BEWARE: Buy 5,679 links for $47!

I've been looking over some sites that sell links lately, and I've noticed a lot of packages like the one in this title (though not quite so exagerated). I wanted to take a moment to warn you not to take anyone up on those kinds of offers.

Why not? You need more links to get better ranking in the search engines right?

Yes, you do. But stop drooling for a minute and think about it: that many links for that little money always means the links are spread across just a few domains. The search engines will only count one, count 'em, one link from each domain as a rule. The others are basically ignored or so completely devalued as to be almost worthless.

That just makes sense. If I have a domain with a thousand pages on it and I put a link in my footer across all of my pages to some other site, does that really make that target site "popular"? Common sense says no. It was just easier for me to add it to my footer.

So beware of the advertisements for thousands of one-way links for pennies a link. Unless the sites can prove that they get a lot of traffic, and it's the kind of traffic that will click on your link and visit your site, it's not worth it.

For the right way to build link popularity and get traffic both from the links and the search engine rankings those links give you, I recommend Jack Humphrey's Power Linking methods.


http://www.articlebase.info/Article/BEWARE--Buy-5-679-links-for--47-/34651

Reciprocal links are dead!

I've been reading a lot of nonsense on various SEO forums about reciprocal linking being dead. People screaming and crying because their sites no longer rank well after Google's last update. I thought it would be timely for me to write an article about what REALLY happened, and what you can do about it.

Reciprocal Links Aren't Dead

First of all, reciprocal links aren't dead, not by a long shot. It would be foolish of any search engine to ignore links from one authority site to another just because that other site points back to it. That, in fact, reinforces the value of both sites!

What really happened is that Google got smarter about reciprocal links. They are harder on link farms now, and bogus "directories" of links. So the people who are crying foul probably had most or all of their links coming from these kinds of shady sources.

From my own experience with my many sites, however, it seems clear that reciprocal links have been devalued by Google. All that means is that they don't count quite as much as they used to, but they are still very valuable.

If you follow my philosophy of optimizing for keywords that are not super competitive, though, then you may have already guessed that my sites weren't affected much, since most of my "competition" isn't really competing for the keywords I'm targeting anyway.

Reciprocal Links Have Always Been A Short-Term Solution

Besides, reciprocal links should ALWAYS be looked on as a short-term boost to get a site going. You want to get those reciprocal links so that you can get ranked for some less competitive keywords. Once you're getting some traffic, if you're offering high quality content to your visitors, you'll get more links into your site naturally.

This happens because if a lot of people value your site, you are bound to get talked about in forums and message boards that are related to your site topic. And other webmasters who visit your site and like it will add links from their sites to yours. Your link popularity will grow naturally–as long as your site content is high quality.

But a site needs the initial momentum that reciprocal links provide to get started. Just the act of emailing webmasters for reciprocal links will result in people who are in your area of expertise looking at your site. So whether you get a link or not, if you have a quality site, you've put it in front of a person who has the opportunity to spread the word about you. And believe me, quality sites get talked about a lot.

Getting More Links

Since it's true that reciprocal links have been devalued by Google, that could mean that you need to get more links to stay competitive (though that really depends on what keywords you're targeting).

Personally, I find SEO Elite to be a huge asset in this regard, because it automates the process of getting people to link to your site. I also highly recommended Jack Humphrey's Power Linking methods.

Summing It All Up

If you're building quality content and using reciprocal links as they should be used (to get a short-term boost that launches a new site), then changes in the valuation of reciprocal links will not be a problem.

If you're a link spammer, or if you're relying on shady directories or link farms, then yes, you're in trouble. Stick to the methods I've outlined above and use software-assisted link gathering tools like SEO Elite and you'll be on top of the search engine game for many more algorithm updates to come.

http://www.articlebase.info/Article/Reciprocal-links-are-dead-/35573

Internet Users Benefit from the Search Engine / SEO Cat-and-Mouse

A constant cat-and-mouse game between the major Internet search engines and search engine optimization (SEO) companies has an interesting result: As these two groups try to psych each other out to beat the other’s system, search capabilities are constantly improving for the consumer of Internet services.

