SEO|The Full Insider SEO Details Exposed

If you were writing a textbook on SEO linking circa 2001, you almost certainly would have included a chapter on web directories. They used to be the primary way of actively acquiring one-way inbound links, before content syndication, blogs, or the paid link market really took off.

Web Directories and SEO Links: What Went Wrong?

Fast forward a few years, and you’d have to rewrite the chapter on directories and web links. In fact, you would probably downgrade web directories from a chapter to a page or two. In the SEO world, nothing good ever lasts long, and so it is with web directories.

* Traffic. With Google more accurate than ever, there was no more reason to turn to a human-edited list of websites. A directory might get you one or two click-throughs a month–or none at all.

* Redirects. Once directory owners realized their link popularity was valuable, they started hording it. Overnight, many, if not most, directories switched their HTML links to search-engine-invisible redirects.

* Fees. Most directories started charging for inclusion, or at least, for inclusion with a link rather than a redirect. If the fees were reasonable, that would not be so bad. But why would you pay $35 for a link on a PR 3 page with dozens of other links and virtually no content, on a site with dwindling traffic?

* Corruption. In the SEO world, low-hanging fruit quickly goes rotten. Any volunteer-edited commercial category in a link directory runs a very real risk of being taken over by a corrupt SEO.

* Dubious link popularity. Given the notoriety of many directories for selling or inappropriately bestowing links, it’s not hard to imagine a search engine quality control engineer turning the link popularity juice off from these sites.

* “Welcome to our list.” If a directory doesn’t charge a fee to enter, it may ask for payment in the form of an email address. You’d better use your special Hotmail account for that one.

* Anchor text. Many directories do not allow for anchor text to be specified, delighting in providing as little SEO value as possible for the effort involved in submitting to them.

* Time. When link directories really were vital efforts to categorize the web, getting a link in them was as simple as having a good website and letting them know about it. Now that they’ve turned into tightly rationed supplies of link popularity, that kind of responsiveness is out the window.

* Idiosyncratic applications without any promise of timely follow-up.

* Application forms that often empty straight into a black hole:
* No way of checking on the status of submissions.
* Threats of scuttling submissions that are re-submitted when there is no response.

Web Directory Linking Alternatives for the 21st Century

* Reciprocal linking with a twist. If you network with other site owners, you can triangulate link trades so that they are not direct. Heck, if you really like each other, you may just link to each others’ sites for the sake of it! It’s worked for me with some high-PR links.

* Blogging. Blog early, blog often, and someone is bound to link to you. It’s the nature of blogging. The fastest way to get inbound links from your blog? Write about other blogs. The more controversial, the better. Post this article on a webmaster blog, and in the same post, reference the blog of someone who thinks link directories are still a good idea! In the blogosphere, arguments mean lots of links.

* Article directories. These are the closest things to link directories, from an SEO standpoint, to emerge in the 21st century. You submit an article to one of these sites (of which there are over 200). In your article you include a link to your site. Article directories are everything link directories used to be: responsive, fair, fast, no-fee, relevant, and quality sources of not only links but information. OK, most of their pages are PR0 and the rest tend to be PR 1-2. But with most article directories, you can choose your exact anchor text for the link–often more valuable than PageRank for non-competitive search phrases. Besides, if most of your links are on PR 4+ pages, how natural will that look?

In short, even if web link directories do still have some SEO value, they should no longer be your first stop for one-way inbound links. There are much better, and much less aggravating, linking methods.

I am in my cave, and looking out kind of furtive,
The reason being, psychologically, I am low assertive,
It seems to me with dinosaurs just outside the cave,
Its entirely reasonable now, to be anything but brave,
But the tribal psychiatrist insists that I must face my fears,
And he issued me with stones, and little wooden spears,
And so I went out bravely, into the land of fools,
And got quickly eaten because I lacked the proper tools.

You see things havent changed much, the tutor whispered sage,
Psychiatry still screws up, no matter what millennium or age,
He pauses for best effect, and to let the chuckles die,
What was needed was a plan, and the means to try.
So they tried all sorts of weapons, all sorts of cunning ruse,
But they always ended up, as just amusing little chews,
And just when they were despondent, try as they might,
Along came Dinosaur disaster, in a great big meteorite.

