SEO and Positioning Tips

SEO and positioning your website to rank top spots in the search engines require some careful planning. Just like setting up a business or going to war, it requires strategizing for optimal results. Diving straight into the internet without any clear game plan is time-wasting, dangerous and more often than not, a futile attempt to rank any website for maximum targeted traffic. Lets dwell a little deeper into some useful SEO and positioning tips to get your web pages indexed and ranking faster.

What is your objective in optimizing your website? Is it for maximum general traffic or targeted niche traffic? Once again, webmasters are unable to get this part clear. Many think that driving as much traffic as possible to their websites is the way to go. Unfortunately, this is a big pitfall. A web site may attract loads of traffic but yet dont perform as well as another with little traffic but making more sales. Know what your objective is, to sell more products or to get more people to visit your website. If you are building an interest-based website or hobby website, perhaps getting maximum general traffic is the right solution for you.

Continue Reading... Labels: Business, Keyword, RSS, SEO, Tip for SE

Top 10 SEO Tips

Be bold. Use the tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site. Here is an example of deep linking, in this case to my personal happiness workbook.

Become a foreigner. Canada and the UK have many directories for websites of companies based in those countries. Can you get a business address in one of those countries?

Newsletters. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives.

First come, first served. If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won't follow additional links to the same page. You can see this in action at the link to the home page on this web site monitoring page

Multiple domains. If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops?

Article exchanges. You've heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else's article on the history of pudding pops with a link back to their site. They publish your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links. (More on high quality links in other tips.)

Titles for links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.

Not anchor text. Don't overdo the anchor text. You don't want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation - something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, "Gumbo Pudding Pop" occasionally, "Get gumbo pudding pops" as well, "Gumbo-flavored pudding pops" some other times, etc.

Site map. A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It's called the navigation bar. See how the second navigation bar at the bottom of Last Minute Florida Villas is like a mini-site map?

Click here for Advertisement on blog

Continue Reading... Labels: Affiliate Marketing, Business, Internet marketing, Interview, Link Building, Optmimization, SEO, Tips for SE

Bad way to build Back Links

When it comes to SEO many webmasters think of link building in order to boost their rankings, generate traffic and earn money during the process, however the methods used by many people are less than appropriate and the same practices are replicated by many others who want to make a quick buck. When it comes to link building, the end doesn't justify the means.

If you are brainstorming your link building campaign here is a good checklist of things to avoid while optimizing your sites.

Spamming Wikipedia

As many of you know, this particular site has tremendous value for the end user, it has unbiased information which can be used for research because it is factual and not based on emotions and speculations; in fact this is one of the reasons why it ranks so high on the search engines, particularly Google. Many webmasters have thought of editing an article related to their site with the purpose of obtaining a high PR link, the only problem is that in order for your article to get accepted at this online encyclopedia it must be well researched, well written and unbiased; while it may sound easy to do, it is actually quite hard since you have to eliminate sales speech and provide pure information. With all of this said, you might want to reconsider your plans of "spamming Wikipedia"

Incidentally, Wikipedia has been using the "no-follow" attribute for some time now, so your site will not get the link equity you might be after.

Spamming Youtube and other Video Sharing Sites

This is yet another "opportunity" for people desperate for back links. Just like Wikipedia, video sharing sites have implemented the "no-follow attribute" which provides no SEO benefit to your site. Moreover, people hate it when they are having a discussion relevant to the video being watched and all of the sudden someone bluntly suggests a site which is not even relevant to the conversation, if you ever decide to do this you would be killing your SEO campaign since potential visitors now hate your site because you have been spamming it all over video sharing sites.

Spamming Forums

Message board spam has been around for quite some time. Message boards or forums were designed to attract people who would like to share their ideas and opinions with people interested in the same topic, as you see forums are all about content relevancy which is what most "sig-spammers" forget.

Spamming Blogs

If you have ever had the change of starting your own web-log, you may have noticed that several individuals tend to post "comments" which are highly irrelevant to the post and are also filled with a plethora of links. Bloggers dislike this practice very much, that is why blogging platforms such as Wordpress have implemented anti-spam plug-ins such as Akismet in order to minimize this "comment-abuse" Again, building links this way gives your site a bad image.

Spamming Webmasters

It is very annoying to check an email client just to find out that one more webmaster has sent a poorly written and sometimes irrelevant link exchange request, there is a really good chance to acquire strong links this way, however sending machine generated messages to a random list of webmasters will not get you anywhere, in fact, it will hurt you. When building reciprocal links, it is always a god idea to focus on relevancy and quality instead of quantity.

Link Pages (not relevant or useful) - Site-wide reciprocals

When webmasters were caught on the "link-fever" a few years ago, the creation of generic link pages became popular. People added links to a huge list which offered absolutely no value to the surfer, if this is what you are doing then you might want to research new ways to attract inbound links. Exchanging reciprocals with other sites is not a bad idea if it is done the right way, so forget link pages and place those reciprocals on pages which have content and are directly relevant to your trades, this will also avoid site-wide links which look like an effort to artificially create weight and page rank.

Submitting Undeveloped or Poor Sites to Directories (DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, Business.com, Joeant.com, etc)

The sites quoted above provide great SEO benefits if your site gets listed and indexed within their categories, the main reason people get rejected from these directories is because their sites are not fully developed or provide no value to the visitor, if this is the case you might want to add content thinking about the end user rather than the search engines because in the end, the ones clicking your ads and buying your products are not the search engine spiders but the "human visitors"

Continue Reading... Labels: Affiliate Marketing, Article, Blog, Business, Google, Internet marketing, Interview, Keyword, Link Building, Links, Optmimization, SEO, Tips for SE, Traffic, Web Hosting, Website

SEO Training

With high search engine rankings becoming increasingly important for business success online, search engine optimisation (SEO) is an important part of the marketing mix. However, hiring a professional SEO to run a campaign for you can be expensive. That’s where SEO training comes in.

The Importance of SEO

With 90% of internet users using search engines to find websites and the majority of those people only looking at the top two results pages, having a high search engine ranking really can make the difference between business success and failure.

By optimising your website for a particular search term you are able to attract traffic to it from people who are actively looking for your products and services.

This helps your business to generate what are effectively, qualified leads which are likely to produce sales.

The Benefits of SEO Training

The primary advantage of SEO Training is that it gives you access the SEO techniques you can apply yourself to achieve for a fraction of the cost of using an SEO consultant. As such, SEO Training is an effective and affordable way to achieve high search engine rankings.

Continue Reading... Labels: Business, Internet marketing, Interview, Keyword, Link Building, ost Google, TrafficTips for SE