Saturday, January 5, 2008
Getting Links
1) USE SEARCH ENGINES:
Do a simple search in any of the major search engines for keywords and terms which relate to your website and its content. When you have located appropriate sites and reviewed them, send the webmaster an invitation message – better yet, call the webmaster. Webmasters get a lot of email, and requests like this are not uncommon, so a call gives you a better chance of success. If you can’t reach the webmaster, send the email. At least you have tried 2 contact methods.
If you have to send an email, your message should be personalized with the webmaster's name and the link information to their site which you have already posted on your site. Read that last part again, the link information to their site which you have already posted on your siteOf course you will also want to include your linking information for your site for them to post a reciprocal link to your site.
2) LOCATE COMPETITOR'S LINKS:
Discover who your competitors are on line and make some visits to their sites to determine who they are linking to. Review those links on their sites and make contact with them about reciprocal links to your site. They are more likely to reciprocate with a link to your site since you have related content to them and a site with which they are already linked. To locate your competition, just do a search on one of the major search engines using the keywords for your site.
3) BUILD RELATIONSHIPS:
Building relationships with other sites which are similar to yours in content can be an effective way to build some good, solid, effective links. Get acquainted with the webmaster by subscribing to their newsletter and contributing articles to it. Send them ideas, suggestions and comments about their site. Offer testimonials for the products or services they offer. Provide a link on your site to theirs and ask for a reciprocal link. These are just a few ways to become a trusted ally and almost always get a reciprocal link. While it is not the quickest or most efficient way to get links, it may be the most certain way to end with great, relevant links to other sites.
4) THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE & SERVICES:
There are some very helpful services and software available for locating linking partners. It is not the aim of this article to recommend any of these, but rather point out that it is an option for you to consider. Alexa offers a free enhanced toolbar which you can add to your browser. It's most important feature is the ability to estimate how much traffic any given site receives. This can be valuable when determining which sites to approach about reciprocal links. A search with words like "linking software," "link tools," or similar terms will produce a variety of sites for you to examine.
MEASURE YOUR LINK POPULARITY:
Link popularity is the total number and quality of links that point to your site. Search engines are looking just for links to your site that may be useless. Do you know what sites link to you now? You can find out at the site AddMe – there are also several interesting tools for beginners.Knowing who links to your site and increasing the amount of good, quality links is an important part of any website promotion. In Summary, there is a lot to learn about linking strategies. This article is not meant to be all-inclusive, but instead a starting point for you to build links that are effective and valuable
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
PickyDomians.Com
Great domains are darn hard to come by. Especially if you consider the fact, that there are over 10000 domainers whose only job is to find cool domain names and register them for further resale. And register they do – every single day. 70% of all registered domain names are registered to domainers.
PickyDomains.Com unites 17 domain namers from United States, Canada, Russia, UK, Australia and New Zealand, all with extensive experience of picking great domain names. Some pick domain names for over 6 years.
Here is “our method”. Each domain namer thinks about what the site does, rather than how to name it. This is how we come up with domains like DialerQueen.Com. This is a site that sells internet dialers.
We’ve also named Publicana.Com – a press-release writing and distribution service for the shareware industry. Our domain namers baptized SoftwareJudge.Com. No surprise here either. This is a software review site, where people “judge” how good or bad a particular software title is.
We don’t need a functioning site or product. We can pick a great domain name just based on an idea. This is how we came up with WorstPersonOfTheDay.Com and Badcyclopedia.Com. These sites aren’t even developed.
When we were looking for a domain name for this very service, all the good names really were already taken. We wanted to purchase NeedAName.Com on the aftermarket from GreatDomains.Com. Care to guess how much NeedAName.Com costs, even though the site isn’t even developed and has no Page Rank? $1888. Ouch!
FREE FOR BLOGGERS
PickyDomians.Com will work for free with blog owners (as long as your blog is real and has traffic). Simply mention PickyDomains in one of your blog posts and send us a URL of your post. You can take us up on this offer only once
Friday, November 23, 2007
Tips for Higher Page Rank
Page Titles
Use an original page title for each page. If you can, use your most important key word phrase as the page title.
