SEO|The Full Insider SEO Details Exposed

Although Overture (now owned by Yahoo) can be used by itself, its often better to use it together with another PPC engine, to get the best chance of being seen. Overture is the largest of the PPC engines so it is a great place to start if youre going to try making money by spending money, but make sure that you dont try to provide your visitor with too much too quickly. It is very easy to over diversify your online advertisement portfolio and, in effect, pull yourself out of the game with a strained wallet.

Overture does nothing to hide the prices of its advertising from you theyre straightforward from the beginning. This is a great advantage for users of Overture, as you can never spend more than you want to. You know exactly where your ads will show up, and you can change them as often as you want. The ideology behind Overtures open display of its prices is that an informed customer is the best kind of customer. You never run into customers who complain about what they got because you tell them what they get. This is the kind of attitude that more online utilities and web sites should adapt. It gives web users a fair shake at optimizing the return on their financial investments.

You can include prices and other details in your listing so that people are better informed before they click this saves you money on people who click and turn out not to be interested. After all, you dont drop the big bucks just to watch your hits climb. You pay for quality hits that will result in sales or whatever else you are trying to deliver via your web page. Make sure to only pay for key words that are going to deliver quality traffic with sales potential. You should write a different ad for every keyword youre targeting, taking the time to do it correctly. Use the keyword in the ad, as Yahoo will put it in bold to make it stand out, and more people will click on your ad.

Remember that one of the biggest reasons that you are probably using Overture is that it is so outspoken with its prices. If you are selling something, why not put the price right out there in the advertisement? This is a quick way to avoid getting hits from those users that are seeking free versions of whatever you are selling. Believe me, no matter what you are selling, somebody is trying to get it for free.

Since using Overture gives you more flexibility and room when it comes to writing ads, youll be able to do more with them. Other sites you typically give you a standard 3-line ad area and no more, which doesnt leave much room for creativity. In the case of Overture you can generate spectacular ads that really give you a chance at displaying your product as something that the user would want to buy before they even click on the link.

One thing to remember when you create an advertisement is to state the most important things first, in case some of the ad gets cut off or the reader gets bored before they finish.

When youre one of the top 5 bidders for a keyword at Overture, you get a little bonus. Yahoo will list you twice when you have one of the top five positions once at the side of the page, and once at the bottom. If youre not in the top 5, youre missing out on this free exposure so its much better to pay a little extra to become #5 than to stay as #6.

Check your advertisements at least weekly, making sure youre still where you want to be relative to your competitors. Change the ads every time you launch a new product or service, and dont be afraid to try out new keywords you think of.

Be creative, and create short-term Overture ads for special offers if youre offering free shipping or free gifts for a limited time, say so! Use your ads to promote, advertise, and sell. After all, sales are what youre paying for, right? Many people are unaware that Overture lets you do this, so its a chance to stand out.

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.

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

What is SEO?

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

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

How Does SEO Work?

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

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

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

Free Search Engines.

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

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

What is Unethical SEO?

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEO for CEOs Search Engine Optimization Unmasked for CEOs

If youre like most other CEOs, the term search engine optimization will mean very little. Either that or it means expense! But it doesnt have to be that way If you feel like youre standing in a dark room handing money to strangers to get you in the search engines, then this article is for you.

This is an article written by a business owner for other business owners and CEOs. It explains Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) in laypersons terms. It wont make you an expert, but it will give you some insight into what youre spending your money on, what you should be spending your money on, and just as importantly, what you shouldnt.

But before launching straight into an explanation of SEO, lets talk a bit about search engines. Approximately 75%-80% of website traffic comes through search engines. Whats more, research shows that most people dont look beyond the first 2 pages of search results. This means if your website doesnt rank in the first 2 pages of the major search engines, its only receiving 20% of its rightful traffic and revenue. (And remember, being ranked number 1 when you search for your company name or web address doesnt count. You need to rank highly for the words your customers use at search engines.)

The biggest concern for search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, etc., is finding content that will bring them more traffic (and thus more advertising revenue). They do this by using complex algorithms to determine whether a site is useful and should be included in their search results.

This is where SEO comes in.

SEO is the art of ranking in the search engines. Nothing more, nothing less.

SEO means creating your site such that the search engines consider it useful. The two main weapons in your arsenal are:

Keywords
Links to your site

KEYWORDS

Figure out what words your customers are looking for at search engines, and use those words at your site. By frequently using keywords that are important to your customers, you tell the search engines what you do. These keywords are used in your copy and in the code behind the page. Generally speaking, the more you use the keywords, the more relevant you are to searches in that field.

