Monday, September 17, 2007

How To Not Get Lost In The SEO World

The ever-increasing level of competition in the Web these days is like a mad scramble for most businesses, with thousands of sites and affiliates boxing-out each other for niche markets, increased traffic, and higher sales.

Website and business owners who spend money on optimizing their websites in the search engines want to know they are getting a good return on their investments. SEO firms and experts need concrete numbers to show that the campaign is working, and that they should continue to invest in optimization.

According to the experts, there are several good reasons why you should measure your SEO efforts, so that you wouldn’t get astray in terms of direction or investment. First, you need to justify how much you're spending to management, your client, or whoever holds you responsible for getting traffic to your website. Second, is to make sure that all the time and funds you're spending on SEO is actually working. Third, to enable you to secure more money for next year's SEO budget. And lastly, to enable you to stay competitive always.

It is also notable to take note that you should understand industry averages, such as how much the average website owner spends on outsourcing SEO, and this could range from $100 to $500 per web page for example, and what sort of return you can expect to receive for paying premium cash. In finding out these spending averages, you are fully equipped with the knowledge when formulating a plan that will convince yourself, or the higher-ups, to spend the money on SEO.

Tips On How Not To Get Lost In The SEO World

It is far better to get started on your SEO journey of learning and make a couple mistakes, than to let months go by, never make a mistake and never get started. Here are a few tips on succeeding, and in preventing yourself from getting lost in the wide, and sometimes tricky world of SEO.

* Make a firm decision to get started. There are a lot of people who will buy a program or purchase a product, but for some reason have difficulty in getting to know how to use it: as a result, they never do.

* Gain self-confidence through experience and constant practice. Far too many people hesitate to try out their ideas. The sooner you strengthen your confidence, the sooner you will realize the potential for what you can achieve and do. In the beginning, start with a few of your own sites where you have full creative liberty without encountering the demands or pressures that come from a client.

* Gather advice from the SEO community by visiting respected forums and discussion groups. Although at times you may not get leading edge stuff, since most of that costs a lot of money, however you will get an awesome amount of pertinent information. Plus, you'll also hear both sides of a story, both the pros and cons, from the debates that seethe within the community.

* Subscribe to reputable newsletters and learn from what the experts say. Many of them are free to sign up to and they can be a wonderful venue to start learning.


http://www.content.onlypunjab.com/Article/How-To-Not-Get-Lost-In-The-SEO-World/4200320092003395578

SEO Tip: How Do Search Engines Choose Page-One Sites?

You may be wondering how search engines arrange the top pages from millions of others. There are calculations involved and you have to work with these to put your site in page one.

How Do Search Engines Work?

There are three important elements that make up the database and finding of relevant material by search engines. From the inputting of words, the search until the hierarchy of results, there is a process that is mathematically formulated and produces the links and sites that suit best.

1. The web crawler. This is also known as a “spider” or “robot” which roams the web. It is a program that translates web pages and any existing links relevant to the page. The web crawler begins by looking through the web addresses that are available in its database or index. Any other page on the internet is added to the database should the web crawler consider it relevant to its existing index. Thus, the database continually grows and the web crawler also goes back to the index to check for updates and again search for new available links.

2. The index. The index holds all information of websites and pages that the web crawler has discovered during its frequent web roaming. Whenever any website or page is updated by the owner, the index also updates its stored information thus it continually grows over time.

3. The search engine. A search engine is a software that goes through all the information stored in the index whenever a search is done by a web browser. An algorithm supports the final results according to how relevant the websites found are to the search. The hierarchy of page results is determined by shutting on or off categories that the search engine feels is relevant to the search.

The Goal of Search Engines

The ultimate goal of a search engine is to provide the most relevant and informative web pages to the web browser. The effectiveness of search engines may be tested through search engine optimization. Page results for different search engines may vary depending on the algorithm that they are using. Thus, website owners aim to improve their rank based on the algorithm.

How Can I Get on Page-On of Search Engines?

1. Links. Links are small routes leading to your website thus a lot of these will increase your visibility in search engines. When typing in a search, it is possible for your URL to be exposed even if the engine may be revealing another website housing your link.

2. Page Summary. Make your page summary more effective by using meta tag names and using keywords in a balanced manner. Be more flexible in your website’s description so that it can stand out even if the search is bound for a different category. This prevents your website from being completely shut out by the search engine.

