Search Engine traffic accounts for nearly 80% of the Internet traffic. It is no wonder all website owners want their pages appear in the first 3 pages of the Search engine Results Pages ( SERPS). Getting there by itself is one tough job, and sustaining your place there is another day to day tussle. Unless most of the mundane tasks are automated the life of an SEO is going to be miserable. We constantly see new webmasters are clueless about the tools of the trade. Let’s see a few main one’s in this article.

Keywords describe the content to the search bots, they guide the search engine to decipher the theme of a webpage. These keywords should be employed in specific ways to acheive optimal results. The first thing to note is the keyword density, SE’s still use the density to validate whether they are being guided towards relevant content as suggested by keywords. Keyword Density Analyzer is one important tool that should be employed to check the usage of keywords and phrases in each of your webpage.

Keyword Research tools are really godsend. In this competitive space, if everyone starts targeting the same phrase then you are going into a virtual stalemate. That is why we should find relevant phrases and target them rather than highly competitive keywords. It is better to be listed in page one of a relevant keyword than on page 6 of the main keyword. There are many tools out there that can provide you a list of keywords based on the popular searches, with cue from the SE’s themselves. These are typically based on the current search terms employed the netizens.

Keywords are just one part of the SEO puzzle, there is a good tool to prepare your website for SE’s. Checkout the resource box for the website with all the tools described in here, they are free to use. The search engine preparation tool helps analyze your website against many criterion. Another popular tool that is a must have is the position checker. The search engine index is really dynamic and hence keeping up with your position manually and that too twice a day is a redundant task that is best left to a script.

The pro tool that is employed by SEO’s is the saturation tool that finds how many pages have been indexed and figures out your presence in the top search engines. This is really helpul because as you know each page in the website is indexed separately and seen as one individual entity in the web. This tool figures out which one’s got indexed and which did not and you can further analyze the reasons and try to enhance the optimization. The free SEO tools can found in http://www.web-inspect.com.

Author freelances for many great web companies and can be found in Aplora Web Solutions and No Fee Free Freelance.

I built my website, it’s perfect. My chosen subject of the website is Computer Support Services. Of course this is an example, but moving along, what should my keywords be?

Keywords are what people type into a search engine to find something on the internet. These words are what drive user requests.

Words to live by I like to call them. Why? Because on the internet your website will live and die by the words you use, or the words I use when you hire me to optimize your site.

How many words should I use?
What should they say?
How many phrases should there be?
What’s a phrase?

First off, let’s cover what a keyword is. A keyword is a word or collection of words used to describe your website. For those doing their own website design these words are applied in what is called a meta tag such as the following:

meta name=”keywords” content=”these words, would describe, your site”

keywords should say something about your website. They should also directly reflect the content of your site. They should not be random words that have nothing to do with your site, or you. If they are, you can expect that your page ranking will fall rather than rise. Of course, you will still have to submit or resubmit your website to keep your page in the eyes of the various search engines.

The number of words and phrases should be no more than 21-22, or a combination of the two. I have seen sites that had over 780 keywords, but no content to support them. Even if there was content there to support that large number of words, it’s fruitless to have that many words. Most search engines will ignore anything over the 22 words limit.

A phrase is defined as more than one word. “Real Estate Sales” is a phrase. “Real, Estate, Sales” is a collection of keywords. Both of these if used in a search would render completely different results.

Short, to the point, and using some of the keywords that describe your service or product. Here it’s Auto Repair Service, it’s New, and it’s Terrific.

Description – The second most important item on the page. Make this relevant to the content (typing) that you have on your webpage:

Bob’s New Terrific Auto Repair Service is the most experienced auto repair shop on the coast. Servicing All types of autos from 9am – 5pm 7 days a week. We offer early bird service on Fridays and Free Car Washes to all customers who pay by cash.

KEYWORDS –
Select about 22 words/phrases that descibe your product or service, and separate them with a comma. This line would look like: auto, automobile, service, terrific, new, free car wash, pay with cash.

How do I find these keywords? Use the following tools:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

This tool known as the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool is one of the most widely used methods of finding out what subjects people are searching for. What products they are searching for, what services they search for.

Enter your words like this: star wars or use something like business plan sample and when you click the button, you will be presented with a listing of how many times that word or words was searched for in the past month. Picking the higher ranked ones will be good for your site.

How does keyword selection help sales? It helps in the sense that by selecting the correct keywords, your site will be more visible, found more often in searches, and as a result of more visitors, eventually you will get more sales. Please make sure that the BUY IT NOW message on your website is clear. If not, all the optimization in the world will not help your sales increase.

Michael Murdock – former Macintosh Systems Engineer for PIXAR now owns/runs DocMurdock – A website optimization & Internet Marketing company. Helping websites move higher on the right search engines, and helping clients products move out the door and into the hands of the ideal clients.

