millions of web sites out there. So how do you become number one and
stay there consistently?



Consistently is the key word here. Sure, you may apply the newest, best
trick in the book today, but when someone else comes out with a better
one tomorrow, you will be scrambling to get to the top again. One of the
keys is to be well-rounded. There are many books and philosophies about
web rankings that are floating around. Some people say article marketing
is the way to go, others link building, others say you have to maximize
your web pages for the search engines.



You have to get all your keywords right and your titles and description.
But what happens when another web site does you one better in that area?
Now you drop in rank. Therefore, it is more important that you do a good
job in all the areas than to be the very best in one area. And it is OK
to be number 8 or number 3 in rank, also. If you are in the very top
spot and you are clicked simply because the top spot gets more clicks,
are you really going to get more sales just because you are number one?



Your product and site have to be relevant to the consumer, not just the
search engine. Another key is to focus on very specific keywords. You
can do an awesome job in every area of search engine optimization, but
if you go too thin here, you will not make it to number one in any of
your keywords. Focus on one, or at the most, two keywords. Build your
site around those keywords. Be everything you can be to someone who keys
in those keywords. Or better yet, one keyword. Would you rather have one
keyword that has a number one placement, or 8 keywords with a number 40
placement each?. It would be better to have one keyword for which your
site is on the first page of results than twenty that are all over the
place. Build yourself a web site that has a strong keyword density-for
one or two keywords. Put those keywords in your title and description
and keyword lists.



You must have incoming links. You must have quality incoming links. You
must build incoming links one link at a time. Links are very important,
but you cannot cheat in this area. You must build them one by one. Some
of the favorite methods of link building is to write articles, like this
one, and submit them to article directories, and to be included in link
directories. Stay away from link farms, large link exchanges, or
anything of the sort. The major search engines want to see you build a
steady supply of links over time. What do you think a search engine will
do for you when you go from 0 links to 3000 in one day? That won't get
you to number one, and certainly won't keep you there, when you are put
in the sandbox for six months. These keys to search engine optimization
are just a beginning. You need traffic, you need click-thrus in the
search engine results. You need visitors to stay at your site for more
than a few seconds when they click in. How do you get that? Build real
content. Build it for people, not machines--while following the first
three keys. Do that, and I believe that in three to six months you will
have each web site you set up with this strategy, in the top ten for
your keyword.



Now that you understand why search engine rankings are so important you
might wonder how to achieve these rankings. The algorithms used by
search engines can be rather complex and include a number of different
factors. Some of the common factors in the equation include keyword
density, META tags, titles, inbound links, website traffic and content.

Keyword density refers to the number of times a particular keyword is
used in the content of your website. The theory behind this concept is
that websites that use a particular keyword often are likely to be
relevant to that keyword; however, overuse of that keyword may result in
penalties if the search engine thinks the keywords are not being used
appropriately.

META tags are pieces of HTML code which some search engines use in
evaluating the content of a website. Placing keywords in these tags can
be beneficial in some search engines. However, care should be taken to
avoid placing irrelevant keywords in these tags as this may result in
your website being penalized.

Some search engines to rank websites also use inbound links. Inbound
links refers to links on other websites which point to your website. In
evaluating the worth of these inbound links, some search engines
consider the rank of the website providing the link to your website.
This means you should try to gain links from websites with higher
rankings than your own to ensure that you receive the most benefit from
these links.

Labels: seo tips

Making sure that your websites are fully crawlable is a key component
for any search strategy, especially if you want your sites to rank well
for multiple related keyword phrases or different products.



One of the ways that you can insure that a search engine spider crawls
your site deeply is to provide it a road map of your site. This road
map, called a "site map" is a very simple page (from a design
standpoint) that only serves one purpose from a search engine optimizers
point of view, to get those interior pages into a search engine's index.



