Web Directory and SEO Blog.

Resources For Web Design

2006-07-27T08:20:00.000-07:00

Specifications
HTML 4.01 Specifications
ISO-HTML Specification
XHTML 1.0 Specifications
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines1.0
Cascading Style Sheets - level 1 (CSS1)
Cascading Style Sheets - level 2 (CSS2)
Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1 Specification
Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Specification
Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Specification
W3C Technical Reports and Publications

Webmasters Reference
A List Apart
The Web Standards Project
The World Wide Web Consortium
Web Developer's Virtual Library
The Webmaster's Reference Library
Web Developer
Webmaster Base
WebSite Tips
Web Developer's Journal
Webmonkey: The Web Developers Resource
SitePoint: Helping Business Grow Online!
BrainJar.com: Experiments in Web Programming
Dev Web Pro - Articles for Web Developers
DevShed - The Open Source Web Development Site

Web Authoring
Web Design and Usability
Web Authoring and Surfing
Workers of the Web, Evolt!
Dan Tobias' Web Tips
Siteusability.com - Improving the Web Experience
Web Articles from 'Eye for information'

Articles on Web Authoring
Why the Web just isn't DTP
Web Authoring FAQ (TOC)
Hints for Web Authors
Designing With Web Standards
Tsutsumi - The Art of Giftwrapping the Web
Why you should avoid the Verdana font
Separating behavior and structure

Character Coding and Entity References
Alan Wood's Unicode Resources
Unicode
Mathematical Formulas in HTML 4.0
Presenting Mathematical Expressions on Web Pages
Checklist for HTML Character Coding
MS Windows Characters in HTML
Character Entity References in HTML 4
Web Design Group: HTML 4.0 Entities
"Character References" explained
Tim Bray on the goodness of Unicode
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Characters and Encodings 1.0
Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Specifying the language of content 1.0
A tutorial on character code issues
Survival Guide to Internationalization

HTML Editors
PSPad
HTML-Kit
EditPlus
TextPad
Amaya
UltraEdit
EditPad Lite
AceHTML 5 Freeware
Vim
Arachnophilia
Araneae
NoteTab
Koala HTML
1st Page
BlueFish
jEdit

CSS Editors
TopStyle Pro
Style Master
Layout Master

HTML Tutorials
W3Schools Online Web Tutorials
Mark Tranchant's HTML Tutorial
Introduction to HTML
HTML 4 Guide From RichInStyle
HTML Center - Tutorials
XHTML Web Design for Beginners
HTML Beginner from HTMLDog

HTML Resources
HTML Help by the Web Design Group
How to read W3C Specifications

HTML Tags
DTD Mapper
HTML Tags From Visibone
HTML Tags From Visibone (Mirror)
HTML 4 Reference From WDG
Index of HTML 4 Elements
The Bare Bones Guide to HTML
Blooberry: HTML Reference

HTML Color Codes and Swatches
Non-Dithering Colors in Browsers
Non-Dithering Colors by Hue
Death of the Websafe Color Paletter?
HTML Color Codes From WebMonkey
HTML Color Codes From Visibone
The 216 Browser Safe Colors From EchoEcho
Web-safe colorizer From RichInStyle
Arisesoft Color Set
Color Cop
Easy RGB
SLUGS (Simple Little Utility for Generating Schemes)
Colour Contrast Analyser
Color Blender
Pixy's Color Scheme
Mezzoblue's Color Schemes
Creating colour palettes
Color Palette Creator

HTML FAQ
alt.html FAQ
alt.html General Information
All My FAQs Wiki
alt.www.webmaster Frequently Asked Questions
Web Authoring FAQ
Vortex Web Design FAQ

Web Content Accessibility
Web Accessibility Initiative
Web Accessibility in Mind
Section 508 Checklist
Accessibility For Section 508
Dive into Accessibility
Diffuse - Guide to Accessibility
Bobby WatchFire
Wave 3.0 Accessibility Tool
Cynthia Says Portal
Accessify.com
Accessibility Myths
Common Myths About Web Accessibility
Section 508/WCAG Sidebar
A-Prompt Accessibility Verifier
Ask Alice: Is Your Website Accessible?
A Web Designer's Guide to JAWS
Accessibility Valet
UsableNet - Website Testing Systems

Accessible Tables
Tables in HTML Document
Accessible Tables
How to Create Accessible Tables
Building Accessible Tables
Techniques for Accessible HTML Tables
Accessible Table Builder

Accessible Forms
Accessible Form Builder
Accessible Forms

HTML Validators
The W3C MarkUp Validation Service
WDG HTML Validator
A Real Validator
Site Valet
Validator-Lite

HTML Version Information
HTML 4.01
XHTML 1.0
List of Valid DTDs

DOCTYPES
HTML Validation: Choosing a DOCTYPE
DOCTYPE Switching
Activating the Right Layout Mode Using the DOCTYPE Declaration
Mozilla's DOCTYPE Switching
Notes on Mozilla's Quirks Mode
Opera DOCTYPE Switches
Opera Quirks Mode
Working With HTML DOCTYPE

Forms
HTML Forms
Better Web Forms
Choices in HTML forms

Frames
Frames - Problems and Solutions
Dan's Web Tips: Frames
Why are Frames Evil?
What's wrong with Frames?
Aren't Frames Bad?
Search Engines and Frames

CSS Tutorials
CSS Tutorial From westciv.com
CSS Tutorial From w3schools
HTML Center - Tutorials
BrainJar - Using Style Sheets
Free Webmaster Tips - CSS Tutorial
Dave Raggett's Introduction to CSS
CSS No Crap Primer
CSS Beginner from HTMLDog
CSS How To

CSS Resources
Web Style Sheets From w3.org
westciv: CSS Resources, Software, Learning
How To Hide CSS From Buggy Browsers
Importing a Style Sheet
The CSS Pointers Group
Zen Garden CSS Resources
Web Design Reference: CSS
CSS Panic Guide
NYPL Style Guide: CSS
Eric Meyer: CSS
CSS Vault

CSS Compatibility Charts
CSS Browser Support From westciv.com
Eric Meyer's CSS Support Charts
CSS Support Mastergrid
CSS Filters
CSS Bugs and Workarounds
Immix: CSS Guide

CSS Layouts & Examples
W3C Core Styles
CSS Layout Techniques From glish.com
CSS Gallery From westciv.com
CSS Edge From Eric Meyer
Real World Style
CSS Colouring Book
WebDev - CSS Layout Templates
CSS Layouts From saila.com
CSS Enterprise
3 Column Layout Absolutely Positioned
Position Is Everything
The Layout Reservoir - BlueRobot
The Noodle Incident - Box Lessons
DotFile - CSS Layouts and Examples
Three Column Layouts
Layout-o-matic
Nemesis Project: Templates
Fluid 2-Column CSS Layout

CSS Reference
Style Sheet Reference Guide From WebReview
CSS Reference From Eric Meyer
CSS Reference From w3schools
CSS Reference From wsabstracts
CSS1 Properties From Web Design Group
CSS Reference From GlassDog
Blooberry: CSS Reference
dentalbloc design: CSS Reference

CSS Articles
A List Apart: Taming Lists
Consistent List Indentation
Practical CSS
A Web Designer's Journey
Centering Tables
Centering With CSS
Center With CSS
CSS Menus: Uberlink List Menu
CSS Tab Menus
Styling

vertical centering with CSS
Vertical centering using CSS

CSS Forums
CSS Discuss

CSS Menus
Eric Meyer: Pure CSS Menus
CSS-only Drop down Menus
Expanding Menus in Pure CSS

CSS Forms
Doing Forms Justice
Real World Style Forms
Styling Form Fieldsets, Legends and Labels
Better Web Forms
Simplified Form Errors
Fun with forms ? customized input elements
Stylish, accessible forms
Tableless forms

CSS Rounded Corners
Rounded Corners With CSS
Bullet-Proof Rounded Corners
Rounded Corners
Redesigning with CSS Rounded Corners
Rounded Tab Corners
Rounded Corners with CSS and JavaScript

CSS Lists
Listamatic: One List Many Options
Listutorial: Simple Tutorials on CSS Based Lists
List-o-matic: Generate CSS-styled navigation based on list items

Perl Resources
Perl Documentation (1)
Perl Documentation (2)
Comprehensive Perl Archive Network
DevShed - Perl Articles
Introduction to Perl
Perl Directory
WebMonkey: Perl
DevLearn: Perl Tutorial
Rex Swain's HTMLified Perl 5 Reference Guide
PERL Regular Expressions
Perl Regex: A Tiny Introduction
Five Habits for Successful Regular Expressions
Perl predefined variables
Subroutines and References in PERL

PHP Resources
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
PHP Builder: The Resource For PHP Developers
Zend Technologies: PHP Tools
PHP Wizard: Building Dynamic Websites with PHP
PHP Resource Index
PHP Knowledge Base
Evil Walrus Group: PHP at is best
TheScripts.com: PHP
HotScripts.com: PHP
PHP.Net: Links
WebMonkey: PHP
Web Design Reference: PHP
DevShed - PHP Articles
PHP Coding Standard
PHP FAQ
Zend: PHP Tutorials
Easier Form Validation with PHP
alt.php faq
PHP Security Mistakes
Develop rock-solid code in PHP: Lay the foundation, Part 1
Develop rock-solid code in PHP: Use variables effectively, Part 2
Develop rock-solid code in PHP: Write reusable functions, Part 3

MySQL Resources
MySQL Home Page
MySQL Documentation
A Gentle Introduction to SQL
DevShed - MySQL Articles
MySQL DB Administration Tool

Python Resources
Python Programming Language
Python For Non-Programmers
Python Tutorial
Learn How to Program with Python
Python beginners mistakes
Daily Python
Dive Into Python

ASP Resources
W3Schools: Learn ASP
Active Server Pages 101
ASP FAQ
ASP Resource Index
ASP Hole
ASP-Help.com: Active Server Pages Developers Help
Active Server Pages Support Center
4GuysFromRolla
15 Seconds
Tutorial: Database Access Through Web Browsers
ASP.Net
ASP.Net Web Matrix Project
WebMonkey: ASP
ASP.NET Is In Session
Web Wiz Guide: ASP Tutorials, Articles, and Scripts

Javascript Resources
JavaScript Kit
Dynamic Drive
JavaScript FAQ Knowledge Base
JavaScript FAQT Knowledge Base
HotScripts.com: JavaScript
CGI Script.net : : Free Javascripts
Jim Ley's Jibbering.com
JavaScript links on Objects and Components
JavaScript Central
Web Design Reference: Javascript
WebMonkey: Javascript
Closures and executing JavaScript on page load
Executing JavaScript on page load
Javascript Closures
Notes on the comp.lang.javascript FAQ
Using JavaScript for Presentation

DHTML Resources
Document Object Model (DOM) Technical Reports
W3C Document Object Model
The Web Standards Project: DOM
Introduction to the Document Object Model
WebMonkey: Intro to the Document Object Model
The DOM Event Model
DOM1 Reference
DOM2 Reference
A List Apart: Meet the DOM
DHTML Kitchen: DHTML Articles
Get Element by Id
Gecko DOM Reference

Server Side Includes
SSI or the Rest of Us
BigNoseBird's Server Side Includes
All My FAQs: Server Side Includes
Apache: Module mod_include
Apache Week: Using Server Side Includes
NCSA HTTPd Tutorial: Server Side Includes
Conditional Server Side Includes (SSI)
alt.html FAQ: Server Side Includes (SSI) Tricks

CGI Resources
Darryl C Burgdorf's WebScripts
The CGI Resource Index
Extropia: Free Downloads
NMS - Web Scripts

Image Resources
The GIMP
Installing The GIMP on Windows: GimpWin Installer Page
PhotoShop Gurus
PhotoShop Resources by myJanee
PhotoShop Filters
Photo Thumbnail Generator
ExpressSoft: Thumbnail Creator
IrfanView
Image Magic

Image Resources: Bandwidth Theft
Prevent Bandwidth Theft
Using Mod_rewrite to block hot linked images
Preventing Image Bandwidth Theft With .htaccess

Forum Packages
Vbulletin
Phorum: PHP Message Board
YABB - Yet another Bulletin Board
YABB SE
Invision Power Board
phpBB: Creating Communities

Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine World
Web Master World
Google News at Web Master World
Search Engine Forums
WebMonkey: Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation 101 From Market Leap
Website Promotion Tutorial
Search Engine Optimisation and Positioning From Spider Food
Search Engine Optimisation Information and Advice
Google Ranking Tips
Google Information For Webmasters
Google Information For Webmasters: FAQ
Site Pro News Archive
26 steps to 15k a day
Search Engine Keyword Tracker
Google Spider Ip Addresses

Site Submission
Google
Alta Vista
All The Web
Open Directory Project
Yahoo
Msn
Add URL

Browsers
Web Browser Guide
Webmonkey: Browser Chart
Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer
Deja Vu: Browser Emulator
Browser Archive
Any Browser
Browser Screen Captures
Lynx Viewer
Lynx Browser
Opera Browser
Mozilla
Phoenix
Amaya
K Desktop Environment
K-Meleon
Netscape Browser Archive (1)
Netscape Browser Archive (2)
Netscape 4.7x Browser Archive
Browser Archive at Evolt
Dan's Web Tips: Brand X Browsers

Counters
Hit Counter Rant
Interpreting Access Statistics
BraveNet
TheCounter.com
Site Meter
HFP Stats!
FastCounter
NextGenStats
Xanga Hits
GoCount
NedStat
StatCounter
Ultimate Counter
BBClone: PHP Web Counter

Web Traffic Reports
Website Traffic Report
Reinvigorate (1)
Reinvigorate (2)
Aardvark Tracking
eXTReMe Tracking
SurfStats Log Analyzer
Traffic Ranking
The Webalizer
Analog: WWW Logfile Analysis

Forums
Web Hosting Talk
Webmaster World
Search Engine Forums
Host Hide Out
SitePoint Forums
Site Owners Forums
Hosting Chat
Web Host Directory Forums
CSS Forum
Create a Site Forum

Web Tools
Delorie Web Tools
Search Engine World: Online Search Engine Tools
Web Sniffer: View HTTP and HTML Source
HTTP Header Viewer
Live HTTP Headers
HTTP Revealer
Search Engine Simulator
Search Engine Spider Simulator
Robots.txt Validator
Link Valet
Link Checker
Xenu's Link Sleuth
Tidy GUI
HTML Tidy Online
HTML Tidy Project Page
Checky Plug-in For Mozilla Based Browser
Linky Plug-in
EditCSS
Lynx Viewer
Web Page Analyzer
DNS Report
WWW Ping

Robots.txt
The Web Robots Pages
A Standard for Robot Exclusion
Robots.txt Validator
Put your robots.txt on a diet
Search Engine Robots

404
Customised 404 Messages
The HTTP Error 404 Antidote
404 Research Lab

Other Useful Stuff
Lorem Ipsum
All My FAQs Wiki: Lorem Ipsum
Find Your PageRank Without the Google Bar
AltaVista's Babel Fish Translation Service
Google's Language Tools
Translate a Website
World Language: Online Translation
WorldLingo: Online Translator

Copyright
What is Copyright Protection?
The UK Patent Office - Copyright - Definition
US Copyright Office
Creative Commons
10 Big Myths about copyright explained

3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic

2006-07-27T07:46:00.000-07:00

Nick Wilson have great aricle at performancing

This is his Post

Amongst the commercial blogosphere there is huge interest in the dark, and mysterious art of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. There shouldn't be. Not because paying attention to Search traffic is bad, or that wanting to rank higher in Google is evil, simply because it's not rocket science, and anyone can do it. Even you.

If you want get more traffic from Search engines, this post is for you. Read on....

The Big SEO Secret: It's Easy
Before we get to the list, (I don't mind if you scroll, but this next bit is important too...) let me explain what i mean by "it isn't rocket science": Manipulating Search engine rankings for sites that naturally find it difficult to get incoming links and attention, say affilate sites, many ecommerce type operations and much of the web1.0 shopping experience sites is very hard, and it takes a lot of skill and knowledge to achieve.

It's become harder and harder over the last few years to game Google, and many SEO's are now wondering if it's time to give up trying to "manipulate" G results and simply start feeding Google more of what it wants -- the unfortunate result of which is a huge increase in workload, namely copywriting and Linkbaiting.

That's the thing most SEO's won't want to tell their clients. That there is no magic wand, mystical powers or Search engine hoo joo to be had anymore, it's all down to 3 things:

Copywriting
Links and
Networking
That's not to say those tasks don't require skill, but it really is that simple.

I'll give you a full checklist in just a minute...

Avoid the Snake Oil Merchants
There are still die hard SEO's out there that spend all their time trying to game the system, but most of them are pretty shit at it, only a very few have enough resources to manage it. There are also, a whole slew of con merchants masquerading as SEO's, just as there are fake designers in the web design field, basing their credentials on the fact that they've read a few articles, or bought a keyword tracking tool.

These people are idiots, and should be avoided at all costs.

At the end of this article I'll point you in the direction of a few quality resources for further reading.

3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic
Now you've patiently read though all of the above, or impatiently skimmed to the bottom, it's time to get into this list.

1. Write Better, More Specific Copy and Linkbait
Good copywriting encompasses many things, titles, subject matter, the post and url's to name the most important. It also goes hand in hand with The Art of Linkbaiting. Here's a checklist for more search engine friendly copy:

Title's are everything.

Titles should be short, snappy, and attention grabbing - think about how you skim through your RSS reader every day, and bear that in mind when writing titles.
Preferably, title's should contain keywords related to your topic -- that should come naturally, if you have to jam them in there, its either a bad title, bad copy, or you're a lunatic.
If your blog software writes titles like this: My Blog Title | My Post Title, you need to change them to this: My Post Title - My Blog Title. Many people will tell you it's even better to ditch the "My Blog Title" bit all together, in order to not dillute the important keywords in the title, but they're forgetting the importance of branding, and with blogs, establishing some brand recognition goes a long way toward gaining links and attention.
Titles are akin to advertising, and the best ones make promises, and deliver

By far the best resource out there for blog titles is Brian Clark's Magnetic Headlines series of posts on the excellent Copy Blogger site.

Body Copy

Body Copy

There's been much written, both online and off about copywriting, and as a writer of small talent, it's not for me to get into the in-depth details of it. I am good at linkbaiting though, and am constantly studying what kind of post are being linked on del.icio.us, Digg and other "link sites".

It's the much discussed art of linkbaiting that this post will focus on. Remember, we're talking about getting search engine traffic right? Here's a checklist for writing good linkbait (we'll discuss why links are important a little further down).

Study the popular bookmarks on del.icio.us to get a feel for what people are linking to

Such things as HowTo's and Lists are always good fodder for linkbait and you should be aiming to get onto those pages by writing appropriate copy. (you want to be there, because being there will gain you links, and links = traffic, more on that soon...).

Use html lists, headlines and other visual means of breaking up posts in order to make them easier to read and skim

Link out, link often and link generously -- Really, forget any rubbish you may have heard about depleting page rank, or any concerns you have over sending away traffic, and work on providing links to great resources your readers will love -- they'll thank you for it, and link to you for it.

Fight bloggers block by getting inventive, and doing some research.

Some of the best blog specific resources for copy writing, and linkbaiting are:

Brian Clark's CopyBlogger.com

Darren Rowse's Content Tips

Performancing Content Section

2. Make it Easy for People to Link to You
All of the above tips on writing more attractive, useful and linkable copy are geared to two things:

Providing what your readers want
Gaining links
Links are the currency with which one trades on the web, the lingua franca of the internet and key to ranking, and traffic. Hint: They're really, really important ok?

