Getting a high ranking in the search engines is something with many variables.

It can rely on what industry you’re in, the products or services you supply, and the competition you have. There is however a few basic things you can do to help this process.

1. Choose The Right Domain Name!

A good example of this is my domain name. At first glance it seems long and drawn out but I chose it to include the keywords I wanted in it. Its getting harder to find available domain names with good keywords. If you want to look for good available domain names you can go to www.deleteddomains.com

2. Selecting a Keyword or Phrase!

There are so many keywords or phrases you could use for your website so its important to find one you believe will help your cause and focus on it. Use this chosen keyword in all of your web text copy, your description and your meta tags in the script. This techy stuff can be done by your web designer.

3. Website Title and Description!

This is where you submit your info to the search engines and they can put your website into the appropriate category. This is important as it helps to make sure your site is recognized for the right area by both the potential customers and the search engines. If you’re not sure what keywords are right for you then go to www.goodkeywords.com and download a fr~e keyword tool to help you identify and find a good one.

This is the basics but often success comes from many small gems that help you overall. Getting to the top of the search engines is always an ongoing battle but don’t forget you can fast track it by using pay per click advertising and get as high as your budget will allow.

Have Fun & Take Care

Scott Wilsn - Business Opportunity Creator and Coach

Start you journey with a free ebook at http://www.thegoldsinhere.com and http://www.internetsalesmentors.com

The best way to avoid being blacklisted by the search engines is to avoid using some questionable techniques that were once popular to gain high rankings. Even if your website is not blacklisted by using some of the techniques below, it may be penalized (buried in the rankings) so your traffic will suffer all the same. When a search engine blacklists a website it will throw your listing off their site and block your site from coming aboard again. This can be done by blocking the domain name, the IP address or both.

Here are a few techniques to avoid, so that your site will not be blacklisted:

Mirror Websites

Mirror websites are sites with identical content but different URL’s. This was once a method used to gain high rankings in the search engines, but since search engines are smarter now, this will only get you penalized or blacklisted.

Doorway (gateway) Pages

Doorway pages are pages with little real content for your visitors that are optimized to rank highly within the search engines. These pages are designed so that visitors will move deeper into the website where the real content lies. Navigation to the doorway pages are usually hidden from the visitors (but not the SE robots) on the homepage.

Invisible Text and Graphics

Using invisible text (text the same or a very similar color to the background) was once used to spam a homepage and some inside pages with non-stop keywords and keyphrases. Also links to doorway pages and hidden site maps can be done with invisible text (or invisible graphics). Some designers will create a graphic link with a 1 pixel by 1 pixel raster image and link this to a hidden inner page such as a hidden site map.

Submitting Pages Too Often

Submitting the same pages to the search engines within a 24 hour period can get you penalized and may delay your website from being listed in the rankings. Some search engines believe that pages submitted sooner than every 30 days is too much. The 30 day rule is a good rule to follow when submitting to multiple search engines.

Using Irrelevant Keywords

Using irrelevant keywords in a website’s metatags and / or body copy in order to achieve high rankings will most certainly backfire. Search engines now want to see parity between these two areas and if your site is thought to be spamming with irrelevant keywords, you site will be penalized or blacklisted.

Automated Submissions to the Major Search Engines

Using an automated service or software to submit your website to the search engines can be extremely counterproductive. Most of the major search engines and directories accept manual submissions but do not like to be spammed with the automated ones.

Cloaking

Cloaking is the practice of deceiving both the search engine and the visitor by serving up different pages for each. The visitor sees a nicely designed and formatted page and the search engine robot scans a page of highly optimized text. Any practice that is deceptive should be avoided and the downfall of cloaking is that, if caught, the website can be banned permanently.

Using a Cheap or Free Web Host

Using a cheap or free web host can hurt in the search engine rankings. Frequent downtime, pages taken down for exceeding the bandwidth deter robots from indexing your site. If a robot cannot access your site often enough, your site will be dropped from the search engines. Hosting is cheap, so if you are serious about your website get your own domain name and host not one like: geocities.com/yoursite.

