Towards A Healthy Economy + Marketing World

According to the recent release of the Google Patent Application, many of the things you’re doing to get better page rank and increase your position in natural search are about to be history. It’s frightening how much things are going to change.

All of those folks trying to “beat the system” with doorway pages and invisible text are about to be (or have already been) punished by the Google Algorithm.

Why are things changing? Because Google wants to remain the premier search engine, which means returning content that matters to people doing the searches. It’s true, marketers are not Google’s primary customer. People using search engines to find information will always remain Google’s #1 priority.

Think about people using search engines for a moment. Wait, forget about them - think about yourself for a moment. When you turn to the internet for answers, what do you want? I may be an oddball, but when I’m looking for an answer to my question, I want, yes - an answer to my question. Your prospective customers are no different. To quote Dr. Phil, “People want what they want when they want it.” Are you giving it to them?

If you’re not giving them what they want, they probably won’t give you what you want ( their attention, their contact information, and their money.) But there is one thing you can do that will inspire them to visit your site, make them open your offer, and improve your search engine positioning all at the same time.

So what is the one thing thing?

Provide content. Content is King and content means articles. Content means the information that addresses that web searcher’s issues and needs.

And it’s what Google expressly wants from you. It’s what Google needs in order to remain the premier search engine. It’s what Google will return in the very top positions of search results, even for the most popular keywords. The Patent Application makes it clear that doing this one thing is going to have a bigger impact than all the keyword stuffing and optimization you can do.

All you have to do is write a short (400-800 words) article on any topic that might be of interest to your target market. If you sell computers, write a review of some recently released technology. If you are a consultant, explain how companies can improve using some of the handy tips and tricks you know.

Your tips and tricks don’t have to be the “magic” of your offering. You don’t have to give away the store. There are some things that you consider quite fundamental in your industry - and there are thousands of newcomers who don’t yet know the fundamentals. Through your articles, you will be the expert who shows them the ropes. Imagine how much this elevates their opinion of you. You become an instant guru.

You become known as an expert in your field, someone who really knows what’s going on in your space. What kinds of problems might your target market be trying to solve online? Write an article to explain a solution to them.

For instance:

I use Article Marketer (www.articlemarketer.com) to distribute my articles to thousands of newsletter editors for publication. It costs me $39.95 to distribute as many articles as I want for three full months. It’s a great bargain.

I use a hosted service from Sales Force (www.salesforce.com) to manage my leads. It costs me $65 per month for a full-featured sales force automation and lead management system that I can get to from any computer with internet access. Like my American Express card, I don’t leave home without it.

I use the free service from PRWeb (www.prweb.com) to send out press releases to the media for my clients. Their paid service is about $400, but I’ve always been happy with the results from their free version.

Can you see how telling people about these tools takes nothing away from my own service offering? Giving away this information does one very important thing: it makes my target market happy.

After all, how many people don’t even know that www.articlemarketer.com is a tool they should be using or that salesforce.com offers a web based lead management SFA offering? When they read my article, they get valuable information about something they can use right now to get more traffic, find more prospects, and increase their sales volume. They are satisfied.

Then the magic happens.

When they get to the end of my article, if they like the free information I’ve provided, they will want to know more. I put my website address in the resource box (yep, see below) and I get a flood of traffic to my site. Not just any old traffic though. The people coming to my website are pre-qualified. It’s what Ken Evoy says is crucial in selling online, these visitors are “open to an offer” from me.

They have already proven to have an interest in what I’m talking about, and they already feel somewhat comfortable with me, my style, my approach, etc. When they arrive at my web site, they get a lot of information absolutely free. They can also purchase things I have for sale.

I’ve seen dramatic spikes in my Simplified Selling book sales after distributing an article. The conversion rate is better too - meaning I get more sales “per capita” than using pay-per-click or buying ads in newsletters.

Of course, it’s not that expensive to buy an ad in a newsletter - but does anyone have enough money to pay for advertising in every newsletter that reaches a particular target market? Of course not, there are hundreds of thousands of ezines published on the web and in print.

However, publishers need content and they are willing to publish your free reprint article (meaning they don’t have to pay you for your writing) and in exchange they provide a link to your website.

That link shows up in newsletters to be seen by your prospective customers. You also get permanent links on websites - something else that the Google Patent identifies as important when ranking sites.

So sit down, draft out an article on some topic you like, and get it published. Watch as the world beats a path to your door.

Chris Ellington gives effective and easy to implement marketing strategies to small business owners and home business entrepreneurs. His Simplified Selling System has been a favorite of salespeople around the world. Get your free marketing strategies at http://www.simplifiedselling.com.

Google’s sweeping changes confirm the search giant has launched a full out assault against artificial link inflation & declared war against search engine spam in a continuing effort to provide the best search service in the world… and if you thought you cracked the Google Code and had Google all figured out … guess again.

Google has raised the bar against search engine spam and artificial link inflation to unrivaled heights with the filing of a United States Patent Application 20050071741 on March 31, 2005.

The filing unquestionable provides SEO’s with valuable insight into Google’s tightly guarded search intelligence and confirms that Google’s information retrieval is based on historical data.

What exactly do these changes mean to you? Your credibility and reputation on-line are going under the Googlescope! Google has defined their patent abstract as follows:

A system identifies a document and obtains one or more types of history data associated with the document. The system may generate a score for the document based, at least in part, on the one or more types of history data.

Google’s patent specification reveals a significant amount of information both old and new about the possible ways Google can (and likely does) use your web page updates to determine the ranking of your site in the SERPs.

Unfortunately, the patent filing does not prioritize or conclusively confirm any specific method one way or the other.

Here’s how Google scores your web pages.

In addition to evaluating and scoring web page content, the ranking of web pages are admittedly still influenced by the frequency of page or site updates. What’s new and interesting is what Google takes into account in determining the freshness of a web page.

For example, if a stale page continues to procure incoming links, it will still be considered fresh, even if the page header (Last-Modified: tells when the file was most recently modified) hasn’t changed and the content is not updated or ‘stale’.

