March 26, 2008

What is search engine optimization - SEO?

SEO or search engine optimization is a technique of taking the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases associated your web site and ensuring that this ranks your web site highly in search engines so that when somebody looks for particular phrases, it returns your site on top. It essentially involves good tuning the content of your web site along with the HTML and Meta tags and as well requires appropriate link building method.

 

Search engine optimization demands a lot of work to be fully accomplished. There are several aspects you have to modify in your web site or add also to get SEO. These will include getting tons of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your web site niche or theme.

 

With SEO you'll be able to get the benefit of returning a high traffic volume. Let’s only say you get just a turn out of victorious sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a 100 hits or more a day, you get an effective turn out of sales already. If you get only 20 to 10 hits a day, you will make fewer sales.

 

You may very well have to rewrite your web site content so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial, but easy and informative. There are certain formulas and guidelines to be watched with making your web site content practical and conducive to SEO.

 

You will also need to cooperate with several additional sites so that you could have link exchanges . The more incoming and outgoing link generated by sites from one to others are among the components search engines use to rank web sites.

 

Tips, guidelines and techniques for SEO are plenty to be found here. We'll show you  how to start to getting better rank in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others.

 

The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This could require a small time and effort in your part but the benefits will be amazing.

 

To be honest, you are able to essentially get good information on SEO anywhere in the web. But only a few truly show you how to work out an inexpensive search engine optimization effort. And those few that really inform include our site. Here you can learn the basics first steps to get a good search engine optimization. And improve your site page rank.

 

All of the time, keep in mind that search engine optimization techniques are crucial in developing your web site status. With that in mind, be sure that you write high quality, keyword valuable content and link your web site to and from a knowing class of extra sites. These things will assistant better your web site popularity and drive increased traffic through your web business.

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March 18, 2008

How an XML sitemap benefits your site

So you've built your website and put it up online for the world to see. You have put your sales information, made an exciting offer, you have nice graphics and are just waiting now for people to find your site and buy your products.

The problem is that they can't find you. They may be looking for exactly what you have to offer them but how do they know you are even there?

Well, part of the puzzle is a small file you put on your website called a "sitemap". Now before we go much further, let's define what a sitemap actually is. First off, there are 2 different kinds of "sitemap". One is an html page on your website that has links to all the other pages in your site. Visitors to your site might use this page to find various areas of information on your website. You might have links in there to your information page, your questions and answers page, your contact page and so on. Many people are familiar with this and may even have used a sitemap on another website before.

There is also another form of this sitemap that you need to have on your page. Simply put it serves the same function as the html sitemap but is directed specifically to the search engines. The file is in the xml format and lists all the pages on your site along with other information relevant to the search engines such as the relative importance of various pages on your site and how often your pages are updated.

So how do you create one of these files? Well there are a number of different tools you can use and they are easily found online. Simply search for "sitemap generator" or "create sitemap". Some programs will run over the web and some are easily downloaded to your computer - this allows you to save and edit your sitemaps easily. In either case, the output of these programs should give you a file that has an .xml extension. You would typically name it sitemap.xml and then simply upload it to the root directory of your website.

After that, it is simply a matter of letting the search engines know that the file is there and they can start looking through it. Each of the search engines handles the sitemap submission a bit differently but they will all find the sitemap if you link to it in your robots.txt file.

In any case, be aware that you should have a sitemap.xml file on your website for the search engines. Now, this will not directly affect your rankings in the search engines but it will enable the search engines to index your entire site - without missing any pages. And, it will encourage them to do it sooner than later. That could affect your rankings.

Jonathan Hook helps people get their websites indexed faster and more completely with an easy to use, automated xml sitemap generator tool available at http://www.mapsbuilder.com

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December 10, 2006

How To Save Money And Do A Lot Of Your Own SEO

By Gregg Hall

If the idea of Internet marketing intimidates you and you are thinking of hiring a professional, hold on!  I’ve got great news for you. It’s really that tough to do search engine optimization (SEO) yourself, save hundreds of dollars, and still get the same results the professionals do. I won’t lie to you, you will probably get better results from highly qualified professionals, but you should definitely take the time to execute these do-it-yourself actions first. Once you’ve done some of this kind of work it will be easier to decide if a professional really needed.