So theres a lesson in the parable, of your cavemen of old,
Dont listen to the shrinks and to anything you are told,
For if you are to triumph, over the odds against the rules,
You will need a bigger club, or ideally 21st century tools,
We dont have dinosaurs now with which to fight,
But PCs and internets where things have to be right,
So ignore your Psychiatrist when problems rear their head,
Just go and see your Guru, and use his tools instead.

The poem you just heard and wondered at in awe,
Is a totally new creation and not cribbed from one before,
And the Tutor is a Fowler, mentioned on the training pages,
Who uses methods slightly more in tune to current ages,
There may not be any dinosaurs lurking on your drive,
But these days a super virus may be all too much alive,
And though Google isnt Pterodactyl proof, it avoids bad links,
And dodgy linking areas, and your ranking quickly sinks.

So crawl out of your cave and click on the link to tools,
That validate bad html and make your website cool,
That check your viability and show you where you are,
And put you back in charge, instead of watching from afar,
Google will love you, the more you do right and sound,
And these tools will pare away all that is not allowed,
And should you need an expert we are here never doubt,
Not with psychiatric counseling, but with proper technical clout.

One day I stepped outside my cave, and the creatures were in shock,
For I hadnt brought a little spear, hadnt primed up my flintlock,
Hadnt sharpened up my arrows, with my trusty longbow in tow,
Hadnt brought a big pistol or a nasty grenade to throw,
No I had brought a massive tank, and though it was overkill,
I flattened all the bloody creatures that ever wished me ill,
And so instead of cowering, like me come out clanking,
And visit the Gurus tools site, and develop your prime ranking.

Adsense and Adwords are two terms that are often used interchangeable. Unfortunately, they are not the same and should be kept separate at all times. Adsense and Adwords are actually the two separate components that Google uses to place relevant ads on web sites across the internet.

Adwords is the component that people who wish to advertise their sites use in order to gain exposure across the web. Adwords is separate from Adsense, but as they are so closely related, it is understandable how somebody could misuse the two terms.

Adsense is the component that allows people to place ads on their site and get paid a small commission for each click. Adsense is one of the most profitable online advertisement publishing services available, and it has the added benefit of being fairly family friendly. As far as relevance of the ads on your site, Adsense is the best. There is no other service available that provides ads that are as relevant and interesting as those that Google provides. It is rare that you encounter an ad that is not closely related to the content of your web page and if you do encounter such an ad, it was triggered by a word of phrase within youre the page that it appeared on.

If you optimize for AdSense, youre sure to make more money than you thought you would. Residual income is one of the best ways to make money on the web right now, and this article will show you how to make the most of it on your website.

Before you read on, go over to adsense.google.com and take their guided tour. This tour will give you a full overview of what Google AdSense is and how it works, so check it out. Done that? Great! Lets continue.

Positioning.

Where you put your AdSense link boxes and banner ads is vitally important trying to make money by putting them at the bottom of the pages is useless. You need to go a step further and have AdSense links right in the heart of your template, or as close to it as you can get. The best way to determine if your ads are in a visible place is to make sure that they are within the fold. the fold is the top five hundred pixels of your page. The reason that this is such great real-estate, if you will, is because most browsers at most resolutions will display this portion of your site without your visitor having to scroll. If you really want to use sub-prime positions, then you should use more than one.

Linking.

The ad links you put on your site appear as if they were just another menu this is fairly new, and it works very well. By adding Google links to your menus, you can get more click-throughs than youd ever expect. You might not fully understand it until you try it, but once youve got the system in place, youll find that many people wont even realize that the links theyre clicking dont belong to you, and theyll find them useful all the same

Leaderboards and Skyscrapers.

Google AdSense comes in all shapes and sizes. You can put it across the top of your website (a leaderboard) or down the side (a skyscraper), and there are plenty of other choices. These ads might become your bread and butter in the future, so its good to learn as much as you can about them now. The best place to put these ads will be relatively obvious anywhere else just wont look right.

Square and Rectangle Ads.

This size of advertisement is a great compliment to any website, as they offer ads small enough to slot in easily. If you have content then you wont want AdSense to get in its way these sizes can be better at making you some extra money than the bigger ones are.

Don’t forget that many of your visitors are used to seeing AdSense within a website, and will need a good reason to click on them. You can have up to three per page, so be creative.

Filtering AdSense.

The AdSense manager gives you the option of using a competition , which allows you to remove your competitors ads from your site. However, doing this might end up hurting your AdSense efforts after all, isnt it better to take your competitors money than not to get any? Take the time each week to monitor the ads being displayed on your site.

