Ben Wheeler

Of all the important parts of creating excellent content, using strong, keyword-rich content is among the most important. Keywords, links and site visits help searchers find your content and website. Without strong keywords your potential visitors won’t find you. If you are not using the same keywords in your content and meta tags that searchers use when they begin their search in Google, Bing, or other search engines, your site will not show up in the search results.

1. Keyword Research—Do some research to find out which keywords will best fit your content. First you need to realize that not all, if any, of your customers are familiar with industry jargon so create a broader list of keywords that your customers might be searching with. After you have created this list, run those keywords through a keyword research tool, such as Google Suggest to find out how many users are searching with those words, how many of those searched convert to sales, etc.

To get some good keyword suggestions, visit https://adwords.google.com and click on their link to get keyword ideas. From this page you can enter an industry phrase or your company website to get some good suggestions for keywords to use. The results also list the statistics of how many times each keyword is searched for every month, and other local statistics to help you determine which keywords will theoretically be the best to use as your tags.

2. Create Content Based on Keywords—After you have discovered the strongest keywords, create content about those keywords. You want to make sure that this is quality content but keep the topic centered around the specific keywords that you have chosen. You don’t have to use all of your keywords in one blog or article but try to use as many related keywords as possible.

3. Edit Content for Over-Use of Keywords. No one will read your content if it doesn’t make sense. Be sure to review your content to ensure its overall quality. Over-using keywords will make your content hard to understand. Above all, ensure quality for your readers and create something that they would like to read rather than something that only fits your purposes. In addition, if you over-use keywords in your document, the search engines will flag your content as potential abuse and not give you a high rating in search results.

4. Meta-Tags—Using Meta tags in your blogs, articles and press releases is basic and still important. This will help search engines find your relevant topics more quickly. Many blogs allow you to sort each blog into a general category of other similar blogs but using meta-tags is where you will really score points with search engines. Include all appropriate keywords in the Meta tags to ensure search engines will find your content and provide your content in the search engine results.

5. Good Titles—How well does your title relate to your content? Make sure that your title is directly related to your content. Use relevant keywords in your title as well. Search engines give more weight to titles than other content in your article. The title is also the first thing your potential visitors and readers will see in the search engine results so make sure it is enticing and relevant to their search.

Excellent Keywords are essential to future link-building and generating traffic to your website to increase your search engine rankings. Be very selective and use the most appropriate keywords for your content. Be sure to research relevant keywords and follow all of the steps to appropriately use strong keywords. Just because you create content doesn’t mean that people will come read it. Make it enticing and relevant to your reader.

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For this and other articles by Brad Hess, please go to http://www.mymark.com/articles . MyMark, LLC is a media rich professional social networking website that gives you the tools to use social media optimization to enhance your search engine optimization and generate revenue. Visit http://www.mymark.com/ today to set up your free account!

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Almost every social networking site offers a feature called a “profile” that allows members to include their picture, a biography, live links to their websites and other detailed information. Most of us have multiple online profiles that are empty or only partially completed. It is this profile that helps other users decide if they want to work with you. Another perk of online profiles is that the live links pointing to your website may impact your search engine ranking.

It is very important that you think of these profiles as your own “Public Relations Department or Media Room”, specifically designed to sell you and your business. Imagine that you only
have a few seconds to sell a new prospect on why they should want to get to know you and possibly do business with you. What is said and offered during these few seconds can make all the
difference in the world. This is EXACTLY why your online profiles need to be completed to capture the attention of anyone who visits these sites.

Let’s look at the different aspects of social networking profiles and what information and content you should include to ensure that you get the maximum results. The following information may or may not be included in every profile, but the majority of it is standard:

Your Picture – Your photo is the first thing people will see upon visiting your profile or when reading your posts. How does it represent you? Wearing a tank top while giving the peace sign with a beer in your hand is not the way to impress potential clients. If you are looking for clients, then professionalism is a must. You can show SOME personality in your photograph but try to strive for conservative whenever possible.

