Archive for July 8th, 2006
Writing outstanding ad copy for pay-per-click advertising campaigns is critical if a webmaster wants to be successful. Why waste money on clicks from people who aren’t going to buy what a webmaster has to sell? To be as targeted as possible descriptive titles and effective ad copy are needed. Since the webmaster is paying for each click it’s very important to have ad copy which conveys the right message to the right person. The challenge is the small area available from most advertising networks like Google (AdWords) or Yahoo! (Overture).
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July 8th, 2006
The popularity of weblogs or blogs has gotten a lot of attention from the media recently. In fact, "blog" was picked as the word of the year by Merriam-Webster, a U.S. dictionary publisher.
There are many ways you can start your own blog. One of the easiest ways to set up your own blog is to use Google’s free Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com).
(505 words, estimated reading time: 2:01 ) read the full post...
July 8th, 2006
Search engines are one of the best tools to bring targeted traffic to your business. Millions of people are always using them every day to search for information that’s suitable to them. Understand that this gives you an advantage to give your prospects whatever they are looking for.
This means that you will get very targeted prospects because they are locating your web site in their system with the use of keywords and phrases related to your product.
(671 words, estimated reading time: 2:41 ) read the full post...
July 8th, 2006
Launching a new website with enough acceleration to rise above this ever increasing daily din needs some force. It is common to see a website with a different name and various product or service offerings with equally unrelated names. Promoting these diverse brands will naturally need more energy than promoting just one brand.
However, if the website’s name is carefully chosen to resemble the site’s main theme, all the promotion energies can focused on just one keyword. Products and services can have this name embedded into the official product names (think Microsoft Office).
(478 words, estimated reading time: 1:55 ) read the full post...
July 8th, 2006
Free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips - Step By Step
by: Robert Toth
Before submitting your site to search engines it is very important to optimize your website. If you can not afford a search engine optimization service, make sure to follow our search engine optimization tips to have your web site well optimized for the top placement in search engines.
Step 1. - Analyze your competition
The best way to start optimizing your web site is analyze your competition. Take a look at the web pages that currently have top rankings (Top 10) on Google and try to find out what these pages have done to get these rankings. - analyze the first top ten web sites related to your branch
- analyze keywords they are using
- look at their source code, meta tags
- look at their keyword density
- look at their comment tag, alt tags, title tag
- internal and external links on their websites
- look how many sites linking to them
- check out the quality and link popularity of sites that are linking to your competitors
- look how many pages they have
After all you can tell is it easy to beat your competition or it is not.
Step 2. - Start to improve your website with quality content
When optimizing your website always use keyword in the meta tags which are reflected in your page. It is not going to help your search engine ranking if the page has nothing to do with the topic. a) Choose the right keywords
As mentioned before, analyze your competition but never use the same keyword and description tag. There are two great resources for finding out the most effective keywords. - Overture - WordTracker b) Creating meta tags - TITLE Tag
The most important tag is the Title tag, because it is in the head section of your website and many search engines use it. Title tag should be short (about 14 words), descriptive and to the point. The title is appeared on first line in the search engines. c) Creating meta tags - DESCRIPTION Tag The next important meta tag is description tag. It describes content of your web page
- shouldn´t be longer than 120 characters
- description is for the search engines not for the viewers to see
d) Creating meta tags - KEYWORD Tag
- use the most important keywords that your website represent
- we recommend to use 5 keywords separated by a commas
- one keyword should have 1 - 3 words
e) Creating meta tags - ROBOT Tags
Step 3. - Check your website URL before submit to search engines.
Your website should be finished without errors:
- no broken links
- no spelling mistakes
- have a good design
- no html tag mistakes
- have a site map
Step 4. - Submit your website to search engines
Submit your website into the most important search engines, it brings you the most of traffic. Make sure to submit your URL for free to www.google.com, www.yahoo.com, www.altavista.com, www.alltheweb.com, www.excite.com, www.lycos.com, www.webcrawler.com, www.Alexa.com, www.Jayde.com, www.whatuseek.com, Open Directory (The ODP powers core directory services for some the most popular portals and search engines on the Web, including AOL Search, Netscape Search, Google directory, Yahoo directory, Lycos, DirectHit, and HotBot, MSN and hundreds of others). DMOZ and Yahoo Directory listings are tremendously valuable. There are a lot more free and paid search engines and directories to submit, but if you do not have time to search for and submit, you can also use our search engine submission service.
