What's the Most Effective SEO Tactic for 2006?

Today, I'm going to try something different. I'm going to go out on a limb hëre and make a blind assumption about you.

"You think that the Q-square formula (quality + quantity) of getting inbound links (reciprocal or one-way) is the best way to increase your search engine rankings."

Just about right, eh? And unless you are a complete newbie to search engine optimization, this is exactly what SEO experts have been telling you time and time and time again. And if there was any doubt that search engines were being spammed, paid links put rest to those fears. The SEO experts make monëy, you get a boost in your rankings, everyone's happy.

Or so they'd have you think.
Over the past year or so, search engines have started to take serious measures to combat sp@m against them. Search engine spamming usually occurs in one of three ways:
Multiple submissions of your web pages (you'd be surprised to learn that people still do this). Keyword spamming in low quality content. Link spamming (building tons of links to a new site REALLY quickly). On the other hand, you've probably heard about the need for quality content ever since you started learning about search engine optimization (hopefully). Either way, here's a refresher:

Search engines are looking for unique and useful content information that is accurate and important to the people interested in that field. Search engines also look for fresh content regular additions to your website, etc (this is why blogging became / is such a huge craze). So let's put that all together:

Search engines are working towards fighting SEO sp@m bad, keyword stuffed content and link spamming by:

Devaluing the "ranking boost" that these elements give. Penalizing the websites that are obviously spamming search engines. The end result?

Traditional link building is no longer your best bet to get high search engine rankings.

That's not to say that you should dump your link campaigns all at once and scamper for the hills links will continue to have value within search engines and until the search engine algorithms develop well enough to distinguish between "organic" linking and links generated through a link-building campaign (not easy to do at all, even with Google's or Microsoft's resources), getting inbound links will stay the easiest way to bump up your search engine rankings by several pages.

However, for SEO purposes, that brings us back to square one. We like things to be easy, but we also want things to work well. If link-building is a good tactic, but not the best tactic (especially when everyone and their mother is getting a few hundred links every month to their 30-page AdSense websites), then where does it leave the rest of us?

The answer lies with what the search engines have been saying all along quality content, wrapped around quality, organic links.

Let me explain that.

Search engines have taken two specific measures to improve their results and reduce commercialized sp@m from their search engines:

Link pages are being "identified" as such and therefore are being considered as low-quality links (you'll remember from Link Building 101 that the quality of the link is a big factor in how much it improves your website's rankings). Some of the identifying criteria for a link page are: the number of links on that page, the ratio of text to links on that page, and relevance of the link, which I explain in the next point. Search engine algorithms are currently looking at the context that the links are placed in (i.e. surrounding text as well as the page's keywords) to measure the relevance of the host site to YOUR website in other words, checking the text of the page your inbound link is placed on to find out whether that site is relevant to your industry / niche. This leads us to the following conclusions:

The linking page must have as few links as possible. The links should be focused on as few sites as possible (to funnel the value of the link page). The links should be surrounded by "relevant" content. The linking page should contain "quality" content (written for human reading rather than written for search engines there's a sharp difference between keyword optimization and keyword stuffing). Now you must be wondering...."is there a point to all this?" And I respect that, because this is exactly what internet marketing and SEO gurus have been saying for a long time now. Just like I often ask myself:

So WHAT?

So...

What if I told you that you could use a blindingly simple marketing tactic that will not only bring you relevant, powerful and valuable inbound links, but that it will ALSO bring you regular visitors?

How many SEO techniques can promise visitors from other websites?

Now I'm not trying to sell you a product, so I'll cut to the chase.

Take a single page. Take ONE core keyword describing your industry / main business, and a few more keywords for a couple of main category pages. Write 350-550 words of unique, quality content that gives the reader useful information. Each paragraph should be tightly focused around one keyword, and should contain one link (not more) to a related page (for your main keyword, link to your website, for your category keywords link to your category pages). Use keywords (but not sentences) as anchor text.

Once you've completed this page, contact link partners in YOUR niche not direct competitors obviously, but complementary businesses (if you sell information books on candle-making, your ideal link partners would be informational websites on candle-making), and make them this pitch:

"Are you looking for a quick and easy way to boost your search engine rankings? Search engines demand relevance, they demand quality, they demand freshness. I'd like to offer you the chance to do a valuable exchange I'll provide you with an optimized article on a subject relevant to your business, and in return all I ask is that you allow me to place some links to my website on the page. In fact, you can even plug in your own links affiliate, to your own website or any other website."

Of course, you'll probably have to write a more sophisticated approach letter than those 6 lines, but the intent is clear: write quality content, and then place it on websites relevant to your industry. Usually, the website hostïng the page will want some monthly payment in return (after all, you're effectively buying a page on their website). If you've followed my advice and picked well-ranked websites with quality content, the money will be worth it. In addition, you'll probably be paying less than an out-and-out link purchase as you're also giving them something in return (quality content to boost their search engine rankings).

Got all that? Congratulations. You've just learned about what I like to call a "Hosted Marketing Page". Don't be fooled by its simplicity. What I've explained in 4 paragraphs (318 words) will probably be the subject of endless marketing campaigns and short $49 reports over the next year.

