What Is Search Engine Optimization

Filed Under (SEO Basics) by admin on 17-09-2009

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Search Engine Optimization is a process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site highly in search engines so that when someone searches for specific phrases it returns your site on tops. It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags and also involves appropriate link building process. The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves. Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine. New sites need not be “submitted” to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.

If you are unable to research and choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with you on these issues.

Search engine marketing and promotion companies, will look at the plan for your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. If you wish, they will also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high. Normally your search engine optimization experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the same time.

Web Hosting Companies

Filed Under (SEO Basics) by admin on 16-09-2009

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With thousands of web hosting companies in the market it can be difficult if not impossible to know which web site hosting companies truly provide an excellent hosting solution at an excellent price. When you have an established domain name with a good web hosting company, you can get reports on your traffic and which of your pages your customers are visiting most often, as well as many other statistics.

Your web host will charge you a fee for monthly service that ranges from 10 or 20 to the more expensive 50.00 per month. Plan to pay between 300 and 500 per year to your web host.

Always avoid free or very inexpensive web hosting services, because you may experience bouts of server downtimes and you are likely to have significant limitations in storage, number of email addresses, FTP upload etc.

Be sure your web host can accommodate e-commerce and storefronts, wireless capability, bogs, forums, chats, online interactive helps and anything else you want to add onto your site.

Estimate what your growth needs are and ensure that this web host can serve you as you grow. The last thing you want to do is change host mid way unless you absolutely have to do so.

Check your bandwidth capability to be sure that, if your website traffic grows rapidly, your customers will not have to wait to download or view information. Three things to look for in a web hosting company are:

1. Excellent Customer Support: Your hosting provider should be there for you 24/7 and give you instant access to the technicians you need to solve your problem. Ask them how long it takes for them to typically respond to your problem. A good test is to call them in the mid night to check if you get to a live, level 3 support.

2. A Sound Infrastructure: Check whether they offer a multi-homed network powered by multiple bandwidth providers to ensure redundancy. Some offer a 100% guarantee on its network availability or network uptime.

3. Financial Stability: If you’re running very critical operations, you can’t afford to be with a hosting company that may not be in business in a few months.

How Alexa Rankings Affect Your Traffic.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 15-09-2009

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Alexa is a very powerful tool, used to rank website traffic. The relationship between how Alexa rates your website and how popular your website is, however, isnt as obvious as it might seem. You need to consider your websites ranking, links, traffic, and many other factors. Many of these factors are hidden and known only to the most experienced Alexa users.

Do other websites link to yours? If you want Alexas attention then you should make sure that they do. Dont worry: usually, all you need to do is ask, as long as you offer a link to their site in return. Remember that your links need to be relevant to your site dont take links from an unrelated site, as they wont be counted. However, if the links are on sites that dont get much traffic, then Alexa will never hear about them.

The fact of the matter is that relevant links are helpful to your visitors. Search engines want to know if a site is worth going to. If it is, they are happy to index it in a higher spot. This is a general rule of thumb that you should keep in mind at all times when performing SEO operations. The difference between a site with a moderate search results and a site with high search results is that the site with the higher results is generally more user friendly. Alexa Ratings and other rating systems try to emulate how a visitor will see your site. Once theyve determined the worth of your site to a visitor they index it accordingly. This is why it is so important to have relevant links. If you are linking to sites that your users would find interesting, Alexa will enjoy it.

By targeting sites that are similar to yours, but not exactly the same, youll get relevant links that Alexa will like. The best sites to link to are with content that complements your own. For example, if your site is dedicated to rock and roll and you link to a guitar sales web site, youll probably get traffic flow back and forth. One way of ensuring relevant information is to link to yourself from other sites that you own: why try to hunt down other webmasters if you have 20 or 30 websites of your own you can use? Traffic flow is the biggest factor, however, as most of what Alexa does is traffic-based.

After comparing your site to the other ones it ranks, Alexa will assign your site a ranking number. The higher that the ranking number is, the better traffic you are receiving. Many search results utilize Alexa Rankings in indexing their results, therefore, if you have a high Alexa Rating not only are you already getting a good deal of traffic, you will begin to accumulate even more traffic. If youd like to see your Alexa rating, all you need to do is go to alexa.com and enter your domain name.

You can also view Alexa rating using the Alexa toolbar, which lets you see how much traffic the site youre currently visiting has. For example, you might be considering whether you should exchange links with a site. If the site youre considering has no traffic then a link exchange wont be worth your time and it may even have an adverse effect on your Google Pagerank which is at least as important as your Alexa Rating.

Using the Alexa ranking system allows you to compare the traffic of your site or other sites with the traffic of the web as a whole. Number 1 is the top rank, so the larger the ranking number, the lower the traffic is likely to be. Lets say that your sites rank at Alexa is something like 1,578,459. No matter how professional the website looks, or how high the Google PageRank is, your website just doesnt have much traffic in fact, Alexa knows of 1,578,458 websites that have more traffic than you do.

It is, however, important to keep in mind that a high Google PageRank will almost certainly increase your traffic. If you have a high Google PageRank and a low Alexa Rating, your site is probably new to the internet. It will take your visitors some time to find the site via Google and the links from other sites. Generally, the Alexa Rating is the second rating that SEO managers should worry about. The Alexa Rating is very useful in analyzing a comparison between your site and others, but you must also keep in mind that because Alexa ranks sites based on visits by users who utilize their toolbar, these ratings can be inflated or under-stated..

Tips to Increase Ranking and Website Traffic

Filed Under (SEO Basics) by admin on 15-09-2009

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It is worth cataloguing the basic principles to be enforced to increase website traffic and search engine rankings.

Create a site with valuable content, products or services.
Place primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words in your page content and spread them evenly throughout the document.
Research and use the right keywords/phrases to attract your target customers.
Use your keywords in the right fields and references within your web page. Like Title, META tags, Headers, etc.
Keep your site design simple so that your customers can navigate easily between web pages, find what they want and buy products and services.
Submit your web pages i.e. every web page and not just the home page, to the most popular search engines and directory services. Hire someone to do so, if required. Be sure this is a manual submission. Do not engage an automated submission service.
Keep track of changes in search engine algorithms and processes and accordingly modify your web pages so your search engine ranking remains high. Use online tools and utilities to keep track of how your website is doing.
Monitor your competitors and the top ranked websites to see what they are doing right in the way of design, navigation, content, keywords, etc.
Use reports and logs from your web hosting company to see where your traffic is coming from. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether search engines or links from other sites and the keywords they used to find you.
Make your customer visit easy and give them plenty of ways to remember you in the form of newsletters, free reports, reduction coupons etc.
Demonstrate your industry and product or service expertise by writing and submitting articles for your website or for article banks so you are perceived as an expert in your field.
When selling products online, use simple payment and shipment methods to make your customers experience fast and easy.
When not sure, hire professionals. Though it may seem costly, but it is a lot less expensive than spending your money on a website which no one visits.
Dont look at your website as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, ever-changing sales tool and location, just like your real store to which your customers with the same seriousness.

SEO - Guide

Filed Under (Free SEO) by admin on 12-09-2009

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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.

Using RSS to Increase Your PageRank.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 18-07-2009

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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.