Wednesday, June 28, 2006
5 Search Engine Mistakes To Avoid
1: Don't submit to 500,000 search engines There are many services that want your money to submit to hundreds and thousands of search engines. The fact remains that probably 99% of search engine traffic will come from the big 3 - Google, Yahoo and MSN and their partners. Just concentrate on these guys and save yourself the submission fee.
2: Don't submit your site to the big 3 The search engines find your site through links. If you have links into your site you will be found, indexed and start to rank for terms.
3: Don't target the big terms I see so many people think that their new website will rank for terms such as "personal loan" or "home business" - the fact is that the big guys who have had websites for many years rank for these terms and will continue to do so. Target smaller searched terms first and build up your rankings from there.
4: Don't worry about Google PR PR or page rank is a score Google gives basically scoring the value of links into your website. It is updated perhaps 4 times per year. Don't have sleepness nights that your PR is 0 - concentrate on getting rankings. There is no point in having a PR6 if you are not getting traffic.
5: Not all links are counted equally If you post in forums it's likely you'll have a signature link back to your website. OK, you may have 2,000 posts and 2,000 links back to your site. However, these are low quality links and will most likely not give you much of a boost in rankings. Go for links from articles or full text pages.
Keywords: seo, search engine optimization, tools, internet
For more info visit :- http://www.geocities.ws/seo2india or http://www.geocities.ws/seoexpertindia
5 Search Engine Mistakes To Avoid
The success of an Internet Marketing Website depends to a great extent on the targeted traffic the website is able to generate. This is where the Website Promotion Strategies adopted by the webmasters play a very significant role in boosting their sales and popularity. The consequences of neglecting these website promotion strategies means only one thing. You loose to your internet marketing competitor.
The more number of website visitors you are able to attract by promoting your website, the more chances you have of benefiting from their visit. Promoting your website methodically and systematically over a period of time by following the 7 Website Promotion Strategies enumerated below will help you build a substantial following of loyal visitors and customers you have been longing for.
1. Grab users when they are looking out for Topics and Products:
The internet is chock-a-block of people searching for topics or products. If your website is most relevant to what they are searching for, and has very useful, valuable and unique content then they will find you. A constant review and updating your website is absolutely necessary to keep your website visitors interested in your site.
2. Emails:
Emails are considered to be the most effective way to get repeat visitors to your website and also get new customers. This can be done by having a newsletter and organizing an opt-in list.
3. Getting users and visitors to Promote your Website:
A way to get your users and website visitors to promote your site is to get them involved. This can be done in two ways. One is to provide a “tell a friend” image in your site and request them to email a friend if they liked you website or product. The other way is to obtain referrals from your users or clients. Referrals are one of the best Website promotion strategies adapted by top marketers. 4. Getting visitors to "Bookmark".
Encourage visitors to add your website to their "Favorite" list or "Bookmark" your site, thereby creating opportunities for return visits.
5. Taking Immediate Action:
Another strategy to adopt is to encourage your website visitors to take immediate action by "clicking" or "requesting" when the information in the ad. or email is fresh in their minds.
6. Avoid Graphics and Delayed Actions:
When users appear on your website and click on something, they should know what they are in for. Vague section heads, only add confusion and desperation in the minds of the user. Always be very clear when naming section heads and other links. Also avoid having too many graphics.
7. Freebies and Special Promotions:
Giving away freebies and other special promotions whereby your website visitors could benefit financially are additional website promotion strategies you can adopt.
Most successful internet marketing webmasters adopt these website promotion strategies. They are of course done in a very subtle manner. Why not adopt these same website promotion strategies for your websites too and reap the benefits.
Keywords: website promotion, website promotion strategies, internet marketing, website visitors, webmasters,
For more info visit : http://www.geocities.com/seo2india
The Dark Side of SEO - Detecting Black Hat Marketing Techniques
You're site has been running in a hosted environment for several months now. Traffic is trickling in at a slow pace, your Google PageRank is 0, and your monthly bills are starting to mount. You are about to give up all hope when you happen upon a professional SEO service promising you top-10 rankings. You hesitate and wonder if it's too good to be true. The SEO experts assure you that you will gain top-10 rankings and you will see an increase in traffic by using their service, for a small fee of course. Before you sign on the dotted line, take a moment to understand the techniques these SEO experts may be applying and how you can detect Black Hat Marketing techniques which can damage both your website and reputation permanently!