A brief history of site maps . . .Before site maps were recognized by
the search engine optimization community as a tool for good search
results, it was used by fortune 1000 companies to help visitors to their
site find out where a particular service or product was located. For
example: If you want to do some sort of business with your bank online,
you might find that their home page doesn't quite get you to the exact
location on their site that you want. After all, a typical bank might
offer car loans, student loans, home loans, credit cards, investment
accounts, mutual funds, etc. If per chance you arrived at this banking
site on a page other than the home page, you might get a little turned
around from a site navigation standpoint.



So, site maps were created. What is a site map? A site map is a page
that contains a basic HTML link to every page on that web site. Every
page, not just your main topics but every page. Site maps do not need to
be fancy (in fact, it's better if they are not), they just need to
contain a logical order and links to all of your pages.



How does this benefit us? Three ways . . .First, a site map gives your
customers an easy navigation system to every page in your web site. Now,
don't confuse the use of a site map as a replacement for logical
navigation on your regular pages. You want to make sure that your site
can be navigated simply and easily from any page on your site. However,
some folks (a very small percentage) prefer to see the entire site's
structure on one page and choose their destination from it. Second, a
site map is a fantastic way to get a search engine spider to see and
crawl every single page in your site. When optimizing different pages in
your web site for different keywords, a Site map is a perfect solution
for ensuring that a spider can get to every one of those optimized
pages. Third, and this is big: A Site Map provides an opportunity to
send link reputation to a particular page.



Now, link reputation is a discussion that's beyond the scope of this
article, but it is perhaps one of the most important factors in off Page
search engine optimization. You want the links on your Site Map Page to
Say the right thing about the pages that they are linking to. It's like
a vote. So, make sure that your site map is voting correctly for all of
your interior pages. Fourth, site maps are also an additional way to
distribute Google Page Rank. If your site map is just one link off of
the first page, it can pass a significant amount of Google page rank
deep into your web site. This helps create a site structure where just
about every internal page has the same chance of ranking as well as your
home page. Finally, site maps allow you to use dynamic linking
strategies to control where page rank does and does not go throughout
your site. For example, a common mistake is to have a normal link to
your privacy policy on every page of your site. In actuality, giving
your privacy policy page the same page rank as every other page of the
site is a big waste of whatever page rank you have available. So use a
good site map and you will reap the rewards.

Labels: seo article, seo tips

Let me start by asking you a question: What's the number-one business killer on the internet? The answer is obvious, but many people miss it. The answer is: not being found on the first page of Google.
I refer to Google often, since the search engine accounts for approximately 50 percent of search traffic. In February 2007, Google sites garnered 47.5 percent of the U.S. search market, with Yahoo! coming in second place at a distant 28.1 percent, according to comScore. Preparing your SEO strategy around Google makes your plan work for other search engines, as well.
Write AwaySo what's the number-one tip for search engine ranking? Articles. With articles, even a brand new domain--some call this the "Google sandbox hell"--can get updated into the search index quickly. Many sites are spidered or crawled, but not indexed, a major problem for new sites.