Sharing an IP Address

Sharing an IP Address even from a legitimate web host can get your site in trouble. If you have cleaned up your website from all of the techniques mentioned above and your website still does not get relisted by the search engines in a couple of months, check with your host to see if you are sharing an IP address with other sites. If so, you may consider moving your website to a new host who will give you your own IP address or at least one that is not shared with another company who has had their IP address (an yours) banned by the search engines.

FAST’s Director of Business Development and Marketing, Stephen Baker, has stated that globally there are approximately 30 million crawl-able servers and approximately two-thirds have been banned by the FAST network for spamming. If these numbers are correct, your site may be blacklisted or penalize for "guilt by association."

Copyright © 2004 SEO Resource

SEO Solutions and Strategies

Kevin Kantola is the CEO of SEO Resource, a California search engine optimization company, and has published many articles over the past 20 years.

You’ve got a website. You’ve put countless hours into it, tweaking the look and feel and making sure all the links work. The bad news is there are a gazillion other websites out there. The good news is there are many things you can control to make sure your site isn’t lost in the morass of dot coms.

One of the most important is showing up in the search engines, and getting listed in the top 20 for your subject. This article covers the steps you can take within your site.

First things first: Just like there’s no “get rich quick”, there’s also no “get listed quick” (unless you pay for it).

Getting top listings in the search engines is an accomplishment. It gets you traffic and it gets you credibility. You can buy sponsored listings – you can’t buy credibility.

Always Remember: Search engines base their usefulness on the quality of the results they give. You want people who are searching for your product to find your site; they want people who are searching for your product to find relevant sites. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about making sure you both get what you want.

SEO requires many steps. They pay off, but not immediately. Once you’re “spidered” you’ll see the effects of changes you make pretty quickly, but getting “spidered” (sorry to all the arachnophobes) can take awhile.

Spidered: Search engines search sites throughout the entire World Wide Web (if that sounds a lot like Sally searching for seashells by the seashore, it’s intentional). But, to search for your site, they have to know you’re there. So, these benevolent spiders send their hairy arms searching through the Web and whatever sticks to their spindly legs they keep.

If you create a web these spiders might want to visit, this process gets you a more desirable string on their web. You want to create a spa for spiders.

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

Think about it: how do you search for something on the Internet? You put in a few words that say succinctly what you’re searching for, i.e. downtown Chicago restaurants.

So, when you design or revamp your site, consider the keywords anyone would use to find what you offer.

The beauty of the Internet is the ability to target niche markets. You don’t need a gazillion hits a month. You need people who are searching for YOUR product to find YOUR site. To illustrate the above example: if you search for “downtown Chicago restaurants” in Google, TheLocalTourist.com is the first listing. If you look for “Chicago Restaurants” it’s aways down the list. But that’s perfect. Because The Local Tourist only lists restaurants in downtown Chicago.

If The Local Tourist had a high listing for Chicago Restaurants, then someone looking for a place to eat in one of the outlying neighborhoods would be disappointed, and we don’t want that.

By focusing on your niche keywords, on your target market’s desires, you’re forced to evaluate what you have to offer and the best way to present it. When you designed your product or service, you (hopefully) had the end-user in mind. So you know what they want.

As you’re starting out, don’t use the most popular keywords; use ones that don’t get as many searches because there won’t be as much competition. You’re just trying to establish a presence. A good resource to find the popularity of keywords is http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. Type in the keywords you think people would use to find your work and this tool will show you how many people have searched for it in the previous month through Overture. Google searches are approximately 12x that number.

Scope Out Your Competition

Go to your favorite search engines and type in your chosen keywords. Now visit the top three for each set of keywords from each search engine. Try to figure out how they got such high listings.

An easy way to keep track of this reconnaissance work is to create a simple spreadsheet and use a different worksheet for each search term. You’ll want to have a row for each of the following:

1. Search term

2. Search engine

3. Your ranking:

a. If I’m not in the top 50, I simply write that.

b. Add a date next to the ranking so you can track your movement up the listings

4. Overture traffic (number of times term was searched for last month)

5. Repeat the following 3 times, for the top 3 listings:

a. Listing URL

b. Title

c. Description

d. Keywords

When you visit each of your competitor’s sites, you’re going to use a wonderful tool called Source Code. Copy and paste their URL into your spreadsheet, then in your browser click on View…Source. A new window opens with their HTML. (I always feel a little dirty when I do this, like I’m a voyeur or a spy, which I guess I am. That being said, it’s completely legit.)

