Many people think that getting a website on the internet is an automatic ticket to fame, increased traffic and three-fold increase in sales figures. Alas, if they only knew that they are only at the bottom rung of a rather long ladder. Getting your business online is different from creating a website. To get your business online, you have to market it appropriately. You have to take certain definite steps towards attracting dedicated traffic which will in turn get converted into a huge customer base. Then you can truly say that you have arrived!

The first step in online website marketing is to get the word out. People must know that your website exists. If you already have a brick and mortar shop, then the best way to start publicizing your website is to let your regular customers know that they can simply shop online. Your regular customers will be delighted, particularly if you give them an added incentive like a free gift or a small discount. You may enhance your online presence through ads in your local papers, word of mouth and yellow page listings.

However, if your goal is to reach out to a global customer base, then, you have to get into online website marketing in a more serious manner. One of the options is to make use of the services of online marketing firms. These firms have the expertise to provide complete business solutions to small businesses. They are experts in Search Engine Optimization techniques. Thus, they will incorporate code into your website that will help you claw your way up in search engine rankings. These firms will also go a step further and link your website with the important search engines, so your web presence will become conspicuous. In short, they will place you somewhere at the top of search engine listings. But they are pricey.

If you do not want to use the services of a firm, you could do a large part of website marketing by yourself. The first thing to remember is to let your viewers know what your business is about. A well laid out website is the best way to do this. Good design, cutting edge technology and helpful tools will help you attract customers.

The next step is to woo search engines so they peg you on top of their listings. There are many ways you can do this, but each of these steps requires persistence. Do not expect online website marketing to yield immediate results.

To attract search engines, your code must be search engine optimized:

* Include title and meta tags in your pages.

* Link your pages well.

* Use descriptions when you insert images.

* Use a sitemap because search engines love sitemaps.

* Update your content every few days because fresh content attracts search engines.

The next important tool in your kit is social media networking. This is nothing but logging on to Blogs and discussion forums related to your website, and posting on them. This way, you attract the notice of prospective customers, who will follow your link back to your website. Also, build and maintain relationships with products and companies that are associated with your products. They will link to you and you can return the favor. Use video and audio effectively on sites like YouTube where millions of people come. Do everything to build your network online.

Making money through your website is possible when you get involved in effective online website marketing. Just check out your best competitors and find out what they are doing. Duplicate it with some extra effort and you could easily become #1 in your niche!

Of all the areas of Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization is the most misunderstood, and potentially the most important to your marketing efforts. There are millions upon millions of pages of web content out there — you can work hard, build a great site, and then be totally lost in the shuffle. SEO is important. It’s also a very complex process that requires patience, careful planning and a long-term approach.

If you’re just getting started with:

Selecting an SEO firm

Trying to start a search engine campaign on your own

Reviewing your current SEO efforts

…read on. This article should provide you with a high-level review of the SEO process, dispel a few SEO myths, and help you understand legitimate optimization strategies.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, defies easy definition. But here’s a short version:

Search Engine Optimization
Using keyword analysis and other legitimate practices to gain the highest possible search engine and directory rankings, under a given key phrase, for a given URL.

Every SEO professional in the world just cringed, so I’ll break this definition down a bit and hopefully prevent a hail of angry e-mails:

Keyword Analysis is the process of mining keyword search data to find the best balance between the keywords you need and the best potential search niche. More on this later.

Search Engine means an automated search engine. ‘Search Engines’ include Google, AlltheWeb.com, Yahoo (powered by Google plus their own directory information), AOL Search, Ask Jeeves and MSN Search. A search engine obtains its results from ‘spiders’ or ‘bots’ — small programs that come to your web site read it in much the same way you would: By reading the content on a page, and then moving from page to page via links. A directory, on the other hand, is built at least in part by human beings reading sites and other information and deciding where each site fits into the directory structure. Yahoo’s directory area and Open Directory are both examples of directories.

Ranking is the numeric rank reflecting your position in the results list when someone performs a search on a particular set of keywords.

Highest Possible means getting as close to number one as you can. Sometimes you just can’t get that number one spot. Maybe someone else has a 400-page web site solely dedicated to the key phrase for which you’re attempting to optimize. Or maybe they’re paying a fortune in advertising. That’s life, sometimes…

Key Phrase is the keyword or set of keywords someone types into the little ‘search’ field in Google or Alta Vista or any other search engine.

A URL is the address of one page on your site. Most search engines display keyword search results and provide a link directly to the page most relevant to those results, rather than your home page. It’s very, very important to keep that in mind when you build and optimize your site.

