What is Web Analytics and How it Helps a Website Owner?

One of My clients was asking that how to read an analytical report and what is this and what is that? From these questions, I thought to have written few notes about the analytical reports which would be beneficial for my clients and the readers of this blog.

Definition:

A web analytics is a series of reports of quantitative indicator of the behavior of the visitors of the website. It tracks the movement of visitor and the reason of his/her visit. In other words, it provides the clear report of the performance of your website and the trends. From these reports and trends the website owner creates and implements more effective program to increase sales.

Web Analytics are based:

1. Collection of visitor's data from logfiles, and 2. by tagging each webpage with a Javascript.

A third web analytics method is a combination of the two whereby more relevant data can be produced than what is possible with either of the two methods.

Web Analytics Terms:

Number of visits means that how many visitors landed on any page of your website from any source. In the case of log files of server, it will log several files for each visit, while the page-tagging script will only consider the page as a whole seen by the visitor. In either case, each web analytics data will clearly identify if the visitor is new or has come before.

Page Views means different for the two web analytics methods. While tagging script considers the whole page as one request, the logfile on the other hand will record multiple hits (one for each file, including images, .js and .css) within a single page-view.

Hits denotes requests for files from server and is recorded only in logfile.

Unique visitors means new visitors, it is noticed by logfiles as well.

The length of time a visitor spends in seeing a website.

The keyword phrase used to arrive at the website.

The unique IP address and therefore the country from where the visits generated

Visits duration

Files type etc

Data transfer to and from the server is always recorded in server's logfile with clockwork precision. And these files can be easily viewed in web analytics programs such as Webalizer, Awstats, etc. which analyze raw logfile data and portray valuable visitor information in easy-to-follow graphics.

What is difference between Logfile and Page Tagging:

1. Logfile analysis is usually already available in the server. Page tagging is an outsourced option, which means that visitors' data is captured by provider's remote server. 2. Logfile analysis can be viewed only in provider's website, while Google Analytics and Click Tracks are examples of page-tagging web analytics. 3. Since page tagging requires javascript to be installed on every webpage, there is always a possibility that some visitors' browsers do not allow the script to run. Whilw logfiles have no such issue. 4. Logfiles enter transfer of all files, including images and scripts, and therefore certain parameters like hits and page views are not as accurate as with page-tagging web analytics. 5. While logfiles record visits by search engines, page tagging does not. 6. Logfile web analytics record failed visits too. Page tagging takes a request into account only when a webpage is successfully displayed.

Web analytics is a type of feedback from visitor which is available all times. These reports are a great source by which you can analyze relative strength and weakness of your website. From these, you can find which pages are most visited and which keywords are more related to your web site.

Please remember, no one can give guarantee of position one on any search engine as far as Search engine optimization is concened. However, professionally experts do their best and follow the procedures and maintain quality and required quantity, than there is no doubt that we can bring your website on the top position of any search engine. For More information visit our quality search engine optimization blog.

About the author
"Nawaz Lakho is the owner of LakhoSoft, An IT Intelligence and quality on-line web service. He is web designer and developer. LakhoSoft has build a worldwide reputation in web design and development, graphic design and presentations, search engine optimization, link exchanges, data management, data entry and sourcing, virtual administration service to clients in North America. They are also offering freelance services for our offshore clients

Source : seoarticles4u.com

Increase Return Traffic to Strengthen SEO Services

When businesses get into search engine marketing, their main objective is driving new visitors to their website. Almost all optimisation strategies devised by webmasters are centered around the same objective, and this is possibly the greatest mistake they can make. It is true that new visitors pep up the traffic influx of a website; but is it wise to neglect the importance of old visitors?

Apart from catering to new users, webmasters have to formulate strategies to bring back old users in the form of return traffic. All web users have certain favourite websites, that they access frequently for daily doses of information and entertainment related to their fields of interest. If webmasters can get their sites to this level, it'll definitely spell success for their SEO campaigns.

Web analytics is one service that can be extremely useful in driving return users to your site. It'll help you analyse prevalent online trends and customer behaviour. The log files of your website will also provide a good insight into visitor reactions, thus helping you identify pages that are retaining or repelling users.

People who bookmark your pages are quite likely to come back once in a while. Buyers - prospective or otherwise â€" will, in all likelihood, visit your site more than once. Return traffic also fosters viral marketing - when users buy something from you, they talk about it to their family, friends and peers, thus publicising your business by word of mouth.

Retaining users is not as easy a task as it sounds to be. Your website should have appealing content matter; something that users have not read elsewhere, something that interests them enough to make a return visit, and above all, something that benefits them. You also need to upgrade your site constantly, catering to latest SEO service guidelines and design techniques. By doing so, you can ensure that users will not find your site boring or static.

It is also imperative that you do away with elements that irk visitors. Things like drop-down menus, scrollers, dragable objects, colours, fonts, etc. have to be dealt with smartly. Review the content of your site periodically. This will help effective Search engine optimizationredirects as much as possible.

When people come back to your website, they would definitely not like to see the same mistakes on your pages. Let your users feel refreshed after every visit to your site. This return traffic will ultimately go on to benefit your campaign in a major way. Use it to your advantage!

About the author
Lalita Negi works with ePurple Media, an SEO Company dealing with various services of effective Search engine optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Pay Per Click, web development etc.

Source : seoarticles4u.com

SEO Tips- How to Write a Press Release for Optimal Web Marketing

What is a Press Release? Press releases are among the most effective ways - if not the most effective way - to get one-way links from high traffic news sites, but you must follow a certain set of guidelines or it will be nothing more than wasted time and your press release will never be published. A press release is a statement of announcement used for publishing and distributing company information or business news throughout the Internet via web media distribution channels. General news releases, event announcements, business news, new product release announcements, and social media news all qualify as valid content for a press release.

How Press Releases can help your SEO and Web Marketing Press releases play a very important role in SEO and web site marketing. Currently, one-way links are more valuable to your search e rankings than ever before. This is due to the fact that two-way links - most often referred to as "reciprocal links" - have decreased in value with regard to Google's "Page rank" system, with most others soon to follow if they have not already. With that in mind, playing an active role in generating news for PR web can serve as your best resource for getting one-way links and generating new traffic to your site without paying a dime. Be aware however, that credible PR web sites have strict criteria for the content that they publish. For example, it absolutely must be newsworthy, grammatically correct, without spelling errors, it must sound professional, and it must give the impression that a decent amount of time was put into it.

The benefit to you is that you may publish your company details including the services you offer, your web address and contact details along with your press release. Be careful not to make your press release sound like an advertisement though, or it will not be considered for publishing. The key here is to go into it with the objective of creating something valuable and informative for the reader.

There are a lot of news websites available that provide free services for publishing your news releases. The real advantage though, is that these websites provide services for distributing that news to subscribers of their news feeds. What this means, is that while you may publish your release to five PR web sites, it will likely end up on twenty or thirty different sites if it follows the criteria stated above. The important thing to remember is that the more valuable and informative that you make your content, the more it will be picked up by additional web sites. Here are some tips to keep in mind when writing your press release:

Tips for writing an effective press release:

* The press release headline should be short, clear and to the point. Treat press release headlines and sub-heads as the ultra-compact version of your entire press release content.
* Your press release summary should be informative. Try to avoid the use long sentences and lengthy paragraphs.
* Start your press release with the "5 Ws" - who, what, when, where, why, and sometimes how. This will make your press release more enlightening and attractive to the editors of the sites you are publishing to.
* Don't forget to include your company information below the press release content. Prepare a brief summary of your company services with the contact details, your website name, and email id for communicating. Most PR sites offer a "company bio" section, which appears under the published release.

About the author
Vision Media Corporation is a Phoenix & Las Vegas based website design and Search Engine Optimization, software, and ecommerce development firm specializing in new approaches to information technology and its relationship to mark

Source : seoarticles4u.com

The importance of SEO

Search engine optimisation, SEO, is one of the vital aspects of any website, but it is often overlooked or neglected. A website may look beautiful, the systems may be flawless, but with no visitors, it is a waste. SEO is the process of getting visitors, traffic and ultimately business to your website, primarily through achieving high rankings for your web site on search terms with high volume.

Studies have shown that Internet searchers are a notoriously impatient bunch. Almost 82% of all searchers do not go beyond the first 30 results. More than 60% don't go beyond the first 10 results. If your website is not in the top ten, you are missing out on over 60% of your potential clients. This can prove to be a very costly exercise. Even if you are happy with the traffic you get to your website, and let's say it's 40%. You can get an extra one and a half times that quantity of visitors and business or more as the result of an effective SEO campaign.

