SEO Tutorial

SEO question and answers

2008-11-14T20:51:00.000-08:00

SEO Question and answers

What is "body content relevance"? A:
"Body content relevance" is the written "non-image" text on the page of the web site which is descriptive in nature and relates to the title, description and keywords. It is not mandatory to have relevant body content, but it most definitely will assist your ranking on the search engines.

What does the Submission Process Actually Do?
The SUBMISSION programs send your web site address, "URL" to search engines and links using what is referred to as add-a-URL strings. After receiving the URL, engines use a "spider" to then parses through the HTML code looking for tags that begin with a href=. After the entire page has been parsed, a small "Web BOT" travels the links it found, searching for more links using the same procedure until all of the pages at that URL address have been found.

What is the difference between submission and placement and when will my first page paid placement list on the search engines?
A: With search engine submission, we do not guarantee that a search engine will place your web site. With search engine placement, we ask for you to allow ten days for placement on the search engines. You will receive a ranking report at the email address you provided on your order form.

Explain the concept - "the long tail of search."
Long tail theory says that in any given demand curve, the "tail" or unpopular products, when combined, will have a greater amount of demand than the popular products at the "head.'

How do search engines treat content inside an IFrame?
The engines all interpret content in an embedded IFrame as belonging to a separate document from the page displaying the IFrame content. Thus links and content inside IFrames refer to the page they come from, rather than the page they are placed on. For SEO, one of the biggest implications of this is that links inside an IFrame are interpreted as internal links (coming from the site the IFrame content is on) rather than external links (coming from the site embedding the IFrame).

• Can you clarify the ideas behind term weight?
The most important thing that I've learned from term weight and KW density is that it barely matters. If you have a keyword in your title tag and in your H(x) tag and mention it in the content of the site naturally once or twice, you've gone 99.9% of the way towards perfect on-page optimization. Anyone trying to reverse engineer the formulas for that 0.1% is probably wasting their time.

Can you talk about the differences between Yahoo! vs. Google users?
This relates quite well to the last question. Since this is a short answer system, let me just quote a statistic I heard earlier this year that codifies my answer quite well. Despite Google getting twice as many searches as Yahoo!, Yahoo! has a greater number of searches per day for the terms "NASCAR" and "WWE." That should help you understand the demographics of the searchers (at least here in the US).

Does mySEO411 offer references from other clients?
and Yes. Our current past clients are available for stellar testimonials.
What about complimentary, non-SEO marketing?
SEM, press releases, and other traditional marketing efforts work well with SEO campaigns. We recommend a strategy encompassing a broad suite of complimentary marketing techniques to meet your goals. We're happy to discuss a comprehensive vision with you

Do we have to sign a contract to enter into a business relationship with mySEO411?

No. We only sign contracts if it's what you want. We typically bill every month. Some clients are billed hourly, some hire mySEO411 on monthly retainer. The only things binding us together in a business relationship are the results we deliver each month. If you ever want to sever our relationship, all you have to do is notify us. We'll cease work immediately and send your final invoice. We agree to as much via email, which is just as good as a signed contract, legally speaking
I know that having a continual plan to get new links to my site is very important to help my Web site be found. What is the ideal number of new links I should be trying to achieve on a monthly basis or is there an ideal number?
Years ago it was all about the quantity but these days, it is also about the descriptive text in the link that counts along with the authoritative aspect (how busy the site is) as well as getting links from locations that suit your audience. Lots of times you can benefit with links that are not huge in number, but are from authoritative sites using good descriptive link text in the link.

I have heard that it can be a bad thing to "buy links." Is that true.
At least Google has warned about buying links on high PR sites which we have never recommended doing anyways. Basically, you don't want to do anything for the purpose of "manipulating rankings." You can buy advertising from people, but don't buy links. There really is no need to because there are so many other strategies you can use that won't get you in trouble.

Is SEO not all about manipulation of rankings anyways?
I'm sure there are some that may think that way. But we believe that search engine optimization is simply about building high quality content that is truly relevant and useful. Content that merits good visibility Because it satisfies the reason why the searcher searched.

Define: Link Farms
— A website that exists purely to increase the rankings of member’s websites thorough increased link popularity

What is google bombing?
Google Bomb — The process of manipulating the results of Google by placing a link to a single webpage on several domains. The most famous incident of Google bombing was when around 32 webmasters put the text “miserable failure” on their websites and placed a link under this text to George Bush’s autobiography. Causing this webpage to rank #1 in Google for the search term “miserable failure
Doorway Page — A webpage that has been designed purely for search engines and often leads to another, separate website. This is a “black hat” SEO technique and although may achieve a high rankings quite quickly, it will ultimately lead to your site being penalised or banned completely. Also known as a “Gateway page”.

Explain:CO-citation Linking Filter
This filter apply due to your website Outbound Link Structure. If your site has a link on a website that links to automotive sites then according to Google your site will also be relate to automotive.

What is Google Sand Box Filter
This Filter basically placed on new websites. Due to this filter a new website does not receive high ranking for its major keywords. Sites that are using high competetive keywords affects more by this filter. The reason for this filter is to discourage the spam sites to use spammy techniques to get 1000 links a night for high ranking.

Search Engine FAQ asked question and answers

2008-11-08T00:47:00.000-08:00

SEO FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Why SEO is important?
• 87% of all visitors are from a page 1 position
• 91% of Internet users use search engines.
• Over 250 million searches carried out daily in the UK.
• 73% of all online transactions start with search engines.

How much does the SEO cost?
Costs associated with SEO can vary from site to site and are directly influenced by your industry sectors and competition.

What is mean by supplemental index?
Pages that are in the supplemental index are placed there because they are trusted less. Since they are crawled less frequently and have less resources diverted toward them, it makes sense that Google does not typically rank these pages as high as pages in the regular search index.

What is spam index?
An information retrieval system uses phrases to index, retrieve, organize and describe documents. Phrases are identified that predict the presence of other phrases in documents. Documents are the indexed according to their included phrases. A spam document is identified based on the number of related phrases included in a document.

Why might you want to use no follow on an internal link?
Many sites have shopping carts and member login or logout links. This type of link is simply an administrative function and does nothing to contribute to site content. The search engine does not need to index those pages.

From an analytics perspective, what is different between users from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
A user coming into your site from an organic search usually has never visited your site before or is performing a general search for a specific product or topic. These visitors are trying to find the site that most suits thier needs. A "type-in" user is specially interested in your website. They may have found your URL in print advertising or from a friend. Often, these users are familiar with what you are offering and are coming back to your site as a repeat visitor.

How many target keywords should a site have?
I advise not more than three or four well related keyword phrases.

What is Latent semantic analysi?
Latent semantic analysis (LSAT
The process of analyzing the relationships between terms in sets of documents. The engine looks not only at the query, but also looks for common terms in the document set. Documents that are semantically similar will carry more weight than those that are not.

What is hilltop ,Bigdaddy?
Hilltop can be just ranking strategies to approach an authoritative ranking, that Google call it. There are three approach about it
1. Ranking Based on Human Classification
2. Ranking Based on Usage Information
3. Ranking Based on Connectivity
Bigdaddy is a data center only live at 66.249.93.104 and 64.233.179.104 right now.

What is page segmentation? (ever heard of VIPS?)
VIPS is a research paper from Microsoft that stands for Vision-based Page Segmentation which is just an offshoot of the general topic of page segmentation. It is an analysis of how a user understands web layout structures based on visual perception and is independent from the underlying code and technologies.

What is Phrase based indexing
Phrase based indexing is used to classify good and bad phrases based on certain criteria inside the entire document. The number and proximity are taken into account. It also is capable of predicting the presence of other phrases on the page and will assign a higher or lower value depending on if those phrases or present or not.

Explain shring algorithm?
These shingling algorithms look for blocks of content that do not occur frequently across a web site and look for blocks with certain desired features. When the engine stores this information, the navigational, advertisements, and other non-content areas are omitted. This increases speed, saves on storage space, and theoretically makes the results more relevant because of the increase in unique content.

Keyword stemming

2008-11-05T02:54:00.000-08:00

Keyword Stemming
Keyword stemming for search engine optimization is a great traffic draw for your website. A wider variety of keywords through keyword stemming also avoids keyword stuffing and repetitions that might blacklist a website from a search engine when it is actually not attempting to fool the search engine.
The process of keyword stemming involves taking a basic but popular keyword pertaining to a particular website and adding a prefix, suffix, or pluralization to make the keyword into a new word.
If we take key word “search” then it would change like “ searches ,seaching, searched,” and “searchable.”

Keyword Effective Index

2008-10-31T00:26:00.000-07:00

Keyword effective index
The KEI compares the number of searches for a keyword with the number of search results to pinpoint which keywords are most effective for your campaign.
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

Finding the right key word:
A keyword that receives no searches is worthless. A keyword
which receives just 10 to 500 searches each month may be very
profitable. Your first task is to find out or discover HOW MANY
SEARCHES are made each month for your keyword or keyword phrase.
You can use sites like Overture (Yahoo Marketing) or WordTracker
and they will give you the number of searches made each month
and also variations of your keyword phrase.

The second point is how much competitors for the given keyword We should know the level of competition for each keyword that we are targeting phrases.If you are using competitor keyword then it might take year of link building to achieve the top spot in search engines. In case if we take less competition keywords then we can able to bring up our site to top position in search engines.

The ratio between search volumes to competitors’ value should be high (KEI).The value of KEI increases when the popularity for the keyword gets increased. While Competitor for the particular word increases then KEI value gets decreased.

Before we get in to keyword research we must look in to these two parameters
• Popularity: Do people search for your keywords?
• Competitiveness: How many other pages target your keywords? Should you have more specific keywords?

Quality back links
• Getting the quality back link from high Pr pages.
• There should be relevance between your sites to client site in main themes.
• The anchor text of the back link should be related to keywords of your web page.
On site Factors

a) Remember the important places of your web page.
These are TITLE, KEYWORDS, ALT, H!..H6, BOLD, PARAGRAPH, etc. In these places you must include the keyword phrases for which you want to highly ranked.

b)First paragraph in your body is very important for google. Here you should give the comprehensive and detailed information for your topic. Disperse your keywords here in a good ratio, like 8%.

c)The alt tags of all images must be used. Use the keywords here in natural style.

d) You can bold the keywords in all your body content. This tell google that these words are important words and google will take these words to consider as keywords with good rank.

e) The keywords should be dispersed in your content in natural style. Natural ratio of keywords is like 5-10%. More than this may be called spamming by google.

Pinging

2008-10-20T22:38:00.000-07:00

Pinging is nothing but intimating to the search engines that a new content is added in the blog. Pinging mainly applies to blogs and sites that have RSS feeds. An XML-RPC signal is sent to “ping servers," which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one. The use of ping servers to direct attention to recent blog posts has led to a rash of ping spam or Sping.

Spings, like spam blogs, are increasingly problematic for the blogging community.

Cloaking

2008-10-15T23:34:00.000-07:00

While we gave SEO service to the website we have to intellect many aspects. In Black SEO Cloaking deals a major part. Cloaking is to obtain better search engine rankings. Through cloaking, websites can differentiate between Search Engine Spider and normal internet user. After this differentiation, deliver different kinds of content to both. To build such a page you need to add a lot of keywords and links to that page and try to optimize it for top rankings, If the spider or bot comes to crawl your server you can show that page but remember most Search Engines will cache a snapshot of your site and this will be displayed if users click on the cache link in the search results. As a rule, the cloaking software creates hundreds of web pages that are optimized for special key words so that the spiders get the intuition that the website contains a lot of relevant information about a special topic.

Mosaic cloaking
Traditional cloaking provides completely different content to Search engine and normal internet user. But mosaic cloaking works only as a part of WebPages. Whenever Search Engine Spider sends a request for a page of the website, server replace all "full stops (.)" with keyword rich content through server side scripting, and other pages of the website remain unchanged. From this technique, search engine indexes a content rich webpage and gives advantage to it. Through this method, we can get some short term results until search engine caught the site as black hat spammer.

Google has a clear statement about cloaking on its webmaster pages: "Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as cloaking."

Cloaking detector:

The cloaking detector simulates the Googlebot based on User-Agent to detect cloaked content. So you can detect websites on which the content presented to the web crawler is different from that presented to the user.

Cloaking Erkennung

SEO Onpage optimization

2008-10-13T01:41:00.000-07:00

Search engine optimization
SEO is considered to be most powerful tool in the web development . From a search engine perspective, Search Engine Optimization is the process of making web pages easy to find, easy to crawl and easy to categorize.
Keyword Selection
The best keywords will be those that are popular search terms (terms that people actually search for), and that clearly describe the purpose and the content of your pages. They will also have to be keywords for which there is relatively low competition. Finalizing the wrong keywords can throw off your entire search engine optimization strategy.
Keyphrases in the body of your page:
It is important to use your keyphrases on your page, since this will help the search engines determine what your page is about, and its relevance to your chosen keywords:
Use your keyphrases several times, and place them as close to the top of the page as possible.
Place your keyphrases between Header Tags (H1, H2 or H3) in the first two paragraphs of your page. o Place your keyphrases in bold type phase at least once.
Repeat your keyphrases often to increase your keyphrase density. Repeating your keyphrases between 5 to 10 times for every 100 words in your page is considered effective. You must also take into account your visitors: they should be able to read your page fluently and effortlessly and the text must not sound awkward. (Remember that ultimately it is your readers who will decide if your page is worth the time they spend on it).
If you use a left navigation bar, the search engine will read it before the body of your page. Make sure you include your most important keywords there, too
Posting in forums and weblogs
Since forums and weblogs offer plenty of fresh content, search engine spiders tend to crawl them often. If you are a prolific contributor to these types of site and use a signature file with a link to your page, having many entries may give you a relevance boost with the search engines. This technique, however, has been abused so much that as of January 2005 Google and other search engines have decided to support a 'no-follow' filter, an attribute that can be set up by blog and forum owners so that guest comment links and signature links will not be followed by search engines.

Search engines are becoming more sophisticated in detecting unnatural linking patterns. For example, if all you inbound links come from the same site, or if they all have the same link anchor text, it will look abnormal and search engines may devalue your link profile .Also, try to get more one-way links (like directory links or resource box links) than reciprocal links. The more you can make your link profile look natural, the better your pages will rank.
Generating Good Keywords
When you have a good list of keywords, you can use several on-line tools to search for related possibilities:
1.google ad words tool
2. Word tracker
Anchor text
Anchor text refers to the words that make up a link; they are the words that turn your mouse cursor into a finger-pointing hand. For example, in the sentence, "I really like to go to “ web design chennai ," "web design chennai" is anchor text for the link.
The important of Anchor Text
Search engines gather data by traveling around the web via links, jumping from page to page. Links are the lifeblood of a search engine and are used as key indicators for identifying the topics of the pages they're about to go to. If 100 sites link to a site with the link "web design chennai" or seo services Chennai, the search engine can be fairly confident that the site is about an web design t in Texas. If you want a page to rank for a keyword that is particularly difficult, be sure to focus on getting the keyword in your anchor text.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is the process that is taken to link one page with another within the same website
Website gets properly spidered and crawled
Build the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase
Increase PageRank to inner pages of your site/blog

SEO Advance Tutorial

2008-06-12T02:15:00.000-07:00

SEO Consultant Tips

2008-06-12T02:13:00.011-07:00

1.Get references Have your friends worked with anyone that they would recommend? What about your business associates? Today, you'll find that even if word of mouth is transmitted by e-mail, it will still go a long way towards getting you the consultant that you need.

2.Hit the directories Many excellent SEO consultants will make sure that they are listed in the various industry-specific directories on the web, so make sure that you give yourself some time to browse and to find the person who will best suit your needs.

3.Read their testimonials Many SEO consultants will have a list of testimonials up on their page, talking about what they have done in the past. Read these testimonials and see if you can get a sense from them regarding how the consultant works and what his or her strengths are when it comes to customer service.

4.Speak with them personally It is increasingly easier to do business without ever meeting anyone face to face, but you'll find that actually getting some information without the benefit of obfuscating text is quite important. Even if it is just a quick phone call, you can learn a great deal just by hearing someone talk and thinking about what you learn.

5.How long does it take to get back to you? If you have sent them an email, how long does it take for them to return your enquiry? You'll find that if you are waiting more than 24 hours, you might not want to wait any longer. Most SEO consultants will have auto responders, and while this is a good solution, see how long it takes before you get a human to respond to you.

6.Google them Get on a search engine and try a few searches to see how long it takes for them to show up under terms such as "SEO Consultant" and "SEO Specialist" as if they can't get themselves the top spots you stand less of a chance.

7.Have a few companies in mind You'll find that plenty of companies will have just one or two different points that will keep them from being perfect, so take some time to make sure that you have a few to choose from.

8.Ask to see their work What companies have they worked with in the past? How long does it take for you to find them using Google? You can see what kind of work they do best by heading right over to check it out.

9.Are they ethical? Getting involved with a company that will do anything black hat such as hiding links and using keyword stuffing, will be a mistake that you pay for with very poor rankings and unhappy visitors, you may even get banned!

10.Think about how they make you feel. At the end of the day, how comfortable do you feel when you work with them? You'll find that because they are connected intimately with your business that you will want to see how comfortably you can work together.

Link Building with Directory Submissions

2008-06-12T02:13:00.009-07:00

Webmasters and all those who are involved in site building and promotion:

Whenever you have started to work with websites you will surely face the problem of website promotion and how to increase the website's page rank? It is quite a great point for discussion. However, we can outline here several of the most important and effective ways of website promotion, which are directory submission and link building. When it comes to directory submissions - here arises another question - what way is more effective, to submit your site manually to hundreds of directories yourself or order directory submission services provided by highly experienced and skilful team. The second variant is much more appropriate and comfortable as it requires a lot less time and effort than the first option. Manually submitting to directories is a long, tedious, and grueling task. It can take hours upon hours and depending upon the number of directories submitting to, I can take days. Many of the directories these days require email confirmations before listing a website in the directory. This, of course, leads to another time consuming task of confirming each and every email that is sent. The other downside of sharing your email address is the fact that many directories will continue to email you promotional information well after you submission is completed and some will pass your email information on, which leads to spam.

Directory submission of your website has several benefits. The first benefit is that it will contribute to the growth of incoming traffic. You will get direct, targeted traffic from directories. Another benefit of this service is that you will get high quality, one-way links to your website from pagerank directories. These backlinks directly contribute to your overall search engine rankings. And finally, the directory submissions will contribute to drastically improving your Google Page Rank! The higher your pagerank, the higher you are going to be listed in all search engine results for specific keywords. These are three enormous benefits that any webmaster needs to focus on in order to survive on the internet today.

So do not waste your time and lose your profit. Hiring a professional directory submission service is the right choice. Directory submission services such as those offered by http://www.adventdesigns.in will give you many different choices and packages to work with. They will include both high page rank directory submissions and also guaranteed and permanent directory submissions and will even handle all email confirmations for you. Both of these types of submissions are very beneficial to any website. Link building is the number one way to promote your website today as it affects a website in a variety of different ways. If you do not focus on building your links, your website will not project the much needed image of popularity and search engines will not include the website in search results. It is an area that no webmaster can survive without.

Just visit iSellPagerank.com to order the directory submission services that are right for you and start reaping the many benefits of directory submissions today!

How To Do SEO Web Design

2008-06-12T02:13:00.007-07:00

Whether you are running a business online, or running a website for any other reason, the design of the website is always important. It is especially important when you are trying to sell products and services. A major factor that plays into your business success is how much traffic your site actually gets. Something that helps improve the traffic and the popularity of your site is search engine optimization. The key to running a successful online business starts before you begin, and involves combining these two ideas to create SEO web design. There are several things you can do in order to make your site SEO friendly. This article is going to introduce you to some tricks to doing just that.

Whether you do your SEO on your own or you have a company do it for you, one of the most important things you can focus on are keywords. Keywords are the basis for SEO web design. They are the groundwork for brainstorming the topics you will cover on your site, and how many pages it will take to complete it. Knowing your basic keywords will also help you to know who your biggest competitors are. It seems like common sense but just knowing these few simple rules can make your site SEO friendly from the start. The next thing you will want to do is focus on the structure of your site. You basically want to develop themes throughout the pages using different URL designs. You want your pages and your URLâ€™s to be as clean as possible, and easy to remember! SEO web design also relies on having solid content, and that begins by keeping your JavaScript down and not cluttered. If you donâ€™t understand web design, the company working for you should know exactly what this means.

