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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog - reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

Submitting your blog/website to search engine friendly directories is useful in boosting sites ranking, and also considered as one of the most effective method on how to increase traffic to your site.

Here are some measures to know if the directory is search engine friendly or not

1. Links are crawlable and indexable by search engines

• Check if the directory has rel=”no-follow” tag (used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.)
• Also try to check if the directory pages were cached by Google, Yahoo and MSN (type “site:www.directorysiteurl.com” in search engine search bar).

2. Links should be categorized properly.

Always see to it the links on the directory was categorized properly.

Once the directory complies on the guidelines i mentioned above, then it’s search engine friendly. I know that most of high page rank (PR) directories are not free, pay for inclusion in this case. But there are still free search engine friendly directories, as a matter of fact;

addlinksuggest.com
all-linkdirectory.com
am-autobody.com
amusingnotions.com
amwart.com
askdrknow.com
beatribe.com
bestdirectorysites.com
bigguide.net
blogdough.comdirectory
borisdiawblog.com
buzz-directory.com
casino-directory4u.com
choice500domains.com
crazyleafdesign.comwebdirectory
dental-plan-providers.comResources
dir.digital-photo-secrets.net
directoryfire.com

Search Engines are widely used almost every where. It’s become most influential system that offers billions of users to track any website matching their desired keywords. To lead these billion of websites there are human beings better known as Search Engine Optimizers? What do they do! They actually optimize website using nearest probable keywords with necessary content through different Search Engines to obtain improved web results, search engine rates these websites in ranking called SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position). It is related to term Internet Marketing or at times Search Engine Optimization from recent past the trade of Search Engine Optimization again bounced back in professional basis. SEO has been advanced through selected popular companies providing excellent services across the globe for whichever site. Nowadays, SEO Free Lancers grown up vibrantly in almost every part of the world.This topic relates to clarify about SEO procedure and its practical execution over web.If you see any Sunday Jobs Classified newspaper you might be see particular job for SEO to promote their website over Internet. Actually, the concept in some under-developed organizations about SEO is just to promote your business & attract customers towards website that’s it. Although a proper optimizer might be able to do so at some extent but these organizations tend to initiate their marketing action plans straight away. SEO is not single or two days game. SEO is a highly sensitive process which takes periodic duration to perform desired user goals.

Recently, I have been interviewed by a multi-national internet marketing company along joint venture of USA in Pakistan. Initially they asked me few questions about SEO and its relevant things after having walk in interview called me next day. I was excited then one American interviewer inquired me same alike questions as local person did last night. Straight away he just asked me how will you able to do SEO. I just clarified with general basic techniques and proper setup. He just kept me to intimating about solid keywords to optimize for his company and generate things using free links. In the end asked me to create some set of back links within 24 hours. I requested him again & again that SEO is a full process takes duration minimum about 60-72 hours to set your keywords using definitive set of content, targeted keywords along active seo frames. However i refused that job due to high requirements without any funds investment for SEO.

So, it’s concluded that SEO is not a magic or show which you can perform by twitching your fingers. It’s a process, in which specified time involved to perform action functions like link building, social book marking, impressive content and website strategy. That’s why mostly SEO’rs work as a free lancer because by free lancing they can visualize their projects & past work but working for a company or organization needs experience with valid sense. Then it is totally cleared SEO is a wholly dedicated process which involves time with money to lead site rank better on Search Engines.

If your website has not been indexed by the search engines you will not come up in the search results. When you search the “web” using Google, Yahoo or MSN’s search tools, you’re not searching the Internet you are searching the search engines databases.

When a site is submitted to the search engines the search engines uses software called “spiders” to crawl the pages of your website through your internal site navigation and captures vital information about each page and in puts it into their database.

The information captured include Meta tags, content, H1 tags, Alt tags, sites that you link to and sites that links back to your site. The Meta tags are at the top of your web page in the code. They are in what is called the header. The Meta tags are very important to the search engines because they tell them what is on the page.

Along with the H1 tags Alt tags and the content in the body of the text on the web page this gives the search engines the information they need to index or put into their database your web page. It is very important that your Meta tags are specific to each page of your site. Do not just copy and paste the same Meta tags to every page on your website. There’s a big explanation from that old and that later. There are several ways to get web pages into the search engines a database (indexed).

