The Know Insider Weblog

One of the most fundamental facets of any online business is how do I deliver the goods in the major search engines, e.g Google and Yahoo. How do I make my site to rank comfortably in Google?

One of the most important aspects in doing well in the search engines (knowing the basics like brilliant content are already in place) is finding links aimed at your website. You can produce this a lots of ways, some viewed positively by the serps and some not so positively.

A honest ways, that the search engines think is O.K. is link building with articles.

Fundamentally this involves composing a great article, rather around something from your business, and then publishing it to a free article directory.

You really cannot afford to undervalue the importance of link building. If there is one signal that takes precedence to the search engines, by and large, it is links. Sure, there are masses of other signals, e.g the domain name, but you are misguided if you reckon you are going to be listed well, and easily seen, if you do not pull in any links.

Building links with articles is easy. It is something the search engines say is okay. And, it adds value to the web, by providing valuable content that might be interesting or useful to users. The real question is what are you waiting for?

Between 75% and 98.8% of visitors to Web sites come from searches made at search engines. If you’re going to get high levels of traffic - and hence the levels of ROI you’re looking for - it’s very important that the search engines can access all the information on your Web site.

Do the search engines know about all of your pages?

You can find out which pages on your site the search engines know about by using a special search. If you search for ’site:’ and your Web site address, the search engine will tell you all of the pages on your Web site it knows about.

For example, search for: site:webpositioningcentre.co.uk in Google. Yahoo or MSN Search, and it will tell you how many pages they know about.

If the search engines haven’t found some of the pages on your Web site, it is probably because they are having trouble spidering them. (’Spidering’ is when the search engine uses an automated robot to read your Web pages.)

Spiders work by starting off on a page which has been linked to by another Web site, or that has been submitted to the search engine. They then read and follow any links they find on the page, gradually working their way through your whole Web site.

At least, that’s the theory.

The problem is, it’s easy to confuse the spiders - especially as they are designed to be wary of following certain kinds of link.

Links which confuse spiders

If your links are within a large chunk of JavaScript code, the spider may not be able to find them, and will not be able to follow the links to your other pages.

This can happen if you have ‘rollovers’ as your navigation - for instance, pictures that change colour or appearance when you hover your mouse pointer over them. The JavaScript code that makes this happen can be convoluted enough for the spiders to ignore it rather than try to find links inside.

If you think your rollovers are blocking your site from being spidered, you will need to talk to your Web designers about changing the code in to a ‘clean link’ - a standard HTML link, with no extra code around it - that is much easier for the spiders to follow.

Links like these will look something like this:

Home Page

Page addresses to avoid

Spiders will also ignore pages if they don’t like the URL (the address needed to find the page).

For example, a Web site that has URLs containing several variables can cause spiders to ignore the page content. You can spot pages like these as they have a ? in them, and &, for instance:

http://webpositioningcentre.co.uk/index.php?page=12&cat=23&jib=c

This URL has three variables, the parts with the = in them, between the ? and &s. We find that if a page has one variable, or even two, the top search engines will spider them without any problems. But if a URL has more than that, often the search engines will not spider them.

Spiders particularly avoid URLs that look like they have ’session IDs’ in them. They look something like this:

http://webpositioningcentre.co.uk/index.php?page=12&id=29c8d7r2398jk27897a8

The set of numbers and letters do not make much sense to humans, but some Web sites use them to keep track of who you are, as you click through their Web site.

Spiders will generally avoid URLs with Session IDs in them, so if your Web site has them, you need to talk to the people who developed the site about re-writing it so they do not use these IDs, or at least that you can get around the Web site without them.

Clean links = happy spiders

If you use clean, easy to follow links without several variables in them, your Web site should be spidered without problem. There are, of course, many other facets to successful Search Engine Optimization, but if the search engines can’t spider your content, your site will fall at the first hurdle.

Paul Silver and David Rosam are Head of Technical SEO and Head of SEO Copywriting at Web Positioning Centre (http://webpositioningcentre.co.uk). Paul has been involved with the Web commercially since 1996 and David has been writing marketing copy for 20 years, and writing for the Web for a decade.

