Google, Yahoo, Msn Big Differences In The Three Super Engines

The 3 super engines Google, Yahoo and MSN account for over 80% of all online searches done in the US. The search results vary tremendously between these three engines. This is because of their unique ways of selecting search results and the differences in how they treat on-page and off-page elements. On-page elements include everything that occurs within the actual web page.
Google focuses on off-page elements and Yahoo’s is with on-page elements. MSN started with a very strong bias toward on-page, but has been slowly moving toward off-page elements. Today, Yahoo and MSN tend to give more weight to the on-page elements such as keyword density, Title Tags, Meta Tags and HTML code errors. Google on the other hand gives stronger importance to off-page elements such as inbound links and the quality and theme of these inbound links.

On Page Elements

Keyword Density

Keyword Density is the number of times a keyword or a keyword phrase is used in proportion to other words on a Web page. The more times the keyword appears in relation to the total number of on page words, the greater the overall keyword density. MSN and Yahoo place great weight on this. It is possible that a high keyword density may help you on Yahoo and leave your website penalized on Google. A density of 2- 4% seems to work across all 3 engines.

Title and Meta Tags

The title tag is the most important Meta Tag and is used for conveying the theme and topic of your web page and is important to all three engines. Place your primary keyword phrase at the beginning of the title tag to show its importance. The Title Tag should be 80- 90 characters in length.
Google tends to ignore all the other Meta Tags except for possibly the description tag. MSN and Yahoo place importance on Description and Keywords Tags. The Keywords Tag should be kept to less than 1 5 phrases. Only include phrases that are part of the text; this is to avoid spamming penalties by Yahoo and MSN.

Text Tags

Using the text tags such as heading, font, numbering and bullets will signal importance to the search engines. Therefore you should put bold or italics tags around your core keywords while maintaining a natural flow of content. This improves the chances of a search engine spider ranking that page higher for those keywords. Other emphasis methods such as bullets or numbering (ordered list) signal the search engines that these phrases have importance in your site.

W 3C Valid code
Search engine crawlers like valid code. They are able to scan error free code much faster and easier without stumbling over incorrect tags and other errors. MSN and Yahoo are known to give weight to error free code. Valid code is also critical for accessibility for the disabled who use screen readers (e.g. JAWS) and surfers who use PDA’s and cell phones.

Internal linking
Search engines find web pages by crawling links. Internal linking is another way of telling the search engines what your web pages are about. Good internal linking will make sure that every page on your site passes PageRank (PR) back to your home page. This is done thru menu navigation, footer links and a good site map. Internal linking is particularly important to MSN and Yahoo. Use keywords in the navigation links and in the text links.
Other On-Page Elements
Including the keywords in the domain name helps with rankings. The domain extensions .edu and .org do better while .com gets extra scrutiny because of the number of spamming sites. Google likes large websites with more content. Negative on-page elements will either cause a site to be devalued or not listed, these include invisible text, and graphical sites with very little or no text. Sites built in frames are at a distinct disadvantage.

Off-Page Elements

Off page elements are obtained from sources outside of the website. Probably the most important are the quantity of inbound links using anchor text containing your target keywords. Anchor text is the hyperlinked text in a link. Off page SEO is the most time consuming, but if done correctly, gives the best results.
Google places their greatest weight on link popularity because on-page elements can be manipulated quickly and easily. Both Yahoo and MSN also place importance on the anchor text and the quantity of incoming links, but not nearly to the level of Google.
Link building must be done carefully to avoid link spamming. Things you can do include varying the link anchor text to make them look more natural. Links need to be added at an even rate and they must be carefully selected for topic and theme and come from quality websites. Google places emphasis on the age of links and the age of the domain.
How fast can you expect to get results? With MSN new content and inbound links are found quickly. It is possible to get good rankings on MSN the quickest of the super engines. Yahoo is slower to see results. It will usually take 3- 4 months to see significant results. Google is the most important yet the slowest to see results from because of their aging delay.

What’s Next?

A good way to see what is coming is to look at the patents being granted to the search engines. Looking at Google’s patent granted in March 200 5 gives clues to what we should expect. Some are already in effect today.

• How long a domain is registered for.
• Age of website, web pages, and documents.
• Rate of link acquisition. Slow and stable is better.
• Age and quality of websites where links appear.
• Links from stale pages are devalued.
• Site click thru rates monitored for rate of change.
• Frequency and magnitude of site updates (stale vs. fresh).
• Variation in anchor text for links is best.
• Bookmarks and favorites monitored.

Conclusion
All three of the major search engines use a mix of on-page and off-page elements in their algorithms for determining rankings. Google, the largest of the engines, emphasizes off page elements. Yahoo, the second largest engine, emphasizes on page factors more strongly. MSN, the newest of the three, is still evolving and is moving from on-page factors toward off page factors.
It is still possible to obtain top rankings for all three of these super engines by combining on-page and off-page SEO strategies.

The What, Why and How of Business Blogs

Blog is short for Web Log or Weblog and the Blogosphere is the online blog world, some parts of which are hyperlinked extensively to each other.
This is the Wikipedia definition: Blog is short for weblog. A weblog is a journal (or newsletter) that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site.
I recommend that you read lots of people's blogs to learn what blogs are. Go to your favorite search engine and type in the word 'blog' and the subject you're interested in. For example, 'web design blog', or 'blog music', or 'sports blog'. You'll find lots of blogs that way.
Blogs have become a way in which regular, non-technical people can post information to the Web as easily as they can access it.

Why Are Blogs So Important?

