By now, you probably already have the theme of your website established, your keywords picked and your website ready to go live. You're thinking that you'll submit your site to the search engines, sit back and see how much traffic the search engines will send you, right?

STOP! There are many different avenues you can take to drive traffic to your site but they should only be taken after you make the search engines your first priority. The search engines should be your foundation. They'll always send you a certain amount of traffic if you have a high page rank.

IMPORTANT!

Your website must be 'set up' for a high page rank in the search engines and it's important to do it 'before' you submit your site for the first time. Here's the reason why:

Usually, after you submit your website to the search engines for the first time, your website will be 'spidered' fairly quickly and hopefully your site will be listed on one of the top pages.

Your website may not get 'spidered' again for months so if you make changes to optimize your site, you may not see your changes take effect for quite a while. You could be stuck on a back page, if any page at all, for a very long time.

Without getting into the mechanics of designing your website, here are the basics of setting up your website to be search engine friendly.

THE FIRST STEP is to establish the main keyword for your site. This is the word or phrase that you want people to type into the search engines to find your website. It's important to have your site focused around your main keyword.

Let's say you have a site dedicated to 'building your own home' so we'll use 'home building' as our main keyword example.

THE NEXT STEP is to create a title for your website and to place it in the 'title tag' of your site. The 'title tag' should be the first tag in the 'head' of your site and it's important because many search engines use the contents of the 'title tag' as the title of the listing. They also look for keywords in the title and your main keyword should be the first words in the title.

Generally, your title should be no more than 40 characters and, again, it should begin with your main keyword. Try to avoid using 'stop words' in your title. Stop words are transition words such as - and, but, or, for, with, etc.

Here's a possible title using our example main keyword 'home building' - Home Building - Home Construction Plans

Notice our main keyword is first, the title is less than 40 characters (39), there are no stop words and we managed to sneak in 3 secondary keywords - home construction, construction plans and home construction plans. Clever huh?

THE NEXT STEP is to create a 'keywords meta tag'. This is where you list all the keywords you want to use for your website starting with your 'main keyword'. A good rule of thumb is to use about 20 keywords and your main keyword should be contained in about half of them.

Using our example keyword 'home building' our keywords could be - home building, home construction, home building plans, home building cost, construction plans, etc.

Notice I didn't use our main keyword 'home building' twice in a row. For example - home building, home building plans, etc. Search engines might see this as spam and it could hurt your ranking.

THE NEXT STEP is to create a 'description meta tag'. This is where you describe your website and, again, you should start with your main keyword.

Keep your description to about 150 characters, use as few 'stop words' as you can and sprinkle in as many secondary keywords as possible.
Make your description interesting because search engines often use the contents in your 'description meta tag' as the description of your website in the listing.

THE NEXT STEP is to use your keywords often in the body of your website. Make sure your 'main keyword' is somewhere in the beginning and at the end of the body of your page.

It's a good idea to use your main keyword in an 'h1' tag and a few of your secondary keywords in an 'h2' tag. This tells the search engines that you put importance on your keywords.

It's also a good idea to underline your main keyword no more than once and to use bold text for your main keyword no more than once.

Although there are other factors that determine your position in the search engines, having the basics of what search engines look for will give you a much better chance of making that illusive first page and driving consistent website traffic to your site.

By: Mike Burke

Author Bio
Mike Burke is the author of numerous articles and has an affection for website marketing. Learn how to drive tons of targeted traffic to your site without spending a dime on advertising. Visit us at http://www.starttheprofits.com

Labels: keywords, meta tags, seo, title tags

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It may not be the most relevant blog post surrounding search engine optimization, but it just happens that today, July 25th is the birthday of Co-Founder of Optimize4engines, Courtney Simmonds. Happy birthday! Hope you like the books I got you!

Labels: birthday, courtney

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Search Engine Optimization is turning into a Culture whether we like it or not.

