Archive for August 20th, 2006
Does anyone really enjoy the tedium of spending hours upon hours searching for quality link partners? I know I don’t. That’s why I’ve devised a free and incredibly easy method for generating thousands of incoming links to websites that takes the hassle out of getting other sites to link to you.
The number of incoming links you will be able to generate is directly proportional to the number of hits on your website. The good news is that even if you have only a small handful of visitors coming to your site daily, you still have the potential to generate a substantial amount of links pointed your way.
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August 20th, 2006
One of my favorite subjects to teach on at our live SEO Mastery Workshops is that of keyword research and the behavior of a specific target audience using my all time favorite research tool, Wordtracker.
For those who have not heard of, Wordtracker it is a Web based service that will help you discover which keywords and phrases will be most effective for attracting the right audience to your Web site. Not only that, but the service also tells you how competitive your keywords are (or how many other competing Web pages have been optimized with those keywords in mind) plus how many people have actually searched for those keywords in the past within the last 60 days on the major search engines.
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August 20th, 2006
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.
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August 20th, 2006
6 Simple Ways Writing Articles Will Improve Your Link Popularity and Increase Visitors to Your Web Site for Free
by: Robert Short
Article writing and distribution creates free one way incoming links back to your web site. Link building in this manner increases your web sites exposure, visitors and you overall search engine rankings. By using the following techniques you can dramatically improve your web site traffic in a very short period of time.
1. Create Viral Content For Your Web Site - Add your own resource box/byline to your articles and post them on your web site. You could allow your visitors to publish the articles on their web site if they also include your resource box and keep your hyperlink active. This will spread your link around the internet like a virus and increase your link popularity fast.
2. Submit your articles to free content web sites for other webmasters to reprint for publishing. When you include your resource box at the end of the article with your website URL you will not only get free advertising but you will get a link back to your site. This will increase your link popularity and cause your site to rank higher in the search engines.
3. Combine your articles into a free e-book. You can place your business ad and hyperlinks back to your site in the e-book. E-book creating software is inexpensive and easy to use. By giving your e-book away to visitors and allowing them to link to your site to give it away to their visitors will multiply your web site traffic, exposure and link popularity.
4. Create an article directory on your web site. People will visit your web site to get the free information. By allowing them to reprint your articles with the stipulation that they keep the resource box and hyperlink active you will increase your link popularity. Also allow your visitors to place a link on their web site that links back to your article directory. By providing your free “instant article directory” to their visitors you will increase your web site’s exposure and receive a percentage of their visitors as well.
5. Offer other web sites, that are relevant to your own, free content articles about your area of expertise to post on their web site. Include your link on all of your content. Your article should be related to your web site because it will bring you visitors that are interested in your product or service.
6. Use an article distribution service that distributes articles to thousands of web sites, newsletters and ezines at one time. Your article will be published on dozens of web sites almost immediately. I used this technique with an article distribution service called http://thephantomwriters.com and got literally thousands of links from only four articles. Distribute your articles several times and you will increase your exposure. Change your article’s title and redistribute it several times more to maximize your article’s potential.
As you can clearly see, writing and distributing articles can have a profound affect on your web site’s exposure. There is absolutely no better or faster way to increase your web site’s exposure, link popularity and search engine rankings.
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About The Author
© Copyright 2005 Affordable Concrete Cutting, Inc.
http://www.affordableconcretecutting.com
Robert Short is a seasoned article writer and an expert on search engine optimization and linking. He is responsible for ranking our local service company’s website at number one on all major search engines for more than a dozen keyword terms. Our website now generates as much revenue as our main service business. Visit our website for more articles on linking and webmaster resources: http://www.affordableconcretecutting.com/construction_seo.html
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August 20th, 2006
Google Sitemaps’ Hidden Secrets - Powerful SEO Tools Revealed!
by: Rob Sullivan
Google has had a feature out for some time which allows webmasters to create a sitemap file to help Google’s crawlers find and index content.
It sounds like a great idea. After all, it is much easier to feed the crawler the content then hope it finds it on it’s own.
But is a Google sitemap worthwhile? Is it even necessary? Well, once you realize the incredibly powerful statistics available to you, you might change your opinion. After all, would knowing what terms might be driving searches to your competitors be helpful?
When the Google Sitemap program first started my thought was “That’s kinda cool but what’s the real benefit?”
So, I thought I’d try it out and submit sitemaps for a few sites that I own.
When Google Sitemaps first came out it was very difficult to figure out what all the entries meant as well as how to actually create the sitemap.