Essentially, you're looking for this:

Links coming to your posts, from many different sources
Links preferably have relevant keywords in the text used to make the link and again preferably come from sites on a similar topic
Links from trusted, authoritative sites
Apart from writing great linkable copy, there are a few things you can do to make sure that your posts get linked, and hence ranked aswell as get more bang for your buck per link.

Encourage readers to submit your posts to Digg and del.icio.us, or more specific link sites depending on your subject matter. Those categories in del.icio.us for example, are exported by users to their own blogs (targeted, keyworded link text = good), and they often kick off a knock on effect [pdf] that can have wild implications for your Search traffic.
There are varios widgets for most blog software to do the above for you, just have a search through your blog softwares list of plugins.

Where possible, make sure your urls contain your keywords. Contrary to popular opinion, this is not because Search engines pay particularly more attention to urls with keywods, but because people often just paste urls into comments, blog posts and forums where they are automatically linked by the software. Those links, contain the keywords, and it's keywords in links, from authoratitive, trusted sites, that are what we want.

Place a "link to this post" widget on your blogs templates

Ask other bloggers in your niche for links -- but don't make a pest of yourself, nobody likes to be hassled, and some people turn down link requests on general principle (me for example..). See Trisha's thread in the Performancing forums on link exchanges for a lively discussion on the merits of the dreaded link exchange. -- My personal advice is dont bother, do the other things listed here and all of it will fall into place.

Network like crazy, see below...

Although there are lots of posts out there on links, I couldn't find much that would add value to what i've written above. If you have resources to share, please post them in the comments.

3. Networking, the Unsung Hero of Blog SEO
You read little about networking in this context. Many bloggers into SEO are facinated with the technicalities, despite it being a very simple thing to do and thus miss one of the biggest opportunities to gain links, readers, and traffic.

Done right, a well built network of contacts, friends and like-minded bloggers can seriously help you get the link love you need, both directly and indirectly. Here are a few tips and resources for working your network for better Search traffic:

Read Chris Garrett's Networking for Blog Success
Comment and participate on blogs within your niche -- Get to know the people around you

Email with them, LINK to them, they'll reciprocate, trust me.

Expand outside of blogs -- find forums, newsletters and groups in your topic

Use social bookmarking sites to discover related topics (see right hand side) and hence expand your groups, newsletters, forums and blogs search even further

Above all: Be generous. If you respect your network, and work hard to be part of the community surounding your topic, the rewards can really pay of -- never abuse it, it tends ot backfire in all kinds of horrible ways.

4. Bonus Tip

There's always a bonus tip, didn't you know?
If you're really set on learning more, more than my overview here -- and if i really can't dissuade you from getting caught up in what i consider a massive waste of time for the majority of bloggers (technical seo) then at least pay attention to the right people :) Here's a list of my favorite, and most authoratitive SEO blogs:

Graywolfs SEO Blog

Search Engine Watch

Aaron Wall's Threadwatch.org

Greg Boser's WebGuerrilla

Matt Cutts - Google

Jill Whalens HighRankings Forum

Aaron Wall's SEOBook.com

Digital Point Forums

Loren Baker's Search Engine Journal

Source: Performancing

Blog Advertising Programs

2006-07-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

AdBrite

Description: Allows publishers to sell text ads on their sites

About page

AdEngage

Description: Allows you to sell text ads on your blog.

About page

AdGenta

Description: A kind of manual Adsense

About page

Blog - Feed

Adsense

Description: The ubiquitous contextual ad program from Google

About page

Blog - Feed

Affiliate Sensor

Description: Contextual affiliate text links

Warning: Snake oil seller one page sales letter website with spammy looking text links in the footer. Does not inspire confidence.

All Feeds

Description: Varied offerings from contextual ads to search ads and affiliate links

About page

Banner Boxes

Description: Contextual looking Adsense like ads

About page

BidClix

Description: Allows publishers to sell text ads on a PPC basis

About page

BidVertiser

Description: Adsense looking ads where advertisers bid for placement by site

About page

Blog Ads

Description: Banners in all shapes and sizes where publishers join groups of similar publishers. Blog specific.

About page

Blog - Feed

CB Pro Sense

Description: Provides auto generation of ClickBank affiliate links

Warning: Snake oil sale one page sales letter with lot's of exclamation marks and outrageous promises of instant wealth.

Click Ads Direct

Description: Unclear what the exact model is, but they appear to be pitching the exclusivity angle

About page

Chitika eMiniMalls

Description: Contextually served interactive ads filled by Shopping.com and others. Allows readers to find reviews and more info on products aswell as purchase

About page

Blog - Feed

Clicksor

Description: Contextual network matching to affiliate programs

Warning: These guys do pop-up/unders

About page

Context Web

Description: Adsense look-a-like contextual ads

About page

Crisp Ads

Description: Blog ad network where publishers can join the "catalogue" and have advertisers be able to browse their blog then buy ads, or earn on PPC from showing text ads

About page

Amusingly, this blog network doesn't appear to have a blog

Expo Active

Description: Lord knows, there's no way to tell without signing up

Warning: Website looks like it was thrown together in about 10mins. Very worrying.

About page

Fast Click

Description: Variety of different formats including regular text ads

About page

Feedburner

Description: Various kinds of banners and text ads for RSS feeds

About page

Blog - Feed

Feedster

Description: Similar offerings to Feedburner, text ads and banners in feeds

About page

Blog - Feed

Federated Media

Description: John Battelle's ad network for blogs. Banner ads in various sizes.

About page

Blog - Feed

Info Grabber

Description: Autogenerated contextual links to affilate sites advertising with Commission Junction / Share A Sale

About page

IntelliTXT

Description: Links words in the body of your text contextually to advertisers

About page

Kanoodle BrightAds

Description: Contextual Adsense like ads

About page

Kontera

Description: Very similar to IntelliTXT

About page

Mirago Context Stream

Description: Mirago is a third tier PPC engine, it can deliver contextual PPC results into content

About page

Nixxie

Description: UK specific IntelliTXT like product

About page

Pheedo

Description: Provide "tools" to integrate ads into regular and feed content

About page

Blog - Feed

Quigo AdSonar

Description: Private label PPC bidding for text ads on your site

Note: Must have 1M+ page views a month to join
About page

Revenue Pilot

Description: Provides a PPC Search solution for sites. Possibly a little too complex for most busy bloggers to be bothered with.

About page

Search Feed

Description: Search and content PPC text ad integration. Like Revenue Pilot, a little complex

About page

Target Point

Description: Contextual affiliate text ads payed out on a CPC basis

About page

Veoda

Description: Auto generated PPC text links provided by other third tier PPC engines

About page

Source: Performancing

Blog Tools

2006-06-22T07:08:00.000-07:00
Statistics Packages

• Sitemeter

• Google Analytics

• My Blog Log

• WebAnalyse

• Performancing Metrics

• AWStats

• Mint

• Extreme

• Webalizer

• Stat Counter

• Measure Map

• Slim Stat

Blog Editors

• Ecto for Mac and Windows

• Qumana

• BlogJet

• Zoundry

• w.bloggar

• Blog Desk

• Post2Blog

• Performancing for Firefox

• Mars Edit

News Aggregators and News Sourcing Tools

• Bloglines

• FeedDemon

• Technorati

• Google Reader

• Website Watcher

• BlogPulse

• Blogarithm

• Topix

• Blog Bridge

• Grazr

• Rojo

• Memeorandum

• NewsGator Online

• Net News Wire

Email Subscription and Newsletter Services

• FeedBlitz

• Zookoda

• Aweber

• Yutter

• RssFwd

• Feedburner’s Email Subscription Service

Blog Poll Tools

• Blog Polls.com

• Vizu

• Free Blog Poll

• Blog Poll

• Blog Flux Polls

• WP Polls

Other Tools

• Pingoat – pinging service

• Pingomatic – another pinging service

• AudioBlogger – audio post to your blog via phone

• BlogRolling – a service to manage your blog roll

• Creative Commons – copyright protections service

• Feedburner – RSS tool that adds a variety of features to your blog’s RSS feed

• Picasa – find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC

• Flickr – Store and share your images - good way of hosting images if you don’t have a stand alone blog on your own domain.

• Flock – A browser that enables sharing and blogging from within it

• Copyscape – allows you to track down other sites that are stealing your content

• TalkDigger – ‘find, follow and join conversations evolving on the Internet.’

• Blog Flux – Stats, Pinging and Directory

• Backpack It – A place to organise your to do lists, notes, files, reminders and more - all online

• Basecamp – Like Backpack it (same people behind it) but great for collaboration on projects.

• Ice Rocket – Blog Search

• coComment – Keep track of the comments you leave on different blogs in a central place

• co.mments – Similar name to coComment but not to be confused with it - a way of bookmarking and following comment threads via RSS

• Gabbly – Add live chat to our blog posts (like real time comments combined with IRC)

• Del.icio.us – Social Bookmarking site - good for sourcing stories but also great if you get linked to on it to get traffic

• Digg – Another major Social Bookmarking site

• Only Wire – a bookmarklet that submits posts to multiple social bookmarking sites at once

• Odeo – a tool for recording and sharing audio/podcasting

• TagCloud – produces Tag Clouds for your blog from RSS feeds

• Indie Karma – a micropayment system for bloggers

• Tiny URL – Turns long URLs into tiny manageable ones

• Swicki – a new type of search engine that harnesses the power of a web community - sort of like a search engine and wiki combined

• Stock.xchng – Free Stock Photos

• Favicon Maker – allows you to make a favicon from a photo

• YouTube – a tool for putting video on your blog

• blip.tv – another video uploading tool

WEB DIRECTORIES (These should all be free)

2006-04-10T01:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.vxbox.com/
http://www.absolutedirectory.com/
http://www.add-link.info/
http://www.addurl-free.com/
http://www.aeoma.com/
http://www.a-free-directory.info
http://www.agada.info
http://www.alldotnet.com/
http://www.allthewebsites.org
http://mkdir.anchorbase.com
http://www.alphadir.com/
http://www.apexoo.com/directory/
http://www.a-web-directory.info/
http://www.blackdhalia.com/
http://www.blisswolff.com/
http://blue.daffodil.uk.com
http://bluemushrooms.com
http://www.bluenoserlinks.com/
http://www.buy-modern-art.co.uk/
http://www.cachedirectory.com/
http://www.cash-for-surveys.com/dir/
http://www.cherrydir.com/
http://chillycool.com/
http://www.clasione.com/
http://computer-remote-control.com/directory
http://www.content-directory.co.uk/
http://www.cyborginfo.com/
http://www.dhundo.com/dir/
http://www.digitalseo.info/dir/
http://www.directory-active.info/
http://www.directory-business.info
http://www.directoryforce.com/
http://www.directoryhi.com/
http://www.directory-internet.info/
http://www.directory-link.info/
http://www.dirone.com/
http://dir.seo7.net/
http://www.directorystorm.com
http://www.dir-submission.com
http://www.dwff.com/
http://directory.ezweb-tools.com/
http://fabaroo.com/
http://fabarooni.com/
http://fastpaths.com/
http://www.findgoodsites.com/
http://www.finditfred.com/
http://www.findwhatwhere.info/
http://uk.geeksonsteroids.com
http://www.guide-directory.info/
http://www.4do.org/
http://www.4-fun.biz/directory/
http://www.777media.com/
http://www.onedollar.co.in/dir/
http://www.funender.com/free_link_directory/
http://www.3dollarauto.com/
http://www.addyoursitefreesubmit.com/
http://www.monkey-directory.com
http://www.funender.com/free_link_directory/
http://www.addyoursitefreesubmit.com/
http://www.monkey-directory.com/
http://www.free-website-directory.com
http://www.gdotz.com
http://www.saanvi.org/
http://www.100pluscheapwebhosting.com/resource/
http://www.dmscs.co.uk
http://www.webmasterdev.com
http://uk.geeksonsteroids.com
http://www.guide-directory.info/
http://www.4do.org/
http://www.4-fun.biz/directory/
http://www.777media.com/
http://www.idorel.com/
http://www.ilushkin.com/directory/
http://www.infovisual.info/directory/
http://directory.inmeres.com/add-url-free.php
http://www.jlinternet.co.uk/directory/
http://www.jupiter-directory.info/
http://www.directory.kalius.net/
http://www.kande.be/
http://www.kingbloom.com/
http://www.kingoftheweb.net/
http://www.kwikgoblin.com/
http://www.linksmatch.com/
http://www.linketeria.com/
http://www.links-factory.com/
http://www.linksnavigator.com/
http://www.look4business.org/
http://www.mammoth-directory.com/
http://www.mars-directory.info/
http://www.maxlinks.org/
http://www.megri.com/directory/
http://www.mercury-directory.info/
http://www.moon-directory.info
http://referralandrecommendation.com/linkdirectory/
http://www.neptune-directory.info/
http://www.netkushi.com/directory/
http://www.network-room.com/links/
http://www.nintra.com/directory/
http://www.pedsters-planet.co.uk/directory/
http://perfext.com/
http://www.pileiton.com/
http://www.pleaseretrieve.com/
http://www.pluto-directory.info
http://www.poddys.com/
http://dir.portprophecy.com/
http://www.pr3.co.uk/directory/
http://www.profitchoice.com/webdir/
http://www.purple-directory.com/
http://www.querycube.com/
http://www.quick-silver.org/
http://www.ranked1.net/directory/
http://www.rdirectory.net/
http://www.redjuniper.com/
http://www.retailposinfo.com/directory/
http://www.riodirectory.com/
http://www.saturn-directory.info/
http://www.searchave.com/
http://search-group.com/
http://www.searchlook.com/
http://searchranger.net/
http://searchsight.com/Directory.htm
http://www.searchtwentyfour.com/
http://www.searchwiz.org/
http://www.searchworth.com/
http://www.seekabove.com/
http://www.seekon.com/
http://www.seofriendlydirectory.com/
http://www.simpledir.com/
http://www.sitelibrary.net/
http://www.sitesondisplay.com/
http://www.skaloosh.com/
http://www.softzdirectory.com/
http://sonicquest.com/
http://www.speedydirectory.com/
http://www.spheri.com/
http://www.sun-directory.info/
http://www.sumwd.com/
http://www.suredirectory.com/
http://directory.sysice.com/
http://thebusinessdir.com
http://www.themedirectory.net/
http://www.thevividedge.com/
http://www.tsection.com/
http://www.turnpike.net/
http://www.uranus-directory.info/
http://www.uudir.com/
http://www.uuiq.com/
http://www.velendi.com/
http://www.venus-directory.info/
http://www.web-central.info
http://www.webdirectory.co.in/
http://www.webmastertag.com/
http://www.websearches.info/
http://www.websitetop.com/
http://www.xland.info/
http://www.yourfreelink.com/
http://www.yourlinkdirectory.com/
http://directory.zappster.com/
http://www.zerovis.com/dir/
http://www.addyoursitefreesubmit.com/
http://www.monkey-directory.com/
http://www.free-website-directory.com
http://www.gdotz.com
http://www.saanvi.org/
http://www.dmscs.co.uk/links/
http://www.addurl-free.com/
http://www.TheSEOKing.com
http://www.addurl-free.com
http://www.uncoverchina.com
http://www.outsidethecube.net
http://www.vxbox.com/
http://www.absolutedirectory.com/
http://www.add-link.info/
http://www.addurl-free.com/
http://www.aeoma.com/
http://www.a-free-directory.info
http://www.agada.info
http://www.alldotnet.com/
http://www.allthewebsites.org
http://mkdir.anchorbase.com
http://www.alphadir.com/
http://www.apexoo.com/directory/
http://www.a-web-directory.info/
http://www.blackdhalia.com/
http://www.blisswolff.com/
http://blue.daffodil.uk.com
http://bluemushrooms.com
http://www.bluenoserlinks.com/
http://www.buy-modern-art.co.uk/
http://www.cachedirectory.com/
http://www.cash-for-surveys.com/dir/
http://www.cherrydir.com/
http://chillycool.com/
http://www.clasione.com/
http://computer-remote-control.com/directory
http://www.content-directory.co.uk/
http://www.cyborginfo.com/
http://www.dhundo.com/dir/
http://www.digitalseo.info/dir/
http://www.directory-active.info/
http://www.directory-business.info
http://www.directoryforce.com/
http://www.directoryhi.com/
http://www.directory-internet.info/
http://www.directory-link.info/
http://www.dirone.com/
http://dir.seo7.net/
http://www.directorystorm.com
http://www.dir-submission.com
http://www.dwff.com/
http://directory.ezweb-tools.com/
http://fabaroo.com/
http://fabarooni.com/
http://fastpaths.com/
http://www.findgoodsites.com/
http://www.finditfred.com/
http://www.findwhatwhere.info/
http://uk.geeksonsteroids.com
http://www.guide-directory.info/
http://www.4do.org/
http://www.4-fun.biz/directory/
http://www.777media.com/
http://www.idorel.com/
http://www.ilushkin.com/directory/
http://www.addurl-free.com/
http://www.infovisual.info/directory/
http://directory.inmeres.com/add-url-free.php
http://www.jlinternet.co.uk/directory/
http://www.jupiter-directory.info/
http://www.directory.kalius.net/
http://www.kande.be/
http://www.kingbloom.com/
http://www.kingoftheweb.net/
http://www.kwikgoblin.com/
http://www.linksmatch.com/
http://www.linketeria.com/
http://www.links-factory.com/
http://www.linksnavigator.com/
http://www.look4business.org/
http://www.mammoth-directory.com/
http://www.mars-directory.info/
http://www.maxlinks.org/
http://www.megri.com/directory/
http://www.mercury-directory.info/
http://www.moon-directory.info
http://referralandrecommendation.com/linkdirectory/
http://www.neptune-directory.info/
http://www.netkushi.com/directory/
http://www.network-room.com/links/
http://www.nintra.com/directory/
http://www.pedsters-planet.co.uk/directory/
http://perfext.com/
http://www.pileiton.com/
http://www.pleaseretrieve.com/
http://www.pluto-directory.info
http://www.poddys.com/
http://dir.portprophecy.com/
http://www.pr3.co.uk/directory/
http://www.profitchoice.com/webdir/
http://www.purple-directory.com/
http://www.querycube.com/
http://www.quick-silver.org/
http://www.ranked1.net/directory/
http://www.rdirectory.net/
http://www.redjuniper.com/
http://www.retailposinfo.com/directory/
http://www.riodirectory.com/
http://www.saturn-directory.info/
http://www.searchave.com/
http://search-group.com/
http://www.searchlook.com/
http://searchranger.net/
http://searchsight.com/Directory.htm
http://www.searchtwentyfour.com/
http://www.searchwiz.org/
http://www.searchworth.com/
http://www.seekabove.com/
http://www.seekon.com/
http://www.seofriendlydirectory.com/
http://www.simpledir.com/
http://www.sitelibrary.net/
http://www.sitesondisplay.com/
http://www.skaloosh.com/
http://www.softzdirectory.com/
http://sonicquest.com/
http://www.speedydirectory.com/
http://www.spheri.com/
http://www.sun-directory.info/
http://www.sumwd.com/
http://www.suredirectory.com/
http://directory.sysice.com/
http://thebusinessdir.com
http://www.themedirectory.net/
http://www.thevividedge.com/
http://www.tsection.com/
http://www.turnpike.net/
http://www.uranus-directory.info/
http://www.uudir.com/
http://www.uuiq.com/
http://www.velendi.com/
http://www.venus-directory.info/
http://www.web-central.info
http://www.webdirectory.co.in/
http://www.webmastertag.com/
http://www.websearches.info/
http://www.websitetop.com/
http://www.xland.info/
http://www.yourfreelink.com/
http://www.yourlinkdirectory.com/
http://directory.zappster.com/
http://www.zerovis.com/dir/
http://www.addyoursitefreesubmit.com/
http://www.monkey-directory.com/
http://www.free-website-directory.com
http://www.gdotz.com
http://www.saanvi.org/
http://www.dmscs.co.uk/links/
http://www.TheSEOKing.com
http://www.outsidethecube.net/dir/
http://www.addyoursitefreesubmit.com/
http://www.funender.com/free_link_directory/
http://www.01webdirectory.com
http://www.ranktips.com/directory
http://dir.icecoldinfo.com
http://www.icecoldinfo.com/search
http://www.tomdirectory.com
http://www.unifieddirectory.com
http://www.dailydirectory.com
http://www.kenlist.com
http://www.rndirectory.com
http://www.saltlist.com
http://www.directorydelux.com

Methods of Website Promotion

2006-03-15T06:06:00.000-08:00
By Michael Medeiros

Promoting a Website is not an easy task. New Website Developers may have the impression of building a Website and sales are generated. This is far from true. There are millions of Websites. Within those millions, there are bound to be competitors. To rise above, or obtain a portion of the market-share, developers need to utilize an effective promotion campaign.