Up until now you have been using the â€œgutsâ€ of your website in order to make it SEO friendly. The next step will be creating content, and this is something you should already have thought of. You have to fill your pages with something appeasing to the mind. You can do this by writing content that is filled appropriately with the keywords you previously chose. Your titles, tags and just about every paragraph of text should include at least one of your keywords. This is really going to help your site reach your ultimate goal. If you are completely new to SEO web design, donâ€™t be afraid to go online and search out different ways to use keywords correctly and to your advantage. The next step will generally occur if you are working with a web design company or your corporation has a special group for the assignment. This part is called wire framing. Basically the site will be presented to you in a simplified version and it will give you the chance to go over it with a fine-toothed comb. There is no room for error when doing this!

Lastly your SEO web design adventure will end with something a little more exciting. Youâ€™ve appeased the mind and now you must accommodate the eye. Getting traffic to the site is one thing but keeping it there and keeping it coming back are something entirely different. You will now want to work on design, whether you do it yourself or with a web design firm. Consider every option such as site navigation, links, colors, graphics, text style, and video. The more pleasing the site is to the visitor the easier the information will be for them to understand. This all may seem a bit complicated but the fact is that SEO web design can be accomplished on any website, as long as you follow the steps and give it your best!

Domain names for internet marketing

2008-06-12T02:13:00.005-07:00

When you start your journey for internet success, then anything that comes in the way for your business is important. What is required is time and energy to solve every problem and determine the best possible solution. The first decision is to determine the domain name for your website. Choosing a domain name is quite important. The domain that looks difficult for people to spell and pronounce is not going to help your website in the long run.

The domain name should be of such type that on basis of domain identity people are able to remember what products and services are offered by you. The word that is used in the search engines to find a business is generally known by the term "keyword". If your goal is to proceed ahead in the internet success then it is better to take the domain that matches with the keyword searched by the users.

Remember to use that type of name for domain for internet marketing that is neither too long nor difficult to spell. It should also be easy to spell otherwise it will result in failed attempts to look after your business. To select a right name for your internet marketing success, is to look in a dictionary write all the alternative words for the product and services that you will be selling and providing. You will be surprised to find some common words that you many not have thought about it.

Creating a domain name close to a well known brand may not be a good idea as this can result in trademark violations. This will cost you money and will defeat the entire purpose of the website to come on first place. In case of any doubt it is better to consult a legal or search service to make sure that the name that you are choosing does not matches with any other.

Thus there are certain recommendations for domain name selection. IF these are followed in the beginning to protect yourself then your business is soon on the road to internet success.

How dynamic sites can affect your PageRank

2008-06-12T02:13:00.003-07:00

Dynamic pages are very convenient for visitors but are not always good for PageRank.

This is because Googlebots are not programmed to read this type of web page. Many of your web pages will not be viewed by the Googlebots or indexed by Google. However sometimes you need to put dynamic pages on your site

Firstly let's examine what a dynamic page is: These are pages that will come up when a visitors plugs in a certain command. This means that visitors will choose which pages they want to see.

This will be very convenient for your visitor. There are several programming formats and HTML coding that will enable a page to be dynamic. A few of them include; PHP, ASP, JSP (Java server page) CGI and PERL. Only make dynamic pages yourself if you have a good knowledge of these programming languages and skills.

Some reasons for creating dynamic pages for your site:

* Information that is categorized by date * Shopping sites * Multiple service providers * Any time you want visitors to be able to pull up a certain page they will need

Now for the crunch time: before you get all excited about these dynamic web pages remember one thing Googlebots cannot read dynamic sites. Thatâ€™s right the Googlebots are robots and will not issue commands to get web pages. If they cannot read your dynamic pages no data about them is going to be relayed to Google and of course your pages cannot be viewed on the search engine.However the main reason that they cannot be viewed is because Googlebots are programmed not to read these types of pages.

Here's the reason why. The programming format will contain? or #&*!%. these are also the signs that Spammers and those infamous black hat SEO people use to trap the search engine spiders For this reason Googlebots are programmed to ignore anything with these signs. So how do you get Googlebots to read your dynamic pages? The answer is quite simple.

Here are a number of ways:

You change the formatting of your dynamic pages. This can be done with software. This will change those small unacceptable signs to ones that will be read by Googlebots. For example, scripts/ShowCode.asp ?lngWId=3&txtCodeId=769 Googlebots do not read ? or & so you can just change the script to txtCodeId.769/gWId.3/qx/vb/scripts/ShowCode.htm. Now unless you have this software do not try this alone without some knowledge of programming language and scripts.

* Make regular static pages that link to your dynamic pages * Submit each page manually being careful to change those signs * Make blogs that link to your dynamic pages * Optimize any pages that need to be indexed * Articles and content pages * Link to your dynamic pages with a table of contents

So if you really need dynamic pages and some businesses do. Remember to set them up so that the Googlebots can see and record all the information on your site. As illustrated this is not an impossible task. It is just a question of working with Google rules to help those Googlebots to read all the information about your site.

Robots.txt File in SEO Services

2008-06-12T02:13:00.001-07:00

BODY:

Generally in case of small websites webmasters are under false assumption that they do not require to create a robot.txt file. But it is required. First of all let us define the robot.txt file. Even prior to it we need to define what a web robot is. A web robot is also called spider or crawler which should not be confused with the normal web browser as web browser is not a robot.

The main use of robots.txt file for webmasters in SEO services is to give instructions to the robot what they crawl and what should not be crawled. This can give you some control over the robots. This give you little more control over the robots and this indicates that you can issue indexing instructions to various search engines.

Robots.txt invites the search engines. Some of the good bots can also step away from your website in case you have not created robot.txt in the top level of your website. Some time there is requirement to exclude some pages from search engines. These are those pages that are still under construction and those directories that you do not want to get them indexed. You may also want to exclude those search engines whose main aim is to collect email addresses.

Robot.txt file is a simple text file created in notepad. This is required to be saved to the root directory of your website. It means that directory where your home page or index page is stored. In order to create a simple robot.txt file with the specification that allows all robots to spider your website, write the following info:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

This will allow all robots to index your pages.

In case you donâ€™t want a specific robot to have access any of your website pages. Then do the following:

User-agent:specificbot

Disallow: /

In case you do not want a specific robot to access any of your web pages, then do the following. Suppose you do not want Googlebot to index a page names as â€œabcâ€ and you directory name is newdir. In the disallow section you will be required to put:

User-Agent: Googlebot

Disallow:/newdir/abc.html

IN case you do not want to get indexed the complete directory then you would put:

Now if it's a complete directory you do not want indexed you would put:

User-Agent: Googlebot

Disallow:/newdir/abc.html/

By putting forwarding slash in the beginning and in the end, search engines are informed that not to include any of the directories.

Thus create a robot. Text is an important part in SEO services and it can not be ignored at all costs.

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Possibly The Biggest Misconception About Ranking Well In The Search Engines

2008-04-14T02:37:00.000-07:00

In previous lessons I've taught you different optimization strategies. I've taught you the difference between onpage search engine optimization and offpage search engine optimization.

Quick Review

Onpage search engine optimization are things that you can change ON your webpage.

Title tag
Header tags
Bolding, Italicizing, Underlining
Alt image tags
Meta Tags
Etc.

Offpage search engine optimization comes down to basically 1 thing, which websites are linking to your wesbite and how they're doing it.

Anchor text uses in your link
The title of the page your link is on
The page rank of the page your link is on
The "theme" of the website your link is on
Etc.

By now, I'm hoping you see that it's the offpage search engine optimization factors that will get your website to the top of the search engines. Again, the onpage factors are things you SHOULD do, but are not nearly as important as the offpage factors.

Ok... Let me show you why.

Let's analyze a website!

In this example I'm going to analyze the #1 ranked website on Google for the search term "click here".

First, let's go to Google and enter "click here".

You'll notice that the #1 ranked website is www.adobe.com. That's interesting...

Now, why would adobe.com rank #1 for that search term? I would think adobe.com would rank well for terms like:

graphic design programs
create printable documents
web design programs
and other keywords related to what they sell...

A few things that you should notice by looking at the picture above.

The word "click here" isn't in the page title
The word "click here" isn't in the URL of the website.
The word "click here" isn't even in the description listed by Google!

Now, let's click on the listing in Google and check out the actual webpage.

Now, get this... The words "click here" aren't even on the webpage, anywhere!

If all of those onpage optimization techniques that many SEO companies talk about were true, then don't you think a different website would rank #1 for this term?

On page optimization factors like:

keyword density
keyword prominence
keyword proximity
bolding, italicizing, underlining
etc.

are NOT critical to worry about when trying to rank well for a search term.

Yes, you should spinkle your keyword throughout the webpage and do the other onpage optimization techniques I've taught you in previous lessons, but again, I really want to drill this into your head. It is the offpage optimization that will increase your rankings in the search engines; specifically Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Then why exactly does adobe.com rank #1 on Google for the term "click here"?

Let's open up SEO Elite and have a quick look...

First, we'll select radio button 1.
Next, we'll enter the URL from Google into step 2. (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html)
Next, we'll select Google from the list of search engines.
Finally, click "ok" to run SEO Elite.

When it's finished running, let's click on the "report view" tab to view some of the results.

The first thing you should notice is the Google Page Rank of all of the pages linking to adobe.com. If you click the column heading within SEO Elite labeled "Google PR", it will sort the column in descending order.

The first thing you should notice is the Google Page Rank of all of the pages linking to adobe.com. If you click the column heading within SEO Elite labeled "Google PR", it will sort the column in descending order.

Next, let's click the "analysis view" tab.

If we click the column heading titled "anchor text", it will sort this column in descending order. We can quickly see that the words "click" and "here" are within the top 10 words listed in the left hand column.

Remember, the anchor text column will show you the number of times the word in the "Word" column appears in the actual anchor text of the link pointing to adobe.com

So, by looking at the analysis above, we can see that the word "click" appeared in 16 of the links pointing to adobe.com and 6.1% of the total links pointing to adobe.com contained the keyword "click". The keyword "here" was found in 32 links pointing to adobe.com and appeared 12.1% of the time.

Reason adobe.com is ranked #1

The main two reasons that adobe.com is ranked #1 for the keyword "click here" is because:

The websites linking to adobe.com are very quality (have a high Page Rank)
The websites linking to adobe.com used the keywords "click" and "here" many times in the anchor text of the links linking to adobe.com

There are a few other offpage optimization factors that help adobe.com to rank #1, but those are the main two reasons. I hope you can clearly see the power of offpage optimization (linking).

So, the next time someone asks you what the proper keyword density is, the proper keyword prominence, the proper number of times you need to bold, italicize, or underline a keyword on your page... You can tell them that onpage optimization is NOT critical when ranking well for a given search term.

Don't Get Your Website Banned BY Google By Accident

2008-04-14T02:22:00.000-07:00

Last time we talked about the onpage optimization factors that can cause your website to be banned by Google. Those things included:

Hidden Text
Alt Image spamming
Meta tag stuffing
Title tag stuffing

Which were only a few of the SEO "no-no's" you should stay far away from.

Today I'm going to dive into some of the offpage optimization factors/techniques that you should never ever do. First let's dispell some popular myths.

If a "link farm" is linking to your website you'll get penalized and.or banned from Google - FALSE
If unrelated websites are linking to you, your website will get penalized - FALSE
Page Rank 1 websites won't help you because Google does not display PR1 websites in their back link list - FALSE

None of the above are true statements for the simple fact that:

Anything a competitor could do to harm your website would NEVER be
penalized by Google.

Think about it for a minute. If any of those could actually penalize your website, how many people do you think would simply add their competitor's websites from link farm websites, unrelated websites, and low PR websites? Unfortunately, it would be quite a few.

The only way you can get penalized by offpage optimization is if YOU link out to "bad neighborhoods", which would be:

Link Farms
Penalized websites (websites that are "gray barred" by Google)

Now, you would think this would be a pretty easy thing to stay away from, right? Wrong!

Example:

Take this case for example, Let's say I had a website and exchanged links with your website. At the time that we exchanged links, both of our websites were very quality, related websites, with a Google Page Rank of 5. This would be an ideal link trade.

Ok, now several months go by, and in the meantime, I'm doing all kinds of "black-hat SEO"

Note: Black Hat SEO is simply doing all of the things that can get you banned by the search engines. I mentioned many of these in the previous lesson.

After doing all of this Black Hat SEO, Google decides to ban my website, which gives me a "gray barred Page Rank"

and I'm no longer in Google's index of websites. I'm completely gone from Google. So what, right? I mean, you could care less since it's not your website...

Well, guess what? Your still linking to my website, which is now considered to be a "bad neighbor" and you could actually get penalized MAJORLY for linking to me, without even doing anything differently to your own website!

Think about that for a minute...

You could actually drop hundreds of search positions without even knowing what you've done wrong!

There is good news!

Ok, here's the good news. You'll remember several lessons ago I mentioned a software program called SEO Elite, my favorite SEO tool :-)

You can actually use SEO Elite to see if you are linking out to any bad neighbors! If you are, then delete their link immediately and I can almost guarantee you will see an increase in your ranking.

Let's go over how to do this:

Open up SEO Elite
Select radio button 4
Enter one of your links pages into the textbox
Select Google PR from the checkboxes and click "ok"

SEO Elite will then visit each website that you are linking to and will tell you whether or not they could be a possible "bad neighbor".

How? Well, let's have a look...

Once SEO Elite is finished processing, click over to the report view tab and look at the column labeled "Google PR"

If you notice any websites with a Google Page Rank of 0, this "could" mean they've been banned by Google. Notice I said it "could" mean this. They could either be banned OR, more likely they're just a new website and their Page Rank hasn't been updated by Google yet.

So, you'll want to write down which websites have a Page Rank of 0. Then...

You'll need to select radio button 6 within SEO Elite. This option will allow you to see if the website is still in Google's index. You'll want to enter all PR0 websites into the textbox, select the Google checkbox, and click "ok".

If Google returns 0 results for the website, that immediately tells you that they've been banned and you should remove their link immediately!

You would be amazed at the number of websites that have no idea why they aren't ranking well, when they've followed ALL of the good SEO practices I've taught. If this is you and you're still not ranking well, I would venture to say that you might be linking out to a penalized and/or banned website.

So, how do you ensure yourself, 100% that you're not linking to a "bad neighbor"? I have just the solution...

Let's sidebar for just a moment.

How many of you search Google for "link exchange forms" where you can add your link to someone's website? I know I do...

Problem ...

The problem with this is that many times those websites won't even ADD your link EVEN after you've gone through the trouble of adding their link to your website, filling out the form, and then waiting for their response.

Doing this can take hours upon hours and in many cases you come away empty handed. So... I've found a 100% FREE alternative to this.

There is a website that will actually allow you to trade links with other websites that are completely related to your website AND are actively interested in trading links.

Each member has a "rating", similar to an Ebay rating. The rating will tell you how many link exchange requests they've gotten, as well as how many of those link exchange requests they've actually exchanged links with

Simply, exchange links with the websites with high ratings and you're virtually guaranteed a response! Plus, all of the contacting of websites is done through our website, so you'll NEVER get in trouble for spam.

You'll notice the website above has had 5 link exchange requests and has honored all 5 of them. They would be a good website to exchange links with.

You could easily get 100s of reciprocal links in less than a week. Even less that a few days, to be honest.

Now, the website is brand spankin' new. It has been up for about 4 days now and already has over 550 websites you could quickly and easily exchange links with. So, I highly suggest you visit the site, sign up for FREE, and start trading links. If anything, once you sign up, you'll probably just be able to sit back and other members will contact YOU to trade links!

I've been signed up for about 2 days and have over 20 new links to my website with almost no effort on my part. The only thing I've done is add their link to my website after they add mine to theirs!

So... what's the website?

http://www.linkmetro.com

Now, back to the original question... LinkMetro only allows quality websites to join. The process is all automated, so you can immediately tell if a website is a bad neighbor. If they are, then they will be kicked out of the directory! What's this mean to you? Well, it means you'll NEVER link to a "bad neighbor"!

Here are two short demo videos that I've created to show you the simple process of exchanging links via this site:

Demo Video 1 (Request a Link Exchange)
Click here to view demo
Demo Video 2 (Approve a Link Request)
Click here to view demo

Again, I highly suggest you take advantage of this completely FREE resource while it's still free.

Google To Penalize Or Ban Your Website?

2008-04-14T02:04:00.000-07:00

It's a simple question... Are you asking Google to penalize your website?

I'm sure you're probably thinking; Well, of course not! Yet daily I see new people complaining in search engine optimization forums that their websites have been banned by Google and they "have no idea why".

These people claim they've done nothing wrong and are absolutely clueless as to why their site is no longer in Google. The purpose of this lesson is to teach you one VERY important thing.

What NOT to do when optimizing your onpage ranking factors

How do you know if you've been banned?

First let me show you how to see if you're clearly banned by Google. Often times people think they've been banned, when in reality they've just dropped in ranking and can't find their website.

There are a couple of things you can do.

Check Google's search results.
View the Google toolbar.

Check Google's search results.
Go to Google and enter your entire URL into Google's search box. In this example we'll use a made up name. (www.jkhljkhkjh.com). On a side note, I tried www.somerandomdomain.com and www.fakedomainname.com and both were already taken.

I guess some people just don't have enough time on their hands :-)

Anyway, we'll go to Google and enter our entire URL and click "search"
http://www.jkhljkhkjh.com

Notice that Google says there is no information available for this URL? This means that the URL is no longer in Google's database.

If you enter a brand new website into Google, you'll always get this message until the website has been indexed. But, in this case, our website has been banned by Google for some reason.

Another way you can quickly see if your website has been banned is by:

View the Google Toolbar.

Downloading the Google Toolbar here: http://toolbar.google.com

Once it's installed, simply visit your website. If the Google toolbar is completely gray, this means you have been banned by Google.

Banned:
* Note: Most SEOs call this "gray barred".
Not Banned:
Ok, so now we know how to tell if our website has been banned.

What can cause your website to get banned?

There are many onpage ranking factors AND offpage ranking factors that can cause Google to ban your website. Today, we'll focus on only the onpage things that can cause your site to get banned.

Before I begin, I want you to know that many websites still get away with doing some of these things. They DO NOT help your rankings and are simply a waste of time, so don't try them. Sooner or later Google will catch up to these websites and will remove them.

It's just not worth the risk, when doing them doesn't help your ranking to begin with.

Hidden Text
Hidden Text is simply text that users can't see when they visit your webpage. Some webmasters will do this so that they can add keywords throughout their webpage without it interferring with what the visitors actually see. Yet, the search engines can still see hidden text.

For example, let's say you have a white background on your website. If you wanted to hide text, you would simply make the color of your text white (#FFFFFF) and users couldn't see it.

I did a quick search in Google and quickly found an example of a website using hidden text. Have a look below:
At first glance, you're probably wondering where the hidden text is...

Let me show you. I went to the website and clicked "ctrl + a" on my keyboard. This will highlight the entire webpage as shown below:
Now we can clearly see the hidden text at the very top left side of their website that says "fat loss body fat abs weight loss diets bodybuilding dieting tips abdominals"

These are keywords that they want to rank well for and want the search engines to see when they first visit their website. Yet, they don't want their visitors to see this text. So, they've made the text white, to blend in with the background.

If you go to Google and enter "fat loss", they actually rank #1, but it's definitely NOT for this reason. They rank well because of their excellent onpage ranking factors, which I've taught you in previous lessons.

If they were to remove this hidden text, they would continue to rank #1 and would not have the potential of getting banned by Google.

Alt image tag spamming

This is another way that people will try to cram keywords into their website, allowing search engines to see their keywords, but not allowing visitors to notice any difference in their website.

The following is a website that wanted to rank well for "cabbage soup diet". What they've done is inserted a graphic of a cabbage. They've then added an alt image tag to the graphic. When a visitors visits the website, hovers their mouse over the cabbage soup graphic, a little popup will appear.
Notice how many times they've repeated the word "cabbage soup" and "cabbage"? Way too many! It serves no purpose other than to cram as many keywords as possible into their webpage.