Submit your site to the different search engines. There are a lot of sites, for small fee, that will take your indexed pager homepage and submit it to hundreds or thousands of search engines over and over every month for the rest of your life. Run don’t walk away from the sites. If you keep trying to submit your site, especially to Google, Yahoo and MSN, this may appear to them as spam. Spamming is bad! I suggest that you do not even register with Google, yahoo or MSN unless you have 6 to 9 weeks to sit around and wait for your website to be indexed.

There are hundreds of different techniques to achieve higher ranking in the search results, but these basic fundamental SEO Tips have not changed for a long time now and every webmaster should implement them to achieve better Search Rankings.

Some like to refer to it as Google Optimization and I think it is simply because of a small difference in how Google, Yahoo or MSN rank websites in their search results but Google is #1 Search engine today and many other engines use Google’s index for their search results. Regardless these tips will work for all engines. Free tips below are not in any particular order of importance as they are all crucial factors in Optimizing your site for Top rankings.

Here are Top 8 most important Free SEO Tips that anyone can give you:

SEO Tip #1, Find Related Keywords

Before you even build your website you need to determine what niche or theme your website is about. Same with any other page, there’s going to be main topic for it. Once you decide on topic, you need to find keywords and phrases that relate to your theme, analyze them and pick most relevant ones but they also should be keywords in “demand”. It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that nobody is even searching for. How do you find in “demand” keywords? The most popular resources are Wordtracker, Keywordcountry and Keywordelite. Using these tool’s you will be able to narrow your keywords to ones that have the highest search volume and not that many websites to compete against which is known as Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI).

SEO Tip #2, Analyze your Competition

Website linking structure and number of links pointing to your site or page is crucial to ranking High in Google and if you rank good in Google, chances are you’ll do good in Yahoo and other search engines but top 3 search engines that will bring most traffic are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Analyzing your competitors is important and included in Free SEO tips because search engines do analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria which is called Page Rank (PR).

So what other websites are doing to rank on top of search results. In order to find out you need to gather a significant amount of data about the top ranking sites for whatever keyword or phrase you are trying to optimize your page for, like:

1. Competition’s rank in the Search Engines Results for given keyword
2. The number of incoming links to the site’s home page, not including

   internal links.

3. What keywords they use in the title tag
4. Number of links containing keywords in the link text
5. PageRank of linking pages
6. The Alexa traffic ranking

SEO Tip #3, Title Optimization

Many SEO professionals still argue over this but the page title tag element is still one of the most important factors for ranking highly in the search engines.

The title tag is displayed as the first line of text in the blue row at the top of any browsing window. Search Engine Friendly title tag is ideally 3-9 words (60-80 characters) maximum in length, straight and to the point, this is what will show up in search engine results as a link to your page. Have at least one main keyword in title tag but don’t stuff all of your keywords in it. SEO Tip: make sure your Page Title Tag is relevant to the content on the page and EVERY page should have it’s own Title tag.

SEO Tip #4, Meta Tags Optimization

META tags are hidden code of information in the head area of your web pages and is used to communicate with search engine spiders/crawlers. The most important META tags you need to utilize in your webpages are:

1. Description
2. Keywords
3. Robots

I personally don’t believe that sequencing of these tags in certain order is that important. Even though I see many websites put title tag after description and keywords tags lately but there is no proof that it is better for SEO.

Optimization of Description Meta tags

The effective META description tag consists of 25 to 30 words or less but using no more than 160 to 180 characters total (including spaces) or some Search Engines would not consider it Search Engine Friendly.

Optimization of Keywords Meta tags

The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don’t appear on the page itself but don’t fret too much over your Keywords Meta tag, instead utilize keywords and keyword phrases from your Title Tag element, Description Meta Tag, heading tag and first one or two paragraphs of visible content. Optimal Keyword Meta Tag has 15 to 20 words max. SEO Tip: Don’t repeat your keywords more than 3 times or search engine will consider it as spam of their search results and don’t include keywords that are not in the main content section of your page.

Robots Meta tag will let search engine know if you want a particular page to be or NOT be indexed or to follow or not to follow links on given page.

SEO Tip #5, Optimize Pages with Headings

Header tags will tell the search engine what “words” are important in the context of your page. Using

,

,

, etc.. tags is the best way to highlight important keywords. With that in mind consider using keywords relevant to the page’s content (theme) in your Header Tags. The best practice is to place your primary keyword in your

tags and your secondary keyword into the

tags.

