Free Article Directory in Australia

Filed under:Internet Search Engine Optimization Resources — posted on May 25, 2009 @ 12:23 am

One of the most powerful facets of any online business is how do I win in the search engines like Google. How do I have my site to rank substantially in Google?

One of the most essential aspects of doing well in the search engines (forgetting the fundamental principles suchlike excellent content are already in place) is driving links aimed at your web presence. You can drive this a number of ways, some viewed positively by the serps and some not so happily.

A authentic ways, that the search engine engineers think is O.K. is link building with articles.

Essentially this necessitates writing a good article, rather around something from your industry, and then publishing it to a free article directory.

You really cannot afford to underrate the crucial nature of link building. If there is one signal that takes precedence to the search engines, generally, it is links. Sure, there are stacks of other signals, for example the domain name, but you are kidding if you suppose you are going to be listed well, and easily found, if you do not stimulate any links.

Building links with articles is easy. It is something the search engines say is okay. And, it adds value to the web, by providing valuable content that might be interesting or useful to users. The real question is what are you waiting for?

The Budget Webmaster’s 6 Step Guide to Improving Existing Rankings in Google

Filed under:Internet Search Engine Optimization Resources — posted on March 26, 2009 @ 8:06 pm

The Budget Webmaster’s 6 Step Guide to Improving Existing Rankings in Google

You know the scenario. You get an occasional click from Google for a certain keyword. You go to find out why you aren’t getting more clicks, and you find out that you’re ranked in the 30’s, 50’s, or heaven forbid, the 300’s. “Great”, you think, “I finally get ranked for a good keyword and it’s a worthless ranking”.

Not necessarily.

If you got ranked for a keyword you wanted At All, the game’s not over yet. If your site’s content is geared towards that subject, you can get your ranking in search engines increased, at no cost. How?

The first thing you want to do is find out how well you are ranked for this keyword. For Google in particular, this used to be a difficult chore. In the old days of 2003, you’d spend your valuable time doing a search on your desired keyword, then a sub-search for your site, and crawling through pages of listings to find out exactly where you stood.

Now there is hope in the form of the following website. Direct your browser to:

http://www.googlerankings.com/index.php

You can use this site to find out what number you come up for in the Google listings, which can be very powerful information if used correctly. If you’re ranked in the top 1000, you have a shot at raising your listing for that page by tweaking the page to be a little more relevant.

So, secondly, you have to know how good a shot you have at getting a better listing. Go to:

http://www.searchguild.com/difficulty/

I posted a tip about this a month ago, and it’s also in the free optimization Guide I released the week of March 7th. It tells you how hard it is to rank well for certain keywords in Google. You’ll need a free Google API key to use it.

Now that you know your chances, the third piece of information you need to know is how much traffic you can expect. Digital Point has a free tool that gives an approximation of how many hits per day a good ranking gets. Access it here:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Okay, let’s say everything checks out so far. You rank in the top 1000. The term you want won’t be that hard to get, and will get you enough traffic per month to justify your efforts.

Our fifth step is to take the term you chose and optimize your page.

This site does periodic reports on the search engines, and their February report gives their analysis of what the best ranking pages in Google have in common. And as a free bonus, it will also tell you what Yahoo wants. Follow the following link for details-http://www.gorank.com

Now that you know what to shoot for, you need to know how the page you want will measure up- you need to calculate your keyword density. You can also do the sixth step at gorank.com - it has a free tool that will calculate it for you. Prepare your page with that in mind, re-upload, and you’re almost done.

Great, you’re all set. Now you should submit your site to Google, right?

Wrong. Absolutely not. If you can help it, you should never, ever submit any page of your site to Google. Let it find you. HOW it finds you can affect your page rank. I don’t mean that there is a standard penalty for submitting. There’s been speculation on that for a while but I have yet to prove it matters.

