This is probably the most unspoken question amongst potential SEO clients - search engine optimization can be expensive. Sure, the payoff is great, but if you don't have the money to begin with, you simply can't afford it. So what to do? Optimizing your own web site can seem like a daunting task, but is it really all that hard?

The answer is no. As long as you have some time, basic html skills, a little creativity and patience. Assuming you already have a good domain name, decent hosting, and a web site designed, here's how I would approach it.

First, make sure the very first page everyone sees is search-engine friendly. Make sure your primary keyword phrase appears first in your title, and can be found throughout text on the first page and throughout the site. Make sure there is text on your first page and not just an entrance page or flash movie. Those types of intros and entrance pages look blank to search engines. You want yours to look relevant for your keyword or key phrase. Include few paragraphs about what the site is selling or offering. As well, be sure to include your geographic area if your service or product is geographically specific. Make sure that when people who don't know anything about your industry or product hit that first page, that they have no doubt as to what the web site's purpose is within seconds. If visitors have that experience, chances are, so will search engine robots.

Second, make sure the rest of your site matches the same search engine friendliness as your first page. Make sure there is a decent amount of textual information on each page, text that includes your keywords and key phrases. Your web site will never rank well on the search engines for any keyword or key phrase that can't be found on the site itself. You also need to clean up your code. Try to use CSS styles when designing the site, and include the styles in a separate style sheet as opposed to the page's header. Move all scripts in the header into an include file. You also want all of your inter-site links to use the full URL rather than just the file name or directory. These can sometimes count as incoming links.

The next thing you want to do is keep the whole site dynamic. There are a number of ways to do this. You can syndicate a frequently updated RSS feed on your site to keep the content fresh. You may want to have your own blog on-site and post to it frequently. You may accept submissions of content from web site visitors. There are many ways to keep your content fresh and growing. This shows the search engine that the site is not something that is out of date.

The final, and most important thing to do to make sure your site is well optimized, is launch an aggressive link development campaign. This isn't quite as simple as it used to be, just merely trading links with relevant sites is not going to do the trick. What you want to do is focus on one-way incoming links. There are plenty of ways to do this. You can offer something in return for a link to your site that is not a link from your site - perhaps a discount on services or products, a mention in your newsletter or custom-written content for their site. Be creative, you'd be surprised what people will give you a link for.

Another way to get one-way incoming links is article submission. Write articles, like I am right now, and submit them to good article distribution places. Find out which online periodicals are in your industry and submit your articles to them in hopes of publication. Be sure to include a link back to your site in your author bio. The links from the article distribution sites are not very valuable themselves, but if, from those site, good relevant web sites pick up your article, they must link back to you and those are the links that will fare well for your web site.

You can also ask your friends, colleagues, business contacts, and anyone else you can think of who have web sites, to link to yours.

If you follow all of these, and don't give up, you can see results anywhere from right away to 6 months from now. Be patient, nothing worthwhile is ever instantaneous, and hard work always pays off. Keep at it and you'll be in the top ten and getting more traffic than you ever have before.

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, diy, do it yourself

Labels: articles, back links, diy, search engine optimization, seo

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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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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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SEO is the acronym for search engine optimization. This title refers to the process of improve the page ranking of your web site through careful use of keywords, keyword placement and links to and from other web sites.

What is it?

SEO is a carefully created method of improving the probability of your web page appearing on the results page of a search engine query. The nearer the top of the search engine results page your web site appears, the more likely that searchers will click on your web site link and go on to purchase the product or service you represent. You can perform search engine optimization yourself, or hire an expert to do it for you. There are approved ways to improve your standing and ways that can get you banned. It's important that you do the optimization correctly to avoid getting your web site shut down.

Who needs it?

Any small business owner with products or services advertised online should make the effort to optimize their web site so as to achieve the best results when the search engine spiders visit your site. There are SEO algorithms that are used that are generally proprietary and different search engines look for different components in order to determine the rank of the specific web page. Naturally, each web site owner wants to achieve the highest possible page ranking for the products or services that are displayed on the web site. Getting your page ranking as near to the top of the search results as possible gives you more web browsers seeing your link.