Now that you’re seeing all their dirty laundry, you’re going to look for their Meta Tags, which will be at the top of the code.

Meta Tags are the code in the HTML that visitors don’t see but search engines do. They used to be the main way to get listed, but search engines have gotten smarter since abusers were loading up their tags with irrelevant keywords. They aren’t nearly as important as they used to be, but the Title and Description tags are still vital. Many search engines use the title for the listing and the description for, well, the description. If your tags are relevant to your content, they don’t hurt and do help with some.

Find the tags for Title, Description, and Keywords. Simply look for “title”, “description” and “keyword” at the top of the source code.

1. The title uses the main keywords potential customers use to find sites. For example, TheLocalTourist’s home page title is “Downtown Chicago Restaurants, Bars and Nightclubs, Shopping, Events, Things To Do”. This title highlights the areas of the site where I want to receive search engine rankings based on the number of searches on those terms.

2. The description is where sites give their metaphorical “sound-byte”. The trick is to pick keywords and write a compelling, succinct description without sounding like you’re trying to use all your keywords. Gee, it sounds so easy.

3. The keyword meta tag is simply a listing, separated by commas, of all the keywords people would use to find a site. They should be different for each page because the content is different. ONLY use keywords that represent your content. Don’t go crazy and don’t use the same ones too many times.

Copy their tags and place them in the appropriate rows in your spreadsheet.

Now go back to the page itself and read through it. Take note of how they use their keywords in their content. It’s a good idea to print each one.

Finally, gather your spreadsheets and your competitor’s site print-outs and pull the keywords and descriptions that reflect your site’s content. Analyze how they present their information.

This process is time consuming, but it forces you to take a look at your competition. It also, of course, makes sure your site is search engine friendly and therefore potential-visitor friendly.

Step By Step Optimization

Now it’s time to really get down to business.

Change your file names to include the most relevant keywords for each page. You can’t do that with the home page since it has to be something like “index”, but you can name the other pages on the site with the relevant keyword for each page. Believe it or not, it does make a difference. Pick one or two so the file name isn’t too long.

Write a title (not a meta tag, a real title) for each page as close to the top of the page as possible using the best keywords to describe the content. Format it as Header 1. (Most HTML editors have an easy way to format text without going into the code if you’re unfamiliar with HTML.) You’re putting it at the top of the page because search engines read like we do: left to right, top to bottom. This placement and the header formatting is a flag stating that “This is what the page is about”.

Within the content of each page, include a blurb that uses as many keywords as possible without being annoying or redundant. Make your keywords bold, but only once. A good, brief example is the Things to Do page http://www.thelocaltourist.com/ThingsToDo.htm. This is one of the most frequently visited pages on The Local Tourist from search engines.

Make sure every picture has an “alt tag” (alternate). That’s the text that shows up while the picture is loading. Search engines can’t “read” pictures, so the alt tags show them what the picture is about. On most HTML editors you add the alt tag in picture properties.

Use your hard-earned knowledge from spying to create your own meta tags. Tailor your competitors’ usage for your own site. (Learning how to implement meta tags is beyond the scope of this article, but you can do a web search for “meta tag tutorial” to find plenty of help.)

Ta da! You now have a website that’s ready to be submitted to the search engines. It’s a good idea to check your rankings on a regular basis and track them with your spreadsheets. Remember, this is not an instant process. The absolute best way to get impressive rankings is to have a content-rich quality site that addresses your target market’s needs.

Theresa Carter is the creator, publisher, and search engine optimizer of The Local Tourist, a free online guide to downtown Chicago. Find restaurants, bars, spas, salons, events, attractions, shopping, media, transportation, articles about Chicago and more. http://www.thelocaltourist.com

Record keeping measurements for Internet marketing

Record keeping tracks money — where it goes, when it comes in. Internet record keeping is also required for success. Yet the statistics show that only one out of a hundred people who own web sites do any type of record keeping on how much it cost them to be there A system that works hard for you when you don’t still requires monitoring and periodic reviews. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, then it manages you.