Step 5. - Build your link popularity (offpage optimization)
Next significant step you should do with your website is build your link popularity. Link Popularity is the number and quality of other websites that link to your site. Top rankings depend on your link popularity. It can be done with creating a quality reciprocal links from related web sites and Internet directories.
We can build for you a non-reciprocal and reciprocal links if you choose our link building service.
Permanent link to this post (687 words, estimated 2:45 reading time)
July 8th, 2006
Search Engine Secrets: Using Tags
by: Mark Lawson
In your web pages, there are hidden areas of the page that the casual browser doesn’t see, but that the search engines sure do. These are called tags, and come in two basic types: first the header tags, which are found at the top of web pages, and second the heading tags, which mark the parts of your text in the page that will be used as titles and subtitles in articles. One other form of tag, alternate text, should be filled out as well.
Header Tags
Most of the tags in your header are called metatags or meta tags; they apply to the entire page and, in HTML, are at the top of your document. In graphic web page design tools like Frontpage or Dreamweaver, if you right-click and select page properties, you’ll find these in the first tab that opens.
When the web first opened to the public, metatags were a critical tool enabling the primitive spiders and search engines of that time to determine how to catalog a page. The idea was that you’d tell the spiders where your page was supposed to be catalogued by how you filled in your metatags, and they’d ensure you were listed properly.
It took very little time indeed before this mechanism was used to rank less-worthy pages higher in the search engines. Today, metatags aren’t as important as they were then because they’re so easy to manipulate; you should still, however, fill them out. They can’t hurt, and in many search engine constructs they’re useful for identifying what your keyword is intended to be.
Title Tags are the most important of the metatags. Whatever you put here shows up in the header bar of your web page, at the top of the window. It should always start with your keyword so it’s clear what you are targeting. Short titles are better, and a very natural style is ideal - no spamming by repeating your keywords over and over.
Description Tags are also important. Start with your keyword or keyword phrase, and describe what your site is about. The content of these tags is often pulled out in search engines and directories to describe your site, so make it concise and precise, and use complete sentences with good spelling and grammar.
The keyword tag should list only keywords you actually mention on your web page. If you use other keywords, some search engines consider it spamming, and will downgrade your page.
Metatags should be focused specifically on the page, not on the site as a whole. Consider each page when you design metatags.
Other Tags In Your Document
Image alternate text or image descriptions should always be filled out; if you’re using a graphic web design tool, right-click on the image and answer the questions in the box. Use your keywords in the alternate text, and if the image is something you’re selling be certain you give it a proper name. This enables the specialized image search engines to find your images.
The H1-H6 tags in your document should always contain your keyword once. Search engine spiders pay special attention to these containers, which hold your text titles and subtitles. They may not give you a huge boost, but anything counts in the search engine derby.
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About The Author
Mark Lawson is the webmaster for http://www.discountdomainsuk.com a leading UK Web Design Service Please feel free to republish this article together with working hyperlinks.
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Permanent link to this post (581 words, estimated 2:19 reading time)
July 8th, 2006
If you’re looking for the number one, hot Internet marketing solution that will propel your website to the number one spot on the most popular search engines you have a long search ahead of you. The truth is that there really isn’t one technique that will accomplish such a major feat for you. The most successful and popular websites employ a number of techniques to garner that longed for spot. That being said, however; you should know that not all techniques are equal. Some techniques will definitely get you more results than others and the granddaddy of them all is content.
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July 8th, 2006
First let’s start with definitions:
SEO: Search Engine Optimization, SFO: Search Friendly Optimization.
These two things are what most webmasters have trouble balancing. These things seem to always be on opposite ends. On one hand you have to make sure search engines can crawl your website without any problems. On the other you have to keep the site looking good to keep your visitors.
