#1 question when it comes to web advertising is how do I get top 10 search engine placements for the terms I wish to aquire?

Without getting into how to aquire #1 placements (Since there are virtually 100’s of articles explaining these techniques), let’s instead look into how companies who do end up aquiring them, never seem to loose them…

1st you must understand that search engines all over the world are battleing what seems like a never ending war to be able to provide the ultimate best results for a search.

So since this is true, search engines are consistently upgraded in order to improve their results. With upgrades come new content, with upgrades come loss of placements as well.

We all are consistently updating our sites to better fit search enignes results but at the same time, the top search engines are telling us to simply provide great relative content for your visitors. So why then do we ignore their wishes?

See what I’ve found through many up’s and down’s is that I had the ability to get the top placements all along. It was right under my nose the whole time.

Here it is… are you ready?…

Create your content for what you’re after and foget it! Move on, attack something else.

See, the reason why so many top companies never lose their precious placements is because they create very good content and then leave it up to search engines to find it, re-find and again re-find the same content.

Here’s what happens. The 1st time a search engine finds your content, they archive your information and keep going. Now that they have it archived, they come back time and time again to see if they can still provide viewers with that information.

If by chance you changed it in any way, search engines will ultimately have to re-archive the information again and start all over. This in turn is like "loosing interest" in your information at that time.

So a good rule of thumb is to leave your content the way it is in order to let search engines to have the opportunity to archive, double check and maybe tripple check your content relavance.

I guarantee you if you create it and forget it, create more and forget it and stick to that strategy, your bound to hit your target.

Keep up the good work!

About The Author

Martin Lemieux

Founder and President of Smartads.

http://www.smartads.ca - Here to provide you with effective web design & web advdertising services.

OASES - Online Advertising Search Engine Services

To read more of Martin’s articles and get these weekly tips: Sign up here: http://www.smartads.info/newsletter

Download Martin’s Articles For Re-Print Here: http://www.smartads.info/top-10/download

Note: In order to preserve the proper format for the HTML code snippet in this article, copy and paste the article into Notepad, then copy and paste it from Notepad into your HTML web page.

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Do you have regularly updating content that you would like to make available to other websites? Perhaps a computer tip of the day, a daily recipe, or even a daily cartoon?

Do you want to give your website more exposure, boost sales, enhance your search engine rankings, or grow your newsletter subscriber list?

A fast and easy way to accomplish all of these goals is by using content syndication. Content syndication is the simple process of making a block of content (which usually changes on a regular basis) available for other webmasters to use on their websites.

Sound complicated? Well, it isn’t!

There are several ways to syndicate your content, but the easiest way by far is to use a simple IFRAME (Inline Frame). Here is the HTML code for creating your own content syndication IFRAME:

To display your content on his/her web page, all the other webmaster has to do is copy and paste this code into his/her web page in the place where he/she wants your content to be displayed.

Instructions:

1 - Replace http://www.yoursite.com/content.html with the URL of the page on your website that you wish to syndicate. Make sure this page contains only the content itself along with any related HTML code such as bolding, colors, etc. Do not include headers, footers, navigation, etc.

2 - The width and height attributes set the size of the IFRAME in pixels. In the example above, the content would fit in the left-hand navigation column of most websites.

You can change these attributes to any size you wish, but keep in mind that the IFRAME must be large enough to accommodate your content. Also keep in mind that the smaller your syndicated content, the easier it will be to find webmasters who are willing to use it.

3 - The frameborder setting determines whether your content will be displayed inside a box. The default setting is yes (1). If you change this setting to 0, there will be no border, hence no box.

4 - Setting the scrolling attribute to "yes" will add scrollbars to the IFRAME. This is useful if you wish to syndicate a long article while keeping the IFRAME small.

5 - Change the URL in "Content courtesy of http://www.yoursite.com" to your website’s URL. This way visitors can click to visit your website if they found your content useful.

I recommend making this line mandatory as a condition for using your content. It will generate targeted traffic to your website and provide a valuable backlink for search engine ranking purposes.

6 - Important: Copy and paste the code above into NotePad, then into your HTML editor. This helps ensure proper formatting in your web page.

7 - Let other webmasters know you have content available for them to place on their websites. You can place a link on your site that says: "Syndicate our content!" or "Like this content? Place it on your website!"