Well, they're not that important, yet. But they could be soon, and most likely will be. In fact, some would argue that they are already vital in today's Web business world. I am not ready to agree to that yet, but it is becoming more obvious to me over time that blogs can no longer be ignored in business.
Online businesses can benefit from blogging by taking advantage of a vehicle for easily posting new, original, and business-related content on a regular basis.

Here Are Some More Business Benefits Of Blogging:

• Blogs help to position you and/or your company as experts and leaders in your industry.
• They're interactive in nature. At the end of each blog entry is usually a link that allows anyone to add their own comments to your blog entries. This allows your customers and potential customers to make comments about your products or services or ask you questions to help them in their buying process.
• Blogs are marketed easily and quickly by their RSS feeds.
• Blogs allow you to stress your choice of products, services, relevant news stories, quotes, pictures and more with your audience, customers and potential customers.
• People are generous with adding links to your blog if the content is good, especially within their own blogs. More links means more traffic and better search engine rankings.

Here Are Some Ways In Which You Can Make Revenue From Your Blog:

1. Selling advertisements. Whether you use banners or text links, if your site draws a regular audience interested in your blog topics or theme, try to offer ad space to organizations that are looking to market to your audience. In fact, if your blogs becomes really popular then advertisers will call you.
2. Offering Google's AdSense. Google's website explains, "Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website's content pages and earn money." Learn more about AdSense.
3. Affiliate Programs. Affiliate programs allow Web sites that provide links to your site to receive payments or reciprocal advertising in exchange for promoting your Web site. In the case of blogging, this is reversed, where you post links within your blog, and collect money from the owners of those links when they result in a click-through and sale.

Here Are Some Websites Where You Can Get Your Blog Listed:

1. BlogWise
2. Blog Search Engine
3. Blog Hub
4. Blog Daisy
5. Get Blogs
6. LS Blogs

How To Blog For Business:

First you need to get blogging software. You can choose to create a blog that is housed on another site such as http://www.blogger.com (which is a blog service) or you can host it on your own Web server. I recommend the latter since the links that are developed by others pointing to your blog won't be counted in the search engines. This is because the links are attributed to domains, so a link to http://MyNewBlog.blogger.com gives a link credit to blogger.com and not your domain.

If your blog is a business blog, you really ought to host your own blog as opposed to using a blog service. You'll need the extra functionality and control.
If you plan on hosting your own blog and if you plan to use a UNIX Web server platform, then you need to go with blogging software such as Movable Type, for example. If you have a Microsoft Web server platform for your site, then you'll need software such as BetaParticle blog. Find a great list of various blog software at: http://www.lights.com/weblogs/tools.html
Next you'll need a database to hook your blog up to. The database is what stores the blog entries, among other things. If you don't know if you have a database on or connected to your website server, or if you don't know how to hook up your blog to your database, contact your host company or Web server administrator for help.

Once you have the blog set up on your domain (for example http://www.MyWebsite.com/blog) and you've hooked it up to a live database, you can start blogging. Generally, each entry is also a day. So you can write a new entry every day, or whenever you want, and that entry will show up on the blog at the top, moving older entries below.
You ought to think of a theme for your blog. In other words, your blog could be about your personal experiences in the industry you're in. It could be about your company's product reviews, or new services. It could be about your thoughts and opinions about issues related to your industry. It could be a place where you regularly find and list new resources to help others in your industry. The list is endless. But be sure to stick to a theme and be original. You want to offer something of value to your website visitors.
Sticking to a theme helps you position yourself for future advertisers and also makes for better reading for your visitors. Furthermore, you want to give a good impression with your blog with each and every entry if you want it to augment your online business. Finally, sticking to a theme helps with the search engines since it's believed that engines determine website themes and use this information for ranking.
Of course your blog could be about personal things too. Many blogs are just that, an online journal. But since we're interested in Web business here, I am discussing business blogs only.
What's great is that blogs get indexed easily and quickly by search engines. Each entry is another "page" that can be potentially listed in Google for example, which will drive more traffic to your site.
Another neat thing about running a blog once it's set up is that you do not need to be technical at all to make regular entries. This is helpful if you want to delegate the writing to someone else, since technical skills won't be a prerequisite. This allows you to have the most qualified person regarding the blog's theme and, hopefully the best writer, actually making the entries.
Be creative. Add images to your blog entries to spice things up a bit. Although blogging can be lonely, keep at it. Sometimes it seems like you're just writing new entries each day for yourself only. It may be a while before someone chooses to add a comment to one of your entries. You may not hear from anyone for a long time. But that doesn't mean people aren't reading it. In fact, check your website statistics to see just how many people are visiting your new blog. As you add more entries, get your blog listed on other sites and market your blog. It will build, and eventually you'll have a nice following of engaged readers.
Most importantly, be sure to pepper your entries with calls to action. For example, if your business blog is attached to your travel website and the blog's theme is traveling and finding great travel deals all over the world, make sure you add a link to an entry that points people to a travel special you're running on your website. What would be even better is a blog entry about the fantastic vacation you took to Hawaii and included at the end was a link to cheap Hawaii vacation deals on your website.

About The Author

Promoting Webs- Developer, Designer and SEO Professional with Promote Your Websites offering website design, search engine optimization and PPC Management.

Optimizing Your Web Design

It only takes an average of four seconds for each visitor to decide whether to stay on your site or not. This means that it is essential to optimize your website’s main page not only for the search engines but also your average visitor who may buy your products, engage your services or even recommend your website to people they know.

A visitor-friendly design

A web design that carefully considers the browsing needs of your site visitors, compliments the content, and overall theme of your site can give your site visitors a good impression. Not only will they have an excellent motivation to browse through your stuff, they just might also decide to bookmark your site as a resource to come back time and again.