It just baffles me that people are still unaware of Search Engine Optimization, which frankly is a drag! There is one major reason why people are unaware (or stubbornly ignore it) is because they do not buy things they do not understand.

For marketing folks, SEO is a term difficult to understand. They would rather put all their money into Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns. In a nutshell, SEM and PPC are easy to understand thereby easy to buy.

But wait!

Search Engine Optimization isn't that difficult to understand. Actually, once you get the hang of it, it will slowly consume you. I mean this in the most positive way.

Search Engine Optimization offers the following benefits:

1. Your website will get immense exposure

2. SEO's effectiveness in marketing is easily substantiated with facts (i.e numbers)

3. Since the web is a dynamic environment, everyone has the chance to rank as number one.

If you are constantly updated with the trend of SEO, there is possibility of ranking as top and gaining immense traffic and ROI is just around the corner.

Search Engine Optimization requires hard work. How much effort you put in learning this marketing tool, will allow you to see the fruits of your labor.

By Maria Paula Tolentino

About the Author
Maria Paula Tolentino is an SEO consultant for NetBooster Asia and has been doing Search Engine Optimization for the past 2 years. Her expertise lie in technical writing, web content, SEO, SEM and SMO

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Maria_Paula_Tolentino

Labels: ppc, search engine optimization, sem, seo, traffic

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Getting your website listed in Search Engines (SE) can sometime be a monumental task in itself, here are my top ten tips to get you started.

1. Page Title
Forget using 'Welcome to my website' as your page title, if you really want to attract target media specify your keywords and list your product keywords separated by an | (hold Shift + backslash key) symbol (eg: Digital Cameras | Video Cameras) will boost the strength of your chosen keywords, in this case Digital and Video Cameras.

2. Page File names
Still naming your page file names as products.htm or aboutus.php, why not add some weight to your website and help the SE distinguish from the multitude of pages with generic names and again utilize your keywords into your file names (eg: paper_back_novels.htm) for a Book selling site with this link to the list of Paper Back Novels.

3. ALT Tags
Again keywords play a huge part in the design of your site and another area to include these words is in your image 'ALT" tags.

4. Header Tags
Getting back to your Page Title, there is no point in making the heading text "Welcome to my Website" especially if you are selling Garden Tools. Using , and tags to emphasize your Products and Services in order of importance is a good idea.

5. Bold Text
Got something to say? Say it in Bold Text. This tells the SE that this text is important and relates strongly to your content and keywords, and should be taken notice of.

6. Keywords
Some say they aren't that important anymore to getting results in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages) but using them correctly can add to your sites overall effectiveness. Concentrate on 3 - 4 keyword phrases (eg: "custom website design" or "web site design" for web site designers) and make sure they are used in the first and last paragraphs of your home page content.

7. Google Toolbar
Not only a search tool, the Google Toolbar displays each sites Page Rank according to Google and it's link popularity and web presence.

8. Alexa Toolbar
Download the Alexa Toolbar from Amazon and sign up to their affiliate program, the toolbar is an essential tool in gauging the popularity and hit results of how your website ranks.

9. RSS Feeds
Want to increase traffic? Well consider starting an RSS Feed on your website with important news items relating to your business and your chosen profession then link these to your articles.

10. Article Writing
Article writing is another way to cross promote your site with helpful information for others and with links back to your site.

In conclusion
There are many facets to Search Engine Optimization of websites and these 10 tips are merely just a few and a good starting points to get your website promoted in the world wide web.

By: Craig Bucknall

Author Bio
Craig Bucknall is the owner and Managing Director of the Sydney based Website Design studio Bullie Graphics. You can view his website at www.bulliegraphics.com.au.

Labels: articles, back links, keywords, seo, tips

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If you have a website you really need to have a robots.txt file. It gives search engine spiders specific commands and it is easy to use and easy to maintain. Here is an easy guide to a robots.txt file in five minutes.

