Words To The Wise:

Feature article by Alex Bennert

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

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

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

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

Strategy 1: Creating Your Own Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategy 2: Acquiring Your Content

Exercise a: Pillage your wholesalers

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

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

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

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

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

Website Promotion Via Social Networking, Search And Bookmarking

If you have been trying to get traffic to your site without paying for it, you must know by now that participating in online communities is one of the best ways. There are many different types of online communities that you can join and most will help you get a certain amount of traffic to your site. For this article, I will focus on only three types. Most commonly, new webmasters try to promote their website by subscribing to an online forum or a news site such as Slashdot or
Digg. In addition, there are two other overlooked communities that can help you drive lots of traffic to your website and that includes social search engines and social bookmarking sites.

When it comes to using an online forum or news site as part of your marketing campaign
it is important that you remember the most essential rule and that is, do not spam. Make sure that you are actively participating in the discussion and that you are not there just to promote your website. Many of these forums such as Slashdot and Digg use a moderation system
that allows other users to give your posting such a low score that the vast majority of people will never see it. This is what will happen to you if you spam the forum other than of course getting banned all together. If you ad meaningful comments to a discussion, other users
will become interested in what else you have to say and they will visit your website either via your signature or your profile.

In addition, social search engines have, recently, been gaining popularity. The internet consists of billions of websites and dishonest webmasters have been busy keyword optimizing their sites just to profit from Adsense. It has become very difficult for surfers to find the most
relevant sites to their queries. Even Google’s results even though the best compared to other search engines often are not the most relevant. In an effort to avoid this clutter, web users are coming together in social search engines such as Rollyo.com to create a searchable collection of websites with useful content. If you are a webmaster and you want to promote your content rich site and your search engine optimization is not working then you might want to consider submitting your website to one of these social search engines.

Finally, social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us are becoming very popular and you can definitely use them to promote your site. In social bookmarking, you store links to your favorite websites online so you can access them from any computer that you are using. Most importantly, you can make your collection of links public so that others can also use them. In addition, you specify a set of tags for each link that you submit. You and other web surfers can use these tags to search for links of similar interest to their own. This is how you can promote
your site. Simply bookmark your site and tag it with the most relevant keywords. Then, when other people search using these keywords, your site will come up and they might pay you a visit. If people enjoy your website, they might bookmark it themselves increasing the chances that
others will come across it.

SEO Advice and LInkbating

On a meta-level, I think of “linkbait” as something interesting enough to catch people’s attention, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. There are a lot of ways to do that, including putting in sweat-of-the-brow work to generate data or insights, or it can be as simple as being creative. You can also say something controversial to generate discussion (this last one gets tired if you overuse it, though). Sometimes even a little bit of work can generate a reason for people to link to you.

Example 1: Danny Sullivan actually sat down and checked the spam filtering accuracy of SpamCop, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail. And not once or twice, but three different times. Personally, counting false positives in your Spam folder would annoy me to death, but putting in that work generates insights on the differences between the competing services. Admittedly, the results will vary by individual, but as the great Fred Brooks would remark, often some data is better than no data at all. Now Danny doesn’t need any more links than he already has, but it’s producing info-laden content that makes a site or blog well-known over time.

Example 2: You can be creative. I’m happy to link to Marc Hil Macalua for a creative app that he wrote in which you can vote on head-to-head battles between SEOs. The Ning service attempts to make it easy for people to write social web apps, so this is a really easy app to create: just drop in your own photos and you’re good to go. Now did Marc do a ton of work? Well, a little bit, but not a ton. But he had that creative insight of something that would grab people’s attention and generate discussion. By the way, it looks like someone is click-spamming on DaveN’s behalf.

Example 3: Saying something controversial. You can be cheeky, like Threadwatch, or you can be incredibly earnest. I give the creator of Google Watch credit for staking out the “anti-Google” territory way before anyone else. Later, Andrew Orlowski probably realized that taking potshots at Google or blogs was a way to generate lots of discussion. By the time it trickles down to sites like FuckedGoogle or whatever, it gets to be “done”–that niche is starting to be tapped out. So how do you take a new approach?

Example 4: Back to something creative: the Google: Evil or Not? site. The site takes RSS feeds that mention Google, lets people vote between Real Good or Real Evil, and adds a graph. It took a little bit of work, but probably not a ton. How much work would it be to extend that to another subject, like graphing the mojo levels at the Yahooplex as it waxes or wanes?

Linkbaiting sounds like a bad thing, but especially if it’s interesting information or fun, it doesn’t have to have negative connotations. I hereby claim that content can be both white-hat and yet still be wonderful “bait” for links (e.g. Danny’s spam email analysis). And generating information or ideas that people talk about is a surefire way to generate links. Personally, I’d lean toward producing interesting data or having a creative idea rather than spouting really controversial ideas 100% of the time. If everything you ever say is controversial, it can be entertaining, but it’s harder to maintain credibility over the long haul.

