While I realise you’re ranking well for some of your main keywords on MSN & Yahoo, how are you doing for that and other more appropriate keywords on Google?

The traffic you’ll get for high rankings on Google will be more than Yahoo & MSN added together and then some, so it’s MUCH MORE value-for-money in terms of pursuing high Search Engine ranking results on Google than the #2 & #3 Search engines offer.

According to the statistics I’ve recently read, Google has nearly 81% of ALL the search engine traffic in Australia (and is similarly high in many other countries), which gives you an idea of how much traffic you are currently missing out just relying on Yahoo & Ninemsn.

If you do some quick searches and your web site doesn’t rank in the top 3 pages for your main keywords on Google (anything below the top 3 pages is pretty much a waste of time), then you’re leaving LOTS of traffic (and potential paying clients) on the table.

If you were to get (in particular) a first page ranking for one or more of your main keyword phrases in Google, you would be blown away with the amount of traffic and enquiries you get at your site, compared to what you currently receive.

Something else that’s important to consider when you review rankings is the amount of TEXT content on your site. The higher ranking sites almost always have lots of text content (articles, news, reviews, etc) on their site and the lower ranking ones don’t have much.

Here’s a quick experiment you can try for yourself. On Google, Yahoo & MSN, do a search for your top 1 or 2 keyword phrases, and note the sites that come out in the top 10.

Then, go to each of those 3 search engines and see how many pages of these sites are indexed, compared to yours. It’s easy to do this by just entering the following command in at each Search Engine:

site:www.domainname.com

(obviously substituting your site URL and the other top 10 site urls where appropriate)

If the number of pages in the index for your site is significantly lower than the competition, there’s one of your main reasons for a poor ranking (there are other factors, but this is an important one).

I often have prospective search engine optimisation clients give me the excuse that they are getting decent results from Yahoo & MSN, and anyway funds are tight, so they don’t want to invest in getting results in Google. You know, the old classic “Call me again in 6 - 9 months!”

However, what they don’t realise is that the additional income they would receive for a higher ranking on Google (from the ensuing customers it brought you) would not only well and truly pay for our SEO services but give them plenty of ongoing new clients, which would take care of any cashflow concerns they might have for a while to come.

Consider that many of the big companies in your market niche spend large sums of money to advertise on TV, Radio & Print to drive traffic to their web site/s & retail location/s, but a good SEO strategy will bring visitors to your site for literally cents on the dollar - a much higher ROI. According to Google’s statistics, a quality Search Engine strategy can achieve similar results but be 20 times CHEAPER than direct mail (for one example).

I guess the lesson here is not to be penny-wise and dollar-poor. Work out how many additional new paying clients you would need to get via Search Engine Optimisation results to break even with the SEO firm’s fee, and then go after the main game in town: Google.

Your return-on-investment for good Seach Engine rankings is way ahead of most any other form of advertising and marketing you can come up with, but you need to see the big picture first. Don’t wait until your competitor sees the light and takes action before you, or you’ll miss out.

1. Add every meta tag that you can.
Use the old adagewhen applying meta tags, KISS or “keep it simple, stupid.” Don’t add tags unless you know what you’re doing. Don’t make up your own tag names because no-one’s paying any attention to them. Most of these tags are skipped over by most search engines today. The only crucial tags are the description tag and the keywords tag which are both utilized only occasionally. Many other tags are there just for the sake of crediting the webmaster, author, etc. These kinds of tags are there mostly for the sake of other webmasters if they need to know who to contact about the page itself.

2. Have lots of keywords.
Using the ‘keywords’ meta tag correctly is good. Getting too hung up on it is bad. Many search engines now ignore it altogether, including Google and AltaVista. Remember that putting too many words in this tag could be considered spamming could get your site banned. Keep the keywords related to your site only. As previously stated, many of your meta tags will be skipped over anyway, but you should keep to your primary key words and not worry too much about assembling a gigantic list. Be descriptive, be honest, don’t be excessive.