The real purpose of an alt image tag is if a user visits your website and the graphic will not load, or is disabled by their web browser, text will appear instead of the graphic. This is often used for blind people.

Alt image spamming is something you want to stay clear of. Using alt image tags are good, but you can overdo it as you can see above. A good alt image tag in this case would simply be: cabbage soup diet graphic.

Meta Tag Stuffing

What I'm referring to here is when people throw in thousands of the same exact keyword into their meta tags.

For example, the following website is trying to rank well for "tents". META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="tents, TENTS, Tents, tents tents tent supplies, tents, tents tent, tent, Tent, TENTS, tents, Tents,tents, TENTS, Tents, tents tents tent supplies, tents, tents tent, tent, Tent, TENTS, tents, Tents,tents,TENTS, Tents, tents tents tent supplies, tents, tents tent, tent, Tent, TENTS, tents, Tents,tents, TENTS,Tents, tents tents tent supplies, tents, tents tent, tent, Tent, TENTS, tents, Tents tents, TENTS, Tents, tents tents tent supplies, tents, tents tent, tent, Tent, TENTS, tents, Tents"

This is obviously ridiculous. Google doesn't use Meta Tags when ranking websites.

Google WILL penalize it, but it WILL NOT help you... so, why would anyone do something like this?

Stay away from it.

Title Tag Stuffing
The title is what appears in the top left hand corner of your webpage. Below is an example of Title Tag Stuffing.

Don't do it... You only need to include your keyword(s) one time in your title tag.

Anymore than 1 time will only dilute the effect, and if you overdo it as shown above, you may get banned.

Those are just a few of the things that people are continuing to do online. These things WILL eventually get

your website banned and WILL NOT help you rank well. It's just a waste of time and effort, plus just plain ignorant to waste your time on something that doesn't work and will get your website banned from the search engines.

In the next lesson I'm going to show you some of the offpage optimization techniques that you should steer clear of. Many of which are things that over 50% of the websites online are currently doing and are dropping out of Google by the handful. So, stay tuned for the next lesson. You just may be doing something you shouldn't be!

How To Skyrocket Past The #1 Ranked Website On Google For The Term Diet Information

2008-04-14T01:41:00.000-07:00

Now that we've analyzed the top ranked website in our niche, we need to do the necessary things to outrank them. As I taught you earlier, it's not the onpage optimization factors that will give you the biggest change in ranking.

Remember, onpage factors include:

Page Title
Header tags
alt tags
meta tags
bolding, italicyzing, and Underlining
Placing keyword in the correct position on the page

While onpage optimization is still something you should do, it's NOT what will get you high search engine rankings. It's the offpage optimization factors that will.

Who links to you and how they do it

Copy the linking strategy of www.chasefreedom.com

Now that we know who links to www.chasefreedom.com (The #1 ranked website) and how they're doing it, we can begin to copy what they're doing.

The goal here is to contact the websites that link to www.chasefreedom.com and copy the exact linking strategy they're using to get a #1 ranking.

So, how the heck are we going to get hundreds of links pointing to our website, let alone contact all the websites that link to www.chasefreedom.com and get them to link to us?

Now, you could just visit them all manually and ...

Search for their contact information.
Open up your email program.
Write out an email to this website and send it off to them.
Then do this another 500+ times.

Or you could do this ....

Open up SEO Elite
Select Radio button 2
Select to find link partners by competitor's URL.
Enter www.chasefreedom.com into the textbox
Select Google from the search engine list
Click Ok

View the Report View Tab
You'll now need to click over to the report view tab. You'll notice that there are two frames located on this screen.

The top frame lists:

All of the websites that link to www.chasefreedom.com.
The contact information for the website.
The number of times you've emailed them. (This is good to know, because emailing the same website multiple times can upset some webmasters.)
Plus, several other important columns...

The allows you to:

Create as many email templates as you wish. This way, you only have to write the link request email once!
Creat custom links pages containing the websites you're going to send link request emails to.Note: It's always best to add their link to your website before you ask them to link to yours. You'll get a much better response this way. SEO Elite allows you to add everyone's link to your website with a single click of a button. It's all automated!
Blast out emails to thousands of websites at once!

To email more than 1 website at a time, simply click the row in the top frame and it will add the website to your email list. You can literally add thousands of websites to you email list!

From then, all you'll need to do is click "ok" and BAM!

You've just contacted 1,000+ websites at once!

Now, all you have to do is sit back and wait for them to email you back, stating that they've added your link to their website.

You have total control over who links to you and how they do it! BY contacting all of the websites that link to a top ranked website, you'll have a good chance at a good majority of those sites linking to you also. If your linking strategy is similar to the top ranked site, chances are, you'll ALSO have a top ranking!

Link Request template

Here's an example link request email that typically works pretty well:

Hello my name is John Smith. I am seeking out possible link partners that our visitors would be interesting in visiting. I've found your website to be a very good fit for our visitors. I have already gone ahead and added your link to our website at: http://www.domain.com/TheLinksPageCreatedBySEOElite.htm

I am contacting you to see if it is ok to have done so. Also, I would like to ask if you mind linking back to us? If so, please use the linking details below and send me the location of our link on your website.

Here is our linking details:
Title: (This is the keyword we want to target)
Description: Description here...
URL: http://www.domain.com

We've got several PR6 and 7 websites, so we expect this site to become atleast a PR5 within 1 month and will eventually become a 6 or 7 in 2-3 months.

I hope this can be a way for us to benefit our visitors with excellent content. Hope to hear from you soon.

parthiban
www.domain.com

If you do this several times, over the course of a month, I can guarantee you'll rank VERY well for nearly any search term, period. It works, and it works extremely well.

Analyzing The #1 Ranked Website On Google For The Term Diet Information

2008-04-14T01:24:00.000-07:00

Let's analyze the #1 ranked website on Google for the search term, 'diet information'.
I'm going to step you through 1 of the many ways you can use SEO Elite to analyze and figure out exactly why ANY website is outranking you.

I think you'll be quite surprised by all of the things SEO Elite will show you. So, let's begin...

First we need to go to Google and enter the search term 'diet information'. You'll see that the number one ranked website is www.chasefreedom.com.

Next, we need to open up SEO Elite.

Select radio button 1 - Analyze backlinks using a specific search engine.
Enter www.chasefreedom.com into the domain to analyze textbox.
Select all of the search engines by checking the checkboxes.
Click ok.

SEO Elite will then begin to process. Once it's finished, we can click over to the report view tab as shown below.

Report View
The report view will show us an enormous amount of important information we'll need to know to outrank this website.

First let's look at the Anchor Text column.
As I've already taught you, anchor text plays a very important roll in ranking well in Google.

Review: Anchor text is the actual text located within the link linking to www.chasefreedom.com.

For example, in the text: diet information is helpful. "diet information" is the anchor text.

You'll notice that www.chasefreedom.com has hundreds of backlinks that contain the words "diet information" somewhere within their anchor text above. This is a BIG plus for them.

Now, let's look at the IP Address summary frame.
Google favors websites that have many links located on different IP Addresses. You can see that chasefreedom.com has MANY links from MANY different IP Addresses (websites).

If you think about it, it makes sense that Google gives priority to websites that have links on many IP Addresses rather than many links all on the same IP Address. This helps eliminate the possibility of people controlling the search engines.

If Google didn't look at IP Addresses, I could simply create 1 website with thousands of pages and link to another 1 of my websites from all pages. I would then have thousands of links pointing to my website and a #1 ranking...

Unfortunately, Google's smarter than that and you can't do it.

Anyway, back to the IP Addresses. As we scroll over, click the "IP Address" column heading to sort the column, we'll notice that www.chasefreedom.com also has many links from different IP Addresses. That's also a BIG plus for them.

Next, we'll look at the column titled Page Rank.
If we click the Page Rank column heading, it will sort the column for us. You can immediately see that www.chasefreedom.com has several Page Rank 5 websites linking to them, along with many Page Rank 4 websites as well.

This is very good, in that it will raise www.chasefreedom.com's Page Rank and ultimately their ranking.

Analysis View

Next we'll take a look at the Analysis View tab.
If we click on the column heading titled "Anchor Text", it will sort the column in descending order. You can see that the 2 words "diet" and "information" are 2 of the words that appear the most times in www.chasefreedom.com's backlink anchor text.

391 of the total backlinks pointing to www.chasefreedom.com contain the word "diet" and 288 of the backlinks contain the word "information". Also listed is the percentage of times these words are found in the backlinks containing each of these words.

The more links you can get to point to your website, containing your main keyword in the anchor text, the higher you'll rank for those terms.

As a side note, let's go to Google real quick and enter the keyword phrase "diet reviews" because you can also see in the screenshot above, that the word "Reviews" is also found many times in their anchor text... When we go to Google and enter that search phrase, take a look who's #1. See below:
This is just another way of showing you why www.chasefreedom.com is outranking their competitors.

SEO Elite is extremely powerful, in that you can immediately see why a website is ranked #1. You can go to Google and enter other phrases you see in the top of the list, from the screenshot above, like "diet weight loss reviews", etc. Chasefreedom.com ranks #1 for that phrase as well.

Lastly, we'll click the column heading titled "Title" to sort it in descending order. You can see that the word "diet" is still the top word, at 37.4% and "information" is still towards the top at 10.1%. The "Title" column shows you the number and percentage of times that the keyword is found in the "TITLE" of the page linking to chasefreedom.com. That's also a very important factor for ranking websites, as you can clearly see from below.
These are just a few of the things that we now know about www.chasefreedom.com by using only 1 of the 6 project types within SEO Elite. VERY cool stuff!

New Software Automates The Optimization Process

2008-04-13T23:52:00.000-07:00

Breakthrough New Software Automates The Optimization Process To Get You A #1 Ranking - All With The Single Click Of A Button!"

Let's get right to it... The software I use to optimize all of my websites is called SEO Elite. Over the years I've managed to purchase every type of SEO product ever available. Things from Web Position Gold, to Traffic Power to many others.

Guess what? Nothing worked. Yeah, their flashy, corporate sales letters drew me in and I ended up dishing out well over a thousand bucks on these programs. Personally, I think they target the audience of people that are just getting started with search engine optimization and just don't know what they need to do. Whatever the case is, they got me to buy.

Anyway, several years went by and I was beginning to get extremely frustrated with myself and these companies... So, finally I decided to just create my own program. Afterall, I'd been working as a full time computer programmer. I used it privately for several years and was starting to see some awesome results, to say the least.

I watched my income gradually increase from 100 bucks a week, to an "average" pay check of $94,321 per month!

Yes, that's right. I said PER MONTH!

And this wasn't even including my regular salary. I was only doing website stuff part time!

Here are a couple of screenshots for some of the products I promote and the income they're currently making me:

This is a weight loss related product of my own that I sell from one of my many websites. This is a direct screenshot taken from within my clickbank.com account...

Yes, that's right, $2,969 in 1 week... from 1 product, on 1 website only. I haven't touched that website in nearly a year and it's still bringing in well over $10,000 a month of pure profit!

That's over $120,000 a year from only 1 product and 1 website!

Now, take a look at a more recent earnings screen shot for a different product:

Does that say $51,988 within 13 days??? It sure does :-)

If you're a super detective, you'll notice the date range in the second screenshot above isn't the same as the date range of the earnings screenshot at the very top. This is because I got tired of taking screenshots and pasting them into Photoshop to create the large screenshot above for each transaction... but rest assured, I pulled in almost $52,000 with this 1 product in 13 days. I guess if you really want to see proof of income for some strange reason, I'll probably get around to adding to this screenshot above when I have time.

Here's another sreenshot:

This is actually my Google Adsense account for another one of my websites. I just stuck up Google's Adsense code on a website and it's paying a good chunk of our house payment. :-) $793.24 earnings per month...
Here's another account where I'm an affiliate for a company and promote their products. Check out the date range. This is only for 1 week. I'm bringing in nearly $15,000 per week for this company :-)
This goes to show that you can make incredible amounts of money by spending nothing! I don't make money from these products using any pay per click listings, banner advertising, or any other type of advertising other than pure Search Engine Optimization. I don't spend a dime on advertising and neither will you!

These are earnings from just 4 sources of income online... I have MANY MANY more, but from the 4 shown above, they're...

Earning me roughly $120,000 a month if I were to have a high earnings month every month!

Below, I've put together some very good demo videos to show you some of the features within SEO Elite.

"Get Literally Hundreds Of Links Pointing To Your Website In Under 10 Minutes!"

Click Here To Watch A Demo Video!

SEO Elite will find thousands of "link submission forms" and will allow you to fill out these forms and submit your link with a single click of a button. Saving you literally hundreds of hours AND shooting you to the top of the search engines in record time!

"Quickly And Easily See Why Your Competitors Are Ranking Well... Then Copy Their Strategy To Blow By Them!"

Click Here To Watch A Demo Video!

Take the mystery out of why certain websites are ranking well in the search engines. SEO Elite will tell you in a matter of minutes, EXACTLY why any website ranks at the top by analyzing links. Then, simply copy what they're doing and blow right by them in the search engines!

"Find And Email Thousands Of Hidden, High Page Rank Link Partners Within SEO Elite!"

Click Here To Watch A Demo Video!

Never again search for contact information for a website. Never again email link exchange requests manually. SEO Elite will find thousands of possible high Page Rank link partners for you. You can then email these websites with a single click of a button! Never before has link exchanging been so easy!

"Monitor Your Rankings In All The Major Search Engines, For An Unlimited Number Of Keywords And Websites!"

Click Here To Watch A Demo Video!

As you use SEO Elite to improve your search engine rankings, you MUST have an easy way to monitor your rankings in the search engines. Rather than manually visiting each search engine to see where your website is ranked, SEO Elite will automatically check your rankings for you!

"In Seconds, Find Out If Your Link Partners Have Removed Your Link From Their Website! And Prevent Getting Penalized By The Search Engines!"
Click Here To Watch A Demo Video!

A little known technique for improving your search engine ranking is to remove those websites that you link to, yet do not link back to your website. Many times you will exchange links with another website and at some point they'll remove your link. By continuing to link to a website that is no longer linking to you, you're actually hurting your ranking!

"Monitor An Unlimited Number Of Websites To Find Which Web Pages Are Indexed In The Search Engines!"
Click Here To Watch A Demo Video!

Use SEO Elite to easily see how many pages you've gotten the search engines to index. In order to rank anywhere in the search engines, your website must first be indexed. This will allow you to see at a glance, which webpages can actually be ranked AND more importantly which ones can't, so you can make the necessary changes (which I'll teach you) in order to rank well for your main keywords!

Watch the videos above. Put into action everything I've taught you thus far, and you'll be destined for success.

Stay tuned because I'll be sending you MANY more lessons in the coming days. The things I teach are ONLY things that work, and work extremely well. I don't want to waste your time and mine with worthless junk, so pay attention to each and every lesson that you'll be receiving.

Now get out there are start doing some serious damage on those search engines!

How To Skyrocket Your Website To The Top Of Google With Properly Planned Offpage Optimization

2008-04-13T23:04:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but I get extremely excited when I see my new websites at the top of Google for the very first time. Making big changes in ranking is primarily done by what is called offpage optimization.

Earlier I mentioned there were two types of search engine optimization.

Onpage Optimization
OFFpage Optimization

We've gone over the onpage optimization, so let's move on to the offpage optimization which is what really makes a difference in your site's ranking.

Important! Properly planned offpage optimization will make the difference between your website ranking #900 on Google, to ranking #1.

So, what is offpage optimization anyway? Offpage optimization basically consists of all of the offpage ranking factors like:

Which websites link to you
The number of websites linking to you
The Google page rank of the website linking to you
The page title of the website linking to you
The anchor text used in the link linking to you
The number and type of links linking to the website that's linking to you.
The number of outbound links on the website that is linking to you
The total number of links on the website that is linking to you
Whether or not the websites linking to you are deemed by Google as an authority website.
Plus some other things that we'll get to later...

In order to optimize our original website for the keyword "weight loss stories", we need to analyze the linking strategy of the top 10 ranked websites for our keyword.

Copy The Top Ranked Websites To Get A #1 Position

The goal here will be to copy exactly what they're doing, and then do things slightly better. We want to give Google exactly what they want, by making our linking strategy as close to the top ranked websites as possible, but as I said, slightly better to edge them out. The keyword we'll use in this example will be a highly popular term. We'll use "diet pills" so I can show you just how powerful offpage optimization is, and what kind of rankings it can get you, if you do it correctly.

First, we need to open up a spreadsheet using Microsoft Excel. You should create the following columns

Linking Website
Anchor Text used
Page Rank
Link Popularity
Page Title
Number of Outbound Links

Next, we need to visit Google and enter the keyword "diet pills". We'll then visit the top 10 websites for this keyword and collect the information above. You should create 1 spreadsheet for each of the top 10 websites.

Note:
Linking Website is the specific website linking to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm, which is the #1 ranked website in Google for the term "diet pills". In order to find all of the websites that link to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm you can do a couple of things. The most common way is to go to Google and enter this search command: link:www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm.

Once you do this Google will return a large list of websites that link to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm.

Over the past several months, Google has cut down on the number of backlinks that it will show you, so you may be better off going to Yahoo and entering link:http://www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm to get a larger list of websites that link to them. Note that for Yahoo you must include "http://".

Anchor Text is the actual text used within the link linking to the specified website. For example, the anchor text in the following link would be "diet pills".

diet pills website

Page Rank is the actual Google Page Rank of the webpage linking to www.weight-loss-institute.com/ diet_pills.htm. In order to see the Google Page Rank, you'll need to download and install the Google Toolbar for free from:
http://toolbar.google.com

Link Popularity is just the number of links that are pointing to each of the webpages pointing to practicalweightloss.com. You can find their Google link popularity by entering this search command into Google: link:www.thewebsite.com then counting the total number of results that are shown OR you could go to a website like www.linkpopularity.com to find each link partners link popularity much quicker.

Page Title is the title of the page that is linking to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm. Does it contain the keyword "weight loss stories", "weight loss" or "weight"? If so, you should note which links pages those are. You'll want to approach those websites and try to get them to link to your website.

Note: Getting links from webpages that contain your main keyword in the page title is extremely powerful and is something many people often overlook.

Number of Outbound Links is the number of links located on the webpage linking to www.weight-lossinstitute.com/diet_pills.htm. The less links located on the page, the more a link from them would increase your ranking.

Once we've collected all of the information, we now can see www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm's linking strategy.

We'll need to calculate the percentage of websites that contain the keywords "diet pills", "diet", or "pills" inthe page title.

We'll need to calculate the percentage of websites that contain the keywords "diet pills", "diet", or "pills" in the actual anchor text linking to www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm.

We'll then need to mirror these numbers, as close as we can, for our linking strategy. This may take awhile to do, but once you've done this...

You'll Have The Exact Blueprint You Can Give Google For A #1 Ranking!

Once the blueprint for our linking strategy is complete, we need to contact each of these websites individually and ask them if they will add our link to their website in exchange for us adding their link to ours.

Tip: The more personalized you can make the email, the better. It is always best to include a blurb stating that you liked "X" about their website and was very impressed with "Z" etc...

Now, if all of that seemed like it would take many days to do, you're right... it would. It works, but it does take A LOT of time.

I have more good news though, there is a specific software program out there that can do ALL of this for you in a matter of minutes. It's what I use on a daily basis and it works very well.

In fact, to prove this program works very well, let me show you an email from one of the companies that I promote their products as an affiliate. Here's what they had to say:

"As an affiliate manager, I count the day I found Brad Callen as being one of the luckiest days in my career so far. I knew he was very good at optimizing for weight loss products because I kept running across his name during my searches on Google; however, I have been amazed at how quickly he is able to take over the #1 spot in Google for practically any term.

Within the past three months, Brad has become one of the leading revenue generators for several of our products. Brad has proven that, within a matter of days, he can get to the #1 position for any keywords that relate to our products. Whenever we launch a new product or offer, I make sure to get it to Brad right away because I know I'll see him at the top of the search engines within 1 or 2 weeks at the most. I have never encountered anyone else in SEO who can come close to Brad when it comes to efficient and effective optimization."