Establishing a Website is not much different than a brick-and-mortar business. Open a Deli in the heart of a City and millions of potential customers will pass daily. In contrast, open the Deli in the suburbs, and there would be one quarter of the potential customers. Obviously, the City would be much more expensive to get started and maintain, but the revenue should provide for the added expense.

The same holds true in Website Promotion. However, the landscape is different. There are no streets and sidewalks customers have to use. Therefore, our businesses need to be found by customers in a variety of places. It needs to be brought to the potential customer, or viewable from wherever they may be lurking.

Where do we start with Website Promotion?

One of the topics sweeping the developer’s world is Optimization. The internet will naturally bring potential customers, if the site is optimized properly. Computers work hard on matching relevant information. This is a huge benefit to e-business owners.

Before promotion begins, or altering existing efforts, understand the Internet’s backbone. Why has the World Wide Web become popular? Most should agree, information retrieval rules. Internet users don’t have to sit down and watch television waiting for local weather. They don’t have to wait for news of interest. They don’t have to drive to find the best prices. They don’t have to look through cook-books to find a recipe. They don’t have to talk to salespeople for a car. Today it’s all on the, “information,” super highway.

As a developer, focus on information delivery before beginning promotion of a Website. If a page can be divided into two topics, make two separate pages. Over-use of graphics can present problems too. While it’s nice to make a Site pretty, most people don’t care. They want the information or products they are seeking. Sectors such as art could be an exception, but for the most part, lots of graphics are a waste. People read on the internet. Give people something to read, not just something to view.

Promotion Budget

If launching a new campaign, it may take time to decipher an effective budget. There are simple variables that should be considered with budgeting. Given the potential scope of a Website, advertising should be devoted to different areas of the site. For example, paying to promote the free portion of a Website is not logical. In contrast, a free forum may sell advertising. The advertising segment of the site should be exploited.

There is a simple formula to develop a budget. If a site is new, it takes some research and investment to draw an accurate conclusion. Put simply, consider the following; how many potential customers are required to make a sale? From each sale, how much profit is generated? Of the profits, how much is invested into advertising? This identifies the value of potential customers. If ten customers make one sale, and ten dollars are allocated towards advertising, each customer is potentially worth one dollar. However, room for growth could be made by reducing the value of a potential customer or increasing the advertising contribution. A competitive sector may force reduced profits rather than reduced value of potential customers.

Comprehensive budgeting could be applied to aspects of the business. Promote each aspect as a unique entity. For example, a Website that sells music and movies could have separate budgets for the segments. This could reveal vital information to the survival of a business. Implement effective models that assist in tracking expense and results. This is fairly simple with website statistics and tracking tools.

Free Traffic Promotion – Keywords and Phrases

When it comes to free traffic, it’s about information retrieval. People utilize tools that provide information accurately and quickly. These tools rely on the developer’s interpretation of a Website or page (On-Site Optimization). What is the Website or page about? What phrases are people looking for that want to use this site? Information retrieval is a complicated double-edge-sword between people surfing the web and people creating the web. When the people creating the web do not create clear and focused pages, people surfing the Web cannot find them.

Free traffic is a gift from creating user friendly pages, clearly focusing on a specific topic, and the result of promotion efforts. It stems from a good balance. While free traffic primarily comes from Search Engines, it also comes from referring sites. People will write about a Website in blogs, forums, or on their personal pages. People will add links to Sites they like.

If developers hunt for free traffic, problems can arise. Hunting for free traffic has made developers try tricks that got the site removed from Search Engines. This can present a big problem as they are a large source of free targeted traffic. Keep free traffic in mind while promoting a Website, but don’t make it the focus of promotion. It will come naturally over time. Take it as a gift and an acknowledgement that a Website has been optimized well, presents clear information, and is promoted in the right places. Although some may argue the point, don’t anticipate quality free traffic to begin immediately. It takes extensive thought, advertising, and planning for this to happen, especially within competitive sectors.

Promoting in Directories

One place to start promoting a Website is Website Directories. Most directories are organized by topic. Some are more comprehensive than others. In addition, there are, “Niche,” directories that focus on one topic. For example, there are directories for shopping, reference, art, and automotive sites. In contrast, there are general directories that provide all the niches.

Finding an appropriate place within a directory may be difficult. Directories can a large structure. However, a comprehensive structure benefits advertisers with targeting. Comprehensive directories enable developers’ to classify a Website. For example, it maybe possible to promote a site the sells speakers, for cars, but only domestic cars, and ones that are late model. In addition, some directories may implement regional indexing. Targeting an index in a directory can be complex, but it can be a great benefit too.

Don’t expect to rush from directory to directory and establish a bunch or references. Each directory is unique. Take time to understand how the directory is structured, what they expect as a title and description, and how the suggestion process works. Seek similar sites; take note of where they appear, and how they are described.

Directories are generally affordable solutions. Most Directories are indexed by search engines. They help search engines understand a sites focus. In addition, they are a reference point for some people. It may be a good idea to seek-out one or two directories a week, or as appropriate to a budget. Finding good directories will consume a lot of time. However, once a link is added, it will remain there for a long duration.

News and Media Promotion – Public Relations

Public Relations an important factor when promoting any Business. News and Media channels are the vehicles that convey information to the public. News about a business can make a huge impact on the public. Good news can make lots of people remember a business. Some developers release news about every change or added feature to a Website. Ironically, some developers never utilize this area of promotion.

There are a variety of distribution sites that will expose news releases to numerous channels, for a modest fee. In addition, most will offer free options. It may be a good idea to utilize free options for news that is not very important. For example, adding a, “Calculator,” to a Website probably will not gain much attention. However, anything that may be important to the public needs to be announced.

If it can be added to the budget, outsource public relations efforts. PR companies have knowledge of what the media likes and contacts that make them valuable. PR specialists can be found in almost every City.

Ezine Articles - Provide Rich Content

Writing articles is a powerful promotion tool. Some developers refer to this as, “Viral Marketing”. There are Websites that require content. Content brings them traffic. Traffic builds valuable ad space.

Article Distribution sites assist promoters with circulating articles. Many Ezines rely on Distribution Sites for their content. Post an article to a distribution site and the article is, “up-for-grabs,” to anyone. The article begins to circulate the internet like a virus. Everywhere it appears, reference is given to the author and their Website.

Advertising on the Web

There are a variety of reference websites. Generally, these sites consist of Forums, Article content, and Online Chats. They rely on selling ad space as the main revenue stream. While some reference developers are, “trying to rich quick,” there are sites that offer affordable solutions to promote a Website. With free traffic in mind, seek-out text link advertising venues. Look for sites that charge a flat fee. Sites that charge per click or by the impression usually mask links for tracking. This does not build good recognition with search engines.

Seek relevant opportunities for promoting the Website. If the allows people to buy tennis shoes, a sports reference and information area may be prove beneficial. Another might be a reference site about footwear. Trial and error will reveal good advertising sources for promotion. Regardless of the site being promoted, there are reference areas that are valuable promotion tools.

Promotion Summary

The internet moves fast in certain aspects. When it comes to Website promotion, it moves slowly. Modifications that are made to a Web Page are not going to be seen the next day. Significant results appear months later. The most important area of promotion, is keeping accurate records. Website promotion is complex. Developers need to consider on-site and off-site optimization, targeting, and ad construction. The right mix can provide a significant advantage over the competition.

Michael Medeiros has an extensive background in business and advertising. He is the proprietor of the Mjmls Classifieds (http://www.Mjmls.com), which is an open-source advertising solution for businesses and individuals.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Medeiros

Easiest Way To Build Web Site Traffic

2006-03-15T06:04:00.000-08:00
By Robert Roy

Yes, the best and easiest way to build Web site traffic is to write articles. And save A lot of time submitting them.

It is through well written articles and keeping your visitor wanting to learn more that you will see more traffic on your Web site. More traffic means more profit for you.

There are many reasons why you need to write articles. Here are just a few. 1. It is easy to do. You can write articles based on your area of expertise or niche. Even if you are not an expert you can learn by surfing the Web. Reading a few articles on the subject will enhance your knowledge to allow you to write an article.

I feel that an article should be more than 400 words but leas than 1500. Unless it's a sales page you will tend to lose your audience with more than 1500 and not build Web site traffic.

2. You will get a pre-targeted audience. People who read your article are those who are interested in your target. Once they are interested, it doesn't take much to get them pre-sold, increase your Web site traffic. And then ka-ching - a sale.

3. Better links. One of the ways that search engines give a site higher rankings is based on the number of "back links". If those reading your articles are interested they will check out your Web site and bingo, you have another back link.

Links back to your site give more points to your rankings then those from your site to other Web sites.

4. Need a call for action. In most of your articles you need to let your readers know what you would like them to do. Either sign up for your e-zine, go to another page that will pre-sell them or purchase a product. In most articles you will have a way to use a "resource box". This is where you will put your "call to action" as well as possibly a little bit about you the author. Here is my resource box for my orchid site articles. "Sign up for tips in our monthly Orchid Newsletter and get your copy of "All About Orchids" e-book and your 10% Discount on an orchid. http://www.orchids-plus-more.com/orchidaceae.html "

I find that the best way for me to write an article is to read 3 or 4 articles about orchids or internet business. Once I finish this I usually have a good idea about what I will write about. Possibly then read a few more articles on the topic and begin writing and watch the Web site traffic increase.

At times, some webmasters don't have the time to write. There are many free lance writers out there who will write articles for you and not charge a lot of money. Some examples are Elance and Rent A Coder.

Once you write an article I suggest that you submit it to article directories. These are some of the best places for "new visitors" to find out about you and what you are saying. Once you get it into the directories you will notice an increase in your Web site traffic.

What a wonderful surprise when I started doing this I noticed a 30% increase in traffic within the first week. It seems the more I submit the more traffic.

You do need to know that submitting to directories is tedious work and takes time. It was taking me about 6 hours to submit to about 40 directories.

Now it takes me about 11/2 hours.

Do you want to see how I freed up 5 hours? Go to my Web site page http://start-internet-business-from-college.com/web-site-marketing-strategy

The easiest, best time saving way to submit articles to hundreds of site. Saves you hours! http://www.start-internet-business-from-college.com/web-site-marketing-strategy.html

My name is Bob Roy and I enjoy helping to make a new internet business successful. I have expertise in using the only all-in-one internet business package. I kinow that if you start an internet business you want it to be a success and I will be able to help you. Go to http://www.start-internet-business-from-college.com/ for more information.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Robert_Roy

5 Quick and Easy Steps On HOW-TO Send Your Website A SURGE Of Amazon’s Traffic For FREE!

2006-03-12T01:53:00.000-08:00
by Cory Threlfall
(c) The IWE, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.internetwondersezine.com

What I’m about to reveal to you in this article will
literally change the way you look at ‘Amazon’ forever.

As you know, Amazon is a buyers market place and is a VERY
powerful search engine for products of all sorts,
especially Books.

Now, you’re probably saying to yourself, “yeah, I already
know that about Amazon, but how do I get my share of
Amazon’s traffic?”.

Well, I’m going to answer that question in just a few
moments, but first, here’s just some of the benefits you’ll
receive once you’ve ‘Set-Up’ what I’m about to show you:

- you’ll position yourself as an Expert within your Niche

- you’ll receive Highly Targeted traffic to your website

- you’ll be able to build a HIGHLY targeted ‘Opt-In’ list

Those are some pretty Powerful benefits wouldn’t you say?

And who would of ever guessed that Amazon could deliver
this to you.

I only recently learned of this tactic myself from a Very
well known Internet marketer who was kind enough to share
it with me.

So now, I’m going to do the same for you.

Are you ready to see what Amazon can do for your Business
and Credibility?

Enough said, lets get started.

Step #1. Set up a account with Amazon.

This is the easiest part of the whole task. Simply go to
http://www.amazon.com and set up an account for yourself.

This should only take a few minutes and is very straight
forward.

Step #2. Click on your “Your Name” Store tab.

Once you’ve set up your account you should have been given
a password in order to login to your account.

If you’re not logged in already, login now.

Now, from within the members area there should be a row of
tabs at the top of the members area, click on the one that
says “Your Name” Store(ex. ‘Corys Store’ tab).

This will take you to a different area with a different
sub-menu.

Click on the tab in the sub-menu that says “About You Area”.

Step #3. Setting up your “About You Area”.

Now this is where you have to pay ‘Special Attention’
because this is what people will see when they click on
your ‘About You’ tab.

Assuming you are at the ‘About You Area’ you’ll notice that
you have spots available to put your Picture, Name,
Nickname, eMail Address, Real Name and About Me.

Go ahead and fill out all the area’s accept your ‘About Me’.

The ‘About Me’ spot is what I’ll talk about in the next
step, but for now, just fill out all the other area’s and
if you want to put up a picture of yourself, you can, it’s
up to you.

Step #4. Setting up the ‘About Me’ section.

This is probably the single most important part of this
whole process because this is where your potential customer
will read about who you are and what you and your business
is all about, so do take this seriously.

Now, you have about 4,000 characters of space to write up a
description about who you are and what your business is
about, so its up to you on how long you want your
description to be.

Before you start writing your description this is what You
have to do First within the first 70 to 80 characters of
your ‘About Me’ description and I’ll show you an example of
how mine looks so you’ll be able to see this in action.

(ex. About me: Hi, I’m Cory Threlfall and I’m the
Editor/Publisher of ‘www.internetwondersezine.com’ which is
a …)

Do you see what I’ve done?

I’ve incorporated my ‘Domain Name’ in quotes into my First
70 to 80 characters of my description so when they click on
my ‘About Me’ and read my profile they’ll also see my
Domain Name, and if they wish to find out more about me
they can either ‘Copy and Paste or Type’ my domain into
there browser which will then bring them to my website
where they can either ‘Subscribe’ to my newsletter or read
my sale copy which will then get them to Opt-In to my
newsletter.

This is where the ‘List Building’ starts to take place from
the traffic sent through Amazon.

Now, we’ve already established that Amazon is a High
Traffic website and now that you’ve set up your ‘About Me
Area’ the way I’ve outlined it above I’m now going to show
you how to direct Amazon’s traffic to your website.

Step #5. Directing Amazon’s traffic to your website.

This is where the fun starts. And once you see How its done
you’ll probably kick yourself in the butt like I did when I
was shown How-To do this.

What we need to do now is a little exercise so you’ll see
for yourself how you’ll tap into Amazon’s traffic.

So, we know that Amazon is best known for Books, so click
on the ‘Books’ tab within Amazon’s members area. This will
take you to a different page.

In the upper left corner you’ll see a ‘Search Books’ search
box.

Now, for the purpose of this exercise, just so that we’re
on the same page, lets use ‘internet marketing’ as the
search term.

So, go ahead and type that in and press GO!.

You should now see a bunch of listings on books related to
‘internet marketing’.

Scroll down and select the “33 Days To Online Profits”
link. This will bring you to its Product Description page.

Within this Product Description page you’ll find Product
Details, Editorial Reviews and most important of all, All
Customer Reviews.

Notice I said “and most important of all, All Customer
Reviews”.

Thats right, all you need to do is ‘Write Reviews’ on books
within your particular Niche and when potential customers
are reviewing the book you wrote the review on and they
scroll down and happen to read your review and click on
Your Name to see what you’re all about, guess what they’ll
see?

They’ll see your profile with your Name, Nick Name, eMail
Address and your ‘About Me’ description with your Domain
Name screaming out at them which can easily be typed into
there browser.

There you have it, “5 Quick and Easy Steps On HOW-TO Send
Your Website A SURGE Of Amazon’s Traffic For FREE!”

I truly hope you see the benefits of writing reviews and
how it will make you look in the eyes of your potential
customer.

This is a great tactic to use if you’re looking to
establish yourself as an Expert within your Niche and at
the same time, build a HIGHLY targeted ‘Opt-In’ list that
you can market to for years to come.

Explode Your Google Adsense and Affiliate Commissions Through Niche Blog Content Sites

2006-03-12T01:36:00.000-08:00
by Cory Threlfall
(c) The IWE, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.internetwondersezine.com

Content as we know it is the Life-Blood or FUEL, if you
will, of the Internet.

That was and still is the Internets sole purpose, except
only now it’s commercialized, giving the online
entrepreneur the world at their fingers tips.

And the facts are that usually when people first come
online it’s not to go purchase something, it’s to look for
Information that will answer a question they might have
about a particular product they’re interested in and/or to
a problem they are dealing with and are searching for a
solution.

Ask yourself this, “Why do I go online?”

Does it resemble anything like what I just stated?

Only you can answer that.

These are simply the facts with out a doubt… Period!

Now that you have an idea of WHY people come online, I’m
now going to explain to you how you can…

“Explode Your Google Adsense and Affiliate Commissions
Through Niche Blog Content Sites”

Did you notice the last two words within the quotations?

That’s right, Content Sites.

What are Content Sites?

I think it’s pretty self explanatory but the basic
definition of a Content Site is this - it’s a site that
contains targeted content that targets a particular niche
or many niches.(niche examples: cars, fitness, hobbies,
etc.)

Not quite up to speed on what a blog is, here’s a quick
definition of a blog - a blog(A.K.A. Web-Log) is simply a
place to go and post your personal thoughts that you can
share with your subscribers and/or readership and receive
feedback.

Now that you know the basic definitions of a Content Site
and a Blog lets continue.

Content Sites can contain Hundreds-to-Thousands of pages of
keyword rich content, which by the way is exactly what the
Search Engines love and will come back for if New content
is added on a frequent basis giving the owner of that site
lots of opportunity to benefit from the Free traffic
inwhich the content pages, or what I like to call Feeder
Pages, generate.

So, now that you have an idea of what a Content Site and a
Blog is it’s now time to tell you how you can build your
own Niche Blog Content Site Empire, no matter what your
niche is, using Blogs, Google Adsense and ClickBank
affiliate products.

Bare in mind that the steps outlined below are only going
to be a summarization of the actual process involved.

So, with that said, here it is.

Step #1. Set up a Blog.

The first step is quite simple. All you have to do is set
up a Blog either through…

Blogger.com - http://www.blogger.com

or…

Wordpress.org - http://www.wordpress.org

This blog your setting up is going to be the foundation of
your Niche Blog Content Site and is where the rest of the
pieces of the puzzle are going to be added to once you’ve
set it up.

(Quick Tip: Make sure you use your Target Keywords within
your URL of your niche blog and in the Title and
Description. VERY Important!)

Once you have your niche blog set up move on to Step #2.

Step #2. Adding your Google Adsense code.

Depending on your experience with scripting and html, it’s
now time to add your Google Adsense code to your new niche
blog in 3 strategic places.

Google allows you to add 3 Google Adsense blocks only to
one page, no more than that, so I recommend one at the Top,
one in the Right or Left sidebar depending on the template
you choose and one at the Bottom of your blog.