Don’t put the cart before the horse.

You can’t do SEO (optimize your web site for search engines) until you’ve researched keywords. You can’t research keywords without a clear view of your target market, your prospect types, and how your offerings fill their needs.

Affordable Small Business SEO

Affordable small business SEO not only uses the same old business and marketing basics, but also leverages the depth of accessible metrics for creating increased online traffic and better web site ROI.

When small business people ask me how their web site could be improved by SEO, I give them some version of the following list of questions. When you know the answers to these questions, you’re much less likely to waste money on SEO efforts, and more likely to succeed online. You might even pull off some of this stuff yourself- and that’ll save you big in consultant fees!

To find the right keywords to target with SEO and/or PPC, consider the following?

Goals: How much monthly traffic and sales do you get now? Where would you like these numbers to be? What are your most wanted responses- what do you want your ideal prospects to do on your site? (e.g. buy something, sign up for your ezine, etc.)

Market Segmentation: Who’s your ideal customer or target market? If there is more than one group, characterize each.

Keywords that work: How do people find your site? What search phrases show up in your web logs?

PPC Metrics: Do you already use pay per click (PPC) advertising? What are your conversion rates? Are your bids profiting, or at least breaking even?

Getting more traffic is pointless if your site isn’t an efficient sales machine.

Profit Margin: What is your online profit margin for each offering?

Conversion Rate: What percentage of your offline prospects make the purchase? (to gauge expected conversion rate for your services and find disparity in online results)

Customer Loyalty: How many people are on your ezine list? How often do you email them? What do you send them?

5 Common Critical Website Errors and How to Fix Them

About 75% of the web sites I’ve seen make all of these mistakes. As a result, their rankings and traffic suffer, and they lose potential sales revenues.

No Sitemap. No matter how well your pages are designed and no matter how nice the graphics are, every site need a good ’sitemap’ page for search engines to index it more easily. This is a simple page of links- no frills except perhaps a bulleted outline structure. Even better, you can use the new Google sitemap xml template, and upload it to Google to increase the chances they’ll index your whole site.

Insufficient Search Engine and Directory Submission. In the ideal cyberworld, you wouldn’t have to submit your site anywhere- it would just get indexed and put where your prospects could find you. The reality is we still have to meet these services halfway. There are only a half dozen super-big sources of traffic (e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.), but you have a better chance of showing up in them if you’ve submitted your site to the 100-200 minor directories and search engines. Also, there are niche directories that will help you rank on your best keywords and attract more prospects directly. Submit your site to these places with a free tool like WebCEO.

Mysterious Website Owners. Your visitors want to know, “who are the people behind this website? Can I trust them?” Unless you have a particularly snobby target market, put your picture and brief bio on the very first page of your site (if not every page). Let them know who you are. This might be taboo in offline marketing (not really- look at Ben & Jerry, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump, etc.), but online, genuine personality is a competitive advantage. It fosters trust, creates credibility and emotional bonds, and bridges the cold gap of cyberspace. You can do it appropriately for most target markets. The real question is: are you ready for the prime time?

Confusing Site Structure. Does your site confuse people? Do you know where they want to go, what they’re really looking for? Where do you want them to go? Good site structure both guides your various prospect types to the places you want them to go and satisfies their needs. Get some of your target market to sit in front of you and use your website- watch what they do- it’ll surprise you. And put a search engine on your website that gives you reports on what people search for- you’ll get clues about what else to put online.

Ezine Neglect. The ezine signup form isn’t prominent on some sites ? make it obvious and ’sell’ your visitors on signing up. Tantalize them into ezine subscription with a free bonus. Why? Not everyone will become your customer the first time they reach your site. They may like your offerings but not trust you enough yet or be ready to buy. They may have questions. Once you have them on your list, you can sell them on you and your stuff (by helping them with tips) every week or two until they buy.

Not only do they need a free bonus to stimulate them to sign up, they also need to know what kind of thing you’ll be sending them, that you’ll keep their email address private, and that they can unsubscribe anytime. And I’d suggest using double opt-in to avoid spam- that means they sign up (you don’t add them), and they confirm via email before they ever get an email from you.

Since 1999, San Diego SEO Consultant Brian B. Carter, MS, has reached more than 2 million readers online. His most popular site ranks in the top 1% of all major websites. Brian’s second book, “$1000 Keywords: How I Made as Much as $1,200.64 a Day Online With My Secret Keyword Analysis Techniques” will be available in July, 2005.

I am ranked #1 for that silly phrase at Google. So What?

Here’s a secret. You can be ranked #1 at Google for the phrase “Waterfall Watches” if you put the phrase on your page 4 times and in metatags twice. How do I know that? I did it in 2001 and still rank number one in Google for the phrase in 2005. On another of my sites I rank #1 for the phrase “Screeching Camels” by simply putting it on the page once in a comment about silly SEO guarantees.