Recent Changes are?

Now there are more than 100 million Web sites, 35 million blogs, and cell phones are hand-held computers that can multitask phone calling, text messaging, photography, video downloading, digital music files and an endless variety of games. It was in 2004 O'Reilly Media coined the phrase Web 2.0--a group of second generation Web-based services.

A decade ago, high-tech acronyms such as CRM, PPC, SEO, MP3, DSL and DVR were yet to join the lexicon. Television consisted of sports, movies and shows you watched on a set in the living room and maybe on another in the kitchen or bedroom. Now TV programming--all 580 channels--can now be TiVo'd, recalled on demand or viewed on a laptop, MP3 player or cell phone. Cable providers now offer high-speed broadband, as well as local and long-distance phone services.

New tech, new media, new Marketing

What does all this mean for marketers? A change in the landscape, a whole new set of consumer and customer segments and a wealth of new tools that still must be smartly deployed and effectively targeted.

Marketing in today's crowded, infoglutted world is more exciting than ever, but it's challenging in new ways. Here are three key dynamics affecting small and mid-market businesses, and some new media strategies to connect customer with your message.

1. Marketing is now in the hands of the people.

As coined by Peter Kim, from Forrester Research in Reinventing the Marketing Organization, participation is now the fifth "p" joining price, product, placement and promotion.

Whether it's blogs, consumer produced Super Bowl commercials or e-mail sharing, customers have never been in such control. Embrace that change. Give your customers opportunities to generate testimonials, feedback and suggestions for product improvements. Allocate time to listen to what they say and respond promptly and honestly. Product and service improvements start with feedback from your own customers.

Instead of being talked at, customers now expect being talked to. Wikis, e-mails, live chat, bulletin boards, texting and video sharing are just some of the ways the word gets spread. Start with the right product (that's never out of date), couple it with good customer service, and you won't need to be afraid of interactive communication--as much communication as you can handle.

American Idol and similar television reality shows are the epitome of the new customer participation model. Instead of just sitting back and watching shows, viewers are now choosing who they want to see by voting. Be creative and think about how you could develop your own company's "fan base." With the technology tools now available, you can deepen your relationships with customers and create the dialogue that leads to loyalty.

2. Online media are mandatory in today's marketing mix.

The Internet continues to absorb more and more of the advertising dollar, leaving other media with less. Newspaper readership is declining. Network TV ratings have declined steadily over the past 10 years. With Internet search engines, consumers can find what they want, rather than be pushed toward purchases with advertising messages. In fact, 66 percent of high school students report that they get their news and information from Web portals such as Yahoo! and Google. More than one-half of U.S. broadband customers said that a recent purchase was influenced by an online message (36 percent by shopping sites and 15 percent by search sites), exceeding the impact of TV commercials (11 percent) and magazine ads (6 percent), according to a 2007 study by market researcher Media-Screen.

"Even the most intensive users of newspapers and magazines spend less time reading these publications than they do online or watching TV," a 2007 Jupiter Research study confirmed.

While a Web site is a marketing "must-have" for today's businesses, additional online presence is also required. E-mail newsletters, blogs, interactive Web elements (videos, podcasts, direct response tools) keep your site fresh and relevant. Targeted e-newsletters are a great way to provide inexpensive yet highly valued information of interest to customers and prospects. New tools now make it easy to personalize the messages and track e-mail opens and click-through rates.



3. Integration is the key to success.

Do all these new media seem like a bit much for any one customer? Possibly. Most people average more than 3,000 commercial message exposures a day, and the volume continues to grow. (Reality check: After you've bought your next $12 movie ticket, count the commercials and previews you have to sit through before the film begins). Creating clear, concise messages that are smoothly integrated is absolutely crucial to successful customer communications.

That's because, despite all the new technologies, this marketing principle hasn't changed: You must start with a relevant position, supported by consistent communications, to achieve a desired position with your target audience.

It used to be that companies could get away with broadcasting clever commercials that generated awareness, and even sales. Now, thanks to infoglut, your company and product and service positioning must be clearly evident across all media. Every customer contact point--how you answer your phone, your e-mails, your customer service and your advertising--need to project the reason why your company provides a unique, relevant value for your intended audience.

Ten years goes by quickly, doesn't it? In 1997, Outsource Marketing started as a way to help companies get the best, most efficient marketing. Even as we strive to keep pace with evolving trends, that remains our most fundamental mission.

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About the Author: Kathy Cox, Outsource Marketing's Marketing Integrator and New Media Strategist, is a former marketing executive and entrepreneur who negotiated the Seattle Mariners' first cable TV contract, helped launch Northwest Cable News and founded ParentOrganizer. Having worked on both the client and agency sides of the business, she is uniquely qualified to provide a wide variety of clients with strategic guidance on utilizing new media channels. (www.itoutsourceonline.com)

What a difference a decade makes

Ten years may not seem like a long time, but at the pace of change in business, it sometimes feels like a lifetime.

