Search engine optimization - SEO, website traffic

Most of us would have heard of SEO companies talking highly of their efforts but there are only a few who make sense. it’s understandable that many take the bait and start paying for “top results and submission to everything”. After all, who doesn’t want their site to be highly ranked by search engines? There is no way anyone can guarantee that your site is the number one result unless they actually control the search engine results, or if the top ranking is for a word or phrase that only exists on your site, of course. If you contact someone regarding optimising your site, ask them what they will do for your site. If they suggest any kinds of shady methods, be very careful. They might get you penalised or even banned from search engine indexes.

Results do not come overnight. If you’re working on improving the search engine positioning of a client’s site, you should probably explain this to them early on. Whatever your site is about, the content needs to be unique and/or specific enough to appeal to people. More specifically, it needs to be useful to the people you want to find your site. Often, the client wants to write their own copy, which is fine if they’re good at it and keep adding new content. In my experience, that is rarely the case. If at all possible, try to make the client realise that they should hire someone to help them write, or at least get someone to help them edit what they have written.

Whatever you do, don’t use the same title text for all documents. Doing so will make it much harder for search engines, people browsing through search results, and site visitors to quickly find out what the document is about. Use search engine friendly, human readable URLs. This will help both your ranking and your users. I’ve seen incredible improvements in search engine results from just changing the URL scheme of a site. Also incidently in my experience incoming links are less important the more specific and unique your content is. Remember, Google is blind, so even if you don’t care about blind people using your site (which you should), you’ll still want it to be accessible. This means that you should use real headings, paragraphs, and lists, and avoid using anything that may interfere with search engine spiders. Some search engines use the contents of the meta description element to describe your site in their search result listings, so if possible, make its contents unique and descriptive for every document.

If there is one problem with online business then that is the trouble getting traffic to website. Sometimes we do get the traffic but then it is rather unrelated or uninterested in the website. Getting traffic online is as important as development of a good website these days. Just developing a site is really not enough anymore as there is huge competition in almost all areas of interest.

Getting targeted traffic is the key to success online but how? Unfortunately there is no definite trick to get the traffic instantly, what works for site A might not work for site B.
Below are some of common ways used by developers around the world to boost the traffic.

Write an article for your website and submit it to top article directories like Ezinearticles or Goarticles etc. Then hope some of readers might like what you have written and respond in a positive manner. Writing an article is very common among developers as it can provide long term traffic and it is also free.

Participate in a forum, join any top rated forum and routinely visit their site and submit a post or add a comment related to the article. Try to be appropriate or you might get into trouble. Many webmasters are using this medium alone to generate huge amount of traffic for free.

Last but not the least try pay per click i.e. pay for the traffic. You can get good amount of targeted traffic through this medium but you need to be persistent as building traffic can take a while. There are many contenders in this like Google Adwords , MSN Adcenter or Yahoo Ad Network.

Search engine optimization is quite an important aspect of search engine marketing. Now a day even the guy running a shop in local market has a website, to either keep in touch with friends or contact their customers and promote their products or services. 

Web site development today is less expensive and is effective form of advertising. Internet has broadened our horizons, now we can forge alliance with a guy far away from our house. 

Any website professional today should be well versed with search engine optimization or SEO techniques. 

Since search engines are going to give you maximum hits and visitors, it is important to understand their style of functioning to survive in the deeply competitive market of internet. 

In short, it is important to rank well on search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL etc. 

Here are some of tips that might help you in your efforts to get instant traffic and earn quick money. 

1. if you haven’t already purchased a domain name, first purchase a domain name of yours for your website, as it will help your website rank well on search engines.
2. Understand your business most profitable keywords and design your website marketing strategy around them.
3. Be creative, find most useful free online resources or develop your own, if you have the expertise, try to be within your website area of interest.

If applied properly these strategies alone can provide you ample traffic to turn your business profitable.

Simplest 7 ways to the Top Search Engine Optimization Rankings

1.      Keywords are vital to any website, so choose them carefully before submitting your website to search engines.

2.      Understand your business and find a niche market.

3.      Unethical but you go to view source code of your competitor to understand what your website might be lacking.

4.      Check to see if your keywords are properly positioned at important places like title of your site, heading etc.

5.      Do not stuff your page with keywords as this will hurt your search engine ranking.

6.      Avoid search engine spamming. Search engines are now taking spamming very seriously and you might get banned, if you don’t pay attention to this.

7.      Hire a professional SEO, optimizing website can be daunting task and can take lot of time. If you relies on internet sales then consider hiring someone for the job.