There is always advertising available as an option, but that is substantially less effective and more costly. On Google, 70% of searchers prefer the natural results to advertisements. Say the term your site is optimised for has 100 searches a day, and you are in position 12. You'll only get 40% of your potential visitors. If you're in position 21, you'll get about 25%. Position 31 and you'll get less than 19%. If you are number 1, you'll get 100 of them. If you buy an advertisement, you'll get 30% and you pay for each visitor. The moment you stop paying, you stop getting visitors. An SEO campaign on the other hand lasts for years. Once you are at the top, it takes a lot to move you down the results. As such, SEO is the most cost-effective and efficient method of marketing your website.

You also need your site to rank well for the correct keyword or search phrase. One of my favourite examples comes from research I have conducted into the job industry as part of an SEO campaign. The term “search jobs” has 21 searches a day. The term “job search” has over 6000. Number 1 for “search jobs” will give you 21 visitors. Number 1 for “job search” though will give you 6000. Choosing the right keywords is an important part of any SEO campaign.

How do you target the site towards a specific search phrase or keyword? By having the keyword in the title tag, the description and in the content. It should also be in the anchor text of links pointing to that site. If you are in a reciprocal link exchange, and the link to your job site is the name of your company, that is far less effective at promoting your website than a link saying “job search �" company name.” It's a simple step and seemingly obvious, but many website owners do not do that and their site suffers in it's ranking as a result.

With the right proportion of the key word in relation to your content and sufficient inbound links with the right anchor text, your website can become the number 1 site for that term. There is more to SEO than just that, but those are the 2 essential factors. Without good content, or links, your website will never rank well and will never bring in all the business it could. For more info, check out SEO - Sigil Online

About the author
Russell Qually is a practicing SEO specialist in South Africa. SEO - Sigil Online

Source : seoarticles4u.com

Tips to Select the Best SEO Company

A good looking website is not enough to give your online business a boost. Instead a website that attracts potential customers is what all online firms are looking for. The competition is fierce and every website wants to earn high search engine rankings and maximize website traffic. Making it SEO-friendly is the only way to attain high-rankings. Undeniably, the selection of the right Search Engine Optimization company can be a strenuous task looking at the numerous SEO companies all claiming to help you achieve business goals. Here are a few guidelines and tips to help you select the right SEO company:

Get a thorough knowledge about Search Engine Optimization Before you find out about the SEO company, do your own SEO research and get a basic understanding about the SEO process. SEO is not rocket science and you can easily understand how it should be done by reading loads of informative websites. This knowledge will help you find and hire a good SEO company and spot the ones that are fake and use blackhat methods. By gaining SEO knowledge, you can also help the SEO company you hire in making decisions regarding SEO implementation.

Get Price Quotes & Find out how good the SEO Company is Get price quotes from multiple SEO companies, and select the best among those. But do remember, high price quotes does not make an SEO Company the best. Go for a company that offers realistic prices. Check the websites of the SEO firms to find out how good they are at their job. Do see the Google PageRank -- a good SEO Company's website must have not less than PR 5. Check out their web design, content, navigation structure, sitemap, etc. Check out if the content is well written and has relevant keywords and hyper linking. The navigation structure must be neat and web design must be well-laid out and striking.

Check if the SEO Company promises you No.1 ranking in various search engines It is next to impossible to attain No. 1 ranking, so if an SEO company guarantees you no.1 ranking, then you should perhaps look for another company that is honest in its marketing approach. According to Google SEO selection tips, no one can guarantee no.1 ranking in a search engine like Google.

Get references for first hand information about the company's SEO work Ask your SEO company to give you the references of a few clients they have worked for. If the SEO company gives you keywords and rankings details, you must verify those once by entering them in Google. You can even call the website owner and get a feedback about the company's SEO services.

Services provided by the SEO Company Comprehensive SEO involves on-page and off-page optimization. Ask the SEO company about the on-page and off-page optimization that they will implement. The SEO company must be an expert in providing various search engine optimization services like website analysis, online competitor analysis, keyword analysis, directory submissions, site map addition, ranking reports, SEO content writing, website development, and overall effective online marketing solutions.

Ask specifically if Link Building, which comes under off-page optimization, is part of the SEO package. Linking is radical to make any website a success. If the SEO company can provide you back links from relevant sites with high PR, then this can be extremely beneficial to make your website an instant hit. Make sure that they have a streamlined link building process in place.

Go for Monthly SEO Campaigns As search engines constantly changes their algorithms, so it becomes important to make modifications in your website continuously as per the latest trends. SEO is an ongoing process and the SEO company that you choose should stay current with the SEO trends in the market to beat help you beat the competition. The SEO company should also be able to provide you with the monthly search engine maintenance plan that will help you maintain and enhance your rankings.

All the above tips will help you select the right SEO company for your website and will definitely help you achieve the desired results. Cybernet Media is an SEO company that enables websites get high rankings, higher conversion and business profits. Please visit http://www.search-engine-promotion.eu.com/ for more information.

About the author
Y Hussain is a professional author who has written many articles on various topics & this time writing article on Tips to Select the Best SEO Company. For more details about Tips to Select the Best SEO Company visit: http://www.search-engine-promotion.eu.com/

Source : seoarticles4u.com

Google Poisoning Giving SEO a Bad Name

Red Tape, the technology blog at MSNBC.com, has an interesting article discussing a new term to me called "Google Poisoning". Google Poisoning is when a group of sites organize a sophisticated attack to take over top spots in search results. The poisoners then use their top positions to redirect users to a maze of redirected sites in order to infect vulnerable computers with spyware and whatever else they care to install. You can see an example from the most recent Google poisoning attack in the picture provided by Sunbelt Software, the Security firm who first discovered the attack..

Sunbelt Software found that a simple search for something like "funny dog picture" on Google directed searchers to Web sites hosted on Chinese domains. People who visited those sites were asked to install "Spy-Shredder" a rogue anti-spyware program.

Alex Eckelberry, the CEO of Sunbelt Software, says he was amazed at the scale and sophistication of the attack by people he calls "SEO Gods". In the most recent attack, Eckelberry says the criminals coordinated a large scale attack that put 40,000 to 50,000 of these malicious pages online at the same time and caused users "bad infections" if they visited those pages.

Google promptly took these pages out of their index when they were notified of the problem but Eckelberry state these criminals can "take any site and get it on the first page of the Google results." If that is the case, I'm not sure why these attackers are wasting their time with spyware, rather than getting some sites ranked for "viagra", "web-hosting", "insurance settlement" or any other of the high payout affiliate terms.

I dug through the Sunbelt blog's posts on the topic, which are here, here, here and here. But to summarize the attackers used a maze of sophisticated 302 redirects, fancy javascript, and operating system vulnerabilities to trick Google and its users.

When it gets down to it, 40k-50k is a relatively small number of sites but I hope Google is proactive in preventing this in the future before it gets out of hand and if any of you criminals are reading this, care to share your 'SEO God' tactics?

Last week alone, criminals posted 40,000 to 50,000 of these malicious pages in a single, coordinated attack, said Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt.

Posted By Evan Roberts

Source : marketingshift.com

Quick SEO Tips

Submitted by Richard Burckhardt

One of the features on my blog, The Web Optimist, is a tip box that shows a different random search engine optimization tip each time a page is loaded. As I come across little pearls of wisdom, I add it to the collection.

For the first time published anywhere, here are the first twenty of my Quick SEO Tips in no particular order and with on-site and off-site tips all together. More to come in Part Two.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don't want the link.

4. Don't be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is "blue widgets" then link to "blue widgets" instead of a "Click here" link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don't design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won't cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues - www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you're splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html. Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem - you can't link to a single page. It's either all or nothing. Don't use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn't matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won't make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google's regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn't change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don't try to stuff your text with keywords. It won't work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you're not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

Whew. OK, try to digest these first 20 tips for a while. I'll be following up with the rest in 40 Quick S E O Tips, Part 2 once you've had a chance to absorb these thoroughly.

Source : webpronews.com

SEO.edu: Can You Learn SEO From a Book?

By Ron Jones, Search Engine Watch

Have you ever wondered how the rock stars in SEO (define) became so great? How did they learn all that information about SEO? We'll explore the education of search marketers here in SEM.edu.

Experience or Knowledge

There wasn't much information available about search marketing in the early days of the Internet. So, some smart people decided to experiment. Look what happened.

