The internet is a massive database storing information of all sorts, answers to almost any question. From looking up bus schedules to searching for the meaning of life, the answers are there, or at least someone’s answer is there. If you’re asking a question that has a factual answer, you should be able to find the correct answer easily enough; you may have to finagle your search queries a little though. If you’re asking a subjective question you’ll get just as many answers, they’ll just all be different, although each one will claim to be the true answer. Some personal evaluation is always required. There are many search engines out there, and more are added each day. The first question you’ll face is which one to use. Each has a benefit, each has deficiencies. You will quickly find out which ones you like the best after searching through endless search results. Google.com for example is a great general search engine, it will find most concepts and pages that explain what you need to know, you may find some guys page in Amsterdam that briefly comments on your topic as well but the top ten results are usually pretty accurate. I’ll get to how to use Google.com and other pages more efficiently later in this article. Wikipedia.org is another great website for looking up factual data only. If you have a question about the Russian revolution, or what bacteria are, here’s where you’ll find your answer. Which site you end up using consistently is up to you, next I’ll tell you which sites not to use.

We all know that the internet is filled with both useful data and useless data, most of us know it is also full of harmful data. Many websites will place trojans, worms, and viruses on your computer if you let them. Stay away from illegal downloads, porn and extreme violence and you should be safe, but there are some of these concerns with search engines as well. Some things to avoid:

If you get more than the occasional popup, dump that site. One popup every other visit or so is probably just a way for the site creator to make some cash, no harm in that. Some sites however flood your screen with multiple popups, or one every time you click anything. These sites may be flooding you in hopes of you accidentally clicking the wrong thing at the wrong time and downloading something nasty. You may not even know it’s there, but they do and whatever they’re doing it can’t be good for you.

If the results come back as porn, no matter what you search for, you don’t want that, well maybe you do.

The last type of site I suggest you avoid are sites such as askjeeves.com, these sites are quality sites in that they don’t have malicious intents. If you use the tips I’ll show you next, you just won’t have a use for sites like askjeeves.com. AskJeeves.com uses other search engines and finds results for you. A great idea for those who are inadequate at searching for themselves, and there is no shame in that, most people are like that. You will no longer need this feature as you will be an expert searcher in a couple more paragraphs.

There are a number of techniques that I use quite successfully to find information, and none of them include breaking thumbs or knees.

The first is put your search in quotes (or search for the exact phrase). You may not get any hits at all, but if you get some they should pretty much be exactly what you’re looking for. Of course this tip won’t always be useful, especially if you’re searching for a single word. If I’m searching for something specific, like “my hard drive is making noise”, I always search for the phrase I want in quotes first. If that doesn’t work I either remove the quotes, or shorten the phrase. Results typically include message boards when you search with quotes, but they are a great source of information, links and all!

Message boards are fantastic, you’ll often be able to find someone who had the same problem, or wanted the same information as you, but he posted a question three months ago and now there are ten answers. You get the same information as him, but now, not in three months. Often message boards will have links to sites that answer your question as well, that way you don’t have to rely on trusting some guy on the internet, like me.

Think outside the box when entering your search terms. Try the obvious first, but if you find yourself stumped, expand your search to include things that are related to what you want to know. For example if you’re interested in knowing more about General Lee, but all you can find when you search for it is the Dukes of Hazard, try searching for the Civil War, or army generals. This is the single most important skill to have when searching for obscure information.

The easiest way to search for something is to let someone else search for it. There are sites such as askipedia.com that will do this for free. It won’t be as quick as doing it yourself, they have a 24 hour guarantee, but it will be much easier. You won’t have to do much work at all, and they may come up with better results anyway.

Practice makes perfect so get out there and experiment. Search of a specific topic and see how many different searches will return the same results, you’ll be surprised.