Now some of you might be saying: I know this isn't this just another version of marketing your website through articles (where you write articles, submit them to article directories and have webmasters pick them up to post on their websites)? What's so great about this? We KNOW this.

The question isn't that you know this, the question is: are you doing this? Article submissions are shots in the dark article farms do give a better boost in search engine rankings than simple links, but most article directories are too general to help you rank well on the relevance factor. If your article gets picked up by a few webmasters, the extra links will be dampened by the fact that the content is "duplicated" thus reducing its value.

Search engines are wising up to article submissions just as they started combating link sp@m a year and a half ago at any rate, article submissions are marketing tools / branding tools, not pure SEO tools.

Experiment with a Hosted Marketing Page of your own. If you don't have the time to contact link partners directly, talk to your link-building expert (or company) and explain what you are looking for (heck, you can forward this article to them).

The beauty of Hosted Marketing Pages is that they complement your regular SEO strategy. Link building, if done right, is still a quick and cheap way of getting higher search engine rankings. However, if you are looking to make a HUGE splash instead of just poking around, then I urge you to seriously consider the power of Hosted Marketing Pages.

If you would like help with your "Hosted Marketing Page" campaign, visit Textlinkbrokers.com. They are the leader in link popularity building programs and are the only company offering this particular service

7 Search Engine Optimization Mistakes and Solutions

To many websites, webmasters discover that major sources of website traffic come from search engines. Therefore, they are all keen on gaining top search engine placements through search engine optimisation.

Based on our several years of SEO experience, we point out some common mistakes and shed some lights to correct it.

1. Cannot Get Indexed by Search Engines, Really?A garment ERP software solution provider came to me and asked a question: "I have established a new website for 1 year, and found a SEO company to submit my website. However, my website can be found in search engines only when I type my domain name http://www.indigo8-solutions.com in search query box. The SEO company told me:
"My domain got banned. What can I do?"
Ah, I told them they have been fooled by that SEO company. If you type your domain name in search box and your website can be found, which means your website has not been banned. Interestingly, your SEO company's domain name is no longer found in Google. Their domain got banned only.

To help them find out their real problems, I found the following in search engines:
a. When typing their domain name in search query box, their site will be displayed in search result. Instead of displaying
Title Tag in the search result, search engine displays their domain name only.
b. Only 1 page is being indexed.
What's the problem then?
With a closer look to their coding, I found that at the top of their webpage, they heavily use Javascript to present their heading, company name, visible content, and website menu. Actually, many search engines have difficulties in reading Javascript codes.
Solution?
Put those Javascript in external js files and leave the webpages with plain HTML codes. Search engines usually have problems in crawling Javascript. Since their whole site navigation menu is written in Javascript, they should build a sitemap using plain HTML so that search engines can read all of their pages.
One more tips: When you cannot get indexed by search engines, do not blindly believe someone saying that your website get banned. You should firstly look at your website structure and see if your coding are clumsy and make search engines hard to "read" your website.
The problem created by Javascript is not uncommon nowadays. Even a very big Asia Market Research Firm also commits this error. They are now starting to rectify it.

2. Link Building In many forums, some people are strongly opposed to link exchange and claim that it is a devil and it hurts your search engine ranking and even get you banned.
I personally do not agree. Evidence shows that many top sites are doing link exchange and getting top rankings across all major search engines. In addition, link exchange has been a long used way for traffic building by smaller websites. I do not see why search engines will block people to promote websites using this simple and long used method.
Indeed, link exchange becomes a problem only when you manipulate link text with a pure purpose of tricking search engines, exchange links with link farms, or buy hundreds of domain names and cross-link with your site.

A solution to avoid link exchange hurting you includes:
1. Use a wide variety of link text
2. Seek link exchange with sites of similar theme
3. Emphasize on how many traffic you can get from your link partners instead of search engine ranking

Some webmasters know the importance of link exchange. However, they think that it consumes most of their time and finally give up doing it. A solution is that you can consider using Linkautomate.com to manage your links. This kind of software saves you time in link checking and link page update.

3. Use of Flash IntroWeb design companies try hard to persuade you to use a Flash introduction as your homepage. You think that "Wow! The flash animation is very appealing and it makes your site looks more attractive". However, do you know that it can hurt your website in search engine ranking?

Let me explain..
Search engines analyze website based on text. Flash, unluckily, is not text. According to "How to Design Website Guideline" of Siuchu Suga, search engines are not able to read content presented by Flash. They just treat Flash as an embedded object or graphics only. If you use a Flash Intro as your homepage, you will never get good rankings.

In addition, many Flash intro do not offer additional and meaningful content to visitors. Ask your visitors, how many of them are really interested in reading your Flash Intro before going straight to your website content?

A solution to use Flash or not, please ask yourself whether the Flash intro is really useful and can offer additional information to your visitors? Secondly, instead of a Flash homepage, you may consider making a Flash header together with content at your homepage.