I’ll wager that many phrases you’ve targeted for your business are almost as silly and deliver NO traffic to your pages from the search engines. Don’t take that too personally. Simply look at your traffic statistics to see what phrases are bringing visitors to your web site. If your logs show no delivered traffic for keywords you thought were golden, you’ve targeted the wrong phrases.

I’m always fascinated when discussions of search engines focus excessively on ranking of a particular site in one particular search engine without checking corresponding statistics about referred traffic delivered to the site from the targeted keyword phrase. Referred search visits from engines is not taken into account. Anyone who looks at their rankings without looking at how much traffic is referred and DELIVERED to your site through the rankings is missing the most important part of the story!

When you check your site traffic statistics for where visitors are coming from and in what numbers, for which keyword searches and from which search engines, you will be astonished to see that things you think are important are sometimes not so important. I’ve struggled for years to gain top rankings for “Small Business Ecommerce” and have achieved #1 at Google #5 at MSN and #13 at Yahoo (at this writing).

But guess what? Nobody searches for that phrase in significant enough numbers to deliver any traffic from it! I’m not saying that this was wasted effort, because in the over 1000 pages at WebSite101 we have enough related phrases that the targeted phrase contributes to the rank of hundreds of related phrases. “Open Source Ecommerce” gets huge traffic for one single page, ranked at # 29 in Yahoo, #7 at MSN and #1 in Google (as of this writing).

But the really interesting thing is that even on phrases that rank equally well across all three major engines, Google delivers referred traffic at a rate of 65% compared to MSN at less than 1% and Yahoo about 5% of all referred visitor traffic. In NO case does Yahoo or MSN refer any clickthroughs at higher than 10% of all referred traffic.

Referred traffic being visitors that clicked on your link from search results or links. This applies both in single instances for specific keywords and cumulatively for all referred traffic.

Hear this very clearly – it has nothing to do with ranking! There are dozens of search phrases that visitors have searched on all three of those engines that deliver traffic to my site that I can’t find my own site for in the top 100 results at ANY search engine. In every case, Google delivers more than twice the traffic for every keyword combination than does MSN or Yahoo!. In many cases, I rank HIGHER on both Yahoo and MSN for many of those phrases, yet Google delivers far more referred traffic for those phrases ranked higher at MSN and Yahoo! Does that make any sense?

If your referred traffic from top rankings at MSN and Yahoo send you no traffic, why be concerned that you rank well with either of them? This same scenario has played out across dozens of client sites I’ve reviewed traffic statistics for. No matter how the site is structured, no matter how many pages they have, no matter what keywords they are targeting.

Search engine referred traffic from Google is always ALWAYS 2 times higher than the other two and very often as much as 10 times. If we ranked engines, NOT on number of searches performed, but on how much traffic they refer, then Google would be more than twice as highly ranked in all cases.

If Google disappeared tomorrow, there would be some dramatically reduced visitor numbers for ALL sites across the web. We would, every single one of us, lose over half of our (organic) search engine referred traffic. Look at your traffic statistics for natural search engine referred traffic (not PPC) volume and which keywords are currently working to deliver that traffic as far more important than your specific # keyword ranking on those search engines.

Avoid the practice of “Keyword Voodoo” to rank for words that nobody searches. Google “Keyword Voodoo” and you’ll find me ranked 5 times for that phrase on page one of the search engine results page. “Reciprocal Linking Turkey” will give you the same result, showing my article on several web sites. Each of those does me no good at all and brings no more search engine referred traffic than does my number one ranking for “Invisible Entrepreneurs” used in the title of this article.

Target the wrong keywords and you will become one of those Invisible Entrepreneurs.

copyright © July 14, 2005 by Mike Banks Valentine

Mike Banks Valentine practices ethical search optimization through content aggregation and creation for your website Optimizing press releases for keyword density – distributed online for visibility & more effective link building

Contact Mike at: http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm

Download Free link popularity software – check inbound links http://website101.com/download/link-popularity-software.html

Check your link popularity at major search engines and Alexa

Oops! I meant "web content management system for windows." Do search engines understand consumer search engine typos? Typing something so close to what you are looking for, like typing "web content management system fr window" instead of "web content management system for windows" may not seem like a big deal, but search engine bloopers alter consumer searches more than we know.

The phrase used in the title, "web content management system fr window" is a real-life example of a common search engine typo. In fact, within that phrase, the "o" and the "s" are missed so often that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN have recorded the phrase "web content management system fr window" as searched about 481 times on a monthly average.

