| SEO

1
Aug

How Blogs Can Break Or Make Your SEO

Written by admin on August 1st, 2008

How Blogs Can Break Or Make Your SEO Strategy Blogs are a great way to get started authoring content and sharing your knowledge and insights with other people. Plus, mix work and play - and you can get rich doing this.

You don’t have to be an MBA-accredited author by any means. However, there are some rules to play by, and I’ll break those out below. We will talk about the top blogs, practicalities around blogs and creative ways to get started, including how you could possibly ruin your good-standing ranking and having to change your Search Engine Optimization strategy.

Blogs - Structure and Layout

I work in the field of Search Engine Optimization. It has a wide range of options, from the technical to the more strategic. Tons of discussions are found on off-page and on-page factors, latent semantic analysis, content scope, quality, HTML/CSS development, site navigational structure, spamdexing, 301 redirects, plagiarism, link strategies, directories, blogs, search engine news, email marketing tips & online (internet) marketing. Most all of the top 10 SEO firms out there agree that blogs are a “must” for driving traffic and get established in the Internet community.

There is a right way, and a wrong way. We’ll discuss these below.

Be warned - too many folks out there are thinking about “how to outbeat the search engines” and use the latest-and-greatest (blogs) to elevate their rankings, essentially via content and blog spam. Blogs are a powerful way to get seen by the search bots. Blogger (Google’s own) is an important key to the puzzle, but there are many.

THE UN-OFFICIAL TOP 7
BLOGGING BEST PRACTICES FOR SEO

Start here, begin a quick review of the world’s top blogs:
http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs - updated daily
http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs - he makes #16,000/month
http://microsaw.stikipad.com/ - web 2.0 blogs

Get an account - it’s free. log in - and - don’t start! What? No, you must first continue by scanning the list above and get a sense for what people are writing about. This could be more generic at first, but start looking to yourself. What do you know? What do people come to you for? Anything that you specialize in? (Hint: don’t think “how can I sell this” - but “how can I share this?”) You’ll also learn how to use trackback functions to allow other people to be notified. Permalinks are great for SEO and should be used where appropriate. So, now you learned something big: be yourself!

Think about an interesting headline. You don’t need to be copywriter, but you should think about your headline and the topic at hand. More importantly, is it something that you are passionate about, or can contribute something to? It’s ok to spend some time here, writer’s block can come up. Think about other sites, can you re-write their UVP (unique value proposition)? How would you write yours (thinking theme here). What I’ve found to work is simply sit back and start talking as if you were discussing a (hot) topic with a friend, and then breaking it out into sub-groups from there.

Writing tips: casual, friendly and interesting (meaning you have something to write and you don’t copy others) works well in blogs. Make sure you stay on topic and that you are truthful. Would you lie to your mother? Of course not - then think about this when you are writing online (and she will not come after you). Yahoo’s blogging policy is a good one: “Be respectful of your colleagues, get your facts straight, provide context to your argument, and engage in private feedback.” Also, make sure to include images (flickr) and video (youtube, google video) where you can. Make the images rich and colorful, don’t worry about sizing too much.

Committment, persistence and disciplin. Sound like an extract from Jim Rohn or Anthony Robbins? Well, they probably are - but it applies to most of the things you do in life. So be it with blogging. Carve out 1/2-1 hour every day to nurture to your blog business. Think of it as your morning ritual - right after you have attended to your family and other duties. Plus, often you are not going to be in writing mode - but rather, maintenance mode - reviewing and responding to other blogger’s input.

Search engines start picking up your blog, and traffic increases. Be prepared and if it gets out of hand, be able to manage that too. I’m not simply talking about traffic, but as others join and comment, you may need to defend your stance, including admitting mistakes if / when you make them. Folks appreciate other folks who are big enough to admit mistakes if it gets there. For example, you may have folks who don’t like you - even if you’re Bill Gates. This guy created a Corporate Weblog Manifesto that I found interesting.

Run and host your own blog service. More expensive, but this could have a large impact on your ability to control not only the content, but custom HTML layouts, code and information architecture that are important to search engines. You can offer this as a service to others in your niche market. http://businesslogs.com/ is a great resource to use for starting this process, and more hands-on development companies like http://www.leveltendesign.com/ can be an option for you. Keep in mind that the market has developed niche-companies, from real-estate to healthcare, and you should research those specifically.

Content is important for Search Engine Optimization - be on top of it, keep a schedule.

Voila - that’s it, there you have it. Watch how the search engines will start picking up your content. You can run tools to see how you are ranking, how often you are showing up in the search engines. We like http://www.UrlTrends.com as a simple beginner starting point. However, it’s not 100% accurate, other SEO tools can provide more detail.

Keep your content fresh, updates daily is preferred - and definitely once a week and your search engine marketing (which includes search engine optimization) will become more visible than it was just last week. Then, use http://pingomatic.com/ to alert search engines that you have made updates. It’s a free service, and will help your visibility.