You can also submit your content to the many "free content" websites that are found on the web. Just do a Google search for "free content".

That’s all there is to syndicating your content on other websites! Have fun!

About The Author

Rick Rouse is the author of the popular Webmaster SEO Toolkit, a free step-by step guide to getting a top-10 ranking in Google, available at http://www.rlrouse.com/SEO.html

Welcome to part two in this search engine optimization series. In part one we covered the importance and tactics for choosing the keywords and keyword phrases that will provide the highest ROI for your optimization efforts. In part two we will discuss how to properly write content for high search engine positioning.

Content is the key to search engine rankings. While there are numerous factors involved with the search engine algorithms, content remains a constant in stable rankings for a number of important reasons.

Over this series we will cover the ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign.

The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are:

Keyword Selection (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/keywords.htm)

Content
Site Structure
Optimization
Internal Linking
Human Testing
Submissions
Link Building
Monitoring
The Extras

Step Two – The Importance Of Content

There are many aspects of your content that are of key importance to your search engine rankings and for a variety of reasons. That said, they can be broken down into their three main benefits. The three main things you should be targeting with your content are:

Unique and well-written. The search engine spiders are looking for unique content and your visitors are looking for well-written content.

With articles come links.

With quality content comes even more links.

As long as you keep these three main purposes in mind while you are deciding what you want on your website and how it should be worded, you will fill this area nicely.

Unique & Well-Written Content

The importance of unique and well written content cannot be overstated. This is the backbone and purpose of your website’s existence and it deserves the time it will take to create. When you are considering what content you want on your site (or what content should be on your site if this is part of SEO or a redesign) you will want to make a few considerations.

What does your audience want to find?

Will you have to do additional research?

Are you an expert writer or do you have one on staff?

What Does Your Audience Want To Find?

Assessing your potential visitors wants does not require a crystal ball. If you have completed and spent quality hours on Step One of this series, fully researching your keywords, you are already well on your way. Delving into those keywords you will often find hints that will push you in the right direction.

If you have an acne site and you have found a number of people searching for “acne treatment” and “natural acne treatment” and have thus chosen these as your targeted keyword phrases you already understand your visitors current situation and more importantly, their desire. Similarly, if you are a real estate agent and have chosen “los angeles real estate” as your phrase you know more than simply characters strung together and dropped into a search box. You know that you are dealing with people wishing to purchase or sell a home in Los Angeles. In both scenarios you know what your visitors want and, assuming you are already successful in your industry, you know what you have to do to convert that desire into a client.

Now what has to be done is to create solid, compelling content that will both grab your visitor’s attention and at the same time, make them want what you have to offer. This is not the same as selling to them when you have the opportunity to speak to them face-to-face. You are working without the benefit of watching their expressions, speaking to them about their objections, or even understanding whether they are looking for information for a friend or if it is they themselves who require your services.

This leaves you with a lot of room for content. In the online environment you have to deal with every question before they ask it, and make every person feel that you can help them even though you’ve never met.

What does your audience want to find? They want to find a solution to their problem. How do you provide that? By supplying them answers to the questions that they don’t have the opportunity to ask and may not want to give you their email address to find out. FAQ pages are good but often used as sales pages, which is fine so long as you are still providing good content that your visitor isn’t reading as “sales” but rather “solutions”. Perhaps create pages of replies to emails you have received. Perhaps place a related “fact of the day” on your homepage with a link to an archive of facts related to your industry, product and/or business. You might even want to add a blog to your site. Regardless, give your visitor the answers they’re looking for and keep this information updated as you get new information and you will stand a much better chance of keeping that person surfing through your website. The longer you can keep them on your site, the greater the chance that you will build trust and once you’ve got that, you can help them with the solution to their problem.

Will you have to do additional research?

For many business owners the gut instinct to this question is“no”. Of course not, you are an expert right? Well you may be, and so is Professor Stephen Hawking (http://www.hawking.org.uk/home/hindex.html), however my bet would be he still does his research.

No matter how much you know there is always more out there and your visitors are probably well aware of that. If you fail to address all their questions, your visitors may very well leave your site in search of the answer. Once they’ve left your site it becomes other webmasters who now have the opportunity to present the benefits of their products or services.

