By using a sitemap, you can make it very easy to get all of your pages indexed by Google. This can help you raise your rankings in Google, as well as help searchers find you.

The beauty of sitemaps is that once you’ve set up your sitemap, you can basically forget about it until you make updates to your site. Then you will need to add the new entries to your sitemap. Google will take care of the rest.

However, if you’re a non-techie, or the idea of setting up scripts, or learning new software doesn’t appeal to you, there are other ways to get the job done without stressing yourself.

There are plenty of online tools that you can use that are absolutely free. Although these sites won’t help you if you have a really large site, usually over 1,000 pages, for the average site owner, these tools will get the job done, and at most, all you’ll need to know how to do is cut and paste, save, and then upload your sitemap to your site.

Below are some tools you can use to help you get started. Try the various tools out first to see which ones you like best. These are the easiest solutions I’ve found for creating sitemaps, and it will only take you a few minutes to get your sitemap created and submitted.

1. Sitemap Doc – http://www.sitemapdoc.com/ – This site will create a sitemap for sites up to 750 pages. All you have to do is enter your URL for the main page for your site, click the create map button, and this site will extract your urls and create your sitemap. It also allows you to customize your map by adding additional urls, as well as changing time, date, and priority settings.

2. Audit My PC – http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp – This sitemap creator actually gives you two options: you can create a sitemap for Google, and you can create a sitemap for your visitors. The sitemap you create for your visitors can help you in getting spidered by the newer spiders offered by MSN and Yahoo.

3. ROR – http://www.rorweb.com/ – ROR is very similar to XML, which is the formatting used in sitemaps, and you can use it to create your sitemaps. Unlike most sitemap utilities, this tool does more. It will help you more fully describe the content on your website. You can also use it to create feeds for your products and services, as well as feeds for your site.

I used the ROR generator to create sitemaps for my sites, and I found it to be much easier. I submitted the ROR sitemap feeds to Google, and it has eliminated any errors I had in my previous sitemaps.

What’s I liked about this site is that it gives you plenty of options in both the types of feeds you create, as well as a choice between an online tool or software to create sitemaps and feeds.

4. WordPress Sitemap Generator – http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final – For those of you who use Wordpress for your blog, this is the only tool you need to create your sitemaps.

This sitemap generator is actually a plugin you can install on your Wordpress Blog and use it to automatically generate a new sitemap for your blog each time you post.

This keeps your sitemap constantly updated, and it allows Google to more fully spider your blog. Once installed and updated, you can forget about it. The plugin takes care of the rest.

5. Google Sitemap Generators List – http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html – If none of the solutions above work for you, or you need something more comprehensive, Google offers a large list of scripts and software you can use to generate your sitemaps. This will be the solution for any site that has a large number of pages and needs a sitemap that can’t be created with the tools listed above.

Once you’ve created and uploaded your sitemap, then it’s time to submit it. You will need a Gmail account so that you can sign into Google Sitemaps. You can sign into sitemaps here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login.

You can also find out more about the various types of content that Google accepts: http://www.google.com/submit_content.html

Follow the instructions for submitting your site. It should take you about two minutes to add your sitemap. Once you’ve added your sitemap, Google will take over. Now, not only will you be able to get your site more fully spidered by Google, you’ll also get plenty of helpful statistics on your site. You can use what you learn from your stastics to improve your search engine coverage and raise your rankings.

Search engines cannot read graphics so you must include an alt tag in your convention to maintain the search engine from getting puzzled. Your titles and meta-tags should be fashioned to evidently recognize your keywords and keyword phrases. An utterance of prudence, deliberation does not bunch your titles and meta-tags full of your keywords or phrases.

Conflicting SEO Expectations

SEO is both the technical effort and art of getting your site ranked highly in search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are two competing factors in the effort, time and volume of traffic, which can lead to clients having unreasonable expectations.

The conflict giving rise to misunderstood SEO expectations deal with keywords. Obviously, an optimization program is designed to get you high in the rankings on various keywords. The problem, of course, is the more traffic a keyword produces, the higher the number of sites competing for rankings under the phrase. Inevitably, this translates to a longer period of time required to get top rankings.

Obviously, most clients want to obtain top rankings as quickly as possible. The best way to do this is identify those keywords that have decent traffic, but few sites competing for rankings. In such a campaign, clients see results relatively quickly, but they have fallen into a trap. Even if they go into the number one position across the top three search engines, they have limited the amount of traffic they can receive. This leads to frustration as revenues are effectively capped.

A proper optimization plan should focus on both short and long term rankings. When laying out the site, the home page and other centralized pages should be devoted to keywords with monstrous amounts of traffic that will require a lot of time to obtain top rankings on. To counterbalance this, additional pages should be built focusing on keywords for which there is less traffic, but for which high rankings can be acquired relatively quickly.

The exact time periods on this approach are entirely dependent on the subject matter of the site and the keywords involved. For a brand new site, one can expect to see rankings on MSN within a month, Yahoo in four to six months and Google in six to nine months. For an established site, the figures will be shorter but it is dependent upon the results of the keyword research in the specific field.

Understanding optimization is the key to having reasonable SEO expectations. A mix of short and long term goals is the best method of attack in nearly every situation.

You may not realize it yet, but you are about to begin an exciting new lifestyle! The world of online auctions is not only a very profitable world, but it can also mean a lifestyle change unlike any you could’ve imagined just a few years ago.

eBay is now the world’s largest marketplace and the online auctions model which eBay first brings into business actually allows you the opportunity to make money online quickly. So why not use this to the advantage of your website and your business? By creating an easy-to-use eBay Store and listing some hot, in-demand items at a small discount from the price on your website, you can drive traffic from eBay back to your website as well as creating sales and revenue for your company through eBay. eBay Store’s monthly fees is nominal and can easily be paid off from the profit of just a few small sales. eBay Store is set up to where your item can be listed automatically saving your valuable time and making the maintenance of your eBay Store effortless.