By doing this your almost forcing your reader to click on a
link within the Google Adsense block, which is of course,
is exactly what you want and where your going to make the
money.

The other great thing about Google Adsense is the ads are
targeted to the content that you post, giving the reader
even more reason to click through.

Here’s a few resources for you that will show you how to
add the Google Adsense code to your blog using the services
I mentioned above if your not sure how to yourself.

Blogger.com:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=964

Wordpress.org: http://www.acmetech.com/blog/adsense-deluxe/

Simply follow the instructions and you’ll have Google
Adsense installed on your niche blog in no time.

Step #3. Find a related ClickBank product.

Now it’s time to go shopping at ClickBank.com -
http://www.clickbank.com - for a related information
product that targets your niche.

Once there click on the link Earn Commissions at the bottom.

This will bring to to their directory where you’ll find
many products to choose from that will target any niche
your blog is about.

(Quick Tip: The first 10 listed under each category are the
TOP converting programs, meaning… their the ones making
the most money.)

If you don’t have a ClickBank.com nickname you’ll have to
sign up for one. It’ll only take you a few minutes.

From there, once you’ve chosen a program to join your going
to want to collect all the affiliate materials available,
like Articles, Banners, Text Links, etc., because your
going to place these on your NEW niche blog site with your
affiliate link linked to them so when your reader clicks on
them and decides to buy the related information, you get
the commission.

Well… there you have it, 3 steps to “Explode Your Google
Adsense and Affiliate Commissions Through Niche Blog
Content Sites”.

Now the only thing left for you to do is to start building
an audience by promoting your Blog.

Here’s a few resources for you to get started with.

Ping-O-Matic - http://pingomatic.com

RSS Top 55 - http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55

Remember this is just a summarized version and is only
going to give you the basic steps, so good luck to you and
your Niche Blog Content Site Empire.

Real Link Popularity Has Nothing To Do With Search Engines

2006-03-12T01:26:00.000-08:00
Although Google uses the phrase “link popularity” as a way to describe how they ranked sites in the early days, and still do in some fashion, link popularity means far more to website promoters than a measure of search engine worthiness.

Link popularity as a marketing tool was around long before Google or any search engines existed. Links are the thread that weaves the web together. Search engines didn’t invent this, they capitalized on it just like all sites on the web have since the beginning.

Your link popularity in a real sense is not a contrived “weight and measure” of your site’s worthiness to be ranked well in a search engine.

Your link popularity is actually based upon how many traffic-driving, visible links you have pointing to your site from other sites in your niche and even from less “relevant” sites than search engines want you to be linked to.

If you can get targeted traffic to your site from another site, regardless of search engine imposed rules for relevancy, by exchanging links or posting on a forum or sharing an article or press release, by all means do so!

Do not worry about people telling you that you are going to ruin your rankings in the engines if you don’t link properly. 90% of the advice out there is from search engine junkies and geeks who rely 100% on search engine traffic.

Without search engines, they couldn’t market their sites to save their lives. Of course they don’t want to do anything to hurt their rankings, their entire livelihood is tied up in that one source of traffic!

Those people are far different from average website owners. We take the search engine rankings we can get PLUS all the other traffic from other sites that we can get. According to our own in-house case studies that’s 80%-85% of the traffic of average sites that have a well rounded marketing campaign!

So it is easy to see why we pay less attention to search engines than the geeks do. The engines only contribute at best 15% of the visitors to any of the sites in our network. (And that’s for purposefully optimized sites using all the tricks and tactics the geeks told us to!)

Therefore, nowadays we give search engines no more than 15% of our time and go for real link popularity that includes a plethora of promotion options.

While people who sit and wait on search engine traffic often find themselves getting bored with little to do, we never run out of promotion that we can do for our sites.

There is always something you can be doing to gain link popularity (link popularity = marketing) every moment you are logged on.

If you find yourself twiddling your thumbs without a clue what you are going to do next to promote your site, there is something wrong with your marketing campaign. It is deficient in Vitamin Link.

You can fix an anemic marketing campaign by spending more time getting content created and syndicated, adopting RSS as a highly valuable traffic generator, and making partnerships out of link partners.

Get (and give) more than simple link exchanges. Exchange articles, other content, and get each others’ links in prominent places around your sites.

Exchange newsletter sign up pages (squeeze pages) or allow people to additionally opt in to your partners list after they opt in to yours.

There are far more ways to promote your site and gain valuable, REAL link popularity than myopic and short-sighted search engine marketing could ever give you.

Don’t get caught up in the search engine marketing myth. There are only ever 10 spots available for your keywords that will get you any significant traffic from any given engine.

What surprises most people who get far enough along in their real link popularity campaign is that they get great rankings in the engines after all. Just by marketing to their audience and not to the engines.

Case in point: A lot of search engine traffic is generated to my blog and other sites from people searching for “jack humphrey.” But customers and readers KNOW to search for my name from all the other marketing that I do to put my name at their fingertips. It’s branding as much as link popularity.

The end result is easy search engine rankings for a name that is not competitive but that, because of all the other marketing efforts in my campaign, puts me in the right places in the engines without any more effort than simply increasing my link popularity by marketing to my niche market.

Marketing to your market, wherever they surf and not just where they occasionally search, is a fail-safe way to market any kind of site on the web. One that lowers the risk of failure (over single-minded search engine obsession) and guarantees longevity and ever-increasing traffic over time.

Paris Hilton's Reputation is SHOT! How's Yours?

2006-03-10T09:25:00.000-08:00
By John Gergye

With apologies for the cheap trick of mentioning Paris Hilton to get your attention, coming to grips with the idea you're about to discover is critically important to your success with search engines!

Because while it's true that there are many factors that determine how well a page ranks in Google - did you know that one stands out above the rest? It's link text. (Also known as anchor text?)

So much so, link text can be the deciding factor when chasing top rankings for extremely competitive keywords.

And for sure can't hurt for lesser search terms.

You see link text creates what's known as "link reputation". Have enough links using the same phrase as the link text and Google can’t help but conclude that's what the page linked to is all about.

Yeah but…how powerful is the link text of inbound links, really?

Well guess what? It's so powerful you can land top listings for a given keyword phrase without the keyword phrase even appearing anywhere on the page.

Since I can sense your skepticism from here, let me prove it using 6 examples which I was able to dig up in about 15 minutes. Starting with

===> The "website traffic" Mystery

First I did a search for "website traffic" in Google.

When I did the search, (and we both know things can change) this site, http://buytraffic.1st-casinoaffiliateprograms.com, was poised in position #3.

Casino affiliates?

Not necessarily what would come to mind as a site dealing with website traffic now is it?

Yet try as I might, when I searched that page for the term "website traffic" I couldn’t find it. Not even once. But when I went in search of the links to that page however here’s what I did find:

"Buy website traffic - casino traffic - You can choose to buy website traffic or if you own an online casino you can buy complete packages including signups, banner displays and unique visitors. This can push your website traffic and signups dramatically."

Huh? See that? That listing’s got "website traffic" in the link text. And a couple more times in the description.

I guess the only possible explanation for the #3 ranking for "website traffic" is the link text. That’s what is causing that page to rank #3 for that term.

===> Cell Phone

For example two I searched on "cell phone". This time Sprint PCS came in at #5 out of 5,100,000 listings in Google.

Once again, the term "cell phone" did NOT appear anywhere on their page.

===> Laptop/Laptops Examples

Next I tried "laptop". The Apple Powerbook listing came in at #4. Yet, and you guessed it, the word "laptop" was no where to be found on that page.

Since I was in the neighborhood, for the fourth example I gave "laptops" a shot. The site was sitting in #4 out of 5,910,000 competing pages when I did that search. Yet once again, the word "laptops" doesn’t show up on that page either.

Of course a check of the backlinks turned this up from the Yahoo Directory:

"Discount Laptops - retailer of new and refurbished notebook computers."

Oh and I found the exact same listing in DMOZ. Since it featured "Discount Laptops" as the link text, it’s only natural Google would conclude the page is about what else? Laptops!

===> Jobs

Monster.com currently holds down the #1 spot for the search term "jobs". Once again, (you beginning to see a trend here?) the word "jobs" does not even appear on that page.

===> Money

Finally I searched on "money". Perched at #16 was MasterCard’s website. Here too, the word "money" was not used even once in the visible text.

===> Summing Up This Link Text Stuff

Based on the evidence when it comes to ranking high in Google, saying link text trumps all is surely not too strong of a statement.

In fact it’s absolutely positively true. Focusing on link text is a surefire Google seo tactic. Yes, content counts, but link text counts for more..

Making link text the closest thing to a sure thing you can get.

Simply put, link text, which is used to develop your site’s link reputation, is one of the most powerful seo techniques going. It gives you ranking momentum like nothing else. Use tightly focused link text with links from high PR pages and you’ve got yourself an unstoppable combination.

So are you capitalizing on the power of link text?

Are you constantly getting links with the appropriate link text in them?

If not why not?

Because as I’ve shown you - link text really does trump all.

John Gergye shares more ideas like this in his recently updated eBook "Traffic From Google in 35 Days". Find out more here: http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/j/tfg35cl.shtml/ Or test your search engine IQ by taking his seo quiz http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/search-engine-quiz.shtml/ and get the free special report "Coming Out On Top".

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Gergye

Does Your Site Deserve a Top Ten Search Engine Ranking?

2006-03-10T08:38:00.000-08:00
By Donald Nelson, copyright 2005

"Can you get my site a top ten ranking in Google?" Many people
ask this question to search engine optimization professionals,
but how many people have ever asked them selves whether their
site "deserves" a top ten ranking in the leading search engines?

Look at it from the point of view of the search engines and the
users of the search engines. The search engines are trying to
offer the best possible matches for queries that people make, and
the searchers want to see the most relevant sites in the first
page of results. So, is your website really among the ten best in
your field? Before you answer the question here are a few things
to consider.

1. Are you an industry leader? Be Realistic. If you are a one-man
or one-woman outfit working from a computer in your basement, you
may not be able to provide the same services, information and
products as competitors who have larger, more-experienced and
better equipped staff.

Although, the search engine robots do not "know" that you are a
new start-up operation, the differences between industry leaders
and beginners is usually reflected in some of the parameters that
search engines measure, and more often than not, the well
established firms wind up at the top of the heap.

2. Does Your Site Look Good? While robotic search engines can't
tell whether a site is pleasing to the eye, the human editors who
decide which sites get listed in directories, such as the Open
Directory Project, are definitely influenced by a site's design.
If you want to compete with the leaders in your field, your site
will have to measure up to the standards set by professionally
designed sites.

3. Is Your Site Content-Rich? This is one of the factors that
separate the top sites from the others. If you offering ten gift
baskets for sale, while your competitor has two hundred items on
display, then his or her site will have more references and links
with the keywords "gift baskets" and this will certainly be
reflected in search engine rankings.

If your competitors have pages and pages of information, articles
and reviews about their products, while you have a skimpy
brochure-like website, then which sites do you think will have
the advantage in the rankings?

4. Is Your Website an "Authority" Site? An authority site is a
site that is recognized as an important source of information in
a particular field. It is often mentioned, and linked to by other
sites. Such a site does not have to go out and search for links.
The websites of the World Bank, United Nations, American Cancer
Society and Greenpeace are examples. You don't have to be this
famous to be an authority site, but you should have an
industry-wide reputation for excellence.

5. Have You Been Around a Long time? A site that has been on the
web since 1996 usually has an advantage in search engine rankings
over a start-up. A site that has been on the web for many years
will have acquired more links and will probably have built up
rich content, and this will usually give it a better placement in
search engine rankings. You can check out your competitors by
doing a "whois" search and see when their website was launched.
The whois searches can be conducted from the websites of the
large domain-name registrars like GoDaddy, Directnic and others.

I haven't written this to discourage anyone from entering the
Internet or with purpose of asking the small sites to fold up and
let the big guys monopolize the web. Despite the obstacles, the
Internet offers a tremendous opportunity for anyone wishing to
spread ideas or do business, and, if you "pay your dues" and work
skillfully, the day will come when your website will be among the
top sites in your field.

Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He
has been working on the Internet since 1995, and is currently the
director of A1-Optimization (http://www.a1-optimization.com), a
firm providing low cost search engine optimization, submission
and web promotion services.

Are your SEO efforts going to waste?

2006-03-10T08:37:00.000-08:00
by: Derek Croote

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a long and complicated process that can be highly rewarding if done correctly. SEO is not a waste of time, but can be if your site doesn’t appeal to visitors or function properly. Your potential customer will be turned off if your site lacks trustworthiness, an eye pleasing color scheme and easy to use navigation. Why lose visitors and possible sales because of a small design flaw or unappealing color scheme? Those visitors could have resulted in sales if those small imperfections were fixed.

As I arrive from your high position in the search engines looking for your product, I want to be able to trust the company I am buying from. People are very leery with making purchases on the Internet, and even more so from sites they don’t know a great deal about. You want to gain trust from the visitor with guarantees, a professional design and color scheme, testimonials and by any other way. If your site doesn’t boast its trustworthiness and make me feel secure, do you think I will purchase your product? No. Visitors are especially leery when they are required to give credit card information. Make them feel protected, boast about your privacy policy, encrypted servers and whatever else you have set up. Be enthusiastic about your site’s security.

I need to be able to find what I want and navigate to where I need to go FAST after I arrive at your site via the search engines. Some visitors get lost and frustrated with poor navigation and will leave your site without a second thought. Do not leave your visitor with a bad taste in their mouth! Allow them to flow through your site with ease and comfort. If your navigation is confusing your potential customer will likely leave and travel to one of the other three billion web sites on the Internet. Speed is also a factor in navigation. Visitors don’t want to sit there for twenty or thirty seconds while your page loads. Don’t make them wait. Cut down on the size of your pages and graphics.

The colors you choose for your site also impact on whether the visitor will make a purchase. A color scheme that hurts the eye will turn visitors off which will lead to lost sales. Visitors may also question how accountable your site is. You cannot have a black background with white, yellow or neon green text. It hurts the eyes. Color schemes such as that scare visitors away. With professional colors visitors will likely feel more secure and relaxed while surfing your site, which will lead to more sales.

A top position in the search engines can provide huge amounts of sales, if your site can be trusted and appeal to visitors. With a defective design and color scheme, slow loading pages or lack of trustworthiness all of the time spent performing SEO could go to waste. So get out, fix those flaws and discover more sales!

Please make sure to include the author and website provided.
-Scott Fish, http://www.topsatelliteradio.com Satellite Radio receivers and history.

Free Web Site Traffic - 4 Keys to Website Promotion

2006-03-10T08:31:00.000-08:00
By Tammy Ames

Web site traffic promotion on the cheap is labor intensive but quickly mastered if you know where to start. Free web site traffic doesn’t mean massive submission to search engines or traffic exchanges. Carving out a web site promotion strategy following basic guidelines will bring the targeted web site traffic you need to have a successful online business.

Keys to web site promotion

Search engine optimization (SEO)

The first step to online web site promotion is ensuring that your web site is optimized for search engine traffic. Every page of your website needs to be worked with strong targeted page titles, heading tags and original content rich with key words chosen to reach your niche market. If you are a self-directed learner then your best bet would be Jill Whalen’s Nitty Gritty of Writing for Search Engines. http://www.wahmconnections.com/nittygritty.htm

If you need more support and would prefer learning search engine optimization in a classroom format then I recommend Cricket Bailey’s SEO class found at GNC Web Creations. http://www.gnc-web-creations.com

Ezine (Online Newsletter) Publishing

Newsletter publishing is a powerful way to stay connected to visitors to your website and help generate repeat traffic to your online business. By creating fresh content and strong readership, your newsletter will be forwarded to others leading to a growing subscriber list. Strong design and subscriber interaction, a newsletter will generate regular traffic that over time will build your credibility and name recognition ~ Branding.

Business Blog

Blogging for online business is quickly becoming one of the best web site traffic generators you can find that doesn’t have to cost you anything. You invest your time learning how blogging works for business then you set up your blog and start using the information you have learned to generate targeted traffic to your website. The most popular free online blogger is Blogger.com which although is owned by Google does not have any extra perks for search engine traffic generation and the initial traffic you draw is to someone else’s site ~ Blogger.

If you have your own website that you have control of your c-panel then check to see if you have Fantastico which allows you to set up your own blog. If you set up your new blog within your own website then your blog is essentially free unless you need to upgrade your hosting to accommodate the increase in bandwidth used with higher traffic but that is a good thing!

A blog with strong titles, quality content and strategic pinging plus rss feeds will be your key to fast search engine indexing, traffic to your blog that can funnel traffic directly to your business website.

Article Writing

Writing articles with a strong resource box is your best free web site traffic generator. Due to its viral nature on the internet, articles that are published on websites and in newsletters of other ezine publishers will bring your website traffic. With each new article and publishing, your articles will reach more people building both traffic and branding You as an expert. With each article you write, your first stop is EzineArticles which is a high traffic article database used by webmasters and newsletter publishers to find fresh content. EzineArticles (http://www.ezinearticles.com) also publishes your articles in a search engine friendly format that lets internet surfers find the information they are seeking.

Every business website owner should take these keys to web site traffic seriously. The energy put into learning SEO, newsletter publishing, business blogging and article writing has a high return on investment.

Creating fresh dynamic articles in your area of interest and expertise will help you build up your website, fill your newsletter and draw traffic to your business blog. Submitting your articles to other webmasters and ezine publishers will further build your reputation beyond your own website.

Learning how to write and publish your articles on your website and your blog in a search engine friendly format means that you have covered all the bases.

Free web site traffic is initially very labor intensive but the investment of yourself in these four areas will bring you the success online you are striving to achieve.

Tammy Ames is the owner of WAHM Connections http://www.wahmconnections.com - Building your home internet business resource site with a weekly online newsletter Work at Home Connections Ezine http://www.wahmconnections.com/current.htm

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tammy_Ames

19 Ways To Attract Higher Paying Clients

2006-03-10T08:23:00.000-08:00
Some people have little difficulty attracting and
maintaining clients who have higher discretionary funds to
spend for solutions. Others can't get to first base. If you
are one of those and want clients that can pay more and you
currently aren't attracting them, here is a list of 10
barriers that might be interfering.

Higher paying clients are easier to work with, appreciate
your work more, pay quicker and are more profitable.

Whenever I am asked by a independent profession how to get a
client to pay more money, the first answer tends to be "you
can't." It is very difficult to raise your rates with your
existing clients. You generally need to find new, higher-
paying clients.

1. Equal stature. People usually take the time to listen
to people who are just as important as they are. Are you on
their listening level? Dress the way they do, even if you
deal with them only over the phone. Speak in their
language. Show the same type of authority and posture.
Avoid jargon and words they aren't familiar with, yet use
ones that they are. Talk across or equal not down or up.
Take control of the relationship. This may seem to
aggressive, however, this is the way you raise yourself to
their equal.

2. Thoroughly know their challenges and what solutions your
service/product provides.If you can't relate to their
"world" then they will not let you in. They are proud of
their "world" because they made it so.

3. Be friendly with all those that surround them.
Administrative secretary, receptionist, any of their
gatekeepers. Yes, they will report about you on your
behavior.

4. The higher the ladder you go, the more likely they will
be a visionary. This means they are more concerned about
the future and will talk and think in those terms.
Visionaries are not price sensitive so don't even place that
on your radar screen with them. Know what their visions
are, support those visions in any way you can. If you have
a product or service that can make their business better,
you will have a sale. Remember though, it's their
perspective of "better" and not yours.

5. The higher you go, the more they expect in great service
and additional services outside the scope of what you
provide everyone else.

6. ALWAYS keep your promises before an after the sale and
they will keep the relationship. Break it once, yes,
usually just once and you're history.

