Interesting and informative articles are in big demand. Article directories meet this demand by making them available in one location for webmasters to use on their sites, in their newsletters, and in their Ezines. There are many article banks to choose from and you should sign up for as many as possible.

So you are wondering what qualifications you need to write an article?

You simply need to have knowledge on a topic, any topic that others might benefit from. You need to ensure your content is clean, contains no profanity, and no hate literature. Article banks will accept most articles that are interesting and informative as long as they don’t contain the above.

If you aren’t sure? Consider this. Would you read it? Does it catch your interest? If the answer is yes then there are most likely many others that would read it.

From search engine optimization, to how to grow the most beautiful roses, to buying jewelry, to lawyers and doctors. It’s all useful. From simple to technical to basic, your perspective may be anywhere from useful to universal.

Your articles should be written in proper English. If English is not your native tongue consider hiring a ghostwriter to write your article for you. Ghostwriters are also a valuable tool if you are not good at writing or simply don’t have the time. There are several sites online where you can obtain the services for a reasonable fee.

When submitting your article to the article directories be sure to read their submission guidelines. Only submit your article if it fits in an appropriate category. If it does not then find a different article bank that is more suited to your article.

The exposure you get from your article is unlimited and you can submit your article to thousands of directories if you like. These articles are an excellent way to boost your one way inbound links and they are a lot less hassle then finding good link partners.

Use the resource box to provide information about your site or yourself and be sure to include the active link to your site. Use the resource box to entice visitors to visit your site.

You can get traffic to your site because of search engines and the possibility or probability of someone reading the article, then clicking your link. You get a double hit – two for one. What more could you ask for. This is virtual marketing at its’ best! Exposure 24/7. Everyday, all day long, and the only effort required by you is to submit your article or articles.

So if you are looking for more exposure, improved search engine rankings, and to get your company in the lime light, you certainly should consider writing a few articles and submitting them to the article directories. In fact submitting one article each week can give you great benefits!

Comparison with Other Linking Methods

Reciprocal Linking: The big advantage of content distribution over swapping links is that the links built are one-way, and therefore presumably more valuable. Of course, reciprocal links still have value, but relying primarily on them might hamper your SEO efforts.

ndirect Reciprocal Links: I link my site A to your site, so you link your site to my site B. The problems are that this can be a lot of work, and also, Google can detect indirect links if you do it more than once with the same group of sites, which might make your linking arrangements look like a link farm.

Paid Links: The problem with paid links is 1) the costs add up; 2) search engines are getting better and better at discounting paid links. According to Matt Cutts’ blog, “I wouldn’t be surprised if search engines begin to take stronger action against link buying in the near future…link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext).”

Kinds of Content to Distribute

Articles. This is the essential kind of content distribution, to the point that many people consider content distribution simple as “article marketing.” However, you’re missing out on a few other sources of links if you only do articles.

News blurbs. A lot of news-style sites will only reprint pieces of a couple of paragraphs. The good news is that often enough the whole point of these news blurbs is to include links to other sites, in a sort of “look what we’ve found” kind of way, a la Slashdot.org

Press Releases. There are some sites that aggressively reprint press releases. A press release is like an article, only in a very specific press release format, and frankly that’s not that enjoyable to read. I don’t know why some sites are so head-over-heels over press releases, but, hey, that’s their business. The good news is that even if you can’t write and don’t want to hire a writer, press releases (at least basic ones) are pretty easy to do.

Tools, games and other webware. Sites with popular tools, software, Flash games and other webware often let other sites use it in exchange for a link. The big potential downside is technical support.

Images. Images, especially charts and photographs, are important forms of content on the web. If you have great images on your site and people ask you to use them on their sites, require a backlink in exchange. The problem with images is that they are so easily stolen. Stolen words can be uncovered with a web search. You could try to watermark images with a copyright symbol, URL, and the link requirement. But in the process you’d make the image much less desirable.

Web design templates. These have been freely distributed for a long time. Yet they are even more easily stolen than images. Also, if you embed a link in the footer of a web template, what you’ll get back are sitewide links, which are often thought to be filtered out in search engines.

Maximizing Content Distribution Links’ Effectiveness: Anchor Text
Anchor text. You need optimized anchor text to rank high for any competitive keyword. That means you need your target keyword in the anchor text, and very importantly, variants of the target keyword (too many links with the exact same anchor text may be filtered). The problem is that some sites by default don’t let you choose the anchor text of the link to your site. So you need to: 1) look for sites that do reprint content with optimized anchor text; 2) specifically ask for your target anchor text to be used. Also, do keep in mind that a true natural linking structure will require you to have a number of links that are not anchor-text-optimized, typically with the URL as the anchor text.

How to Find Sites

Finding sites to submit content is the biggest challenge. You can start by asking around to any other webmasters you already have a relationship with. Next, web-search. The classic method is “submit article” + [keyword]. Most of the sites you find this way won’t be good candidates, which is why this can be a bit labor-intensive. I use offshore labor for this step, as well as a program that will sort and store all the search results into a spreadsheet; otherwise it might not be worth it. Then again, the same would be true for finding reciprocal linking partners.

Ethical Issues and Best Practices

Golden rule: remember that there’s a human being who has to approve your article for submission.

Read and adhere to all submission guidelines.

Avoid automation. There’s almost always some detail of submission that requires a human eye: a multitude of html formatting requirements, changing site themes, etc.

Don’t submit by email unless specifically instructed. Using a contact form prevents possible sp@m accusations.

Only approach websites that request content submissions.

Don’t misrepresent reprint content as original.

Don’t submit the same content too often. After about two hundred reprints, a lot of people will be seeing the same thing over and over again and possibly complaining.

In short, as SEO gets more competitive, having more and more linking methods at your disposal gets more and more important. Don’t overlook this important tool.

Now that you are all set up with your affiliate programs however, you may be wondering, what can I do to generate traffic to my affiliate links? Lets explore some of the ways we can accomplish this.