The top keys to making money on the Internet are working smart, planning, testing, immediately stopping when something isn’t working, reinvest in new techniques and approaches that improve and then keep testing. For every success there are usually 10 to 15 try, sometimes more, that weren’t successful. Even prolific writers create a number of drafts to get to the end result that works.

Here are nine terms you want to become very familiar with and that you want to use to measure your success. As a past CPA, these terms aren’t just for an Internet site, they too are usable in other services or brick and mortar operations.

1. Cost per action, sometimes also called, cost per acquisition. How much does it cost you to get a visitor to take a specific action beyond just clicking around in your web site? How many click-throughs does it take for visitors to make a purchase? Another way to apply this to ezines subscribers — how many clicks were made before the subscriber registered for your eNewsletter? You take the total expenses for running your web site and divide by the number of clicks measured.

Example: If the cost per click is $0.50 and it takes 30 click-throughs to get one person to register for your eNewsletter, the cost per action is $15. If you write articles, how many registrations do you get for each article? If your measurement is 10 for each article and it takes you about two hours to produce and deliver the article over the Internet. If your estimated hour rate is $100 per hour, then each registration is costing you $10 plus your web expenses.

2. Cost per sale. To measure, divide the marketing expenses by the total number of transactions to come up with the cost per sale in a dollar amount.

3. Return on Investment, also known as your ROI. Divide your gross sales, this is all your sales coming from your web site, whether it is from affiliate, commission, advertising, or items sold, by all your marketing costs. All that you have invested in its production. You come up with a percentage amount which is the bottom line on how successful your marketing was in terms of sales. Refunds or credits are also taken into account. If you gave away a number of products you need to count these as part of the items sold even though they didn’t land any money in the bank account. Giveaways are a frequent overview in this calculation and can be a huge eye opener.

Example for service professionals. If you provide a service where you give away the first session as complimentary, give a presentation for a sale, or prepare a proposal, these costs also need to be included in your ROI calculations. If you provide this service in person you need to also add in your travel time and an average cost for car expenses (not just gas). This is why it is so important to prequalify. For coaches, this is why I recommend only performing complimentary session over the phone or in your office unless you’re fee is built in and high enough.

4. Pay per sale, also called a referral fee for closed transaction . This is typically a percentage of the sales generated by the advertisement. A commission is paid when a sales is made by the advertiser and not by the number of click-throughs. Advantageous to the advertiser not to the publisher.

Example: Someone places an ad in your eNewsletter with an agreement to pay a higher percentage fee for each sale but zero for any nonsales. The responsibility of success for the sale falls mainly on the advertiser. If you enter into this type of agreement, make sure the advertiser delivers on their promises, and has a structurally sound sales processing system in place. Not to mention a means for reporting to you what was sold, when and where too.

5. Customer lifetime value. Stated in dollars, this is the average length your customer remains with you divided by net profit of that value. If you are new in business or don’t have the actual figures you will need to estimate.

Example: If you are a coach and average of 22 steady clients per month for an average agreement of six months. Your net profit for six months would be $46,200. You then divide the $46,200/22 = $2,100. What this means is that every client that you acquire for six months is worth $2,100 to your business.

6. Cost per click, also known as cost per click-through (CPC). How much you have to pay for every time someone clicks on your ad — clicks from that point to the next point, usually your web site.

Example: You purchase a banner space on someone else’s web site for your product or service. That space costs you $400 for the month. There were 225 click-throughs from that banner to your site during that month. $400 divided by 225 = $1.77. You paid $1.77 for each click-through.

7. Cost per lead, also known as pay per lead. This usually occurs when you purchase prospect lists. These are specific lists from people who have already given permission to someone else that they are interested in this type of product or service. In other words, they have opt-in to a similar request, and they are the target market you are looking for. The leads can be limited to just providing the e-mail address or in great details.

Catherine Franz is a Marketing & Writing Coach, niches, product development, Internet marketing, nonfiction writing and training. Additional Articles: http://www.abundancecenter.com blog: http://abundance.blogs.com

Getting a high ranking on Google is a big achievement. There are many factors that go into pulling a high page rank. I have put together a small list of things that should not be overlooked when optimizing your site. Let’s start from the top:

META Tags- Sorry, but Google doesn’t read META tags. That includes the KEYWORD tag. Some search engines, however, still use them.