7. Don't brown nose. They smell it a mile away. They will
either quickly turn you away or play you for entertainment
and then toss you away. Once you get this label you can
almost hang it up in their circle unless you fess up to your
inappropriate behavior.

8. They don't have the word "mistake" in their vocabulary.
Everything to them is a "learning lesson" and is connected
to a price tag. If you are even harboring some person
beliefs of making mistakes, they will sense this as fear.
And since fear has a special energy/vibration they have keen
senses for it.

9. Their first response to your proposal will always be
"how can they do it in house themselves." Expect to be able
to demonstrate the specialness and if you can particular
show how it can be completed in-house, the more brownie
points you earn. The higher your expertise or specialties
the less chance they can "create it in house." This is
because higher paying clients tend to gravitate to
specialists.

10. The higher the clientele, the better their leveraging
skills are. If they can figure out how to leverage it
better and cheaper, you will lose. This isn't always true,
most times if they have too much on their plate already and
don't want to spend their focus time away AND they like you,
you can get the sale.

11. "No" is a test. Don't take anything for granted.
Flexibility and diversity are important in riding out the
storm.

12. Find clients to whom your work is not only valuable,
but essential to their goals.

13. Know your worth and stand by it.

14. Remove the "under earner" mind set.

15. Make it easy for them to work with you. Remove any
hoops or extra steps that take up their time.

16. Decide in advance what you're going to do if they don't
accept your higher fee.

17. Presentation level needs to be on their level or
perceived to be there.

18. Rely more on referrals for this market.

19. Be confident and know you can attract them. Feel and
allow the possibility without question -- 100%. Remove any
doubt.

Millionaire Coach, Catherine Franz. Order her
latest strategy, How To "Get 'Them' To Follow Your Yellow
Brick Road". http://www.marketingstrategiestogo.com
http://www.AbundanceCenter.com

Content, Links, Relevance and Page Rank

2006-03-10T08:22:00.000-08:00
By David Andrew Smith

EO experts are constantly telling us about the importance of good quality content and good quality back links from web sites with relevant content. They also tell us that reciprocal links and page rank are of decreasing importance. They then instruct us as to how to go about getting good links by personally contacting other web sites and proposing a reciprocal link! Confusing! As is much of the advice given to prospective site designers.

Personal experience with our own web site has shown that the following is correct and works;

· Content is the key. Lots of it, with constant up dates to it, and it should be well written and informative not just a sales pitch.

· The more pages you can create the better. Upwards of 100 pages will highlight your site as an important one. Sites with only a few pages rarely appear on the first page of search engine results.

· As the site ages its importance will increase. Those who got in early generally outperform the later sites. Google also have an ageing process for links. As these links approach six months old they become of more importance.

· Reciprocal links once gone through the ageing process are still being counted, even with Google’s updated algorithm.

· Article writing and publishing will produce huge numbers of backlinks. You should be looking to produce upwards of 30 articles and aim for around 250.

· Attaching a weblog to your site which is updated daily will increase the rate at which the search engines visit your site and at the same time adds valuable content and links.

· Page Rank has still some importance in determining your position in the rankings because it is based on the links and the content of your site. However the page rank as given by the Google Toolbar is not necessarily accurate. A more accurate page rank can be gauged from using the detail supplied by the Google Sitemap statistics. Consequently generate a sitemap and submit it to Google.

The most important piece of advice is to design your site for the visitor and not the search engines. Have as much information within the content as possible and keep the graphics to a minimum.

David Andrew Smith is the owner of http://www.wesparkle.co.uk a cleaning services company which operates throughout the UK

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Andrew_Smith

Create a Google Sitemap for Your Web Site

2006-03-10T08:17:00.000-08:00
By Herman Drost

Google Sitemaps is a simple and fast way for your site to be constantly indexed and updated by Google.

This article will discuss the benefits of implementing this new technology, who should use it, how it works and how to create a Google Sitemap for your web site.

Benefits of having a Google Site Map

1. Speeds up the discovery and addition of your web pages in the Google index.

2. Enables Google to quickly find web pages that have been recently changed.

3. A method for your site to be listed and appear quickly in Google.

4. Helps Google to keep search content fresh, so people have the most up to date information available.

Who should use Google Sitemaps?

All site owners can use Google sitemaps whether you have one page or millions of pages, however it's mostly geared towards people that make frequent changes to their web pages.

Normally web pages on a large site will not all get indexed because the links are too deep within the site. By including all your pages in the Google Sitemap you have a better chance of them all being indexed as Google thrives on fresh content. According to Google, it won't increase your site's rankings.

How does it work?

Google sitemaps are created using XML (Extensible Markup Language). This is a coding language similar to HTML(though a little more complex). It is often used these days in syndicated feeds or blogs.

Here is the sample XML code you would include for each page of your site:

<.url><.br> <.loc>http://www.yoursite.com/<./loc>
<.lastmod>2005-07-15
<.changefreq>monthly<./changefreq>
<.priority>0.5<./priority>
<./url>

(remove periods for code to work)

Here is a breakdown of what each line represents:

location - name of your webpage ie http://www.yoursite.com

last modified - when you last modified the page.

change frequency - tells Google how often you modify that particular page, whether it's never, weekly, daily, hourly, monthly or yearly.

priority - sets the priority you want Google to place for that page on your site. You can prioritize your pages: 0.0 being the least, 1.0 being the highest, 0.5 is in the middle.

This is only relative to your site. It will not affect your rankings. Certain pages on your site may have more significance than others because they are updated more often ie home page, articles page.

How to Create a Dynamic Google SiteMap XML File

It would take a long time to create your Google Sitemap by hand especially if you have a site that contains 1000s of pages.

Fortunately Google provides the Sitemap Generator that allows you to generate a sitemap very quickly. It's a Python script that creates a Sitemap for your site using the Sitemap Protocol. This script can create Sitemaps from URL lists, web server directories, or from access logs.

You can read more about it here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Other Sitemap Generators.

Google has also compiled a list of third party generators.

Personally I use the free sitemap generator It's simple to use and quickly produces the necessary XML code for your site.

Here are the steps on how to create your Sitemap using this free Sitemap Generator:

1. Go to http://www.sitemapspal.com and enter your site's address.
2. Copy the code that it generates for your site and paste it into notepad.
3. Save the text file as sitemap.xml
4. Upload this file to the root directory (same place as your home page) of your web server.
5. Open up a Google Site Map account and submit your site's address.
6. Every time you modify a page or pages, login to your Google account and click on the resubmit button.
7. Repeat this procedure for all of your web sites.

Conclusion

Google is still the largest and most accessed search engine on Net. Each year millions of web sites get added to Google making your site harder to find. Creating a Google Sitemap will help your web pages stay fresh in Google's index.

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com. Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hosting. You can read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Herman_Drost

Latest Website Promotion Ideas

2006-03-10T08:16:00.000-08:00
By Steve Hill

I have written articles about website promotion in the past, however things on the internet are always changing and my opinions have now changed. This article is all about my new website promotion ideas, ideas which I use on my all of websites.

A good linking campaign is the main priority. Attempting to increase the number of backward links you have pointing to your website is essential. However you have to be careful. Here is a list of do's and do not's.

Do:

Increase the number of backward links pointing to your website slowly

Obtain backward links from within the same industry/market as your own

Build up the number of one-way links your website has pointing to it

Write articles and submit them to article directories

Add your website domain on all of your adverts, documentation and e-mails

Offer the visitors to your site the chance to sign up to a monthly newsletter

Offer the visitors to your site a free e-book

Write press releases

Do not:

Join a link building website to automate your linking requirements. These are tempting to join however are frowned upon by the search engines. Always remember hard work pays off.

Increase the number of backward links to quickly

Purchase too many link text ads

Just leave your website without any promotion, it will not grow on its own

Build hidden pages

In my opinion one-way links are vital. These are the most powerful form of backward link and the search engines love them. I can see no way in which they can penalise a site that is only acquiring these type of links.

The best and easiest way of obtaining these one-way links is by writing articles like the one you are reading. Once you have written the article, you then need to submit it to a number of article directories. You are able to add a link to your website on the bottom of the article and the hope is that other webmasters will want to include your article on their website, thus giving you a one-way link.

I have been writing articles for around a year and I must say it has done wonders for my businesses. The number of visitors to my sites have rocketed and the page rank have also steadily increased.

I hope you have found this article interesting to read and beneficial to you.

Good luck with your website promotion campaign

Stephen Hill has a number of websites including:

manual article submission service

anti aging website

debt reduction information

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steve_Hill

How to Choose Keywords to Theme Your Pages and Boost Your Traffic

2006-03-10T08:14:00.000-08:00
By Andrew Williams

One of the most frequent questions I get asked is in the choice of keywords for a new site, specifically secondary keywords.. These are the words or phrases that you use when writing your content to help theme the page so that the search engines know what your page is about. These secondary keywords also help to bring in more traffic, because they add more depth to your page, meaning that your page is found for a lot more phrases than just the primary phrase you page is built around.

Let's look at an example.

Suppose you were building a niche site on hemorrhoids.

One of your main pages is likely to be about treating hemorrhoids. Let's use "hemorrhoid treatment" as our primary keyword phrase for this page (it has high searches, but also high competition, so secondaries are going to be working hard to get this page ranking high for related phrases).

So how do you find secondary keywords for use on this page? Surely there cant be many possible secondaries?

Well, you have a few options for finding secondaries. There is a paid service called Thememaster which a lot of marketers use for this purpose (search Google for this one if you are interested - I have not used it, so cannot recommend it). However, my own favourite method is using Keyword Results Analyzer. If you own it, you have all you need to find those secondaries.

I carried out research at Wordtracker for this niche, and imported them into KRA. One of the strengths of KRA is the filtering and reporting features. To find secondary keywords, I simply filter the phrases that contain the word "treat". This will pull out all phrases containing treat, treatment etc. Since all phrases in my database are related to hemorrhoids, all phrases returned will be related to treating this condition.

KRA gives me 61 phrases that are searched for at the search engines related to hemorrhoid treatment. Now the difficulty is not how to find secondaries, it is how to choose from 61 related phrases (which is obviously too many for a single page).

Here are the 61 phrases:

Alternative Treatments Hemorrhoids
Best Hemorrhoid Treatment
Chiropractic Hemorrhoid Treatment
Cure Hemorrhoid Treatment Hemmoroids
External Hemorrhoid Treatment
Haemmaroid Treatment
Haemorrhoids Treatment
Haemorroid Treatment
Hemarroid Treatment
Hemorhoid Home Treatment
Hemorrhoid Cures And Treatments
Hemorrhoid Home Treatment
Hemorrhoid Home Treatments
Hemorrhoid Internal Treatment
Hemorrhoid Treat Holistic Herbal
Hemorrhoid Treatment
Hemorrhoid Treatment By Infrared Coagulation
Hemorrhoid Treatment By Micro Current
Hemorrhoid Treatment Cure
Hemorrhoid Treatment Drugs
Hemorrhoid Treatment Hemoids
Hemorrhoid Treatment Hemorrhoids
Hemorrhoid Treatment Hemorrhoids Common Cure For Piles
Hemorrhoid Treatment In Pregnancy
Hemorrhoid Treatment Phoenix Az
Hemorrhoid Treatments
Hemorrhoid Treatments Hemorroids
Hemorrhoidal Polyps Treatment
Hemorrhoidal Treatments
Hemorrhoidectomy Treatment
Hemorrhoids Banding Surgical Treatment
Hemorrhoids External Treatment
Hemorrhoids Symptoms Causes And Treatments
Hemorrhoids Treatment
Hemorrhoids Treatment Care
Hemorrhoids Treatment Cure Hemorr
Hemorrhoids Treatment Of
Hemorrhoids Treatment Review
Hemorrihoid Treatment
Home Hemorrhoidal Treatments
How To Treat Hemorrhoids
Internal Bleeding Hemorrhoids Hemorrhoid Treatment
Internal Hemorrhoid Herbs Treatment
Internal Hemorrhoid Treatment
Irc Hemorrhoid Treatment
Kansas City Hemorrhoid Treatment
Laser Treatment For Hemorrhoids
Med Treatment Hemorrhoid
Natural Hemorrhoid Treatment
Natural Treatment Hemorrhoids
Natural Treatment Of Hemorrhoids
Natural Treatment Of Hemorrhoids During Preganancy
Pph Hemorrhoid Treatment
Treat Hemorrhoids What To Eat
Treating Haemmeroids
Treating Hemorrhoids
Treatment For Hemorrhoids
Treatment Hemorrhoids
Treatment Of Hemorrhoids
Treatment Of Hemorrhoids During Preganancy
Type Of Doctor To Treat Hemorrhoids

If you used all of these phrases as they are, you would not only have a very large page, but you would have a very high density of certain words like treatment, treating. We obviously have to be very careful about not using a word too many times, so one of the useful features built into KRA is its unique keyword list report. This report shows you all of the unique words that make up a set of phrases. Here are the unique words that make up the above phrases:

alternative
az
banding
best
bleeding
Care
causes
chiropractic
city
coagulation
common
cure
cures
current
doctor
drugs
during
eat
external
haemerroid
haemmaroid
haemmeroids
haemorrhoids
haemorroid
hemarroid
hemmoroids
hemoids
hemorhoid
hemorr
hemorrhoid
hemorrhoidal
hemorrhoidectomy
hemorrhoids
Hemorrihoid
hemorroids
herbal
herbs
holistic
home
how
infrared
internal
irc
kansas
Laser
med
micro
natural
phoenix
piles
polyps
pph
preganancy
pregnancy
review
surgical
symptoms
treat
treating
treatment
treatments
type

What this list gives you is a set of keywords that you can use in your content where they make sense. By adding these words to your page, you can theme your page so that it matches lots of frequently searched for phrases.

For example, if you used these words:

treat
treating
treatment
treatments

on your page, you would have the chance to rank in Google for "treat hemorrhoids", "treating hemorrhoids", "hemorrhoid treatment" & "hemorrhoid treatments".

By also using Mispelled variations of hemorrhoids highlighted in this list:

haemerroid
haemmaroid
haemmeroids
haemorrhoids
haemorroid
hemarroid
hemmoroids
hemorhoid
hemorrhoid
hemorrhoids
Hemorrihoid
hemorroids

together with the above treatment words, you can expect to be found for search phrases containing every combination of the mispellings when searched with a treatment phrase. That's 48 different search phrases that your page could be found for.

Now, the above example is one I don't necessarily recommend you follow, since all those mispellings may make your page read very badly. But you get the idea.

Perhaps a better use of this type of unique keyword list would be to target the treatment/cure style keywords.

This would not look unnatural:

alternative
Care
cure
cures
doctor
drugs
herbal
herbs
holistic
Laser
med
natural
symptoms
treat
treating
treatment
treatments

Add these into your content, together with a couple of alternative spellings, and you can have a page that can potentially rank well for large numbers of hemorrhoid treatment related phrases.

Imagine if you were a search engines, and after analysing your page for theme, you found the above words (and one or two spellings of hemorrhoid).

Would you have any difficulty deciding which theme the page was about?

For a free Wordtracker Tutorial (and several other free reports), sign up for Andy's free ezSEO Newsletter. No BS advice and tips for affiliate markete

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andrew_Williams

The Budget Webmaster's 6 Step Guide to Improving Existing Rankings in Google

2006-03-10T07:59:00.000-08:00
By Tinu Abayomi-Paul

The Budget Webmaster’s 6 Step Guide to Improving Existing Rankings in Google

You know the scenario. You get an occasional click from Google for a certain keyword. You go to find out why you aren’t getting more clicks, and you find out that you’re ranked in the 30's, 50's, or heaven forbid, the 300's. “Great”, you think, “I finally get ranked for a good keyword and it’s a worthless ranking”.

Not necessarily.

If you got ranked for a keyword you wanted At All, the game’s not over yet. If your site’s content is geared towards that subject, you can get your ranking in search engines increased, at no cost. How?

The first thing you want to do is find out how well you are ranked for this keyword. For Google in particular, this used to be a difficult chore. In the old days of 2003, you’d spend your valuable time doing a search on your desired keyword, then a sub-search for your site, and crawling through pages of listings to find out exactly where you stood.

Now there is hope in the form of the following website. Direct your browser to:

http://www.googlerankings.com/index.php

You can use this site to find out what number you come up for in the Google listings, which can be very powerful information if used correctly. If you’re ranked in the top 1000, you have a shot at raising your listing for that page by tweaking the page to be a little more relevant.

So, secondly, you have to know how good a shot you have at getting a better listing. Go to:

http://www.searchguild.com/difficulty/

I posted a tip about this a month ago, and it’s also in the free optimization Guide I released the week of March 7th. It tells you how hard it is to rank well for certain keywords in Google. You’ll need a free Google API key to use it.

Now that you know your chances, the third piece of information you need to know is how much traffic you can expect. Digital Point has a free tool that gives an approximation of how many hits per day a good ranking gets. Access it here:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Okay, let’s say everything checks out so far. You rank in the top 1000. The term you want won’t be that hard to get, and will get you enough traffic per month to justify your efforts.

Our fifth step is to take the term you chose and optimize your page.

This site does periodic reports on the search engines, and their February report gives their analysis of what the best ranking pages in Google have in common. And as a free bonus, it will also tell you what Yahoo wants. Follow the following link for details-http://www.gorank.com

Now that you know what to shoot for, you need to know how the page you want will measure up- you need to calculate your keyword density. You can also do the sixth step at gorank.com - it has a free tool that will calculate it for you. Prepare your page with that in mind, re-upload, and you’re almost done.

Great, you’re all set. Now you should submit your site to Google, right?

Wrong. Absolutely not. If you can help it, you should never, ever submit any page of your site to Google. Let it find you. HOW it finds you can affect your page rank. I don’t mean that there is a standard penalty for submitting. There’s been speculation on that for a while but I have yet to prove it matters.

What I DO know from personal experience and testing on my member’s sites, is that getting the Googlebot search engine spider to happen upon your site shaves up to 6 weeks off the standard time it takes for indexing. You can show up in Google in as little as 4 days.

Which site links to you can also affect your Google Page Rank. While this is not as important as it once was, it still carries significant weight– my site didn’t start getting spidered on a daily basis until my Page Rank increased to 5.

So even if the spider comes to your site on a Monthly basis, you’re better off waiting for the spider to come back by. That’s the seventh step, let your page be re-discovered with it’s great new changes.

And yes, there’s an even faster, better way to get Google.com’s search engine spider to re-index that page, but that’s another article, isn’t it?

For more free traffic tips, subscribe to her newsletter at ftdsecrets-subscribe@topica.com or visit her feed enabled blog: http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/blog

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tinu_Abayomi-Paul

The Disease of Google Banning: Are You At Risk?

2006-03-10T07:55:00.000-08:00
By Wael Serag Eldin

Definition:

Google banning occurs when Google removes your site from its index and flags your domain as 'banned', so it won't spider your site anymore. It is actually a serious disease and may be even life threatening specially for small websites.

Etiology:

Webmasters' mistakes are almost always the leading causes of google banning; here are some of the common mistakes that will get your website banned:

1. Using small or hidden text in your web pages. Some webmasters will try to use hidden text containing certain keywords inside their site, so that the text is not visible by the human eyes, but visible by search engines.

2. Using popular keywords such as "sex, mp3, yahoo" in the meta tags when the subject of your site has nothing to do with those keywords is commonly called keyword stuffing.

3. Participating in Link farms. Link farms or Free-for-all links pages are pages that consist of links and exist solely to help listed sites gain higher search engine rankings. These pages have no unique content just links. Obviously you can't control which sites link back to you, but if you link to link farms, your site will get banned.

4. Submitting multiple versions of the exact same page or an identical page for indexing. Some webmasters try to increase their page count by having similar pages and only changing the title, subject or small word changes.