Compare this with the majority of businesses out eBay, which may actually take a year or couples of years before they realize any real profits, you will feel satisfied. Is it amazing to make money online selling on eBay?
By simply understanding and knowing what you are doing, you can be very successful doing your online business to make money selling on eBay.

The traffic on eBay is massive, check out the figures for yourself at any source you trust. eBay has a staggering 10 million items on sale at any point in time. The site gets 1.5 billion auction page views each month. This is the key that makes it so easy for ordinary people to make money on eBay. It is simply a matter of taking your products to where the customers are waiting for it. But you need to know what you are doing. It all boils down to getting the formula to maximize your auction effectiveness.
You can be found by more eBay users by being as descriptive as possible in the Item Description and by using as many keywords as possible that describe your item and industry within the Item Title. Reports show that over 90% of searches on eBay are done using the search facility. What users do not know about eBay search facility is that by default it only searches the item titles – not the descriptions of the items.
Imagine building a website that got more than 10 million unique visitors per Day. Do you think you might be able to find a way to make money online selling on eBay? One of the greatest benefits of selling on eBay is this sheer volume of traffic that you automatically acquire as a registered seller of eBay.

eBay allows you to set up an account with only some basic personal information and a credit card for billing. There is typically no up-front investment required! Meanwhile, you can use PayPal as your tool to collect your money from selling on eBay. If you compare this to traditional business, you have to admit this is for your utility.
One of the main concerns that sellers have about trading on internet is: “How do I know that they are going to pay?” That is not a question at all. eBay and PayPal have protections for sellers and protect buyers also. One protection is “feedback”. This is simply a recorded “comment” (either positive, neutral or negative) left by both the buyer and seller after a transaction ends, telling future buyers and sellers how that particular transaction went.
Just imagine the facts that there are numerous of people making money online. The facts are that there are numerous of people who make money online selling on eBay. So why the next one is not you?

The emergence of vertical search or Meta search engines, which is the latest trend in web searching methodologies, enables the profit seekers to have a glance at the wide and multiple web sites that are available on the internet. Some of the latest search engines provide index about the primary long-established web boards. Search engines are used mainly because they cut down on the search time.

Everyone wants to make money on the web and so as you. This you can make only if you have a web presence and bring customers to your website and turn leads into sales. Your search engine ranking is the key to the amount of visitors, and the success of your website, finally. But… but… but… this is not an easy task. In the age of tough competition it’s difficult to achieve top ranking on the top search engines and for the top keywords.

Its good to a have website highly rich with animated pictures, graphics but if content of your website is not good then its really not worth to have that. Stunning visual design may do a great job of attracting visitors, but, if in the end, the substance isn’t there, all your effort was in vain.

Content is the most vital part of your website. No matter how good is the design or how fast your site, people visit for content, and that is what you should be giving them. There are so many sites around which have no real content, or are just plain boring with some animated pictures. Good content keeps not only your visitors interested and give you a good site but it can also help you to promote your website.

What I believe is, for any type of business, a plenty of well-written, informative, related content of your website is a prerequisite to infinite success. The more pages and words you have, the more chance you have or being on the top as a search result. You must have heard about Google, EBay, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Would you say that these sites have stunning designs and visual effects…Not at all!! These sites offer information first i.e. content. See, Google gives you one of the best search results; yahoo provides content, news, products, etc in abundance. You will be astonished by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web.

So how can you get high-quality content on your website? There are many ways to add content to your website:

Write Yourself

Writing yourself is the cheapest way of generating the content. But for this you need a good knowledge of your subject to be able to write effectively on it. If you have the skills and time to generate content then this is really the best route to take. You have to focus on your site’s purpose and find a way to balance the information in categories that help communicate your goals.

Hire someone else to Write

If you do not feel confident enough of writing great content yourself, it’s better to hire a good writer to do it for you. But before choosing an appropriate copywriter, but he should possess Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) copywriting experience. As you have a website which is selling your business, and your main aim is to bring traffic to your website. So a person with an experience of SEM/SEO can only do wonders for your business.

Last but not the least, If you are running a business and want traffic then there must be more value in writing higher quality content than in redesigning your site or updating your technology. Just get your designing out of the way and let your visitors have what they want, information. I’m not trying to detract from visual design, information design or good technology. Each makes a huge difference in the quality of a web site, but the web site doesn’t stand a chance without content.

So how to find the right SEO partnership to join the hands with for a holistic search engine optimization? If you are aiming at finding the right SEO services India from an experienced SEO company India to increase website rankings then there are a number of factors which you have to take into consideration.

We have a team of SEO experts India who understand the search engine dynamics inside out. Our SEO India Company consists of talented search engine optimization specialists who are immensely experienced to handle SEO campaigns for the most competitive keywords and key phrases in any specialized business domain. Being a leading SEO company India, we believe that succeeding in any SEO marketing campaign requires impeccable and in-depth keyword analysis which is the cornerstone of the entire SEO process and one of the most crucial factors in boosting your website rankings. Our search engine optimization specialists analyze keywords and keyword phrases using cutting-edge keyword analysis tools to arrive at the keywords and key phrases that are not only less competitive but also highly searchable on the web.

As a top-notch SEO services India provider we are renowned for offering SEO content writing services that will potentially boost your page rank. Our content writers bring their creativity and experience together to write keyword rich content with an amazingly assertive, appealing and marketing punch making the page a must-read for your classified audience. We know that content is the soul of any webpage and play a crucial role in getting you good search engine ranking in all popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Before you go for a full-fledged SEO campaign, don’t underestimate the importance of the right SEO partnership. The right kind of Seo Company India can make or break the very purpose of your SEO campaign. If not handled properly or if you choose the wrong SEO partnership, then you will stand to lose money as well as your precious time. On the top of it, you will end up subjecting your website to mal-optimization which again will add to your injury.