Outgoing Links
Do not exceed 100 outgoing links, always link to good quality sites and never link to farm links. Extra tip: you must check your outgoing links on a regular basis to make sure they are still working and the quality of the sites you are linking to is still good.
Keyword Density
Keep your keyword density under 5% or it is keyword spamming. Keyword spamming can increase your listing as long as you play it carefully and pull the keywords off after you are spidered once.
Flash, Images and really cool new stuff
Skip them. If not, to be used in moderation, the make your site load slowly and there are still people out there with slow connections and no one likes watching the "loading" window. People also don't like complicated menu setups, keep it simple.
Alt Text
If you use pictures and put your keyword in the alt text, your alt text must describe the picture. You could write something like: "keyword header", "keyword image" or "keyword logo". Stuffing lots of keywords in your alt texts can work like the keyword density I mention above.
Think of your audience
Avoid slang or rude words in your copy unless that is what your audience uses. Consider that is will also get you banned, but it may get you incoming traffic.
Finally, remember that search engine algorithms change frequently. So keep up to date by browsing the SEO sites and forums.
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Richard_Mclaughlin
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Search Engine Optimization mini course
Getting to the Top Position in Google
9-lesson mini course
Introduction
Easy step-by-step mini course in optimizing your web copy for
top position on search engine result pages. Learn what gets customers to your web site fast. This simple to follow mini course explains every
step very clearly and includes:
Guidelines
Create high quality, optimized websites, fast.
Google likes well-structured pages with lots of interesting and regularly updated content. Pure SEO experts create and maintain fully optimized
pages quickly, with content supplied by the client. It is simple enough for a beginner to create a perfect web site but without any training the
search engines will not find a site.
Link Popularity Tools
Build link popularity by finding quality link partners from
authority sites to help your ranking Link Popularity.
How to submit your site to all the major search engines with a
click of a button and keep track of manual submissions Search Engine Submission
I must make it absolutely clear what this training is
not:
You will NOT need to:
- spend more time than you have
- invest in any business premises
- have lot of money to get started
- struggle learning how to advertise
You will not need to buy anything after you join although I
will recommend software and books that you can decide about the value as you see it.
It does not matter where you are in the world; I am an
American living in France and you can be who you are, where you are. You do not have to be an expert Internet programmer, but you do need to
own a PC and have access to the web and an understanding of what I consider basic internet use.
What You Will Learn:
- Introduction & overview to search engine optimization (SEO)
- How to create effective page Title Tags
- How to create effective Alt Image attributes
- How to create an effective and optimized META Description Tag
- How to create an effective and optimized META Keywords Tag
- How to create effective and optimized text navigation menus
- How to use link titles and anchor text effectively
- How to research and select appropriate keywords to target
- How to successfully integrate search keywords within your web site copy
- How to optimize each page of your web site step-by-step
- Overview of important search engines and directories
- How to submit your site to important search directories
- How to submit your site to crawler-based search engines
- An overview of what search engines consider to be "spam"
- Web design elements to avoid to ensure your site is search engine compatible
- How to monitor your search rankings and site traffic
- How to increase your site's link popularity
- Overview of Google PageRank
- Introduction to pay for performance search engine options
- How to measure the Return on Investment of your SEO campaign
- How to set up and start your own SEO business
Benefits of this mini-course
You will develop a long-term skill that most people
don’t know
Possibly an income for working from home
Quit your job?
Detailed instructions
Improve your web site page ranking
Targeted website traffic
Software list that you may choose to buy
Advanced techniques * find related keywords that real
people use
dig deep to see how your keywords are used in longer
search terms
estimate how much competition your keywords will
face
export the results of your research by email
Applications to use
Search Engine Submission Tools
Ranking Reporting Tools
Page layout tools (try them all until you find one you
like)
Templates
Simple templates with the information you need
A list of some of the most useful power words and words to not
use
Friday, November 9, 2007
Build A Low Charge (no charge?) Membership Site
1. Choose the topic for your free membership site.
This topic should be one that will attract the specific group of people in which you want to market your products or services to. In most cases you would be advised to narrow your topic but in the case of building a free membership site, it is better to make your topic a bit broader.