Sure, it was XML based, and I could plainly see what they expected but when you have a large site, how do you go about creating this?
Then Google came out with a sitemap generator which is a program intended to help you create a sitemap for your site. This does help speed up the process but unless you are a developer it is a little difficult to implement.
Also, you need access to your server to run the script required to generate the sitemap. If you are unsure you should check with your web host to see if you have terminal access to execute Python scripts.
Personally, I’ve never tried the Google Sitemapper tool but I have used others. For example, on my personal blog which uses Moveable Type, I found a blog post which shows How to build a Movable Type Google sitemap template. And I’ve used Xenu and an Excel spreadsheet which works great as well.
Now that the sitemap creation is covered, let’s get into the question at hand. Is a Google sitemap really worth the effort?
A few months ago I would have said no, but lately Google has been adding features that make me think otherwise.
For example, if you’ve gone through the verification process (which is really just placing a blank HTML file on the site and having Google find it) and ensured your 404 errors are properly configured you can get access to a wealth of additional intel.
One such feature is the “Top Search Queries.” This tells you which queries were used when your pages appeared in the search results but may not have been clicked on.
In other words, these are actual searcher queries that were performed on Google where your site may have appeared but not had click-through’s.
From a keyword research point of view, this is a huge advantage to you. By monitoring your sitemap stats you can easily see some of the terms people are using and perhaps determine what you need to do to rank higher for those terms so you too can get the clicks that your competitors are receiving.
If you don’t have ready access to log analysis or other stats, the Google sitemap can also tell you what terms actually drove traffic to your site.
In other words, these were searches performed on Google that actually generated clicks for your site.
There’s also a wealth of other information. For example, “Crawl Stats” shows you how Googlebot sees your site, errors generated by it, and even a PageRank distribution chart detailing how well PageRank is distributed.
So, if you are like me and wondering if a Google sitemap is worth it I’d say yes, it is. The information provided, while mostly technical, can help you troubleshoot problems as well as provide ideas to help you improve your positioning.
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About The Author
Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for http://www.textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.
seorobsullivan@gmail.com
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August 20th, 2006
How much revenue do you generate from Google Adsense?
Recently there has been a lot of discussion about people who earn over $10,000 a month just from Adsense. Furthermore, there are rumors of a few individuals who earn over $1 million a year just from using the power of Google advertisements.
So what is Google Adsense and how can you use this program to earn a six-figure income?
About two years ago, Google created this program to help websites to monetize their web-traffic.
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August 20th, 2006
This is the second part of an article series in which you’ll find many tools that you can use to monitor your site’s search engine position and see how your do-it-yourself search engine optimization efforts are coming along.
The following tools are for monitoring your search results in the three major search engines. It isn’t an all-inclusive list, but rather a highlight of some of the tools you can use. (I’ll point you to one of the master lists when we get into more general tools in part three.)
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August 20th, 2006
With the advent of Google Local, a service that helps Web users find local businesses by typing in a search term and a city name, many questions arise concerning its impact on Natural Optimization.
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August 20th, 2006
Ethical Search Engine Optimisation Services: Are You Unintentionally Search Engine Spamming?
by: David Touri
Many people who have websites are not totally up to date with what is considered to be search engine spamming. Having worked on search engine optimisation for a few clients, I have come across websites that are using spam techniques to help elevate search engine rankings. When I confronted clients about this, they honestly did not know they were using a form of spam nor did they realise the consequences if detected by the search engines.
So what is search engine spamming? A simple definition would be; deliberately designing website pages that offer poor and irrelevant content, and are used to trick search engines into ranking the content highly for inappropriate search results.
People tend to use spam as a way of attracting as many visitors to their website. When caught by the search engines, this will result in a major setback to business. Websites will be blacklisted from the search engines and chances are they will not appear in the index for a very long time.
Not sure if you are spamming? Below are a few common forms of spam techniques that you should avoid.
Doorway Pages - Optimising a single webpage to perform exceptionally well in search engine ranks for a group of keyword phrases (keyword stuffing on the webpage). Once a user clicks on the link, they will be automatically redirected to a completely different website.
Invisible Text - Using text that is not visible to the human eye (having the same colour text as the background colour). The invisible text will usually contain a large number of keywords (keyword stuffing).
Link Farms - Joining community websites that provide large volumes of irrelevant links to your website.
Along with other forms of spam, these techniques should be avoided at all costs. If you are not sure whether your site uses some form of spam, then it would be best to contact a search engine optimisation specialist before it could result in your website being blacklisted.
