Search Engine Optimization

This is a continuation of our article “SEO:: search engine Optimization – Getting Started”, and we are going to start where we left off so be sure to check out the first article for steps 1-5.

6. Content, Content, and did I mention Content – The single most important thing for your website to be seen in the search engines is the content on your page. You need to have you keyword search terms throughout the text on your website, so if you main search term is “Computer Store” you need to incorporate that term along with any other main search terms in you page. So many pages have great graphics but absolutely no content on the site. Fill you site with content, I try to get about 1000 words on an html page, and place my main keywords throughout the page. Try to have as many relative pages as possible. Remember the more relative content the better placement

7. Do Your Research – it is important that you research other websites that are in the field you are in, and that you look at what they are doing seo wise so that you can get a feel of what you site is going to need. Many times you can find a lot of you keywords and keyword phrases on a competitor’s site that has had the search engine optimization. Don’t copy their content, but you can use the same keywords. Once you see the competition then you need to see the amount of times the search terms are being used on the net. Use the yahoo tool I showed you in the first article for that. After this you can now see which keywords you want to use and which you want to trash. It pays to do the research so that you have relative seo keywords and phrases that are going to bring traffic to your site.

8. Do NOT use other people’s content (Duplicate Content) – Do not put other content from other sites copied on your site. This is call duplicate content and highly frowned on in the seo community. Also, do not use the same content on every page of your website. This is also considered duplicate content and can get you flagged unless you are doing GEO Targeting, which will only change the names on the cities and states.

9. DO NOT Hide content on your page – some black hat seo websites will take a key search term and on a white background write in white font the phrase 100 times, so that it will help them sore to the top of the search engine. If you get caught they will blacklist your site and once you are kicked off you can never get back on.

10. Add or Change Content – Don’t just put a site up and never change any information for 5 years. You need to add and delete information on your site to keep the information current and up to date. search engine optimization is about relative information on your site. Plus, the webcrawlers love new content. The more you add the more they crawl, and the more they crawl the better your site is going to do.

I hope this article has been helpful, and I will be adding more like, but with more detail to each point in the weeks to come. Good luck on your SEO, and we hope to see you at the top of the search engines.

The Overview:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very rewarding when successful but one must keep in mind it is a long term effort. Success requires time and effort while following a consistent and well tested program. For this article, we will be referencing Google a lot for the simple reason they account for over 70% of all web searches. The concepts going forward work with any search engine.

To begin lets quickly go over why Google and other search engine do what they do. First off they are all businesses; that is, they exist to make money. Advertising is the life blood of all search engines and to be successful they must accomplish two things. First, Google must provide the end user a rich and rewarding experience by delivering relevance for their searches. What relevance means is Google wants a user to find what they are looking for. Secondly, to get companies to advertise with them Google must provide quality customers to they advertises via ads. Content providers and websites that help Google achieve these two goals are rewarded handsomely.

So what makes a web site relevant?

Search engines want to know which site is relevant for a particular concept. These concepts are represented by phrases or key words. Example: single family homes, luxury resorts, organic food store.

Possessing massive computing power, the search engines read all these pages and ranks the sites based on a set of rules. When you go on a search engine and type a key phrase, the search engine picks the best matches by looking at the following hierarchy:

1. Authority…How many links from their sites about the subject. The more links to your site, the more authority
2. When the key word is the main focus of each site. They determine this by your sites structure
3. Which pages on the sites are most dedicated to the key works
4. Where those pages are more relevant an all the other pages in the search engines index.

No search engine releases it’s exact criteria, much less search algorithm, but we have found the following factors are what matter’s in obtaining a high search ranking.

Title Tags – Tags on the top of the hierarchy page. They are the first thing search engines look at.

Description Meta Tag- Affects your rankings and some search engine show this a snippet in your search

Headings (h1, h2, h3, etc) – Headings provide a content outline to the search engines when they crawl. If your heading contains the key word, that shows relevance.

Paragraph Copy – The more one writes, the easier it is to obtain a ranking. Don’t stuff keywords though. Including your key words in the copy multiple times will actually hurt your rankings.

Links and Link Text- The more links increases your authority.

File Names – keyword Rich file names

URL – keyword Rich URL’s help

Trust Factors – Physical Address, Privacy Policy, Contact Page

Image Captions – Text captions near image results

What does not matter:

Keyword Meta Tag – Since all the seo people abuse them, most search engine’s ignore this.

Hidden Text – Text that is hidden from view to “stuff keywords”. This will hurt you as once its discovered, your site will be de-indexed.