For example: When Outsource Marketing first launched in 1997, outsourcing was not some trendy term for staffing CSRs and software programmers in India. It would be eight years before Tom Friedman's The World Is Flat was published and introduced people to the notion that the global economy had arrived.

Marketing has changed even more dramatically during the past 10 years than any other similar period in the past. Why? Technology and its incredible impact on how we access and process information.

In 1997:
* There were fewer than 500,000 Internet Web sites
* Google, YouTube, MySpace or the iPod didn't exist
* Cell phones were just phones

SEO Considerations before submitting your site

Before submitting your webpages you must check all the link pages thoroughly one by one. Do not forget that they should be judged not only by you and your visitors but by number of professional Web site reviewers once you submit them to Web Directories. Check them online after you check them as your local files on your computer. Spend time browsing and clicking on every link on every page. Double check if all the images are loading and how long it takes to load the pages. Use different browsers to see how compatible they are with old and new versions.
Tell your friends to browse your site and give you their feedback how easy it is to navigate, how easy they understand it's content, how easy it is to find a product or how easy to order and the overall performance of your site.
You should check your pages on different computer monitor resolutions. They must look good at 480X640 as much as with 600X800 resolution and even in 1024X768 resolution. Select different font sizes on your browser and make sure your page looks good with any of them. You may add a line mentioned best viewed in 1024X768 resolution.

10 Tips For Getting Backlinks

Inbound links, usually referred to as IBLs or backlinks are essential if a Website is to become popular and rise to the top of the SERPS (Search engine results pages), and over time, a site with plenty of quality content will naturally get linked to by related sites. This is all well and good, but if you are in a hurry to build Web traffic (and who isn't?) it is useful to know that there are some things we can do to speed things along.

Before embarking on your link building strategy be aware that some of these methods are open to abuse which could have a negative effect or even get your site banned, so please excercise some common sense and only submit your site's link when it is relevant and reasonable to do so.

So without further ado, here are my 10 tips for obtaining search engine friendly outside links:

1 - Find online forums related to your site and become part of the community (along with a suitable signature that links to your site).

2 - Add comments to blogs with a link to related content on your Website.

3 - Submit on-topic articles to article directories and include your link in the author bio.

4 - Submit your link to the many free online directory sites.

5 - Add your comments to a guestbook and include your url.

6 - Email the webmaster of a related site and ask to trade links.

7 - Offer to provide some content for another site in return for a link back.

8 - If you have an eBay account, create an "about me" page and include a link to your Website.

9 - Program a useful tool or script that Webmasters will happily add to their sites.

10 - Create compelling and perhaps even controversial content on your Website that people will want to link to.

Of all of the above tips, numbers 7 and 10 are by far the best for an ethical and long term link building strategy, but don't ruile out the others for some quick link building. Overall; with time and experimentation you will find that by building a quality site with interesting content the links to your site will develop all by themselves!

How To Calculate What Your Visitors Are वोर्थ

Some search engine optimization firms charge on a pay-for-performance basis. For example, one search engine optimization company used to charge $85 for a top 10 ranking. You may have come across this company.

A top 10 ranking would almost definitely produce more click throughs than a top 30 ranking. If we use the figure of 200 monthly visitors for a top 10 ranking at a cost of $85, the cost of each visitor would be 42 cents.

Not bad. But don't forget that once you achieve a top position, little effort is required to maintain that position. So, in reality, it could generate as many as 2,400 visitors in a year. At $85 for a top ranking, this equates to just 3.5 cents for each visitor coming from a top 10 listing.

Analyze your log files. How many visitors do your top 30 search engine positions bring in each month? Now multiply the average of number of monthly visitors these search terms bring in by 12. This is your average return-on-investment of each top position for a whole year.

So for example, let's say you get 20 top 30 positions, and they bring in an average of 200 visitors a month.

Top 30 Positions 20 x Visitors 200 x Months 12 --------------->Total Visitors 48,000

Now if you set a budget to acquire 20 extra top 30 positions, you would increase your search engine traffic by 48,000 visitors.

If we take the rate of $85 for each top 10 position that Coastal Site charges, 20 top positions would set you back $1,700.

$1,700 / 48,000 visitors = 3.5 cents per visitor

How much does it cost you to acquire a visitor at present? Probably somewhere in the 25-50 cent range.

Top positions in pay-per-click search engines, such as Overture, cost as much as $5 to $6 a visitor. According to Overture, the average price its advertisers paid for a visitor was 30 cents, during the second quarter of 2002.

Based on our calculations above, the cost of acquiring a search engine visitor is as low as 12% of what it costs to acquire a visitor at Overture.

As you can see, search engine optimization clearly produces an excellent return-on-investment.

Don't forget that search engine positioning is effective, because the traffic is very targeted. Prospects who find your site through search engines are actively looking for information on products and services just like yours.

Search Engine Optimization Is A Science

Just like other forms of marketing and advertising, search engine optimization requires persistence and a lot of testing.