3. Keyword lists must have a formula.
People have a tendency to get very distracted by the keyword meta tag. Relate it to your site and do not expect miracles from it. It gets skipped more often than not by the SE spiders. Even it’s used it is used in conjunction with the content on your page. If you want to obsess with optimizing something, optimize your content.

4. The title tag doesn’t really do much.
Out of all the tags, this one is the most important when it’s used correctly. Just like with your site’s content, write your title tag for your audience first and the search engines second. Think about your site’s branding and navigation issues as you create
your title tags. Your title should be relatively long. A seven to ten word title is not out of the question. The title is the first thing that a search engine really cares about and it should be the most common thing that you want your visitors to find you for. Your most important key words should all be worked into your title.

5. If I copy my competitor’s keywords I will do just as well. You need to understand tags and the details of search engine optimization in general. What works for one site doesn’t necessarily work for another! You do not have identical sites so you cannot work with identical keywords. Aside from this detail, a site that has been around longer is more likely to have success from its key words than a new
site. If you are trying to take over a small niche, you have to expand and do something that your competitor hasn’t done yet.

6. If I repeat my keywords in a comment tag I will rank better.There was a time when this was true but it is not so anymore. Search engines are all wise to this trick nowadays.

7. We need to have as many different keywords as possible throughout our site. This is an SEO nightmare. Your pages need to be focused, not always trying to cover all basis. Limit your keywords. A ketword density of 5-10% of total copy is good and they should be woven into sentences to make sense.

8. Anyone can write a website’s tags.
SEO calls for copywriting and marketing talent. Practice at it. Writing good tags that can attract both humans and search engine spiders isn’t easy.

9. Google doesn’t rank me by the description tag, so why should I use it? Google does still use the description tag from your site. It displays it to its users in their search results. If there’s no description tag, they’ll just see a nonsense excerpt from your site, which is bad. Don’t forget that there are still plenty of uses for the description tag. Make the title and the description complement each other, as they will often be displayed together.

Here is my technique:

Ok, so you got a whole bunch of keywords now? (If you’ve read my last article:http://www.keywordkingdom.com/killerkeywordlist.html How to Conquer Your Competition by Creating a Killer Keyword List then you would know the significance of this step)  So now what? What do you do with your exhaustive list of thousands of keywords?

Filter your list to the keywords that convert the most sales:

I’m sure you’ve been told and have even beaten over the head with this quote:   “The longer the keyword phrase the more targeted it usually is, and the higher it will convert”.  Yet it baffles me how many times people still overlook this.  If you want to spend a year targeting keywords that get bazillions of searches go right ahead, I’ll spend a dedicated month getting a top ranking for a longer more targeted phrase.  I tend to get the highest conversions from keyword phrases 3-5 words long, but it all varies on the site and market.

Please don’t do what everybody else does and use KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) as the be-all-end-all solution to keyword research.  You’ll simply be doing yourself an incredible disservice as that data is not very accurate.

So what is the million dollar secret to finding the keyword in your market that convert the most sales?  It’s simple: run a massive Adwords pay-per-click campaign.

Google Adwords is a very efficient and inexpensive way to find the keywords that convert the highest possible sales.  Create an Adwords account (as the other pay-per-click options don’t come close to the accuracy or tracking Google offers) Place all of the keywords you accumulated in your market into a single AdGroup (there are better ways of grouping your ads but its irrelevant in the context of this article) Bid high enough to have a top 8 listing for every word (this will ensure many impressions).  Also, be sure to integrate the “conversion tool”, under the “Tools” tab in your Adwords campaign.  Simply paste the bar of code Google gives you on the “thank you” page of the targeted site.  This will give you the conversion numbers and ratios that make this technique work. After a few good weeks of impressions you should have a large enough sample to know EXACTLY what keywords are converting at the highest percentage.

Note: Don’t be afraid to spend the ten or so dollars on your pay per click campaign, the information this technique reveals is worth thousands alone.