4. Hidden Text and Meta Tags, Webmasters understand that keyword density is a way to improve search engine ranking, and some webmasters use a technique called "keyword stuffing". They will stuff keywords into their webpages repeatedly, e.g. "keyword 1, keyword 2, .... keyword 1, keyword 2...." Well, everyone knows it does not make sense to visitors. Therefore, those "clever" webmasters will make those text invisible. For example, make the text color identical to background color.

Unluckily, this trick no longer works. Search engines are able to detect it, and penalize websites using this nonsense technique. If you do not want your site being penalized, remove those text immediately in case you have adopted this method.

Okay, some webmasters only stuff keywords in Meta Keyword Tags, an area for putting keywords. I am sorry to say that stuffing keywords in Meta keyword tags is also no good. You can only repeat a keyword for 3 times at most. Nowadays, search engines place less emphasis or even no emphasis on Meta keyword tags. So, what is the point of risking yourself by stuffing keywords there?

5. Use of Dynamic Pages, Many websites use content managment system (CMS) to generate their webpages. As generation of dynamic pages are easier for website development, CMS generally use dynamic pages. However, search engines have difficulties to spider and understand them.

To solve the problem, you can consider using Mod Rewrite in case you use Apache server or finding a CMS that can generate static HTML pages.

6. Be a Pagerank Monster, Many search engine marketers are too focused on their website's pagerank. Everyday, they are talking and checking pagerank.

They perform link building based on pagerank only. In fact, pagerank is only one factor for Google to determine search engine ranking. It also cannot affect your rankings in other search engines like Yahoo and MSN. If you are too concerned about pagerank, you finally will ignore other important optimization criteria.

Therefore, you should repeatedly remind yourself that pagerank is only one of the many factors and you cannot only work on it.

7. Too Believe in Sandbox, Some webmasters propose that a new website will be put into sandbox by Google so that you cannot get any high rankings for highly competitive keywords. Even though their website cannot get any rankings after 1 year, they still believe that it is sandbox effect. Some even says Yahoo has Sandbox, MSN has Sandbox, etc...

From Google's patent information, there is no clue that such sandbox occurs. From my experience, if your site is new and cannot rank high in highly competitive keywords, it is solely because other websites are more established in search engine world. For example, they have more inbound links, more content, etc. Therefore, webmasters should not focus on finding how to get out from sandbox. Instead, you should put more effort in link building and content optimization. Eventually, you will see your website's rankings rise.

Back to Basics in SEO

There has been a lot of talk about Google and MSN's new algorithms and Yahoo's search engine changes. When these changes finally do occur, it is always important to remember the number one rule in SEO: Don't Panic!

If there is one guaranteed constant in this business it is that there will always be changes in the search engines' rankings. Our job, as search engine marketers, is to stay on top of the changes and to monitor how the change affects our clients' site's traffïc.

I am actually excited about any algorithm change, because it means that the search engines should actually get better.

What follows is a "back to the basics" on getting good rankings:

Keyphrases
First things first: Always be sure to research the keyphrases you intend on using. Find out what keyphrases Internet users most often employ to find your product or service. There is no point optimizing your site for "online web marketing" if everyone types in "Internet marketing".

Once you have a list of potential keyphrases with a high amount of Internet traffïc, comb over that list and see which keyphrases best describe your product or service. These are the ones you should consider.

Here are some sites that can help you in your research:


Wordtracker
Google AdWords (Click to sign up, it is frëe to do the keyphrase research)
Snap
Competition

Research your competition with these questions in mind:
What keyphrases are they using (take a peek at their keyword Meta tag)?
What are the titles of their sites?
When you do a search for the keyphrases you are considering, who comes up in the top five rankings?
What is their title/keyphrases?
Are the top ranking sites your competitors or are they industry associations?

Use the keyword effectiveness index (KEI) tool at Wordtracker to compare the effectiveness of your keyphrases. A higher KEI signifies a better ratio of demand-to-competition for a keyphrase.

Do a link search to see who is linking to your competition. In a search engine, type in "link:" (without the quotes) followed by the URL you want to verify. This will allow you to see all the important links to the site that the search engine tracks (I would recommend doing this in both Google and Yahoo).

Can you get links from the same sites as your competitors?
Are there industry associations or organizations that are linking to the top sites, but not to you?
Get your link campaign going! (see the article about linking for search engines to learn why links are important)

Optimising Your Web Site

Now that you know what keyphrase you are optimising for, here is how to optimise your site: write good quality content that focuses on your keyphrases.

Above all else, this is the single most important factor.

Sure there are other on-site factors such as:


Getting the keyphrase into the title (this is the second most important factor)
Getting the keyphrase into the Meta description tag, the Meta keyword tag, the headers and sub headers, the alt tags, and into some link text (some of these factors are VERY minor)
Having a good site map so that the search engine spiders can easily navigate your site
Having a robots.txt to include the pages that you want the search engines to include
Don't use frames
Use flash wisely (not the WHOLE site in flash)
Use external files for your java-scripts
Use cascading style sheets (a .css file)
Use dynamic URL's wisely (Avoid using URL's with ? or & in them)



Content is king

Oh...and did I mention that you need to write good quality content that focuses on your keyphrases? All of the points above are superfluous if you don't have good content. Content is the food that the search engine spiders like to gobble up with a voracious appetite. The items below are just the side dishes. You need good content to get decent rankings, but you need the side dishes to become a serious competitor in your market.


