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SEO Tips #3 Title and Description

Saahir — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:00:06 +0000

SEO Tips #3 Title and Description – One area that people overlook or try to shortcut is the Title of a webpage. What is the Title and where is it located? The Title is shown in the upper left corner of the web browser while visiting a page, the title is in the portion of your html code and is very important in your SEO process. The Title < TITLE>< /TITLE> tag tells the search engines what your page is about and it is recommended to have a different title, related to that particular page, on each page of your site. That way the search engine does not skip over the pages and think they are duplicates.

You want to use keywords or keyword phrases at the front of the title, then a category and then some sort of website title. So if I were making a page about a Playstation 3 I would do something like this…

Playstation 3 Accessories | Games | Wireless Game Controllers

And then from there every page of the site would have a different but related title, using other keywords based on the content of the page.

Next let’s talk about the description tag, this is the content that what will show up when you do a search on Google. In the description you want to use all your keywords and or phrases so that you make a good descriptive short paragraph of what your site is all about. Think like the user, what would you search for to find this website? You only have about 160 characters to make this happen so be descriptive but short. Also try putting the keywords in different order than the title, using plurals, singulars and try changing acronyms to full description for example SEO would be Search Engine Optimization.

Note: Since we are talking about the portion of the code, it’s a good practice to take your java script and css out of the code and make external files for this information, this will keep your page clean and readable for the search engines.

Orignal Author : TheSEOtips.com

SEO Tips #1 Keyword Research

Saahir — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 20:22:39 +0000

SEO Tips #1 Keyword Research – I had no idea how important keyword research has become, for example as a new person with your first site, let’s say you are promoting skateboards, your first thought would be to use the keyword “skateboards” right? Well that is not the best thing to do because that keyword has entirely to much competition so what you want to do is find a niche in that category like “skateboard trucks” or “skateboard wheels” your chances greatly increase of getting better rankings under a niche product. I would recommend using a keyword tool, there are plenty of them on the internet, one that I use is Google Keyword Tool and do some research, you will be surprised some of the search terms you use will not generate any traffic according to the keyword tool. If you are doing Pay Per Click or PPC campaigns the tool will tell you the average CPC or Cost Per Click, this will help you determine your budget’s for the campaign.

Also when you find a keyword or phrase, try and choose a domain name or URL with the keyword included, for example let’s say your keyword is “student loans” so your URL would be something like getyourstudentloans.com or studentloansguide.com this will greatly increase your ranking ability.

These 2 tips alone will take some time, I have spent hours and hours on the keyword tool searching for niche phrases, it does take some work but the results are so helpful, it actually saves you time and money on wasted keywords. Just think of all the time you would put into making a website and finding out at the end that your keyword gets no traffic on the search engines.

Source : theseotips.com

Configuring GOOGLE sitemap for web page Index

Saahir — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:25:55 +0000

Configuring google sitemap for web page Index

Google sitemap is for suggesting information to google regarding your website like page imporance and updated web pages.Do it right now and google spiders and robots will follow your suggestion
through google sitemap and it will be XML Format.

Once you have created the google sitemap file, place it on your server and then visit Google Sitemaps to submit your map.

Google site map can be generated by many online free tools.You can find the tool using the keyword “Google sitemap generator” in google search engine.

Once google sitemap XML file is created, upload to your server and then visit google site map address to submit.Google sitemap address can be found here
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemap

Login with your Google account and submit sitemap, before that you have to upload a google verification html page, genetated as a random number from google.

After next spider visit you can find google indexed new updated web page.

This facility is mainly helpful for shopping and online product sale website.

Orignal Author : Jagadeesh M

Best 12 WordPress SEO Tips

Saahir — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 02:51:45 +0000

One of the best opensource I like is wordpress and wordpress can be used both as Blog and CMS

WordPress by default has some search engine friendly setup but we need to edit some part of the code and add plugins to make it more search engine friendly and the plugins will help us to do the work easier and better. Below are the tips to create search engine friendly wordpress blog

(1) Initially you can add search engine friendly theme with less image and your choice of image can go for logo, banner and bullets. Try to reduce code size and bytes.
(2) Install “All in SEO” Plugin“. Activate and edit in options according to your visitors focus

(3) Most importantly do add alt attribute for logos and banner, i see most of the blogs miss to implement this technique or alt attribute are not unique. To solve this you can try “Custom Header” plugin and enter HTML codes for each posts and pages

(4) Permalink a very important part that helps to create search engine friendly URLS. In wordpress admin you can find “Permalinks” under option. In this you can notice “Custom structure”, you may try adding this tag /%postname%/
(5) Create and configure .htaccess file and place the below code

RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Save and upload in root and confirm that .htaccess file is been enabled in your server and your done
(6) If your theme doesn’t have archive section, don’t miss to add because new visitors to you blog may also like to read your old posts, so try adding the code to your theme
(7) Again “Popular tags” one of the very important part for blog and seo which helps to show visitors and search engine to the importance of blog posts and subjects. The follwoing code will show tags popularity by size
(8) Intall “Recent post” plugin and activate. This plugin helps to retrieve list of the most recent posts for your visitors
(9) Add “Google Sitemaps” to the plugin folder and activate . Set write access to the root server and then go to options >> Google sitemap and then click “Build sitemap manually” link and this creates site map and as you add new post xml file gets updated automatically with new posts URL.
(10) Add this sitemap.xml file to Google and Yahoo Webmaster tool so that spider will crawl the URL on regular basis
(11) Configure and add Google Custom Search and Google Analytics
(12) Register to Feedburner and add your post RSS feed to Feedburner and create an option in the blog for your readers to subscribe your posts, by this as and when you post, your reader will be sent mail or noticed through browser about your new posts

Hope above WordPress SEO Tips and Advice will help you to create search engine friendly wordpress blog

Orignal Author : Jagadeesh M

Submitting to Directories

Saahir — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:44:42 +0000

Submission to online directories still works. Contrary to the widespread rant that directories are dead, they are not. Good directories can still help you rank in Google; you just have to watch for signs of quality. You can still make a website rank for relatively competitive three-keyword-long terms with directory submissions.

One of the best signs of quality is whether a directory is found in search results. If it is, especially on Google, take it as a good sign. It’s usually worth the money to buy a link from that directory.

Don’t submit to too many directories too fast. Space it out over several months.
Avoid free directories.

Directory Description and Anchor Text

Search engines are well aware that SEOs use directories to promote websites, so they’ve developed technology to spot directory submissions designed to manipulate search results. One of the biggest clues is the use of similar anchor text and descriptions on many directory listings. Some SEOs simply copy and paste a paragraph from the website, which is never good. Try varying your anchors and descriptions.

Directories also watch for SEO submissions, so if your URL is whitehorse.com and your anchor is “real estate agent,” then there’s a problem. Try varying that anchor to something like “white horse real estate agent” or “white horse real estate,” something that still has targeted keywords but is not as obvious.

Watch competing websites in a directory and see what behavior is accepted. If competing sites are pretty aggressive, it’s a sign that you can be aggressive as well.

Number of Links in a Category

The more links are on a page, the less PR is passed, so look for the number of links in each category. If the ”real estate” section has 150 links and “real estate agents” has 25 links, then the second section can pass more page rank. Watch for the inbounds to each section to judge whether or not the link is valuable. If “real estate agents” has 25 outbounds and 5 internal links, but the “real estate” section has 150 outbounds, but 50 internal links and 20 inbounds, then the latter link is better.

Also watch to see if the site fits in a specific category topically.

Directories used to be an easy and fast way to get Google rankings, so Google had to diffuse this manipulation issue. The problem with generic directories is they might have a high page rank, but no content or real value from the user’s perspective. If all a directory does is sell page rank for the sole purpose of manipulating search results, then the search engines will want to discount it.

It the past, it was pretty simple. For example, Bob the SEO dude got into SEO, and then realized he could make money from directories by charging for submission. He got directory scripts, built a database and rolled out a new directory. Then Bob ran into a problem…no one submitted.

“What’s going on?” Bob thought. Then he realized that he needed page rank, so he reciprocated, did free-for-all links and bought listings. Bob got his directory’s PR to 6 and started selling links for $40 apiece.

The problem with Bob’s model is that his directory is built solely for PR manipulation, without any value to the end user. Obviously Google does not like those tricks; it wants to provide its searchers with real value. It’s only natural that search engines want to reduce low quality directory link effects.

Many directory owners build multiple directories for nothing but SEO, which reduce their value.

Determining Quality of a Directory

A good way to determine the quality of a directory is to look at whether there are any good sites in that directory. If its listings lead mostly to low PR, low quality sites, then it’s not worth bothering to submit your site to it.

Also, if most listings are empty, this means that the directory is either new or abandoned. A new directory may become good later on, so submitting to it may be worth the effort. Save the link somewhere and come back a few months later.

Check the crawl date of the index page and of a specific page in a directory. If it’s over a month old, chances are the search engines don’t trust it. Google also makes a lot of manual adjustments, which can hit spammy directories.

General high quality directories like DMOZ and Yahoo Directory still pass value to websites. Yahoo costs $299, but it’s still a good buy.

