The Right Way to Submit Your Site.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 13-10-2009

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Are you going to submit your site to the search engines the right way or the wrong way? To do it right, you need to know what youre doing, and your site needs to be optimized before you take it anywhere near a search engine.

How can you know if your site is ready? You consider these things before you submit. Have you included your keywords in your title tag, description, and content? Make sure youre tightly focused on only one or two keywords. You should also check for broken links, as these can cause big problems with search engines spiders.

Once youve submitted your site, you need to be prepared to wait. The chances that you won’t be added to any engine’s database for at least a month.

The Rules of Submission.

1. Theres no need to submit more than once. Despite the hype, you should never resubmit your site unless it gets dropped entirely. This doesnt apply to new pages, however. If you have created a few hundred pages in the last month or so and you dont think that they will be indexed quickly enough via links to them it is a good idea to submit them manually rather than waiting for your site to be indexed again. If you are using a Google Site map, simply adding them to this document will get them indexed pretty quickly.

2. Do it right the first time: be thorough when submitting, especially to directories. Take the time to research and find the most appropriate category for your site. If your site would fit into multiple categories find out what the policy is on multiple submissions. Some directories want you to submit to every relevant category, others want no more than one submission or they reject all submissions. Some want every page, others (most) want your index page and nothing more.

3. Be brief when you describe your site: get right to the point in two short sentences. Most directories will actually restrict the number of characters that you can use. If they dont it is still a good idea to try to wrap it up within twenty-five to thirty words. This is one of the largest differences between directory listings and search engine listings. In the directory you only get a short line to attract visitors; this is static for every visitor.

4. Be as accurate as you can. Dont try to trick people into visiting your site, as itll only backfire. Most directories are actually monitored by a team of editors. These editors will visit your link and red flag you if you are trying to deceive visitors or if you are trying to cheat in any other way. When it comes to directory listings, there are even less avenues for cheaters than there are in search engine listings as directories are checked out by hand.

5) Make sure that all your information is relevant, and try to make it appealing to humans as well as dense with keywords. Directories dont care about your key words very much. If your site isnt attractive to human beings it will be listed poorly. When human beings edit, human beings rank, and human beings get what they want.

6) Be patient: good things come to those who wait. Let the search engines take their time.

7) Dont submit any more than your homepage. The crawlers are quite capable of following your links and indexing your whole site from just your homepages URL.

If youre submitting you site to the DMOZ directory, follow these steps. If one doesnt work, wait a while and then do the next.

1. Submit your site.

2. Write a follow-up email to the categorys editor, explaining that youve been waiting and would like to know your sites status.

3. Email the next category editor up, in case theres a problem with your categorys editor.

4. Seek assistance at the Open Directory Projects public forum.

5. Email DMOZ senior staff seeking help. This is pretty much the last resort.

Submissions can be time consuming at first, but youll quickly get it down to a science. If you work hard on your SEO before you submit your site then you can get to the top more quickly than youd think.

SEO Tips for Yahoo.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 08-10-2009

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With the improvements that have taken place at Yahoo over the last few months, the site is starting to become important again. Many say that their new search tool provides more relevant search results than Google does now great for Yahoo, since they were the top dog before Google came along.

Even for a few years after Googles conception, Yahoo! was the high and mighty search engine. It is still the popular choice for those who are seeking popular culture solutions and should be the target search engine for such pages. Yahoo! will put up a fight here for the king pin of search engines again before too long so make sure that you have quality results here as well as Google.

In general, Yahoo’s spiders work the same way as Google’s, following every link they find on the web and putting that information in a database. As always, you can also submit your site to the index manually. These manual submissions will speed up the process slightly but probably wont give you instantaneous results. There are no real ways to incorporate highly

Yahoo places some weight on your incoming links, but not as much as Google does its more interested in your content, which could explain why Yahoos results seem to be more relevant. To get a strong ranking at Yahoo, you should pay more attention to your keyword density than you do to your link popularity. Yahoo is also less likely to index a huge number of pages than other search engines are. Normally forums and posts are not touched by Yahoo as it will deem them unnecessary. There are times when this may seem like a good idea to many searchers, but there are also times when these types of results are missed. Basically, keep in mind that you will not get as many pages indexed by Yahoo! as you will by Google, MSN, and other search engines. You may, however, get a higher number of hits out of each page that you get listed in Yahoo! depending on the type of site that you provide.

At a Glance.