According to their patent filing Google records and scores the following web page changes to determine freshness.

·The frequency of all web page changes

·The actual amount of the change itself… whether it is a substantial change redundant or superfluous

·Changes in keyword distribution or density

·The actual number of new web pages that link to a web page

·The change or update of anchor text (the text that is used to link to a web page)

·The numbers of new links to low trust web sites (for example, a domain may be considered low trust for having too many affiliate links on one web page).

Although there is no specific number of links indicated in the patent it might be advisable to limit affiliate links on new web pages. Caution should also be used in linking to pages with multiple affiliate links.

Developing your web page augments for page freshness.

Now I’m not suggesting that it’s always beneficial or advisable to change the content of your web pages regularly, but it is very important to keep your pages fresh regularly and that may not necessarily mean a content change.

Google states that decayed or stale results might be desirable for information that doesn’t necessarily need updating, while fresh content is good for results that require it.

How do you unravel that statement and differentiate between the two types of content?

An excellent example of this methodology is the roller coaster ride seasonal results might experience in Google’s SERPs based on the actual season of the year.

A page related to winter clothing may rank higher in the winter than the summer… and the geographical area the end user is searching from will now likely be considered and factored into the search results.

Likewise, specific vacation destinations might rank higher in the SERPs in certain geographic regions during specific seasons of the year. Google can monitor and score pages by recording click through rate changes by season.

Google is no stranger to fighting Spam and is taking serious new measures to crack down on offenders like never before.

Section 0128 of Googles patent filing claims that you shouldn’t change the focus of multiple pages at once.

Here’s a quote from their rationale:

“A significant change over time in the set of topics associated with a document may indicate that the document has changed owners and previous document indicators, such as score, anchor text, etc., are no longer reliable.

Similarly, a spike in the number of topics could indicate spam. For example, if a particular document is associated with a set of one or more topics over what may be considered a ’stable’ period of time and then a (sudden) spike occurs in the number of topics associated with the document, this may be an indication that the document has been taken over as a ‘doorway’ document.

Another indication may include the sudden disappearance of the original topics associated with the document. If one or more of these situations are detected, then [Google] may reduce the relative score of such documents and/or the links, anchor text, or other data associated the document.”

Unfortunately, this means that Google’s sandbox phenomenon and/or the aging delay may apply to your web site if you change too many of your web pages at once.

From the case studies I’ve conducted it’s more likely the rule and not the exception.

What does all this mean to you?

Keep your pages themed, relevant and most importantly consistent. You have to establish reliability! The days of spamming Google are drawing to an end.

If you require multi page content changes implement the changes in segments over time. Continue to use your original keywords on each page you change to maintain theme consistency.

You can easily make significant content changes by implementing lateral keywords to support and reinforce your vertical keyword(s) and phrases. This will also help eliminate keyword stuffing.

Make sure you determine if the keywords you’re using require static or fresh search results and update your web site content accordingly. On this point RSS feeds may play a more valuable and strategic role than ever before in keeping pages fresh and at the top of the SERPs.

The bottom line here is webmasters must look ahead, plan and mange their domains more tightly than ever before or risk plummeting in the SERPs.

Does Google use your domain name to determine the ranking of your site?

Google’s patent references specific types of ‘information relating to how a document is hosted within a computer network’ that can directly influence the ranking of a specific web site. This is Google’s way of determining the legitimacy of your domain name.

Therefore, the credibility of your host has never been more important to ranking well in Google’s SERP’s.

Google states they may check the information of a name server in multiple ways.

Bad name servers might host known spam sites, adult and/or doorway domains. If you’re hosted on a known bad name server your rankings will undoubtedly suffer… if you’re not blacklisted entirely.

What I found particularly interesting is the criteria that Google may consider in determining the value of a domain or identifying it as a spam domain; According to their patent, Google may now record the following information:

·The length of the domain registration… is it greater than one year or less than one year?

·The address of the web site owner. Possibly for returning higher relevancy local search results and attaching accountability to the domain.

·The admin and the technical contact info. This info is often changed several times or completely falsified on spam domains; again this check is for consistency!

·The stability of your host and their IP range… is your IP range associated with spam?

Google’s rationale for domain registration is based on the premise that valuable domains are often secured many years in advance while domains used for spam are rarely secured for more than a year.

If in doubt about a host’s integrity I recommend checking their mail server at www.dnsstuff.com to see if they’re in the spam database. Watch for red flags!

If your mail server is listed you may have a problem ranking well in Google!

Securing a reputable host can and will go a long way in promoting your web site to Google.

The simplest strategy may be registering your domain several years in advance with a reputable provider thereby demonstrating longevity and accountability to Google. Google wants to see that you’re serious about your site and not a flash in the pan spam shop.

http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-1604302-10294265

Googles Aging Delay has teeth… and they’re taking a bite out of spam!

It’s no big secret that Google relies heavily on links when it comes to ranking web sites.

According to their patent filing, Google may record the discovery date of a link and link changes over time.

In addition to volume, quality & the anchor text of links, Google’s patent illustrates possible ways how Google might use historical information to further determine the value of links.

For example, the life span of a link and the speed at which a new web site gets links.

“Burst link growth may be a strong indicator of search engine spam”.

This is the first concrete evidence that Google may penalize sites for rapid link acquisition. Whether the “burst growth” rule applies to high trust/authorative sites and directory listings remains unknown. I personally haven’t experienced this phenomenon. What’s clear for certain though is the inevitable end to results orientated link farming.

I would point out here that regardless of whether burst link growth will be tolerated for authorative sites or authorative link acquisition, webmasters will have to get smarter and work harder to secure authorative links as their counterparts become reluctant to exchange links with low trust sites. Now Page Rank really has value!

Relevant content swaps may be a nice alternative to the standard link exchange and allow you some control of the link page elements.

So what else does Google consider in determining the aging delay?

·The anchor text and the discovery date of links are recorded, thus establishing the countdown period of the aging delay.

·Links with a long-term life span may be more valuable than links with a short life span.