What I DO know from personal experience and testing on my member’s sites, is that getting the Googlebot search engine spider to happen upon your site shaves up to 6 weeks off the standard time it takes for indexing. You can show up in Google in as little as 4 days.

Which site links to you can also affect your Google Page Rank. While this is not as important as it once was, it still carries significant weight- my site didn’t start getting spidered on a daily basis until my Page Rank increased to 5.

So even if the spider comes to your site on a Monthly basis, you’re better off waiting for the spider to come back by. That’s the seventh step, let your page be re-discovered with it’s great new changes.

And yes, there’s an even faster, better way to get Google.com’s search engine spider to re-index that page, but that’s another article, isn’t it?

For more free traffic tips, subscribe to her newsletter at ftdsecrets-subscribe@topica.com or visit her feed enabled blog: http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/blog

Quick Way to Earn Money

Filed under:Internet Search Engine Optimization Resources — posted on February 25, 2009 @ 10:43 pm

I had taken the day off yesterday from work to transfer the registration of a new vehicle I bought recently from a friend. I was surprised to see the number of people waiting out side the Vic Roads building before Vic Roads was officially open. I thought I got there earlier but several people were earlier than I was. Any way, I walked in as soon as they opened and grabbed a ticket and waited for my number to be called out. My ticket was called out and I proceeded to the counter where I was to be served and noticed that on the wall where personalized plates. I remember how much I wanted one and how much I still wanted on but just could not justify spending the cash on it to purchase a luxury item. Then I remembered search engine optimisation Melbourne was a quick way to earning money. Search engine optimisation directs more traffic to a website which leads to more people, the more people that get directed to the website, the possibly of getting more sales also increases. I will have to mention this to my colleagues at my IT firm and consider incorporating search engine optimisation into our product packages.

Google Rank Cake

Filed under:Internet Search Engine Optimization Resources — posted on February 8, 2009 @ 1:54 pm

6 cups thick content mix
1 jar word of mouth, whipped
2 tablespoons meta tags
1 cup creativity

1) In a bowl, stir content mix with 1 cup creativity. Stir. If hard, let sit overnight

2) Stir in meta tags.

3) Heat server to 100 degrees. In a 1024×768 pan or two 800×600 pans, pour mix. Beat in meta tags.

4) Let bake for one year.

5) While baking, prepare word of mouth.

6) Pagerank and Linkback will start to form on cake. Spread with a spoon of new content batter every 1-3 weeks.

7) Bake until done.

FAQS/Comments

Q. Should I buy content batter from the box or attempt to make it myself?
A. Content batter usually tastes best homemade. Although some people might want to get it over with and buy the mix from a box, it’s all according to your taste. I, personally, believe homemade is more rich and adds your own personal touch.

Q. What if I’m out of creativity?

A. There are many, many people making these cakes and I’m sure they won’t mind if you took a taste for inspiration. Sometimes the batter just needs a little beating.

Q. I have baked for a year and pagerank nor linkback will grow!

A. Is the server set to the right temperature? Did you check it frequently? Several factors can contribute to lack of pagerank and linkback growth. Make sure you didn’t do anything to make your cake stale.

Q. What brand of meta tags do you recommend?

A. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. The generic ones are just as good as the expensive ones. So I wouldn’t worry too much about spending tons of money on them. Actually, the best way is to make them yourself.

Q. I heard word of mouth was hard to come by. So how am I supposed to get 1 jar!

A. Easy. Give ‘em something to talk about. You’ll have the whole jar in no time.

Q. I do not have the patience to wait a whole year for Google Rank Cake! I have money and I will buy the biggest one there is!

A. Good luck and see you at the unemployment line. Google Rank Cake cannot be bought. Ever! While it’s true you can purchase the ____________ which appears next to the Google Rank Cake, however you can never purchase the cake itself.

Q. Is it okay to let my Google Rank Cake bake longer than a year?

A. Yes. In fact, the more you let it bake, the richer it will get. Just as long as you remember to spoon on fresh content batter every so often to prevent dryness.

