SEO|The Full Insider SEO Details Exposed

DMOZ is the directory where Google starts when it crawls the web, so getting listed in DMOZ is good for you. SEO with DMOZ starts with selecting the search terms youre targeting, and then finding a directory category that includes them. This can be a time-consuming and difficult task. Youll often find lots of matching categories. The trick is to find the most precise category and, if possible, a directory that does not have too many other competitors in it. You can hit a niche market simply by being placed in a category that has few competitors. DMOZ, of course, makes the final decision as to where your website will be located.

Dont choose a category thats too general for your site, as it might just get removed later on. Make your site stand out by using a unique, catchy description one for people, not search engines. Remember, you will probably get a pretty hefty number of hits from DMOZ itself. When you are trying to get listed in DMOZ, dont worry about trying to get a nice listing in the search engines that crawl here, worry about getting a good listing here. The search engines care more about where DMOZ lists your site than what you have to say about your site in your description; DMOZ cares more about how accurately described, how interesting, and how often visited your site is than where you are listed in the search engines.

A third feature to be aware of is the PageRank of the category, and the number of listings on the page. Youll do better with more specific, smaller categories, especially if they have dedicated editors. A small category with a high page rank is the best situation that you can run into. Remember that a pages page rank is split between the number of links that go out from it so if you run into a page with a rank of seven with seventy-five out links you probably arent as well off as a page with a ranking of five and ten out links. This is a constant for Google Page Ranks, not an exception for DMOZ. Your targeted keywords should appear in your sites description, towards the beginning. Dont put them towards the end, as the editor might chop them off to save space!

Remember that once a site is submitted to DMOZ, its very difficult to update its description. Give it a few days to think it over before you submit it, and be more vague about websites if you think they might change. Dont write descriptions that could become out of date easily. If you are running a monthly special you shouldnt include this in your description unless you say something to the extent of low price sales monthly. If you suddenly decide that you are going to completely transform your site into something completely different you will have huge problems with your listings. Keep this in mind before you start building your site if there are possibilities that you will choose to reuse the domain that you have purchased.

If you absolutely have to resubmit, you can submit a blank form that informs the editor of your former web site that your site has changed drastically and that you want the old listing deleted. From there you can submit a new form to any category (or categories) that you need to be listed on with an updated title, description, and key words.

Multiple Listings for the Same Site.

Some editors allow multiple listings for submitted sites, especially if theyre good quality sites that span multiple DMOZ categories. Its always best to request multiple listings you can use the text box on the submission page to justify yourself.

If you find a good category for a niche inform the editor as to whether or not this will be a specified category and then search for any other categories that are related. You may get a good deal of hits from your niche, but it may also be a small market for a reason. If there arent that many people who would be utilizing that particular category, you may want to submit to other categories that will provide you with more substantial results.

Being Patient.

Follow the submission guidelines and dont exaggerate. If no-one seems to be reviewing your site after a week or so has gone by then you could post a question. Be patient, though: most of the DMOZ directory is edited by hand, and theyre very busy. In many cases it can take as long as three months to get added.

DMOZ simply wasnt prepared for the sudden importance it had forced upon it. One of the biggest problems with the directory is that each site must be looked at by editors, so your site might not get indexed for no reason other than the editor not liking it, or even just losing it.

There are two major search engine marketing strategies in use today: SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click). These two methods are very different, and deciding which one is right for you can be hard. Which one do you think will do more for your website? Well, that all depends on what your websites like.

One leading contributor to the difficulty in deciding which is correct for your site is that you dont really understand why you cant just use both. There is no real reason that you cannot implement both methods when marketing your site, in fact, I encourage this behavior as PPC can be integrated quite nicely into an SEO plan.

PPC is a good way to get users to become more familiar with your site. Once they are used to seeing your site, they will probably begin to stick around if they encounter it in a search engine. The more often that your site is visited the more that search engines will like it. This is one reason that it is so crucial to attempt to get as many quality hits as possible.

Reading up on the pros and cons of each program lets you sit down and decide in your own time which strategy would work best for your website. Since search engine marketing is undoubtedly the best source of targeted traffic out there at the moment, as people will continue to battle for the top search engine positions, even from day to day.

As people continually try to find new and unique ways to being additional traffic to their websites, the SEO industry continues to grow. PPC refers to text-based advertising on a search engine, and you will be charged by the click whenever a visitor clicks on one of your ads. These order of ads is usually based on bidding prices, meaning that the advertiser who bids the highest price per click will be listed first. Weve all heard of sponsored listings, right? Well, thats what they are: PPC listings.

SEO tries to change your search ranking by looking at a number of factors, including link popularity, PageRank, and so on. Rankings you get through SEO will appear on the main, natural search results pages, not over in the box with the sponsored links. And you dont have to pay for your clicks!

So, how can we tell which method is better? You cant say that one method will always be better, because they serve different purposes. However, one is likely to be a better fit with your business than the others.

PPC.

PPC traffic, rankings and results tend to be more stable and predictable than SEO, and, combined with its low cost, this makes PPC one of the more popular ways of advertising. Most companies try PPC before they try SEO, because its seen as more stable and respectable.

In many cases PPC lets you rank high on the search engines, without having to do the tedious work involved in SEO no finding link partners, posting links, and so on. As long as you have the budget for it, the rankings yours, and another advantage is that the listing will get posted when you add it, not when the search engine gets round to it.

Sadly, PPCs popularity makes it a competitive market. You will find that CPCs (costs per click) are steadily rising, and that hurts the little guys. Prices work as auctions the more people in the auctions, the higher the prices.

SEO.

The main benefit of SEO is that it can be done entirely for free, and lets face it, who doesn’t like free traffic?