5. Using unauthorized automated software to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs violate Google's terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google. It is better to hand submit your site and only do so once a month.

6. Keyword stuffing: adding too many keywords in Meta tags or page text is called Spam and will get you banned. For example, if your website contains 400 words and the keyword phrase "website advertising" is repeated 50 times, the search engines will most likely think you are spamming them.

7. Using Doorway pages: Doorway pages are Web pages designed and built specifically to draw search engine visitors to your website. They are standalone pages designed only to act as doorways to your site. Doorway pages are a very bad idea for several reasons, though many SEO firms use them routinely.

8. Linking to a banned site, specially extensive linking as in networks.

9. Registering an already banned domain. Some webmasters, after their website becomes banned from google due to any reason, delete this domain and register another while the first domain remains banned from google. So, before you register a domain, make sure it is not banned by doing the test mentioned below in "Diagnosis".

Manifestations:

1.The earliest manifestations of google banning are usually first noticed by the webmaster as a sudden and severe drop in the number of website visitors and when the webmaster tracks the referrers of his visitors, he will not find anymore visitors coming to his site from google.

2. Sudden drop of the google PageRank of all pages of the website from any level to 0.

The combination of the above 2 symptoms is highly suspicious for google banning specially if they occur suddenly to an "old", established, high ranking website. In case of "newly born" websites, the diagnosis may be difficult depending on the above manifestations alone as these manifestations may be normal and transient for new sites which have not been indexed by google yet and so their pagerank is still 0. In this case, we need an "urgent" diagnostic test.

Diagnosis:

The diagnosis of google banning is very easy, even for new sites that have not been indexed by google yet. The diagnosis is made by a simple, accurate, and rapid test:

Test: Provided the site suspected for google banning is called www.suspected-domain.com, do a search in google for www.suspected-domain.com.

Results and interpretation: if www. suspected-domain.com is banned, google will say: "Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.suspected-domain.com" WITHOUT a direct link to www.suspected-domain.com. This sign differentiates between banned sites and new non-indexed sites. In the later case, there will be a direct link to www.suspected-domain.com, and google search results will say: "Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.suspected-domain.com" followed by "If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link: www.suspected-domain.com". This sign is absent in banned sites.

Complications:

Google banning is an infectious disease; all sites linking to the banned site are at a risk of catching the banning. So it is usual that many link partners escape and on the long run, the site will lose many of its inbound links.

Prevention:

Prevention is always easier than treatment, and fortunately, google banning is a preventable disease. Prevention is easy, you don't need to do anything to avoid banning, just don't do bad things, most of them are mentioned above.

Treatment:

Unfortunately, no curative treatment is available and the prognosis is bad, just palliative treatment:

1. Treatment of the cause. The first thing to do is to correct the cause. If you are not sure there must be some errors you suspect, correct all of them.

3. Isolation: if you have other websites linking to the banned sites, remove their links to it to avoid them catching the infection.

2. Writing to google:

After you have corrected all possible errors, email google at webmaster@google.com with an reinclusion request. The following is a template of reinclusion request letter:

Dear Google,

I am the owner of http://www.banned-domain.com/

I did not realize that (doing a mistake) was a bad thing that would get me banned from Google. Now, I understand that I have done a mistake, and I apologize profusely. I have removed (bad thing) from my site, and I promise not to make this mistake again.

I am asking you to Please Consider reinstating my website, http://www.banned-domain.com/ , into Google's Index.

Sincerely,

4. Domain transplantation: many people just ditch the former domain name and start with something new. It is much easier to build a site from a PR3 or PR4 (which most new sites are given) rather than trying to dig a banned site from the depths of PR0.

Last word:

Google banning is google's defense mechanism to keep their search results as accurate and useful as possible and it is their right, however, in my opinion, it is a very severe and even fatal punishment for webmasters' mistakes. If google has the right to ban a site from its search results, its right to take off its pagerank is questionable. Page rank is a measure of site popularity and "I am bad" does not necessarily mean that "I am not popular".

Author: Dr Wael Serag, a specialist in SEO diseases and complications. Improve your SEO health and get free articles, tools and more at: http://money-making-webmasters.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Wael_Serag_Eldin

What is The Google Sandbox Effect?

2006-03-10T07:54:00.000-08:00
By Jakob Jelling

In the age of fair competition you may find it hard to believe that a search engine may hinder the appearance of a new website. This is what is currently believed to be happening on more web servers today. Some programmers have viewed Google as uncomfortable to rank newer websites until they have proven their viability to exist for more than a period of “x” months. Thus the term “Sandbox Effect” applies to the idea that all new websites have their ratings placed in a holding tank until such time is deemed appropriate before a ranking can commence.

However the website is not hindered as much as the links that are reciprocated from other users. Newer links that are created are put on a “probationary” status until again they pickup in rank from other matured sites or placed directly by an ad campaign. The idea behind the hindrance is to prevent a fast ranking to occur on a new website. The usual holding period seems to be between 90 and 120 days before a site would start obtaining rank from reciprocal or back linking.

Some advice has been given to have companies you are going to reciprocate back add your link first to the website. This may help grandfather your site in, thus reducing the waiting time associated with “new” websites. People have noticed a 0 page rank when first signing up and receiving a bolstering 7 page ranking after 4 months. Why the delay? The fact is, that if people realized how easy it would be to get a high ranking, would that take away the credibility of the engine. It depends on whom you ask, but it does seem to be happening frequently to newer subscribers. Do not discontinue back linking, your rank will eventually appear.

Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.com. Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jakob_Jelling

New Features in Google Sitemaps

2006-03-10T07:53:00.000-08:00
By Philip Nicosia

The Google Sitemap program has brought a high level of assistance to web developers, web designers and business owners who want to optimize how their website’s web pages are seen by the Google search engine. We all know how important page ranking is for a web page. The higher your page rank in Google, the more chances that it will be clicked and visited by visitors. Increased internet traffic is what drives sales and awareness for products and services.

The Google Sitemap program has become very popular because it made the task of submitting web pages to Google so much easier. A web developer or designer does not even have to worry about aking frequent changes to the web pages because it is more easily known by Google. By presenting a constantly fresh index of web pages for your web site you are assured that what is presented in Google is the latest pages that you are maintaining.

The very high popularity of Google Sitemap has encouraged Google’s team of engineers to develop and add more features to the program. These additions seek to make Google Sitemaps more intuitive and effective in its functions.

Google recently announced that it has again added a bevy of new features for the Google Sitemap program that just made certain aspects of the program so much easier to understand and maintain.

Here are the latest new features of the Google Sitemap program:

Query Stats. Knowing the top position of your website is important. With Google’s Query Stats, you will now know the top search queries where the results included your website as well as those that Google searchers actually clicked on. The position given is the average statistic posted over the last three weeks.

Top mobile search queries. Google acknowledges that there is a growing number of people who use mobile devices for browsing the internet and also consider it as a separate “demographic”. For this reason, the top mobile search queries feature shows web designers and developers the top search queries made from mobile devices in which the results showed their website. Web designers and web developers will see both the mobile searches of all web sites as well as the mobile searches of mobile-specific web sites. The results given by this feature will only appear if it is available in your web site. At this point of the development of this feature, Google only shows the top search queries and not the clicks made for those queries.

Downloading Sitemap details, statistics, and errors. Your Sitemap account now also contain additional information. You can now download information in the form of a comma separated value file. This type of file can be opened by using any text editor or spreadsheet program. You can decide to download the information on a per table basis, or you can opt to download Sitemap details, errors or statistics for all of the web sites in your Google Sitemaps account in one convenient file.

Philip Nicosia is the webmaster of XML-Sitemaps.com which provides a free site map generator which produces sitemaps in XML format for Google together with Yahoo site maps and HTML sitemaps for human visitors.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Philip_Nicosia

Reciprocal Linking Scams, What to Look for and How to Avoid Them

2006-03-10T07:52:00.000-08:00
By Brian Osborne

Reciprocal linking scams have increased immensely during the past year. Initially we thought that this problem only related to gambling and casino related websites but an audit of our commercial link partners suggests that it is a serious problem within the broader online community.

Over the past eighteen months, we noticed that our page rank was slowly declining despite the fact that we were continually adding new link partners to our link directory. We had slipped from a five down to a two before we finally identified the exact cause of the problem.

Out of the first 100 links on our anchor site, only seven were still being reciprocated.

We recrawled the sites where no link was found with a second spider and got exactly the same result. Then we started manually checking the sites where no link back was found and started discovering patterns of deliberate link fraud.

The scams in order of popularity amongst the scammers – 1. The link on the home page to the link directory remained but clicking on it or specific directory links produced a template style page with a few casino banners or simply a page with no directory content – This scam was most popular with the owners of multiple domains with the .co.za and .co.uk suffixes

2. The link on the home page to the link directory remained but clicking on gambling or casino related links returned a list of links to sites owned solely by the same person or company. The worst offenders in this group preferred domain extensions of .biz, .us and .md

3. The link directory index page remained but the link directory had been severely pruned and most remaining links were to the site owners other sites or to casinos. This one is common across all suffixes.

4. Links not clickable – links to the directory and various pages within the directory remained intact. At the time of their link exchange campaign, their links were clickable but at some stage after that the code that makes the link clickable was removed and the site name was placed in bold text so at a glance it appeared to be a legitimate clickable link. This scam is most favored by sites that place a miniature screen shot of the index page of your site beside your back link.

5. A variation of the previous scam. When you run your mouse pointer over the page, the ‘links’ change color but no URL displays in the search bar at the bottom of your browser window. Right click has been disabled on the page so that most people looking at the page cannot see the code. If you use Dreamweaver MX or later, highlight the part of the page you want to look at and then using Control C copy it to the clip board and then use Control V to paste it into the design side of a basic Dreamweaver page. When you click on code you can see what they were attempting to stop you seeing. It may work in the later versions of similar authoring programs. Worst offenders are a poker room and a media company operating out of India.

6. One way link exchanges – usually you are contacted by a search engine optimization company or the SEO person for a large group of websites offering you multiple one way link exchanges with half of their sites if you will link back to the other half of their sites. After a few weeks or months the links to your sites are deleted. The worst offender in this group is a prominent search engine optimization company located in India.

7. Your link starts out on a page with fair page rank usually attached to a domain with high page rank. But after a few weeks is moved to a boon docks page with no page rank that will never be indexed. – common amongst higher PR sites.

8. The link directory is on another domain with no page rank. When you click on the link to the directory on the home page, always watch the bar in the bottom of your browser window and see that the link you clicked is in fact on the domain with which you are exchanging links – watch especially for domain names that are very similar e.g. one letter different in the spelling or a .net instead of a .com and link pages that are hosted on the domain of a link management company. Also watch for redirects. If suspicious go back and click the link again. Often the redirected URL flashes up for only an instant or it just takes an inordinate time for the page to load compared to other pages on the site. If in doubt search for a site map - very popular with some owners of multiple bingo sites.

9. Sub domains of domains with no page rank. Sub domains are supposed to always rank lower than the parent domain. (Of late I have found a few sub domains with up to PR3 attached to a domain with no page rank) If the parent domain has a page rank of zero then link pages attached to that sub domain will almost always be zero so why trade a good link for a dud link?

10. We have never fallen for any in this group but many novice webmasters do so regularly. Beware of high PR sites offering you a link exchange on one of their inconsequential internal pages with the same PR as your index page in return for you placing a graphic link to their index page on your index page. This is a deliberate attempt to steal your hard earned traffic. A variation of this one is they have a number of new sites listed on their index page each month and visitors are encouraged to vote for the site they consider to be the best and you are asked to ask your visitors to vote for your site at the high ranked domain. The purpose is still the same as in the first example in this group.

11. We no longer trade links with sites using Linksmanager unless the link to our site is to be on a hard coded page. You can search in their search box for their link to your site and if they are still linking to you, your URL and site description will be returned but no information to show which page your link is on. Google usually indexes only a few pages in each category of dynamically generated link directories. If your link has not been added to an indexed page, it is unlikely to ever end up on one. When we had a large number of indexed back links, no link manager links were ever returned in a back link querry.

12. Be wary of link exchange requests from webmasters using anonymous e-mail addresses because when they delete your back link they also delete the anonymous e-mail address.

13. Beware of webmasters with PR 5 or above sites offering you a link exchange with a high PR site and an inspection of their link directory suggests that your link will end up on a non indexed page i.e. a useless link that is unlikely to ever improve. If the link exchange was with a PR 2 or 3 site there is at least reasonable potential for the PR of the page to increase if the link directory has been fairly constructed.

Reduce exposure to link scams

To reduce your exposure to such scams it is essential to carefully vet all potential link partners in the first instance. Enter link back partner details in a database. As an absolute minimum, enter their URL, the location of the link back on their site, the page rank of the page on which your link is located, the date of the link exchange and a real e-mail address for the contact person.

Use a good link checking program monthly and contact offenders as soon as you find your link is missing from their site. This is now essential to keep link partners honest. This problem is a direct consequence of the current page rank system and fierce competition for top rankings. It is easier to retain existing link partners than to continually find new ones.

Points to look for when Assessing Potential Link Partners

Before trading links, look carefully at the other site – 1. If there is no link to the link directory on the index page –Reject. You will get no traffic from that site.

2. Look at the structure of their link directory and count the number of clicks from their index page to where their link to you is likely to be located and then deduct that number from the PR of the site’s index page. If that page is PR3 and there are three clicks to get to the page on which your link will be located, that page will have a PR0. That link will be worthless unless the site gets a minimum of a PR4.

3. If you have not already done so, download Google’s tool bar. If the page rank bar is grayed out, when you are looking at a site, never trade links with that site. The grey bar is said to indicate that the site is banned by Google. I do not know if that is true but I have only ever seen two sites produce grey bars.

4. A growing number of sites with dynamically generated link directories have no page rank on any link pages even though the directories are often constructed in such a way that you would expect the page to rank to be 2 points below the home page. I do not know how most are achieving this. The visible way is to have multiple folders and index pages leading to the links pages and the number of clicks from the home page destroys any potential page rank for the link page. A rare method is to add a no index command for the link directory in their robots.txt file.

Just remember links to such sites are one way links from your site to their site. You give them a good link and they give you a worthless link. A link on a page with a PR0 is a non indexed link and carries no value regardless of the page rank of the index page of the site to which it is attached. When you do a back link check on your domain in Google, you will notice that very few links to your domain that are on Google indexed pages with a PR of less than four are returned in your list of back links. This is why I and others consider that Google now discounts the value of such links.

For indexed pages, count the number of links on the page. The first factor in determining the value of the link is the page rank of the page on which it is located. The second factor is the number of links on the page. The value of the link to you is roughly the page PR divided by the number of links. Of course no one outside of a chosen few at Google knows the actual formula but that is a rough approximation and the reason most webmasters will not trade links with sites with more than 40 links to a page unless the page has a very high PR.

A link on the bottom of a good content page is always better value than a link on a directory page as more people are likely to click on it.

When on the receiving end of a link exchange request, do not hesitate to ask for your link to be placed on a specific page and do not hesitate to reject link requests from sites that do not adhere to basic acceptable linking practices. When considering link requests from new sites, look at any other sites that belong to or have been built by the webmaster proposing the link exchange. Most importantly, look to see if existing link pages have been indexed and the structure of the directory. This will be a good indicator of what to expect for the new site.

When you create your own link directory, consider a hand edited directory with the links at the same level as the rest of the pages on your site. That way your link pages will be only one point below your index page and you will attract more link requests because of that. Many high PR sites will not trade links with you unless you can place their link back on a minimum of a PR4 page. That way you can start shooting for the top once your index page makes a 5 as opposed to a 7 with the way many link directories are set up.

When you are shooting for the top, it helps you get those high pr links you need to make it to the top.

Article by Brian Osborne. Brian is an I.T. professional and the webmaster at http://www.winnersrun.com, a site focusing on gambling strategies that also includes some articles of interest to webmasters.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brian_Osborne

SEO Content Writer: How To Find One

2006-03-10T07:42:00.000-08:00
By Christopher Kyalo

There are many people who still don't identify SEO with a content writer or content writing for that matter. To them SEO is some complicated technical thing that a content writer can not possibly be able to make head or tail of.

This kind of thinking is extremely expensive because it is currently costing many site owners millions of hits. The truth of the matter is that a very important and key part of SEO is the use of the best non-competitive keyword phrases for the particular site. One keyword phrase can produce millions of hits via leading search engines. Keyword phrases are used on the content and that is why it is so important for a content writer to understand the use of keywords, even if somebody else is researching them for him or her.

Hiring a content writer who understands and uses seo techniques can therefore gain you many million hits over a relatively short time. It will also save you the time and money in researching the best keywords for your site yourself, or hiring a different person to do it for you.

Finding a good SEO content writer is easier than you think. For starters carefully trace your steps backwards to how you found your seo content writer. If they used seo methods to advertise their services, then you will be pretty sure that they are experts and know exactly what they are doing.

How can you possibly believe in a seo content writer who does not use seo content writing techniques to advertise their own services?

Christopher Kyalo Is A leading web content provider who provides all the key traffic generation ingredients in all his work for clients. He is occasionally available to handle new client assignments. Get the details on how you can contact him at his content provider blog. Or learn all the inside secrets of high traffic generating content from his free newsletter. Subscribe now by sending a blank email to articlesrgold-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Kyalo

SEO Content Writer: How To Find One

2006-03-10T07:35:00.000-08:00
By Christopher Kyalo

There are many people who still don't identify SEO with a content writer or content writing for that matter. To them SEO is some complicated technical thing that a content writer can not possibly be able to make head or tail of.

This kind of thinking is extremely expensive because it is currently costing many site owners millions of hits. The truth of the matter is that a very important and key part of SEO is the use of the best non-competitive keyword phrases for the particular site. One keyword phrase can produce millions of hits via leading search engines. Keyword phrases are used on the content and that is why it is so important for a content writer to understand the use of keywords, even if somebody else is researching them for him or her.

Hiring a content writer who understands and uses seo techniques can therefore gain you many million hits over a relatively short time. It will also save you the time and money in researching the best keywords for your site yourself, or hiring a different person to do it for you.

Finding a good SEO content writer is easier than you think. For starters carefully trace your steps backwards to how you found your seo content writer. If they used seo methods to advertise their services, then you will be pretty sure that they are experts and know exactly what they are doing.

How can you possibly believe in a seo content writer who does not use seo content writing techniques to advertise their own services?

Christopher Kyalo Is A leading web content provider who provides all the key traffic generation ingredients in all his work for clients. He is occasionally available to handle new client assignments. Get the details on how you can contact him at his content provider blog. Or learn all the inside secrets of high traffic generating content from his free newsletter. Subscribe now by sending a blank email to articlesrgold-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Kyalo

Anatomy Of A Top Ranking Web page

2006-03-10T07:33:00.000-08:00
By Andrew Williams

Optimizing web pages for high rankings in the search engines involved two main processes. Firstly there is the on-page factors which include what keywords you place where on the page itself. The second, and more important process is getting the off-page factors right - incoming links.

This article explores mainly the on-page factors. As the competition for a keyword phrase increases, off-page factors become more important to good rankings and these often mask the effects of on-page factors making it impossible to see what on-page factors are important. For this reason, I am going to look at a high ranking page with low levels of competition in Google.

First, let's consider what we mean by competition.

There are two ways to look at competition in Google. There is the competition a page has when you type the phrase with quotes, and the competition when you type the words without quotes. The number of results returned by Google in each case is YOUR competition.

The main differences between these two types of search are as follows:

Search with Quotes - this returns only those pages that have been "optimized" for the exact phrase.

Search without Quotes - this returns all pages that have been "optimized" for the words making up the phrase.

e.g. (in simple terms)

a) If you search Google for

alsatian dog

Google returns 41,000 competing pages.

b) If you search Google for

"alsatian dog"

Google returns 6,390 competing pages.