The optimization process is complex and time-consuming. You're trying to align your Web pages with the ranking algorithms of the search engines, while at the same time trying to out-smart your competitor's optimizers.

But the fact remains, search engine optimization is cost effective, and should not be ignored.

SEO Tips & Tricks

You have created a Good Looking Website! Now it’s Live. Thing is that lot of effort has been done in but results are not appropriated. Visitors should increase in - you brace yourself up to reply to those unending queries. You shocked after a week you never got any query, still waiting but this time no result also after a week. You check the web logs and find that you haven't had any visitors! What went wrong?

So, you talk 2 people then you came to know about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Realization creeps in. First thing people don’t know about your site, Mostly 80% Internet Website Surfers use help of Search Engines, what they are looking for, search engine like Goggle, Yahoo, Msn, Alexa However, When you search keywords related to your Website your site doesn’t appear in 20 pages. And to think most people don’t like to go beyond more then two or three pages

You agree?. You need to optimize your website for the search engines. Now, you consider the options available.

1. you need to decide whether you like to do its through offshore SEO outsourcing / completed in-house. If you have competent SEO people you know, go for it otherwise you don’t consider Outsourcing try to attempt it yourself. Then you have to learn many factors which are rapidly changing demonically.

Once you have decided to outsource SEO program consider the type of training and knowledge your SEO expert should possess, to deliver efficient SEO services for your website.

Regardless of the product or service and company size, SEO is not something that everyone can handle - at least for now. Most SEO consultants can get you some rankings, but they can't make your web site more users friendly or convert the rankings to more traffic and business.

Whether you go for search engine optimization program in-house / outsource the program, you should check that you haven't missed out on these techniques:

Advanced SEO Techniques, including page titles, META descriptions, META keyword sets, internal page cross-linking, search engine submissions, robots.txt files and domain name management.

· Keyword weighting, proximity, density and related factors.

· Search term ranking analysis.

· Link popularity building research, management and strategy.

· Online forum and industry newsletter monitoring.

· HTML validation.

· Optimized web site content writing.

Please ensure that your SEO consultant has the following qualities: Please ensure that your SEO consultant has the following qualities:

Follows essential website usability practices.

Performs proper keyword research, including a firm understanding of the language and the way people search.

Marketing and branding experience.

Familiarity with pay per click (PPC) programs and how their performance directly relates to natural SEO results.

Management of paid inclusion (24 to 72 hour rapid indexing programs)।

Our SEO Services guarantee top search engine rankings across major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Our Link Popularity solutions help to increase the Google Page rank and consequently, the ranking of your website. We have successfully deployed Internet marketing solutions for clients in the US, UK and Europe.

How To Justify A Search Engine Optimization BudgetHow To Justify A Search Engine Optimization Budget

If you're a marketing manager, I'm sure you use all the weapons at your disposal to achieve your sales and profit targets.

Every banner advertising, direct email advertising, lead generation, magazine advertising campaign requires a proposal to justify the investment.

But what about search engine optimization? How do you justify the investment to your VP of Marketing, CFO, President, or CEO. And how do you quantify the value of search engine traffic?

Well, first take a look at these statistics.

Jul 05 2000: Forrester Research reported that over 80 percent of Internet users reach sites through search engines.

This means if your Web site doesn't attract 80 percent of your visitors from search engines, you're losing out on a lot of search engine traffic.

Feb 14 2001: A study from NPD Group found that search listings are more effective than standard banner or button advertisements when it comes to brand recall, favorable opinion rating and inspiring purchases.

In unaided recall, search listings outperformed banners and buttons by three to one, and 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.

Again, if your sales from search engine traffic accounts for less than 55 percent of your total sales, you are missing out on a lot of potential customers.

So how do you justify the investment of either outsourcing your search engine optimization campaigns or employing a search engine optimization specialist to do it in-house?

Well, let me speak from my own experience.

I managed the search engine optimization for my old company's Web site, www.iBoost.com. I spent a month optimizing over a thousand web pages.

The result was that in total I obtained over 2,000 top 30 rankings in the major search engines and web directories.

This helped grow the site traffic by 33%, which translated to an extra 400,000 visitors and 8 million page views a month.

Based on those figures, one top 30 position generated on average 200 visitors a month, or 2,400 visitors over the course of a year.

The initial optimization campaign was actually carried out back in October of 2000. But the web pages still command somewhere in the region of 1,800 to 2,000 top 30 positions.

So your rankings never really disappear from the index, once you have established your positions. They may move up or down the index, but they don't usually drop off the top rankings completely, for no apparent reason.

Before the online ad market softened, my old company could command up to $25 per thousand banner impressions. So, the extra 8 million monthly page views could have generated as much as $200,000 in revenue, per month.

Since my company didn't sell any products or services on the web site, I can only imagine how much revenue could have be generated by the extra 400,000 monthly visitors.