·The appearance and disappearance of a links over time.

·Growth rates of links as well as the link growth of independent peer pages. Again, this suggests that rapid link acquisition and the quality of peer pages are monitored.

·Anchor text over a given period of time for keyword consistency.

·Inbound links from fresh pages… might be considered more important than links from stale pages.

·Google doesn’t expect that new web sites have a large number of links so purchasing large numbers of brokered links will likely hurt you more than help you. Google indicates that it is better for link growth to remain constant and naturally paced. In addition, the anchor text should be varied as much as possible.

·New web sites should not acquire too many new links; it’ll be tolerated if the links are from trusted sites but it may be considered spam.

So how do you build your link popularity / Page Rank and avoid penalties?

When it comes to linking, you should clearly avoid the hocus pocus or magic bullet linking schemes. If you participate in quick fix link exchange scams, use automated link exchange software or buy hundreds of links at once, chances are Google will interpret your efforts as a spam attempt and act accordingly.

Don’t get caught in this trap… the recovery period could be substantial since your host and IP range are also considered!

When you exchange links with other web sites, do it slowly and consistently.

Develop a link management and maintenance program. Schedule regular times every week to build the links to your site and vary the anchor text that points to your site.

Obviously, the links to your site should utilize your keywords. To avoid repetition use lateral keywords and keyword phrases in the anchor text since Google wants to see varied anchor text!

Your sites click through rate may now monitored through bookmarks, cache, favorites, and temporary files.

It’s no big secret that Google has always been suspected of rewarding sites with higher click through rates (very similar to what Google does with their AdWords program) so it shouldn’t come as a great surprise that Google still considers site stickiness and CTR tracking in their criterion.

What’s interesting though is Google is interested in tracking the behavior of web surfers through bookmarks, cache, favorites, and temporary files (most likely with the Google toolbar and/or the Google desktop search tool). Google’s Patent filing indicates Google might track the following information:

·Click through rates are monitored for changes in seasonality, fast increases, or other spike traffic in addition to increase or decrease trends.

·The volume of searches over time is recorded and monitored for
increases.

·The information regarding a web page’s rankings are recorded and monitored for changes.

·Click through rates are monitored to find out if stale or fresh web pages are preferred for a search query.

·The traffic to a web page is recorded and monitored for changes… like Alexa.

·User behavior may be monitored through bookmarks, cache, favorites, and temporary files.

·Bookmarks and favorites could be monitored for both additions and deletions, and;

·The overall user behavior for trends and changes.

Since Google is capable of tracking the click-through rates to your web site, you should make sure that your web pages have attractive titles and utilize calls to action so that web surfers click on them in the search results.

It’s also important to keep your visitors there so make your web pages interesting enough so that web surfers stay some time on your web site. It might also help if your web site visitors added your web site to their bookmarks.

As you can see, Google’s new ranking criterion has evolved far beyond the reliance of criteria that can be readily or easily manipulated. One thing is for certain with Google, whatever direction search innovation is going; you can trust Google to be pioneering the way and setting new standards!

Copyright 2005 Lawrence Deon

Lawrence Deon is an SEO/SEM Consultant and author of the popular search engine optimization and marketing model Ranking Your Way To The Bank. http://www.rankingyourwaytothebank.com

In this article You’ll Learn How you can Increase web site
traffic at your site. This article will assume you understand
Search Engine optimization terms (SEO). Over the last few years,
search engine optimization (SEO) has been needed and used more
and more, although it has been around for much longer than most
people think.

We’ll be discussing SEO techniques and other Free/Paid methods
to generate Traffic.

Search Engine Optimization Techniques

1. On Page Optimization:

Though these days, on page optimization will not help you much,
But still it is important for any website to rank high.

Meta tags, keywords, descriptions, and titles. They’re all
important elements, even if they’re not what will make or break
your site - they’re just one part of your strategy. These
elements need to be compelling and sprinkled with your keywords,
as this will entice users to click through from the search
results page to your website. It’s best to start off slowly,
gradually adding things in as you learn.

The basics are Optimizing Title, Meta tags, H1 tags and
optimizing Paragraphs with 3-5% of keyword density. You should
also include outgoing links with proper keyword anchors.

Another thing most people forget is updating site content
regularly. Search Engine loves Fresh and related content. You
should be updating your site at least 2 times a week.

2. Off Page optimization:

There are many ways you can optimize your site with off page
optimization methods. We’ll be discussing Press Release and
Linking techniques

2a. Press Release:

Press release is one of the effective way to get noticed by
media, plus an effective way to get noticed by Search Engines
fast. You need to write an effective press release and
distribute using any of the Press release Services like HREF="http://www.prweb.com" rel="nofollow">www.prweb.com or HREF="http://www.prleap.com" rel="nofollow">www.prleap.com. Write a press
release that can be termed as a news for press reporters. Ask
Yourself before submitting your Release. Is your news
“newsworthy?” The purpose of a press release is to inform the
world of your news item. Do not use your press release to try
and make a sale. If your press release reads like an
advertisement, rewrite it.

Best way to issue an effective press release is to Time it
according to current affairs. Pick an angle to make your release
more attractive.

Simple tips for an Effective press release.

Strong Headline : If your headline doesn’t entice news reporters
then your efforts are going to waste. Your headline and first
paragraph should tell the story.

Write for Media : Write in third person. Avoid Jargon, clichés
and hype. If a reporter wants to add your release to the site or
newspaper, he should be able to do it without minimal editing.
Avoid clichés such as “customers save money” or “great customer
service.”

Another tip which I’d like to share with you is paying press
release services to distribute your release to sites like Google
news, Yahoo news. You can do it with minimum of 50$ expenditure.
Another resource which I prefer to distribute my releases with
is HREF=http://www.lifestyledecision.com/press rel="nofollow">http://www.lifestyled
ecision.com/press

With this you’ll be able to write an effective release and bring
loads of free traffic to your site.