-- Sue Sharp
Sales & Marketing
1800patches.com

If you haven't figured out what program I'm talking about is, you'll need to stay tuned to tomorrow's MOST POWERFUL LESSON YET!

Not to sound cliche, but what I will share tomorrow will likely change your entire business forever - guaranteed...

The Secret To Getting Listed In Google In Under 48 Hours

2008-04-13T22:46:00.000-07:00

You may or may not have heard people claim they can get listed in Google in only 1-2 days. It seems that nearly 100% of the people you run across in forums act like in order to get indexed by Google within 48 hours is some miracle feat that can only be accomplished by doing some "top secret" marketing tactic or advanced optimization strategy.

Well, the truth of the matter is...

Getting listed in Google in under 2 days is quite easy!

First let's talk about what NOT to do. This drives me absolutely crazy when I see people doing this, and is actually what I did at one time as well. After you read this lesson, DO NOT waste your time doing this. I repeat... DO NOT waste your time doing what I'm about to tell you.

The following URL might look familiar to you:
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

This is Google's actual website submission form. They state that you can use this form to submit your website to their index of websites and it can take up to 6 weeks for your website to be placed into their index.

I don't know about you, but 6 weeks is a heck of a long time to just wait to be placed in their index rotation, let alone get a top ranking!
Never Use The Google Submission Form!

You should never use this form, or any other of the top search engine's submission forms. These search engines include Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Alltheweb.

So, how do you get your website indexed within 48 hours?

There are many methods, but for someone that has a new website and doesn't have tens of older websites already indexed by Google, there are 2 main ways I would suggest to get indexed into Google quickly. Note, when I say "Google", I'm basically referring to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Method #1
First thing's first, before I can teach you how to get indexed quickly, you need to know how search engines find websites. It's very simple.

The way that search engines find new websites is they will visit 1 website that is already in their index, then from that site, they'll follow all of the links on that site, to visit the next site. Then they'll visit that website and visit all of the links on that page and so on... This is called "crawling". Search engines will "Crawl" your website to find new information and place it into their index of search results.

In the example below, if Google were to visit this webpage, it would then "crawl" all links on this site, to find other websites like:

Ok, so let's think about this for a minute... Let's say that you have a new website (www.MyCoolWebsite. com) and you just created it. It's not indexed by any of the search engines. Meaning, the search engines don't know this website exists yet.

So, how would the search engines find out about this site? Easy... They need to find your site by following links on websites that are already in their index. Make sense?

Alright... now, once we know this, all we need to do is find websites that are already indexed by the search engines and get them to link to us. That's all fine and dandy, but it can be a little tricky getting others to link to your site, if they have no incentive to do so...

No problem, that's why we'll use this method I'm about to teach you, to get TONS of websites to link to your site quickly.

All you'll need to do is write 1 article based on the topic of your website. Because our website is called www. MyCoolWebsite.com, we'll write an article called, "10 steps to becoming the coolest guy on the block". At the bottom of our article, we'll include a link to our website (http://www.MyCoolWebsite.com)

Once we've done this, we'll visit many of the popular article directories on the web, and we'll simply submit our article to those directories. Once they've added our article AND link to their site, the search engines will visit their website, and then follow all the links on their site. 1 of those links will be a link to our site, and BAM! We're indexed by the search engines.

The more article directories that we submit to, the more links we'll get back to our website, and the more times that search engines will visit our site. The more links you get, the quicker you'll get indexed.

Sounds simple, right? Well, it is!

Here's a list of the most popular article directories you can submit your website to...

1. http://www.goarticles.com

2. http://www.ezinearticles.com/

3. http://www.articlecity.com/

4. http://www.certificate.net/wwio/

5. http://www.amazines.com/

6. http://www.articledashboard.com/

7. http://www.article-directory.net/

8. http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/

9. http://www.magportal.com/

10. http://www.isnare.com/

11. http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/

12. http://www.article-hangout.com/

13. http://www.webarticles.com/

14. http://www.articlecube.com/

15. http://articles4content.com/

16. http://www.article-buzz.com/

17. http://www.free-articles-zone.com/

18. http://www.newarticlesonline.com/

19. http://www.articletogo.com/

20. http://www.articleworld.net/

21. http://www.impactarticles.com/

22. http://www.articlealley.com/

23. http://www.directorygold.com/

24. http://dir.salon.com/

25. http://www.articlefever.com/

26. http://www.content-articles.com/

27. http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/marketing-article-directory.html

28. http://www.niche-article-directory.com/

29. http://www.jogena.com/articles/articleform.htm

30. http://news.collectors.org/

31. http://article-niche.com/

32. http://blogtelecast.com

33. http://superpublisher.com/

34. http://www.articlecentral.com

35. http://www.article-directory.net

36. http://www.article-emporium.com

37. http://www.ebooksnbytes.com

38. http://www.ideamarketers.com

39. http://www.internethomebusinessarticles.com

40. http://www.site-reference.com

41. http://www.stickysauce.com

That's really all there is to getting indexed by Google within 48 hours. Ok, now let's move on to another method of getting indexed by Google quickly.

Method #2
Let's go back to our weight loss website from the previous lesson for now. First...

Go to Google and enter the broadest keyword you can think of that's related to your website. In our example, it will be "weight loss". Once you've done this, you'll see a list of Google results.
Browse through each website and pay particluar attention to the Google Page Rank of the website.

Note: As I said in lesson 1, Google Page Rank is measured by the number of websites and the "importance" of those websites that link to your website. In general, the more websites that link to your website, the higher your Page Rank will be.

So, as you're looking at these top ranked websites for the search term "weight loss", you should try to find websites with a Page Rank of 6 or higher.
Once you've found several websites like this, you should search their website for their contact information.
Once you find their contact information you should send them an email asking if they will link to your website in return for you linking back to their website. If you do this correctly and professionally, they will respond and will place a link on their website to yours.

Note: Obviously, in order to persuade someone to add your link to their website, you must give them a good reason to do this. So, always contact sites that are highly related to yours AND always think of a way that you can offer them something their visitors would benefit from if they add your link.

If you can manage to get 1 PR6 website to link to your website, you should be indexed by Google in under 3 days. If you can get 1 PR7 website to link to you, then, in most cases, you will be in Google's index in under 24 hours!

Sometimes persuading the higher page rank websites is pretty tough, so there's another option you can pursue and that is ...

Purchasing Text Links - But For Only 1 Month

Purchasing links from high Page Rank websites. The easiest and fastest way to do this is to visit 1 of the many link purchasing websites. Here are a few of the better ones:

1. http://www.textlinkbrokers.com
2. http:///www.text-link-ads.com
3. http://www.linkadage.com

Many times you can purchase 1 PR7 link for a 1 month time period for, say, $150. After the month is up, there is no need to renew because you are already in Google's index! So, basically by paying $150 you can be indexed by Google within 24 hours, with no work on your part.

So, there you have it. 2 SIMPLE ways to get indexed by Google extremely fast. Now, when someone mentions in a forum, bragging about how they've gotten indexed by Google in under 48 hours... you can laugh to yourself and know that it's really not rocket science :-)

That wraps up this lesson. Look for my email tomorrow, containing the next lesson titled:

"How To Skyrocket Your Website To The Top Of Google With Properly Planned Offpage Optimization!"

How Changing One Single Onpage Optimization Factor

2008-04-12T04:21:00.000-07:00

Ok, so now we've selected our main 3 keywords:

weight loss story
weight loss picture
safe weight loss

Notice that all of the keywords contain the word "weight loss". This will make things easier for us when we begin to optimize our offpage ranking factors which you'll learn about later.

Let's Optimize Our Webpage ...

The first thing we need to do is select a page Title for our website.

Add a Title
The page title should:
Include ONLY our main keywords. The least amount of words you can place in the title, the more weight Google will give to each of the keywords and the higher you will rank.

Note: When I say "Google", I'm really referring to all the major engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN). But I am saying Google because this is the search engine you should really focus on optimizing for because Google gets roughly 50% of all the searches on the web. Yahoo receives about 30% and MSN about 20%.

When creating your page title, it should not look like this:

Welcome to our website!
Welcome to our website!This is the html code used to create this title:

It should not even look like this, which does contain our main keywords, but contains an unnecessary number of words:

weight loss story and weight loss picture and safe weight loss
weight loss story and weight loss picture and safe weight lossThis is the html code used to create this title:

Although that title isn't horrible and does contain all of your main keywords, you should do a couple of things to cut down on words used.

This would be a perfect title for your webpage:

Weight Loss Story | Safe Weight Loss Picture
Weight Loss Story | Safe Weight Loss PictureThis is the html code used to create this title:

Notice that I've:

Taken out all of the "ands"
Replaced one of the "ands" with a "|" character (Note: You can add this character by holding the shift key on your keyboard and pressing the backslash key above the enter key.)
Combined the keywords "Safe Weight Loss" with "Weight Loss Picture"

Always Combine Your Keyword When Possible to cut down on the total number of words that are in your title!

Always Combine Your Keywords In The Page Title!

When Google looks at our title, it will see all 3 of our keywords only. Combining keywords to cut down on the total number of keywords displayed in the title is a great way to boost the strength of each individual keyword, which will have an immediate impact on your ranking.

Add h1 header tags

Next we'll need to add 1 h1 header tag and place our most important keyword there.

The h1 header tag should be as far towards the top of the page as possible. When Google reads awebpage, it views the text from the top left hand side of the page to the bottom right hand side of the page.

Note: Here's a neat free tool which allows you to visually see how the search engines view your
webpage: http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml

So, it's best to place your h1 header tag on the top left hand or top/middle portion of your page. You can think of an h1 header tag as a title for whatever content you have on your page.

For example, the h1 header tag of this lesson would be:

"How changing 1 onpage optimization factor can boost your rankings by over 350 positions!"

... and the html code would look like this:
h1 How changing 1 onpage optimization factor can boost your rankings by over 350 positions!"h1

Of course, I would have changed my lesson title to contain my main keyword if I was actually trying to optimize this page for Google. Also, if possible, it's ideal if you can include ONLY your main keyword within the h1 header tags. h1 "Weight Loss Story" h1 would be perfect.

Add h2 header tags
Next, we'll need to create an h2 header tag. This can be thought of as a sub heading for our webpage. You should place your 2nd most important keyword in the h2 header tag. The h2 tag should be placed somewhere towards the top half of your webpage.

A good h2 header tag for our example would be:

After we've done this, we need to actually create the content for our webpage. When writing the content, try to evenly sprinkle your main keywords throughout the copy. Don't overdo it though.

Try to mention each keyword in a natural way as you are writing, but be sure to include at least one of the keywords per 1-2 paragraphs, depending on how large your page is.

Tip: Make sure to mention your main keyword at the very top left and the very bottom right hand side of the webpage. A trick I like to use is to include this in the copyright information line at the bottom of the website. For our example, this would be a good example:

Notice that it flows and doesn't really look too strange.

Bolding, italicizing and underlining ...
Once we've finished writing the copy, we should go through and bold, underline, or italicize some of the keywords only 1 time each, maximum. Only do 1 per keyword or it will hurt you more than it helps. This isn't crucial to do, but it's good to maybe do this to a couple keywords...

Properly include alt image tags ...
Next, click on the very top image of your webpage (This is usually your website's header graphic) and include an image tag using the text "weight loss story header" if you're adding this alt text to your website header graphic. Click on 2 more graphics throughout your webpage and enter your other 2 keywords, plus an extra word like "graphic" or "image"... For example, we would use "weight loss picture graphic" and "safe weight loss image". This ensures that Google won't view this as spam.

For example, if we have an image on our webpage called: picture1.jpg
The code that would be used to insert the image would look something like this:

Now, if we were to add an alt image tag called "Weight Loss Story Graphic", we'd simply do this:

Force Google To Read Your Keywords First!

Now, remember I stated above that Google views your webpage from top left, to bottom right? Well, in general they do. But because most websites contain a left hand column which contains all of their navigation links...

Google WILL View all of the text in the left hand column Before The Body of the webpage

To show you what I mean, look at the image below to see the order of information that Google will view this webpage. because of the way the person has created the tables containing their content. I've added red lines so you can visually see the way the site was designed, has they not made the table borders invisible.

How can you get around this? I've come up with a neat little trick that will ensure that Google reads the actual body of your webpage before the left hand column containing your navigational links.

Here is what you need to do:
Rather than creating a table that looks like this:

Navigational links | You body text...

You should create a table that looks like this:
See how I've changed the website above, so that Google now sees our content BEFORE our navigation menu:

By doing this, Google will read the top left hand row/column first... BUT will see that it is empty or only contains a couple words in this case, so it will then read the body of your webpage and then read the 2nd left hand row/column which contains your navigational links! :-)

That's all there is to it!

In summary, I really want to point out the fact that, although good onpage optimization is something you'll really want to do, it is NOT how you make dramatic changes in your search engine ranking!

Important! Let me repeat that again, onpage optimization... which is what I've taught you thus far, will make small changes in your ranking, but WILL NOT help your site make dramatic jumps in ranking.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions in the search engine world. Many believe that by getting your keyword density just right, or by moving your keywords around on the page in just the right places, you'll really move up in the search engines.

That is not the case at all. It is the offpage optimization factors that will get you high rankings. I will teach you exactly what offpage optimization factors are, AND how to make sure you optimize these factors perfectly for Google!

Stay tuned for tomorrow's lesson. You're going to love what I have to teach you... It's titled:

"The Secret To Getting Listed In Google In Under 24 Hours!"

Optimize The Wrong Keywords

2008-04-12T02:58:00.000-07:00

Note: Before you begin, if you're NOT 100% serious about getting your website to the top of
Google, Yahoo, and MSN, don't read another word. Only read on if you plan to put everything I will be teaching you into action. It's best to download the PDF version from above so you can print each lesson off on your printer, highlight areas and take notes as you learn the exact steps needed for a top search engine ranking.

If you're anything like I was when I first began online, you've probably created a brand new website. Then submitted it to a few search engines and hoped that people would mysteriously show up at your site and buy whatever it is you were selling.

After a couple of weeks go by and only a few stray people show up at your website, you decide to try and "optimize" your website around your main keyword in hopes that you just might rank well in 1 of the millions of search engines. Another couple of weeks go by and still no luck.

At this point you probably give up and decide to either build another website around a different target market or just lose all hope and quit. Well, news flash, as you've probably figured out by now, this is not the way to go about doing things.

Let me give you a specific example of what your very first steps MUST be when creating any website... no matter what the subject matter.

In our example, let's create a weight loss related website. Before we start creating and collecting content for the website, we need to do a little keyword research. This is VERY important and should not be skipped. To do our keyword research we need to visit a few websites.

The first of which should be http://www.goodkeywords.com/.

They have a very good keyword tool, and best of all it's free! Once we've downloaded this software, we can enter the most generic keyword for our website into the software. In our example, our keyword would be "weight loss".

You'll notice that in the screenshot below, Good Keywords will return a list of related terms. The "count" column will then show us how many times the specific keyword has been searched for the previous month within the Overture.com search engine. Generally, you can multiply that number by 8, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month.

You'll notice that weight loss was searched 817,038 times during the previous month.

Do NOT start off by optimizing for the keyword "weight loss"

Why, you ask? If a keyword is searched that many times in Overture, then 100 times out of 100, the competition you will have to outrank will be extremely fierce. This is not something you should try to take on right away. For a brand new website, or one you're just beginning to optimize, it's better to select more specific keyword phrases. I'll talk about this a bit later.

Let's take a quick peek at Google so I can show you exactly how many websites are competeting for this keyword.

If you were to optimize your website for this keyword, you'd be competing against over 66 million other websites(web pages)! I don't know about you, but that's an aweful lofty goal to start with.

By the end of this course, you will be able to eventually target HUGE keywords such as "weight loss", but it's always best to start off on the keywords with less competition. Get some traffic with those keywords, and THEN you can focus on the larger keywords.

Ok, so back to finding which keywords we want to target.

If we scroll down, we can find some more specific keyword phrases like "weight loss story", "weight loss picture", "free weight loss plan", and "safe weight loss".

These could be possible keywords we should target to begin with. Once we have our list of 3 to 4 keywords, we need to go to Google and check out the competition to see exactly how hard it will be to optimize for the specified keyword.

We'll begin with the keyword "weight loss story"

You'll notice that the #1 ranked website for "weight loss story" is: (Side note: rankings can change in the search engines, so if this site is no longer ranked #1 when you view this yourself, chances are their competition simply has optimized their site better, and passed them up.)
http://www.runwalkjog.com/weight_loss_success_story.htm which is not a top level webpage, meaning it'snot simply http://www.runwalkjog.com/

This is good news for us because, typically, if a website's subpage is ranking well in Google, we have an immediate advantage if we choose to target the same keyword with our homepage (i.e. www.domain.com). For now, just take my word on this, as I will go into more detail why it's usually easier to rank well for your homepage than any other webpage on your website.

You'll also notice that the website has a Google Page Rank of 5.

Note: Here's a quick definition of Page Rank. Page Rank is Google's way of giving a specific value to how popular your website is. It is based on the number of "votes" other websites cast for your website. A "vote" is simply when another website places a link on their website that is pointing to your website. Generally, the more "votes" or links you have pointing to your website, the higher your Page Rank (PR) will be. Page Rank is 1 of the many factors that Google takes into account when ranking websites.
In order to see your own Google Page Rank, as well as others, you must have the Google Toolbar
installed on your computer. You can get that for free here: http://toolbar.google.com/

Seeing that the #1 ranked website for this keyword only has a Page Rank of 5 is also good news for us, because a Page Rank of 5 should be reasonable to obtain. Remember, the ONLY way to increase our website's Page Rank is by getting other websites to link to us. Later, I'll teach you the right way to get thousands of links pointing to your website in a matter of a few days... and I'll go into more detail about Page Rank.

View The Source Code

Next we need to view the source code of this website by clicking "view", then "source" within our web browser as shown below:

Note: Source code is simply the code that was used to create the webpage. You don't need to know html, which is the prgamming language used to create most websites, so don't worry. You just need to know a few things to look for when viewing the source code.

This will open up a text file for us to have a look at and see if this website is actually optimizing their "Onpage Optimization factors".

Note: There are 2 types of optimization, onpage and offpage optimization. We'll cover offpage optimization in the following lessons.

As we view the source file from this website, we need to look for a few things.

l Whether or not they are using header tags and are placing the keyword "weight loss story" within those tags. In this case, they are not... AND they aren't even using header tags at all! Another great thing for us!
tags</span> of the website. In this case, they are, which is one of the main reasons they're currently ranked highly for "weight loss stories". There title is "Weight Loss story stories" and the html code they used is: <title>Weight Loss story stories tags of the website. In this case,they are, which is one of the main reasons they're currently ranked highly for "weight loss stories". There title is "Weight Loss story stories" and the html code they used is:<br /><title>Weight Loss story storiesWhether or not they are using their main keyword in the
Whether or not they've bolded, underlined, or italicized the words "weight loss story"
anywhere in the body of the webpage. In this case, yes... they have. They've actually bolded the keyword "weight loss stories" 4 different times throughout the webpage. At first glance, it looks as though this is another one of the major reasons they've managed to grab the top spot for this keyword. Bolding is something we can do right away, so now we know that we should also bold some of the keywords throughout our copy. Notice I said they've bolded "weight loss stories" 4 times, rather than "weight loss story" (singular). You should always look for both the plural and singular form of the keyword, as the search engines view them as "almost" the same word.
Whether or not they are using image tags and placing the keyword "weight loss stories" within that tag. In this case, that answer is easy because they're not even using any images at all! This is definitely something we can do when optimizing our website. And another thing we can do to "one-up" this #1 ranked website. It is best to add images that are actually named after our main keyword. For example, we could insert an image and call it weight-loss-stories-graphic1.jpg and so on.
The final thing we want to note is whether or not they've placed the keyword once at the very beginning of the copy, and once at the very end of the copy. In this case they have placed it near the beginning and also at the end. Not to worry, we can do this as well.