Past clients who were using some form of spam and were not aware of it, had taken a big loss by having their website blacklisted in some search engines. The road to recovery can take very long and it is one that no one would like to follow. Be cautious!
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About The Author
David Touri is a search engine optimisation specialist working for SEO Sydney. He has worked on many projects and offers pay per click optimisation & bid management services to companies in Australia. For further information, please visit http://www.seosydney.com.au.
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August 20th, 2006
SEO Success - Step Two is Attracting Search Engine Attention
by: Chesa Keane
Once the website has been created and published, many new website owners think that the web development project is finished. But in reality, the real work is just beginning. In order to create a money-making site, traffic must be generated and driven to the website. There are several effective methods that can be implemented in Tier II of the SEO strategy to create this web traffic. While all methods may not be required to realize successful traffic generation, some combination of most, if not all, will probably be needed to create traffic, maintain traffic and finally, grow traffic to your website with long-term, lasting results. Consider implementing these strategies:
- Dynamic content is necessary for search engine recognition, and by updating the website frequently, the search engines see your website as an active, not stagnate, website. How often should changes be made? At the very least, monthly. But the more frequent the changes, the better. There are some tried and true methods you may want to employ:
- Monthly newsletter (or weekly)
- Tip of the day that rotates to the page using a script from an existing database of information at your site
- RSS feed to public news feeds that update hourly or daily at the least
- Changes to contact information, staffing, clients, etc.
- Checking the links frequently to make sure that they are active and valid, and changing the link text from time to time will register as a change to the page
- Simple modification of content from time to time should be done in between these regular maintenance tasks which will update the website
- Good links management will result in a stronger weight given by the search engines for search positioning. The algorithms used for weighting one page over another require link popularity assessment for successful traffic to your website. Link popularity is also one of the main considerations for Google and Alexa Page Rank. How do you achieve link popularity? It can be tedious and requires careful attention to the selection of the links, but there are several means that can be employed:
- Reciprocal Links - Search for relevant and desired web pages with which to trade links
- Purchase Page Rank-based links - boost your relevance and weight in the eyes of search engines by purchasing links for a period of time, three to six months until you have achieved a better ranking
- List with directories - paid or unpaid directory listing that are relevant to your website will give your website additional exposure
- Anchor text - create the links with link text in mind, utilizing relevant keywords where possible
- PageRank consideration - link only with websites that have decent PageRank (PR); i.e., PR of 3 could be a minimum but a PR of 4 would be a better minimum requirement from those pages who want to exchange links with you
- Blogs - web logs linked to your site or posting to popular blogs with your links included to point traffic back to your site; a good strategy is to employ pinging with the blog posting
- Forums - forum participation that allows you to leave your link with the intent of attracting traffic back to your site can get traffic back to your website, however, take care that you actually offer something of value in your posting so you are not accused of spamming
- Search engine listings - listing with the few free search engines and directories is an essential step, although you won’t see any results for months
- Gather opt-in email addresses - utilize an email list subscription function on your website with the intent of sending e-newsletters and announcements on a regular basis. This subscription list can be used for several other campaigns, including the sale of advertising space on your newsletter.
- Advertise on ezines - purchase sponsorship on other email lists where you can promote your product and/or services as well as links to your website in the process.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns with Google and Yahoo Search Marketing where you purchase advertising space based on keywords that are popular for your website if you are not in a saturated market. If your business operates in a saturated internet market, seek niche keywords for your PPC advertising. Determine your budget first and from there, you will know how much you can afford for the positioning you desire. It’s all mathematical:
- Price Per Click = monthly budget/number of clicks or
- Number of clicks = monthly budget/price per click
Some suitable combination of price and number of clicks based on your own budget will result in a campaign you can monitor and adjust as necessary. The important result to watch for is the conversion rate. How many paid clicks convert into the desired result; i.e., new contract, sale of product, sign up for e-newsletter, etc.
Remember that the website is only the first step. Driving traffic to your site is the next important task. Layout a plan of action and follow-through. You are not going to realize success until you spend the time and energy - or pay someone else for their time and energy - to get the job done.
(c)2005. TAO Consultants, Inc. All rights reserved.
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About The Author
Chesa Keane of TAO Consultants has been involved with the internet for 10 years through internet consulting, web development and search engine optimization. Go to www.computergoddess.com for a free Search Engine Optimization Checklist.
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August 20th, 2006
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