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SEO Template

Domain Name

Your domain name should be about your product, not about you. It should say “www.widgets.whatever”, not “www.the-great-us.whatever”.
Where you make blue widgets and your keyword research has established that people are indeed searching in quantity for the term blue widgets, then your domain name should be “www.blue-widgets.whatever”. Use of the hyphen is deliberate. Engines see hyphens as a separator between words. Don’t forget, the human eye can seewordsjoineduptogether as being words joined up together. An engine can’t do that. We can’t have spaces in domain names though (a technical thing) so the obvious compromise is to separate the words in the domain name by a hyphen. Not by a dot (.) or by an underscore (_), but by a hyphen (-).

File Name

Again, blue-widgets.htm or .html, .php or .asp, (or whatever according to format) for preference.

Title Tag

Your subject or service should be first, your company name second, if at all. Remember, if you’re Joe Blow and you make widgets, the public will be searching for widgets, not Joe Blow. They never heard of you to look for you, right? So the layout is as follows; “Blue Widgets from Joe Blow Services, the Best of the Blue Widget Makers.”

Description Meta Tag

Same rules; product first, your name second. So it’s “Blue Widgets Customised to Your Specification, from Joe Blow, Home of the Quality Widget. Also, it needs to be long enough for Google to be able to fashion a decent-sized snippet from it. If it’s too short, only a few words long, Google will look elsewhere on the page to source its snippet. This means you relinquish some control over what appears there.

Keywords Meta Tag

Blue,Widgets,Quality,Specifications” etc. Whatever you do, don’t be tempted to shovel in every possible related word you can think of, I’ve seen sites that have lines and lines of these, the same ones on every page. A few pertinent ones on every page please, with variations according to the content of the specific page. Separate them either by commas or by spaces, not by both. It used to be said that you only need to include any one keyword once as the engines would parse them into any possible phrases. Lately there are suggestions that Yahoo wants to see comma-separated phrases. perhaps it would be as well to include just that.

Head

Javascripts and CSS styles usually go in here. They need to be externalised into an external file and referenced accordingly. I used not to bother with either a doc type or a charset but I include both religiously now as validation lately receives wider acceptance as important.

Header Tag

There’s several Header Tags, varying from Most Important (H1) to Least Important (H6). Your keyword or key phrase need to be the first words in the first Header Tag, which should be an H1 tag. The tags should be used in order of descending importance, i.e., your first tag should be the H1 tag and each following tag should be in series, use next a single H2 tag or a series of H2 tags. Don’t start with an H3 tag, then use an H1 tag etc. This will just confuse the engines about the relative importance of your site’s content.

First Paragraph

First words in the first paragraph are your key phrase.

Bold

They’re in “bold”. Or “strong”.

Text Content

Sprinkled liberally throughout your page is your key phrase. If it feels right, then it is. If it feels right and it’s only mentioned twice in a 10,000 word document, and it feels right, then it is right. It’s the document that’s wrong. You’ve written a document that, let’s face it, can’t include your key phrase to any great extent because your document isn’t actually about the subject, is it? You may have started out with the right intentions, but you seem to have got lost along the way. I’ve done it - no reason why you shouldn’t either. Perhaps you can take this page, run a keyword analyser over it and find out what it’s actually about then you can use it as a related page in your site. Remember, you’ll always need more content. Home, asleep in bed, you’ll always need more content.
To sum up, if it’s mentioned ten times in a document that’s one thousand words long, and it feels right, then it is.

Graphic Content

Keep your graphic file names brief and inclusive of a keyword. Alt tags for ordinary graphics are lately being considered relevant again for seo purposes so it’s best to include a keyword.

Internal Graphic Links

Remember that in a graphic used as a link the alt text counts for seo purposes just as normal anchor text does in a text link. Alt=”widget site - large blue widget” would be preferable to alt=”here is a picture of me and Sharon at the beach on holiday in Blackpool last year and if you look closely, you can see I’m holding a widget”.

Internal Text Links

Use keywords in the anchor text throughout. Don’t link to “home” link to “blue widgets home”. Who searches for “home”?
Don’t link to “seminars”, link to “blue widget seminars”. Who searches for “seminars”? Include your keywords in your links. Take this important opportunity to remind the engines what your site is about.

Headers/Footers

Notice the layout of the pages here? I use the same sets of links in the header and the footer. This gets them all in twice (at time of writing - the site expands almost daily so I’ll have to re-think soon) and it’s perfectly legitimate.

Tables

If you’re going to use the traditional table layout, remember to build your table so that the actual main content appears to the engines before the list of links to the left does. Search Engines will expect important information to appear first. This won’t be so important if all your links include related keywords as I advise above, but it’s still worth bearing in mind.

Deciding a correct, proper and related keyword for your web site is key and most important as far as SEO (search engine optimization) is concerned. Selecting proper keywords is the base of the search engine optimization campaign. In other words it is the foundation of the search engine optimization campaign. At this stage, think many times and look around in the top search engines and/or use keyword selection tools to create a list of related keywords not only for your home page but every single page of your website.