Find all the information that you can and make sure that you include as much as possible on your site. The additional benefit in doing this is that constant new information on your website will not only keep visitors coming back to find new information but the search engines spiders too. If your site changes often the spiders will pick up on this and will visit you more often. While this by itself will not improve your rankings it does give you an advantage. The more often search engine spiders visit your website the faster changes you make will be picked up. The faster these changes are picked up the quicker you will be able to react to drops in rankings. If you know the spiders visit your site every second day and you drop from #8 to #12 you know that with proper tweaking to your content you may be able to recover that loss in as little as two days.

Are you an expert writer or do you have one on staff?

When you need a doctor do you read a book entitled “Heart Surgery For Dummies” and buy yourself a very sharp knife. Of course you don’t and while your website may not be quite as important as your heart, it is how your company is being perceived online. This perception can be the make-or-break of all your online marketing efforts.

If you are committed to attaining high rankings, to making money online and/or promoting your business through your website, shouldn’t you also be committed to insuring that your conversions are maximized. High search engine positioning is important but so too is converting those visitors once they get to your site. You may be an expert in your field but if that field isn’t writing, and you don’t have a writer on staff, be certain to at least consider hiring one to make sure that your website is conveying the message you want in verbiage that your visitors will understand. Assuming you choose your writer well you will not only have a well-written site but you will also gain the advantage of having an outsider, who is more likely to write for people who aren’t experts, creating your content.

If you feel that you are qualified to write your own content (which you may very well be) be sure to have it proofread by someone from the outside. Find someone (ideally plural) from within your target market and demographic, and have them go through your content giving suggestions and criticism. Don’t take it personally, every change they recommend is earning you extra money. Whether you implement the changes or not you are learning something new about what people will want and expect to see on your site.

With Articles Come Links

Writing content is not just an exercise for your own website. We all know that inbound links to your site help rankings. Additionally, if those links can be ones that provide genuine targeted traffic you’re doing very well.

There are a number of methods for driving traffic to your site with paid advertising, PPC, etc. however one of the most cost-effective methods is to publish articles. Article writing is no simple task however the rewards can be enormous. Articles server two great purposes:

Increased Link Popularity – When you write an article and submit it to other website to post, they will generally link to your website from the page the article is on. Here’s a completely legitimate, relevant, and quality link to your site.

Exposure & Credibility – The added credibility that article writing lends to your business coupled with the added benefit of the visitors who come to your site directly from your article are invaluable.

When it comes to article writing there is little in the way of more effective advertising. You will have to find sources to publish those articles on, but once you’ve done this time-consuming task you can reuse the same list for future articles.

Get those articles on a number of quality resource sites and enjoy watching your stats and your rankings improve.

With Quality Content Comes Even More Links

Yet another benefit that derives from having a website with great content and writing articles is that, with time, your website itself will become a resource. If you provide great information that other people will find useful people will link to it naturally.

With so much emphasis in recent times on reciprocal linking some might think this is the only way to get links at all. Believe it or not there are still webmasters out there who will link to sites for no other reason than they feel their visitors will be interested in it’s content.

Build a good site with quality content, keep it easily navigated and create sections for specific areas (articles for example) and you will find that people will link to your site and may even link to specific articles or your articles index. Perhaps then your articles index is a good page to target an additional keyword phrase.

Next Week

Next week in part three we will be covering site structure and the importance it plays in your rankings and in visitor experience. This will cover getting a spider through your site while also giving your visitors an easy path to the pages you want them on.

About The Author

Dave Davies is the owner of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/). He has been optimizing and ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of success. Dave is available to answer any questions that you may have about your website and how to get it into the top positions on the major search engines.

info@beanstalk-inc.com

Welcome to part four in this search engine positioning series. Last week we discussed the importance of the structure of your website and the best practices for creating an easily spidered and easily read site. In part four we will discuss content optimization.

This is perhaps the single most important aspect of ranking your website highly on the search engines. While all of the factors covered in this series will help get your website into the top positions, it is your content that will sell your product or service and it is your content that the search engines will be reading when they take their “snapshot” of your site and determine where it should be placed in relation to the other billions of pages on the Internet.

Over this series we will cover the ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign.

The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are:

Step Four – Content Optimization

There are aspects of the optimization process that gain and lose importance. Content optimization is no exception to this. Through the many algorithm changes that take place each year, the weight given to the content on your pages rises and falls. Currently incoming links appear to supply greater advantage than well-written and optimized content. So why are we taking an entire article in this series to focus on the content optimization?