Legitimate Practices is a pet peeve of mine. A true search engine optimization campaign will not use practices such as page or content cloaking, redirects, or lists of links (so-called ‘link farms’) but relies on good coding practices, well-written content, steady link popularity work and site features that will be every bit as valuable for site visitors as for search engine ranking. Anything less is a short-term fix that will likely reduce your rankings more often than increase them.

So, the long version of the definition would be:

Search Engine Optimization
Using keyword analysis, good coding practices, well-written copy, link popularity analysis and careful site organization to move a web page as close to the number one search results position as possible for a given key phrase, in both search engines and directories.

Hey, that’s not so bad after all. But how do you get started? First, you separate reality from myth…

SEO Urban Legends

There are quite a few SEO myths out there. Here are my favorites:

The Keywords META Tag Matters. Mostly wrong. Only Inktomi pays any attention to the keywords meta tag. You should do something basic, but don’t bother putting in keywords that aren’t supported by your page content.

Search Engines can read Flash, images and video. Sorry, and Ford isn’t selling a flying car yet, either. Search engines can read one thing: Text. Anything else, while perfectly legitimate as a design tool, will not help your ranking. And relying too heavily on Flash or images may reduce your site’s visibility. Google is one partial exception — they can read some links in Flash, but still have very limited ability to read Flash content.

Mirroring my site in multiple locations will improve ranking. Actually, just the opposite. Duplication of content will generally have no effect or, worse, reduce your ranking in major search engines. Most search engines now have rules against this form of ‘spam’ and may reduce your ranking or ban your site altogether.

‘Doorway’ pages improve ranking. Pages that have lots of keywords but then quickly redirect to the main site will not help you in major search engines, such as Google. And, if someone catches you and reports you to Google or the other search engine, you may be banned altogether. A ‘landing’ or ‘bridge’ page, though, that’s designed to be as useful for users as for search engines, and does not redirect the user, can help by providing keyword-rich content that’s genuinely worthwhile.

Firms promising to get me #1 rankings in 10,000 search engines for $99.95 can help. I alternate between tooth-grinding and hysterical laughter when I see these ads. First, there aren’t 10,000 search engines. Actually, there are probably 10-20 you should really worry about. Getting listed in the other thousand or so is largely a waste of time. Second, no one can guarantee any ranking in any search engine for a specific keyword. Period. And finally, the price is less than half the cost to get an express submission in a single directory (Yahoo). Chances are anyone trying to get you to spend the $99.95 is operating a ‘link farm’ where they list dozens, or hundreds, of sites. While they won’t hurt your ranking, they won’t help, either. To learn more about how to choose an SEO firm, check out Google’s article: http://www.google.com/intl/mr/webmasters/seo.html.

Firms charging me more money and guaranteeing a #1 ranking on Google can help. This is the latest SEO scam. I can get you a number one ranking on Google, too, as long as I get to pick the keyword or can get you ranked under a fairly unique company name. But no one, and I mean no one can guarantee a #1 rank under a specific keyword. Even Google says so.

Forget the myths — if an offer seems too good to be true, it is. The truth is that search engines are now almost savvy enough to read your pages like a human being would, so anything that will drive away a typical site visitor will also probably reduce your ranking. Things that will increase your search engine ranking include:

Well-written content

Good, clean HTML code

Useful, relevant TITLE tags

Useful, relevant DESCRIPTION tags

Relevant, appropriate links from other web sites

There are some basic steps that, well executed, will do more to increase your page rank than an ocean of snake oil.

The SEO Campaign Process

A typical SEO campaign starts with keyword analysis, and then emphasizes insuring your site doesn’t impede search engine bots and follows up with ongoing link and traffic analysis. If you like pretty pictures, here’s one:

 What’s a Bot?
A ‘bot’ is a program used by a search engine to read the content of your site into a directory. I mentioned this briefly in ‘What is Search Engine Optimization?’ above. Keep up, now….

Step 1: Keyword Analysis. Ah, keywords. If you say the right word enough times on your site, you’ll get that coveted #1 spot, right? Wrong. Choosing the right keywords starts with you making a list of the keywords or phrases under which you’d like to be found, and typically ends up somewhere completely different. Typically, selecting the best keywords is a four-step process:

List the keywords and phrases under which you’d like to be found.

Find out whether anyone searches on those keywords, and whether they’re searching for relevant items.

Find out how many other sites are struggling for rankings under those keywords.