KeyWord Stuffing
Keywords are extremely important when it comes to Search Engine Results Placement (SERPs). If your website targets a very broad keyword with a lot of competition (ex: video games) then you'll find it near impossible to achieve a top ten ranking on that keyword. If you target a very niche keyword or keyword phrase (ex: He-Man video game) then you'll find top ten placement much more achievable. Many websites simply target the wrong keywords or webmasters fail to keep monitoring and fine-tuning their keyword selections. As a result, webmasters (and self-proclaimed SEO experts) are tempted to employ Keyword Stuffing. Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page's meta tags and content are loaded with a particular keyword or keyword phrase in a repetitious manner. Not only does this repetition make content unreadable by humans (and thus worthless), it can also raise a red-flag to search engines. Although the practice may get you higher SERPs in the short-term, it's sure to gain your site a bad reputation with users and possible banishment from search engines. If you are using an SEO service, keep an eye out for Keyword stuffing. Start your keyword campaign in an honest fashion by visiting Word Tracker and opening up an account. Word Tracker is a tool that many legitimate SEO experts use. With Word Tracker you can analyze keywords, see competition on keywords, and target keywords that gain you the most traffic with the least competition.
Hiding Text
Hiding text consists of shielding keywords and phrases from the view of the user. SEO companies may employ hiding of text as a Black Hat Marketing technique to help increase SERPs. There are several ways to hide text, including setting the color of the text to be the same as the background. Webmasters may also use the CSS "Z" positioning technique to place text on a lower plan behind images (thus shielding them from user view). Another technique is absolute positioning, where text is placed off the visible boundary of the main webpage content. Recently, search engines have been advancing their algorithms to try to detect pages that make use of hidden text for the purpose of rankings. If the SEO company you plan on doing business with suggests text hiding, move on and find another SEO company.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages, also commonly known as landing pages, bridge pages, jump pages, and gateway pages, are web pages that are designed to appeal to search engine spiders that are looking for pages to index. They're purpose is to spam the index of search engines by falsifying results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending users to a different page than the one they intended. Doorways are particularly easy to identify as they generally contain no content and are not designed to be useful tp users. Their main target is search engine spiders.
Cloaking
Content that is served up to a search engine spider that differs from content presented to a users' browser is a technique commonly known as cloaking. Cloaking is often used as a spamdexing technique. Cloaking does have valid uses, but is often a ploy used by sites that serve up illegal warez, pornography, male enhancement pills, and Viagra (to name a few).
Link Farms
Links farms consists of a directory of web pages with little or no content that contain hyperlinks that point to every other page in the directory. Most link farms exist for the purpose of spamming the search engine indexes (spamdexing) in order to help sites gain higher search engine placement. Note that link farms should not be confused with directories (such as DMOZ) nor should they be confused for legitimate link pages. For example, it's perfectly appropriate to have a resources or links page in your site that contains links to other site (partners). The key is to not overload the page with just links and to limit the number of links per page. It's suggested you categorize links if you're linking to several dozen sites and wrap link text within the body of a sentence. It's also recommended that you join link services that do not involve link farms, such as Free Links Direct. If your SEO company is suggesting listing your site in directories, make sure you find out which directories you'll be listed in and preview them on your own. If the directory is nothing more than a series of unrelated links with no structure, then you've happened upon a link farm. Bid that SEO company a fond farewell and move on. According to Google, a site that participates in a link farm may have its search rankings penalized.
Pop-Unders
Pop-unders are usually a technique applied by traffic service websites that guarantee you'll receive X number of visitors form their service. With pop-unders, a window loads a web page behind the page you are currently surfing (think of it as a reverse pop-up). When a user clicks away (closes) the current website, you're site is displayed behind it. Although not necessarily Black Hat Marketing, pop-unders are not the most effective way to gain traffic. Your site may garner a negative impression by users as they'll associate it with the pop-under. Most users do not appreciate or welcome schemes that direct them to a site other than the one they specifically targeted. That's why web browsers come with built-in pop-up blockers. In general, if something seems hokey to you it will seem hokey to your users.
Spam
The ultimate in Black Hat Marketing... SPAM! There really isn't much to say about this that hasn't already been said. Simple rule, Don't spam! Don't spam search engines, don't send out email spam, don't spam forums, and don't spam user blogs! Once labeled as a spammer, you risk taking a serious blow to your reputation, not to mention any legal issues that can peruse. Be very wary of any SEO expert that offer website promotion through blast emails. Ensure that any email going out with your web url are being targeted towards users with a general interest in what you have to offer and that it's not unsolicited email.
Once you know what SEO techniques you should avoid, finding a quality SEO expert will be much easier. Any company or person who claims to be an SEO expert will avoid applying any of the fore mentioned techniques. For every right way of doing SEO, there's at least one wrong way. Stay focused on what's important and conduct your business practices in an honest and ethical manner and you'll soon find your website taking a turn for the better."