Your Biography – This is your chance to tell others more about you, such as interesting aspects of your life and what makes you, YOU. Take your time here, as this area is the equivalent of sitting down with a prospect and telling them exactly why they should do business with you. Include specifics about your expertise, your business, how you have helped others and even your personal philosophies. You want others to be excited about connecting with you and this is YOUR opportunity to shine.

Links – Make sure to include helpful links in order to allow others to find you online. A link to your website, your blog and additional information about your business is crucial. However, some people make the mistake of including each and every link that points to a profile of theirs online. If you have 25 social networking memberships, it is NOT advisable to list them all here. A good idea would be to vary these links on every website where you have a profile.

Contact Information – You have to include contact information if you want people to have the ability to contact you. Do not try to hide at this point. Many people have the wrong opinion that they should NOT put contact information in their profile, assuming that people contacting you for business purposes is a bad thing. Would you include your contact information in a yellow pages ad? Then why not offer it online? Please only include information you want to be made public.

Interests – Do you like to play golf, workout, volunteer or build model airplanes? You might be surprised that many people would be interested in connecting with you just based upon similar hobbies and interests. This connection can lead to a deepening friendship that may lead to business and even referrals down the road.

Education – While some people may or may not care about your schooling, including specifics about your education can do two things to help you increase the number of responses. First of all, those who went to school where you did may want to connect. Secondly, by offering details about your education, it will help others to see your experience and expertise in various areas.

Favorite Movies or Books – While you may not see the correlation between your favorite movie and a potential new client, trust me, it exists. Just like much of the information above, the information in your profile is designed to help you connect with potential clients and to build business relationships. Sometimes, simply sharing your favorite movie can be the start of a beautiful business relationship.

Testimonials from Past Clients – One of the best ways to demonstrate your ability to help others is by including testimonials from past or current satisfied clients. These testimonials will help others to get a snapshot of some of the work you have done in the past and help to build a foundation of a great business relationship.

Looking at the list above, there is a lot of information that should be included in each and every social networking profile. Because of this, many people decide to skimp and their profile winds up being about 3 or 4 sentences long. This is a mistake. It is better to leave a profile blank than to create such a lackluster one. If you need inspiration, visit some of the most popular social networking sites and read a few profiles to get some idea of how to get started.

If filling out multiple social networking profiles is too much for your busy day, you might look at getting help from a virtual assistant. Many of them have experience in this area and can create a compelling COMPLETE profile that will best represent you AND your business. We live in a world of social networking… making it a part of your business marketing simply makes sense. Take the time to do it right or hire someone who can do it for you.

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Bonnie Jo Davis creates and manages social networking strategies for her clients. She is a published author, expert in article marketing, and feels comfortable working in a virtual environment. For more information on how she might help you get the most out of your social networking efforts, visit http://www.your-marketing-assistant.com. If you need help marketing your local brick and mortar business visit http://www.local-map-listings.com

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Long tail keyword research tools are essential for small web businesses. You must put together collections of micro niches, each identified by a long tail keyword. You need to do long tail keyword research to find those niches of low competition keywords.

You need to find a large number of keywords, the number of searches for them per day or month, and the amount of competition for the keywords. The competition, at minimum, consists of all those web pages containing the keyword. More detailed information would include the number of pages optimized for the keyword. You can get all this information for free on the web, from Google; although, there is software available that automates the process for you.

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You can use the Google keyword selector tool as a long tail keyword generator. It suggests a large number of keywords with low search volume but low competition.

When you type in a keyword into the Google keyword selector tool, it suggests related keywords and gives you a downloadable spreadsheet of their search frequencies and AdWords competition.

Sort by declining numbers of searches and delete those keywords with too few. They are not worth optimizing pages for. What’s too few searches? That is up to you, but I have heard people say they set the limit somewhere between 200 and 300 searches per month (7 to 10 per day).

If you wish, you can reserve those keywords with too few searches to sprinkle into ezine articles. Keywords with low competition may bring the article to page one of a search engine’s results.

Next you use the Google search page. It is not usually thought of as a long tail keywords tool, but you use it for two competition searches. Do a Google search for the keyword in quotes to find the number of pages containing those keywords as a phrase, that is, adjacent to each other. The first page of the results gives an estimate of the number of pages containing the phrase. Do not search without quotes — that counts all pages containing all the words in the keyword phrase even if they are not close on the page.