While content plays a vital role to your site’s ranking and popularity, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t provide them with a candy-for-the-eyes user friendly images and design. Would you opt to shop from a site with simple yet elegant layout, appropriate product images and relevant descriptive content that’s easy to navigate and browse through. Some sites may offer just about the same products and services but the way their website is presented and designed may spell the difference between high sales traffic and a trickle.

Basic things to consider

Keep in mind that there are two things you have to take into account in your basic website design layout:

First, you must keep in mind what your visitors would like to see in your site. If you plan to be in authority of a certain topic, you can’t just put on poorly designed graphics. Everybody loves colors, and a little Flash animation here and there wouldn’t hurt but remember that search engine bots won’t be able to see or index them. Your website, especially your main page, should convey something to your customers. It should communicate trust and confidence in what you have to offer them. Bottom line for your consumers, make your site easy and simple with design and with complimented content.

Second, you have to design your site search engine friendly. This could be a tad more difficult but search engine friendly sites have greater chances of topping the SERP’s rather than flashy, graphic intensive sites. Most search engines have what they call “spiders” that crawl into your website particularly your HTML codes and scripts. The easier the spiders can get to your text of your web page, the better. This gives the spiders a better view of your site’s content. On the other hand, spiders frown on a much complicated programming like that of java scripts, cloaking tactics, invisible texts, and too much flash pages.

Basic Design Tips

Here are some tidbits you might want to take note of when optimizing your web design for search engines:

Go easy with images. While you have shouldn’t have to totally omit the use of graphics and images, remember that SE spiders can only read HTML text. You just have to make sure that your images don’t overshadow your text content. Use appropriate ALT text and keyword related filenames for your images.

• Avoid creating webpage frames. Spiders seem to have difficulty crawling into web pages with frames. Same advice is given to tables and layers.

• Though tempting, minimize using Flash images and texts. The thing is search engine spiders will be having a hard time what you ought to convey through your Flash. If you can utilize your Flash designs to be accompanied by HTML, the better.

• Links, nowadays, are often blended with JavaScript which presents similar problems with spiders. It is important to note that links play a major role in getting your site ranked in search engines. If their spiders can’t get through your links and index them, you’ve wasted time and effort harvesting your vast links.

• Make use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to anticipate future changes without affecting your entire site design. CSS can smooth the flow of your website as you add content, images, or whatever future updates you may have.

Bottom line is: create a simple and interesting design for your savvy visitors and, by the by, gain better positioning in major search engines.

Choosing the right keywords

Nowadays, optimizing you website has become a necessity to compete and strive in the World Wide Web. Search engine optimizing your site whether doing your SEO work in-house or delegating it to seo professionals should be thought about comprehensively just like any other business venture.
It’s important to get the basics right by having a clear idea about your website’s target audience profile and website content. You need to focus on what the major search engines like Google or Yahoo consider search engine friendly and be familiar with the guidelines they provide. One aspect search engine optimization experts do point out that’s important in the start up process is keyword selection.
Since the aim of optimizing a site is to put it on top or as close to the top of the SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages, you need to determine the right keywords to use and concentrate on.

So how do you get the right keywords?

You need to consider two things: the first one is to get a list of ‘in demand’ or popular keywords relevant to your business, service or website. You can start by choosing from at least five to ten keywords which you think may lead visitors to check out your site and there are a number of free internet tools that will help you determine which key terms are being used the most for searches or find out which isn’t being used at all.
One of the most popular tools available is Overture’s keyword selector. By entering at most a three word phrase in its suggestion tool field, you can compile keywords ranked according to popularity with all other terms closely related to keywords being used in the search. Overture constantly updates its searches every month so while your ‘keyword’ may not be as popular next month as it is now, it will give you a general idea of what words or phrases most internet users make use of. Aside from this useful tool, you can also check keyword popularity through Wordtracker, Google AdWord’s Keyword Suggestions, and Guidebeam.

Look out for the competition!

You don’t want to be a little fish in a large ocean full of large predatory sharks. A keyword’s strength is its ability to surpass its competition. So you might want to start from the less competitive ones. How do we determine competition? Since we are now in the Google era, it would be efficient to use the Google search. Enter your search keywords at Google and it will bring you to its SERP’s. On the top right navigational bar, you will find the total number of pages that target your keyword searched. With this figure you can an idea of how many are competing for your searched keyword. It is easier and faster to rank well with a keyword where there are only 100,000 sites to compete against rather than with a keyword that has over half a billion contenders.

Hidden Ways to Get Into Google

Everyone is concerned about their Google rankings. An algorithm change or an update can often leave many a webmaster in tears.
However, I often like to sneak in through the back door. So today I'm going to reveal to you some of my Google secrets, because Google's Lab is much larger than you think.

Google Video
Google Video allows you to have your very own tv show on one of the largest search engines on the internet. This is a form of multimedia that is certainly gaining popularity online. Right now Google Video is in a growth stage and it's one of the perfect times to get in and be one of the first to brand yourself in a particular market. Videos are also a great selling point if you have a product that can be demonstrated. With Google Video, you can have your very own infomercial indexed in the search engines. Of course, you'll want to provide some great content too. To check out this new technology, go to http://video.google.com.

Google Base
Google Base was launched in November of 2005. Google base describes itself as "a place where you can add all types of information that we'll host and make searchable online". Now, if that isn't a webmaster's dream, I don't know what is.
Your item could be almost anything: your products, research papers, articles, press releases, etc. You can describe all of your items so that you can zone in on your targeted visitor.
Anyone with a Google account can use this service, so why not give it a try. Google base is the perfect way to get an additional audience for your content. To find out more about Google Base, visit http://base.google.com/base/about.html.