We adopt white-hat SEO techniques for better India website rankings. With us, you stand to gain standardized, customized and cost-effective SEO packages that meet all your needs. Here is a lowdown on what we offer in our SEO services India.
1. We offer a campaign specific module for each of our clients. We allow them the privilege of specifying their own keywords (unless they want us to carryout a comprehensive keyword analysis), their targeted demography and the list of competitors. Our search engine optimization specialists then examine and optimize them which is then sent to our customers for their approval. The final list is drafted after the clients’ approval.
2. Our search engine optimizations specialists do a lot for boosting the website ranking of our clients. They follow a strategic on-page optimization process by enhancing the keyword density, keyword positioning, URL structure guidelines, meta-tags content, relevance of visible text and so forth.
3. Link popularity is the most crucial factor of search engine optimization which boosts the popularity of your website. We have a dedicated team of link builders who do the job for strategic link building to improve the popularity of our clients’ websites.
4. We carry out the optimization services with an LSI based SEO approach. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is the technique that gives you a crucial edge over your competitors for attracting high volume of traffic as well as potential clients. This ensures better results for your clients and higher profits for you.

Just right now is a great deal of hype and talk about blogs, but when one strips them down and looks at them clearly, they discover that a blog is nothing more than a web site. In essence, a blog is a website featuring an easy to use content management system that allows for quick updating in chronological order. The roots of blogging trace back to online journaling and community-building efforts, but approached from a business perspective, blogs are uniquely positioned to make you money. Their structure, treatment from search engines, and ease of use make them a wonderful moneymaking tool.

The structure of blogs is perfect for revenue-producing efforts. This is because the sites are, invariably, heavy on content and are naturally organized in an intuitive fashion. Regardless of what platform one uses for blogging, they will be able to produce a content-based site featuring a series of potentially well-targeted pages.

Search engines love content. Textual content keeps search engine spiders well-fed and persuades them to visit again and again. Google, Yahoo and MSN reward informative sites chock-full of information with better positioning in search results and index these sites quickly. Because blogs are content-driven, they serve as a model for how to build a “cooperative relationship” with a search engine. In the end, effective blog use produces high search engine rankings and, thus, great traffic levels. Traffic, of course, is a key to profitability. It is hard for a site to profit if no one sees it! The traffic advantages vis-à-vis search engines is one of the chief selling points of blog use.

If you are familiar with running a traditional website, you have undoubtedly learned two things. First, success will hinge, in large measure, on your ability to provide fresh content to your visitors. Second, adding new content to a static site can be a definite hassle.

One must write the content (or pay to have it written), convert it to HTML, insert it into the static page and then upload the page to the server again. The inefficiency of doing this makes it all too tempting to “overlook” making updates as frequently as one should.

Blogging solves this problem. All major blog platforms allow users to create new “posts” (which are nothing more than blocks of content) via an easy interface and to add them to the blog with a few simple mouse clicks. The result is empowering. Instead of dreading content updates, webmasters can actually look forward to adding new material in moments. Whether a blog user writes their own content or outsources the job to a pro, adding the new text is a simple and convenient proposition. This makes it easy to build the content-rich sites that soar to the top of the search engine rankings. It also creates a heightened level of stickiness for the blog, making return visitors far more likely. That traffic, when coupled with the right moneymaking strategy produces impressive results.

If you are relying exclusively on traditional static websites for your online ventures, you may want to reconsider your perspective. Using a blog affords some unique advantages and can be a great way to create profitable, highly-visited sites that require minimal effort.

So why not start blogging today?

The next thing you will need to know is the “Art Of Gaging An Item Price on eBay”. A nifty way to find the going price for an item is by looking at the ended listings. To search for ended listings, simply click “Advanced Search” link found under the upper right hand search box. And then check the “Completed listings only” check box before beginning the search.

Always “Find Reserved Price Auctions”. You will be amazed at how many people just don’t bother bidding when they see the reserve price tag, most of times the reserve price is less then 10% of the item going rate which means huge savings. Remember however to place your bid in the last 10 seconds.

A nifty way to save cash on items is by offering sellers an end bid early option. The key here is that you will have to find recently listed item (less then 100 views) and from sellers with fewer than 50 feedbacks. Try to keep your initial offer to no lower then 10% of the regular eBay price (See Gaging Item Price).

If you are a pro on eBay then you will mostly likely only bid twice on an item. The first bid is optional and it meant to take the item out of the “Buy It Now”, since you will be more likely to win the item at a lower price through an auction. The second bid should come on the last 10 seconds of the auction, this maybe longer if you are on dial-up

You can tell a lot about your competition (fellow bidders) by looking at their previously won items to see their bidding pattern. You will be amazed at how many people keep their last bid to a whole dollar, meaning you only need to add a cent to snipe them in the last 10 seconds.

You will be more likely to win an item at a lower price on a weekday then a weekend. The reasoning is simple, less competition, most people with jobs will be unavailable or less likely to bid, and thus increasing the probability of winning the item at a lower price.

Did you know eBay occasionally issues Paypal coupons that could save you anywhere from (5 % -10 %) when paying for your eBay items.

You can save a lot from buying from sellers with little or no feedback. But again the key is knowing your seller so you don’t get burned. Here is what I do before I place a bid, first I email the seller, asking him/her about the condition of the item. If he/she replies back then I check the email headers to get the remote ip address, I then go to a WHOIS database and verify the location of the seller. If everything is OK so far, I contact the seller through telephone to verify the item, its condition…etc. Remember that eBay only covers up to $175, so it’s best to ask for insurance and always ask for shipping with tracking. Also I found its best to stick with Paypal as payment option.

