SEO|The Full Insider SEO Details Exposed

MSN may be the most complete search engine out there. It seems to me that every web site that I look at in order to find the number of pages that it has listed has the following fallout: MSN has the most results, Google comes in second, Yahoo! comes last. Other search engines will generally fall somewhere between Google and Yahoo! This is a result of some very extensive work by the team and MSN. The beautiful thing about MSN is that you can find results for just about everything. If you cant find it at Google, cant find it at Yahoo! head on over to MSN and youll find something even if it is nothing more than a forum posting.

Its still quite easy to figure out what you need to do to your site to rank highly at MSN. MSN generally indexes every page that it can find anyway and is a pretty handy search engine in that it is the third most popular out there and it is also a nice one to foreshadow what may be happening to your listings at Google in the not too distant future. Theyve recently changed their algorithm, though, and everyone wants to know how it works. Well, here are some answers.

MSNs ranking algorithm analyzes factors such as page content, the number and quality of the sites that link to your pages, and the site content, and keyword relevance. Keep in mind that there are lots of differences between MSN and Yahoo and Google. All search engine algorithms are similar, but little differences can have big effects when it comes to SEO. The nice thing about MSN is that its algorithm isnt as strict as those of Yahoo! and Google and is therefore a very powerful SEO tool in and of itself.

Relevant themes and topics are very important to MSN optimization, and you should also consider keyword density remember, no keyword stuffing, as MSN explicitly says this is against their rules. The general rule is that you should make sure that there are key words in your title and then follow the basic platform for key words. Put a few in a header at the top of your page; scatter a few throughout the page including several in the first and last paragraphs; finally, put a couple of links that contain key words towards the bottom of your page. These steps are common for all search engine optimizations and should be a set process for every page that you attempt to optimize. Complete this work before attempting any other SEO procedures as this is the basis of SEO.

Links are important, and maintaining good incoming links with your keywords will get you good rankings. Its very important to get as many natural links as possible providing interesting and useful content can make this happen for you with no extra work at all! Youll seem completely natural to MSNs spider. These natural links are the basis of link SEO. If you are trying to attain links you should first attempt to attain these links from pages that would naturally link to you but may not have heard of your site yet. After you have done this you should go to directories and other sources of links that may not be as obvious. First things first, dont mess up your search engine listings because of a bunch of bogus links from unsuitable, questionable, or malicious locations. These links can and will get you banned.

MSN doesnt allow you to pay to boost your sites ranking, but they do offer advertising. This advertising will allow you to pay a certain amount for links in their sponsored links boxes on the top and sides of each results page. The value of these links depends on the demand for them. At any particular time a sponsored link could become very expensive by somebody bidding an outrageous amount for a link, or by a large number of people trying to overwhelm a niche market.

MSN doesnt update often, but when it does it often removes links it believes to be out of date, so make sure you change your site occasionally.

One thing that MSN likes a lot is well-formed HTML code, with closed, valid tags. Watch out for broken links, and make sure you have static URLs that dont move around, and contain your keywords.

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.

Summary: Are article directories the new SEO link directories? As 1990s-era link directories fade into relative irrelevance, article directories offer new opportunities for one-way inbound links. There are currently about 200 of these directories, none of which charges a fee.

Article Directories: The New Web Link Directories?

We are witnessing a new explosion in web directories that are actually worth the investment in time to submit to them. No, not link directories–their time has passed for good. The new directories are article directories.

What Are Article Directories?

Article directories are sites such as http://isnare.com and http://goarticles.com, which aggregate large numbers of articles into massive, categorized databases. Most of them act as clearinghouses for reprint content, encouraging visitors to add the content to their own sites. The articles are screened for basic indicators of quality and relevance before being posted.

The articles each have an author’s resource box, an “about the author” paragraph at the end of the article. The directories allow authors to include a link, and often, multiple links, in the resource box.

I personally know of about 200 such directories that will accept articles on any topic–with a live link and without charging a fee. There are at least as many specialized directories that limit themselves to business-only articles, women’s issues, technology, etc. All you need is a single good page of well-written content–and if your site doesn’t have that already, you probably should give up your web ambitions right now.