Drop the keywords that are on too many pages from your list. Various people give the cut off at more than 30,000 other pages, give or take. Your pages will be lost in the crowd if you try to contend for them.

 

The next step of long tail keyword research is to find the number of pages optimized for the keyword, and you can find the number of pages optimized for a keyword by a Google search. A page is optimized for a keyword if

(1) the keyword is embedded in the URL of the page, for example in the domain name or in the page name,

(2) the keyword is in the page title, or

(3) the keyword is in the anchor text of one or more links pointing to the page.

 

You can tell Google to filter for pages with these optimizations by specifying, for example, inurl:”keyword” to select only pages with the keyword in the URL. (You can find more information on advanced Google query operators at Google Help Center). Delete the keywords with too much competition of this kind. What is too much competition? Again, it is a matter of taste, but the boundary may be somewhere between 50 and 300. (I’m relying on the opinion of James Jones who suggested these limits.)

Pages optimized in all three ways are serious competition. Not only do those optimizations tell search engines that the page is relevant to the keyword, but they indicate that someone is consciously trying to contend for the keyword.

If you are intending to sell products or services to the people searching with these keywords, you may want to check the estimates of their “online commercial intention” (OCI). You can get those estimates at Microsoft adCenter Labs. It will give you a fraction between zero — the search seems to have NO commercial intent — and one — the search does seem to have a commercial intent. The numeric value indicates a kind of confidence level, not a fraction of searches that have the intent. In experiments, the non-commercial keywords averaged about a 0.2 value, and the commercial keywords averaged about 0.83. Fractions near 0.5 had a high rate of incorrect classifications. If you intend to sell, you can cut off those keywords with an OCI less than 0.6 or 0.7. There are, however, questions about the methodology and assumptions used in the construction of this tool.

You can do long tail keyword research for free by using the Google keyword selector tool, a Google search, and optionally the MSN online commercial intention page.

About The Author
Thomas Christopher has gathered videos and other information about using long tail keywords for ezine article marketing at EzineArticleShow.com. See a video showing how to begin a search for a niche market at: ezinearticleshow.com/NicheMarketResearch.htm.

While there are many ways to get your website noticed arguably submitting your website to a search engine is the best. What is the best way to get your website to the attention of the Search Engines? The first thing to beware of are companies that promise automatic submission to hundreds of search engines. For the most part these promises are false. Maybe there are companies that can achieve this but to be honest I have yet to find one. Frankly the best way is to submit your website to search engines is to do it yourself or alternatively hire an expert to manually contact search engine companies and/or directories on your behalf. Whatever you do you should refrain from submitting an incomplete website. However, before you start this process you must ensure that your website is finished to a professional standard.

The right keywords, good graphics and certainly relevant content are all important. Take time to get it right and ensure that all the pertinent information is included especially your name and contact information!

However submitting your website to a search engine company will not guarantee that it will be listed immediately or that the ranking (position on site) will be high. There are thousands of new websites completed every day so it could take time for your site to be reviewed.

Please remember to include a site map of your website. This will make crawling by the web robots easier. In fact some search engine companies like Google may not even consider submissions without sitemaps.

So what is a sitemap?

A sitemap is normally one page (although sometimes a group of pages) which lists all or at least most of the pages on your website. Basically you can think of a sitemap as being similar to the index showing the chapters of a book. The reason it is important is that the crawlers can search out the website easier using the site map (index) i.e. they look at the titles of each “chapter” of your site to get the general “feel”. This enables them to categorise your site correctly. Please see the separate report on this subject.

I mentioned above that it is not advisable to use companies that promote automatic submission of your website to search engines. However that doesn’t mean that you should ignore the many online companies that do provide search engine submission services. There are software packages available that enable you to do your own submissions or if you want professional help then this is available on line too. Just avoid the” automatic” promotions.

There are thousands of search engine and directory companies to which you can submit your website including some of the best known like Google and Yahoo. Just do a search on the web.