As a buyer you need to be aware of the following points:

• Be suspicious of sellers with low rating.
• Be suspicious of sellers using stock pictures (pictures from manufacturers website).
• Sellers who use free email (Hotmail, GmailScience Articles, Yahoo..etc).
• Sellers who do not accept Paypal.
• Sellers who do not reply to email.
• Low rating sellers with 1 day listings.

It would be nice if we could master search engine optimization, and procure high rankings simply by editing Meta tags, but that’s just not going to happen. The reason is because, in order to achieve SEO success, a combined effort of different, long-term methods is required. There is no “one quick fix” that will solve the problem.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that there are no easy solutions, people still insist on using various techniques to try and find them. For instance, it is possible to quickly generate high rankings from words that no internet users will search for. However, even if you rank number one, if no one uses the words, your business will flop.

In addition, the following are some more quick fixes that many people try, and fail at:

Changing or Adding Meta Tags – Search engines are limited when it comes to deciding what sites should be shown in the result list of a keyword search. Meta keyword tags assist search engines and help them select the pages with the most relevancy that pertain to the keyword of a Web surfer.

Of course, there is a difference between a public search engine, like Yahoo, and an internal search engine. A public search engine contains virtually every webpage they are aware of. Therefore, they can’t trust all the Meta tags they find, as not all website have been designed to provide the internet users with relevant information on the keyword they are searching for. Some website have been set up for the sole purpose of advertising and generating traffic. Thus, the goal of a public search engine is to weed out these “irrelevant” websites and help searchers find exactly what they are looking for.

An internal search engine, on the other hand, consists of only a small amount of web pages or products. Therefore, it is less difficult for the search engine to produce the most relevant pages. Moreover, the Meta tags that are present on the internal search engine on your site are trustworthy; because your goal is to help your visitors find what they are looking for.

When all is said and done, by adding or changing the Meta tags on your website doesn’t quickly or slowly fix anything. The bottom line is this method will have not effect on the result of your SEO traffic.

Increasing Web Content – Increasing web content can boost your SEO success, but this is something that takes plenty of time. Sure you can quickly increase the content by writing useless puff pieces, using auto-generating software, or ripping off content from other sites, but none of these methods are actually going to improve your business profits in the long run.

The only web content that is going to secure your success is information that is relevant and valuable. It takes time and experience to generate this type of information, so don’t try to cheat your way to the top with wasted words or words that are not your own. Stay true to your business and keep your integrity.

Link Popularity – One of the most popular quick fix methods out there are link schemes. Anyone who does business on the internet knows how valuable links are. Links are what help to increase web traffic and increase website visibility. That being said, you will want to avoid becoming a “link farm”, because if your goal is to only get links to increase your SEO rankings, you’re not going to take your business anywhere.

As tempting as it might sound, you need to ignore link popularity. Your focus should be on your target market, and how you can reach them to let them know your website exists. Thus, you need to market your website, which means you may have to dish out a little money to publicize your website in local newspapers, magazine, or even in a television ad. The more your site is recognized, the better chance it has of ending up in the right niche markets to attract the right attention.

If you want to be successful with search engine optimization, you need to commit yourself to achieving long-term results. This does take patience, but is necessary if you want to come out on top. The following tips can help bring you closer to your high ranking goal:

Tip 1: Conduct thorough research for keyword phrases – use effective keyword programs such as KeywordDiscovery or WordTracker. The paid programs of their software will help you generate the best keyword phrases for your business.

Tip 2: Valuable web content – Don’t create a website that is overrun by graphics. SEO spiders will crawl right over these graphics and pass you by. Your website needs a reasonable amount of web content that is pumped full of valuable information. It needs to be clear and concise, and should also convey your website message which needs to include the keywords you’ve selected to rank high for.

Tip 3: Relevancy – Ensure that all your link anchor text and title tags are relevant to one another, as well as to the web content that is presented on your site.

Tip 4: Patience is a virtue – It will take almost a year, or even longer, before you begin to see any traffic from the natural results of search engines. Try not to let this get you down. Take this time to continue to improve your site and give the competition a run for their money. Eventually, your persistence, patience and positive thinking will pay off.

Always remember, it doesn’t matter how well you market your website, you are not going to achieve overnight success. Just like most things in life, taking the easy way out when it comes to marketing your business online isn’t going to create you long lasting success. If you want an impressive future that provides you with plenty of reward, you need to spend the time and money, and do things right the first time.

My idea why I would like to use expired domains is the notion that old domains are favored than new domains, and to get instant PR.

So I set out to find deleted domains with PR that I can register. One characteristic of domains I was looking for was that the domain still had a PR, and it was still listed in google.

I won’t be mentioning the actual domains here as I need to control the results and prevent people from making backlinks to these domains.

I registered about 4 domains, some have PR2 and PR3. Some have a few pages indexed, some have a few thousand. I also bought a couple of new domains for my new projects.

I found out that google rarely visits these domains so I need to prime it but with some fresh backlinks. After creating some backlinks to these domains, two domains eventually lost their PR. These two domains have only a few pages indexed in google. In one domain, I did a 301 permanent redirect to the new index page. This domain retained its PR. One key difference this domain has compared to the other two is that this domain has thousands of pages indexed in google.

In another domain, I did a 301 and redirect it to a fresh new domain. The result is that the new domain got indexed faster and more pages were indexed compared to another new domain I registered at the same time. However, PR was down to 0.

There is also a case where I did a 301 redirect from an old deleted domain with PR and never got any benefit from it.

In conclusion, there is still conflicting results on whether buying deleted/expired domains. Some works, some don’t. However, what seem to work is that…

a. Old delete domains does contain traffic from existing backlinks. If the old domain has tons of backlinks, it still does generate some traffic.

b. Other search engines such as yahoo and msn do not seem to have an biases against expired/deleted domains.