You might ask how this affects your search engine searches. Well, let us use the same phrase for an example. Typing the phrase you are looking for, "web content management system for windows," yields about 29.6 million indexed pages in Google, 14.7 million in Yahoo, and 2.3 million in MSN. However, the typo "web content management system fr window," only slightly different from what you really meant to type, yields drastically different results: 654 thousand indexed pages in Google, 131 thousand in Yahoo, and 56.5 thousand in MSN.

That doesn’t seem so bad. Who doesn’t want to narrow down the search? The problem is that the number of indexed pages is not the only difference with search engine typos; the poor search engines are trying to find the most relevant pages they can to the misspelled search, but it may not find what you need. On the one hand, you have tens of millions of relevant pages with a correct search; on the other hand, you have hundreds of thousands of semi-relevant pages. Which would you rather have?

Search engine typos are very common, but they do alter the relevance of your results.

Joe Miller is an author of informational articles and online advertisements on business, technology, and health. ‘Web content management system fr window’ is actually ‘web content management system for windows’.

Just for a change, rather than a technical article, I would like to tell you a story. To begin, imagine your website is a little country bar, now let’s go back to when the internet began, and reciprocal linking was being done properly. Now just sit back and picture the following…..

There you are running your bar, it’s a fairly busy little bar with plenty of regular customers. You also get other customers who come from all directions. Some make their way to your bar using all the little country back roads (from links on other websites), others come on the big highway (the Internet) from the big bars in the city (The Search Engines).

Your customers usually stay and have a beer or two (read a few pages of your site), then decide they’d like to try somewhere different. Because you realize your customers are bound to leave at some point anyway, you recommend the bar down the road, telling them it is a great bar too. You even show them a little leaflet you made (your link section), which gives them directions on how to find it.

The bar down the road also has his regulars, plus a few visitors from you, and a few from the bars in the city. He knows you send him customers, so when his customers have had a drink or two, and fancy going somewhere different, he returns the favour, recommends your bar and gives them directions how to get there.

In fact, there are 10 little bars in your area that are all doing this and the local back roads are alive with customers going from bar to bar (The World Wide Web). Occasionally, when someone comes from the big bars in the city (the Search Engines), you recommend the other local bars and all your friends benefit from that visitor too.

Then one day the big bar in the city sent all the local bars a letter saying: “We are a much bigger bar than you, we have thousands of customers, and they are all looking for nice little country bars like yours. We would be glad to recommend your bar, however, we need to know that your bar is popular before we tell our customers. The busier your bar is, the more customers we will send you. We will of course be sending one of our employees to see just how busy your bar is (Search Engine link spiders).

Great you think, more new customers, more business, more profits. Oh no! Wait a minute! If you send your customers to the bar down the road, he would be busier than you, and get all the new customers from the city. Better stop sending them there. So you stop recommending his bar, and hide the little leaflets that gave directions. (You feature your link section only with a tiny little text link right at the bottom of the page.)

You can’t get rid of your leaflets, or the other bar may take you off his leaflet, then when the employee from the city visits the other bar he will think you are not popular, because you are not listed. Maybe you could change the title of your leaflet, so it doesn’t look like directions to other bars, that way your customers won’t pick it up. (Call your links page “resources” or “partners”).

Now, when your customer has had their first beer or two, you don’t recommend your friend, and they don’t find the leaflets, so they don’t know there is a back road that leads to other bars. The result? They take the highway (the Internet) and go back to the big bar in the city where they came from (The Search Engine).

When they get to the big bar in the city, they don’t stay there long, because they know the barman can recommend some other great country bars. Why does the barman do that? Because they are his busy friends, but he also recommends a few bars who pay him to give them a plug (Pay Per Click or advertising).

Meanwhile, the bar down the road has been thinking the same thing as you, he wants to be the busiest bar and get the extra customers from the city. He has hidden or renamed his leaflets, and stopped recommending you, like you stopped recommending him.

That road that used to carry customers between your two bars is now very quiet and no longer buzzing with customers driving up and down to the different bars. Eventually, it becomes unused, because the customers don’t know it exists. (Hidden link sections). You never get customers from your friend, because they too go back to the city to ask the barman’s advice. Your bar is much quieter without his referred customers, and his bar is much quieter without yours.

What can you do? Your bar is not as busy as it used to be, and you still want the customers from the city. Hey, that’s it! Pay the barman to promote your bar (Pay-Per-Click or Advertising). Now what happens? The barman sends you a visitor and makes himself some money. When the visitor has had a few drinks at your bar, he goes back to the barman in the city who recommends your friends bar down the road. Why? Because your friends bar was empty, so he too paid the barman to send customers.

The WEB of back roads is closing down, and being replaced by a network of highways, all leading back to the barman who is making lots of money. Who is paying him that money? You, and your friend, who used to share those same customers for free. Meanwhile, the customers think the only way to find a good bar is to see the barman in the city. NOT TRUE IS IT? Both your bars are good, and before you had lots of people recommending you, not just the barman.