DMOZ
Yahoo Directory
Librarians Internet Index
Business.com
GoGuides
JoeAnt
Skaffe

DMOZ Directory

The Open Directory project is a free directory run by volunteers and enthusiasts. No editor is obliged to submit or review your website. DMOZ is one of the highest quality directories on the web, so make sure you build up your site a little before submitting, because it will go easier for you if you do.

Though DMOZ is free, there are some editors who accept “bribes” and may list a site for a fee. The danger is that the site may be removed by other, more authoritative members, so several hundred bucks can go to waste. If you intend to do this, watch out for quality flags.

Become an editor

You can also become a DMOZ editor. Make sure to state that you’re interested in helping and have no commercial relations in the industry, nor SEO (this last point is very important).

DMOZ is valued by all search engines.

Trust Rank and DMOZ

Google’s Trust Rank is an algorithm that helps Google fix some PR holes. Seed pages are high quality pages with links to other websites. A link from a seed page passes a trust score to the linked page, and then that trust score follows a pattern similar pattern to page rank. DMOZ is considered to be one of the seed pages (or more precisely a seed site), hence their link is valuable. Do not get upset, though, if you cannot get a link from there. There are many sites that rank high without DMOZ.

Yahoo Directory

The Yahoo Directory costs $299 per year. You don’t need to submit to it to show up in Yahoo search results, but your ranking will go up on Yahoo if you do. Google also trusts the Yahoo Directory.

Some websites may get accepted for free, but those have to be non-commercial.

Yahoo sorts its listings by link popularity instead of alphabetically. If a category has 200 sites, then the ones with the most links will show up at the top. If you have few links, it will take some time before your site shows up at the top.

Yahoo Directory editors have a reputation for being picky as to whom they submit, but with recent Yahoo financial troubles they may loosen up and accept anyone who pays. Also keep in mind that Yahoo may still end up being purchased by Microsoft, despite all the drama over the past year and more, so a link from the Yahoo Directory is worth the price.

You can search for a niche directory by using the format “keywords + directory” or “keywords + add URL.” Please note that some directories prevent the “add URL” part from being crawled.

Also check out business partners, distributors and affiliates. Sometimes they have directories or a partners page.
The Chamber of Commerce is a directory from which it is worth your while to get a link.

Auto Forms and Submission Software

At all costs, stay away from submission software. It has no value and you will end up penalized by the search engines. Also stay away from submission schemes priced at $1 per listing (or similar). Those hurt instead of helping.

If you do use an auto form filler, make sure to vary your information slightly and remove any trails that may indicate software was used. It’s generally a good idea to create different descriptions, but if you’re extra lazy at least vary them a bit.

On the topic of software, stay away from applications that claim they can help you gain top rankings on search engines. Those go for few hundred bucks, but never get you promised results. Search is a billion-dollar game. A $300 program from Joe the garage guru will not beat it.

On the other hand, there are plenty of useful apps that help with overall SEO tasks. Many can be found for free or at moderate prices.

Quality Game

If you have a quality site, with high PR, but few editorial links, the site may be lacking in trust and get flagged for review. Internally leaked Quality Rater guidelines showed that despite Google’s war on spam, it may tolerate some degree of spam as long as there’s quality content, aka the formula “quality site + PR only links (non-editorial) = Google tolerance.” I won’t suggest you follow this formula, since going for PR links can get a site penalized by algorithms first, before human raters, but it’s good to know.

Directories are good sources of links, but they are not the core of SEO rankings. You can still make a site rank on directories alone for relatively competitive terms, but it’s better to mix these with more editorial links.

Don’t make directory buys your primary link building strategy; it’s a risky game that can backfire. Focus more on editorial links through content development, and then submit to directories.

How Search Engines Work (and Sometimes Don’t)

Saahir — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:36:48 +0000

You know how important it is to score high in the SERPs. But your site isn’t reaching the first three pages, and you don’t understand why. It could be that you’re confusing the web crawlers that are trying to index it. How can you find out? Keep reading.You have a masterful website, with lots of relevant content, but it isn’t coming up high in the search engine results pages (SERPs). You know that if your site isn’t on those early pages, searchers probably won’t find you. You can’t understand why you’re apparently invisible to Google and the other major search engines. Your rivals hold higher spots in the SERPs, and their sites aren’t nearly as nice as yours.

Search engines aren’t people. In order to handle the tens of billions of web pages that comprise the World Wide Web, search engine companies have almost completely automated their processes. A software program isn’t going to look at your site with the same “eyes” as a human being. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a website that is a joy to behold for your visitors. But it does mean that you need to be aware of the ways in which search engines “see” your site differently, and plan around them.