Jot down the keywords that converted at the highest percent, you can find out what to do with this smaller list by reading my article:http://www.keywordkingdom.com/milliondollarmistake.htmlAre You Making this Million Dollar Mistake When Choosing Your Keywords? you now have an edge on 99% of the competition in your market.

When I first read Stuntdubl’s take on the Sandbox I was intrigued.

You see, I’ve never been a fan of the whole sandbox theory – that new sites are arbitrarily assigned to this Google neverland for some pre-determined period of time.

In fact, for quite a while Google wasn’t even aware of its existence (at least according to them). In fact, they found out after some heated discussions on well known forums that there was indeed some sort of dampening factor affecting some sites.

So I did some more digging around on the whole issue of Trustbox – what it was and what it means.

The first mention I could find of Trustbox happened on November 18th. That’s where the author asked if the Sandbox would be more appropriately named the Trustbox.

This is because, as more people dug into the sandbox (pardon the pun) they began to realize that it wasn’t really a neverland that affected all sites.

In fact, most sites were treated differently based on a bunch of factors.

Ultimately, it seems to come down to trust. That is, is a site trustworthy enough to have earned its way out of the “sandbox” and into the regular organic listings.

And then there was the followup by Stuntdubl on how “Time + Trust = High Quality Indications for relevance.”

And I have to tell you, based on what I’ve seen in the past few months I have to agree. As I said I don’t believe in the sandbox, but I do believe in the trustbox.

So how does one get out of the “Trustbox”?

As the name implies, you need to be a trusted source of relevant information before your site can be unleashed into the regular index.

But since it’s so difficult to determine relevance on a site by site basis, Google needs to look at offsite factors to determine if your site is trustworthy.

How it does that is by looking at the incoming links you’ve managed to build since entering this space. And you can’t just have any only links. They must be from trusted sources. You want people to link to you that are considered worthy already by Google.

In my previous article about trustrank and the sandbox I talked about some of the things your site should do to get out.

Things such as ensuring your site is always growing. Not only does this help promote internal link inheritance it also shows Google that your site is a meaningful venture. One that intends to stick around.

As for links you do want relevant, authority sites linking to you. And more then just a couple links. While a link from DMOZ and Yahoo! Will help, they aren’t the only links you need.

Try and get links from other related sites in the industry. For example, if your site sells pet beds turn to other pet related sites to get links.

You see, all Google has really done is closed a few loopholes in the algorithms. They are trying to take what they say in the webmaster guidelines of their FAQ section and apply them to the index.

Therefore, as long as you stick to these guidelines you will be ok.

One more thing that hasn’t been mentioned, but I also believe that while you can earn your way out of the Trustbox, you can also earn your way back in. That means, if you do what you are supposed to to get out, but then turn to spam techniques to promote yourself, you’ll just as quickly earn a one way ticket back into the Trustbox. And if you do that it will probably take much more to earn your way back out.

Your web site NEEDS links, it can’t survive at the top of the search engine rankings without them. In this article I am going to explain how anyone can get good quality links for their web site, without paying for them…

Link building for your web site is not technically difficult, it just requires some time and dedication to do the job properly. If you don’t have the time and discipline to do the job right, I strongly suggest hiring someone - WCR Internet Marketing provides this service in some of their Web Marketing plans.

I recommend only looking for links from sites that are related to your site. If you can’t determine a relationship between your site and theirs, move along, there are plenty more sites out there that are more relevant!

Always remember why you have a web site - you want people to find your site useful, so make sure you are only linking to useful, relevant content. Think about this - if a surfer is browsing a site about rebuilding a car engine, they aren’t likely to find a mortgage broker link very useful, are they? Stick to linking amongst relevant sites, and I guarantee you that in the long term your site will benefit greatly.

This is the 6 Step process we use when building links for clients:

1) Determine what sort of links you want.

This is extremely important. The types of links that you’re looking for are industry specific. If you have a web site that is focussed on the rebuilding of car engines, you will be looking for links in the automotive or car related areas in directories. If you are selling electrical contracting services, you will want to look for regional listings or general business listings to find possible links.

2) Find your source of links.

So we’re looking for links that are relevant to your web site. The best place to source your links are directories such as DMOZ. Go to a directory, browse through to a category that suits your site (a lot of the time there will be more than one suitable category) and you will see a whole lot of other relevant sites, perfect for sourcing quality links. Try the directories below, they should keep you going for a while:

http://directory.google.com
http://directory.yahoo.com
http://dmoz.org

3) Determine whether or not a site is relevant.

It’s time to start visiting web sites. Have a look at each site one by one to see if a link to your site would realistically fit in. A webmaster isn’t likely to want to change the structure of their site just to add a link to you, so if you don’t think you’re going to fit in, close the site and move along to the next. If you think you have a chance of getting linked, move on to the next step.

4) Determine where on the site your link would fit best.

If it’s a directory that you’re browsing through, find the most appropriate category for your site. If it’s just a web site, have a look for a links page or any other pages that have links or might be suitable to have links on it.

5) Submit your site.

If it’s a directory that you’re on, once you are in the appropriate category for your web site, look around the page for a place to submit your site. Quite often you will find something like “Add URL”, “Submit your site” or “Add a link” etc. Use this link to submit your site.

If you’re on a relevant web site and there is no “Add URL” function, you will need to find an email address for the webmaster. Keep in mind that when emailing the webmaster, always personalize your request - don’t just copy and paste a template to thousands of different webmasters - that’s a sure way to have your request sent straight to the recycle bin.

Take the time to look around for a name, it won’t always be available, but when it is - use it. Let the webmaster know where you think it might be suitable to have a link to your site and let him know if you are happy to reciprocate the link. At the end of the day, the easier you make it for them, and the more polite your request is, the more likely you are to end up with a link.

6) Document all of your work.

I can’t stress this point enough, it is absolutely the most important part of any link building campaign. Create a Word document with all your site information in it (Title, Description, URL). Also in this Word document, have a few email templates prepared for different scenarios - I know I said don’t use templates, but you don’t have to type out every request every time you want to ask for a link - make up a template that you can fill out specific information on like the web site address, where you would like your link to be placed etc.

Make sure you also document each individual link request you make - every time you ask someone for a link, write it down in your Word document. That way, at a later date, you can go through the list and check who is linking to you and who isn’t.

In Closing

Remember to be patient and keep your eye out for new potential links. Improving your web site link popularity won’t send your web site straight to the top of the search engine rankings, but it will help you in the long term. If you plan on building a successful web site over a number of years, a properly organized link building campaign will do you the world of good. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

I then installed wordpress and start posting some blog entries. By 5:39pm on that same day, I was visited by blo.gs, technorati, omniexplorer, and googlebot. Just imagine, that was just 3 hours. Now here’s the exciting part. By June 3 my blog posts was already in google’s index. That’s about 2 days!

So what did I do right? I know a lot of people are complaining that it took them a few months just to get indexed. We’ll here’s some few tips on how to achieve the same. I cannot guarantee that you will get the same result, but this is exactly what I did.

Firstly, blogs are such a very nice tool. Once you enter some blog entries, do a ping. Actually, most blog software already has a built-in ping system. I never did a ping but you can visit pingomatic to have your blog pinged just to be sure.

Second, what I did to jump start this new domain is to find other sites that you know are being visited often by the search engines. Put some links there. What I did was I pointed these links to my blog posts and not my main domain.

There’s one person who actually own a PR6 domain. He linked this new domain from the existing PR6 domain and he also was indexed within 2 days. This is a very good technique if you already have an existing high PR website.

This is the first time I joined an SEO contest but I’m doing a lot of SEO work for my own sites as well as for some clients. Do you think there’s a lot of stuff to be learned in SEO contests? Oh definitely. Want to get some of the latest working SEO tactics? Here’s the deal.

I would love to get some more backlinks to boost my rank. In my site,noels isulong seoph, there’s a note there about linking to my site. Copy the link, past it in your website (the page with the highest pagerank) and send me an email (noel at globaleshop dot biz). Don’t forget to email me the URL where you put the link so I can verify.

I’ll be creating a distribution list, and after the contest is over, I’ll be compiling a list of the actual techniques used in the seo contest and send it ONLY to the people who created a link to my site. The contest will be over by Sept 30 so you can delete the links after that date

If you want your web page to stand the test of time, then create real content!

The last few years have been an interesting time in Internet Affiliate Marketing. Like the Wild West, there were few rules and those who moved the quickest could profit quickly and sizable returns. But things are changing. The Search Engines are getting smarter and the days of automated content generators are numbered.

I know that there are several search engines out there,Yahoo,MSN, etc, butGoogleis the only one that really matters for sheer numbers. A year ago, google search results were getting worse and worse. It was filled with spam. I’m sure that if you were searching for an answer to some problem and were using Google, that you’ve seen the useless pages. Basically, the title of the page would be the exact string that you were searching for and the remainder of the page would be affiliate links with no useful information present.

Google has gone through several updates. These updates were called Jagger and Big Daddy (and that’s just the last 8 or 9 months). I think that you’d agree that Google results are now much improved over a year ago. What’s missing? All the spam. The Spam pages were created by various tools that could automatically create thousands of pages. Basically, you feed them a list of keywords, which may have been collected fromMetaSpyor Wordtrackerand they create thousands of pages based upon those keywords. Some of the page generation scripts would do a search engine scrapes of the keywords and place the results on your pages. Really little more than stealing someone else’s content.

This method has worked for a few years, but is becoming less and less effective daily. If you use these methods, then I’m sure you’re seeing your affiliate commissions shrink as you lose positions in Google. Frankly, I’m sick of this constant warfare and electronic countermeasures! If you keep using these strategies, then you’ll be buying / learning / implementing / abandoning page generation software for years to come. Yes, it’s expensive, but it’s also very time consuming and time is one resource that you can never recover.

So what is the solution? I think it is to create web pages with real, useful content. Not just scraped results. And you can keep many of the tools that you may have purchased over the years to keep your web pages fresh.

Getting the real content is the tricky part. How do you do this without hiring an army of writers? There are several cost effective methods.

1) Get content from Article sites. These articles are mostly of good quality and the rights to republish them are implied. You can manually search for articles at sites likeArticle Center,Easy Articles,GoArticles, etc. There are literally hundreds of these sites. You can also use tools likeArticle Miner. Article Miner actually creates a database of articles from about 20 article sites on your PC and lets you search locally. Then it automates the process of creating web pages from the articles from templates that you design. It’s one of my favorite tools.

2) Write Once and create multiple version. You can use tools likeWebSpinnerto take content that you write and turn it into hundreds of articles that say the same thing but with synonomized words, sentences, even paragraphs. WebSpinner is a very powerful tool for those who want to write once and create tons of unique and useful content.

3) Pay someone to write for you. Now don’t be scared away by this method. You can find someone locally I’m sure, but when I need articles written, I useElance.com. Having articles written is super easy. You post a request to have 1 or more articles written about a particular subject and within an hour, you’ll have responses from many people who will write for you. I generally pay about $5.00 per article using Elance.com and the authors have all impressed me. You get to choose who is going to do the work for you and you can generally get a look at their work before you buy from them. Elance also has a Feedback system similar to ebay’s, so you can purchase without fear. I’ve also has custom software written (like myClickbank Quickviewer application).

4) A method that I have never used, but which I’ve heard others using, is to use public domain material. I won’t go into detail on how to determine if a book is in the public domain, but you can find thousands of them on the Project Gutenberg web page. Here’s a link to theirCopyright How-topage that describes how you can know if a book is in the public domain. Now, before you discount this method, check out this page called,The Illustrated History of the Roman Empire. I was blown away by the concept of this page. Is it a huge money maker? Probably not. But I bet it earns a few bucks each day and only had to be set up once. How many old books about the Roman empire could you find that are in the public domain and which could be turned into a multi-page web site with ads in a hurry? The subjects are too numerous to mention. I found this page while doing some bible study research on Google, so their placement is good. Their Google PR is 6. Not bad.

Wrapping up, I think from this point and going forward, you should not be looking at ‘quick fix’ tools that generate thousands of pages of garbage. While these tools may work in the short term, you will be facing a constant battle with the search engines to keep your content within their indexes. Instead, you should focus on creating web sites that have real content. You don’t need 10,000 page web sites when you have pages that actually get read and used. 100 good pages are better than 10,000 pages any day.

Here’s to a profitable day!

Charles Waters jumped into the world of Internet Affiliate Marketing in 2003 and has never looked back. Today, his flagship website isThe Affiliates Home, a meeting place for other Internet affiliate marketers.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for “spam” pages and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search engine’s index.

The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the “spam” net and tossed from a search engine’s index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do - and things you should be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind of misperception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links “bad neighborhoods.”

You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven’t linked to a bad neighborhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a “Pagerank” which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.

Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.

Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the keywords but made them the same color as the background color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye - but the eye of search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page’s link ranking.

Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text - splat! the page is penalized.

The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the gray text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background color of the page - ever!

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called “keyword stuffing.” It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called “Keyphrase Density” to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering - unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is “renters insurance,” be sure you don’t use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.

The final potential risk factor is known as “cloaking.” To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For the rest of you?cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees is “cloaked” because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site’s search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page’s ranking to the top of the list.

It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as “pagejacking.” This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days due to the use of “off page” elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great risk.

Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.

The author, William Yost, is a software engineer who is exploring website marketing as a hobby, possibly a second income. He maintains a free articles site at http://www.freearticles.u-seek-it.com, an online store at http://www.webstore.u-seek-it.com, and a forum at http://www.websitemarketing.u-seek-it.com .

Article Source: http://www.articlecube.com

Search Engine Rankings. Everyone wants to be number one, and there are millions of web sites out there. So how do you become number one and stay there consistently? Consistently is the key word here. Sure, you may apply the newest, best trick in the book today, but when someone else comes out with a better one tomorrow, you will be scrambling to get to the top again.

I think one of the keys is to be well-rounded. There are many books and philosophies about web rankings that are floating around. Some people say article marketing is the way to go, others link building, others say you have to maximize your web pages for the search engines. You have to get all your keywords right and your titles and description. But what happens when another web site does you one better in that area? Now you drop in rank. Therefore, I think it is more important that you do a good job in all the areas than to be the very best in one area. And I think it is OK to be number 8 or number 3 in rank, also. If you are in the very top spot and you are clicked simply because the top spot gets more clicks, are you really going to get more sales just because you are number one? Your product and site have to be relevant to the consumer, not just the search engine.

Another key is to focus on very specific keywords. You can do an awesome job in every area of search engine optimization, but if you go too thin here, you will not make it to number one in any of your keywords. Focus on one, or at the most, two keywords. Build your site around those keywords. Be everything you can be to someone who keys in those keywords. Or better yet, one keyword. Would you rather have one keyword that has a number one placement, or 8 keywords with a number 40 placement each? To me, number 40 is like number 1 million–you don’t get enough clicks to pay the bills. I would far rather have one keyword for which my site is on the first page of results than twenty that are all over the place. Build yourself a web site that has a strong keyword density–for one or two keywords. Put those keywords in your title and description and keyword lists.

You must have incoming links. You must have quality incoming links. You must build incoming links one link at a time. Links are very important, but you cannot cheat in this area. You must build them one by one. My two favorite methods of link building is to write articles, like this one, and submit them to article directories, and to be included in link directories. Stay away from link farms, large link exchanges, or anything of the sort. The major search engines want to see you build a steady supply of links over time. What do you think a search engine will do for you when you go from 0 links to 3000 in one day? That won’t get you to number one, and certainly won’t keep you there, when you are put in the sandbox for six months.

These keys to search engine optimization are just a beginning. You need traffic, you need click thrus in the search engine results. You need visitors to stay at your site for more than a few seconds when they click in. How do you get that? Build real content. Build it for people, not machines—while following the first three keys. Do that, and I believe that in three to six months you will have each web site you set up with this strategy, in the top ten for your keyword.

If you are interested in generating traffic for your web site, blog, or RSS feed then you must spend some time working on SEO. Of course, you can ignore SEO and depend on other methods of traffic generation but this can be very expensive and time-consuming. Of course, SEO can be expensive and time consuming as well but if it is done right it will not only enhance the appearance, usability, and usefulness of your site, blog or feed in the short run it will also increase traffic and revenue in the long run.

Search engine traffic is the best source of long-term free traffic. If you are looking to attract visitors to your new online store featuring dog sweaters then obtaining a good listing on Yahoo could deliver 1800 visitors searching for dog sweaters and another 2000 searching for some other variation of key words including dog sweater. Google could deliver even more and MSN could make a healthy contribution as well.

If you ignore SEO then you will still get some search engine traffic, especially if you employ other marketing efforts, but it will be a paltry trickle compared to the flood of visits you could receive from proper SEO. Taking some time to ensure your site is properly optimized for search engines will eventually result in higher rankings for the search terms you target with your SEO efforts. The higher your site appears in search engine listings then the more visitors you will receive.

All search engines have a set of rules, often referred to as algorithms, that are used to judge the importance, also known as rank, of a web page for a specific word or phrase, also known as keyword. Software robots called spiders continually “crawl” the web and report back to search engines with the results. Once your site has been crawled by a search engine, the site will be included in that engine’s index of web sites and eventually ranked according to the individual search engine’s rules.

Obviously you want your site, blog or feed to be spidered, indexed, and ranked quickly but it is best to have your site optimized before it is spidered as once it is indexed and ranked you may need to wait for a return visit to register the improvements. It is OK, and even desirable, to continue to add to and improve your site after it is spidered but you should wait to attract the spiders until after your site is ready.

There is a great deal of misinformation regarding how to get your pages spidered and indexed quickly by the search engines. You could spend a great deal of time and money chasing down the secret tools and tips that abound, but there really isn’t a secret. Some search engines provide a facility that you can use to submit your site details to them, but this method often takes a lot of time to work. The fastest and most effective way is to have a highly ranked website, preferably one related to your site’s topic, provide a link back to your site. When the spiders crawl the highly ranked site, which may happen every day or at least within a week, they will find your link. Spiders discovering your link on a prominent site will temporarily classify your site as important and follow the link to crawl your site.

The factors that influence a web site’s rank within a search engine index are closely guarded secrets and the rules frequently change. Just to make things even more complicated the factors vary from search engine to search engine.While you can spend a great deal of time and money studying SEO there are many free articles and discussion groups available but concentrating on a few simple issues will likely produce the results you need without further investigation.

Content is king when it comes to search engine optimization. Your site should have several pages of original content centered around the primary topic of your site. Pages or blog posts should have at least 200 words. Regularly adding pages or posts will keep your site relevant and interesting to search engines as well as visitors.

Don’t overlook the use of tags within your site as well. These tags include meta tags, title, header and anchor tags. Your key words and phrases should be reflected in these tags as well as the content you place on your site.

Search engine optimization is an important part of internet marketing but it doesn’t have to as complex and expensive as some folks make it out to be. If you generate a clean, attractive site with unique and relevant content then the search engines will like it. If the search engines like it then they will tell their visitors and your traffic will rise.