Write about your keyphrases.
Write extra pages.
Write about your industry.
Write about your product or service's uses.
How will your product/service improve the life of the consumer? Find out, and then write about it.
Why is your product/service better than your competitor's? Think of a reason and write about it.
What is the history of your product/service? Or your industry? Write about it.
Who are you? Everyone always enjoys "about us" pages...
And of course, be sure to serve the search engine spiders with a tasty main dish full of keyphrases!
Whatever you do, be sure that you don't write junk or filler copy and double chëck that everything reads well. Keep in mind that writing about your keyphrase doesn't mean adding the keyphrase unnaturally into the text. If you have any doubts, employ the talents of an expert to do the writing for you!


Links

Start soliciting links today! Get people in your industry to link to you. Contact:

Industry associations and organizations
Web sites about your industry
Sites related to your product or service
Suppliers
Resellers
Competitors who don't compete in the same region
Sites that sell products/services that relate to yours, but don't compete directly
See my article on soliciting links for more information on how to go about it: Linking is Queen

Submissions

Submit to all the directories you can find, so long as they are related (e.g., don't submit to the Abba directory unless your site is about Abba). Submitting to a directory should not be a mindless activity. Read the directory's directions on how to submit Very Carefully. Write your description very well, and tailor it to each directory in order to follow their guidelines. Make sure you submit (and get in) to www.dmoz.org - it is probably the most important directory out there today.

Do research and find "vertical directories" that focus on your industry, and submit to them. These directories are very important because, for example, if you have a dodo bird site, what better potential client than someone who found you through a dodo bird directory!

Search engines and directories are different. Do not confuse them. You can submit to all the search engines you can find, but it usually won't do much because the good search engines will find you anyway. Submitting to random search engines will usually only increase your email sp@m. Don't waste your money on search engine submission software for the same reasons.

Hëre is a partial list of the current important search engines:


Google
Yahoo
MSN
Conclusion


Build your web site for your customers, within the guidelines that the search engines set out.
Don't make the site awkward by over-conforming.
The site's first focus should be on what your clients want.
Create good content. Good, quality content that reads well and flows seamlessly.
Update it regularly. An active, living site is healthier than a stagnant, dead one (the search engines spiders like their food alive and full of life).
And remember: Content is King!

An Easy Guide To Building Links to Your Website

Link Building is vital for a good placement in any search engine and most website owners are unaware of this or don't really understand how it actually works.

Apart from good Keyword research and the right meta tags, linking building is an absolutely must for the success of any website and is an on going process, so make sure your put some time aside for this on a weekly basis or pay some one with experience to do it for you. Without it your website will certainly get no traffic.

There are 4 different types of Linking involved and each one is as important as the other.
If they are done correctly, they most certainly will give you a good ranking in the search engines.

They are : Reciprocal Links, Oneway Links, MultiSite Links & Directory Listings.

Reciprocal Linking
Quite simply - this is a link from your site to another and they link back to you. A bit of advise here is to only link to sites that are relevant to yours. i.e - If you are selling Cars - only link to Car websites, a link to a Health website will really do you no justice, and trust me I have seen hundreds of website owners make this mistake. What's important here is not number of the links you have, but the quality and relevancy of the site your are linking back to. Be Selective and also take a good look at the sites linking to the site you want to link. It's really no good if this Car Site you want to link to has 40 reciprocal Links from Online Pharmacies.

How to Do this :
1. Pay a SEO Company to do it for you. (can be quite expensive)2. Buy Them3. Link Exchange Sites.4. Search for them on your own.

Important : Do not add to many reciprocal links to quickly, build it up gradually otherwise you will be penalised by the search engines, as it will be seen as un-natural. A good way to start is not more than 10 to 20 in one month. As your site gets older you can start adding more.

One Way Links
This is what the search engines call a natural link, and these links are given a far better ranking than a reciprocal link. The easiest way to do this is to write articles on what you are selling and then submit them to article directories with a link back to your website. Website owners are always looking for content for their sites, and Article Directories are the easiest way for them to get content, with out them having to write them on their own. There are hundreds of these directories around and the more you submit to the quicker you will build up your one way links. It also is less time consuming than reciprocal linking and you will get far better results.

MultiSite Links
For this to be effective you need at least 3 to 4 websites to be involved in this. It is also seen as a natural link by the search engines and can be quite difficult to do if you only have one website. Although it can be done. You will just need to find 3 other websites that are interested.

How it works is this :
You link to site B, Site B links to site C, Site C links to site D and site D links back to you. This way all the sites get a link with out any of them creating a reciprocal link.

Directory Listings
This is also seen as a natural link as most directories don't require a link back. It's very simple and all you need to do is submit your site to as many directories as possible. There are thousand's of them on the Internet, so all it requires is a little bit of time and hard work. If you make it your goal to submit to one a day, the process won't become a tiresome.