Joe DeClara, is a researcher/writer for Askipedia.com. A question isn’t just something that you have answered, it’s a chance to learn something new, and what is more important than expanding our area of knowledge. Come learn with us, all you need is a question.

http://www.askipedia.com

Every website listed in the search engines has a position, or ‘ranking’, and each one of these rankings can change very quickly, in some cases as often as weekly or even daily. One day your website’s in a good position, then the next you’re wondering what happened to it. Staying on top of this situation is a must for any SEO professional – you need to become a search engine ninja. If that’s what you want to do, then you need to keep these things in mind at all times:

1. Good SEO requires frequent updates and ranking checks.

You might have a good spot today, but all it takes is for a few new sites to open, and before you know it you’re back down at the bottom. If you pay attention to your rankings, then you have a shot at fixing things that go wrong before your rankings fall too far.

2. You should check all your links weekly to make sure they work.

Maintain high-quality, relevant reciprocal links and check them weekly to make sure they’re working. Remove any dead links, as search engine crawlers may mark you down if they find them on your site.

3. Tweak and assess your website on a daily basis.

You need to continually assess and tweak your listing to keep your site in its proper place – that is, at the top. This ensures that your site is in the best position possible, and helps you keep your competitive edge.

4. Maintain the content on your website.

Update your content weekly at the very least, to make sure that search engine crawlers come back frequently. Even the smallest changes will be picked up on by the search engines and will help to maintain your ranking. If you can’t write, find someone who can: you need content.

5. Keep up-to-date with the latest developments in SEO.

If you can’t decide what you should be doing or you don’t want to keep up with SEO on your own, you could consider hiring a specialist. Consulting with an SEO specialist will still allow you to make your own changes to your website and learn which things work best, but you’ll have someone to answer your questions if you need them.

You should review your SEO techniques at least every few months, to see how the algorithms have changed and to devise new plans and strategies for increasing your rankings based on those changes. Any SEO ninja will tell you that there are only really two major search engines that you need to worry about: Google and Yahoo. You can do well even if you only have the time or energy to focus on these two engines. Being an SEO ninja is hard work, but it can be very rewarding if you’ve got the dedication for it.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about SEO and PRL.

You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews

Does the whole idea of Internet marketing intimidate you? Are you thinking of hiring a professional? Well, we’ve got great news for you. It’s really not difficult to do search engine optimization (SEO) yourself – you can save hundreds of dollars, and get the same results as the professionals do. You will probably get better results from highly qualified professionals, but you should definitely perform these do-it-yourself actions first. Once you’ve done some of this kind of work it will be easier to determine if a professional is worth his/her salt.

Basic SEO is very simple and easy – all it takes is the willingness to put in the work. Once you know the ropes, it’s not that difficult though it can be time consuming. The content of your website the focus of what SEO is all about. Here are the top points to think about when you’re doing it yourself.

1. You will start by registering a domain name, which should reflect what your site about. Keep it short, as long as it’s somehow related to your site. Being more specific can help. You could choose to name the page after one of your products or services, for example. Another method is to get a sub domain of a popular domain. This will generally help you get indexed more quickly though it will not appear quite as professional to your visitors. There is a trade of here, sub domains are quicker (and generally cheaper), but domain names are more memorable, and, in the long run, better for your indexing.

2. The next thing you should look at is your page’s title (i.e. the HTML title tag), which is critical in letting search engines see what the page is about, and is the first item looked at by search engines to determine your relevance. You should put your most important keywords in your title tags – you don’t need to worry about singular or plural forms as search engines account for these changes in most cases. Whatever you do, don’t call your home page ‘Home’ – make the title a mini-description of the page.

3. The two primary meta tags aren’t as important as they used to be, but the description tag is still used by some search engines to display information about your website to users and help them decide whether they’ve found what they are looking for. Not all search engines bother with this, though most will put some bearing on it (even if it is minuscule).

For very short descriptions the alt tag can be used. Alt tags let you describe an image or graphic file – they’re the pop-up descriptions that appear when you hover your mouse over a graphic, or when the graphic can’t be downloaded for whatever reason.

Text within comment tags is never displayed on the page – it is used by coders and designers to remind them of what that part of the page is for. Some coders used to put lots of keywords in the comment tags, so that they would be seen by search engines but not users, but search engines have now stopped paying attention to any text that isn’t seen by the user. Keep this in mind when trying to post invisible text (i.e. white text on a white background). This kind of behavior can get you banned from a search engine.