1. Use keyword-rich titles, about 20 words long and unique for each page of your site. These titles are the first things that Yahoo! sees and are the single most important aspect of your site regardless of which search engine you are optimizing for.

2. Use the meta description tag on each page too, with a description that fits your site well. Yahoo! still uses meta tags for its descriptive purposes but not necessarily word for word. Make sure that you have a quality description so that you dont run into situations where you dont get listed because of lack thereof. Basically, your description tag is an evasive action rather than an attempt at attaining a high number of hits or a higher rating.

3. A meta keywords tag should be included on every page of your website, and it should list words and phrases related to the site. Make sure that the key words describe the specific page rather than the site itself except for the index page. You dont want a bunch of people to be going to the wrong front page. They may see the page, not find their answer and leave. If they find your home page, theyll probably see that its a home page, look for a relevant link, and find the answer or material that they are looking for.

4. Well-written, keyword-rich content will help you a lot with Yahoo. Well-written content is important regardless of search engines. This content is the entire reason for your sites existence. Make sure that the content that you deliver is something that you want your name on. Something that you can stand behind.

5. Easy-to-follow internal links in plain text will help Yahoos spider the bottom of the page is a good place for them.

The key to getting a high ranking at Yahoo is to keep adding keyword-rich, relevant content to your website on a regular basis. Continual updates let Yahoos spiders know that you are maintaining the site and keeping your information updated theyll come back regularly to check out these changes.

Yahoos improvements are sure to help them in the market, and the number of users flocking to Yahoo is starting to show optimizers that there are more search engines out there than just Google.

SEO Tips for Google.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 06-10-2009

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Google is still the most popular search engine out there, and theyre not showing any signs of slowing down. Its important to know how to get on the right track with your SEO for Google. It is also important, however, to remember that Google is not the only search engine out there and that Yahoo! is also a highly rated search engine which actually has more pop culture usage.

Before you can truly understand Google you must understand a little bit of the history behind Google. In the beginning, Google was considered by many to be the Geeks Search Engine. This changed as Google started delivering better and better results. Google slowly evolved into the most trusted search engine around, but Yahoo!s advertising strength and popular usage has still claimed a large number of users. It wasnt all that long ago when Yahoo! was the most popular search engine by far.

Googles search engine is based on PageRank, a complex algorithm that was revolutionary when it was invented. This page rank is the primary reason that Google is so popular. The Page Ranking technology that Google has created and the evolutionary steps that Google has taken to increase the strength of its algorithm has made it a search engine giant which actually sets out to protect internet users from fraudulent web sites. Google has come to be a search engine that cannot really be tricked. Its kind of the integrity police f the world wide web. Basically, Google checks the number of links to each site in its database, and treats them as votes. Here are some tips on getting ranked high on Google:

1.The more incoming links you have, the better your chances are. Good links are ones that are relevant to your own page and link with text that makes it obvious that they intended to link to your site. Google has also recently integrated a new piece into its algorithm which makes old links better than new links. In Googles opinion, if a link withstands the test of time it is has to be relevant or else both parties would have removed the link after not seeing any positive action by Google. Basically, this is another one of Googles keeper of integrity options that have become so famous among SEOs.

2. Links from authority sites, such as directories or non-profit organizations, tend to produce better results than links from commercial sites. Google likes to decide what sites are important. A site has some huge credential for being a spectacular source for quality information will be appreciated more than sites that dont have such strong affiliations with quality work and content. This will result in stronger, more heavily weighted links to and from this site.

3. Site elements to consider for Google are the title (including the strongest keyword phrase), the meta description (Google displays this to its users) and the body text (it needs to be highly-focused and use keywords well), as well as your onsite navigation.

4. Make sure that Google can spider the whole site easily. Youll probably want to have plain links to every page on your site at the bottom of each of your pages.

Dont forget, though, that Google is strict about cheaters who use unethical SEO techniques. Here are some things that Google hates:

1. Getting lots of shadow domains that all point to one site.

2. Using doorway pages.

3. Using falsified WHOIS information.

4. Sites that are “fake” search engines or spyware.

Google Facts and Fiction.

Google has an article on its site called Google Facts and Fiction. For example:

Fiction: Advertising on Google affects my rankings in the search results.

Fact: Advertising with Google neither helps (nor hurts!) a site’s rankings on Google.

