you have a 100 page web site, as far as the search engines are concerned you have given them a book with all the pages stuck together, unless they are linked in a way that the spiders can follow. There are very simple bits of coding that can be placed in the source code of each page to ensure the spiders access all pages.

There are other, more sophisticated ways to attract the attention of the spiders, such as the development and publishing of separate ‘portal’ pages, each directed back to your index page. However, by adapting the information above and applying it to your companies web site you will start to see a rapid increase in visitors and a promotion to the upper echelons of the ‘Spider’ based Search engines.

Human Reviewers

These are people who are either employed by the search engine company or are volunteer editors. They control what appears where in the King of all search engines, Yahoo, and in the human edited directory known as Open Directory. In order to attract their attention you need to develop snappy, factual, compulsive sales copy for the and the element of the web site.

Although these appear in the tags and are therefore unseen by the normal viewer, they are also the words that are used when registering with the Human edited Search Engines. they are the words that will entice them to review and, hopefully, categorise your site.

Restrict the to 150 characters, including spaces, it does not require keywords, but make it appealing to a human being since they probably see hundreds of sites per day. avoid phrases like ’simply the best’, ‘the only web site to visit’. Just like the editor of a newspaper, or magazine they are looking for interesting, quality, information for their clients who are the end users, the people who are ceaselessly searching the Internet for exactly the type of service, or product, you provide.

Finally

Whatever you invest in web site development is wasted money unless you are willing to ‘market the site’ to the Internet ‘buyers’. With 2.605 Billion Web Sites out there (yes it has increased by 5,000,000 since you started to read this article) it’s a little like throwing a pin on the floor, in a house, in London, and expecting someone to find it - without giving them the address.

Go back to basics in sales and marketing - identify the buyer, study the buyer, understand buyer behaviour and then make it easy for them to buy. And remember, if you have a 10 page web site that’s 10 opportunities they have to ‘buy’ since each can have it’s own , , and .

Ensure that you get the Attention of the Search Engine Buyers, work with your marketing department on developing a Site that Interests the end user, builds their Desire to buy your service, or product, and deliver a compelling call to Action that produces e - success for your on-line business.

About The Author

John Saxon is a Companion of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management and a Director of Fastlink Solutions Limited and Site-Pro Limited. He has had a number of articles published in different mediums including the internet and the ISMM Magazine. His web sites may be visited at http://www.fastlinksolutions.co.uk and http://www.site-pro.co.uk

1. Use reward programs to keep people revisiting your web site and buying your products. You could reward gifts or discounts for revisiting or buying.

2. Publish ezines for other web sites to increase your traffic. You could do it at no charge and in return just ask for a sponsor ad in each issue.

3. Trade endorsement ads with other ezines. They pull more hits and sales than just trading classified ads because it gives your ad instant credibility.

4. Test your ad copy before you start taking orders. Tell your visitors to email you if they want to be notified when you launch a new product.

5. Get your visitors excited about your product by letting them know how excited you are about it. Tell them why you’re excited and use exclamation points.

6. Use incentives to gain referrals if you don’t have an affiliate program. Tell people when they refer customers you will award them with free products.

7. Tell your visitors the reason why you’re having a sale so they don’t think your products are cheap. It could be a holiday/seasonal sale or clearance sale.

8. Stay away from overloading your web site with images and graphics. They can create a slow loading web page and distract people away from your offer.

9. Cut out words, phrases, and paragraphs in your ad copy that aren’t selling or supporting your product. This will stop people from getting bored with your ad.

10. Keep people at your web site as long as possible. Allow them to download free ebooks, sign-up for contests, use free online services, etc.

About The Author

Robert Kleine is the owner and webmaster of OpportunityKnoxx http://www.opportunityknoxx.com where you can find thousands of free webmaster resources, free ebooks and software.

This article reveals several important web design elements you must consider during website optimization process.

1. CSS Stylesheet

It is good to use CSS stylesheet to format your web design because it can standardize the appearance of your website. For the sake of convenience, some web designers use internal CSS.

It is no good! You should use external CSS stylesheet so that your HTML coding becomes consise, and mainly compose of your website content. It is an essential SEO practice.