Despite the complexity of the web, and dealing with all that data at speed, search engines actually perform a short list of operations in order to return relevant results to their users. Each of these four operations can go awry in certain ways. It isn’t so much that the search engine itself has gone awry; it may have simply encountered something that it was not programmed to deal with. Or the way it was programmed to deal with whatever it encountered led to less than desirable results.

Understanding how search engines operate will help you understand what can go wrong. All search engines perform the following four tasks:

Web crawling. Search engines send out automated programs, sometimes called “bots” or “spiders,” which use the web’s hyperlink structure to “crawl” its pages. According to some of our best estimates, search engine spiders have crawled maybe half of the pages that exist on the Internet.

Document indexing. After spiders crawl a page, its content needs to be put into a format that makes it easy to retrieve when a user queries the search engine. Thus, pages are stored in a giant, tightly managed database that makes up the search engine’s index. These indexes contain billions of documents, which are delivered to users in mere fractions of a second.
Query processing. When a user queries a search engine, which happens hundreds of millions of times each day, the engine examines its index to find documents that match. Queries that look superficially the same can yield very different results. For example, searching for the phrase “field and stream magazine,” without quotes around it, yields more than four million results in Google. Do the same search with the quote marks, and Google returns only 19,600 results. This is just one of many modifiers a searcher can use to give the database a better idea of what should count as a relevant result.
Ranking results. Google isn’t going to show you all 19,600 results on the same page – and even if it did, it needs some way to decide which ones should show up first. Thus, the search engine runs an algorithm on the results to calculate which ones are most relevant to the query. These are shown first, with all the others in descending order of relevance.

Now that you have some idea of the processes involved, it’s time to take a closer look at each one. This should help you understand how things go right, and how and why these tasks can go “wrong.” This article will focus on web crawling, while a later article will cover the remaining processes.

You’re probably thinking chiefly of your human visitors when you set up your website’s navigation, as well you should. But certain kinds of navigation structures will trip up spiders, making it less likely for those visitors to find your site in the first place. As an added bonus, many of the things you do to your site that will make it easier for a spider to find content, will often make it easier for visitors to navigate your site.

It’s worth keeping in mind, by the way, that you might not want spiders to be able to index everything on your site. If you own a site with content that users pay a fee to access, you probably don’t want a Google bot to grab that content and show it to anyone who enters the right keywords. There are ways to deliberately block spiders from such content. In keeping with the rest of this article, which is intended mainly as an introduction, they will only be mentioned briefly here.

Dynamic URLs are one of the biggest stumbling blocks for search engine spiders. In particular, pages with two or more dynamic parameters will give a spider fits. You know a dynamic URL when you see it; it usually has a lot of “garbage” in it such as question marks, equal signs, ampersands (&) and percent signs. These pages are great for human users, who usually get to them by setting certain parameters on a page. For example, typing a zip code into a box at weather.com will return a page that describes the weather for a particular area of the US – and a dynamic URL as the page location.

There are other ways in which spiders don’t like complexity. For example, pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the same site can make them get tired with just one look. A spider may not follow each link. If you are trying to build a site map, there are better ways to organize it.

Pages that are buried more than three clicks from your website’s home page also might not be crawled. Spiders don’t like to go that deep. For that matter, many humans can get “lost” on a website with that many levels of links if there isn’t some kind of navigational guidance.

Pages that require a “Session ID” or cookie to enable navigation also might not be spidered. Spiders aren’t browsers, and don’t have the same capabilities. They may not be able to retain these forms of identification.

Another stumbling block for spiders is pages that are split into “frames.” Many web designers like frames; it allows them to keep page navigation in one place even when a user scrolls through content. But spiders find pages with frames confusing. To them, content is content, and they have no way of knowing which pages should go in the search results. Frankly, many users don’t like pages with frames either; rather than providing a cleaner interface, such pages often look cluttered.

Most of the stumbling blocks above are ones you may have accidentally put in the way of spiders. This next set of stumbling blocks includes some that website owners might use on purpose to block a search engine spider. While I mentioned one of the most obvious reasons for blocking a spider above (content that users must pay to see), there are certainly others: the content itself might be free, but should not be easily available to everyone, for example.

Pages that can be accessed only after filling out a form and hitting “Submit” might as well be closed doors to spiders. Think of them as not being able to push buttons or type. Likewise, pages that require use of a drop down menu to access might not be spidered, and the same holds true for documents that can only be accessed via a search box.

Documents that are purposefully blocked will usually not be spidered. This can be handled with a robots meta tag or robots.txt file. You can find other articles that discuss the robots.txt file on SEO Chat.

Pages that require a login block search engine spiders. Remember the “spiders can’t type” observation above. Just how are they going to log in to get to the page?