Over time, a set of search marketing best practices emerged as some of these experiments worked out. This information was shared with friends for the most part, but there was no real formal body of knowledge.

After a while, some of this information was found in books. The majority, however, was surfacing through word of mouth and networking in forums to solve problems. As more search marketers tried out these new tips, they learned what worked and what didn't.

It's challenging to learn search marketing. The rules are made by the search engines and their algorithms (define). All we can do is try the tactics we learn from others and learn for ourselves what works and what doesn't.

We often find that what works for one Web site doesn't necessarily work for another. Once we go through this process and learn for ourselves what works, then we can start to be called an expert.

Once you read or are taught about search, you have some knowledge. Experience will make all the difference. You'll also need to a network of resources to tap when you hit a roadblock.

Staying Up To Date

A prospective client recently asked me to look at redesigning his Web site. I asked if he was planning to implement a search campaign.

"Oh," he said. "All I plan to do is fill out the meta tags on the home page. That should do it."

People often hear a single tip or trick that worked in the past, but those won't necessarily work today. While meta data still has a place today, it doesn't carry nearly the same amount of weight as it did in the late '90s.

The search engines are continuing to update and change their algorithms in an effort to deliver their users to the right pages. We, as search practitioners, need to continue learning what's working and what's not.

Where to Learn SEO Today

One of the most common questions prospects ask me is, "Where do you go to learn about search marketing?" Many sources have risen to the top in the past few years.

There are events, like Search Engine Strategies conferences, that provide opportunities to learn from the experts. There are Web sites dedicated to search. There are also formal courses, like SEMPO Institute, that offer a certificate of completion.

These are all great places to establish a foundation of knowledge on search marketing and help you stay up to date. Remember: this knowledge is as only good as your hands-on experience.

So, if you own a domain or a small business, go out there and join the ranks of SEO practitioners and start optimizing and marketing the sites you have influence over. Learn what works for you and maybe you'll find a niche that will make you the next SEO expert.

Source : searchenginewatch.com

20 Things You Need to Know Before Optimizing Your Site

By Kalena Jordan

20 Things You Need to Know Before Optimizing Your Site

One of the most important aspects of a search engine optimization project is also one of the most overlooked – preparation! There are some important steps to take in advance of optimizing your site that will make sure your SEO is successful.

Before You Start

Before you start any search engine optimization campaign, whether it's for your own site or that belonging to a client, you need to answer the following questions:

)What is the overall motivation for optimizing this site? What do I/they hope to achieve? e.g. more sales, more subscribers, more traffic, more publicity etc.

2)What is the time-frame for this project?

3)What is the budget for this project?

4)Who will be responsible for this project? Will it be a joint or solo effort? Will it be run entirely in-house or outsourced?

Answering these questions will help you to build a framework for your SEO project and establish limitations for the size and scope of the campaign.

Get Ready: How Search Engine-Compatible is the Site Currently?

Something I find very useful before quoting on any SEO project is to produce what I call a Search Engine Compatibility Review. This is where I carry out a detailed overview and analysis of a site's search engine compatibility in terms of HTML design, page extensions, link popularity, title and META tags, body text, target keywords, ALT IMG tags, page load time and other design elements that can impact search engine indexing.

I then provide a detailed report to potential clients with recommendations based on my findings. It just helps sort out in my mind what design elements need tweaking to make the site as search engine-friendly as possible. It also helps marketing staff prove to an often stubborn programming department (or vice versa!) that SEO is necessary. You might consider preparing something similar for your own site or clients.

Get Set: Requirements Gathering

Next, you need to establish the project requirements, so you can tailor the SEO campaign to you or your client's exact needs. For those of you servicing clients, this information is often required before you are able to quote accurately.

To determine your project requirements, you need to have the following questions answered:

1)What technology was used to build the site? (i.e. Flash, PHP, frames, Cold Fusion, JavaScript, Flat HTML etc)

2)What are the file extensions of the pages? (i.e. .htm, .php, .cfm etc)

3)Does the site contain database driven content? If so, will the URLs contain query strings? e.g. www.site.com/longpagename?source=123444fgge3212, (containing "?" symbols), or does the site use parameter workarounds to remove the query strings? (the latter is more search engine friendly).

4)Are there at least 250 words of text on the home page and other pages to be optimized?

5)How does the navigation work? Does it use text links or graphical links or JavaScript drop-down menus?

6)Approximately how many pages does the site contain? How many of these will be optimized?

7)Does the site have a site map or will it require one? Does the site have an XML sitemap submitted to Google Sitemaps?

8)What is the current link popularity of the site?

9)What is the approximate Google PageRank of the site? Would it benefit from link building?

10)Do I have the ability to edit the source code directly? Or will I need to hand-over the optimized code to programmers for integration?

11)Do I have permission to alter the visible content of the site?

12)What are the products/services that the site promotes? (e.g. widgets, mobile phones, hire cars etc.)

13)What are the site's geographical target markets? Are they global? Country specific? State specific? Town specific?

14)What are the site's demographic target markets? (e.g. young urban females, working mothers, single parents etc.)

15)What are 20 search keywords or phrases that I think my/my client's target markets will use to find the site in the search engines?

16)Who are my/my client's major competitors online? What are their URLs? What keywords are they targeting?

17)Who are the stake-holders of this site? How will I report to them?

18)Do I have access to site traffic logs or statistics to enable me to track visitor activity during the campaign? Specifically, what visitor activity will I be tracking?

19)How do I plan on tracking my or my client's conversion trends and increased rankings in the search engines?

20)What are my/my client's expectations for the optimization project? Are they realistic?

Answers to the first 10 questions above will determine the complexity of optimization required. For example, if the site pages currently have little text on them, you know you'll need to integrate more text to make the site compatible with search engines and include adequate target keywords. If the site currently uses frames, you will need to rebuild the pages without frames or create special No-Frames tags to make sure the site can be indexed, and so on.

This initial analysis will help you to scope the time and costs involved in advance. For those of you optimizing client sites, obtaining accurate answers to these questions BEFORE quoting is absolutely crucial. Otherwise you can find yourself in the middle of a project that you have severely under-quoted for.

The remainder of questions are to establish in advance the who, what, where, when, why and how of the optimization project. This will help you determine the most logical keywords and phrases to target, as well as which search engines to submit the site to.

For those of you optimizing web sites for a living, you might consider developing a questionnaire that you can give clients to complete to ensure you tailor the web site optimization to their exact needs.

Go!

So now you are clear about your motivations for optimizing the site, you know more about the target markets, you know how compatible the existing site is with search engines and how much work is involved in the search engine optimization process. You're ready to tackle the job!

Source : isedb.com

Blogworld Session Summaries: New Media, SEO for Blogs

Andy Beal

The opening day for Blogworld was a great success. While aimed mostly at corporate attendees–the real geeks get here today–there was still enough of a buzz surrounding the inaugural conference.

I spoke on two different panels.

The first looked at SEO for blogs, and I was joined by Vanessa Fox, Stephen Spencer, and Aaron Wall. WebProNews was there filming the session and they put together a video summary for you to enjoy.

Source : marketingpilgrim.com

Corporate America Can Learn a Lot from Bloggers

If you're in charge of a B2B (business to business) corporate Web site, you may have wrestled with the decision of whether or not your company should create a blog. If you'd rather not engage in blogging, there are alternatives that can still help you drive qualified traffic and leads to your corporate Web site, as a blog might, and to get the search engine ranking benefits a blog might bring.

You don't have to be a blogger to take advantage of the latest blogging techniques. In fact, you can learn a lot about promoting your company's products and services online by "doing what the bloggers do."

The corporate world has traditionally been very slow to adopt blogging. After all, adding a blog to a corporate Web site is a big decision – and could have an impact on the company's brand, as well as how the brand is perceived. Additionally, there are a lot of maintenance requirements of a blog. For example, who in the company will be responsible for the writing and posting on the blog? How often will it be updated? Will the traditional blog "comments" be added as a feature? If so, whose job would it be to "moderate" those comments?

The United States Government recently launched their "GovGab" blog, in an effort to reach out to more citizens. Several managers are assigned a day of the week when they're responsible for posting on the blog. Each manager is charged with posting something on his or her designated day, and with moderating any comments left by the blog's readers, which could quickly become a full-time job in itself. A few other managers serve as backup bloggers.

If you decide not to implement a blog on your corporate site, there are still several ways that you can benefit from using the techniques of successful bloggers. Let's take a look at the many techniques they are using today to become popular, and apply them to the online promotion of a corporate Web site.