You can think of an

header tag as a title for whatever content you have on your page and you should have ONLY ONE (1) h1 tag on any page.

h2 and h3 header tags should be thought of as a sub headings for your page. You should place your 2nd most important keyword in the

header tag. The

tag should be placed somewhere towards the top half of your webpage, in any case below

tag.

SEO Tip #6, Use Deep Linking and Anchor Text

When you exchange links or submit your website to directories you want to link to as many pages on your site as possible as this will tell search engines that you have a lot of good and worthwhile content. If you have all links pointing to your homepage it will tell search engine that your site is very shallow and they might think that the links were created with some automation software instead of naturally (organic).

Use keywords in Anchor text of your links but you definitely don’t want all your incoming links to look the same, because that also looks like automation and you might get red flagged by Google. SEO Tip: Use your website URL sometimes, your company name other times and different but related keywords in anchor text of inbound links.

Getting as many as possible inbound links have become #1 priority in SEO world as that will get your website higher Page Rank and therefore higher rankings in Search results. There are different links you can acquire: Reciprocal and One Way links. One way links are by far better and much harder to get but any link you can get to point to your website is better than none. To get free one way links I use Free tools like Dictionary Submitter and Article Submitter .

SEO Tip #7, Create Site Map and Google XML Map

Every website needs a Sitemap big or small. Sitemap should be linked to from every page on your site. A site map will help users and search engine robots find all the important pages on your site with just two clicks. This is especially helpful if your site has a hard-to-crawl navigation menu like java script or images based navigation. For WordPress blogs I recommend downloading this free Sitemap Generator Plugin.

Smaller sites can use second navigation bar in the footer that will act as a small mini site map. This is nothing more than all your important pages as links in the footer.

By submitting a XML Sitemap to a search engine, you are making easier for that engine’s crawlers to crawl and index pages of your site.

“Sitemaps are particularly beneficial when users can’t reach all areas of a website through a browseable interface.”

For regular websites there are many free online xml sitemap generators, just Google it but for your WordPress blog you can use this free Google XML sitemap generator Plugin as it will also create Robots.txt file which is the next Free SEO Tip.

SEO Tip #8, Create Robots.txt file

The robots.txt file will instruct search engine robots what pages and/or folders on your blog or website should be or should NOT be crawled and indexed. Most Content Management Software (Wordpress, Joomla, etc.) will have files and folders that are not relevant for search engines (like images or admin files) and you really don’t want them to crawl them because there is no relevant content on them so creating a simple robots.txt file can actually improve your website crawlability and therefore rankings and organic traffic.

Being advertised on a search engine is one of the most basic ways of inviting visitors into your site. But advertising yourself is not enough you also have to ensure that you have the right amount of visibility which will get you noticed; a high ranking therefore is an absolute must. Search engine optimization is that missing link between a good and a great business, it earns you customers, keeps your website well visited and makes your investment on the site a success.

While nobody dare deny the kind of benefits you are likely to reap from being ranked high on a search engine, a certain amount of decorum needs to be maintained even here. A number of unethical practices have recently become prevalent amongst those desperate to boost their rankings. While on first glance these might seem completely harmless to you it is important that you recognize them for what they really are. The first step towards doing that is spotting what YOU might be doing wrong. Following is a list to help you through your discovery:

Inappropriate use of keywords

Sooner or later you are bound to find out that between you and the search engine, you are the one with the brain cells. But dont go overboard with your discovery. Yes, you can fool the search engine with long strings of text into which you discreetly bury a gallon of keywords which have no relevance whatsoever with your site, but in the end you wont be fooling the customers who will be finally using the links. Lets face it, if the user is searching for fish or fishing he/she is most likely to not click on a site with a text like boating fishing exotic animals site seeing great locations cruising Kuala Lumpur. The irony is that if someone is really searching for a subject related to your sites material even then he/she is probably going to skip clicking on your link because the description betrays no clue as to what really the site is about.

Inappropriate use of Meta tags

First things first, if you are wondering what META tags are then they are the html code that your website designer has used to create your webpage. They are also used to inform search engines as to what the keywords on the site are. So as is obvious by now certain ways of tampering with your META tags, certain tricks, lets call them, might help you fool the search engine in ways very similar to that described above. However, your brainwave wont get you too far unfortunately because stupid though it is, even a search engine knows not to go by appearance alone when it comes to websites, so instead of depending on the META tags alone it usually also checks up the content!