SEO solutions are the perfect means to make a site search engine friendly. Search engines play a big role in determining the success or the failure of an online site. Studies undertaken by leading research agencies have indicated that more than 90% of the people search information in the internet with the help of search engines. Search engines assign page rank to websites based on their importance and some other factors as well. So, whenever a person searches for information online, they will automatically search the first few pages displayed by the search engine. Consequently it is very important for a website to undertake proper SEO solutions for their site to do business.

The internet is flooded with website providing SEO solutions. If you are serious about your online site, do not be taken in by simply any solutions offered by just another website. Check out the effectiveness of the solution and see for yourself whether you can actually adopt the SEO solutions for optimizing your website. You must check out to see whether the solutions actually deliver results for your online business or not. There is absolutely no point in simply having a site, if you are not able to generate new business leads through your online site.

There are different types of SEO solutions available to you for optimizing your website. Base your search engine optimization methods on the principles and guidelines laid down by Google and other search engines. If people cannot find your site displayed in search engine results, you will actually have very few visitors to your site. Online website is meant to do business and earn revenue for your business. So, it is imperative to adopt the best SEO solutions for your online site.

Keyword research is one important aspect of SEO solutions. Using the proper keywords in your site is vital to the success of your online site. Online visitors always search for products or services with the help of a particular keyword or keywords. Your site may have the best information and the best services offered for a particular product, but if the relevant keyword is not used your efforts will simply go down the drain. In fact your site will not even feature in a search engine. Proper keyword research is one of the basic essentials of SEO solutions.

Content optimization of your website is another SEO solutions which you can adopt. The Content should be relevant and updated on a regular basis to generate traffic to your site. Link building with other websites is another SEO method that is effective for optimizing a website. It will be beneficial for your site to build link with websites which deal with relevant products and services. Pay per click is another optimization tool which can be adopted to make your website search engine friendly. Here you can put up your site for advertisement in other sites.

SEO solutions undertaken properly for a website can bring lots of revenue to the website. The trick for search engine optimization lies in properly utilizing the different optimization methods to garner high page rankings from search engines. You must adopt the best SEO solutions, after all the purpose of a website is to attain high rankings from a search engine.

Over the last few years, search engine optimization (SEO) has been needed and used more and more, although it has been around for much longer than most people think. With new development tools being used to create websites that are heavy on Java, Flash and images, its important to have something that the search engines can read. If the content cant be read by search engines then they cant index it, and if your site doesnt get indexed then it wont be found when people search for it on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or anywhere else. This article will outline what SEO is, how it works, and some unethical SEO methods that you should avoid.

What is SEO?

SEO is a way of analyzing your site and modifying it to allow search engines to read and index it more easily. SEO is all about maintaining and building websites that get ranked highly on the major search engines.

You see, when people use a search engine, they generally dont look beyond the top 20 or so results. If you want to make any money from your website, you need to get ranked in the top 20 out of potentially hundreds of websites.

How Does SEO Work?

Search engines maintain a huge database containing information from individual websites. Most of the information search engines collect isnt listed on their results pages, but it is taken into consideration when it comes to deciding those results rankings.

It is very important that you encourage the search engines to rank your website in a high position, and you can do this through the keywords that you use on your website, as well as when you submit it. If the keywords you use in your submission tool dont match the ones on your site then you could harm your rankings be sure to have all the keywords you want to use on the website itself before you submit it.

Most websites dont focus on their topic well, and so keyword lists containing 50 or more phrases per page are recommended. By focusing some of the pages of your site on keywords, you will score higher with the search engines.

Free Search Engines.

The major search engines on the Internet are still free, and its not hard to take advantage of this free advertising you can do it in as little as an hour.

There are several companies that provide free SEO tools, or you can pay a professional to take care of it for you. Looking around on the web will turn up all sorts of useful resources.

What is Unethical SEO?

Unethical search engine optimization techniques can be unlawful, unscrupulous, or just in bad taste. Youd be surprised how many people use these methods. A lot of what is now called unethical SEO used to be accepted, until people went overboard and it started to have a negative affect on the web as a whole.

Keyword stuffing is when your site consists of long lists of keywords and nothing else. Don’t do it. There are ways to put keywords and phrases on your site without running the risk of getting banned.