Embrace Networking
Probably the biggest, most important "technique" that successful bloggers use today is networking. Networking with other bloggers, linking to and commenting on each other's blogs, and even "guest blogging" for others' blogs is common.

Sure, corporate America does a lot of networking. After all, that's how a lot of partnerships are made and how a lot of deals get done. But there's not enough "networking" going on amongst corporations' Web sites and those responsible for maintaining the corporate Web site, including those in the marketing department.

Bloggers link to each other and recommend each others' blogs; why not link to your corporate partners and ask that they link back to your corporate Web site? If one company is an official "partner" with another company and will work together to provide solutions to their customers, why not continue this partnership on the internet level by linking both corporate Web sites together and recommending each others' solutions?

The same goes for industry trade groups. Corporations should help promote trade groups and associations to which they belong. Likewise, it's helpful if the trade group or association lists its member companies, providing links to the corporate Web sites.

Besides your existing partners, it's important to reach out to new partners as well. Why not start networking with the bloggers themselves?

In most industries there are at least a few popular bloggers who keep a close watch on the industry as a whole – and constantly write about what's really going on. When your company issues a press release, keep these bloggers in your outreach plans. Making your news and access to company executives available to the top bloggers in your industry can pay off tenfold in backlinks and blogger goodwill.

If a blogger receives a press release directly from a company in their industry, most likely they will pay attention to it. After all, bloggers are always looking for something to write about. And it's the bloggers who have the power to link directly to the corporate Web site, which will ultimately help your site's search engine rankings.

Additionally, the publicity your company will receive is wonderful: many tech industry bloggers have thousands of regular readers and subscribers who will instantly receive notification of the company's news.

Use Technology to Get Your News Out There
Another technique bloggers can teach corporate marketers is to make technology your friend. Corporate Web sites could use the latest blog publishing platforms, such as WordPress, TypePad, or BlogSmith, to publish content to the Web site.

Besides being easy for marketers to use and update the site without IT intervention, blog software has the added benefit of automatically creating an RSS feed from the content. RSS feeds allow customers to keep track of your site's content. Additionally, the blog software sends out a "ping" to search engines and other sources, alerting them that the content of the site has been updated.

A corporate news and press release section, or a company newsletter are appropriate places to provide the content in RSS format. By doing this, journalists, industry bloggers, company employees, and anyone else interested in the company's information and news could subscribe to the RSS feed and be notified instantly whenever there's news to announce.

Adding an RSS feed and the latest blogging technology to a corporate Web site doesn't mean that the company has to have a blog on the Web site. In fact, the site's visitors don't have to know what technology is being used behind the scenes. The "look and feel" of the page is still up to the site's Web designers. Pages created with blogging technology can be made to look exactly like the rest of the Web site.

By embracing online networking and adopting the latest technology that bloggers are using, a corporate Web site doesn't have to be static anymore. You can gain valuable traffic and visibility with the search engines, and build a sense of community with others in your space by applying those techniques to your corporate site.

Bill Hartzer is a search engine marketing, social media, and website marketing consultant. His primary focus is on the optimization of business to business Web sites. He is the founder of the Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association (DFWSEM), and a frequent speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conferences.

Source : searchenginewatch.com

Should SEOs Work For Commission?

By: Steven Bradley

Would you offer your seo services for commission only? As a small business owner would you request someone to market your site based only on how many sales you make? The question of commission based seo services arose in a thread on the Small Business Forum where the original poster was hoping to get just that.

He wanted to get in the top 10 in Google or Yahoo offering 10% of sales generated from search engine optimization in return. Would you take the deal?

Why Working For Commission Is A Bad Deal For SEOs

I wouldnt and said as much in the thread. My rationale is that too much of the sales process would be out of my control. An SEO could drive plenty of traffic to a site that wont convert or has a poor business model. The request is essentially asking the SEO to take on the risk of another business. In this specific case the thread starters business is easily duplicated. Why work for 10% of the sales when you could duplicate the site and work for 100%?

Even if you are willing to take on some of the risk would 10% be enough? It depends on how much the 100% is I suppose, but is seo only 10% of the success? Again it depends, but I would suggest that for a two month old business a successful seo campaign is worth a lot more.

In my last This Week In SEO post I linked to an article by Stoney deGeyter asking where does the responsibility of the seo end and that of the client begin? A successful seo campaign needs both SEO and client to do their part. While its not automatically the case my general sense is clients asking for commission based seo are looking to avoid their share of the responsibility. Read More...

Expert Strategies for SEO

By Mike McDonald

Optimizing your site for search engines can be challenging and time consuming. It's a game where the rules are always changing and there is no shortage of outdated and just flat out bad advice readily available. So, what should you be doing? How should you be approaching the whole search engine optimization mess?

When creating your SEO strategy, due diligence mandates that you not just take the word of the first self-styled SEO expert that just 'shows up' in your inbox one day. Beyond that it's an even better idea to look for consensus viewpoints among established and recognized experts in the field.

So, where would an SEO expert start with a site? That's what we wanted to know. What are some of the common themes, concepts, ideas and practices all of these guys would agree on? We put these questions to four leading SEO guys. Read More..

Source : webpronews.com

How To Survive the Google Pagerank Breakup

Google just broke up with you- after a yearlong pagerank 7 relationship. It's just temporary of course. You'll have her chasing you back with some of these search engine flirtation tips.

Go bold. Just as women love bold suitors, so do search engines. Start highlighting keywords on each page with the tag to increase search relevance. Search engines are attracted to words contained in the H1 and B tags. Just don't go wild- two bold words per page is enough.

Go Deeper. Having other sites drill deep into your web at various locations tells google that 'hey, this guy has varied useful content'. It's poor SEO strategy to acquire links just to link to the homepage. The search engines may ultimately discount those links

Go foreign. Why focus on North America? You can take your business to India, Pakistan, UK and Hongkong! Start creating pages for lucrative markets and submit to their local directories. This ensures multiple streams of revenue

Fire Up Newsletters. Provide articles to publishers like ezinearticles. The links breathe for many years in their archives and funnel backlinks to your site.

Go Bi. Image links are good, but text links are more appreciated. If your site is full of image links, have your webmaster place the text links first because that's what google looks for. Subsequent links are often discounted.

Multiple Partners. Create different domains on varying IPs that talk about similar subjects. The reason is that Google only lists one domain page per search result. Imagine if you owned ten domains that came up for the same search result? You'll be seducing more curious searchers. Another tip: search engine consulting firms recommend varying the keywords used on these domains just to minimize looking spammy

Article Exchanges. You've heard of reciprocal link exchanges. Text link purchases. One way backlink purchases. Try them, and it's like getting herpes on the net. Google blacklists you and your worth is downgraded. But article exchages are different. Whip up an article, upload to Ezinearcticles and before you know it- wham! Dozens of sites publish your article and bring fawning admirers to your door.

Shun Unvaried Anchor Text. If 1000 sites links to you with the appellation "Gimme Money", Google starts to squint and dig deeper, "Smells like automated filthy spam, methinks." Avoid the search engine ban by varying the anchor text. Dance under different names and you'll flirt more grandly with search engines.

Expose Your Glory With a Site map. Your visitors reach the honeypot more rapidly when you have a structured sitemap that links to every major page. Keep the map on a location easily accessible so you keep the action flowing. Google bots flirt with sitemaps too and often births detailed search results. So keep it search engine friendly.

Source : seoarticles4u.com

SEO or PPC - Choose the right option for your business web site marketing

When businesses start web site marketing or promotion, two main options help to achieve the goal, SEO (also referred as "organic optimization") and PPC (also referred as "inorganic optimization"). Selecting the best option of these two is the first mile stone of any Internet Marketing Campaign.

PPC (Pay Per Click):

Pay Per Click involves online advertising on web sites, search engines and their related advertising networks, by bidding highly searched and product relevant keywords and appropriate creating ads. These ads are called "sponsored links" or "sponsored ads", which generally appear to the right or on top of organic (natural) results of search engines. Advertiser needs to pay whenever user clicks on the ad in accordance with his bidding amount.PPC is the ideal option for highly funded adversting campaigns aiming to achieve visitors and targeted traffic within short duration, however involves more cost and risk involvement.

Edge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) over PPC :

* Guaranteed Clicks: Many Researches revealed that visitors in general prefer natural organic search links in comparison to PPC sponsored links.

* Long Term Traffic and ROI Benefit: Web site once ranked top in search engine's organic results brings steady, long term traffic and in return ROI in contrast to short term traffic and ROI based ppc campaign.