False content

As a user you have probably come across a dozen sites which seem to have long strings of text which have nothing to do with the site as a whole and probably make no sense individually either. These are what are called False content; they are put up on a site only to use a few keywords which might get detected by a search engine. Needless to say such content is a complete obstacle in a good read and even if the overall look and feel of your site is A1 every visitor will get put off by these.

While no one is taking away the fact that a good ranking is important it is probably also of some importance to gain it the right way. And tricking the visitor or disrupting their read is certainly not the way I would call right. Stick to making your website useful and make sure it has the right kind of real content, once that is done no one will be able to stop you from getting a high ranking with the search engines.

Page Rank Updated…Good News for Some, and bad for Many

On Jan 10th Google Officially update its Page Rank database. There were many ups and downs occurs in different websites. This time many many websites which was at Page rank greater than 5, now becomes to Zero , People are still carious why this is happening.

But there are also many websites which are just 2 months old and got Page rank 3,4,5. Like this site. I started it on Nov 20th 2006 and today at Jan 12th, i can watch the Page rank of my website is now 4.

How to Get Page Rank

Many people think that there is no need to worry about Page rank. But in case of earning, there is a great value for Page Rank. Because google’s PR calculating algorithms are based on its own provided logic “Page Rank” . The more backlinks from high PR websites you have, the more chances for you to get a higher Page Rank.

Then, there comes another factor, which is the quality of the backlinks. Of Course if the backlink is coming from a relevant content website then its a good backlink and may have value more than the unrelevant backlink(even if it has more PR).

Benefit of a Better PageRank

The backlinks can give you a reasonable Page rank and you can sell your adspace to other peoples on a better price. You can also go to adbrite or TLA(text-link-ads) because they will reduce your work to search for link buyers.

This is the list of 50 such search engine ranking factors. These is the list which came to my mind right now. I may have missed on some of them. So, if you know of any and can add to the list, please comment it. I will add it in the list.

search engine optimization,search engine optimization software,search engine ranking tips,search engine ranking

50 Search Engine Ranking Factors
1. Keywords in the title of the page
2. Keywords in the headings of the page (h1, h2, h3, etc.)
3. Keywords in domain name
4. Keywords in the file names of the pages, images or any other content
5. Keywords in bold, italics and underlined text
6. Keywords in alt text for the images
7. Keywords in the text of different color/size
8. Variations of keywords on the page (Eg: eat, ate, eaten, eating, eater, etc.)
9. Keyword density on the page
10. Appearance of the keyword in the above half of the page
11. Keywords in the description meta tag
12. Keywords in the keywords meta tag
13. Uniqueness of title, description and keywords with other pages of the site
14. Age of the domain
15. Age of the page
16. TLD of the domain (Eg: .in domains will rank better in google.co.in domain)
17. Hosting location
18. Pagerank of the site
19. Quality of the content (well written, informative, not duplicate)
20. Number of backlinks
21. Quality (PR) of the backlinks
22. Anchor text used for the backlinks
23. Title text (if any) used for the backlinks
24. Age of the backlink
25. Where the backlink appears on the page (top of the pages, bottom of the page)
26. Is the link in-content or exists with other links (pointing to some other site and separated with some specific text [like “,” or “|” ])
27. Number of total links on the page which is linking to you
28. Is the theme of the linking page is same as the linked page
29. Relevance of the keyword with the primary subject of the overall website.
30. Website load time (server response time and the size of the page)
31. Availability of the server (those 99.99% uptime things)
32. Outgoing links (to whom are you linking? Are the related?)
33. Number of pages in the site
34. Website navigation and accessibility (reach-ability of all the pages easily)
35. Links to the internal pages (yes, this will improve the ranking of the main page as well if the navigation is correct)
36. How many people come back from the site to the search engine after searching for the keyword (my be Google tracks this with toolbar)
37. Number of internal page links on your pages (not more than 100)
38. Number of external links on your pages (try to minimize)
39. Backlinks from .gov, .edu links (some thinks, its not a factor)
40. Using “-” hyphen (and not “_” underscore) in your file names wherever space is needed.
41. How often the site is updated
42. Duplicate content from other sources (negative effect)
43. Linking to bad sites (called bad neighborhood) (negative effect)
44. Keyword stuff on the pages or over optimization (negative effect)
45. The speed by which new links are building up for a site. Is it consistent over a longer period?
46. Backlinks from DMOZ and Yahoo directory are considered quite valuable.
47. Avoid session identifiers (SID)
48. Deletion of the pages (dead links on the site) without proper 301/302 redirect (negative effect)
49. HTML validation of the document (I am not sure how much effect it makes)
50. History of the domain (did it do anything bad in the past?)

