Archive for SEO Parlor
12.13.09
Posted in Domainers Universe, SEO Parlor, Travel Tips at 10:39 pm by admin
Laws Of Similarity between proper and organic traffic
Weather you operate a web site or a physical business, you want visitants to your location and to get dealings to your commercial enterprise, you need to be active and do some hard piece of work. Sometimes the closest length from one place to another, is the difficult way about, so you will want to get active in some variety of traffic optimization to get the chore done.
A serious offering for your clients is perpetually a good means to get dealings, the offer can be date stamp dependent so that you make the offer on slow down dealings days. Based on your merchandises you can provide deductions, bropas or some different saving on vacations as well. It is a noted fact that discounts force dealings to both online stores and physical stores.
If you operate an live shop or a website you will need SEO to get the dealings you desire, vistors from search engines is great and converts well so that you will get higher sales and more clients.
Just like your store in the city, your shop on the cyberspace must have a good fundament and a solid structure so both your craftsmen and your host must be world-class. Like they say about pizza pies, if the bread is good, the whole pizza pie is good.
Don?t go for the cheapest answer unless you are hundred pct positive that it is as well the best solution, you will have to stay to your basic pick for a long period and you will relieve yourself from plenty of trouble later on.
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10.24.09
Posted in SEO Parlor, World Wide Web Resources at 6:10 am by admin
This is the year that search engine optimization at long last broke into the mainstream, and is now a common exercise applied by businesses seeking to promote their website. All the same, just a couple of years ago, SEO was seen as “gaming the system”. And now, how matters have changed: now SEO demands a larger set of talents in ethical spheres : writing great content, marketing a website across social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and persuading others to link to your site.
Google and other search engines have also grown to be a lot more advanced than just appraising links to determine search engine rankings : they can see for how many minutes people stay on your site, the number of pages they view, and in the main how “sticky” your website is.
Having said that, without doubt backlinks are still primary to decide rankings, and so you need to make your website a marvellous resource that individuals want to link to.
If you can’t wait to rank, you can use Pay Per Click advertising. What is Pay Per Click? This is a scheme where businesses bid a certain cost for every time the advertisement is clicked on. The sum one bids for is dependent on the keyword(s) that actually trigger the showing of your ad in the search engine results pages. Keywords are essential to the targeting of the individuals that actually click on your ads, and so Pay Per Click is a fantastic method to see which keywords convert to sales and which don’t. When you’re equipped with this data, you can then concentrate on those keywords in your SEO strategy too!
We recommend you hire a managed pay per click service provider first of all, and gain knowledge and experience from their strategy and tactics. In this way you’re not merely putting your website in the hands of masters, you can also gain experience from them as well.
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12.24.08
Posted in SEO Parlor at 8:28 pm by admin
Most webmasters have no idea on how to make a search engine friendly web site. If you are one of them this will all change by following these steps below.
1. Research keywords – Before you start to build your web site you should research your keywords or your site may get hurt in the short term. Use the keyword research tool, use Overture to research the most popular keywords that are related to your site. Overture will show you how much traffic each keyword has got in the past 30 days.
2. Create a list of about 50 to 100 keywords that you can include within your web pages. After having completed the above research, you should have found the keywords that were searched on most frequently, but few competing sites.
3. Write a paragraph of at least 250, but better with 500 words of text for the top of each web page. Put your keywords within this text, but be careful because you could repeat your keywords to much and make sure the paragraph makes sense with all those keywords, remember visitors are more important then the search engines.
4. Optimize meta tags – Meta tags have lost there touch with most search engines, but they still help! The most important meta tags are the keyword and description meta tags. Include your keywords within each of these meta tags. Your keyword meta tag should include the most frequently used keywords contained within your web page, but keep it short to about 10 to 15.
5. Title Tag – The title tag is one of the most powerful on-site SEO at your disposal, so use it wisely. Put your most important keyword in the title close to the beginning as posable, keep it short and to the point.
7. Optimize your site size – Too many images or very large images on your web page will slow down your server and cause slow loading times for your site. Slice large images into smaller pieces with a graphic editors. Also to long of pages and to much text will do the same.