2. Register a domain
The next step is to register a domain name that reflects the subject of your free membership site. It is recommended to keep your domain name under 20 characters if possible. Here are two of the top registers to register your domain name:
Cheap Names http://www.namecheap.com
GoDaddy http://www.godaddy.com
Find a domain name that is available and secure it for two years.
3. Get a web host
When registering your domain name, you will also need a web hosting service. You will need a web host that will allow you to have as many domains as you want on the same server. Here are a few to consider:
HostGator http://www.hostgator.com
NetHost http://www.nethost.ws
4. Membership scripting
You will need a membership script for your free membership site. You can find one at the following sites:
LaunchFormulaMarketing http://www.launchformulamarketing.com
ButterflyMarketing http://www.butterflymarketing.com
Amember http://www.amember.com
5. Referral buttons
You may also want to add a "Refer A Friend" button. Here are two sites where you can get this program:
http://www.sendtofriends.com
http://www.kcscripts.com/scripts/refer_a_friend/features.htm
6. Need Tech support?
You might also want to include a helpdesk option on your free membership site. This is optional but the site to get this program is http://www.perldesk.com (and I never tried it - have an issue with something I wrote on my site, call me!)
7. Content is KING (and queen)
You will need content for your free membership site.
The most important part of any website including free membership sites is content. There are many ways to obtain content for your membership site. You can use reprint articles from article directories or join a PLR website and get articles that you can edit and call your own. This will help you to avoid the duplicate content problem.
http://www.suite101.com
http://ideamarketers.com
http://www.isnare.com/
Other options for your membership content is writing it yourself.
Here are a few sites that you can hire a ghost writer:
Elance http://www.elance.com
Guru.com http://www.guru.com
The above information and tools needed to build a free membership site (or a paid membership site for that matter). Now you can either build your site or have someone else build it for you.
As with any other type of website the most important part to making it successful is to market it.
Here are a few ways to get you started:
Writing articles with a link back to your membership site in the resource box. Then submitting your articles to articles directories such as:
http://www.ezinearticles.com (where you can find my name)
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.articlecity.com (spammy pop-ups)
Post to comments to related blogs and forums, again including your resource box or signature file with a link back to your membership site.
Find partners to exchange links with. An excellent source to find link partners is http://www.linkmetro.com
These are just a few ways to promote you membership site for free. There are many other free and paid ways to generate traffic to your membership site.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Search Engine Myths
Many big websites, have penalized for the use of "doorway" pages. These doorway pages are a known method to show search engine spiders different pages then it was showing real human visitors to its website. This can be done for many reasons, sometimes with the ethical frame of mind, but big sites, and your site too, could be penalized from such actions. There are certainly different ways to use doorway pages, and done properly they can actually benefit your site, but they are not advised for any blackhat seo style campaigns to rank your website highly.
One famous site was the site of famous German car maker's BMW. Their website used doorway pages, in order to show search engine spiders different pages to what visitors of the website actually seen. The site was publicly known to have been penalized by Google Search Engine.
The reason big sites were mentioned, does not mean that this penalization only happens to big sites, definitely not. However, if your website is out their to create a good image for yourself, your brand, then make sure you, or your webmaster, does not contribute to anything such as blackhat seo operations, that could potentially de-rank you from the search engines, especially Google, you may face a smaller penalty, but I'm sure you will agree, its certainly not worth the risk!
There are definitely some areas where seemingly blackhat seo techniques are actually surprisingly ethical. If your company image and website is not worth much to you, then try it out for yourself, but I have a feeling that if you are reading this right now, you are here to make sure you don't make some crucial mistakes with your search engine optimization campaign.
Having invisible text on your page is definitely something you want to avoid. Invisible text is text that is simply on your page, but not viewable to the human eye, this may be text that is the same color as the background it is on, or other forms of hiding text from a human user, in order to gain more keyword density, and keyword frequency, in an attempt to trick search engine spiders.
Google penalize highly if this is found out, and there are ways to detect such things, so this is highly recommend that you DO NOT do it! Certainly, a blackhat seo technique you don't want to be a part of.
Link farms and linking schemes primary idea are working on a way to get as many links to your site as possible, in the easiest way. Link farms are known as sites where you can sign up, and get your page on a link with tons of other unorganized links, or unethical link building scenarios.