Keywords in Your Copy

The use of keywords in your copy is easy to understand. But its not easy to do. You cant just pepper your site with a meaningless array of words. The trick is using the most important keywords a lot without compromising the readability of your copy. Its a balance between writing for the search engines and writing for your reader.

TIP: If you find this too time consuming, a website copywriter can take care of it for you. And if you know your keywords already, it should cost you no more than normal web copy.

Keywords in Your HTML Code

The use of keywords in your HTML code is harder to understand, but its easier to do. There are four main places these keywords are used:

Keywords
Description
Alt
Title

TIP: When you hear people talking about meta tags, this is what theyre talking about. To see how meta tags are used in practice, go to Google and pretend youre a customer. Search for something your customers would search for. e.g. If youre in car audio, search for car audio. Click on the first couple of results to bring up their website. Right-click on the home page, and select View Source. Youll see a whole lot of code. You can ignore most of it. What youre looking for are the following

meta name=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”keyword 1,keyword 2,keyword 3″

meta name=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=”Meaningful description of page using the main keywords”

img src=”filename.gif” alt=”Meaningful description of picture using the main keywords”

Take a look at the way the creators of the site have used keywords in these areas, and follow their lead. You already know theyre ranked highly, so chances are theyve done a good job. Alternatively, take a look at my site, http://www.divinewrite.com to see how Ive done mine.

LINKS TO YOUR SITE

Now that you know how to tell the search engines what you do, lets talk about how to convince them youre important.

Links to your site (or inbound links) are the most important factor in ranking. The more links you have to your site from other sites, the better your ranking (related sites generate better rankings).

TIP: Think of the Internet as a big election. All the websites in the world are candidates, and all the links to those websites are votes. The more votes (links) a candidate (website) has, the more important it is, and the higher its ranking.

There are many possible ways to generate links. Some are dubious (like auto-generation software). Others are legitimate, but offer limited results (like asking customers and suppliers to list you on their sites, and adding your site to various business directories). You can experiment with these methods, but Ive always found the best way to generate inbound links is to write helpful articles and let publishers of newsletters and e-zines use them for free on the proviso that they link back to your site.

People who publish e-Zines and newsletters are always hungry for quality content. And there are websites out there dedicated to giving them just that. If you submit a well written, relevant, helpful article to one of those sites, you can have thousands of newsletter publishers ready to snap it up. Then you just sit back and watch the links multiply!

TIP: This method is beneficial in other ways too. Readers of your article will see that you know what youre talking about, and because youre published, theyll see you as an authority.

Its impossible to say how much time youll need to spend generating links. You just have to keep at it until you have achieved a high ranking. Even then, youll still need to dedicate some ongoing time to the task, otherwise your ranking will drop.

Summary

So to cut a long story short, it comes down to this. If you have a lot of the right keyword phrases, used in real sentences, distributed realistically throughout your site, and a lot of links from other relevant sites, you stand a good chance of being ranked highly.

Thats what youre paying your providers for. And thats what SEO is all about.

Why Directories Are Important

Directories should play a major role in your SEO efforts, well, at least the big and important ones, for the following reasons:

- Listings within major directories provide “context” to search engines. For example, if your web site is listed in the Open Directory Project under the category Pets -> Weird Pets -> Blue Cats, search engines will assume your web site has something to do with blue cats. Your web site and pages will be indexed faster and might have a better ranking in search results for specific terms (in this case, blue cats).

- Major directories (such as Yahoo! Directory, ODP, Jayde etc.) have high page ranks and as long as you obtain a non-reciprocal listing from them, paid or unpaid, your page rank will benefit greatly.

- Major directories are often replicated by other web sites (think of ODP, with hundreds of copies) which means that a listing somewhere in such a major directory will cause listings in all replica sites, contributing towards your link popularity efforts and boosting page ranks.

- The ODP (Open Directory Project) feeds results to Google, AOL, AltaVista, Lycos, Netscape - once again, a presence in ODP can get you quite far.

Submitting to Directories

As with most good things in life, you need to make efforts to get into quality directories. Although detailed instructions on how to submit your web sites are always provided by the directories, there are certain aspects to consider before you start hunting for directories and submit your web sites:

- Start with Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project: being listed in the two of them is worth more than being listed in all other directories together! You will find soon enough that, unfortunately, being listed in these two is the hardest thing to do: Yahoo requires a $299 annual fee for regular web sites (only non-commercial sites qualify for a free listing) and $600 for adult sites, while ODP is free but you need A LOT of luck to make your way into it. ODP is so large yet is strictly human edited, which means the waiting time for a listing can extend to even years! Make your duty as a SEO worker and submit your web site, but don’t get your hopes too high, unfortunately.