Google Local/Maps
Getting your products into Google Local can put your items in front of some serious buyers. People often go to Google Local looking for a specific item or service in a particular geographic area. So, if you own a small business, Google Local is the perfect opportunity to increase your reach without spending lots of advertising dollars.

Froogle
Froogle offers searchers a directory of products by category, a searchable index of online products, and the ability to narrow searches by price range. By putting your products into Froogle, you can get some very targeted, qualified traffic to your website.
So, how do you get into Froogle? Well, Google has already been actively searching the web for online product catalogs. For many online merchants, there's a good chance that Froogle already has some of your products listed.
However, one of the best ways to get into the Froogle directory is by providing them with a data feed that lists your products, descriptions, pricing, and URLs. This allows you to fully optimize your listings.
To get the most out of Froogle, you'll want to make your product description clear and enticing. Create titles that not only have targeted keywords, but also encourage the visitor to click-through to your site.
Once they are at your site, it is important to upsell and cross-sell. Otherwise you will be throwing potential profits down the drain. Make the most out of every Froogle referral by capturing their name and email address.
Now, onto a section of Google that you certainly won't want to miss out on.

Google Blog Search
This is one of the best ways to get some additional listings in Google. If you have a website, why not start a blog. By starting a blog, you can tap into a variety of blog search engines, including Google Blog search. This area of marketing is largely untapped, so it is the perfect time to get your particular niche grounded in these specialty search engines.
To get your blog listed you simply need to ping an updating service such as Weblogs.com. It's as simple as that. If you are using Wordpress, you can set it up to where your blog pings the major services every time you make a post.
You can even have multiple listings in the Google Blog Search because they list specific posts as well as entire blogs.

Google News
Want to get your article and even your picture into Google News? Well, it's really not that hard. The first step is to go to www.americanchronicle.com, scroll down to the very bottom of the page and click on the link that says "submit work". From there you can sign up to be a contributor.
If accepted as a contributor, you will then be able to submit articles along with your picture. Many of their articles are syndicated on Google News and will be available to the millions of searchers who go to Google News each and every day.
If you are looking to get your press release into Google News, that is simple as well. All you have to do is submit your press release to PRLeap.com. Using these techniques, you can get into Google News 100% free, while many other webmasters are paying to do so.
Now that you know about the many faces of Google, you will be able to use many of these tactics to your advantage. You see, there are so many people who just don't put in the extra effort required to get exceptional results. Luckily for you, this puts you at a great advantage over many of the webmasters online today.

About The Author
Promoting Webs- Developer, Designer and SEO Professional with Promote Your Websites offering website design, search engine optimization and PPC Management.

Google Search Engine Optimization Pitfalls

On Page Factors - Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly?

So you have a website but where is it on Google? Have you fallen foul of a penalty or have you overlooked one of the many common search engine optimization pitfalls when designing your site?
Understanding what works for the search engines and what doesn't when it comes to the content on your website can have a crucial impact on the relevance and/or page rank of your pages from a SEO perspective.
Here we highlight common mistakes that could affect your ranking on Google and other search engines.

Optimizing for the Correct Keywords

Basically 'Get real' about what keywords you feel your website can be ranked for. If you have a ten page website in a highly competitive market then ranking naturally for the major terms will be close to impossible.
Use the Overture keyword tool together with the number of results on Google to find out what keywords are searched for and how many other websites are targeting them. If you are lucky then you might even find a popular keyword that not many other websites are optimized for. Alternatively a good tool for this job is Wordtracker from Rivergold Associates Ltd.

Code Validation

If your html code is not valid, then this could make it very difficult or even impossible for a search engine to separate your page content from your code. If the search engine cannot see your content, then your page will obviously have no relevance.

Frames

Even though most, if not all, major search engines now index frames and even with the use of the NOFRAMES tag, you run the risk of your pages being displayed in the search engine results out of context. As each individual page is indexed separately, it is likely that your website visitors will not see your pages within your frame and will effectively be stuck on the page they arrive at.
On Page Factors - Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly?
So you have a website but where is it on Google? Have you fallen foul of a penalty or have you overlooked one of the many common search engine optimization pitfalls when designing your site?
Understanding what works for the search engines and what doesn't when it comes to the content on your website can have a crucial impact on the relevance and/or page rank of your pages from a SEO perspective.

Here we highlight common mistakes that could affect your ranking on Google and other search engines.
Optimizing for the Correct Keywords
Basically 'Get real' about what keywords you feel your website can be ranked for. If you have a ten page website in a highly competitive market then ranking naturally for the major terms will be close to impossible.
Use the Overture keyword tool together with the number of results on Google to find out what keywords are searched for and how many other websites are targeting them. If you are lucky then you might even find a popular keyword that not many other websites are optimized for. Alternatively a good tool for this job is Wordtracker from Rivergold Associates Ltd.
Code Validation
If your html code is not valid, then this could make it very difficult or even impossible for a search engine to separate your page content from your code. If the search engine cannot see your content, then your page will obviously have no relevance.
Frames
Even though most, if not all, major search engines now index frames and even with the use of the NOFRAMES tag, you run the risk of your pages being displayed in the search engine results out of context. As each individual page is indexed separately, it is likely that your website visitors will not see your pages within your frame and will effectively be stuck on the page they arrive at.
If you must use frames then create a 'Home' link on each of your individual content pages and point the link at your frameset index page.

JavaScript Navigation

If you use JavaScript to control your website navigation, then search engine spiders may have problems crawling your site. If you must use JavaScript, then there are two options available to you:

• Use the NOSCRIPT tag to replicate the JavaScript link in standard HTML.
  