Q. My friend’s cake is the biggest I’ve seen and mine is the second biggest. But I’ve used more content batter and meta tags than him!

A. Boy, I remember the day when having a cake that was one layer too small was something to truly fuse about. You’ll have your day too, just remember to keep adding content batter and creativity.

I’d love to hear how your Google Cake Rank turned out! And remember, it’s not the size of the server that matters, but the person behind it!

“Ignore what other people think you like and listen to your heart, it’s your passions in life no one can rightfully criticize.”

Tia is CEO of Client Centers, LLC, an internet and graphic service business based in Florida since 2000.

She is also the editor and founder of http://www.NerdByte.com

Tia Scott

CEO

Client Centers, LLC

http://www.clientcenters.com

Link building Strategies for 2006

Filed under:Internet Search Engine Optimization Resources — posted on October 11, 2008 @ 2:37 am

“off page” factors have become one of the important factors for search engine ranking. And link popularity is “off page” factor.

Link building is very pain staking process because it consumes lot of time and also see the results only gradually. During the past few years webmaster exchanged mails to other webmaster to gain inbound links to their website which is commonly called “Link Exchange” during the year 2005 many link farms, link directories and building and selling link website and companies popped up just to carter this sector. Since search engines still value these links like MSN which gives importance to anchor text links pointing to any website in their algorithm. But after some of the major update of Google in 2005 and especially the Jagger update which was done in 3 phrases over a period of 40 days made webmasters and SEO experts to give a second through about reciprocal linking.

Reciprocal linking was a method to artificially increase the link popularity of the website and gain search engine ranking. However after Google Jagger 3 update webmaster and website promotion experts learned that their website was dropped to a few hundreds of pages in the search engine results. What happened was Google discounted or gave no value to those kinds of links build artificially by webmaster to gain link popularity. Besides website which has high quality inbound links replaced those ranking which was previously enjoyed by other websites. Inbound links doesn’t mean just links pointing to the website; it should be from authority website and should be seen as natural by search engine spiders. Any kind of artificial method to gain inbound links will be identified by these spider bots and there will be a drop in those particular website ranking.

The important tips and techniques to be used in future link building for 2006 are as follows.

1) Reciprocal link - Before I go further I would like to tell you that reciprocal linking is not dead. For example if you run a website on pets supplies and linking to a dog grooming website it is definitely take in to consideration by search engine, since it adds value and information for the visitor to these websites.

2) Directories links - A link from Dmoz and yahoo directory is still considered as gold by Google and eventually your website will be included in Google directory is you are listed in Dmoz. Directory submission is not bad idea but if you run a website related to real estate and submitting to non related directory it is not given value and will be discounted. The quality of the link matters rather than number of links. So try to get links from your Niche areas and directories.

3) Be a Content provider:- This is pretty tough but worth the effort that means give people a reason to link to your website. The reasons could be if you provide information to relate to our niche area on your site. I mean unique content and where webmaster can’t find these kinds of information and it will be useful to reader in your niche area. Create an article section in your own website, so definitely you will get requests from other webmasters to link to your site.

4) Think out of the box to get links: - Send testimonials for products and services which you have used and ask a link pointing to your website. Conduct interviews with professionals in your niche area.

5) Press release:- Submitting a press release related to new services, features or products which you are launching will have drastic effect to gain links and popularity to your website. Submitting press release is fast catching up with webmasters. There are many publishers and subscribers looking for latest news and content. So by submitting a press release you gain a wide publicity.

6) Submitting articles.- This is a form of viral marketing or like a virus because you articles submitted to article banks and ezine publishers will be picked by hungry webmaster and publisher looking for free reprint content. Imagine this article which i have written might be picked up in newsletters and online publishers which in turn gain me a free inbound link.