- Religiously follow the submission guidelines provided by directories: read them as many times as you need to make sure you will not upset its editors by submitting your site the wrong way, with inaccuracies, the wrong description style, or to the wrong category.

- Try to find niche directories if your web site’s content is suitable for that. For example, if your web site covers Marketing topics, focus your efforts into finding a Marketing-only directory (such as MarketingWHO.com) and submit your site there: search engines love links from sites relevant to yours!

- You will probably come across many directories with paid inclusions: use your common sense to appreciate if its worth it or not. A good criteria is to check their Google Page Rank: if its at least 3 levels higher than your site’s Page Rank, it’s probably worth spending the money for the inclusion fee. However, do look for directories with a flat, one-time fee rather than recurring monthly or annual fees: you’ll end up spending less money!

In the end, remember a simple rule: if it’s too easy to get into a directory, it’s probably not worth the effort to get into it in the first case.

When you analyze a competitors website, you need to make sure youre prepared to do the job correctly. Competitors websites, if analyzed properly, can give you all sorts of information that you can use to increase the traffic and the popularity of your site. You can use these sites to analyze your own market. If a site gets a lot of hits it has to be doing something right. Check out where it is ranked, what key words it uses, how it is formatted, and what you can do to exemplify the good and filter out the bad. Also be sure to keep copyright laws in mind as a copyright infringement suit is never good for you, your site, or your blood pressure.

Identifying the Leaders.

You need to start off by identifying the major players a good place to do this is Yahoos directory. Its not as comprehensive as it once was, but its good if youre looking for the major players. You may want to print out the directory to take a closer look. Look for large companies, as well as innovative approaches and new products. Also use this examination as an attempt to identify the niche markets that the major players have not identified and exploited. If you can find new niches youre basically set as far as traffic goes.

Also consider that since Yahoo!s directory is the place that you look to find the big players, it may be a good place to get listed in order to become a big player. These little associations are important if you want to start to attain more and more traffic and conquer a niche or category. Try to identify all places that the big dogs hang out and start hanging out there. Its all about who you know in this business so bigger is better. You might not be ready to play with the big dogs, but the only way to get there is to sit down and give it a shot.

Sites like Media Metrix 500 can tell you which companies get the most traffic, and you can learn about the relative traffic by using Alexa. Alexa is a free add-on to your browser that ranks the traffic to each sire you visit, telling you whether its in the top 100, the top 1000, the top 10,000, and so on. This gives you a rough idea of where your competitors are in the pecking order.

Scrutinize the Leaders.

The next step is to study the top 5 or 10 competitors very closely. There is a lot that can be learned by looking at competitors website and analyzing them. These are the things that you should look for.

1. Make sure you check to see what products or services they offer, and note anything thats different from your own offerings. Look for gaps that you could fill.

2. Think about the look, feel and functionality of their website.

3. See what advertising campaigns and offers theyre running.

4. Look at their strengths and weaknesses, from the customers point of view.

5. See if you can figure out their strategy.

When youre dealing with publicly traded companies, you can often get detailed information from their SEC filings. Write down the names of their key players and then look for any interviews and speeches they might have made about their website.

Look for Strengths, Vulnerabilities, and Gaps.

Now, summarize the information youve found into a few sentences for each competitor, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Note strategies that are going to be necessary to counter their offering these will depend on your own websites strengths. If youre small, then youll need to be resourceful to exploit their weaknesses.

With this research, you can create a marketing plan. Be sure to include how you intend to deal with competition, and what steps you think youll need to take for you site to come out on top. Once youve finished analyzing your competitors, you need to consider whether it would be better not to compete at all, and find a less-saturated market.

Dont get frightened away prematurely, though make sure you know what youre getting into before you start, and dont let big companies intimidate you. Remember that you can move faster than they can! All you have to do is offer your customers things they cant find anywhere else.