Add Content To Increase Website Traffic

Why lots of quality content is the key to lots of traffic.

Content - All webmasters want lots of it and need lots of it to get a lot of traffic to their websites. In order to boost traffic, many webmasters try work on their meta tags or even resort to tricks in an effort to get more visitors to their site.

But one of the simplest, most effective, and most dependable ways to increase the amount of traffic to your website is to offer more quality content. I'm sure you have heard it said that on the Internet, content is king. Well, it's true!

For your website to be successful, you need to understand exactly how more content brings more visitors to your site as well as how to generate quality content that is related to your particular website theme.

Why do you need more content to bring in lots of traffic?

Many websites are really just company brochures that have been placed on the web. The site simply describes the company, with some contact information thrown in.

These types of websites usually have anywhere from five to ten separate html files. If these pages have a moderate amount of text on them, it's possible to optimize them for a few keywords and a few web surfers may find the site via the search engines.

But if these sites are in fairly competitive fields, it may be very difficult to build enough traffic because the search engines try to rank the most important websites that match a search query. Search engine robots search for keywords or phrases in the pages' text to try to determine what the site is all about.

But the search engines also consider the links on the web pages. For example, if your homepage is about bicycles and you have links to other pages on your site relating to the same theme, such as mountain bikes, racing bikes, etc, then the search engine will conclude that the site is about bicycles.

So if your site has a lot of pages about bicycles, your site will be better represented in the search engines for the search term bicycles than one that is simply a bicycle company brochure site with a handful of pages.

Also, each page stands alone as a "mini website" and may come up in searches, allowing people to enter your site through the "side" or "back doors" and not the homepage. The more pages your site has, the more chances it has of being found in searches, and the more you can optimize your site for different search terms.

In a nutshell, more pages mean more "roads" from the search engines to your sites. And traffic needs roads to travel on.

So then, by adding lots of quality content pages to your site, you boost the chances of one of your pages coming up in searches and you will increase your site's overall traffic.

Another thing to consider: the more quality content your site has, the more respect it gets from human-edited directories such as the Open Directory Project as well as from other webmasters.

If you have lots of quality content, then you'll get lots of link requests, requests for permission to publish your articles in newsletters, and more links to content pages on your website. All of these factors result in more website traffic for you.

How do you get lots of quality content for your site?

Depending on the type of products or services you offer, there are many ways to build quality content for your site. Here are a few examples:

1. Product Reviews - If you are selling other companys' products as an affiliate, rather than just linking to the product, you can write a full-page review of it. Explain how the product has helped you and what its strengths are.

This type of content pre-sells the product, as well as providing interesting reading in itself. If you sell your own products, you can give background information on them or solicit satisfied customers or users to write reviews, or testimonials.

2. Background information - Every product exists in some context. For example, you may have a hotel in a particular city. Instead of only providing information about the hotel, you could offer some content pages about the history of the city where the hotel is located as well as any popular tourist attractions near there. The possibilities for adding this type of content are unlimited!

3. Questions and answers - Let your website's visitors help you create content. Place a questions and answers feature on your website or in your newsletter. Not only will you get insight into what is on your visitor's minds, but by answering these questions you can generate lots of useful content for your website and newsletters.

4. Forums - Your site's visitors can also directly write the content on your site through a forum. Some forums are searchable by search engine robots, while others aren't. If you have quality content on your forum, you can also cut-and-paste it onto the main pages of your website to ensure inclusion in the large search engines.

5. Guest articles by others - There's no real need to spend a lot of time writing your own articles if that isn't something that you enjoy doing (or of you aren't very good at it). You can publish the articles that other people write!

There's a lot of top-quality free content that is available on the internet. While you're usually required to provide a link back to the author's website (or give his/her email address), this is a small price to pay when you consider the fact that many of these well-written articles pull in tons of traffic.

Finally, if you're wondering how best to arrange all of your site's new content, you have two effective options. Some people may simply build a second content-rich website to draw lots of traffic and then direct the visitors to their main "sales site" via links.

My preferred method is to place an articles section on your existing site, or simply link your new content pages to the particular product and service pages that are most appropriate.

However you decide to present your content, you can expect to see a greatly increased traffic flow to your site as a direct result of the quality content that you have added.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great source of getting you site noticed, especially if you have something to offer.

So you have a few thousand email addresses that you could send an email to, but could you reach more?

Many community type websites offer to send your "email" from within there template. This allows you to reach potential customers that won't be classed as spamming them, as long as the mailing list is legit. Sure it may cost you a few thousand dollars, but when the reach of the email is over and above a few hundred thousand people, look what it could do for business. Even if only 5 percent of the people receiving the email decide to purchase or sign up that’s a hell of a lot of potential customers that you wouldn't normally have had.

Now to make thing favour you more in your efforts to increase your customer base, you need to offer some sort of incentive for them to click through from the email to your website. The best way is to set up a competition. This will grab the attention of so many people. But make it believable, otherwise people will think it's a scam.