You have to think about a real world shop for example your paper shop that you may go to in the morning will be mainly selling papers but will also probably have adverts in the window. So from this example you can see that although he is doing his main business from selling papers he is also renting out advertising space.

You need to view your website in the same manner either you are selling something yourself you may also want to put other ads that complement your website and bring in extra income from this.

The main thing to decide is how you are going to go about doing this there are two main methods there are providing context based ads from people like Google, Yahoo, and MSN there are general affiliates that you have to look for.

There is already a lot of information about contextual based advertising and I can recommend that if you are website owner that looking at Michael Cheney’s videos are probably the best source of information.

As for affiliate marketing the two main players are commission junction and click bank and you can go to their respective websites and get an account and before delving into just whacking up ads anywhere, sit down plan your web page.

Look at Google’s hot spot in there help file for advertisement placement you need a google account to access this but it s not that hard to get one.

Both click bank and commission junction have extensive help to get you started on the road to affiliate marketing and I know that it is well worth the time in planning and maybe doing a dummy run just to see how the ads and affiliates work and getting an understanding of the programs involved.

This is not a get rich quick system it’s more of a steady method of generating extra income from your website without putting a great deal of effort in.

When entering this market also remember there are some major players in this field who generate large sums of income from these methods but they don’t do this by trial and error. The main thing to remember is that when you have a method that works stick to it as long as possible.

The affiliate marketing game or business is very fast changing field of opportunities and you may be lucky to hit a particular niche to be very successful you have to look at new trends and do a lot of research on a wide range of subjects.

I have been in the affiliate marketing business around three years now and I’m still surprised by the speed of changes to what is hot and where did the traffic come from. You need to arm yourselves with the best tools available but it’s not easy to get advice on what will suit your needs.

Keep up-to-date with the newsletters provided by commission junction and click bank and you can’t go too far wrong. I wish you success in the fields of Internet marketing.

This software can show you who are your competitors and you can actually request a partnership with them. In internet world Google, Yahoo, MSN Search is the most popular search engines.

Which comes first the Chicken or the Egg?

The eternal question, here’s a way to answer it, in relation to Search Engines anyway

First, the major Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, all have different formulas for calculating how they rank a site and these formulas are always changing so it’s impossible to know exactly how to optimize a site for top ranking all the time.

One thing is fairly certain though and it doesn’t matter if this changes or not because the means of achieving a top rank will on its own, provide more traffic than we would get from a top ranking position anyway! I’m talking about INCOMING LINKS.

I’ve seen Log reports from a site ranked consistently in the top 5 positions on all major search engines, which show that less then 20% of all traffic is coming from the search engines, and the rest is coming from incoming and reciprocal links.

To learn more about incoming and reciprocal links go here

Incoming links are links from other sites and pages that send people to our site.
Reciprocal links; are links from our site to someone else’s and a link from them back to our site.

Having a large numbers of reciprocal and incoming links is good because while giving us more traffic it also makes us rank highly in search engines. As explained above it doesn’t matter if we don’t rank so well in the search engines, because we have more traffic from the incoming and reciprocal links anyway. So more traffic better rank, better rank more traffic, it’s perpetual motion!
If you would like to see how Alexa determines ranking here’s a quote from their site.

“The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach).”

(Taken from: http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/traffic_learn_more.html )

1. Create pages within the blog that contain reference material you refer to often in your posts. These static pages will also get crawled and indexed by the search engines and as you write posts about your topics you can refer people to these static pages as references to what you are posting about.

2. Use articles as static pages. You can reprint articles on any topic for free by visiting one of the many article directories like http://www.articlecontentprovider.com/articlesubmit/ Then refer people to read the articles that relate to the post you are making. You could even add one article as a new page every time you make a post.

3. Refer to other posts you have made on your blog or on another one of your blogs while posting. This gets the reader to click over to previous posts. You can even decide your posts by browsing previous posts and deciding which one to follow up on. Those archives are not to be lost and forgotten. Its great material, (you wrote it right?), so use it.

4. Create a page that links to your favorite posts that are timeless. You browse your old posts, find posts that you want readers to find easily, then build a links page with those posts directly linked. Then add a link to that page from your front page. Call it favorite posts or whatever and you will benefit by those that click through and follow those links.

5. I’ve posted here before about the “more” tag. You write your post as normal, then decide where you want to break the post up onto a new page. You put the more tag in and readers have to click to a new page to read the rest of the story.

6. Write once per week special projects. These are a series of articles on a particular topic. You will be offering it once per week giving readers a week to comment on it, then have them hanging on for next weeks special post in the series. Each time add links to previous posts in that series.

7. Using your content from your other websites or blogs is also a great way to get more pageviews for all of them. Use the target new tag and refer to material on your other blogs and websites. It will open a new window leaving the current blog open while they visit your other website or blog. You can quickly double up your pageviews while also introducing your readers to your other websites and blogs.

8. Make a list of 10 previous posts and the links to those posts. Make a post in your blog about 10 things you want your readers to know and read in case they have not done so before. At your suggestion they will at least go see if they have read those posts before, increasing your pageviews once again plus bringing old material to new readers. That also lets them know they should browse the archives for things they have missed.

9. Using that same list of 10 posts or a new one, visit other blogs on your topic. Find posts that talk about something similar to one of those 10 posts, then instead of adding a link in your signature to the home page, make a comment there and refer to the post that is similar and that contains helpful information to that blogger and their readers. You will also be increasing your link popularity while doing this. Do not spam the link. Make sure it actually contains useful information. Don’t be trolls or spammers and you will end up with new readers and more page views for your blog.