• Replicate your JavaScript links as standard HTML links in the footer of your page.

Flash Content Currently only Google can index Macromedia Flash files, how much or how little content they see is open to debate. So until search engine technology is able to handle your .swf as standard it would be advisable to avoid the use of these.

Again if you must use Flash then offer a standard HTML alternative within NOEMBED tags.

Dynamic URLs

Although Google and Yahoo are able to crawl complicated URLs it is still advisable to keep your URLs simple and avoid the use of long query strings. Do not include session IDs in the URL as these can either create a 'spider trap' where the spider indexes the page over and over again or, at worst, your pages will not get indexed at all.

If you do need to include parameters in the URL, then limit them to two and the number of characters per parameter to ten or less.
The best SEO solution for dynamic URLs is to use Mod-rewrite or Multiviews on Apache.

No Sitemap

A sitemap is the search engine optimization tool of choice to ensure every page within your website is indexed by all search engines. You should link to your site map from, at least, your homepage but preferably from every page on your website.

If your website contains hundreds of pages then split the sitemap into several categorized maps and link these all together. Try and keep the number of links per page on a sitemap to less than 100.

Excessive Links

Excessive links on a given page (Google recommends having no more than 100) can lower its relevance and, although it does not result in a ban, this does nothing for your search engine optimization strategy.

Be Careful Who You Link To

As you have no control over who links to your website, incoming links will not harm your rank. However, outbound links from your website to 'bad neighbourhoods' like link farms will harm your ranking.
As a rule ensure as many of your outbound links as possible link to websites that are topical to your field of business.

About The Author

Promoting Webs- Developer, Designer and SEO Professional with Promote Your Websites offering website design, search engine optimization and PPC Management.

Secrets To Increasing Web Traffic

It is no accident that some web sites have thousand or even millions of hits every day while others seem to be camouflaged with no visitors clicking on their sites. In general, there are 3 major areas of Internet marketing strategies.
Have a product or service that is in demand. The more unique and desirable, the better. If you're trying to sell something that lots of other people are also trying to sell, you're facing competition in two ways. It’s going to be a lot harder to get noticed on search engines, and the competition is going to eat away at the profits.

1. Have a product or service that is in demand. The more unique and desirable, the better. If you're trying to sell something that lots of other people are also trying to sell, you're facing competition in two ways. It’s going to be a lot harder to get noticed on search engines, and the competition is going to eat away at the profits.
2. Create a site that sells. A website sells product by design. It presents the product / service, builds trust, and then closes the sale. If people don't trust you, they won't buy from you. It doesn't matter how many people you attract to your website if they get turned off by an unattractive presentation or a half-built website.
3. Draw a stream of potential buyers to your site. You can obtain first page rankings on search pages without using tricks. If you build highly optimized, search engine friendly web pages, you can score well on several different keywords or keyword phrases. This is called search engine optimization.

Let’s start by looking at what doesn’t work:

1. Banner Ads: Click thru rates have now dropped to just 0.3%. This is not a cost effective traffic builder for your site. Banner ads that are tied to keyword phrases are more effective.
2. Exchange Banner Ads or links. The downside is that you work hard to attract a targeted customer to your site and they end up leaving before you can close the sale. The upside is that links pointing back to your site improves your ranking with many search engines. My suggestion is that if you want to add links, do this on a separate links page.
3. E-mail marketing: This is one of the most disliked forms of internet advertising. It violates one of the basic rules of the Internet…NEVER SPAM. The bottom line is that email marketing doesn’t work.
4. Classified ad services: “Free for all” classified ad sites have popped up all over the web. This is how they work…first you sign up and receive your own classified ad site. Then you allow visitors to post their ads for free. In exchange, you get to send them your spam. The issue is that you are not dealing with targeted customers and you end up with zero results.

Search Engines

Search engines are a great source for new customers. Existing customers already know you and usually they usually don’t arrive thru searches. Since visitors find you by entering in search terms, they are new customers. These visitors are targeted…they create the search that finds your keywords. Since they found you, they are motivated and much more likely to buy. Properly targeted search engine traffic results in sales that could have gone to your competitors…and this goes to your bottom line.

Keywords and Keyword Phrases

This is a very important part of web page optimization. You need to understand how your customer thinks. People who use a search engine are looking for the product and its features. Remember, 3-4 word keyword phrases attract buyers, 1-2 word keyword phrases attract browsers.
Create a list of keyword based on common names, combining words into compound words, common misspellings, looking at competitor key words. Stay away from company name and brand names as keywords. Select keywords based on recent actual search usages. This information is available from the Internet.
In picking the best traffic building keywords you will want to end-up with 80% specific keywords or keyword phrases and 20% general keywords / phrases. Eliminate words that are unlikely to be used. Choose approximately 16 specific keywords / phrases and 4 general ones. Make sure that the words cover your entire product line.

Spiders on the Web

Search engine spiders are programs that follow links on web sites, gathering data for search engine indexes. The spider, robot or crawler goes to a web site and follows hyperlinks throughout the site. The spider reads the meta tags on the web pages. Meta tags are tags that appear in HTML at the top of each web page; these tags tell the spiders what's on the page in a fashion that is easy for them to index. The robot reads these tags and compares them to the content on the page. The better the tags add up with the actual content of the page the higher the spider will rank the page's TITLE, DESCRIPTION, and KEYWORDS. When the spider finds material in the tags that does not reflect the actual content of the page, it will give the page a low ranking or will not index the page at all.