Here’s what happens: Each search engine develops a formula for producing the most accurate, relevant results according to the Internet user’s keyword search, and then the SEO companies analyze the search engine’s function and develop a system of strategies to allow their customers to take advantage of that formula. Common strategies include providing enriched text blocks (a few paragraphs of text containing multiple keywords likely to be picked up by the search engines), general interest articles, with embedded links, on particular topics relevant to the customer, development of multiple links to the customer’s site from other websites, and a combination of sponsored links and pay-per-click ads (paid ads which appear on other websites). This combination of strategies promises to improve a website’s ranking in the search results, a valuable asset in cyberspace; if a company can land on the first page of a keyword search, the probability of the Internet user visiting its website skyrockets.

Of course, as soon as the SEO companies figure out a particular search engine’s formula, the search engine changes the rules, since the search engine’s honchos want to provide the most accurate, up-to-date, and relevant information, and not allow website owners to game the system. And of course the SEO companies respond with new, more sophisticated strategies. The result to Internet users is a constantly improving ability to search efficiently for the goods, services, and information they need.

Google is the biggest game in town, but other search engines have their following; Alta Vista is popular among college students and serious researchers, for instance. There’s also dogpile.com, a search engine that searches all the other major search engines and pulls up the most relevant results from each. And new search engines pop up all the time – Ask.com and AskJeeves.com are two examples of newer search engines with popular followings. A good SEO company will develop strategies not just for Google, but for all the major search engines.

Search engines aren’t perfect, of course, and one thing they can’t do at the moment is access specific information contained in the multitude of databases available on the Internet. Federal, state, and some local governments have searchable, free databases which allow users to access this information; other databases, such as Ancestry.com, charge a subscription fee for their use. For public information on the federal level in the U.S., FirstGov.gov is a great place to start.

Search strategies exist for the web surfer as well. Just try doing a Google search for tax information, for instance. Type “taxes” into the keyword search bar and click on Search. In the U.S. you’ll see irs.com, and then numerous companies advertising their tax services. But type in “taxes .gov” and you’ll pull up the same IRS site, followed by many more government website pages, some of which may provide more direct access to the information you need than going through irs.com, and without having to wade through a bunch of accounting firms. Type in “taxes UK .gov” and you pull up government information for the United Kingdom, and so on. Doing a keyword search on the general topic you’re researching should pull up relevant database sites. (By the way, if you want to see an example of great search engine optimization strategies, do a search on “genealogy” and look at all the links to Ancestry.com on the websites you find—they’re everywhere!)

As the cat-and-mouse game continues between search engine companies and SEO firms, the result promises to be ever more sophisticated, powerful, and accurate techniques for accessing valuable information over the Internet. As the continuing success of more and more new search engines suggests, we may have only scratch


http://www.articlebase.info/Article/Internet-Users-Benefit-from-the-Search-Engine---SEO-Cat-and-Mouse/36414

Article Submission for Search Engine Rankings

Vary Your Anchor Text

The primary reason you want to submit articles is to get links back to your site, but how are you formatting that link in the resource box? You want to have the anchor text of the links to be the keywords you're wanting to rank for, yes, but it's important that you don't have the same anchor text in every link.

Why? Because if the search engines see that every link to your site contains the exact same anchor text, it's a red-flag that your links were not acquired naturally. People don't always behave the same, and search engines know that it's statistically impossible that every single person who links to your site will use the same link text.

So be sure to vary your link text. I like to reinforce my main keywords while also optimizing for related keywords. For instance, if your site's primary keywords are "kitchen remodeling", you could use a variation like "kitchen remodeling tips" or "kitchen remodeling advice" or "how to remodel your kitchen".

Those anchor texts still help reinforce your ranking for your primary keywords since they contain your primary keywords (or variations), but they also help you rank for lesser terms–and it's the lesser terms that are the easiest to rank for.

So when submitting to article sites, be sure and vary your anchor text, using your primary keywords about 70% of the time. This is simple enough to accomplish: just change your resource box for each site that you submit to.

Submit Slowly to Avoid the Sandbox

There is one school of thought that Google and Yahoo both penalize links that appear too fast. They basically wait for months before actually applying the value of those links to your ranking. This is referred to in the search engine optimization world as "sandboxing".

As of right now, MSN (under it's new name, Live) does not sandbox links. So if you're looking to rank and get some traffic going quickly, getting a lot of links fast will pay off with MSN. You'll just have to wait a while before seeing much results in Google and Yahoo.

If you're trying to rank in Google or Yahoo as quickly as possible, and if you're a believer in the sandbox theory, then you're best bet is to submit to the article sites a little more slowly. Maybe only submit to a few a week. This will cause your links to build more "naturally" from the search engines point of view.