Link schemes are very similar in that some cases, you must install certain software on a web page, so that you can link to all other sites in the scheme automatically, and that you are added to their software and they link to you automatically. Taking part in such thing are findable and known to search engines, so beware the penalty and cost if participating in such activities.
Blackhat SEO, is not worth the risk in any form or situation. The techniques are known and have been stated here, that any form of blackhat campaign, or work on your site, or by whoever works on your site, are going to do you damage, at one point or another.
Don't waste your time on such activities, honest, ethical and natural search engine optimization and link building, will give your site the chance to stay in the search engine results, and grow effectively and naturally over time.
Tips to Better Search Engine Performance
Take a sneak peek at what your competition is doing. Use your browsers "View Source" to look at the HTML code behind the page. You can do keyword searches with several search engines and then look at the source code of those web sites that are listing high on the search result page. You can spot their keywords and description and title information right at the top of the source code.
Make use of tags. Meta tags are HTML words and descriptions that the user does not see, but which many of the search engines use to catalog your web site.
Try not to repeat phrases or word combinations one right after another.
Try to limit the number of keywords and the length of your description. If you use more than say 30 keywords, put the most important or descriptive ones towards the front of your list. If the search engines "cuts off" your list after a limited number of characters, there's a good chance the most important words will be in the search engine database.
Be sure to use a descriptive tag. Instead of Your Company Name try something like:
Your Company Name – detail, like this:
- Eastern Ohio's Best Real Estate Agents Home Page
- Eastern Ohio's Best Real Estate Agents Best Deals
OR - Quick sales specials – Eastern Ohio's Best Real Estate Agents
- Sales Agents Page – Eastern Ohio's Best Real Estate Agents
Often search engines will look for matches to keyword searches in the title of the home page.
Use tags for photos and graphics. ALT tags are used by browsers to display the name of a graphic as it loads or is used by people using your web site with Auto Load Images option turned off. Remember the Google Images page you search.
Don’t use frames, search engines don’t like them and people with slow connections are annoyed by them. Search engines treat frames as if they are links within your main page. What happens is while your main page will be indexed, the search engine will return later to index your secondary pages as if they were external links. Be sure the main page (index.htm or default.htm) page has some descriptive text between the and tag. This descriptive text should contain the most important keywords.
Check your web site's ranking periodically by several keywords. Also, check to make sure your web site has not be dropped or disqualified. Just go to the different search engines and search by your domain name ( type - +domain.com). If you have been dropped, go back and examine your tags and other information to make sure you are not causing the search engine to not list your site.
Google and search engines that use Google count for over 50% of all searches and they make an amazing effort to get everything listed. Yahoo! is more difficult to get listed in, it is worth the effort. The first thing is finding the appropriate category to be listed under. This may take some time to determine the best categories for your web site. Once you are in a specific category, at the bottom of the page is a "Suggest a Site" link you can use to submit your URL. Yahoo will allow you to be listed in more than one category, but will only let you suggest one extra category at a time.
DO NOT "hide" mass amounts of hidden keywords at the bottom of your document. Search engines will often calculate keywords by how many times they appear on a page and if you have too many repeating words, search engines will penalize you.
Tips to Better Search Engine Performance
Tips to Better Search Engine Performance
Take a sneak peek at what your competition is doing. Use your browsers "View Source" to look at the HTML code behind the page. You can do keyword searches with several search engines and then look at the source code of those web sites that are listing high on the search result page. You can spot their keywords and description and title information right at the top of the source code.
Make use of tags. Meta tags are HTML words and descriptions that the user does not see, but which many of the search engines use to catalog your web site. Example: and
Try not to repeat phrases or word combinations one right after another.
Try to limit the number of keywords and the length of your description. If you use more than say 30 keywords, put the most important or descriptive ones towards the front of your list. If the search engines "cuts off" your list after a limited number of characters, there's a good chance the most important words will be in the search engine database.