We should now know how to out optimize this #1 ranked website

Atleast for all the onpage optimization factors that Google deems as important. The reason we know we can out optimize them is because of the following things we've found out by analyzing their website:

The website is not using the keyword "weight loss stories" in an Header Tags
The website did not use image tags containing the keyword "weight loss stories".
The website has a Page Rank of 5, which can be beaten. We can easily achieve a Page Rank of 5 or better. I'll show you the exact steps for this in the coming lessons.
The website is ranked with their subpage (weight_loss_success_story.htm). By optimizing our index page for this keyword, we can one up them.

Notes - Remember, the main idea behind ranking well on Google is to analyze the top ranked websites and then do those things that they're doing, BUT just a little better to one up them, which will lead to a better ranking.

We'll continue to go through the same process for the other 2 keywords we've found. It is best to analyze the top 5 ranking websites for each keyword. If the top 5 websites for a specific keyword have a Google Page Rank of 6 or higher, it's probably not best to shoot for that keyword until we build some momentum and get some initial traffic from the easier ranking keywords with less competition.

Earlier I mentioned that keyword research was very important in building traffic. Some other very good resources for building keywords and finding niche phrases include the following:

http://www.keywordelite.com (This is being developed as we speak)
http://www.wordtracker.com
http://inventory.overture.com (This is the same as goodkeywords.com but is web-based)
http://www.adwordanalyzer.com/

Ok, now that I've taught you these main principles, I want to make your life a heck of a lot easier...

I've created a free software program that will do all of this for you, automatically! No need to know any html code OR use that goodkeywords.com software. All you have to do is enter a keyword and the software will do all of this for you... It's VERY simple and powerful.

To get your copy of this software, all I ask is 1 small thing... and no it's not to give me money. I promise :-)

Click here to watch a video demo of the software!

There will be many more bonuses where that one came from, so be on the lookout for much more to come.
That wraps up lesson 1 - Targeting the right keywords. Hold on to your hats because tomorrow's lesson is a doozy! You'll be receiving Lesson #2 tomorrow.

Lesson #2 is titled:

How changing 1 onpage optimization factor can boost your rankings by over 350 positions!

SEO TOOLS

2008-04-12T02:23:00.000-07:00

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Google Data Centers

SEO Basic Tutorial

2008-04-12T02:11:00.000-07:00

Introduction to seo

This document is intended for webmasters and site owners who want to investigate the issues of seo (search engine optimization) and promotion of their resources. It is mainly aimed at beginners, although I hope that experienced webmasters will also find something new and interesting here. There are many articles on seo on the Internet and this text is an attempt to gather some of this information into a single consistent document.

Information presented in this text can be divided into several parts:
- Clear-cut seo recommendations, practical guidelines.
- Theoretical information that we think any seo specialist should know.
- Seo tips, observations, recommendations from experience, other seo sources, etc.

1. General seo information

1.1 History of search engines
In the early days of Internet development, its users were a privileged minority and the amount of available information was relatively small. Access was mainly restricted to employees of various universities and laboratories who used it to access scientific information. In those days, the problem of finding information on the Internet was not nearly as critical as it is now.

Site directories were one of the first methods used to facilitate access to information resources on the network. Links to these resources were grouped by topic. Yahoo was the first project of this kind opened in April 1994. As the number of sites in the Yahoo directory inexorably increased, the developers of Yahoo made the directory searchable. Of course, it was not a search engine in its true form because searching was limited to those resources who’s listings were put into the directory. It did not actively seek out resources and the concept of seo was yet to arrive.

Such link directories have been used extensively in the past, but nowadays they have lost much of their popularity. The reason is simple – even modern directories with lots of resources only provide information on a tiny fraction of the Internet. For example, the largest directory on the network is currently DMOZ (or Open Directory Project). It contains information on about five million resources. Compare this with the Google search engine database containing more than eight billion documents.

The WebCrawler project started in 1994 and was the first full-featured search engine. The Lycos and AltaVista search engines appeared in 1995 and for many years Alta Vista was the major player in this field.

In 1997 Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google as a research project at Stanford University. Google is now the most popular search engine in the world.

Currently, there are three leading international search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. They each have their own databases and search algorithms. Many other search engines use results originating from these three major search engines and the same seo expertise can be applied to all of them. For example, the AOL search engine (search.aol.com) uses the Google database while AltaVista, Lycos and AllTheWeb all use the Yahoo database.

1.2 Common search engine principles
To understand seo you need to be aware of the architecture of search engines. They all contain the following main components:

Spider - a browser-like program that downloads web pages.

Crawler – a program that automatically follows all of the links on each web page.

Indexer - a program that analyzes web pages downloaded by the spider and the crawler.

Database– storage for downloaded and processed pages.

Results engine – extracts search results from the database.

Web server – a server that is responsible for interaction between the user and other search engine components.

Specific implementations of search mechanisms may differ. For example, the Spider+Crawler+Indexer component group might be implemented as a single program that downloads web pages, analyzes them and then uses their links to find new resources. However, the components listed are inherent to all search engines and the seo principles are the same.

Spider. This program downloads web pages just like a web browser. The difference is that a browser displays the information presented on each page (text, graphics, etc.) while a spider does not have any visual components and works directly with the underlying HTML code of the page. You may already know that there is an option in standard web browsers to view source HTML code.

Crawler. This program finds all links on each page. Its task is to determine where the spider should go either by evaluating the links or according to a predefined list of addresses. The crawler follows these links and tries to find documents not already known to the search engine.

Indexer. This component parses each page and analyzes the various elements, such as text, headers, structural or stylistic features, special HTML tags, etc.

Database. This is the storage area for the data that the search engine downloads and analyzes. Sometimes it is called the index of the search engine.

Results Engine. The results engine ranks pages. It determines which pages best match a user's query and in what order the pages should be listed. This is done according to the ranking algorithms of the search engine. It follows that page rank is a valuable and interesting property and any seo specialist is most interested in it when trying to improve his site search results. In this article, we will discuss the seo factors that influence page rank in some detail.

Web server. The search engine web server usually contains a HTML page with an input field where the user can specify the search query he or she is interested in. The web server is also responsible for displaying search results to the user in the form of an HTML page.

2. Internal ranking factors

Several factors influence the position of a site in the search results. They can be divided into external and internal ranking factors. Internal ranking factors are those that are controlled by seo aware website owners (text, layout, etc.) and will be described next.

2.1 Web page layout factors relevant to seo
2.1.1 Amount of text on a page
A page consisting of just a few sentences is less likely to get to the top of a search engine list. Search engines favor sites that have a high information content. Generally, you should try to increase the text content of your site in the interest of seo. The optimum page size is 500-3000 words (or 2000 to 20,000 characters).

Search engine visibility is increased as the amount of page text increases due to the increased likelihood of occasional and accidental search queries causing it to be listed. This factor sometimes results in a large number of visitors.

2.1.2 Number of keywords on a page
Keywords must be used at least three to four times in the page text. The upper limit depends on the overall page size – the larger the page, the more keyword repetitions can be made. Keyword phrases (word combinations consisting of several keywords) are worth a separate mention. The best seo results are observed when a keyword phrase is used several times in the text with all keywords in the phrase arranged in exactly the same order. In addition, all of the words from the phrase should be used separately several times in the remaining text. There should also be some difference (dispersion) in the number of entries for each of these repeated words.

Let us take an example. Suppose we optimize a page for the phrase "seo software” (one of our seo keywords for this site) It would be good to use the phrase “seo software” in the text 10 times, the word “seo” 7 times elsewhere in the text and the word “software” 5 times. The numbers here are for illustration only, but they show the general seo idea quite well.

2.1.3 Keyword density and seo
Keyword page density is a measure of the relative frequency of the word in the text expressed as a percentage. For example, if a specific word is used 5 times on a page containing 100 words, the keyword density is 5%. If the density of a keyword is too low, the search engine will not pay much attention to it. If the density is too high, the search engine may activate its spam filter. If this happens, the page will be penalized and its position in search listings will be deliberately lowered.

The optimum value for keyword density is 5-7%. In the case of keyword phrases, you should calculate the total density of each of the individual keywords comprising the phrases to make sure it is within the specified limits. In practice, a keyword density of more than 7-8% does not seem to have any negative seo consequences. However, it is not necessary and can reduce the legibility of the content from a user’s viewpoint.

2.1.4 Location of keywords on a page
A very short rule for seo experts – the closer a keyword or keyword phrase is to the beginning of a document, the more significant it becomes for the search engine.

2.1.5 Text format and seo
Search engines pay special attention to page text that is highlighted or given special formatting. We recommend:

- use keywords in headings. Headings are text highlighted with the «H» HTML tags. The «h1» and «h2» tags are most effective. Currently, the use of CSS allows you to redefine the appearance of text highlighted with these tags. This means that «H» tags are used less than nowadays, but are still very important in seo work.;
- Highlight keywords with bold fonts. Do not highlight the entire text! Just highlight each keyword two or three times on the page. Use the «strong» tag for highlighting instead of the more traditional «B» bold tag.

2.1.6 «TITLE» tag
This is one of the most important tags for search engines. Make use of this fact in your seo work. Keywords must be used in the TITLE tag. The link to your site that is normally displayed in search results will contain text derived from the TITLE tag. It functions as a sort of virtual business card for your pages. Often, the TITLE tag text is the first information about your website that the user sees. This is why it should not only contain keywords, but also be informative and attractive. You want the searcher to be tempted to click on your listed link and navigate to your website. As a rule, 50-80 characters from the TITLE tag are displayed in search results and so you should limit the size of the title to this length.

2.1.7 Keywords in links
A simple seo rule – use keywords in the text of page links that refer to other pages on your site and to any external Internet resources. Keywords in such links can slightly enhance page rank.

2.1.8 «ALT» attributes in images
Any page image has a special optional attribute known as "alternative text.” It is specified using the HTML «ALT» tag. This text will be displayed if the browser fails to download the image or if the browser image display is disabled. Search engines save the value of image ALT attributes when they parse (index) pages, but do not use it to rank search results.

Currently, the Google search engine takes into account text in the ALT attributes of those images that are links to other pages. The ALT attributes of other images are ignored. There is no information regarding other search engines, but we can assume that the situation is similar. We consider that keywords can and should be used in ALT attributes, but this practice is not vital for seo purposes.

2.1.9 Description Meta tag
This is used to specify page descriptions. It does not influence the seo ranking process but it is very important. A lot of search engines (including the largest one – Google) display information from this tag in their search results if this tag is present on a page and if its content matches the content of the page and the search query.

Experience has shown that a high position in search results does not always guarantee large numbers of visitors. For example, if your competitors' search result description is more attractive than the one for your site then search engine users may choose their resource instead of yours. That is why it is important that your Description Meta tag text be brief, but informative and attractive. It must also contain keywords appropriate to the page.

2.1.10 Keywords Meta tag
This Meta tag was initially used to specify keywords for pages but it is hardly ever used by search engines now. It is often ignored in seo projects. However, it would be advisable to specify this tag just in case there is a revival in its use. The following rule must be observed for this tag: only keywords actually used in the page text must be added to it.

2.2 Site structure
2.2.1 Number of pages
The general seo rule is: the more, the better. Increasing the number of pages on your website increases the visibility of the site to search engines. Also, if new information is being constantly added to the site, search engines consider this as development and expansion of the site. This may give additional advantages in ranking. You should periodically publish more information on your site – news, press releases, articles, useful tips, etc.

2.2.2 Navigation menu
As a rule, any site has a navigation menu. Use keywords in menu links, it will give additional seo significance to the pages to which the links refer.

2.2.3 Keywords in page names
Some seo experts consider that using keywords in the name of a HTML page file may have a positive effect on its search result position.

2.2.4 Avoid subdirectories
If there are not too many pages on your site (up to a couple of dozen), it is best to place them all in the root directory of your site. Search engines consider such pages to be more important than ones in subdirectories.

2.2.5 One page – one keyword phrase
For maximum seo try to optimize each page for its own keyword phrase. Sometimes you can choose two or three related phrases, but you should certainly not try to optimize a page for 5-10 phrases at once. Such phrases would probably produce no effect on page rank.

2.2.6 Seo and the Main page
Optimize the main page of your site (domain name, index.html) for word combinations that are most important. This page is most likely to get to the top of search engine lists. My seo observations suggest that the main page may account for up to 30-40% percent of the total search traffic for some sites

2.3 Common seo mistakes
2.3.1 Graphic header
Very often sites are designed with a graphic header. Often, we see an image of the company logo occupying the full-page width. Do not do it! The upper part of a page is a very valuable place where you should insert your most important keywords for best seo. In case of a graphic image, that prime position is wasted since search engines can not make use of images. Sometimes you may come across completely absurd situations: the header contains text information, but to make its appearance more attractive, it is created in the form of an image. The text in it cannot be indexed by search engines and so it will not contribute toward the page rank. If you must present a logo, the best way is to use a hybrid approach – place the graphic logo at the top of each page and size it so that it does not occupy its entire width. Use a text header to make up the rest of the width.

2.3.2 Graphic navigation menu
The situation is similar to the previous one – internal links on your site should contain keywords, which will give an additional advantage in seo ranking. If your navigation menu consists of graphic elements to make it more attractive, search engines will not be able to index the text of its links. If it is not possible to avoid using a graphic menu, at least remember to specify correct ALT attributes for all images.

2.3.3 Script navigation
Sometimes scripts are used for site navigation. As an seo worker, you should understand that search engines cannot read or execute scripts. Thus, a link specified with the help of a script will not be available to the search engine, the search robot will not follow it and so parts of your site will not be indexed. If you use site navigation scripts then you must provide regular HTML duplicates to make them visible to everyone – your human visitors and the search robots.

2.3.4 Session identifier
Some sites use session identifiers. This means that each visitor gets a unique parameter (&session_id=) when he or she arrives at the site. This ID is added to the address of each page visited on the site. Session IDs help site owners to collect useful statistics, including information about visitors' behavior. However, from the point of view of a search robot, a page with a new address is a brand new page. This means that, each time the search robot comes to such a site, it will get a new session identifier and will consider the pages as new ones whenever it visits them.

Search engines do have algorithms for consolidating mirrors and pages with the same content. Sites with session IDs should, therefore, be recognized and indexed correctly. However, it is difficult to index such sites and sometimes they may be indexed incorrectly, which has an adverse effect on seo page ranking. If you are interested in seo for your site, I recommend that you avoid session identifiers if possible.

2.3.5 Redirects
Redirects make site analysis more difficult for search robots, with resulting adverse effects on seo. Do not use redirects unless there is a clear reason for doing so.

2.3.6 Hidden text, a deceptive seo method
The last two issues are not really mistakes but deliberate attempts to deceive search engines using illicit seo methods. Hidden text (when the text color coincides with the background color, for example) allows site owners to cram a page with their desired keywords without affecting page logic or visual layout. Such text is invisible to human visitors but will be seen by search robots. The use of such deceptive optimization methods may result in banning of the site. It could be excluded from the index (database) of the search engine.

2.3.7 One-pixel links, seo deception
This is another deceptive seo technique. Search engines consider the use of tiny, almost invisible, graphic image links just one pixel wide and high as an attempt at deception, which may lead to a site ban.

3 External ranking factors

3.1 Why inbound links to sites are taken into account
As you can see from the previous section, many factors influencing the ranking process are under the control of webmasters. If these were the only factors then it would be impossible for search engines to distinguish between a genuine high-quality document and a page created specifically to achieve high search ranking but containing no useful information. For this reason, an analysis of inbound links to the page being evaluated is one of the key factors in page ranking. This is the only factor that is not controlled by the site owner.

It makes sense to assume that interesting sites will have more inbound links. This is because owners of other sites on the Internet will tend to have published links to a site if they think it is a worthwhile resource. The search engine will use this inbound link criterion in its evaluation of document significance.

Therefore, two main factors influence how pages are stored by the search engine and sorted for display in search results:

- Relevance, as described in the previous section on internal ranking factors.

- Number and quality of inbound links, also known as link citation, link popularity or citation index. This will be described in the next section.

3.2 Link importance (citation index, link popularity)
You can easily see that simply counting the number of inbound links does not give us enough information to evaluate a site. It is obvious that a link from www.microsoft.com should mean much more than a link from some homepage like www.hostingcompany.com/~myhomepage.html. You have to take into account link importance as well as number of links.

Search engines use the notion of citation index to evaluate the number and quality of inbound links to a site. Citation index is a numeric estimate of the popularity of a resource expressed as an absolute value representing page importance. Each search engine uses its own algorithms to estimate a page citation index. As a rule, these values are not published.

As well as the absolute citation index value, a scaled citation index is sometimes used. This relative value indicates the popularity of a page relative to the popularity of other pages on the Internet. You will find a detailed description of citation indexes and the algorithms used for their estimation in the next sections.

3.3 Link text (anchor text)
The link text of any inbound site link is vitally important in search result ranking. The anchor (or link) text is the text between the HTML tags «A» and «/A» and is displayed as the text that you click in a browser to go to a new page. If the link text contains appropriate keywords, the search engine regards it as an additional and highly significant recommendation that the site actually contains valuable information relevant to the search query.

3.4 Relevance of referring pages
As well as link text, search engines also take into account the overall information content of each referring page.

Example: Suppose we are using seo to promote a car sales resource. In this case a link from a site about car repairs will have much more importance that a similar link from a site about gardening. The first link is published on a resource having a similar topic so it will be more important for search engines.

3.5 Google PageRank – theoretical basics
The Google company was the first company to patent the system of taking into account inbound links. The algorithm was named PageRank. In this section, we will describe this algorithm and how it can influence search result ranking.

PageRank is estimated separately for each web page and is determined by the PageRank (citation) of other pages referring to it. It is a kind of “virtuous circle.” The main task is to find the criterion that determines page importance. In the case of PageRank, it is the possible frequency of visits to a page.

I shall now describe how user’s behavior when following links to surf the network is modeled. It is assumed that the user starts viewing sites from some random page. Then he or she follows links to other web resources. There is always a possibility that the user may leave a site without following any outbound link and start viewing documents from a random page. The PageRank algorithm estimates the probability of this event as 0.15 at each step. The probability that our user continues surfing by following one of the links available on the current page is therefore 0.85, assuming that all links are equal in this case. If he or she continues surfing indefinitely, popular pages will be visited many more times than the less popular pages.

The PageRank of a specified web page is thus defined as the probability that a user may visit the web page. It follows that, the sum of probabilities for all existing web pages is exactly one because the user is assumed to be visiting at least one Internet page at any given moment.

Since it is not always convenient to work with these probabilities the PageRank can be mathematically transformed into a more easily understood number for viewing. For instance, we are used to seeing a PageRank number between zero and ten on the Google Toolbar.

According to the ranking model described above:
- Each page on the Net (even if there are no inbound links to it) initially has a PageRank greater than zero, although it will be very small. There is a tiny chance that a user may accidentally navigate to it.
- Each page that has outbound links distributes part of its PageRank to the referenced page. The PageRank contributed to these linked-to pages is inversely proportional to the total number of links on the linked-from page – the more links it has, the lower the PageRank allocated to each linked-to page.
- PageRank A “damping factor” is applied to this process so that the total distributed page rank is reduced by 15%. This is equivalent to the probability, described above, that the user will not visit any of the linked-to pages but will navigate to an unrelated website.

Let us now see how this PageRank process might influence the process of ranking search results. We say “might” because the pure PageRank algorithm just described has not been used in the Google algorithm for quite a while now. We will discuss a more current and sophisticated version shortly. There is nothing difficult about the PageRank influence – after the search engine finds a number of relevant documents (using internal text criteria), they can be sorted according to the PageRank since it would be logical to suppose that a document having a larger number of high-quality inbound links contains the most valuable information.

Thus, the PageRank algorithm "pushes up" those documents that are most popular outside the search engine as well.

3.6 Google PageRank – practical use
Currently, PageRank is not used directly in the Google algorithm. This is to be expected since pure PageRank characterizes only the number and the quality of inbound links to a site, but it completely ignores the text of links and the information content of referring pages. These factors are important in page ranking and they are taken into account in later versions of the algorithm. It is thought that the current Google ranking algorithm ranks pages according to thematic PageRank. In other words, it emphasizes the importance of links from pages with content related by similar topics or themes. The exact details of this algorithm are known only to Google developers.

You can determine the PageRank value for any web page with the help of the Google ToolBar that shows a PageRank value within the range from 0 to 10. It should be noted that the Google ToolBar does not show the exact PageRank probability value, but the PageRank range a particular site is in. Each range (from 0 to 10) is defined according to a logarithmic scale.