4. Having keyword density in all of your content is good, but keep in mind that each search engine has its own requirements when it comes to how many times that a keyword or phrase should be in the content for the page to be relevant. Somewhere between 5 and 8 percent is a roughly optimal level – but this isn’t always possible, and you shouldn’t force it. Don’t overdo it, or the search engines might mark you down.

5. Many search engines judge web page importance on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites. You should link to some related sites, but not too many. Don’t overdo incoming links either, and keep them related your site’s content. It’s also good to get sites to use your keywords as the text of these links.

If you follow the advice above, you can do it yourself and do fine. SEO, if done right, can keep you on top for as long as you want to be.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about SEO and PRL.

You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews

Finding the right SEO tools and resources can be challenging – but we’re here to make it a little easier on you. SEO forums and newsgroups can be very confusing to a person with no SEO experience. These forums and newsgroups are just so heavily populated that they can intimidate many new users.

The first rule regarding these situations is to just slowly try to integrate yourself into the community. Follow these rules closely and concisely so that you do not offend anybody:

1. Do not spam the forum with your problems. If you have a few things that you would like to discuss you will probably get help, but do not try to hog all of the assistance for yourself. For one thing, most of your questions have already been answered, believe it or not. There is generally a “search” option. Always use this before posting your problem.

2. Do not “Flame.” Flaming is a term used among forum dwellers to describe the behavior of “yelling” at people via the forum. This is generally associated with cursing, constant argument, typing in all caps to try to convey anger, and dismissing other people’s posts in an undignified fashion. There are other problems that are included in flaming, but I have given you the jist of it.

3. Never take a post off topic. If there is something that you would like to discuss that was inspired by a post on another topic, post a new topic in the appropriate board and explain where the topic was conceived. You may still want to reply to the post just to let people know that the topic has been created so that somebody else doesn’t take it off topic.

4. Do not “bump” your thread (or post). Bumping a post is when you reply to your own post in hopes of getting a response sooner. The only time that this is acceptable is if your thread has laid dormant for about a week. Bumped threads are very annoying to most forum users. Bumping posts on a regular basis will probably lead to a lack of interest in your posts and will probably contribute to a lack of support in your ventures.

6. Be friendly. There is no reason that you can’t be completely polite when posting on a forum. You will get very good response if you are simply polite in your post. Politeness in the world of forums includes making sure that you have communicated your problem carefully so that people attempting to help you can understand and provide answers to the best of their abilities.

7. Join in on the community favorites. Many forums now include “games” which are occasionally pretty fun. They are pretty much just there for if you are bored and waiting for a response to your other posts, but they are enjoyable if you keep up with them as many forum dwellers are quite articulate and witty.

Here’s a list of resources that you can use when you need help but you don’t want to pay for it.

Finding Groups.

Google makes discussion groups easy to find with their ‘Google Groups’ tool (groups.google.com). Go there and type in ‘seo’ to see what’s on offer. Two popular groups are alt.internet.search-engines and alt.www.webmaster. If you don’t like Google’s groups, try Yahoo’s instead (groups.yahoo.com). Either of these sources will provide you with a pretty substantial list. Remember, regular search engine listings seem to apply here so generally you will see the best results towards the top of the listing.

dmoz.org is a good place to start: from their home page, you can browse down to any subject you want, and you should find at least one mailing list, discussion forum or message board in the listing.

There are several forums out there on the web that focus on SEO, and you can learn a lot from all of them, even if some of the discussions are over your head at first. Even ordinary searchers can learn a lot from following these discussions, as they tell you a lot about how search engines work.

Here are some useful forums: WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, ThreadWatch, Best Practices Search Engine Forums, cre8asite forums and the High Rankings Forum. Check them out.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about SEO and PRL.

You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews

Search Engine traffic has always been and continues to be one of the best ways to drive qualified traffic to a web site - it presents information about goods and services when the interest level is high and it can be acted on immediately. Up till now opt-in e-mail marketing has been an effective complement to search engine ranking campaigns; but the never-ending deluge of Spam is rapidly ruining the effectiveness of opt-in e-mail and helping to add luster to the value and cost-effectiveness of search engine traffic.