How to get the best results

The best results for SEO is to determine the specific algorithm used by a particular search engine and write your web site to use the best possible mix of keywords, links, and placement so as to improve your ranking. Attention should be paid to using the keywords or keyword phrases correctly. Not only the number of times they are used, but in what context they are used. Even the placement of keywords on the page is important for best results. Another factor that is important is that of links to other web pages.

How does SERP apply?

SEO best results are returned on the SERP or Search Engine Results Page. When a searcher on the internet uses terms in a search engine query box, the search engine returns results on a page called the Search Engine Results Page. This can be a few links up to thousands of links, but few searchers look beyond the first page or two of results, since the results often are less relevant as you move further down the page. The ranking of your web page up toward the top of the list is what can increase your sales significantly.

Page rankings

Page rankings are the somewhat arbitrary number assigned to web pages based on the SEO results identified by the search engine spiders or robots. Each major search engine relies on a different algorithm for ranking, although there are similarities between the three major search engines, MSN. Yahoo and Google. The goal of search engine optimization techniques is to have the web page appearing on the first page of search results for the specific query.

Optimization techniques and resources information can be found at Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the goal of each business and web site owner in order to increase the sales revenue for the

Author - Alan Lim

Labels: keywords, link building, page rank, search engine optimization, seo

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I wanted to review 7 long held SEO misconceptions and discuss the truths. In order to separate the SEO truths from traditional misconceptions or errors, you always must first examine the truth.

For example, if an expert is trying to determine a counterfeit $100 dollar bill from a real $100 bill, he only gains insight by examining the real bill first. You could examine many different counterfeit bills for a long time and never gain any ground at all. But once you know and understand the real government issued bill, then you can spot the false things much more quickly.

A Word about Hats: White, Grey or Black

First let me say that most SEOs are not all bad people. They are not all schemers who are just out to get your money. Like anything else, there are people who are good and bad in every area of life. When it comes to practicing SEO skills, there are many people doing many different things, but it all comes down to the intent of the individual person.

People pegged for being "black hats" usually think quite a little bit differently than the SEO professional. The Black hat is more prepared to lose the domain and knows that they are always on the run and they often view the search engines as the enemy. Search engines MUST be "outsmarted" or so they are convinced. Some tend to enter more like a game with throwaway domain names that they'll purchase in quantity knowing that they'll have to do the same types of things over and over again each time they get penalized.

White hat SEO professionals are more focused on creating high quality, useful content that serves a purpose and satisfies the reason why the user searched. They are not on the run, because they have nothing to fear being caught at. They tend to do the job once for long term stable rankings that can last for years.

Black hat technique tends to relate to "tricks" and little "short cuts" to try and fool the search engine.

Okay so this fits in part, with the first misconception or idea that was first pitched years ago. However, this first misconception is a major misconception. Here it is...

Misconception 1. You are at war with the search engines to gain top rankings. Therefore you must learn to do sneaky tricks to outsmart their algorithm. Therefore you must learn ways to beat the search engine to gain top visibility in search results. Have you heard this story before?

While this whole concept (probably dreamt up by a marketer years ago sometime) it cleverly appeals to a human beings somewhat carnal side of being "sneaky" or being able to beat the search engines at their own game by using "secrets" and "tricks." Even though the pitch may appeal to some people, the only trouble is that the concept is 100% FALSE from beginning to end. Some of you may be disappointed to hear this because for years, you thought you were at war with the search engines. Think a little bit more and let's separate marketing pitches from the real truth.

Truth 1: The truth is that you have never been at "war with the search engines." You are not required to "outsmart" or fool" the search engines at all to gain top visibility for your Web pages.

Listen up now. The only one you are truly competing with for visibility is your competitors, NOT the search engines. The whole idea that you must "beat" the search engines or "outsmart" the search engines is a completely false concept.

You never need to compete with any search engine. You never need to trick it or even try to "fool it" in order to get excellent visibility. A search engine does not really care whether you rank number 1 or not. They are fine with it, so long as you are offering relevant content that is useful and satisfies the reason why the user searched. Obviously any search engine does not want junk showing up in the results.

The only competition you have now or you have ever had, or will ever have in the future is with other competitors pages, not the search engines.