URL- Having a keyword or words in URL will help you somewhat. Having a key word in your URL is not by any means a guarantee, but it never hurts.

TITLE Tag- This is an important step, use this tag wisely. Place your top keywords here. Remember, your page is indexed starting from the top of the page. Make this one count.

Site content- The first paragraph of your site is a crucial part of your optimization. This will also be used as your site’s description. Be careful not to overdo it on the keywords. Make sure your content makes sense. Your keywords should make up a total of 6% to 8% of your page content. An average of three hundred words is a good rule of thumb.

Header Tags- Header tag < H1 > should be considered important. Make headers uniform on your site. I like using them on the top of my page just before the first paragraph.

ALT Tags- These tags are great for adding keywords to images, so take advantage of them. I also use mouse over text with linked text.

Links- Any links you have on your site should have key terms in them. Never use “Click Here” or other unrelated words when creating links.

Bonus tip: When exchanging text links, use key phrases as the actual links. This will certainly help you out.

For Example:

Affordable Search Engine Optimization & Web Site Marketing Mr. SEO is the leader in SEO. We handle targeted traffic, marketing and more. We also offer Web Site Marketing Articles to help you get more traffic to your site.

Links exchange- This will help boost your overall ranking. It’s actually better to be linked from another site (one way) than reciprocal (both sites linking to each other). Being linked one way is a huge bonus. However, the following should be kept in mind.

A: The site you are linking to needs to be related to your site.

B: Google’s page rank of the site should be higher than yours; the higher the better.

C: Avoid linking to sites that have too many links. A site that has forty or more links will only hurt you.

Bonus Tip: See where you rank on Google by using this free tool. http://www.googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php

This Google ranking tool will show you under what keywords you are found on. Use this to help adjust the keywords you want to be found under. Be sure to check your ranking before you start any optimization. Then do it again 3 – 4 weeks after you have made your adjustments. See if your ranking has gone up.

Joe Balestrino is a published author and owns http://www.mr-seo.com and http://www.jnb-design.com . For more info on SEO or his services, visit his websites or email him at joe@jnb-design.com

This is another one of the controversial questions in many of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) forums, yet it is very easy to answer for any particular search engine. While popular belief seems to be that pages should be very short (less than 10K) to rank well with the leading search engine, this article conclusively answers that question… with a completely different answer.

The methodology is really quite simple for this question. I gathered the results of the queries naturally performed last month by myself and three associates using Yahoo and Google. I then visited each page and wrote down the size of the body section of the page. Those sizes were then tabulated for the top 20 rankings and converted into a normalized “ranking correlation”.

The resulting number shows each group of body section sizes normalizing into a number between –100 and +100 showing the likelihood of being ranked higher/lower. A value of +100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper order to show that pages of the studied size ALWAYS rank HIGHER than pages of another size. A value of –100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper order to show that pages of the studied size ALWAYS rank LOWER than pages of another size. Numbers in between show the varying likelihood of rankings proportionally between –100 and +100.

That is the number you see on the Y-axis. On the X-axis, we have groups of page sizes varying from 0 to >100K bytes. Here are the graphs for Yahoo and Google:

http://www.searchenginegeek.com/graphs/dey02.gif

http://www.searchenginegeek.com/graphs/deg02.gif

(Note to Webmasters: Feel free to hot link to the above graphs or even copy them to your own site. Also feel free to delete this note.)

There is an obvious correlation on Google, which shows that body sections of a size between 50K and 60K generally rank much higher than shorter or longer bodies. The Yahoo graph is a bit more erratic, but also shows a nice peak at 60-70K (and another one at 20-30K). This goes against the popular belief that states that shorter pages rank highest. The popular belief is shown to be completely inaccurate with this study.

Notes:

1. For the purposes of this test, the actual body section size in bytes was used. The page was saved to disk and then everything before the body tag and after the end body tag were deleted. The resulting size of the file as reported by the operating system was used. Graphics and any other external references were completely ignored.

2. Over 1,000 queries and over 10,000 sites were examined for this study.

3. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords. I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by myself and three associated during the prior month.

Conclusion:

Pages with a body section size between 50K and 70K rank best on the two leading search engines!