Unfortunately, the increasing popularity of search engine ranking methodologies is helping to raise the barriers to entry - as more businesses, ad agencies and SEO firms concentrate their efforts on creating highly optimized web sites, the competition for keyword rankings and qualified traffic is increasing significantly. The rules are changing rapidly and if you expect to succeed you must deploy a sophisticated methodology that blends technology and processes. Here is a list of five bottom line requirements that must be adhered to if you expect to generate qualified traffic:

Link Strategy: The web is maturing and search engines are putting more and more emphasis on link popularity or page rank or "PR" in Google’s vernacular; i.e. the number of web sites pointing back to your own. If you are to be successful you must develop and deploy a systematic process to establish links to your web site with others that are in your market segment and setup an outbound "link to" resources page via your own site. This takes an investment of time and resources - typically you need between 400-800 links back to your web site to achieve a good "page ranking." Here is a link to an excellent detailed article on setting up an effective link popularity strategy:

http://www.website101.com/arch/archive143.html

Keyword Fundamentals: Keywords are the fundamental building blocks of any search engine ranking campaign - many/many companies waste significant resources optimizing for keywords that are either wrong; i.e. not targeted for their market or there is too much competition and rankings will never be achieved. You must utilize keywords that are targeted for your market and find those that can effectively drive page 1-3 rankings - WordTracker www.wordtracker.com has rapidly emerged as the defacto industry standard technology tool for researching keywords - we’ve used it for years and highly recommend this cost-effective and comprehensive service to our clients and business partners.

Keyword Saturation: Search engine "spiders" or "bots" are automated software applications that constantly roam the web to assess what is called "keyword saturation" via web site content (pages) to identify how a site should be listed in a search engine database. They typically look for 3-7% usage of keywords versus the text on a specific page - you must adhere to their standards if you want to achieve keyword rankings for your selected keywords. And, to further complicate matters, top tier search engines all have different rules for keyword saturation - we highly recommend and use this software application to help us ascertain and setup the correct keyword saturation for our client’s web sites:

http://www.se-optimizer.com/

Optimized Content: Highly optimized content is still very important as far as search engines are considered - the more search engine optimized content on a web site the better. Search engines prefer content that is thematically grouped, loads fast, is textual with minimal graphics, is highly optimized for keywords (keyword saturation fundamentals are addressed) and incorporates one or two of your primary keywords for a specific page in the page title.

Site Maps Essential: Site maps are frequently overlooked when search engine ranking processes are deployed. A site map not only serves as a quick reference and/or navigation guide for anyone visiting your web site but it’s also used by search engines to "crawl" (the action a spider or bot takes to review your web site) your web site to find pages and links. Make sure you include a basic site map in your optimization plans, it’s very important to help search engines navigate through your site.

About The Author

Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc. http://www.intelective.com, a marketing services company which provides strategic and tactical marketing services exclusively to small to medium sized companies. Lee@intelective.com.

Reprinted with permission from Intelective Communications - this article may be reprinted freely, provided this attribution box remains intact. (c) 2002-2003 by Intelective Communications, Inc.

Lee@intelective.com

Advertisers and search engine optimization campaigns are focused on getting the most bang for the buck. To organize your effort, you need to know which search engines have the biggest pieces of the traffic pie.

Subjective Numbers

Ask anyone in the Internet game and they will definitively tell you which search engine is the best. Of course, this often correlates to the actual search engine they use. I once had a person present me with a long winded, yet passionate, diatribe about why AllTheWeb.com was better than Google, MSN and…Yahoo! If I only had a brain, I would surely see that AllTheWeb.com would become the dominant search engine. This I was told with great conviction and more than a few people nodded their heads around us.

Since I was in a particularly bad mood that evening, I hipped the person into the fact that Yahoo provides all the search results on AllTheWeb.com! I even had to pull the site up and show my "teacher" the truth of the matter. So much for making friends!

Many people fall in love with a particular search engine, which is fine. I do it myself. That doesn’t mean the search engine in question is the biggest, baddest or best! Subjective views are, well, subjective. Follow them in lieu of objective facts and you run the risk of making huge mistakes.