There are times when you don’t want a search engine to index a page or a folder on your website. Maybe you have some information you just don’t want to have show up in google. This may include your statistics page, a page of notes, or a dynamic page. And, importantly, if you use google adsense and the search tool that displays search results on your website google mandates you exclude this page from search engines. Which means they mandate you having a robots.txt file.

A robots.txt file is a simple document named robots.txt and saved in the root folder of your website. Search engines see this and follow any commands it contains. Create a simple text document using any word processor program like notepad and put these two lines it:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

The first line tells all spiders to listen up because the following command is for you. The second line means do not index any of the following pages. And it is here you put the url of any pages you don’t want spidered. So if you wanted the spiders to skip your private page it looks like this:

Disallow:/privatepage.htm

If you want the spiders to skip a whole folder you put the url of that folder with a slash like this:

Disallow:/privatefolder/

Simply place this text file in the root folder of your website and you are done. In the future you can add and remove commands easily.

The robots.txt file is a very easy file to write and maintain and it is a very powerful tool that will help you interact successfully with search engines. This disallow command is the simplest and most used command but there are also many other commands you can use and if you have a website it is well worth your time to have a robots.txt file and even to research it a bit further.

by: Will Kalif

For more interesting insights into being a creative webmaster and making your website work for you visit the authors site at: The Creative Webmaster – Forging the Iron of Creativity on the Anvil of a Website

Labels: index, robots.txt, search engines, seo

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When it comes to search engine optimization, the single most important sentence that you will write for your website is the title tag of your main page. If you write it properly then you will have taken a big step towards getting your site well placed in search engine queries for your important keywords.

Before I give you a step-by-step guide to writing title tags, let's define what they actually are and see why they are important. When you look at a web page in your browser, the writing in the blue strip above browser's commands (file, edit, view, etc.) is the title tag. On your actual html document the title tag is in the head portion between the notation <title> and </title>.

The title tag is important because it "tells" the search engine what the page is about, and in the case of your main page, what your website is all about. I remember back in my school days that we used to take standardized examinations in which we had to read a story and then answer the question: "What would be the best title for this essay?" Choosing a title tag is something like answering this kind of question. You've got to pick out the gist of your enterprise and highlight it in a sentence. So, take a look at your web page and get ready to begin, following these steps:

1. Make sure your three or four most important keywords or keyword phrases appear in the title tag. The most important words should appear near the beginning of the sentence, and they can be repeated within the sentence for added emphasis. For example, if I am offering low-cost web design, then my title tag might look like this: <title>Web Design: Affordable, Low Cost Web Design from the Acme Web Design Company</title>

2. Leave your branding and sales pitch for another part of the web page. Although it is a natural tendency to want to put your company name at the beginning of the title tag, you should remember that unless you are very famous like Coca Cola, people are not searching for you. So, put your most important keywords at the front of the title tag, and establish your brand name with your logo and other elements of the web page. If your company name includes your keywords, like our hypothetical Acme Web Design Company, then put it in the title tag, but not necessarily at the beginning.

Similarly, the title tag is no place for your sales pitch, so keep out flowery or extraneous adjectives, unless they are actual terms used in searches for your product or service.

3. Place your geographical or niche-defining term in your title tag. If you are trying for a top ten or top twenty position for a term such as "web design," then you are really in for a difficult struggle. However, suppose the Acme Web Design Company is located in Columbus, Ohio. Then instead of attempting the almost impossible task of getting the top rankings for the term "web design," it would be far better to get a high ranking in the geographical niche using a title tag such "Web Design, Columbus, Ohio: Low Cost Web Design in Columbus, Ohio by The Acme Web Design Company"

4. The title tag can be longer than you think. Some guidelines say that the title tag should be no longer than 70 characters. It is true that only the first 70 characters will show in the top bar of the browser, but search engine robots will read the rest of the tag and the search engines will not penalize you for going over the 70 character mark. Take a look at highly ranked sites in heavily competitive categories and you will see examples of long title tags. Write the tag according to your need to get your important words and phrases included in a sentence that best describes what your product or service is about.