Free Article Submission Software Gets You TONS Of Quality, 1-way Links!

With the search engine evolving each and every day, it's absolutely critical to not fall into the trap of following the latest and greatest craze for ranking highly in the search engines. Things such as cloaking, keyword stuffing, blog spamming etc. are things that worked at one time, but are definitely not something that will last in the long run. Your website will either get banned for doing something like that, or you simply won't get ranked anywhere and your effort will be in vain.

With that said, now is the time to start taking your business seriously. There are legitimate ways to increase your search engine ranking that will always be effective at not only increasing your search engine ranking, but also at building your credibility in your chosen niche, generating quality leads to your business, and not to mention, getting your name and business in front of lots of people around the world.

What's this method I'm referring to? Article Submission. Yes, you heard me right... Article Submission really isn't anything shockingly new, but the problem up until now has been the fact that although submitting your articles to article directories was an incredible way to increase your search engine rankings, it took one heck of a long time to actually find these directories, and then fill in all of the required criteria for submission.

This is where the brand new, free software program created by Brad Callen and Bryxen Software, Inc. comes into play. This software will allow you to submit your articles to literally hundreds of popular article directories all over the world. Only a few mouse clicks and you'll be able to instantly submit your articles. It's taken the tedious process of finding and filling out these submission forms, incredibly easy and fast.
About the Author

To learn more about Article Submitter and how you can download a free copy, visit the link below:

http://32jam1.bryxen7.hop.clickbank.net

But, please keep this to yourself, as I'd like to keep this our secret weapon :-)

Enjoy!

How to Get Indexed By Google Quickly

Getting indexed in Google and other search engines is a task that some consider a rather daunting task, but to me and the other experts its one of the easiest tasks in getting started with website promotion.

One of the first steps in getting the word out about your website is getting search engines to pick up on your site's presence and list it in its search database. From that point, search engine optimization and other techniques can be applied to raise your site up the ranks to possibly being the first listing for your site's topic.

Now to the good part, I will show you exactly how to get indexed in Google quickly in three easy steps. I've never had to wait longer than two weeks ever in my internet marketing career to get any of my ten sites indexed. Proceed on in confidence, for your site will be indexed in no time after you take action on the following steps.

Step 1: Google loves sitemaps! Sitemaps are scripts read by search engines that explain to crawlers and bots the sites structure and contents. To generate a sitemap there are a variety of websites that offer scripts that will generate the file to be downloaded for you. Go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com and type in your website's address. From there, pick how often you update the site and set the priority to 1. Click "generate" and you will be taken to a page that lists 3 files: sitemap.xml, sitemap.xml.gz and ror.xml. All 3 of these can be used so download them to your hard drive then upload them to the main directory of your website.

Step 2: Go to http://www.google.com/sitemaps and register for a webmaster's account if you don't already have one. Add your site to the list and follow the verification instructions to verify your site; then proceed to the Add a Sitemap link and type in the URL of all three sitemaps that you uploaded to your website.

Step 3: Go to google.com/submit_content.html then click Submit URL and enter your website's URL into the text box and click submit.
About the Author

In a matter of days or a week or two your site should be indexed. There are a few other tricks to the trade but this is a great start. To discover more about indexing, search engine optimization, internet marketing and what to do after your site is indexed visit itoutsourseonline.com

Internet Traffic and SEO Techniques

You might be wandering the reasons your web site is not getting much internet traffic. After all your web site took lots of financial and human resources, but unfortunately like so many web sites, it is quite unknown and as a result it does not get enough internet traffic to make it financially viable.

Did you know that about 80 percent of all web site traffic originates from search engines? Yes, it is true! Listing near the top page of search engines and obtaining the attention of your target audience should be a main priority for any web site internet promotion.

And the good news about this is that improving a web site position in search engine pages may be done for free. How? Using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

There are many ways to promote a web site. Some promotions are paid and some are free. Among the free ones, the search engine optimization techniques enable web sites to become search engine friendly. In other words, it makes website pages to accept the search engine crawler in a friendly way. These techniques will be some of the steps one will have to use to obtain a better position in search engine's pages, when searching for specific keywords, related to services or products offered by a web site.

Search engine optimization steps for a web page:

Title:

The html Title tag is a very important element and must include the most important keywords or phrases, which best represent the products or services offered by the web page. It should not contain more than 60 characters.

Keywords:

The html meta Keyword tag should have all the keyword phrases which best represents the products or services offered by the web page. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not contain more than 250 characters.

Description:

The html meta Description tag is a description of the web page, which will be displayed by the search engine. Make sure it contains keywords phrases. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not contain more than 200 characters.

Keywords in Headings:

Keywords in Headings tags (h1) will be interpreted by search engines as being an important keyword relevant to the web page, and it should be looked for and indexed by the search engines.

Web page text:

It is a good practice to include informative text one every page, using natural language and appropriate keywords. It should contain more than 200 words. Informative text should be placed in the html Body section of the web page.