Finally, I’d like to make a special note of pages that redirect before showing content. Not only will that not get your page indexed, it could get your site banned. Search engines refer to this tactic as “cloaking” or “bait-and-switch.” You can check Google’s guidelines for webmasters (http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/guidelines.html) if you have any questions about what is considered legitimate and what isn’t.

Now that you know what will make spiders choke, how do you encourage them to go where you want them to? The key is to provide direct HTML links to each page you want the spiders to visit. Also, give them a shallow pool to play in. Spiders usually start on your home page; if any part of your site cannot be accessed from there, chances are the spider won’t see it. This is where use of a site map can be invaluable.

I’ll assume that you are all reasonably familiar with HTML. If you have ever looked at the source code for an HTML page, you probably noticed text like this wherever a hyperlink appeared:

SEO CHAT

When a web browser reads this, it knows that the text “SEO Chat” should be hyperlinked to the web page http://www.seochat.com. Incidentally, “SEO Chat” in this case is the “anchor text” of the link. When a spider reads this text, it thinks, “Okay, the page http://www.seochat.com is relevant to the text on this page, and very relevant to the term `SEO Chat.’”

Let’s get a little more complicated.

SEO CHAT

Now what? The anchor text hasn’t changed, so the link will still look the same when the web browser displays it. But a spider will think, “Okay, not only is this page relevant to the term `SEO Chat,’ it is also relevant to the phrase `Great Site for SEO Info.’ And hey, there’s a relationship between the page I’m crawling now and this hyperlink! It says that this link doesn’t count as a ‘vote’ for the page being linked to. Okay, so it won’t add to the page rank.”

That last point, about the link not counting as a vote for the page being linked to, is what the rel=”nofollow” tag does. This tag evolved to address the problem of people submitting linked comments to blogs that said things like “Visit my pharmaceuticals site!” That kind of comment is an attempt by the commenter to raise his own website’s position in the search engine rankings. It’s called comment spam, by the way; most major search engines don’t like comment spam because it skews their results, making them less relevant. As you may have guessed, then, the “nofollow” tag in the “rel” attribute is specifically for search engines; it really isn’t there to be noticed by anyone else. Yahoo!, MSN, and Google recognize it, but AskJeeves does not support nofollow; its crawler simply ignores the nofollow tag.

In some cases, a link may be assigned to an image. The hyperlink would then include the name of the image, and might include some alternate text in an “alt” attribute, which can be helpful for voice-based browsers used by the blind. It also helps spiders, because it gives them another clue for what the page is about.

Hyperlinks may take other forms on the web, but by and large those forms do not pass ranking or spidering value. In general, the closer a link is to the classic text, the easier it is for a spider to follow a link, and vice versa.
Article by SEO CHAT

Keyword Research Tips

Admin — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:17:10 +0000

Keywords are search queries visitors use on search engines. Keywords are one to six words in length, with a few longer exceptions. You know your site needs keywords, but which ones? How do you research keywords? Keep reading; that’s the topic of this article.You cannot have a successful search engine optimization campaign without keyword research. Your website must show in search results for key phrases that indicate interest in your products/services and deliver some kind of benefit to the company (sign ups, purchases, downloads, etc), so it’s important to find and test keyword phrases.

This article will teach you basic keyword research strategies and introduce you to more advanced local tactics.

Where Can I Find Keywords?

There are special tools on the web that help markers find keywords, called keyword research tools. There are free, subscription-based and pay-per-use tools. In this article I focus on the free ones.

Disclaimer: Subscription and pay-per-use tools are not always better than free ones. Search for reviews and feedback before spending bucks with any company. There are many bad products aimed at “newbies” and their curious wallets.

Free Keyword Research Tools

Google Keyword Tool – Search for keywords in over 50 languages. It features a very high quality, clean and frequently updated keyword database, with estimated search volume. The down side – keywords that don’t meet Google’s search volume criteria don’t make it to the database, rendering this tool useless for long keyword phrases (four to eight words in length). Regardless, this is one of the best keyword research tools.

Wordtracker – Their free tool has a limit of 100 results. If you want to see all keywords, you must pay. Its free database is very detailed, so in most cases 100 results is enough. Wordtracker gathers keyword data from two meta search engines – Dogpile and Metacrawler. Both search engines hold around a one percent market share, so to estimate real search volume numbers across all search engines you must multiply Wordtracker numbers by 99.

Keyword Discovery – This tool has a noisy database, so use it with caution. It gathers data from toolbars installed on many computers. I find their free database needs a huge clean up.

Yahoo Search Marketing – Follow these steps to get to Yahoo’s keyword research tool. When you click on the link, you will get to a page that says: “Start Advertising with Yahoo! Search Marketing in 5 Simple Steps.” On the right side, select your “market” and “time zone,” then click on “Get Started.” You will see Yahoo say: “1. Target Customers by Geographic Location.” Leave everything as is and click on “Next: Keywords.” You now have access to Yahoo’s keyword tool. There’s no need to register further. Copy your keywords when finished and close the window.