Keywords: SEO, search engine optimization, website marketing, PageRank, PR
For more info visit : http://www.geocities.com/seo2india
Inbound Links From Blogs - The Untold Story
When you are starting out, choosing the right source for inbound links can be difficult to determine, especially when you have a new site and no PR.
When I started writing my first blog, one of the main ways that I used to promote it was through gaining inbound links from various other blogs using articles. I had tremendous success and still do with many of my great articles. It's a very quick and efficient way to gain the best foothold in the search marketing world because of your ability to target multiple websites with similar content with very little effort. So, very shortly after I started that first blog, that's what I did. As a result, a lot of my articles ended up on various blogs. What I noticed, though, was that a few months after I started gaining those inbound links, I started to lose them quickly. And to find out why, I had to do some investigating...
I utilized the Search Engine Marketing Reports that I offer through my business to see why it was that I was losing these links and found out that what I thought was a fundamental flaw was really a fundamental design in the search engines and blogs.
The reason that I was losing those links is due to the aging effect in the search engines. You see, most search engines spiders are designed to index only a certain distance away from the main page of your site. The idea is that the majority of your content (or the content that you want to market to your clients) will be contained on those pages. For instance, Google has been rumored to only index approximately 4 levels away from the landing page of a site.
When a blog author makes a post to their site, older posts are moved further toward the bottom until they are placed on another page of the site (or 2nd level). This continues until a post is so far away from the landing page, that it no longer will be indexed, because it's considered too old.
So when you author an article and submit it to directories, your article is posted to a number of blogs, websites, newsletters... all of them need quality content. But as time goes on and more posts are made to that particular blog, your article (and essentially, the link to your own site) moves further down the list until it is no longer is indexed by the search engines and they begin to drop it altogether in favor of the newer content.
So mystery solved... I was losing my links because the blogs were doing what they were made to do...add newer content.
So, where does this put the Search Marketer who wants to actively promote their site using free article directories? Essentially, what you do will still work (as it always has), but your marketing plan must include consistently submitting to article directories, because eventually, you will lose those inbound links."
Keywords: Blogs, Search Engine Marketing, Inbound Links
SEO: For Search Engines or Humans
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is something that many webmasters are now obsessing over. Many web site owners are spending countless hours tweaking and modifying their web sites, adding keyword rich content, and spending hours obtaining back links, so that their site will rank higher in search engines. It is true that over 90% of all web surfers use search engines to visit sites on a regular basis, but should web masters and web site designers build and tweak sites for search engines, or for their visitors?
The answer to this question is that when you build a web site, you are not targeting web search engine crawlers, you are targeting people and human visitors. Hence, you should build a web site for humans, not search engines. The whole purpose to create a web site is so that you can get traffic. Without traffic, a web site is worthless. No matter how many features and how functional your site is, without traffic, your design and functionality do not matter. Although search engines can help bring in traffic, web sites that are designed for search engines, are often not designed for human visitors and all the traffic that your web site gets will be worthless. Visitors will visit and then soon leave your web site and not return again. Return visitors are critical for the success of any web site.
One good example of optimizing for search engines purely is some webmasters tend to stuff tons of keywords into the Meta-Tags; this is a very bad practice and will get the site blacklisted. Moreover, this black hat technique does not benefit the users.
Hence, when building a web site, one should build it for human visitors. If you have articles that are too keyword dense, the quality of the writing will not be as high as it should, and quite frankly, many of your visitors will be annoyed if you keep using words such as “mesothelioma” or “home insurance loan” to get your web site high in the search rankings for these terms. They will leave your web site and most likely not return. If you create a web site where content is created for people to read and is well written, chances are you will get many return visitors who like the quality of the content you provide and come back frequently to read any new content you may have added. The more people that visit and link to your web site, the more popular it well become and naturally, it will be ranked higher in search engines.
Also, rather than spending hours building links for SEO purposes, that time could be better spent on adding features to your web site which would prompt more people to return to your site and stay at your web site for a longer period of time.
In conclusion, although spending lot of time on SEO and increasing your search engine rankings in the short run, the visitors you get from your SEO efforts will not be valuable as chances are they will not visit again. If you build your web sites for people, your traffic will grow and search engine rankings will rise naturally. Hence, the best way to build a successful web site is to build for people and allow your web site to naturally move up search engine rankings.
Keywords: SEO, Search Engines, optimize for humans, keywords stuffing
For more info visit : - http://www.geocities.com/seo2india
