Monday, January 5, 2009

Get First Page on Google Searches - SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Basics and Tips


Do you want to get first page on Google? If you have a web page or blog, you likely already are first page for some searches. With a bit of SEO, you can gain first page on more searches. And its simple.

The first and most obvious step is think about what words or phrases you want to be first page on.

Once you have that list, determine how many people are searching for those terms. To check how popular a search is you will need a tool. I use Wordtracker (there is a free online version). The higher the number, the more popular the search. No point in trying to optimize for a word or phrase that is rarely searched.

There is also no point in trying to optimize for a word that is too popular because getting a high ranking there will be almost impossible.

Think about "long tail"

Think about how people will search. People often search with a question. EG where do I find X? Or where do I find Y in Canada. The longer the string, the less competition you will have for it so the easier you will get ranked.

So make the list of phrases you want to "own" and ones that are realistic to "own".

Now it is simple. Just put these words and phrases in your titles, picture descriptions, videos and in your text. The titles are the most important. That is why a blog called "Shrimp Fish Soup Recipes" will get good Google juice on all 4 words. So searching "Shrimp soup" will get first page. Or "fish soup recipes" or "Shrimp recipes" etc.

Yes you want to repeat your words and phrases often in the text. This said - write naturally. Never let SEO be a substitute for good content.

So you do this and you still are not first page. That is because you do not have enough credibility with Google. You need another free tool to check this. I use a free Firefox plugin called searchstatus. It gives me both the PageRank and the Alexa rating of any web page. Higher PageRank numbers are better. High credibility is your ultimate goal as that is what gets you ranked first and Alexa tells you traffic (a lower number is better)

How do you increase your PageRank?

It is all about quality inbound links. You want people with a high credibility (PageRank 4+) to link to you - eg Wall St Journal would be great. More is better and link rank is almost logarithmic so a PageRank of 6 is worth 10 times one of 5 etc.

This said, for you to get a link from an 8 rated site like pornstars.com would not increase your rank in the business genre. Sites are ranked for relevance.

The best inbound links are contextual. So someone blogging and saying I heard time management guru John Doe speak and hot linking from "Time management guru" is great for John Doe. Second best, hot link from "John Doe". Third is just having a link on a blogroll without any context.

You get a higher rank if you update your content regularly. That is why having a blog on your site is a good way to increase your ranking.

Moderate cross linking within your own material will also increase your rank and clarify for google what it is that you do.

3 ways to get links to your site:
1 - Ask politely. You might not always get a link but it never hurts to ask.

2 - Comment on other relevant blogs (and have your PageRank on so you ignore low PageRank and high alexa). Note that most comments in themselves do not constitute a link. But being out there gets people to look at you. You need people to look at your stuff for them to be inspired to link to it.

3 - Have good material. People link to quality. But of course they have to see it so promote your content:
Have your URL on all your print material, cards, letterhead, email sig file etc
Write guest articles and blogs in the right (high traffic) places (check the Alexa).
PR - get written about
Contribute to other sites. EG write reviews on Amazon, join the conversations.

And a word of warning. Never play games (like buying links).

In the end it is about having good quality material. And being out there so people look at your material. People link to quality without you asking as long as they know about it.

Jim Estill is the CEO of SYNNEX Canada, a $2 Billion distributor of computers.

To learn more about his successful business strategies, visit his blog at http://www.jimestill.com

Jim Estill's CEO blog at http://www.jimestill.com also has information on ordering his audio book and ebook, Time Leadership.


SEO - What is SEO?


SEO is one of the most effective things you can do online, getting your web site optimized in such a way that the search engines will reward you by basically sending traffic your way. SEO is not really that simple, but the bottom line is, if your page is optimized both on page and off, you generally get higher natural search engine rankings, which leads to traffic for you.

If you’ve spent time online recently, you’ve probably read the term “SEO,” or “Search Engine Optimization. But what does it mean, exactly? “SEO” is a term that is used to describe the process by which traffic to a particular site is increasingly generated by search engines by way of search results. The quality of visitor traffic to a site can be measured by analyzing how often a visitor who uses a specific keyword phrase in a search actually performs what is known as a “conversion action.” That is, how often those visitors make a purchase, download materials, request information, or interact with the site in any other way that indicates interest in the product or service the site offers.

Simply put, SEO is marketing through an understanding of how search algorithms work combined with a knowledge of what human users might search for. The end goal is to create a site that contains words for which people will likely search when looking for information such as that contained on your site.

SEO is an extremely powerful tool online – use SEO wisely!

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building


HOME::Internet-and-Businesses-Online/SEO X Ping New Content and Have the Search Engines Come to Your Website Almost Instantly! By Tim Buchalka P


You may be familiar with the concept of pinging. In blogging terms this is an automatic process when you publish a new post on a blog. The blog sends out a message to essentially tell other services "Guys, I have a new post for you, come check it out sometime".