OK, you published your site, now you just sit by the phone with a notepad as the orders pour in, right? Well, weeks go by and nothing happens. What’s wrong?

Oops, you forgot to submit to search engines. No problem, you go onto Google, Yahoo, MSN, perhaps a couple more, and after some hassle with the usual red tape you get yourself submitted. Surely the orders will pour in now?

Or will they?

Let me illustrate the problem for you with an example.

Let’s say you are considering buying a new home theatre system this year. You want to do a bit of research so that you don’t get ripped off. How would you go about it?

Of course, you’d use a search engine. You might type in “audio visual suppliers melbourne” (assuming you live in Melbourne). Let’s say the search returns 30 thousand results, ten per page.

How many pages will you look at? One, maybe two? In other words, if your business is not within the top 20 in your category, it might as well not exist. So, the big question is, how do you get into the top twenty?

The search engines use complex mathematical formulae (algorithms) to determine the ranking of sites. To make matters worse, the algorithms are different for each engine, and secret. However, in general terms the engines look at only two factors: relevance and popularity.

Relevance means simply how relevant is your website to the search the customer is conducting (ie. To the keywords they typed in). The search engines make money by selling advertising space, and their prices depend on traffic they can generate; the traffic in turn is a direct result of how relevant the search results are for people visiting the engine’s site.

Relevance is influenced by:

• How early the keywords appear on the page, are they in headings, meta tags, titles, picture names? (Keyword prominence)
• How often are the keywords used? (Keyword frequency)
• What’s the proportion of keywords to the page’s word count? (Keyword weight)
• How close are the keywords to each other? (Proximity)

Of course, the ultimate in keyword prominence is when it appears in your domain name (remember fastweightlossdiet.net?).

Now, you probably gathered that it’s next to impossible to optimise a page for more than one sequence of keywords. However, your customers might actually search for you under dozens (if not hundreds) of keywords. How can you possibly hope to capture this traffic?

Well, the solution lies in creating so-called doorway pages. Once you’ve done your research and you have a list of keywords your prospects are using, you need to create a separate page for each keyword, and then optimise it for this particular keyword or keyword sequence. When the prospect clicks on the doorway page’s link it takes them straight to your site.

Now, once you’ve covered relevance, it’s time to consider popularity. It is judged by two factors:

• How many other websites (preferably related) link to yours?
• How long does an average visitor stay on your site before getting out?

There are several strategies you can use to get other sites to link to yours. Start by linking to good-ranking sites in your category, then email them saying you just linked to them and ask politely to link back to you. Visit guestbooks of related sites and sign your entry with your URL (URL is www + your domain name) - this automatically creates a link. Research link farms (free-for-all link areas).

To increase the time an average visitor spends on your site, there is only one effective way: having interesting and compelling content on it!

A word of caution about search engine optimisation - as the Net grows, it takes longer and longer to wait from making changes on your site to seeing your rankings actually go up; currently 3 months seem to be the norm, and you probably need to allow a year to achieve a decent ranking in a popular category. Also, once achieved it needs to be constantly maintained, as the algorithms change all the time and your competitors don’t sleep!

Search engine optimisation is a very significant time commitment that is not realistic for a majority of busy business people. Once again, the only solution is to hire someone to do it for you. Prices range from $500 to $10,000; on-going maintenance $50 - $150 per month. They depend on the number of keywords and doorway pages, and the keywords popularity (it’s harder to get into the top of ten in a keyword category with millions of businesses competing, such as “weight loss”, than it is for a niche category such as “natural diet recipes”).

Make sure you get a guarantee on results, so that when they don’t achieve the agreed ranking for you at least you get your money back.

Darius Mikolajewski is Director of Allwelt International, an Australian Internet Marketing Company, and author of books and articles about internet marketing as well as weight loss and nutrition. For more information visit http://www.allwelt.com

Sites will take extraordinary steps to get every possible page into Google to enhance their page rank. In the case of the Google cache, this tactic can sometimes come back to haunt sites, particularly sites selling products

Google Cache

Google copies everything it can get its dirty little spider robot on. Google stores these copies in a cache. The cache is simply a copy of all previous web pages for the link in question. If you search for something on Google, each result returned for the search has a “cached” button at the end of the link. Click the “cached” link and you will see previous copy of the page. Often, what you see is an older version of the page.