3. Title. Although the true nature of the fixed algorithm used by search engines is not fully known, it might help to start with titles that begin with the letters A to E. Engines arrange equal scoring websites in alphabetical order.

4. Keywords. Wisely input keywords in your web pages. More is not better when it comes to key words since engines will decrease your value with too much repetition. Four to five keywords per page is the most you may be using to help boost your visibility.

5. URL. Share your URL as much as you can in multi and single-database services to increase your value. You may also put it in blogs, your friends’ linking addresss and emails.


http://www.content.onlypunjab.com/Article/SEO-Tip--How-Do-Search-Engines-Choose-Page-One-Sites-/4200320092003395699

Top 5 Ways to Get Inbound Links

I've listed the methods below in the order you should use them: from the beginning (things you should do when you first start out a site) to the advanced methods, the ones you should use when your site is a little bit older and you're already getting a fair amount of visitors.

Before we get down to business, I have to tell you this very important detail: don't start promoting your site until it has some content - it's unlikely that you'll get good results when you promote an empty site!

1. Directory submissions - this is a very important step for a new site, because this is probably how search engines will first find you. What you will need:

* 5 different versions (except for the site URL) for each of the following: site URL, title, description, list of keywords.

* an email address, specially created for directory submissions. This email should be on the domain of the site you are submitting or else it will be rejected by some directories.

* a list of seo-friendly directories -
http://info.vilesilencer.com/main.php?rock=seo-friendly.php has one of the best lists of seo-friendly directories.

Now here comes the hard part: take that directory list, visit each directory and submit your site cycling your titles and description on each submission. This is the hardest part mainly because of the amount of workload - don't worry, this can be made bearable by using 2 utilities: Roboform (www.roboform.com - which you can use with Internet Explorer and Firefox that has free and paid versions) and Informenter (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/673/ - a Firefox only plugin).

2. Reciprocal links (link exchanges) - I personally don't use this method anymore because it's too much work and there are not enough rewards! Link exchanges used to be a very powerful method in the beginning of Google and PageRank, but not anymore. This doesn't mean that reciprocal links don't work anymore, it's just that they're not that important anymore.

However this is one step you could follow when you have little competition, somewhere in the range of 300 000 or 400 000 results for your search word or phrase.

3. Reprint rights articles (submitting articles to article directories) - this is one of my favorite methods of obtaining backlinks: it requires little time, it's free and you can (possibly) get a lot of return on your investment!

Writing articles gives you perfect control over the environment your links are in, and even a little control over the site where your article resides (considering the fact that webmasters usually post only articles that have the same topic as their site). Writing articles of high quality will ensure that your articles will be posted on many sites - a good article will get you a good number of backlinks!

One last thing about article writing: never, and I mean never post the article that you'll distribute on your own site! Considering the article could appear on very important sites, Google may apply a duplicate content filter on your site, thus possibly burring it in the SERPs. Your site should be as clean as a whistle, with as much original content as possible.

4. Buying links - in my opinion, if you are not an expert in search engine optimization you should not try buying links to improve your rankings. There are a lot of factors to take into account when looking to buy links: theme of the site, the traffic that the page or site gets, whether that traffic is from natural and sustained (not from PPC, traffic exchanges or such methods), PR, anchor text and many more!

However, if you decide on buying text links on other sites, do the following:

* choose well established sites that have the same theme as yours.
* the link should be spiderable: check the robots.txt file, nofollow metatags and the rel="nofollow" link attribute.
* make the link look as different as possible from a bought link: surround it with text and avoid placement in the site's footer or in an "Advertisements" or "Partners" box.

5. Link baiting is one of the most powerful method of online promotion, but this should be used only when your site is a little bit older and stable - getting a lot of links in a short time span can actually hurt your site.

There are a few hooks that you can use to attract links:

* news: get an important story first and you could be the focus of your industry sector, even if for only a few hours! People are always on the look-out for fresh stuff, and if it's good you could end up with a lot of backlinks.

* resource: gathering a list of useful pages in your industry, or maybe offering a new viewpoint on a certain research paper.

* controversy: this kind of link baiting can actually get you on the wrong side of some people because it requires contradicting a popular point of view or an authority figure. So tread carefully!



http://www.articlejoe.com/Article/Top-5-Ways-to-Get-Inbound-Links/35713

Why is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) necessary?

Why is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) necessary?