2b. Linking Techniques:

One Way Links:

Submitting Press releases is first step towards building long
term plan for One way links. For one Way links I prefer to Buy a
link on PR 6 website for one year or so. If you can find a site
in your own niche, then you can bring traffic as well as get
noticed by Search engines too.

Links Exchange:

Though You must have heard recently about Google ignoring sites
who are exchanging links. This is far from truth. Remember, A
link is a Link. If you are building links from related niche
sites, Your position will increase. Every Link count, doesn’t
matter if you have some unrelated sites linking to you.

2c. Submitting Articles:

Submitting articles is just like a press release. If your
article is not strong there is chance that it won’t help you as
you expect. Write down an article which people want to read,
another “10 tips for weight loss” won’t do you any good. Make
sure you have at least 500 words article and submit it to sites
like HREF="http://www.ezinearticles.com" rel="nofollow">www.ezinearticles.com
and www.goarticles.com .

Let us Summarize everything again in step by step of What
procedures You should Do.

1. Build a Site with properly Optimized keywords and content. 2.
Find One way Link Exchange as partners. 3. Issue a Press release
to bring attention to your Site. 4. Submit articles to articles
directories. 5. Work on Link exchange with related niche sites.
6. Update Your Site every week with new content.

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

1. I searched online for information about the title and description tags to get a better idea of what they should say. http://www.selfpromotion.com is a great site for this kind of information. It’s all about search engine positioning, and it’s free to sign up. However, your account only stays active for 4 weeks, after which the webmaster asks that you donate money to his site to keep your account active.

2. I used Overture’s free keyword tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. Just enter keywords that are relevant to your site, and Overture will generate the most popular search terms that people are using. I picked the most popular terms (making sure they were relevant), and made a list of keywords for each page of my site in Notepad.

3. Next, I visited http://www.scrubtheweb.com/abs/meta-check.html. This handy tool will check your meta tags and tell you if there are too many characters in your title, keyword and description. The above site is just one of many meta tag analyzers available on the net, so beware - every analyzer says something different when it comes to how many characters your meta tags should have. My advice? Pick one and stick with it, at least for a while. Otherwise, you will just get frustrated.

4. As soon as I uploaded my pages with their new meta tags, I resubmitted to the search engines using (the former) World Submitter - http://www.worldwidepromoter.com/?strategy. Note: there are some search engines that require you to submit your site manually in order to get listed. Selfpromotion.com has great information and articles about how to properly submit to these engines. I wouldn’t suggest submitting to the search engines more than once or twice per month, unless you want to run the risk of being accused of spamming them.

5. If I see the opportunity to add my link on a relevant site, I go for it. The more links your site has to other sites, the higher you will rank in the search engines. However, you will want to avoid linking with sites that are your direct competition.

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

Elizabeth Piotrowski

About The Author

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

Step 1 : Website modification This step includes adding
optimized content to all pages in the website. This is necessary
because targeted keywords have to be added in the right density
at the right places.

Step 2 : Add tags Add or make changes to Meta tags, Title tags,
H1 tags, H2 tags and alt tags for images, after keywords
research.

Step 3 : Link building

a) Inbound links

Make the website available in about 100 directories and 80
search engines and trade forums to build up on number of
incoming links to the website. All submissions are done manually
including major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

b) Reciprocal links

1, Create a links page and make link exchanges with relevant
websites.

2, Find out all competitor websites with good ranking and
analyze where they have placed their links.

3, Then make sure our link is also placed there.

4, Gradual build up of relevant and quality reciprocal links.

5, Regular verification of reciprocal links.

Step 4 :Maintenance

Report on improvement in ranking on a regular basis

Re-optimization and resubmission based on client feedback

Website statistics monitoring and conversion tracking

The higher the PR of your site the higher will be its search engine position. So the goal is to get lots of sites linking to your site. But quality is much more important than quantity. The higher the PR of the sites that link to yours the more they boost your sites PR.

When planning your effort, always remember than one link from a PR-6 or PR-7 site is worth indefinitely more than hundreds of links from PR-0 or PR-1 sites.

In addition, you should aim to include your link on pages with as few other links as possible. Pages with over 25 links have little value. Additional factors that go into the algorithm include the amount of different sites that point to yours (10 links from 10 different sites count much more than 10 links from the same site) and the inclusion of your keywords in the text of the links.

As a general rule of thumb, a one-way, high PageRank link will give your site a PR two points below that of the linking page. So a link from a PR-8 site should get your site a PR-6. However, at the lower end of the scale, I have seen a PR-5 turn a new PR-0 site into a PR-4.

The effects of having a high PageRank (PR)

Most industries, market niches and business sectors only have a PR5 or PR6 site as the top ranking result. The implication is that you can dominate a niche or local market on search engines without investing too much money or time. For example, you can buy keyword rich text links on networks of sites that have a PR of 8-9 for $ 500-2,000 a month. Doing this is likely to get you a PR of 6 or 7 right out the gate. The implication is that your site will appear as number one when users search Google for key phrases related to your market niche.

Where to start

Before starting to actually work on improving your PR, be sure to install the Google Toolbar on your browser. The Toolbar shows a value (on a log scale) of 0-10 for each website that corresponds to the underlying PR of that page. The average website with little or no marketing support is typically PR1 to PR3. Google is updating the PR level it displays in the Google Toolbar about once every three months so patience is required until you can see the results of any PR building campaign.

Since PR is all about links you’ll have to know who already links to you. You can either use the Google Toolbar by selecting “Backward Links” or type in Google “link:www.yourpage.com”

The easy ways

There are two easy ways to get a site with high PageRank:

Buy one – at any given time there are thousands of websites offered for sale on ebay and other sites with moderately high PR. You can buy one in an industry of your choosing and adapt it to your needs.
When your site is new you will have a PR of 0. But that’s not a problem if you, or a close friend, own another site with a high PR. Lets say the other site has a PR5 website. If you link to your new site from all the pages of the high PR site, then the new site would automatically get at least a PR4. If you don’t own a high PR site and neither do your friends, don’t worry. There are other options.