The first thing you will want to do is to have a webpage with brief descriptions of all of your affiliate programs along with your affiliate links accompanying it. The reason for this is, for the most part, you will want to promote your own website as opposed to your individual affiliate links. Your webpage dose does not have to be fancy. Once you have accomplished this you will have a huge advantage over simply attempting to generate traffic to your individual affiliate links.

Start a business Blog. A Blog, short for, Web Log, is a great way to promote yourself as a knowledgeable person. People will begin to believe in you and will eventually trust you. Just make sure to post a new article every day so that people will keep coming back to read your latest article. That will breed familiarity. People will buy much more readily from people who they know and trust. Another reason to post every day is that, although it won’t be long before the search engines find your Blog, you can ping the search engines every time your Blog is updated and search engines L-O-V-E new content! Make sure to have a bio along with a link back to your website. Your bio should contain a brief description about you such as, [ John Doe is the owner of yoursite.com. John specializes in helping people to work at home in their own home based business. To learn about the different business opportunities John has to offer you visit his website at www.yoursite.com].

Write and publish your own business articles. This is the greatest form of free advertising available. By writing and submitting articles, along with your bio at the bottom of each of your articles, you will not only have more and more non-reciprocal links pointing back to your website but most importantly the search engines will begin to spider your articles(read them word for word.) When people type into a search engine, keywords or phrases, that match what is in your articles, they will show up on the search results along with a link back to your website! Make sure to insert keywords into your articles that are relevant to your website such as business opportunities, affiliate programs, work at home, home based business, etc. The more relevant links there are pointing back to your website the higher your page rank will be. A higher page rank means your website will show up higher on the search engines results page, so keep writing those articles!

Ezines are email newsletters that people subscribe to on every topic imaginable. Find Ezines that are relevant to the business you are promoting such as business opportunities, affiliate programs, work at home, home based business, etc. Most Ezines will accept advertisements. This is not spam because the subscribers have agreed to accept offers from time to time as part of their subscription and can unsubscribe at any time. With Ezines it is better to advertise your individual affiliate programs along with your affiliate link as opposed to your website with a link back to it.

Email lists are another great way to advertise your individual affiliate programs. These are people who for whatever reason have agreed to receive certain offers. Find lists that are relevant to what you are promoting such as business opportunities, affiliate programs, work at home, home based business etc.

Pay-Per-Click(PPC) advertising such as Google AdWords is a form of advertising for the first time in history were you only pay for advertising if people are actually interested in your ad, since you only pay if someone is interested enough to click on it! These are ads that show up along with the regular search engine results. In the case of Google AdWords for instance the ads appear overhead and also on the right side. This form of advertising however requires a deep technical understanding to make it cost effective, otherwise, it will suck up your advertising dollars in no time!

Promoting your affiliate links dose not have to be expensive. It all depends on wether you would prefer to spend time, money or some sort of compromise between the two. You have various options available to you and what path you decide to take is entirely up to you.

So why does it happen? Well, Google pulls its results from over ten thousand servers, and they can’t all be updated at once – Google would have to go down for the update. Instead, each server is updated with the new index, one at a time. This can cause very strange behavior in the page rank process if two major sites located on separate servers happen to have a close linking bond. These sorts of separations are interesting and can contribute to a great deal of change and motion in page ranks. The most important thing to keep in mind is that eventually Google will get you into your proper place. Generally, if you behave, you will not be thrown down for long by the odd activity that can occur when Google is in the process of updating its index for your server (or for the servers of your favorite link partners.

One common misunderstanding is the idea that Google controls which server each kind of information is coming from, and so stores similar information on the same server. Google’s index doesn’t work this way – it’s a big, disorganized mass of information that Google searches very quickly. This is a blessing in disguise because it allows your site to remain reachable via other sites that are related to it when the index is taking place. Your site generally won’t suffer for too long when an update is taking place anyway, but if you are heavily dependent on Google results, you will see a slight drop for a short period of time. This drop is often followed by a slight spike especially if your page rank has increased since the last index.

The 10,000 servers that Google uses are distributed between seven datacenters all over the world. Google doesn’t keep all of those eggs in one basket – they want to be able to lose one datacenter and have the rest survive. If part of Google goes down, people can still use the search engine and as I said before, this allows your site to be accessed via related sites if the server holding your sites index happens to go down. The datacenters that Google has put into play are enormous in comparison to most datacenters around the world. Google rivals some of the largest datacenters in the world with each of its datacenters and is probably the largest in the world if all were combined into one.

You see, the ‘time-to-live’ for www.google.com is only five minutes – that means that Google’s IP address can change every five minutes. This allows them to switch between their datacenters regularly, spreading the search load between them intelligently and routing around any damage. If you constantly entered the same datacenter with every search that you placed it would almost certainly fry within twenty four hours. Considering the number of users on Google each and every day, it is surprising that ten thousand servers is enough. A server can only handle so much traffic in a day and Google insures that it can hold more than any other service on the internet.

The datacenters updating their indexes at different times causes Google to do its dance. Unless you’re looking for your website’s ranking, you’d never notice this as your site is normally available at all times. The unfortunate bit is that often times you will lose your page ranking for a short period of time or your site will seem to have a lower number of pages indexed by Google. If you insure that you have several hundred pages available on Google at all times you will most likely be able to provide all of your content at all times either directly or indirectly.

-Clean code and use of a CSS. It is still imperative to write in clean code and avoid proprietary tags or server side extensions such as the ones created/required by certain web design programs. Use a cascading style sheet to reduce attribute clutter.

-Keyword density. The accepted parameters call for keyword presence on each page in order to rank well for the particular term. Too little density and the search engines will not rank the site well and too much will be viewed as spam.

-Unidirectional and reciprocal linking. The more sites linking to one and the better the site will score. Note: reciprocal links are being discounted by Google in particular because of rampant, free for all link exchange abuse. Make sure anchor text reflects the keywords being targeted when conducting a link campaign.

The standard above guidelines are what many SEOs are focusing on to help websites in the top rank arena.

While these are still the basics, we are seeing a a shift in the ranks where sites rank extremely well for a keyword without such term even being present on the page. How is this possible? The only possible explanation is the contextual text relationship or theme of a site.

Google seems to be at the forefront of this technology: the sites that are doing well even for terms that are not present in the text or anchor links are very rich in related content. Also, very important, the site relates to the particular key phrase. Let’s try an example: when searching for “market timing”, a site is in the top 3 in Google. The site has hundreds of pages indexed and deals with market research for stocks, stock buying and investment decision tools. A human being reading through the site found by searching for market timing will find the site extremely informative and pertinent to the search. Then, how is it possible that Google could rank it high if it is just blindly indexing the text to find the exact keyword? The answer is ontological text recognition. By reading the contextual relationship between words and paragraphs, Google is capable of “understanding” that the site, without mentioning a particular keyword, will be relevant when a user searches for it.

What does this mean for you? Simply put, a lot. Copywriting is king. Well written content, informative article writing in conjunction with standard SEO techniques are the new search optimization reality. It means more work but also the advantage of maintaining more solid ranks over time as no competitor site can just easily tweak some code to rank higher. We have been focusing heavily on this new aspect to find the best way to create user friendly and rich content that will be positively received by search engines and searchers alike.

The in order on the website SEO Delhi is supposed to not be messy. In SEO Delhi the Information ought to be categorized meaningfully and content should be appropriately categorized into different sub pages of the website. If user fails to find what they want right away, they are likely to go to one more site.

1. Affiliate Program Directories
There are several sites on the Internet dedicated to listing affiliate Programs.
Get your program listed in these directories. Affiliates usually look these
directories to find new products. By listing your program you’ll get more
exposure. Just make a search on Google for “Affiliate Program Directories” and submit your program.

2. Find Complimentary Sites
“Complementary” sites are a sites that sell products or services that compliment your offerings. If you sell “gardening tools”, a site that sells books on “gardening tips” would be a perfect affiliate. If you sell software, try looking for sites that sell computers or computer parts. Finding sites that already attract your target market, and can benefit from recommending your product or service to their visitors, is the goal.

3. Find content sites
There are many sites that do not sell any kind of product or service but are
mainly content-oriented sites. Such sites promote an idea, concept, study or
belief. Content sites that are used as a resource for your target market are ideal affiliates.

4. Place a link on your Sales Page
One of the ways to find affiliates is to place a visible link of your affiliate
program at your home page. A healthy side of this coin is that you can convert your visitors in to your affiliates. You can offer your affiliate program to your customers also.
By doing this you’ll get a decent number of affiliates. Now the Second Step is to provide them promotional material so they can make more sales. Each of your affiliate will have different needs so you should focus on each type of
promotional material.

Here are some basic things to look for:

1. Email Ads:
Your most affiliates may be interested in placing ads in e-zines or their own
newsletters. Try writing a few ads in different lengths. While writing email ads
always try to use hypnotic language and emotion trigger words so it increases
your Click through rate (CTR).

2. Signature Files:
Some affiliates may even add your tag to their signature line. Give them a few witty lines to choose from.

3. Articles:
These are great for affiliates that need content for their websites and
newsletters. Write some good articles and allow your affiliates to republish it at their website and newsletter. It will improve your search engine ranking also.
Make a pin point that your article must be a healthy reading for your readers so they read it again and again.

4. Banners:
Though banners aren&t much effective as other methods but are still widely
used. Make banners in a variety of sizes to fit tops of pages, bottoms, toolbars, sidebars and other miscellaneous areas.

5. Product Images:
Give your affiliates images that show and link directly to specific products.
They&ll be able to choose an image specific to their site, or choose several
images to display.

6. Brandable Reports:
This is probably the best tool in my opinion because it adds a viral effect in your program. Make a short report so your affiliate can brand it with there own affiliate link and give away.
To add viral effect just place a line at first and last page of report like “Click
Here to make this Report your 24/7 digital salesperson” and add a link to your
affiliate page.

These are some points to start and run your affiliate program. Once you have
your affiliate program properly set and your system under control, consider
developing promotions for your affiliates. Give them special incentives to sell
more during a certain time frame, move seasonal products, or increase business during your slow months. Offer them additional commissions, or even bonuses for reaching a specific amount of sales.
In conclusion, if you follow the steps I have just outlined and if you are ready
for a little work and a lot of organization, your affiliate program should be up and running in no time.

Actually it would be wrong if we say that search engines send traffic at zero cost. There is a price you need to pay to rank high and that’s TIME. Yes, it takes time to reach there.

there are many factors that undergo a normal Search Engine Optimization exercise and building “inbound links” is considered one of the most challenging tasks involved today. To understand better why search engines look for inbound links, let’s take a real life example.

For a moment forget the Internet, forget you website/search engines
anything that has to do “ranking high”, just read this small
story.

There was a young boy Jim, about 21 years old. He was a fantastic painter. He painted in water colors on canvas. His favorite subjects were landscapes, natural beauty, mountains, etc…He could spend hours painting and playing with colors. Colors were his passion, his life.

He lived in a small village that was away from a major metro city. With a small population, no one really visited this village very often. Jim was very happy with his passion of painting.

One day Jim’s uncle visited his home on a Sunday. When he saw Jim’s paintings he thought Jim has got an inborn talent of colors, of looking towards the surrounding beauty that he was able to capture on canvas. His was a special skill that very few people have. So he suggested Jim to move to the city to display his work to people out there. Jim assured him that whenever he gets the opportunity he would definitely make the best of it.

Then the golden day arrived. Jim was listening to a radio station, when he heard the announcement of an exhibiting of paintings to be held in the metro city. Jim thought this is what I was looking for an quickly rushed to the city at his Uncle’s place to arrange for the formalities.

Five of Jim’s paintings got selected and displayed at the metro city exhibition. He got a tons of post and is still getting from his fans and now the best part is he is making thousands of bucks just from a single painting. He is happy and wealthy too. His passion is keeping satisfied and now he is famous guy. The villagers are proud of having him in their village.

OK… now what’s this story got to do with SEO..you ask..

A lot…If you read the story again you will discover that Jim is already happy when he is in his village, spending most of his time with paints and brushes. But when he displays his work out to public, his work is admired by more and more people. It has to do with “numbers”. Again when no one knew about his talents, he still was a great painter, but now because now thousands of
people say that “Jim is a great painter” his value becomes magnified thousands of times.

Now if Jim launches his website on water color paintings where do you think it must rank.. You see, it’s a numbers game. Of course it’s also important that who recommends Jim as a great painter. But Jim doesn’t care, he’s already taken all the care for years polishing his painting skills. All he knows is producing great quality paintings for his customers which are ready to pay him truckloads of money.

There is a simple exercise to do. Put yourself in Google’s shoes, imagine that you are Google.com [:-)] and then look at Jim’s new website. If I am a regular Google user I will take all the care to see that my search results for the keyword “water color paintings” show up results that are best and most importantly recognized by experts in the art industry.

This is true for every search engine out there, including Yahoo! and MSN, because they want to retain their users.

Here “inbounds links” come into picture. The number and the quality of inbound links is the only way for the search engines to recognize the quality of the website it is supposed to rank. Of course as I mentioned there are many factors that a search engine will look for, but inbound links can have a major impact on your rankings.

Again if Jim wants his website to rank well for many years to come, he will have to keep on producing quality work just the way he is doing now. Most people think that search engines are money machines, just build a website, get is indexed and forget about it. But it is getting a long term goal now a days to rank high at the search engines. As I said it comes at the cost of TIME. If you are ready to go for it, creating traffic through search engines
will be one of the most profitable skills you will ever learn in this lifetime.

I hope this article was useful….

Copyright Shrinivas Vaidya

This technique allows your site to be ranked higher and increase free traffic on your web site. In writing of SEO content copy it important to remember that one should not attempt to write a completely new web copy rather one should concentrate on the revising and reediting content written by copywriters. Remember that final product should be “suitable for reading” both by search engines and people. The survival of many web sites depends on the traffic got by major search engines. Once your text ha been written and has been submitted, the search engines starts looking for relevant words in it. The pages of your web site will be ranked higher if more relevant keywords appear in the content of your web site. Finally, try either to read about this process or even hire some professional who can handle this task for you. Remember that if SEO process is performed incorrectly it might ruin rather than help your business.

Text links are the foundation of the internet. Without text links, there would be no internet. Without text links, there would be no internet users. Text links make the internet “user friendly” and allow surfers to easily move from one location to another to locate the information they choose.

In spite of the facts that this advertising tool is so familiar and simple, many internet marketers overlook it when devising an advertising and marketing plan. But this is a very big mistake because text linking is one of the least expensive and yet most powerful advertising options available.

Why You Need A Text Link Strategy For Your Web Site

Why is it important to have text links spread across a network of other web sites? I can answer that in one word — traffic.

Text links equal traffic. It really is that simple.

Text links work for you three ways:

~ Direct traffic when visitors click on the key words you have selected as your “anchor text”. This is very targeted, very profitable traffic too as each visitor deliberately clicks with the intention of learning more about whatever the key words are promoting.
~ Search engine traffic when their spiders encounter the text link and key words then visit your site. This can lead to more frequent visits by the search engines and factor into search placement.
~ Back links that affect both search engine ranking for your site but also search results

Text links can provide all those benefits — which can directly translate into income from your web site — and you can often buy text links for under $10 and the link will not only promote the specific site or page you choose but also connect it with the specific key words that will benefit you the most. Even better, when you buy a text link you are locking in your price so even if it delivers a ton of traffic — you don’t have to increase your ad budget.

How Can You Get Started With Text Links?

After you have developed your site and it is ready for visitors you should work up two versions of your text link. The first will be just a few words or a short phrase that includes the key words for your target site. The second will also include a longer description that may be a sentence or two. You should be able to find a selection of text links available for either choice.

When purchasing text links it is important to work with a known quantity and that usually is made easier if you work through a reputable text link broker.

Some points to consider when buying a text link:
~ Search engine rank (Google, Alexa, etc.) and age of site
~ Traffic
~ Content, design and usability of site
~ Placement of your link and number of links on the page/site

Many inexperienced text link buyers focus solely on Google PR but that little number doesn’t really tell an accurate tale about the traffic level on a site. While you shouldn’t ignore search engine rank information, I think it is more important to pay attention to the position of the link and the relevancy of the page or site content to yours. This will deliver better results in both the short and long term.

Where can you find text links? Visit my newsletter Establish Your Epresence for some helpful hints.

To get the best overall, long-term search engine positions, three components must be present on a web page:

Text component

Link component

Popularity component

All of the major search engines (AltaVista, FAST Search, Google, Lycos, MSN Search and other Inktomi-based engines) use these components as a part of their search engine algorithms. Sites that have (a) all of the components on their web pages, and (b) have optimal levels of all the components perform well in the search engines overall.

Text component

Since the search engines build lists of words and phrases on URL’s, then it naturally follows that in order to do well on the search engines, you must place these words on your web pages in the strategic HTML tags.

The most important part of the text component of a search engine algorithm is keyword selection. In order for your target audience to find your site on the search engines, your pages must contain keyword phrases that match the phrases your target audience is typing into search queries.

Once you have determined the best keyword phrases to use on your web pages, you will need to place them within your HTML tags. Search engines do not place emphasis on the same HTML tags. For example, Inktomi reads Meta tags; Google ignores Meta tags. Thus, in order to do well on the entire search engines, it is best to place keywords in all of the HTML tags possible, without keyword stuffing. So no matter what the search engine algorithm is, you know that your keywords are contained in your documents

Link component

The strategy of placing keyword-rich text in your web pages is useless if the search engine spiders have no way of finding that text. The way your pages are linked to each other, and the way your web site is linked to other web sites, does impact your search engine positions.

Even though search engine spiders are powerful data-gathering programs, HTML coding or scripting can prevent a spider from effectively crawling your pages. Examples of site navigation schemes that can be problematic are:

1. Poor HTML coding on all navigation schemes: Browsers (Netscape and Explorer) can display web pages with sloppy HTML coding; search engine spiders are not as forgiving as browsers are.

2. JavaScript: All of the major search engines cannot follow links embedded inside of JavaScript, including but not limited to mouseovers, arrays, and drop-down menus. Note: Even though reputable designer resources claim search-engine friendly scripts exist, many of them are untested and unproven.

3. Dynamic or database-driven web pages: Pages that are generated via scripts, databases, and/or have a?, &, $, =, +, or % in the URL can present spider “traps.”

4. Flash: Currently, none of the search engines can follow the links embedded in Flash documents.

Therefore, to ensure that the spiders have the means to record the data on your web pages, we recommend having two forms of navigation on a web page: one that pleases your end users, and one that the search engine spiders can follow.

Popularity component

The popularity component of a search engine algorithm consists of multiple sub-components:

Link popularity
Click-through popularity
Web page popularity

Attaining an optimal popularity component is not simply obtaining as many links as possible to a web site. The quality of the sites linking to your site holds more “weight” than the quantity of sites linking to your site. Since Yahoo is the most frequently visited site on the web, a link from Yahoo to your web site carries far more “weight” than a link from a smaller, less visited site. Other outstanding sites that can help generate excellent popularity are LookSmart, the Open Directory, and About.com. Non-competitive, industry-specific sites (such as javascript.com) are also excellent link development resources.

Obtaining links from other sites is not enough to maintain optimal popularity. The major search engines and directories are measuring how often end users are clicking on the links to your site and how long they are staying on your site (i.e., reading your web pages). They are also measuring how often end users return to your site. All of these measurements constitute a site’s click-through popularity.

The search engines and directories measure both link popularity (quality and quantity of links) and click-through popularity to determine the overall popularity component of a web site.

As I have said before, blogging is a therapeutic form of rehabilitation. It allows a sigh of relief in most cases, allowing people to get a load of their shoulders. Blogging has been limited to people who are Internet exposed people, most of which are the yuppies of tomorrow. Some professionals, particularly in the great areas of the United States and Europe have taken this up and most of them have two things on their mind: for personal distinction (fame) or as another source of income (fortune).

Many have claimed that people are earning millions by the day from blogging alone. Some are just in it to gain the exposure they are longing for, something that they fail to achieve in the competitive world of today, particularly in journalism and article writing tasks. It is not hard to distinguish which blogs or compositions are authentic and the purpose of which is to spread information and become sources for future people who blog. It is the content, hence why people say “Content is King”. If it is just money for the sake of placing keywords in a particular article, then writers and bloggers may as well be given a negative attention towards people who search the web for quality written content or blogs. This is a rarity today, the reason being, all they want is to attract people to visit their sites and raise their page ranks as analyzed by Google which will raise the stakes for possible pay per click advertisements. This gives article and content writing a bad name. It deprives the people who really pour out their heart and minds towards sharing towards people what their opinions really are. Blogging should not be treated solely for making money, it should be about a person’s viewpoint, something that is surely different from that of others.

For fame itself, people who love to read what a person writes is more than enough to give due recognition to the author. Quality should never be sacrificed for keyword density as they say. It is not easy to spot a poorly written article. Repetitiveness of words, and totally out of sync compositions are the immediate noticeable marks. So the next time you see such things, expect the blog or composition to be full of non-sense and just go back to the previous page and look for that quality written composition that is worth the time reading. Besides, everyone values their time, hence make good use of it and spot the low quality content right away.

There’s a lot of money in affiliate marketing. This is true, however, only to those are seriously and zealously working on his affiliate program. Success in affiliate marketing varies in every individual affiliate and for the most part, it depends on his will and perseverance. No matter how good an affiliate program is, it will not prosper if the affiliate marketer does not pay the price of hard work. One must exert extra effort especially on the aspect of promotion. Nothing will happen if the links or banners would just lie idle in a web page, an affiliate must be able to convince the visitor to click it and proceed to the business site to buy the products. No click-throughs means no income for an affiliate marketer.

You can actually generate a full-time income by means of affiliate marketing and you can do it at home, and yes, even while you sleep. You must have a good web site to begin with. It must have good promotional and informative contents, pleasing design, inviting banner ads and all other important elements in an affiliate marketer’s web site. It would be great if you have exhausted other means of advertising such as newsletters, email marketing, message boards and ad listings such as Google AdWords. You just have to go online once in a while to check your site and update it and to watch over the development of your marketing program. Does this sound so easy?
It can be this easy if you have planned your affiliate program well and have taken all the steps towards success carefully and diligently. Now, there’s a tool you can use to help you go through the program with ease and confidence, the Ad Tracker. For many experienced and successful affiliate marketers, the Ad Tracker is a key to a successful affiliate marketing program.

What precisely is an ad tracker? It is a marketing tracking software or program that allows you to trace and take note of every click-through made by visitors of your site and by other customers who got your referral link. There are ad tracking service providers as well, so you will just have to pay them to do the tracking for you. With the ad tracker, you can keep an eye on the progress of your marketing campaigns even offline. This tool or program is especially helpful if you are engaged in several affiliate and pay-per-click programs and have placed ads in emails, pop-ups and pop-unders, message boards, auto responders, Ezines, forums, several web sites, surveys and various ad service providers.

Of course, you don’t want all your efforts to be put to waste so you want to make sure you are getting paid for your hard work. Likewise, you want to make sure every dollar or cent you disburse in your advertising campaigns is wisely spent. With the help of the ad tracker, you will know accurately how many and which of your links where clicked on, how many clicked on your links, how many of your emails were opened and how many of those who opened your email clicked through the business site and purchased a product, how many products were purchased, which of your banner ads or links brought the most leads and sales and many other pertinent facts and figures you need.

Sales records and all data stated are necessary in any business as this could determine if your affiliate program is still worth continuing. This would also help you determine which of your marketing strategies is most effective and which is most beneficial for each product or service you are promoting.

Every decision and plan you make must be well grounded on facts. That decision or plan of action may not be the best, but it is something not to regret about when you had valid reasons for coming up with such decision or plan. You cannot just decide to terminate your affiliate program, just because you don’t earn big in an instant.

If you are serious with affiliate marketing, again and again, keep in mind that your success lies mainly on promotion and your hard work. If you don’t seem lucky enough to convince many of your site users to buy the products, don’t be disheartened and jump into a conclusion that your affiliate program is a failure. If it works for others, it could work for you, too. Know whether your advertising techniques are effective or not, which works best for your program and which doesn’t. Get an ad tracker to help you know all these and you’d surely be on the right track towards success!

Dynamic websites are websites whose pages are generated on the fly. Unlike static pages (primarily .htm/.html pages), dynamic pages are generated when an user triggers an action through that particular page.

Here is a sample dynamic URL-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/search/results.pl?q=%22dynamic+websites%22&tab=news&go=homepage

As per the above example of www.bbc.co.uk, the dynamic part (i.e. the part) of the URL which changes as per surfer request is the part after the question mark (?)

What are the problems that search engines face in indexing Dynamic URLs?

1. Search engines often consider a dynamic URL as an infinite set of links.

2. Since dynamic URLs find maximum application in online shopping carts, there is a possibility of incorporating a session id to a particular page. As session ids of that particular page change, the search engine spider needs to index an infinite number of copies of the same page, which is a Herculean task for them.

3. Proceeding with the same logic presented in point # 2, indexing the same dynamic page might overload the servers of the search engines and therefore prevent the search engines to present with the most relevant information in the fastest possible time.

Here is what Google says about indexing of dynamic websites -

Reasons your site may not be included: Your pages are dynamically generated. We are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index. (Source – http://www.google.com/webmasters/)

What are the options that you have in order to make a search engine spider index your Dynamic URLs?

1. Use of softwares – Exception Digital Enterprise Solutions (http://www.xde.net) offers a software which can change the dynamic URLs to static ones. Named XQASP, it will remove the “?” in the Query String and replace it with “/”, thereby allowing the search engine spiders to index the dynamic content.

Example –
http://www.my-online-store.com/books.asp?id=1190 will change to

http://www.my-online-store.com/books/1190.

The latter being a static URL, it can easily be indexed by the search engine spiders.

2. Use of CGI/Perl scripts – One of the easiest ways to get your dynamic sites indexed by search engines is using CGI/Perl scripts. Path_Info or Script_Name is a variable in a dynamic application that contains the complete URL address (including the query string information). In order to fix this problem, you’ll need to write a script that will pull all the information before the query string and set the rest of the information equal to a variable. You can then use this variable in your URL address.

Example – http://www.my-online-store.com/books.asp?id=1190

When you are using CGI/Perl scripts, the query part of the dynamic URL is assigned a variable.
So, in the above example “?id=1190″ is assigned a variable, say “A”. The dynamuc URL http://www.my-online-store.com/coolpage.asp?id=1190
will change to http://www.my-online-store.com/books/A through CGI/Perl scripts which can easily be indexed by the search engines.

3. Re-configuring your web servers –

(i) Apache Server – Apache has a rewrite module (mod_rewrite) that enables you to turn URLs containing query strings into URLs that search engines can index. This module however, isn’t installed with Apache software by default, so you need to check with your web hosting company for installation.

(ii) ColdFusion – You’ll need to reconfigure ColdFusion on your server so that the “?” in a query string is replaced with a ‘/’ and pass the value to the URL.

4. Creation of a Static Page linked to an array of dynamic Pages –

This approach is very effective, especially if you are the owner of a small online store selling a few products online. Just create a static page linking to all your dynamic pages. Optimize this static page for search engine rankings. Include a link title for all the product categories, place appropriate “alt” tag for the product images along with product description containing highly popular keywords relevant to your business (You can conduct keyword research for your site through http://www.wordtracker.com). Submit this static page along with all the dynamic pages in various search engines, conforming to the search engine submission guidelines.

How Amazon.com, Earth’s Biggest Bookstore, coped with the issue of indexing of dynamic URLs?

A search in Google for internet marketing books, yielded a result that takes you directly to the appropriate dynamic page at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0395683297/103-0475212-8205437.

Since the above URL does not contain any query strings, all search engines can index Amazon.com’s products. Amazon.com uses this method to get its product selections indexed by search engines. This is very important for Amazon, because being an online bookstore, it is very natural for them to adopt dynamic URLs yet it was equally important for them to make their dynamic URLs search engine index friendly.

Conclusion

Even a few years back, most of the major search engines did not index dynamic URLs, thereby often preventing top search engine rankings for the online stores. With Google starting to index dynamic URLs a few months ago, the picture is going to change in the coming days. This is more so because Google’s numero uno position is currently being threatened by Microsoft’s MSN (developing its own search engine) and Yahoo! who recently acquired Overture, the biggest player in the PPC Search Engine industry.

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Meta Tags and Heading Tags

Some claim that search engines, especially Google, no longer regard meta tags as being important. In fact nobody really knows what Google thinks is important, and there is evidence that some meta tags are still used by spiders in the assessment of the relevance of your website to specific search terms or keywords used by search engine users. The meta tags that you should use on every page of your site are the description and the keyword meta tags.

Your description meta tag should provide a good description of your website, and contain your main keywords. This will likely not be seen by anybody, only the search engines, but it might be used to assess the relevance of your site in indexing with respect to specific search terms being used.

The other meta tag that search engines still use is the keyword meta tag. This should contain a list of keywords used on the page. If you don’t use it, don’t add it to the meta tag. Also, don’t use the same word too many times, since it will be regarded as keyword stuffing. After meta tags, you should look at your titles and how they are presented to search engines spiders.

Ideally, the title should be the keyword for each page. Do not use the same title for every page. It is the title of your web page that should be here, not your website. This provides search engines with an indication of the topic of your page. The title itself should be within H1 tags. This tells the search engine that these words are the most important on the page. They should also be the first text that the spiders come across on your page, since Google also gives special emphasis to the first text it finds.

Any secondary titles you might have on each page should be contained within H2 tags. These titles should also contain keywords that you are using on your page and that are contained in your keyword meta tag.

Linking Strategy

The more links you have leading back to your web pages from other websites, the more influential the search engines will calculate your web pages to be for the topics concerned. Many people use a reciprocal linking strategy, whereby two websites agree to show each other’s links. This can be self defeating, since search engines such as Google can regard a link away from your site as weakening yours, and so cancels out the benefit of the back link.

The crucial aspect of who benefits from this arrangement comes for the relative page ranking. The page rank of a web page can be found on the green bar on the Google toolbar, This is an indication of the link popularity of the page you are viewing. If you are linked with a web page with a higher page rank than yours, then you might get the benefit of the deal. However, in general terms, the more links you have back to your site the better.

If you carry out a Google search for keywords that relate to yours, you should be able to find some websites with high page ranking that are not direct competitors. Write asking for a link to your site from theirs, explaining the benefits to their customers/visitors of you doing so. One of four things will happen. They will not reply, they will refuse , they will agree or they will agree on condition that you provide a similar link back to them.

The usual reply is the first or the last, but it costs you nothing to try, and you can get a lot of good links back to your website by doing this. If the page rank is high even a reciprocal link will be of benefit to your site’s page rank and search engine listing.

Some website directories offer software on a free or a subscription basis that automatically handles reciprocal link requests. The paid versions generally set up a link directory on your website then provide you with offers of reciprocal links that you can either agree to or refuse. If you agree they can automatically add the link to your directory. With free versions you have to add the link yourself. These are very useful if you are selective.

Article Marketing

Links are much more valuable if they are one way, without you reciprocating. This is where the benefits of article marketing become huge. When you write articles and submit them to article directories, you get a one way link back from each directory your article is published on. Not only that, but if readers deem your article worthy of being copied to their website as content, then your web page also gets a link back from there. The link you get is to the page for which you provided the URL in your ‘bio’ or ‘author’s resource page’.

Although article marketing is a good way of achieving back links, they are not targeted to specific websites that could benefit you. What are really of benefit are either sites that relate to yours, from which your links could provide you with traffic focused on your niche, or high page rank sites that will provide you with high value links and that is where you have to resort to personal requests.

If you apply all of the advice provided in these recommended best practices for dominating the search engines you should give your listing a big boost, and if done properly you have a very good chance of achieving a Page One position.

Businesses often spend big bucks on SEO experts, advice, and systems that are touted to deliver your site into the promised land of high rankings. The bad news is — most of this advice is outdated, untested, or just plain wrong.

Here’s why. Search engines are extremely complicated and constantly changing. What worked last year may be completely wrong today. What worked yesterday may be outdated by this afternoon. SEO advisors who get their information from discussion groups (as many do) are often repeating untested guesses, theories, and rumors. Sometimes they misinterpret what search engine changes really mean for real websites.

Keeping up with search engines has become a full-time job, not just for one person, but for a full team of seasoned pros. It takes that many trained people to pour through the hundreds of pages of new findings, and TEST new methodologies.

I stress the word TEST because that’s really the only way you can know an optimization or marketing strategy is going to work. My team constantly tests new strategies in real life situations to see how search engines will respond.

In general, it’s good to learn how at least some of the Net’s most important search engine features (like Google’s vital PageRank system) work. You should also learn how to use meta tags and Overture to get your site listed quickly and in a way that will bring you more visitors and sales.

If you really want better ranking for your site, you are well advised to get the help of a qualified SEO professional. Choose a firm that specializes in SEO or SEM. You’ll know which ones are the most successful because THEIR sites are ranked high in search engines.

In fact, it’s the very first step to online shopping. With every new day, online shoppers conquer more E-bay buying techniques, and slowly lift off the novice&s launch pad.

From then on, online shoppers realize there’s more they can buy on E-bay than meets the eye.

Generally, E-bay is comprised of almost all the things a buyer would want and need under the sun. In fact, it seems that E-bay&s selling almost everything.

Because of its diversity in items being sold, E-bay categorized each item for easier search. Though, each listing varies from one country to another.

Generally, online shoppers may choose to buy things under the category of antiques. These may include old-fashioned decors; house wares; vintage cars, clothing, and accessories; historic collector&s item; and old postcards.

Buyers may also deliberate on buying items classified under the automotive category. These may range from cars to accessories to almost insignificant extras like car stickers, car perfumes, and collectibles.

Those who are looking for computer gadgets, electronic bolts, or printers may look at the Electronics and Computers category of E-bay.

E-bay listings also have the basic necessities like clothes, shoes, and accessories. It also includes different kinds of jewelries like trinkets, charms, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, rings, watches, and ornaments.

Those who are looking for stamps and other collectables like postcards, old papers, even different kinds of minerals, rocks, and fossils will find E-bay a very lucrative place to do online shopping.

E-bay also caters to people who are into sports. Buyers can find different sorts of sports gadgets, sports get-ups, and tools. Those who are hobbyists may also find practical tools for their respective hobbies like gardening tools, cross-stitching paraphernalia, cooking and baking utensils, or scrapbooks.

Best of all, E-bay offers a great line of entertainment appliances and high-tech gadgets like mobile phones, mp3 players, pc tablets, PDAs, memory cards, flash cards, video cameras, digital cameras, audio recorders, sensors, and camcorders.

Aside from these common items that reflect fads and fashions in today&s contemporary society, e-bay has also that special section that consists of “everything else.” These are the things that do not fall under the basic categories. These are ephemera, costumes, children&s themed gift sets, party packages, mobile sim card, and mobile load, even a Google account.

With these things, buyers can be assured of a wide array of things and gadgets that would serve them best provided that it does not fall under E-bay&s prohibited list.

Take a look at the domain name. Do a Google search for it. Does it show up? Keep in mind how long the seller claims the site has been in business. Go to Internic and do a Whois on the domain name…how long has it existed? Chances are less than a month.

Are there any bids on it? the number of bids is generally a good indicator on how legit this “business” is. If there’s only 25 minutes left on the auction, and there is one bid for a very low dollar amount, this one&s most likely a dog. If it is down to 25 minutes and there are 60 bids on it up to 500 bucks, it’s most likely a keeper.

Proof of income. Some sites show a screen shot of their payment processor. Visit the website. Is the payment processor the same? For example, is the screen shot on Ebay from 2Checkout, and Paypal is the only payment method on the site? Smells fishy to me.

Most of these sites claim to be “100 Percent custom hand coded by experienced developers”. Do some Googling for “website templates”. Look through some of the places that offer web templates for sale. You will most likely run across the design of the website that is for sale. View the source of the site that&s for sale – you may find that the seller forgot to remove the comment code that states that “This site was developed by ” . There are actually websites that SELL turnkey web businesses specifically for sale on Ebay, and they use these templates all the time, over and over again.

If you are still skeptical, email the seller with your questions. If this site is truly on the up-and-up, they&ll be honest. If not, they&ll dodge your questions like a bullet.

One more thing to consider: Often these sites will come with “Dirt Cheap Web Hosting”, for something like $6.99 per year. Think about it – would a TRUE e-commerce site that was getting tons of traffic and sales rely on lowest-bidder web hosting? Nope.

Now, don’t get me wrong – there ARE some good web businesses available from time to time on Ebay…but with the availability of so many free website scripts and templates, they seem to be few and far between. Caveat Emptor, my friends – let the buyer beware.

However, if you want to learn more about running a real ebay business and selling real goods and making good sales,

take a look at this site, “ebay auction software” to find some great tips

Before we get down to business, I have to tell you this very important detail: don’t start promoting your site until it has some content – it’s unlikely that you’ll get good results when you promote an empty site!

1. Directory submissions – this is a very important step for a new site, because this is probably how search engines will first find you. What you will need:

* 5 different versions (except for the site URL) for each of the following: site URL, title, description, list of keywords.

* an email address, specially created for directory submissions. This email should be on the domain of the site you are submitting or else it will be rejected by some directories.

* a list of seo-friendly directories – http://info.vilesilencer.com/main.php?rock=seo-friendly.php has one of the best lists of seo-friendly directories.

Now here comes the hard part: take that directory list, visit each directory and submit your site cycling your titles and description on each submission. This is the hardest part mainly because of the amount of workload – don’t worry, this can be made bearable by using 2 utilities: Roboform (www.roboform.com – which you can use with Internet Explorer and Firefox that has free and paid versions) and Informenter (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/673/ – a Firefox only plugin).

2. Reciprocal links (link exchanges) – I personally don’t use this method anymore because it’s too much work and there are not enough rewards! Link exchanges used to be a very powerful method in the beggining of Google and PageRank, but not anymore. This doesn’t mean that reciprocal links don’t work anymore, it’s just that they’re not that important anymore.

However this is one step you could follow when you have little competition, somewhere in the range of 300 000 or 400 000 results for your search word or phrase.

3. Reprint rights articles (submitting articles to article directories) – this is one of my favorite methods of obtaining backlinks: it requires little time, it’s free and you can (possibly) get a lot of return on your investment!

Writing articles gives you perfect control over the enviroment your links are in, and even a little control over the site where your article resides (considering the fact that webmasters usually post only articles that have the same topic as their site). Writing articles of high quality will ensure that your articles will be posted on many sites – a good article will get you a good number of backlinks!

One last thing about article writing: never, and I mean never post the article that you’ll distribute on your own site! Considering the article could appear on very important sites, Google may apply a duplicate content filter on your site, thus possibly burring it in the SERPs. Your site should be as clean as a whistle, with as much original content as possible.

4. Buying links – in my opinion, if you are not an expert in search engine optimization you should not try buying links to improve your rankings. There are a lot of factors to take into account when looking to buy links: theme of the site, the traffic that the page or site gets, whether that traffic is from natural and sustained (not from PPC, traffic exchanges or such methods), PR, anchor text and many more!

However, if you decide on buying text links on other sites, do the following:

* choose well established sites that have the same theme as yours.
* the link should be spiderable: check the robots.txt file, nofollow metatags and the rel=”nofollow” link atribute.
* make the link look as different as possible from a bought link: surround it with text and avoid placement in the site’s footer or in an “Advertisements” or “Partners” box.

5. Link baiting is one of the most powerful method of online promotion, but this should be used only when your site is a little bit older and stable – getting a lot of links in a short time span can actually hurt your site.

There are a few hooks that you can use to attract links:

* news: get an important story first and you could be the focus of your industry sector, even if for only a few hours! People are always on the look-out for fresh stuff, and if it’s good you could end up with a lot of backlinks.

* resource: gathering a list of useful pages in your industry, or maybe offering a new viewpoint on a certain research paper.

* controversy: this kind of link baiting can actually get you on the wrong side of some people because it requires contradicting a popular point of view or an authority figure. So tread carefully!