Article Directories’ Linking Advantages

* Anchor text. About two-thirds of the article directories allow for the author to select the anchor text of the link in the author’s resource box. This is the primary value of the links from the article directories. The article directory pages usually have PR 0; some have PR 1-3. Fortunately, anchor text is often a deciding factor in ranking for non-competitive search strings that make up as much as half or more of all web searches. These links may also help a site that already has competitive PageRank but is getting beaten in the SERPs for want of anchor text relevance.

* Relevant links. The links are at least as relevant as links from link directories. The page on which the link is located is categorized within the site according to topics such as automotive, technology, decorating, or sports. Since most of the directories use the article title as the webpage title, you can even assure that the title of the webpage with your link has your target keyword.

* Traffic. Click-throughs on the links in the author’s resource boxes bring traffic, particularly in the early days after the article is submitted.

* Reprints. Clearinghouse websites that offer articles for reprint pack the double advantage of a link on their site and a link on any site whose webmaster chooses to reprint the article. In reality, few articles get reprinted since the competition for reprints is fierce. Moreover, fewer than a dozen of the 200-odd article directories actually get many reprints. The market is dominated, as most web markets are, by the best established sites.

* Mindshare. A click-through from a traditional link is just another visitor. But someone who has read a page of content from your site and clicked through the author’s resource box link is generally a highly qualified visitor who has been partly sold on the value of your offering. Meanwhile, even readers who do not click-through have been exposed to your message. You can help shape the market, building awareness of your product or service.

In short, article directories offer just about everything the web link directories used to, and more.

There are hundreds of search engines available today, but some are far more complex than others. This article will give you an overview of how some of the most popular ones work.

Lets start with a smaller engine: InfoSeek. They only index about 200 words of your web page, so its important to make sure that you have meta tags on your site, and that the most important things are listed first. The information you put in your meta tags will be used to display a description of your site, and most meta tags can contain about 200 characters of text. The keywords meta tag, however, can have up to 1,000 characters.

These simple rules are important to keep in mind for all search engines. The more important that the information is, the closer it has to be to the beginning of your meta tags or even the beginning of your sites content. Many search engines wont even touch your meta tags so it is important that you have the same information in your body that you have in your meta tags (although you obviously cannot simply enter lists and lists of key words as this would be detrimental to your sites content).

The AltaVista search engine will send Scooter, its spider, to check out your entire site. Scooter can take as long as three months to spider and fully index your site the average spider only takes 6-8 weeks. Scooter will normally spider somewhere between two and ten pages from your site each week. This means that the longer that your web site lasts, the better it will be indexed which is in example of how search engines implement Darwins Theory into their ideology.

Excite used to be a search powerhouse, but has now been dropped as the provider of AOL and Netscape search, so its less important than it once was. The algorithm it uses to determine keyword relevance is very complicated: it indexes your pages and then attempts to summarize them by selecting only the most relevant sentences. Expect to have your pages reviewed roughly once every two weeks. Keep in mind, though, that with meta tags have no meaning to Excite when it comes to rankings, even though it will use your description tags as long as the words are relevant to your pages content.

Lets move on to Lycos. Lycos has fully integrated the Open Directory Project (ODP) into their mainstream results pages, and they also use search results from AllTheWeb. Lycos also runs click-throughs to their sister site HotBot. Lycos is one of the harder search engines to understand, as their submission pages say one thing but then they index your site in a completely different way. As a general rule of thumb, your site will be indexed in Lycos in due time as long as you get indexed in ODP and AllTheWeb.

Even though WebCrawler is owned by Excite, it still has its own search engine and indexer. If you happen to be listed with WebCrawler, you should try to stay listed with them, as it isnt the easiest search engine to get listed with. Its hit-and-miss standards combined with the sporadic indexing methods makes the submission process tough, although not impossible.

The biggest player is, of course, Google, who use a page ranking system as the central basis of their index. It was once nearly impossible to manipulate this page ranking system to drive up your rankings, but people quickly figured out that the more links they could generate to their site on the rest of the net, the better Google ranked them. Google is not thought to be using context-sensitive rankings. Context-sensitive information is used at Yahoo, Looksmart and the ODP, however, and Google regularly spiders those sites when it re-indexes its own database.