So the bottom line is try to gain maximum inbound links from authority sites and your niche related website. This will definitely make your link building for the year 2006 a better experience and see your website visibility and popularity gain new heights.

SEO Hints and Tips and Free SEO Tools

Filed under:Internet Search Engine Optimization Resources — posted on October 10, 2008 @ 8:53 pm

Do you realize that if you manage your website, SEO tools, and pay-per-click tools, you can literally have as many leads as you want from your website? I assume that a website should convert approximately 5% of the viewers to doers, taking some kind of action that you want them to take. So, all we have to do is make sure the website does convert viewers to doers, and then we make sure we’ve got the right amount of traffic arriving at the website. All quite manageable. Today, we’re mainly talking about how to get the traffic to your website through Search Engine Optimization, SEO.

Here is a list of the best tools I’ve found to do SEO and a quick review of some of the top issues for SEO. Most of these tools are either free, or can be tried for free before buying

Most search engines are looking at your site to find relevant search words. How relevant determines your eventual search engine position.

How do they determine relevancy? Although every search engine has slightly different rules, here are some of the key ideas. Keep in mind, they could change tomorrow. Search engines are continually changing because just as soon as they determine how to find the relevant search words on your site, someone finds a way around their rules. Then search engines change the rules again.

A key word usually has to show up in each of the following areas of your site, with a density that falls within a range that search engine would like to see. They also like to see the words at a certain position in that area, usually at or near the beginning of these areas:

Areas search engines look at:

1)Meta tags (title, description, and keywords) (NOTE: I’m told that most search engines don’t consider meta tags any longer, but I keep seeing my keywords pop up from the meta tags).

2)Body text of the site

3)Headlines

4)Alternate text behind the graphics

5)Links, and link text

How do you choose the right keywords?

Here’s a big warning: Consider what people are looking for, not who you are or what your product is. For me, I would rather be found for “small business help” than for my company name, The Leader’s Perspective. Obviously I want people to find me, if by chance they are looking for me by name, but just think about this:

  • Aren’t there more people in the world looking for “small business help” or “business help” than could possibly be looking for my name. Those looking for my company name are those that I have probably met personally and sent them to my site. That’s a small number, in comparison to the number of companies on the internet looking for help that don’t have any idea who I am….yet anyway.

    Here are some tools to find the right keywords.

  • http://inventory.overture.com
    Enter a keyword, and Overture will return the number of times that keyword was searched for in the last month. It will also show you other variances of that same keyword and the number of searches for each variance.
    Use this to brainstorm keywords. (NOTE: I’ve also discovered this is a VERY useful tool to use before sending out any kind of marketing. Find what people are looking for and then make sure those words show up in your marketing, AND in your website.

  • http://www.wordtracker.com

    Now, this is an even better tool. This one contains a thesaurus as well, so it will show lots of other ways people have been searching for the keywords you’ve typed in.

    This tool also has a way of measuring the RIGHT keyword that is even better than Overture for Search engine optimization.

    Overture reports the number of searches last month for that keyword, so you can find the words that have the greatest number of searches.
    However, Wordtracker, reports the greatest number of searches for the words with the LEAST competition.

    When you are doing SEO it won’t do you any good to go after the words that have been searched for the most if there are millions of competing sites. It’s just not likely that you COULD get a page 1 ranking among millions of sites.

    So, Wordtracker helps you find words that have been searched for ENOUGH to give you traffic, but at the same time have the least competition. They provide their own proprietary ranking that finds the best search words that you are likely to get a search engine position for.

    Just make sure that the words you end up with from that search actually are words that someone would be looking for to find you.

    Hint: I use Overture to find the greatest number of searches and use that for pay-per-clicks, and use Wordtracker to find the right search words for Search engine optimization.

    Here are some other useful tools.

  • Tools that help you Learn Search Engine optimization while guiding you through the process.