* Less Risk and Cost Involvement: "Click Fraud" is the most concerned, risky and costlier affair for any PPC Campaign. SEO, in comparison involves zero or less risk and cost involvement.

* More Keyword Targeting: PPC facilitates bidding and ranking for limited set of keywords. SEO offers no such limitations on keyword targeting and ranking

* More Exposure and Wider Space Promotion: PPC Campaign is confined to pay-per-click search engines and its advertising networks. SEO promotion gives more exposure and wider space with RSS, Blogs, Social Search, News Articles, in addition to Search Engine placements.

In general ,SEO has major gains in comparison to PPC. However PPC can be considered for short duration in combination with long term and result -oriented seo promotion strategy.

Source : seoarticles4u.com

What do 16,000 people 'do' at Google?

I'm beginning to think that besides search advertising, hiring is the thing Google does best.

On Thursday, the company reported gains of 50 percent or so in quarterly profit and revenue from a year ago, beating analyst expectations. It wasn't a stellar quarter, but it was pretty darn good.

The notable thing was the hiring. The company added 2,130 workers to its roster, bringing the head count to 15,916. What do nearly 16,000 people do at a company that doesn't make widgets (at least in the hardware manufacturing sense of the word)?

That's an average of about 35 people showing up for their first day of work each business day during the past three months. Granted, that is in offices around the world, but still, that's impressive. By comparison, Yahoo has 13,600 employees, after hiring 1,200 during the past quarter. (Actually, when you think about it, that's even more crazy given the need for Yahoo to retrench right now.)

Those numbers may seem surprising given the fact that Google attributed last quarter's 3-cent earnings miss to overspending on hiring, and promised to curb that impulse. However, during the conference call with analysts Thursday afternoon, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said many of the people hired during the quarter had been given offers before the previous quarter had closed.

The fast pace of hiring at the search giant is the one concern Jordan Rohan, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, mentioned in an interview with CNET News.com after the Google earnings call.

"Half the company has been hired in the last 12 months. That's chaotic," he says. "The new employees find it difficult to figure out how to get things done. It's not a normal company."

I can only guess that the new hires are working on the much-anticipated "Google phone," which is probably going to be a Google operating system for mobile devices, and on the new copyright content filtering technology deployed at YouTube this week. They're also probably tasked with taking over the advertising world with the company's lucrative online automated ad platform.

"They have possibly the best core business in the history of the Internet," Rohan says. "That is supporting them as they attempt to find an Act II. I don't know if it will be media, display, mobile or what."

Source: news.com

'Google bowling' and negative SEO: All fair in love and war?

The term "Google bowling" has been floating around the Internet for a while now. The practice is one of many that can be put under the heading of negative SEO, and while I'm not a proponent of these methods, they are worth noting:

Google bowling: As Google attempted to curb link-popularity exploitation by penalizing Web sites that purchase link ads across the entire site, it also created the environment in which Google bowling came to be. As a form of negative SEO (search engine optimization), certain unscrupulous entities began buying sitewide links for competitor sites, thus causing them to incur the Google penalty. Simple, evil and a very real practice.

Spam in another's name: This form of negative SEO is even more simple. If spam gets Web sites in trouble with search engines, then creating spam on behalf of a competitor might lower their search engine results. In addition, a Web site's URL can be used for spamming in online forums, social-network sites and blog comments. It's hard to prove that the victim is innocent, and social-network sites might ban that Web site regardless. This can have a negative effect on the link neighborhood of a site.

Tattletaling: Did you buy links on other Web sites to improve your search engine rankings? Google doesn't like that at all. If your competitor finds out that you use paid links, he might tell Google and your rankings might drop! Of course, you can tell on your competitor, too.

Faux copyright complaint: If a search engine is notified that a copyright infringement exists (or might exist) on a Web site, then the search engine must remove the reported page from its index for 10 days. Snarky, but effective if someone wants a page out of the search engine results page (SERP) system for a spell.

Faux duplicate content: If someone creates duplicates of a competitor's Web pages, these duplicate pages will split rankings with those of the original site. Again, this isn't theory. This is something that is done in practice regularly.

To be clear, I am NOT promoting these tactics, and some of them will put you in legal hot water. But it is good to be aware of them so you can protect yourself against such practices, or at least identify these attacks when they are occurring. And, if someone is pulling one of these stunts on you--well, all's fair in love and war.

Source : news.com

Empty Google News

Imagine a day without any news headline. Well, that’s what’s happening to Google News today... it’s showing empty fields for all the topics, across various country versions (including the US one at news.google.com). Some test searches I tried didn’t yield any results either. People had been reporting problems since some days already, but this scope seems to be new.

Source: blogoscoped.com

Official Google Blog: Get your iGoogle in 42 languages

Official Google Blog: Get your iGoogle in 42 languages

Get your iGoogle in 42 languages

Earlier this week, iGoogle launched in 13 new languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 42 and the total number of country domains supported to over 70. For those of you who don't know, iGoogle is a personalized version of the Google homepage that lets you select the content that matters to you most from across the web and arrange it in a way that you find useful and fun. People rely on iGoogle to save time by putting all the information and services they need in one place. They also use it to discover new content through the iGoogle gadget directory.

With this launch, more than 99% of Internet users can take advantage of these features in their native language, which is really exciting for us. We're particularly curious to see what iGoogle ends up looking like in these new languages. For example, who would have guessed that 'Tu Nombre en Japonés' (Your name in Japanese) would be among the top 20 gadgets in Chile and Spain? (Mine is Jえすしか, by the way.) Because users and developers ultimately decide what iGoogle will look like in each of these new domains, we can't be sure what will be popular, which is part of the fun.

If you're a developer who speaks one of the languages below, now is a great opportunity to get your cool gadget idea out to a fresh audience. For more information, visit our Gadget APIs page. Who knows, maybe it'll be the next 'Tu Nombre en Japonés.'

Here's a list of the new languages available:

* Arabic
* Bulgarian
* Catalan
* Croatian
* Icelandic
* Indonesian
* Latvian
* Lithuanian
* Malay
* Serbian
* Slovak
* Slovenian
* Tagalog

Source: googleblog.blogspot.com

China accused of rerouting search traffic to Baidu

Reports have surfaced that China is redirecting traffic from foreign search engines operated by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to homegrown Baidu.com.

According to various reports online, some online users in China attempting to access Google.com, Microsoft's Live.com and Yahoo.com search sites have been redirected to China-based Baidu.com.

Blog site TechCrunch reported that Chinese traffic to Google's blog search engine was being rerouted to Baidu. TechCrunch later published another article saying a similar situation was observed with the other two search giants.

Vivian Wong, a manager at CB Richard Ellis in Shanghai, said visits to the three search engines showed Baidu's home page instead.

Beijing-based David Feng wrote in his blog on Thursday that he was able to gain access to both Google and Yahoo, but not Microsoft's Live.com or Yahoo-owned search engine AltaVista.

However, Ori Elraviv, chief executive of Dragon Ports in Beijing, said he had no problems getting through to the sites. "I find such an occurrence really hard to believe. Blocking a service is one thing; diverting it to a competitor is a completely different story." Dragon Ports is a developer of mobile applications.

Google has, however, confirmed the traffic-rerouting episodes. In response to queries, Google sent similar statements to The Register and search engine blogger Danny Sullivan, noting: "While this is clearly unfortunate, we've seen this happen before and are confident that service will be restored to our users in the very near future."

China has been involved in previous allegations of Internet censorship, though the government has denied such claims.

Incidentally, Google sold its minority stake in Baidu last year, explaining that it was doing so to focus on building the Chinese version of its search engine, Google.cn.

Source: news.com

Google's PageRank Update Goes After Paid Links?

Seems like there is a PageRank update taking place now that seems to be impacting sites that sell links. Can't say that we were not warned about this. Danny Sullivan wrote Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google over two weeks ago, and now it appears many sites are getting hit with a drop in PageRank.