The goal for anyone following this series is to build and optimize a website that will rank well on the major search engines and, more difficult and far more important, hold those rankings through changes in the search engine algorithms. While currently having a bunch of incoming links from high PageRank sites will do well for you on Google you must consider what will happen to your rankings when the weight given to incoming links drops, or how your website fares on search engines other than Google that don’t place the same emphasis on incoming links.

While there are many characteristics of your content that are in the algorithmic calculations, there are a few that consistently hold relatively high priority and thus will be the focus of this article. These are:

1. Heading Tags
2. Special Text (bold, colored, etc.)
3. Inline Text Links
4. Keyword Density

Heading Tags

The heading tag (for those who don’t already know) is code used to specify to the visitor and to the search engines what the topic is of your page and/or subsections of it. You have 6 predefined heading tags to work with ranging from to .

By default these tags appear larger than standard text in a browser and are bold. These aspects can be adjusted using the font tags or by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Due to their abuse by unethical webmasters and SEO’s, the weight given to heading tags is not what it could be however the content between these tags is given increased weight over standard text. There are rules to follow with the use of heading tags that must be adhered to. If you use heading tags irresponsibly you run the risk of having your website penalized for spam even though the abuse may be unintentional.

When using your heading tags try to follow these rules:

Never use the same tag twice on a single page. While the tags holds the greatest weight of the entire heading tags, its purpose is to act as the primary heading of the page. If you use it twice you are obviously not using it to define the main topic of the page. If you need to use another heading tag use the tag. After that the tag and so on. Generally I try never to use more than 2 heading tags on a page.

Try to be concise with your wording. If you have a 2 keyword phrase that you are trying to target and you make a heading that is 10 words long then your keyword phrase only makes up about 20% of the total verbiage. If you have a 4-word heading on the other hand you would then have a 50% density and increased priority given to the keyword phrase you are targeting.

Use heading tags only when appropriate. If bold text will do then go that route. I have seen sites with heading tags all over the place. If overused the weight of the tags themselves are reduced with decreasing content and “priority” being given to different phrases at various points in the content. If you have so much great content that you feel you need to use many heading tags you should consider dividing the content up into multiple pages, each with its own tag and keyword target possibilities. For the most part, rather than using additional heading tags, bolding the content will suffice. The sizing will be kept the same as your usual text and it will stand out to the reader as part of the text but with added importance.

Don’t use CSS to mask heading tags. This one just drives me nuts and is unnecessary. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) serve many great functions. They can be used to define how a site functions, looks and feels however they can also be used to mislead search engines and visitors alike. Each tags has a default look and feel. It is fine to use CSS to adjust this somewhat to fit how you want your site to look. What is not alright is to adjust the look and feel to mislead search engines. It is a simple enough task to define in CSS that your heading should appear as regular text. Some unethical SEO’s will also then place their style sheet in a folder that is hidden from the search engine spiders. This is secure enough until your competitors look at the cached copy of your page (and they undoubtedly will at some point) see that you have hidden heading tags and report you to the search engines as spamming. It’s an unnecessary risk that you don’t need to take. Use your headin!

gs properly and you’ll do just fine.

Special Text

Special text (as it is used here) is any content on your page that is set to stand out from the rest. This includes bold, underlined, colored, highlighted, sizing and italic. This text is given weight higher than standard content and rightfully so. Bold text, for example, is generally used to define sub-headings (see above), or to pull content out on a page to insure the visitor reads it. The same can be said for the other “special text” definitions.

Search engines have thus been programmed to read this as more important than the rest of the content and will give it increased weight. For example, on our homepage we begin the content with “Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning …” and have chosen to bold this text. This serves two purposes. The first is to draw the eye to these words and further reinforce the “brand”. The second purpose (and it should always be the second) is to add weight to the “Search Engine Positioning” portion of the name. It effectively does both.

Reread your content and, if appropriate for BOTH visitors and search engines, use special text when it will help draw the eye to important information and also add weight to your keywords. This does not mean that you should bold every instance of your targeted keywords nor does it mean that you should avoid using special text when it does not involve your keywords. Common sense and a reasonable grasp of sales and marketing techniques should be your guide in establishing what should and should not be drawn out with “special text”.