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July 8th, 2006
Link Building for Hilltop
by: Andy Hagans
Hilltop is one of the major concepts underpinning Google’s search algorithm, yet its workings and implications are often misunderstood. After the infamous Florida Update, many webmasters were aghast as their rankings plummeted; and again, when the mysterious “sandbox” was implemented, some webmasters could not get a Web site to rank well, period. Part of the reason that some Web sites get shuffled out of the SERPs when new algorithmic features are implemented is that those sites never gained authority in the eyes of the search engines–that is, they were not sufficiently meshed into their local topical communities.
This concept of authority was one pioneered in a paper titled “Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents,” written by Krishna Bharat and George A. Mihaila. The full text is available online at http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~georgem/hilltop/.
(Note: Google has obviously not implemented Hilltop in its pure form, but rather uses the principles of topical communities and authority in its algorithm. Likewise, other search engines such as MSN and Yahoo! are not using Hilltop per se, but rather similar algorithmic features. Thus when I mention ‘Hilltop’ I am referring to not just the specific paper published by Bharat and Mihaila, but also to the fundamental theory upon which any authority-based link popularity algorithm is based. This theory applies to Topic-Sensitive PageRank, etc.)
The Basics of Hilltop
Google’s PageRank formula revolutionized search, but it has a major flaw: it gives each page an absolute measure of importance. Recognizing that a page’s importance should be interpreted in light of a given query topic, the Hilltop formula uses the link structure of the topical community related to the query topic when determining relevance.
For a given topic query, some pages are considered to be “expert documents,” and others are “authorities.” A page is an expert document if it “is about a certain topic and has links to many non-affiliated pages on that topic” (this type of page is also sometimes called a hub). A page is an authority “if and only if some of the best experts on the query topic point to it.” To summarize: hubs link to authorities; authorities are linked to by hubs.
The Challenge for New Web Sites
The nature of the World Wide Web dictates that it will take time for a new Web site to get links from within its topical community. Many hubs such as resource lists or niche directories are only updated periodically with new links. Still others are static pages that will never be changed.
Then there is the “human factor.” It takes time for a Web site to be recognized as valuable, and for webmasters to trust it enough to link to it. Older authority sites and hubs also tend to link to other older authority sites, creating a sort of self-perpetuating authority set (Mike Grehan refers to this phenomenon in his article “Filthy Linking Rich,” available online at http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/Oct04/RichLinking.html). This all adds up to the fact that it is very hard to make a new Web site an authority in the eyes of the search engine, which begs the question: How can a new Web site become entrenched in its topical neighborhood more quickly?
Break Into Your Topical Neighborhood
To make your Web site an authority, you should first seek to obtain links from topical hubs. Obvious hubs might include any niche directories or resource pages about your Web site’s topic.
One way to find less obvious hubs is to do a backlink search on authority sites in your topical community. Finding authority sites is easy–they are the sites that rank highly for a search for that topic. Once you find an authority, search “link:http://www.theirsite.com.” Go through the backlinks, and find pages that link out to multiple sites within your topic; a page that links out to multiple authority sites is probably considered a hub by a search engine.
Aside from hubs, it can be quite helpful to get links from the authority sites themselves. I have seen many Web sites get a significant boost after obtaining just one link from a top authority. It is implied that an authority site will link out less than will a hub, and therefore it is possible that these links are even more valuable in terms of rankings.
Obtaining links from quality hubs and authorities is easier said than done. One can however use certain methods to get links quickly. These methods include but are not limited to: offering to swap links; submitting a relevant, well-written press release; submitting a relevant, well-written article with your Web site’s URL hyperlinked and embedded in the copy; offering to buy or rent a links; and, of course, writing a lot of great content (it will get noticed, sooner or later!).
Conclusion
Obtaining links from reputable sources within your Web site’s topical community is necessary in order for that site to be ranked highly in today’s search engine algorithms. Getting your Web site entrenched within its topical community would be a good idea anyway, even if search engines did not exist–which is a pretty good litmus test for a strong, long-term SEO method.
Permanent link to this post (890 words, estimated 3:34 reading time)
July 8th, 2006
Maggie knows how to find what she wants. She lets her fingers do the walking ? not in the Yellow Pages, but at Google.com. She wants to learn about bread baking, and you have just written Bread Baking Made Simple, and you sell some great baking tools. The good news is the Google and other search engines exist for one simple reason: to help Maggie find your website.
(780 words, estimated reading time: 3:07 ) read the full post...
July 8th, 2006
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