2. Content Management Software (CMS)

If you use CMS to manage your website, make sure your CMS provides these features:

a. Allows you to define different templates for different sections/pages. It gives you flexibility in optimizing website content.

b. Allows you to define Title and Meta tags for different web pages. Again, it gives you flexibility in optimizing every web page.

c. Allows you to generate static HTML pages instead of dynamic pages. Search engines are not good at reading dynamic web page. Accoding to Google webmaster guideline, Google may not index dynamic URL with more than 2 parameters within the URL.

If your web pages cannot get indexed, you definitely get no rankings no matter how many SEO effort you make.

3. HTML Code Compliance

As a good web design practice, make sure your HTML coding is compliant to some well recognized HTML standards such as W3C standard. Some search engine optimizers reported that non-compliant web design could cause difficulties for search engines to index and analyze your website. It hinders your website to get top search engine ranking.

4. Use of Graphics

You must optimize the file size of your images. As search engines like to read text, you should consider avoiding the use of graphics near top of your website, whenever it is possible.

5. Multiple-level Navigation Menu

Many websites use multiple-level navigation menu in Javascript. However, the coding usually leaves in the HTML body. This is no good in terms of SEO. I recommend seperate Javascrpt from HTML coding by using external Javascript file. For example, Marketshare - an Asia consumer market research firm, found that their website cannot get indexed properly by several search engines. This situation has been changed only after adopting external Javascript.

6. Bad Web Design

To make your web design search engine friendly, you must consider avoiding:

a. Use of frame. Search engines have difficulties to index all your frameset. Even though they can index some frame pages, users would only access to part of your webpages only in case they can find your website from search engines, e.g., only see a left-hand side navigation menu with a blank page on the right-hand side.

b. Re-direct techniques. For some reasons, web designers may make some re-direct pages or adopt Javascript re-direct techniques and re-direct visitors from one page to another content pages. Since search engine spammers usually use this technique, search engines could penalize your website.

7. Flash

Web designers may sell you to build a flash website or make a flash intro page as your home page. Their point is that flash makes your website more appealing and it would improve effectiveness of your website. However, it is not always the case.

Visitors want to find information fast. Flash sometimes could make your website slow and require visitors to install plugins before they can see your website. In terms of SEO, simply speaking, search engines treat flash as a graphic and cannot analyze content inside a flash file. The implication means a flash website is hard to get top search engine ranking.

Conclusion:

For small business to succeed online, you must strike a balance between SEO and fancy web design. A too fancy web design, in many cases, cannot give you any business as no one can find your website from search engines and if it annoys your visitors.

Jimsun Lui, is working in Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Limited, a company offers SEO Services for both English and Chinese search engines. Click here to learn more about how to optimize website. The company also offers Ecommerce Web Design Service with an emphasis of search engine friendliness.

Everyone is looking for "secrets" about how to get more qualified traffic to their web sites. What I’m going to share with you is no secret, however it is not practiced by very many companies or individuals. Many companies and individuals only submit their home page to search engines and directories. You can easily quadruple your traffic in 90 - 120 days by implementing the following procedures.

1. Create a unique title for each page of your site that covers a different subject matter. I am astounded when I surf the web and I find large and small companies whose web sites don’t have a decent title for their home page, much less titles for any of their content pages. Your title should not be named "home". If you own a web design program or if you have competent web designers, your title can be changed on every page in 10 - 30 minutes. Your title should be short and describe the content on that page. In case you were not aware, the title of each page always appears in the upper left hand corner of the browser used by the person visiting your web site.
2. Create meta tags for each page that has a different title. Most people use the same meta tags for each page of their web site. If you have different content on different pages, then you should have different meta tags for those pages too! Meta Tags are the hidden text that programmers use to enable the search engine "spiders" to find your site on the world wide web. If you don’t know what meta tags look like or how to write them, you can learn this information by visiting this URL at our web site: http://www.emarketingman.com/searchengine.htm
3. Submit your pages to search engines and directories every month. Once you have the proper title and meta tags for the interior pages of your web site, register them once a month. If you want ANY of your pages indexed by search engines, you have to submit them once a month! You can do this manually or you can do it through various submit programs. The most affordable method we have found are the free directory submit tool and free search engine submit tool at JimTools: http://www.jimtools.com

JimTools allows you to register with 56 search engines and over 100 directories at no charge. If you do this once a month, you will start getting traffic to your newly submitted pages within 60 - 120 days.

In summary: Optimizing your title and your Meta Tags for each page can easily quadruple your traffic in just a few months. Submitting your internal pages of your web site to directories and search engines is an affordable and easy way to bring more qualified traffic to your web site.