Bolding Key Words and Bullet Texts

A note about Flash:

Another tip is to avoid using too much flash in your website. Flash compiles files, link, fonts, and structures differently than a typical html page. The search engine can crawl (i.e. read your website) but can’t organize the data in a meaningful form. Google and Adobe Systems (creator of flash) have announced they are working to make flash more friendly, but as of this writing a flash heavy website is a detriment to a good seo ranking.

5 Steps you can do for a better Google ranking

Now that you have a basic understanding of SEO, here are 5 easy steps you can implement to obtain a better Google ranking.

Step 1: Avoid Blackhat Techniques. Black Hat seo uses tactics specifically designed to improve search rankings and fool search engines into providing a higher ranking than a website would receive according the that search engine’s algorithms. These techniques will give you a quick boost but the downside is far to great. If caught, penalties range from your website disappearing entirely from the rankings or your website moving down to four or five pages without warning. There are only 10 results per page in Google and the first page receive 80% of all clicks. Simply moving back a few pages will result in you effectively losing all your search engine traffic.

Step 2: Choose the Right Keyword

Choosing the right keywords to base your site optimization around is the most important step. Avoid general or generic keywords as they are usually not the best approach. Most times it is better to be specific and focus on niche keywords related to your service or product.

For example, let’s assume you have a hair salon.

The problem is there are a lot of Hair Salons. So how do we get it in the top 10 page?

We need to find our niche and get more specific.

1. We can optimize for a specific market
2. We can optimize for a specific location
3. We can optimize for a specific technique or service of the hair salon

Depending on the product or service you offer, your target market will change. Just keep in mind when you are looking for keyword, be specific. Also, the average search phrase is 3-5 words so remember you just don’t need a keyword, you can search for keyword phrases.

An example is, you can optimize your “hair salon” for “Los Angeles Hair Salon.” If you live in a specific neighbord in Los Angeles you can go with “Westwood Hair Salon” or “Beverly Hills Hair Salon” or “Hollywood Hair Salon.”

You can find out how many websites are competing with your keyword by simply doing a search on Google and write down how many search results are returned. For the above example, “hair salon” returns 25,300,000 websites. “Westwood Hair Salon” returns 21,300 results. Obviously, the more sites there are competing with you, the harder to get into the top 10 results.

A good place to start looking for keywords if you cannot afford some of the software is Google Adword’s Traffic Estimator.

There are many software programs for keyword research. Of course, all the good ones due require either a monthly fee or purchasing of software.

A simple technique to get you started is optimize every page on your site for a different search phrase (2-3 words each).

Step 3. Your URL and Title Tag

Two of the most determining factors in Google’s ranking are your domain name and title tag. For example, a domain name such as:

hair-salon-losangeles(dot)com will usually get ranked higher than yourcompany(dot)com assuming that they had identical keywords and content.

Because most of us have already purchased the domain name, and keywords in the domain name would look to funny or unprofessional; the following tactic is useful. Try adding keywords into the name of your pages.

yourcompany(dot)com/hair-salon.html

The title tag is equally as important as your domain name. Improve your Google ranking by using keywords in your title tag.

Going back to our example of the hair salon, a good title tag would be:

“Your Company is the top hair salon in Los Angeles.”

Also, the closer to the front of your title tag the keywords are placed, the better.

Step 4. H1 Tags and keyword Density

tags are not used as much as they use to be with the advent of stylesheets. However, Google’s ranking algorithm still uses them.

The Google ranking algorithm dictates that if you’re using a tag, then the text in between this tag must be more important than the content on the rest of the page.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the page content. Putting keywords in your page content can improve your keyword density. The ideal keyword density is 7-10% for each page on your site. There are penalties for overdoing keywords, so don’t over do it.

Step 5. Links, Links and More Links

Back links are websites that link directly to your website. However, please remember building back links takes time and does not happen overnight. The more back links you have, the better. Your website will be ranked higher under the principal your website must be good if so many websites are linking back to it. Submitting your site to many directories like Yahoo! And Bing are important steps to increase the number of sites linking back to yours. Another great place for back links is Yelp! (if you’re a restaurant) and other vertical searches and directories. Exchanging back links with other businesses you know is another great way to build back links. I would recommend emailing 10-15 websites each and every day to request back-links or partnership links. Within 8 weeks you should have 50-100 sites linking back to yours.

Being new to the world of Blogging, I have been stressing on how to get visitors. What good is it to have a site I put time and effort into if nobody knows it exists? Of course there are many ways, to include word-of-mouth, commenting on other blogs, newsletters, etc, but the way this article will focus on is called search engine Optimization (or SEO). seo is a major deal, and many companies pay their web designers high dollar-amounts to get their site noticed!