The playing field is equal on the Internet irrespective of the size of the business and hence Search Engine Optimization becomes so necessary. Most surfers arrive at a particular web site after a search. About 75% of web users in North America use search engines performing about 4 billion searches in a month. Briefly put, search engines are responsible for directing visitors to a website. Sadly, not many business owners know how to get their web sites listed in the databases of search engines, nor do they know how to get their site a higher rank when related key words are searched for.

How SEO works?

Several ecommerce sites face the problem of shopping cart abandonment. Web sites face an average abandonment rate of 30% or more. The main reasons for shopping cart abandonment are:

If a website has to be listed in a search then either it has it to be submitted or has to be among the ones indexed by search engine robots (bots) that travel across the web in search of web sites to add to their database. In order to rank higher, web sited must be optimized appropriately. Ranking is important from a statistical point of view as in the first site listed in the results page of a search engine is visited by thrice the number of people than the fifth site, result sites found on the first page of search are visited 78% more than the ones found between 11th and 30th.

Having the correct key words and a high amount of link popularity is the key to SEO.
The higher the frequency of the keywords and the higher the number of links to you site especially from similar websites, the better the ranking.

Search engines like Google look at links for a web site as validation. More validation means that a web site is listed higher in search results, provided it is well optimized.

A few companies try an illegitimate techniques called ‘black hat’ to increase rankings by building link farms. The companies make these farms by creating numerous websites usually of similar content all linking back to the main site. However, web sites using this and other black hat techniques always run the risk of being caught and not being listed in search engines at all.

Web Sites with graphic content can be optimized to suit search engines, as the latter are incapable of transforming pictures into words. However, this problem can be overcome by placing key words in a concealed bot recognizable code (known as alt tag) connected to each image and by providing small captions above the images.

Other type of hidden text known as meta tags can be inserted into the web page code for eg. page header, description and key words found in the web site. Although search engines don’t consider them as that important these days following meta tag abuse, any type of optimization helps the web site.

Another way to optimize your web site is by using key words in place of hyperlinks in a web site. The key words in the links get captured by the robots that are in the search of them for adding to their database.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleJoe.com


http://www.articlejoe.com/Article/Why-is-Search-Engine-Optimization--SEO--necessary-/35794

Search Engine Optimisation That Works

There are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques that work and there are also supposed SEO techniques that do not work. It is up to you to find what will be most effective for the purpose of bringing more traffic to your website. In order to know how to optimize your site you need to know what the practice of SEO really is. A comprehensive definition of Search Engine Optimization is the following: The act of designing and marketing a website so that it ranks high in search engine results. SEO is accomplished in a variety of ways.

One of the most important components of Search Engine Optimization is making sure that each page of a website consists of specific keywords. This is usually done by providing content such as articles or blog entries which contain these specific words. Along with that, it is recommended that site owners or operators only concentrate on one primary keyword (and its synonyms) per page. All the primary keywords on site pages are the base keywords from which are drawn more keywords. For example, a site owner may write an article that contains the primary keyword “budgeting”, and then from there are drawn secondary keywords such as financial budgeting, budgeting software, personal budgeting and so on.

You will even be able research some of the secondary keyword phrases and find even more specific keyword phrases to use on your pages which are drawn from them. For instance, you can derive “personal financial budgeting” or financial budgeting software from the phrase financial budgeting. The more specific the keyword phrase that you choose for the page the less competition you will have for a spot high in the search engine results for that page. Therefore, one piece of advice is to try to find as specific of keywords as possible which will draw a fair amount of traffic to your website. However, one word of caution is not to put too specific of keywords on your page that no one would use to search for items. Otherwise, that keyword will bring little to no traffic to your site.

Another very important aspect of SEO is the process of link building. Simply put, the definition of link building is the act of acquiring inbound links to your site from other websites. Link building is accomplished in quite a few ways. One of the ways to build links is to join link exchange groups where you can offer your website link in exchange for someone else’s. The trick to making this work for you is to gather as many relevant links from others as possible and place your site on the pages of those whose websites are of a similar subject as yours. Mutual (reciprocal) link exchange is often also though of as a great way to advertise for free as well, and can be done automatically or manually. However, you should do it manually because it will keep you away from bad neighborhoods.

Always try to provide excellent value to your visitors, which in turn can get you links from authority websites. There are also other ways to help improve your site’s popularity as well. For instance, you can join free blogging sites such as Blogger.com. When you create a free blogging site you can add links to your other website(s) and this helps increase the number of visitors that view your site pages. You can also make your site more well-known to people when you list it in e-zines, free and paid search directories, search engines, and newsletters. There is also the possibility of promoting your site by presenting podcasts, streaming video and audio, and other publications which will increase the amount of site traffic you will receive. There are countless other offsite and onsite SEO techniques that you can. Offsite techniques are measures that you take outside of designing your website (i.e. link building) in order to promote your website.