About The Author

Daryl Clark is the owner of www.EMarketingman.com. A web site designed to teach individuals and organizations how to successfully promote their businesses on line. Visit his web site at http://www.emarketingman.com

Everyone likes to read or get a referral about something they are considering buying. It helps overcome that fear of mistrust. Do you know how to get over that fear of mistrust with your visitors on your website?

Use great testimonials of your product. Its like the friend who recommends a certain dentist, doctor or plumber. You would rather use the friend’s referel, than pick a stranger out of the yellow pages. I know I would. Would you like to know how to get these wonderful comments that praise your products?

A good testimonial is descriptive, using words that entice feelings of happiness, satisfaction. Words that show a customer is very happy that he bought the product. Descriptive phrases that show how the product has increased the customers, profit, time management, etc….

You probably thinking, yeah right, and just who is going to do that, for me? please read on!

A good testimonial also has a live link and person connected to it. Another requirement to fulfill. Actually this requirement becomes your selling benefit to your testimonial request.

A great testimonial is very important in the world of internet online marketing. It is important in the web design of an internet sales page.

The human voice, touch and feel, is not present in your sales pitch on the website print. Adding several testimonials for your product, with live links, will increase trust and credibility for your business.

Okay, I hear you thinking, so just how do I go about getting these wonderful words of wonder for my product?

What many business owners don’t realize is how easy it is to get testimonials.

So, how do you get unsolicited testimonials? Well, you could just ask? But you don’t have to. There are other ways to naturally receive raving reviews of your product.

Make sure you have a quality product.

First, remember that the good you do comes back to you. Offer free review copies of your product to newsletter publishers and other parties likely to have an interest in your product.

They have a stake in being honest and in backing up anything they’ve said about your product. That will get you started.

Then, if your product is good, you will receive good feedback from your readers.

When you get something you’d like to use, write to thank them and ask if you can quote them. Tell them you’ll link to their website if they like.

Then you’ve got an unsolicited testimonial from someone likely to stand behind what they said because it was an honest and unsolicited comment to you.

Be sure and let them know that you will be posting their comments with a link to their website. Offer to post links to their site directly from their testimonial. They will get extra traffic to their site just for telling the truth about their experience with your product! Do you see how this can be a win -win situation for both businesses involved?

You would be amazed at how fast you can grow your own websites traffic with testimonial links on other sites. When I check my web statistics, it amazes me how many of my visitors are generated from a link from another webmasters sales page!

This technique will also help you get your website link rating for the search engines increased. It will help you build credibility has an expert. It will also help you build relationship with other online internet marketers.

Can you ask for much more than that?

Laurie Meade is editor of the "Yes You Can!" Ezine. She focuses on reviewing information products, software, webmaster tools, and resources. She tells it like it is, the honest facts in her own words and opinions. Get a review written for your product or service! Visit her website, or her blog for more resources and great help with your webmaster needs. http://lauriemeade.blogspot.com http://lauriemeade.com Subscribe to the "Yes You Can Ezine," by sending an email to mailto:subscribe@lauriemeade.com

Has this ever happened to you? You spend hard-earned money on Google Adwords pay-per-click advertising and you lose more money than you make. It seems that Google is getting richer while you get poorer. There are several tricks to advertising on Google Adwords that unless you know them, it becomes almost impossible to turn a profit on your advertising. Part 3 of this series continues the theme of revealing the inside secrets of successful, profitable advertising with Google Adwords.

If you missed Part 1 or Part 2 of this series, simply send a blank email to googlearticle@superiormarketingpartners.com to get a all three parts of this series of articles emailed back to you automatically.

Secret #8 - Track your ads by keyword in Google Adwords

After spending the time setting up separate AdGroups within Google Adwords for each keyword as mentioned above, the key is to know which keywords are costing you money and which ones are profitable. The only way to know that is to track how many people click on the ad and which of those clicks convert into sales (or actions you hope the prospect to take, such as registering for your email newsletter, etc.). There are several ways to do this, including Google Adwords own ad tracking system (which I do not recommend for several reasons that I won’t elaborate on in this brief article).