You may have seen invisible text if youve been selecting the text on a page and found words that are the same color as the background. This text is often lists of keywords put there in the hope of fooling search engine spiders while hiding the words from visitors. This is considered unethical, and you shouldnt do it.

A doorway page is a page that isnt designed for real people to see its purely for the search engines and spiders, in an attempt to trick them into indexing the website in a higher position. This is a big no-no and should be avoided.

Even though unethical SEO is tempting, and does work, you shouldnt do it not only is it annoying to users, but its likely to get you banned from the search engines sooner or later. You sites search engine rankings just arent worth the risk. Use efficient SEO techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like unethical SEO.

SEO is a set of techniques used in order to attract visitors or prospective customers to your website, and the goal of a search engine is to provide high quality content to the users of the Internet. These two objectives are not in opposition, if you do SEO the way it should be done.

Adwords is the component of Googles advertising programs that allows web masters or SEO professionals to advertise web sites via links from other web sites. Adwords is used in conjunction with adsense in such a way that your links are placed only on the most relevant web pages. You are given a good deal of traffic at a very reasonable price and the conversion rate from adwords is higher than that of any other pay per click advertising system on the web.

As I just mentioned, Google Adwords is a pay per click service. This means that you must pay Google a certain amount for each click that you receive via your adwords links. The best part about this is that you never have to pay unless your link is clicked so every payment that you make to Google was in exchange for a real, live potential customer.

When advertising with Adwords, it is crucial that your advertising links go to pages that have high conversion rates. You dont want to send traffic to a page that doesnt make money. If you have one page that absolutely blows the other pages out of the water in the way of conversion rates, setting up an adwords program that links to this site can give your profits a huge kick.

Once you have decided what pages you are going to link your ads to, you must decide what you are going to place in your ads. Google Adwords allows you to place a headline, two descriptions, a URL to display, and a destination URL. The best way to configure this is to put the title of your destination page into the title, use the two description lines to inform your visitors of what they are going to see, list your domain or root directory as the display URL, and use a high conversion page as the destination URL. This combination of information will provide your visitors with the best idea as to whether or not they are going to find something that they want to purchase on your site.

Remember that there may be a page with a high sales rate that doesnt stand alone well if you send traffic directly to it. If you have pages that build up the products sold, these may be the places that your links are better spent. You may want to provide your visitors with a brief description or several pages of information regarding your product before sending them to the order page.

Google attempts to enforce its standards so that you do not pay for clicks that are made merely in an attempt to boost an adsense users profits. This is crucial because there are so many web masters out there who will continually click on the ads on their own pages in an attempt to boost their profits. These clicks do nothing for you as the web master probably doesnt even look at the page before exiting it and clicking the links again.

Googles anti-fraud system is a match for that of any advertising agency on the net. It is, however, possible that you will pay for an click here and there that is not honest. This is the risk involved in Google Adwords. It is so easy to think that you have come up with a powerful solution with no possible downside, but the possibility of fraud is always there when it comes to online pay per click ads.

The best way to combat fraudulent clicks is to keep close tabs on your statistics. If you are getting hundreds of visits from a particular web page each day and each of the visits is under twenty cents in length, there is more than a slight possibility that it is a fraudulent attempt to inflate that sites adsense earnings. If you encounter such a practice, report it to Google immediately. This will save you and many other web masters a great deal of money. The fact that there are dishonest people in this world will not change, but the dishonesty of pay per click advertisement is diminishing and will, hopefully, continue to do so.

When using adwords, you will increase your traffic, but that isnt the goal. The goal of advertising is to increase profits so if your profits do not increase when you begin to utilize adwords, you may want to reevaluate your usage of your ads. You may decide that you need to change the destination page or you may find that you want to display your ads on pages based in different countries. Whatever you decide, the fact is that if you plan carefully, adwords is bound to increase your sales opportunities.

It’s the timeless question: how do you get other sites to link to you? The most commonly discussed ways are reciprocal linking (swapping links) and buying links. Yet there’s another important tool for building links that should be a part of your toolbox: distributing content in exchange for one-way inbound links.

Comparison with Other Linking Methods
Reciprocal Linking: The big advantage of content distribution over swapping links is that the links built are one-way, and therefore presumably more valuable. Of course, reciprocal links still have value, but relying primarily on them might hamper your SEO efforts.
Indirect Reciprocal Links: I link my site A to your site, so you link your site to my site B. The problems are that this can be a lot of work, and also, Google can detect indirect links if you do it more than once with the same group of sites, which might make your linking arrangements look like a link farm.
Paid Links: The problem with paid links is 1) the costs add up; 2) search engines are getting better and better at discounting paid links. According to Matt Cutts’ blog, “I wouldn’t be surprised if search engines begin to take stronger action against link buying in the near future…link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext).”