    Internet Business Promoter will provide not only an analysis of many of the search engine sensitive stats, but will give you almost a step-by-step how to fix your site. Although this has ended up down the list, this is probably the number one greatest tool to learn search engine optimization.
    www.axandra.com

    Another similar tool is
    http://www.wpgsales.com/

  • Link Popularity

    Search engines tend to give websites that have more external links from other websites pointing at them a higher search engine ranking. Here are a couple of free tools to track your link popularity, and to check our competition as well. www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com
    http://www.marketleap.com (this one shows a graph if your history)

    Alan Boyer - EzineArticles Expert Author

    Alan Boyer, President/CEO of The Leader’s Perspective, LLC is considered one of the world’s leading breakthrough specialists. He has worked with some of the worlds largest companies, on projects in the multi-billion dollar area, and with single proprietor companies. He has worked on many hundreds of projects with companies that have resulted in multi-$100 million savings or gains.

    With over 35 years of business, quality, and process experience, he has catapulted businesses lightyears ahead in weeks. Some have doubled and some have jumped 10 times. He claims the key to that is:

  • Helping the business owners/employees develop the business skills

  • Helping them overcome the limitations and attitudes that they built between their ears (the self imposed limitations, I can’t, this won’t work for me, I’m different)

  • By helping them find the breakthroughs in their business and thinking

    He helps companies worldwide reach further than they EVER thought possible….FASTER

    http://www.leaders-perspective.com/Small-Business-Help.aspx

    mailto:AlanBoyer@leaders-perspective.com

  • The steps involved in Search engine optimization?

    Filed under:Internet Search Engine Optimization Resources — posted on October 7, 2008 @ 11:01 pm

    Step 1 : Website modification This step includes adding optimized content to all pages in the website. This is necessary because targeted keywords have to be added in the right density at the right places.

    Step 2 : Add tags Add or make changes to Meta tags, Title tags, H1 tags, H2 tags and alt tags for images, after keywords research.

    Step 3 : Link building

    a) Inbound links

    Make the website available in about 100 directories and 80 search engines and trade forums to build up on number of incoming links to the website. All submissions are done manually including major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

    b) Reciprocal links

    1, Create a links page and make link exchanges with relevant websites.

    2, Find out all competitor websites with good ranking and analyze where they have placed their links.

    3, Then make sure our link is also placed there.

    4, Gradual build up of relevant and quality reciprocal links.

    5, Regular verification of reciprocal links.

    Step 4 :Maintenance

    Report on improvement in ranking on a regular basis

    Re-optimization and resubmission based on client feedback

    Website statistics monitoring and conversion tracking

    The Disease of Google Banning: Are You At Risk?

    Filed under:Internet Search Engine Optimization Resources — posted on @ 11:19 am

    Definition:

    Google banning occurs when Google removes your site from its index and flags your domain as ‘banned’, so it won’t spider your site anymore. It is actually a serious disease and may be even life threatening specially for small websites.

    Etiology:

    Webmasters’ mistakes are almost always the leading causes of google banning; here are some of the common mistakes that will get your website banned:

    1. Using small or hidden text in your web pages. Some webmasters will try to use hidden text containing certain keywords inside their site, so that the text is not visible by the human eyes, but visible by search engines.

    2. Using popular keywords such as “sex, mp3, yahoo” in the meta tags when the subject of your site has nothing to do with those keywords is commonly called keyword stuffing.

    3. Participating in Link farms. Link farms or Free-for-all links pages are pages that consist of links and exist solely to help listed sites gain higher search engine rankings. These pages have no unique content just links. Obviously you can’t control which sites link back to you, but if you link to link farms, your site will get banned.

    4. Submitting multiple versions of the exact same page or an identical page for indexing. Some webmasters try to increase their page count by having similar pages and only changing the title, subject or small word changes.

    5. Using unauthorized automated software to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs violate Google’s terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google. It is better to hand submit your site and only do so once a month.