If you sell products on your site, do you really want Google copying old pages and making them available? Put another way, do you really want customers to see the old prices of the products you are selling? Many sites change prices or information during the year as a reflection of selling cycles, etc. If your prices are at their high point in September, do you want customers clicking the cache link and seeing lower prices listed from July? Probably not.

Don’t Get Cached!

Keeping Google and other search engines from copying your pages is fairly simple. It requires a bit of meta tagging, but nothing difficult. To stop the process, simply add the following meta tag to your site:

The robots for all search engines relying on meta tags should stop copying your site. Lately, YahooSlurp has been acting odd, so make sure you keep an eye on it after it crawls your site.

To get rid of pages that have already been copied, you should just contact the search engine in question. They will usually delete the copies, but they aren’t particularly quick.

Adding pages to Google, Yahoo, MSN and any other search engine should be a definite goal for every site. Before storming down that road, just make sure you understand the consequences of old pages appearing in the cache.

Halstatt Pires is a search engine optimization specialist with http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing and advertising company in San Diego offering meta tag optimization services and link popularity services.

Everyone seems to want the benefits from working at home: more time, more money, and theoretically less work. But the later of the previous list seems to be the problem. No one wants to do work! When it comes to getting your site highly ranked on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or other search engines the only way to do it fast and effectively is to put a little time and effort into your cause. Links are the way to do this, and the theory is not complicated; the more links that you have to your site with keywords relating to your site, the better your ranking.

It seems that in the recent commotion about link popularity and linking in general, the art of reciprocal linking has really taken off. Reciprocal linking is an agreement between two websites to exchange links with each other, in order to boost ranking throughout any search engine. However, recently, Google and Yahoo have been hinting at diminishing returns for these reciprocal links, as they don’t happen often in a real setting, and as such have been considered artificial. It seems instead that Google is placing much, much higher value on one way page links. This is probably a good time to considering paying for a real link exchange.

As far as free linking goes, three way links are becoming popular. You link to one site, that site links to a second site, and that second site links to you. However, this is MUCH harder to automate and trying to set up with quality, content similar sites can be a royal pain.

So what’s next in the new SEO world?

Jeffrey Abbott is a respected author and editor of eMoneyReport.com

Visit the site at http://www.emoneyreport.com and read reviews on programs that help you to make money from your own home. eMoneyReport offers a simple and easy format to find articles relating to all types of online business and website promotion.

As an experienced management consultant to senior management of private and public companies, I have found that search engine optimization is the single most powerful marketing tool that every CEO should be aware of and eventually implement. Below are 5 of the endless reasons why search engine optimization must be implemented into your marketing strategy before you are left in the dust of your competition.

Absence of risk. In many cases, paid advertising is subject to click fraud risk and competitor’s black techniques (such as using software that would click your ads thousands of times without any real profit to your site; however, you pay for each click to the search engine). High-tech pay-for-performance programs (such as Google AdWords) claim to have advanced protection against such behavior (and they do have), however the risk can never be reduced to zero.

SEO is free of any risk. Unless you spam or make obvious mistakes, it cannot damage your business.

Reliability. Banner ads or paid search engine placement work until the marketing budget depletes. Then, the site disappears from the listings, and your returning customers cannot find you any more (new visitors cannot find you either). SEO helps buffer this process, so you can gradually reduce the advertising budget as you’re increasing your results obtained from organic search engine listings. Also consumers are more likely to purchase from a site ranked high in the search engine results than from an evidently placed advertisement.

Brand awareness. A web site having a high ranking means more people see the name of the company and become familiar with the company and its products, even if they haven’t made a purchase. A surveys show that consumers are twice as likely to recognize businesses ranked in the top three in search engine results than those appearing in banner ads.