If a child read that story they would probably say how silly it is. This is what linking JUST for rankings produces. The alternative?? Link for traffic first, link only with sites who understand their visitors are leaving at some point anyway, sites who are willing to send their leaving visitors to other sites not straight back to search engines all the time.

I am not search engine bashing here, they are excellent and useful resources. However if webmasters are not careful and continue to hide link sections they will give the big search engines a monopoly on traffic. Try turning things around. Exchange only quality visible links, that will bring you visitors. If the current method of “Guru” thinking is correct, this will automatically increase your popularity and search engine rankings at the same time, the difference being, you get visitors while your rankings improve not WHEN they have improved.

Just because Google or any other search engine does not consider a site important, it does not mean that site does not have great content, it does not mean that site is not busy, and it does not mean the site will not send you visitors.

There are millions of great sites with no PR and millions of great sites who are not on the first page of search engine results. The only people who have the right to judge a sites importance, and indeed the only people who’s opinion REALLY matters, are the users of your site.

Gary McHugh is co author of HonestLinks.Net, a site dedicated to teaching webmasters to exchange links that bring traffic. He also runs his own web design and hosting company 2001web.com

With search engine algorithms changing seemingly daily, the quest to rank high in the search engines and stay there is proving to be quite the challenge for most webmasters. One of the more recent popular ways of achieving this is through buying text links on websites that have high PR’s (page ranks) on Google and that also rank well in the other major search engines. Is buying text link placement worth it?

Purpose
The primary purpose of buying a text link on a website that ranks better in search engines than yours is to receive a backlink to your site, without having to reciprocate a link back (as this dilutes the quality of a link). This backlink counts as a "vote" for your website and especially if coming from a site that is credible to the search engines, helps your site establish credibility as well. For example, a website has been online for three years and currently has a PR of 7. Your site is three months old and has a PR of 2. The 3 year old website places a link to your site from their homepage. As this site has history and is therefore established, this "vote" from a PR 7 website holds a lot of value. Compare this to a site linking to yours that is only a year old and holds a PR of 1 ? it makes sense that you would want links coming from older sites that have high PRs. The higher the number and the better the quality of backlinks your website receives, generally the higher your rank on the SERPs (search engine results page).

Not only are text links great for search engine purposes, but if placed well, can actually drive traffic to your site. And whose website nowadays couldn’t use more traffic? Enough said.

Those are the benefits behind purchasing text links. But what are the disadvantages?

1) Cost ? it’s not uncommon to pay $100 monthly for a 3 word textlink on a PR 6 website. If you do choose to go this route, choose your text carefully and budget wisely.

2) Relevancy to search engines ? if you’re running a homemade toys website and have a popular online pharmacy website linking to yours, this won’t be as relevant as say having Mattel® linking to you. Remember that search engines are becoming more and more sophisticated and they can tell whether two sites have complimentary, competitive, or completely unrelated website content.

3) Limited link length – rarely are you given the option of selecting more than three words when purchasing links. You may have difficulty coming up with only three keywords relevant to your website, so this can often prove to be a difficult task.

4) Page is already populated with other text links ? online auction sites that have sellers auctioning off website text links are notorious for selling textlinks on websites that already have 50 more on the same page. Look for sites that limit the number of textlinks sold.

5) Search engine spam ? your site linked on every single page of a 3000 page website using the same keywords and url can be considered spam to a search engine. If you choose to purchase multiple text links on multiple websites, make sure your linking text varies.

The lesson is to be simply cautious. Using a textlink broker to find relevant and complimentary websites to buy links from can prove to be highly beneficial ? just do your research first. Would a $100 monthly textlink investment be better spent on a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, or will the long term benefits of buying a text link outweigh a temporary influx in visitors? Return on investment is key ? whichever route will yield you the highest ROI should be your ultimate determining factor.

Veronica Dubak is an SEO expert, internet entrepreneur, and the owner of the successful free online paid surveys directory, SurveyBounty.com. With a comprehensive listing of market research companies classified by region, and background information on the online survey industry, SurveyBounty.com is the legitimate source for online survey information.

Search Engine Optimization is a key to any successful internet marketing strategy. There are numerous definitions and interpretations as to exactly what Search Engine Optimization means. It is the process in which the careful and strategic placing, analysis, and wording of keywords of text on a particular website to enable optimum search engine rankings, this definition comes from www.pixelphoria.com/glossary.php. There are several ways in which this process can benefit internet marketing strategies.

When creating or updating a commercial website, the reason is typically to make the products more attractive to viewers, while at the same time creating the ability to gain more exposure with a broader audience. While most websites have a target audience, it is this ability to gain a larger, broader audience that they are all searching to gain. The Search Engine Optimization process allows for the creation of a higher page ranking when a potential viewer is using a search engine to find specific websites based upon the searchable keywords they will enter. This process identifies those keywords that will benefit a particular website and uses them in such a way that it gets a higher page ranking when those keywords are searched. For example, if “internet marketing” was searched for in Google, the more times the phrase “internet marketing” is included within the website, potentially the closer to the top the page will be displayed.