If You're Not a Sandbox Believer…

There are other schools of SEO thought that claim sandboxing doesn't exist at all. Their theory is that it just takes a long time for the algorithm updates to hit Google and Yahoo so that your links are counted. If they are correct, then it's still best to get as many links as possible as quickly as possible, and then just wait for them to be applied.

What I Believe

I tend to lean away from the Sandbox theory myself, but not because I have a lot of emperical evidence that it doesn't exist. It just seems illogical to me for search engines to sandbox links just because they appear quickly.

For example, let's say there's some big news event that happens regarding some web site, and suddenly thousands of links appear from every news site covering that sector. Would it make sense for the search engines to ignore all of those links just because they appeared quickly? It was natural that they appear quickly, since the event was unexpected.

So I tend to believe that it just takes a while to update the rankings for billions of web pages, and therefore the links don't kick in immediately.

Summing it All Up

Whatever your Sandbox beliefs are, you can see that your linking strategy needs to be analyzed before you start submitting to article sites. Take a few minutes to come up with the list of keywords you want to rank for. Try to get at least five or six sets of keywords into your article resource boxes. Don't put all of your keywords into one basket, so to speak.

Taking a little time to plan out your submission strategy could save you from wasting all of that time only to find that the search engines have ignored your links because they think they're "not natural".


http://www.articlebase.info/Article/Article-Submission-for-Search-Engine-Rankings/38090

Flash and search engine optimisation best practise

The world of search engines has evolved over the recent months and still we can’t be 100% sure about flash design. It is still hard to get flash web sites spidered and ranked how we would like using the traditional search engine optimisation techniques. The main problem is that the search engines can’t index the content in the flash code so they have no way of ranking the website accordingly. The reason for this is that they see the flash as a graphic and cannot always read what is inside it. Your online flash designer should consider the following:
Flash pages and movies

The benefits of flash are:

• Great special effects
  
• Easy for designers to create impressive animations using images and sound
  
• Interactive applications which are easy to use for visitors
  
• Flash works across platforms and browsers
  
• Flash has excellent accuracy for web designers

The main disadvantages of flash design are:

• Initialy there is a massive learning curve involved
  
• It can have long load time (which is not so much an issue as in the past due to popularity in broadband continuously improving)
  
• Some firewalls block flash
  
• Some stats show that more people would prefer not to use flash (although if everyone had used well designed and developed flash as well as running it on broadband I feel this stat would be different)
  

When it comes to search engine optimising a flash designed web site you are limited to the following:

• Meta tags – keyword, description, title and research
  
• Link building – link exchanges, directory submissions, article submissions and press releases
  

It is best to consider your keywords and see how competitive the market is. If it is not too competitive then you many rank a full flash web site on your chosen keywords but the more competitive the phase the nearer to impossible it gets, although the search engines are improving and may soon be able to read the flash content.

Consider your options?

Consider using flash design for different movies on multiple html pages to give you more pages for visitors to come into your site. This will make it easier for the search engines to pick up content and internal links. This will also give you more pages to concentrate different keywords on helping you to rank in more areas. The downside to doing this is that for every page you create the visitor has to re-download a sometimes large flash file.

The alternetive is to give your visitors the option of viewing a flash or html version so the search engines can read the html version and you can still impress your visitors with the flash version.

To help the search engines index you it is worth considering a half way house and imbedding flash into your html. This gives you a search engine optimised site plus enhanced menus and usability. Obviously you have to consider your internal linking strategy along side this option and try to make navigation which the search engines can read so they can search through your site. Use the flash in places to impress the user but do not hide away your content from the search engines. If you use flash as part of your navigation make sure you add additional text links to allow the search engines to crawl your web site.

Conclusion

If you want to pursue the full flash option then ensure you research your keywords and make your meta data clear and concise for the search engines. Ensure you have an html home page which is keyword optimised with plenty of readable content for the search engines. Offer a text version of your site that search engines can crawl and put all your efforts into your link building strategy.


http://www.articlebase.info/Article/Flash-and-search-engine-optimisation-best-practise/38179

Google Sitemaps - How important are they?

There is no denying that Google is the king of the hill when it comes to search engines. A fairly decent page ranking in Google is worth so much more than a better showing in other less prominent search engines. The reason for this is the overwhelming popularity of Google. A vast majority of internet users use Google’s services in looking for quality content on the internet. With the large number of people using it, a high page rank acts a great advertising opportunity for your website.