Buy Links with High PageRank

You can easily buy PR buy renting text links from sites that have high PR. Links can be acquired through numerous intermediary sites such as Linkadage, Linkauctions or Text-Link-Ads. Typical rates for high PR links are:

PR5 text link: $7-20/mo.
PR6 text link: $25-$50/mo.
PR7 text link: $65-$100/mo.
PR8 text link: $100-200/mo.
PR9 text link: $ 700-1300/mo

But buying links is best if used as a short term strategy to support a campaign for several months. For long terms purposes, move away from the pay for high PR links and seek other methods such as high quality reciprocal link partners, directory listings or improved content.
Directory Links

The most popular directories are Yahoo and DMOZ. But paying $ 299 a year for inclusion in Yahoo’s directory is usually not a wise investment since too many sites are listed in each page and the PR benefit you’ll receive is inadequate. Inclusion in the DMOZ is free and important but unfortunately most sites get rejected or ignored.

You should seek those directories that have a high PR on their homepage but more important also on the category that interests you. The PR your website will receive from inclusion on these directories is also a function of the number of other links on the page where your site’s link will appear. The fewer links, the higher the PR you will receive. So your top priorities are directories with high PR and few other links in the relevant category page. Visit Directoryarchives to find lists of niche directories to submit your link.

Some of the older directories have over time built up a PR6 or PR7. But the smaller and newer directories typically buy their PR through text links ads on more popular sites. In turn they typically charge a $ 25-40 registration fee. Some of these newer directories have smaller category structures which mean that you may buy a link that will deliver a PR4 or PR5 that may last many years for that one time fee.

Copy your Competitors

It’s quite easy to find out where your competitors get their links from. If you don’t know who your top competitors are, all you have to do is query Google for the main key phrases in your market and the result page will list your top competitors. Next, Visit the homepage of each competitor, and in the Page Info dropdown box of the Google Toolbar, select “Backward Links”. You will then see a list of pages that link to the page you are visiting. It won’t list every page, but will list all the ones worth getting a link from. Write down the URLs linking to each competitor and continue until you have some one hundred URLs from about 10 competitors. Than, send a personalized email to the owner or webmaster of each of these sites requesting a link or a reciprocal link.

Link exchanges

A common practice to increase PR is to exchange links with other sites, a practice also known as reciprocal linking. You can start by looking in a directory such as About.com or DMOZ for reputable sites with a topic somehow related to yours. If at all possible, your partner’s link page must be accessible from their homepage, have a decent PR and not contain too many outbound links. Open each URL to learn a little bit about each site and find a contact email and than send a personalized email asking for a reciprocal link.

In addition you should set up a links page that is easily accessible on your site to offer reciprocal linking opportunity.

You should note however that link exchanges and reciprocal linking are slowly becoming a thing of the past as this technique has been abused, and search engines have increased their capabilities to detect it. There is strong evidence that search engines give more weight to one-way links (such as links from directories or from articles).

Writing articles

This is a great way to get links from important pages with high PR and it is successfully used by many top marketers. Basically, you write articles related to your field, and allow others to publish them for free in websites and newsletters. At the end of your article, you include a resource box (a small bio) with a link to your website. The link should include the full URL spelled out (http:// …) since some sites copy just the text and delete the links. Now you’ll have to publicize your articles by finding sites that post articles. Type your main keywords + “articles” in Google to find potential sites. Before spending the time to send your articles check each site to verify it has a PR of at least 4.

As your articles get published, your links will spread like wildfire and your PR will increase. The bonus is that many of the sites that publish articles are respectable portals or news sites and such sites are likely to have a high PR.

Getting Links without Even Asking

My favorite way to get links (but the most time-consuming) is to simply have the best site on the Internet in any specific niche. Even if you think there is nothing unique about your website try to find a small niche where you can specialize. Interestingly enough, if your site is focused around a theme and is well written, providing tons of useful information and is constantly updated, you often won’t have to seek out links at all. Other sites will simply link to yours. The better your content, the more one-way links and reciprocal link offer you will get over time.

Guest Book Signings

Another linking strategy is guestbook signings, as most community-based sites allow free signature links in forum posts. So participating in popular forums related to your industry is likely to increase your PR. You can search the web the old fashioned way. Find a guestbook, drop a note with your URL or signature and move on, or you can pay a guestbook signing service a few dollars to auto-sign your name and site URL in several thousand guestbooks.

Keep in mind, that this technique is questionable since there is a dispute among search engine optimization specialists if this technique is effective or not. It is speculated that search engines may apply filters to prevent guestbook links from increasing PR.

Get a Blog

Blogs are the newest hot trend on the Internet and are also valuable as an online marketing tool. They make it simple for the average joe to write online and even add content to their site on a daily basis with just a few clicks of the mouse. This dramatically changes the way information is shared and distributed. With blogs anyone can easily become a source of valuable information. The search engine companies recognize this and make it a point to spider the blog networks on a regular basis.

There are in fact several blog programs available that you can either load into your own domain with ease or that you can use from a third-party, remotely-hosted server. One popular service is Blogger.com by Google. Adding a blog by Blogger to your new website will ensure it gets spidered within days.

There are actually a few ways to get one-way inbound links with blogs. The first way is simply to host a blog on your website and update it frequently. People tend to link to blogs because they provide content that is constantly being updated. The second way is to submit it to blog directories. Just like website directories, there are tons of blog directories you can submit to for free. Just do a search on Google for “blog directory” and you will find them. The third way of getting inbound links with a blog is to host it somewhere other than on your website. Then, provide a link from your blog to your website. After you have done that, you can submit your blog to directories for the extra page rank and added exposure.

This article is published by Dave Gilis of PromoteTOP Web Marketing. PromoteTOP is a leading provider of website marketing services, including guaranteed search engine placement. The company offers industry-specific marketing plans that cater to websites in the travel, tourism, hospitality, real estate, financial services, legal, medical, gaming, health & pharmaceutical industries.

The PromoteTOP Website (http://www.promotetop.com) provides a valuable collection of free Internet marketing tools, articles and resources.

You can freely reprint this article with this resource box included.