So my advice is to make sure that your website is submitted to as many search engines as possible. Bear in mind though that a poor website can do damage to your image/brand so ensure that you do due diligence before submitting. Take your time, learn as much as you can first then send your professional site for all to see and begin your journey to success.

You CAN do it To YOUR Success

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John Beaumont ( Internet Marketer) – Sign up to get your 6 Pages To 6 Figures Special Report that Reveals EXACTLY How to Build a long lasting and Passive $100,000/yr Online Business here

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Recent changes to Google make it seem like Google is no longer just one search engine but a combination of 6 or 7 different search engines all rolled into one. Your SEO efforts should now be geared to ranking high in these search engines as well as in traditional organic search.

A little while back, I wrote an article entitled “The Five Pillars of Google Search” and had I known how important those pillars would become, I would have paid more attention to them. What I didn’t factor into the equation was Google’s whole re-structuring of its SERPs interface or landing page. It really is a whole new Google with not just one search engine but a combination of 6 or 7 search engines all competing for your attention.

The new left side column with its new functions and displays, opens up new opportunities for webmasters to get their listings within Google on that all-important first page. There are also many new ways to view the results such as view everything, or you can view with more or less shopping links. Plus, you can also view Google results for books, maps, blogs, updates, and discussions – all new ways to get your site or links into Google. Throw in the Wonder Wheel and things are indeed looking very different within the new Google SERPs.

As a full-time online search engine marketer, I should have expected something like this but the recent changes within Google has been totally unprecedented. We have seen major updates before, some of them very disruptive like the Florida update, but with Google Caffeine, MayDay Update, new layout and the recent shakeup of its Algorithm, Google has fundamentally changed how its organic search are ranked and used.

Before I start sounding too cryptic, these recent changes seem to be a “coming together” of all the different types of searches in Google, which have been around for some time. Now it seems with the new interface architecture… each type of search is given more importance or rather more of an equal billing or footing within Google. There are now multiple ways to get your links viewed and hopefully clicked within the most important search engine on the planet.

First, I always try to start any piece on Google or the search engines with a disclaimer. Mainly, in the course of running 9 or 10 websites, I keep a daily monitoring of the keywords which produce revenue, some of these keyword phrases have been monitored by me for 6 or 7 years, but they are only a small sampling of keywords and sometimes drawing or making conclusions with such a small sample can be misleading or downright wrong. So take any of the following information on Google with this point in mind, just one webmaster observing what’s happening with Google and putting in his two cents worth.

Now, the reason I say “Google’s New Search Engines” is the feeling which has gradually crept into my daily marketing – it feels like you’re no longer dealing with one organic search engine but 6 or 7 different search engines. Let me explain, for years Google has been presenting results for not just static webpages but also for images, videos, news, blogs and shopping/products – but recent changes have shaken up things significantly.

With the recent changes, Google seems to be placing more importance on these new ways to search. Videos have taken a big step forward and can now pop up on the first page and stay there. Producing a video is now one of the fastest ways to get on the first page of Google, even for very competitive keywords. While many online marketers are taking advantage of this fact, it is relatively new and you can have a much better chance of ranking for a video instead of an ordinary web page in Google. It can happen almost instantly.

Personally, I like using the YouTube platform because it is also owned by Google and they no doubt can easily tap into all the background stats on a video such as comments, viewer ratings… and so on. In other words, Google has always favored ways to make their SERPs more democratic and user generated/rated videos are the perfect fit.

So too are blog posts and entries, these can be easily monitored and (comment spam aside) are more democratic since it’s harder to fake Diggs or Re-tweets. All of these social bookmarking systems and sites provide the search engines, especially Google, with some very helpful user-generated rankings and ratings. Blogs now also have two subcategories – Twitter/Facebook Updates and Forum Discussions, which are now being displayed separately.

Google seems to be placing more importance on popular Posts, Diggs, Tweets… in their SERPs. Again, I find using a simple Google owned program like Blogger to be an effective way of ranking high in Google. For example, my posts in Blogger are indexed in Google within minutes, this recently seems to have been sped up and we are moving more towards instant search results.