Ad tracking basically comes down to a choice between paying for a subscription to a service or buying software that installs on your own web hosting server. From hard-won experience, let me tell you to avoid the subscription services altogether. Relying on someone else’s service for your critical stats is a gamble you do not want to take. There are several good software programs out there that will do the job, but I recommend the one you can find at: http://www.superiormarketingpartners.com/adtracking.html

Secret #9 - Put keywords in your ad text in Google Adwords

Did you know that the keywords that are part of the text of your ads in Google Adwords will appear in BOLD? If someone searches for "plastic widgets" and your ad text reads "50% off plastic widgets", then the phrase ‘plastic widgets’ will appear in bold when your ad is displayed. This makes a huge difference in the click-thru rate of your ads!

If you don’t believe me, simply follow the tip mentioned above for split-testing your ads and create two ads, one with the keywords in the ad text and the other without. You will be surprised at how much better the Google Adwords ad with the keyword(s) in the ad text performs.

Secret #10 - Only run ads on the Google ‘Search Network’ in Google Adwords

When creating a new campaign in the Google Adwords system, the default campaign settings are configured to show your ads on both the ‘Content Network’ and the ‘Search Network’. Google has a pay-per-click affiliate program called Google Adsense. This program pays people for each click on Google Adwords ads that are displayed on their own web sites. The problem for you, the Google Adwords advertiser, is that you do NOT want your ads showing up on any old website that has relevant content to your ad. You only want your ad displayed to people actively searching for the keyword(s) that trigger the display of your ad. Why? Because these are the best prospects for whatever you are trying to sell!

The power of the Google Adwords system is that you can attract highly-targeted, motivated buyers to your site by displaying an ad relevant to what a person is searching for at the moment that person is looking for what you are selling. By allowing your ads to be displayed on Google’s ‘Content Network’, your ads are showing on all kinds of websites being casually surfed by people that may not be interested at all in what you are selling. This means you are paying for these Google Adsense clicks for less than qualified prospects.

The first thing you should do when creating a new Google Adwords campaign is uncheck the ‘Content Network’ box in the campaign settings and limit your ads to being displayed only on Google’s ‘Search Network’ to insure only highly qualified and motivated prospects click on your Google Adwords ads.

Make no mistake about it…finding qualified, motivated buyers and getting them to your website when they are ready to buy is what doing business online is all about. There is no better marketplace for this steady stream of valuable traffic than with Google Adwords. By employing the tips and strategies outlined in this series of articles, you will be armed to the teeth to convert those hard earned dollars spent on Google Adwords into profits for your online business!

Ron Isaiah is an expert online marketer. Get free eBooks, mini-courses, tips and tricks by visiting Increased Website Traffic

I have seen my site hit #3 at Google, and some of my fellow entrepreneurs are wondering how I did it. Well, it’s no big secret, and it won’t cost you anything but your time. Here’s what I did:

1. I searched online for information about the title and description tags to get a better idea of what they should say. http://www.selfpromotion.com is a great site for this kind of information. It’s all about search engine positioning, and it’s free to sign up. However, your account only stays active for 4 weeks, after which the webmaster asks that you donate money to his site to keep your account active.
2. I used Overture’s free keyword tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. Just enter keywords that are relevant to your site, and Overture will generate the most popular search terms that people are using. I picked the most popular terms (making sure they were relevant), and made a list of keywords for each page of my site in Notepad.
3. Next, I visited http://www.scrubtheweb.com/abs/meta-check.html. This handy tool will check your meta tags and tell you if there are too many characters in your title, keyword and description. The above site is just one of many meta tag analyzers available on the net, so beware - every analyzer says something different when it comes to how many characters your meta tags should have. My advice? Pick one and stick with it, at least for a while. Otherwise, you will just get frustrated.
4. As soon as I uploaded my pages with their new meta tags, I resubmitted to the search engines using (the former) World Submitter - http://www.worldwidepromoter.com/?strategy. Note: there are some search engines that require you to submit your site manually in order to get listed. Selfpromotion.com has great information and articles about how to properly submit to these engines. I wouldn’t suggest submitting to the search engines more than once or twice per month, unless you want to run the risk of being accused of spamming them.
5. If I see the opportunity to add my link on a relevant site, I go for it. The more links your site has to other sites, the higher you will rank in the search engines. However, you will want to avoid linking with sites that are your direct competition.

You may just find that selfpromotion.com is the only place you need to go for information about search engine positioning. I did quite a bit of research and found several sites with great information, so I just tried to combine them all. Am I a glutton for punishment? Probably But even though it took hours to redo all of my meta tags from scratch, it was well worth it to see my site in Google’s Top 10!