Let's first take a look at recent content strategies you can use to write stronger articles. If you're not familiar with the next wave in quality content scoring and relevancy for search engines, you need to understand a little bit about search engine technology.
Google contains more than 100 algorithms that make it the world's most popular search engine. One of those is PageRank, a complex voting system I'll cover in a future article. Another important secret, which has been around for a while, but not utilized by most webmasters, is latent semantic indexing.
"Context" is the new buzzword for SEO in 2007. While you should still write good, natural, user-friendly and relevant web copy, using some simple LSI techniques can elevate your search engine ranking.
When using LSI, engines try to determine what the content or page is about without specifically matching the search term text. It looks at the document collection as a whole and examines which other documents contain some of those same words. In simple terms, this means that as you write and link to and from other pages and sites, search engines using LSI will look at words and phrases that are contextually related and try to figure out what you're writing about. So, if you're writing about bait, poles, lures and tackle, you're probably addressing fishing.
If you want to be ranked higher in the search engines, you should write content and link profiles that have supportive text and anchor text (links) using this "theme" approach. To find related keywords and phrases, use a keyword research tool, like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. First type in your key terms into the Google search engine and pick the first site that comes up. Then go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, click the "Site-Related Keywords" tab and paste the URL there. Study the results and use groups of related keywords with links on your page to develop strong on-page factors.
Distributing Your ArticleWriting an article that is topically related to your business and then submitting it to article directories like ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com and buzzle.com will pay off big.
Imagine the effect of getting a link from the Los Angeles or New York Times. There isn't a sure-fire formula for achieving this, but providing quality articles and adding your link in the resources box of the article will allow search engines to find and index you faster. If the content is interesting and newsworthy, the journalists may start calling.
Yes, this could be a lot of work. But one option is to find a service that can distribute your articles for little or no cost. I like isnare.com; for a few dollars you can get your own distribution credits. Once approved, they'll submit your article to hundreds of directories. Watch your server logs for traffic and spider bots; you'll see domains and search engine referrers very quickly.
Continue these efforts by writing press releases using similar distribution mechanisms. I use services like prweb.com and marketwire.com. SEO firms have developed a complete marketplace for the SEO compliancy of press releases. They clearly understand the power of submitting and distributing content and press releases. If you don't know how to write a press release, hire somebody to help you. You can go to sites like elance.com and guru.com to have something written for $50.
If you haven't pursued these simple tactics for your SEO strategies, you've been missing out on important traffic and business. There are a number of resources for traffic acquisition and how-to-books on building an internet presence. Outside of articles, press releases, SEO and pay-per-click, there are social networks, blogs, paid links, affiliate marketing, paid advertising, viral marketing, co-registration and banner ads--certainly enough to keep you busy for a while.
Jon Rognerud is a recognized authority on the subject of search engine optimization and has spent more than 15 years developing websites and marketing solutions at companies like Overture and Yahoo!. His website, www.microsaw.com, provides a wealth of informative articles, resources and complimentary e-mail courses on everything you'll ever need to know about SEO and search marketing.

Labels: seo article, seo tips

One, therefore, needs to pay great attention to SEO so that your site achieves good ranking in the natural search listings and you get free traffic to your site through the organic search results.

Now, there are so many things to look at while working on SEO for your site. If you start doing these manually, it becomes a chore, is extremely tedious and takes an immense amount of time. Hence the need to automate this free traffic SEO. The key ingredient to getting continuous and free traffic to your site can be succinctly put in the following words: "Automated Free Traffic SEO Generators". Let me now give you the tips on this.

1. First and foremost, you need to know what your competitors are doing. This means doing a lot of research on the kind of keywords they are using, their meta tags, linking, headlines, keyword optimization, page rank, and the like. If we try to do these manually, it shall take ages to collect such data and then to sift through them, but an automated free traffic SEO software does all these and much more with just a click of the button.

2. Link Popularity Check - One important issue that affects any site's listing in the natural search results is the link popularity. This means, the larger the number of sites linking to your website, the better shall be your ranking. If you get a good automated free traffic generator software, it not only does the analysis but also imparts the knowledge and the tools to achieve huge link backs.

3. Create Doorway Pages. Doorway pages are search engine designed pages created with "keywords" which are relative to the content on your site. A well designed doorway page outperforms any other webpage and is an absolute must to get your site going with the search engines, hence due attention should be paid on the creation of these.

4. The most important and exhaustive exercise with regard to SEO, relates to keywords. What are the keywords that are being searched the most? What kind of keywords are the competitors using? Which keywords should you optimize your webpages for and what is the keyword density of these webpages? These are the absolute crucial elements to attend to if one wishes to zoom up to the top few in search engine listings. Again, it is a cumbersome task and can only be managed with an automated free traffic SEO generating software.

5. Submit your site to as many places as you possibly can. The more places the site is submitted to, the larger shall be the number of back links and greater the chances that your site shall show up in natural search results. Again, this is a wonderful way to getting many one way links fast and a great method which I use to drive traffic to my website. My particular program submits to over 700,000 sites!

Now time for the super - tip. All of these strategies that I have expounded can be automated with the use of an automated free traffic SEO generator software. But the choice of the program is vital as many just do not measure up to the desired standard.

Labels: seo article, seo tips

If you only have five seconds to spare, just remember the three C’s of optimized copy: be concise, correct and credible.

In 2003, Kathy Kiely published an article in USA Today discussing the impact of bloggers on presidential campaigns. Despite the subject matter, Kathy’s points still apply today, “Many bloggers are not professional journalists. Few have editors. Most make no pretense of objectivity.” I believe many search engine and social media marketers fall into the same category and as a result our industry, clients, their customers and the search engine results suffer.

The Bottom Line

People either do not like or do not have the time to read poorly written content. Therefore, whether you are writing an optimized web page, linkbait, blog entry or press release, it is essential that you write with concise language, correct grammar and credibility. Besides increasing readership, you will make the search engines very happy.

Let me take a moment to state that my mother was an English teacher. Growing up under her watchful eye I rebelled by misusing commas and tenses. Despite being grammatically challenged I managed to become a competent writer, which I attribute to being opinionated and following these simple rules:

1. Be concise: answer what, where, and when early in the content. Well-written titles and opening lines that stick to the facts have a stronger response rate from both humans and search engines.


2. Be correct: use correct grammar and spelling. If there is only one thing I want you to remember from this article it is that you should read your content out loud, preferably from a printed document. I am a huge environmentalist, but the mistakes spell check does not catch are easily heard and seen when you remove yourself from the computer. As for grammar, try to use familiar words in short, declarative sentences.


3. Be credible: get the facts straight. Wikipedia is NOT a reliable source for unbiased information. Neither are most blogs that quickly turn news into a bad game of telephone. If you are writing about a subject, go straight to the source. In the age of backlink nepotism, many search engine marketers are losing sight of how to write as the authority. This is not high school, do your own homework or fall into an ever-growing sea of noise. Or worse yet, get removed from feed subscriptions!

Do these points sound like common sense? They should, they are the basic pillars of journalism. I have left out some of the biggies: humor, creativity, newsworthiness, etc. For a nice summary read Michael Gray’s post, Top 12 Ways To Win Friends & Write Magnetic Headlines, at Search Engine Land.

Fortunately, when it comes to search engine optimization, marketers have free license to bend those rules for the sake of keyword integration. Flora Fair, an accomplished journalist turned optimized copywriter states, “Though journalistic and SEO writing are similar, one key difference is the challenge of integrating keyword phrases for searchability. You sometimes have to bend the strict rules of grammar applied to journalism and make the copy sound as natural as possible. But whether you’re writing for the news or for the Web, the ultimate goal is to tell a compelling story that conveys information. Including optimized keywords adds another factor to the process.”

Marketers can also bend the rules for the sake of creativity or branding, but I will never forget my mother’s caution, “you must understand the rules before you can break them.”

Labels: seo article, seo tips

Before we begin, some of you may ask why you should even bother listening to a blogger with barely 2 weeks of experience with Wordpress - good question!

The answer is that I always consider the marketing aspect when embarking on any online projects. Since I’m not technically-trained and can’t create fancy websites, I need to rely on my marketing skills to have an edge over my competition.

For example, I took over a forum in November last year and without a clue about how the IPB forum software works. But I managed to grow my community of less than 2,000 members to almost 9,000 members in 5 months - a 350% growth! The Vista Forums is one of the biggest unofficial Windows Vista forum today, receiving close to 7,000 visitors/day and ranks #1 on Google for “windows vista forum” and “vista forum”.

Now that we have gotten that out of the way, here are my SEO recommendations for Wordpress blogs:

1) Put Your Post In Only 1 Category

Make it easier for the search engines to find your posts by putting them into only 1 category.

2) Make Use Of The “Read More” Feature

Make use of the “More” tag - leave the first paragraph on the mainpage and the rest of the content on the post page. This helps prevent duplicated content and keeps you off Google’s Supplemental Index.

3) Related Posts

There’s a Wordpress plugin called “Contextual Related Posts” that automatically displays 5 of your previous related posts below the comment box. It’s an old (2005) plugin that works by simply activating it in your Wordpress Dashboard. With related posts you get more inner links, exposure for older posts and stickiness on your blog.

4) Create Attractive Titles

Getting more exposure is not enough but you need to get people to want to click on your link. Think of a creative title that can get potential readers interested, e.g. “How to cheat Ping.sg” (see image above).

5) Customize Your Permalinks

Wordpress creates boring URLs for your posts by default, e.g.

www.larrylim.net/seo-online-marketing/?p=5

You can customize the permalinks to embed your title (with keywords) into the URL, e.g.

www.larrylim.net/seo-online-marketing/chief-marketing-officer-2007/5/

Simply set your preference in your Wordpress Dashboard and add some commands into the .htaccess file.

6) Have Different Meta Titles

There’s a Wordpress plugin called “SEO Title Tag” that lets you set different meta titles for every post, including the static pages and categories. A meta title is the title that appears in your browser header when viewing a page and it’s also the title for your pages in search engine results. Unfortunately, this plugin is still in beta and was showing MySQL errors for my Wordpress version 2.1.2.

Update: I’ve managed to find a solution to the problem here.Â

7) Create Description And Keyword Meta Tags

You can also set your meta description and keyword tags for all your posts, static pages and category pages using a Wordpress plugin called “Add-Meta-Tags“. These meta tags are used by search engines when ranking your blog pages in search results. By default, the first full sentence is automatically used as your meta description, while the category is used for your meta keywords. There’s an option to set them manually by using custom fields in Wordpress when writing a post.

8) Create Technorati Tags For Each Post

There’s a Wordpress plugin called “Bunny’s Technorati Tags” that lets you manually insert tags for your posts. This helps increase your presence and gain more exposure at the Technorati blog search engine. While we’re at that, you should probably add “Action Buttons” to your posts - those cute little buttons you see on other blogs. It provides your readers a convenient way of adding your posts to social networking sites like Digg.com and Del.icio.us. I’d advise using a maximum of 5 buttons because any more than that may confuse your readers and create an ugly clutter.

9) Generate A Sitemap

Next, make sure to generate an XML sitemap so that the search engines know which pages to crawl - you can use a Wordpress plugin called “Google Sitemaps” to do this automatically. Then inform Google and Yahoo about the location of your sitemap.

10) Use A Pinging Service

Blog pinging services like Pingoat help you ping or notify a number of blog agregators and blog search engines, e.g. Technorati and Syndic8, whenever you update your blog. This helps increase your blog’s presence on the Internet and creates more avenues for visitors to find you.

Note that all the SEO recommendations above are specific to the Wordpress blog and do not include general SEO strategies like keyword analysis and linkbuilding - we’ll keep that for future lessons. ;)

If you appreciate my effort, feel free to:

- add me to your Technorati favourites using the button on the left.

- blog about this article.

- add me to your blogroll if you’re a blogger.

- join my community at MyBlogLog.

Labels: seo article, seo tips

Quick Facts

1. There are 55 million blogs out there, if you don’t stand out you will
have no chance.

2. The first second of a visitors attention is the most crucial.

3. Your main traffic should come to articles and posts inside your blog, not the
home page.

4. Search engine rankings relies heavily upon the quality and quantity of links
to your blog when they determine the ranking.

5. The best way to get links is by natural recommendations from other bloggers
or web site owners.

Section 1: Optimize Your Blog

Usually the WordPress themes are well designed and structured already but
there are a number of things you really should do to improve it for better
optimization for search engines.

Using the best URLs

To enable the permalinks is easy and you have probably already done that,
just go to Options -> Permalinks in the admin panel. But what format is the
best to choose? The structure /%postname%/ - nothing else. This is best because
your URLs to your articles should never change. And if you have it like
this it does not matter if you change the category of the article or republish
it with a new date, it will always be the same URL (more about that later). And
if you happen to have two posts with the same title it is not a problem as
WordPress will automatically add “-2″ in the end.

Have you been using the wrong format? Well, if your blog is not totally new
you should not change. It is not vital and for the next time
you make a blog you know how to make it right.

Handling URL Canonization

Every WordPress blog has an issue in which there are 4 different URLs for the
same post and this has to be fixed to prevent dilution. Follow my guide on how
to fix it here.

Title Tags

The title tag is the most important HTML-tag in terms of SEO.

Here are different versions you should use inside the
located in theme/header.php

Optimum ranking:

For branding purposes:

The best title tag solution for advanced users

Either install and properly use the SEO
Title Tag plugin or do the following:

1. Download and install this
plugin.

2. Replace with the context in header.php on
single.php, page.php and category.php.

3. Work out the best titles for the different versions and use the plugin to
create different versions of category.php and single.php with their own versions
of title tags. For example if your category with ID 5 is “SEO News” you
could have the following title tag in single-cat-5.php:

In category.php you could have:

Headings

Headings are defined by HTML with H1 (largest) to H6 (smallest). You need to
use them in your articles when you write. Your article title should be in a main
heading (H1), sub headings with H2 and small headings with H3.

Make sure that in theme/single.php this code is
wrapped in H1 so that it looks like:

If your theme designer already used a specific CSS design for the heading
tags you can do like this:

1. Open up theme/single.php and add

.singleheadings h1 {font-size:XXpx;font-family:XX}
.singleheadings h2 {font-size:XXpx;font-family:XX}
.singleheadings h3 {font-size:XXpx;font-family:XX}

You can change your quicktags by for example using this
file instead (also add H2 to the file) so that you easily can insert heading
tags when you write.

Navigation

Most of the link power is coming to the home page of your blog and gets
distributed evenly among the rest of the links on that page. So in additional to
having a good navigation structure for your visitors also do the following:

• Have links to the most important articles and pages from your home page.
  That can easily be achieved by making a category with your best articles and
  using the WP
  Category Post plugin to make a list of them on the index.php file.
  
• Install the Related
  Posts plugin and have your articles link to similar articles.
  
• Also link yourself to previous articles you have written.
  
• Place the attribute rel=”nofollow” on links that are totally useless
  for search engines such as to RSS feeds for the blog and comment links. In
  case you want to remove the nofollow on the comment links make sure you
  check the author links before approval as it is important that you don’t
  link to bad sites from your blog.
  
• You should not have hundreds of external links on the home page, if you
  have that I recommend that you place them on a separate page.

Site Map

A Site Map is where your visitors go to navigate and find specific articles
and posts on your blog. It is also a place for search engines to find links to
all your pages on your blog.

Use my
article on how to make an automatic WordPresss Site Map and add one for your
blog. I prefer that you make the first version in the guide.

What about a Google Sitemap?

It is not needed. There is no reason for a WordPress blog with a proper
navigation structure to submit a Google Sitemap other than for information
purposes. A Google Sitemap does not improve your ranking, only crawling, and
that is not a problem.

Design

Everyone has different tastes about design but here are points to think about
when you design your blog:

• Keep the design simple, very simple.
  
• Have the body text big with big and clear headings.
  
• For some reason blogs are not liked in the big social network sites (like
  digg, reddit etc) so make your theme unique and try to make it look like a
  site and not a blog.
  
• Make sure nothing steals attention from your text.
  
• The text width should not be longer than one and a half alphabet, even
  shorter.
  
• When a visitor reaches an article on your blog, the text should be seen
  instantly. Have the text as far up as possible. A visitor should not have to
  scroll to reach the content.
  
• If you are not making decent money with ads I suggest you to erase all ads
  you have on the blog.

References to follow:

• Web
  2.0 how-to design style guide

What About the Meta Tags?

There are various WP plugins out there for this but to be honest and frank I
can tell you that they are not worth the effort. The meta keywords tag are not
used anymore (or extremely little) in the ranking calculation and while the meta
description tag can show up in the SERPs
I consider the snippet of text the visitor gets being better.