Fiction: Sites that are not HTML are not included in Google’s index

Fact: Google is and does index as many file formats as possible, however there are some that it cannot index. File types Google is able index include: pdf, asp, jsp, hdml, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri, swf.

Everyone who wants to optimize for Google should make sure they read this article, to avoid common mistakes.

SEO Elite Review: Check out SEO software ranking examples!

Filed Under (Free SEO) by admin on 22-09-2009

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SEO Elite does what exactly?

SEO Elite starts from the following assumption:

- look at the page that ranks number 1 in Google,
- do exactly the same + a bit better,
- and you will be number 1

SEO Elite will examine “all” the SEO parameters that it finds out about the number 1 site in Google. Then this SE software will automate the process in mimicking this for your site.

SEO is more than a software-approach!

SEO is the art of ranking number 1 in any search engine for any keyword.

Spiders rank a website number one because they “think” that this site deserves to be number one. Of course the spider cannot think, and there needs to be a programmer who programs the spider to find out which site is best.

Now if you are smart enough to feed the spider exactly what the programmer thinks is important, you will have the knowledge to rank number 1.

This is exactly what SEO Elite does: it claims to know how to find out “all” the parameters that make a website ranking number 1.

Pitfalls of a software-approach to SEO

Suppose you find all the parameters needed to rank a website number 1. You manage to get all this parameters onto your site and you even manage to be rank number 1.

Now if your site is really deserving to be ranked number 1, all is fine. But if surfers start complaining that you are not, they will complain like: gosh, this Google these days just gives undeserving sites ranked at number 1.

It won’t take long since Google find out that “somebody broke the code” of the spiders, and they will update the spiders, hey, they want the search engine to give quality back to the visitors!

So that means that you need to get an upgrade of your SEO software approach… in other words: you are running after the facts in stead of above the facts.

How to be ranked number 1?

You rank number 1 because you deserve it. In general spider logic this still means:
- your page talks about the keyword you are optimizing for
- you page has lots of incoming links about the keyword you are optimizing for.

This is what SEO is about, and whatever you do different could make you not be number 1.

But my SEO software is really up to date, or is it not?

Your software can only be up to date AFTER the spiders’ software is updated. Unless you write the spiders yourself, you will always be a bit later.

You cannot know all the parameters the spider takes into account, unless again you are writing the spider software yourself.

And some of the parameters you cannot influence: age of the website is one of them. Suppose the spider needs to choose between 2 websites: the oldest one and the SEO mimic: which one to choose? The oldest one would be the easiest bet, and you cannot change the age of your website can you?

SEO Elite: a close look at this SEO software

SEO Elite advertisement says you can get a top 5 Google Ranking in under 30 Days… But the examples on the SEO Elite website tell a different story!

There are 16 websites listed at the bottom of the website with their rankings.

Examining those 16 websites :

- 6 are about Yahoo rankings (and the advertisement stated clearly Google ranking!)
- from the 10 Google rankings left, only 1 is stated to rank number 1 in Google BUT
- typing this so called number 1 website keywords in Google, the website ranks down only number 9!
- and the so called number 1 website keyword-phrase is far from a popular keyword-phrase, in other words:
not a lot of people search for that keyword AND
the website doesn’t rank number 1 for this keyword…

Why do you do SEO in the first place?

SEO is 1 of the ways to get more traffic to your website. But there is more in getting a lot of traffic to your site, than “blindly ranking 1 in Google”:

— Always make sure you rank number 1 for a word a lot of people are looking for! —

If you buy any SEO software or outsource your SEO to the SEO specialists: always check their SEO examples:
- are they ranking number 1
- are the keywords they rank for popular search keywords (bigger than 10.000 searches a month in the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo’s searchmarketing is considered not too low)
- how long did it take them to be number 1
- how big is the competition for the keyword-phrase (smaller or bigger than 5 million? As a general rule : above 5 million keyword-phrase results in Google, things become though)
- how big is the competition for the quoted “keyword-phrase” (smaller or bigger than 33.000? As a general rule : above 33.000 quoted “keyword-phrase” results in Google, things become though)

If for all these items the SEO software or SEO specialist can answer YES, then you can start taking them very seriously!

Let us use SEO Elite as an example of how serious you should take this SEO software.

1. SEO Elite: Are they ranking number 1?

Yes they are for the keyword-phrase SEO Elite.

2. SEO Elite: Are the keywords they rank for popular search keywords?

According to the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo’s searchmarketing, SEO elite has less than 2000 searches, so it’s not that bad, but again, it is under the 10.000.