    6. Keyword stuffing: adding too many keywords in Meta tags or page text is called Spam and will get you banned. For example, if your website contains 400 words and the keyword phrase “website advertising” is repeated 50 times, the search engines will most likely think you are spamming them.

    7. Using Doorway pages: Doorway pages are Web pages designed and built specifically to draw search engine visitors to your website. They are standalone pages designed only to act as doorways to your site. Doorway pages are a very bad idea for several reasons, though many SEO firms use them routinely.

    8. Linking to a banned site, specially extensive linking as in networks.

    9. Registering an already banned domain. Some webmasters, after their website becomes banned from google due to any reason, delete this domain and register another while the first domain remains banned from google. So, before you register a domain, make sure it is not banned by doing the test mentioned below in “Diagnosis”.

    Manifestations:

    1.The earliest manifestations of google banning are usually first noticed by the webmaster as a sudden and severe drop in the number of website visitors and when the webmaster tracks the referrers of his visitors, he will not find anymore visitors coming to his site from google.

    2. Sudden drop of the google PageRank of all pages of the website from any level to 0.

    The combination of the above 2 symptoms is highly suspicious for google banning specially if they occur suddenly to an “old”, established, high ranking website. In case of “newly born” websites, the diagnosis may be difficult depending on the above manifestations alone as these manifestations may be normal and transient for new sites which have not been indexed by google yet and so their pagerank is still 0. In this case, we need an “urgent” diagnostic test.

    Diagnosis:

    The diagnosis of google banning is very easy, even for new sites that have not been indexed by google yet. The diagnosis is made by a simple, accurate, and rapid test:

    Test: Provided the site suspected for google banning is called www.suspected-domain.com, do a search in google for www.suspected-domain.com.

    Results and interpretation: if www. suspected-domain.com is banned, google will say: “Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.suspected-domain.com” WITHOUT a direct link to www.suspected-domain.com. This sign differentiates between banned sites and new non-indexed sites. In the later case, there will be a direct link to www.suspected-domain.com, and google search results will say: “Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.suspected-domain.com” followed by “If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link: www.suspected-domain.com“. This sign is absent in banned sites.

    Complications:

    Google banning is an infectious disease; all sites linking to the banned site are at a risk of catching the banning. So it is usual that many link partners escape and on the long run, the site will lose many of its inbound links.

    Prevention:

    Prevention is always easier than treatment, and fortunately, google banning is a preventable disease. Prevention is easy, you don’t need to do anything to avoid banning, just don’t do bad things, most of them are mentioned above.

    Treatment:

    Unfortunately, no curative treatment is available and the prognosis is bad, just palliative treatment:

    1. Treatment of the cause.
    The first thing to do is to correct the cause. If you are not sure there must be some errors you suspect, correct all of them.

    3. Isolation: if you have other websites linking to the banned sites, remove their links to it to avoid them catching the infection.

    2. Writing to google:

    After you have corrected all possible errors, email google at webmaster@google.com with an reinclusion request. The following is a template of reinclusion request letter:

    Dear Google,

    I am the owner of http://www.banned-domain.com/

    I did not realize that (doing a mistake) was a bad thing that would get me banned from Google. Now, I understand that I have done a mistake, and I apologize profusely. I have removed (bad thing) from my site, and I promise not to make this mistake again.

    I am asking you to Please Consider reinstating my website, http://www.banned-domain.com/ , into Google’s Index.

    Sincerely,

    4. Domain transplantation: many people just ditch the former domain name and start with something new. It is much easier to build a site from a PR3 or PR4 (which most new sites are given) rather than trying to dig a banned site from the depths of PR0.

    Last word:

    Google banning is google’s defense mechanism to keep their search results as accurate and useful as possible and it is their right, however, in my opinion, it is a very severe and even fatal punishment for webmasters’ mistakes. If google has the right to ban a site from its search results, its right to take off its pagerank is questionable. Page rank is a measure of site popularity and “I am bad” does not necessarily mean that “I am not popular”.