10. Do not stop being creative. Use the tips in this article, plus invent some of your own ways to interlink your blogposts together. Create pages. Don’t just post and forget. That content is valuable, use it. Do not make people search your blog. They are lazy and busy. Bring it to them. That is just good customer service.

I hope this article helps you learn there is more to blogging than just writing a post once in awhile or even daily. If you employ the tips I just gave you into your blog I guarantee you will increase your pageviews which in turn will increase your revenue if using an ad program in your blog.

I went out this weekend looking for content that I could publish here temporarily while I got down to writing. I had a hard time finding unbiased content. Most of the so-called reviews out there are infomercials, and that’s not what I was looking for with this blog. So you’re going to have to bear with me. I’ve been looking and learning and reading and talking, and I’ve got a lot to say. I just need the time to write it down, and I will, starting tomorrow. No, really I will.

In the meantime, you need to ask yourself this — are you ready for an affiliate program, or Internet Advertising in general? I put together four questions you should ask before you embark on your affiliate program or any Internet advertising.

Before I get to the four questions you should ask before you enbark on your affiliate program, I am going to review two concepts that I use often here on Affiliateblog. The first is what I call the macro view of your Internet presence:

Incoming visitors – Internet Presence – Sales or Actions

You are really running two campaigns with your Internet presence — the first campaign is concerned with getting visitors to the site, and the campaign is ongoing. The second campaign is to get those visitors to do something. That something may be just to spend more time at your site, or it may be to sign up for something or buy something.

The other represents the process of Internet advertising:

Impression – Click – Action

Most affiliate programs pay publishers in the last part of the process, the Action. I’ll be using both of these concepts in my questions. So here we go…

1. Do you know enough about your visitors?

There are literally thousands of affiliate programs out there. While some affiliate marketing hubs are experimenting with context-sensitive serving of affiliate banners and banner rotation on affiliate sites, YOU will be the one to decide what kind of products and services you want to offer your visitors. This seems like a minor detail, but it is a major factor in your success.

If you haven’t already, take a look at the stats for your web site over the past month or so. Where do your visitors come from? Have you paid for Google, Yahoo or other search engine traffic? What are the keywords that people used to get to you? More complex and specific search terms tend to result in more immediate conversions, while broader search terms may result in sales later. If people get to your site using what you believe to be broad search terms, you need to be sure that the cookie life (the amount of time that passes between someone from your site visiting the affiliate merchant’s site and the sale) is long.

Do you have textlinks or other advertising on other sites? Do you know the demographics of the visitors from those sites? Have you spoken to the webmaster, owner or manager of the sites on which you advertise and asked him or her about their visitors? Do you know the websites? Have you visited the sites that advertise on the same sites as you? When you investigate all of these things a profile of the visitors to your site should begin to emerge.

Which search engine brings you the most traffic? If it’s Google, the user is slightly more apt to be male, and in the middle (of MSN, Yahoo and Google) as far as propensity toward buying something (42% more likely than the average user). There’s a terrific article on marketingvox.com if you want to see more details. You can also find some interesting demographic info on the major search engines from AQABA.

You should pay particular attention to the domains of your visitors. If you have a lot of AOL traffic for example, you should consider that the profile of the average AOL user is 35 or older (77%) and married (62%).

If you have trouble with textual representation vs. graphical representation (as I do), there is a terrific product called VisitorVille that takes your web logs and animates them. The text is represented as pictures (buildings, people, buses for the search engines, etc). You can see it here. Disclaimer: I am a VisitorVille affiliate.

After all this you should be able to sit down and come up with the profile of a typical visitor. This profile should hopefully include estimates of age, country of origin, education and income.

Try to think like your visitors. Try to anticipate their interests and the products and services they might want to purchase. Affiliate programs raise the bar from PPC — your payment comes at the end of the Internet marketing process (the Action) rather than at the beginning (Impression or Click) like Google Adsense or Doubleclick. You need to apply more brainpower to the process, and you’ll make more money if you do it right.

2. Is your site perfect?

You’re asking someone to buy something from your site. If the pages have sloppy html code, broken links or instability from a bad Cascading Stylesheet, it makes you look cheesy. We’ve all been uncomfortable buying something off a cheesy website. You don’t want to be that website.

Let’s start with the html code. Are you sure there are no errors in it? Have you used an html checker like the one at W3C? I find mistakes in my code all the time. Unless you check your code on several browsers in several resolutions you might not catch an error. The validator will. If you use Cascading Stylesheets you should also visit the CSS Checker.

Speaking of validators, you should check your links often. W3.org also has a link validator.

The site should also be optimized for search engines, be easy to understand and navigate, and should have a sitemap for people (and spiders) to find their way around. You should have had ten of your closest friends take a look at the site and give you their feedback, and you should always listen to unsolicited comments from users with an open mind and place value on them. If someone takes the time from their busy day to send you an email about your site, they feel strongly about it and you should take a close look at what they’re talking about.

Understand that if your Incoming Visitors campaign is not working right, you’re wasting your time with your Sales or Action program.

3. Do you know what kind of ads you’re going to use, and where the ads are going to go?

People have been ignoring banners for ten years. That’s why they shake and make sounds (someday I’ll tell you about the screaming match I had with a creative director the day we put out the first talking banner ad) to try to get your attention. Where you put it on the page is going to make a huge difference. Briefly — banners need to go somewhere the eye naturally rests (next to the masthead, near the navigation, at the bottom of the page).

Placement of any ads is a huge part of getting them noticed or clicked.

A lot of people (including me) believe that text ads should be placed at natural breaks and be close to the same in text size and color as the text. You need to surf around and look at where people place their ads, and you need to figure out where you think they would work on your site.

If you plan to create pages for some of the products you endorse (a great idea), you need to figure out how prominently you want to place the advertising. Most people won’t buy something if they believe you’re shilling for a particular company. They will buy from someone they believe honestly endorses the product or service. You need to figure out how to keep the distinction.