5. Vary the title tags on the inner pages of your website. Even with a long title tag, it is not possible to highlight all the possible terms which someone might use to find your website. This is not a problem if you make use of the other pages of your website. Instead of simply having a title tag that says "services" our web design firm could highlight "low cost, web design services" on that page. The "contact" page could be used to emphasize the geographical location once again, and so on. Many websites make the mistake of repeating the same title tag on each of the inner pages of the site. Avoid this and use each of your page's titles to target important keywords and keyword phrases.

So, take a look at your web site's title tags, and see if you can improve them. The effort that you make will be well rewarded.


By: Donald Nelson

Author Bio
Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He has been working on the Internet since 1995, and is currently the director of A1-Optimization (http://www.a1-optimization.com), a firm providing low cost search engine optimization, submission and web promotion services.

Labels: keywords, search engine optimization, seo, title tags

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When you begin the task of acquiring quality and relevant backlinks to your website there are many factors that can increase or decrease your search engine rankings. This article outlines the difference between good and bad backlinks.

A quality backlink pointing to your site should be in the same category and relevant in content to your website. The page where your link is located should be indexed by Google and the page should also have a Google page rank. The webpage where your link is located should also contain no more than 30 other out-going links to other websites. Link pages with more than 30 out-going links are less relevant to the search engines. Having your link posted on this type of webpage can affect your search engine rankings in a negative way. Other excellent techniques of acquiring backlinks are directory submissions, posting articles, blogs and forums.

For directory submissions select the proper directory category and take a look at how many other websites are contained in the category where your link would be posted, if you can manage to get on the first or second page of the listings, this is a quality backlink. Also look at the Google page rank of the landing page for your link. If the page has a Google page rank this is also a quality backlink.

Stay within your category, relevant content is very important to the search engines. Write an article preferably relevant in content to your website and submit the article to high quality article directories. Blogs are an excellent way to get quality one-way backlinks, Blog sites also receive tons of traffic, which in turn give your site more exposure. Posting your link on forum pages is also an efficient method of aquiring backlinks instantly.

Backlinks to avoid would be a zero page ranked webpage, especially if the home page has a zero page rank. Links posted within framed webpages which will also steal your traffic. Especially avoid link farms, webpages which contain more than 100 unrelated outgoing links, This type of link page is frowned upon by many major search engines. Avoid Webpages with mirror sites containing the exact same content with a different URL, also pages that utilize redirects and URL cloaking. Never post your link on a webpage that contains a "no follow" or "no index" robots meta tag within the source code. Dynamic websites with question marks in the URL should be avoided because they are not always indexed by the search engines.

Avoid posting your link on a page that opens very slow or contains mostly ads and flash banners. Try not to acquire or purchase great numbers of backlinks in a short period of time, backlinks should be accumulated gradually. Also avoid webpages and directories that list their results in alphabetical order, as their database increases your link could be moved to a less relevant page with less pagerank. Quality backlinks are one of the most important factors involved in the process of achieving high search engine ranking.

By: James Day

Author Bio
Article written by the CEO of www.submit-site.org

Labels: back links, link building, search engine optimization, seo

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Word of the mouth might not be enough if an effective networking has to be achieved. This is done with an active assistance of networking tools such as social book marking, video and photo sharing websites and an engagement with blogs which share the content through the use of RSS in the blogosphere. Other special blog engines which perform in the same way like Technorati are especially popular with the younger lot. Techniques like these help in building new opportunities for the marketers and for even those who are new entrants in this field. Social media optimization is basically, a set of methods for generating publicity through the social media, online communities and community websites. The method is similar to search engine marketing differing though, in a number of ways from it. Actually, the focus is on driving traffic from other sources apart from the search engines whereby improved search engine ranking is emphasized.