Onsite techniques for SEO are ones that involve designing your site (i.e. providing relevant content and placing primary keywords in title tag) in a way that web crawlers will be able to read it, which increases the likelihood that your site will be listed at the top of search engine results. Make your site valuable for your visitors, keeping search engines in mind; and try gaining links from authority and relevant websites.


http://www.articlejoe.com/Article/Search-Engine-Optimisation-That-Works/35854

http://www.articlejoe.com/Article/SEO--Creating-Your-Own-Basic-Web-Statistics-Database/35868

There are literally thousands of website statistics systems available on the Internet. Some provide complex analysis, whilst others provide very basic information. Sometimes simply due to whom your web provider is you may not be able to install your own statistics applications. I will set out in this article to provide a very basic web statistics database that will allow you to catch whom is visiting your web site and where they are coming from.

The first step in the process of building your own web statistics database is to identify where you will store the statistical information you have collected. In this example, I have decided to store all the data in a Microsoft Access database. I basically created the database in Microsoft Access and called the database "dbStatistics".

The next step is to build a table in which you will store the data. The table in the database will be called "tblStatistics". The table needs five fields and the names are:

fldPageName DataType - Text 255 Characters
fldIPNumber DataType - Text 255 Characters
fldAll_Http DataType - Memo
fldAll_Raw DataType - Memo
fldTimestamp DataType - DateTime Default Value - Date() & " " & time()

The information above simply defines the type of fields each field should be set to and some specific field properties which will be important for this code to work. You will note that there are no primary key fields. The reason this is undertaken is that the AutoNumber function in Microsoft Access is to limiting in the volume of data that you can hold.

You will also notice that there is a field called fldTimestamp. This field allows you to store the exact local Date and Time the person visited your website. The local time is the time on your server that is hosting your webpages.

For this basic web statistic log to work, we now need to get the information into the database. The first thing you need is to ensure that your provider can in fact support ASP (Active Server Pages) pages. Most web hosting companies can support them, but it is worth checking.

We now need to add the code to each webpage that will log information on who is visiting your website and also which websites were referrers and the browsers they were using and what language they were searching in. You will find out all this information in both the fldAll_Http and fldAll_Raw fields.

The following code needs to be copied into the top part of your webpage before the HTML tag.


http://www.articlejoe.com/Article/SEO--Creating-Your-Own-Basic-Web-Statistics-Database/35868

How to write good content for your website

If you are intended to implement the right onpgae technique on your website,you have to adopt a complete change of focus for the copy. Rather than “we“ and “us“ the copy would be directed toward the visitor while still communicating important benefits about buying from the company.

Organic searchers who click your pages are highly qualified visitors to your site. They are much more likely to make a purchase than some other kinds of visitors you receive.

Besides knowing that a page contains the words in a search query, isn‘t it important to know where they appear on the page? You better believe it. All other things being equal, pages where query terms appear in important places, such as the page title, tend to rank higher than pages where the terms are buried at the page bottom. Pages that feature query words in titles and initial paragraphs are said to have high keyword prominence, because the keywords appear in more prominent places than on other pages.

The title of your page is the most important part of the Web page to a search engine. The title is what displays in the search results page, and it is also shown in the window title for the browser. You can think of a Web page‘s title as similar to the title of a magazine article, which usually strongly indicates what the entire article is about.

Therefore most search engines give more weight to terms found in bold headings, and to italicized or colored text, assuming that these are more important occurrences of the terms. Headings are most similar to bold section headings inside a magazine article that break up the running text and indicate what the paragraphs below are about.

Body text includes all the words that appear on the page, but body text that appears closer to the top of the page is considered more important than text found in the middle or at the bottom of the page. Pictures on the page also contain alternate text that search engines use to “learn“ what each picture is about.

Web pages generally contain a summary that some search engines still show under the title in the search results. Most search engines, however, no longer show the description nor give it any more weight than body text.