Design your site to be spider friendly

The Meta Tags are important to getting good rankings, and on many search engines, the page title (often truncated) and the Meta Description tag are what gets displayed.

1. Constructing your Meta TITLE tag. All your most important key phrases should be in the TITLE tag. Browsers only display the first few words of a title tag (whatever fits into the title bar of the window). So while the first sentence of your title tag should be readable by people the rest can be just a list of key phrases.
2. The Meta Description tag should contain a short description of the web page. You've already written one for the TITLE tag! So just edit that to make it human readable (and perhaps a little shorter).
3. Meta Keywords tag. Enter your key phrases in the order you think is most appropriate, separated by commas. Don't repeat a key phrase, and don't repeat any individual word more than 5 times.
4. The first paragraph of your page should repeat and expand upon everything in your title and description meta tags. You need to have all those key phrases in it. However, since this is going to be read by people, it needs to be written with them in mind.

Don’t put up spam pages

You clearly want to have your important key phrases on your page more than once, because this is what gives the search engines a clue as to what your page is really about. However, you don't want your key phrases to appear too many times. This might make the search engines think your page is a spam page trying to rank highly for a particular phrase and will not list them.

RSACI Rating

Say that someone visits your page... but they can't! Their browser blocks it, saying that it's "not appropriate". This is probably because you haven't installed rating tags on your site. It's pretty simple to do, and it means that a lot more people will be able to access your site. See The Internet Content Rating Association at http://www.icra.org/ for more information.

Paying for hits

Pay-per-click is another way to increase the traffic to your website. Pay-per-click providers are simply a search engine where you can bid for the top positions for various search keywords.
Even if you have done everything right and you have a perfectly optimized web site for search engines and you have traffic flowing to your site, you can quickly lose your potential customer with a poorly designed website.

10 ways to design an annoying site that drives traffic away.

1. Have useless or just plain bad content.
2. Make your pages over 50K so the pages load real slow.
3. Disable the back button so people can’t leave the site.
4. Place blinking text and moving or spinning graphics to distract the reader from the other really bad stuff on your site.
5. Don’t proof read what you do and have plenty of spelling and grammar “misteaks”
6. Put in music…and make it really loud.
7. Make your text unreadable by putting light blue printing over a medium blue 3D wallpaper or similar background.
8. Put your entire site on one…long…long…long page.
9. Clutter up your site and make it confusing so no one can figure out exactly what you are up to.
10. Have plenty of pointless graphics or clipart for no real reason.

SEO With Google Sitemaps

What is a Google Sitemap?

A Google Sitemap is a very simple XML document that lists all the pages in your website, but the Google Sitemaps program is actually much more important than that. In fact, the Sitemaps program provides a little peek inside Google's mind - and it can tell you a lot about what Google thinks of your website!

Why Should You Use Google Sitemaps?

Until Google Sitemaps was released in the summer of 2005, optimizing a site for Google was a guessing game at best. A website's page might be deleted from the index, and the Webmaster had no idea why. Alternatively, a site's content could be scanned, but because of the peculiarities of the algorithm, the only pages that would rank well might be the "About Us" page, or the company's press releases.
As webmasters we were at the whim of Googlebot, the seemingly arbitrary algorithmic kingmaker that could make or break a website overnight through shifts in search engine positioning. There was no way to communicate with Google about a website - either to understand what was wrong with it, or to tell Google when something had been updated.
That all changed about a year ago when Google released Sitemaps, but the program really became useful in February of 2006 when Google updated it with a couple new tools.
So, what exactly is the Google Sitemaps program, and how can you use it to improve the position of your website? Well, there are essentially two reasons to use Google Sitemaps:

1. Sitemaps provide you with a way to tell Google valuable information about your website.
2. You can use Sitemaps to learn what Google thinks about your website.

What You Can Tell Google About Your Site

Believe it or not, Google is concerned about making sure webmasters have a way of communicating information that is important about their sites. Although Googlebot does a pretty decent job of finding and cataloging web pages, it has very little ability to rate the relative importance of one page versus another. After all, many important pages on the Internet are not properly "optimized", and many of the people who couldn't care less about spending their time on linking campaigns create some of the best content.
Therefore, Google gives you the ability to tell them on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 how important a given page is relative to all the others. Using this system, you might tell Google that your home page is a 1.0, each of your product sections is a 0.8, and each of your individual product pages is a 0.5. Pages like your company's address and contact information might only rate a 0.2.
You can also tell Google how often your pages are updated and the date that each page was last modified. For example your home page might be updated every day, while a particular product page might only be updated on an annual basis.

What Google Can Tell You About Your Site

Having the ability to tell Google all this information is important, but you don't even need to create a sitemap file in order to enjoy some of the perks of having a Google Sitemaps account.
That's because even without a Sitemap file, you can still learn about any errors that Googlebot has found on your website. As you probably know, your site doesn't have to be "broken" for a robot to have trouble crawling it's pages. Google Sitemaps will tell you about pages it was unable to crawl and links it was unable to follow. Therefore, you can see where these problems are and fix them before your pages get deleted from the index.
You can also get information on the types of searches people are using to find your website. Of course, most website analytics tools will give this information to you anyway, but if the tool you use doesn't have this feature, then it's always nice to get it for free from Google.
But the best part of the Sitemaps program is the Page analysis section that was added in February of 2006. This page gives you two lists of words. The first list contains the words that Googlebot associates with your website based on content on your site. The second list contains words that Googlebot has found linking to your site!
Unfortunately, Google limits the number of words in each list to 20. As a consequence, the inbound links column is partly wasted by words such as "http", "www", and "com" - terms that apply equally to all websites (hey Google, how about suppressing those terms from the report?). That said, this list does provide you with a way to judge the effectiveness of your offsite optimization efforts.
When you compare these two lists, you can get an understanding of what Google thinks your website is about. If the words on your Site Content column are not really what you want Googlebot to think about your site, then you know you need to tweak your website's copy to make it more focused on your core competency.
If, on the other hand your inbound links don't contain any keywords that you want to rank well for, then perhaps you should focus your efforts in that direction.
Above all else, you really want these two lists to agree. You want your inbound linked words to match up to the site content words. This means that Google has a clear understanding of the focus of your website.