This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from this study whether the leading search engine purposefully entertains this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant from the factor we studied, but the end result is that this search engine does, in fact, rank pages between 50K and 60K higher than pages of other sizes.

Copyright 2004 Jon Ricerca

About The Author

Jon Ricerca is the lead researcher and author of the Search Engine Ranking Factor reports at Search Engine Geek. For more information, please visit: http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com

In order to have more trust in your visitors’ eye, help you to pull more sales, you need put some testimonials on your website. But how to make your online testimonials more believable?

Here are a few tips for your reference:

1. PICTURES
Ask people if they would e-mail a picture with their testimonial. If they don’t have one scanned you could have them send their picture by mail and you could scan it. This technique will give your testimonials more credibility.

2. ELECTRONIC SIGNATURES
Most online testimonials you see have text signatures. You could have people mail their written signature, scan it, and upload it with their testimonial. People will feel the testimonial is more official.

3. ONLINE AUDIO
You could record people’s testimonials with a mini tape recorder over the phone, on your answering machine, or voice mail. Then you could convert the recording into a online audio file and upload it to your web site. You can find more information about converting audio recording’s by typing "real audio" at a search engine.

4. POSTCARDS
Have people mail you their testimonial on a postcard, scan it and upload it to your web site. This will give people proof that the testimonial isn’t fake because it will have a post mark on it.

5. PROFILES
Ask people to include a profile of themselves with their testimonial. You could just have them answer some questions like age, occupation, hobbies, favorite quote,etc. This will make your testimonials more entertaining
to read.

6. HAND WRITTEN LETTERS
This is similar to the "electronic signature" tip. Scan and upload the entire written testimonial or letter to your web site. This will give your testimonials a feel of realism.

7. RECORDINGS
You could record peoples testimonials over the phone with a mini tape recorder. Then, take the recording and record it to an answering machine or voice mail system. Under each one, include a phone number they can call to hear the actual testimonial.

8. E-MAIL MESSAGES
When you get e-mail testimonials, publish the entire e-mail message instead of just the contents. It will be more believable because it will include the date, time, subject, who it’s from and who it’s to.

9. CONTACT INFORMATION
When you get testimonials from people, ask them if you could include their contact information under the testimonial. This will allow potential customers to ask your current customers questions about your product or service before they buy. Usually, they will trust them more than you.

10. ONLINE VIDEO
If some of the people who give you testimonials have a camcorder, ask them to record their testimonial on video and send it to you. Then you could convert the video to an online video file and upload it to your site. You can find more information about converting audio recording’s by typing "real video" at a search engine.

Run test with different versions, and find the winners - which ones pull more profits. Then keep that web copy for more sales.

———————————————————
Julia Tang publishes Smart Online Business Tips, a fresh
and informative newsletter dedicated to supporting people
like you. To find out the best online business opportunities,
to discover hundreds more proven and practical internet
marketing secrets, plus FREE internet marketing products
worth over $200, visit: http://www.best-internet-businesses.com
———————————————————-

Search engine rankings are an important factor to consider when you have a website that needs more traffic. If your website doesn’t have a good position in the rankings then no-one will find it, so you need to make sure that your website is ranked highly enough to be seen. The other important quality to getting high traffic to your site is having a nice arsenal of links. The more links that you have to your site the more traffic you will get, but also, the more links to your site the more search engines like your site. Keeping a nice supply of links pointing at your site requires similar precautions and practices as getting high search engine listings.

Although no SEO company can guarantee a high ranking for your site, here are some tips for raising your search engine ranking. Using these tips will not get you to the top unless your site is the best out there, but they will at least put you into the positioning that you truly deserve. After all, the internet is basically a free market. You will naturally flow into the place that you deserve and many search engines try to insure that you do not rise above or fall below this position. This is why they are so strict, and this is why you must keep yourself on good terms with them.

1) Content is an important factor in high search engine rankings. Make sure that you have plenty of content throughout your site with your target keywords in the articles. It’s also worth doing a search for websites similar to yours and taking a look at their articles for ideas. The more content you have the better. It is generally a good idea to have between three hundred and five hundred words per page, but more important than a quantity of content is the quality of the content that you are providing. You cannot just put out three hundred words of jargon and expect your visitors to find it interesting and stick around for the long haul.