Targeted traffic. Search engine optimization brings paying customers to your door step. The customers that SEO bring you are long for your products/services as they have entered your websites keywords/phrases into the search engines. SEO will further help you transform visitors into buyers by analyzing their behavior once they find your site. You will learn how to transform these visitors into buyers by utilizing the content of your website in the most effective manner possible.

Affordability. In comparison to banner ads, which cost between $2500 to $35000 a month and outsourced SEO plan costs as little as $1000. Well, and after this course you will hardly need to hire an SEO expert or outsource an SEO campaign, anyway.

These are only 5 of the reasons which substantiate why SEO is the single best investment for all CEOs.

About the Author

Carmen is the VP Client Relations of Ms. SEO Inc., a Calgary based Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing Company. Ms. Seo Inc. works with their sister company Ms. Hype Inc., a Calgary Web Design Company, and their parent company Cre8 Hype Solutions Inc., a Calgary based Internet Marketing Company, to offer their clients a powerful online presence.

OK. So you’ve created a nice website with lots of interesting products and information. Now all you need is visitors.

No problem.

This is what online marketers call “getting traffic”, and it definitely is a problem. In fact, probably much more of a problem than you realized when you got into this online selling stuff. You probably figured it was just a matter of creating a nice site and waiting for people to discover it. Get listed in a few directories; “submit” your site to a bunch of search engines, and you’ll be on your way.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.

Why it doesn’t work that way

The reason is pretty simple. Most new internet entrepreneurs have no idea how important the big search engines are — especially Google, MSN, and Yahoo. And they have no idea how these big search engines work. If they did, they would probably tear their beautiful websites apart and start over.

And guess what? That is exactly what most online entrepreneurs end up doing. If they are persistent enough, they eventually learn about the search engines, and they rebuild their sites the way they should have been built in the first
place.

What they think they have learned

The reason they rebuild their sites is because they learn a little bit about something called “Search Engine Optimization” or “SEO”. The mysterious art of SEO starts from the premise that search engines analyze websites in terms of content and subject matter. Their automatic “spiders” look over your pages and use hints within those pages to determine what they are about. If they see lots of words about “golden retrievers” on a particular page, then they assume that page is about “golden retrievers”. These are known as “keywords” — the words that indicate what your content is about.

SEO takes this fairly obvious fact and says, “Since the search engines are going to draw conclusions about the subject matter of your pages based on keywords, then you should make sure they see the correct ones.” In fact, there are all kinds of little SEO techniques that try to exploit the way spiders draw
conclusions about your pages.

Why this is not enough

Unfortunately, no matter how much SEO you do, it is still not enough to ensure you a high ranking in searches for your most important keywords.
Especially if you are chasing popular keywords like most of us are. For instance, it really doesn’t matter how much “optimization” you do for a keyword like “Real Estate”, since you will be competing for search engine results with literally millions of other pages which are also optimized for that term. Why should they choose your humble little page?

The fact is, they don’t choose yours. And the reason is pretty simple. Your page is just not important enough to rank a high position for a term like “Real Estate”. You have to do something to give it some importance.

Making your pages “important”

The most effective way to make your pages “important” in the eyes of the
search engines, is to get other sites to link to yours. When the search engines see a link pointing from an outside site to a page on your site, they assume this means your page is important enough to be considered a resource worth looking at. The more links you have pointing at your page, the more important
your page is considered and the higher it will rank when people search for the type of content your page is about.

It is also important to understand that not all links are considered equally valuable by the search engines. The most valuable links come from other important sites that share your area of interest. For instance, if yours is a Real Estate site, then the most valuable links are from other real estate sites that have already achieved some importance in the eyes of the search engines.

To put this all in “link strategy” terms:

The best way to enhance the importance of your web pages in the eyes of the search engines, is by getting as many links as possible from relevant sites that are considered authoritative in your area of interest.

Rick Hendershot is an internet writer and publisher and is the creator of the Linknet Publishing Network. For information on products to enhance the exposure of your website and build traffic, go to Linknet Products.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something you should be aware of before creating a site. Make sure you’ve done careful researches on the best keywords to use. Using the wrong keywords would eliminate your site from search engines forever!