4. What’s your hunch on the right kind of offers for your site?

I ask this question a lot. Now that you have a better idea of the demographics of your visitors, try to decide on which action you think they would be more apt to take — pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale or even pay-per-click (hard to come by) on your site.

If you have a general interest website that gives away free stuff it’s probably going to be difficult to sell people products from that website. It might be smarter to try to get them to sign up for a free products newsletter from one of the affiliate programs, or you may want to look for offers that target the age group of your site rather than offers that target a specific interest. You might be looking for smaller-ticket sales or only leads. Leads get the user to the end of the advertising process chain, but require less of a commitment.

Try to come up with the four, five, six or fifty ways to slice this all up, by type of action, by type of sale or lead, or any other way you can come up with. Then you can go out and find the different offers that might appeal to your visitors. When it comes time to place the ads, try to put different ads in similar spaces on the same pages, and see how they do.

Get your questions answered and you’re ready to take the plunge into affiliate marketing.

The first step in the process of keyword selection is finding the right keywords. There is a free tool available on overture for keyword selection, the url is:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Overture is the company that handles Yahoo’s pay-per-click advertising and other programs. This tool will tell you how many times any given keywords were searched for during the period one or two months prior. It can give you a very good idea of what keywords or keyword phrases to optimize your site for by using the free tool above.

You should always try to mix up the popularity of the keywords you choose. The most searched keyword or phrase is important to optimize your website for, but you should choose some lesser searched phrases, as well. This should make it easier for your prospective customers to find you. The lesser searched keywords and phrases are not optimized for as often as the most searched terms and will be much easier for your company to rank well for them.

Once you know what your main keywords are, you need to take one or two keywords and create a page of content based on the keywords you chose. You can do this by writing information on your products. If you offer furniture and hard wood furniture is one of the keyword phrases you have chosen, you should write a page on the quality of the wood you use in your furniture products. By using the term “hard wood furniture” as often as possible, you will be able to show the search engines why you should be ranked for that term. Feel free to scatter your other main keywords throughout the content you write for your website. This can only help you obtain good rankings for those keywords. You must create a page of content for every one or two keywords you want to rank well for.

Once you have content written for your keywords, it is important to have a solid linking structure for the interior of your website. Search Engines look at exterior and interior links to figure out what is important to your customers and help them find you easier. In English, this means that you will rank better by using the correct words inside the hyperlinks used on your website. These words are given extra weight by search engines by being used inside a link. You should include a link to another content page inside of every content page you write that points to a separate content or product page inside of your website.

The last, and possibly the most important, piece of your search engine optimization puzzle must be the exterior links pointing to your website. Major search engines, especially Google, put a very large focus on the words that are used to link to your website from other web pages. It is also important to obtain links from “authority” sites. A relevant site’s link is worth much more than a site that has nothing to do with what your company does. By following the simple steps above, you will be on your way to better search engine rankings for the most important keywords.

The major players in the search engine world, like Google, Yahoo, Alta-vista and Lycos, all have their own systems for indexing and ranking, so what might be great for one of them, may not be so great for another. As there are millions of web pages competing for the top rankings, there are also lots of companies out there promising to make your site achieve top spot. Lets just stop and think for a minute. As with all business’s in life, you will have your reputable ones, and then you will have the opposite. Can they really achieve what they say they can? We are not doubting that there are a lot of professional companies out there who could do such that, but if you do choose to go down that road, we think you should do your research and choose carefully. There are lot of companies offering to submit web designs to thousands of search engines, but realistically, it is the major search engines you should be interested in.

So how can you get your web site in the higher rankings of the major search engines? That is the million dollar question that everyone wants to know and would like to be done yesterday. The answer is not that easy, but then again it is not impossible.

First of all, consider the field your site is competing in. Obviously the first thing you should be looking at are the sites which are ranked highly. What are they doing that you are not? Take a look at their web site. Are they graphically intense. Do they use frames and so on and so on. Viewing other sites which are top of the pile for your chosen subject will give you an indication of how the search engine indexes and ranks and what criteria it uses.

Now, lets take a look at your site. Keep in the back of your mind what you have learnt from looking at other web designs. How does your compare?

Content within your web design. Has your site sufficient content? Search engines love content. This might be hard to achieve if your web site is just a few pages and is of brochure style. Is the content on your site relevant to the overall criteria of your site?
Inbound and outbound links in your web design structure

Do you have links on your site and do other sites link to yours? Certainly Google will look at this when ranking your site. Google uses a page ranking algorithm and judges the importance of your site with the amount of inbound and outbound links. If you do not have any links, or very little, you will not achieve a high page ranking score, thus affecting your overall ranking.
Graphically intense web design?

Take a look at how you are using graphics on your site. A graphically intense web site results in longer download times and bandwidth consumption. Another downside to using graphics, especially for buttons that link to your pages and other sites, is that search engines don’t really see them. If you are going to use graphics for buttons and links, try and make sure that you use text links somewhere on your pages. That way, the search engine spiders or robots will be able to follow your sites link structure. Another good practise to adopt is to always use the alt tag for your images.
Web designing using frames

Try and avoid frames if you can as search engines do have trouble with framed pages. In our opinion, unless you are really sure of what you are doing, leave frames alone and look for an alternative way of designing web pages for your site.

Utilising meta tags in your web design

Although strictly speaking it is not a meta tag, it is certainly the most important part of your web page. The Title! Having a well written and descriptive title is crucial to search engine optimisation. Google displays a maximum of 66 characters from the Title in their search results. Try and write a title that will catch the eye of the surfer, whilst utilising keywords.