Another instant way to get your content onto the first page of Google is to use a News Release. Google has always listed News Items on the first page but this now seems to play a more important role, especially when you consider all the new features in the left side column. Surfers will probably stay on that first page longer and you have a better chance of getting your news item read.

Within the last couple of years, I have started doing Press Releases, mainly through PRweb but there are lots of free programs you can use. I also like posting my articles to American Chronicle since Google News picks up and displays a lot of these items. Again, like videos, getting your News item listed is almost instant and within seconds you can have traffic flowing to your site.

Images and image search has always been an important feature of Google Search. One that online marketers and webmasters have taken advantage of by creating images to match the main products or keywords of their sites. Now image search, itself, is much more varied and has many more options to re-define your image search, for example you could target a certain color or line drawings. Regardless, images can be an easy way to get traffic from Google.

Within the shopping results is the place to be featured if you have a product to sell. This is the old product listing (Froogle), which Google has renamed to Shopping or Product Search. For those into online marketing, this is probably the most important listing as you’re sure to attract specific buyers who are in the right mind-set to purchase. To learn more about submitting your products to Google Product Search go here: http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/products/submit.html

While all these search options can be somewhat confusing to grasp even for the online marketer, all these options do present different ways to get on that first page in Google search. And while the number one spot in organic search will always be your main goal, ranking for the top spot in the shopping results, video results, news results, blog results, update results, discussion results and image results are all worth aiming for in your SEO efforts. Some of these are temporary or fast moving, but there are certain tactics you can use, which will increase your presence in the most important search engine, which delivers the most search traffic on the web.

Make sure you take a holistic approach to both your content and SEO. Create videos and images geared towards your site’s topic and keywords. Make sure you have a blog and a forum on your site to take advantage of these types of listings. Likewise, fully integrate your site with all the social bookmarking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Google Buzz… and become an active part of those sites. Make sure you’re creating news related items for your site or keywords, to keep your site in the whole mix of things on the web. Make sure you have a steady flow of fresh content being added to your site regularly and link this content to the “Q&A” types of sites; there is a growing emphasis being placed on these help-based sites by the search engines.

Lastly, I am a firm believer in having all your content/sites/programs interconnected with one another. Something as simple as using a Google Profile to list ALL your online programs and sites is one way of making them ALL reachable by your visitors and Google. But go for the overkill, do the same thing for your Facebook page, your MySpace page, your Linkedin page… and also interconnect all your different content by referencing your videos in your News Releases, your Twitter profile in your articles, your Facebook page in your posts… well, you get the picture.

Just make sure the search engines, and especially Google, have no trouble finding you or your content. Make sure this content is varied and displayed in different mediums such as videos, images, news, tweets, blog posts, and shopping links. Reaching that first page in Google has become a lot more challenging in many ways, but it also has become a lot more easier to do. Just go for it.

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The author is a full time SEM marketer who operates numerous niche sites, as well as two sites on Internet Marketing, where you can get valuable marketing tips for free: internet marketing tools or try here free marketing courses

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

When linking to other websites from your site, you inevitably have a decision on your hands. Should you add a ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ attribute to the HTML anchor tag used to link to the third-party website, or should you leave it out (do-follow it).

In the eyes of the search engines, a do-followed link from your site is basically a vote for the site being linked to. In a way, you’re vouching for the legitimacy of the site you’re linking to. If that site turns out to be abusive, you risk hurting your site’s credibility with the search engines by linking to that site.

On the other hand, linking out to high-quality sites that are relevant to the subject matter of the page you are linking them from, is known to actually benefit your site. As long as you don’t overdo it, most search engines appreciate your letting them know that a site is worth linking to, and will give your site a little more credibility as a result. If you no-follow links to high-quality sites and pages that have content that is relevant to your site’s content, then you are basically telling the search engines, “I can’t be bothered to check that this site is worth linking to, but I’m going to link to it anyway.”, which obviously doesn’t encourage the search engines to have confidence in either you, or your site.