Here is an example: each page has a real PageRank value known only to Google. To derive a displayed PageRank range for their ToolBar, they use a logarithmic scale as shown in this table
Real PR ToolBar PR
1-10 1
10-100 2
100-1000 3
1000-10.000 4
Etc.

This shows that the PageRank ranges displayed on the Google ToolBar are not all equal. It is easy, for example, to increase PageRank from one to two, while it is much more difficult to increase it from six to seven.

In practice, PageRank is mainly used for two purposes:

1. Quick check of the sites popularity. PageRank does not give exact information about referring pages, but it allows you to quickly and easily get a feel for the sites popularity level and to follow trends that may result from your seo work. You can use the following “Rule of thumb” measures for English language sites: PR 4-5 is typical for most sites with average popularity. PR 6 indicates a very popular site while PR 7 is almost unreachable for a regular webmaster. You should congratulate yourself if you manage to achieve it. PR 8, 9, 10 can only be achieved by the sites of large companies such as Microsoft, Google, etc. PageRank is also useful when exchanging links and in similar situations. You can compare the quality of the pages offered in the exchange with pages from your own site to decide if the exchange should be accepted.

2. Evaluation of the competitiveness level for a search query is a vital part of seo work. Although PageRank is not used directly in the ranking algorithms, it allows you to indirectly evaluate relative site competitiveness for a particular query. For example, if the search engine displays sites with PageRank 6-7 in the top search results, a site with PageRank 4 is not likely to get to the top of the results list using the same search query.

It is important to recognize that the PageRank values displayed on the Google ToolBar are recalculated only occasionally (every few months) so the Google ToolBar displays somewhat outdated information. This means that the Google search engine tracks changes in inbound links much faster than these changes are reflected on the Google ToolBar.

3.7 Increasing link popularity
3.7.1 Submitting to general purpose directories
On the Internet, many directories contain links to other network resources grouped by topics. The process of adding your site information to them is called submission.

Such directories can be paid or free of charge, they may require a backlink from your site or they may have no such requirement. The number of visitors to these directories is not large so they will not send a significant number to your site. However, search engines count links from these directories and this may enhance your sites search result placement.

Important! Only those directories that publish a direct link to your site are worthwhile from a seo point of view. Script driven directories are almost useless. This point deserves a more detailed explanation. There are two methods for publishing a link. A direct link is published as a standard HTML construction («A href=...», etc.). Alternatively, links can be published with the help of various scripts, redirects and so on. Search engines understand only those links that are specified directly in HTML code. That is why the seo value of a directory that does not publish a direct link to your site is close to zero.

You should not submit your site to FFA (free-for-all) directories. Such directories automatically publish links related to any search topic and are ignored by search engines. The only thing an FFA directory entry will give you is an increase in spam sent to your published e-mail address. Actually, this is the main purpose of FFA directories.

Be wary of promises from various programs and seo services that submit your resource to hundreds of thousands of search engines and directories. There are no more than a hundred or so genuinely useful directories on the Net – this is the number to take seriously and professional seo submission services work with this number of directories. If a seo service promises submissions to enormous numbers of resources, it simply means that the submission database mainly consists of FFA archives and other useless resources.

Give preference to manual or semiautomatic seo submission; do not rely completely on automatic processes. Submitting sites under human control is generally much more efficient than fully automatic submission. The value of submitting a site to paid directories or publishing a backlink should be considered individually for each directory. In most cases, it does not make much sense, but there may be exceptions.

Submitting sites to directories does not often result in a dramatic effect on site traffic, but it slightly increases the visibility of your site for search engines. This useful seo option is available to everyone and does not require a lot of time and expense, so do not overlook it when promoting your project.

3.7.2 DMOZ directory
The DMOZ directory (www.dmoz.org) or the Open Directory Project is the largest directory on the Internet. There are many copies of the main DMOZ site and so, if you submit your site to the DMOZ directory, you will get a valuable link from the directory itself as well as dozens of additional links from related resources. This means that the DMOZ directory is of great value to a seo aware webmaster.

It is not easy to get your site into the DMOZ directory; there is an element of luck involved. Your site may appear in the directory a few minutes after it has been submitted or it may take months to appear.

If you submitted your site details correctly and in the appropriate category then it should eventually appear. If it does not appear after a reasonable time then you can try contacting the editor of your category with a question about your request (the DMOZ site gives you such opportunity). Of course, there are no guarantees, but it may help. DMOZ directory submissions are free of charge for all sites, including commercial ones.

Here are my final recommendations regarding site submissions to DMOZ. Read all site requirements, descriptions, etc. to avoid violating the submission rules. Such a violation will most likely result in a refusal to consider your request. Please remember, presence in the DMOZ directory is desirable, but not obligatory. Do not despair if you fail to get into this directory. It is possible to reach top positions in search results without this directory – many sites do.

3.7.3 Link exchange
The essence of link exchanges is that you use a special page to publish links to other sites and get similar backlinks from them. Search engines do not like link exchanges because, in many cases, they distort search results and do not provide anything useful to Internet users. However, it is still an effective way to increase link popularity if you observe several simple rules.

- Exchange links with sites that are related by topic. Exchanging links with unrelated sites is ineffective and unpopular.

- Before exchanging, make sure that your link will be published on a “good” page. This means that the page must have a reasonable PageRank (3-4 or higher is recommended), it must be available for indexing by search engines, the link must be direct, the total number of links on the page must not exceed 50, and so on.

- Do not create large link directories on your site. The idea of such a directory seems attractive because it gives you an opportunity to exchange links with many sites on various topics. You will have a topic category for each listed site. However, when trying to optimize your site you are looking for link quality rather than quantity and there are some potential pitfalls. No seo aware webmaster will publish a quality link to you if he receives a worthless link from your directory “link farm” in return. Generally, the PageRank of pages from such directories leaves a lot to be desired. In addition, search engines do not like these directories at all. There have even been cases where sites were banned for using such directories.

- Use a separate page on the site for link exchanges. It must have a reasonable PageRank and it must be indexed by search engines, etc. Do not publish more than 50 links on one page (otherwise search engines may fail to take some of the links into account). This will help you to find other seo aware partners for link exchanges.

- Search engines try to track mutual links. That is why you should, if possible, publish backlinks on a domain/site other than the one you are trying to promote. The best variant is when you promote the resource site1.com and publish backlinks on the resource site2.com.

- Exchange links with caution. Webmasters who are not quite honest will often remove your links from their resources after a while. Check your backlinks from time to time.

3.7.4 Press releases, news feeds, thematic resources
This section is about site marketing rather than pure seo. There are many information resources and news feeds that publish press releases and news on various topics. Such sites can supply you with direct visitors and also increase your sites popularity. If you do not find it easy to create a press release or a piece of news, hire copywriters – they will help you find or create something newsworthy.

Look for resources that deal with similar topics to your own site. You may find many Internet projects that not in direct competition with you, but which share the same topic as your site. Try to approach the site owners. It is quite possible that they will be glad to publish information about your project.

One final tip for obtaining inbound links – try to create slight variations in the inbound link text. If all inbound links to your site have exactly the same link text and there are many of them, the search engines may flag it as a spam attempt and penalize your site.

4 Indexing a site

Before a site appears in search results, a search engine must index it. An indexed site will have been visited and analyzed by a search robot with relevant information saved in the search engine database. If a page is present in the search engine index, it can be displayed in search results otherwise, the search engine cannot know anything about it and it cannot display information from the page..

Most average sized sites (with dozens to hundreds of pages) are usually indexed correctly by search engines. However, you should remember the following points when constructing your site. There are two ways to allow a search engine to learn about a new site:

- Submit the address of the site manually using a form associated with the search engine, if available. In this case, you are the one who informs the search engine about the new site and its address goes into the queue for indexing. Only the main page of the site needs to be added, the search robot will find the rest of pages by following links.

- Let the search robot find the site on its own. If there is at least one inbound link to your resource from other indexed resources, the search robot will soon visit and index your site. In most cases, this method is recommended. Get some inbound links to your site and just wait until the robot visits it. This may actually be quicker than manually adding it to the submission queue. Indexing a site typically takes from a few days to two weeks depending on the search engine. The Google search engine is the quickest of the bunch.

Try to make your site friendly to search robots by following these rules:

- Try to make any page of your site reachable from the main page in not more than three mouse clicks. If the structure of the site does not allow you to do this, create a so-called site map that will allow this rule to be observed.

- Do not make common mistakes. Session identifiers make indexing more difficult. If you use script navigation, make sure you duplicate these links with regular ones because search engines cannot read scripts (see more details about these and other mistakes in section 2.3).

- Remember that search engines index no more than the first 100-200 KB of text on a page. Hence, the following rule – do not use pages with text larger than 100 KB if you want them to be indexed completely.

You can manage the behavior of search robots using the file robots.txt. This file allows you to explicitly permit or forbid them to index particular pages on your site.

The databases of search engines are constantly being updated; records in them may change, disappear and reappear. That is why the number of indexed pages on your site may sometimes vary. One of the most common reasons for a page to disappear from indexes is server unavailability. This means that the search robot could not access it at the time it was attempting to index the site. After the server is restarted, the site should eventually reappear in the index.

You should note that the more inbound links your site has, the more quickly it gets re-indexed. You can track the process of indexing your site by analyzing server log files where all visits of search robots are logged. We will give details of seo software that allows you to track such visits in a later section.

5 Choosing keywords

5.1 Initially choosing keywords
Choosing keywords should be your first step when constructing a site. You should have the keyword list available to incorporate into your site text before you start composing it. To define your site keywords, you should use seo services offered by search engines in the first instance. Sites such as www.wordtracker.com and inventory.overture.com are good starting places for English language sites. Note that the data they provide may sometimes differ significantly from what keywords are actually the best for your site. You should also note that the Google search engine does not give information about frequency of search queries.

After you have defined your approximate list of initial keywords, you can analyze your competitor’s sites and try to find out what keywords they are using. You may discover some further relevant keywords that are suitable for your own site.

5.2 Frequent and rare keywords
There are two distinct strategies – optimize for a small number of highly popular keywords or optimize for a large number of less popular words. In practice, both strategies are often combined.

The disadvantage of keywords that attract frequent queries is that the competition rate is high for them. It is often not possible for a new site to get anywhere near the top of search result listings for these queries.

For keywords associated with rare queries, it is often sufficient just to mention the necessary word combination on a web page or to perform minimum text optimization. Under certain circumstances, rare queries can supply quite a large amount of search traffic.

The aim of most commercial sites is to sell some product or service or to make money in some way from their visitors. This should be kept in mind during your seo (search engine optimization) work and keyword selection. If you are optimizing a commercial site then you should try to attract targeted visitors (those who are ready to pay for the offered product or service) to your site rather than concentrating on sheer numbers of visitors.

Example. The query “monitor” is much more popular and competitive than the query “monitor Samsung 710N” (the exact name of the model). However, the second query is much more valuable for a seller of monitors. It is also easier to get traffic from it because its competition rate is low; there are not many other sites owned by sellers of Samsung 710N monitors. This example highlights another possible difference between frequent and rare search queries that should be taken into account – rare search queries may provide you with less visitors overall, but more targeted visitors.

5.3 Evaluating the competition rates of search queries
When you have finalized your keywords list, you should identify the core keywords for which you will optimize your pages. A suggested technique for this follows.

Rare queries are discarded at once (for the time being). In the previous section, we described the usefulness of such rare queries but they do not require special optimization. They are likely to occur naturally in your website text.

As a rule, the competition rate is very high for the most popular phrases. This is why you need to get a realistic idea of the competitiveness of your site. To evaluate the competition rate you should estimate a number of parameters for the first 10 sites displayed in search results:
- The average PageRank of the pages in the search results.
- The average number of links to these sites. Check this using a variety of search engines.
Additional parameters:
- The number of pages on the Internet that contain the particular search term, the total number of search results for that search term.
- The number of pages on the Internet that contain exact matches to the keyword phrase. The search for the phrase is bracketed by quotation marks to obtain this number.

These additional parameters allow you to indirectly evaluate how difficult it will be to get your site near the top of the list for this particular phrase. As well as the parameters described, you can also check the number of sites present in your search results in the main directories, such as DMOZ and Yahoo.

The analysis of the parameters mentioned above and their comparison with those of your own site will allow you to predict with reasonable certainty the chances of getting your site to the top of the list for a particular phrase.

Having evaluated the competition rate for all of your keyword phrases, you can now select a number of moderately popular key phrases with an acceptable competition rate, which you can use to promote and optimize your site.

5.4 Refining your keyword phrases
As mentioned above, search engine services often give inaccurate keyword information. This means that it is unusual to obtain an optimum set of site keywords at your first attempt. After your site is up and running and you have carried out some initial promotion, you can obtain additional keyword statistics, which will facilitate some fine-tuning. For example, you will be able to obtain the search results rating of your site for particular phrases and you will also have the number of visits to your site for these phrases.

With this information, you can clearly define the good and bad keyword phrases. Often there is no need to wait until your site gets near the top of all search engines for the phrases you are evaluating – one or two search engines are enough.

Example. Suppose your site occupies first place in the Yahoo search engine for a particular phrase. At the same time, this site is not yet listed in MSN, or Google search results for this phrase. However, if you know the percentage of visits to your site from various search engines (for instance, Google – 70%, Yahoo – 20%, MSN search – 10%), you can predict the approximate amount of traffic for this phrase from these other searches engines and decide whether it is suitable.

As well as detecting bad phrases, you may find some new good ones. For example, you may see that a keyword phrase you did not optimize your site for brings useful traffic despite the fact that your site is on the second or third page in search results for this phrase.

Using these methods, you will arrive at a new refined set of keyword phrases. You should now start reconstructing your site: Change the text to include more of the good phrases, create new pages for new phrases, etc.

You can repeat this seo exercise several times and, after a while, you will have an optimum set of key phrases for your site and considerably increased search traffic.
Here are some more tips. According to statistics, the main page takes up to 30%-50% of all search traffic. It has the highest visibility in search engines and it has the largest number of inbound links. That is why you should optimize the main page of your site to match the most popular and competitive queries. Each site page should be optimized for one or two main word combinations and, possibly for a number of rare queries. This will increase the chances for the page get to the top of search engine lists for particular phrases.

6 Miscellaneous information on search engines

6.1 Google SandBox
At the beginning of 2004, a new and mysterious term appeared among seo specialists – Google SandBox. This is the name of a new Google spam filter that excludes new sites from search results. The work of the SandBox filter results in new sites being absent from search results for virtually any phrase. This even happens with sites that have high-quality unique content and which are promoted using legitimate techniques.

The SandBox is currently applied only to the English segment of the Internet; sites in other languages are not yet affected by this filter. However, this filter may expand its influence. It is assumed that the aim of the SandBox filter is to exclude spam sites – indeed, no search spammer will be able to wait for months until he gets the necessary results. However, many perfectly valid new sites suffer the consequences. So far, there is no precise information as to what the SandBox filter actually is. Here are some assumptions based on practical seo experience:

- SandBox is a filter that is applied to new sites. A new site is put in the sandbox and is kept there for some time until the search engine starts treating it as a normal site.

- SandBox is a filter applied to new inbound links to new sites. There is a fundamental difference between this and the previous assumption: the filter is not based on the age of the site, but on the age of inbound links to the site. In other words, Google treats the site normally but it refuses to acknowledge any inbound links to it unless they have existed for several months. Since such inbound links are one of the main ranking factors, ignoring inbound links is equivalent to the site being absent from search results. It is difficult to say which of these assumptions is true, it is quite possible that they are both true.

- The site may be kept in the sandbox from 3 months to a year or more. It has also been noticed that sites are released from the sandbox in batches. This means that the time sites are kept in the sandbox is not calculated individually for each site, but for groups of sites. All sites created within a certain time period are put into the same group and they are eventually all released at the same time. Thus, individual sites in a group can spend different times in the sandbox depending where they were in the group capture-release cycle.

Typical indications that your site is in the sandbox include:

- Your site is normally indexed by Google and the search robot regularly visits it.
- Your site has a PageRank; the search engine knows about and correctly displays inbound links to your site.
- A search by site address (www.site.com) displays correct results, with the correct title, snippet (resource description), etc.
- Your site is found by rare and unique word combinations present in the text of its pages.
- Your site is not displayed in the first thousand results for any other queries, even for those for which it was initially created. Sometimes, there are exceptions and the site appears among 500-600 positions for some queries. This does not change the sandbox situation, of course.

There no practical ways to bypass the Sandbox filter. There have been some suggestions about how it may be done, but they are no more than suggestions and are of little use to a regular webmaster. The best course of action is to continue seo work on the site content and structure and wait patiently until the sandbox is disabled after which you can expect a dramatic increase in ratings, up to 400-500 positions.

6.2 Google LocalRank
On February 25, 2003, the Google Company patented a new algorithm for ranking pages called LocalRank. It is based on the idea that pages should be ranked not by their global link citations, but by how they are cited among pages that deal with topics related to the particular query. The LocalRank algorithm is not used in practice (at least, not in the form it is described in the patent). However, the patent contains several interesting innovations we think any seo specialist should know about. Nearly all search engines already take into account the topics to which referring pages are devoted. It seems that rather different algorithms are used for the LocalRank algorithm and studying the patent will allow us to learn general ideas about how it may be implemented.

While reading this section, please bear in mind that it contains theoretical information rather than practical guidelines.

The following three items comprise the main idea of the LocalRank algorithm:

1. An algorithm is used to select a certain number of documents relevant to the search query (let it be N). These documents are initially sorted by some criteria (this may be PageRank, relevance or a group of other criteria). Let us call the numeric value of this criterion OldScore.

2. Each of the N N selected pages goes through a new ranking procedure and it gets a new rank. Let us call it LocalScore.

3. The OldScore and LocalScore values for each page are multiplied, to yield a new value – NewScore. The pages are finally ranked based on NewScore.

The key procedure in this algorithm is the new ranking procedure, which gives each page a new LocalScore rank. Let us examine this new procedure in more detail:

0. An initial ranking algorithm is used to select N pages relevant to the search query. Each of the N pages is allocated an OldScore value by this algorithm. The new ranking algorithm only needs to work on these N selected pages. .

1. While calculating LocalScore for each page, the system selects those pages from N that have inbound links to this page. Let this number be M. At the same time, any other pages from the same host (as determined by IP address) and pages that are mirrors of the given page will be excluded from M.

2. The set M is divided into subsets Li. These subsets contain pages grouped according to the following criteria:
- Belonging to one (or similar) hosts. Thus, pages whose first three octets in their IP addresses are the same will get into one group. This means that pages whose IP addresses belong to the range xxx.xxx.xxx.0 to xxx.xxx.xxx.255 will be considered as belonging to one group.
- Pages that have the same or similar content (mirrors)
- Pages on the same site (domain).

3. Each page in each Li subset has rank OldScore. One page with the largest OldScore rank is taken from each subset, the rest of pages are excluded from the analysis. Thus, we get some subset of pages K referring to this page.

4. Pages in the subset K are sorted by the OldScore parameter, then only the first k pages (k is some predefined number) are left in the subset K. The rest of the pages are excluded from the analysis.

5. LocalScore is calculated in this step. The OldScore parameters are combined together for the rest of k pages. This can be shown with the help of the following formula:
Here m is some predefined parameter that may vary from one to three. Unfortunately, the patent for the algorithm in question does not describe this parameter in detail.

After LocalScore is calculated for each page from the set N, NewScore values are calculated and pages are re-sorted according to the new criteria. The following formula is used to calculate NewScore:

NewScore(i)= (a+LocalScore(i)/MaxLS)*(b+OldScore(i)/MaxOS)

i is the page for which the new rank is calculated.

a and b – are numeric constants (there is no more detailed information in the patent about these parameters).

MaxLS – is the maximum LocalScore among those calculated.

MaxOS – is the maximum value among OldScore values.

Now let us put the math aside and explain these steps in plain words.

In step 0) pages relevant to the query are selected. Algorithms that do not take into account the link text are used for this. For example, relevance and overall link popularity are used. We now have a set of OldScore values. OldScore is the rating of each page based on relevance, overall link popularity and other factors.