The top keywords are :
46762 searches for seo
10815 searches for seo services
9849 searches for seo company,

and for none of these the SEO Elite website ranks number 1.

So “No” for popular search keywords.

3. How long did it take them to be number 1?

I cannot answer that question now.

4. How big is the competition for the keyword-phrase

SEO elite has about 1.5 million search results in Google, less than % million, so shouldn’t be to though to rank number 1 for. So that’s a “NO”.

5. How big is the competition for the quoted “keyword-phrase”

The quoted keyphrase “Seo Elite” has about 250.000 search results, so the competition is stiff here and the SEO Elite website ranks number 1 here,
so that’s a “YES”.

6. SEO Elite results

2 YES and 2 NO… so for my analysis, it SEO Elite is a 50-50 program. It means it can do some good but is not proving it can do all. And the question is: do I really need to spend the money to reach not the highest goal: ranking number 1 for a popular key-wordphrase?

6. SEO Elite: the website

Whenever you are interested in something to buy on the Internet, check out the overall website of the product you want to buy! For SEO software

SEO Elite website is a 1 page website… Now what was the first idea to set up the Internet? To give people information, lots of information.

And we are talking about a “net” in Inter”net”: net means links here, there, everywhere… (that’s why links is so imprtant in SEO)

I didn’t see any of these and from the point of the “information-internet” I don’t like that: a SEO software program being on a website without loads of interesting content and without loads of links.

SEO software: read and check the examples before you buy!

Again this goes for all SEO software you want to buy on the Internet: if they say “I ranked this website for that
keyword number 1 in Google”, spend a few seconds to check it out!

1. SEO Elite: check out Google

SEO Elite’s first sentence talks about “your page in Google”

This sounds promising: is SEO Elite “the” SEO software to get me number 1 in “the” number 1 search engine
Google?

Well, at the bottom of the screen of the SEO Elite web page you then read:
Using SEO Elite I rank number 1 in Yahoo for this, that, and more site…

Oops, Yahoo! …

So do you want to be ranked number 1 in Yahoo, or do you want to be ranked number 1 in Google?
Everywhere I can hear you say… You want to be ranked number 1 in Google as that is at this moment the most
used search engine of all. If you get number 1 in Google, you surely will have a high ranking in Yahoo and MSN,
not the other way round!
So why starting the SEO Elite website with Google rankings and then switch to Yahoo?

But you mostly want to be ranked number 1 in Google because you have to pay for SEO Elite!

2. SEO Elite’s website examples

The SEO Elite website lists 16 example pages: high example-rankings using SEO Elite.

From those 16 , there are 6 Yahoo rankings, so that leaves us with 10 Google rankings.

Remember my SEO keywords rule above : SEO is well possible if your keyword phrase has less than 5 million results in Google.

How many of the example site in SEO Elites website are below this 5 million?
Only 2 out of 10.

And how many of those 10 rank 1 in Google?
Only 1 (or at least that is what they want you to believe!)

Hmmm. if I am going to pay big bucks for SEO Elite, then I want to be number 1. Don’t you?
Don’t you just hate it to be number 2?
I do, especially when I need to pay for it!

3. SEO Elite’s website examples : The numbers are wrong!

Numbers, numbers and numbers… Always check the numbers on any website!
So SEO Elite claims to have a number 1 ranking website :

* keyword phrase : learn to type faster
* website typingmaster.com.au

It takes only a few seconds to verify what SEO Elite says :
Type in Google - learn to type faster - and see what comes out:

55 million results! and not 5 million like mentioned on the SEO Elite website.
Great you say: SEO Elite is modest, he is able to rank number 1 with a higher competition than mentioned!

Does he???

Eh, you take a few seconds and a scroll down to find the example website ranking number 9!

Number 9!

Eh, yes you say: maybe the competition took over after the time the SEO Elite website was written…

Yes, but wasn’t the idea of SEO to rank number 1…. not for 1 day but “forever”.
Or was it just a typo like the 55 million that became 5 million, people do make mistakes you know…

Whatever the reason for the mistake: you need to check out all numbers quoted on the internet yourself!

All is a lot you say? I agree, but if the first example I chose already doesn’t fit the reality, then you don’t need to check all.

Anybody can make mistakes, but luckily we can easily check everything what is said about SEO, so always check
anything said about SEO before spending money on it!