Inline Text Links

Inline text links are links added right into text in the verbiage of your content. For example, in this article series I may make reference to past articles in the series. Were I to refer to the article on keyword selection rather than simple making a simple reference to it as I just have it might be better to write it as, “Were I to refer to the article on keyword selection rather …” (this instance of "keyword selection" is mean to be an inline link to http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/keywords.htm however limitations in the article submission process do not make this possible)

Like special text this serves two purposes. The first is to give the reader a quick and easy way to find the find the information you are referring to. The second purpose of this technique is to give added weight to this phrase for the page on which the link is located and also to give weight to the target page.

While this point is debatable, there is a relatively commonly held belief that inline text links are given more weight that a text link which stands alone. If we were to think like a search engine this makes sense. If the link occurs within the content area then chances are it is highly relevant to the content itself and the link should be counted with more strength than a link placed in a footer simply to get a spider through the site.

Link “special text” this should only be employed if it helps the visitor navigate your site. An additional benefit to inline text links is that you can help direct your visitors to the pages you want them on. Rather than simply relying on visitors to use your navigation bar as you are hoping they will, with inline text links you can link to the internal pages you are hoping they will get to such as your services page, or product details.

Keyword Density

For those of you who have never heard the term “keyword density” before, it is the percentage of your total content that is made up of your targeted keywords. There is much debate in forums, SEO chat rooms and the like as to what the “optimal” keyword density might be. Estimates seem to range from 3% to 10%.

While I would be the first to admit that logic dictate that indeed there is an optimal keyword density. Knowing that search engines operate on mathematical formulas implies that this aspect of your website must have some magic number associated with it that will give your content the greatest chance of success.

With this in mind there are three points that you should consider:

1. You do not work for Google or Yahoo! or any of the other major search engines (and if you do you’re not the target audience of this article). You will never know 100% what this “magic number” is.
2. Even if you did know what the optimal keyword density was today, would you still know it after the next update? Like other aspects of the search engine algorithm, optimal keyword densities change. You will be chasing smoke if you try to constantly have the optimal density and chances are you will hinder your efforts more than help by constantly changing the densities of your site.
3. The optimal keyword density for one search engine is not the same as it is for another. Chasing the density of one may very well ruin your efforts on another.

So what can you do? Your best bet is to simple place your targeted keyword phrase in your content as often as possible while keeping the content easily readable by a live visitor. Your goal here is not to sell to search engines, it is to sell to people. I have seen sites that have gone so overboard in increasing their keyword density that the content itself reads horribly. If you are simply aware of the phrase that you are targeting while you write your content then chances are you will attain a keyword density somewhere between 3 and 5%. Stay in this range and, provided that the other aspects of the optimization process are in place, you will rank well across many of the search engines.

Also remember when you’re looking over your page that when you’re reading it the targeted phrase may seem to stand out as it’s used more than any other phrase on the page and may even seem like it’s a bit too much. Unless you’ve obviously overdone it (approached the 10% rather than 5% end of the spectrum) it’s alright for this phrase to stand out. This is the phrase that the searcher was searching for. When they see it on the page it will be a reminder to them what they are looking for an seeing it a few times will reinforce that you can help them find the information they need to make the right decision.

Final Notes

In an effort to increase keyword densities, unethical webmasters will often use tactics such as hidden text, extremely small font sizes, and other tactics that basically hide text from a live visitor that they are providing to a search engines. Take this advice, write quality content, word it well and pay close attention to your phrasing and you will do well. Use unethical tactics and your website may rank well in the short term but once one of your competitors realizes what you’re doing you will be reported and your website may very well get penalized. Additionally, if a visitor realizes that you’re simply “tricking” the search engines they may very well decide that you are not the type of company they want to deal with; one that isn’t concerned with integrity but rather one that will use any trick to try to get at their money. Is this the message you want to send?

Next Week

Next week in part five of our "Ten Steps To an Optimized Website" series we will be covering internal links strategies and best practices. This will cover everything from image links and scripts to inline and basic text links.

About The Author

Dave Davies is the owner of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/). He has been optimizing and ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of success. Dave is available to answer any questions that you may have about your website and how to get it into the top positions on the major search engines.

info@beanstalk-inc.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

Writing effective web copy begins with an understanding of what the goals of your web site are. Are you trying to get your visitors to purchase something or have them sign up for your newsletter? Remember you are trying to get someone you can’t see and have never met take a step towards building a relationship with you or your company.