Here is a list of some sites, including major publishers, who seem to have taken a hit overnight:

* http://www.washingtonpost.com ==> / PR7 to PR5
* http://www.forbes.com/ ==> PR7 to PR5
* http://www.suntimes.com/ ==> PR7 to PR5
* http://www.sfgate.com/ ==> PR7 to PR5
* http://www.statcounter.com/ ==> PR10 to PR6
* http://www.masternewmedia.org/ ==> PR7 to PR4
* http://www.autoblog.com/ ==> PR6 to PR4
* http://www.engadget.com/ ==> PR7 to PR5
* http://www.problogger.net/ ==> PR6 to PR4
* http://www.copyblogger.com/ ==> PR6 to PR4
* http://www.joystiq.com/ ==> PR6 to PR4
* http://www.tuaw.com/ ==> PR6 to PR4
* http://www.searchengineguide.com/ ==> PR7 to PR4
* http://www.searchenginejournal.com/ ==> PR7 to PR4
* http://www.johnchow.com/ ==> PR6 to PR4
* http://www.quickonlinetips.com/ ==> PR6 to PR3
* http://weblogtoolscollection.com/ ==> PR6 to PR4
* http://andybeard.eu/ ==> PR5 to PR3
* http://www.seroundtable.com/ ==> PR7 to PR4
* http://www.blogherald.com/ ==> PR6 to PR4

For more information please visit: searchengineland.com

Google October 2007 Page Rank Update

Looks like the toolbar PR updated today, with many sites losing lots of greenbars I have received message from friends in international and alerted me to it, since i have notice that some website PR went decrese to a 4, However, I’ve still got great rankings and traffic for things I track, so there’s no direct reflection there.

The toolbar data is months out of date, so the changes in SERP (if there were any) likely already happened weeks or months ago.

Seems like there is a PageRank update taking place now that seems to be impacting sites that sell links. Danny Sullivan wrote Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google over …

Let see, wait and watch for upcoming happenings.

Source: Topseo.org

How long does it take until a new site ranks in Google, Yahoo and MSN?

As explained in one of your previous newsletters, Google has some filters for new websites. How long does it take exactly until search engines list a new site in the top 10 rankings?

How long does it take until Google, Yahoo and MSN list a new site?

In a recent test, a webmaster optimized his site for a four word keyword. After about three weeks, Yahoo and MSN showed the website in the top 10 results. Even after several weeks, the same website was nowhere to be seen in Google's top 10 results. The highest result that the website could obtain on Google was position 30.

What does this mean for you?

It looks like Yahoo and MSN are much faster to list new websites in their result pages. The test confirmed that Google has filters for new websites.

For webmasters, the results of this test mean that they have to overcome Google's filters for new sites if they want to have top 10 rankings.

It's difficult for new websites to get high rankings on Google but it is possible. You have to make sure that Google trusts your site.

For searchers, the results of this little test mean that Google might not always have the best search resaults, particularly when it's a search for new content. Yahoo and MSN might be the better choice for some searches.

Is your website still not listed in Google's top 10 for your keyword?

Is your website still not listed in Google's top 10 results although your site is several months old?

Your keywords might be the reason for the problem. If you target very competitive keywords, then it will take much longer until your website is listed in the top 10 rankings.

If you want to get high rankings for competitive keywords, then you need very many good inbound links that contain your keyword in the anchor text.

If you target keywords that consist of one or two words then you might want to reconsider them. One word keywords usually don't lead to sales because these keywords are too general.

Keywords that consist of four words are much more likely to convert to sales than shorter keywords.

Keys To Improve Search Engine Ranking

Search engine optimization is the hottest thing to hit the internet since the arrival of the social networks. What is search engine optimization and what does it do? There are many different types of search engine optimization techniques but they all focus on the same goal. That goal is to get your websites higher ranking on the search engines, attract more traffic to your website so that your website gains enough exposure to actually show up in the top 10 spots of the search engines when people search for certain keywords. The reason why this is such a hot topic is because once your website gets ranked on the first page of the search engines, you will see a dramatic increase in your monthly profits.

Once a website is created it is very weak and although it looks good there is no way for the search engines to find your site among the other billion websites on the internet. To tell you the truth it truly is like finding a needle in a hay stack. Over a period of time, the search engines will eventually find and send their robots to crawl your website so that they can add this to their index. This is how the search engines not only find your site but also rate your site and see where it should be placed in the search engine rankings. If you can wait a year or so and let your website grow without any help from search engine optimization then that's fine. The truth is even when the website is mature it most likely will not receive the exposure that you are looking for. I know some people that have had their websites for over 5 years and they have a page rank of one and they are still not ranking anywhere for the most common keywords for their business. By the way, page rank is how the search engines value your website. Although it is very hard to achieve page rank, the more page rank you have the better ranking you will see. Most people with disagree with the page ranking but supposedly that may change in the very near future.

How can I Improve search engine rankings you may ask? There are many different ways to improve search engine rank and to improve the exposure of your website but you have to start out with a good structure first then move on to the more technical techniques. If you are ready to take that next step and learn two of the most important techniques of search engine optimization, then keep reading and enjoy.

The first way to improve search engine placement and in my opinion are the most important technique to focus on are onsite search engine optimization. This technique is very powerful. I will give you a few hints on how this technique works.

First, we are going to talk about onsite optimization. This is one of my favorite techniques because it does wonders to your website. This is one of the most important tasks you must do to help the search engines find your web pages. You have to make your pages stick out like a lighthouse on a foggy night so the search engines can see them easier. Make sure that all pages in your website have good title tags. These are located at the top of each website you arrive on and they describe what the page is about. Make sure that you don't have just your business name as the title because if no one knows about your business then how are they going to know what the name of your business is when they do a search for it. If you are going to be branding you business name and you think the business name will send you the traffic you want the by all means do it. Just like Nike, everyone knows what Nike is so people will use the keyword Nike to search for shoes and sports apparel.

Place some good keywords in the title tags that you think people will use to search for your business. This is a very powerful tool to help get your site more exposure. Next, make sure your "meta tags" description has a good compelling content for people to view and come to your site. Make the description about two sentences in length. This next step is very important. Make sure your "Meta Tag" keywords have all the good keywords that will help the search engines and people find your website pages. Now whatever keywords you place in this area, you need to also place these keywords all over inside the content of your website pages.

The content of your website has to be very compelling and you should also add these keywords here and there inside the content. Make sure the keywords you are using are related to your product you are selling on your website. If the content is not good and is just spammed with key words then you risk the chance of having the search engines boot your website. If this happens you will have a very slim chance of getting back into the search engine index. It's not worth it to spam keywords, if you get caught you may have to start a whole new website over and loose any leads or income you have worked so hard to get.

This is one of the key tools to help improve search engine ranking. If you follow this tool and implement this on your website you will see a great change in the traffic to your website. It is not going to happen overnight but if you do it correctly I promise you it will happen over time. Remember, your website is a long term investment that will only get better with age. If you can be patient and use these tools I have shown you, you will see the difference.

Source: Articlebase.com

Google officially launches AdSense for mobile

Google has just launched AdSense for mobile, which can help you expand your online content to new platforms. If you have a website optimized for mobile browsers, or are interested in creating one, you can start monetizing your mobile site by accessing a growing number of our mobile advertisers.

When you add the new AdSense for mobile code to your site, we'll display relevant ads using the same targeting technology that you are familiar with for existing AdSense products.

To get started:
1) Sign in to your account.
2) Select the AdSense Setup tab and click on AdSense for mobile.
3) Follow the instructions to customize your ad unit for AdSense for mobile.

We've just launched AdSense for mobile, which can help you expand your online content to new platforms. If you have a website optimized for mobile browsers, or are interested in creating one, you can start monetizing your mobile site by accessing a growing number of our mobile advertisers.

When you add the new AdSense for mobile code to your site, we'll display relevant ads using the same targeting technology that you are familiar with for existing AdSense products.

To get started:
1) Sign in to your account.
2) Select the AdSense Setup tab and click on AdSense for mobile.
3) Follow the instructions to customize your ad unit for AdSense for mobile : https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=11951&sourceid=aso&subid=ww-en-et-asblog_2007-09-19&medium=link

Source: adsense.blogspot.com

Google introduces Google Presentations

Google Inc. has expanded its online suite of office software to include a business presentation tool similar to Microsoft Corp.'s popular PowerPoint, adding the latest twist in a high-stakes rivalry.

The Mountain View-based company planned to unveil the presentation software late Monday, about five months after Chief Executive Eric Schmidt announced Google would add the application to its software arsenal.

The new program will be included in Google's free software bundle, called "Docs," which users must be online to employ. And the company will sell a souped-up version to businesses, universities and government agencies for $50 a year per user.

As PowerPoint does, Google's presentation software enables users to create a series of slides with a mixture of text and graphics on each. PowerPoint is widely used in business meetings.

Google's software suite already included word processing, spreadsheet and calendar management programs. Microsoft has been reaping huge profits from similar applications for years. Unlike Google's applications, Microsoft's programs are usually installed directly on the hard drives of computers.