Rank 9 is not that bad after all you say….

I agree, the first time your website gets on the first page of Google is one you keep remembering.

But:
I had to scroll down to find the SEO example page and only found it because I was looking for the particular URL
stated in SEO Elite’s example.
In other words, if you are ranked number 9, it takes some efforts of the visitor to actually scroll down and chose to click on number 9.

What is even more strange: The quoted keyword-phrase : “Learn to type faster” has no ranking on the first page!

Now this is what really bothers me: if I search in Google for the exact phrase “learn how to type faster” I would
assume that the SEO Example site would be number 1 there!

Back to Basics: what is the purpose of SEO?

Your purpose is getting as much people to your site as possible, isn’t it?

SEO software has the purpose of ranking 1 in Google.

Now it is very easy to rank 1 in Google for the keyword-phrase “jhdkghgkbdcds”,
but who is looking for jhdkghgkbdcds??? Nobody!

So if nobody looks for jhdkghgkbdcds, then why bother to rank number 1 with it?

Same with the above example-site with keyword phrase “learn to type faster”:

The Overture keyword-tool says that 448 people are typing in this keyword sentence in Yahoo.

448 people… is this a lot?
As mentioned above in this article: Nope,
and those 448 need to find the result example website at rank 9… not ideal SEO!

What is a nice number? Anything above 10.000 but: also know that above 10.000 “the big boys’ are competing
with you, below 1000 you kind of have the field for yourself. Ranking second for this example website could be expected after 2 months, but it should be number 1 in no time, even without using SEO software.

SEO Elite Conclusion

As I said before: always check the numbers and the facts about any SEO software! Also check the numbers in this SEO article written 13th May 2006.

Then make a decision yourself. If you see that the SEO software
- is ranking well for it’s own product
- is ranking websites for popular keyword well,

only then you can consider buying it.

How to Check Your Sites Ranking.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 22-09-2009

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First, go to the search engine where you want to check your sites ranking, and enter the keywords you want to check. Your result pages will come up, and you will need to look through them until you find your website. SEO experts recommend that if you arent listed in at least the top 20 then you should continue to optimize, as most people wont look any further than that. This is simply common sense. When you are determining if your rank is high enough simply think to yourself, Would I look for this long for this page?

You will want to do this with each search engine and directory until you have some idea of where you are. Check your website’s rankings regularly, because changes to algorithms can affect them drastically and quickly. Keep in mind also that thousands of new web pages are added daily, and many of them are actively trying to get ranked ahead of you. Thats right. There are thousands of other in on the same game as you so you must keep sharp. Your competitors may be reading these same articles and using these same tricks!

If you cant find your website in a search engines results, you should enter site: your domain name in the keyword field to see whether you are listed at all. If your URL appears with the name or description of your site then you are somewhere in the search engines index. If all you get back is a blank page, then youre not in the search engines database at all you need to wait longer. This trick of typing site:www.yourdomain.com also helps you to determine how many pages you have indexed on each particular search engine. The more pages that are indexed, the more likely somebody is to encounter your site.

It you find that your website is miles away from the top 20, dont be discouraged you can change that! You may need to re-evaluate your keywords, and try to find new ones that are more relevant to your site. Many search engines have human-edited rankings for the most commonly searched-for phrases, and it is often difficult to get in that list. Good content is the best way to increase your chances of getting a high ranking for a certain topic. The more popular that your page is with the masses, the more popular it will be with search engines.

Search engines are a perfect example of the chicken or the egg. In this case, there is an answer! Search engines attempt to deliver sites that the populous has deemed important, not the other way around. This is why it is so important that you have good, relevant content and plenty of it.

If you want to check to see if a single web page on your site has been indexed, visit the search engine and enter the complete URL, like this: http://www.yourpage.com/yourpagename.html.

If the search engine has indexed that particular page then it will come back with a description of it. If it hasnt then youll see a message saying something like Sorry, no information is available for that URL.

On Google, if your URL has been indexed, this page will offer you to show the cached version of the page, or to find similar pages, as well as pages that link to your page or that contain your URL on the page.

You could go ahead and use these manual tracking methods, but we would recommend that you consider using online tools or downloadable software that will allow you to check these things more quickly. It can be a very tedious and time-consuming job to do by hand, especially if you have several sites to monitor.

Top25web.com is one such search engine-ranking tool. You can find out where your website ranks in Google, Inktomi and AltaVista for free. You can also analyze the results of a particular keyword search, to create a plan for improving your sites ranking.