Of course, it’s not always possible to thoroughly vet each and every site you may link to on your website. There’s also the possibility that a site may change for the worse after you have visited it. The search engines understand this and will give you some leeway as a result. Nevertheless, it’s in your best interest to investigate the sites you are considering linking to wherever possible, and make an informed decision about whether you want to link to them, and how you want to link to them

Paragraph First impressions are often the best guide when you visit a new site. Does the site instill you with confidence? Does it look like the webmaster takes their site seriously, or are they just slapping up any old content, and spamming the site with keywords? Are there obvious issues with spelling and grammar, and with page layout and site navigation? Does it make you want to leave, or stay?

Is the content on the site relevant to your site, and in particular, is the page that you are linking to relevant to the page that you are linking it from?

You may also wish to check out some of the sites that the linked site is itself linking to. Are these quality sites and are they relevant to the page they are linked from? And yes, I know what you’re thinking – “Where does it end?”. A quick and cursory sampling of a small, random selection of the linked sites is all that you need, but this can sometimes tell you more than all the other factors combined. Remember that search engine link juice can flow a long way along the link chain.

If your overall impression of the site’s quality and relevance is good, then you should consider do-following it. If it is bad, or you don’t have the opportunity to check the site out, then consider no-following it.

NOTE: You can learn more about the ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ HTML anchor tag attribute by visiting the Wikipedia page at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

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Davide Botticelli – Seo serch engine, specialized in google position. posizionamento motori ricerca

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

If you’re new to online marketing and are making minimal profits for your hours of effort….I feel your pain and hope this article will ease it a little.

Internet Marketing is not as easy as you first thought, and you’ve suffered a few learning curves along the way to where you are now.

Your family and friends have told you, you’re wasting your time on the internet. And you’re beginning to think they’re possibly correct.

But you would be dead wrong to give up on marketing now. Just as wrong as a student dropping out of high school before he had the time to graduate.

You have to realize when you enter any new business, you’re the small fish in the sea.

Here you are the little fish internet marketer trying to carve out a niche for yourself online, and the internet is like a huge sea full of sharks and other predators who eat small fish like you and me for snacks.

We would be better served to acknowledge this, and look at ourselves as just pilot fish swimming under an online shark, trying to grab some of the left over’s that the massive internet fish eats.

For you and I, the massive internet fish is corporate advertising. They own the internet.

Who of us little guys can compete with their multi million dollar marketing campaigns? Most of the time they lose money on internet marketing just to get rid of their competition….(That would be you and I by the way).

So, what can we do to compete against corporate marketing to become a successful on-line marketer?

Try these 3 Online Marketing Strategies to boost your online income.

1) Research Your Product and Find Some Leftovers the Shark Missed.

Identify the market you’re in and educate yourself on the product you want to promote.

Pick a product that compliments a high ticket item like an Ipad that the shark would sell, and you sell the Ipad accessories.

Only choose those products you yourself would use.

Some expert internet marketers can sell anything, but you are just starting out. Choose something you know you will feel comfortable spending time working with.

2) Write Informative Articles, Blogs and Reviews about Your Product.

Go to sites like Facebook and Myspace and join social groups like Google Groups or Friend Finder and post your blogs or links.

Viral marketing is the wave for 2009. Write like a maniac on every site you can find, then link the sites and articles to one another.

3) Invest in a Landing Page and Auto Responder System.

All that writing and advertising is time well spent if you invest in a good landing page and auto responder system.

It’s possible the person who clicked on your ad or article was just window shopping until payday came. If you’ve got their email address you can keep them updated to information they may have missed about your product during their first visit, and when their payday comes, your site will be first in line for them to review again.

It’s a fact there are more sales made through email contact than anywhere on the internet.

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Thomas Palmieri – If you have found this article informative and would like more tips on how to market products online, please visit me at The Business Opportunity where my free internet business tutorials are helping thousands discover the basics of online marketing.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

You aren’t crazy; search engine optimization keeps getting more and more complicated. Remember the easy days when you could just use meta-tags for your keywords? As with everything, a few bad apples had to use popular but unrelated keywords to drive traffic to their site and ruined it for the rest of us. Search engines – in particular Google, are now focusing on the relationships between websites and the easiest way to calculate this is with backlinks.