8. Find backward links – Web sites that link to yours raise your link popularity. Search for web sites that are compatible with yours. Write articles that are related to your site and submit them to sites like Articlecity.com.
Matt Colyer began as a SEO Specialist in 1997. He founded Superior Webmaster in 2004 as a source of articles and tutorials for Web site owners looking to improve their Web site.
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09.23.08
Posted in SEO Parlor at 10:26 pm by admin
Many of you have heard of submitting your website, but what does this really mean? What places should you really submit your website? What about submitting to thousands of search engines and directories through some website promotion service?
WHAT PAGES TO SUBMIT:
At the minimum, you should submit your home page. Many search engines will promise to find and crawl the rest of your website automatically (in their own good time). But if they don’t discourage you from doing so, I would submit several of the important pages in your site. For example, a site map is definitely something I would want to submit, since it should have direct links to the rest of your website.
Also, if I get another webmaster to link to my website, it I like to submit that page as well. I want the search engines to recognize that this resource has changed – it has a link to my website and I want the credit for it.
WHAT TO PREPARE:
For the search engines, I would make sure that the website is properly optimized. At a minimum, I would do a double check the meta-tags to ensure that the title, meta-description and meta-keywords properly describe the web pages and have some of my desired keywords in it. I would also run a website validator on the pages I intend on submitting – to keep the search engine spiders from choking on my website. (http://validator.w3.org/) For more information on optimizing a website for the search engines, go to http://website-optimization-2.blogspot.com/.
For the directories, I would normally prepare some commonly requested information. This really helps to speed up the process. I normally use a generic text editor like Microsoft Notepad and save the following data before I go and submit to the different search engines and directories. This enables me to use copy and paste.
This should have:
* Your email
* Your website url
* A good title for your website
* A description for the website
Since Yahoo will allow you to submit a list of URLS that are in a text document (or an RSS feed) I would encourage you to prepare one to help them out. These should be at the root directory of your website and be updated whenever there is a change to your pages. That way you can just submit the location of the RSS feed or the text file and let Yahoo use that to find the rest of your pages. It is a nice time saver. Personally, I like using an automated RSS feed since Yahoo can use it to determine when the last changes occurred and decide what pages to re-crawl first.
(If you don’t know what RSS is, here is a great article on it: http://feedvalidat or.org/docs/rss2.html.)
Google uses a similar technology to help it find all of your web pages. It is called a “Google Site Map”. That is the subject of another article. I wrote one that has a lot more info on the Google Site Maps, for when you are ready to build one. Google also has a special way to submit these. Just follow their instructions. If this is too complicated, contact a webmaster or a SEO specialist who is familiar with this feature.
WHERE TO SUBMIT:
I would recommend submitting your home page to the major search engines individually, at least initially. However, there are several services that do groups of them for you – and is a big time saver for the rest of your site. The following is one of my favorites: http://www.freewebsubmis sion.com/ I have always deselected Google, though, since I submit to them manually through the Google website. I submit my web pages to the following search engines manually (without a special tool) just to ensure that it is done.
* Submit to Google
* Submit to Yahoo
* Subm it to MSN
You will need a Yahoo account to submit to the Yahoo search engine. And don’t fret if you don’t see immediate results. Your site should normally exist in MSN within about 6 weeks, in Yahoo in 8-12 weeks, and in Google within about 3 months. (You will not likely get much search results from Google for the first year though – but hold out and keep working on the other tricks. In the long run, Google will normally give you about 60 – 70% of the search engine traffic if you follow these methods.)
Also, if you have the Alexa toolbar installed, navigate to your website and click on the “info” button on the toolbar. Then you will have to fill in information about your website. Once this is registered, you will start seeing how your website’s Alexa rating looks. There has been some rumors that Google considers the Alexa description in its searches – so make sure it is relevant to your website as a whole and has at least one of your keywords.
You should also submit your website to DMOZ. This is a massive directory that is republished in several other websites. It is managed by humans, and is therefore considered to be of special relevance by other search engines. I strongly recommend reading all their rules before submitting – and follow them closely. Make sure that you try to get listed in only one category – the most relevant one for your business. It can take a month or two to get listed, but it really helps with your backlinks and overall relevancy as a website.