So now there’s an incentive for more people to visit your site through an email campaign. Now with the competition add an option for them to "subscribe". This will allow you to increase your thousand or so email addresses to tens of thousands or more.

Does it stop there? NO, why not spread your reach even further. Once the visitor has entered the competition, why not allow them to increase there chances of winning by referring friends to your site. This will allow the visitor to spread the word for you as well as offering them an incentive to do so.

Imagine that, you get a few hundred thousand people looking at your email, a number of which will visit your site to enter the competition, which then the majority of these people will refer friends to your site. You might get over 100,000 opt-in email addresses from which you can now use to send your monthly newsletter with all your other promotional stuff to.

This will not only allow you to reach a large number of people, but imagine what it could do for business.

Search Engine Optimisation - What next?

So you've completed a sucessful SEO campaign, you're seeing an increase in visitors and your rankings in serps are quite high. But for some reason the conversion rate is on the decrease, why is that? There are several possibilities.

You've lost sight of the goal.
Sometimes the changes made to make you're site more search engine friendly actually decrease the usibility. You get a sense of achievement by the increase in traffic, the increase in sales etc. But could the conversion rate be better? A good thing to do is run usibility test to try to find the bottleneck that may be driving potential customers away.

You've targetted the wrong customer base.
Sometimes targeting certain keywords that you think are ideal, turn out to not be all that ideal. These keywords may be driving visitors to your site, but the visitors may be after something else. This is why identifying your target market and keyword analysis combined is essential for success.

So there you have it two possibilities for why you're SEO campaign may not be working 100% for you. Remember a little planning will go a long way in the end.

Search Engine Optimisation - Keyword Analysis

Keyword analysis is a beneficial part of any SEO campaign. The success of keyword analysis is identifying keywords and phrases that are in high demand, but little competition.

There are many programs out there that help with keyword analysis. Basically they're statistical programs that give you feedback as to the competition and demand for keywords and phrases. They help to identify additional keywords that yuo may not have thought of. For example, the other day i was doing some keyword analsys for accounting software, using a program it helped me identify related keyphrases like: financial software, payroll and the list goes on. With these related keywords I could perform analysis on these to see which keywords and phrases that would be more beneficial to target during the release of the new website.

Keyword analysis could be the difference between a website being sucessful or failing in search results. So try and get access to a keyword analyser program, the benefits are great!

Search Engine Optimisation - Html optimisation

Html optimisation plays a part in search engine optimisation.

When optimising a pages html there are a few things to do.

1. Strip out any unnessasary tags.
2. Simplify pages html and table structures
3. Remove as much javascript code as possible. You can always include the javascript from an external file
4. Extract any css styles from within the page and put these in an external css file

Pretty much what you're trying to do in increase the relevency of the optimised page to your targetted keywords. A basic way to think of html optimisation is:

Html optimisation is like a rum and coke. The potentcy of a glass of rum and coke, reflects on the alcohol percentage of the rum and the amount of coke in the glass. The optimised content (i.e. Alcohol percentage) and the less "additional" code (i.e. Coke) the greater the relevency (potentcy) of the page for the targetted keywords.

Well thats the way I see html optimisations role in search engine optimisation.

Search Engine Optimisation - Anchor Text

What is anchor text?
Anchor text is the visible hyperlinked text on the page. For example, let's examine this code:

Search Engine Optimisation
The anchor text for this link is "Search Engine Optimisation".

Why is anchor text important?

Anchor text is important in search engine rankings because the search engines use anchor text to help determine the relevance of a page being linked to for those keywords. By having this link pointing to my web page from other websites, this search engine optimisation blog will perform better in searches for the phrase "search engine optimisation". Have you seen many "click here" links? These links are not very well optimised as they don't describe the page's content.

Go through your site, or find sites that are linking to you and see what the anchor text is like. If the anchor text isn't well optimised for your targeted keywords? Ask if they can change the anchor text for the links to your website.

Don't forget "text" links bear more weight in search engines than "image" links.

Search Engine Optimisation - White Hat VS Black Hat

Today at work I read an artitle regarding bmw and google. Basically BMW were using cloaking to get the number 1 spot for searches such as "used cars". Google have penalised them by reducing their page rank back down to zero. This brings up the topic White Hat vs Black Hat search engine optimisation techniques.

White Hat Search Engine Optimisation Techniques
Basically white hat techniques mean "doing things by the book".
Eg,

1. Optimise your title, and Meta tags for your site so they represent the content of the page being displayed.
2. Optimise your content to represent your chosen keywords and phrases.
3. Create incomming links from other related sites.

Black Hat Search Engine Optimisation Techniques
Basically black hat techniques mean "doing things that search engines see as being illegal".

Eg,

1. Cloaking
2. Spamming Keywords and Phrases
3. Linking from link farms

My view on this is simply, if you want your site to rank high and you want it to stay there use "White Hat" techniques. This will ensure that your site is going to stay in the rankings and won't be banned.

If you're happy-go-lucky inspired you might try some "Black Hat" techniques. This may get you immediate results but more often than not it doesn't take long for the search engines to catch on to it and you'll soon be banned.