The disadvantages, though, are that your traffic is unpredictable. You have to guess, adapt, and constantly change strategies. One month you could just fall out of the top 10 without any warning, and there goes your income. SEO is also slower than PPC, as the search engines only update their natural listings about once a month.

So what should you choose? Well, it depends on how much money you have to spend. If you have cash then PPC should be your first choice, as it produces faster results. If youre on a low budget, you should look at SEO first. The best thing to do, though, is to use both techniques together use PPC for some keywords and SEO for others, depending on the keywords price.

There are millions of pounds and multiple hours spent every day trying to increase website traffic, by both ethical and unethical means. There is so much demand for traffic solutions that people will go to any lengths to get ranked higher in the search engines. But did you know that you could increase your traffic by about 20% right now, with virtually no effort?

Most times when you hear something like this I suggest that you turn tail and run as it will normally lead to your sites ranking demise. This particular method of boosting traffic, however, is not a scam; its not an unethical ploy; it is a genuine method of increasing traffic via a future internet standard. The reason that you can increase your traffic so vastly is because you are getting in on the ground floor of a new technology which will revolutionize the internet and the way that traffic is distributed.

To understand what were about to tell you, you need to understand what an RSS feed is. Put simply, its a standard format for sharing your content instantly with users and other websites. People can quickly get access to teasers for your latest newsletters, articles, blogs, content and more, and click through to see the full version. This method of distributing your information is very helpful because it basically generates dynamic newsletters without spamming and without causing your visitor any grief at all. In fact, many users find RSS to be their preferred way to hear about updates as RSS is so fast, user-friendly, and (most importantly) dynamic.

RSS feeds are often used by news sites or blogs, as the content changes often enough to make it worth while. By using highly targeted RSS feeds, you can improve your site’s web content without having to write it on your own if someone offers you an RSS feed of their site, you can add it to your site easily. This provides you with a good content base which will keep visitors coming back. The more information that people associate your site with the more important they consider your site. The more important they consider your site, the more important search engines will consider your site. Providing RSS yourself will get lots of people to link to you and so potentially improve your search engine rankings. Why?

1. RSS feeds can provide good, relevant content for your website there are plenty of RSS publishers with themed content for you to choose from. These highly-targeted feeds will often contain your keywords, and so increase the keyword relevancy of your website. This helps even more than you may think as the key words will be within link or anchor tags. Search engines value anchor tags almost as much (if not more than) header tags (h1-h6).

2. RSS feeds can provide new, fresh content. When new content is added to them, the old content drops off, making sure that your websites content doesnt go stale. Most of your visitors will not visit your site if they find that there is nothing new between the first and second time that they visit it. If you want to keep your visitors where they belong, you have to have a good selection of content that is updated on a regular basis.

3. RSS feeds can get search engines to crawl your site more frequently daily in some cases. This helps your site to rank higher in the search engines, and gives you an advantage over your competition. Your RSS feed can do your SEO work for you.

RSS feeds can be great for getting your newsletter, articles, or blog onto other people’s sites, and thats very powerful, as long as you make sure that your RSS feed is adding more to your business than it takes. In some situations, you might find that including RSS on your page makes visitors click away from your site, as they find that sites content more interesting than you and people who click on RSS links might be less likely to click on ads. Use caution with RSS feeds, or you could be in for a shock.

From what it looks like, the German websites of car maker BMW have been kicked out of the Google index. BMW.de at this time has a PageRank of 0. A search for BMW Germany, which only days ago yielded BMW.de as a top result, now doesn’t show any sign of BMW.de at all. Instead, BMW.com – BMW’s international site – is on top for this search.

The reason for the ban is likely to be that the BMW websites have been caught employing a technique used by black-hat search engine optimizers: doorway pages. German and international bloggers last week were quick to spread the news.

As you may know, a doorway page is stuffed full of keywords that the site feels a need to be optimized for; however, as opposed to real pages, this doorway is only displayed to the Googlebot. Human visitors will be immediately redirected to another page upon visit. And that’s exactly what happened at BMW.de, as reported Wednesday.

While BMW almost immediately removed the pages after the news broke (after having them live for almost 2 years), apparently it was too late. German BMW are now suffering what is known as the “Google death penalty”: a ban from almost any imaginable top search result, and a degrading of the PageRank to the lowest possible value.

Consequently, a search for gebrauchtwagen bmw, which had a page at BMW.de as top result on Wednesday last week, now shows AutoScout24.de as top result. (Interestingly enough, the second result at this moment is the report on this blog.) A search for BMW.de using Google’s site operator doesn’t yield any results, either. (Note that sometimes, different Google data centers return different results, so this change may not yet be visible on all of Google.)

How many pages exactly are affected by this is hard to tell, but a search on Yahoo for BMW.de returns 41,500 pages – including cached copies of many of the keyword-stuffed doorway pages, like bmw.de/bmw-kauf.html, which now return a “file not found” message. Most of the pages can still be accessed from Yahoo’s cache, while others – like a doorway page stuffed with the phrase “BMW review” – are missing from Yahoo’s cache, but can still be accessed at Archive.org if you disable JavaScript.

This penalty is a good example of what can happen to sites going against the Google webmaster guidelines – no matter how big or important one might deem the site. Google writes:

“If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or ’throwaway’ domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index.

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BMW, Back in Google

BMW has been talking to Google/ Matt Cutts and apparently filed a reinclusion request (formal or informal) – they’re back in Google with BMW.de, as Christian Mayer notes in the forum. Ricoh.de is back as well. Matt says:

“I appreciate BMWs quick response on removing JavaScript-redirecting pages from BMW properties. The webspam team at Google has been in contact with BMW, and Google has reincluded bmw.de in our index. Likewise, ricoh.de has also removed similar doorway pages and has been reincluded in Googles index.”

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