The overall goal you may have is to increase conversions for your site and you can achieve good results in the SERP if at the beginning of your seo efforts you take care of the code structure of your site.


http://www.articlejoe.com/Article/How-to-write-good-content-for-your-website/43251

Important Tips to Select a Good SEO Consultant

Good search engine ranking is important for every webmaster, because they are launching their websites with an objective to get more targeted customers for their websites. Good ranking in major search engines ultimately help them to increase the sale of their products and services. All these show that how the search engine ranking is important for a webmaster or businessman. At the other end, people also prefer to search their required information through search engines. Different techniques are followed by webmasters to promote their websites, among all the techniques SEO can be the best one. But for better optimization of your site, you can take the help of a good SEO consultant who will help you move up in the search engines, get more traffic to your website and ultimately get more sales.

Before giving any suggestion about your website, the SEO consultant thoroughly studies your case. Then only the SEO consultant starts messaging information for keyword selection and creative development. But when you are selecting a SEO consultant, you need to be very careful about this. As a webmaster you should take different aspects into consideration. Some of them are follows-

• Before hiring any SEO consultant, go on collecting detailed information about their working procedure and clients. If required, you can also inquire about their previous work.
• You can get information about their services from their previous clients.
• Search engine algorithms are changing in regular intervals. So, before buying any SEO service from any SEO company, be sure that the SEO consultant has thorough knowledge about major search engines and their algorithms.
• You can inquire about their on-page as well as off-page services they are providing. Don’t forget to ask about their additional services.
• Ask them what type of tools and techniques they are using for keyword identification and content optimization etc.
• You can get detailed information about their techniques from their online journals.
• Inquire whether they have any relation with search engine marketing or not. This can help you to get more reliable information.

Be clear about all the above discussions, because your SEO consultant can not only boost your ranking in search engines but also keep in continuous improvement program.

http://www.articlejoe.com/Article/Important--Tips-to-Select-a-Good-SEO-Consultant/43276

Ethical Search Engine Optimisation Services

Concerned about not getting an adequate amount of traffic to your site? Want to boost your visibility on net? One answer to all such questions! Your site needs SEO services.

SEO (search engine optimization) means optimization of a site to increase its visibility & usability to search engines like google. SEO services help in generating more traffic to your site which means more interested customers, which will convert to increased sales for your business.

A SEO consultant would guide you about what all should be done to get a higher ranking on a search engine. We, a seo company uk, provide a complete solution to all your SEO services need.

Key benefits of SEO services can be summed up as below. Read on to find out why you need search engine optimization…

Increased Traffic - Search Engines do better than all other media in encouraging visitors to a website. As about 85% of Internet users prefer search engines as the crucial method to start their search. Traffic from search engines is the most considerable traffic as it is comprised of experienced visitors. These are the people who actively look for a product, service information or solution. So, your seo services uk will make certain that you have valuable traffic.

Improved Competitive Edge – if chances of finding out your website are more, it means your competitors are less likely to be found out. It directly means that if you have more customers, the more online market distribute you get. This is where we, uk seo company help you cut down your competition so that your profits will go higher.

Larger Customer Base - a SEO consultant can help you locate the best search terms to target which will not only attract more visitors to your web site, but ensures that those visitors are more likely to be strong potential customers for your business. Millions of searches are conducted each day; sites appearing at the top of the search results certainly get free web site promotion. In this way, your online market expands. By escalating your market online you expose your products and services to more motivated and interested customers.
Excellent Return-on-Investment – an affordable SEO package has been proven to acquiesce a higher Return on Investment in terms of generating more traffic to your website, qualified sales leads and customer acquisitions. It provides a very low cost of internet advertising with a probable high rate of return, giving you a high Return-on-Investment.
It works Non – stop – your SEO partner works for you non-stop 24/7. It saves your time & effort. After you submit your site, it will continue to be crawled and indexed by search engines and is maintained with minimal endeavor.

Besides being an efficient online marketing tools – they’re also cost effecive. High level SEO services also make possible online marketing of the site. For a SEO program that can help you locate the best search terms to target more visitors that are strong potential customers for your goods and services, you need to look for a SEO partner who provides premium SEO services with own originality.

In simple terms, SEO services make a web site generate traffic from relevant search term queries. An affordable SEO package will take care of aspects like effective search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), internet marketing strategies and execution to bring persistent visitor traffic to your site. Our seo services uk esures correct implementation of search engine optimization that will significantly affect where your web site is positioned against your competitors.

For more information about Search Engine Optimization services UK , visit::
www.brickblue.co.uk


http://www.articlejoe.com/Article/Ethical-Search-Engine-Optimisation-Services/43298