Elizabeth Piotrowski

About The Author

Powerful ad copy is the key to producing the visits and sales you want. Drop by http://www.strategyadservice.com for low-cost, effective solutions!

As an authorative hub a link from a DMOZ directory category to your website will give your site a boost in PageRank™ and may assist in getting search engine spiders to crawl your site faster and more often. Google also uses DMOZ data for its Google directory.

What does this mean? It is well known in seo circles that by having a site listing in DMOZ you will also get a listing in the Google directory, effectively creating two high PageRank™ backlinks. Hundreds if not thousands of smaller sites also use Dmoz directory data. Check my search engine relationship table for who DMOZ supplies directory data to. So from a single listing in DMOZ the potential for hundreds of backlinks can stack up quite substantially.

Unlike Yahoo! with it’s paid inclusion via Yahoo! Express, you may submit your site freely to DMOZ for inclusion into their database. This can be a harrowing and traumatic experience for some as the DMOZ directory submission requirements are very tight and strict.

DMOZ prides itself on listing websites with high quality content, culling bad and garbage sites. Hopefully I can lay to rest some of your DMOZ submission fears.

Prior website checks before submitting to DMOZ
A peek at the site suggest guidelines at DMOZ gives a few clues as to what DMOZ editors look for when processing site submissions.

I don’t know how many times I have read on forums and message boards webmasters complaining they have submitted their site/s to DMOZ over and over again only to be rejected.

You can bet their site either doesn’t conform to the submission guidelines, was submitted to the wrong category or was just complete crap with no quality content.

Here is the DMOZ submission guidelines list taken from their site. Follow it to the ‘T’ and ensure your site conforms.

• Do not submit mirror sites. Mirror sites are sites that contain identical content, but have altogether different URLs.
• Do not submit URLs that contain only the same or similar content as other sites you may have listed in the directory.
• Sites with overlapping and repetitive content are not helpful to users of the directory.
• Multiple submissions of the same or related sites may result in the exclusion and/or deletion of those and all affiliated sites.
• Do not disguise your submission and submit the same URL more than once.
• Do not submit any site with an address that redirects to another address.
• The Open Directory has a policy against the inclusion of sites with illegal content. Examples of illegal material include child pornography; libel; material that infringes any intellectual property right; and material that specifically advocates, solicits or abets illegal activity (such as fraud or violence).
• Do not submit sites under construction. Wait until a site is complete before submitting it. Sites that are incomplete, contain Under Construction notices, or contain broken graphics or links aren’t good candidates for the directory.
• Submit pornographic sites to the appropriate category under Adult.
• Submit non-English sites to the appropriate category under World.
• Don’t submit sites consisting largely of affiliate links.

A good tool for checking inbound and outbound links is Xenu Link Sleuth, it does a great job and of course it’s free. The reason I have focused on site link checking is the DMOZ editor will most likely run a similar program on your site when reviewing it.

Submission Time
Ok your site is set, you conform to the DMOZ submission guidelines, Let’s do this thing! Surf to DMOZ and perform a search using a broad search term that relates to your site. You will be presented with a category full of sites that should relate to your site theme. At the top of the page should be sub-category links.

At this point ask yourself two questions;

1. Does my site fit this category?

2. Is there a Suggest URL link on the page for this category?

The idea behind this is to find the closest category match to your website. If you answer no to any of the previous two questions drill down further using the sub-category links at the top of the page until a suitable category match is found.

NOTE* Something to note when finding a category is region. If your website is regional submit using regional categories first before drilling down.
If you think you have found the right category visit some of the sites that are listed to be sure they are similar to yours.

Suggest URL
Congratulations! You have found your niche category that best fits your site. Click the Suggest URL link and let the fun begin.

Titling Your Site
This is an area where most webmasters come unstuck by using promotional words in their titles. DMOZ editors don’t take kindly to it. Use your real site title. If your official website title is Tech Law, then that is the title to submit.
As stated in the DMOZ submission guidelines, don’t use all capitals in your title.

Site Description
When describing your site common sense should prevail. As with writing page descriptions for meta description tags, write a compelling, brief, and descriptive overview of your site. Don’t be overly promotional and keep the site description free flowing.