Jon Rognerud is a recognized authority on the subject of SEO, and has spent over 10 years developing websites and marketing solutions at companies like Overture and Yahoo. His website, http://www.microsaw.com/, provides a wealth of informative articles, free email courses and more

31
Jul

Secrets to Getting High Search Engine Rankings Getting

Written by admin on July 31st, 2008

Secrets to Getting High Search Engine Rankings Getting Link partners is vitally important to your website ranking in the search engines including Google, MSN and Yahoo. Now you can get link partners with virtually a few mouse clicks at our site at http://www.link-exchangers.com You will not have to cut and paste any html code, and you don’t even need to know html. You won’t have to upload your html pages to your web host nor will you have to email the other website owner to request a link exchange. These chores are all done for you automatically behind the scenes. All you have to do is browse the directory for a website that you want to trade links with and click on one link. The request is immediately sent to the other member site and their linking code is put up onto your links page instantly with the click of a mouse. You merely have to wait for them to respond to your link request.

The best aspect about our site is that is takes a lot of work out of your hands and saves you lots of time. You’re website’s linking code is stored on our server and you never have to worry about getting this code onto the other website owner’s links page. This is done automatically according to your instructions.

Recipricol linking used in conjunction with onpage and offpage site optimization techniques will have a dramatic effect on your rankings. In most cases, one can learn from the other websites that are ranked ahead of yours and you can try to do things in your page to “one up” the other site.

One of the most important offpage techniques includes the anchor text in your link. It is very important that you choose all your linking text to match what keyword you’re trying to rank high for.

I normally use the same word(s) in the anchor text as I would in the title and meta keyword tag as well. This keyword, or keyword phrase is never something I “think” should rank well, but rather something that I have researched online with a tool like good keywords, or worktracker. It’s always better to see what people have been actually typing into the search engines to see the quanity of requests for the word or phrase. If nobody is typing in this phrase then it’s a complete waste of time and you’ll get no traffic from it. Once I’ve found a good one, usually with over 100,000 requests per month, I will pepper the keywords through the text in the main body of the page. I may also include it in one or two alt tags of images. It’s important to not overdue this as you can be penalized for overduing this at some search engines. This is in a nutshell, one of the ways I’ve gotten a #1 ranking in MSN for a few of my sites.

Scot King has been in the SEO field since 2001 and he has acheved high ranking results for many websites through SEO techniques. He runs the Link-Exchangers website at http://www.link-exchangers.com

30
Jul

SERP Optimisation Building a website in 2006 is

Written by admin on July 30th, 2008

SERP Optimisation Building a website in 2006 is nothing like it used to be. Today, the majority of visitors to your site will come from search engines. The top three - Google, Yahoo, and MSN refer more than 90% of all search engine traffic. This is the reason you need to make your site look as good as possible in the search engine’s eyes.

SERP optimization is a process by which one seeks to receive a better placement in the results anyone receives when searching for a particular keyword in Google or any other search engine. SERP comes from Search Engine Result Page and represents the place in which your site is listed when someone does a search for a particular keyword. Because Google usually finds thousands or million results for a usual search, appearing as the first result (or at least appearing on the first result page) can be a great advantage over your competition.

The first question that would spring in mind is what makes a site and not another be the first in the results. Unfortunately, there is no definite answer to this questions and it clearly depends on the search engine (Google, Yahoo or MSN) - type the same keyword in Google and MSN and you have big chances of receiving different results. This is because different search engines use different algorithms to rank pages and while the main idea behind them is similar and made available to the public, the details are different. These details, one would need to make exact decisions when optimizing his page, are kept secret and even changed from time to time, at each tuning the search engine receives, so from this perspective, optimizing a page is part technical expertise, part wizardry.

There are two kinds of optimization techniques that are used in conjunction: static optimization and dynamic optimization. Static refers to changes made to your site. Dynamic is about receiving links to your site.

Static optimization.

A term that’s used in conjunction with SERP is keyword density. A first step to make after deciding to optimize a page for a specific keyword is to make the density for that keyword in that page as high as possible which means that you have to use it as often as possible. In highly competitive domains, a keyword density of about 30-40% can normal. This may be good when your page is seen by a search engine but may make it unreadable by your visitors - having the same word every three words has the consequence of making very awkward sentences. Bottom line: there’s a thin line between static optimization and comprehensibility that you should be aware of when targeting your pages for a particular search engine.

Going even further with static optimization, you should not only use the targeted keyword in your page body but also in the title, meta description and address. Actually, these fields are having a bigger weight when computing your SERP. More advanced static optimization techniques also exist but they are beyond the scope of this article. They are usually used by specialized SEO experts and companies like CHML Srucnoc.

Dynamic optimization.