If you want results fast why not participate in paid advertisments like google adwords, where you can bid for ad placement withing search results. This allows you to create targetted ads to a targeted audience.

Search Engine Optimisation - 301 Redirect

The 301 redirect is a wonderful thing. It's a search engine friendly way of redirecting the visitor from an old non existant page to your page of choice.

For example: A website has all it's file formatting in .html, i.e. index.html and they want to make their site more controlable, so they decide to use PHP. This is a tricky move when it comes to search engine optimisation as the file extensions are going to change resulting in the pages that are already indexed to be superseeded by the new .php versions.

Implementing a 301 redirect is fairly simple, depending on how you're going to be doing it and what type of server you're running.

There are many rules that you can put in place to forward specific pages to new specific pages.
Here is a basic 301 Redirect using the .htaccess file:
redirect 301 / http://www.example.com/
Once put in the root of the site it will forward everything to http://www.example.com/

Using a 301 redirect it passes all the pr from the old page to the new redirected to page. This means that all that hard work creating pr is not lost and hopefully you will maintain your position in SERPS.

Thats it for basic 301 redirect. In the future I will go more indepth with the rules etc.

Search Engine Optimisation - Content

As you all should know content is king when it comes to search engine optimisation. But there's more than just writing up a bit of content to use on your website.

Firstly each page should target certain keywords. This will help by widening your reach for search terms that people could search for to find you site.

Secondly frequent updates of content ensure that once your site is established in search engines that they frequently spider your site.

Thirdly try an keep all the pages directed to the one overall theme. This will give your overall site a general theme for which it fits. It is suspected that this helps with identifying relevency of a particular theme.

Last but not least. If you can't write good content, hire someone experienced to write the content for you.

Just remember content is king when it comes to search engine optimisation.

Search Engine Optimisation - The Domain Name

One of the most important things when it come to building a website is the domain name. Deciding on a domain name can be difficult as it is used for branding. Creating a brand that works isn't easy.

The domain name is also used by search engines. Placing specific keywords at the start of the domain name works best especially for competitve keywords. Just do a search for "toys" on google and look at the returned domain names. What do they have in common? Most of the sites in the top 10 have toys in their domain name.

So when chosing a domain name, make sure you have looked at incorporating keywords in it.

Thats it for now

Search Engine Optimisation - Internal Page Links

To get the best out of all your pages of your website it is important that the search engine spiders are able to follow the internal links of your website. There are a few techniques that benefit you more in your search engine optimisation campaign.

1. If possible try to use text links.
2. Try to include keywords in the link text
3. Try to include keywords in file names
4. Validate all links to all pages of your site
5. Try and stick to a two to four clicks to any page on the site
6. Appropriate links between lower level pages
7. Try to include a sitemap, outling all the pages of the site in text based links.

If not all your links are valid it could cause a penalty in search engines, so be careful.

It's not always possible to only create text links, therefore if you are using image based navigation try to include text links at the bottom of the page.

Search Engine Optimisation - How do search engines find my site?

Search engines index millions of websites and now you want to be included. Right? I will run through basic techniques that almost guarantee that you will get indexed.

Firstly most search engines have submission pages. Most are free but you may find some that you need to pay. These submission pages don't speculate a particular time frame that your site will be indexed. Your site will be put on the stack and indexed when it is reached.

Secondly and most importantly build incomming links from other theme related websites. This allows the search engine spiders a pathway to your website. The more pathways the greater chance that your site will be indexed and updated by search engines promptly. In upcomming posts I will run through incomming links in greater depth. But for now this will do.

Thirdly, Submit your site to major website directories such as: DMOZ, Yahoo! etc... But prepare to pay a premium if you want your site listed in the directory in the shortest amount of time. I will go through the major directories and how to submit your site to them in upcomming post.

But for now thats it. Following one of these steps will help your site to be found by search engines. Following more than one step would almost ensure that you will be found reletively quickly.

Over and out

Search Engine Optimisation - Image Alt Tags

Search engine optimisation doesn't stop at just content optimisation. Images can be used to enhance the relevence of certain keywords and phrases. This is done by optimising the alt tag used by each image. The purpose of the alt tag is for usability.

• In text based browsers instead of an image the alt tag is displayed.
• Some browsers use the alt tag for the image as a title where if you were to mouse over the image the alt tag content will pop up.

In a usability sence it is a good idea to add a relevent image title in the alt tag. This will increase the usability of the website which is on par in impotance as search engine optimisation.

Image Alt Tags for Search Engine Optimisation

Because alt tags are ideally used for giving a title of the contents of the image. That is why search engines use this tag in determining what the image is about and add this to the relevency of the page.

The problem is that people use this tag as a means to spam certain keywords and phrases. So recently the weighting of the alt tag has been reduced dramatically. But as I have said earlier "It might only have little weighting, but every little bit helps when it comes to search engine optimisation."

How to Optimise the Image Alt Tag?

Firstly you need your keywords and phrases that you want to be targetting. Have the content to match. Then in the alt tags start it off with a relevent keyword or phrase then expand on the description of the image. But don't make it too long as it is only intended to be consice.