Keywords in Alt Tags:

Every html picture 'img' tag should contain an ALT tag with an appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when appropriate.

Keywords in Anchor Tags:

Every html hypertext link 'a href' should contain a TITLE tag with an appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when appropriate.

Robots.txt file:

Make sure there is a robots.txt file in you web site directory. This is a text file created by the webmaster, which will guide the search engine's crawler when indexing a web site.

There are some cases in which one might not want to have some web pages indexed. This way thru the use of robots.txt, one will have control over which pages will be indexed and made available to the search engines.

User-agent: * Disallow: /tmp/ Disallow: /data/

HTML code validation:

Search engine's crawlers become more efficient when indexing web pages with no html errors. Beware that some html errors can make search engine crawlers to give up indexing web pages. So it is recommended for those web pages to be indexed, there should be no html errors.

Links:

Links are very important to search engines. The quality of links and whether it is reciprocal or not, are important factors in evaluating the importance of a web page. Links from web sites with higher page ranks are a plus.

Registering with Directories and Search Engines:

It is very important the registration of a website with directories and search engine web sites. It is a way of telling the world that your web site exists. Avoid using automatic search engine/directory registration.

Search engine optimization has become a very important set of procedures which helps web sites to become more relevant to search engines. To obtain an increase in internet traffic will take some time. It probably will take some kind of additional promotion too. But anybody in need of higher internet traffic, free search engine optimization might be considered his first option.

SEO Link Popularity

Link popularity is the single most influential factor for determining how well a web site will perform in search engine rankings. It is hard enough to perform SEO on your site without constantly working on your link popularity.. A web site's link popularity is computed from the number and more importantly, the quality of links pointing to a web site with the link building part of your SEO campaign. We do our own but outsource a small part like the education and government link building side. Our decision was simple after Google cracked down on link buying and added it to their so called SPAM report.

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


One-way links:
An example of a one-way link is when either SiteA links to SiteB OR SiteB links to SiteA, it is one-way only.

SiteA <----- SiteB
OR
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.

Can Meta tags such as the keyword tag bring High Rankings® to my site?

Title and Meta Tags

Good search engine optimization includes several factors that are explained in these SEO articles to help you achieve better search engine placement. Most of the advice given can be achieved almost immediately, where as other factors explained will take a lot of your time and effort. If you are serious about search engine optimization then you're on the right track. Please note that the tips mentioned in these SEO articles are used by SearchBliss and some of the information stated is merely our opinion.

The most important advice I can give you is to build your web pages with your visitors in mind. We have all been to sites that "don't make much sence" as a result of webmasters targeting keywords that they have trouble placing into readable text. You can have thousands of web site visitors each day, but it is useless traffic when they exit your page out of frustration, and they may never return.

If you had to give up one meta tag, the meta keyword tag would be the one to give up.

What Does This Meta Tag Look Like?

This meta tag is usually placed beneath the title and meta description tags in the section of your pages' HTML code, like this:

However, as always happens with anything this simple, people began to abuse it. People (spammers) began to put keywords into the meta tag that had nothing to do with the content of their site. Because they knew lots of people were searching with the keyword "sex," for instance, they'd put that word in their meta tags a number of times to bring visitors to their site, even though their site had nothing to do with sex! Personally, I don't quite understand that logic, because it brings in untargeted visitors But apparently the goal was to bring in traffic, period.

Over time, less and less weight was given to poor abused meta tags, and more and more weight was given to the actual content of the pages. Today the meta keyword tag is quietly living in its foster home and is fairly irrelevant to getting a page ranked high. If you were pressed for time and had to give up one meta tag, this would be the one to give up. To be sure, some engines still do index the words within these meta tags, but it appears that they use them as a minor supplement to the text in the body copy and title tags of your Web pages.

Targting the Right Keywords

Choose the right keywords. This is extremely important. Optimizing a site takes a lot of time, patience, and hard work. Doing this targeting the wrong keywords can be devistating. Find relevant keywords that are searched for often. Make sure you target "phrases" rather than single keywords. For example, targeting "hosting" alone will not help you. There are too many search results. But targeting "web hosting provider", "web hosting service", and "hosting business" will get you more realistic results (and a ton of traffic). Plus you are still targeting "hosting". I would suggest targeting ONE "reach phrase" and TWO "realistic phrases". Three phrases may seem like a lot, but not when one or two keyterms is in all three phrases. When this occurs, things don't get watered down, giving better results.

Let's begin with the "bare bones" of SEO. Title tag and meta tags. Most search engines give little to no relevance to some of these, however, since no one really knows how they are factored by each engine, they are still important steps in optimizing any web site.

1: The TITLE tag

Here is an example Title tag which should appear in-between the tags of your web page(s):

The title tag is very important. Why? Because search engines not only give it value in relation to optimization, SE's use it in their search results. Search on ANY search engine, and you'll see the content of this tag used in the anchor text of the links for each web site. Here is a little experiment. Follow the Google link (opens in a new window) and take a look. Google Example

There are Millions+ pages in Google with the title tag So most of the web page links displayed are Untitled. Why? Because who ever built these web pages used an editing program that adds the title tag, and they never changed the title text.