Google executives have consistently depicted the company's software applications as counterparts to Microsoft's products.

Source: smh.com.au/

Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Seems Dead

A DigitalPoint Forums member reports that the Yahoo! Overture Keyword Tool is no longer providing results.

It looks like the Overture tool is finally gone unless this is a bug. YahooSarah said in January that Overture would be offline until an updated product was released. Does this mean the product is ready? After all, in May, Yahoo stopped updating the Overture tool. It has been four months so hopefully a new tool will be announced shortly.

Since so many tools use the Overture API, I certainly hope that this is the case. DigitalPoint Forums members agree.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums : http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=476913

Source: seroundtable.com

Tips Of Driving Search Engine Traffic To Your Site

Search engine traffic to your website can be improved by measuring certain aspects and resolving the changes undertaken in your site. These aspects depend on the nature of your site. Each site is built up with some specific site goals. The best way to find out how well your site attracts and retains visitors to meet these goals is to categorize all possible reasons why a user would visit your Web site. The reasons may be as followed:

* To get detail information on products/services * For an email or phone contacts to ask questions about products/services * Purchase products/services * Compare pricing of products/services * Check status of pending order for products/services * Get more information or tips on using purchased products * To get customer service aid * Report a failure of online forms or shopping cart * Register for newsletters, product updates, marketing brochures, white papers, etc. * Discover new products/servces * Join an online community * Read updated news regarding the business, industry, etc. * Study information on accessories for purchased products/services * Sort out problems related to purchased products/service

Once you make out the reason of the visitors visiting to your website, you can assign desired actions to visitor clusters and track their movements within your site to determine how successfully you are receiving valuable Search engine traffic.

For instant increase in Search Engine Traffic

* Write better, specific, relevant and unique content. * Give People reasons to link to you. * Provide what your visitors want. * Get quality external inbound links. * Traffic Analysis Data * Evaluating SEM Campaign Performance.

Search engine traffic depends upon the study of the above data, checking visitor behaviors to test the marketing message on your site, the efficiency of your offer, the choice of various SEM marketing procedures (site/content optimization, linking strategy, paid inclusion, paid placement, etc.), the choice of search engines (MSN, AOL, Yahoo!, Google, Lycos, AskJeeves, AltaVista, etc.), and many other elements of your marketing campaign. Change in your campaign will likely result in increased Search engine traffic - conversions, lower acquisition costs, and improved ROI.

Source: seoarticles4u.com

How to Get More Pages into Google's Index

Many people obsess about every word Matt Cutts says, but there are plenty of other Googlers that can teach us a thing or two about Google's inner workings. At Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2006 I was on a panel with one of them: Dan Crow, who is part of Google's search quality group and is the Product Manager for the crawl infrastructure group.

When Jill Whalen and Pauline Kerbici of High Rankings started a local organization called Search Engine Marketing New England (SEMNE), I suggested that they invite Dan to speak. Besides his charming British accent, Dan's a great speaker because he knows everything about Googlebots and indexing.

Last month in Providence, nearly 100 SEMNE members and guests showed up to meet Dan. To learn about the official presentation, you can read Jill's summary, "Getting into Google," and Rand Fishkin's post, "Dan Crow of Google on Crawling, Indexing & Ranking." Instead of yet another summary, here I will cover the unofficial story, the conversations I had with Dan before and after the main event.

Dan Crow's Advice to Webmasters

Dan started our conversation by saying that the World Wide Web is very large, and Google is not even sure how large. They can only index a fraction of it. Google has plenty of capital to buy more computers, but there just isn't enough bandwidth and electricity available in the world to index the entire Internet. Google's crawling and indexing programs are believed to be the largest computations ever.

Googlebots fetch pages, and then an indexing program analyzes the pages and stores a representation of the page into Google's index. The index is an incomplete model of the Web. From there, PageRank is calculated and secret algorithms generate the search results. The only pages that can show up in Google's search results are pages included in the index. If your page isn't indexed, it will never rank for any keywords.

Because the Web is so much larger than the index, Google has to make decisions about what to spider and what to index. Dan told me that Google doesn't spider every page they know about, nor do they add every spidered page to the index. Two thoughts flashed through my mind at that moment: (1) I need to buy Dan a drink, (2) What can I do to make sure my pages get indexed?

Bandwidth and electricity are the constraining resources at Google. On some level they have to allocate those resources among all the different Web sites: Google isn't going to index Web sites A – G and then ignore H-Z. Dan suggested that each day Google has a large but limited number of URLs it can spider, so for large sites it's in the site owners' interests to help the indexing process run more efficiently, because that may lead to more pages being indexed.

How much effort Google decides to put into spidering a site is a secret, but it's influenced by PageRank. If your site has relatively few pages with high PageRank, they'll all get into the index no problem, but if you have a large number of pages with low PageRank, you may find that some of them don't make it into Google's index.

Clean Code Matters

What can we do to get more pages indexed? I've always suspected that streamlining HTML code is a good way to facilitate indexing. Reducing code bloat helps pages load faster and use less bandwidth. I asked if it would help to move JavaScript and CSS definitions to external files, and clean up tag soup. Dan's answer was refreshingly clear. "Those would be very good ideas," he said.

SEOs pay a lot of attention to issues like duplicate content, link building to increase PageRank, and link structure to move PageRank throughout the site. However, I haven't seen many SEO articles about the importance of proper Web development methodology. All too often when I look at a new site, I am appalled at the sloppy coding. The typical site could be streamlined significantly.

Yes, you should try to increase the PageRank of your pages, and you should design your link structure so that PageRank is distributed throughout your site in a way that makes sense. You should provide unique and valuable content. Those tactics will help your indexing, but you also need to pay attention to the dirty details of how your pages are put together. If everybody served clean code, Google would be able to index significantly more pages.

Why doesn't Google do more to educate webmasters about the efficient use of bandwidth and computing power? Perhaps it would look bad for Google to ask webmasters to recode their sites to make Google's job easier. Nonetheless, if Google can tell me how to get more of my pages into the index, I'm ready to listen and cooperate.

Clean HTML is good not just for getting indexed, but also because it means more people can read your site. The cleaner and more compatible your code, the wider a range of browsers it will work with, and this is especially important for users with screen readers and those using mobile devices such as cell phones.

Source: searchenginewatch.com

Online Web Marketing Tips

Here is a list of a few of my favorite marketing tips and ideas. They all proved to be effective in my business, use them them for yours as well!

1. Seek out link sites. Linking up with other sites and linking other sites to your webpage is a great marketing idea. I've generated a lot of traffic hits, linking up with other sites alone. Make sure to be in touch with people whom have sites similar to yours or fit your genre.

2. HTML META. Meta tags are for your search engines. Using meta tags are effective when you want to be sprouting up on search pages, use your keywords.

3. Search Engines. Blast your site out into outerspace. Search engines drive TRAFFIC. And to increase your popularity of your site, utilize some common search engine sites like AltaVista.com, Google and Yahoo.

4. Your Website Headers are important! Make your titles strong. The titles are very important because it shows how your page shows up in the search engine. Make sure it has a great title or else your pages will show up very weak.

5. Updating your site. Keep your site updated regualarly and keep your surfers coming back for more. Everyone loves new refreshed content. That is key.

6. Newsletters. Offer updates, free newsletters, sms messages to your browsers. They will be updated personally on your site and be provided with regular infoformation.

7. Branding your web page. Branding your site is used to make a long lasting effect. Keep your logo, main title on every page. This will be sure to follow through in terms of getting the message down to your browsers.

8. Build more sites. The more the merrier, the more sites the more traffic. Its also great marketing if you are a newbie company trying to get your name well known.

9. Emails. Emails, we get emails every second, every hour, every day. Don't let them sit in your mailbox. That's a no no! Be proficient and answer them right away. No one likes to wait, especially online users. They have the least patience of them all.

10. Get Involved. Your surfers are important for if you don't have them then what do you have? Cutomoze your content and make it personal. If you involve them, interact with them they will naturally want to be involved as well. Add polls, offer them to bookmark your site, use your site as a homepage, place a forum, chat room, voting contest, etc.

There are many many more ways to effectively market your online site. Do some research on the web, look at some of the other sites and observe there strategies. They are all very different but we all have the same message we want to get through. We want to win our customers trust and loyalty to our sites. With a properly executed marketing plan and given time, your site should be getting the results you want in no time.

About the Author:
Jennifer Lynn is an ecommerce entrepreneur, artist, writer, and musician based in New York-Chicago.