In step 1) pages with inbound links to the page of interest are selected from the group obtained in step 0). The group is whittled down by removing mirror and other sites in steps 2), 3) and 4) so that we are left with a set of genuinely unique sites that all share a common theme with the page that is under analysis. By analyzing inbound links from pages in this group (ignoring all other pages on the Internet), we get the local (thematic) link popularity.

LocalScore values are then calculated in step 5). LocalScore is the rating of a page among the set of pages that are related by topic. Finally, pages are rated and ranked using a combination of LocalScore and OldScore.

6.3 Seo tips, assumptions, observations
This section provides information based on an analysis of various seo articles, communication between optimization specialists, practical experience and so on. It is a collection of interesting and useful tips ideas and suppositions. Do not regard this section as written in stone, but rather as a collection of information and suggestions for your consideration.

- Outbound links. Publish links to authoritative resources in your subject field using the necessary keywords. Search engines place a high value on links to other resources based on the same topic.

- Outbound links. Do not publish links to FFA sites and other sites excluded from the indexes of search engines. Doing so may lower the rating of your own site.

- Outbound links. A page should not contain more than 50-100 outbound links. More links will not harm your site rating but links beyond that number will not be recognized by search engines.

- Inbound site-wide links. These are links published on every page of the site. It is believed that search engines do not approve of such links and do not consider them while ranking pages. Another opinion is that this is true only for large sites with thousands of pages.

- The ideal keyword density is a frequent seo discussion topic. The real answer is that there is no ideal keyword density. It is different for each query and search engines calculate it dynamically for each search query. Our advice is to analyze the first few sites in search results for a particular query. This will allow you to evaluate the approximate optimum density for specific queries.

- Site age. Search engines prefer old sites because they are more stable.

- Site updates. Search engines prefer sites that are constantly developing. Developing sites are those in which new information and new pages periodically appear.

- Domain zone. Search engines prefer sites that are located in the zones .edu, .mil, .gov, etc. Only the corresponding organizations can register such domains so these domains are more trustworthy.

- Search engines track the percent of visitors that immediately return to searching after they visit a site via a search result link. A large number of immediate returns means that the content is probably not related to the corresponding topic and the ranking of such a page gets lower.

- Search engines track how often a link is selected in search results. If some link is only occasionally selected, it means that the page is of little interest and the rating of such a page gets lower

- Use synonyms and derived word forms of keywords, search engines will appreciate that (keyword stemming).

; - Search engines consider a very rapid increase in inbound links as artificial promotion and this results in lowering of the rating. This is a controversial topic because this method could be used to lower the rating of one's competitors.

- Google does not take into account inbound links if they are on the same (or similar) hosts. This is detected using host IP addresses. Pages whose IP addresses are within the range of xxx.xxx.xxx.0 to xxx.xxx.xxx.255. are regarded as being on the same host. This opinion is most likely to be rooted in the fact that Google have expressed this idea in their patents. However, Google employees claim that no limitations of IP addresses are imposed on inbound links and there are no reasons not to believe them.

- Search engines check information about the owners of domains. Inbound links originating from a variety of sites all belonging to one owner are regarded as less important than normal links. This information is presented in a patent.

- Search engines prefer sites with longer term domain registrations.

6.4 Creating correct content
The content of a site plays an important role in site promotion for many reasons. We will describe some of them in this section. We will also give you some advice on how to populate your site with good content.

- Content uniqueness. Search engines value new information that has not been published before. That is why you should compose own site text and not plagiarize excessively. A site based on materials taken from other sites is much less likely to get to the top in search engines. As a rule, original source material is always higher in search results.

- While creating a site, remember that it is primarily created for human visitors, not search engines. Getting visitors to visit your site is only the first step and it is the easiest one. The truly difficult task is to make them stay on the site and convert them into purchasers. You can only do this by using good content that is interesting to real people.

- Try to update information on the site and add new pages on a regular basis. Search engines value sites that are constantly developing. Also, the more useful text your site contains, the more visitors it attracts. Write articles on the topic of your site, publish visitors' opinions, create a forum for discussing your project. A forum is only useful if the number of visitors is sufficient for it to be active. Interesting and attractive content guarantees that the site will attract interested visitors.

- A site created for people rather than search engines has a better chance of getting into important directories such as DMOZ and others.

- An interesting site on a particular topic has much better chances to get links, comments, reviews, etc. from other sites on this topic. Such reviews can give you a good flow of visitors while inbound links from such resources will be highly valued by search engines.

- As final tip…there is an old German proverb: "A shoemaker sticks to his last" which means, "Do what you can do best.” If you can write breathtaking and creative textual prose for your website then that is great. However, most of us have no special talent for writing attractive text and we should rely on professionals such as journalists and technical writers. Of course, this is an extra expense, but it is justified in the long term.

6.5 Selecting a domain and hosting
Currently, anyone can create a page on the Internet without incurring any expense. Also, there are companies providing free hosting services that will publish your page in return for their entitlement to display advertising on it. Many Internet service providers will also allow you to publish your page on their servers if you are their client. However, all these variations have serious drawbacks that you should seriously consider if you are creating a commercial project.

First, and most importantly, you should obtain your own domain for the following reasons:

- A project that does not have its own domain is regarded as a transient project. Indeed, why should we trust a resource if its owners are not even prepared to invest in the tiny sum required to create some sort of minimum corporate image? It is possible to publish free materials using resources based on free or ISP-based hosting, but any attempt to create a commercial project without your own domain is doomed to failure.

- Your own domain allows you to choose your hosting provider. If necessary, you can move your site to another hosting provider at any time.

Here are some useful tips for choosing a domain name.

- Try to make it easy to remember and make sure there is only one way to pronounce and spell it.

- Domains with the extension .com are the best choice to promote international projects in English. Domains from the zones .net, .org, .biz, etc., are available but less preferable.

- If you want to promote a site with a national flavor, use a domain from the corresponding national zone. Use .de – for German sites, .it – for Italian sites, etc.

- In the case of sites containing two or more languages, you should assign a separate domain to each language. National search engines are more likely to appreciate such an approach than subsections for various languages located on one site.

A domain costs $10-20 a year, depending on the particular registration service and zone.

You should take the following factors into consideration when choosing a hosting provider:

- Access bandwidth.
- Server uptime.
- The cost of traffic per gigabyte and the amount of prepaid traffic.
- The site is best located in the same geographical region as most of your expected visitors.

The cost of hosting services for small projects is around $5-10 per month.

Avoid “free” offers while choosing a domain and a hosting provider. Hosting providers sometimes offer free domains to their clients. Such domains are often registered not to you, but to the hosting company. The hosting provider will be the owner of the domain. This means that you will not be able to change the hosting service of your project, or you could even be forced to buy out your own domain at a premium price. Also, you should not register your domains via your hosting company. This may make moving your site to another hosting company more difficult even though you are the owner of your domain.

6.6 Changing the site address
You may need to change the address of your project. Maybe the resource was started on a free hosting service and has developed into a more commercial project that should have its own domain. Or maybe the owner has simply found a better name for the project. In any case, moving to a new address can be problematic and it is a difficult and unpleasant task to move a project to a new address. For starters, you will have to start promoting the new address almost from scratch. However, if the move is inevitable, you may as well make the change as useful as possible.

Our advice is to create your new site at the new location with new and unique content. Place highly visible links to the new resource on the old site to allow visitors to easily navigate to your new site. Do not completely delete the old site and its contents.

This approach will allow you to get visitors from search engines to both the old site and the new one. At the same time, you get an opportunity to cover additional topics and keywords, which may be more difficult within one resource.

7 SEO software review

In previous chapters, we explained how to create your own site and what methods are available to promote it. This last section is devoted to seo software tools that can automate much of the seo work on your site and can achieve even better results. We will discuss the Seo Administrator seo software suite that you can download from our site.
7.1 Ranking Monitor
Any seo optimization specialist is faced with the regular task of checking the positions of his sites in the search engines. You could check these positions manually, but if you have several dozen keywords and 5-7 search engines to monitor, the process becomes a real chore.

The Ranking Monitor module will do everything automatically. You are able to see information on your site ratings for any keywords and in a variety of search engines. You will also see the dynamics and history of your site positions as well as upward and downward trends in your site position for your specified keywords. The same information is also displayed in a visual form.

7.2 Link Popularity Checker
This program will automatically poll all available search engines and create a complete duplicate-free list of inbound links to your resource. For each link, you will see important parameters such as the link text and PageRank of the referring page. If you have studied this article, you will know how important these parameters are. As well as viewing the overall list of inbound links, you can track how the inbound links change over time.

7.3 Site Indexation Tool
This useful tool will show you all pages indexed by a particular search engine. It is a must-have tool for anybody who is creating a new web resource. The PageRank value will be displayed for each indexed page.

7.4 Log Analyzer
All information about your visitors is stored in the log files of your server. The log analyzer module will present this information in convenient and visual reports. Displayed information includes:
- Originating sites
- Keywords used,
- What country they are from
- Much more…

7.5 Page Rank Analyzer
This utility collects a huge amount of competitive information on the list of sites that you specify. For each site it automatically determines parameters such as Google PageRank, the number of inbound links and the presence of each site in the DMOZ and Yahoo directories. It is an ideal tool for analyzing the competition rate of a particular query.

7.6 Keyword Suggestion Tool
This tool gathers relevant keywords for your site and displays their popularity (the number of queries per month). It also estimates the competition rate of a specified keyword phrase.

7.7 HTML Analyzer
This application analyzes the HTML code of a page. It estimates the weight and density of keywords and creates a report on the correct optimization of the site text. It is useful during the creation your own site and is also a great tool for analyzing your competitors' sites. It allows you to analyze both local HTML pages and online projects.

Instead of a conclusion: promoting your site step by step

In this section, I will explain how I use seo in promoting my own sites. It is a kind of systematic summary where I briefly recap the previous sections. Naturally, I use Seo Administrator seo software extensively in my work and so I will show how I use it in this example.

To be able to start working with a site, you have to possess some basic seo knowledge. This can be acquired quite quickly. The information presented in this document is perfectly adequate and I must stress that you do not have to be an optimization guru to achieve results. Once you have this basic knowledge you can then start work, experimenting, getting sites to the top of the search listings and so on. That is where seo software tools are useful.

1. Firstly, we create an approximate list of keywords and check their competition rate. We then evaluate our chances against the competition and select words that are popular enough and have average competition rate. Keywords are selected using the keyword suggestion tool. This is also used to perform a rough check of their competition rate. We use the PageRank Analyzer module to perform a detailed analysis of search results for the most interesting queries and then make our final decision about what keywords to use.

2. Next, we start composing text for our site. I write part of it on my own, but I entrust the most important parts to specialists in technical writing. Actually, I think the quality and attractiveness of the text is the most important attribute of a page. If the textual content is good, it will be easier to get inbound links and visitors.

3. In this step, we start using the HTML Analyzer module to create the necessary keyword density. Each page is optimized for its own keyword phrase.

4. We submit the site to various directories. There are plenty of services to take care of that chore for us. In addition, Seo Administrator will soon have a feature to automate the task.

5. After these initial steps are completed, we wait and check search engine indexation to make sure that various search engines are processing the site.

6. In this step, we can begin to check the positions of the site for our keywords. These positions are not likely to be good at this early stage, but they will give us some useful information to begin fine-tuning seo work.

7. We use the Link Popularity Checker module to track and work on increasing the link popularity.

. 8. We use the Log Analyzer module to analyze the number of visitors and work on increasing it. We also periodically repeat steps 6) - 8).

SEO services - start-up seo package

Our Start-up package is a group of seo services for those who want to optimize their websites and do their own promotion. This comprehensive package provides you with all of the information you need to get the best possible search engine placement for your web pages.

Our Start-up package consists of three seo services:

1. Website audit and practical seo recommendations.
We will thoroughly check and analyze your website. We will then give you clear-cut and practical seo recommendations on what changes you can make to improve your site’s rankings. This service will evaluate:

The package also includes the following additional seo reports:

These reports will be accompanied by comments to ensure that you get the maximum seo benefit from them.

2. Promotional seo resources.
For this seo service we use special analysis software to provide you with a comprehensive list of promotional resources where you can publish links to your site. You will receive the following reports:

These seo reports may list thousands of sites that could, in theory, publish links to your site. Checking and actually obtaining these links is a lot of work but the result will be well worth your efforts!

3. Seo software
The third part of our seo service package includes our seo software, Seo Administrator Expert edition. This will give you additional expert help in promoting and optimizing your website.

To summarize, purchasers of the Start-up seo package get: - Practical seo site improvement recommendations.
- A list of seo promotional resources specific to their website.
- Seo Administrator Expert edition software.

SEO Forums - URL Change for Website

2008-04-08T23:43:00.000-07:00

Questions - 1
I am having a strange problem with a website i am working on, the company recently changed their domain name but the old domain maps to the new one.

They were www {dot} gtcsports {dot} com

Now they are www {dot} thorntonsports {dot} co {dot} uk

They dont want to be associated with the old name and when i put 'thornton sports' in google, GTC Sports appears top

Also i noticed that when i go to www {dot} thorntonsports {dot} co {dot} uk and check Cached Version in my google toolbar it says it is caching www {dot} gtcsports {dot} com
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Answers - 1

Quote:

Originally Posted by slaterminn

I am having a strange problem with a website i am working on, the company recently changed their domain name but the old domain maps to the new one.

The main problem I see is that the old domain doesn't "map" to the new one! At the moment the old home page/domain root url (301) redirects to the new domain but many of the inner pages don't!
Search Google for site:www.gtcsports.com and check the results (52), many of them are just returning a 404 page

Quote:

Originally Posted by slaterminn

They dont want to be associated with the old name and when i put 'thornton sports' in google, GTC Sports appears top

You have this url on the new site: "/gtc-sports" (page title is GTC Sports Ltd) so "don't want to be associated" isn't quite accurate! I also see that url returned top of the "site" results for the new domain (hence the title)!

Quote:

Originally Posted by slaterminn

Also i noticed that when i go to www {dot} thorntonsports {dot} co {dot} uk and check Cached Version in my google toolbar it says it is caching www {dot} gtcsports {dot} com

I think you'll find you're looking at the cache for "www.thorntonsports.co.uk/gtc-sports ", not the home page.

You need to (301) redirect the remaining urls to clear it up.

I am currently using on the GTC Sports site

Code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*$
RewriteRule ^/?$ http://www.thorntonsports.co.uk [R=301,L]

** ADDITION **

this is used code for thorntonsports.co.uk website

Code:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^thorntonsports\.co.uk
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.thorntonsports.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

Thanks for all your help

SEO FAQ - Google Page Rank ( PR )

2008-04-08T23:28:00.000-07:00

1.) I am changing my domain but want to keep my PR, how do I do it?
A 301 redirect is the most efficient and spider/visitor friendly strategy around
for web sites that are hosted on servers running Apache (check with your hosting
service if you aren't sure). It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve
your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you *have* to change
file names or move pages around, it's the safest option. If you are unfamiliar
with editing your .htaccess file, you should ask your hosting company for help.

2.) I have a new site but it has no PR .I have backlinks, etc When does
it update?
A. It updates internally every day or so, (every time google's spider follows
a link through to your site) you may see a difference in the SERPs very soon,
however you will not see the backlink appear in a link:www.domain.com command
search in google, until google do an official backlink update.

3.) I noticed my PR in the Google directory is different from my PR
on the toolbar, Why?
A:This is because the google directory gets its listings from DMOZ. As with
google's PR and backlink updates, it only updates its directory every so often,
so your site may be showing an old PR.

There are also a host of "theories" such as "Googles Directory
is on a scale of 0 to 8" and "The Directory PR is actually a comparison
between you and other sites in the Directory". No matter what you may believe,
it is most important to state that they rarely match and this is VERY common.

4.) When does Google update backlinks and PR?

A: There isn't a set schedule as many times an update is skipped or late. Backlinks
on average are updated around once a month while PR has seemed to move to quarterly.
The best way to "guess" when the next update will be is to utilize
the SEOChat Calendar.

SEO FAQ - Google General

2008-04-08T23:16:00.001-07:00

Google General
1.) What is the "Sandbox Theory"?

The sandbox theory proposes that Google has a unique ranking element in their algorithm that has been affecting sites whose major SEO efforts began after March of 2004 (this would include all sites registerd after this date). The criteria, elements and solution of the 'sandbox' have not yet been identified or publicized by the SEO community, but ongoing discussion and testing have determined that the two of the most likely issues creating the sandbox could be:

Age of backlinks - older backlinks now carry greater weight at Google

SEO specific filters - Google is actively attempting to filter sites out of their index that are actively optimizing (link-building, etc) or appear to have un-natural attributes (optimized pages, links, anchor text, etc.)

If your site is ranking well for specific keyword phrases at engines like Yahoo!, Teoma, MSN & for the allin sets of searches at Google (allinanchor:, allintitle:, allintext:, etc.) but not listed in the top 50-100 results at Google, the sandbox effect may be at work. However, it is important to keep in mind that this phenomenon is an 'unknown' algorithm piece at Google and standard optimization tactics, even by some of the best and most experienced SEOs have yet to consistently beat this effect.

2.) When does Google update their SERPs (When is the "dance")?
A. There is no longer a Google "dance" per se as SERPs tend to be
updated constantly.

3.) I now use the link: command all the time, is there a list of the
other commands I can use in Google?

link:www.domain.com (returns a list of backlinks that google has indexed. Only
a small selection is listed however.)

related:www.domain.com (returns a list of sites that google sees as related
to the topic on your page. At present, not very accurate.)

allinurl:keyword (returns a list of pages and sites that contain the 'keyword'
in their url.)

site:www.domain.com (returns all pages of the domain that google has crawled
and indexed.)

allinanchor:keyword (returns a list of pages and sites that contain the keyword
as anchor text in their backlinks.)

cache:www.domain.com (will show the current cache that google has for the page)

info:www.domain.com (will return information that google has for the page)

allintitle:keyword (returns webpages that have the specified keywords in the
title)

intitle:keyword (returns listings of webpages that have only the specific keyword
as the title.)

You can find all the Operators at

4.) Am I banned in Google?

A: You can tell if you are banned or not indexed in google, by using the 'site:'
command in Google's search.

(ie. site:www.domain.com)

5.) What is the first thing you would check for if you saw your site
slip down the listings at Google? ( i.e. I'm not on top anymore, what happened?
)
A: A drop in backlinks. Obviously when not aggressively acquiring new backlinks
to your site from day to day, existing backlinks may even deteriorate in value.
The referring site may disappear, be changed, lose relevance or lose PR itself,
reducing the PR that is passed onto you.

6.) When I look up my site in Google, I am #23, but when my friend in
California looks it up I am #31. Which one is right?

A: They both are! Actually, a more accurate explanation is that Google using
multiple datacenters that deliver the results you see. The datacenter that is
used depends on your geographical location. It is very common to see a small
difference in results depending where you are. Sometimes, results can differ
when you move just a few miles away!

7.) Why does Google hate me/pick on me?
A: "Google" does not pick on individual sites but instead allows complex
mathematical equations to decide the value of your site in any particular search.
Although it may sometimes feel like they are picking on you, most times a ban
or bad results can be traced to a small piece of bad or misguided SEO.

8.) Should I submit my website to Google every month?
A: No, you only need to do it once. In most cases you will not even need to
submit your website to Google. If you are active in building links to your website
then Googlebot will frequent your site soon, and thus include it in the index.

9.) My site is not cached in Google, I've submitted it to google numerous
times but I'm not seeing the googlebot crawl my entire site. I'm also seeing
an incomplete listing.

A: Sometimes the googlebot will visit, and leave, only to come back at a later
time in order to crawl all of your pages. If a site has no cache, or an incomplete
listing, it has not been crawled and indexed properly yet. The best thing you
can do is get more in bound links to your site, so that the googlebot arrives
to your site from more than 1 source.

SEO FAQ - Link Popularity, Development, and Analysis

2008-04-08T22:01:00.000-07:00

Link Popularity
1.)Why don't all my links show up when I use the link: command?

A. At this moment Google is only showing a sampling of the total links to you. As far as numbers, it is only important to remember
it is a sampling and to just continue your link building strategy.
To see a much more accurate figure please login to your google webmasters account and use the link tool there.