    Author: Dr Wael Serag, a specialist in SEO diseases and complications. Improve your SEO health and get free articles, tools and more at: http://money-making-webmasters.com/

    Choosing a good domain name isn’t always so simple.

    Filed under:Internet Search Engine Optimization Resources — posted on October 6, 2008 @ 2:42 am

    So you need a domain name for your brand new internet business. You may even have some cool ideas for a new domain name combination that will really impress your friends. Question is, is your new domain name going to help your business or hurt it?

    What could be simpler than choosing a domain name right? Wrong. There are a number of things you need to consider and research before you register your favorite domain name.

    First off, what is a domain name and why would I want one?

    A domain name makes our lives much easier when surfing the internet. You see, all computers on the internet are actually referenced with what is called IP addresses. On the internet, IP addresses are four sets of numbers that serve like street addresses allowing two computers to talk over a network. An example of an IP address is the one for Google.com. It is 216.239.39.99. If you enter this IP address into the address bar of your browser it will bring you to Google’s home page in that very same way that typing www.google.com would get you there. Unfortunately, we humans have difficulty remembering our phone numbers let alone so many digits for all kinds of sites. That’s one of the main reasons domain names were invented.

    Domain names make it easy for us humans to remember how to find a site. Most people know Google.com and anyone familiar with the internet knows that to reach Google, you simply type www.google.com in your address bar and you are transported to their website. The same goes for Disney.com, Microsoft.com, CNN.com, etc…

    Now you would think that choosing a domain name would simply be a matter of choosing something that is unique and that people would remember. The problem with that approach is that most of us don’t have the money needed to turn our name into a brand name on the mass market. Most of us need to rely on our prospects reaching our website through other means. The best of these are search engines.

    Choosing a good domain name for your site starts with the main keywords you have chosen to focus on for your website. Before you launch your business, you should conduct some preliminary research online to determine which keywords have the most traffic and the least number of other websites competing for that particular keyword. Some tools that help in this are the Overture keyword suggestion tool and Wordtracker.com. Both of these tools will give you a rough idea of how much traffic each of your chosen keywords will likely get each month. This helps to determine which keywords to focus on.

    Should you choose a domain name that includes your main keywords?

    In most cases, the answer is yes. Google and to some degree Yahoo both give you a small boost for your domain name. If your domain name happens to contain your targeted keywords, your domain name will help you in your quest for higher search engine rankings. Now if you do everything else wrong, having your main keywords in your domain name will not magically catapult you to the top of the listings. Many other parts of your site must be working for you as well. Other things you can do to improve rankings are beyond the scope of this article.

    Choosing a keyword rich domain is a smart business move.

    For some sites, it could be the edge they need to move up a few spots in the search engines. When choosing a keyword rich domain name, you may want to consider hyphens between your keywords. An example is cheap-airline-tickets.com. Current research trends for Google and Yahoo suggest that hyphens are the only way to separate keywords within a URL that will give you a rankings boost.

    Why not simply choose your company name? Simple. Is your company a household name? Are you so dominant in a category that people have stopped referring to the generic name of your category and use your brand name like Kleenex has for tissue paper? If so, register your company name. If not, register a keyword rich domain wherever possible.

    You may be thinking, “But I already own a domain name that is my company name. Should I go and register a new domain and point it to the same site? The short answer is no. Years ago, you could improve your rankings on search engines simply by setting up lots of doorway pages and having them all link back to your home page with all kinds of domain names. That tactic nowadays can backfire. You are better off optimizing individual pages within your existing website than you are creating a whole bunch of “fluff” sites just to increase rankings.

    The technique I suggest above is really best suited for brand new business ventures. If you still have not registered your domain name for that special online business you are about to start, then make it keyword rich wherever possible. If you have already launched your business, you’ll just have to take advantage of this information next time you start another online venture.