URL Ranker offers instant, online reports of website rankings in 17 top search engines, including Google, Yahoo, AOL Search, MSN, AllTheWeb and AltaVista, again for free. It will tell you if your site is listed in each engine, and tell you the ranking if it is.

These tools alone offer an excellent way of checking your sites rankings. Once you know where you stand, you can continue with your SEO plan, and move on to other aspects of marketing too.

How to Become an SEO Ninja.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 20-09-2009

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Every website listed in the search engines has a position, or ranking, and each one of these rankings can change very quickly, in some cases as often as weekly or even daily. One day your websites in a good position, then the next youre wondering what happened to it. Staying on top of this situation is a must for any SEO professional you need to become a search engine ninja. If thats what you want to do, then you need to keep these things in mind at all times:

1. Good SEO requires frequent updates and ranking checks.

You might have a good spot today, but all it takes is for a few new sites to open, and before you know it youre back down at the bottom. If you pay attention to your rankings, then you have a shot at fixing things that go wrong before your rankings fall too far.

2. You should check all your links weekly to make sure they work.

Maintain high-quality, relevant reciprocal links and check them weekly to make sure theyre working. Remove any dead links, as search engine crawlers may mark you down if they find them on your site.

3. Tweak and assess your website on a daily basis.

You need to continually assess and tweak your listing to keep your site in its proper place that is, at the top. This ensures that your site is in the best position possible, and helps you keep your competitive edge.

4. Maintain the content on your website.

Update your content weekly at the very least, to make sure that search engine crawlers come back frequently. Even the smallest changes will be picked up on by the search engines and will help to maintain your ranking. If you cant write, find someone who can: you need content.

5. Keep up-to-date with the latest developments in SEO.

If you cant decide what you should be doing or you dont want to keep up with SEO on your own, you could consider hiring a specialist. Consulting with an SEO specialist will still allow you to make your own changes to your website and learn which things work best, but youll have someone to answer your questions if you need them.

You should review your SEO techniques at least every few months, to see how the algorithms have changed and to devise new plans and strategies for increasing your rankings based on those changes. Any SEO ninja will tell you that there are only really two major search engines that you need to worry about: Google and Yahoo. You can do well even if you only have the time or energy to focus on these two engines. Being an SEO ninja is hard work, but it can be very rewarding if youve got the dedication for it.

The Importance of Referrer Logs

Filed Under (SEO Basics) by admin on 13-09-2009

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Referrer logging is used to allow web servers and websites to identify where people are visiting them either for promotional or security purposes. You can find out which search engine they used to find your site and whether your customer has come from a linked site. It is basically the URL of the previous webpage from which your link was followed.

By default, most hosting accounts dont include referrer logs but may be subscribedd for an extra monthly fee. If your web host does not provide a graphic report of your log files, you can still view the referrer logs for your website by logging into the host server using free or low-cost FTP software, like these:

FTP Explorer: http://www.ftpx.com/
LogMeIn: http://secure.logmein.com/dmcq/103/support.asp
SmartFTP: http://www.smartftp.com/
FTP Voyager: http://www.ftpvoyager.com/

The log file is available on your web server which can be download into your computer later. You can use a log analysis tool, like those mentioned below, to create a graphic report from your log files so that the files are easier to understand.

Abacre Advanced Log Analyzer http://www.abacre.com/ala/
Referrer Soft http://www.softplatz.com/software/referrer/
Log Analyzer http://www.loganalyzer.net

You can view the files using Word, Word Perfect, txt or WordPad files even if you dont have the right tool. This information is very crucial to your business and marketing plans and is not advisable to neglect it.

In addition to identifying the search engine or linked site from where your visitor arrived, referrer logs can also tell you what keywords or keyword phrases your client used for searching.

As referrer information can sometimes violate privacy, some browsers allow the user to disable the sending of referrer information. Proxy and Firewall software can also filter out referrer information, to avoid leaking the location of private websites. This can result in other problems, as some servers block parts of their site to browsers that don’t send the right referrer information, in an attempt to prevent deep linking or unauthorized use of bandwidth. Some proxy software gives the top-level address of the target site itself as the referrer, which prevents these problems and still not divulging the user’s last visited site.

Since the referrer can easily be spoofed or faked, however, it is of limited use in this regard except on a casual basis.