In this time of maximum Internet usage, many searchers only use first page displayed websites on their searches because this is where the pages with those higher page rankings are displayed, which translates into these pages find the highest relevance to their keyword searches. Please do not make the mistake of thinking that these websites are the only ones out there that will have the relevant search information, it just means that these websites have better marketed themselves to be located when specified keywords are searched, which is the exact benefit of Search Engine Optimization. This makes it even more critical that each website understand the importance of and the knowledge necessary to adapt their websites to benefit from Search Engine Optimization.

As should be understood by this point, it is imperative that an understanding of and taking advantage of Search Engine Optimization will provide the website a higher profile in the world of search engines. By taking advantage of optimization techniques, more searchers will gain faster access to the particular website. If the website has something worthwhile to offer in the world of ecommerce, then is a strategy that should be employed immediately.

Online reprint rights granted as long as the article is published in its entirety, including links and resource box. © John Doetsch 2005.

John Doetsch is founder of Websition.com where you will find additional articles and free web content written by the Internet’s most gifted authors. Visit his site at http://www.websition.com

Ranking well under the free listings in the major search engines basically mean one thing ? Lots of free, recurring, and targeted traffic. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN can be very powerful weapons in your internet marketing, if you know how to optimize your website to rank highly for your keywords. This article will focus on how you can optimize your website to rank on the top positions in search engines.

Getting listed on search engines is one thing, optimizing for top rankings is a totally different thing altogether. If you type in any keyword, the results shown may run into the millions of pages. Visitors would normally focus their attention on the first page of their search results, and few would browse to more than the first three pages. It is thus crucial to rank your website on the first page for your target keywords, or visitors would not find your site at all.

The three major search engines you should focus on are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Together, these search engines constitute more than 90% of the searches done online. With an audience reach of more than 50% of the internet community, Google is, by far, the most powerful search engine for free listings. Because its results are completely determined by algorithms, its listings are totally unbiased and ‘pure’. Other search engines may contain sponsored listings as well as free listings. Thus, visitors are likely to go straight to Google when looking for ‘pure’ search results, and this is the search engine you should focus on for optimization.

Note that since Google changes its algorithm very frequently, you have to continually keep updated on the latest changes to the search engine industry to keep your site on the top of search engines.

Search engine optimization (especially for Google) basically comprises of two factors: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page optimization involves the manipulation of page components like titles, content and text links, to rank well for Google. Off-page optimization involves getting more links from other websites directed to your website.

On-page optimization. There are several on-page ranking factors for your website:

1) Title tag. When giving your website your title, you should include only your main keywords. The title must also be as concise and short as possible, and not include many redundant words. Do not include words like ‘and’, you can instead use symbols like a ‘dash’ to separate your title words. Fewer unnecessary words would give each of the other title keywords greater weight, and thus a higher ranking for your site.

2) Good content. All search engines base their search results on the content you have on your webpages, and how well they relate to the keywords you want to optimize your website for. It is best if you write your website content on your own to prevent copyright violations, and to be able to control exactly the content you want to place on your website. Search engine spiders like Googlebot also determine your ranking based on the keyword density on your website. Keyword density is the ratio of the number of times that your keywords appear throughout your content to the total number of words. When writing the content, you should place your keywords evenly throughout your content. Use your keyword once in every one to two paragraphs, and also once in the first and last paragraphs.

3) Header tags. The Header 1 tags of your website should include your main keywords, and the Header 2 tags should include your secondary keywords.

4) Bolding and Italicizing. Whenever possible, you can bold or italicize your keywords throughout your content, as search engines to place greater weight on bold or italic words.

Off-page optimization. Off-page ranking factors are really what make a HUGE difference to your rankings, and search engines like Google may place up to 90% of their emphasis on off-page factors. They can mean a difference between ranked in the thousands, or on the first page. From this you can see the great importance of focusing on off-page optimization. The off-page factors are:

1) The number of websites linking to your website. Commonly known as ‘link popularity’, this is one of the prime factors that determine your ranking on search engines. Link popularity is the measure of the number of websites linking to your website, and search engines like Google place strong emphasis on it, because more backlinks to your website generally means that your website is a better or more important resource for people. Thus, as far as possible, try to secure as many links from as many websites as possible. The most common method is to write personal emails to webmasters to ask for their link to your website, and provide a reciprocal link back to their website if they require it. This is where your website content plays an important role as well. If your website is full of informative content and resources, then webmasters would be more than happy to link to your website, as their visitors would also benefit from your useful content.