So what is search engine Optimization? seo is a method, or an art really, of discovering the inner-workings of search engines (such as Google or Yahoo!) so that we can understand what exactly to do to our site to get it top-ranked on the search engines.

For example, let’s say we go to Google and search for “SEO.” Google returns, as of today, 248 MILLION results of SEO. The number one on the list for me is Wikipedia.org, followed shortly by many companies who offer services in search engine Optimization. These sites have spent countless dollars having programmers optimize their site to reach those rankings. But why throw your money away when you can find plenty of sites online, like mine, that offer tips on how to do it yourself? So where do we start?

Before we begin, I should point out that visitors will not arrive at your site overnight. I have been up-and-running for about 2 weeks now and I see around 4-5 visitors a day. Just in the last few days I’ve begun trying to actually get word of my site out there, but I expect at least a month or more before I start seeing real results. Also I should point out to not give up. The number one reason why the sites that fail go downhill is because the authors start giving up, which leads to less updates, and eventually a complete vanishing act.

Web Design: You want to thoroughly check your site for spelling errors, problems in the code, or any other minor errors. You want your meta tags to be clean, with proper keywords to your site. Don’t flood your keywords with irrelevant words to try to create traffic. Search engines used to fall for that, but they are much more intelligent now-a-days.

Study Habits: Take the time to study and learn all you can! If this is the only article you have ever, or will ever, read, maybe you should pack your bags. seo is a big deal, and if you want to be successful you need to constantly try to get better, even if you think you have it down!

Include a sitemap. Sitemaps are basically a page (this can be a .html file or XML file, or whatever method you have found that works) that has a link to every page on your site. This allows search engine spiders (the term used for their software that “crawls” the web and indexes sites) to easily see every link on your site, and get it all right the first time. http://www.xml-sitemaps.com provides an easy, free, way to create sitemaps to your site.

Write Understandable Titles and Descriptions on every page – This is VERY important. Why would a user click on a site that says “SEO Tips” and expect something different? Make sure all of your page titles are related to the content contained. Visitors will not want to come back if they find themselves in a pool of marketing schemes or whatever your flavor may be.

Participate – This is yet another very important factor. If you want to create a blog and have visitors come to your site, shouldn’t you visit other sites as well? This is key to success. Visit sites, see what others are talking about: it might inspire you. And don’t forget to leave comments. Don’t leave comments like “Come to my site,” but try to leave actual constructive comments. This will develop your character and web surfers will be more likely to visit your site.

Diversify your Content – Having a site specialized in a single topic can be fun to maintain, especially if it’s something you enjoy to do, but what happens when people just aren’t interested in reading the same old stuff over and over? Try to mix it up a bit, talk about different things. It doesn’t have to be different every time, but keep in mind that readers like reading new content.

Media – I can’t really confirm if this helps or not, but I have read that YouTube videos on your site increase your site ranking. That being said, whether it increases your ranking or not, videos on your site help your visitors visualize what you are trying to say, which makes them want to come back more!

Get Help – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ is a great place to start if you have a new site. Google has spent the time to develop these tools to assist you in optimization of your site. It will tell you detailed statistics about your site, including broken or missing links, code errors, links to your site, and much, much more. Take advantage of these tools, they are there for you!

www.google.com

That is just a few of the massive amounts of tips that can be found all over the internet. “Google seo Optimization tips” is a great search to begin with, if you want to learn more.

Good luck and I hope we all see some traffic soon!

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a method by which website developers utilize unpaid or ‘organic’ means to improve quality or volume of traffic to their website. In order for a website to generate higher traffic volumes, the website must appear higher on searchengine results. Here are a few steps that you can take in order to enhance traffic volumes to your website through search engine optimization.

When designing the content of your website, make sure you keep in mind a dozen or so keywords that pertain to your websites topic. By including relevant keywords in your websites title, general body, and description, search engines will pick up on these and index your website according to its topic and rank it in search results.

It is imperative that you don’t use excessively long title and description tags. Try to stick to a maximum of ten words for the title tag, and a maximum of fourteen words for the description tag. This will allow readers of search engine results to swiftly decide whether your website is relevant for their needs.

When writing the body of the website, that is the main written content that discusses your websites topic and target audience, try to include as many of the keywords as possible and as frequently as possible. However, don’t overuse them such that the quality of your content is being sacrificed.

Try to use graphics and images that are relevant to your website, and use Alt tags including the appropriate keywords. Try to stay away from flash graphics or images, as searchengines often struggle to read them and likewise, opt for straightforward tables, as quite often search engines find them easier to read as opposed to frames.