Ok, here’s the deal, follow these steps and shoot me if your rankings doesn’t improve. I know that there’s been so many articles on how to improve your search engine rankings but most of them are either incomplete or untrue. So I’ve put up a list of what works best to improve your rankings and I’m telling you now this works but it’s no walk in the park.

1. Long before you register your domain, start creating pages. You have to write at least 50 pages with real content for your initial website. If you register your domain before creating pages, it would take you at least a month before you could create those 50 content rich pages (well of course that is assuming that you’re not an english major grad. or a person with an IQ of 160) and you don’t want your new website to be seen bared for that long.

2. For domain names, choose a catchy one word, easy to write, easy to type, easy to spell, easy to remember, easy on everything domain name like yahoo, google or webomania. Keywords domain (like bestoranges.com or workwhilesleeping.com) are way out today. They may still have some effects on rankings but not as much as they were not so long ago. Besides, if you think of it, the best and most popular websites have branded names, like yahoo, google, msn, amazon, nba, nike, and this goes on and on…

3. When designing your webpages always remember the popular verse, simplicity is the best policy! or was that honesty? anyway the point is, the simpler your webpages is the better in many ways.

Firstly, it would be more readable to your audience. Lots of clutters in your pages (like banners and heavy graphics) would defocus the attention of your audience from your content. Sometimes (or maybe all of the time) when a person looks at a webpage and see lots of distraction, he would leave your site immediately without even reading your content.

Secondly, search engines loves webpages with more content than html codes. Speaking of search engines, stay away from javascript as much as possible, SE hates JS so much and it does more harm to your site than good. If you can’t help using JS, do it externally.

Thirdly, your webpages should be compatible with any web browsers out there in the entire universe! Seriously, with lots of different web browsers being used in the internet, your pages should be compatible with all of them. Of course, the simpler your webpages is, the more uncomplicated it is. And the more uncomplicated it is, the better for any web browsers however simple or complicated they may be! Are my sentences getting complicated?

Fourthly, a more simple webpage means less graphics, less codes and less kilobytes. This means (if you didn’t get it) your webpages would load much faster and in the world of internet, speed isn’t everything. It’s the ONLY THING! Take Google for example.

Lastly, (this is my favorite) a simpler website is easier to make. So why spend hours on creating a single page that would hurt your audience eyes from reading, be rejected by search engines, be uncompatible with different web browsers and loads forever when you can make it in minutes with much better result?

4. “Content is King” which has been said so many times already (my ears are begginning to bleed on this phrase) couldn’t be more true. Search engines loves hard-written, quality content. Build one page of content with at least 200 words per day. Timely and in demand articles are best. Learn to write web style. Use short sentences. Lots of breaks. Something that would be read quickly. People don’t really read articles, they scan them. Use humor to not bore your readers. Try not to use complicated words (unless your site is about english major or scientific names), if it exceeds three syllables, its complicated. Remember, not all your audience are good in english and will appreciate your english expertise. If you’re not sure about your content’s readability ask your seven-year old son, or brother, or neighbor to read your content and ask if he understands.

5. Keyword Positions and Density. Use your keyword once in the title, description tag, headings, url, alt, bold, italic, at the beggining of your content and at the ending of your content. Choose a keyword density of 5-12 percent but never ever compromise grammar. Spelling is equally becoming important today as search engines are gearing towards auto correction.

6. Links. Make sure that you don’t have any broken links within your site. All pages should be within reach from the root or at least 2 levels deep. Important pages should be linked from as much pages of your website. Your homepage should be linked on all pages of your website.

For exchange links, link only with websites that are within your topic. It is also quite helpful if you can get exchange links with websites in your niche that has a higher ranking than you. Here’s a good idea, search for your niche in DMOZ and mail each websites listed in there for an exchange links.

For outbound links, use your keyword to link to a high ranking site. Make sure that you link to a relevant site with the keyword you use.

7. For hosting, if you have the budget, go for a private hosting with a stand alone ip.

8. Directories. Submit to DMOZ and Yahoo. Getting an inclusion here is weight heavily by SE specially by google. If you have the money pay for a submission to Yahoo for a faster review. Submit to other directories that you can find.

9. Search Engines Submission. Submit your homepage to Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos. You can submit to other search engines but it’s not worth the effort. These 4 generates more than 90 percent of search results. Submit only once per 3 months. Submitting too much may ban your site. Dont panic if your site isn’t indexed in a few months. Some are lucky if they’re indexed within six months.

10. When your site do get indexed, make sure it is crawled entirely. If not, check your links.

11. Log and track your visitors. Study your log files. They are valuable. See where visitors are entering, going and exiting your site. If they’re not going to important pages, tweak your design. If they’re exiting abnormally on one page see why. Know what keywords visitors are using to reach your site. Build specific contents about those keywords.

12. Promoting your website. Use forums to advertise your site. Create articles and pass it around freely (with your url attached ofcourse). If you have the budget, use PPC advertising. $.5 per visitors might hurt you but if you’re confident about the quality and content of your website, that person’s next visit would be free.

You should also promote your website offline. Print your url on almost anywhere you can. Use your car, ballpens, jackets, t-shirt, freebies and giveaways. If you can, use the media. It might sound trickier but it is equally important. People would find your website more important when they see it on tangible objects.

After doing all those twelve steps, the last and hardest thing to do is wait. Be patient, no web sites are a one night success these days. Sleep and recharge for you have done a good job and soon, success would be yours. Goodluck!

http://www.webomania.org - website development and promotion

You can publish this article anywhere provided you do not alter anything.

The World Wide Web contains more than ten million websites with thousands more being added daily from all over the world, and search engines are tasked with presenting the most relevant pages based on the search criteria entered. Finding a large and popular site like www.irs.gov is easy because it is related to a large agency, but a small site like mine www.consumermortgagereduction.com would be impossible without the use of search engines. The task of finding a website that relates to a specific subject would be almost without the use of the search engine, yet they perform this task with relative ease using tools that may be unknown to most users of search engines.