It is indispensable therefore to get the attention of major search engines as well such Google, Yahoo, Alltheweb.com and others. In order to get high rankings you should have well-optimized content. SEO copywriting is a special technique that allows search engines to get more high rankings for your web site. This method by which your web site is found by major search engines is one of the most effective as it is most frequently used by the visitors of your web site. Moreover, it is one of the most cost-effective methods as well. Online advertisement might cost a lot, besides your potential client might not even pay attention to it. Certainly you should bear in mind what type of business you provide as well as what type of clients you intend to target. That is why it is very important to develop effective marketing strategy with the search engine optimization process. You should know the keywords by which your web site is found by your visitors. Needles to say, that the web site of dental company is found by other keywords than the site of law firm.

This technique allows your site to be ranked higher and increase free traffic on your web site. In writing of SEO content copy it important to remember that one should not attempt to write a completely new web copy rather one should concentrate on the revising and reediting content written by copywriters. Remember that final product should be suitable for reading both by search engines and people. The survival of many web sites depends on the traffic got by major search engines. Once your text ha been written and has been submitted, the search engines starts looking for relevant words in it. The pages of your web site will be ranked higher if more relevant keywords appear in the content of your web site. Finally, try either to read about this process or even hire some professional who can handle this task for you. Remember that if SEO process is performed incorrectly it might ruin rather than help your business.

You cant just put your website on the net with right keywords and all the right touches and expect your traffic and ranking will remain constant. As the web is an ever changing landscape, you have to keep track of your own web results like what is happening with the competition and also the best and highest ranked sites. There are many useful tools to help you find out what exactly is happening.

1. A tool which you can use to test your own website links or other websites for broken links:
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

2. With this tool you can check search engines for the number of back links to your URL i.e. other web pages linking to your site:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/backlinks/

3. It sometimes becomes important to know where the servers of your hosting company are physically located. Because, some search engines like Google have the ability to filter search results based on their physical location called geotargeting. This could be used to determine why your site is showing in only a certain country. This link can also be used to research the country location of a particular competitors website:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/website-country/

4. In order to track the location of the visitor or a customer to your website:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/geovisitors/

5. In order to check the Yahoo! web ranking of yours or your competitors website use :
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/webrank/

6. Here is a link to check the web ranking of a website using a Mac or Apple computer:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/pagerank-mac/

7. You need a Google AdSense account for using this. This link provides you with charts and reports which will help you analyze traffic, clicks, and results from your AdSense advertising
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-charts/

8. If you have an AdSense account, you can analyze your website address or another website address to see what Google ads will be displayed when the customer selects certain website names or keywords:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-sandbox/

9. This link will take you to a cooperative advertising network where you can join to display and
share your ads with other website owners:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/

10. You can add the Search Functionality on your website which uses Google. This works only if your site is listed in the Google Index.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/search/

11. Here are some links to free website counters which you can use on your website to track your traffic and hits:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/counter/
http://www.amazingcounters.com/?ref=gad033
http://www.cyber-counter.com/signup.php
http://www.statcounter.com/free_hit_counter.html
http://www.free-counters.net/

Search Engine Optimization uses a combination of techniques, tools, and technical know-how to get results .Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves the careful optimization of corporate web sites to effectively increase their visibility in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Alta-Vista,and many others. 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. 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.
Meta Tags
Navigational links
Rich Content

Meta Tags:
Meta Tags are very important for your website’s visibility. Many search engines read them from your site when you submit it to them .Major meta tags that you can use:

Meta Title
The only resource type that is currently in use is “document” This is the only tag that you need to put in for indexing purposes.

Meta Description
Depending on the search engine, this will be displayed along with the title of your page in an index. “content” could be a word, sentence or even paragraph to describe your page. Keep this reasonably short, concise and to the point.

Meta Keyword
Choose whatever keywords you think are appropriate, seperated by commas.

Navigational links:
at the right or at the bottom, but not on the left, of the page. When the search engines “read” your site, they read from the top left to the bottom right. Search engines place an emphasis on the first 100 words or text on the site. You do not want these words to be navigational links or Javascript. Ideally, you want to have your heading tags with your keywords in the beginning of your page. This being said, placing your links/JavaScript on the right or bottom of your page ensures the search engine spiders get to the text first, giving more weight to what’s important on your page.

Rich Content:
The more content you have on your site the more likely someone is to find what they’re looking for when they get there. Keep your site very content rich. Have a lot of pages.Update the site even twice a day if you have the time. Updating your site does not mean that you copy paste content from other sites.That will only push your rankings further down. Don’t have any duplicate content. At the same time ,dont spam multiple content across the same website. When a search engine views or reviews a website, which they do at least every few months, it looks for specific characteristics found in the content of website landing pages.For information about Search Engine Optimaization visit http://www.googleseostar.org.