After DMOZ, here are the most important list of directories to be listed in.
* Yahoo Directory website submission ($299 annual fee)
* Business.com website submission ($199 annual fee)
* Microsoft Bcentral Directory website submission ($49 annual fee)
* Best of Web website submission ($40 annual fee)
* goguides.org website submission ($40 lifetime fee)
* gimpsy.com website submission ($40 lifetime fee)
* joeant website submission ($40 lifetime fee)
* Tygo website submission ($40 lifetime fee)
* Skaffe.com website submission ($40 lifetime fee)
* wowdirectory.com website submission ($25 lifetime fee)
If you haven’t used directories before – try browsing these before you fill out the form to submit your site. They are organized by category. You need to find the most relevant category to put your website before you start to fill out the form for each of these. Have a pen and paper as you browse – and write down directory paths of where you want to be.
Being in some directories just adds some good backlinks. (When another webmaster links to your website, this is considered a backlink.) Others, like Yahoo and DMOZ, tend to get some special relevance to certain search engines. After you get familiar with these well-known directories, look for niche directories that are specific to the type of business your website is about.
There are specialized directories that focus on a particular category of links. These can be valuable – you will just have to do a bit of searching to find them. These may be considered as part of your overall strategy.
Being listed in a search engine there doesn’t guarantee that you will have a good ranking – this is just the first step – letting them know that you exist.
IF YOU SEE AN OFFER TO GET LISTED IN HUNDREDS OF DIRECTORIES AND WEBSITES AUTOMATICALLY – BEWARE! Many of these will list you in hundreds of FFA (free for all) sites. These sites are considered SPAM by search engines and I would strongly encourage you to avoid them. Did I mention to avoid these? Check out what Google has to say about these: http://www.googl e.com/webmasters/seo.html . They may get you quick backlinks, but they are from the “wrong” type of site. These are just a list of sites – and they stay there temporarily. Only the latest 100 submitted or so are displayed there and you need to be resubmitted regularly to stay there. Few humans use this – it is just a linking game to trick the search engines about your popularity (and search engines don’t like it). Don’t bother.
TO WRAP IT UP:
Get backlinks – but avoid FFA sites. There are some important directories, but being listed in “THOUSANDS OF WEBSITES AND DIRECTORIES” is likely a promotional trick to get you listed in FFA sites. The most important backlinks are from web pages with content related to your website and those that your customers visit. If it isn’t likely to draw your customers, it may not be very important for your website traffic.
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09.21.08
Posted in SEO Parlor at 6:06 pm by admin
Internet search engines exist to organize the seemingly immeasurable amount of information available on the web. They direct people to pages that are relevant to their searches, pages that discuss the exact keywords they are looking for. For a business that receives the majority of its clientele from search engines, search engine rankings can make or break an e-commerce company.
Search Engines
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the marketing technique of enhancing a website and its content in order to increase the chances of achieving a high rank on search engine result pages (SERP) under relevant keyword searches.
Search engines are very secretive about their criteria and ranking systems, they continuously update and revise their algorithms (a mathematical formula used to determine which web pages are displayed in search results), and therefore, there is less likelihood of webmasters and search engine optimizers being able to achieve higher rankings by manipulation and spamming.
Each search engine has its own formula and criteria for indexing and ranking pages. One can analyze SERPs and backward links (all the links pointing at a particular web page) and attempt to determine a search engine’s indexing criteria, however, there is a lot of risk involved in relying on a limited number of optimization techniques.
Because of the unpredictable nature of search engines, a website can easily move from a top ranking position on a SERP down to the third or fourth SERP or even banned from the search engine altogether.
To Trust or Not to Trust
There are so many unethical SEO companies that claim to be able to achieve your website #1 rankings, they use overwhelmingly aggressive marketing techniques, and attempt to manipulate search engine results, that they give the industry a bad name.
The main problem with SEO companies is that they base their methods and techniques on research, trial and error, and speculation. As a result of the secretive indexing criteria of search engines, webmasters and SEO companies can only make an educated guess about the ranking systems and possible algorithm revisions.
SEO companies may be able to achieve high rankings in search engines for your website, they are good at what they do, however it is the way they do it that is precarious and dangerous.