There is a big down side to using this tool; you have to go through this process every time. If you don’t like the hassle, you can pay Yahoo $50 to open an account with their pay-per-click service.

SEO Book Keyword Research Tool – This tool gives exactly the same results as Wordtracker (above). In fact, its database relies on Wordtracker. What you will like about the SEO Book tool is all the extras that come on top of regular keyword research. You can search Yahoo Suggest, Google Suggest, Google Traffic Estimator, Google Insights, Quintra, News Search, Directories, Blog Search, Tag Search and more, all in one place. Play around with it a little.

Now you know where to find keywords. To find more, search with “keyword research” or “keyword research tool” on search engines.

Basic research is easy. Enter a word or a phrase that describes your business/ web site and keyword research tools will give you the results, including synonyms. For example, here’s what Google tool gave us for the word “mortgage”:

Keyword	Search Volume Per Month
mortgage	83,100,000
mortgage lenders	201,000
mortgage brokers	201,000
home mortgage	20,400,000

Now I know that around 200,000 people search for “mortgage brokers” in the US, every month. If I run a mortgage website, it makes sense to optimize for this keyword (though a keyword with this level of popularity will need tens of thousands of dollars for content and links).

Go through the list and spot key phrases you would like to rank for on search engines. Make a list and build an Excel spreadsheet of all the phrases. The trick is to select keywords that will deliver the most for your dollars/efforts.

For example, “shoes” is a popular phrase. People searching for “shoes” may want to find running shoes, high heels, winter shoes, boots, sandals and more. The phrase is too general to know for sure.

On the other hand, the key phrase “buy athletic shoes” tells us clearly that visitors want to buy athletic shoes! There’s no guesswork. This keyword also takes less time (or less cost) to optimize for than “shoes,” because it’s longer, less competitive and has less search volume.

Be realistic with keyword selection

We all want to rank for the word “shoes,” “car,” or “mortgage,” but competition is stiff. It would take several years of optimization and hard work to get to the first page for those keywords — oh yeah, and did I mention that it will also take a fat budget for links and content creation? Search engine optimization companies charge at least $100,000 for those phrases, so you must have big wallet.

Unless you have big budget, you must compromise with less competitive keywords and go for local markets.

What city are you in? Write it down.

What is your main keyword? Write it down.

Combine the two and get to a keyword research tool.

For example, I am a mortgage broker in New York. My main keyword is “mortgage broker” and my city is “New York.” Combined, those two give: “new york mortgage broker.”

Plug this into a keyword research tool and wait for results. Here what Google gave me:

Keyword	Search Volume
new york mortgage brokers	1,600
new york mortgage broker	2,900
mortgage broker new york city	140
new york state mortgage broker	260

As you can see, those keywords have less search volume than our previous keywords. The up side, however, is that there are fewer competitors and it will take less time, effort and money to have a web site optimized for those keywords, while still enjoying a good flow of customers.

Optimization for local keywords is the first stage of optimization for new web sites. We usually optimize our clients for their local city first and only then for more competitive keywords. This way clients see the power of search engine optimization, gain rankings fairly quickly (no delusions; search engine optimization takes at least four to six months if you’re going for the first page) and start making profits on a local level. It also costs less.

Only after we achieve good rankings for local keywords do we optimize for more competitive ones. This strategy is perfect if your web site is new and is not found anywhere on search results. Here are three reasons why:

It establishes a link profile (links are everything for Google, and Google is becoming everything).
It establishes a level of trust from search engines.
It tests effectiveness of keywords and search engine optimization for a particular business model.

Research several local keywords and test.

If you’re skeptical about search engine optimization, you can test its effectiveness. Here’s how to do it.

Research your keywords (described above).
Set up a pay-per-click account with Google Adwords.
Run a campaign with your selected keywords for a week or so, and measure the results.
Research more keywords if you don’t like the results.

I recommend Google Adwords for testing, since it’s the best pay-per-click platform. Some Adwords ads will be shown on Yahoo, due to the Google – Yahoo Partnership.

It’s very easy to use Adwords. You can learn how in detail here.

When you test keywords, make sure you have effective landing pages. A landing page is a page that users see after they click on your advertisement. It’s important to create a separate page for pay-per-click advertisements (and SEO) instead of directing visitors to your home page because:

A landing page can contain and expand upon the content your advertisement had, giving a strong information scent to visitors.
A landing page can have clear calls to action such “buy it now,” “call us now,” “fill out a form,” etc.
It’s been proven that landing pages are more effective in converting visitors into customers than home pages.