By following these simple, yet effective tips on search engine optimization you’ll soon find that your website is getting higher and more quality traffic because your website is indexed higher in search engine results.

The topic for discussion today is about what not to do when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). I was going to name this article The Do’s & Don’ts of SEO, but I figure at this point you know what to do. I’ve dedicated many articles that are focused on what to ‘DO’. Just check my articles “SEO Basic’s for the Dummy” or “Dominate the Search Engines” or “The Art of Keywords” to understand what to do. Or just read this article and ‘DO’ the opposite of what ‘not’ to do.

The things that I will talk about in this article are about what is called in seo “black hat” SEO. What’s been talked in previous articles are what we call “white hat” To learn more on “white hat” strategies, refer to any of the articles above. From this point on, it’ll be about “black hat” strategies.

Black Hat

What’s this mysterious “black hat” seo strategies? Is it the latest fashion trend? No it’s not a fashion trend at all. Should I do it? Does it work with the SE’s or is it just a waste of time? The answer to these questions depend upon who you are talking to. Many employ these strategies and continue to do so today.

My answer to these questions is yes they do work. However, in my opinion, Black Hat strategies are quick fixes with short term gains. I see it as continuing to work hard and not necessarily smart. I am lazy, so I want to do something once and let it go from there. Black Hat strategies do not allow this. Your site may get the rankings quick, but soon your site will be at the back of the line. (or out of the line completely). Black Hat involves spamming and the SE’s do not like this. They will find your site, penalize or ban it completely from the index.

Then your off again starting a whole new site employing the same strategies. White Hat strategies start off really slow. And I mean ssllllooooowwww… But eventually get momentum and out last the rest. The reason it is so slow is your at the mercy of the search engines. Ever heard of the infamous Google Sandbox? Well experts say it could take any new site 6-12 months to get out of it! You kidding me? I have to wait a year to see results in Google? Who has that kind of time? You? Definitely not me. I’m lazy but not that lazy. I have bills to pay today, not next year. This is why many webmasters go with black hat instead of white hat.

Even with this flaw, white hat will pay off big in the long hall. It will flow continuous money into your mailbox while others are jumping around trying to get new sites started to keep their black hat strategies going.

What Not To Do?

Ok, ok, you have me convinced. I do not want to go with the black hat strategies. But what would be considered black hat? How can I avoid it? Just hold on a second. I’m getting there. Didn’t I tell you I was lazy. The rest of the article is focused on the things not to do. By the time I am done, you will know what not to do to your website to not get it banned. There are 2 ways of spamming. On-page and off-page. Sounds familiar? Same factors to help you rank well are the same that can get you penalized or banned. Let’s start with our own backyard. Your thinking…Yea, yea I know “As momma always told you.” Yep. See your getting it!

On-page

Keyword Stuffing

First up to bat, keyword stuffing. What is that, you may ask. Almost sounds like some food. Making me hungry just thinking about it. I’ll take some chicken with a side of chicken stuffing, mash potatoes and keyword stuffing please.

Anyway, in my opinion, there are 2 forms of keyword stuffing. I call them keyword list stuffing and keyword body stuffing. They will not get your site banned, but it won’t rank you well either. Let’s get into the first one, keyword list stuffing.

Keyword List

This involves adding every word known to your niche in the meta keywords. You see a website with meta keywords and it is stuffed full with 1000 or so keywords. Look like they got the dictionary and started writing. Seriously. As funny as it sounds, there are websites out there that do this. People, this not going to get you ranked. It will not get you banned, but definitely will not get your ranked on the first million pages!! Some SE’s do not even read the list to begin with. Keep it short. No need to add the A-F section of the dictionary to your keyword list.

Keyword Body

This is the process of taking your keyword list (Probably too big to begin with) and repeating it all over the page. It makes no sense to the user, just a bunch of words all over the place. I haven’t seen this much, and I hope I do not. Will not help you in anyway.

Also, while we are on the subject, over using the keywords is a no, no. Some websites will take their main keyword and repeat over and over and over. You’ll see it in the Title, meta description, everywhere. This strategy will get you banned or penalized. Again, it’s an attempt to appear more relevant than the website really is. I have seen the tactic work, but not for long. If your ranked well, and you put in your main keyword and you suddenly see a site up that has no business being there. Check back again in a few days and you’ll see that site gone.

The Invisible KeyWord

Sounds like a Super Hero. When there is trouble with ranking your website, call “The Invisible KeyWord” No, please do not! He is a enemy, not a hero. This is involves taking your keywords, put them on the body of your website and make the color of the font the same color as the background of the website. It’s invisible to you or I, but visible to SE’s. It’s a process of spam to make the website appear more relevant because it has the keywords in the body. SE’s have caught onto this tactic and you will be penalized or banned for this. I have seen this tactic done. But I have the visible ink. One way to tell, is when you visit a website and you see a big blank space at the bottom or somewhere towards the bottom, take your mouse, point and try to highlight the space. When it highlights, it will reveal the words!!

Formatting Keywords

This is when you bold, italicize, or underline every keyword on the website. There is no need to emphasize every word. Now you know those words are not that important in every sentence. Come on now! Just once is fine. Twice at the most. This tactic could end up backfiring. The SE’s will give less importance to the words.

Excessive Link Pages

This is having too many links on one page. Normally, it’s 100 or more that’s a problem. Experts have difference numbers that they believe will hurt. I believe 100 is most agreed upon that will hurt your SE rankings. A rule of thumb I try to do is stay with around 15-25 links on one page. Anything more than that can create clutter on your website. It will make it difficult for your surfers. Besides that, it does not help the websites you are linking to. If a surfer cannot find their site because it’s buried on a page with over 100 links, do not expect any traffic.

Missing Title

I just had to put this in there. This won’t get you penalized or banned, but since this article is about what not to do, I had to talk about this. This is so common among websites. You would be surprised at how many websites do not have a Title at all. Makes you want to put a ad up on the back of a milk box. “Has anyone seen this Title”? or a Wanted sign in the Post office Wanted “Website Title” $1000 reward if found.

This is so big. This is one of the top reasons why websites do not rank period. Just this one change alone could move a website from the 100millionth page to the millionth page. What is your site about? Why should I click on it?

Off-page

I really shouldn’t call this off-page. Technically it’s really not, but I wanted to make a clear difference here. The difference between on-page and off-page is on-page is the way you set your site up. Off-page involves more of the linking side. You cannot really help who links to you and SE’s know this. That’s why I am not talking about that kind of off-page. You’ll see more of what I mean as you read along.

Link Farms

Link Farms? What is this? Is this where links are raised before sent out to the internet? Not quite. Link farms are a bunch of webmasters getting together to setup 1000′s of sites and pointing the links towards each other. There are a few ways of accomplishing this. When you do your link campaign, stick with hard reciprocal linking. Many are not aware, but there are link director sites like PowerLinks or Linkvault that brag about helping your build links fast. These are essentially link farms. Avoid them like the plague. How do you know? The red flag is usually when you have to add some kind of script to your website in order to do a link exchange. Don’t do it. Again, short term success, but short term gains.

Banned / Penalized Sites

Again, you cannot control who links to you, but you have full control over who you link to. Avoid linking to other penalized or banned sites. This can eventually affect you. Why? Remember, a link pointing to a site is a vote. So your voting for this banned or penalized site that the SE’s have stated is bad news. If your voting for them, then that must mean your site is also bad news. Ever heard of the saying, “Birds of a feather, flock together?” I have. It’s another one of the sayings that didn’t make sense to me until later on in life.

How do I know if I am linking to someone that is banned? The easiest way to do this is by checking the pagerank of the site you are linking to. You can download the Google Toolbar to do this. If you see a grey bar for the pagerank. It’s been banned. Now, do not confuse a 0 PR with a penalized site. Having a PR of 0 does not mean the site has been penalized. It’ll be grey’d out if it is penalized.

That’s all for now folks. I’m sure there will be other tactic’s that will arise as SE’s catch them. Malicious webmasters will continue to look for quick, easy ways to beat the SE’s. The SE’s will catch it, update their alogorithms and the cycle will continue. It’s a endless cycle as to why I say “white hat” eventually will out last the “black hat” and flow continuous surfers to your site producing tons of money. White hat strategies will hold up through all the changes to the SE’s. The choice is always yours. Whatever works for you. Good luck and happy optimizing.

It’s in Googles Patent… but not the end of the story! Googles Patent application became public information according to United States Patent Application 20050071741 on March 31, 2005 Serial No.: 748664 Filed: December 31, 2003.

That day I went home to read the legalize mixed with geek speak and attempt to make whatever sense I could out of it… and I have to confess, I still find myself re-reading it;)

When I got to Section [0096] Domain-Related Information I was very interested indeed because I knew it could effect hundreds that I manage Domain Name Service (DNS) for. Before I share the details of the story of how I tested the sole value of the prepaid domain issue on Google and in my mind, I’d like to quote the Patent Application with a special attention to item [0099]:

[0099] Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.

About the time I re-read this the second time, I grabbed my cell phone to telephone my Business Manager. – LOL

I told him, I discovered something really simple and one of the few things that will cost a few bucks, but then, it’s all relative.

One thing that everyone who knows anything about Google is that they are all about not promoting spammers! Since Spammers or fly by night get rich quick idiots use throw away domains, they never invest in their domains future… I may even have slapped myself on the forehead for the simplicity that this one little thing which makes so much sense.

I discussed with my manager peer the possibility to not test over a 9 month period because I’m just as needy as my clients are to do good on the ‘net, but to do it over a quarter of a year. The following day I proposed paying for three additional years, then a month later three more, then on the third month the remaining four so that I might better measure the results. We also determined that since we’ve had a decade to prepare our site, we could not make any other changes to so much as a single web page what-so-ever. No dotted i’s or crossed t’s because I love that humor in these days of technology. I knew that this test wouldn’t fall into the scientific quality, but figured the results could be measured, in any regard.

Now at this point I need to share the string I was trying hard to “own” for just too long a period. I’d been working on the string “National Internet Service Provider” since 2004 but just couldn’t get above page 40. Yep, not 40th place, but rather the 40th page, and I thought I knew what I was doing, because I did have over decade of experience behind me.

Ten to fourteen days after pre-paying three additional years, I did my Google research and discovered I made it to page 20. As far as I could tell that represented a 100% improvement! It was all I could do to wait another couple of weeks to pay for another three…

So when the second month rolled around, I promptly paid another three years making the total only 6 years in advance so far. Geez-O-whizo, I found myself at the bottom of page one, about 7th to 10th place. You can imagine my excitement and the even stronger desire yet to just go ahead and pay for the rest… but no, I knew that some day a story would come from the experience that would potentially benefit anyone interested. It seems enough people have asked me over the years how to do better in the engines, so mot it be.

On the third month, the remaining four years was paid giving config.com a full decade of prepayment. It was at this point we reached the number one spot for that string I wanted so badly of “National Internet Service Provider”. Of course, a few calls and extra mail started to flow also. The down side for the Internet service business is that our bread and butter was established with traditional dial-up Internet access which has been migrating to broadband cable, DSL, and wireless. In the course of tweaking our site to reflect the commercial interest which we had maintained since 1993 on the ‘net, we started getting more commercially oriented calls. To our surprise, even from a few big companies that were looking for various access solutions to transmit cash register receipts, medical data, single source ISP billing, etc..which included dial-up National access.

Once we were established on the top ten, we also started gaining click through to our pages which also gained page rank and in the end, many other strings started moving to the top ten also. One should also assume that just because the domain was paid in advance, they need not do anything else toward maintaining any degree of quality SEO, without the many other things that can effect the final placement rank! I like to say there are many little simple things that need to be thought of as an element of a web page. It’s not getting them all done overnight but rather getting the important easy ones out of the way first, and move on to the next!

I might also add that how fast prepayment may work for you, compared to my story, I’d suggest getting the basic minimum prerequisites out of the way at the creation of each page! I also like to compare domain pre-payment like buying an ad in a local newspaper that will run only one day and may generate a worthy result of a few calls, to, like having an advertisement that will bring results for a decade! All you have to do is keep paying every year on the anniversary date of yoru domain, for another year, and have the other elements of seo in place and you too can “own” your piece of Google placement.

Now that a couple of years has passed since we learned the value of pre-paid domains, we made several discoveries which we like to call seo trade secrets. For the sake of completeness, added credibility, and of course some humor, I’ll share a couple.

My marketing Guru and I sat one day and thought of all the big name companies in technology we could fill up a legal pad full line by line. Then we went to domaintools.com and started to perform a whois on them. To our great surprise Google being at the top of the list and the owner of the Patent only had there paid for a few years in advance. As of this writing at http://whois.domaintools.com/google.com it Expires: 2011-09-14… I guess Google doesn’t need to promote themselves or has special code that favors their pages which I also doubt.

It’s really exciting to see our company above such as Microsoft for different Internet business strings, whom to their credit had their domain paid for farther in advance than any of the other companies we researched which Expires: 2014-05-03! I’ve wondered however if their motive wasn’t seo related but to the embarrassment they suffered when they purchased Hotmail back around 1999 and failed to renew their $35.00 annual domain fee. The Hotmail domain expired and millions of users were without email until a nice young Linux Geek paid it for them. I always loved that story enough to smile knowing even a huge multi-Gazillion dollar company can make a simple mistake which can cause so much potential harm, integrity certainly, and otherwise!

As long as the big boy public companies are spending millions more toward their on-line advertising each year than on their SEO, I guess the small guys still have a chance in the World of E-commerce! I get the biggest grin every time I see Verizon paying their $8.00 per click out of their 1.3 billion dollar advertising budget for 2007 knowing they have a lot more money than me, and that the knowledge one can possess can still allow online competition….

The domain prepayment issue is in fact the first thing I tell a new potential client or peer to commit to, even before paying me, as it will help me help them much faster and less of the other little things that need to be attended to. It is simply that important to any company that is serious about online marketing and it’s search engine Optimization (SEO)!

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

This keyword-tweaking game for a site is often called OnPage Optimization. In order to rank high in search engines, make sure you execute these tasks:

1. Include your keywords in the domain name

2. Include them also in the page title

3. Use “h1″ and “h2″ header tags

4. Type some keywords in bold, italic and underline

5. Put your keywords at the beginning and end of your webpage

6. Named all the images or graphics after your keywords

A wrong thing to do is performing unnecessary keyword-filling! This could make your site banned by search engines. An example of unnecessary keyword-filling is by putting hidden texts all over your webpage. Did it ever cross your mind? Well don’t do that silly thing!

Also don’t fill your meta tag, alt image tag, or title tag with keywords. You will get caught and your site will be banned for this!

After all, there is another important factor that has a huge impact on your site’s ranking in search engines. It’s the OffPage Optimization. I’ll write about it in another article!

Search engine optimization is a free way of generating enormous amount of traffic. Realizing the benefits of seo will make you want to start optimizing your website or blog ASAP. You don’t want to miss out on free traffic, do you?!

The First Step

You need to find the best keywords within your niche. (Your niche is the field in which you represent yourself as an expert to your audience. ) These keywords will enable you to dominate your targeted market.

Let’s say you are striving to represent yourself as a “guru” in any dog related topic, and want to find the most targeted keywords.

Make A List of:

- New company names related to dog products

-New dog related books, products, courses…etc.

-Biggest names (gurus) in the field (Cesar Milan for instance)

-Any news or gossip (launch of a new product)

The point here is that you need to think with the head of your market. What might they be looking for? What’s hot out there “today”?

If somebody is searching for a dog health product, they are probably looking for a solution to a problem. If they find the solution, they are more likely to make a purchase. If you rank in the top 10 on Google search engine for that given keyword, chances are that your website will provide the information, the person is looking for. Ranking high also shows a lot of credibility in the eyes of your prospects; they basically sell themselves.

Let’s say there is a rumor about a launch of a new dog product on the net. You create an optimized (using SEO) website or a blog about that product. It’s a new product so chances are that there is not much optimization on it (no competition). You being the first, would capitalize on that buzz. And when the rumor becomes the latest news and goes viral you will get insane traffic.

Where To Find Keywords?

Go to Amazon.com and make a search on dog or dogs. You will find a ton of popular books. Make notes of the books titles and the authors. Those are your “keywords” that you will be sprinkling all over your content, to optimize your page.

Writing Your Content-Tips

-Do not write anything negative or bash anybody. Do not put negative energy out there. Karma will come back and bite you in the butt.

-Be helpful, add value, and be objective when writing a review. You are giving your honest opinion on a subject. You are acting as a “commentator” who reports on rumors and news.

Off site seo (search engines optimization) is as much important as on site SEO, so what is off site SEO?

Well off site seo consist of a number of things from backlinks to PR’s (Press releases), first we will start with backlinks with what is a good thing and what is a bad thing here is a short list of the good and the bad off site SEO

Good

1. Links placed of related subjects to your website.
2. Links on high traffic websites.
3. Links on high ranked websites in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
4. Links on high PR (Google page rank) websites
5. Text links not banners.

Now we will start with each one that is good off sites seo and brake them down telling you the best way that this can and could be done, so starting with number one.

Links placed of related subjects to your website

This can be quite easy to do but this would depend on your website related subject, when looking for a website that is related to yours if you find some related websites you should also check to see if the website meats search engines requirements here are some good things that you should look out for

1. Check to see if the website is up to date.
2. Check to see if the website gets updated regally.
3. Check to see if the website has the same related subjects on all or most of its website.
4. Check to see if the website is high ranked in search engines like Google.
5. Is the website getting much traffic?

So once you have checked all these things and you are happy with the website there are two things you can do, one is ask then can you pay for a link on there website, this can be good for one reason and that is the text link will be a one way link and this looks very natural to search engines but this can cost quite a lot on some websites, so you could take the other option and that is ask them if they are interested in a link exchange this means you would place a link on your website and they would place one on there website. It is some times best to make a links page and place there link on your website before you contact them, also show them the page that you have placed a link on from your website to there’s this will give you more of a chance in them saying yes to your offer.

Remember the page you have made for adding links, well the page should have a title of something like sponsors or resources you would be better not having something like links for the title. An ideal backlink on another websites would be if the owner of the website let you fully write a page that contains a full description and your keywords with approximately 300-400 words then on the same page two text links to your website, but this is very hard to get hold of if you can get your hands on owners that will let you do this then that would be the best backlink you could ever have.

This next bit covers sections 2, 3, and 4in the things to do that are good. A web site that very high traffic is most likely to be ranking quite high in search engines for some of there search terms, the reason it is good to get your backlink on a website like this is because there website is more than likely classed as a important website so robots would spider this site quite often if your link is on there website this would been your site will get spiders more often, now for the PR (Google page rank) with PR it starts from 0 to 10 and the 10 is being the best so placing your link on a low page rank will be good but not as good as placing it on a website with a PR7 or higher and a bit lower, the reason this is good is because websites like this with high PR wouldn’t rely place lots of links on there site and when they do search engines think that these must be important websites as well.

So why text links and not banners?

Well this is easy for some good reasons text links do a better job for your website than a banner because search engines will spider your website from these and you can place your keywords within the text of the link this is great for helping your rank higher in search engines here is a little example of this

Go to google and type in the search term click here you will see that the website ranking first is Adobe, the reason for this is because people that offer file downloads on there website that may need Adobe to read these files also offer a link to the Adobe website and they most on the times write this

To download Adobe click here

The click here is the link so remember place your keywords in your links. The reason I say banners are not much use is because they are mainly used for traffic to your website and that is it, so if you concentrate on the other off site seo then you will get the traffic in the end.

Here is a list of the bad of site SEO

Bad

1. Try not to place a link on un related websites, this will not really be as much as a bad thing but it will not help you get any were better so it’s a waste of time.

2. Don’t place links on your website from a website that is band or black listed in google, the reason for this is that they will pull you down with them as google will look at your website being bad as well. Always check to see if the website is doing anything search engines illegal on there site and don’t worry it is ok to have your link on bad sites jut not there link you your website.

3. don’t place links on other websites to fast doing maybe 10 a day is good as this would look very natural to the search engines, but placing links in the hundreds a day isn’t a very good thing and you could look like a spammer to the search engines, so this would make your website take longer to get higher ranks from all your hard work.

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The key to any successful online marketing plan is improving your company or affiliate website’s search engine position. The field of search engine optimization (SEO) is very active right now; the internet is full of self proclaimed seo experts offering site optimizing schemes that guarantee to drive traffic and increase sales. Enlisting the services of a professional seo guru to get your website listed at the top of Google’s search results is entirely possible, but it is also very expensive and can cost thousands of dollars.

The simple truth is that many of the seo techniques used by so-called seo experts are just rudimentary things anyone can do to improve their site’s rankings on Google, Bing or Yahoo. There is no one big secret to improving search rankings and traffic to your site, just a number of smaller steps that all work in conjunction with each other. The good news is that any novice webmaster or e-marketer can do all these steps themselves cheaply and effectively, without having to dish out huge sums of money to know-nothing experts.

One of the most effective steps to improve a site’s search engine visibility is to take part in a link exchange. Linking to and accepting links from other sites with a similar area of interest is a great way to spike your search engine ranking. Most link exchanges are free to join and allow you to take part reciprocal linking with hundreds of other sites. Individual website owners can also be contacted to inquire about exchanging links – this is a win-win scenario since it improves Google rankings for both sites.

Include original and informative articles in your site. keyword rich articles are a surefire way to increase your site’s popularity with all the leading search engines. While the best option is to write fresh articles yourself with new and compelling information that will be useful to your readers, you can always save time by using Prewritten articles from article directory sites. Always get permission from the original author before using someone else’s article; most authors are more than happy to give you permission to publish their work provided that you include the author’s bio and a backlink.

Another often overlooked search engine optimization technique is a short and memorable domain name. Use a catchy and clever domain name that people will easily recall – this goes a long way to increasing your site’s popularity. Be creative, you’ll be surprised what you can come up with.

A final cheap and easy way to improve traffic is to make your site user friendly. The average internet user is notoriously fickle and won’t stick around for very long if he or she finds a site too difficult to navigate. Make sure you don’t ruin an otherwise excellent internet marketing campaign with a badly designed landing page.

SEO strategies are always evolving to keep up with rapid changes in search engine technology. Google and all other leading search engine companies constantly refine and improve their search technologies, so all seo experts and online marketers should always be on their toes. Following the simple methods shown in this article can be a cheap and highly effective way to significantly improve your site’s search engine rankings and increase your earnings.