Did I missed on something? Add them in the comments and I will add it here.

In my last post How to Get Traffic to Your Website or Blog I listed several basic SEO techniques that all bloggers should follow - regardless of whether you are trying to make money online or just blogging for fun. In either case you will want visitors. Many beginners chase social traffic only to find out later that they don’t make money from this form of traffic and all too often they find that this traffic doesn’t convert into loyal readers either. They come, browse and then leave without so much as a comment. I have called this type of traffic useless. Some have taken offense at this description and usually tell me that it isn’t useless as it helps them build links. This is true - social traffic can produce backlinks for your site. Unfortunately most often the backlinks are useless as well.

If you follow my directions then you can use social traffic to provide you with useful backlinks which will in turn help you to rank well in the search engines for terms that people search for. Search engine visitors are targeted which mean they have an interest in your topic before finding your site. Unlike social browsers the search visitors will click ads, buy products and even become loyal readers who will leave comments. There is a certain irony to all this - I have found that the best way to grow a readership and a social network isn’t with social networks - it’s best done with the search engines.

Here is the list of SEO basics I published on the last post.

SEO Basics that must be used in order to drive search traffic to your blog are as follows;

You must use your keyword in your URL.

You must use your keyword in your Blog Title.

You must use your keywords in your Post Titles.

You must use your keywords and related terms in your post content.

You will get the best search results by only posting one post per page unless all your posts are related to the same keywords.

If using Adsense then always stick to one post per page.

If using photos then your keywords should be used in the alt tags.

You must use html for the bulk of your pages content

Rather than getting into a long winded explanation of why you should follow my Advice I will just show you an example of a site that uses Keywords for all of the above and a site that doesn’t. The benefit of using Keywords will be crystal clear when I’m finished.

I said that social traffic can indeed produce backlinks but that these links are all too often useless. By useless I mean that they don’t use anchored text in the link for any useful terms that people search for in the search engines.

Melissa from “Why be Normal” has a social blog here on Today.com. She spends a lot of time driving traffic using social networks and I suspect Google Images. She does quite well but could do a lot better with a lot less work.

Her Keyword “Why Be Normal” has no search benefit. In simple terms nobody searches for the term. It also doesn’t reflect her blog’s topic or niche. Her site is most accurately described as a humorous photo blog. I did a search for “humorous photo” on Google before my last post. Why be Normal was not listed on the first page of the serp’s (search engine results page) for that term. I added an anchored link to Melissa’s blog in that post. And waited.

I did a search today on Google for “humorous photo” and guess what?

(Click images to enlarge - use magnifier to enlarge further)

All it took was two anchored links using the term “humorous photo” to get Melissa’s blog ranked on page 1. (The term doesn’t have a lot of competition.)

Here is what Melissa’s backlinks look like. Notice that her links all contain “why be normal” in the anchors. This is because most people link to your site using either your URL or your Blog Title. In some cases they will use your Post title.

Now imagine if she had used a term like “Humor Blog” or “Funny Pics” or “Humorous Photos” in her URL, Blog Title and Post Titles. Every one of her links would contain those keywords and she would be easily ranking well or even number 1 in Google for terms that get searched for and drawing in daily traffic without having to do any work what so ever. No new posts, no chasing social network traffic. Search traffic shows up consistently day after day and if they like what they see they will leave comments and click on relevant ads and buy relevant products.

Now let’s look at this Adsense blog. I use keywords in all my titles and URL. I don’t post often and only in order to target more keywords.

Not bad - 9 posts, 1100 comments (which contain a ton of keyword rich content that the Google bot devours) and no time spent chasing social traffic.

You will notice I have very few useless backlinks.

