Sitemaps And SEO - Do Sitemaps Help Your Google PageRank

With the millions and millions of websites in existence today, how do you get yours noticed? The most common way is for it to be high up in the rankings of useful and relevant websites. Google is the most widely used search engine today. When someone keys in a search term on Google, you can only hope that your website comes up in the first ten pages of results. You do not have to sit there and just hope, though. There are a number of things you could do to improve your chances of being noticed.

Google came up with a system to determine how important a website is. Everyday, Google's automated programs called spiders "crawl" the World Wide Web. The purpose is to index all the existing web pages out there. The information these spiders gather is used as the basis for calculating what Google calls PageRank. This concept was developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Stanford University.

What exactly is PageRank? It is an algorithm which assigns numerical weights to linked pages. The higher the figures, the more important the page is. The PageRank is resultant of how many pages link to your own page. It is of no use to make bogus incoming links to your page though. Google gives more weight to more reputable sites that link to your page. Bogus and paid incoming links can actually be detected. The algorithm takes into account all incoming links – both external and internal.

This is where sitemaps come into the picture. As can be gathered from the name, sitemaps are basically a guide to what can be found in your website. It is a page within your site wherein the user can see the overall structure and informational content. It contains links to all the pages in your website.

Will providing a sitemap increase your Google PageRank? The answer is simple: yes it may. As mentioned earlier, the PageRank system also takes into account internal links. The more pages you have in your website, the higher you PageRank. A word of caution is necessary here. Pages should contain original content and not simply be copies of each other. Otherwise, your PageRank may actually decrease. As the spiders follow links to get to web pages, a sitemap will actually facilitate the "travel" of these spiders within your site. If each of the pages on your web site are interconnected and are easily accessible from one page, then chances are the spiders will find the necessary information faster and easier. Experts suggest that you put only a maximum of 100 links in one page. If you have more than that number of links, you should create different sets of sitemaps. In order for the idea of the sitemap to really work, you need to provide a link to the sitemap on every page on your website.

The keys to increasing your PageRank are fairly simple. Include original content in as many pages as you can. Link your pages together. Create a sitemap to make navigation easier. Provide links to the sitemap for each page. This way, both user and spiders can find all the information that you have to offer.

XML-Sitemaps.com provides an online sitemap generator that creates XML, HTML and text sitemaps and also helps find broken links on your website.

[tags]sitemaps, sitemap generator, find broken links[/tags]

Overview Of SEO

Search Engine Ranking - Optimization Strategy

Think of the Internet as the biggest library-like source of information in human history, with one major difference from a actual library. The Internet is not organized, nor is all the information out there credible. This is where search engines come into play and why SEO services, SEO ranking and SEO optimization strategies are so important to real businesses who provide real information, services and products.

Why You Need Good Search Engine Ranking and Optimization Strategy

We call it being in the Top 10 of a search engine. It means your web site is listed on the front page, in the first 10 results, of any given search engine listing for your keywords ... and that's referred to as a Natural Listing or Natural Results.

In reality, your web site coming up in the top 10 of any search engine is anything but natural. Appearing in the top 10 for your business's keywords will bring in potential customers to your web site just as effectively as the businesses that pay for the Google Ads and Yahoo Ads, but it's more cost effective to you because you didn't have to pay $3-$20 per click like they did ... and remember, clicks don't mean sales, it just means someone clicked onto their web site. Also, I'm not inflating those prices ... if you want to compete with the big boys at the top of the keyword list on Google, that's what it's going to cost you. Suddenly optimizing your web site has much more importance to you doesn't it?!

Search engine ranking and optimization is a highly specialized field of Internet study combined with the ability to write decently. Search engine users are what we call a targeted audience because they come looking for your business and usually want to buy what you sell. You don't need to do anything, but provide them a clean web site that nicely displays your products, and close the sale (but that's another article).

Internet Users and Search Engine Search Listings

Every web business needs a web site marketing plan with a solid search engine ranking and optimization strategy. The Georgia Institute of Technology says more than 85% of all Internet users find new web sites through search engine search listings. Data shows that search engine listings are the number one way to generate traffic to a web site.

Search Engine Ranking and Optimization Services

Think about it ... when you got your very first computer, hooked it up and wanted to go out onto the world wide web ... didn't you ask yourself, How do I find web sites? Then you discovered what a search engine was and from there, you relied on the search engines to give you keyword results and that's where you played on the Internet.

That's what millions of users do everyday. These are people who are not tech savvy like you and me. They use search engines as a way of sifting through the myriad of web sites out there, narrowing their search and focusing them on the top 10 results. The goal of any SEO company is to get your web site to rank in the top 10 for your set of keywords, bringing you the people who are searching for the goods and services you provide.

Good Search Engine Ranking and Optimization Strategy

SEO services involve knowledge of SEO optimization, web site planning, SEO experience and having the right SEO tools, but most of all it requires patience because getting your web site into one of those top positions on the search engine results pages (SERP) takes an average of 1-3 months. Any SEO company will need to tweak your web site and it's content, and then wait for the search engines to make their changes. The goal is to achieve and maintain true search engine optimization and placement for your web site.

By hiring an SEO company like us, to handle your search engine optimization you will see results. A good SEO company will bring you good search engine placement, and any business that can get the targeted traffic should also get the conversion necessary to drive profits up if the web site is able to close the sale.

Your web site content should both drive SEO optimized traffic to your web site and help close the sale. A good SEO Copywriter can help with both!

Search Engine Ranking and Optimization for Good ROI

ROI is the return on investment. You need to compare your ROI for the costs of placing pay per click ads (PPC) with Google and Yahoo vs. the cost of optimizing your web site to get a natural ranking.

How competitive is your market? If it's highly competitive, like the Finance market is, then you're most likely going to need to do both to make it in that business online. This is where where our SEO experience can be invaluable to you and the success of your online business.

Forrester Research reported that Over 80 percent of all Internet users reach sites through search engines. Translated, that means if your web site isn't attracting 80 percent of its visitors from search engines, you're losing out on a lot of free traffic.

A study from the NPD Group found that search engine listings are far more effective than standard banner or button advertisements when it comes to brand recall, favorable opinion rating, and conversion of traffic to sales.

In unaided recall, search listings outperformed banners and buttons by three to one. More than twice as many people gave a more favorable opinion of companies in the top three search positions than those featured in ads. The study also found that 55 percent of online purchases were made on sites found through search listings, while a mere 9 percent were on sites found through banner ads. You do the math! Search Engine Optimization is clearly linked to a better ROI for your business.

Based on our own internal calculations, the current cost of getting customers through a good SEO optimization strategy is less than half of the cost of pay-per-click services such as Yahoo's Overture or Google's AdWords.

We also know that organic or natural traffic, that comes to your web site from natural search engine ranking, converts better than traffic delivered via pay-per-click search... because the traffic is better targeted! Not all, but most people don't want to click on the Ads and prefer to click on the organic links instead.

Search Engine Ranking and Optimization

Search engine ranking and SEO optimization is cost effective and should be a high priority. While the search engine ranking and SEO optimization process is complex and time consuming, it is very do-able if you know what you're doing. That's why you may want to hire an SEO writer.

SEO optimization is not only about working your web pages to match the ever changing search engine algorithms of all the major search engines, but it's also about trying to out-rank your competitors.

If you are new to SEO optimization and want to learn more, Wild Wolf SEO Copywriters and Wild Wolf Webmasters both have a lot of tutorials and articles regarding SEO.

About the Author: Bobbie Grennier is an SEO copywriter and web site copywriter. She publishes Webmaster Blog. Visit her web sites wild-wolf.com or http://www.wildwolf.ws.

[tags]SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Google, Yahoo, Get More Traffic, Seach Engines[/tags]

What Is The Google Dance

As with any good web developer, the ability to time the changes Google will update your website and refresh the content for better SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is in your favor. Welcome to the world of "Google Dance". The Google Dance is simply that the predetermination of when the actual update will commence.

What really happens is Google sends out spiders to crawl the Internet, usually done to DNS (Domain Name Servers), upon spidering all of the available tables it begins to go through each individual site and updates the content on to Google.com. Thus if you watch your rank on the Google Toolbar, you can tell when your overall page rank has changed.

Understanding SEO and what is necessary to improve your overall ranking. Webmasters have been looking for ways to increase the odds of guessing when the next spidering would commence. There are various versions and servers that go out and crawl thousands of servers at a time, it takes time to relay and decipher this information back to the web server that Google.com pulls its information from.

Some vendors have created programs that actually go out to the data centers themselves to find out approximately when the last index was kicked off. Depending on the information returned from the trace the exact time and date are pinpointed. Is there really that much of an advantage to doing it this way? It depends, if you have a vital update that you want to optimize your site, you may want to know when the last time Google visited your site for content to keep information fresh and relevant.

There are many data centers that Google uses to spider across the world. Each center has a specific region it covers and all the information is gathered in aggregate and returned back to populate Google.com. With this many data centers the chances for continuous indexing is good, but not guaranteed.

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

[tags]google dance,seo,search engine optimization[/tags]

Googled

The Internet may have started as the fervent brainchild of DARPA, the US defence agency - but it quickly evolved into a network of computers at the service of a community. Academics around the world used it to communicate, compare results, compute, interact and flame each other. The ethos of the community as content-creator, source of information, fount of emotional sustenance, peer group, and social substitute is well embedded in the very fabric of the Net. Millions of members in free, advertising or subscription financed, mega-sites such as Geocities, AOL, Yahoo and Tripod generate more bits and bytes than the rest of the Internet combined. This traffic emanates from discussion groups, announcement (mailing) lists, newsgroups, and content sites (such as Suite101 and Webseed). Even the occasional visitor can find priceless gems of knowledge and opinion in the mound of trash and frivolity that these parts of the web have become.

The emergence of search engines and directories which cater only to this (sizeable) market segment was to be expected. By far the most comprehensive (and, thus, less discriminating) was Deja. It spidered and took in the exploding newsgroups (Usenet) scene with its tens of thousands of daily messages. When it was taken over by Google, its archives contained more than 500 million messages, cross-indexed every which way and pertaining to every possible (and many impossible) a topic.

Google is by far the most popular search engine yet, having surpassed the more veteran Northern Lights, Fast, and Alta Vista. Its mind defying database (more than 1.3 billion web pages), its caching technology (making it, in effect, one of the biggest libraries on earth) and its site ranking (by popularity and links-over) have rendered it unbeatable. Yet, its efforts to integrate the treasure trove that is Deja and adapt it to the Google search interface have hitherto been spectacularly unsuccessful (though it finally made it two and a half months after the purchase). So much so, that it gave birth to a protest movement.

http://groups.google.com/

http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce.html

Bickering and bad tempered flaming (often bordering on the deranged, the racial, or the stalking) are the more repulsive aspects of the Usenet groups. But at the heart of the debate this time is no ordinary sadistic venting. The issue is: who owns content generated by the public at large on computers funded by tax dollars? Can a commercial enterprise own and monopolize the fruits of the collective effort of millions of individuals from all over the world? Or should such intellectual property remain in the public domain, perhaps maintained by public institutions (such as the Library of Congress)? Should open source movements gain access to Deja's source code in order to launch Deja II? And who owns the copyright to all these messages (theoretically, the authors)? Google, as Deja before it, is offering compilations of this content, the copyright to which it does not and cannot own. The very legal concept of intellectual property is at the crux of this virtual conflict.

Google was, thus, compelled to offer free access to the CONTENT of the Deja archives to alternative (non-Google) archiving systems. But it remains mum on the search programming code and the user interface. Already one such open source group (called Dela News) is coalescing, although it is not clear who will bear the costs of the gigantic storage and processing such a project would require. Dela wants to have a physical copy of the archive deposited in trust with a dot org.

This raises a host of no less fascinating subjects. The Deja Usenet search technology, programming code, and systems are inextricable and almost indistinguishable from the Usenet archive itself. Without these elements - structural as well as dynamic - there will be no archive and no way to extract meaningful information from the chaotic bedlam that is the Usenet environment. In this case, the information lies in the ordering and classification of raw data and not in the content itself. This is why the open source proponents demand that Google share both content and the tools to access it. Google's hasty and improvised unplugging of Deja in February only served to aggravate the die-hard fans of erstwhile Deja.

The Usenet is not only the refuge of pedophiles and neo-Nazis. It includes thousands of academically rigorous and research inclined discussion groups which morph with intellectual trends and fashionable subjects. More than twenty years of wisdom and erudition are buried in servers all over the world. Scholars often visit Usenet in their pursuit of complementary knowledge or expert advice. The Usenet is also the documentation of Western intellectual history in the last three decades. In it invaluable. Google's decision to abandon the internal links between Deja messages means the disintegration of the hyperlinked fabric of this resource - unless Google comes up with an alternative (and expensive) solution.

Google is offering a better, faster, more multi-layered and multi-faceted access to the entire archive. But its brush with the more abrasive side of the open source movement brought to the surface long suppressed issues. This may be the single most important contribution of this otherwise not so opportune transaction.

About The Author

Sam Vaknin is the author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited" and "After the Rain - How the West Lost the East". He is a columnist in "Central Europe Review", United Press International (UPI) and ebookweb.org and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com. Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

His web site: http://samvak.tripod.com

[tags]google,google search,seo,search engine,web rank,website rank,yahoo,overture,search engine optimizati[/tags]

SEO Freelance Writer's Work Wanted The Power Of Never Showing The Fish The Hook

Many a webmaster who has wanted work done for them by a SEO freelance writer has failed to realize the real power of promotional articles online.

Most have simply wanted their SEO freelance writer to produce some well-written work that will enhance the image of their web site. Very few have had clear objectives for increased traffic and profitability based on the immense power of this amazing online marketing tool.

Other webmasters have wanted work from their SEO freelance writer that directly and blatantly advertises the products and services on offer at their web site. They have failed to realize the simple truth in life that you will hardly catch any fish if you show them the hook.

To fully benefit from the work of your SEO freelance writer, you will need to hire somebody creative enough to write a highly entertaining article that merges your ad message with valuable content in such a way that any reader who comes across it will view it only as the exact information they wanted. They will not look at it as some promotion. In this way your prospects will not see the hook and that is how they will "bite", that is precisely how to catch fish and customers in large numbers.

Are you considering hiring a ghost writer? If so don't do anything until you've read a few more articles at the author's hire a ghost writer blog.

[tags]freelance seo work writer wanted[/tags]

How To Succeede In The Search Engines

The best traffic comes directly from the search engines. Your visitors have found your site through a keyword search. You paid nothing and you got an interested visitor. The way you get this has to do with things like keyword usage in your actual text, your inbound links, and developing quality and informative subject matter (which is the most important).

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is what it's all about. No matter how nice your site looks it will not get very much traffic without focused SEO efforts. Pay-Per-Click Advertising, banner or text ads can be helpful in supplementing your traffic but this can be costly if not done correctly.

Using Keywords and Phrases for an introduction to the concepts of "On Site" SEO. Equally important, if not more so, is "Off Site" SEO. This is where your inbound links come into play. Generally speaking, the more inbound links there are that point to your sites pages the better your search engine rankings will be. Naturally, all inbound links are not equal in the value that they contribute to your site.

Usually you will not have direct control over off site SEO. The best way to increase your one-way inbound links is to build a genuinely helpful and content rich site. Sometimes a friendly request to another webmaster may get you a one-way link. Ask for links from only relevant and quality sites. Always be polite and in your requests. Explain why you chose their site and why their visitors could benefit from your content.

There are four primary factors involved in the "value" of an inbound link:

The Rank of the Site

It is well known that Google uses links as a significant factor in determining PR (Page Rank). Simply put, consistently adding links will have a much better effect than adding links in bunches.

The search engine notes the discovery date of links, the life span of the link and the speed at which a new web site obtains links. This approach reveals that Google is discounting quick link exchange strategies such as buying bulk links for your site. Instead, Google appears to consider a natural linking evolution as a sign that a site is legitimate.

The specifics of a good linking strategy are a bit difficult to nail down. Factors that might be considered include:

1 The anchor text of the link.

2 The discovery date of the link.

3 The growth rate of links to your site.

4 The rate at which links to a page appear and disappear.

5 The age of links with older links carrying more value.

6 Numerous links to a new site will be looked at as spam, unless some of the links are from highly valued sites.

7 Link growth that is constant is optimal.

8 Sudden bunches of new links will be devalued as spam.

Google values sites that are in it for the long term, update regularly and consistently grow in link popularity. Taking this theme into account, it is easy to understand why the Google sandbox exists.

One-Way or Reciprocal?

One-way links to your site are much better for your site from an SEO standpoint. The main value of an inbound link is in whether or not it will generate traffic to your site. Get reciprocal links from sites that will bring more visitors to your pages.

The Relevance of the Site

What is going to make you the most amount of sales if you are trying to sell fishing equipment? A link from an outdoor hobby website or a link from a bubble gum corporation? I think the answer is straightforward, the outdoor hobby website. The trick is to know your market and understand your customer. What age group would your customers be, and what other type of website would they look at if they were interested in your product? What about demographics? Does your product or service need to be promoted only in certain countries? If you're selling fishing equipment in the U.S. a site who's traffic comes from outside the U.S. may not be desirable.

There are two types of inbound links - One Way and Reciprocal. Usually a one way link is gained by another webmaster finding your web site useful enough to where they voluntarily post a link to it on their own site. A reciprocal link is a "trade" where both webmasters post links to each others sites. One way links, naturally, are worth more than reciprocal links. Recently much has been written saying that the value of reciprocal links can be very low or none at all.

Be careful when selecting sites for reciprocal linking. Your outbound links are part of your on page SEO and they are important. You do not want to have links pointing to questionable web sites or "link farms". Always go for sites that are relevant to your own content. The best way to increase the value of your website is to concentrate on linking to helpful and relevant content. Think of the value to your web visitor when choosing other sites to link to. The search engine "spiders" who crawl your site will recognize links to good and especially relevant web sites.

How to look for sites to get inbound links from Do a search on a site that is similar to yours. Type link:http://www.domainname.com in the search box. This will give you a listing of the sites who have links pointing to the site you are interested in. Now you will see who is linking to the site that is similar to yours! Visit the sites and request a link from those who seem the most relevant.

Another good way to increase your inbound links is to join as many quality and relevant forums as you can. Search for forums that deal with the same subject matter as your site. Join the best forums you can find and try to become an active member. Be sure to read the rules or guidelines for any forum before you post a message. The best way to get involved is just to read the messages. If the forum is about an area of interest related to your site's theme you will be sure to have replies to questions or questions of your own.

Dont forget place a link to your web site in your profile. Take it a step further and put a link to your web site in your signature. The search engines often pick these up!

The Wording of the Text Link

Text links that contain relevant keywords are much more valuable than those that do not. Suppose you have a web site about fly fishing. A link to your site using the words "Learn how to catch the big ones with fly fishing" would be much more preferable to a link that says simply "yourdomain.com". Obviously you will usually have little control of the format of any inbound links to your site. But when you do have a choice always opt for the use of relevant keywords.

Make SEO an ongoing effort. Inbound links take time to accumulate and it can be very time consuming to search for quality reciprocals. Spend time on it when you can. Always grow. Never consider your web site complete. Update and add new pages as often as you are able. The search engines love fresh, new and updating information.

Copyright 2006 David Slone You may republish this article on your website provided author information and active link be intact. Visit Webmaster & Work at Home for more articles about Web Mastering. A Successful Link Exchange A Beginner's Guide to Exchanging Links

[tags]google page rank seo search engine optimization reciprocal link inbound popularity[/tags]

Five And A Half Ways To Amp Up Your Search Engine Optimization

Statistics show that 85% of pages visited on the Internet come from people who have gotten there from a search engine. Statistically, people look first at the top of the first page of the regular search results, then the bottom, and then they go to the sponsored listings.

There is an art and science to being ranked highly on the search engines. The science is formatting the pages with the right meta tags and submitting them in the right way to the search engines. The art is to make the site look and read normal in spite of filling it with key words.

Here are five and a half ways to get a higher ranking and more visitors:

1. Pick the right Key Words and Phrases

These are the words and phrases that people will put into search engines to try to find your product, business or organization. Having good key words and phrases is foundational to have good optimization. This takes research using such tools at Wordtracker and Overture's Keyword Suggestion Tool. They give you a good idea of what people are searching for and what you should focus on.

2. Use Good Header Tags

Header tags are hidden in the code within your Web page. The most important one is the "title" tag, which isn't considered a META tag. It tells what's within your page and it's important to have your keyphrases in it. It is also good to have keyphrases in your "description" META tag, though it doesn't rank nearly as high as the "title" tag.

3. Use Keyphrases in Your Visible Page Title

Provide a unique title to each page on your site that is chock full of key words and phrases. Search engines like this because it means that there is a higher probability that your site is a good match for what people are looking for. This is should be placed within the H1 tag (top heading) of your page and is visible to the visitor. It also pays to have your keyphrases in subtitles on the page.

4. Provide Plenty of Content on Your Site

Shoot to have at least 450 characters on your page. Concentrate on putting key words and phrases in the first paragraph and last paragraphs.

5. Secure a Lot of Related Incoming Links

The more sites linked to your site, the higher you will be ranked by the search engines. These links can be from strategic partners, vendors, directories or other types of sites with whom you exchange links.

If you are a web site developer, put in your contract that you are going to put a developer's link at the bottom of the site, such as, "Web site design by Green Chair Marketing Group," with an active link to your site. This will help your site grow in its link popularity.

5.5 Keep Optimizing Your Site

The more content on your site, the better. I suggest adding a couple pages a month, whether it's case studies, more product information, testimonials, articles, press releases, etc. If you add just five new pages a month, you will have 60 new pages by the end of the year, and over 100 pages by the end of the second year.

You are bound to catch some people you would have missed because there is more content to choose from. And your site will be more highly ranked by Google, because they highly weigh sites that have more content.

While you're at it, continue to get relevant links coming into your site. Google loves incoming links. And you might have people click through to your site from these other places.

If you don't have time to work on the optimization or would feel more comfortable having someone else do it, consider strongly hiring a professional to do your search engine optimization. That way you can focus your energies on sales or creating more and better product.

One caveat, I would stay away from companies that initiate contact with you through emails or phone calls. They often use techniques that can get your severely penalized by the search engines. Ask people you know who have been successful in their search engine positioning who they use.

About The Author

Dave Carlson owns Green Chair Marketing Group, an Internet marketing firm specializing in driving visitors to web sites by search engine optimization, pay per click, and web design/redesign. 720-427-5660 Visit his site at http://www.GreenChair.net; links@greenchair.net

[tags]seo,search engine optimisation,search engine optimization,search engines,website rank[/tags]

Elite Key Words

By choosing elite, or niche, key words, you'll be providing a needed service to web surfers seeking information as well as ensuring web traffic on your site. By using elite keywords properly in your website, you will attract the search engines and, because you'll have few competing web pages, you are likely to have the people seeking information on your topic visit your site.

It doesn't matter what the topic or theme of your website may be, you can find elite key words to incorporate into the content. For example, if your website is about fast cars, you'll probably find the term 'fast car' has millions of web pages already but the term 'sports cars', oddly enough, has many fewer responses when used as a search term. Therefore, 'sports cars' would be considered an elite key word, providing a niche in the web for you to fill.

Elite key words are important to sales websites as well. If you are providing a service or product, people still need to locate you and if you do not appear in the first 30 or so search engine responses, you'll probably be lost in the crowd. By choosing keywords that are elite, you'll find your search engine rankings improve significantly.

There are many tools available for choosing elite key words. Wordtracker is a well-known tool, but rather expensive to use. Of course, it is probably also the best. But there are many other tools available and many of them are free to use or download. Some are web-based and the application runs right on the Internet. Others require that you download and install software on your computer. Either way, many of these tools are quite effective.

You'll be able to determine how well your search for elite key words has improved your web page after including them in your meta-tags and content. As the search engine spiders find your site, you can search for your keyword and see where in the search engine results you rank. If your site does not appear high in the rankings, continue to improve through the use of elite keywords until you obtain the ranking you desire.

Peter Vermeeren is the owner and webmaster of: Free articles and resources - Keyword Elite Review Keyword Elite made me 1150$ in 12 hours: learn how to do this yourself- All about affiliate marketing and business online

[tags]keyword elite, keywords, keywordselite, keywordelite, keywords, seo, software, website[/tags]

Using Google Alerts To Help Your Business

At times it seems that Google releases more new products and services than we can keep track of. From Google Calendar and Google Video, to Google Base, Google Finance, and Google Trends, it can be overwhelming just to remember what each one does. One of the oft overlooked hidden gems in Google's enormous offering is Google Alerts. Within minutes, one can be signed up for email alerts that can give them and their business a leg up on the competition. Alerts can be used to spy on competitors, keep track of what people are saying about your business, or follow an important news story.

How Does It Work

Google Alerts sends you an email each time a new page for your chosen term makes it in the top twenty results on Google's web search. You can also have the alert check Google News and/or Google Groups. To sign up for a Google Alert, all that you need to do is visit the Google Alerts homepage (http://www.google.com/alerts), enter the search term, type of alert (search Google News, Google Groups, or the web), frequency of emails (daily, as it happens, or weekly), and your email address. You can set up alerts for as many terms as you like using a Google Account. So why would you want an unlimited amount of alerts? Because as a business owner, you have a lot to keep track of and very limited time to do it.

Spy on Your Competitors

Every business has a competitor. More likely, you have several direct competitors and several more indirect competitors. While regularly checking out their websites is an important part of the process, it doesn't paint the whole picture. A competitor's website is very much crafted to the image that they want to portray to their customers. This is great if you want to know what their latest sale is or how much their new product costs, but it isn't likely to feature a negative review in last Sunday's newspaper.

That's where Google Alerts comes in. By simply setting up a News, Groups, and search alert for each of your competitors, you will know what other people are saying about your competition – both the media and consumers, both good and bad.

Keep Up To Date on Your Industry

Equally as important as what people are saying about your competition is what people are saying about your industry in general. If there's a negative PR swing against violent video games, and you just happen to run a video game store, you will probably be affected. By receiving alerts on important key words related to your industry, you can be on top of any sudden changes and react accordingly. By the time your competition realizes what's happening they will be scrambling to catch up to you.

Track Yourself and Your Business

It goes without saying, if it's important to know what people are saying about your competitors and about your industry, it would stand to reason that it's important to know what people are saying about you. I have Google Alerts on both my name and my businesses name. I know that they go hand in hand – if one is getting slandered you better bet it will hurt the other. By receiving alerts, you can be on top of anything negative relating to you or your business, and hopefully nip any problem in the bud before it grows too large. On the flip side, there's nothing better than receiving an alert where someone praises your business. Those are the types of things that you want to make sure are on the PR page of your businesses website.

Get News Stories for Your Site or Blog

I own a site where I do weekly news updates about what's going on in the industry. Some weeks, there are tons of news items to choose from, other weeks it's hard to find anything. In addition to the regular industry news sites that I check to get information, I have Google Alerts set up for each of the key terms. You'd be surprised how frequently a unique story from a local newspaper pops up in Google News. Many times these stories haven't been seen by my competitors and I am able to "break" the news to the online community. This works well for blogs too – if you have a daily blog about being an entrepreneur, having an alert for the word "entrepreneur" can fetch you several quality stories each day to help inspire fresh posts.

In this increasingly competitive business world, you need each and every leg up on your competition that you can get. Used properly, Google Alerts can be an extremely efficient way to track what's going on across the web. The alternative would be to search each term every day for new updates. Who has time for that? Spending less time researching enables you to spend more time on the things important to your business.

Adam McFarland owns iPrioritize - simple to-do lists that can be edited at any time from any place in the world. Email, print, check from your mobile phone, subscribe via RSS, and share with others.

[tags]Google Alerts, SEO, search engine optimization[/tags]

Search Engine Optimization – Back To Basics

An organic search engine ranking is the more cost effective method. There is a lot of time and work that goes into making a website search engine friendly to get good rankings and even longer to build up good quality links.

The only downside to organic search engine placement is the time required to get your website to the top, but once it is, you will reap the long term benefits for ever. Do not expect search engine optimization to work miracles overnight, it takes time, hard work and a lot of patience. The average time for a new domain name to rank well on Google is around 6-8 months now a days, as a new site do not get placed well until they have been up and running several months, so that Google know the site is genuine.

Building Link Popularity is a very important aspect of any effective Search Engine Optimization campaign today. The off page factors such as link popularity, Page Rank and Anchor Text in incoming links play a major role in your site's ranking in the search engine results pages. More and more major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, AltaVista etc. rely on off page factors such as 'Link Popularity' to establish the importance of your site in order to give it a high ranking. Now website optimization is not enough to get you good search engine rankings. A large number of good incoming links help your website beat competition to rank high in Search Engines.

There are two types of links you can establish on the web. One way is to trade links with other website's, you give a link from your links Page on your site to the partner sites in return for their site linking to you. The second method is to establish one-way links, which are very hard to obtain and can be very costly. Both are extremely beneficial in gaining higher search engine rankings. Building Link Popularity is a very long and time consuming process, hence why many website owners employ the services of us to help them spend more time on other time consuming aspects of their business, such as running a shop etc.

More information on Search Engine Optimization can be found at the author's website at http://www.seogeek.co.uk

[tags]search engine optimization,first page, SEO, placement, top search engine ranking,[/tags]

Link Popularity Explained And How To Build Links

Link popularity is the single most influential factor for determining how well a web site will perform in search engine rankings. A web site's link popularity is computed from the number and more importantly, the quality of links pointing to a web site.

Link Popularity history

To gain a better understanding of link popularity it is useful to know why it became so crucial for search engine rankings. In the past a web page's ranking was determined, amongst other factors, by the number of keyword occurences within 'on-page' elements i.e. in page text, META tags, title tag.

When web developers learned that they could trick a search engine to return their web pages by cramming keywords into their pages the search engines had to get a bit smarter. They were using 'on-page' elements to determine relevance so it was only natural that they would look to elements out of direct control of the web page creator i.e. 'off-page' elements. Search engines made the assumption that the greater the number of links from other sites pointing to a web site, the more popular the web site is and therefore a more quality resource. This worked nicely in theory but in practice it was also to be abused.

Web site owners figured out many ways to get links pointing to their web sites one example of which was through the use of link farms, pages the contained nothing more than a collection of links, Quantity of links was being abused so the search engines made use of the old saying "quality not quantity" and began to assign a quality factor to each of the links pointing to a web site. Now web sites that had a higher number of high quality links were looked upon favourably by the search engines. Building link popularity became a science in itself and today is still the most time-consuming and frustrating activity for a search engine optimizer.

Main classes of links

Note: In the following examples SiteA is our web site and SiteB is an outside site (i.e. a web site under a different domain name than SiteA).

Inbound links:

Inbound links to a web site are links that originate from an outside web site. An example would be a link on SiteB pointing into a page on SiteA.

SiteA (----- SiteB

Outbound links:

Outbound links from a web site are links pointing to a page on an outside web site. An example would be a link on SiteA pointing out to a page on SiteB.

SiteA -----) SiteB

There are two further classifications of links:

Reciprocal links:

An example of a reciprocal link is when SiteA links to SiteB AND SiteB links to SiteA, the link is reciprocated by both parties.

SiteA -----) SiteB

AND

SiteA (----- SiteB

To achieve a high link popularity the type of links to build are inbound one-way links. This simulates how natural links are created i.e. links that people create to point to your site because they found it worth linking to.

For outbound links it is natural to assume that they might decrease link popularity of a web site but this is not true. You do not give away your link popularity when you link to another site. They do not add to your link popularity though.

Reciprocal links can add to your link popularity if the web site that you exchange links with has a higher link popularity than your site. However they are not as powerful as inbound, one-way links as they are quite artificial in nature i.e. most probably created by communication between the owners of both sites.

How to build link popularity

So it is quite obvious that to help build up a nice link popularity many inbound, one-way links need to be created. This can be achieved in a number of different (and most importantly, legal) ways:

Directories:

Directories are categorized listings of links from around the web. Many, many directories exist and vary in their methods of getting your link posted on them. They provide a great source of quality inbound, one-way links. Getting listed in quality directories such as DMOZ or Yahoo can be more beneficial for your link popularity than a lot of links from smaller, newer directories.

Great site content:

The most powerful way to get inbound, one-way links is to have great site content that other web sites will want to link to. This allows you to get links from sites other than directories, which can definitely be better. The best thing about this is that it requires no communication on your part, it just happens naturally. If your site has poor content then others sites may not link, including the directories. Most of the top ranking web sites today got to the top because of great content. Writing interesting and informative articles for your web site is a good way of getting these kind of links.

Emailing web site owners:

If you come across a listing of links on a web site other than a directory e.g. a links page on a somebody's personal web site, it can do no harm to write the web site owner a polite email requesting a link to your site from their page. They may request a reciprocal link in return but sometimes they do not and you can get a quality inbound, one-way link for your efforts. I have got many links in the past using this method. In my email I always ask them to visit my site first before making a decision to link and I personalise each email with a comment or two about their site.

Summary

The best and most effective way of increasing your search engine rankings is working to improve your web site's link popularity. This can be achieved by getting as many inbound, one-way links as you can from quality sites such as directories. Other ways to get these links are having great content on your site and requesting a link to your site from other web sites.

Increasing link popularity is a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process but is definitely worth the time and effort when you see a dramatic increase in traffic.

Frank Kilkelly is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Expert and Webmaster at http://www.seo-ireland.com/, a complete search engine optimization resource. The highlight of the site is an SEO forum http://www.seo-ireland.com/forum/ for discussion of the latest techniques and tips to improve the ranking of your web site.

[tags]seo, link, popularity, dmoz, search, engine, ranking, internet, google, msn, yahoo, pagerank[/tags]

Article Writing - The New SEO Master Tool - Part 1

Since search engines were invented, there has been a constant head to head between the search engine algorithm writers and webmasters. Every time the algorithms changed the webmasters tried to outwit them. The internet is full if conflicting SEO advice on how to achieve top rankings. This article hopes to clear up some of the confusion.

In the beginning it was sufficient to have an adequate amount of keywords on your website in order to rank highly in the search engines. This led to keyword spamming, a practice which still continues today amongst inexperienced webmasters.

Then along came Google and the goal posts shifted. Google put more emphasis on webpage linking, Their thought was simple - if one website had a link to another website, then it was as if the first website was placing a vote of confidence for the second website's content and therefore the second website must be useful and relevant to the readers of the first website. Thus the Google Page Rank was invented.

Soon the webmasters and internet marketers got to work. This saw the emergence of link forms and reciprocal linking sites. Internet marketers declared that the more links that appeared on your site, the higher it would rank in Google. Suddenly link pages from websites started to run into multiple pages as the race was on to exchange links with whoever would agree. Some sites started to have thousands of links point to their sites and began rising in the search engine rankings.

Of course the game of cat and mouse with Google continued as the search engine giant once again changed its algorithms.

It is now widely accepted that previous linking strategies are failing because of what Google now expects from links.

RELEVANCY

Google expects links on a site to be relevant to the readers of the original site.

ONE WAY LINKS

Google gives a much higher priority to one-way links without a reciprocal link in return.

ANCHOR TEXT

It is better for the anchor text (the actual text that contains the link) to be keyword relevant to the content and also to vary as numerous instances of the same anchor text without variance can be interpreted as keyword spamming.

The importance placed on the above factors has all but eliminated the effectiveness of previous linking strategies. Most links on link page directories were exchanged with any site who would reciprocate. Therefore most of these sites were not relevant to the original site.

The reciprocal linking strategy also negates the one-way linking preferred by Google. Most link directories contain the same anchor text in all links, as this anchor text was advertised on the "link to us" page.

Therefore Google now looks upon these reciprocal link directories as having no value. They do not distribute page rank and therefore do not help the ranking of your website.

That is why I now describe article writing as the new SEO Master Tool - please see Part II of this article for the reasoning.

Alan Chestnutt is webmaster of http://www.articles-keyword-rich.com, an article submission site where webmasters and ezine publishers can pick up FREE keyword rich content for their websites.

[tags]SEO, search engine optimization, search engines, Google, algorithms, article writing[/tags]

How To Choose Keywords Before They Skyrocket In Popularity

Long before the days of researching phrases with the helpful online resources of today, the art of keyword/phrase selection was often left just to guesswork. However, guesswork by today's highly competitive standards is just not good enough. So how is it possible to select a powerful traffic-pulling phrase in this fashion without researching it in real time? Better yet, is it possible to choose such a phrase and get positioned before it becomes popular?

Well of course it requires some research, but in a slightly different way. Every single day, we have a world of information that happens all around us. With all of the focus on the Internet these days, we need to also consider giving our attention to other medias as well. We have television programs, we have the news and the radio which all bring us current and upcoming events. With the news itself, there are often many ideas that can help the SEO to really think and plan ahead for some truly unique optimization strategies. I am talking about the potential of developing part of your client strategy around an upcoming newsworthy event. Of course it needs to be relevant and useful to the target audience. It also needs to genuinely "relate".

If at first, it does not sound that exciting, let's think about it and give you an example.

Here is a simple example.

If I were promoting a video store online right now, one of the things that I might be doing would, would be to optimize a page for the single search phrase "Johnny Eck." Perhaps an information or a tribute page would work.

But wait....Who was Johnny Eck, you ask?

A way back in 1932, there was a movie by Todd Browning called "Freaks" starring a man named Johnny Eck. The film "Freaks" was about the fictionalized lives of physically and mentally challenged people who, in them days, were exploited in what were commonly called "freak shows". Johnny Eck just so happen to be born into this world without the lower half of his body and was just one of the "main actors" exploited in this rather unusual film which marked the end of Todd Browning's career as a Director.

Although you may have never heard of Johnny Eck, in over 60 years you can count on the fact that everyone will soon know who he is. The film "Freaks" (1932) already has a tremendous cult film following around the world.

So why optimize a page for a film which is over 70 years old?

What many people may not be aware of, is that a brand new movie based on the lives of Johnny Eckhardt is currently being produced. The new movie has a big budget, good script, and you can be certain that many, many people are going to plan to see this film on it's release. There's no way to predict for certain, but it'll probably be quite a blockbuster.

Simple Strategy: Optimize well and relate to the audience

As part of the strategy, you could prepare this optimized page offering to sell the old movie, which is now available on video. On the same page, I would talk about the film. I would write about my remembrances of seeing it for the very first time. As strange as the film is, it makes quite a statement about the how so called "normal looking" people can be very cruel.

You could talk about the film, review it. Talk about how it made you feel. Really try to relate to the audience. In creating the content, you would write for voice, just like you were talking to an old friend. At the same time, offer some trivia or anecdotes about how the film was made. I would prepare the page and get it ranked firstly for the phrase "Johnny Eck" and perhaps secondly around the name of the old film.

The Traffic Payoff:

Usually when a new "big name" movie is released, there is always a tremendous flurry of activity on the Internet by movie goers who enjoy looking up information about it. When they start searching for info on the new film and your pages come up in the top ten, they'll also be reminded about the old film and quite possibly want to purchase it. In this type of promotion, don't take the page down after the movie comes out because you may get double waves of heavy traffic. Actually, if you're lucky the whole routine is going to happen all over again when it's released on video usually six to eight months later. Might there be a third wave when it finally makes it to DVD?

Fine Tune Your Thinking:

Think along these lines, now ask yourself if there may be value to optimizing a page around other big events that are definitely scheduled to happen. The use of a new movie release is only one idea, amongst hundreds of others. If you practice thinking this way, you can develop strategies for retail, professional clients or even business-to-business Web sites. Newsworthy events happen all the time.

• Do you think "the Olympics" might benefit a sporting goods store which offers an overview of the various participants.

• Do you think that a scheduled tour of a famous rock group might influence traffic to a music site offering a contest for free tickets?

• How might that upcoming children's film influence traffic to a toy store?

These are only a few quick examples but learn to think laterally about news events. Take full advantage of the media in its entirety to bring maximum benefit to your clients. It's just a matter of paying close attention to those big scheduled events and creatively examining how these might benefit a your strategy.

In the scenario I explained above, it would be ideal for a video store who is selling old classic films to (if they have any films available starring Johnny Eck) to take advantage of the public interest that might be generated by a new movie.

By the time the film is released, (assuming it is created at all) I expect there will be a flurry of interest about this actor's life and any old films he may have appeared in.

About The Author

John Alexander is the Co-Director of Training of Search Engine Workshops with Robin Nobles. Together, they teach 2-day beginner, 3-day advanced, and 5-day all-inclusive "hands on" search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe. John also teaches online search engine marketing courses through http://www.onlinewebtraining.com, and he's a member of Wordtracker's official question support team.

john@searchengineworkshops.com

[tags]keywords,seo,internet,internet marketing[/tags]

What Size Body Section Ranks Highest

This is another one of the controversial questions in many of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) forums, yet it is very easy to answer for any particular search engine. While popular belief seems to be that pages should be very short (less than 10K) to rank well with the leading search engine, this article conclusively answers that question… with a completely different answer.

The methodology is really quite simple for this question. I gathered the results of the queries naturally performed last month by myself and three associates using Yahoo and Google. I then visited each page and wrote down the size of the body section of the page. Those sizes were then tabulated for the top 20 rankings and converted into a normalized "ranking correlation".

The resulting number shows each group of body section sizes normalizing into a number between –100 and +100 showing the likelihood of being ranked higher/lower. A value of +100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper order to show that pages of the studied size ALWAYS rank HIGHER than pages of another size. A value of –100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper order to show that pages of the studied size ALWAYS rank LOWER than pages of another size. Numbers in between show the varying likelihood of rankings proportionally between –100 and +100.

That is the number you see on the Y-axis. On the X-axis, we have groups of page sizes varying from 0 to >100K bytes. Here are the graphs for Yahoo and Google:

http://www.searchenginegeek.com/graphs/dey02.gif

http://www.searchenginegeek.com/graphs/deg02.gif

(Note to Webmasters: Feel free to hot link to the above graphs or even copy them to your own site. Also feel free to delete this note.)

There is an obvious correlation on Google, which shows that body sections of a size between 50K and 60K generally rank much higher than shorter or longer bodies. The Yahoo graph is a bit more erratic, but also shows a nice peak at 60-70K (and another one at 20-30K). This goes against the popular belief that states that shorter pages rank highest. The popular belief is shown to be completely inaccurate with this study.

Notes:

1. For the purposes of this test, the actual body section size in bytes was used. The page was saved to disk and then everything before the body tag and after the end body tag were deleted. The resulting size of the file as reported by the operating system was used. Graphics and any other external references were completely ignored.

2. Over 1,000 queries and over 10,000 sites were examined for this study.

3. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords. I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by myself and three associated during the prior month.

Conclusion:

Pages with a body section size between 50K and 70K rank best on the two leading search engines!

This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from this study whether the leading search engine purposefully entertains this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant from the factor we studied, but the end result is that this search engine does, in fact, rank pages between 50K and 60K higher than pages of other sizes.

Copyright 2004 Jon Ricerca

About The Author

Jon Ricerca is the lead researcher and author of the Search Engine Ranking Factor reports at Search Engine Geek. For more information, please visit: http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com

[tags]seo,traffic building,site rank,linking,search engines,web site promotion[/tags]

Generating Constant Traffic For Your Website Ethically!

There are literally thousands of online companies brashly promising to generate a "ton of traffic for your website." Most of them use those exact words to lure in anyone desperate to improve website performance.

Usually, the solution is expensive, and will be at best a flash in the pan, bringing a temporary surge in web stats. At worst those companies can get you banned immediately from one or more search engines, leaving you with the task of building your web presence all over again from scratch.

There is No Instant Solution
The real secret to achieving a satisfying level of web traffic will take a little time, and not a little effort. But it will be worth it because your traffic, and therefore your web presence, will be stable and reliable. Even disturbances in the online community resulting form a Google shakedown shouldn't affect you. I actually gained a little in my web ranking after Google's Jagger update in October 2005!

You're probably wondering by now what the heck I'm talking about, so I'll get right down to it.

I'm talking about Search Engine Optimization of course. Increasingly referred to as SEO, true SEO is by definition organic, and that's how many consultants refer to it.

What's organic? Good question.

If you have employed any gimmicks or fly-by-night techniques to get your site listed with the search engines then you are not organic.

Organic listing comes about with time and effort, doing the following things:

• Carefully select keywords: these will be words or phrases that a searcher would use if he were searching for your site. The better your choices, the more traffic you'll get.
• Simple web design is best. It loads faster and doesn't distract the surfer from the business of gathering data and taking action. At the very least, stay away from Flash movies and excessive Java scripts.
• Pick navigation that doesn't foil the search engine spiders when they come crawling around.
• Come up with some quality content that is interesting, gets your message across, and also let's the search engines know you're there.

Now let's take a look at each of these in turn.

Selecting Keywords
How should you select keywords? Some SEO copywriters and experts make it all seem so complicated. It really isn't. You need a free tool for checking on the popularity of the keywords you choose. I love Overture: http://inventory.overture.com/

Also, take a look at the first five or six sites that come up in a search for your products or services. They can usually provide valuable pointers to keywords that you might use. Also, you'll get a good idea of the standards you'll need to exceed to surpass those pages.

Minimize Page Loading Time
Keep your web graphics as small as possible. Try and overcome the urge to be flashy: your words are the most important thing on your website, along with a good dash of white space. Too much detail will only distract your visitors anyway. The faster your loading time, the more visitors will stay to read what you have to say.

Navigation
Never use graphics for navigation. The search engines cannot read the words, so you are wasting a valuable opportunity for SEO. Worse than that, the search engines cannot navigate through to your other pages.

Create Catchy Content
It may take some time, or a little investment to get the content you need. If you know you're not up to the task, then bite the bullet and contact an experienced SEO copywriter. You will consider the cost a highly profitable investment once you begin to see your website climbing the search engines, and the traffic begins to come pouring in.

Whatever style you choose to employ, some rules remain the same. Your sentences should be short, clear and to the point. The words should be skillfully woven around the keywords so that the copy flows, and does not sound stilted.

Remember to add keywords to your page title and links to other pages. This will also help your ranking.

This is basically it, in a nutshell. It's not rocket science by any means, but you could refer to it as rocket fuel for your website!

Patricia Skinner is an experienced SEO copywriter and published author. Here's what just one client has to say: "John Hanney recommended you as the best content writer in the game!" Drew Hubbard of DesignPeople. February 6, 2006 http://www.wellwrittenwords.com http://www.seomemo.com

[tags]seo copywriter, seo optimization, search engine ranking, search engine optimization,[/tags]

Google Duplicate Content Penalties Revisited

A few Google updates ago one of my review websites went from top placement in Google and friends to 50th over night. Yahoo, MSN and the rest were unchanged. As it turns out one of the test domains I own was pointing to the server with the review site and tripping up Google's duplicate content filter. A year of hard work SEO'ing seemed flushed down the toilet. Now the problem has since corrected itself but I have never achieved that top ranking on Google again from this rookie mistake.

TIP: In apache the first container you make in httpd.conf will be the default website shown. For that reason I now make this initial entry a 'COMING SOON' type of page with links to some of my other projects.

Google's duplicate content filter is one of the most speculated and pondered about black hole's in SEO discussion today. One of the biggest anomalies is why the other big search boys do not employ similar tactics. Does Google have it wrong?

Yesterday as I was plowing through the days feeds I came across a really interesting experiment conducted by Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy at SEOChat that looked into this further. Here is a blurb:

"Initially, there were 14 sites that featured the article, including my own. Within a few weeks, that number grew to approximately 19,000 or so sites, which also contained my website, which was the actual origin of the content. Then after about 5 or 6 weeks, the number of sites featuring the article fell to 46 sites. What's aggravating is that my site, which was the source of the original content, was not included anywhere in the search results for this article title."

So the content filter works by eliminating from its rankings content which it deems is not original. But as Jennifer and SEO'ers across the web point out is this is clearly not always an accurate process. In fact if you are submitting articles on a regular basis and testing your results, you must have noticed this by now. Often if your article is plagerized not only are you penalized for dupe content but the perpetrator is rewarded with a steller ranking. Your ranking! Sadly if you are the original writer of stolen copy and Google decides otherwise, there isn't a whole lot you can do. Any by a whole lot I mean nothing.

So as it stands in 2006 tripping up Google's duplicate content filter is a guaranteed way to kill your rankings - but for how long? For me it took 7 months to get back on the top page of Google at position number #9. A helluva long tumble from #1 for my very competitive keywords. Many domains never recover.

So how do you avoid this happening to you aside from always writing your own content? The bad news is you can't. The good news is that it is no secret Google works very closely with copyscape.com, the same people who handle their Google Alerts service.

From my research Copyscape seems to trigger when strings of 8-10 words are being repeated. It seems amazing but the service is actually performing a dupe check 'net wide'. Judging from its results, it would appear that the search is not being conducted or calculated in real time but rather may be cached during Google's sandboxing, or once every 1-2 months. The bottom line is that if you suspect a dupe is killing your rankings, and searching for your string of text receives no results on Google AND Copyscape, you can likely rule it out as a cause.

In closing I guess the obvious question is how can Google tackle a problem like plagerism effectively with billions of indexed pages. With so much stock cash at thier disposal you would think they would look at human editors (see the Google Peoplerank Memo Leak) being deployed when duplicate content is detected. I mean if they can throw dollars at insuring their top results pages are not affiliate spam, surely they can do the same against article bandits...

Until then one has to hope that a solution is 'in the lab' :)

Miles Evans provides indepth reviews on every SEO/marketing or killer app he can get his paws on. His reviews, essays, and tools on SEO, OLM, reporting, and other equally fascinating subjects are normally carried out at ProfitPapers.com - Stop by and check out my free backlinks page.

[tags]google duplicate content, duplicate content, plagerism, google seo, copyscape[/tags]

SEO What

SEO, What?? It's amazing to us that so many companies are still missing the mark when it comes to search engine optimization as a vehicle for generating leads. This is the most important guerilla marketing technique that any company can be using in today's day and age in order to generate more business for itself, yet most business owners are still skeptical about the value of good online marketing. FACT: 85% of business buyers go to a search engine to look for a vendor when they don't already have one in mind. They either used Google, Yahoo, or MSN to type in key words and find potential vendors for products and service.

If 85% of all business buyers are doing this, yet your company is still engaged in traditional advertising through yellow pages or tradeshows or direct mail or other types of vehicles like this, how is it that you can expect to grow your sales when you're not present where actual people are searching for your product and service? The great news about search engine optimization too, is that your company doesn't have to be big in order to gain a high level online presence, where organic search brings your company name up. Likewise, it doesn't have to be the biggest company in order to get to the top of the search engines, given today's pay per click campaign opportunities. So, if your company is still not doing anything to optimize its web presence by getting it optimized for search engines and indexing your website into the major search engines, and doing link building and textual optimization, you're really missing the mark.

Doing this kind of foundation work to provide for better search engine visibility for your website is not even expensive and there are plenty of search engine optimization companies out there or search engine marketers, SEOs and SEMs that are capable of doing this work. Think about how search engine optimization can help your business. Even if your company is not doing ecommerce and selling online, most companies still routinely go first to the internet to look online for vendors and they go first to your website to see what sort of a vendor you are.

So, it stands to reason, that even if you're not selling your products online, from the standpoint of an ecommerce engine, you still should be marketing your products online to generate leads and awareness for your company. So, if your company is still in the dark ages and hasn't done any work to optimize its web presence, or if your company's name is the only thing that comes up when people actively search for your company by name but they can't find you when they search for your product or service, then you've got some work to do. Now is a great time for you to think about investing a modest amount of your marketing budget into search engine optimization in order to boost your online success and lead generation.

About Cube Management

Cube Management delivers sales acceleration services to emerging growth and mid-market companies. The experts at Cube Management work across the entire spectrum of marketing, sales and business development to provide customized solutions (whether recruiting, interim management or consulting) that drive revenue and profit growth. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process & People to produce winning results. Download the Cube Management Inside Sales Guide and the Cube Management Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide.

[tags]seo, search engine optimization, internet marketing[/tags]

Search Engine Optimization For Beginners, Part 1 SEPOV Isn't A Russian Hacker

SEPOV is an acronym for "Search Engine Point of View"; it is usually used in the context of search engine optimization (SEO) discussions. If you really want to approach SEO with confidence, you need to learn to look at your web site from the search engine spider's perspective and consider its motivation (if you'll forgive a little anthropomorphism).

Fortunately, search engine spiders are actually rather simple creatures.

What's My Motivation?
--------------------------

There is, in fact, one simple, central, and obvious search engine truth from which everything else is derived: A search engine's popularity is directly related to the quality of its results.

Never forget this truth. Do not minimize its importance or allow yourself to think of it as simplistic. There is much hand-wringing and money-spending by those who try to predict what Google is going to do next. The simple fact is that all the search engines will do what they've always done and always will do, namely try to improve the quality of their results.