For those with skepticism towards the latest optimization technique, Rand has something to suggest. He says that awareness should be there because in its absence, one can get a double listing by the competitor. This is made possible by some advanced planning on the competitor’s part to do some ‘virtual drafting’ and thus appear directly behind you. Social media optimization however, has its positive aspects as well. Like Rohit Bharghava, the man behind the coinage of term, explains it in yet simpler way and suggests the implementation of changes to optimize a site. In this way, it is easily linked to more highly visible sites in social media searches on custom search engines such as Technorati. Besides, these changes are introduced frequently in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs. Social media optimization assists in building search engine friendly sites resulting in generation of large traffic. Bookmarking a website is yet another feature that helps in the increased visibility of a webpage.

Social media sites on most of the occasions operate as a magnifying glass, in that they help in tapping into many other links. These links usually flow back helping with the search engine rankings on an increased scale though. Cameron Olthius’ introduction to Social media optimization provides further insight. It is a common knowledge that in SEO method, a single website is present with a common domain rather than its division among various places. An added advantage of having the multiple sites is understood by the SEO whereby a corporate blog and a corporate website double the representation in top search results. Limitations are however, there because of the traffic directed towards your own places. With SMO, one can own multiple sites while they being still valuable to you.

Social media optimization utilizes several methods by which one can advertise their products in an appealing way. Communication is a prominent factor here and besides that, interesting web content still decides the viability of a site. Opinions are expressed freely and other people come to know about your services and products. Here, target audience has to be identified which in turn, facilitates in marketing the services and products offered by the companies. SMO has made the communication between the common people a lot simpler and thus made your business touch the heights you always dream of.

About the author
Steve Waganer has specialization in web marketing. He is expert in Search engine optimization and Social media optimization. To get the SEM tips from SEO firm for your website to get high rank and top position in major search engines visit www.cometsearchenginemarketing.com

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Page ranks are defined numerically, from 1 through 10 - 10, being the highest. Very few pages have a page rank of 10, and anything above a 6 is considered very good. There are many factors that determine a page's rank, but the main variable seems to be based on how many websites link to your page. The higher page ranked sites that link to your site, the better. In other words, 10 links to your page from high ranking sites like CNN.com, Yahoo.com, etc, will easily outweigh five times that amount of links from unknown sites with low page ranks. And, just to make it trickier, the amount of "credit" your site gets from incoming links, is also divided by the amount of sites you link OUT to.

Equally important, is your site's actual content. It needs to be information that people can use and take active interest in. Having content that matches your keywords should also go without saying.

Why Is This Important?

Page rank is extremely important, in that it determines how high you get on search engine results. And just as it's helpful to have your incoming links be from reputable, trusted, relevant sites, your outbound links will also be more valuable to those pages you do link out to. This is important when negotiating for link exchanges with other sites. The higher your page ranking, the more desirable a link from your page will be to others - Including those willing to pay for said link.

Are There Ways To Generate Better Page Rank At No Cost?

Absolutely! To follow are some of the simplest steps you can take.

Build more pages: The more pages your site has, the more content it is generally considered to have. If your site only has 3 pages, the maximum page rank would be a 3. Make sure to have at least 8 relevant pages including the main page, in order to have a healthy amount of content.

Avoid Dead-end Links: Let's say you've worked real hard to get 8 good pages. Your page rank ideally has the potential to be a page rank of 8. However, if half those pages are not leading anywhere, you've got a problem. When the search engines "crawl" your site, they want to go from one page to the next. You can have a really great page, but if it has no other link on it to go somewhere new, it will be considered by the spider to be a dead-end page, which will hurt your site's page rank. Make sure every page has a door out, other than a back button (which to the bots, will generate the equivalent of a good old "Nothing more to see here" type statement). Combat this by making sure you at least have a link back to the index - or better yet, a site navigator at the base of each page with choices between the main pages of your site (ie. FAQ, About Us, Contact Us, etc). Again, these are pages that add convenience to your human visitors as well.