2: The DESCRIPTION Meta Tag

Here is an example description meta tag which should appear in-between the tags of your web page(s):

A Description of My Business.">

The description meta tag is less important for optimization, but it is still utilized by the search engines. Google for example, will use the web pages body text, image alt tags, and yes even portions of the description meta tag will show at times. The body text and alt tags will be discussed later on in these articles.

So in my opinion, it is important enough to use. The best way to use it is to place your keyword phrase inside this meta tag "once", then split up the phrase and add the keywords again separately. But keep it readable, and avoid too many comas. This can be viewed as "spam", so don't do it or your site could be black listed and ignored by search engines all together. Also, use two sentences maximum and avoid "sales pitches" like "The best shop ever", and so on.

The META Keywords Tag is where you list keywords and keyword phrases that you've targeted for that specific page. There have been numerous discussions at various search engine marketing forums surrounding the use of the keywords tag and its effectiveness. The overall consensus is that the tag has little to no relevance with the major search engines today.

SEO Tips Everyone With A Website Should Know

I’m going to start with the basics here. The following are ten things everyone with a website should know to gain online visibility in search engines. These are the basics of the basic and when applied will give you a firm basis to start a long term Search Engine Optimisation campaign. The structure of your website is important, just as much as the structure of your link building campaign. I know these may seem rehashed, but they are the building blocks for a good SEO campaign.

1) A Keyword Rich Domain. While not always possible, when setting up a new website, consider setting it up on a domain that contains the sites main keywords. Search Engines give considerable weight to a website with keywords in the URL. Never use a keyword stuffed domain (ie. www.your-keyword-here-&-another.com)

2) Title Tag.
The title tag on your page is the most powerful on page factor you can control as a webmaster. Use it wisely. Carefully choose which keywords are going to go in here and remember that it will be read by humans as well as search engines. Never stuff keywords into your title. It only devalues its weight and makes you look spammy.

3) Heading Tags.
The second most important on page factor you can control is the heading tags. Not only are they useful for search engines to determine the context of your document, it is semantically sound HTML practice.

4) Bold, Strong and Emphasis Tags.
While there is no set answer to which carries more weight, assume that both are the same. Emphasize keywords in bold using the BOLD or STRONG tags. Search engines give more weight to keywords if they are emphasized.

5) Keyword Rich Text.
It is always possible to rank for search terms when they are not on your page but using them sparingly will only help increase your search engine visibility for these keywords and

6) Structured Navigation And Correct Internal Navigation.
Make it easy for search engines to index your entire site. Use a text link navigation. I this is not possible, use a sitemap or second text navigation in the footer of your site.

7) Keyword Rich Internal Links.
Use your sites main keywords in the anchor text when linking to pages within your site. This not only describes the link to your visitors, it also lets the search engines know what content is on the page being linked to.

8) Avoid Flash.
While some search engines claim that they can index some flash content, it is still in its infancy. An entire website does not need to be built in flash. Use it wisely and make sure any text that is output by flash is rendered as HTML text so search engines can see it. If possible, avoid flash completely.

9) Avoid Duplicate content.
Search Engines do not like duplicate content. Make sure all the content on your website is different on all pages. Many navigation elements, headers, footers etc. is the same, but make sure that each page has marginally more unique content. Some search engines give a penalty for duplicate content, while others just ignore it. Just make your content unique. If anything else, it benefits your site visitors.

10) Keyword Rich, Relevant Inbound Links.
A relevant, keyword rich Inbound Links is the holy grail of online marketing. There are many ways to get quality inbound links to your website. Directory Submissions, Article writing/marketing, Press Releases, Posting in forums and blogs, Link Exchanges. Obtaining inbound links is the undisputed king of SEO tactics.

We will be going into more detail on each of the above methods over the coming weeks. Am I missing any? What other basic SEO tips are essential to today’s SEO?

Is Your Site Getting Out of the Sandbox?

So Just what is a “Google Sandbox”?

The Google Sandbox or the “Google Aging Delay” is a much debated restriction that Google places on new websites so that they cannot rank “well” in its search results for a certain amount of time. This time is supposedly to allow Google to determine weather a site is trustworthy and legit or spam. While a website said to be in the sandbox may have many strong incoming links and lots of unique and useful content, it will fail to rank high for the search terms it is aiming to be ranked for.

There has been a lot of talk about Google placing new sites in a “sandbox” away from the regular ranking index, to rank well in Google’s general organic listings a new site simply must get out of this sandbox phase as soon as possible. So how long does this period last if you don't take specific steps to speed it up? Generally from 120-180 days, that is up to a half a year just to start being given a fare shake. During this period, new sites tend to have low page rank or even a page rank zero however, they often rank well in MSN or Yahoo in spite of being shunned by Google.