Additional Benefits of the Sitemaps Program

Google has even started notifying Sitemaps-participating Webmasters if they are breaking any of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. This can be very valuable information if your site suddenly becomes de-listed on Google and you don't know why.
Only Sitemaps participants can get this information, and it is only provided at Google's discretion. In fact, Google will NOT notify you if you are creating worthless websites that offer no original content, or if you are creating thousands of doorway pages that are redirecting to other web sites. Google doesn't want to give the sp@ammers any clues as to how to improve their techniques.

How Do You Get Started with Google Site Maps?

The first thing you must do is obtain a Google Account. If you already have a Gmail, Adsense, or Adwords account, then you are all set. If not, you can register an account by visiting the Google Accounts page.
Building your sitemap file is pretty easy to do if you are familiar with XML, and if you aren't you can always use a third-party tool such as the ones that are listed on Google's website. Google also has a "Sitemap Generator" that you can download and install on your server, but unless you are fairly adept at managing Python scripts, you should probably stick to the third-party tools.

At any rate, once you have your Google Account and your Sitemap file built, the rest is very easy. All you have to do is:

1. Log into your account
2. Type your website's URL into the "Add Site" box and click on "OK"
3. Click on the Manage Sites link for the website you are adding, and add your sitemap file to your account.

Google Sitemaps - An Excellent SEO Tool

Google Sitemaps help Googlebot quickly find new content on your website. They allow you to tell Google what's important, what's new, and what changes often. The tools provided to webmasters through the program can play a vital role in helping you understand how the search engines (especially Google) view your website.
Using this information you can dramatically improve the position of your website and quickly clear up any issues Google finds. You can also use the tools provided by Google to gauge the effectiveness of your off-site optimization efforts so you can better focus your time and energy on activities that bring you the most success.

About The Author

Not that there is anything fundamentally wrong with doing business with Google. Everyone is profiting from Google, find out how you can too! Click-here: Promote Your Websites © 2006 Promoting Webs.