Create Internal Links: Remember to make links to yourself whenever relevant. For example, on your About Us page, don't just mention your online ordering system - hyperlink to the page where your visitor would need to go in order to begin an order. Not only are you creating another link for the crawler, you're also making it convenient for your guest to find that page right then and there, if they so desire.

Utilize Free Directory Listings: They may not always be big high ranking sites, but they are an easy way to get your name out there. You never know when someone might end up using one, and thus find you in the most unexpected of ways!

How To Generate More At Cost: Getting a high ranking site to link to you isn't always the easiest thing to do. Sometimes it is necessary to buy that privilege via ads. There are literally 100's of different options to choose from, however the most effective method these days is by purchasing text based links to your site. For the largest comprehensive list of quality paid link directories along with page rank statistical information visit: http://www.helpmyhits.com/paid-web-directories.php Some tips to stretch you advertising dollar as far as it will go would be linking to different pages of your website (not just the index) and also using different keywords in those links.

As you can see, page rank is a very real and vital aspect of web development that should always be kept in mind. Without it, your chances of being found easily on search engines is compromised. With it, you'll be on your way to a highly successful website.

Author Bio

Kimberly Bodane - www.helpmyhits.com

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

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If you have a website you've probably heard of blackhat SEO tactics, an optimization method to help your site climb the all-important rankings of the major search engines. While there is nothing actually illegal in blackhat SEO, it's doomed to fail every time, regardless of what the peddlers and proponents of the technique tell you. This is something I explain to clients of mine when putting together a PR campaign, and I won't work with any that wish to use blackhat SEO.

What is Blackhat SEO?
There are two main forms of search engine optimization - whitehat SEO and blackhat SEO. Whitehat SEO tactics are the everyday optimization techniques that reputable companies, SEO specialists and Internet marketers use to make their website(s) more visible to the search engines. Keyword placement; quality backlinks; blogging; social networking; meta tag optimization - they're all ethical ways to optimize a website, which in turn helps that site climb the all-important Google rankings and similar.

Blackhat SEO techniques, on the other hand, are very dubious, largely unethical methods to make your website look more popular than it is. These include spamming; building thousands of irrelevant backlinks; cloaking keyword-stuffed pages so they don't show up on search engine spider indexes, but do contribute to keyword searching; duplicate content and more. Blackhat SEO is very popular with unethical Internet marketers that set up hundreds of automated websites to sell you something that you probably don't need, and more than likely doesn't work.

Blackhat SEO Saves Money - A Fallacy
Many "SEO specialists" that recommend using blackhat SEO techniques will usually try and tell you that it's worth it because it saves you money. They'll try and convince you that building and promoting a blackhat SEO website costs a lot less money that what you would spend on traditional SEO methods. This is a crock.

While you can certainly set up a website free of charge today, thanks to the likes of Wordpress and SynthaSite, and you can then stuff hundreds of keywords onto that site to try and get it noticed, it'll only be a short-term gain. Google and the other search engines are constantly updating their search engine algorithms to combat blackhat SEO techniques, and websites found using these methods will be blacklisted by Google.

Now, considering that Google is the most popular search engine on the planet, having your business blacklisted because of unethical search engine techniques is quite possibly the worst thing that can happen to you. Potential customers won't be able to find you through keyword searches, leaving your competition to clean up, and businesses won't want to be associated with you for fear of being connected to your site. Basically, you'll be killing your business online.

So, is blackhat SEO really worth it? Definitely not - after all, you wouldn't tolerate an employee who continued to cause you problems and money, would you? Instead, use tried and tested search engine optimization methods and leave blackhat SEO to the fast-forgotten crowd.

About the Author

Danny Brown is the owner and Managing Director of Press Release PR, providing search engine optimized press releases and SEO-friendly web content for the commercial and consumer market. With a BA in English and a Certified Associate of Marketing degree, Danny now resides in Canada, where Press Release PR continues to draw plaudits and clients alike.

Labels: blackhat, blogs, seo, whitehat

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