Now I am not generating nearly the same traffic as Melissa is at the moment. But from Today.com’s perspective I am generating better traffic. Traffic that they can make money from using Adsense. When my traffic clicks an ad Today.com receives top CPC for the click as my visitors are targeted to the ads placed on my site.

In Melissa’s case and basically most of the Today.com sites the Google Adsense ads are smart priced and Today.com only receives a few pennies a click. The reason for the poorly targeted ads on Today.com is because the bloggers don’t use keywords in their post titles (this is the main trigger for what ads Google produces on your page) and they have several unrelated posts (and titles) on a single page. The Google bot is forced to determine what your page is about in order to serve relevant ads. If you do not target a keyword in your post title and have several post titles on a page the end result is a mishmash of ads usually not relevant to anything in particular and almost never relevant to what your social traffic is looking for. (It’s worth noting that Social Traffic rarely clicks ads anyway nor do they buy advertising or buy from advertisers. A problem Today.com is having trying to monetize all the social traffic blogs here on Today.com) This means that any clicks you do receive will not convert well for the advertiser and Google will give them a discount by simply paying Today.com a few pennies instead of the bid price.

Why be Normal should be showing ads for various humor related topics as that is what the traffic is looking for. Instead the site is showing ads as follows;

If her post titles all contained related “humor” or “Funny Pics” keywords she would see an instant change in the ads displayed and Today.com would see a much better return as far as CPC (cost per click) is concerned. Changing her blog title to “Humour Photos - Why Be Normal” would have the most impact on both her search rankings and Adsense relevancy. Moreover the blog description should simply read, “Humorous Photos and Funny Pictures to make you laugh”. If her friends would change their anchored links pointing at Melissa’s blog to related keywords like “funny pics”, “humor Photos”, “Humorous Pictures” etc she would see a sharp increase in search traffic as her blog ascends the serp’s for those terms.

These simple tips will work for any site and aside from making you more money with Adsense they will increase your readership and comment levels as you will be drawing in targeted visitors. Melissa averages 3k - 7k visitors a day with un-targeted traffic and has to post often and work the social networks to keep the traffic coming. Is it worth all the work? Today.com isn’t making much from the traffic, Melissa has few comments and her RSS feed subscribers show no readers. (using Blog Perfume Feed Analysis which may be broken? )

This Adsense blog had a whopping two posts for the month of March. How did my traffic stack up?

13,300 unique visitors or 6,650 unique visitors per post. Not a lot of work put in any way you look at it. I even made $40 for the effort but that isn’t why I’m here. I am simply trying to dominate another set of keywords related to the make money online niche. In time I will add more and more targeted keywords to this site and eventually drive 1000’s of visitors here daily without doing much of anything. It’s the ultimate system for passive income and I have reproduced this method countless times before.

My main blog produced the following search traffic over the final two weeks of March with only two posts;

and in case you don’t believe that targeted search traffic makes money this shot shows how well each keyword converted into revenue;

No amount of social traffic will give you those kind of earnings for the work involved.

Be smart - blog socially if that is your thing but at least optimize your sites for the search engines. Using proper keywords in your URL’s and Titles will create useful anchored links even from social bloggers who don’t know what an anchored link is. They just send links using your URL so make sure your URL has your keyword in it and you will rank for it in the serp’s. Eventually you won’t have to chase social traffic. Google will send you all the traffic you need.

Book description

• This in-depth Bible delivers the holy grail of online marketing: how to influence search engine results to drive online shoppers to specific Web sites; the process is called search engine optimization (SEO) and it is a hot topic
  
• One-stop resource offers readers what they need to plan and implement a successful SEO program, including useful tips on finding the shortest routes to success, strategy suggestions, and sidebars with more information and additional resources
  
• Features interviews with executives from top search companies, plus appendices on creating successful listings with Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and others
  
• Topics include creating an SEO plan; managing keywords; maximizing pay-per-click strategies; understanding the role of links and linking; robots, spiders, and crawlers; maintaining SEO; analyzing success rates; and much more
  

Biography
Jerri L. Ledford has been a freelance business technology writer for more than 15 years. Over 750 of her articles, profiles, news stories, and reports have appeared online and in print. She also develops and teaches technology training courses for such companies as IBT Financial, Hewlett Packard, and CNET. She is the author of Google Powered: Productivity with Online Tools and coauthor of Google Analytics, both from Wiley.O


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Keyword Research is one of the most important process of optimizing your web site and pay-per-click campaign. This step involves choosing the most apt keywords your target group requires to improve its ranking in search engines.