During Selection of Keywords, make sure of following considerations:

First of all, select domain name which reflects the theme of your web site (if it is possible), however, if it is not applicable to get the related domain name then consider another, because it is not very important because most of search engines don’t give weight to the URLs.

Select keyword which are specifically related to your product or services you are going to offer. If you are using keywords in phrases then these must be meaningful short sentences, otherwise, yes your site will appear in top positions but there will be no use if no one is using that unnatural keyword phrase on the net. That means the keyword should be selected as per your product and services in meaningful short phrases.

If it is applicable, regionalize your search engine optimization key words, because targeting on regionalized market will result more useful and targeted traffic with lower competition, in fact there will be more sales. For example, if you are selling product or service in Las Vegas, Nevada, then add Las Vegas or Nevada in your selected key phrases.

Select relatively less competitive keywords which will increase the probabilities of appearance of your site in top rankings.

After these considerations, you will find a good comprehensive list of keywords; now you can professionally and effectively optimize your entire site for all of your selected search engine optimization keywords, if you have series of landing pages with various services and products.

Another term which has very significant role in search engine optimization is Anchor Text; it has importance within inbound links. Inbound links from websites provides your site two benefits. The first and obvious is that these links can help your company by sending potential customers to your website. The second benefit is that Google and the other major search engines will see these links as votes of confidence therefore giving your website a boost in its rankings. When developing inbound links it is important to take advantage of keywords that your site might be targeting.

In the First paragraph I mentioned that you need keywords not only for your home page but for your other pages as well, it has paramount importance that your search engine optimizationo efforts should never stop after your home page is completed, your entire site should be professionally optimized for maximum results.

At the last but not least, do not make mistake in selecting higher competitive keywords, this will lead your website dropping in deep pages of search engine results.

Recent drops in PageRanks of various websites, another waves of discussion was started and the owners of websites who lost their ranks on Google were stunned initialy but when they recovered from the shock, they pointed their fingers to the SEO (Search engine optimization) guys. Anyhow, after these shock question was raised that; Is There Still Any Importance of Incoming Links for Google?. In answering this question we found rumours again. So, I myself as new SEO (Search engine optimization) student, tried to find answers and I found following notes from google.

(Following comments are copied from google’s page http://www.google.com/technology/index.html and printed here only for your information)

Google Still Says:

“PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Integrity

Google’s complex automated methods make human tampering with our search results extremely difficult. And though we may run relevant ads above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a particular or higher placement). A Google search provides an easy and effective way to find high-quality websites that contain information relevant to your search.”

From above paragraphs it is clear that the inbound links from related and important pages are most valuable as far as page rank is concerned. Also from these word we have have found answer of another rumour that google is not going to sell placement with in results.

At this point, most businesses have realized that Search Engine Optimization (or SEO as it’s most commonly referred to) is a crucial part of any business. However, many people are still unclear as to what it really is and why it’s so important. If you miss the mark, it could cost you and your company valuable time and a great deal of money without yielding the kind of results you expect.

What Is SEO and Why Is It Important?

SEO is the process of optimizing your website so that it is rich in relevant content and search engine friendly. In other words, when you optimize a site, you are doing two things: you are going through a process that will help search engines rank your web site favorably for relevant keywords so that possible clients can find you and potentially purchase your goods and services. This process includes a number of steps, everything from content to code layout to inbound links. They all have an effect on your optimization and page rank. But there is a second thing to keep in mind while optimizing for search engines: you want to optimize for visitors too! Your content has to be relevant to your keywords and topic at hand, AND it must also be informative and serve its purpose- which in most cases is to get your visitor interested in you! If your site is not user friendly, your good ranks with Google will only increase your traffic, but not your business.

A poorly optimized website runs a number of risks. If you’re not optimized at all, you may show up on page five hundred of any given search, and let me tell you, that will do you no good. If you do not have clean source code and informative content, you may not be indexed at all! If search engine bots and spiders are unable to crawl your page, they are unable to index it; therefore you will not rank at all. Another risk is if you do in fact seek a company to optimize your site but you don’t do your homework. Search Engine Optimization is just like any other business where you have to seek out experienced professionals with proven success. Believe it or not there are some people out there still using unethical search engine optimization methods. You want to seek a company who has years of experience and many happy clients to back up their work.

It’s All About Location!

When you are first opening a business, a primary concern is the location of your establishment. For example, if you were opening a business in New York, and let’s say you do lawn mower repairs, you wouldn’t want to open up in the heart of New York City would you? There’d be very little business! You’d be better off on Long Island or upstate New York where people have yards. But if you were a professional interior designer, you’d want to be in Manhattan or out in the Hamptons.