The first of these tools utilize by search engines are web-crawlers; they search sites based on meta-tags, or the hidden descriptions of the site encoded in the head of the web page. By using web-crawlers to spider websites, the search engine does not have to search the entire webpage to return results, just the first few lines of code. The majority of the code web-crawlers spider is contained in the head section or top of the web page, and search engines use this information to list relevant search terms results.

Meta-bots and Google-bots are used by search engines in the same way that web-crawlers are deployed, and the only difference is that bots read the first lines of text that is visible on the browser of the user. Meta-bots and Google-bots are useful in providing content oriented sites with a quick description of the site, and is use to match the relative words in a search engine query.

The indexer is not a search engine par say, for example the largest indexer is Yahoo, which is not a search engine like Google that is a true search engine. A true search engine uses keyword searches to find website, whereas an indexer stores a link to sites based on categories. To submit a website for inclusion into an indexer the submitter has to find a relevant category that matches their website, but to submit to a search engine they only have to submit the site Universal Resource Listing or URL and the search engine deploys its web-crawler or bots to index the site.

The search engine has become an intricate part of life, especially in the lives of students that utilize the web for research. Without the search engine the search for sites that contain the terms being searched for would almost be impossible to locate in a world of millions of websites.

About The Author

Thad Collins is the owner of Consumer Mortgage Reduction Service a company that specializes in providing business programs to entrepreneurs that want to start a Biweekly Equity Acceleration and Auditing business. For more information visit: http://www.consumermortgagereduction.com

Do you have to sacrifice all of the creative and artistic
elements of your web site to rank in the search engines? Later
in this article I’ll show you a real case scenario and the
design and SEO approach used.

Thanks to the birth of professional search engine marketers the
top ranks are saturated with the pages of companies that can pay
for such insight. That said, it’s certainly possible to employ
high ranking tactics in your own website. Actually, the most
basic tactics can move you up from an 800 position to a 300.
However, it’s the top of the scale where efforts seem almost
inversely exponential or logarithmic, you put a ton in to see a
tiny change in rank.

How do you meld the ambitious overhauls required to attain
significant ranking and NOT compromise the design of your site?

Design Can’t Be Ignored

If you have an existing site, you’ve probably tied it into your
existing promotional content. Even if you’ve allowed your
website to cater to the more free form of the net, it should
still be designed as a recognizable extension of your business.

The reasons for doing so are valid, and can’t simply be ignored
for the sake of achieving a first age position, can they? If
your research into search optimization leaves you shuffling
around thoughts of content, keyword saturated copy and varying
link text, you are correctly understanding some of the basic
pillars of search engine optimization.

And, you aren’t alone if you have this disheartening thought–If
I do all this SEO stuff and reach number one across the board,
who would stay at my site because it’s so stale and boring I’m
even embarrassed to send people there!

There are two ways to successfully combine design and SEO. The
first is to be a blue chip and/or Fortune 500 company with multi
million dollar advertising and branding budgets to deliver your
website address via television, radio, billboards, PR parties
and giveaways with your logo.

Since chances are that’s not you, and certainly not me, lets
look at the second option. It begins with some research into
your market, some thoughtful and creative planning, and a
designer who is a search engine optimizer, and understands at
least basic CSS and HTML programming techniques. Or a
combination of people with these skills that can work very well
together.

Design is for brochures, instant results are for the web

That’s not the whole truth, but it will help compare and
contrast design and SEO. In reality, SEO needs the quantity and
detail of supporting text that a brochure has, but good web
design has to catch a viewer’s attention in 5 seconds. It’s
pretty difficult to read and absorb the content of an entire
brochure in less than 5 seconds.

Search engines need rich, related, appropriate, changing and
poignant content. And for them to rank you, all of that must be
on your pages. But if it’s not well organized and broken down
into bite size chunks, no one is going to bother learning about
what you’re offering.

Construction 101- Attractive Design and SEO

Sadly, it’s very difficult to optimize a site without completely
overhauling it. You’ll soon understand why. Design and SEO must
be strongly rooted into every aspect of each other, possessing a
true, symbiotic relationship. Lets look at a simplified example
of this. Lets say you are optimizing a page for the keyword
phrase, “pumpkin bread recipe.”

>From a design standpoint “Pumpkin Bread Recipe” would be the
heading for the page, in a nice, readable font with the words
perhaps an orange-brown color. And lets add a fine, green rule
around it.

There are many ways to create that simple, colored heading.
However, there is only one way that is best for both design and
SEO. That is to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. In addition,
that line of code containing “Pumpkin Bread Recipe” needs to be
as close to the top of the page as possible (which CSS also
allows).

To a viewer, the recipe text might be read more if it were
located to the right of a photo of a buttered piece of pumpkin
bread on a small plate next to a lightly steaming cup of coffee.

SEO needs to read that ingredient list and baking instructions.
Search engines now understand on a rudimentary level that the
ingredients are indeed related to the optimized words- pumpkin
bread recipe.

Additionally, it would take many extra lines of code to make a
table in this example if you didn’t use CSS. Search engines
don’t like extra code. In fact, given enough times, that “extra”
code will make the keyword phrases seem less important and hurt
rank.

Note: In the page code, a few thousand characters more than you
need to get all of that content organized would normally just
add to your page load time, and might be acceptable. But to a
search engine, that time can really add up. It wont read through
page after page, site after site, billionth after billionth
character of unimportant code to find the relevant text.
Therefore, the less code, the better your chances. Moral- Less
code, more content.

SEO usually means REDO

In the previous pumpkin example, CSS will eliminate the need for
almost any extra code at all, and provide the means to place the
text to the right of the photo.

Now, imagine that someone had already created this page, but
done so using other programming methods. The page could very
well be W3C compliant, well programmed and got the job done.
However, without designing and programming for optimization as
in the above illustration, the end result would have no
significant rank compared to others that do.

You can be sure that there exist at least 30 web sites built to
rank for the keywords “pumpkin bread recipe”. Note- why did I
use the number 30? It’s safe to assume if you’re not on the
first three results pages of a search, you’re not being seen.