2) Your website’s URL can help you rank higher with the search engines if it contains your keywords. However, don’t think that naming your site after your keywords will always help your rankings – you need to do more than just that.

3) Search terms should be written out in text, instead of graphics. If you do use pictures, be sure to give them alt tags. The alt tags in your pictures are almost as important as text. It’s also a good idea to put some of your key words in links to other pages. In the eyes of a search engine it is almost as good to have a link to a page full of the content that the visitor is looking for as it is to have the content that the visitor is looking for on your page. If a visitor is looking for something that you are linking to and he or she finds your page, they may look around your site on the way through.

4) The title of your page is very important, and making sure that you choose it wisely will make a big difference. Terms such ‘free article on safe children’s toys’, or ‘contact the children’s toy expert today’ are good to use as titles, for example – they would get you a high ranking. The title area is the most important place to include your keyword phrases, so make sure that you put them all in.

5) The navigation menu that appears on each page of your website should include your page’s title.

6) Don’t just use the most popular keyword phrases – the market is so competitive that you should be sure to include some niche keywords too.

7) Make sure that you don’t have a lot of irrelevant links on your site. The more closely related to your site your links are, the better your chances of being ranked in a higher position.

8) You need to periodically update the content of your website, even if it’s only a slight change, as websites like sites that are kept updated.

9) You need to consider the fact most search engines don’t like automatic submissions or multiple submissions – submit once, manually.

10) Always be on the look out for SEO news – staying up to date and using the latest techniques will help you stay one step ahead of your competition.

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

How to market your business? It needs your continual effort. You need keep learning and practicing to find out where your real customers are and how to target them effectively. How in other words, how can let other people find your business? It should be a long term plan and investment. You should consider it as your job, your business. You need take care of it. If you respect your business and work on it with your effort, you will be rewarded eventually.

So where to begin? Here are some tried and true tips that will help you market your website with confidence. You can begin marketing your website when:

- Your website content is complete. This includes your website text, products you want to sell, the correct title, descriptions, and hidden keywords.

- You are ready for your first customer. You need test it by yourself before send your website to public. Make sure all links are working, the order form is ready. Testing everything you can think of. - You have a clear knowledge of the product(s) or service(s) you want to sell online. You need understand your product very well. Please remember: content is the King. When most people think about marketing, they think of advertising.

Don’t fall into that trap. Marketing also encompasses your design, your page copy. According to MediaMetrix, 75% of all repeat visitors come back to a site due to the site’s content. It is vital that the content be good, compelling, new, and free. Offer some valuable freebies so your visitor will come back to visit your site.

Tip 1. Prepare to Collect Email Put an form on your website to let visitors to subscribe to your mailing list. You can initially offer them a free ebook or a valuable report. Then you follow up with them using the auto response system. You can start to sending out your own newsletter weekly or bi-weekly to your opt-in prospects. They have option to remove themselves from your list if they are not interested in it. Even you do not have a website, you can still collect opt-in people’s email address by advertising your eZine with your auto response email address.

Tip 2. Use Pay-Per-Click Services Set up an account with a pay-per-click (PPC) service, such as Overture. Pay-per-click means you pay for every visitor that comes to your site through the service provider. You post an advertising on the sites. If visitor clicks your advertising, you will be charged. At very beginning, it is recommended that starting from small, like pay $0.05 or $0.10 per click. You need time to test which key word is better and which advertising works out. The Overture network includes big names like Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, Lyocs, HotBot, Netscape, Dogpile, Metacrawler, and Go.com.

Tip 3. Submit Your Site to Your Search Engines Once your website is ready, submit your site to major search engines. Please make sure not to submit your site too often to those big search engine companies. They will ban your site out if you submit the site frequently. They will eventually include your site in their index. For small search engines, you can use some automatic software or service to submit your sites since there are thousands there.

Tip 4. Create Your Signature File A signature file is a short message that goes out at the bottom of each message. It contains your name, your contact, like your email address, your website if you have one. Then add a brief description for the product you want to promote. You can create a signature file at the end of your email. You can create a signature template file in the "mail preference" area, or some other area depending on what kind of email service you have. Make sure to keep it down to 4-5 lines with 65 characters wide. Save it to your local hard disk. You may use this short signature file for your future articles’ resource box.