You must test your keywords for at least a week to have real measurements. Analytics software can help you figure out how much time visitors spend on your web site, when they exit, which pages they spend time on and from which pages they leave. The biggest measurement however, would be your bottom line. If you spent $1000 on pay-per-click during your test week and only got back $200, then your keywords aren’t good enough. Go back and research more keywords. Test to see if results improve.

Once you see at least a double return on your investment, you’re safe. If your returns are poor, you should also examine your landing page and fix any problems there. Take the keywords you tested and optimize your website.

Good luck!

Article from SEO CHAT

10 SEO Tips

Admin — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:59:42 +0000

It is not hard to be barking up the wrong tree when it comes to getting search engine traffic because there is so much out of date information being circulated.

That is why it is always best to also learn many other traffic generation methods like viral marketing for example.

Not only is there out of date or invalid SEO advice getting around, there is also information which if acted upon, can result in your pages being banned.

The SEO tips below should assist the reader in forming a basic understanding of how to create human friendly web pages which are easily understood by the most popular search engines.

Know this. There are thousands of search engines but only two of them will bring you most of the traffic. They are google and yahoo. Another search engine that brings me a little traffic is msn but I do not focus too much on tactics for that engine.

Focus your attention on the engines that will bring you the most visitors first and work your way down.

Basic SEO

1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing targeted traffic to your site.

Make sure that the title tag contains text which a human can relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up in a search result. Treat it like a headline.

2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.

3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.

Adding the exact same text for your h1 tag will tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine result that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page where they intended to visit. Robots like this too because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the headline.

Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.

4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

I always use the headline of my pages as the title tag to help the robots know exactly what my page is about. A good place to insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is the same as the title tag text.

5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were. I just place my headline once within the keywords and description tags.

6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods.

7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.

8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.

My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this tag to your links.

9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.

10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.

Here is the submission page for google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Submit only once. There is no need to submit every two weeks. There is no need to submit more than one page. Robots follow links. If your site has a nice link trail, your entire site will get indexed.

My site has a nice human friendly link trail which robots follow easily. All my pages get indexed without ever submitting more than the main index page once.

More SEO Tips

Get the facts here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/. This page will explain most of what you should focus on along with what you should forget about.

If you have been thinking about handing over the task of SEO to someone outside of yourself, you should read some warnings before you part with any money. http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

SEO Discussion

Most SEO Professionals will not tell you about the goose that laid the golden egg. The following link will take you to a jealously guarded FREE SEO discussion.

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=google.public.support.general

You can search the forum for specific questions you may have. I like to just lurk around and read the messages.

The author, Ed Zivkovic owns his own website which contains articles with all sorts of tips for work at home webmasters. Here is the site: http://www.ezau.com

SEO Video – How to Use Google’s Keyword Tools for SEO

Saahir — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:12:09 +0000

If you are currently implementing search engine optimization (SEO) for your website or are thinking about it, then this article will be worth tens of thousands of dollars for you.

Conducting effective keyword research from an SEO perspective is critical, because the next 12 months of SEO activities and investment will be focused on the words you identify before you start optimising.

The key to a successful SEO campaign is selecting keywords where a top ranking will earn you more profit per month than the cost of achieving and maintaining those rankings.

If you get it wrong, you could spend tens of thousands of dollars on achieving a top 10 ranking, only to find that the top ranking is not making you any money!

I’ve seen it many times… businesses optimising their site for a keyword which has high number of people searching those keywords, but an extremely low number of people actually buying.

Here are step by step instructional videos on how to use Google’s keyword research tools to identify highest value keyword phrases:

STEP 1: GOOGLE ADWORDS KEYWORD TOOL

In this video you’ll learn how to use the Google Keyword Research Tool to identify target keyword phrases for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

STEP 2: GOOGLE TRAFFIC ESTIMATOR

In this video you’ll learn how to combine the results from the Google Keyword Tool with the Google Traffic Estimator to identify highest value keyword phrases for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

By following these steps you will ensure that your SEO efforts are focused on those keywords that will generate maximum profits for your business.

Orignal Author : Alex Cleanthous @ webprofits.com.au

11 of the Best (Free) SEO Tools and How to Use Them

Saahir — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:59:19 +0000

Just as a there are tools which make the process of building a house easier, there are tools which make the process of ranking a website at the top of a search engine easier.

Every seasoned SEO professional has their own arsenal of SEO tools which they use every day to help them rank websites. It saves time, effort and provides a strong advantage against those competitors who do not use the same tools.