She has written and contributed numerous articles online about adult entertainment, entrepreneurship, ecommerce, technology, pop culture, generation x, quarter life and city trends & news.

A highly creative entrepreneur with focus in web marketing, business development and ecommerce. Presently, she is involved in JMR, an online referral biz for artists in the entertainment industry. She also runs other ecommerce sites including an interactive entertainment hub and her own personal site.

Before startin' JMR, Jennifer Lynn was a tech recruiter with a Chicago based start-up company. She's also a professional pianist. Jennifer Lynn received her degree from De Paul University in liberal arts.

When she's not workin' away, you can find her lofting on a beach, into travel, and dabbling in new creative ventures with artists & entrepreneurs around town.

Jennifer Lynn believes passion in doing what ever it is you love to do is the key to one's personal success.

Source: internet-marketing-sites.info

Words To The Wise: Creative Methods for Adding Text Content to Your Website

There are two strategies you can use to develop content for your site. One is to create your own and the other is to acquire content.

If you were to open a store on Main St, the necessary ingredients for success are clearly established. It's been said that if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door. But when your door is a file on a server, it takes more than a road sign to direct traffic. What it takes, in a word is… words.

In regards to website traffic, always be aware that the words on your site are sifted through increasingly sophisticated software programs. These programs send out an army of virtual site reviewers, known as "spiders". Words are the food those spider bots love to gobble. It is impossible to over estimate the importance of relevant textual content in getting highly ranked. Without words, you cannot achieve rankings.

So how do you develop your own word-based site content? The most important thing to remember is that the words must be relevant to your site. It's not so hard really, just a mental exercise. A little creativity can yield a lot of good words.

Strategy 1: Creating Your Own Content

Exercise a: Write an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page.

This one is easy. Review the questions you get from your site visitors over and over. What are the same things they are asking you about in 90% of the emails you receive? Do yourself, your customers, and your site a favor. Make a list, and answer each question. And use this opportunity to provide descriptive responses peppered with your key phrases. Let's say you often receive emails asking how long it takes for your special ordered doorknockers to ship. One question in your FAQ might read:

Q: How long does it take for your custom doorknockers to ship?

A: Our personalized, engraved doorknockers ship within 3 weeks of order.

Make the page look good… neat, orderly, and professional. Go ahead and add a few of your product photos in a column along the text.

Exercise b: Getting into the psyche of your site's visitors

Take a little time to think about your customer's related needs. The best way to illustrate this strategy is with an example. Let's say you're an independent realtor. If your site visitors are looking for available houses and prices in your area, they might also want be interested in a layman's breakdown of the various neighborhoods, suburbs or towns in the area. How close are they to the highway and downtown? What are the local public schools like? On another page, you could discuss how to price your home for sale, as well as tips on selling a home quickly. Even a simple glossary of real estate terms provides not only relevant, useful information, but also food for those hungry, hungry spiders.

Strategy 2: Acquiring Your Content

Exercise a: Pillage your wholesalers

If you have a product-based site, your suppliers can be a terrific source of content. One e-tailer who sold hand woven rugs received permission reprint promotional material provided by the rug maker on the details of weaving and hooking the rugs. This content was beautiful written by a professional copywriter and was naturally loaded with pertinent keywords. Additionally, it was supplied in digital format so adding to the site was a snap. A few product photos were placed along side the content, and it didn't take long before the site was ranking highly for handmade rugs, hand woven rugs braided rugs, rag rugs, and hooked rugs.

Exercise b: Lazy SEO method for adding more words to your site

The reason this is a great "secret" is because everyone wins. And that's my favorite method of doing business. Bear in mind, authorities and experts in a given field are often seeking collateral exposure, which you can provide them. The exercise is to find an article published online that contains content related to your industry and ask for permission to "reprint" it on your site. The trick is to identify complimentary, not competing materials. And it's out there.

Let's go back to the realtor example. There are numerous associated trades that go hand in hand with selling homes (i.e. home appraisals, financing, etc.). So get on the web and do your homework. Find a really good article that has something useful to say about the associated subject. If you are a regionally based business, it would be even better if you can find something from the site of another local business. When you find it, send a gracious email requesting permission to reprint their article on your site. Mention how helpful and informative their article is and how valuable it will be to your site's visitors. Naturally you will give appropriate credit to the author as well as a link back to their site. This provides them with additional credibility and exposure, as well as a nice reciprocal link. So… what if they ignore your request, or even say no? Just keep looking. The beauty of this process is that the information is readily available. Trust me, it won't take long before someone says yes. And voila… you have content. Juicy, relevant, wordy content. And all you had to do was a little surfing and a little sweet-talking.

Creating or finding content for your site is not rocket science. Think about it. Every product or service solves a problem for the consumer. Identify that problem, and in theory, you're an expert on it. So, write about what you know, or find related content that someone else has already written. Just get those words on your site. By doing your homework, providing pertinent content, and supplying your customers with a wealth of resources, you are building not only business, but also relationships. And there's only one word for that -- success!

Source: seonews.net

Get 10,000 "unique" visitors a month!

Get 10,000 unique visitors to your website - now

Are you using "social Media" sites correctly?

For the last 3 months I've gotten 10,000 plus "unique" visitors to my small site using "Social Media tips"

Can you "DIGG" it, can you - Digg it ????

One of my all time favorite movies is "Warriors", it's about a gang that is framed for the murder of an influential gang leader [ Cirus ] who only wanted to unite all the gangs of NY - sort of like organized crime today. It's a wonderful movie to watch.

But I bring it up only because I am curious if you are using "DIGG" and the other like kind social media's?If used correctly you can build your ranking, your website's traffic and even make money - Can you "DIGG" it.. can you digg it...

While people are talking about little things like : is myspace losing to Facebook? Or things like: Will Yahoo buy XYZ company? People like you and me are losing the opportunity to make good use of social media sites like "Myspace", "you tube", "face book", even "Blink"....I want you to think about it, a good catchy title and good content can get you hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site - In one day.... I did a small experiment, just to test it out. I used "Digg" and linked a page from one of my sites [ can not divulge source ] and with a good catchy title had 3,560 visitors go to my site in one day.

You say so what, others do it all the time..... But for a new site that has yet to be index on any search engine. No ranking, no SEO, nothing - just - DIGG.......... ????

No this is not a replacement for good old fashion "SEO" or providing good content. But it can help a struggling beginner and a small website compete with the big boys.

Source : seoarticles4u.com

Top 3 Steps to Generate Traffic

There are 3 steps that will basically Guarantee traffic to your website, blog, etc.
First: Pay-Per-Click ads A Pay-Per-Click ad is an advertising campaign that is set up with one or more of the major Search Engines.(Google, Yahoo, etc.) You set up your account and pick the keywords that you feel will be the most relevant to your needs. Next, you design the look and feel of your ads. You try to "word it" in such a manner as to evoke a need to find out what your site has to offer. The ads are usually 4 lines tall with each line not exceeding 35 characters. You will find them placed on the search pages of the search engines and on other people's web sites. With Google... it's with Google Adsense and look like:

Title Goes Here Come See What's Here You'll Find What You Need www.YourDomainHere.com

You can monitor how many clicks are generated by your ads and what ads work or don't work. You can also see which keywords are working for you.

Second: Submit Articles You can writing as many articles as you can think of and submit them to Article Directory sites. This is something that you can do on your own and do it for free. Some people hire others to write articles for them and pay someone else to submit the articles to the article directories. Now, if you are just starting out and don't have a huge budget to work with... I would suggest doing it yourself. You don't have to be an award winning writer and submitting articles is one of the easiest things you to do on the Internet. By submitting as many articles as you can, you start to improve your "search engine" rankings. As people use the keywords you chose in your P-P-C campaign, your articles will come up in the search results. Also, you can include a link to your website at the bottom of your article which creates what is called a "back link". The more "back links" that are pointind back to your website, the better chance you have to rank higher on the search engines.

Third: Forums and Press Releases There are so many forums on the Net right now. Forums for anything you can think of. All you have to do is "Join the Forum" and let everyone there know about your website and what you have to offer. You can also submit "press releases". There are a number of press release avenues that you can pursue. Just type "press release" into your favorite search engine and go from there.

In conclusion, these three steps will almost guarantee traffic to your website. It just depends on how diligent you are and how much work you put into it.

About the author
T.J. Brian writes articles on a number of topics including, traffic generation, achieving, self-belief, internet scams, business, internet marketing, success , mortgages, credit repair, and real estate. For more information on succeeding on the Internet visit http://www.AlphaWealthProducts.com

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