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.

Rick Jorgenson, CEO and found of Mass Traffic Network, will be gifting the internet marketers with a free webinar on December 19th from 7:00 to 8:15 PM EST. Webinar will focus on secrets to increase website traffic.

Having worked for many Fortune 500 companies, Jorgenson will apply his nearly 10 years experience in mass traffic generation towards helping affiliates earn huge incentives.

Webinar will uncover the hidden secrets to search engine success and website traffic.
Although it will be free, it is required to register, as there are limited numbers of telephone lines. Being very popular, it is likely to get filled up pretty quickly.

In order to get register and to know more about the webinar, visit the mtn website.

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.

Worldwide web is place where every body feels like “Oh, It’s easy, I can do it. I can create a website.”.

 Yes you can create a website, but is that all you need.

There is over a billion website and number is as huge as population of the world today.

Any body who wants to establish here, like any other field, needs to workout his goals like :

• What kind of website do you want to create?
• Who you think will like your work?
• Is there space for one more website?
• How will you market?
• How many visitors you need to break even?
• and most important! what is the moto of your website?

Only after you get answers to these question, you should move forward towards development and marketing of website.

I was cruising around today looking for ways to help you and me get more traffic to our blogs. I ran across Seth Godin’s blog. He has posted 54 ways to get traffic to your blog. Seth Godin is a master, I know, but it seems his list contradicts itself every other number. For example he says don’t blog about your kids, then a couple items down the list he says blog about your kid.

Makes me wonder, again, if it really comes down to just blogging about whatever makes you feel good. I think there is a huge amount of Law of Attraction in blogging. The other day I posted about Weaning a high needs toddler, it’s something I’m currently dealing with, and didn’t know where I should even begin. Later that very same day I searched over at mothering.com and instead of searching that site it searched google. There was my post, #2. I didn’t look for good keywords, or do any of the other technical stuff I usually do, and there it was within a couple hours, top of Google.

I’m not saying not to do all the keyword searching, and making sure you are relevant, but what Seth’s post told me, is it’s kind of a crap shoot. Do this, don’t do this, it all works if you work it.

I don’t know if that’s right, but it’s what it said to me. What do you think? I’d love to hear what you think of Seth Godin’s list of how to get more traffic.

This post is taken from blog by jackie lee

It is a mildly risky but potentially brilliant counterstrike against Facebook’s rising popularity.  Myspace will announce shortly that they are joining the Open Social movement spearheaded by Google and which is now officially a social juggernaut of global proportions.    TechCrunch seems to have the latest on this breaking story.

If Facebook was worth 15 billion yesterday I’d suggest it just dropped by more than 50% in value.   Why?   Without Myspace’s hundreds of millions of users Open Social looked like it would be a third player in the field, struggling to catch up with the user bases of Myspace and Facebook and keep up with Facebook development.   But  not any more.  With Myspace, Open Social instantly becomes the key social network, dwarfing Facebook by any reasonable measure of prominence.   Can new Facebook partner Microsoft help sway onliners and developers to stick with Facebook’s “partly open” architecture instead of defecting to what appears to be a very open Google architecture?   No way.

The Amazon Kindle has received a lot of publicity since its release but a few days ago. This e-reader most certainly is the best we have seen thus far, however, it is nowhere near what I would like to see. I don’t want to go into too much detail as this item has been covered by a number of articles and blogs: 

http://www.amazon.com/, 

http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/11/amazon-kindle-meet-amazons-e-book-reader/ 

http://www.michaelhyatt.com/fromwhereisit/2007/11/kindle-first-im.html

And many others. Anyway, a few things I have noticed that I don’t like are that i have to pay for blogs! (unless i just surf to them using Kindle’s online functionality).

I also don’t like having to pay 10c to have information sent from my computer, converted to Amazon’s proprietary file type, and emailed to my Kindle, all of which is a pain in the ass itself. I also cannot transfer file from the Kindle to my computer. according to Amazon’s website, the 10c fee is only for sending emails from your personal computer to your Kindle, but not for converting files to work on the kindle.

By this understanding, I can have Amazon convert my files to “Kindle” and emailed back to my computer at no charge, and then i can hardwire transfer the file to my kindle using USB. to continue this train of thought, i would technically be able to get digital text files from wherever (lets use Google digital scans of entire Libraries) send them to Amazon to be converted and emailed back to my computer, then hardwired to my Kindle….all at no charge!It may be badly worded on the Amazon website, in which case my theory will be worth nothing, but in the profound confidence I have in my understanding of the english language, the above would be true.

Not a bad way to go if you want loads of free reading material in a 10 oz Package, as ugly a package as it might be.A quick corollary, for the next revision of Amazon’s Kindle, i think they should work with Apple’s design department, at least make this machine look decent!That’s it, I’m done! 

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.

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.