Backlinks are links on other websites to your website. This includes a link to your blog in your signature line as a comment on a forum, links on traditional social media sites or any other website out there. Backlinks work like real estate in that most of the value resides in the location. A backlink on a highly reputable website with content related to yours is rated higher by search engines than a link on another personal blog with few readers, for example.

Backlinks serve two purposes, firstly to derive more traffic from the referring website and secondly, and perhaps, more importantly to increase your rankings for your targeted keywords in search engines, in particular, Google.

There are a few rules when it comes to developing valuable backlinks:

• § Make sure the anchor text is a keyword you are competing for with your blog. This is a prime reason why your domain name should include your number one keyword phrase, so even if someone posts just a long URL, you get some keyword credit.
• § Backlinks in article directories are good for increasing traffic to your site, but most search engines do not value them very highly. Search engines also can’t “see” your backlink in an URL shortened form (like Twitter) or on any site with a “No follow” designation for links.
• § Swapping backlinks is appropriate networking with other blog owners or colleagues, but mass backlink swaps with money and no personal contact or connection to the site owners is a no-no. These sites get blacklisted by search engines almost as fast as the owners spend your cash, leaving you with nothing in return.
• § Be selective in where you include your blog’s backlink, especially if you have personal and professional information out on the Internet. For example, if your blog is about financial advice, and you are part of a gun enthusiast forum, placing your backlink on the gun enthusiast forum could confuse the search engines. You can’t control other people placing your backlink in obscure locations, but you don’t need to water down your own blog marketing focus.
• § The most beneficial backlinks are placed in locations that will bring in traffic. By making sure the primary goal of your backlink is to bring in qualified traffic– people likely interested in reading your blog’s content– the search engine optimization will come more naturally. Also, this will decrease your bounce rate and make your focused advertising appealing to your reader.
• § In general, keyword anchor backlinks on trusted websites, i.e. those with a higher page-rank will have more influence on your SERPs than the same keyword anchored backlink on a page with a lower page-rank
• § If you want to increase your SERP position for a given keyword quantity (different websites) and quality (page-rank) of keyword anchored back-links matters.
• § If a website has written about your competitors products/service, they may be interested in writing about your product/services – inform them and ask them to write about it.

Backlinks are currently the darlings of search engines, and the algorithms are computing website “relationships” with them. However, if your blog is meant to bring in an income, qualified traffic is your number one concern. A backlink is just the transport a reader uses to get to your blog, but you can make it appealing with keyword anchor text and place it prominently where your intended reader hangs out in the virtual world. Do these things and the search engines will take notice.

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Elizabeth Ann West, Elizabeth writes for the Facebook Messenger application Chit Chat for Facebook. Chit Chat for Facebook supports Facebook Chat History, text formatting and Facebook Chat Emoticons

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Today we will talk about the right way to grow your website

When you first launch a website, you naturally want all the content crammed into it that you can lay hands on. But if it’s real traffic you’re looking for, consider taking a more patient approach.

Anyone involved in SEO can tell you that organic growth of relevant content is the most successful long term strategy for search engine placement. When people read that, however, their brains toss the part they don’t understand or want to deal with: “organic.” What they see is “successful long term strategy” and “search engine placement.” And that’s where the trouble starts, because it’s the organic growth that does the work.

What do people mean when they talk about organic growth?

Organic growth means slow, steady, continual growth – the way plants and animals grow. When Google ranks your site they look for this pattern of growth to help determine whether your site is “for real.” Think of an informational site you visit a lot, a forum perhaps, or a site like Wikipedia. Those sites did not spring into being overnight, chock full of content and with a hundred links pointing to them. They started as miniatures of themselves, and as people posted messages and articles they got bigger and bigger.

How can this be harnessed to help promote a website?

Timing of updates can be more important than size of updates. A lot of webmasters have a hard time updating their site regularly. They have day jobs, families, and other websites to run. This can lead to a tendency to update sites in large infrequent chunks.

To get the maximum benefit from your updates, do this instead: When you get time to update your site, prepare and arrange your new content so that it can be uploaded in small pieces. Get everything ready to go so that the only task remaining is the actual publish. Then upload each small piece separately, allowing a day or two to pass between each upload.