Google rose to prominence because its results were the best. Their primary user interface was (and remains) ridiculously simple. Their results were just better than everyone else's. And they still are—although Yahoo and Microsoft are gradually closing the technical gap.

The search engine spider's motivation is therefore that of its creators: Find valuable information so that the rest of the search engine software can provide good results.

All of the major search engines apply advanced contextual analysis to return links to pages that have the greatest amount of high quality information about specific search terms. Think about that statement again for a moment, "…return links to pages that have the greatest amount of high quality information about specific search terms."

There are profound implications to that simple statement that the vast majority of web site designers just flat-out miss.

Go Deep
--------------------------

For a given web page, depth is more important than breadth. A lot of information about one subject is far, far better than a little information about a lot of subjects. When the Google spider is examining one of your web pages, you have to convince it of two things:

1. Your page has a lot of information about the search terms. That is, it is relevant to the search query.

2. Your page has good information about the search terms (do you have high quality or authoritativeness)

Of those sites that are relevant and authoritative, Google makes one last value judgment: Freshness. The site with the most recently updated content wins.

Playing Favorites
--------------------------

Research has also proven that search engines in general and Google in particular tend to favor web sites that have one or more keywords in their URL. For example, one reason I liked the "web-marketing-advisor.com" domain name is that it contained some of my top keywords right in the name itself.

If your web site has the keyword in the URL, it also implies that depth is more important than breadth for an entire web site, too, since you'd want all the pages on the site to be highly relevant to the keywords in the title.

In other words, in my opinion, it is better to have several sites, each of which is focused on a narrowly defined subject matter than one site that has a shot-gun approach to many subjects.

Coming up in the next installment: Spiders are more human than you think!

---------------------------------------
Ross Lambert is The Midnight Marketer and founder of MidnightMarketer.com (http://midnightmarketer.com), an online community. He also authored Sonic Page Blaster(http://spbsavestime.com)

[tags]search engine optimization, SEO, key words, web site optimization, page optimization[/tags]

Why Link Swapping Can Hurt You

In the world of online marketing and business it seems that people face more and more pressure everyday to want to improve their link popularity. Everyone is constantly fiddling around trying to swap links with other webmasters. Link swapping is good to a point, but there are reasons why it could hurt you and your website.

First off, it can become so addictive. One morning you are running your reports and you see all of those inbound links going into your site. You scream, jump, and act like a 2 year old because you are so happy.This feeling will lead you to even more link swapping. Now it is not all bad, just pace yourself and do not become a "swap addict." Just relax and ask yourself a few questions. Do you want these links coming into your website? Why do you want these links coming in? Is all because you want to increase your link popularity? Find the definition to these questions before you jump into deep.

Another reason why it can hurt you is, that it can take up so much time. The last time you went out searching for a link, how long did it take you? Well, if it did not take you very long, then how was the quality of the link you received? Take your time researching the websites that are relevant to yours. Locate the ones that provide a contact link. You can then proceed to putting yourself together a nice email to the owner asking to link with them. By all means do not use software to link with the owners. People think it is faster this way, and truthfully, it is. That is not genuine. Is that how you treat your website, without genuine interest. Be smart, trade with the right people, and good things will come.

A third reason on why swapping links can hurt is that you may end finding yourself spending too much time at other people's websites. All the time spent researching and creating links could have been used for creating valuable content for your readers. Is that not why you created the website? If you created the website just in a sense that you wanted to make money from, then you will probably find out that it is going to be a bumpy road. Give something valuable away, like information that people are interested in and everything else will eventually fall into place.

My last reason why link swapping could hurt you is that you probably do not have enough money to beat the system. What do I mean? Okay, you are out there swapping links with everyone you can find, but did you forget about the term "relevancy". Having links is only one part of optimization. Understand that there are tons of terms that determine your rankings. If you are gaining links that are of no relevancy, then, trust me, you will not beat the system. Those people at the top of search engines are way smarter than you will ever will be. Why would I say that? Because, you have learned to gain links with relevancy and they have learned how you found those links, the relevancy of the link, and the purpose of your website. If you do things in a non-professional manner, then you can face penalties, or quite possibly a banning. Then what will you do? The search engines are constantly changing and improving their ways to "sniffing people out." They have millions of dollars to aid them in their cause and you do not. To be a professional, you have to act like one. The internet's game of "marketing" is all about keeping the balance. If you are doing things that could possibly tip that balance, then you are bound to fall off sooner or later.

Ralph Ruckman is the Author of: "Enable The World" http://www.enableworld.com An Information Hub For People Seeking Articles And Information On Specific Topics

[tags]SEO, link swapping, websites, pagerank[/tags]

Why Search Engines Place High Value On Human-Edited Web Directories

In the technological world of websites, search engines and web directories have a long-standing relationship. Individuals who place their website links on web directories have a better shot at obtaining higher search engine ranking. Web directories are ones which can be human-edited or computer generated. There are a few different reasons why search engines place a high value on the web directories which are human-edited.

Human-Edited Web Directories Are More Exact

One reason why search engines place high value on human-edited web directories is that directories of this kind are more exact. Since an actual human being is editing the information which comes in and placing it within the web directory, a search engine ranking will relate to this feature as it may prove to be more exact than when a computer is taking care of the web directories. Therefore, if a website owner wishes to get more links to their website, they should use a human-edited website, as this will go over better with the search engines that rank them.

Human-Edited Web Directories Provide Calculated Placement

Another reason why human-edited web directories are more favorable to search engines than non-human edited web directories is that the editors know exactly how to place the links in the web directory so that they obtain the most hits on the search engine radar. Since actual individuals are editing these web directory submissions, they know how to place them on the directory in the most favorable way which will draw the attention of search engines and ultimately Internet users who utilize search engines.

Conclusion

Web directory submissions are a great way to draw attention to one's website. Since the web directories place items in a certain category or subcategory, visitors to that web directory will be directed to the exact type of website they are looking for. Human-edited web directories make it even more likely that individuals will visit the particular websites as they are crafted in such a manner by live human beings to be picked up frequently by search engines. Since individuals use search engines on a frequent basis to get to their desired result, they too can reach the web directory and ultimately the website listed on that directory. Due to the fact that human beings edit the web directory submissions, the search engines are most likely to pick up on the links on that type of directory and bring extra traffic to the individual's website.

Build incoming links to your web site by submitting to the Net-Guild web directory at http://www.net-guild.com

[tags]search engines, seo, link building, web directories[/tags]

The Magician's Wand SEO Technique

I know most of you will be surprised to read the title of this article. Actually this is what search engine optimization is all about. There are a few points which every search engine optimization engineer should remember. Going through this will not only get you a better SERP's ranking but also will increase your Google PR.

1. The more your websites content is unique the more chances are that it will rank at the top. So place your website content with some unbelivable words like for example - thought provoking content.

2. Many people do submit articles to various sites and think there job is over. But if you really want your article to make headlines, you should make it as unique as possible like the title above which is "The Magician's Wand SEO Technique". So now you know what this technique means.

3. Getting Linkbacks: Most SEO's think the more the linkbacks the better the PR and SERP's which is one of the most biggest rumours going around in the world of SEO. Concentrate more on Anchor Text: Anchor Text means the title of your LinkBack. Eg. If I give a link to http://www.latur.info from an article or a website, it will not be of as much of value against a Linkback which is like this Latur City . This is a very important thing while you buy paid links.

4. Don't place common anchor text on hundred's and thousands of sites as these can be identified by Search engines as link spam or a Black hat technique. Instead, work on the Magician's Wand Technique of Search Engine Optimization.

5. Avoid Link Farms: Avoid sites which offer thousands of links instantly by placing a folder on your site. This is one of the worst methods of getting linkbacks. While submitting to directories, have a close look at the PR and the quality of the backlink.

6. Make use of all tags in your pages like title, description, keywords, header 1, header 2, alt of images by focusing on 10 main keywords for optimization.

7. Install a sitemap script for your website if it has thousands of pages and set a cron to update it daily if you wish search engine's to crawl your site regualarly. You can find many such scripts on the internet today.

8. Sumbit to as many quality directories, article sites and Press Releases as possible. While doing so the most important factor to remember is that all these should have a unique content and anchor text. As this is what I am using for several years successfully and which I am promoting as "The Magician's Wand SEO Technique".

So do try out these tips and give your comments on this article.

The Author, Abhilash Pillai is an expert SEO engineer who works self independently and is the owner of a major SEO firm named http://www.abhilash.net.

[tags]seo, optimization, search engine[/tags]

Google Algorythms What Is The Latest Scoop

People in the SEO business are always sitting around the edges of their seats with much anticipation to know what is the latest in Google Algorythms. A Google news scoop regarding the Google Algorythms is just what they need to turn their SEO marketing plans around in time with the launch of new Google Algorythm schemes.