Always describe your site from a third person view. If DMOZ editors write a description for your site they will use third person view.The idea is for your site to be listed with your description. So make the DMOZ editors task as simple as possible. If you write from a third person view and give an accurate description the editor may not make any changes to it. Using correct grammar and spelling is a must.

One way to get help for an accurate description is to ask friends to view your website or ask people from forums to view your site. Use their feedback to write a compelling, accurate and non-promotional description.

The long wait
DMOZ is free submission and edited by volunteers. There is no paid express directory inclusion and from what is stated at the DMOZ directory website, nor shall there ever be.

Processing of site submissions will take a while, even up to six months, sometimes longer. Don’t focus on this but instead continue to build quality content for your site. As one of my mentors recently stated in his ebook.
“I usually submit and forget about it.”

(c)2005 Paul Cody

Paul Cody has for the last six years studied website design and search engine optimization. Paul is active in a number of webmaster forums and has recently launched his new site http://www.auswebdesigns.net focusing on seo resources for webmasters new to this area of site design.

1. Introduction - about Google

Unless you are a web surfer in the true meaning of the concept, if you are reading this, I am almost certain that you know Google. Or, you think you know Google. You are probably aware that Google is a "search engine", that almost 80% of the internet searches in the world are done through Google. If you are a metro- or uber-geek, you probably know that the term "to google" became part of the English language, as in "she googled her high school boyfriends". And if you are really, really on top of things all trivia and have Wikipedia as your browser’s home page, you might even know that the name "Google" is a play on the word "Googol", which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nine-year-old nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by one hundred zeros. But here’s one piece of geek trivia that you might not know: The "Google" spelling is also used in "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, in which one of Deep Thought’s designers asks, "And are you not," said Fook, leaning anxiously forward, "a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?"

2. Everflux - what is that?

Some obscure "Glossary of SEO terms" (SEO = Search Engine Optimization) defines the Everflux as "An anomaly by which pages can quickly appear and then disappear in Google page rankings. Usually occurs to newly added webpages."

Basically, Everflux refers to the constant change in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), while Google constantly scours the web looking for “minty fresh” content, changing their index accordingly.

In plain English, occasionally, ranks go up or down randomly, link popularity is completely lost, pages that have been indexed for years just vanish and are nowhere to be found in Google and other similar Outer Limits phenomena. Most people whose income depends proportionally on their potential customers’ ability to find them via a Google search, may think their business is destroyed, they are ruined, and I can clearly see why.

According to forums at Webmasterworld, the first sightings of the phenomenon took place in July 2002. Later that year, the following speculation on Everflux emerged: "Lastly, they could be working on the index, rolling indexes back, switching parts of the index, backing up parts of the index, rewriting some offending part of the index, deleting parts of an index - or a multitude of other actions or problems that only Google could know about."

Legend has it that there is one ex-Google employee who goes by the name of Googleguy, who posts in related forums. He offered this explanation: "As we do a full crawl of the web, we find most of the sites from our fresh crawl and put them in our regular index. My advice on our fresh crawl is to view it as a nice "bonus" on top of Google’s deep index. Users can always search our full index, but sometimes we can serve up even fresher pages as an extra nicety."

Google introduced a "fresh crawl" process to make their results as relevant and as fresh as possible. It runs each day. The purpose of the daily fresh crawl is to update Web pages in the index that change regularly. This allows Google to provide results that are up-to-date with current events.

Google also does one major update per month, which generally begins anywhere from around the 19th or 20th of the month to approximately the 28th of the month. The update process continues for several days, with search results appearing to fluctuate as the update continues. Once the update has been completed, the new data migrates to google’s partner sites. The main reason for the fluctuation is that Google employs several sites that have to be synchronized (in popular terms). While this process takes place, search results might seem to jump and information might seem to disappear and re-appear. It is similar in concept with the idea of DNS propagation.

The regular monthly crawl takes place at different times for different web sites. The results of this crawl are generally reflected at the time of the following update.

For a number of months, beginning early Summer 2002, spidering of sites and changes have been observed to be going on all month, in between the regular monthly updates. This has come to be known as Everflux, and represents google’s continuing desire and efforts to keep their search relevant, of high quality, and "minty fresh."

Everflux is another evolutionary step in the process of offering the most recent and relevant snapshot of the web to the public. Google is adding to their value as a search tool by giving their index some of the same qualities as what is being indexed. That is, the more fluid and adaptable an index of the web is, the more accurately it will be able to reflect the fluid and adaptable nature of the web.