You can also join link exchange communities like http://www.linkmetro.com. Such communities list many websites willing to exchange links with others. This free services only require you to provide a reciprocal link back to the website you are exchanging links with, in return.

2) The relevancy of the websites linking to your website. Search engines rank highly those websites with many relevant websites linking to them. The higher the number of relevant websites linking to your website, the higher your search engine rankings will be. It would not help your search engine rankings much if you have hundreds of unrelated websites linking to yours, but they may still boost your rankings a little because these are still considered valid links from many different websites. However, as far as possible, try to solicit links from relevant websites instead of non-relevant ones.

3) The importance of the websites linking to your website. Google measures the importance of websites with their PageRank (PR) system. It is a scale ranging from 1 to 10. Pages with very high importance are given a very high PR, and vice versa. The scale is exponential, which means that it gets increasingly harder to increase your PR. If a website with very high PR links to your website, that shows that their webmaster places a high value on your website, and your site has content worthy to be shown to their visitors. This will, in turn, give your webpage a higher PR. For example, if a website of PR 6 links to you, then your PR may rise from 1 to maybe 2 or 3. Thus, in addition to a higher PR, higher search engine results are also attained if many websites with high PR link to yours.

If you have a new website that has not been indexed in Google yet, then you should try to get links from high PR websites. Some experts claim that if you have many high PR websites linking to yours, your website would be indexed in Google automatically, even without using the Search Engine Submission Form.

4) The anchor text of the link pointing to your website. Links pointing to your website should have your main keywords in the link. For example, if you want to rank well for ’search engine optimization’, then the link pointing to your website should read ’search engine optimization’, and not other unrelated words.

5) The IP addresses of the websites linking to your website. Whenever possible, you should get links from many different websites, instead of links on many pages from the same website. Same websites would show the same IP address, and Google prefers many links located on different IP addresses.

Although this article focuses mainly on Google, the optimization techniques also apply well for Yahoo and MSN. That is why you find that websites of high popularity can be found among the first pages of most major search engines. Remember to place more emphasis on off-page optimization than on-page optimization. Your website would be well optimized for most search engines if you follow the guides on this article.

*You are welcome to reprint this article as long as you include the Author’s resource box with the article.

About the Author: Ray Yee is the founder and president of Dropshipperscentral, a website which provides a wealth of informative articles, tips and resources on everything you’ll ever need to know about setting up a Drop Ship Business and marketing it.

Click here for the Wholesale Drop Ship Directory from http://www.dropshipperscentral.com

Previously…

In our article on Understanding Google’s Algorithm, a brief explanation was given on what the Google algorithm is and a few general tips were given to help the beginner to optimize their website for it. This article will go into much more depth on different tactics to use to further optimize your site for higher rankings in Google’s search engine.

Types of Optimization

As explained in the previous article, there is a myriad of things needed to be done in order to properly and completely optimize your site to take advantage of Google’s algorithm. Here is a quick list of the things we will be learning to optimize, which will be explained in further depth shortly.

Things we will be going over in this article will include: Text Links and Optimization, Content Optimization, Domain Registration, Whois Information, Click Through Rates, PR (Page Rank), Traffic, Frequency of Updates, and IP address.

Text Links and Optimization

Although briefly explained in the first article, there are new ways of getting good links coming out almost daily, and having a deeper knowledge of getting links to your site from related ones is always important. As said before, try to stay away from the doorway pages or portals out there, as well as the FFA pages, as these will hurt your rankings on the major search engines more than help them. Be careful who you request links from, in regards to sites that are not within your specific category, or at the very least make sure they have a section for your general area on their links page, such as a “web services” section if you are a web hosting company.

Links from completely unrelated sites on a page with links from all different categories from all over the internet will not benefit your site much, if at all. This being said, don’t worry if a site adds a link to your own without a request simply because they like your site or services or product. The added traffic is always a plus, and if you don’t already have a lot of incoming links, every little bit helps.

Content Optimization

Be sure your content is all related to the subject your site is based on. Don’t have articles on the latest video games if you sell furniture, as the keywords are much less likely to get picked up, and most people looking to buy furniture online don’t want to be bogged down searching through hundreds of pages of video game reviews while trying to find a couch that will match their living room set.

Free content sites are always helpful, and although the content is duplicate, with the added articles and guides you will attract more visitors, increasing your rating through the quality of your traffic. Be sure to always include the article exactly as you got it, and include the actual author’s name and a link to their site at the very least. Stay away from tactics such as simply copying another site’s front page for an article, even if you plan on giving an author name and a link to where you got the information from. This can be seen as not only duplicate content, but is also a technique used by spammers to provide a huge collection of “content” in order to boost their rankings. Once the same information has been seen enough times by the Google spiders, it is considered “duplicate content” and therefore disregarded.