1. Create a customer profile – try to find out what are the needs and desires of your visitors. Here are some examples of questions you could ask:

Are they young, middle aged or senior?

Are they primarily male or female?

Are they financially secure or budget-minded?

What gets him or her excited?

What are his or her most pressing concerns?

Try to brainstorm a list of topics that might interest your target audience.

2. Create a Unique Selling Position (USP) – This is a statement of 2-3 sentences that explains why you are different from everybody else. This is the unique factor that sets you apart from your competition. Make this the first thing your visitor sees when they arrive on your home page.

3. Focus on benefits – most web users want to find the information about the product or service they need as fast as possible. If they land on your site, they want to know how they will benefit from buying your product or subscribing to your ezine. You will need to answer that question as clearly and concisely as possible or you will lose that visitor.

4. Use the inverted pyramid style – provide a summary of your information by clearly communicating the direction of your discussion. Use informative headings and subheadings with a paragraph of 4 to 5 lines that supports them. You only have a few seconds to grab your visitors attention. Most will simply scan for the information they are seeking.

Use bulleted or numbered lists, boldface or colored font to emphasize the points you wish to make. Include links at the end of your paragraph (or within the text) to direct visitors to other pages of your site for more in-depth information.

5. Write in an informal or personal style – write in a unique way that differentiates you from other small businesses in a similar business or niche. It doesn’t have to be elaborate or super-creative. You simply provide a style that gets the attention of your visitors.

6. Keep your sentences simple – you are not writing to impress. You are writing to communicate. You want to pre-sell your product or service, therefore write as if you are talking to a 13 year old.

Don’t use large words but opt for strong verbs over weak ones. Use the active voice instead of a passive one. i.e. Instead of “a good score was achieved by the team”…say “the team scored a season high”. Speak “to” but not “at” your visitor. Keep your sentences short and snappy.

7. Include searchable keywords – use targeted keywords in your web copy that will allow the search engines to find your site. Include these keywords in your meta tags, links and file names also.

8. Eliminate the fluff - don’t waffle on in your writing. You will only bore your visitors and they will click elsewhere. Try to remove filler sentences that contain phrases like “for those of you” and “all of you”.

9. Proof read your web copy – errors in your web copy give the impression of being unprofessional or sloppy. Read the copy aloud to yourself or get someone else to proof read it. Often they will find more errors because they are more objective.

Use the spell checker but don’t rely on it. Often it doesn’t pick up all incorrectly spelt words. Print a copy of your content. It’s easier to find grammatical or spelling errors on a hard copy.

10. Take a break – revise your web copy after taking a break from it for several hours or a few days. This allows you to see it from a different viewpoint. You may find a better way to say something to further improve your copy.

11. Use images sparingly – images should only be used if they relate and support your web content. If not, they will only distract the visitor from reading your web copy. Too many images will slow down the time it takes for your visitor to load your site in their browser.

12. Use effective navigation – your navigation bar should help visitors easily find the main sections of your site. Read: "How to Create an Effective Web Site Navigation Structure" (http://www.isitebuild.com/navigation)

Writing effective web copy is the key to converting visitors into buyers. Getting 1000s of visitors to your web site doesn’t guarantee sales. Reading your web copy should pre-sell your product with the words you use. Once you achieve this, your web site will become very profitable.

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com - Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hosting

Pick up your copy of the 159 page ebook TODAY titled: "Make Your Content Pre Sell" by going to the bottom of this page : http://www.isitebuild.com/web-copy.htm

It is said that content is king, but today ‘fresh, relevant content’ is the master - or is it?

Every owner of a commercial web site knows that frequent fresh content is needed on their pages in order to achieve and maintain a high listing on search engines which actively seek fresh content. Google sends out its ‘freshbot’ spider to gather and index new material from all the sites which offer it. MSN Search seeks it too. I’ve noticed that MSN Search’s spider pays a daily visit to a site of mine which has proper fresh content every day.

By incorporating fresh content, commercial web sites will remain competitive, for without it they will certainly fall down the search engine listings and lose business. Besides, having something new keeps visitors coming back and attracts potential customers.