Here are 11 of the SEO tools which I use on a regular basis to rank websites at the top of the search engines. You’ll note that there is a strong focus on Google – this is because ranking a website at the top of Google will, in my experience, drive anywhere between 10x and 100x the traffic of a top ranking in Yahoo or MSN combined.

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool – this is a free tool provided by Google, which provides keyword suggestions based on ‘descriptive words’ or ‘website content’. Although this tool is made to assist Google Adwords advertisers, you can use it to research SEO keywords as well, by selecting ‘Exact’ from the ‘Match Type’ drop down menu. The best thing about this tool is that you can see estimated traffic volumes for exact match phrases within any country where Google has a search engine. And what better place to get keyword suggestions than from the search engine which controls the lion share of search engine traffic online?

2. Google Adwords Traffic Estimator – this is a free tool provided by Google, which provides Adwords advertisers with an estimated cost of running a PPC campaign using specific keyword phrases. Use it like this: export the exact match keywords from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, paste them into the Google Traffic Estimator, select the country you are optimising in, run the search and then sort the keywords in descending order by ‘estimated cost per day’. This is a great way of identifying the keywords which may have high traffic volumes but don’t convert very well, because those phrases which do not produce revenue for advertisers will have a low cost-per-click and an overall lower estimated cost per day as a result.

3. Google Webmaster Tools – this is a free service provided by Google to provide information to website owners about how Google views their website. You can see the top search queries which produce traffic for your site, as well as the top keyword rankings which you have. You can also see how many back links each page on your site has, as well as which sites are linking to each page. Other features include uploading an XML sitemap, generating robots.txt files, removing URLs and finding broken URLs on your website. Use every tool available in the Google Webmaster Tools service.

4. XML Sitemap Generator – use this tool to generate an XML sitemap of your entire site, and then upload the sitemap inside of Google Webmaster Tools. If your site is less than 500 pages then the free version is fine. But if it is larger than 500 pages you will need to purchase the full version, which then needs to be installed on your server.

5. SearchStatus – this is a Firefox plugin which provides a range of competitor SEO analysis information through a toolbar, including PageRank, Alexa Rank, Yahoo Backlinks, Highlighting Nofollow Links, Indexed Pages and Whois Information.

6. SEO Quake – this is another Firefox plugin which provides information similar to SearchStatus. The main difference with SEO Quake is that it displays the competitor analysis information within the search results, rather than the toolbar, which means that you can see information such as PageRank, Backlinks, and Domain Age etc. without having to actually visit a website.

7. Google Analytics – this is a free analytics service provided by Google. Simply open an account and paste the tracking code on every page of your website and you’ll be able to see a wide range of information about your website visitors. For SEO purposes, you want to look at the ‘traffic by non-paid keywords’ report to see which keywords are producing traffic for your site. Setup conversion tracking and sort the list in descending order by keywords which are producing the highest number of conversions. Keep an eye on this report to find new keywords which are driving traffic and conversions which you weren’t aware of and then focus SEO efforts on them as well.

8. WordPress – this is the leading blogging platform for SEO professionals because of the internal linking structure of the blog software as well as the customisations and plugins available. Maintaining a regularly updated WordPress blog will have significant impact on your SEO rankings.

9. Pingoat – once you have setup your blog and have posted some articles on it, use Pingoat to notify the RSS directories of your blog. This will build exposure to your blog as well as incoming links from those directories.

10. RSS Submit – similar to Pingoat, this is a piece of software which will notify additional RSS directories of your blog. To notify all of the RSS directories available in the software you will need to purchase the full version.

11. Google Trends – this is yet another free service by Google which shows the trends of particular keywords over time. You can compare the trends of multiple keywords against one another, with a specified country. As the process of ranking a website at the top of a search engine can take 12 months or more, you want to make sure that the trend of your target keyword is moving in an upwards direction.

12. SEO Elite – although this software is not free, it is great piece of software which you will need to use to monitor your ranking improvements over time, as well as analysing competitor backlinks for new linking opportunities. Although there are many free pieces of software available online, this SEO software is definitely worth the investment (note: I no longer use this software to monitor rankings as my needs have grown over time, as will yours, but this is a great piece of software to use when starting out).

As with any toolset, you will gain the maximum advantage by using all of the tools in conjunction with one another. For example, you will conduct keyword research using the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool. You then export the results into the Google Traffic Estimator. Take your top 3 phrases and put them into Google Trends. Type each of those phrases into Google. Use SearchStatus and SEO Quake to research your competitors, and so on…

The process of ranking a website at the top of Google takes a long, focused, consistent effort and is difficult even at the best of times. Using every tool you have at your disposal will give you an unfair advantage and will make the process that much easier.

Orignal Author : Alex Cleanthous @ webprofits.com.au