Objective Numbers

There are two types of results you can look at when calculating search engine traffic percentages. The first represents the total traffic covered by a search engine across all sites it provides results to. The second, which we cover here, refers to only the percentage of searches actually on the engine itself. For instance, Google provides results for AOL. In these figures, the AOL searches are NOT included in Google’s totals.

For the first half of 2005, the objective numbers were:

1. Google: 47 percent

2. Yahoo: 22 percent

3. MSN: 12 percent

4. AOL: 5 percent

5. Others: 14 percent

Short, sweet and to the point. Google is clearly eating the biggest piece of the pie. If Google buys AOL, it will grow even more. Conversely, if MSN buys AOL, it will move closer to Yahoo.

When it comes to your marketing, Google is clearly the beast you should focus on. It controls more traffic than Yahoo and MSN combined.

Halstatt Pires is a search engine optimization specialist with http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing and advertising company in San Diego offering meta tag optimization services and link popularity services.

The vernacular is "build a site and they will come." This cliché is only true if your site is indexed in the relevant search engine database.

Indexing

Search engines are essentially massive databases of domains and sub-domains for sites. When a person searches for something, the search engine instantaneously searches the domain names to come up with relevant listings. The method for doing this differs by engine and involves factors beyond the scope of this article. Instead, we are going to focus on figuring out if your site is in these important databases.

If you want to be included in the rankings on a search engine, your domain name has to be in the search engine database. Put another way, you have to buy a ticket if you want to win the lotto. Your chances of getting free traffic from rankings are far better if you have as many urls from your site included in the database as possible. Having just your home page indexed isn’t going to cut it.

If your site has 500 total pages, you ideally want 500 urls included in the search engine index. While this is admittedly a simplification of the situation, the more pages included, the better chance you have of getting high rankings under different keywords. The more high rankings you produce, the more free traffic you can get and the easier it will be to survive the loss of one ranking.

To check how many pages of your site are indexed in a particular search engine, simply do a search on the particular engine for "site:yourdomainname.com". Pay particular attention to Yahoo, as it often will fail to pick up many of your pages. The result of this search will tell you every page the engine has found on your site and included in its database.

If you discover only a few pages have been indexed by the search engine, you need to take a look at your site. A common problem for sites using databases concerns dynamic urls. Many programmers will write session ids and so on into the urls. The search engines have massive problems reading these urls and will often fail to include them in their databases. You have this problem if the internal pages of your site have tails like:

yourdomainname/id43/s-876783/product=46830

If you have this problem, the best solution is to create static pages without the dynamic urls issues. The session ids and so on should be moved into the code of the page and removed from the url. You will probably need a programmer to make the fix.

If you do not have this problem, you need to figure out how to get your site into the indexes. There are plenty of articles telling you how. The first step, however, is just figuring out if the search engines have found you.

Halstatt Pires is a search engine optimization specialist with http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing and advertising company in San Diego offering meta tag optimization services and link popularity services.

Today one of the biggest concerns for owners of online businesses is their placement in the search engines, especially Google, Yahoo! and MSN. For many companies losing top placement in the search engines would be devastating. But how are the search engines affecting business in general?

I’ve been with an SEO company for about three years now and getting results for our clients is getting a lot harder than it used to be. Three years ago you could simply stuff a website with keywords and it’d be on the first page of Google for the desired keywords. Today it takes at least three to six months to see good results for any keywords worth going after. What I’m wondering is if it’s changed this much in the last three years how much more will it change in the next three? Or five? Or ten?

I see things going something like this. As internet access becomes more available and portable the use of search engines is going to increase more and more. On the other hand there are still only going to be ten spots on the first page for search results. This means that the same group of ten to twenty websites is going to get more and more business. As these companies grow they will be able to spend more money on other kinds of advertising such as print and television advertising. As these get more aggressive in their advertising they are going to be able to push out the other companies that depend on the business that comes from print ads and commercials.

How long until this becomes reality? It’s already starting to happen in some markets. For businesses in very competitive markets they are already feeling the squeeze being put on by their competitors who are enjoying the top ten ranking. To those who aren’t there now all I can do is suggest you do whatever you have to do to get yourself top placement in the search engines. For some businesses the short term return on investment might be small but come on, this is the future. Plan ahead before it’s too late.