Usually the website receiving the ping will do just that, and add it to their content somewhere. As I say this is an automatic part of blogs, and is one of the reasons why blog posts are quickly indexed by Google.

Google might take days to find your post when it next decides to visit your website.

However, if a website like technorati indexes your website the Google bot is checking that for new content hundreds of thousands of times per day. As a result it will often quickly find your post by following the link from technorati (or another site like it) and index your post right away.

Sure would be nice if this was available for non blogs, wouldn't it?

Well guess what, it is! There are free websites that you can use to advise these sites that you have new content available, even if it's not a blog.

All you do is go to a free website offering this service, and enter a title (read the section on titles/descriptions above) and enter the URL you want to be pinged (hopefully this is the page you have just created).

Leave feed blank (or if you know what you are doing, enter the web 2.0's feed URL) and click ping.

Anything up to 20-30 websites get immediately notified of your new content.

A few things to keep in mind about pinging:

1. Only ping when you have new content.

2. Don't overuse the services.

3. Don't limit yourself to just pinging the main page though, ping any page on the same site that links to your page.

You may have 10 or more things to ping for each website. That's 10 opportunities to get Google to index your page faster!

Of course, it's possible that more than one of these pages (which they are in their own right) will be ranked separately and take it's own position in the search engine results.

I am sure you won't mind if your website is ranked 3 or 4 times, would you? I'm certainly happy for that to happen to me.

Pinging is not essential as chances are your content will be found anyway. If you are impatient like me you want it indexed about 3 seconds after you've finished it!

Pinging can be a great way to achieve fast indexing (and rankings).

Please don't over do it though. These websites are free services so overloading their services isn't going to be a good thing (we all lose out).

In fact, if you are pinging too quickly you might get locked out for a period of time.

Make sure you keep that in mind. Pinging is a great way to tell the world (or the search engines) that you have new content and to come check it out.

Tim Buchalka has developed a new method for ranking quickly on page one for Google. Visit his blog pinging techniques website to obtain a special free report showing you how you can start doing the same.


How Do I Get Google to Index My Website Faster?


Google doesn't index every site at the same speed if website A adds a new page at the same time as website B this does not mean they will both be indexed at the same time. Why is this? In this article I will discuss why this happens and what you can do to be website A.

Let's start by discussing why Google indexes webpage's quicker than others. The reason Google will index a page from website A before website B is mostly due the frequency that you add new pages to your website. If you think about it if you are adding pages every day then Google is going to pick up on this and crawl your website more often in search of new unique content. If on the other hand you only add new pages once a month then Google won't index your new content as regularly.

If you want Google to increase the crawl rate of your website you need to add new pages with unique content on a regularly basis. However just adding any old rubbish won't help Google still needs to value the content you are adding. If you add a sitemap xml document to Google through your Google webmasters account this will help as Google can see when you add new content and from here you can also see the crawl rate of your website. Adding a sitemap xml can also give you a host of other statistics regarding your website.

Another way to get your webpage's index quicker is by getting links from other websites that Google indexes quick. For example if you add you content to websites like Digg which is a website that get indexed very frequently then Google will find your link and follow it to your website. Then from there Google can decide whether to index your webpage or not.

If you need you ecommerce web design to be indexed quicker hiring a search engine optimisation company that knows about these things can help.

Making sure your new pages on your website are well linked from other indexed pages on your website will also help as when Google revisits these pages it will find the new link pointing to your new page. You should never add content on your website just for SEO purpose you should only add new pages if you feel your website visitors are going to benefit from this new content. If you haven't added an xml sitemap already I suggest this should be your first step.

Author
Jack Mack


How To Get Unlimited High PR Backlinks


Backlinks have become so important for Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. In this article, I will explain to you what a backlink is, why they are so important, and what you can do to get them without getting into trouble with the Search Engines.

What are "backlinks"?

Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL's). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

In other words,Google can only tell if your site is good or not and worth a high ranking if other people tell Google they like your site. Backlinks are like popularity votes in in Google's eyes.

Google determines the most popular websites not only by how many links they have,but by the quality of those links. Every website in the world has a certain PR score.PR is how Google judges quality of a website. PR 3 is average and anything PR 5 and above means GREATNESS. Technically Google is just a robot which has to assign formulas.

There are good and bad ways to build Backlinks for your website. The best way is to get quality Backlinks from high PR Websites.

Getting quality backlinks without having to reciprocate provides a major boost to your site's Google PageRank,search engine rankings and traffic. I'm sure those are goals of yours. It is also a fact that people surf the Internet looking for information.

By combining those two ideas, you can increase your visitor traffic to your website, while getting new High PR Backlinks at the same time.

For More Information and a UNIQUE Strategy for Getting Unlimited High PR Backlinks check out the LINK in the Signature.