Be sure to use a descriptive tag. Instead of Your Company Name try something like: Your Company Name – detail, like this:
- Eastern Ohio's Best Real Estate Agents Home Page
- Eastern Ohio's Best Real Estate Agents Best Deals
OR
- Quick sales specials – Eastern Ohio's Best Real Estate Agents
- Sales Agents Page – Eastern Ohio's Best Real Estate Agents
Often search engines will look for matches to keyword searches in the title of the home page.
Use tags for photos and graphics. ALT tags are used by browsers to display the name of a graphic as it loads or is used by people using your web site with Auto Load Images option turned off. Remember the Google Images page you search.
Don’t use frames, search engines don’t like them and people with slow connections are annoyed by them. Search engines treat frames as if they are links within your main page. What happens is while your main page will be indexed, the search engine will return later to index your secondary pages as if they were external links. Be sure the main page (index.htm or default.htm) page has some descriptive text between the and tag. This descriptive text should contain the most important keywords.
Check your web site's ranking periodically by several keywords. Also, check to make sure your web site has not be dropped or disqualified. Just go to the different search engines and search by your domain name ( type - +domain.com). If you have been dropped, go back and examine your tags and other information to make sure you are not causing the search engine to not list your site.
Google and search engines that use Google count for over 50% of all searches and they make an amazing effort to get everything listed. Yahoo! is more difficult to get listed in, it is worth the effort. The first thing is finding the appropriate category to be listed under. This may take some time to determine the best categories for your web site. Once you are in a specific category, at the bottom of the page is a "Suggest a Site" link you can use to submit your URL. Yahoo will allow you to be listed in more than one category, but will only let you suggest one extra category at a time.
DO NOT "hide" mass amounts of hidden keywords at the bottom of your document. Search engines will often calculate keywords by how many times they appear on a page and if you have too many repeating words, search engines will penalize you.
Avoid dropping your page rank
Here are some things to avoid or your page rank could drop – or worse – your site get de-indexed.
Plagiarism
Never steal content.
That should be stand alone but if you do take content from someone else you have moral issues, legal worries and you may vanish from the search engines.
Keyword Density
Keep your keyword density under 5% or it could be considered keyword spamming.
Title Tag
Your title tag should contain less than 60 characters and should not contain any special characters. Your title should contain keywords.
Outgoing Links
Keep outgoing links down to about 20 – 50 at the grand max. Only Link to good quality sites that have something to do with your topic and avoid “farm links”.
URL Length
Keep your URLs as short as possible and avoid hyphens.
Description & Keyword Tags
Keep your description meta tag short – under 200 characters. No promise that the Google spider reads that far and if it does, long tags are spammy
Put fewer than 10 keywords in your keyword meta tag and make sure every keyword appears in your web page copy. Also, avoid putting the same keyword twice in your keyword meta tag (accounting news, accounting sales).
Cloaking
Never, ever, use cloaking. Don’t know what it is? Don’t even look it up.
Search engine algorithms change all the time so make an effort to keep your site up to date and the most important thing is to keep creating good, fresh content for your site.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
How to Boost Your Traffic
Content can do more to build your business and profits than just about any other resource or service available.
Following is a list of 5 key ways that content can help build your traffic, subscribers, and customers. Adjust to your taste as required.
1. Boost your search engine ranking and daily visitor count by posting keyword rich articles and content on your web-site. Find a way to write your keywords in the first paragraph.
ex. There are great event speakers, content writers, SEO analystist and shoe salesmen in the Pittsburgh area.
Keywords and key phrases were - event speakers... content writers... SEO analystist... shoe salesmen... and Pittsburgh
2. Offer content in the form of special reports, manuals or guides as bonuses for subscribing to your publication. People love freebies and your 6 free articles can become a newsletter. 4 newsletters can become a manual. 6 (8? 10? 12?...) manuals are a book.
3. Create an automated cashflow by using content to formulate multi-part email training courses with related web-site or affiliate links carefully place in each course. Use an autoresponder service to automate the delivery of your training course (such as a 5 part training course delivered over a 5 day period).
Training courses (mini-courses, e-studies...) can also serve as excellent bonus offers for your prospective newsletter subscribers.
4. One of the most important keys to a successful online business is building a trusting relationship with your subscribers (your online frineds). By sending informative articles (content) to your list on a regular basis you will establish yourself as an expert on your topic of business, as well as gain the trust of your subscribers over time. As a result, your subscribers will be more likely to take advantage of your paid product and service offers.