Tip 5. Submit Articles to eZines

Starting to write articles, then submit it to eZines. You can reach thousands of peoples with your products and service for FREE.

How it works? If you are familiar with some area, like gardening, cooking, or how to use a specific software… just think of any topic people may have interest in, then write it. Make sure there is some good value in it so people will like to read it through. Once you finish it, just go ahead to contact some eZine editors with a short cover letter. Tell them you have an article which is valuable to their eZine readers and wish to post it.

At the end of each eZine, there is a resource box. You can put your signature file you create or some other kind of contact information. People will know you from there or may contact you if they are interested in your topic and want to learn from you more.

Tip 6. Increase Your Link Popularity Link popularity, or the number of quality websites that provide a link to your website, is a vital part of your online marketing campaign. If you have a business, check some website which offers the products which will benefit to your customers. Like if you own a website builder, you are looking for the business who can provide the graphics, free business cards, etc.. Once you find a site with good content, then you contact the website owner. Tell him you want to swap the links. It will take some time and effort to do, but the reward will be big.

Quality link popularity can not only get you listed in the major search engines without you ever having submitted your website, but it will help your website move up in the search engine result rankings as well. Tip 7. Start Your Own Newsletters If you want to build relationship with your client, or really want to make money online, a good newsletter will help you. You can send out your newsletter weekly, bi-weekly. Do not send out once a month since the time span is too long, people may forget you.

Writing a newsletter may be hard at the beginning. But once you start, you will realize you can do it, and do it successfully. Of course, you need learn a lot of materials, and write the valuable information to your people. Gradually you will build up the good relationship with you. Down the road, they will join into your business.

Tip 8. Build a Daily Marketing Routine Market your website daily, even if it’s just for 15 minutes. Get into a daily routine–even if it is only for 15 minutes. Doing so will increase your traffic, your customer loyalty, your sales, and your profits. It will pay big dividends months or years from now. Daily promotion activities include:

- Email. Responding to customer’s e-mail in a timely manner. If this is overlooked, you could lose hard-won customers. Many Internet businesses have earned and kept business based on their ability to respond quickly to customer email. Customers appreciate a timely response.

- Update Your Site. Keeping your site fresh with new content is vital, even if you are selling product. By expanding your content you are not only giving new content for your customers to read, but you are also expanding the number of pages listed in the search engines, which will increase your chances of appearing in the top of the search results. Search engine likes fresh contents. - Link Popularity. By contacting sites on a daily basis, your link popularity will increase, and if you do it right, your Link Reputation will increase as well.

- Write Articles. Writing an articles or prepare a newsletter. Contact eZine editors for submission. Keep learning new information and marketing strategies, apply the latest technology into the marketing campaign.

If you apply the above 8 methods, you will gradually build up customer base. In the long term, you will have a successful business.

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Julia Tang publishes "Smart Online Business Tips", a fresh
and informative newsletter dedicated to supporting people
like you. To find out the best online business opportunities,
to discover hundreds more proven and practical internet
marketing secrets, plus FREE internet marketing products
worth over $200, visit: http://www.best-internet-businesses.com
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Note:
You may use this article in your ezine or on your site as long as the article and resource box remain unchanged

As the search engines continue to improve, your SEO needs to as well. A ranking tumble for your website can be devastating. You need to recover as soon as possible – it’s not the easiest task in the world, but it’s not as hard as you’d think. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you cannot panic. You have to keep working on your SEO projects and you need to remember that listings and rankings come and go spiratically at times but that search engines won’t let you down if your site is useful.

The experts’ advice to websites that have lost their ranking is usually to start over, following current and good SEO information. Look over your entire site and insure that you haven’t done something that would have caused this sudden change in listings and rankings. Normally if you haven’t done anything wrong, your links will slowly begin to reappear again especially if you have a nice sized linking network that is listed well.

One step that you can take is to narrow your site’s focus and work hard on one or two keywords. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s sufficient. Make sure each page of your site includes good enough navigation that someone can get anywhere from anywhere else, and make sure you do this with plain ‘a href’ links, not fancy JavaScript.

If you are using frames, now is a good time to dump them. You can replace them with scrollable