In (a) above, there are 41,000 pages that refer to alsatian AND dog, but not necessarily to alsatian dog.

In (b) above, there are 6,390 pages that refer to the exact phrase alsatian dog.

Now, if you want to rank well for the term "alsatian dog" on Google, you only have to compete with 6,390 other pages for this exact term.

However, there are 41,000 - 6,390 = 34,610 other pages that are related to this search, and might still beat you if Google sees them as more relevant than your page.

We have discussed before the importance of link reputation and PR in ranking. It is possible for a high PR page to rank well for a term like alsatian dog, even if it does not have the exact phrase on the page.

This fact clouds the issue somewhat, and so although I recommend searching with quotes to find the real competition, I also recommend that you look at the top few results in Google (as searched without quotes) to determine how important those "partial match" pages are.

A quick search at:

http://www.prsearch.net/

for alsatian dog, shows me that the top pages for this search without quotes have a low PR (0-3) and many of those pages have 0 incoming links.

The same search at PRSearch.net using quotes around the phrase show very similar results. The competing pages for the exact term have low PR and low incoming links.

This phrase should be easy to target and get top rankings if done properly.

A word of warning: Because the PR reported on the Google toolbar is out of date (see earlier), you cannot be 100% sure of the PR of the pages, even using a site like PRSearch. They will use the same formula that the toolbar uses, and so will be equally out of date. Only Google knows the exact PR it is using in its ranking for any one page.

A second check I often do is to check what the PR of the homepage of the site that is ranking well, as this gives me an indication of how important the site as a whole is. For the phrase alsatian dog (with or without quotes), the top page is:

http://www.castleofspirits.com/stories02/alsatian.html

The homepage

http://www.castleofspirits.com

has a PR of 6 - quite an important site.

However, there is no link to the alsatian page on the homepage, so the PR 6 homepage wont directly help towards the high ranking of the alsatian dog web page.

Doing a backward links check on Google does not help since there are no backlinks listed for this top ranking page.

OK, putting on my detective hat, I see a link at the bottom of the Alsatian page called "March 02 Ghost Stories". There is another link to "Ghost Story Page".

Clicking on the link to Ghost Story Page, I am taken to a PR 5 page:

http://www.castleofspirits.com/storypg.html

where I find a link to March 2002 Ghost Stories. Clicking that link takes me to a PR 3 page:

http://www.castleofspirits.com/stories02/mch2002.html

And on this page I find a link to Ghostly Alsatian dog.

So, the top ranking alsatian dog page has one link I know of from a PR 3 page. I might assume that this site also has a sitemap (although I cannot find one) where it contains a second link to the alsatian dog page. That means a total of 2 links, both internal.

I can assume from this that the alsatian page with a PR 2 is probably the correct PR, and the page itself has very few incoming links. I am confident that if I targeted the phrase alsatian dog, I would easily get a top ranking.

The phrase alsatian dog is therefore an EASY phrase to target.

As a final check I went to the searchguild difficulty tool mentioned in section 6 of this newsletter and typed my phrase into that. The Search Guild rates this term as EASY.

With relatively few off-page factors contributing to the high ranking of this page, I can only assume that the on-page factors are what makes this page stand out from the rest and rank at number 1 on Google.

There are a variety of tools available for calculating density, but I use a tool I wrote for myself and is not available for purchase.

Running this URL through my tool tells me a lot of useful information.

Density of the phrase "alsatian dog" on the page is 0.49%

The keyword is found ONCE in the title (11.11%), and TWICE in the main text on the page (a density of just 0.34%).

The keyword is not found in any header or meta tag!

As a second check I always look at what I call the partial density. That is the sum of the densities of all words that make up the phrase.

e.g. the phrase "alsatian dog" is made up of two words - alsatian AND dog. I look at the density of alsatian, and the density of dog, and combine the two densities.

This is useful because it tells me the density on the page of the words that make up the phrase (remember it is possible to rank well without the exact phrase on the page) - a kind of simplified page reputation.

The partial density of this page is 3.09%, made up of 7 occurrences of alsatian, and 12 occurrences of dog. This page is obviously about alsatians and dogs!

Let's look at the prominence of this phrase on the page. First an explanation of what prominence means.

Prominence is a measure of where on the page a word exists.

A prominence of 100 would mean it was the first word on the page.

A prominence of 1 would indicate it was the last word on the page.

A prominence of 50% would indicate it was the middle word on the page.

If the phrase was the first word (100% prominence) and the last word (1% prominence) on the page, the average prominence on the page would be about 50%. That means the keywords are well spread out on the page. As prominence increases, the keyword is found higher up the page, as it decreases, it is found lower down the page.

For analysis of top ranking pages, I look at not only the average prominence of ALL occurrences of the phrase on my page

i.e. how the keywords are spaced out on the page,

but also the prominence of the first occurrence on the page.

i.e. how close to the start of the document is the phrase first found?

The prominence of the first occurrence of the phrase alsatian dog is 99.67%. That means it is almost the first phrase on the page (only the word ghost comes before it).

The average prominence of the whole page for this term is 62.62%. That means that the keywords are distributed more in the upper portion of the page. Haven't I always told you that it was important to get your main keyword in the top one-third of the page?.

This page is a good one to study. It shows a top ranking page for a low competitive keyword phrase. Because of the low competition, incoming links and PR are less important (though if you have both, you could dominate this phrase), while on-page factors will make or break the ranking.

Even though the exact phrase is only found 3 times on the page, the fact that the phrase is in the title of the document and in the body text seems to be enough. This low density is backed up by using the words that make up the phrase several times on the page. Google will be in no doubt what this page is about.

A final help to the ranking of this page is the filename. Notice that part of the keyword phrase is found in the filename - alsatian.html

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Andy Williams is author of the free, ezSEO internet marketing newsletter, offering subscribers up-to-date information on all aspects of internet marketing.
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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andrew_Williams

7 Biggest Mistakes People Make When Doing Keyword Research - Mistake Number Two

2006-03-10T07:32:00.000-08:00
By John Mann

This lesson often comes as a surprise to many readers.

Mistake Number Two: Not taking advantage of correctly targeted keywords.

"You Simply Must Have Massive Lists of Well-Targeted Keywords!"

Question: In the headline above, which word is more important to your online success, "massive" or "targeted"? (Answer later in the article).

There's an old axiom that every offline sales professional has probably heard more than once. It goes something like:

"If you throw enough pasta against the refrigerator door, some of it's going to stick".

That's the way to begin the quest for your keyword lists. Get enough of them, learn to use them effectively and you'll find some that work. You'll find that others do not work so well for you.

And then you'll occasionally stumble across what seems to be the next Holy Grail; a keyword that is both relatively inexpensive (if you're paying for that keyword through Google AdWords or another pay per click marketing campaign (PPC) - more about this in the 5th article in this series) and extremely effective in its ability to draw massive amounts of traffic that result in tons of sales.

Yessir, the thought of that type of keyword makes me smile. Heck, it makes me drool. I love finding those diamond-in-the-rough keywords that my competitors don't even have a clue about, much less use!

However, before you run off to your favorite keyword tool(s) (and I believe that you need to use more than one. Actually I use 7 tools for my really extensive keyword research - but that's coming up in the next article), stop for a minute and take a few moments to digest the next paragraph.

Massive keyword lists are your goal but you what you really want is the traffic that these keyword lists will ultimately generate.

You want these keywords and the corresponding traffic to be:

1) Well targeted - you don't just want traffic no matter what anyone has told you in the past. You want traffic that's interested in what you're offering. You want the real potential customers to visit your website with their checkbook or credit card, ready to make that purchase. You're not after the tire thumpers.

2) Passionate enough about whatever you're offering (and affluent enough to be able to purchase it) to the point that price is not the deciding factor in consummating the sales process.

In order to accomplish those goals, you need to generate massive keyword lists. Then you need to learn how to manage these lists even further, depending on exactly the type of online sales you're doing.

If you are attempting to optimize your website, be it a brand-new website or 10 years old, you'll be performing what's called search engine optimization (SEO) on your site. You'll learn more about this on Day 6 of this series of articles.

But if you're just salivating to get started using keyword research with your SEO activities, I can think of no better place to start than with a subscription to PlanetOcean.com. (Please see the active link for Planet Ocean in the Resources Box at the end of this article).

The folks at PlanetOcean are among the best SEO strategists around. Their eBook called "The Unfair Advantage to Winning the Search Engine Wars" (which comes with your subscription) takes you from "complete SEO newbie" all the way to the level of the pros.

The book and the website are updated monthly to assure you that their highly respected advice on optimizing your site (for the dozen or so top and second tier search engines, no less) is current and up-to-date.

If you're trying to find great SEO advice believe me, you will like and benefit from these folks. And they have a great, 365 day, "even if the dog ate it" guarantee. You simply cannot go wrong by checking them out.

Now if you are doing PPC campaigns with Google AdWords (or Yahoo which used to be Overture) that's a horse of a different color. You need to generate massive keyword lists as well. However, you will want to employ and manage your keyword lists in a much different manner than the folks looking to employ SEO to achieve great "organic" search results will.

Heck, you're paying for your keywords and the traffic they generate. You need to learn the basics from an expert in order to make money with the keywords that you are going to generate.

The man who is simply THE AdWords Guru, IMNSHO (In My Not So Humble Opinion), is my associate Perry Marshall. Perry is the author of
"The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords". If you're an AdWords wannabe, you absolutely, positively want Perry's eBook (HINT: Your competitors probably already have their copies!).

And if you're an intermediate AdWords user (a semi-pro, so to speak) and you haven't read Perry's book, you need to. And if you have read it, you want to read it again with the version that's just been updated (for Autumn 2005) to bring yourself up to speed. Click the link in the Resources Box at the end of the article for more information or to order this Great AdWords eBook.

OK, that's enough for today.

Oops, I almost forgot the answer to the question I posed at the beginning of the article.

ANSWER: IMHO, both words are important but if I had to choose only one of them as THE most important, I'll take "targeted" over "massive" when it comes to traffic any day of the week, especially if it's in a PPC campaign where I'm directly paying for that traffic. But in reality, I want them both! (I'm a firm believer in the quote "Be happy with what you have, so make sure you get enough!")

Again, though, that's just IMNSHO. ;-)

John Mann, "The KeyWord Mann" is President of MannMade Software, LLC. He's been doing online sales & marketing for over 10 years now, starting back before Windows 95 was around.
MannMadeSoftware.com and YourKeyWordAssistant.com are the websites for his online sales & marketing software applications.

Curious about these tracking urls that I'm using? To see the first truly complete ad tracking & A/B split testing program around today visit:
http://www.MannMadeSoftware.com/trk.php?c=2128&u=EzineArticles2

For more information about PlanetOcean.com or their eBook "The Unfair Advantage to Winning the Search Engine Wars" visit:
http://www.YourKeyWordAssistant.com/trk.php?c=2135&u=EzineArticles2

Using Google AdWords? If you're doing any kind of AdWords campaigns, you'll want Perry Marshall's
"The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords"
http://www.YourKeyWordAssistant.com/trk.php?c=2136&u=EzineArticles2

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Mann

7 Biggest Mistakes People Make When Doing Keyword Research - Mistake Number One

2006-03-10T07:29:00.000-08:00
By John Mann

I should be upfront with you and say that in some respects my use of the word "Biggest" is a tad deceptive.

Why?

Well, as you will discover during the course it is often the "little things" that make the "big difference" when it comes to keyword research. Let me say as a brief side note that I find this to be one of the overlooked aspects of online sales & marketing.

For instance, one little tweak to your website’s copy might not produce an avalanche of new sales or leads. But it’ll help a little bit, right? The trick is to put 100 of these little “tweaks” to work for you, each one making the overall system just a little bit better. Now you’re talking!

Okay I’ll climb down off of the soapbox. Let’s begin with ...

KEYWORD MISTAKE NUMBER ONE: Not understanding (or realizing, perhaps) just exactly what keywords really are and what they actually represent.

Please allow me to explain a bit.

Keywords really are, IMHO, the “mirror into your market’s psyche”. They are the clues your market is readily supplying you, the online marketing person, about who they, the market, truly are and exactly what they care about.

Keywords tell you what your market is searching for or attempting to do or buy online at any specific moment.

OK, now maybe your thinking “John, that’s so obvious. It doesn’t take a keyword genius to figure that one out. I hope the rest of this course is going to be a bit better than this!”

Yes, you’re right. It doesn’t take a keyword guru to realize this. However, I have found that all too often many folks overlook this fact. Many, many online marketing people including some keyword gurus, seem to forget this fact as they scurry about performing all of the necessary tasks one needs to do in order to build & operate an online business.

Now, it may seem like I’m digressing a bit (or even a lot) in the next couple of paragraphs so please bear with me for a moment.

Any truly good salesperson will tell you that your sales efforts need to be “market driven” not “product driven”. Have you ever heard the phrase “Sell the sizzle not the steak”? That’s simply the salesman’s way of remembering to be “market oriented” rather than “product oriented”.

Think of your market first; make yourself think like them. Figure out for your market exactly what’s in it for them in relation to your product. And then tell ‘em about what’s in it for them and give it to them. To put it in even broader strokes, the key to a successful online business (and offline business as well) is simply to find out what your market wants and give it to them.

Key Evoy, the author of the book “Make Your Site Sell” and the excellent “Site Build It!” website development software/program says it like this. “It’s my lawn, not your grass seed” meaning it’s their needs and wants that concern them, not your product. I use this quote to remember to keep myself in my customer’s shoes.

OK, so how do you find out what your market wants? Simple. You start by doing your keyword research. You strive to uncover the keyword phrases that your market is typing into the search engines on a daily basis. These keywords or keyword phrases are gifts from your potential customer to you.

Keywords are telling you exactly what your customer wants. If you, the online salesperson, wearing your keyword guru’s hat for the moment, simply listen to what your market is telling you that they want, you’ll find yourself miles ahead of your competitors who do not.

That’s why I equate keywords with the manifestation of my market in my mind whenever I’m doing keyword research. For me, keywords literally are my market.

Once you understand that .......

“Keywords are simply your market talking to you” .......

you’ll no longer be making the first (and most serious, in my opinion) mistake that many keyword researchers make.

All you need to do now is to listen. Are you listening?

John Mann, "The KeyWord Mann" is the President of MannMade Software, LLC
http://www.mannmadesoftware.com/trk.php?c=2132&u=EzineArticles

He's been doing online sales & marketing for over 10 years now, starting back before Windows 95 came on the scene.

Doing keyword research? Visit http://www.YourKeyWordAssistant.com/trk.php?c=2133&u=EzineArticles to see the first piece of keyword research software that you'll want and need in your website's arsenal of tools if you're serious at all about doing keyword research.

For more information about Ken Evoy's products (highly recommended!), simply visit
http://www.mannmadesoftware.com/trk.php?c=2130&u=EzineArticles

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Mann

Microsoft Search Engine - Window to the Future of SEO?

2006-03-10T07:27:00.000-08:00
By David Casey

SEO experts around the world have grown comfortable in the knowledge that a strong link campaign, some adequate optimization and some semblance of optimized content can help drive clients to the top of search engines.

Google and Yahoo made small modifications to their algorithms over the past few years, however, little has changed the formula for success for search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO experts and so-called experts concentrated on link campaigns above all else and clients were none the wiser because these campaigns improved rankings.

With Kosmix and now Windows Live (which will become the search engine for MSN) opening windows for change that will soon become doors, many SEO experts are concerned about how this will impact their existing clients and future clients.

The future of search engines clearly point to a change of focus from link campaigns based on keywords to content. With a growing demand of Internet users for search results based on the content of a site the future of SEO is now the present.

Virtually all SEO companies optimize a website including titles, tags, internal links and the like. Most of these same SEO firms also concentrate on link campaigns with varying success (the strategy and approach of the link campaign are crucial, yet often overlooked). Few SEO firms, however, take content seriously and that may spell disaster for their clients and their future success.

Content has always been king when it comes to what web surfers want and look for. Content is likely to now become king when it comes to search engine rankings and that means savvy site owners will begin to ratchet up their efforts for increasing and improving website content.

Those SEO firms and Internet marketing firms that already concentrate on content will likely find their clients shooting to the top of the rankings as the sites of competitors that concentrated solely on link campaigns sink faster than a ship hitting an iceberg.

Though Google and Yahoo may not be shaking in their boots over the competition by Microsoft, and certainly not Kosmix, they are aware that the future is here and it is time to reevaluate their ranking system and give searchers what they want - relevant sites based on content.

David Casey, VP, SetSitesHigh (http://www.setsiteshigh.com) works as part of a team of SEO experts, marketing experts, website designers, developers and content writers for an Internet marketing and SEO firm.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Casey

Search Engine Spiders Lost Without Guidance - Post This Sign!

2006-03-10T07:26:00.000-08:00
By Mike Valentine

The robots.txt file is an exclusion standard required by all web crawlers/robots to tell them what files and directories that you want them to stay OUT of on your site. Not all crawlers/bots follow the exclusion standard and will continue crawling your site anyway. I like to call them "Bad Bots" or trespassers. We block them by IP exclusion which is another story entirely.

This is a very simple overview of robots.txt basics for webmasters. For a complete and thorough lesson, visit http://www.robotstxt.org/

To see the proper format for a somewhat standard robots.txt file look directly below. That file should be at the root of the domain because that is where the crawlers expect it to be, not in some secondary directory.

Below is the proper format for a robots.txt file ----->

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /group/

User-agent: msnbot
Crawl-delay: 10

User-agent: Teoma
Crawl-delay: 10

User-agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 10

User-agent: aipbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: BecomeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: psbot
Disallow: /

--------> End of robots.txt file

This tiny text file is saved as a plain text document and ALWAYS with the name "robots.txt" in the root of your domain.

A quick review of the listed information from the robots.txt file above follows. The "User Agent: MSNbot" is from MSN, Slurp is from Yahoo and Teoma is from AskJeeves. The others listed are "Bad" bots that crawl very fast and to nobody's benefit but their own, so we ask them to stay out entirely. The * asterisk is a wild card that means "All" crawlers/spiders/bots should stay out of that group of files or directories listed.

The bots given the instruction "Disallow: /" means they should stay out entirely and those with "Crawl-delay: 10" are those that crawled our site too quickly and caused it to bog down and overuse the server resources. Google crawls more slowly than the others and doesn't require that instruction, so is not specifically listed in the above robots.txt file. Crawl-delay instruction is only needed on very large sites with hundreds or thousands of pages. The wildcard asterisk * applies to all crawlers, bots and spiders, including Googlebot.

Those we provided that "Crawl-delay: 10" instruction to were requesting as many as 7 pages every second and so we asked them to slow down. The number you see is seconds and you can change it to suit your server capacity, based on their crawling rate. Ten seconds between page requests is far more leisurely and stops them from asking for more pages than your server can dish up.

(You can discover how fast robots and spiders are crawling by looking at your raw server logs - which show pages requested by precise times to within a hundredth of a second - available from your web host or ask your web or IT person. Your server logs can be found in the root directory if you have server access, you can usually download compressed server log files by calendar day right off your server. You'll need a utility that can expand compressed files to open and read those plain text raw server log files.)

To see the contents of any robots.txt file just type robots.txt after any domain name. If they have that file up, you will see it displayed as a text file in your web browser. Click on the link below to see that file for Amazon.com

http://www.Amazon.com/robots.txt

You can see the contents of any website robots.txt file that way.

The robots.txt shown above is what we currently use at Publish101 Web Content Distributor, just launched in May of 2005. We did an extensive case study and published a series of articles on crawler behavior and indexing delays known as the Google Sandbox. That Google Sandbox Case Study is highly instructive on many levels for webmasters everywhere about the importance of this often ignored little text file.