Why Content is King.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 20-08-2009

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You have heard it time and time again: Content is King. Yet still people ignore the truth of this common-sense phrase. People use the web to find information its the content of a page that is important to them, because thats why theyre there.

The content of a page is the primary thing that a search engine will look at when considering your site. The meta tags and the hidden text that many people like to place on their pages in order to draw search engines to their sites is much less important to the search engine. Many search engines dont even consider meta tags any more. Dont get me wrong, meta tags are a necessity when optimizing, but they are much less important than content.

Hidden text is not only skipped over by most search engines, it can give you serious problems with search engines. The king of search engines, Google, will remove sites from its index if they utilize hidden text. Hidden text is categorized as text that is the same color (or similar color to) the background or text that is the set as transparent using CSS.

When people arrive at your site, one of two things will happen. They will either find something of interest and stay, or theyll turn around and leave. They make this decision within seconds. You need to have things that people want to read, or all your precious click-throughs will be for nothing. If you cant come up with something to put on the front page of your site, hire a writer. Writers are there to create reasons for people to stay. They get paid for a reason, they are worth while.

You can never have too much information its a fact that people want information. The web is great for information because you can find so much out there with so little effort. Hidden somewhere in all that information, you can be sure theres something that youd love to find. Search engines are there to help you uncover it.

You could take some of this information and tailor it to your websites needs, using bits and pieces that will be easy to read and useful to your visitors. The more interested in your website a visitor is, the more likely that theyll stay a while, and come back some other time. You might even see some money from them, sooner or later.

Borrowing content word-for-word isnt the way to go, though, because of copyright laws but you can always create your own content. Remember that the most valuable web content is unique information that no-one can find elsewhere.

Another great method for delivering content is to provide RSS feeds from other sites straight onto your site. Many sites i.e. the New York Times site will allow you to put their RSS feeds onto your site. An RSS feed is basically an online news bulletin. If you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 or lower you probably havent encountered RSS. If you use FireFox or Opera for your web browser, you probably already know how great RSS can be for personal use. Imagine having all of that content available on your web site without having to pay a writer!

When selling products and services, make sure that you have enough information about your products features. Include everything anyone could ever want to know about your product. If you are running an affiliate site, buy a few of the products that you are selling and use them on a regular basis. This will give you the opportunity to find out what their major selling points are and allow you to make them into featured products and provide high quality reviews.

Think of it as leading your reader for a walk through your mind arrange the site to help your readers see what you see.

For example: a page on music, could lead to a page on rock music, which in turn leads to one about the various forms of music, which leads to a page on equipment, and so on and on. Each page on the site can lead into the next, in a reasonable progression of thought. Your content becomes not only new but also fun to experience, as you make it easy for the reader to understand where youre coming from. Tell a story with your pages.

Warning! You Cant Fool Google.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 19-08-2009

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Almost daily, I see a report about a company or individuals who is trying to fool Google through SEO. When are they going to learn that you just cant fool Google? Why would you even want to try it, with when you risk being banned from the biggest search engine in the world? Many people seem to try just because they wonder if it could ever be done. As a general rule of thumb: it can’t!

There are some instances in which people think that they have tricked google. They believe that something that they have done has rocketed their site to the top of Google’s listings and they truly believe that they have managed to “stick it to the man.” Nine times out of ten when this happens they either performed an SEO procedure that Google allows or even endorses or they just happened to fill Google’s criteria better than other sites in their category without even realizing it.

Once in a while someone will actually come up with a way to fool Goggle. They will be enjoy a nice high spot on google’s listings for maybe even several months, but then the end comes for these proud sites. As soon as Goggle notices that it has been cheated, these sites are removed from the index; sometimes permanently.

The fact is that these people dont understand the power that Goggle has. Anyone with a real interest in making money from the web should consider that getting banned from the search engines effectively removes your site from the web. They dont have to let you back in, and they dont have to give you any right to respond youre entirely at their mercy. You dont want to get in their bad books.

Aside from the fact that Goggle will remove you from its listings, there is another incentive against trying to fool Goggle. If you fool Goggle, you are fooling your clients. There is no reason to try to lure visitors onto your page expecting to get something and really giving them something else. This is a poor way to conduct business and more often than not it will chase the customer away for good.

If you want your website to be found in categories that dont apply to it, try purchasing ads on pages that are listed towards the top of the Goggle listings in these categories. You can actually increase your sites reputation in Googles eyes rather than hurting it by adding another link to your site. This is an excellent form of marketing because it allows you to reach out beyond your market simply by dishing out a few dollars a month.