But creating and then manually uploading fresh content onto our web sites each day is hard, time consuming work, isn’t it? What we want is a way of putting daily fresh content onto our web sites easily and efficiently. Let’s look at the current techniques available to us to achieve this goal and see which one offers a global solution to the fresh content problem:

1) Server Side Includes (SSI’): These are HTML statements written by the webmaster and uploaded onto the server. SSI’s inform the server to include a specific block of text when a specific page is served to a browser or a search engine spider.

Because these scripts are compiled ‘before’ they are served, they remain ‘visible’ to search engine spiders and therefore will be seen as fresh content. Unfortunately, not all web hosts support SSI’s; this is because the server must ‘read every page’ on the web site as it looks for include statements, a process which clearly reduces server performance.

How many web site owners have the time to manually upload fresh HTML content onto their servers every day? Probably very few, which is why the use of SSI’s is not a global solution to the fresh content problem.

2) Blogging: Google’s Freshbot spider is so voracious for fresh content that it eagerly devours the contents of common weblogs. But can a daily blog be used to influence the listing of a web page under specific keywords or phrases?

It can, but for the vast majority of web site owners, blogging is out of the question. Putting up a daily keyword-rich business blog onto a web site is hard, time-consuming work, and it requires the blogger to be a competent writer, too. Few business owners have time available or the competence to write something new about their products or services every day.

Blogging is therefore not a global solution to the fresh content problem.

3) RSS Newsfeeds: Having newsfeeds placed on a web site is certainly an easy way of getting fresh material to appear each day. ‘Really Simple Syndication’ or RSS, is a fast growing method of content distribution. Newsfeed creation is an uncomplicated procedure and therefore appears to be an easy solution to the fresh content problem.

Many owners of commercial web sites believe that by incorporating newsfeeds on their sites they will improve their search engine rankings by using the links appearing within those feeds, which are given relevance by Google. This belief is wrong because newsfeeds are basically JavaScript or VBScript.

These scripts must be executed by search engine spiders for the fresh content to be noted, and since the spiders take a simplistic approach when reading web pages, these scripts will not be executed at all. These scripts are compiled ‘after’ they have been served, and not before.

There are also a couple of growing menaces associated with RSS newsfeeds:

o Since the popularity of RSS use is growing exponentially, the idea to monetize syndication with ads is gaining ground. Indeed, Yahoo has announced that it will begin displaying ads from Overture’s service within RSS feeds. Now who wants other people’s ads on their web site? I don’t.

o There are rumors of newsfeeds being used to deliver spam. If this gets out of control then newsfeeds will quickly become history. Who wants spam messages appearing on their web site? I don’t. RSS is therefore not a global solution to the fresh content problem.

4) Newsfeed Scripting Solutions: A software solution can be rigged up to ‘extract’ the HTML from newsfeeds. The HTML is then placed onto web pages so that the fresh content will be seen by search engine spiders. This however involves the use of PHP and MySQL, which tends to put many business owners off. And if there’s spam or ads in the feed, they will get extracted, too!

Newsfeed scripting solutions are therefore not a global solution to the fresh content problem.

5) Creating Original: Content As mentioned above under SSI’s and Weblogs, creating and manually uploading your own fresh content every day is a time-consuming chore. And what if you have a number of web sites, each of which requires frequent fresh content in order to remain competitive? Yet we all know that there is nothing better than our own proper keyword-rich fresh content.

In summary, getting frequent proper fresh content onto our web sites is not straightforward at all. HTML extracted from RSS feeds appears to offer a partial solution, but it is too complicated for most businesses and is potentially menacing.

The e-commerce industry is clearly in need of a genuine solution to the fresh content problem. The way to do it is to automatically have our web pages updated every day with ‘our own’ content, not anyone else’s. Only then will we be able to say that fresh content is truly the master!

About the author: Victor George is a "fresh, relevant content" crusader whose web site can be found at:

http://www.autopageupdate.com Easily control your web content to suit your clients and to keep the search engines well fed with your new and relevant content.

It may be Queen, but it is definitely not King and I’ll tell you why. I’m really tired of hearing the virtues of content when all of the search engines put more value on off-site influences. If content really were king and you had ten sites that were all on the same subject, well written and optimized, how would the search engines determine which site was most relevant? One of those sites is going to have to be first and one of those sites is going to have to be tenth. Well, Google found an answer for this and that is off-site influences, specifically link popularity - sites linking to your site. Each site linking to you is a “vote” for your site saying, “this site is about so and so.”