Pick keywords with the same meaning but a better search-to-competition ratio.

Maybe I want to rank #1 under ‘Search Engine Optimization’. Guess what? There are 686,000 other URLs in Google trying for that spot. Hmmm. But wait! Under ‘Seattle Search Engine Optimization’ there are only 19,000. So, I targeted that key phrase, instead. And guess what? We got a #3 ranking.

Don’t forget about relevance, either. If you want a high ranking under ‘tires’, you’re going to have your work cut out for you. And in the end you’ll likely end up getting found for ‘bicycle tires’, ‘automobile tires’, ‘spare tires’ and who knows what else. Is it worth it? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But you have to do your homework to find out.

Data Mining and Keywords
If you’re doing a campaign for a large site, you may end up testing and comparing thousands of keywords and phrases. Having a good data-mining tool (even Excel will do) on hand is important when you’re doing keyword analysis. We use S-Plus, by Insightful Software. It’s saved our lives, and clicker fingers, several times.

There are several tools that help you research the number of searches and competitors for keywords. Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) is a good one — don’t depend on their results from Overture, though, unless you’re specifically preparing an Overture campaign. Metacrawler’s MetaSpy tool is worth a look, too. Ideally, look at results from a few different sources.

Keyword analysis is the hardest part of a campaign, in number-crunching terms. It requires a lot of work and may not tell you what you want to hear. But in my experience it’s critical to a successful campaign.

Step 2: Search Engine Readiness. Almost every web site we review has one or more problems that will prevent search engine bots from properly reading all content. Typical showstoppers include:

An all-Flash or all-images home page

A home page that automatically redirects to another page

Pop-up ads (does anyone really read these things?)

A site full of pages with fewer than 400 words on a page

Broken links

Navigation that is generated by JavaScript

No TITLE or DESCRIPTION tags

A major step in any SEO campaign is making sure that the site will present the friendliest profile to search engines. Happily, the investment in optimizing will also pay off in a faster, more universally compatible site.

Step 3. Content and Site Preparation. You’ve done your research: You know which keywords match your message, and your site’s HTML code is one big search engine welcome mat. Now it’s time to make sure that your site contains those keywords. This is where I most often see folks get confused — should you rewrite your web content to emphasize keywords? Yes, but with extreme caution. Should you make small, appropriate changes? Yes. Here are my guidelines for content preparation.

Don’t write for keywords (much). This almost always leads to stilted, hard-to-read prose. Writing keyword-rich content that really works for users is an art form. Be careful.

Do a little careful editing. If you use the word ‘car’ but ‘auto’ is the keyword you need, chances are you can do a few replacements without marring your carefully crafted copy.

Spend time on the titles and description tags. Make sure every page in your site has a unique, relevant TITLE and DESCRIPTION tag.

Never use an automatic page generator. Tools like WebPosition Gold offer to generate optimized pages for you. Don’t. They tend to hurt your ranking as much as help, and they generate ugly, ugly pages.

Write more stuff. More content is almost always better. If your site is just missing a specific keyword or phrase, but you think it’s important, then your potential customers probably do too. By adding a few more pages, or a white paper, or some other content focusing on those absent keywords, you’ll likely help visitors and improve your keyword ranking at the same time. And, the more text-rich your site is, the better the odds that you’ll catch longer, stranger but really important key phrases that you can’t anticipate.

Step 4. Link Analysis. Quite a few major search engines (Google, most importantly) weigh your ‘link popularity’ when ranking your site. A more accurate term, though, is ‘link analysis’, because these engines don’t just count up the number of links to your site. They look for links near and containing relevant text. So a page full of links, one of which happens to be yours, won’t help very much. But a link from a related site, near a short paragraph that contains relevant keywords, will probably give you a boost. Having keywords in the link itself is even better. A quick example:

http://www.portentinteractive.com doesn’t help much.

For search engine optimization, visit http://www.portentinteractive.com is much better.

For search engine optimization, visit Portent Interactive where ‘search engine optimization’ is the link to Portent, is the absolute best case.

There are a few ways to build your link popularity:

Contact sites that relate to yours and request a link exchange. This works really well, but obviously takes a long time.

Syndicate your content. If you can provide an easy way for interested webmasters to link directly to relevant stories on your site, you provide an instant link popularity boost, and get your message out to boot.

Start an affiliate program. If you sell a product, consider setting up an affiliate sales program.

Google’s ‘One Site, One Vote’ Rule
Google awards a lot less weight to a link to your site if that link is on a page with lots of other links. That’s why so-called ‘link farming’ doesn’t work. Ideally, you want a link to your site from a page that includes relevant content and not that many other outgoing links.

Step 5. Submit your site. Many search engines, Google included, allow you to submit your site for free. Generally you can submit your home page and let the search engine crawl the rest of your site. Some directories and engines offer paid ‘express’ services, and some, like Teoma, require that you pay for URL submission. Which engines you choose depends on your budget and campaign.

Step 6. Review, Revise, and Keep Going. Think you’re done? Wrong — search engine optimization is an ongoing project. At least once per month, review your rankings, site traffic reports and link popularity and tweak your site as necessary. The tools you need to measure results are:

Site traffic reports. Any web hosting company should provide you with a web site traffic report, and almost all of the reporting tools in use today provide a ‘referrals from search engines’ section. Take a look at this section for a good measure of campaign results.

Link counts. Use the link: command on Google (see above) to determine your link popularity.

Your keyword list. Search on the relevant search engines to see if your ranking has improved.

Your brain. You have to interpret what you see, and decide whether changes are warranted. There’s no hard and fast rule for this, and no magic formula. Sorry about that…

So now you’ll get instant results, right? Well, not quite…

A Word About Expectations

Search engine optimization can take time. Even Google only refreshes its entire index once a month, so don’t expect instant results.

If your first registration run doesn’t generate increased rankings within a month or two, don’t panic. Look at your site traffic and search on the keywords you chose. Make sure that the search engine you’re checking actually includes your site, too — most likely the bots just haven’t gotten around to ‘crawling’ your site.

Still stumped? Find a professional. Sure, we cost money. But you may have missed something about your site that’s preventing a good keyword rank, and a second set of eyes can help.

A Solid Marketing Strategy

Obviously, Search Engine Optimization is a big job. But nothing can send more traffic to your site, for lower per-click cost. If you follow the basic steps, and keep at it, you will definitely get results. What’s really, really important is to make sure you don’t award too much weight to one step (such as link popularity) at the expense of the others. A well-rounded campaign will provide solid, long-term results.

What about pay per click?
Pay-per-click services, such as Overture and Google Adwords, are very different animals. If you’ve done your keyword analysis you’re halfway there, but there are other tasks. I’ve not talked about them in this article because, well, they need an article of their own. Check back soon…

There are a number of SEO marketing strategies. Organic SEO is one of the most popular and reliable methods which is used to enable any website to rank in the Search Engine. In fact Search Engine Optimization methods can be classified into two phrases- Off page optimization and on-page optimization. With organic SEO tactics websites can be optimized. It helps the sites to gain better position in the Search Engine, thus increasing your chances of alluring more and more customers. So make sure your website seo package focuses on organic seo.

Now let us discuss in detail seo packages and what are the components that should consist of. On-page Optimization actually deals with the SEO strategies (organic) that are employed on the web pages to optimize it. Many companies are using these strategies to get success in their business and you need to select an affordable seo company to do this work for you. They understand the benefits of organic SEO. It is not as straightforward as the other strands of internet marketing; nonetheless it is the perfect starting point for any kind of business.

Organic Search engine optimization or Organic Search engine Optimization requires a multi level approach and so you need to select the best los angeles seo company to do this work for you. Such companies need to know both on page and off page optimization tactics to optimize the site. Off-page optimization deals with the tactics that are employed off the website page to optimize it. Keep in mind a basic fact -Search engine optimization organizations falls in one of two groups- White Hat search engine companies and Black Hat search engine companies. A White Hat SEO organization will abide by the terms of services of the main search engines and will use content-based approach. On the other hand, Black Hat SEO organizations violate the terms of service and use technology driven approach.

To be more pragmatic Google needs its search results and it ensures that these results are relevant to its users. Thus content based white hat approach or an organic seo approach will help the website in the long run. So make sure that your Los Angeles seo company does not employ any black hat techniques. Some of the reputed search engines, like Yahoo, Google and MSN follow their own set of regulations. It is called as search engine compliancy. They use it to determine the relevancy of websites.

In organic Search Engine Optimization, simple, small changes can have a great impact on your traffic. Organic Search engine optimization can really prove to be advantageous. Another great benefit of organic Search Engine is that is not hampered by ad business. To make your website stand in a better position in the search engine, you need to apply these website seo strategies. So make sure that your partner with an expert – the best la seo company.

Copyright (c) 2008 Dock J Murphy

Directories are search engines powered by human beings. Human editors compile all the listings that directories have. Directories consist of a collection of categories into which links are separated. Categories can have sub-categories to make the division of links more specific.

Sites started popping up where you could pay for a program that would automatically submit to thousands of sites for you or you could pay a monthly fee and they would do it for you. The quality of these various services and programs is mixed. Sites of low quality, illegal materials, inappropriate content and those submitting multiple or spam my submissions will not be included in our directory. Please don’t waste your time or ours.

Publish your own blog with easy to use tools. Share your favorites with friends. Publishers can select articles to publish on their websites, in newsletters or ezines.

Search engine friendly article submission directory. Search and see what comes up on the Internet. Search engines value links from quality web directories because it means that your site has been checked and selected by a human being. But not all web directories are equal, and you want to be careful when submitting your site to not just throw good money after bad links.

Submitting your articles to different article directories can contribute to your site’s maximum exposure. Heedfulness is necessary in choosing the best article directories to submit to, that’s if you are doing the manual submission. Submit only one URL a day (no more than five). Force-feeding your URL’s will only get them not listed or even banned. Submit and share some of your own original content. This article blender is filled with letters and words and out comes a delicious blend of smooth, quality articles.

Submit your original quality articles, and submit often! The WWW is FULL of people craving, needing fresh reading materials. Submitting 2 pieces is like submitting 22 and so on. Please pay attention that approx 1/2 of the total number of visitors of our directory are coming via the translated articles and thus you get better exposure with us!

Google scores me well, yahoo really bad. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

The first is to create massive back-links to web pages in order to increase their position on search engine results pages. The second is to attract targeted visitors to your website. Over time, this will help drive traffic to your web site and increase your link popularity. Getting started on Article Creek is easy and you can begin publishing your articles online immediately. How many links they accept or where they accept them. Do something different, useful, funny, and sexy in your niche and people will link to it naturally.

Incorporating various search engine optimization strategies within the article like, using keywords, keywords phrases etc. Only if the article has been optimized to meet the requirements of the search engine can it be found on Google . Also use the keywords effectively on the page content. Right keyword and optimized keyword specific content is the key for better search engine ranking.

It relies on choosing some niche keywords based on your web site theme. The process is fairly simple and can be expanded to get tons of traffic to your site. You can then buy the keywords that are likely to convert into sales. When you are able to be smart about your marketing, it stops becoming an expense and starts becoming a cost of sale. It does you absolutely no good to be number one for a keyword phrase that nobody every uses in a search.

One of the biggest reasons why many organizations are not doing even simple things to help people find their websites in search engines is they simply don’t understand how search engines work. This article is intended to explain the basics of how search engines work and in the course of doing so shatter some search engine myths and help you understand what you can do to help people find your website in search engines.

What is a search engine?
The first to step to understanding how search engines work is to understand what a search engine is. The simplest explanation is that search engine is a tool for finding things online. There are many different types of search engines but they can be put into two major categories…

Human-Powered Directories
The first “search engines” were not actually search engines as we think of them today, but searchable directories of websites organized by hierarchical categories. A site is added to a directory when the website owner fills out a submission form on the directory’s website requesting their site be included in the directory and include their website’s title, description, URL (web address), and category. A moderator later reviews the site and if it meets the directory’s criteria a listing for that site is added or activated. The original Yahoo was originally a human-powered directory, and directories like Open Directory Project continue on today.

The downside of the human-powered search engine is that it only includes websites that have been submitted to it, which means you may not find what you’re looking for especially if it’s a new web page. The other downside from the directories’ point of view is that reviewing every site submitted is very labor-intensive and costly. I know because my company’s “search engine”, OurChurch.Com’s Directory of Christian Websites, like almost all church/Christian “search engines”, is a human-powered directory.

Crawler/Spider-Powered Search Engines
The next generation of search engines has programs which actively seek out new sites and read them into their indexes. These programs are called crawlers, spiders, robots, or bots. All of largest and most popular search engines today are of this type, including Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.

The rest of this article is focused on how these crawler/spider-powered search engines work because more than 99% of searches are done on this type of search engine.

The Crawler
As mentioned above, the first part of a search engine is the crawler (AKA spider, robot, and bot). The crawler reads pages into the search engine raw database of every page the search engine crawler has read. Some important things to know about crawlers…

1) Search bots periodically reread every web page in their database. Why does this matter?

• You don’t have to do anything when you change your site. If your site is already listed in a search engine and you make changes to your website, search engines will eventually update their information.
• You do have to be patient. The frequency of re-crawling varies depending on the search engine, the importance of your site (as determined by the search engines), and how often you update it. It could take a day or it could take more than a week.

2) Search bots follow links on the pages that have already been crawled in order to find new pages. Why does this matter?

• If you add a new page to your website or create a new website, it’s important to add a link to it on a web page that is already in the search engines.
• If a web page that is already in the search engines has a link to your new page or new website, you do not need to submit a request to the search engines to crawl the new page or website, though it may still be worth doing just to be sure your website will be found quickly.

3) Some search engines have forms you can submit to request a website be crawled. Why does this matter?

• If you have a new website and no sites link to it, search bots will not be able to find it. In this case, submitting a form to the search engine requesting your site be listed or indexed can get it into search engines.
• Because human-powered directories do not have search bots/crawlers, to be listed in them you must submit a request form.

The Ranking Algorithm
Some time after a web page has been crawled by the search bot or crawler, the search engine then processes or indexes the page to determine what search words and phrases the page is relevant to as well as how relevant that page is compared with other web pages for those phrases. During this processing the search engine looks at many different factors including how many times each word and phrase occurs on the page, which words are in headings or bold, the domain name of the site, filename of the page, the pages that link to the page, and many more.

Exactly which factors a search engine looks at and how they’re weighted is called the search engine’s search ranking algorithm. It’s like the search engine’s “secret sauce.” Each search engine’s algorithm is different and each is a heavily guarded secret.

Why does this matter?

• There is time between when your site is crawled (or recrawled) and when it is processed or indexed. So, it can take as little as a few hours to many days or weeks before changes to your website may produce changes in its search rankings.
• Because each search engine’s ranking algorithm is different, a web page can be #1 in Google but #20 in Yahoo for a particular phrase.
• Because each search algorithm is a heavily guarded secret nobody outside of a few select engineers at each search engine knows exactly how much each particular factor weighs into the rankings of each search engine. But, people who spend their professional lives helping sites rank better in search engines have gained very good idea as to what factors matter most.
• Because the search ranking algorithms look at text, headings, and other elements on a web page, changing things on the web page can change where that web page appears in the search results.
• Search ranking algorithms look at factors outside of a web page, such as the age of a website and links to the web page. So, there are other factors which you may have less influence over.

The goal of every search engine is to display to the user the information or websites the user is looking for. In other words every search engine wants to provide the best, most relevant results. As a result, search engines are constantly improving their algorithms and including new factors which they think will produce better search results. Why does this matter? As search algorithms change, so will your website’s search engine rankings.

The Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
The crawling of websites and indexing of web pages are constantly going on even when no one is searching. The last part in the search process is part that you’re probably most familiar with – the actual search. You type in a word, short phrase, or question, and the search engine displays a list of websites.

That list of websites is called the search engine results page and sometimes referred to as the SERPs.

If you do a search and look at the SERP, you’ll notice two columns. Above the right column it says “Sponsored Links.” These are paid advertisements. The companies and organizations listed here pay a fee to Google for each person who clicks their ad, so they’re often referred to as Pay-Per-Click or PPC ads.

In the left column are the unpaid search results also sometimes called the organic results or natural results. These are the websites the search engine believes are most relevant to the search phrase that was queried. Sometimes search engines also display sponsored links in the left column above the natural results or will even place a block of pay-per-click ads in the middle of the natural results. Sponsored links are always labeled, though not always very clearly.

Why does this matter?

From the searcher’s perspective, there is nothing wrong with clicking on a paid link. You may find what you’re looking for there. But it’s important to be aware of which websites paid to be in the results and which are there naturally.

From the web administrator’s perspective, it’s important to understand there are two opportunities to get to the top of the search engine rankings, through natural results and by purchasing pay-per-click advertising.

Help the Search Engines
With a better understanding how search engines work, you can make better decisions about the marketing of your website though search engines. Search engines need your help to find your website and to know what words and phrases it’s relevant for. Give them the help they need. That’s where search engine optimization comes in, but I’ll get to that on another day.

Search engine optimization is the activity of improving the volume and quality of real time traffic to web pages or whole sites from search engines through natural search results for targeted keywords. Most often a website that gets a higher position or ranking in the search results is the one which the searchers will visit more frequently. Therefore, it is important that a site is optimized to get real time traffic the right way to make it more search-engine friendly and get a higher rank in the search results.

Though SEO helps in boosting real time traffic to a website, it should not be considered as the marketing of the site. It may be easy for one to pay and appear in the paid search results for a set of keywords, however, the concept behind the SEO technique is to get the topmost ranking without paying since your site is relevant to the search query entered by the user.

The amount of time that can be spent on optimizing a website to get real time traffic can range from a few minutes to a long term activity. If your product or service is such that the keywords used are uncommon, then some general SEO would be sufficient to get a top rating. However, if your product or service industry is competitive or is in a saturated market, then it is important to dedicate considerable amount of time and effort for SEO. Even if one decides on simple SEO solutions, it is necessary to understand how search engine algorithms work and which items are crucial in SEO to get real time traffic.

The marketing approach that SEO adopts for increasing a site’s relevance is consideration of how search engines work and what searches are performed by users. The SEO process attempts to concentrate its efforts on a site’s coding, presentation, structuring, and also resolving issues that prevent search engine indexing program from spidering a website entirely.

Additionally, SEO efforts also include inserting unique content to web pages to make it more attractive to users and also to ensure that the search engine robots can easily index the content. Optimizing a site to get real time traffic can either be done by in house personnel or outsourced to professional optimizers who carry out SEO projects as a stand-alone service, like us – SEO Traffic Spider.

SEO tactics can be varied to achieve top ranking in search results. These fall into three categories (White-Hat SEO, Grey-Hat SEO, and Black-Hat SEO) depending on legitimacy and ethics.

White Hat SEO uses strategies which are considered ethically correct and legitimate by SEO’s as well as search engines while spidering a site. It would be best to use this tactic as a means of achieving top ranking in the search results for real time traffic. These tactics will not lead to penalties which are generally imposed when Black Hat SEO is used and even though it may take some amount of time to reap the rewards of this process, it will surely bring in promising results in terms of high rakings.

Grey Hat SEO uses tactics which may be considered legitimate if they are used correctly. However, these have been subjected to misuse by unethical SEO’s and webmasters. It is possible that your website will not get penalized or banned for using this strategy and it may be necessary to use this process at times, however, webmasters are careful in the use of these tactics. This is because search engines may penalize tactics that are subjected to abuse even though they are used in legitimate forms.

Black Hat SEO employs techniques that are considered illegitimate and ethically incorrect and which have been or will surely be penalized and cause your website to be banned by search engines. Since Black Hat SEO is subject to abuse widely because it tends to harm search engine user experience, it is highly recommended to avoid using it as a means of attaining high ranking.

www.twitter.com follow me on Twitter. 801-201-7575 We will help you with any business. Check Out Your Competitors Search for your keywords and check out the pages that rank highly. How many times is the keyword used in the text? How is the title tag written? Which keywords are in the URL? You can also see how many inbound links your competitors have. On Yahoo, enter the text link:www.(nameofsite).com and youll see all inbound links to that page. Those same sites may also be willing to link to you. If multiple pages ranked in the top 10 have links from similar sites, go after getting those links first those sites are probably trusted sources. Sign up for more free stuff!! Get Your New Site Noticed Google will eventually find your new website, but you can speed up the process. The best way is to get inbound links from trusted sites; when Google crawls those sites it will follow that link to your site and youll get noticed. You can also submit your site directly to Google for crawling. Using the basic Site Submit can take months; a better approach is to submit your site at Googles Webmaster Central. Youll have to add a small piece of code to your sites HTML code so Google can verify you are the owner of your site, so your programmer may need to help you. (The process only takes a few minutes, though.) Your pages will then be crawled and hopefully indexed in days instead of weeks or months. Yahoo also has a site submit process. Search submit site on Yahoo and you can get …

801-201-7575 We will help you with any business. Check Out Your Competitors Search for your keywords and check out the pages that rank highly. How many times is the keyword used in the text? How is the title tag written? Which keywords are in the URL? You can also see how many inbound links your competitors have. On Yahoo, enter the text link:www.(nameofsite).com and youll see all inbound links to that page. Those same sites may also be willing to link to you. If multiple pages ranked in the top 10 have links from similar sites, go after getting those links first those sites are probably trusted sources. Sign up for more free stuff!! Get Your New Site Noticed Google will eventually find your new website, but you can speed up the process. The best way is to get inbound links from trusted sites; when Google crawls those sites it will follow that link to your site and youll get noticed. You can also submit your site directly to Google for crawling. Using the basic Site Submit can take months; a better approach is to submit your site at Googles Webmaster Central. Youll have to add a small piece of code to your sites HTML code so Google can verify you are the owner of your site, so your programmer may need to help you. (The process only takes a few minutes, though.) Your pages will then be crawled and hopefully indexed in days instead of weeks or months. Yahoo also has a site submit process. Search submit site on Yahoo and you can get details on free site submissions as well …

E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in search engines and if you lose your

guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines will still be the most widely used internet tool.

Most people that use search engines only click on the top ten search results in the first page. Making it to the first page or even to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability of being clicked on when you rank high, resulting into more traffic (thousands of visitors per day) for your site, implying more leads or sales. The best part of SEO is, you get all this immense traffic and high sales volume for free.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or may be at least make your site income generating.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to be search engine optimized. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme. You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site’s content applicable and conducive to search engine. You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more links you have pointing to your sites from other site or domain the higher your site ranking in search engines.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES

Insert keywords or key phrases in your title tag.

Avoid linking to link-farms or irrelevant sites. In other words if your pages do not contain any words that reflect the content of the site you are linking to, do not link to it.

Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. Use H1 and bold tags on your keywords once or twice especially at the top of the page.

Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. This is viewed as duplicate content by search engine robots.

Design your page titles to be simple and descriptive, making it easier for search engines to know what each page is about and visitors scanning through search results can easily determine whether your document contains what they are looking for.

Try to add fresh content to your site daily, if possible. Search engine robots like fresh content.

If your site contains plenty of links (pages), you must create a sitemap in XML format (according to Google guideline) and submit it here http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login. As a matter of fact you must do this if you want all your pages indexed in Google, and on time. For those of us that might be wondering how to create a sitemap in XML format, you can have your site map created using software, visit the link below http://www.walmol.com/bestbuy/secretspidergenerator.php

Avoid dynamic URLs. These are links with question mark (?). Spiders can’t read these links; instead try using human readable URLs.

When using images, use ALT tags to describe your images. Search engines robots can’t read images but can read ALT tags.

Do not use a submission service; most of them are nothing but spam machines. If you must use submission software, I recommend you use Trellian Submit Wolf. Visit the link below to learn more.

http://www.walmol.com/bestbuy/submitwolf.php

However, if you’re not internet savvy you may optimize your web sites using software; your best bet would be SEO ELITE. This is one of the best search engine optimization software available on the net, for more information on SEO elite visit the link below. http://www.walmol.com/bestbuy/seoelite.php

Search engine optimization if done right is the most powerful

form of generating traffic available on the internet.

All the best,

Chris Ogunor – http://www.walmol.com

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SEO stands for search engine optimization and if you have a website that is selling services, then this is what you want for your website. You want your website to appear at the top of engine results pages whenever someone types in a specific keyword, SEO web site promotions can help you get there. Studies prove that being at the top of search engine pages get a much better return on their investment compared to traditional forms of advertising. It is said by others that SEO web site promotion is the only “fool proof method’ to guaranteed the top 10 placement on the page. Search engines use two types of listings, those that are paid for, usually by sponsored links, the other is organic. Organic search engines listings are those that appear down the middle of the page. Spider-driven search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN use “robots or crawlers” to score websites across the Internet. Robots will spider or crawl over each site and keep a tally of pages based on how pertinent they are. Your website placement within any spider driven search engine comes from many variables such as link popularity, density and frequency of keywords in page content, HTML code, site themeing along with more things that are too many to count here. You want your website positioned well among the major search engines and a SEO web site promotion can do this for you.

The two most influential SEO web site promotion factors you can use to help your website are Link Popularity and Page Content. Link Popularity: Google’s database currently has about 4 million pages making it the most popular spider-driven search engine on the Internet today. When Google spiders the Web, it finds sites by traveling through links and the more sites that link to you, the more important these search engines believe your content to be. So your focus should be on getting as many important sites that you can to link to your site, and the more hits your site get, the more sales you can make, if that is what your website is about. There are many ways to do this: exchange links with business partners and industry related sites, submit to online directories, or participate in Link Building . Page Content: The search engine spiders only spider through text and will use the content on your site to determine what your site is all about and this will help decide how popular your site will be ranked for specific keyword phrases when someone types them into a search engine. This is why keyword research is so important to obtaining top search engine placement. In order to get the top spot in search results, your going to need to know how many people are looking for your keyword phrases and also to see what kind of competition you are facing while trying to get a top spot in the search results. A SEO web site promotion may be the best thing that can happen to your website, so why wouldn’t you want it?