These of you who analyze web logs probably notice that traffic surges for certain search terms on certain days. For example, say you create a page on the web (or as the younger generation refers to it these days - you make a blog entry) about a movie which is just coming out on DVD and the "fresh crawl" daily process visits your site and makes note of it. Because of its relevance in time (overly simplified: sort results by pagerank and date), your page climbs to the top of the SERPs for a few days. Eventually, though, the story falls off your homepage and is replaced by another story about another movie which is soon gobbled by Google’s robot. Meanwhile, the long-standing sites regarding that particular movie regain their dominant positions in the SERPs. This is Everflux in full action.

As I am writing this article, there are reports of a potentially calmer Everflux coming to a browser near you. Google has very recently performed an update to their software, dubbed "Jagger". It appears that "Jagger" affected Everflux, but things started to slow down. It has been reported that the most interesting effect of "Jagger" on rankings has been diminishing the effect of reciprocal linking as a measure of popularity. It looks like "Jagger" has negated the hard work of thousands of website owners. The result is expensive linking campaigns that lead to high rankings and high revenues have plummeted. On the other hand, article submission seems to have come through the "Jagger" update apparently safe and sound. I believe this is happening because Google has put more emphasis on one way links.

The moral of the "Jagger" update story? Make sure that you do not follow the fads and the top new found ranking factors of the search engine algorithm. If you have all your eggs in one basket, I promise you, Google is sure to trip you up eventually. So, diversify your ranking efforts and generally, try to follow the very basic rules that webmasters have been hearing since the beginning of the web: design your website for users, not for Google and not for robots. Make sure every page has a unique title (you know, the < title > tag), don’t put a google of keywords in the title, just one or a few that reflect the content of that page. Make sure every page has different content and different title. Most of us, myself included, get lazy or just copy and paste pages and forget to change the title - Google’s software sees all that and does not forgive. Make use of the old-fashioned < h > tag, that is the "Header" tag. Google considers it to be polite to have paragraph headings. Don’t use images for titles, or anything text.

Google does not care about your images and does not consider a page full of images to be useful - they put a lot of emphasis on good old text. Use the description tag (read about Meta Tags if you don’t know what I’m talking about) and the keyword tags. Do not keyword-spam, do not use gateways, do not hide text (you know, white text on white background). Basically, play nice, a-la late 90s pure HTML websites. If all this is too complex, hire a SEO consultant at the very least. An analogy is the stock market. If you know what you’re doing, you know what you’re doing - basically, you follow the rules and play nice. If you don’t know what you’re doing, yes you can dabble, but most people have an adviser to avoid the ups and downs of the market shift. In the Google world, we call this shift Everflux.

3. Conclusion - don’t be scared of the big bad Everflux

Even if you don’t own and/or design and/or run your own website, it’s interesting to see how all the information collected by humanity over centuries is put into place inside a so called index of indexes. It is interesting to see how the exponential increase in information that has to be indexed presents real challenges to a process that started as a mere science experiment and evolved into a cultural phenomenon. It is also interesting to see how the people at the steering wheel deal with such challenges and the creative solutions they come up with in order to tame the information overload monster that can literally eat it all, if unleashed.

Now if you do own, operate, design websites and if your paying bills on time process depends on the above mentioned process, it can be really frightening, as incertitude is the main enemy of happiness as we know it. The advice we get from the most famous gurus (found in forums postings, of course) unanimously suggest the following: "don’t go hacking your pages to bits on account of Google’s Everflux." In other words, it’s not something to freak out about, but it’s still something a well rounded webmaster should understand. As always, I believe that while you might not be able to control a process, your happiness will benefit dramatically from just the mere idea of understanding that process. If you can’t beat it, join it - in other words, learn how to understand it and live with it.

4. Conclusion - about Google

Someone should really write a book entitled The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Googling and start it with an excerpt from Google’s own "Information for Webmasters" resource:

[…] "Don’t Panic." Just do the normal things you should do:

1. Create a great site.
2. Submit your site to google on our "add url" form.
3. Get a link from the Open Directory Project or other directories (Yahoo, etc.).
4. Don’t panic if your site takes a little while to show up in google. Be patient, and start to look around the web–there’s lots of great advice about improving your site for users and search engines.

Hope this helps,

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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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