SEO-Title and Meta Description Tag Optimization

Title Tag and Meta Tags are the author-generated source codes that are positioned in the segment of your HTML document. Apart from the Title Tag, other information inserted is not visible to the person surfing your web page, but is visible only to the search engine crawlers. Title and Meta Description Tags are especially important as they can be used to influence the ranking of your site (to a certain extent) and the way it appears in some search results. There are several Meta Tags like Meta Description Tag, Meta Keywords Tag and more, but out of the existing Tags the most important and popular ones are the Title Tag and the Meta Description Tag. Though the Title Tag does not belong to the Meta Tag family (click for more information on Meta Tags), yet from the Search Engine Optimization point of view, the Title Tag is the most significant tag on your web site, followed by the Meta Description Tag. What is a Title Tag? The Title Tag is an HTML code that shows the words that appear in the Title bar at the top of your web browser. These words do not appear anywhere else on your web page. For instance, the Title Tag of this page appears as ‘ Meta Tag Optimization: Title and Meta Description Tag Optimization ' at the top bar of your web browser. This is because these words were entered into the Title Tag of the web site's HTML code. Usually, the Title Tag is the first element in the area of your site, followed by the Meta Description and the Meta Keywords Tags. Before, we discuss the Title Tag in greater detail; lets see how it looks in your web site's HTML code: Why is the Title Tag Important from Search Engine Optimization perspective? Title Tag is an important Tag amongst other SEO related options, as it not only communicates the theme of your web page to the human visitors but is also considered very important by the Search Engine crawlers. Title Tag is not a Meta Tag, but nevertheless it is the most important of all Tags. Almost all crawler based search engines use the Title Tag to gather information about your web site. The search engines use the words or the content of the Title Tag during the ranking process to analyze the relevance of your web page. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, AltaVista, and AlltheWeb use your web page's Title Tag to evaluate its relevance. Title Tag is the hyperlinked text title that is displayed in the search engine results page (SERP). The users, in turn, click on this hyperlink to go to your web site. The Title Tag is also used as the text when you 'bookmark' a page or add a certain web page to your 'favorites' list in your browser. A carefully constructed Title Tag is very important for your page's ranking with the search engines. Of late, a large number of articles have been written with differing views and opinions regarding the relevance and benefits of various Meta Tags. Most experts, however, agree that the Title Tag is a significant tool in any search engine optimization campaign. Working with the Title Tag Since the Title Tag plays a vital role in determining your site's ranking in the SERP, you need to pay a lot of attention to the words that appear in the Title Tag and the order in which they appear. You need to develop a crisply worded Title Tag that includes your most relevant keyword phrases and performs the function of announcing the summary of your web page's content. Title Tag and Keywords Amongst all the places you can use your important keyword phrases, the usage of keywords in the Title Tag gives the highest weight. While using your keyword phrases in the Title Tag, it is important to be highly focused. You should use the same keywords not just in your Title Tag, but also in your page content and the Meta Description Tag of your web page. If the keywords you intend using in your Title Tag do not appear anywhere else in your page's content, then avoid using them in your page title as the weight of the keywords in the Title Tag gets diluted. It is essential to sequence your keyword phrases correctly in your Title Tag. The order in which they appear is of great importance. Having your most important keyword phrase towards the beginning of the Title Tag helps display your title in bold in the SERP (search engines result pages).
Other Do's and Don'ts
Consider using both singular and plural forms of the important words in your Title Tag. For instance, you may use both 'loan' and 'loans' while making the Title Tag. Google is still experimenting with Stemming (interchange of singular and plural terms); however, it is fluctuating in its deployment frequently. A word of Caution: Do not overdo it.
Title Tag length : Google usually reads about 90 characters of your Title Tag. Therefore, a Title Tag of about 80-90 characters is good enough.
Do not use keywords repeatedly as the density of your keywords does not matter in your Title Tag.
The sequence in which keywords appear in your Title Tag is important. Try using natural phrases for your Title Tag, which read better and will likely conform to your Keyword Phrases.
Avoid using the same Title Tag throughout your site. Try using a unique Title Tag for each web page and use keyword Phrases that holds theme relevance to that page. You also get to leverage more keyword phrases if you individualize the Title Tag in all pages.
Most search engines are not case sensitive ; therefore, you can write your Title Tag in a way that looks most visually appealing.
Title Tag should ideally read like a phrase that makes some grammatical sense, not just a collection of keywords. This is all the more important as the Title Tag usually appears as the text when you 'bookmark' or add a page to your 'favorites' list. Therefore, it should make sense when a person reads it later. For instance, if you want to include the keywords Home Loans, fast clearance, No credit check in your Title Tag, you can write a Title Tag that reads: Home Loans: fast clearance with no credit check. What to Include in your Title Tag? You could put the product or service you are offering in the Title Tag, instead of your firm or company name. This is because most users when searching for, information search for specific products or services, not company names. Also note that search engines read about 80-90 characters in your Title Tag. This is prime Real Estate for your important keywords. If you strongly feel like putting your company or domain name in your Title Tag, then, do so at the end. Wasting several characters by inserting your site name does you little good. In a nutshell, the basic ingredients of a good Title Tag are :
It should announce the summary of your web page content.
It should read like a crisply worded sales pitch that is enticing enough to make the users click on your entry when it is displayed in SERP.
It should include your most important keyword phrases or search terms.
The sequencing of the keywords should make logical sense.
Each page of your website should have different and customized Title Tag relevant to the context of that page. The Title and Meta Description Tags are very important aspects of your search engine optimization campaign. This exercise begins with carrying out a thorough Keyword Phrase research. Keyword phrase research forms the most essential and important aspect of any SEO initiative. After selecting your most relevant keyword phrases and writing a keyword rich copy for your web page, you can now work these important search terms into your Title and Meta Description Tags. Read our detailed article on Keyword Phrase Research . The Title and Meta Description Tags are very important aspects of your search engine optimization campaign. This exercise begins with carrying out a thorough Keyword.
Phrase research. Keyword phrase research forms the most essential and important aspect of any SEO initiative. After selecting your most relevant keyword phrases and writing a keyword rich copy for your web page, you can now work these important search terms into your Title and Meta Description Tags. Read our detailed article on Keyword Phrase Research.
What is Meta Description Tag? The Meta Description Tag is a part of HTML code that allows you to give a short and concise summary of your web page content. The words placed in this Meta Tag, are often used in the search engines result pages (SERP), just below the Title Tag as a brief description of your page. In the Search Engine Results Pages, after reading the Title, a user usually studies the description of the page and decides whether she wants to visit your site or not. Some Search Engines prefer to ignore your Meta Description Tag and build the description summary on the basis of the search term for the SERP on the fly. They usually pick up parts of the text on your page wherever the search terms appear. The only exceptions are the Flash, Frame or All Image sites that have no content, and some high importance websites, where the search term is not found in the text. In such a case, Google picks up your entire Meta Description Tag and displays it.

Importance of Meta Description Tag All search engines do not give very high prominence to the Meta Description Tag and may generate a description on the fly while listing your web page in SERP. However, in some search engines, a good Meta Description Tag might help a page to rank higher for your targeted search terms. This holds true for Flash, Frame or All Image sites that have no content as well as some high importance websites, where the search term is not found in the text. In such cases, some search engines pick up the exact Meta Description Tag and display it in its SERP, just below the Title Tag. Hence, it is important to write a crisp and enticing Meta Description Tag that includes your important keyword phrases and manages to interest your user, thus making her click on your entry. Working with Meta Description Tag Keyword Phrases and Meta Description Tag: Include your most relevant and important keyword phrases in your page's Meta Description Tag. As in the case of Title Tag, focus on the same keyword phrases as you used in your page's Title Tag and body text. Fewer and highly targeted search phrases can boost your web page's relevance in the search engines results. Hence, stress should be on writing a brief yet informative description for your web page. The Meta Description Tag of your web page should not read like a collection of keywords, but should be written as an informative and interesting summary of your web page. Do's and Don'ts of a good Meta Description Tag:
Excessive keyword repetition should be avoided. Instead, pay attention to the sequence in which your keywords appear. Your most important terms should be placed in the beginning.
Make sure each page on your web site has a different and a unique Meta Description Tag using the keyword phrases that are relevant to that web page.
A Meta Description Tag of 25-30 words should do fine.
The most important keyword phrases should, ideally be placed at the beginning of your Meta Description Tag, which increases your chances of better Search Engine Rankings

About The Author

Not that there is anything fundamentally wrong with doing business with Google. Everyone is profiting from Google, find out how you can too! Click-here: Promote Your Websites © 2006 Promoting Webs