Some SEO companies may use ‘black hat’, techniques to manipulate search engine results to their advantage. These techniques are high risk or illegal and can get a site banned from search engines. Black hat techniques can cuase seevere damage to the business of an e-commerce company.
A few examples of ‘black hat’ techniques:
• Hidden text/hidden links: stuffing your pages with keywords or links too small to read or the same color as the background, so viewers are unable to see any difference in the aesthetics of the page.
• Cloaking: using browser/bot sniffers to serve the search engine spiders a different page than the page visitors see. It is used to show an optimized page to the search engines and a different page to viewers.
• Mutiple submissions: submitting your domain and pages to search engines, for example submitting http://www.logobee.com and http://www.logobee.com/samples as two seperate urls.
• Link farms: sites created soley for the purpose of search engine ranking. These sites are nothing more than random links which have no relevance to one another.
• Selling PR: sites that sell their high PR links for a fee through direct advertisement and for the sole purpose of increasing link popularity.
• Doorways: having one page stuffed with keywords that re-direct to another more user friendly page.
• Meta tag abuse: having too many keywords in the meta tag description, title and keywords.
I am not implying that all SEO companies use ‘black hat’ techniques, there are some that use safe techniques, however I am only pointing out that relying on an SEO company to achieve top rankings for your website is a gamble.
As Easy As ABC
You don’t have to be a computer genius to achieve higher search engine rankings for your website. Effective search engine optimization can be done by anyone who has the time and determination. There exists hordes of information, suggestions, ideas, methods and tehnicques about successfully optimizing your website for search engines. SEO companies do not use any ’special’ tactics that we don’t already know or that we can’t easily research on the internet.
Safe SEO techniques:
• Content: Add valuable and relevant content to your site. The more content the better. Keep your paragraphs brief and to the point.
• Continuously update your website: Add new information and new pages to your site. Create a section on your home page containing up-to-date news items relevent to your business.
• Link popularity: Participate in link exchanges that are relevant to your business or that compliment your business. The more inbound links, the more important your website is perceived to be by the search engine spiders. Progressively build your links. Do not add 500 links to your site at one time.
• Site maps: Include a site map on your site. Site maps can help your visitors easily surf your site.
• Meta tags and Alt tags: Meta tags contain information about the website, placed in the HTML header of a web page, that is not visible to browsers. The most common meta tags relevant to search engines are title, keyword and description tags. Title tags are the most important tags because they contain the information that a viewer sees concerning your website on a search engine results page. Choose a title that clearly represents your business. Make sure that your all your tags contain relevant keywords. Alt tags describe the graphical elements in a web page.
• Header tags: Header tags (H1, H2, H3….) are tags used to represent headers and important titles. Use H1 tags for the most important headers, H2 for the next, etc…As well, use bold, italics, underlines, and different font sizes. Spiders and bots give high value to sites that contain a variety of text and font sizes.
• Keep it simple: Make your site simple and viewer friendly. Make you site easy to surf, eye-catching, informative and interesting. Keep in mind that surfers have a short attention span.
• Stay away from large images and Flash images. Spiders have a preference for html text sites.
• Keyword density: Keywords should exist in your title tag, headline tag, description tag and throughout the content of your home page as well as other internal pages. Be careful not to over do it though.
• Informative and authoritative: Include authorative articles pertaining to the topic of your business, FAQ, tips, how-to’s, etc..
• Participate in SEO and webmaster forums to keep up to date on SEO techniques and search engine criteria revisions. Read websites and articles on various SEO suggestions.
• For other safe optimization techniques see Google’s guidelines for webmasters (http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html).
SEO companies are by the dozen, attempting to lure you in, convincing you to believe that they, and they alone, can help you attain top position results on search engines. While you consider whether to go with an SEO company or not, you may want to do some research on the SEO industry. You can find some helpful information at http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html.
Instead of spending big bucks on achieving big results, take initiative, do it yourself. Don’t spend endless hours worrying about search engine results and crawling spiders. While keeping in mind basic SEO techniques, customize your web site for your human users and not for spiders and bots.