MSN is another important search engine. The holy trinity of search engines at the moment is Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. These three search engines combine to provide you with the vast majority of the traffic that you will receive from search engines. MSN will generally be the first search engine to index your site and it will almost certainly list the most pages the fastest.

Although no-one can tell you exactly when you will be indexed on any search engine, its best to check back at least weekly. Whatever you do, though, dont re-submit your site more often than every two months or so you might not get indexed at all if you do this.

A Page Rank is a number Google gives to a web page that represents how important Google thinks the page is on the web. When one page links to another, Google considers it to be effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes there are for a page across the whole web, the more important that page must be. But thats quite an assumption, isnt it?

The importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself really is, meaning in Google calculations a page’s importance comes from the votes cast for it. These votes are then taken into account when the page is ranked.

As a general rule of thumb, Google Page Ranks along with Alexa ratings are the best indicators of how well your SEO work has been going. Granted, the ranking that you appear in on the results for your most important key words is the real indicator, but a strong Google Page Rank will help to boost this position substantially. The more links that you have pointing at your site, the better off you are. Thats a basic rule that will apply throughout your SEO operations.

Page Rank matters because its one of the most influential factors that determine a page’s ranking in Googles search results. If you want to have good Page Rank, youd better make sure people are linking to your site.

Well, dont jump the gun and try to get your site linked from everywhere you can, because Google doesnt count every link. They have started filter out links from known link farms (sites that are nothing but big lists of links), and being linked to or from these kinds of sites will get you penalized by Google. Be careful out there. They have also implemented a new relevance calculator that (true to its name) tries to determine how relevant the links into and out of your site are. The most important factor here is that Google considers long lasting links as more meaningful than a recently published link.

The best way to increase your page rank is to contact people with relevant and complementary content (that is, content that does not compete with your own but that enhances it). These links are most likely to last and they will not only increase your Google Page Rank, but they will also provide relevant hits via the links themselves.

How is PageRank Calculated?

Google calculates the PageRank PR of all pages it indexes, taking into account all the links to and from each site. When a page votes for other pages by linking to them, it shares out some of its PageRank value amongst these pages.

This algorithm means that a link to your site from a page with PR4 (i.e. a Page Rank of 4) and five outbound links would be worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and a hundred outbound links. Its not just the Page Rank of the page thats important, but also the number of links it has.

The more links there are on a page, the less Page Rank value your page receives from them. You should also remember that it takes progressively more Page Rank to move up a level. It is generally pretty easy to achieve a Page Rank of three. Once you achieve a Page Rank of four, your site is getting formidable. Increasing past this mark may prove difficult and will require very important content. Reaching 8+ is very difficult. These ranks are usually reserved for sites that are crucial for the functionality of the internet.

Each time you add a link, or a page that links to you adds a link, you run the risk of lowering your PageRank. Make sure that you have as few links as possible, and so do any sites that are associated with you.

Google repeats its PageRank calculatons many times at each update, and each time the calculation is made it gets more likely to be accurate. Total accuracy can never be achieved, however, because one sites PageRank is entirely relative to the others. You should understand that the results searchers end up with can really only be properly worked out by Google, because theyre the only ones with access to the whole index.

Does the whole idea of Internet marketing intimidate you? Are you thinking of hiring a professional? Well, weve got great news for you. Its really not difficult to do search engine optimization (SEO) yourself you can save hundreds of dollars, and get the same results as the professionals do. You will probably get better results from highly qualified professionals, but you should definitely perform these do-it-yourself actions first. Once youve done some of this kind of work it will be easier to determine if a professional is worth his/her salt.

Basic SEO is very simple and easy all it takes is the willingness to put in the work. Once you know the ropes, its not that difficult though it can be time consuming. The content of your website the focus of what SEO is all about. Here are the top points to think about when youre doing it yourself.

1. You will start by registering a domain name, which should reflect what your site about. Keep it short, as long as its somehow related to your site. Being more specific can help. You could choose to name the page after one of your products or services, for example. Another method is to get a sub domain of a popular domain. This will generally help you get indexed more quickly though it will not appear quite as professional to your visitors. There is a trade of here, sub domains are quicker (and generally cheaper), but domain names are more memorable, and, in the long run, better for your indexing.