In a layman's parlance, keywords are nothing but words and / or phrases which people may use to locate your services, products, information or brands via search engines.


Step 1: Keyword Identification
The first activity in the keyword research process is the identification of keywords. Keyword identification means locating the keywords which are used by your target group. You look for related keywords. First, you identify the industry and then zoom into the specific field. For example, if you own this pet shop, you should take up keywords like: “cat food” and “dog food”.


Step 2: Locate Your Keywords
The second activity in the keyword research process is a more informed and technical search. It involves finding keywords that people actually use and organizing them by their popularity.

To locate keywords and find out their popularity, you can make use of the Alexa keyword search box to know more about the search behavior of your target audience. Learn what they call things, the way they identify subjects, how broad or how precise their search generally is. These parameters become essential in looking for the right keywords.

You may also access relevant and useful ideas for keywords from the collection of top keywords containing the top one hundred keywords of the last year or maybe a keyword directory that offers keywords organized by subject. Wordtracker is one such program that allows you to look for relevant keywords.


Step 3: Choose Keywords
The method of deciding on the right keywords involves the following steps. Copy all relevant phrases and counts onto a spreadsheet. After you have made an examination of all individual words and phrases that might apply to your website, you will have every single important phrase on your spreadsheet.


Instead of making your search more vague and inaccurate, (which generally happens when you try to choose one-word keywords), it is suggested that you focus your concentration on only those keywords that can be easily managed. And that would typically mean phrasal keywords.

This book was found leeched on Digital Point and the thread was quickly deleted. The ebook was written by a Web 2.0 SEO expert and regularily retails for $2499.00.


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Get to the Top on Google Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of the Search Engine Rankings -- and Stay There




2008 | PDF | 1.3 MB


Written in a clear, non-technical, style by a leading expert in SEO (search engine optimization), GTTTOG explains techniques and strategies proven to return higher search engine rankings and sales. It addresses all aspects of search engine marketing and includes an assessment of the impact of Web 2.0 on Internet search strategies.


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Here's a Post of how to use it:

Ok first i'll start off by saying Hello, just joined the board a few days ago and been lurking reading alot here. Glad to be here and hope to share any information I have as well as soak up any available.

Secondly let do a simple review of 'Magic Traffic Bot' and if you are a fan of it you should stop reading now this isn't a favorable review.

I installed this 'gem' last night and from the instructions you are supposed to run a keyword search on google, let say for 'DOGS' copy the url from the google result page into the MTB and put the referrer link (your website) you want to ping.

Now the premise behind this software is to generate pings or hits to all these websites and curious webmasters either link back to your website or at least visit it, generating you a bit more traffic. Ok that is fine and dandy and the basis of this program is sound and reasonable. And I agree with what it does and does it work, yes.

On the other hand it is very poorly written, A little background into myself, I am a hobbist programmer who has written several application for the underground community in the past. Mostly working on projects dealing with http authentication, referrer spoofing, and various other server penatration techniques. Ok back to MTB it is poorly written because it uses a IE (Internet Explorer) web module. Is that all I have? Well no, it is a hidden module so you do not see what is happening in the background. Now the software visits each page injecting a fake referrer into the HTTP header, this method works, and is very simular to some cracking projects I was working on several years ago (mid/later 90's) however since it is actually visiting the page through a IE window it also allows anything to come through.

So I set this thing up ran it for about 30 mins hitting about 539 websites. About every 30sec I had to click a 'javascript' error box to continue. Where did this javascript error box come from? The websites themselves. I can live with a bit of an annoyance with some software if it works as intended 'Most of the Time'. However the method this software uses to connect to each page is unacceptable. So after my mouse clicking finger gave out from canceling all the errors, I shut the program down.

What came next you ask? Web bugs, Virii, Spamware, and Spyware. My Spybot Seek and Destroy started going haywire, every 3 secs a registery entry was coming in. The IE module this software uses allowed every spyware, spamware, and IE virus to enter my computer from all the pages it was pinging. It took me nearly 5 hours today to finally clean and disinfect my PC, and in the end had to do a complete system restore.

In short there are better methods to accomplish what this software is doing, I might actually release a tool that does this correctly in the future. But my suggestion is to stay away from this software if at all possible.


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