Besides Onpage Optimization, to rank well in search engines you must optimize your OffPage factors too. What you have to do is basically creating many links pointing to your site and getting links from different IP Addresses.

When you have many links pointing to your site, that means you have many votes. The more votes you get, the more popular you are to the search engines.

To create many links pointing to your site, the first thing you can do is exchanging links with other sites. But, make sure you are linking to good websites! There is a free service in the net that will make this task easier. Simply go to: http://www.LinkMetro.com

Here, you can exchange links with related-content sites and you will be notified when a certain website is no longer exist.

Another way to get those links is by buying text links. Or, if you want the free technique, you can always post some articles and comments in online forums containing your site’s URL in the signature.

Improve your OffPage and the search engines will love you!

Copyright 2005 Farid Aziz.

Farid Aziz is the author of “How to Make Money Onine with Your Hobby”. Visit http://Internet-Marketer.blogspot.com to grab your FREE copy of “Internet-Business-In-A-Box”, a kit worth US$ 497.00.

SEO is all about “Individualism”

According to me SEO is not only getting rank for keywords (Of course that is the primary objective) but apart from ranking your objective should be “Conversion” getting “Sales” (No matter if its personal site or clients site)

SEO Steps:

1. Understanding Business.

# What is your business all about

# How is it going to Operate.

# Target audience (Global/Local)

# Opportunity

# Competitor study operating in same business.

# “Core competence”

2. Target Keywords.

# Getting a good list of keywords. (More keywords maximum number of ppl can be targeted)

# This is something that will directly reflect your efforts (targeting wrong keyword will get all your efforts in vain)

3. WEB Designing.

# Navigation

# Page size

# looks n feel

# inter linking

# HTML Code validation*

4. Meta tags & Content

# Title

# Description

# Keywords

# Content

*This is something all seo do in their style, some do not emphasis more on 1st point (according to me which is very important) & shoot up with 3rd step then 2nd & 4th.

5. Directories

# They are the boss (More the submission to directories more the chance to rank top for targeted keyword)

6. Link Building

# I am very bad at this (This is something which can do wonders for you)

I am still in process to transferring my skills & knowledge to a Brand “SEO Expert” or “SEO Specialist”

Ravz..!

Ravz is into research & analysis of online marketing. SEO India site (http://expertseo.rediffblogs.com) which offers Search Engine Optimization at affordable prices.

Selecting the right keyword phrases is the key to a successful search engine marketing campaign.

Industry statistics indicate that as many as 85% of all initial Website visits begin with a search engine query, and according to researchers NPD Group, more online purchases originate from search engine listings than from any other source. It’s no wonder, then, that search engine marketing campaigns - which include organic search engine placement, paid inclusion, and pay-per-click, among the major elements - are a centerpiece of every online marketing strategy.

A marketer’s first step in developing a successful search engine marketing campaign is optimizing each page on their website with a set of relevant keywords. In the audiobook, “Sound Advice on Search Engine Optimization,” author Jill Whalen says, “The keyword phrases you choose to focus on within your visible Web Page copy is the key to success.”

Whalen notes that marketers need to use keywords that are most relevant to their Web site - two and three-word phrases that best describe their products and services. To develop a list, start with a brainstorming session. What words will prospective customers use to search for information? How often are people searching for those words and phrases?

“Once you have a decent list,” says Whalen, “head on over to WordTracker.com, which will tell you how many people are actually searching on those keywords.” From there, rewrite or edit the copy on each Web page, utilizing the best keyword selections. “Submit these pages to the search engines, and soon you should start to see your traffic soar!”

Jill Whalen offers search engine marketing strategy advice each week in the free audio newsletter from What’s Working in Biz, http://www.whatsworking.biz/full_story.asp?ArtID=92

About The Author

Richard Cunningham is a principal of What’s Working in Biz, http://www.whatsworking.biz, a publisher of business audiobooks and online audio programs on marketing, sales, and small business strategies.