Mike Foster

http://BacklinkGuru.net - UNIQUE Strategy for Getting Unlimited High PR Backlinks


SEO - Tips and Tricks For the Average Person


The Internet is massive. There are billions of websites on the Internet, and they're all competing with one another for attention. Entrepreneurs, businesses small and large, and personal websites are all competing in a global economy that is made smaller by the Internet. So how does one get their site noticed?

In this article, we're going to have a look at some of the basic ways that you can get your site noticed by the search engines. We're also going to briefly touch on how you can keep traffic flowing to your site.

Keywords

Keyword or SEO (search engine optimization) articles are crucial to any website. Search engines use keywords to rank sites, so it's very important that you take the time to learn a little bit about them. They are the first step that you should consider when setting up your website.
Keywords or phrases generally make up about 1%-4% of any web page. If you use too many keywords too frequently, it can make your web pages almost unreadable for humans, which is not a good thing if you want those visitors to come back in the future. Also, if you jam your web pages with keywords, you run the chance of having your website banned by the search engines.

Search engines don't like to be fooled. It's a search engines job to rank sites well, and if your keywords don't help them to do that, but instead trick them into thinking your site is well done, ultimately their search results suffer. Instead of allowing that to happen, a search engine will ban your site.

Keep the Content Fresh

Constantly updating the material on your website not only helps your search rank, but it also keeps people coming back for more. You should consider updating your website content every few months. This will ensure that your visitors have a reason to return. The more visitors you get to visit your site, the better your search rank.

Pick the Right Keywords for the Job

When you write a keyword article for your site, make sure you pick the right ones. There are a myriad of free keyword tools on the web. These tools can be invaluable, and will help you build a keyword list for your site.

Also, make sure that your keyword shows up in the title of the page, as well as near the end. You can sprinkle the keyword liberally throughout the rest of the article. But remember, you want your content to read as though you haven't used keywords at all.

Hire a Professional

If you don't have the time to learn how to use SEO techniques to optimize your site, you can always hire an SEO professional. You can hire freelance writers or ghostwriters to write the content for you. You can also hire an SEO company to build your site from the ground up. It may cost you a few bucks, but usually the price is well worth it. Just make sure that you hire someone who is reputable, and knows what they're doing.

Mike has been a ghostwriter for over 7 years. He is also the owner of Mike's Ghostwriting Services, and has had thousands of articles published over the years. He's also written ebooks, short stories, blogs and sales letters.

If you have something that needs to be written, you can visit his site at: http://mikesghostwritingservices.com


How to Create SEO Friendly File Names


This is something easy to do and Google highly recommends you to do it. It is always important that what Google likes you should do if possible.

File names are the names of your website pages. For example: A page about dog food you probably will name it something like dogfood.html

Google suggests you use punctuation marks in your file names. Instead of dogfood.html put it dog-food.html

You should use the - symbol to separate words, not the _ symbol.

This is great way for visitors to understand faster and easier what the page is about. Makes sense.

Google always tried to give their users (the people who search the search engine) the best results and experience. These little things make a difference, and for search engine optimization purposes you will get (even though small) credit. It is a good thing to do.

Do not however go and rename all your website pages. That will results in lots of 404 page not found error pages. Just for next time when you create pages, start using the punctuation symbol to separate words.

Let me give you few more examples. Wrong way to name a page is catfood.html or cheapcatfoods.html

Good way to name a page instead is cat-food.html or cheap-cat-foods.html Easy and simple tip. File names also make more sense.

Something to think about now. Blogger blog platform is created and owned by Google. By default the blogs you created are search engine optimized. Notice the file names of the post pages. They are all created with the punctuation symbol. Google implemented this in the blogger blogs by default.

Here are some more tips on this subject.

1) Do not create a ton of different folders or directories on your website. For example create a folder named articles and put all articles inside it.

2) Avoid creating sub domains with identical or very similar content as your domain name.

3) Make meta tags unique for each webpage. If your site is big, you obviously cannot make each page with a unique meta tag. In that case at least make the most important pages with very descriptive meta tags that clearly describe what the page is about.

4) Avoid also creating pages like this: www.domainname.com/Support

(You do that by creating a new folder called Support, then putting an index.html page inside the folder) That can result in some errors too with redirection and so on.

So it is best to create html pages, like this: www.domainname.com/Support.html

These things that deal with how to structure your website and so on are all known as onpage optimization strategies/methods or techniques.

They are not so important as the offpage optimization strategies, which deal with getting links. But they still count and obviously simple things like these you should start implementing them.

Check out Karl Sultana's search engine optimization techniques. The strategies can be used by every marketer to drive traffic towards his website from the search engines. See Karl's software, OutRankSmart (ORS)


Tips on Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking


The techniques used to increase your search engine rankings may appear like rocket science to you, but this is not an excuse for you to avoided dealing with this subject. A top 10 search engine ranking for your website is so vital that if you really want to do well in your business, you simply cannot avoid this issue.