While this is a simple example, hopefully you understand that it
would be impossible to optimize this simple page without redoing
it. This isn’t always the case, but extrapolate this into
detailed, multiple pages in an entire website and the issue is
greatly magnified.

Aesthetic Importance vs. Traffic

Everyone has an idea of what they want their site to look like.
The pretty factor- splash pages, cool flash and graphics must
now be justified as to their importance to the bottom line. If
you want/need to establish an online presence, you will have to
make some compromises in these areas.

Understand exactly the role your site should play in your
company marketing.

Ask- What is the goal of your website and who is its audience?
Is it for existing clients to see? Is it to reach new clients?
To venture into yet untapped market segments?

Ask- How strongly do your other marketing efforts promote your
site?

Ask- Is your website an extension of your existing collateral
that must reflect the same graphical look?

Ask- Is your website meant to assist to your sales force or is
it your sales force?

Chances are you wont have any single answers. That’s ok. It will
give you some meat for your designer/SEO to digest and develop a
solution for you.

Real case of Design balanced with SEO and salability

If you sell jewelry solely online, you must have a catalog of
exceptional photography and detailed, high-resolution close up
images. But, you must be optimized and rank well if you want to
sell any of that jewelry.

If such a company approached me with this project, my
recommendation would be this: If you sell a product, people have
to see that product. Lots of good images. The site should be
slick and sheik and easy to navigate. The home page has to
capture the buyer’s attention. If it’s very expensive jewelry,
the site should have a lot of class and elegance. If it’s home
made jewelry, the site shouldn’t look home made.

However, as you have no store front, if the online community
can’t find you, you’re business will fail. So I’d have a very
optimized home page with some discussion of the quality of your
product, the history of your company, etc. This is also great
sales copy. Ad a few special catalog pieces with descriptions
below some smartly placed gifs, jpegs and readable type graphics
built out of CSS and you’ve got a cool to look at, content rich,
well optimized layout.

I’d make the link to your catalog very obvious and prominent.
Note the catalog is not the homepage. I’d also include
subsequent well written, in depth pages about the history of
some specific pieces. Load them with targeted keywords and a few
images. Again, make your catalog link very prominent. In doing
so you’re creating relevant content for search engines AND
providing additional pages that can rank.

The catalog can be database driven, simple and changeable, and
you have the foundation to build your search rank.

Planning Your Site

If your designer is not a search engine optimizer, hire one to
work with your designer from the initial development stage of
your site. If you would like a visible presence that is not
dependant on traditional marketing efforts to get your name
around, then you will have to optimize.

However, with advances in html and css, text itself can be a
very flexible and attractive design element with endless
possibilities. Site optimization consists of some rigid,
unbendable rules. It can be intertwined successfully with very
creative and attractive design. If your Designer and SEO aren’t
the same person or company, make sure they have the same, close
working relationship.

“off page” factors have become one of the important factors for
search engine ranking. And link popularity is “off page” factor.

Link building is very pain staking process because it consumes
lot of time and also see the results only gradually. During the
past few years webmaster exchanged mails to other webmaster to
gain inbound links to their website which is commonly called
“Link Exchange” during the year 2005 many link farms, link
directories and building and selling link website and companies
popped up just to carter this sector. Since search engines still
value these links like MSN which gives importance to anchor text
links pointing to any website in their algorithm. But after some
of the major update of Google in 2005 and especially the Jagger
update which was done in 3 phrases over a period of 40 days made
webmasters and SEO experts to give a second through about
reciprocal linking.

Reciprocal linking was a method to artificially increase the link
popularity of the website and gain search engine ranking.
However after Google Jagger 3 update webmaster and website
promotion experts learned that their website was dropped to a
few hundreds of pages in the search engine results. What
happened was Google discounted or gave no value to those kinds
of links build artificially by webmaster to gain link
popularity. Besides website which has high quality inbound links
replaced those ranking which was previously enjoyed by other
websites. Inbound links doesn’t mean just links pointing to the
website; it should be from authority website and should be seen
as natural by search engine spiders. Any kind of artificial
method to gain inbound links will be identified by these spider
bots and there will be a drop in those particular website
ranking.

The important tips and techniques to be used in future link
building for 2006 are as follows.

1) Reciprocal link - Before I go further I would like to tell
you that reciprocal linking is not dead. For example if you run
a website on pets supplies and linking to a dog grooming website
it is definitely take in to consideration by search engine,
since it adds value and information for the visitor to these
websites.

2) Directories links - A link from Dmoz and yahoo directory is
still considered as gold by Google and eventually your website
will be included in Google directory is you are listed in Dmoz.
Directory submission is not bad idea but if you run a website
related to real estate and submitting to non related directory
it is not given value and will be discounted. The quality of the
link matters rather than number of links. So try to get links
from your Niche areas and directories.

3) Be a Content provider:- This is pretty tough but worth the
effort that means give people a reason to link to your website.
The reasons could be if you provide information to relate to our
niche area on your site. I mean unique content and where
webmaster can’t find these kinds of information and it will be
useful to reader in your niche area. Create an article section
in your own website, so definitely you will get requests from
other webmasters to link to your site.

4) Think out of the box to get links: - Send testimonials for
products and services which you have used and ask a link
pointing to your website. Conduct interviews with professionals
in your niche area.

5) Press release:- Submitting a press release related to new
services, features or products which you are launching will have
drastic effect to gain links and popularity to your website.
Submitting press release is fast catching up with webmasters.
There are many publishers and subscribers looking for latest
news and content. So by submitting a press release you gain a
wide publicity.

6) Submitting articles.- This is a form of viral marketing or
like a virus because you articles submitted to article banks and
ezine publishers will be picked by hungry webmaster and
publisher looking for free reprint content. Imagine this article
which i have written might be picked up in newsletters and
online publishers which in turn gain me a free inbound link.

So the bottom line is try to gain maximum inbound links from
authority sites and your niche related website. This will
definitely make your link building for the year 2006 a better
experience and see your website visibility and popularity gain
new heights.