5. Another excellent way to generate no cost traffic is by submitting ready-made articles to other web-sites and newsletter publishers with your bio attached.
When submitting or offering your article(s) for reprint purposes, just make sure to specify that each article is to be reprinted "as is" with your resource box attached.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Most Effective SEO Ethical Techniques
- You should ensure that:
- your pages are indexedyour pages are structured with headers and subheaders
- use descriptive page titles and other page text
- build many keyword rich inbound links
- surround your keywords with the most important text (so when your keyword is displayed on Google there is smart text on the screen)
- Why Search Engines like the White Hat version of SEO
- Google is a company. Companies exist to make money – not to provide service.
- They provide a service to make money. Advertising (pay per click more than anything else) generates billions of buck for the search engines every year (Third-quarter revenue for the search giant reached $4.23 billion, up 57 per cent over the same quarter last year).
If you are manipulating their search results that means:
- the result are not the quality that the company could deliver
- they are not making the money that they should
Is Search Engine Optimization Ethical?
Yes. If you follow the rules that they set up there is nothing wrong with search engine optimization. You just get your site listed higher than a person who does not follow the possibilities. Think about it like driving a car, you are allowed to dive 130 on the French highways, some people only drive 110, so if you are like me and drive 110 you are going to get there, just slower. If you don’t use all the ethical SEO options you are going to get listed, just lower on the list (and if you are not on the first page you may as well not be there at all).
Why do Search Engine Optimization Experts Use the Ethical Marketing Angle? The SEO industry is often lacking in credibility. Its easier to use that as a branding angle than it is to be original and come up with your own.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
why a white hat?
A Search Engine (in case you didn't know) is just a tool used to find information. Google is the example that people know best and you have probably heard the phrase "I googled it" which means someone searched on google.com to find information. Oddly, people assume that if it is on Google, it has to be true.
What a search engine does (or the bit of software they have running does) is to go out and look at page layout and 'special' source words and links to and from a site to determine the importance page. Since people like me know what a search engine is looking for we can modify a site to have words in the proper area & sequence and perfom magic with pictures, links, advertisements and blogs. Right now the most expensive way to get people to a site is to get it ranked high in google and people will buy the right to link words of phrases to their site. If I had the money and time I could make any search for a word or phrase point to my site even if I had nothign to do with that subject. Same in reverse, if you have enough money you can find a way to point people to your site.
People, like me, work on their own site or clients sites to boost their rankings in search engines. We do this by using the right content and having the site of most interest for the subject in question. This is White Hat SEO.
Black Hat SEO is using tricks to get a top rating. I have 2 clients that wanted a #1 Google rating and I got it for them, although they did not last because they did not have the right content to keep themselves there.
To have a good page rank you have to start using specific keyword rich page titles, headers, subheaders, and CONTENT. Content is King! Your content has to be logical and use your keywords in real English (or French or whatever you happen to write in).
I won't tell you the site by name, but one real estate agent had the keyword phrase "Eastern Washington's Best Real Estate Agents" and then did not use those words on their home page. Then every single sub page was entitled Untitled when they could have used:
- Eastern Washington's Best Real Estate Agents Home Page
- Eastern Washington's Best Real Estate Agents Best Deals
- Eastern Washington's Best Real Estate Agents Quick sales specials
- Eastern Washington's Best Real Estate Agents contact page
- Eastern Washington's Best Real Estate Agents community support program
One way to get a higher site rank is to have a real link building campaign. Real links are when someoen likes your site enough to link to it, and you don't want them to list http://www.blah.con/ but Eastern Washington's Best Real Estate Agents (yes, these last 2 links don't work by choice) where your www is hidden from the internauts view and they only see your keyword or phrase. Most links using a variation of the keyword phrases are hard to get because people pointing to you may not know (or care about) your keywords.
White Hat SEO
Learn Ethical SEO Copywriting from an old pro. When I say SEO Copywriting it means getting your site listed high by Google, Yahoo! and others. White Hat SEO is refernce to following the rules so you don't get banned.