Meta keywords are used by search engine spiders or robots to index your page, so think about the audience you are trying to target. Think of words you would enter into search engines to find a site similar to the yours. Think of other combinations of words. Are you targeting the specific area in which you live? If so, make sure you put your location into the meta keywords. Have a look at the example below:

In our example, this is something which could relate to our site, so be creative and think about keywords that could tell the search engines what your site is about. Do not repeat the same words though and most importantly, ensure that these words you use as keywords, actually appear in the main body of your content. Do not put words that are not in your page content!

The meta description tag is also very important and is used by search engines to inform users what your site is all about. For example:

The text within the meta tag description will be displayed under the title in the search engine ranking, so it is important to be descriptive. We recommend that you use a maximum of 155 characters for the description of your page. A well written description is certainly 100% better than just keyword stuffing.

Although this article is not an exhaustive explanation to search engine submission and search engine optimisation, hopefully you will understand a little more of the complexities of search engines. It is no easy fête to get you web design to the top of the pile, but it is achievable. We will let you know when we achieve it for ours

1. Decide who your targeted customers for your ezine are. For example if you are selling herbal health products, then customers who are interested in computers wont be looking at your site.
2. Choose the correct category for your products. To get an idea how to do this you can visit one the online auction sites. For example if you are selling leather belts, you can list it under apparel and accessories. Again, you have to list if it is for men or women.
3. Then you have to offer your item to the customers. To do this successfully you have to describe your product in a very positive and seductive way? How do you do this? List out the different colors of leather belts available, different sizes of belts. Offering a guarantee is also a sure way to make people know that you are genuine. You can also use positive feed back for previous customers who have bought the product from you.
4. A picture speaks a thousand words. So make sure you have good photographs of the product, so that customers can have n idea of the product that they are going to get.
5. Make sure that your product is listed with a very attractive headline. As the space for headlines is small in online auctions you have to express a lot with very few words.
6. Work in references and links throughout your sales copy to your ezine. Mention your ezine many times throughout your online auction site. Put your listing on some of the biggest online auction sites on the Internet. Some of the big online auction sites charge for a listing but it is free on smaller online auction sites.

Some of the online auction sites are listed below—
http://auctions.amazon.com
http://auctions.cnet.com
http://auctions.lycos.com
http://auctions.msn.com
http://auctions.yahoo.com
http://www.ebay.com

Once your ad is put up then it is time for you to put up your feet and relax. Your ad will create a steady stream of subscribers for your ezine.

Increasing web site traffic and Revenues have always been the aim of all internet marketing strategies. At the end of the day, you create a website so that people can visit it and you can get the desired result. You can do it by selling a product or a service and this could be your own or for another company. But if there is no traffic then there will be no sales, which means no profits. When we say traffic, it doesn”t mean just about anyone visiting the Internet but a targeted traffic that consists of visitors who will buy your product or use your services.

There are of course many ways or methods to bring traffic to your website but we are going to look at only the ones which have proven to be successful. In all, you can use three internet marketing strategies to get targeted traffic to your website and they are:

Pay-Per-Click/PPC: This is a perfect plan if you have a marketing or advertising budget. Pay-per-click campaigns offered by Google or yahoo don”t need you to spend too much money but it all depends on how effectively you are able to choose the right keywords for your advertisement. In a Pay-per-click campaign, you have to create an advertisement that is relevant to your product or service and place a bid on the keywords you select. So the primary concern is the keyword. You will have to do some research to find the right keywords and also understand how each keyword is associated with your product or service offering and how they can actually drive traffic. If you have a website selling travel tours, you can use keywords like trekking and hiking, honeymoon packages. If a visitor is looking for a travel tour company and sees your advertisement with the right keywords then he will definitely click on it and you will have to pay for every click.

Link Building: The second method of effectively bringing traffic to your website is through link building. Link popularity startegies can be free and also paid. In the paid method, you will be either paying a membership fee for submission of your website link to multiple directories, and ezines. It can prove to be costly if you are approaching too many vendors. To cut down the cost, you need to approach only those ezines, which have a higher page rank and where there are more than 500 visitors a day or more than 500 members. The free linking method on the other hand requires a lot of hard word and you will have to search for them. Again remember, don”t just go around putting your website link in just about any directory. Relevance is important hence approach only those directories or ezines, which have your product or service as one of their sections. There are many ezines where you can even submit optimized articles with your link free. These ezines probably have thousands of such articles but it will help in the long run to create visibility.

Organic Search Engine Optimization: The third and one of the most effective methods of increasing web traffic is Organic search engine optimization or SEO. Organic SEO is basically a method by which you can optimize your web pages so that you can start with a decent ranking by the search engines, and then work your way up. As the ranking increases, so does the web traffic. It is a long process but quite effective. Your website can be search optimized only when you use strong and relevant content on your website. The content should not just be attractive but will also be informative and keyword rich. If you are selling a service then provide as much information as possible without making the page too long. Again, try to keep the content within 500-700 words a page. Any longer than that, people will start losing interest. No one really has the time to read so much. People have come to your website to find a solution and hence you should focus more on providing the solution through good navigation, great content and refined information.

Once you have applied the three methods, your work doesn”t end. You need to also monitor if your website is getting the relevant website traffic or not. There are times when you may get only 40% of the relevant traffic and the 60% are visitors who came to your website out of curiosity or by accident. You can have a form on your website that visitors can fill so that you will get to understand their psychology.

Do it Yourself or hire a SEO Services Company?
Web optimization techniques are pretty complicated but anyone dedicated and willing and able to invest time to learn them can acheive a certain level of expertize. Certain competitive keywords will require professional help. If your site is a business and your budget allows you to do so, It is suggested you hire a professional SEO expert as doing it yourself will be extremely time consuming and may not even lead to noticeable outcomes.

Moe Tamani is a senior search engine optimization expert and copywriter for SEO 1 Services based in dallas,Texas.