I hope I’ve gotten your thoughts running. One thing I see is people only worrying about next week and next month. Five years is a long way away and ten years is even farther but I know that five years ago doesn’t seem that long ago and if I knew then what I knew now I’d be retired already. Don’t be the guy who in five years wishes he had taken care of this now. Instead be the guy who in five years is reaping the benefits of his foresight.

Jeffrey Henderson
Director of Marketing
ViP Search Engine Marketing
(877) 484-7736 ext.209
www.vipsem.com

I am the Director of Marketing for a professional SEO firm in Burbank, CA. I am relatively new to writing articles but I really wanted to de-bunk a lot of the myths out there about SEO and to help people understand what SEO really is. I hope that you, the reader, benefits from these articles and if you have any questions feel free to contact me.

Ever since there have been search engines, there have been techniques that unscrupulous webmasters and shady search engine optimization firms have used to artificially boost rankings. As search engines caught on to these techniques, they devised ways to detect them without having someone physically look at each site (a practical impossibility, considering that several individual engines now index well over a billion pages). While most engines are becoming more adept at detecting "spam" pages and penalizing or removing them, there is an unfortunate side effect to this efficiency- some companies that are innocent of intentional wrongdoing unknowingly have sites that fall into the "spam" category. What follows is a list of some of the issues that can hurt such sites, followed by suggestions of how to prevent penalization or removal.

1: Hidden Text

Almost all search engines use the words on the pages of web sites as one factor in their ranking equation. This means that if the text on your pages includes your keyphrases, you have a better chance of ranking highly for those phrases than a competing page that does not include them. Some webmasters, aware of this but not wanting their visitors to actually see the text (usually for "aesthetic" reasons), began taking keyphrase-rich text and making it the same color as the page background. For example, if a page had a white background, they would add text to the page, loaded with keyphrases, in the same shade of white.

A human visitor would not be able to see the text, but the search engine "spider" (the programs that search engines use to go out and index web pages) would, and it would get a ranking boost accordingly. However, engines soon caught on and began penalizing pages that used this tactic. Unfortunately, some innocent sites are still penalized for this, even though the text on their pages is visible. Say, for example, that the background of a page is white. On this white background is a large blue box that has white text within it.

Even though the text is clearly visible to the visitor, the search engine is not smart enough to realize that the white text appears in a blue box- it just assumes that the white text has been placed on a white background. To avoid any potential problems, it is important that you let your webmaster know that the text on your pages should never be the same color as the assigned background color.

2: Bad Links

Much of the internet is founded on sites linking to one another (a search engine itself is really just a very large collection of links). However, with the relatively recent emphasis placed upon a site’s links as part of the ranking formula (commonly called "link popularity"), it has become crucial to carefully select and closely monitor the sites with which you exchange links. Google, the pioneer of this ranking methodology, often penalizes sites that provide links to what they call "bad neighborhoods"- sites that Google determines serve no purpose save for artificially boosting link popularity.

It is important to note that sites are only penalized when they actively link to another site, not when a site links to them (which is only fair, as webmasters have no real control over what sites choose to link to theirs). If any page of your site contains links to outside sites, it is important to make certain that these outside sites are not being penalized. The easiest way to do this on Google is to download the Google toolbar (available at http://toolbar.google.com/). Most pages that you find on the internet have been assigned a "Pagerank", which is represented by a sliding green scale on the toolbar (visit the link to see an example). To be safe, avoid linking to any site that does not show any green on this scale (most importantly when this scale is grayed out).

Such sites may be penalized, and linking to them may get your site penalized in turn (do not, however, refrain from exchanging links with sites simply because they show just a sliver of green- these sites are not being penalized and links from them may become more valuable over time). It is also very important to monitor the sites that you link to periodically to make certain that they have not been penalized since you originally added their link to your site.

3: Cloaking

Cloaking, loosely defined, is the practice of showing a search engine spider a different page than what an actual human visitor sees. This means that the server of a cloaked page makes a note of the unique address assigned to each visitor, and when that visitor is a spider, it feeds it specialized content that is designed to rank highly for certain search terms. Virtually every major engine now imposes harsh penalties on sites that use cloaking (although a few of them will allow you to pay them for the privilege, but that’s a topic for a future article).