Because of the astounding amount of websites that submit their web pages to Google, the think tanks at Google decided to come out with Google Sitemaps. This service, which was started in June 2005, makes web page submissions to Google much easier but with the added bonus of getting detailed reports regarding the submitted page’s visibility in Google. With Google Sitemaps webmasters can continually inform Google about their web pages as well as any changes that they make to help improve their standing in Google. This program serves as complementary service to Google’s regular crawl, although it is considered that using Google Sitemaps can do a better job than the regular crawl.

Google decided to come out with the Google Sitemaps program as a way for the search engine to offer better search results to its users. With the current limitations of web crawling, usually not all pages are discovered. It is also difficult to determine if a page has changed. With so many uncontrollable variables, crawlers sometimes just make guesses. With Google Sitemaps it becomes easier to get a better picture of all the possible URLs in a website as well as the frequency of the changes that are made. Knowing these variables makes searching in Google a more robust and fruitful experience because users are assured that they always get a fresh index of web pages.

To take advantage of the Google Sitemap program, webmasters only need to download a free open-source tool called Sitemap Generator that helps in creating a Sitemap using the Sitemap protocol. Google hopes that webservers will eventually support the protocol so that webmasters will not take any other extra steps to in order to join the program.

Google Sitemaps also freely accepts codes taken from or generated by third party providers and even lists down all of the available third party software within the Google Sitemap pages.

XML-Sitemaps.com is one such provider that provides a free Google sitemaps generator for webmasters which will also produce a HTML site map.

Google’s software and service developers are continually tweaking and improving the Google Sitemap program to better address the needs of webmasters. Because of this, new features are continually added to the Sitemap program.

Some of the new features that have been incorporated now revolve around the reporting aspect of Google Sitemap.

When a site has been verified, Google can show webmasters the statistics and errors about the website as well as the web pages. Among the information that would be included are:

* The URLs that Google had trouble crawling including the reason why. Also included are the top queries that resulted in returns from their websites as well as those that brought traffic to their sites.

* The web page’s PageRank distribution

* The common text in external anchors that other websites used to link to their websites.

These new features, as well as others that are still being developed, brings tremendous advantages for webmasters because it makes the task of running a website so much easier. It also simplifies certain tasks that webmasters need to do to better manage their website’s page ranking. Ultimately, it gives their websites better exposure as well as the inclusion of more of their web pages in Google’s index.


http://www.content-corral.com/Article/Google-Sitemaps---How-important-are-they-/1383

Why is Search Engine Optimization Important

If your business is dependant on customers visiting your website, then you should take a second and ask yourself if you're happy with the amount of business you're receiving from your site. If the answer is yes and you're overloaded with work, then you probably already had your site optimized or chose other means of advertising. However, being that you're reading this article, you are probably in search of answers or suggestions as to creating more traffic to your website.

Now that we got that out of the way, let's address why optimization is important. For starters, who doesn't want more business, right? I mean business is money and almost everyone I know enjoys making more money.
So, with that being said, seo is an essential part of the online community when it comes to actually making money.

The reason I'm saying this is because the web is a vast place.
Whatever your company sells or offers as a service is more than likely offered by many others. Some of your competitors have probably already had their site optimized. My point being is that there are probably 100's if not 1000's of sites ahead of you in the search engines.

A professional SEO can rank your site and bring EFFECTIVE traffic your way. Let's use an example. Let's say you're selling candles and you want your site to come up in Google when some one types in "candles".

Now there is definitely some competition going on to rank for that key term, but not a whole lot. You're competing with roughly 7 million other sites using that term. Now you're probably saying to yourself 7 million! That's a lot! It may sound like a lot, but it's not that bad.

The term "candles" was searched a total of 2,580 times over the last 110 days. This is according to a very accurate tool we use to find key terms to use. Let's say you rank #1 for that term and you get everyone who searched for that term to click on your site. Now, assuming you get 10% of the total traffic to complete a sale, that is 258 sales.

Assuming a candle is 5 dollars and each person only purchased ONE candle. 5x258 = $1290 Not bad right? The hard part is done. That's getting people to your site. Now all you have to do is sit back, relax, and watch sales increase. The possibilities are endless!


http://www.content-corral.com/Article/Why-is-Search-Engine-Optimization-Important/1529