By doing this your website ends up with the same content, but search engines monitoring how frequently you update will see a pattern of steady growth. You can still write or gather all your content in one fell swoop, just dole it out to your webserver slowly instead of as a single publish. You won’t see immediate results, but give this a month or two and search engines will take notice, to your benefit.

Yours,

Philipp

www.selfseo.com

So you’ve bought your Dreamweaver, an eternity later worked out how it works, started to build your site which is targeting your chosen niche or promoting your affiliate product and after what seems like forever you have added quality content. You’ve bust a gut to get this far, but this is where the real work begins. You need to get your site seen by as many people as possible. You need to drive as much traffic as you can whether it be through a pay-per-click campaign or via organic traffic.

Let’s say you decide to target organic traffic. You need to get a high ranking in the search engines. During your website construction you have already been using a keyword research tool and a SEO Tool and spending the midnight hours mulling over the chosen keyword phrases your research has indicated you should be targeting on your pages and using in your URL. Your whole site from headings to meta-tags, to meta-descriptions and anchor text are all optimized taking account of semantically related words, keyword density and the long tail.

Next you begin your back link campaign spending hours trying to get quality back links to your site. Social bookmarking takes over your life for days on end, you post on relevant blogs and all relevant forums, you set up your own blog, submit articles to article directories and then submit your entire site to SEO friendly website directories.

Yet more analysis follows, as you now study your competitors’ websites. You investigate what keywords they are targeting and study the links that they have developed and you develop strategies to be better than they are. Slowly but surely your site climbs the rankings. You constantly update your site adding quality content and before you know it your site is fast approaching the first page. A steady trickle of traffic flows on a daily basis. At this rate you should soon be top of the rankings and then… the sky’s the limit!

Unfortunately it doesn’t usually quite work like this. Yes it is true that if you have picked some long tail keywords to target you may be able to get somewhere near the top of the rankings or indeed even to the number one spot. In most instances however the traffic won’t be great and you would need to get each page of your website targeting a different long tail phrase and getting to the top of the rankings for that phrase each time for the total traffic to be lucrative. It’s certainly possible but does require a lot more graft.

For very popular keyword phrases it proves incredibly difficult to dislodge the top sites from their positions, even though in theory you may know that you have better back links and better content. Without the top positions the mass traffic will never be yours. It is just so frustrating as you probably know. I certainly do. So you go away and you research again and you analyze again and you spend days poring over the detail and you
work and you work and you know what, it makes not one jot of difference. You just cannot crack the top spots. Why not? How many times have I asked this of myself?

Now perhaps your tactics aren’t quite right. Perhaps the phrases you are targeting are the wrong ones or perhaps you’re back links are not quality back links. Do you have the quality of content on your site that you think you do? Yes, yes, yes, I hear you say. So what is going on? Well it could be something as simple as the age of your domain.

Google places a lot of trust in back links, especially quality back links to your site, but it also places significant trust in sites which have been around for a significant period of time. This is especially true if they are frequently updated. In many cases the top ranked sites are trusted sites as far as Google is concerned because they have an authority status due to their back links, but also due to the length of time they have been operating. If your site is an equal to a competitor’s site in terms of content and back links, but it is a far newer domain, there will be little chance of you dislodging your competitor from the top slot. The site that has been there for five years serving the web community carries a lot of trust with Google.

To dislodge these sites requires tremendous effort to create quality back links and sometimes you may never achieve it. It can be done however, you just need to be aware of what is going on and keep persevering. Some internet marketers have resorted to buying old domains in an attempt to overcome this challenge in building the website around the domain. I’m not entirely sure how Google reacts to this, especially if you are adding new content on a continual basis. Does the domain itself carry an inherent trust because of its age or is it the content that carried the trust from the old website?

Either way it’s worth exploring as one of the tactics along with keyword analysis and building back links that you could adopt in an attempt to get higher rankings and hence higher rates of traffic.

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Andy Lunt is an internet marketer who concentrates largely on organic traffic and the techniques needed to drive this traffic to various sites. If you want to learn how to find lucrative keywords that make money then you need the best keyword tools possible. Take a look at the options at http://www.keyword-selectortool.com

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources