Search Engine Secrets – Get Top Listings On Google and Yahoo!

Let me show you How to Get Top Listings for every page of your site and Rank #1 for all of your Keywords in the Search Engines – Guaranteed.

Did you believe this? If your like me you’ve probably seen a million pages and emails like this that claim they can work miracles for you in all the search engines. They claim everything from having inside information or special relationships with Google and all the search engines.

The simple Truth is this: No one can guarantee top listings on any search engine, in fact, no one can even guarantee that you’ll ever be listed. So beware of big claims and unethical SEO firms as there are many out there.

So how do you get top listings in the major search engines. Let me try to answer that as simply as I can without thoroughly confusing you. CONTENT – yes that’s right… content is still king… the more you try to fool search engines the more damage you’ll do to your rankings. Search engines are getting smarter and smarter and they have seen every trick in the book done by every unethical SEO/SEM firm and spammer out there. So don’t fall pray to the hype and false claims.

Here’s the big Search Engine Secret

Well Written and Related Content, Relevant Page Titles and Meta-tag Descriptions. So there you have it, the secret is out… if anyone tries to tell you different or convince you otherwise – put away your check book and run. Yes, there are other things you can do to help your rankings using the 3 items above and a few more.

How to improve your chances in the search engines rankings:

*** Know your top keywords.. Use Yahoo’s Keyword Tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?mkt=us〈=en_US or Goggle’s Sandbox https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox to find what users are actually typing into the search engines to find sites like yours. Once you have all your top keywords – don’t loose them… you will use these over and over and over again.

*** Use your top keywords in the content of your pages, in your page titles and in your mate-tag descriptions. I don’t mean to use pages that are filled with nothing but keywords, use them in Real Sentences. Pages that are nothing but keywords will hurt you in the search engines, this is called keyword stuffing and will hurt your rankings or worse yet, get your site delisted or banned from the search engines. Simply take your current site content and use your top keywords in appropriate places where they make sense in real sentences.

*** Don’t over use keywords or try to use to many on one single page. Have your main keyword in the title, the description and a couple times on the page content is usually sufficient. Do this for every page of your site optimizing it for the subject of that particular page using the relevant keywords from your research. I see so many sites with the same Title and Meta Descriptions on every page. Make sure yours are different.

*** Get as many high value links as possible. Best way to determine High Value links is to install the Google Toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com/ and use Google’s Page Rank to determine link value. You can also use out PR Tool at http://www.i4market.com/tools/rankcheck.html. The higher the rank the better. You may have to pay for links on PR7 or higher sites – but don’t pay too much. You can also use Alexa Traffic Rank or their toolbar – http://www.alexa.com/. The more High Value links you have the better your Search Engine Popularity will be.

*** Install Link Exchange Software… but be selective about the link exchanges you approve.

*** Add value added relevant content to your site, such as articles, news, blogs or tools related to your business or industry. This will increase your search engine saturation. A site with 100 pages of good quality content has much a better chance of being found than a site with only 10 pages.

*** Use Google XML Site Maps or find and company that will create one for you. http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

*** Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, break the site map into separate pages.

*** Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. Search Engines do not recognize text contained in images or flash content. If you must use images, then always use the Alt tag to describe the link.

*** Check for broken links and correct HTML.

*** If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as Google does not include these pages.

*** Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

*** Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the spiders from content you want included.

*** Understand the difference between a Search Engine and a Directory. A Search engine uses spidering technology and will search the web for new sites. Directories will not seek you out and you will have to be tell them about your new site manually.

*** Revisit your keywords on a regular basis. There are a 1000’s ways to search for the same thing, search patterns change from time to time. You’ll want to keep up with those changes.

*** Submit your site to the search engines if it has never been submitted or you are not listed in that particular engine. Most search engines still have a free submit for the “Natural Listings”, yet they may not be easy to find. You can find Google’s ADD URL here http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

*** Submit your site to the Directories including Yahoo! and DMOZ. DMOZ http://www.dmoz.org/ is the Open Directory Project and is used to power thousands of other sites and directories – Inclusion in this directory gets you links in 1000’s of other sites. DMOZ is also the directory Google uses. http://directory.google.com/

WHAT NOT TO DO.

– Don’t Use hidden text or links
– Don’t Use doorway or gateway pages.
– Don’t Use pages that redirect users to other places.
– Don’t use any type of cloaking technology – no matter how great it sounds. It might work for a short time – but you will get caught.
– Don’t use Flash content for important information. Flash is an application that is completely invisible to most search engines. Flash is good for animations and other page elements – not for an entire site unless you also have an html version.
– Don’t Use Misleading or overly repeated words
– Don’t Use Bait and Switch tactics… they don’t work.
– Don’t Use Duplicate sites or pages
– Stay away from Free For All or Link Farms schemes, as these will only hurt you.

There are many things that affect your rankings then just the content on your pages, so DON’T obsess about being #1 – you may never get there no matter what you do. Your time is better spent operating your business in areas you have more control over.

Following the above guidelines will get you the best results your site will achieve. That’s not to say that there is not more you can do – but these are the main items that will effect your rankings in the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages). The internet a huge place and technology changes all the time – so do the search engines – a site that is #1 today might be #1001 tomorrow.

You can try to do all this yourself or you can hire a company that specializes in SEO/SEM (Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing), however beware, there are many that will separate you from your money quickly and leave you with little to no results. We suggest you take some advice from Google concerning selecting an SEO firm for your company. http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/seo.html

Above all else – remember this – There are NO GUARANTEES in any type of marketing campaigns, be it on the web, in print, on television or radio. So spend prudently and select your Marketing firm wisely!

Tags: Adwords, Blog, Google, Guide, Money, Search Engine, SEO, SERP, Tactics, Yahoo

SEO Stoopid!

Why am I SEO Stoopid?

I’m SEO Stoopid because I didn’t properly take notice of what my stats could have told me.

If I would have done, I would have noticed something sooner and factoring that something into my response would very probably have saved me a goodly number of lost posters and art print sales.

My site is primarily about SEO. I’ve been doing it since 1996 or thereabouts and have clients of many years standing. Halfway through last year, I started adding posters pages to it. It’s restful and unoressured compared with a lot of SEO, plus I wanted to see how fast I could get unrelated pages indexed and where and with whom, plus unexpectedly I found that I enjoyed doing it, lots of reasons.

When the first two phases of Jagger hit, I was cool. It washed over my seo clients the way I expected it to (it had no effects at all), and it washed over my (by now only mostly) SEO site the way I expected it to (it had no effect at all there either).

Then came the third wave. Oh dear!

My site’s serps (not my clients’ – they’re all fine) went into a decline that they still haven’t come out of. I was getting damp postcards from my serps telling me what depth they were reaching. They told me in one message they’d dived deeper than any known footballers. Imagine! If they ever come back up they’ll need time in a decompression chamber before they can surface again.

I decided that since I was tanking anyway no-one would be finding my poster pages from the engines and so now was the time to hive my poster pages off to their own site, something I’d been meaning to do for some time as a site is unlikely to do well for two such diverse subjects. I got myself a new domain for them too, in anticipation of the day when I have more time and can settle them down on their own dedicated space – the demand I had for them shows that they deserve it and I’ll be attending to this in the new Year.

I put them in a little backwater personal hosting space I have with my Broadband ISP. I have a custom 404 on my main site and I adjusted it to make it plain to folk that I’d moved the posters to a new domain as they were swamping my SEO efforts.

Now I always kept a good eye on my stats but I’d failed to note that results from Google, these days, aren’t just from Google any more. They’re from Google Images too – and despite the fact that I’d tanked in Google.co etc for text seaarches, unknown to me as my old stats package didn’t make the distinction, my posters were still very very well ranked in Google Images. I only found this out by studying my Google Analytic stats, a service I’d only recently signed up to in anticipation of clients expecting me to keep them abreast of Search Engine and SEO events.

I checked out “Michael Sowa Prints”. I was in the 80’s in Google.com but to my amazement I was at positions 1 and 3 in Google Images. I checked out “Salvador Dali Prints” and “Escher-prints”. Same kind of deal, I was well off the main map and out in the boonies in the text-driven Googles but top 5 in Google Images. Go see, they’ll probably still be there even now.

So, what was I to do? All those potentially hard-to-get serps were going to waste as when people didn’t see the result they expected when they clicked through, just my 404 page (polite though it was) they just went somewhere else.

Hurriedly put all my pages back up again is what I did, and on my SEO site too, thinking to catch what business I can from what’s left of the Christmas rush. I’ve left all of the links to the new site in place as they’ll get people hopping back and forth from each site to the other, hopefully without realising. All the posters and art prints, the wall tapestries too, will have to be moved over eventually and on a permanent basis. You can have a site about SEO or a site that uses SEO to sell posters, you can not, not for any length of time, have just the one site that does both.

Not the way Google are ordering the universe anyway.

I’ll change over slowly in January using individual 301 redirects and this time they really will be permanent.

For now I don’t believe it’ll matter as Google, according to their own stats via Google Sitemaps, have no info about the new posters site and given everything else they have on their plate just now I don’t suppose they’ll be indexing it all and handing out a content penalty before I’ve moved everything over permanently.

But look at the sales opportunity I very nearly missed, eh?

Moral of the story is, make sure your stats package is the best that it can be. I don’t think I’ll be using my old stats package too much from now on, but I’ll keep it on as it does have some individual visitor tracking capabilities that Google’s version of Urchin currently lacks. Reading your stats regularly will save you money and time in the long run.

But do make sure they’re as detailed as possible – you may miss important information if they aren’t! Don’t be an SEO Stoopid!

Tags: Google, Money, Search Engine, Sell, SEO, SERP

SEO contests a new effective way of internet marketing

First, let me explain you what a SEOcontest is. A SEOcontest is a contest where every webmaster can build a website or page about a special keyword. There must be no results in the targeted search engine for that keyword or keyphrase. So most contests have not existing words in them or have the site name of the sponsor in the keyphrase. Like the ambatchdotcom seocontest. Where you need to rank number 1 in Google for the keyphrase ambatchdotcom seocontest. And when you become number one in Google or another search engine and you stay at that spot until the end of the contest you win the main price. Normally thousands of dollars.

But how can a simple seocontest sponsor make profits from such a contest if it costs that much? That will be explained in this article.

The most big contests dure a couple of months or even half a year. So it can attract a lot of webmasters/SEO’s because they can jump in any time, even if the contest is already going on for a month. And big prices attract big amounts of media and participants. So you’re brand gets big attention for a long time.

Also, most contests contain the main keywords or the site name or the sponsor of the contest. Like the ambatchdotcom seocontest. The sponsor is ambatch.com. The contest is already going for a month and there are allready over 500,000 participants who promote the name ambatch.com. So when you start a SEOcontest you will be known in the whole webmaster world. Also a lot of contests like the Cpayscom2 Online Casino contest have they’re main keywords in them. In the Cpayscom2 Online Casino contest the keyphrase is Cpayscom2 Online Casino to rank in msn at the first spot. But cpays.com is an affiliate program for online casinos, so the participants are not only promoting the main sponsor but also the main keyphrase of that sponsor.

In most contests there are rules. A common used rule is that you have to place a link back to the sponsor of the contest. So in the Cpayscom2 Online Casino you have to place a link back to cpays.com with the text online casino. But every participant has been optimizing their website for the keyphrase Cpayscom2 Online Casino. That keyphrase contains the words online casino. So every backlink from a participating page is a high value backlink! And if there are 500,000 participating websites, it makes the sponsor a huge jump in the serps and lots of traffic and….MONEY!

Tags: Google, Money, MSN, Profit, Search Engine, SEO, SERP, Website

Jagger Algorithm Update Part-1

If there is one thing Search Engine Marketers and website owners fear – it is a major algorithm update, especially by Google. Well, much as we may like it not to happen, its here. Google has recently done a major algorithm update, nick named “Jagger” update series.

Google does minor algorithm updates almost on a monthly basis and once in a while, it implements a major algorithm update. The last major Google algorithm update happened in November 2003 called the Florida update, which created quite a stir with website rankings. To know more, read our article on Google Florida Algo Update.

Like the Florida update, the Jagger update has done the much feared “blender” act. It has churned the top-ranking websites and turned it into a list of unrecognizable pulp.

Google has been a hot-favorite amongst the web community searching for information. Most feel that the search results have always been highly relevant. It would be therefore safe to assume that whatever algorithm Google has, works just fine. So why does Google need to re-engineer its perfect-looking algo so drastically? Has it not heard the saying don’t fix what aint broke”? From Google’s standpoint, the reason is simple and valid. Well, for starters, web is ever-evolving and the algo always need to be adjusted in order to provide the best of results. Google engineered an algo, which it believes will reward good sites and rank them well for its viewers.

Google, like most other search engines, keeps this algo a closely guarded secret to prevent it from being exploited. However, the SEO community is constantly at work trying to rank their sites well. Using calculated guesswork, logical thinking, special tests and extensive trial-and-error methods, they gradually figure out what the algorithm likes and dislikes. Armed with this knowledge, it is not difficult to work on websites to rank them high in SERP (Search Engine Result Pages), irrespective of whether the site deserves to rank at the top or not. This kind of algorithm abuse results in ‘less than desirable’ websites displacing good sites from the top ranks, contaminating the Google index. Consequently, following the Kaizen philosophy, Google needs to re-engineer its algorithms to keep, what it believes are bad sites, out of its top ranks. Naturally, major algorithm updates upset the current high-ranking websites and sends a lot of SEO professionals back to their work-bench in order to start all over again.

What is interesting to note is the timing of the algorithm update. When Google updated its algorithm in November 2003, there were large scale allegations by website owners that Google intentionally upset the rankings of popular websites just before the Christmas shopping season to force them into buying Google AdWords paid advertising in order to sustain the visitor traffic. While Google claims that the algo update decisions are not influenced by the AdWords team, it is difficult to understand why they would once again choose a critical timing just before Christmas shopping season to update their algorithm. The stakes are very high and its business after all. Google earned $1.57 Billion in Q3 of 2005. If 2003 pre-Christmas algorithm update effect is any indication, I estimate that Google would record revenues of over $2.05 Billion in Q4 of 2005.

Tags: Adwords, Buy, Google, Revenue, Search Engine, SEO, SERP, Website

The Values of a Link for Search Engine Optimization

Since most link building campaigns are done to support ongoing ranking strategies, it’s important to know where and how to look for “link traps” that keep you from your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts and goals. Websites that employ the use of robots.txt, JavaScript or certain redirects should be avoided. Websites that show no meter of Google green (PR) should be thoroughly checked. It’s important to secure links from a venue a search engine can spider. Links from websites outside your industry niche won’t hurt your link building effort; however they don’t provide a good ranking boost contribution since it doesn’t reinforce any relevancy of your keywords.

Overview

Reciprocal linking is an effective way of generating targeted, topic related traffic to your website. By increasing the amount of websites that pass a vote to your web page through the use of a backlink, the more important Google’s will deem your website, which with time will lead to higher Search Engine Result Pages (SERP’s).

What we will focus on is determining which link exchange partners have links that are worthwhile of your time and effort. When looking for link exchange partners you want to look at multiple factors to ensure you are receiving a quality link exchange that allows a vote to be passed back to your web page. Intense Development is going to review 3 factors that qualifies the link as a good exchange:

1. Passing a vote
2. Passing traffic
3. Passing PageRank

1. Passing a Vote

This factor is more virtual than materialistic since this would at most times be based on your personal opinion. The quality of the vote passed on to your web page consists of multiple pointers that you have to ask yourself:

• Is it informative to your websites topic? Does it provide a quantity of quality content? Stick to websites that provide unique content that provides additional insight and is relevant to your websites topic.

• How long has the website being in existence? Has this website being in existence long enough to build itself up to be considered an authority site?

• How many outgoing links does the link page have?

Web pages that have less than 50 outgoing links are still considered effective enough to exchange with. See it this way: A Search Engine will provide (example) 100 points to each page outgoing links. If you have one outgoing link it will get the full vote value. If you have 50 outgoing links to other websites, than you vote count is only 2 points. Web pages with limited amount of outgoing links are favorable.

The placement of the link: Will the link partner allow a submission of your link within a paragraph of keyword related / informative text? This way your outgoing link does not follow the webs usual linking exchange pattern, which overtime could become devalued with Search Engines? The surrounding text reinforces your links keywords and might provide additional boost in the keywords relevance.

2. Passing Traffic

Serves good for targeted and high-volume traffic which could convert to clients. Many times the position of the link is what it takes to get more traffic from the website. On good way to determine the hotspot where visitors look most often is by checking out this site EyeTracker

3. Passing PageRank

PageRank (PR) is Google rating system of the quality of the website. The bar runs between 1 to 10 and the closer to 10 you can get the more valuable the exchange. In the past, Page Rank has been the main focus point in many webmasters and Search Engine marketers. Page Rank has overtime become less important in Google’s overall ranking algorithm, and now it determines the interval of the Search Engines spider / bots return to the website, for faster indexing of new content.

Tags: Google, Search Engine, Secure, SEO, SERP, Website

Basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Have you heard stories about legendary online entrepreneurs who hit it big after getting a #1 rank in several popular search engines? You probably wondered what it would take for you to achieve that elusive #1 spot in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in ensuring that your business gets the best possible search engine ranking, which can lead to increased sales for your online company.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization is the process of modifying web page content and meta-information to improve the search engine ranking of the page. Meta-information includes certain HTML tags (title, heading, emphasized text, keyword and description meta-tags), as well as the internal (links between pages on the same site) and external (links between pages on different sites) link structure of a web site.

Impact of High Search Engine Rank on Sales

Internet market research estimates that between 70% and 90% of online shoppers use search engines to find a specific product or service. Let’s examine factors that influence sales to see how effective search engine optimization can boost your revenues.

Three metrics are required to forecast online sales: the average ticket, the conversion rate, and the amount of web site traffic:

* The average ticket is the amount of money spent by a customer on a typical transaction. Computer and electronics stores have high average tickets (hundreds or thousands of dollars), while bookstores have low average tickets (tens of dollars).

* Web Site traffic is measured by the number of site visitors, typically expressed as the number of page views per month.

* Conversion rate is the number of sales divided by the number of page views per month, expressed as a percentage.

Let’s look at an example. The Ultimate Taupe Widget (UTW) store has an average ticket of $25, a conversion rate of 2%, and gets 5,000 page views per month. The estimated monthly sales are $2,500 ($25 average ticket * 0.02 conversion rate expressed as a decimal * 5,000 page views per month). Achieving a high search engine rank will increase the number of page views, and therefore increase sales. In this example, if traffic doubles to 10,000 page views a month, UTW’s monthly sales should (approximately) double as well (to $5,000).

Keep in mind that a high search engine rank will produce a measurable increase in traffic only if there is significant marketplace interest in taupe widgets and your web site appears in the first thirty search engine results.

However, search engine optimization is not going to produce measurable results if there is very little demand for taupe widgets. The #1 spot in search engine result pages is not particularly impressive if only two people search for “taupe widgets” each month. Role of Keywords in Search Engine Optimization

Keywords are words or phrases users provide to search engines to locate information. Search engines examine page content to determine whether a specific page is relevant for a particular search word or phrase. Thus, effective keyword selection is one of the cornerstones of search engine optimization.

Each keyword is characterized by supply (number of search engine result pages) and demand (number of searches). The easiest way to improve search engine rank is to select keywords that have favorable supply-demand characteristics; that is, ones with a relatively high demand and a relatively low supply. It is much more difficult to improve the search engine position of a page on a high supply, competitive keyword.

Good keywords must be relevant to your product line, as well as your line of business. A #1 rank for “navy widgets” is worthless if you sell taupe widgets exclusively. A potential customer will find your page, quickly discover that you don’t sell any navy widgets, and promptly go elsewhere. In effect, the conversion rate for irrelevant search engine hits is very close to zero.

Using Keywords Effectively

Choosing a set of target keywords is the first step in search engine optimization. The second step is using them in the body, title, headings, and meta-tags of a page.

Include the target keywords in the text of the page. Don’t overdo it, though — the keywords should fit smoothly into the surrounding text. Search engines use several techniques to detect excessive keyword density, or too many keywords stuffed into very little supporting text, and will reduce the rank accordingly. A page has too many keywords if they interfere with the general flow of the text on a page and appear to be glaringly out of place

The title tag should contain information that describes the page. Unless you operate a multi-national conglomerate that is already a household name, your company’s name is not a descriptive title. Most search engines use the title tag as the first line of your listing in the search engine result pages. Strive to make your title tag say “click me” to a prospective customer. “Superior taupe widgets – 50% off every day” is a good page title, while “Ultimate Taupe Widgets, Inc.” is not.

Incorporate keywords into the headings on the page, as well as into emphasized sections (bold or large text). Even though search engines are de-emphasizing descriptive meta-tags, include keywords in them nevertheless. The description meta-tag should have an accurate description of your page, and the keywords meta-tag should contain a set of keywords (separated by commas) that list key concepts mentioned on the page.

Understanding the basics of search engine optimization is an important first step in creating an optimized, well-positioned web site.

Tags: Money, Revenue, Search Engine, Sell, SEO, SERP