To me personally this is just one big reason Google will continue to loose market share to Yahoo and MSN. People what the most germane content to their search and ruling out all the content put up over the past 180 days rules out a lot of content.

Why do some sites not get “Sandboxed”?

Some sites are just plain lucky to avoid the “Sandbox” and some are trying to rank in an industry that Google will consider not extremely competitive. Let’s say you have a site offering “Information On Local Cricket Acadamy On The any local city”. Google’s job is to help users find relevant results. This site would be relevant and would be far less subject to spam compared to a site geared toward “Making Money Online” which has many fly by night websites trying to spam their “latest get rich scheme” into the index. It should also be noted that even if a site is subject to the “Sandbox” effect, it can still rank pretty well for what is called Long Tail results. But that is a nice advanced topic for another day.

So I’m in, how do I get out?

Unfortunately, there is no sure fire way to get out of the Google “Sandbox”. There are theories that suggest placing your site on a subdomain of an established site and then using a 301 redirect to your domain once established. This is less than desirable for a variety of reasons, among them being no proof really exists for this and what company wants to be a parasite on another company’s website? All you can really do is wait.

What triggers the sandbox?

According to the few people at Google, who will comment on the sandbox, “The sandbox is triggered mainly by unnatural linkage patterns. As evidenced by Goggle’s recent patent, Google has been keeping track of historical data for some time now. Google has an excellent understanding of what natural linkage and text looks like”. Which to me again personaly is Google simply stating, that we have decided that a new site is not capable of gaining quality links in any quantity quickly no mater how germane the content may be or what the quality of the site may be.

So how long?

Now here is where it gets interesting. While there is no data freely available on the aging delay Google imposes on new sites, it does seem to vary from site to site. Sometimes it seems it’s based simply on the mood Google is in. However, one thing that is almost certain is that the time spent in the “Sandbox” is directly effected by a trust factor for your site/domain. This brings us to TrustRank. I will be covering this in more detail later, but for now, lets just say that Google gives a certain level of “trust” to your site based on many factors. One of them being the age of your domain. Let’s just say a new sandboxed site on a 10 year old domain would almost certainly be out of the sandbox before a site in similar conditions on a recently registered domain.

Can you speed up the whole process?

It seems that there's nothing or very little that can be done to speed up the sandbox process. Some webmasters advocate that getting inbound links that point to different web pages of your website ( not just to your index page) can speed your your time spent in the Sandbox. Others suggest trying to get quality links from .edu or .gov websites.

The sandbox is Google's attempt to prevent spammers from creating web sites that are just after quick gains. Google aims to return high quality web sites with good content in its result pages. So while you’re waiting for your site to emerge you might as well spend your time productively; write good content for your website, and try to get good quality, one-way backlinks, and before you know it the 5-7months will be up.

Possible other factors. There has been much talk about all sorts of weird and wonderful factors that Google could use to evaluate sites such as-

(1) Outgoing links. Google does have human editors that check sites manually for quality and linking to someone regarded as a 'bad neighbourhood' could indeed get you penalized. Lots of outgoing links and you'll lose 'page rank' to the external sites and your site may look like a 'link farm'.

(2) Domain registration period. Several SEO's talk about the fact that if you register your domain for a long time, you'll look more serious than someone who registers it for 1 year. However, some domains can only be registered for a set period such as .co.uk (2 years) so I doubt if this would be any good as a guide to the seriousness of the site owner.

(3) Age of site. Much more useful as a guide would be how long the site has been in existence, as a webmaster, I've lost track of the number of clients who have come to us, had a big web site built, paid for a years hosting, lost interest, and abandoned it after the first year.

(4) Over optimization. Viewing the source of sites in the first page of results will astound SEO's as often they appear to have paid no attention to optimization at all, so how did they get there? It is possible that Google will penalize a site if it detects that it has too much optimization, i.e. a keyword appears too many times on the page.

First acquire offsite links slowly and avoid “link farms”. Work hard especially in the beginning to gain 20-30 links on very much “on topic” pages and vary your anchor text using the main phrases surrounded by different terms and even break your phrase up and leave a word out from time to time. By the time you gain 10-15 links to your home page try to have 20-30 “deep links” to various pages on your site. One of the biggest things you can do is the second you register your domain, place a temporary page up and get it indexed. If your site is going to be in initial development for say 1-2 months DO NOT WASTE THAT TIME get indexed fast and let Google see you continue to add content as soon as a page is decent get it added to your online web.

Even during construction try to obtain some off site links and start pushing links to your sub pages right away. Continue to develop your content and stay aware of all the important on page factors as well. We may not like that sandbox but it is here to stay for a while anyway.

Now here is the good news, no make that great news. In spite of the fact that Yahoo and MSN don’t at this time have a sandbox of their own the reality is if you take the approach I advise here you are going to do very well with both of them as well.