Going to dynamic optimization, the main idea is that you should start gathering as many links to your site as possible (as a side note, the number of links going in your site is called link popularity). Why? Because the relevance of a page is also computed by taking into account these links. Every link another site has for you is considered by search engines a ‘vote’ for your page. While the main idea is simple, the details are not. Not every vote is the same. Its weight regarding you SERP depends on a number of parameters: number of links on that page (a link from a page with few link is more important than one from a page with tens or hundreds of links), rank of the page that makes the vote (a page with higher authority will have more weight in its votes). Another important thing to consider is the anchor text the other pages are using when linking to you because the search engines will consider that your page is about that subject. What you should do then is have other sites use the keywords you want to optimize for as the link text. The content of the page that casts the vote is also important: a vote from a page from the same domain of activity as your site is more important that a vote from an unrelated page.

You may see that these rules are highly similar to the ones a human would use to categorize pages. Thinking how you would decide if a page is more or less relevant to a specific topic (without using semantic rules) is the first step in understanding how a search engine operates and how you can make it operate in your benefit.

In the process of gathering links you should always prefer one-way links but this is not always easy and always time consuming. Usual free methods you can always use are directory submissions, forum posting, press releases and article submissions. To save time, you can use programs which were designed exactly to help at this kind of tasks: Directory Submitter (http://www.directorysubmitter.com), Forum Submitter (http://www.softwar3.net/forumsubmitter). Yet another approach is to use the services of specialized SEO companies (CHML Srucnoc - http://www.chmlsrucnoc.net) that take care of all the details in a professional way leaving you free to focus on ideas for growing and enhancing your business.

Paul Martin is a leading software developer and the founder of CHML Srucnoc SEO http://www.chmlsrucnoc.net.

27
Jul

Search Engine Optimization: Intro to SEO The definition

Written by admin on July 27th, 2008

Search Engine Optimization: Intro to SEO The definition of Search Engine Optimization differs depending on who you ask. My definition of Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving a website’s search engine compatibility by virtue of implementing various proven website design features and functions such as choosing good content and content relative keyword selection and placement, using meta tags concisely and effectively, proper html formatting and clean code, building up as many backlinks as you can from other websites, plus a host of other methods that will ensure that your website has a high search engine ranking that leads visitors to your website after they conduct a keyword search.

Search Engine Optimization is a process of selecting the most appropriate targeted keyword or keyword phrases related to your site and making sure that these rank your site high in the search engines so that when someone searches for specific keyword or keyword phrase it returns your site on the top of the (SERP) search engine results page. Search Engine Optimization basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags and also involves appropriate link building process. The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves.

Search engines are secretive and keep their methods and ranking algorithms to themselves, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine. New sites need not be “submitted” to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.

Many people classify Search Engines and Directories as being the same. But there are distinct differences between the two. A Search Engine utilizes computer algorithms in order to determine the acceptability of a website for inclusion into it’s index. A ’spider’ will ‘crawl’ a website and bring the necessary data back to the search engine for indexing. A Directory, on the other hand, does not make use of technology to determine the acceptability of a website. On a Directory, a human being actually reviews a website to determine whether or not a site meets their criteria for indexing. The “index” is a hugh database that stores all of the information about websites.

Some of the things you may wish to avoid when working on your SEO include avoiding artificially increasing a page’s keyword density. For example, you do not want to stuff a webpage with unnecessary words in order to heighten its keyword density. Nor do you want to hide text or links. For example, you want to avoid writing out a bunch of keywords on a website in the same color as your background in order to trick the search engine spiders into thinking you have a greater keyword density then you do. Both of these tactics are considered unethical and, as such, you could be heavily penalized if you are found out, to the point of getting your website permanently banned.

The unethical techniques webmasters sometimes use are commonly referred to as Black Hat SEO methods such as keyword stuffing as mentioned above or spamdexing. The search engines look upon Black Hatters as those that are always attempting to manipulate search engine rankings unfairly and are willing to take calculated risks to do so. Some SEO companies employ aggressive techniques that potentially get their clients banned from the search engines. Black Hat methods often will cost all reputable webmasters once the search engines decipher what the Black Hatters are doing that is not so appropriate and put a stop to it. We are all penalized by these methods and it has been known to crush high income adsense campaigns of hundreds or even thousands of people in the past, to the tune of mid five figures monthly, higher and lower.

Jimmy Oakley-©-2007- Jimmy is an Internet Marketer who markets a variety of the best Email and Internet learning systems offered online. Today you can learn his secret weapon to getting 1,645 quality, 1 way links to my brand new websites in less than a 2-4 weeks with very little effort! Increase your Google ranking by easily using this new software program that is being secretly used by top ranked websites in Google, Yahoo, and MSN! I think you’ll be surprised when you visit the website and watch the demo video and read all of the user comments… Visit http://www.jimmyoakley.com/DirectorySubmitter.html