Unfortunately, the intent of cloaking isn’t always necessarily to trick search engines. Some high-ranking pages are cloaked simply to prevent others from stealing the underlying code (such theft is commonly called "pagejacking"). This concern, however, is somewhat unfounded today. With the increased emphasis of "off the page" elements, such as link popularity, an unscrupulous webmaster could steal the code from a high-ranking page and replicate it exactly without achieving the same high rankings. In any case, the practice of cloaking, for whatever reason, puts your site at risk of being penalized or removed from major engines, so make sure that your webmaster does not employ the technique.

4: Keyword Stuffing

As mentioned above, the words on your pages can be an important factor in the ranking of your web pages. However, it is entirely possible to have too much of a good thing. "Keyphrase Density", as it is commonly called, is the ratio of keyphrases on your page to the overall number of words on the page. While different engines prefer different keyphrase density, almost all have an upper limit, after which pages can be penalized. In most cases, this threshold would be hard to break without the text sounding inane. However, particularly when a keyphrase is part of a company name, density can accidentally become unnaturally high.

For example, if your company name was "Atlanta Plumbing Pros" and you styled your text so that this company name was used in almost every sentence, you would have a dangerously high density for the phrase "Atlanta Plumbing" and would be at risk of penalization. To correct any potential problems, go over the text on each of your pages and make certain that it reads naturally and that no phrases are repeated too frequently (for example in more than half of the sentences).

Search engines are becoming increasingly cognizant of the techniques used to try to fool them, and they are also becoming better at detecting and removing pages that violate their terms of service. It’s important to remember that search engines make decisions on how to rank pages based upon extensive studies of their users and their preferences, and any webmaster or optimization firm that claims to know better (and subsequently uses underhanded techniques) is doing a disservice to their client. Unfortunately, however, sometimes the spam detection methods that the engines use target good sites that inadvertently meet the criteria for removal or penalization. By paying attention to the four issues above, you can help ensure that your site isn’t one of them.

David Hennebery is the owner and creator of a very successful ebook called ebookprofitmaker. He is regarded as an expert in eBook marketing and selling. To contact him email support@ebookprofitmaker.com or http://www.ebookprofitmaker.com/articleoffer.html

You can start with a few dollars and a good idea to make lots of money online writing and selling your own ebook! I did and I’ll show you how. To find out more and receive a 35% discount on my new eBook for reading my article visit http://www.ebookprofitmaker.com/articleoffer.html

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Most webmasters have no idea on how to make a search engine friendly web site. If you are one of them this will all change by following these steps below.

1. Research keywords - Before you start to build your web site you should research your keywords or your site may get hurt in the short term. Use the keyword research tool, use Overture to research the most popular keywords that are related to your site. Overture will show you how much traffic each keyword has got in the past 30 days.

2. Create a list of about 50 to 100 keywords that you can include within your web pages. After having completed the above research, you should have found the keywords that were searched on most frequently, but few competing sites.

3. Write a paragraph of at least 250, but better with 500 words of text for the top of each web page. Put your keywords within this text, but be careful because you could repeat your keywords to much and make sure the paragraph makes sense with all those keywords, remember visitors are more important then the search engines.

4. Optimize meta tags - Meta tags have lost there touch with most search engines, but they still help! The most important meta tags are the keyword and description meta tags. Include your keywords within each of these meta tags. Your keyword meta tag should include the most frequently used keywords contained within your web page, but keep it short to about 10 to 15.

5. Title Tag - The title tag is one of the most powerful on-site SEO at your disposal, so use it wisely. Put your most important keyword in the title close to the beginning as posable, keep it short and to the point.

7. Optimize your site size - Too many images or very large images on your web page will slow down your server and cause slow loading times for your site. Slice large images into smaller pieces with a graphic editors. Also to long of pages and to much text will do the same.

8. Find backward links - Web sites that link to yours raise your link popularity. Search for web sites that are compatible with yours. Write articles that are related to your site and submit them to sites like Articlecity.com.

Matt Colyer began as a SEO Specialist in 1997. He founded Superior Webmaster in 2004 as a source of articles and tutorials for Web site owners looking to improve their Web site.