One thing we didn't expect to glean from the research involved in indexing delays (known as the Google Sandbox) was the importance of robots.txt files to quick and efficient crawling by the spiders from the major search engines and the number of heavy crawls from bots that will do no earthly good to the site owner, yet crawl most sites extensively and heavily, straining servers to the breaking point with requests for pages coming as fast as 7 pages per second.

We discovered in our launch of the new site that Google and Yahoo will crawl the site whether or not you use a robots.txt file, but MSN seems to REQUIRE it before they will begin crawling at all. All of the search engine robots seem to request the file on a regular basis to verify that it hasn't changed.

Then when you DO change it, they will stop crawling for brief periods and repeatedly ask for that robots.txt file during that time without crawling any additional pages. (Perhaps they had a list of pages to visit that included the directory or files you have instructed them to stay out of and must now adjust their crawling schedule to eliminate those files from their list.)

Most webmasters instruct the bots to stay out of "image" directories and the "cgi-bin" directory as well as any directories containing private or proprietary files intended only for users of an intranet or password protected sections of your site. Clearly, you should direct the bots to stay out of any private areas that you don't want indexed by the search engines.

The importance of robots.txt is rarely discussed by average webmasters and I've even had some of my client business' webmasters ask me what it is and how to implement it when I tell them how important it is to both site security and efficient crawling by the search engines. This should be standard knowledge by webmasters at substantial companies, but this illustrates how little attention is paid to use of robots.txt.

The search engine spiders really do want your guidance and this tiny text file is the best way to provide crawlers and bots a clear signpost to warn off trespassers and protect private property - and to warmly welcome invited guests, such as the big three search engines while asking them nicely to stay out of private areas.

Copyright © August 17, 2005 by Mike Banks Valentine

Google Sandbox Case Study http://publish101.com/Sandbox2 Mike Banks Valentine operates http://Publish101.com Free Web Content Distribution for Article Marketers and Provides content aggregation, press release optimization and custom web content for Search Engine Positioning http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_Valentine

Submitting your Site to Yahoo! Directory

2006-03-10T06:37:00.000-08:00
By John Hamman

Yahoo is a tough engine to get your blog into, least if you are trying to get in without paying. I have determined to try to find a way to get listed without paying, but that takes patience. A few weeks have passed since I attempted to submit to Yahoo! Directory and since then I have received nothing in emails from them, nor do I find my site listed in the directory yet. Oddly enough my website is showing up in the yahoo web search sporadically. So I figured its time to resubmit, but this time I think we will try some new things and discuss our methods.

Since we submitted our site to Yahoo! via the free submission, then there is a chance that the editor didn't have time to review it. So we keep trying. Especially since we didn’t receive a email with a announcement to our listing or a denial.

To get listed in the directory, for free, you need to do some research first.

Note: Be sure to read http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/appropriate.html and any other Yahoo! suggest information first. It does help.

Start out with writing down search terms that are the most defining to your site. For oursite the list looks something like this "blogging", "income from blogging", "how to blog", "professional blogging", "blogging tips", "blogging help" etc… So lets start out with searching the directory with our first search term "blogging". First navigate to the http://dir.yahoo.com and plug in the keyword "blogging" and hit search. You should get a wide variety of sites returned but what we want to pay attention to is the "Related Directory Categories", and what you see is "Weblogs" and "Weblogs about Blogging". Jackpot. I think we fit into these categories, one issue though, "Weblogs" category is to broad and is one of the "Top Categories". Our chances of getting listed here is about nil. So lets hit "Weblogs About Blogging". Take note that there is no more sub-categories and there is only 31 sites listed here, that’s a good thing.
Ok, so now we have found our category, lets get to the submission. Click the "Suggest a Site" link on the page. Now you should be brought to a page that is titled appropriately "Suggest a Site to the Yahoo! Directory". On this page you will have one of 2 views; The first gives you a choice to either submit the site via the "Standard" Submit (the free one!) or the "Yahoo! Directory Submit (with the 7 Day Guarantee and $299 us dollar fee!). The second view you may get shows ONLY the paid submit. If you get this, you have 2 choices. Either find another category that fits your site and shows you the "Standard" submit, or Pay. Since we have the option of "Standard" submission, we are going to try that. We click the "Standard Consideration" option and verify that the category is correct and hit continue. You will have to login/register with Yahoo! ID if you haven't already. The next screen should be the main submission form.

The Yahoo Directory Suggest a Site form is pretty simple to fill out. If you really don’t care, just fill out the appropriate fields and hit submit. But that's probably not going to help you in your chances nor is it going to help your directory listings if you happen to get accepted. So here we need to pay attention to what we are entering into the form. The title, in my opinion, is just as important or more important than the description. So lets take a moment to focus on the title.

Yahoo does list its directory listings in alphabetical order so you can attempt to use a title that would help your listings in that search type. Keep in mind though, if you are putting something like what you find in your everyday phone book, a title "#1 site for blogging income" or "AAA Professional Blogging Tutorials" you just wasted your time because your not going to get listed. Now if you business name is "AAA Professional Blogging" you can do that. What I recommend for your title, is that it is "Keyword" friendly and highly relevant to your site. Don’t try to pull a fast one on the editors and search users by using a slick title that doesn’t really describe your site. For our title we are going with "theladderproject's Successful Blogging by Example". Be sure not to make the title in all caps, use exclamation points or use a title that is more of a sales pitch like "Make money from home".

The description is the most difficult item to define corretly. Ideally you want to include as many relevant keywords in the description as possible. You will find that this can be difficult, especially since you do not want to list a bunch of keywords in a row. Our description will look like this "Weblog about blogging as a profession. Learn how to successfully make money by marketing your blog advertising and affiliate income". In our description we have about 10-11 keywords that someone might use to search for our topics and we kept the description under 25 words.

Next you enter in a Email Address and Contact Person for the ability of changes and contacting you about your listings. I suggest a more permanent email address that you will probably not change.

Finally there is the Additional Information box. Here you can put other categories that your site may fit under. I have found that this box is definiatly character limited and cutting and pasting 2 category url's didn’t work. I suggest you explain briefly your category suggestion and why your site should be there. I don’t think that any suggestions made here will affect your chances for listing, though you may want to type in some sweet nothings or flirtations (you never know!).

Ok, so now you review everything for errors or mistakes and hit submit. Next step is to just wait. If you don’t hear from Yahoo! After 3 weeks (2-4 business days for the paid submission) then it's time to resubmit. If this fails after 2-3 tries then its time to try some other steps.

Copyright © http://blog.theladderproject.com 2006

John Hamman has been in the internet business for 10 years now and specializes in site usability, accessibility, SEO, and online marketing tactics. He now manages the Ladder Project, a "tell all" weblog about how to make money by blogging, from start to finish. This site gives unprecedented access to the internet's best kept secrets in website promotion and driving traffic that will produce income.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Hamman

Have You Been Dropped By Yahoo?

2006-03-10T06:34:00.000-08:00
By Andrew Williams

Yahoo has fairly recently updated its guidelines. You can read the full list at:

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html

I thought that a few points were of great interest to you because we have discussed these issue in the past when describing the best way to future-proof your site against search engine algorithm changes.

Here are some of the new guidelines:

Pages Yahoo! Wants Included in Its Index ________________________________________

1. Original and unique content of genuine value

2. Pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations secondary

3. Hyperlinks intended to help people find interesting, related content, when applicable

4. Metadata (including title and description) that accurately describes the contents of a web page

5. Good web design in general

It seems content is now King for Yahoo, and unique content at that. As I have always told you, develop webpages with unique content and your sites will do well.

Here is a summary of some of the guidelines Yahoo makes on what not to do. I have added my own comments in brackets afterwards:

1. redirects (targeting smart pages and similar cloaking techniques).

2.Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages (pages generated by page generators that substitute one keyword for another).

3. Pages in great quantity, automatically generated or of little value (data feed sites that are built in a day by someone wanting to put out thousands of pages quickly).

4. Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity (webmasters who cross link all their sites in an effort to rank better).

5. Pages built primarily for the search engines (highly optimized pages).

Read the full set of guidelines for yourself as they offer a great insight as to why your site may have been dropped by Yahoo.

*********************************************************
Andy Williams is author of the free, ezSEO internet marketing newsletter, offering subscribers up-to-date information on all aspects of internet marketing. His search engine optimization website offers unique, no BS information, for free.
*********************************************************

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andrew_Williams

Google - PR & Backlinks

2006-03-10T06:33:00.000-08:00
By Andrew Williams

Here are some observations that I have made recently:

1. On several of my own sites, I have some pages with zero page rank despite having links pointing to them PR 5 pages on the same site. These pages are now 2-3 months old. Shouldn't they have PR by now?

2. Most of these pages rank well despite the apparent PR 0.

3. Doing searches on Google show up a lot of anomalies. Many top ranking pages have PR 0.

For example, go to http://www.prsearch.net/

This is that great search tool I mentioned last week which gives you the PR and backlinks of the search results. Do a search for Bratz dolls..

Here are the top 10 sites when I search:

#1 PR 6 Backlinks - 151

#2 PR 7 Backlinks - 5

#3 PR 0 Backlinks - 18

#4 PR 4 Backlinks - 2

#5 PR 0 Backlinks - 0

#6 PR 0 Backlinks - 0

#7 PR 0 Backlinks - 0

#8 PR 0 Backlinks - 0

#9 PR 6 Backlinks - 46

#10 PR 0 Backlinks - 11

4. Backlinks at Google don't tally with known backlinks. This has been reported a lot in various publications recently. Google use to only show backlinks from PR 4 or more sites, but it has been reported that backlinks from lower PR sites are showing and backlinks from some higher PR sites seem to be missing.

Reading through these observations, it is clear that something is going on.

It might look at first glance that PR is not being updated since lots of pages which should have PR don't. I don't think this is the case, and I will explain in a moment what I believe is going on. However, before we do that, let's consider some of the other stuff listed above.

Look at those top 10 results again.

How can it be that 6 pages with PR 0 rank in the top 10 for a competitive term?

Also, how can it be that some of those PR 0 pages don't have PR, yet they do have backlinks? Look at position 10. PR 0 yet 11 backlinks reported by Google. Go look at those backlinks and they all have PR 0 as well. So is Google now reporting backlinks from pages that are PR 0?

It all seems very weird, yet I believe the answer to this is very simple. Google has not updated the Google Toolbar for some time, yet in its own database, PR is largely up to date. This means that pages that appear to have a PR 0 may in fact have much higher PR.

From a webmasters point of view, this is a real pain. Imagine putting up a site, adding a page to get some link partners, but not getting any PR on the links page for several months. You contact other webmasters for a link exchange, but the other webmasters ignore your request because you are PR 0!

Could it be that Google have decided to update the Google Toolbar far less frequently, or not at all, so that webmasters cannot find out the true PR of pages in the index?

If so, why would they do this?

Google use to show only backlinks from pages with PR 4 or more, yet now appear to show backlinks from pages with much less PR, even PR 0. Does this mean that Google have changed their policy on which pages they show as backlinks?

Possibly, though doesn't it make more sense that Google still only shows PR 4 pages as backlinks, but since PR on the toolbar has not been updated, we see these backlinks as significantly less PR than they actually are?

For any search engine to return the most relevant results possible, those engines must try to stop webmasters using techniques that get their web pages better rankings. For Google, this includes manipulating PR.

Google state this clearly in their Program Policies for use for Adsense advertising.

Read through the section "Site Content" and look at the last point in the bullet list. Google specifically mentions PR manipulation. If Google is applying these rules to Adsense advertising, does it not make sense that they also apply these rules in their algorithms?

If Google is trying to:

a) prevent reverse engineering of its algorithm, and

b) prevent webmasters from using techniques that might get a webpage ranked higher than it deserves based on its content,

Then surely, not updating the PR on the toolbar is a good thing for Google.

In doing so, it makes it very difficult:

a) for webmasters to find out why top ranking pages rank so well, and

b) for webmasters to get links from other webmasters (which is a way of manipulating PR and increasing rankings).

I know Google want to make their engine the best it possibly can be, and they should be applauded for that. It makes it easier for searchers to find things of relevance. I believe that the whole idea of Pagerank was based on the premise that quality sites would get links from other sites because of their quality, not because of artificial linking like link exchanges. Link exchanges have just gotten out of hand and made a mockery of the Pagerank idea.

So what can you do about it? Well, my suggestion is the same as always. Add quality content to your sites. Other sites will naturally link to yours because your site offers value to THEIR visitors. In addition, write some quality articles and submit them with your own resource box that links back to your site. Submit these to sites that reprint articles, and you will naturally grow your own backlinks and PR through quality content. Your rankings will improve, and Google should love your site for the value it adds to the internet.

For details on how to use Articles for better rankings, why not re-read the fr.ee report available to my newsletter subscribers.

*****************************************************
Andy Williams is author of the free, ezSEO internet marketing newsletter, offering subscribers up-to-date information on all aspects of internet marketing.
*****************************************************

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andrew_Williams

8 Essential SEO techniques

2006-03-10T06:02:00.000-08:00
by: Matt Colyer

1) Title Tag - The title tag is the most powerful on-site SEO technique you have, so use it creatively! What you place in the title tag should only be one thing, the exact keyword you used for the web page that you are trying to optimize. Every single web page should have it's own title tag.

2) ALT Tags - ALT tags were meant to be for text browsers because the images didn't show in text browsers and the ATL tags would tell the visitor what it's about. You should put your main keyword(s) in the ALT tags, but don't over do it because you could get dropped in the results or even worse banned for life!

3) Link Popularity - Link popularity is the most powerful SEO tool out of all them. Most search engines don't even consider web sites if there is not at least one or two links pointing to the web site. Having another site(s) link to your web site is important when it comes to getting your site a good ranking. Your keywords should be in the links you get and keep the keywords short. When you receive requests for a link exchange, check the site out before linking with them, check for spam (Repeat keywords, hidden text, etc.).

4) Keyword Density - This is also vital and should be used with research. You should use the keyword(s) once in the title tag, once in the heading tag, once in bold text, and get the density between 5% to 20% (Don't over do it!). Also use your keyword(s) both low and high on the web page, keyword(s) should be in the first sentence and in the last one.

5) Page Size - Your web page's speed is important to your visitors and the search engines. Why? Because the robots will be able to spider your web page faster and easier. Try your best to keep your web page over 5k and under 15k in size.

6) Rich Theme - Search engines are looking at themes more and more. Build content (Articles, FAQ, tips, etc.) much as possible and keep the web pages around 200 to 500 words. Create content that's related to your market and link them out to other related content on your site. Try to get 200 web pages or more.

7) Web Site Design - This is also important, if you want to get indexed! Text content should out weigh the HTML content. The pages should validate and be usable in all of today's leading edge browsers. Stay away from flash and Java Script, search engines dislike them both a lot.

8) Insite Cross Linking - This will help you get all of your web pages indexed by the search engines. Your web pages should be no more than three clicks away from the home page. Link to topic related quality content across your site. This will also help build you a better theme through out your web site. On every page you should link back to your home page and your main service(s).

Please make sure to include the author and website provided.
-Scott Fish, http://www.topsatelliteradio.com Satellite Radio receivers and history.

An SEO Checklist

2006-03-10T05:13:00.000-08:00
Would you like a checklist of the important steps to take in optimizing a web site? Well, here it is:

1. Use a keyword research tool to find profitable phrases (i.e. those that are actually being searched for).

2. Build each page optimized for a single keyword phrase. Also sprinkle in some secondary keywords relevant to the main keyword.

3. Link your web site together so that all pages are only a couple of clicks away from the homepage.

4. Use text links instead of fancy graphics or buttons to link to your pages.

5. When you add a link to a page where the main keyword phrase for that page is "blue widgets", make sure the links to that page include the phrase "blue widgets".

6. Build a sitemap.

7. Add articles / Content to your web site and add links from these articles to your important pages.

8. Get quality link partners.

Once you have completed these 8 steps, repeat steps 7 & 8 over and over again. I would say that 80% of your time on a new site should be steps 7 and 8. Add content & find link partners. A great way of getting links into your site is writing and publishing articles on article submission sites. When webmasters take up your article and publish it on their site, you get an incoming link to yours.

As your site climbs in the search engine rankings, you can decide when you are happy with your rankings and reduce the amount of time spent on 7 & 8.

By Andrew Williams
Andy Williams is author of the free, ezSEO internet marketing newsletter, offering subscribers up-to-date information on all aspects of internet marketing. His search engine optimization website offers unique, no BS information, for free.

SEO Basics

2006-03-10T05:11:00.000-08:00
Research

1. Research Your keyword using Word Tracker and Overture, use http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

2. Carrying out a short term adwords campaign can be used to find the click through ratio and conversion ration of the chosen keywords.

On Site Optimisation

1. Target between 1 and 3 key phrases per webpage.

2. Have a unique and relevant title for each page created, the title should be in readable English but include the key phrase you are targeting on that particular page.

3. Each webpage should contain ONLY unique and relevant content, Google will penalise duplicate content that you have ripped off. Split very long articles up onto multiple pages, to allow for optimisation of multiple phrases.

4. You should try and make each optimised page contain 300+ words

5. Content on your page should focus around your keyword, it should be written in clear and readable English but try to have the key word density around 6-12%.

6. Each webpage should be named appropriately, use you keyword/phrase in the URL, if using multiple words in the URL use "-" instead of the "_" because search engines will read "-" as a space.

7. The heading of the page should be in H1, this should contain your key phrase, subheadings should use other tags such as H2, H3 etc these also should contain your key phrase if possible.

7. All images should use the Alt attribute, if the image has no use then set the attribute to blank. Key images should explain what the image is and if possible contain your key phrase.

8. Use the Meta Description to display the description of your site in the search engine, apart from that it makes little difference.

9. Use your keywords/phrases in the Meta keywords, don't duplicate phrases or words and don't key stuff. Meta keywords will not make a difference to the SEO

10. If your website uses asp/php and has long complex URLs, use the mod rewrite function to simplify the variables in the URL to be search engine friendly.

Off Site Optimisation

1. Do not bother submitting your site to Google site submit, post your link onto a forum with a high Page Rank(PR), or any website you have access to with a high PR. Google crawls high PR sites frequently, and follows outbound links to check their relevance. Initially it will just crawl the first page, but later will come back for a deep crawl.

2. Back linking is still very important, but it is no longer about getting as many as possible from where ever. Submit your site to niche directories that focus on your subject area.

3. Write articles relavant to your subject and submit them to article directories, such as GoArticles and EzineArticles.

4. Articles that you add to your website submit them to Digg or Shoutwire to generate some traffic.

5. Find other websites in your subject area and swap links with each other, the higher their PR the better but if they are good websites in your subject area will be useful.

6. Try and make your website appealing enough for people to link to your site without the need to reciprocal link. This can be done by providing a useful resource such as programming tools, SEO tools or just writing interesting articles on popular subjects.

7. Try implementing a forum into your site to generate reoccurring traffic.

DO NOT!!!!!

1. Join linking farms, these are websites that will distribute your link to hundreds if not thousands of websites. Google will perceive your website as a spam site and penalize you for it. If you are in the Google sandbox and you gain links at an unnatural pace it will take considerably longer to get out of the sandbox.

2. Keyword stuff in your website, this means you repeat your keywords in the content/title/headings etc. This could be either just repeating the word constantly or making the text very difficult to read. Google will penalize you!

3. Use hidden text to avoid the issues of keyword stuffing, Google is intelligent and will notice these techniques.

4. Use doorway pages that are heavily optimised and then redirect to you main page, Google will kick you out of the Search Engine Results Pages if found for example bmw.de was booted at the start of the year.

By J Smythe
This information has been provided by J Smythe @ Blue Echo UK.