Thats about it. Happy Search Engine Optimising

Search Engine Optimisation - Content Optimisation

Content optimisation is one of the biggest factors when it comes to targeting specific keywords and phrases in search engines. It has to do with placement of these phrases and still being able to keep the content very natural.

First of all the hx heading tags. These are most important as this sets the theme for the page. Try to include keywords close to the start of these tags.

Following on from the heading tags it's a good idea to have a few paragraphs of keyword related content. Included in this content try and contain the targeted keywords and associated keywords.

To give additional weight to keywords, you could include them between bold tags.

Another good thing to include are unordered or ordered lists, these can also add additional weight to specific phrases.

Content optimisation boils down to a fine art of placing keywords and phrases in specific places, but also maintaining usability and readability. Keep it real.

Search Engine Optimisation - Meta Tags

In the early days of the internet the search engines used to rely on the moral of webmasters to insert there keywords and phrases into the keyword and description meta tags. Search engines used to use the data in these tags to determine the pages content.

The problem was that webmasters clicked on to this and found ways to get their website to the top of listings by spamming these tags with repeated keywords and phrases.

Now search engines have evolved and are more intellegent now towards spamming. For this reason it's important to be careful not to cross the line into spamming specific tags.

The Keyword Meta Tag
The keyword meta tag is not as important as it used to be. It's hard to determine the weighting that is put upon this tag by search engines. Some webmasters find that it isn't worth the time to put this in. I feel otherwise. Putting in this tag and populating it with your targeted keywords might not help much when it comes to your site featuring for specific keywords, but every little bit of help can make a difference when piled together with other little bits of help. Remember try to place the more impotant keywords and phrases towards the start of the tag to generate greater relavency.

The Description Meta Tag
The description meta tag still has some benefit, but like the keyword meta tag it is not as important as it used to be. On some search engines they still use the description tag as the content for their results. For this reason it's important to populate the description tag with user friendly keyword rich content that describes the page. Remember try to place the more impotant keywords and phrases towards the start of the tag to generate greater relavency.

Remember: Try not to repeat keywords too many times as some search engines may see this as an effort to try and spam your way to the top and may punish you for this.

Search Engine Optimisation - The Title Tag

The single most important sentence for search engine optimisation is the title tage of your main page. If you write it properly then you will be a big step closer to getting your site well placed in search engine results for your important key words.

What is the title tag?
Located on your actual html document, the title tag is situated in the head portion between the <title> and </title> tags . The text that is put between these tags are used for many things regarding your website. It is displayed in the blue bar above the browser commands, adding the page to favourites will also include this text as the linking text. But more importantly search engines. Some search engines such as google and use this text when displaying their results.
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. 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:

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. I find that putting the most important keywords at the beginning of the title tag followed by (if you need to add it in) the company name. This means that the words at the beginning of the title tag are given heavier weight than subsequent words.

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 thats is very broad and a popular keyword or phrase, then it is going to be a real difficult to rank high for these search terms. Some times it would be better to narrow down your specific keywords to include a niche-defining term or geographical location. As the popularity of websites targeting these search terms will dramatically reduce, making it less of a struggle to reach for top spots.

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. I have personally worked on a website that has thousands of pages, when I started the title tag for the majority of pages was the same. This wasn't a very targeted way to single out what each page was. Luckily the site was dynamically driven. I used this to single out what each page was, now the sites search engine traffic has boomed.

Something so simple can make such an impact in your search engine optimisation campaign. The title tag is very important and can easily be forgotten about. Make a not to yourself. The title tag is an all important tag that should never be forgotten. Creating the right title for your site will take some time to make sure you're targeting the right keywords, but it's well worth it.

Search Engine Optimisation - 01 - The Basics of SEO

Search engine optimisation is becoming more and more popular. This is making it more difficult to feature high in SERPS (search engine result placement). To increase the chances of ranking well there are some proven yet basic techniques that almost anyone can incorporate into their existing website.

1. Know your target audience - it's better to target traffic that is more likely to find your site useful. In a business sence this will create a higher conversion rate on sales.
2. Identify specific keywords and keyphrases that are likely to be searched for when people are searching for content, services or products that your site has to offer
3. Target these specific keywords and phrases throughout content on specific pages of your site.

I have personally spent 100's of hours reading, learning and trialling search engine optimisation techniques and yet there is still much to learn. Thats why if you own a website and are thinking of diving into the depths of SEO then it might pay to access a few things to see which approach will be most feasible for you.

1. Time - One of the biggest factors in SEO is time. Time for learning SEO techniques. Time for researching each technique to see the benefits.
2. Expertise - Unless you have a CMS, simple things like changing the content of a page may have to be done manually. This could mean that you would need to know HTML or if the site is dynamically drive then you may need to know the specific language.
3. Cost - Look into getting you're website SEO'd by a SEO professional company. The costs vary dramatically between businesses so shop around, ask for past proof of work done.

Thats it for Search Engine Optimisation - 01 - The Basics of SEO