Kinds of Content to Distribute
Articles. This is the essential kind of content distribution, to the point that many people consider content distribution simple as “article marketing.” However, you’re missing out on a few other sources of links if you only do articles.
News blurbs. A lot of news-style sites will only reprint pieces of a couple of paragraphs. The good news is that often enough the whole point of these news blurbs is to include links to other sites, in a sort of “look what we’ve found” kind of way, a la Slashdot.org
Press Releases. There are some sites that aggressively reprint press releases. A press release is like an article, only in a very specific press release format, and frankly that’s not that enjoyable to read. I don’t know why some sites are so head-over-heels over press releases, but, hey, that’s their business. The good news is that even if you can’t write and don’t want to hire a writer, press releases (at least basic ones) are pretty easy to do.
Tools, games and other webware. Sites with popular tools, software, Flash games and other webware often let other sites use it in exchange for a link. The big potential downside is technical support.
Images. Images, especially charts and photographs, are important forms of content on the web. If you have great images on your site and people ask you to use them on their sites, require a backlink in exchange. The problem with images is that they are so easily stolen. Stolen words can be uncovered with a web search. You could try to watermark images with a copyright symbol, URL, and the link requirement. But in the process you’d make the image much less desirable.
Web design templates. These have been freely distributed for a long time. Yet they are even more easily stolen than images. Also, if you embed a link in the footer of a web template, what you’ll get back are sitewide links, which are often thought to be filtered out in search engines.

Maximizing Content Distribution Links’ Effectiveness: Anchor Text
Anchor text. You need optimized anchor text to rank high for any competitive keyword. That means you need your target keyword in the anchor text, and very importantly, variants of the target keyword (too many links with the exact same anchor text may be filtered). The problem is that some sites by default don’t let you choose the anchor text of the link to your site. So you need to: 1) look for sites that do reprint content with optimized anchor text; 2) specifically ask for your target anchor text to be used. Also, do keep in mind that a true natural linking structure will require you to have a number of links that are not anchor-text-optimized, typically with the URL as the anchor text.

How to Find Sites
Finding sites to submit content is the biggest challenge. You can start by asking around to any other webmasters you already have a relationship with. Next, web-search. The classic method is “submit article” + [keyword]. Most of the sites you find this way won’t be good candidates, which is why this can be a bit labor-intensive. I use offshore labor for this step, as well as a program that will sort and store all the search results into a spreadsheet; otherwise it might not be worth it. Then again, the same would be true for finding reciprocal linking partners.

Ethical Issues & Best Practices

Golden rule: remember that there’s a human being who has to approve your article for submission.
Read and adhere to all submission guidelines.
Avoid automation. There’s almost always some detail of submission that requires a human eye: a multitude of html formatting requirements, changing site themes, etc.
Don’t submit by email unless specifically instructed. Using a contact form prevents possible sp@m accusations.
Only approach websites that request content submissions.
Don’t misrepresent reprint content as original.
Don’t submit the same content too often. After about two hundred reprints, a lot of people will be seeing the same thing over and over again and possibly complaining.

In short, as SEO gets more competitive, having more and more linking methods at your disposal gets more and more important. Don’t overlook this important tool.