2.)How come I get a different amount of links when I use www.example.com
and example.com?

A. In the search engines eyes, these are two different domains and therefore have
different amounts of sites linking to them. So you should 301 redirect one version to the other.
If your site is hosted on a linux server you may do the following:

Open your .htaccess file(in the root directory of your site), if you don't see one create a .htaccess file and add the following:

Code:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Of course you will need to change domain.com in both instances to your domain name.
Make sure if you are creating the .htaccess file you save it as .htaccess or it will not work.

3.) What's a Link Farm?

A. A set of web pages that have been built for the sole purpose of increasing
the number of incoming links to a web site. This is done in order to increase
link popularity and search engine rankings. Link farms usually require a reciprocal
link from sites seeking listings. Link farms are a known spam tactic and sites
that participate in them are likely to be penalized or banned from the major search
engines.

Please keep in mind that links from these sites do not harm you, what harms your site
is you linking OUT to these sites NOT them linking in. However these types of links
will not benefit you either so don't waste your time with them.

4.) What is "Anchor Text"?

A:Anchor text is the text that you use within a html link.

For example ( This is Anchor Text

The anchor text that you use, should reflect the keywords of which you are trying
to get a higher listing for. It should also accurately describe what information
will be found on the next page if you click on the link.

Your anchor text should be varied, you should not use the same
anchor text for all your links(that you control), if you use a variety of
anchor text your overall link strength will be stronger and you
will rank for many more phrases than if you focused on only one keyword.

5.) What is an "IBL"?

A: An "IBL" is an 'In Bound Link'. When a site links to yours, that
link is called an IBL. The same thing as a BL (Backlink).

Backlinks play a major role in ranking a site in the search engines
specifically Google and MSN. Google also puts a great deal of value
on the quality of the links, where it is placed, is the site related to yours?
A link on a content related page is going to be worth a whole lot
more than a link on a links page.

6.) What is Reciprocal linking or link exchange?

Link exchanging or reciprocal linking is where two sites
exchange links. Usually this occurs when a webmaster
sends an email to another webmaster requesting a link
on their site.

Because of how easy it is to get a link this way Google
has greatly dis-valued these types of links. They are still
worth something but not as much as they have been in
the past.

Some tips if you do exchange links...
-Only exchange links with related sites, don't reciprocate
with sites who are irrelevant even if they have a high PageRank.

-Don't reciprocate with sites who link to anything, only exchange
links with sites who are particular about who they link to.

-Don't reciprocate with sites which have categories for every
industry or hobby ever invented. Again keep it relevant.

-Don't reciprocate with sites whos link pages contain hundreds of links.

-Before reciprocating view the source of the page(CTRL + U for FF | View > Source for IE)
and check that NONE of the links on the page contain a nofollow tag.
A quick way to check is to use the find tool and search for "nofollow"

-Also goto http://www.domainnameofsite.com/robots.txt
That way you can see if they have excluded the links pages.
Also do a search in google for cache:domain.com/linkspage
to see if the page your link will be placed on is indexed.

Those are tips you definitely should follow if you do decide
to exchange links.

7.) What is Linkbait?
Linkbait is when you create a tool, write a articles or many articles
or otherwise do something that works as a link magnet.
Website owners start linking to your pages without even being
asked, many times the sites linking to you are authorities in
your industry so a good linkbait can have a an extremely
large positive effect on your rankings.

How do I create a linkbait?
-Talk about a hot subject - preferably before anyone else has
written extensively on it.

-Take a recent event in your niche and write a extensive article
detailing what it is about, what is good and bad about it etc.

-Be controversial - Perhaps one of the best ways to create
a link bait.

-Be contrary... take a point that most, almost all of the experts
in your niche agree on and disagree with it. Preferably provide
evidence that you are right. If you do it should create quite a buzz.
Some good tips can be found here:
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001936.shtml

8.) What is cross linking?

A: When multiple sites link to each other for the purpose of increasing link popularity.

9.) How long after I am listed in DMOZ should I start to gain the search engine benefit?
A: The days of DMOZ Search Engine Ranking are over. Submit and forget but don't expect any search engine value from the listing if you do get it? If you can get in thats great but if not don't sweat it.

10.) Would I be penalized if a "Link Farm" or a "Bad Neighborhood" linked to my site?
A: No, you have no control over who links to you and this would be an easy way for a competitor to sink your site. What you SHOULD be careful of is if you are linking to them. This CAN hurt your site and should be avoided.

Don't be afraid to link out to sites that are related to yours
but never link to a site because they guarantee search engine value if you do.

Search Engine Optimization
1.) How do I use a Robots file or do you have an example of one?

A. You mean robots.txt. It's a file in the main directory of a website which tells
the search engine spiders where they are allowed to go.

A basic, spider can go anywhere file is:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

You can disallow folders or files by putting this into the file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /foldername/

2.) Should I use a Site Map? and does anyone have an example of one?

A: Every site should have a sitemap of some sort. It provides a way for visitors
to navigate your site, as well as a shortcut for bots to crawl all your pages.
Google for "sitemap" and you'll find nice examples, although it would
be advisable to follow Google's official guidelines and keep the number of links
per page under 100.

4.) What are SERPs?
A: Search Engine Result Pages

5.). I am number 5 in Yahoo, but not in the top 1,000 in Google. Why?

A. Yahoo and Google use two different algos to come up with their SERPs - Yahoo
favors on- page optimization such as H1 tags, keyword density, etc while Google
favors off page like in bound links. If you have done more on page then Yahoo
will rank higher and vice versa. As part of this if you are now addressing your
off page then you need more backlinks with anchor text and time for these links
to age (Google lag)

6.) Is there a way I can find out where I rank?

A: There are two sites you can use if you are just checking a few keywords -
www.googlerankings.com for Google and www.yahoosearchrankings.com/ for Yahoo.
If you are looking to track multiple keywords over time then the best (and free)
tool is Digital Points Keyword Monitor at http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords
(Google Only)

7.) What is an "ALGO" ?
A: An 'Algo' is an abbreviation of 'Algorithm'. (In short, the mathematical
formula or calculation that Google use in order to rank websites.)

8.) What is Hidden Text?
A: Text that is visible to the search engine spiders but not to site visitors.
Hidden text is primarily used to add extra keywords in the page without actually
adding content to a site which may mostly consist of images. Most search engines
will penalize Web sites which use hidden text.

9.) What is cloaking?
A: Determining which search engine spider is visiting a web page and then giving
each spider a page optimized for it's particular algorithm. This method of search
engine optimization can result in a website being removed from the major search
engines.

10.) What is a doorway page?
A: A method of search engine optimization considered to be SPAM. These are pages
created for nothing but the purpose of ranking first for a particular keyword
phrase. These pages usually lack any significant content and do not reflect
the tone of the rest of the website. If a search engine determines a website
has used this tactic then the website will be removed from the search engine
permanently.

11.) What is Geo Targeting?
A: The distribution of ads to a particular geographical area. For example, you
can use a place name in your keyword, such as "Texas Web Design".
Some search engines allow you to target specific countries – and languages
– without using keyword relevance.

12.) Do XHTML pages rank better than HTML-pages?
A: No. They have the same value. Google however puts more weight to well structured
content, and thus XHMTL is in most cases more suitable option.

13.) Does using CSS affect my rankings?
A: Not directly. Googlebot does not (at the moment) read CSS-files. Using CSS
makes pages lighter, and page structure more organized. Thus using CSS could
lead to better rankings. When adding CSS styles to page, it is recommend to
put them to external file (using link-tag).

14.)Should I use submission software to make sure all the search engines have
me included?
A: Most submission programs that promise to "Submit Your Site to 1000's
of Search Engines" are used to harvest your email address for spammers.
The truth is there are only a handful of Search Engines used by enough people
to justify a submission and these can all be submitted by hand. Even better
yet is to get other sites to link to you. Search Engine spiders follow these
links and you will be indexed naturally. Submission programs are unnecessary
and may actually hurt you.

15.) I submitted to DMOZ but didn't hear anything. Should I resubmit?
A: You should only submit once as resubmitting only deletes your original request
and lengthens your wait. Resubmitting too many times can have you classified
as SPAM and blocked. You can also submit to a "normal" category and
a "regional" one if it fits. You must be physically located somewhere
to be able to also submit to regional and read their guidelines as certain sites
like real estate are the exception. They have set up a forum as a way of letting
you know your status and this is a much under posted and under used area of
DMOZ - The address is http://www.resource-zone.com/forum/ . Just remember to
take the time to follow the posted directions.

16.) What is URL canonicalization?

For most websites, the www and non-www versions both resolve to the same content but can be browsed independantly, especially if using internal links without the full domain name.

Similarly it's often possible to view both yoursite.com/ and yoursite.com/index.html

The following urls could contain different content, but in most cases it is the same:

www.yoursite.com/
yoursite.com/
www.yoursite.com/index.html
yoursite.com/index.html
yoursite.com/index.php

This gives rise to url canonicalization, whereby Google has to decide which url is the best represented from the possible options. Usually this would see the page with the most back links (internal and external) displayed in the search results, and so for most webmasters the problems remain hidden.

The most significant disadvantage of canonical url problems is that any link juice is split between several possible options and therfore not maximising the full ranking potential of the page.

To prevent the problem on an Apache server with rewrite enabled, place the following code in your .htaccess file:

To redirect from the non-www version to the www version

Code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

To redirect from the www version to the non-www version

Code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

To redirect from yoursite.com/index.html to yoursite.com/

Code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

To do the same for index.php simply replace .html with .php in the code.

To do this on a Windows server, assuming you have access to the administrative tools:

For the main page files, redirect as follows

Code:

-In Administrative Tools open Internet services manager
-Select the file to redirect, right click and open properties
-In the menu click the Home directory tab
-Select redirect to a url
-Select directory on this PC, but type in your Domain url
-Check exact url as entered above
-Check permanent redirection

All done..Click apply

For the domain url

Code:

-Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Internet Information Services.
-Double-click "Web Sites" and then find the web site where the domain is.
-Right-click on the site and choose "Properties". Choose the "Directory" tab.
-Click the "A redirection to a URL" option.
Enter http://yourdomain.com/ to the right of "Redirect to: add $S$Q to the end to redirect paths, files and querystrings (eg http://yourdomain.com/$S$Q).
Select "The exact URL entered above" and "A permanent redirection for this resource".
Use "OK" to save the changes.

To do this in pure php:

To redirect from the non-www to the www version

Code:

if (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,3) != 'www')
{
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header('Location: http://www.' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
}

To redirect from domain.com/index.php to domain.com/

Code:

if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == '/index.php')
{
header( 'HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently' );
header( 'Location: http://www.domain.com/' );
}

And in ASP:

To redirect from the non-www to the www version

Code:

If InStr(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME"),"www") = 0 Then
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www."
 & Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST")
 & Request.ServerVariables("REQUEST_URI")
Response.End
End if

NB, there is no SEO advantage to using either the www or the non-www version of the site, so it's down to personal preference which one you use.

SEO Forums - Getting Closer To First Pages

2008-04-08T21:42:00.000-07:00

Questions - 1
After putting everything to use that I have be able to learn here ( thanks Guys ) its taken almost four months and we are at # 23 for our main keyword out of 7 million possible results. Since getting into the top 30 the movement up has been slow and in much smaller increments.

Would you just leave the onpage seo alone and continue with links etc because smaller movements is normal and good when your this close. Or would you make changes to your page also?

Answers 1

Don't get links, instead get linkable content.

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Answers 2
Just increase your back links for google.com and you see slowly increase in your ranking every day - also use your main keywords - when you do offsite seo activities

Answers 3
I like to think that if you're putting everything to use that you've learned here, you'd still be working hard. Even if it's slowly increasing, you're making progress. SEO results don't come overnight but with constant refinement and persistent work. Keep in mind that the other 22 websites are probably doing the same thing, so to keep up and overthrow their position, you need to work harder and smarter.

Onpage SEO includes adding fresh relevant content. Continue to offer your viewers new valuable content. Start thinking less about your rank and more about what your customers are looking for. You'll find that this will boost you naturally, which is what Google is ultimately seeking from you.

This way of working sounds altruistic... and it is, but this is also what the web is moving towards. Let's get rid of the crap sites and push up the quality SERPS.

Questions 2
Great Advice... working on this site 10 hours a day.

It feels like I am stuck at 3rd page #23, I have a PR0 and everyone above is PR4,5,6 - Does that matter?

Answers - 4
The four months includes putting the site together which went live mid February, I think we have PR0 because we were too new and missed the PR update?

My daily routine is:
3-4 Hours finding and requesting links with Anchor Text that are related, making and researching blog comments.
1 Hour doing Manual Directory Submissions
1 Hour writing an articles for submission, including for other sites that have content on what we sell, they in turn have links in the text to our products.
2-3 Hours on the site, updating product descriptions , adding products and general management and writing a blog. The rest of the time I am reading on Seochat and various forums.

Feel free to add to my list, I know I should be doing more.

Link Partners

File Recovery
Outlook Repair
Company-List Business Directory
Computer Directory
Dating Directory
Hard Drive Recovery
Finance Directory
RAID Recovery
Used Dodge
List Nation
Internet Privacy
Internet Marketing
Shopping Directory
Software Directory
Bad Credit
Travel Catalog & Directory
Undelete
Free Web Hosting
Used Cars
Zip Codes
Data Recovery
Mesothelioma
Automotive News
Renovations
Data Recovery
http://www.all-directory.net/Computers/Internet/Online_Teaching_And_Learning
http://www.all-list.net/Computers/Internet/Online_Teaching_And_Learning/
http://www.companylist.net/Internet/Online_Blogs/
http://www.computerdirectory.biz/Internet/Browsers/
http://www.datinglist.biz/Miscellaneous/Ads_And_Classifieds/
http://www.ezlist.org/Computers/Internet/Online_Teaching_And_Learning/
http://www.financedirectory.biz/Business_Finance/Company_Directories/
http://www.guide-pro.com/Computers/Internet/
http://www.listsite.net/Computer_Software/Internet_And_Browser_Software_And_Utilities/
http://www.list-nation.com/Computers_Communications_And_Electronics/Internet/
http://www.listnation.net/Computer_Software/Internet_And_Browser_Software_And_Utilities/
http://www.megacatalog.net/Computers_Communications_And_Electronics/Internet/
http://www.shoppingdirectory.us/Computers/Internet_And_Network_Software/
http://www.softonline.biz/Windows/Internet/
http://www.super-directory.com/Computers_Communications_And_Electronics/Internet/
http://www.travelcatalog.net/Miscellaneous/Classified_Ads/
http://directory.vestigatio.com/Computers/Internet/Online_Teaching_And_Learning/
http://directory.mister.net/Computers/Internet/
http://dir.carcasher.com/Computer_Software/Internet_And_Browser_Software_And_Utilities/
http://directory.zip-code-database.org/Computers/Internet/Online_Teaching_And_Learning/
http://res.bitmart.net/Computers/Internet/
http://health.e-mesothelioma.us/Directories/
http://directory.autopolitan.com/Computers/Internet/Online_Teaching_And_Learning/
http://directory.reno-pro.com/Computers/Internet/
http://directory.r-tt.com/Computers/Internet/

SEO Preparation

2007-06-16T05:26:00.000-07:00

Search engine optimization should Ideally be one of the areas taken into account at the initial planning stage of a website. Thoughts on making a website search engine friendly should be made before even the first line of code is written. Careful consideration should be given to your design, site structure, navigation and internal linking structure. Do you REALLY have to use Frames for example. Is it really necessary to use active server pages (.asp) on every page of your website? Search engine friendliness should not be the only topic up for review in the planning of your website, but it is so commonly missed out completely in a websites planning phase. The major corporate websites are the most guilty of all for poor planning.
Let's however take the case that you are going to go for a search engine friendly website. No frames, no or limited use of Flash, Java applets or extensive Javascript etc.The next step is to establish your best search terms (keywords) or better phrases. This is a very important phase of search engine optimization. Just go for what you THINK are your best keywords and you may well regret it afterwards, when you find most searchers do not use the search term you thought was good. Research your keywords properly and you are halfway home. Do you know for example what users are typing into search engine boxes to find sites with similar or the same content your site provides? Do you know what two and three word combinations are most commonly being used and have relevance to your site? Do you know how many competing pages there are for each of your main keywords? Which keywords will bring you the best visit/sale conversions? What keywords your competitors are targeting?
If you don't know ALL the answers to the above then you should not skip this section of the tutorial.
There are essentially 3 main methods you can use to establish the best keywords for a given web site.
1. Send all your friends and colleagues an email or hand them a sheet of paper with the following question on it stating specifically that you need 5 answers:
If you were searching for a web site with content identical to, or of the same theme as www.yourdomain.com, what word, or better word combinations (2-4 words) would you type into the search box? Please give 5 possible search terms or search term phrases that you believe are relevant to www.yourdomain.com content. "
1 _______________
2 _______________
3 _______________
4 _______________
5 _______________

Important: Make sure you actually write a numbered list 1-5 leaving spaces for them to fill in! Otherwise in my experience you will find you generally get just the one or two possible keywords.
You then collate the results from everyone and you can normally see clearly what enters most peoples heads for the keywords relating to your site. This method is particularly useful if you have plenty of people to ask. The more the better really. Ideal for companies with more than a handful of employees. You will commonly see keywords that you would never have thought of yourself and it gives you a great start on your keyword selection process. Studies have shown that 65% of the replies will be 2 words or more combinations. This is good news, I'll tell you why later.

Search Engine Optimization Tutorial

2007-06-16T04:14:00.000-07:00

Search engine optimization has changed dramatically over just the last 2-3 years.
A few years ago, it was for the most part sufficient to incorporate a well optimized title tag and have a few relevant search terms (aka keywords) in the meta tags to get a top 10 ranking. Those days are long gone, and yet in my estimation, over 75% of webmasters still hold on to the notion that search engine optimization (SEO) is all about tweaking title and meta tags. It is essential today to understand that meta tags for example, carry zero to little weight in a search engine algorithm.In fact, the keyword meta tag for example, is completely ignored by the Google search engine, other search engines give it very little weight.
The main reason for the big changes has been the abuse of the meta tags on mass and the search engine results pages (aka SERPs) were becoming just a list of spam ridden sites with keyword stuffed meta tags, often not even relevant to the site in question. There are now for Google approximately 100 different HTML, design, on and off-page elements that can make the difference between a top 10 and top 100 ranking.
Of far more importance nowadays for example, is the actual body text content within a page and what I like to call off-page criteria which includes number of inbound links, anchor text of inbound links and whether the links come from "authority" / "high value" sites (in Google's case).
The design, structure and website technology used are also important ranking criteria for the major search engines. Where in a websites source code, and in which HTML tags keywords appear, is just as important as the number of occurrences and the ratio of these keywords in relation to the rest of a pages text content (known as keyword density).
Search engines use so called robots or spiders which go through a web pages source code and store the crawled page in a database. This robot will usually follow the links on a page (assuming it can read and interpret them, but more on that later) and then crawl the linked page, and store this page also in it's database, follow on to the next link and so on.
The favorite diet of these search engine robots/spiders is text. I usually call it spider food. Text embedded in images is unreadable to spiders, so are the text content in Java applets, javascript, css and in many search engines the links/text in image maps and flash objects are ignored. The links in framesets can also cause problems for some search engines.
The following pages are my attempt to dispel the common myths about achieving high rankings on the search engines and is designed to provide the basics on how to achieve a good ranking. Experienced search engine optimizers will not learn much from these pages. The place for SEO experienced webmasters would be my forum which provides up to date SEO technology, tips, views and commentary on modern SEO methodology.
To get the most of this tutorial, a little HTML and CSS knowledge is of benefit.
There is NO simple formula for getting ranked No.1 on Google for example.
Let me make that clear, there is however optimization methodology that makes it far more likely for someone to get ranked far higher than they would be without any optimization.
The best way to use this tutorial is to always click on the "next" button and not jump pages by means of the navigation on the left .
Webmasters may freely link to this tutorial either in part or entirety so long as ABAKUS is credited.
I hope you find this tutorial useful and enjoy it. Be sure to recommend it to friends and/or link to it.