Bio: Colleen Ryan is the Art Director of Logobee Inc., a logo design firm that designs high quality logos and corporate identity design for businesses worldwide. Logobee Inc. was founded in 2000 and since then the company has grown at an exponential rate.
http://www.logobee.com
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09.19.08
Posted in SEO Parlor at 4:35 am by admin
Webmasters today spend quite some time optimizing their websites for search engines. Books have been written about search engine optimization and some sort of industry has developed to offer search engine optimization services to potential clients. But where did this all start? How did we end up with the SEO world we live in today (from a webmaster standpoint seen)?
A guy named Alan Emtage, a student at the University of McGill, developed the first search engine for the Internet in 1990. This search engine was called “Archie” and was designed to archive documents available on the Internet at that time. About a year later, Gopher, an alternative search engine to Archie, was developed at the University of Minnesota. These two kinda search engines triggered the birth of what we use as search engines today.
In 1993, Matthew Gray developed very first search engine robot – the World Wide Web Wanderer. However, it took until 1994 that search engines as we know them today were born. Lycos, Yahoo! And Galaxy were started and as you probably – two of those are still around today (2005).
In 1994 some companies started experimenting with the concept of search engine optimization. The emphasis was put solely on the submission process at that time. Within 12 months, the first automated submission software packages were released. Of course it did not take long until the concept of spamming search engines was ‘invented’. Some webmasters quickly realized that they could swamp and manipulate search results pages by over-submission of their sites. However – the search engines soon fought back and changed things to prevent this from happen.
Soon, search engine optimizers and the search engines started playing some sort of a “cat and mouse” game. Once a way to manipulate a search engine was discovered by the SE-optimizers they took advantage of this. The search engines subsequently revised and enhanced their ranking algorithms to respond to these strategies. It was clear very soon that mainly a small group of webmasters was abusing the search engine algorithms to gain advantage over the competition. Black Hat search engine optimization was born. The unethical way of manipulating search engine resulted in faster responses from search engines. Search engines are trying to keep the search results clean of SPAM to provide the best service to customers.
The search engine industry quickly realized that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as an industry would not go away, and in order to maintain useful indexes, they would need to at least accept the industry. Search engines now partially work with the SEO industry but are still very eager to sort out SPAMMERS that are trying to manipulate the results.
When Google.com started to be the search engine of choice for more than 50% of the Internet users it was highly visible to anyone in the industry that search engine spamming had reached a new dimension. Google.com was so much more important to the success of a website that many webmasters solely concentrated on optimizing their sites for Google only as the payoff was worth the efforts. Again – Black Hat SEO took place, pushing down the honest webmaster and their sites in search results delivered. Google started fighting back. Several major updates to Google’s algorithms forced all webmaster to adapt to new strategies. Black Hat SE-optimizers but suddenly saw something different happening. Instead of just being pushed down in the search results their websites were suddenly completely removed from the search index.
And then there was something called the “Google Sandbox” to show up in discussions. Websites either disappeared into the sandbox or new websites never made it into the index and were considered in the Google Sandbox. The sandbox seemed to be the place where Google would ‘park’ websites either considered SPAMMY or not to be conform with Google’s policies (duplicate websites under different domain names, etc.). The Google Sandbox so far has not been confirmed or denied by Google and many webmasters consider it to be myth.
In late 2004 Google announced to have 8 billion pages/sites in the search index. The gap between Google and the next two competitors (MSN and Yahoo!) seemed to grow. However – in 2005 MSN as well as Yahoo! Started fighting back putting life back into the search engine war. MSN and Yahoo seemed to gain ground in delivering better and cleaner results compared to Google. In July of 2005 Yahoo! Announced to have over 20 billion pages/sites in the search index – leaving Google far behind. No one search engine has won the war yet. The three major search engines however are eagerly fighting for market share and one mistake could change the fortune of a search engine. It will be a rocky ride – but worth watching from the sidelines.
About the Author
Christoph Puetz is a successful entrepreneur and international book author. Examples of his search engine optimization work can be found at Web Hosting Tutorials and at Highlands Ranch, Colorado.
The article can be published by anyone as long as the resource box (About the Author) is posted on the website including the links. These links must be clickable.
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