The most important thing to remember when trying to optimize your content is that writing your own articles and information will provide your site with free, unique content. This attracts browsers and at the same time impresses the Google spiders. Having unique content will even make other webmasters much more apt to link to your site as an “authority” in the field.

Domain Registration

Another thing checked for by the Google algorithm is how long your domain is actually registered for. Many Spam sites only register domain names for one year, leaving it to die so they can move on with an untainted domain name to attempt to spam their way into the top rankings on Google. Keeping your domain registered for five or more years, although it may cost a bit more initially, will help your rankings considerably in Google’s search engine rankings.

Whois Information

Your Whois information, as stated in the previous article, is also taken into account when calculating your rankings on the search engine. Is your physical address a real place, or was it falsified? Is your contact information up to date, including your phone number and mailing address? Is your name associated with spam sites from the past? All this information is recorded and worked into the algorithm. Just be sure to have your actual information used when registering a domain name, and make sure your contact information is accurate. Another tip would be to use your full name when registering a domain name, including middle name as well as any titles, such as Junior or the Third, as this will help to prevent confusion between yourself and other webmasters.

Click Through Rates (CTR)

Click through rates on your site are now observed by Google as well. If your site is seen on the Google search results, how often is it clicked instead of the other 9 sites on the same page? This is tracked with many things in mind, including seasonal click through rates as well as current trends among browsers. In this system, if you own a ski shop online, obviously your site will be ranked higher during the winter on certain keywords than during the summer. Likewise, if you promote a beach resort online, then your site will be more likely to be ranked higher during the summer months and during spring break than during the winter or fall.

PR (Google’s Page Rank)

PR, or Google’s Page Ranking system, is a way to keep track of how popular your site is. This is determined through traffic to your site as well as the amount of related sites linking to your own. The complexities of this system have not fully been discovered yet, but the main thing to know is that the more related links and the more high quality traffic you have coming to your site the higher your PR will be. With links from high PR sites, your own PR will skyrocket, bringing you ever higher in Google’s search results.

The algorithm also takes your PR into account when working out rankings. The higher PR your site has (on all of its pages), and the longer your site has a high PR, the more likely you are to get in the top rankings with Google. Even with a page ranking of 6 (out of 10), the results can be astounding, and your ranking within the search results will continue to grow.

Traffic

Traffic is also monitored to and from your site, and even how long your visitors stay. This allows Google to accurately gauge the amount of “real” traffic you get in any given month, as well as the type of visitors you receive and the overall popularity of your site. Now, for the younger sites that only get a few hits a day at most, this will not effect your rankings as much as the larger sites with hundreds or thousands of visitors a day. Instead of focusing on the amount of traffic you get to your site, focus on the quality of the traffic you receive. With more visitors that stay longer and actually stay to view your site and purchase your product or sign up as users, you should be able to get better rankings than some of the sites that have three times the volume of traffic but one tenth the amount of time spent by that traffic on your site.

Quality is king, while quantity is simply an added benefit on today’s internet. Work on your quality and then you can focus on the quantity.

Update Frequency

Spiders from Google also check the frequency your site is updated with their new algorithm. The more your site is updated, in essence, with fresh and unique content, the higher it will become ranked in the Google search engine. If you take a month vacation, leaving your site to gather dust until you come back, be prepared for a drop in your rankings. If you update your site daily, on the other hand, you can expect to be ranked much higher (provided you have fresh, related content) than the sites that only update once a week.

Basically, as the old adage says, “You reap what you sew.” Or, in other words, the more work you put into something, the better results will come of it. In general, this remains true for not only Google, but the other search engines and directories as well.

IP Address

Even the IP address is considered in the Google Algorithm, which can be a good or bad thing, depending on the other websites that are currently sharing your IP. If you are on a specific IP address that is dedicated to your site, you have little to worry about, but if your IP is shared between multiple websites, you could have a real problem. IP addresses are recorded and compared between your site and others on the web. If, for example, your site just happens to be on the same server as a spammer who shares your IP, not only will Google delete the spammer from their rankings, but they could also delete your site simply for being related to the Spam site.

Obviously, there are some simple solutions to this problem, including talking to your hosting company to get a dedicated IP address specifically for your own site. This might cost a bit more per month or year, depending on your billing schedule, but the benefits will be numerous. If you simply don’t have the cash flow to pay the extra money per month, you can search through the sites that share your IP and report spammers to your hosting company. In nearly every case they will be ready and willing to get rid of spammers on their server.

Overview

Again, the basic idea is to keep your site reputable in its promotion practices. Stay away from anything that could possibly classify your site as a Spam site, and keep good, relevant links and content coming. For more information, please look at our articles below:

You can see other articles by Claude Beavers on this topic at: SuperFaster.com – Free Search Engine Optimization Articles and Resources