Being "sneaky" may appeal to some emotionally in a marketing pitch. It may make you even feel like the service or the course or publication will ultimately "make you smarter" somehow. But people need to learn to distinguish truth from error and you'll be blowing far less money on e-books, tool sets and memberships that appeal to the emotion but are founded on untruths.

Many marketers come across with this anger or emotion in their messages using words that are planted to trigger your emotions.

You can be sneaky... I am angry because... I am so embarrassed by what happened... You are going to learn a secret... I am going to show you something exciting! etc...

Don't let your emotions be exploited.

Learn to recognize a marketing mailer that is attempting to exploit your emotions. Recognize these types of messages. Separate them out from communications that offer advice based on truths. I'll do an article on this in the future.

Misconception 2: You must submit your Web site to the Search Engines, therefore you need to buy our services and we will submit your site to 30,000 search engines for only $29.95 per month. The misconception here is that a submission to a search engine is beneficial.

Truth 2: You are far better employing strategies that allow search engine robots to find your pages on their own (without submitting.) Any company that bases their whole concept of traffic or SEO on submitting does not understand how search engines work themselves. If you are using this type of service, save your money. There is no valid reason to be using a submission service for search engines. It is still being offered today widespread because there are always new people coming online to be exploited.

Misconception 3: If a Web site has been banned, the person must be an evil or unethical person.

Truth 3: Search Engine Workshops reject anything related to Spam or short cuts or tricks that are outside of the search engines guidelines, but we do not believe people are "always evil." Many people that get banned or penalized by the search engines, are not even aware of SEO best practices. The only thing they turn out to be guilty of in the end, is of never having had any real structured SEO skills training.

In other words they were listening to some bad advice or perhaps were not even aware that each search engine has guidelines. In some cases it's their Webmaster that may have gotten their site banned. Every situation is different but ultimately it's far better to gain your skills sooner than later. It is not always about good and evil but there most definitely is always a story behind the story and it boil down to user intent.

Misconception 4: SEO is a nightmare to try and learn.

It is extremely important to measure each SEO influence and get each factor exactly right. Therefore you need to research how many characters go in a title tag, keyword density, keyword prominence, keyword placement, how many keywords can go in a Meta tag plus all of the other factors for each individual search engine. This concept is what people seem to talk about because it's what some people are selling, but it is also completely false.

Truth 4: Sure you can spend your days measuring these types of things, but chances are you will be burning out after a while and getting very few success stories. This is because there are for more important things to understand that have an extraordinary impact in the results. SEO influences all affect one another, plus each search engine grades on a curve based on each specific industry.

Any researcher that tells you he is giving you the latest criteria based on these old fashion units of measurement will not make much impact. These days you are looking for the big picture, not individual influences one at a time. We have seen cases where people spend hours working on one page, when they could have dozens of pages performing for them in minimal time with much less stress. Yes I mean all 100% white hat strategies too, because these are all that we teach our students.

Misconception 5: You need to spend hours tweaking your source code each month to keep those top ranking positions. Therefore you cannot possibly manage your own in house search marketing. False again.

Truth 5: There are advantages to having your SEO handled by a professional firm that has been structurally trained. But don't buy it if someone says they must continually "tweak your code" to keep you in top place. It is just not true. Yes, you may want them creating fresh new content. Yes, you'll want continued practices if you're Blogging maybe for example. But if a page is ranking in top spot, leave it alone. If you do look at making changes, make sure you are grabbing a look at the entire search landscape for your industry.

Misconception 6: SEO is Dead. This myth makes a great attention grabbing article headline although in my opinion it has been a little bit over-used and rather gimmicky. If you've read it, it is completely false.

Truth 6: SEO is merely more competitive these days but SEO is far from being dead. SEO is alive and well!

It may feel like it is dead if you are relying on old second hand advice or listening to some marketers who are pushing their next big thing. Most Webmasters have access to all of the same old common tools that everyone else has, so there feels like there is less advantage than a few years ago.

Misconception 7: There is only one correct solution to solve a specific SEO challenge. If it is not my way, it is the wrong way. Needless to say this is also false.

Truth 7: For any specific SEO challenge there are often multiple solutions to choose from. In many cases there are alternative strategies that are all white hat and yet very solid solutions. Don't let anyone tell you that there is only one way. Every Web site is different with different challenges and you need to be equipped with the full range of solutions.