This off-site influence is so strong that sites can rank extremely well for terms that don’t even exist in the site’s copy. If you search “miserable failure” on Google the #1 site is Biography of President George Bush. If you search the copy on the homepage you’ll find that the term “miserable failure” does not even exist on the page. If content is king how can a site rank #1 for a term that doesn’t even exist on the page? Isn’t this telling us that content really isn’t king and that link popularity is really the reigning power?

I have a site that I put up for my mom’s book all about chastity, sex and relationships. The whole book is available to read online either on html pages or pdfs. The content is relevant and beautifully written. Is is #1 for chastity in any of the search engines? No. Why? Because it lacks link popularity.

Content is not King and probably never will be. It definitely helps, but it will never give you the weight in search engines that link popularity does now.

Adam Sorenen writes for Lavaball a SEO Firm that provides search engine optimization services, ecommerce, design tips and advice.

Many search engine optimization companies will sell you a search engine optimization package that addresses many of the major aspects of search engine optimization. These aspects include, but are not limited to, use of file names, alt tags, h1 tags, keyphrase density, meta tag optimization, link analysis and the like. These are all key aspects of a good search optimization.

However, one problem is that the major search engines (especially Google) not only rank pages upon relevant content (which is determined by the factors listed above, and more), but by fresh content as well. What this means to you is that, even after your site has been "optimized to the max", your rankings will increase to a certain level and then not go much higher. To get to the top and stay there, your site should deliver fresh, relevant content on a regular basis. Depending upon the nature of your business, your competition, and targeted keyphrases, the rate at which you should add content to your site can vary from monthly to daily.

The delivery of fresh content to your site, in a form that is readable by search engines (i.e. not through the use of javascript, iframes, or the like) requires a dynamic, database driven content management system.

The most cost effective way to achieve this is through the use of a weblog that sits on your server and resides under your domain name. Updating the weblog with rich articles or commentary, broadcasting this information to the internet, and allowing users to post comments, achieves the following:

1) Increases the number of inbound links to your website

2) Increases the frequency at which major search engines will spider or crawl your site

3) Increases interactivity for the web user

4) Improves your search engine ranking

For further information, you may contact ArteWorks toll free at 877-336-8266, or visit http://www.arteworks.biz.

Matt Foster, CEO, Arteworks Business Class - Search Engine Optimization Expert since 1995

http://www.arteworks.biz

3 Problems with Search Engine Optimization Tactics:

Let’s start with the main problem of Search Engine Optimization-nobody really knows what the search engines are looking for except the people responsible for the maintaining the algorithms. That’s right, you can pay hundreds of dollars for software, ebooks, or seminars to learn about SEO techniques, but the people selling you these products and services are only guessing at what they think the search engines will like.

The second problem with trying to optimize a site is that the search engine algorithms are constantly changing. What were good optimization tactics last year, last month, or last week, may have no bearing on what is looked for today by the search engines. In addition, all search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN and others, use different algorithms.

The third problem you will come across when attempting to optimize your website is securing quality links. No site will stay highly ranked with any search engine if it doesn’t have a sufficient number of good backlinks. There are several strategies commonly used to obtain backlinks, but each has its own set of problems:

1. Trade reciprocal links–but this can drain PR from your own site and it is very time consuming to look for relevant partners, email them, and maintain a linking relationship over time.
2. Purchase links-costly and not too effective unless you keep the paid for links for a long period of time.
3. Join linking partnership groups-the problem once again is that you will normally have to pay to join these groups. Also, the search engines have stated that they are against this type of linking strategy.

Articles, the Best Alternative to SEO Techniques:

So what can one do instead of attempting to optimize a site? The best answer is to write an article and submit it to the various article directories. Just one keyword-rich article, that is picked up and displayed on other sites, can immediately start to bring you important backlinks and improve your site’s ranking. As more and more directories and individual websites display your article, your backlinks will increase, as will your ranking. Over time, this process can take on a life of its own.

With an article you don’t have to worry about current algorithms, changing algorithms, linking strategies, or other SEO tactics. The “self-optimizing” benefits of articles will happen automatically once the article is published.

John Martin has been involved with the computer industry since the late 1970’s. He runs successful Internet businesses as well as authoring many computer/Internet related articles.