Some of the most popular methods of trying to fool Google’s PageRank system are link farms and link exchanges. Link farms are basically websites that exist only to get links to specific sites counted by the search engines. Link exchanges are groups of websites that each pay a monthly fee to link to each other like link farms, only more expensive and dodgy. In both cases, the websites involved are attempting to climb the ranks of Google’s search results through the sheer quantity of links to them this is known as Googlebombing. But it doesnt always work.

Goggle knows that cheaters can ruin their search engine for the rest of us. After all, if link farms inflate the rankings of less-useful Websites, then well all start seeing worse search results. Thats why Goggle constantly updates PageRank to keep those kinds of sites away. The Page Rank formula that Goggle implements is mysterious and ever changing. This is the primary reason that Goggle cannot be fooled.

It has been found recently that Goggle is now sending out cloak bots, disobeying robots.txt to find out whether sites are cloaking serving a different page to search engines than what visitors see. These cloak bots are controversial but seem to have some positive effects on the Googles results.

Unethical methods make it difficult for people who are trying to do SEO the proper way, which is one of the reasons why it needs to be monitored so carefully. If people stopped trying to find ways to manipulate the system, it would be much easier to keep up with whats going on.

As you may already know, Goggle publishes a list of guidelines suggesting legitimate ways to improve a site’s ranking, by making it more accessible and better. One of the tips is to make pages for users and not for search engines. Youd do well to listen to their advice.

Understanding Stop Words, and How to Avoid Them.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 16-07-2009

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To understand how to avoid stop words, you first have to understand what stop words are. Search engines have words or phrases that are considered stop words. When a spider or crawler encounters one of these stop words, they will immediately leave your website and any information they gathered from it will not be saved in their database. This means that your website will not be indexed. If your website is already indexed in a searched engine, the crawler will come back to see if there are updates — and if it finds stop words when it does this, then your site could get banned from the search engine. You will not be allowed to remove the words and re-submit: its too late.

Different search engines have different lists, but some are nearly universal usually words that refer to sites with graphic sexual content, or other adult material. We cant really put a list here, or youd never find this page! You should be able to tell what they are for the most part, but remember, pornographic web sites will often get indexed as well. The norm for search engines is that they will attempt to avoid content that is illegal. When they encounter adult oriented sites, they will generally only ban sites that contain especially vulgar or illegal materials. The problem being that many of these sorts of sites will use gateway pages that have no content other than click here to enter. These sites are less likely to be caught with the stop word censors.

These arent the only stop words, however. Some search engines create different lists of stop words for each different kind of website. What does this mean? Well, the algorithms which rank the pages determine how many times on a page a keyword is listed. Keep in mind that there are people trying to keyword stuff their pages to improve their ranking. If a word is not relevant to your site, dont list it in your key words. This is one easy way to avoid losing your index privileges. There is no reason to try to lure people into your site on key words that dont apply as they will not stick around long enough to provide you with revenue anyway.

Now you might be asking what keyword stuffing is. Keyword stuffing is when someone uses the same keywords over and over again in the meta tags and the content of the web page. If youre searching the web and you come across a website that seems to be ranked far too highly, then keyword stuffing is usually to blame. The search engines work hard to stop people from using these kinds of tactics, and usually de-list sites that they find to be using them. Thats why some sites can be listed near the top for a while, before one day seemingly disappearing altogether.

Some sites, however, get ejected for repeated keywords, even though these sites arent trying to keyword stuff. This is where keyword analysis comes into play. To avoid repeating the same word or phrase too many times, you need to analyze your pages before you submit them you wouldnt want your efforts at finding good keywords to go to waste.

Although search engine optimization is a long-term effort, the processes and rules change frequently, without any warning. There are, however, tools available that will help you to stay on top of whats going on in SEO. Many tools can be tried out at no cost, letting you try before you buy. There are so many to choose from that you cant just start downloading them you will want to read the information on each tool before you make a decision.

By using these tools before you submit your pages to any search engines, you will fully understand “stop words” and how to avoid them! You need to keep in mind, though, that different search engines have different stop word lists, so words that dont matter to one search engine can stop your site from being listed on another.

There are also some words that arent included in searches, such as and, of, the, and other small words. You should keep these words out of your meta tags, as theyre just a waste of space.