2. The next thing you should look at is your pages title (i.e. the HTML title tag), which is critical in letting search engines see what the page is about, and is the first item looked at by search engines to determine your relevance. You should put your most important keywords in your title tags you dont need to worry about singular or plural forms as search engines account for these changes in most cases. Whatever you do, don’t call your home page Home make the title a mini-description of the page.

3. The two primary meta tags arent as important as they used to be, but the description tag is still used by some search engines to display information about your website to users and help them decide whether theyve found what they are looking for. Not all search engines bother with this, though most will put some bearing on it (even if it is minuscule).

For very short descriptions the alt tag can be used. Alt tags let you describe an image or graphic file theyre the pop-up descriptions that appear when you hover your mouse over a graphic, or when the graphic cant be downloaded for whatever reason.

Text within comment tags is never displayed on the page it is used by coders and designers to remind them of what that part of the page is for. Some coders used to put lots of keywords in the comment tags, so that they would be seen by search engines but not users, but search engines have now stopped paying attention to any text that isnt seen by the user. Keep this in mind when trying to post invisible text (i.e. white text on a white background). This kind of behavior can get you banned from a search engine.

4. Having keyword density in all of your content is good, but keep in mind that each search engine has its own requirements when it comes to how many times that a keyword or phrase should be in the content for the page to be relevant. Somewhere between 5 and 8 percent is a roughly optimal level but this isnt always possible, and you shouldnt force it. Dont overdo it, or the search engines might mark you down.

5. Many search engines judge web page importance on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites. You should link to some related sites, but not too many. Dont overdo incoming links either, and keep them related your sites content. Its also good to get sites to use your keywords as the text of these links.

If you follow the advice above, you can do it yourself and do fine. SEO, if done right, can keep you on top for as long as you want to be.

1. Alexa Ranking Tool:

Alexa is a very powerful tool used to rank web site traffic. Find out how your web site traffic stacks up against all your competitors! This is one of the most accurate freely available tools to find out how well your site ranks up against millions of other sites on the Web.

Remember:

“The lower the Alexa ranking number the more heavily visited the site.”
Some examples are:
Traffic Rank for Yahoo.com : 1
Traffic Rank for msn.com : 3
Traffic Rank for google.com : 5
Traffic Rank for ebay.com : 8
Traffic Rank for Rediffmail.com: 3,338
Traffic Rank for amazon.com: 14

These rankings are generally consistent with the amount of traffic they have.

2. What is PageRank?

In short PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there’s no link there’s no support (but it’s an abstention from voting rather than a vote against the page).
How many links you have from other web sites are the votes you get for your web site?

3. How is Page Rank Used?

Page Rank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. It is only one part of the story when it comes to the Google listing, but the other aspects are discussed elsewhere (and are ever changing) and Page Rank is interesting enough to deserve a paper of its own.

Page Rank is also displayed on the toolbar of your browser if you’ve installed the Google toolbar.

4. What is SEO and why is it so important?

It is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in Internet marketing, this also helps your site get the exposure it deserves and increase your website traffic instantly.

5. Site Maps?

Site maps are useful in at least two ways:

1. If a user types in a bad URL most websites return a really unhelpful “404 - page not found” error page. This can be discouraging. Why not configure your server to return a page that shows an error has been made, but also gives the site map? This can help the user enormously .

2. Linking to a site map on each page increases the number of internal links in the site, spreading the PR out and protecting you against your vote “donations”.

6. Your Link Popularity:

Utilization of the search engines is a very important aspect of marketing; they are usually the first means by which prospects can find your site. That’s why link popularity is so essential. If the customers can’t find your web site, you will not see any sales.

The term “Link popularity” refers to the ranking assigned to your web site by the search engines. It determines the position your page gets displayed on when people search for certain keywords in a search engine. I can already hear you screaming… “Cool, tell me how to get my link popular!”

7. Link Exchange?

Link Exchanging, is important because it can drive more visitors then search engines, once established. Directories ad valuable content for your customers/visitors, and this it improves your SEO.

8. Reciprocal links:

1. Reciprocal linking is another name for swapping links.
2. That’s a link from you to someone and a link from them to you.