More than 80% of people looking for goods and services online find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The reason why you need to optimize your pages for high search engine rankings is because you want to attract targeted customers to your website. These are people who are more likely to buy from you. The higher your page appear in search engine results, the more the traffic that is channeled to your website. That is the objective of search engine optimization.

The first thing you should look at is the title bar.

The title bar shows the information in your title meta tag. To increase your search engine rankings, the words on your title meta tag should include the most important keywords or phrases.

Here are some tips regarding the title meta tag:

- Avoid very long keywords. Try to keep them to five words or less.
- Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title meta tag

The next thing you should look at is your website content.

The aim of any search engine is to list sites that contain quality content. The article on your site must contain the most important keywords. These are words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

Here are some tips regarding your website content:

- Try to have at least 300 words on each page. This is the typical length for a decent page.
- The first sentence in your first paragraph should contain the keywords that you want to optimize for.
- The last paragraph should contain the keywords that you want to optimize for.
- The entire article should have a keyword density of about 1.5 to 3.

Want to see how I triple my traffic and increase my Adsense earning from $19 to $100 a month using only one link building strategy? Read the whole story at my Linkvana Bonus.


Top 5 Common SEO Mistakes


So you built your website, with hopes and dreams of internet riches, and the site looks great. But no one's coming to it! Then you start learning SEO, and you're feeling a little bit more confident about it. Here are a few easy mistakes that people make when learning SEO, to look out for as you start doing more SEO work for your site:

Mistake 1: Keyword Stuffing

Before explaining why it's a bad idea, let's first define keyword stuffing as overfilling your content with your targeted keywords/keyphrases. By way of example, if you're targeting the phrase "navigation system," then keyword stuffing your content might read something like "Buying a new navigation system is something most customers do regularly as their old navigation system often fails to function in the proper way that a navigation system should..." and so on. It reads like a fourth grader's essay, and the search engine spiders pick up on the unnaturally high incidence of the same phrase repeated over and over.

While every SEO expert has a different opinion about keyword density, a safe but effective range might be considered 4-9% density. This makes sure the search engines correctly categorize your site for the services you offer, without them penalizing you for blatantly stuffing it with keywords.

Mistake 2: Link Farms vs. Directories

What is the difference between a link farm and a directory? It sounds like an easy question, but it's deceptively difficult. The reason is that directories and link farms share almost everything in common, so instead of a black and white difference between the two, they basically fall on a spectrum, and usually somewhere in the grey middle area.

That said, a working definition of link farm might go something like "a page of links with no other purpose or benefit to the visitor other than to provide backlinks to other pages." And why are they a problem? Search engines will not only disregard them as useless, they will often penalize the linked sites as well, by de-indexing them or demoting them in the rankings.

So how do you tell the difference between a link farm and a directory? Here are a few things to look for: 1) What's the Google Page Rank? 2) How well organized is it? 3) Does it have useful content other than links? 4) Is it visually attractive or otherwise made to be appealing to visitors? Be sure to ask these questions before submitting your site to an online directory.

Mistake 3: Duplicate Content

There's a lot of buzz going around the internet about duplicate content; quite simply, it's the same content appearing on more than one page on the internet. The search engines have been known to devalue pages that they see as duplicates, since the implication is that a site is simply spamming by putting automated content out on the web.

However, unlike link farm penalties, duplicate content isn't actively penalized, but merely disregarded sometimes by the search engines. If you're worried about it, well, write new content!

Mistake 4: Overbidding for PPC Advertising

Pay per click advertising (PPC) and SEO are NOT the same, but they're related enough to warrant a mention here. Amateurs often overbid for their PPC advertising, which not only costs them unnecessary money but drives up PPC prices elsewhere artificially. As with so many concepts in business, start low and go slow, which in this case means opening the bidding around 5-10 cents per click, and raising your bids as necessary to achieve your desired results.

Mistake 5: Investing Too Much Time in SEO Education

Serious webmasters devoted to online businesses and internet marketing would be wise to learn as much as possible about SEO. That said, the overwhelming majority of online business owners would probably be better off using their time to expanding their client base, or developing new products or websites, rather than spending tedious hour after tedious hour learning the minutiae of SEO and internet marketing. If you're capable of earning $45/hour while aggressively working your business, and can hire someone to handle SEO for you for $20/hour, then it's a no-brainer: hire an internet marketing company and get back to running your business.

Happy Optimizing!

Brian Gregory is a writer and SEO specialist who has worked with many websites to help them reach the top of the search engine rankings through internet marketing. He has recently consulted with Click Agent Marketing, a Vancouver SEO company currently accepting new clients.