To gain a real significant advantage, the answer rests with building your genuine SEO skills and less reliance on tools.

* If you are interested in building genuine skills or managing a team overseeing SEOs then the surest why to close the gaps in your learning time is with a focus on live skills training and ongoing mentoring at a workshop or else study a course that focuses on teaching you the genuine skills. It is safe to say that you will be far less likely to ever be taken advantage of again, once your own knowledge is up to speed. * That being said, there are many who do not feel they can learn the skills. Maybe you're looking for hiring an SEO firm instead of managing your own projects. One of the easiest ways to separate the trained experts who have had good structured training from the hit and miss individuals (or worse,) is to simply examine the evidence of their work. Examine it closely so you can determine that behind them, the results show the evidence of their skills. - Ask them for a list of their recent client's phone numbers. - Ask them for a list of their oldest client contacts and their Web sites. - Dependable SEO services will never have trouble providing you with the evidence of their success although they may want to offer you client contacts in a different business category than the one you are in (out of respect for their clients.)

* While many SEOs will offer you typical proposals, try and watch for those who also have alternative approaches that will serve your best interest at reasonable cost. Optimization is only one aspect of visibility these days. It is not just about how many pages show up in the top rankings for specific keywords anymore. There are a lot of additional things that a well trained graduate can bring to you that are beyond SEO.

* Beware of any service that builds their whole success platform for SEO on "search engine submissions." Submitting to search engines is one thing you don't need to do and you don't need to do certain things over and over to get results. * Due diligence is the word of the day when hiring an SEO firm or seeking SEO skills training.

About the Author

John Alexander has taught live SEO workshops to people from over 80 different countries at http://www.SearchEngineWorkshops.com and also teaches live Webinars online at http://www.SEW-WRC.com

Labels: misconceptions, search engine optimization, seo, techniques

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of making web pages attractive to get high rankings on the search engines. As better the page optimized is, the higher a ranking it will get in search engine results. The objective of Search Engine Optimization is to improve the ranking of the web sites in major search engines like google, msn, yahoo etc. through optimizing content, building link popularity, search engine submission, directory submission etc.

As a part of a large marketing effort, SEO plays a very important role for the initial design and development of the site that help you to popularize your site among your targeted visitors. SEO involves a wide range of ethical strategies and techniques to improve search engine rankings. Below are some ethical seo techniques which are often widely used to utilize SEO:

DESIGN:

Optimising Web design of a web site is one of the important steps in SEO . Your website must be well designed using required applets to be easily noticeable. Here are given some mistakes which people often do not care but you must avoid them otherwise it will be difficult to get better rankings in search engines. You should avoid frames and also if you use flashes in your content as search engine spiders would not able to read flash text. you must add a description while using images.

KEYWORD:

The First and the most crucial step for optimizing a website is to research and define the best keywords. Right keywords selection can make you more visible and help you reach your target visitors and improves your search engine rankings too.You need some relevant or well known keywords which are usually used by people to get listed in search engines. In absence of right keywords search engines will not list your website.

TITLE TAG:

Title Tag have also an important role in SEO. Don't ignore them, they are a powerful tool and must be used to their fullest advantage. The Title tag helps the search engines decide the theme of the web page being crawled for indexing. When a search for keywords is conducted, the Title tag is given heavy consideration by major Search Engines like Google, Msn and Yahoo. You should remember that each page in your website is unique and needs a different Title tag. Place the most important keyword phrase for that particular page in the Title tag, and the page will get higher rankings in the search engines.

META TAG:

META tags are HTML tags that are used to include information about your web page they are created to give search engines the important information about your website. Search engines have recognized that website owners and administrators can use this resource to control their positioning and descriptions in search engine results.

ALT TAG:

ALT Tags are commonly omitted from web pages, from the smallest personal pages to the largest web corporate sites. Yet, if properly used, ALT Tags can be quite useful. Among other things ALT tags provide further detail about an image and other needed information. It also enables and enhances access for people with various disabilities.

Webexcel Solutions (ISO 9001:2000 Certified) A Software Development Company and an SEO Company
Author involve in research and analysis of various search engine strategies and algorithms. For more articles by author please visit- Latest Google SEO Tips and Strategies

Labels: design, on site, search engine optimization, seo

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