Everyone is aware that every month, there are changes made in the search positioning rankings. In fact, everyone is hanging around anxiously and excitedly over how their web site would fare against thousands of competitions for a high Google ranking.

These changes, everyone knows, are also the result of the latest update in the Google Algorythms. The changes in Google's algorythm affect the customer web sites or those websites indexed in Google. This latest Google news on the Algorythm change ensues by MVI marketing support team.

In connection with this, MVI tweak client sites to take the opportunity of the new Google algoythms. The changes determine the new site rank positioning of the web sites.

However, because Google control the Algorythms in the ranking, they also have control of its results and easily sidle up their clients into top ranks.

Google indeed has control of the Algorythm and is decisive on the web sites' ranking in their database. Free services or charge-nothing site listing often do whatever they wish. Google is quite an expert in this kind of subtle "manipulation." In addition, they will not deny this to people in the SEO arena.

The latest Google Scoop

You might feel that Google guards their Algorythm updates secretly and you will not know them until Google loads them up at the target month. Now, SEO people, out there, here are some of the Google SEO updates you will come to expect in September 2006! Check them out!

Google SEO's focus for the new algorythm in September 2006 is solely based on links. Its main goal is to drive on how Google uses links.

Before long, September will be along and this scoop comes from the Google information to their staff on how to understand the necessary Google algorythm changes to be done so that they can react immediately once the changes are done.

Google Bombing - recent Google algorythm strategy

The most recent strategy introduced on September is the "Google Bombing. It will result into having a multitude of web pages with the same links and with the same key phrase used within the text links, all pointing back at the same page within a web site. If you are worrying over the low traffic turn out of your web sites, even if they have relatively high page ranks, these Google Bombs will be an incredible and effective way of building you site traffic.

This strategy has two versions:

1. The first version can be run by websites on their own.

2. The second one can be used for humorous and malicious purposes.

In all likelihood, the Google Bombs may create the same effect for your website what affected George Bush when people bombed the phrase "MISERABLE FAILURE" and pointed all links to George Bush.

You know, as a fact, that when users key in the phrase, miserable failure, the search inevitably redirects you to the White House Website! What's more, the users are even automatically redirected to the biography of George Bush.

How can Google Bombs become possible?

This Google SEO trick is very possible to happen and effectively benefit your site. Every SEO personage knows that Google does not only search the web page contents of the web sites. They also count how often a site is linked to and the link texts used.

Online community members affect the results of Google searches. Google Bombing trick will most likely be affected by these main criteria of Google in searching web sites. To take advantage of this, start linking your web sites to chosen locations.

Don't you know that the Google's search engine results can be manipulated? You just need a small group of users, like you, with web sites that link the link text you use in as few as 32 web pages. Well, now you do know.

If you are a marketer that represents a company-based web site, then you can also do this trick and gain advantages for your web site, and actual company, too. Your company's affiliate program, introduced on your website can play up well. Have those affiliates and other related company's link to you with identical text within the links.

Once you get enough, Google will be led to believe that your company's web site is well recommended on a particular subject. You might even bag the top 1 ranking because of this tactic.

If you feel that your web site really needs a boost in its web traffic, then you might consider early on shifting strategies. By the time, September 2006 comes and Google introduces its Google Algorythms updates, full hilt, you will be ready.

Mary Murtha has BLS and M. Div degrees majoring in biblical studies and ethics. For more information about Google News and Google Search Appliance visit: Best Google Info

[tags]Google Algorythms, Google SEO, Google News, Google Search, Google Info[/tags]

1 Simple SEO Strategy To Get More Visitors To Your Site From Google

Did you know that you can dramatically increase the number of visitors that come to your site on a daily basis from Google? And it's not constantly improving your position in Google search engine result pages(SERPs) for your competitive keywords which can take some time after working on your search engine marketing campaigns.

I take this example from Google because I've experienced it some time back now. Apart concentrating on getting and maintaining a top 10 ranking in Google, there are lots of easy traffic sources that you haven't exploited yet. We are still talking about search engine traffic here.

What's that strategy you ask? The answer might surprise you but it's a technique that works and is pretty legitimate. It's not creating stand alone or doorway pages with practically no content, overly optimized with keywords and a link back to the homepage. Doorway pages work but only if you know how to do it well. And this article will talk a bit about this topic as well.

The strategy is to search for overlooked keyword phrases which are not too competitive and create effective doorway pages related to these keyword phrases. These pages can be promoting a product for instance.

Just by adding a few effective doorway pages, I managed to make 9 sales in just a few short weeks and earned $364.59.

Imagine you come up with several keyword phrases that generate a few monthly searches, you now have several pages. So each page targeting a specific keyword phrase is worth traffic and not any type of traffic but it will be targeted.

So if you have one page which brings you only 1 visitor per day and you have 50 pages, you can easily receive 50 visitors per day for free. You see the potential now.

Keywords that have about 1000 searches on Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions previously known as Overture at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion are valuable keywords with lower competition.

If you are using Wordtracker at http://www.wordtracker.com, a keyword with only 10 searches per day can get you a good ranking and bring you traffic.

If you have already a website which is generating traffic, you can dramatically increase your numbers, simply by adding relevant doorway pages targeting a specific keyword. These pages have content and have your optimized navigation menu on it with their specific keyword phrases. These pages are just an entry to your site nothing more nothing less.

They should not be overly optimized with keywords but they must have some optimized content which is readable by your visitors and friendly for the search engines as well.

If you have a good website which is crawled by Google's robot called "Googlebot" often, your new pages will get spidered and indexed fast and will start bringing you small loads of targeted traffic.

But be careful when adding pages, don't go in a frenzy with this and add hundreds or even thousands of pages all of a sudden. For eg if your site has 50 pages already indexed in Google and ranking well and you add 100 new pages at once, your indexed pages might suffer a temporary drop in rankings. The key here is to add pages on a regular basis say 1 or 2 pages daily until you reach the total number of pages to be added.

Why not capitalize on this free source of traffic? The key is to research your keywords well first, work on your content and create these pages afterwards.

Your website will grow bigger and bigger with time and it will attract loads of targeted traffic from multiple keyword phrases.

Good luck and happy research and optimizing.

This article can be freely published on a website as long as it's not modified in any way including the author bylines, plus the hyperlink must be made active just like below.

Jean Lam is the author of the highly acclaimed eBook Top Search Engine Ranking Secrets in Google Revealed, a concise, step-by-step guide to high search engine ranking for the beginner to intermediate level webmaster.

[tags]seo, search engine optimization, search engine ranking, search engine placement[/tags]

Small Business Enterpreneurs Use Search Engines For Branding

For small business companies, online marketing is the easiest way to generate business leads. The search engines are the single biggest source of sales. This article deals with new approach which will be able to leave several perplexed: BRANDING by the search engines. Thus let us leave to side the visitors targeted, the sales and the return on investment (KING) to concentrate on the influence which the search engines have on the mark.

When we look at the figures (353 million research per day to the States-Unis1), there is not any doubt that this place is favourable to influence Net surfers. Nevertheless, it is not enough to be present in the engines to succeed. It is necessary, indeed, to define the new objectives of your countryside (in this case the branding) and thus to work it over again to come to good results.

Concretely, that means not to evaluate one countryside by the direct results more only. If your objective is to generate sales and that you notice that a key word offers performances mitigated for this purpose, you could be tempted to withdraw this key word of your strategy. On the other hand, even if the KING of a key word is weak, it may be that its positioning in the first results has a positive influence on the mark and that it is beneficial to maintain this key word active.

As example, LG decided to lately use 20% of its budget on the internet research at the start of their marketing campaign for portable LED monitors. The objective was to create a buzz around the product. All the campaigns pointed towards only one and single page which misait on the product, but which did not comprise a real call to the action to support the conversion of the visitors. The antithesis of the pages of references (landing pages) traditional.

The results speak about themselves. In spite of less low investments five times in the countryside on the search engines in comparison to the banners and other postings, the countryside on the search engines generated more half of the clicks towards the page of reference and 88% of the sales of products starting from this page2. The strategy thus was of most effective.

In order to integrate the search engines in a strategy of BRANDING, it is first of all necessary to evaluate your countryside and to define the key words which could be associated there. The number of key words will be undoubtedly larger than at the time of a campaign aiming at conversion, in particular since words which are not profitable will be used. For example, a company carrying out a campaign on the quality of its service could decide to buy words like guarantee or repair.

For the level of textual publicity in oneself, it is necessary to use words hookers which are directly dependent with the countryside. The re-use of slogan and words used in the banners or a traditional campaign is also of setting.

While finishing, it is important to recall that such a strategy is not addressed to all the wallets. Indeed, a use of a number of important key words increase the costs appreciably.

The author is one of the founding members of Dassnagar Infosystems, which is one of the leading Web Design India Company specializing in helping their clients to build online business in cost effective manner. The company is lead by experienced Internet consultants, computer scientists and management professionals and backed by recognized companies including but not limited to DIS Web Design and SEO India Pvt Ltd.

[tags]Search Engines, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Small Business Solution[/tags]