    EzineArticles Expert Author Joe Duchesne

    This article was written by Joe Duchesne, president of http://www.yowling.com/
    , a budget web hosting company that specializes in helping online business owners increase their website traffic. Copyright 2004 Yowling. Reprint Freely.

    Getting To Know Google

    Filed under:Internet Search Engine Optimization Resources — posted on September 29, 2008 @ 6:56 pm

    Having greatly benefited from my relationship with Google in the past several years, I am dedicating this article to the search engine superstar.

    I have to be brutally honest and relay that our friendship hasn’t always been rosy. I got to know Google several years back, when it was just a small fish in a big pond. I started to analyze its every move and realized that Google is a fickle, clever and extremely mysterious being. Still, I decided to get more acquainted.
    Here are a few things I learned along the way.

    When it comes to logic, Google is the queen

    In other words, avoid participating in anything that may blacklist you from this search engine, including keyword stuffing, link farms and hosting 50 “sister” sites on the same server. Keyword stuffing doesn’t refer merely to the content of your site, but also the alt tags, headers, URLs and any additional areas of your web site.

    Google likes to stay focused

    When optimizing the individual pages of your Web site, try to hone in on one or two relevant keywords per Web page. Analyze each page and identify which keyword would be most suitable.

    If you decide to optimize for two keywords per page, make sure that they are similar in context. For example, if you are optimizing for the key phrase “insurance leads,” you may also consider optimizing for “insurance sales leads” within the same page.

    Google loves to travel

    It is commonly known that Google loves links, both inbound and outbound. When it comes to search engine optimization, lots of research has focused on inbound links, but little has focused on the number of links on an actual page. It appears that Google favors sites that have several internal and outbound links over those that don’t have links.

    If you have any doubts about this theory, simply do a search on any high-volume keyword or phrase within this search engine and analyze the first few sites that come up. Notice how the majority of them have numerous internal links on the main pages of their Web site.

    Google is popular and expects you to be, too

    The more popular your site is across the Web, the more Google will favor you. Obviously, having several high-quality inbound links to your site is key in achieving higher rankings. When identifying Web sites for inbound links, target the ones that are highly relevant to your site. For example, if you run a jewelry site, look for sites that are purely informational on the topic of jewelry or gemstones. Also, make sure that the sites you decide to partner with have a good PageRank (at least a 5) and online presence.

    To save yourself a lot of hassle, conduct a keyword search relevant to your business and target the Web sites that show up on the first and second pages of Google (weeding out the competition, of course); contact the Web masters of those sites and tell them about your company and find useful ways to compensate them for adding your company’s information on their site.

    If you have an affiliate program, don’t be shy to pitch it. If you have an online advertising budget, offer them a pay-per-click deal or monthly advertising fee for promoting your Web site. Note that partnering with these sites or purchasing ads should complement your overall marketing and business development strategyand not be used merely to get link value.

    Google gets bored easily

    Regardless of whether your site is informational, e-commerce or just a sophisticated version of a business card, having quality content is crucial for search engine optimization. Adding to that factor is how often you update your site’s content.

    If you run a site that has new content added on a monthly basis (do not overdo it), then eventually the Google “freshbot” will start visiting your site more often and index your new content into the database. The more content you update, the more Google visits your site and indexes it quicker. Do not refresh your content simply for search engine optimization purposes, but do take the effort to keep interesting articles, blogs and entries to keep your visitors coming back.

    If you haven’t already noticed, keeping pace with Google is not an easy undertaking. It takes a certain level of knowledge, skill and creativity to truly benefit from this relationship. The rest is up to the stars.

    Dali Singh is the Managing Director for Blueliner Marketing, a full service marketing and Internet consultancy specializing in Internet Marketing, Public Relations and Corporate Branding. Visit http://www.bluelinermarketing.com or email her directly at dali @ bluelinermarketing.com.


    next page