SEO in 10 easy Tips
Having your site top-ranked for a hot keyword can effectively improve your traffic and therefore your profits as well. All you need to do is to optimise your content and create many links of different quality. But if you don’t have any money to start off, its hard but it can be done.
You may also have the money it takes for reaching a top position, but are unsure if your money will be well spent or not. It may cost you a whole lot more than you thought in the beginning.
Wether you have the money or not, considering a self made budget SEO is a wise thing to do, because it’s both free and educating. After a while, you will gradually improve your technique and you will become an SEO expert. Once you’re there, you will be able to perform as good as a paid SEO but saving the money it takes to hire one.
Here’s 10 free ways to improve your rankings
1. Directory submissions - The most effective way in getting lots of back links fast. Grab a good directory list and submit your link in every single directory. Make sure that you get a few new back links everyday to ensure long term success. The best way to do that is by viewing all new directory announcements in Digital Points forum Solicitations & Announcements section.
2. Article Submissions - Almost every single article directory on the web is free. Article directories are a good compliment to ordinary directories because it will bring you more diversity in your back link structure. Write a good article with more than 500 words and include a back link to your site and submit it to all major article directories. Hope fully, if your article is good, some webmaster will pick it and put it on their own sites, so you’re not only getting back links from the article directories themselves, you are also getting free back links from real sites, which is very valuable in search engines like Google.
3. Wikipedia.org - A good source to collect incoming links. Do you have any content that is related to any wikipedia article? In that case, you can edit the wikipedia article and input your link on the link page. Make sure that the content you are linking meets up with the standard, otherwise, your link will be removed as fast as it came up.
4. Onpage SEO - Onpage optimisation was the most important SEO technique available before 2001. Today, it does not have the same decisive factor that it once had. It is however still very useful to do some basic onpage SEO. Make sure that your targeted keywords are included in the title, the headline and the footer. Make sure that you always provide some fresh content on the pages that you specifically want to optimise. Provide it at least with an RSS feed. But most important, make sure that the onpage SEO does not overshadow the content and make your site look less useful.
5. PRWeb.com - Post a press release once you release your site. It will help you a little bit in the rankings, but most importantly, if your Press release is good, you will get some natural links generated by PRWebs users.
6. Myspace.com - Myspace has recently become one of the hottest sites on the internet. It has also became one of the most effective places to market your site. Just make a profile for your site there, then try to get as many friends as possible. Post links to your sites on other profiles, post bulletins of your site and if it’s cool enough, you will get some natural back links in return.
7. Ask for back links - Send out nice original emails to other webmasters that have similar sites. Write some sentences about what you think of their site or anything related to the subject of their site. When you get the reply, answer them, tell them something more and then ask for a reciprocal or a one-way link.
8. Forums - Forums are not only a great place to discuss things but also a good resource for generating back links, feedback and traffic. Put a link in your signature. Make a post about your site or even better, make a post about something and then make a related link to your site. Note, go for inactive forums, they tend to give more weight than the active ones and your link will be displayed over a longer time.
9. Make sattelite sites - Put up a site with some content on e.g. geocities.com and include a back link to your site somewhere, then submit the sattelite site to somewhere around 100 directories so it will be indexed in Google, and you got a high quality back link.
10. Also, SEO is an area where there are lots of paid alternatives that may help you in getting a good ranking. Some of these are paid article submission, paid onpage optimisation, paid directory submission paid link exchanges and paid links. If you are good on doing directory submissions but bad on onpage SEO, you can charge for making directory submissions for others and then hire someone to do onpage SEO for you.
More Tips and other interesting articles with great onlinetips can be found here.visit our other resources and Get free gospel song lyrics!!
Todd Gamble is a staff writer for onlinetips.

SEO guidelines also known as Search Engine Optimization set the rules used by major search engines like GOOGLE, Yahoo, and MSN, etc. to judge whether or not to include a website in their search engine results. Believe it or not , having your website included in Google results is not part of the Bill of Rights under the constitution. There are Search Engine Marketing guidelines that govern which websites are included and those excluded from their results.

SEO Guidelines Thou Shall

Write your pages for people, not for search engines. It seems obvious, doesn’t it? We have all gone to web pages with garbage content written to deceive search engines for top rankings. When discovered (and they will be discovered), these websites are banned. Other SEO guidelines prohibit offering different content to search engines than your visitors. Called “”cloaking”, it’s unethical and another trick to avoid for high search engine rankings. Instead, focus on providing useful content your visitors are seeking and update your site frequently with fresh content.

SEO guidelines - Thou Shall Not…

Here are some important search engine optimization methods to avoid when using SEO methods on your website. These are unethical techniques that may lead to having your websites removed from the Google index. OUCH!!! That hurts! Once banned, your site will not appear in GOOGLE results or partner sites.

SEO guidelines clearly ban link farms that create multiple links to your site to raise your page rank by unethical means. Sooner or later your site will be caught and penalized for breaking SEO guidelines. In particular, avoid links to web spammers and software that auto submits your pages to search engines.

SEO guidelines Search Engine Optimization

Create web pages free of hidden texts and links seen only by the search engines. Instead, use search engine marketing strategies without redirects to other sites. Instead of garbage content, search engine optimization promotes useful reader content. Do you like to read the same thing again read the same thing again read the same thing again neither does the search engine. After all, search engines are people too!