So how can location matter on the internet? Oh, trust me it matters! The first thing you do when you are looking for any given service, product, or information is usually to jump onto the internet and type a few keywords into your search engine of choice. The search will yield thousands and sometimes millions of results! How long do you poke around before you enter a new set of keywords or settle for something you’ve already found? Probably not very long. If someone typed in your chosen keywords but you ranked on page 7 instead of 1 or 2, there is a very low chance they will find their way to your page.

This is exactly why page rank is so incredibly important. Your rank is in direct correlation to the amount of exposure your website gets and the number of people that will visit your site. If one in every four visitors spends money with your company and you are ranking well and receiving a great deal of traffic, then it’s safe to say you’ll see an increase in business! But if you’re site is not ranked well, and you have low web traffic, very few people will be finding their way to your site to purchase your goods and services.

Overall, finding an excellent search engine optimization company is crucial to any internet business. If you’re not ranked well on search engines, then why even bother?

Internet article marketing, often referred to as bum marketing, is a method that is used by nearly every internet marketing guru I have learned from.  Online article marketing is not only extremely effective at helping increase traffic and conversions for your sites, but it is ideal for the beginner because it can be done with practically no investment of marketing dollars.  The fact that you are reading this search engine optimization article right now is almost proof enough in itself that internet article marketing works.

Why write internet articles?

1) Real Traffic - When visitors click through links that appear at the end of your search engine optimization articles it is generally an ideal visitor because they have qualified themselves by reading to the bottom of your copy and are already primed for making a purchase.

2) Search Engines - Search engines are the largest source of potential traffic for your web business.  While search engine optimization consists of many variables, most important is the number and quality of links coming into your webpages from outside websites.

3) Credibility – When you write articles there is an extra benefit of having your name appear in the about the author section.  Chances are if someone is reading your article they know less about the topic than you do, making you an instant expert.

So who writes all the articles?

1) You and Your Team - Creating articles yourself is the best way to go in my book, and even better yet if you have partners or employees to who write as well.  You are thinking, “Who has time to write search engine optimization articles?”  As you read on you will realize that you do.

2) Outsourced Labor - I suggest using guru.com or needanarticle.net to hire writers, cost is usually $5-$10 per search engine optimization article.  The quality of search engine optimization article is likely not as high, but to get explosive traffic you need help.

3) User Generated Content -  Very know the tricks you are learning right now, so you can actually get people to allow you to distribute the content they wrote for their blog.  Just offer to send a link to their site as well as yours and it is a win/win.

So how do you write the articles?

1) Speed - Never spend more than a half an hour writing an article and if you really want to explode traffic you will write four articles an hour.  I am going to get this one done in 20 minutes, it may not be perfect, but I do not think that you or anyone else will mind.

2) Cheat - For my first article I wasted 45 minutes on research before I typed the first word.  Now I just pick an article I like, rewrite it in my own words, throw in a few ideas as I type and add one stat or quote if needed.

3) Help - As you can afford to get other people to do to improve your articles so you do not need to worry about the details.  For $8 an hour you can get someone to edit, load your articles with keywords and submit the articles to sites such as this.

What are the specs of the articles?

1) Length - Make your articles 400-800 words long.  If you go over it does not really matter too much, but don’t go too long as it does not help with search engines and it is a waste of time.

2) Titles – You only get one chance to grab their attention, so try to make it straight and to the point.  Not too clever, always make sure that they can see the benefit of reading your article by reading the title.

3) About the Author – It is usually 50 words long and can have up to 4 outbound links.  You will not want to use the same about the author every time as you want to appear the expert for the topic of the article and vary the links depending on the content.

How do I optimize for search engines?

1) Research - First thing you will need to is select which keywords you want your article to appear in search engines for.  Most article sites will let you enter a bunch of keywords when uploading, but you will want to focus on 2 or 3 good terms for the body of your article.

2) Title -  Titles are also crucial for search engine optimization purposes.  Articles sites use the title of the article as the title of the webpage (the text at the very top of your browser).  Your title should have your keyword first to you improve your chances of showing up in search results for that term.

3) Density – D onot spend too much time on this, but optimal keyword density can increase exposure for your selected keywords.  If you use your desired keyword too much or too little you will not hit the top page.  Shoot for 8% density on your top terms.

What else do I need to know?

1) Automation - You would need to be insane to submit your search engine optimization articles manually to all the article sites.  There are a ton of programs that will submit to over 500+ article websites with the click of a button.  You will need to get outsourced help to register with all the sites, but that is cheap.

2) Anchor Text - What this refers to is the actual words of text that link to your site.  You want to use keywords whenever possible as this gives search engines the idea that your site is important for that search engine optimization term.  This only works for some sites as some do not allow HTML.

3) Duplicate Content - Search engines supposedly pay less attention to content they see repeated over and over online.  From what I have seen you do not really need to worry about this too much.  When you have the budget just hire more people to rewrite different versions for search engine optimization.