Basic SEO is not difficult at all – all it takes is the willingness to put in the work. Once you know the basics, it’s not that hard, though it can be time consuming. The content of your website is the main focus of what SEO is all about. Here are the top things to think about when you’re doing it yourself:

1. The first thing is the registration of your domain name, which should reflect what your site about. Keep it short; as long as it’s somehow related to your site, being more specific can definitely help. I have had sites rank in the top of the search engines just from the domain name alone with no other SEO at all!  You could choose to name the page after one of your products or services, for example. Another method is to get a sub domain of a popular domain. This will generally help you get indexed more quickly though it will not appear quite as professional to your visitors. There is a trade off here, sub domains are quicker (and generally cheaper), but domain names are more memorable, and, in the long run, better for your indexing. Also try to stick with .com and avoid multiple hyphens.

2. The next item you should examine is your page’s title (i.e. the HTML title tag), which is crucial in letting search engines see what the page is about, and is the first item looked at by search engines to determine your relevance. You should put your most important keywords in your title tags – you don’t need to worry about singular or plural forms as search engines account for these changes in most cases. Whatever you do, don't call your home page ‘Home’ – make the title a mini-description of the page. Look at the title of my page from my site, “The Internet Marketing Secrets”. If people find my site in the Search Engine results for those keywords it is going to stand out. The title of The Marketer’s Mind is “Website Optimization and Promotion”.

3. The two primary meta tags aren’t nearly as important as they used to be, but the description tag is still used by some search engines to display information about your website to users and help them decide whether they’ve found what they are looking for. Not all search engines bother with this, though most will put some bearing on it (even if it is minuscule). Again, this is crucial for people searching as well. Here’s the first line of mine,” The Internet Marketing Secrets Your Complete Internet Marketing Online Resource”. Again, it makes people want to see more.

For very short descriptions the alt tag can be used. Alt tags let you describe an image or graphic file – they’re the pop-up descriptions that appear when you hover your mouse over a graphic, or when the graphic can’t be downloaded for whatever reason. These should be peppered with keywords for your site.

Text within comment tags is never displayed on the page – it is used by coders and designers to remind them of what that part of the page is for. Some coders used to put lots of keywords in the comment tags, so that they would be seen by search engines but not users, but search engines have now stopped paying attention to any text that isn’t seen by the user. Keep this in mind when trying to post invisible text (i.e. white text on a white background). This kind of behavior can get you banned from a search engine, DON’T DO IT!

4. Having keyword density in all of your content is good, but keep in mind that each search engine has its own requirements when it comes to how many times that a keyword or phrase should be in the content for the page to be relevant. Somewhere between 5 and 8 percent is a roughly optimal level – but this isn’t always possible, and you shouldn’t force it. Don’t overdo it, or the search engines might mark you down. Additionally you should be creating your sites to be more visitor friendly by using the methods espoused in The Master Plan by Charles Heflin. Charles really has a good handle on how sites should be constructed and how the content should be written to take advantage of the new LSI technology that the Search Engines are moving to. If you don’t think LSI is important you need to check out the news where Google has bought several LSI technology companies. Another excellent report on visitor enhanced optimization can be found from Colin McDougall of The Veo Report.

5. Many search engines judge web page importance on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites. You should link to some related sites, but not too many. Also, be sire to use “no follow tags” on links to pages within your own site that aren’t “money” pages. Don’t overdo incoming links either, and keep them related your site’s content. Don’t trade links with a site about online dating if your site is about auto parts. Lastly, it’s also a good idea to get sites to use your keywords as the anchor text of these links. You should vary these and you should specify what you want them to use.

6. Use Technorati tags to get traffic from Technorati. For details on how to do this I recommend you get my free report available by subscribing to my newsletter link in the upper right hand column below my picture on the home page of The Marketer’s Mind.

If you follow the advice above, you can do it yourself and do fine. SEO, if done right, can keep you on top for as long as you want to be. The Marketer’s Mind is brand new, but The Internet Marketing Secrets is number 6 in Google right now for the term “internet marketing secrets” out of almost 3 million results. The only sites above me have been online for much longer than mine. Do you think the domain name has a lot to do with it?

domains

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internet marketing

social bookmarking

 

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