There are many factors we look at when choosing a host. There are literally thousands of providers in the World and there are many, many considerations to take into account. I like to take a systematic approach and narrow down my field of possible hosting provider candidates before I even look at prices. I write down a list of criteria that I must place on choosing an appropriate website host and these form my requirements base.

1. I look at the required target audience and their geographic location - where does you target market live? And I seek to answer the question; do I want to rank more highly in a regional index rather than an International Index? For example, lets say you sell blue widgets and you are based in Melbourne, Australia. Through your website you only ship to addresses within Australia. In this situation you would ideally want to be listed more prominently in the Australian regional search indexes - like google.com.au

Why do we need to consider this? The reason is simple, the search engines will rank you more highly in a regional index if you use a hosting provider based in region or country in question. So, this is our first factor

2. Dedicated IP Addresses or Shared. When it comes to search engine optimization this can have an impact so I like to mention it as early as possible in choosing candidates for website hosting provider. Some SEO professionals believe that not having a dedicated IP can have a detrimental affect in Google rankings but from my experience it sometimes does and it sometimes doesnt. I have had some sites come in with high PR rankings on shared IPs and others when I shifted to a new IP the PR of the site jumped, so this is still a bit of a mystery when it comes to Google rankings. My advice from a logical SEO perspective is that you never know with whom you are sharing an IP address; they could be running a porn site or a warez site, so logic says get the dedicated IP if you can.

3. Requirements of the coding and database for my website. As an example you might be using a Joomla website and with this comes certain requirements - we need PHP, a MySQL database, a web server (HTTP), sendmail (if you want to get/end email), and some kind of file transfer access (FTP or SFTP). These might seem like fairly common requirements but there are additional items you might want to consider in this segment like the operating system of the host, Linux or windows or what other services they have running on the server, Perl CGI-BIN access, SSI, .htaccess, telnet or SSH crontabs. This item covers all dependencies your website has on services and software to make it perform correctly on the web server.

4. Reliability, Speed and Uptime Guarantee. There is nothing that can hurt your business more than your website visitors coming to your web site only to find that its inaccessible. You lose a lot of credibility and possibly even sales through your website being down. You should consider removing a candidate web host if they do not provide you with at least 99.9% uptime. Many web hosts will provide guarantees like this and you should seek to find them. Many web hosts have redundant back-up systems for Internet access that are used when the main connection fails for some reason. Do your research and find out how many redundant connections they have to ensure less chance of the website being unavailable. Website “Redundancy” means if any of the normal Internet connections are interrupted then an alternate Internet connection will be used.

5. Customer Support. One of the most frequent complaints that people make about website hosts is the lack of customer and technical support. From my experience it does not matter if you are an expert or a novice in web hosting, you still need a web host with a good customer support system. Many web hosts offer email, online chat and phone support while others are available only via email. In most cases, email support is adequate, but you should be cautious if a potential web host has no phone number available in case of an emergency.

Response times to support questions can vary greatly. Some web hosts may take only a few minutes to get back to you while others take days or even longer. It’s important to find out what support any web host candidate provides. Searching on the Internet for references can often be of assistance in this regard.

6. Data Transfer - Traffic/Bandwidth. This is often referred to as “bandwidth”, which is the amount of data that can be transferred from or to your website. Basically look for a service which provides a good amount of traffic when compared to other services available. Also when choosing your website host you should ensure that the plan you are on can be expanded so that any foreseen increases in traffic can be accommodated accordingly.

7. Disk space. Again, take into consideration other hosting providers and find a service which provides a good amount of storage space in comparison. You might want to take into account any foreseen increases in storage space required also and factor the ability to be able to change the plan to accommodate these needs.

8. Price. This is always a huge consideration after all you could get a dedicated server for about $200 per month but for the most part this is not required for a new business website. The normal business website is not going to have 5000 visitors per day when it first starts up. Of course there are exceptions and if you are expecting this much traffic then you should get the dedicated server straight away. If however you are like most normal businesses and looking to gain a web presence then I would advise you to get a shared server with a dedicated IP. For something like this the prices can vary from $5 per month to $100 per month. Often you get what you pay for, so you should look at what services they provide for the money and weigh these up against the benefits. Often there are extra’s that are suitable for your particular needs, like Joomla support or content input or specialized hosting services.