CSS Positioning

It has been said that by providing the important content first in the source
code it will make a positive difference in your search engine ranking. I am not
sure if this is true, but it won’t hurt to do it. For example on this blog the
navigation on the left is in the bottom of the code.

Section 2: How to Craft Your Articles

You should read the entire section of Authoring
High Quality Content by Mr. Fishkin but I give you here a very quick summary
as it relates to this article.

First the most important quote:

One Great Page is Worth a Thousand Good Pages

While hundreds or dozens of on-topic pages that cover sections of an
industry are valuable to a website’s growth, it is actually far better to
invest a significant amount of time and energy producing a few
articles/resources of truly exceptional quality. To create documents that
become “industry standard” on the web and are pointed to time after time
as the “source” for further investigations, claims, documents, etc. is to
truly succeed in the rankings battle. The value of “owning” this traffic
and link source far outweighs a myriad of articles that are rarely read or
linked to.

Write articles or posts that serves as a stand alone document. This means
there is everything valuable collected on that page on that specific topic. For
example a stand alone document on “SEO for WordPress” should have everything
on that page and the reader should not need any other articles on that topic.

Better 1 great article that you revise 10 times than 10 smaller ok articles.

To do this you can also rewrite and republish your old articles with the
current time to show up again as the latest article.

Include links to more reading if applicable

Withing or at the end of your article you should link to other sources so
that the reader can read more if he is interested. You can also use this as
sources if you got your writing materials from other places.

Headlines

You should write the kind of headlines to your articles that:

• Contains important keyword combinations or phrase for ranking
  
• Describes with great interest what the article is about
  
• Makes the reader want to read it and clicks on it in the SERPs
  
• And is short and to the point

Section 3: Increase User Interaction

• Use polls from for example Poll Daddy.
  
• Increase the commenting field for longer user comments and better
  interaction. This also provides more unique content to your articles.
  
• Install the Subscribe
  to Comments plugin.
  
• Actually do reply to your commenters and answer their questions.
  
• If you revise an article based on a comment, do link and give credit to
  the commenter.

Section 4: Get Links

• The art of writing the kind of content that get natural links is called
  link baiting. See my article on that with a list of ideas here.
  
• Post your link baits on the major social network sites such as digg,
  reddit and the others.
  
• Install my Link
  to Me Textbox WordPess Plugin which provides an automatic HTML box of
  code for easy linking to you.
  
• Regularly link and reference other bloggers in your field in your posts to
  get attention from them. You loose nothing of it and many of them will
  return the favor and link to you. Also comment on their blogs to make them
  discover your blog.
  
• Read and follow my Link
  Building Guide

Labels: seo article, seo tips

Yahoo's Optimisation Factors
Yahoo Optimisation or Yahoo SEO is about improving your website's "organic" ranking for key search terms on Yahoo. Yahoo is more "on page" driven than either MSN or Google, the two other major search engines. By "on page", we mean that when Yahoo produces its results it relies on information it collects about a site from sources on the target website.
1. Meta Tag Title
This is easily the most important meta tag. Very few sites with weak meta tag titles appear in the top rankings of Yahoo. My recommended approach is an interlocking phrase of 5 or 6 words adding up to no more than 60 characters including spaces.
2. Meta Tag Description
The meta tag description is less important than the title for ranking purposes. however, the tag normally shows up in the results pages so it is seen and may be acted upon by potential website visitors.
3. Meta Tag Keywords
These have little direct role in search engine ranking. Where they are useful is as a device for testing on page alignment. See below.
4. Page or Site Content
The content or subject of a site is very important to Yahoo and MSN. Content for this purpose means words in general and headings in particular. It is important that this content has been highlighted in the meta tags title and description.
5. On page Alignment
On page alignment of the meta tags and content are a key component of success with Yahoo rankings. The meta tags on their own will not work. Simply Clicks can carry out a quick and simple test to provide the information to improve rankings.
Yahoo's Off Page Optimisation Factors
Yahoo, like all other search engines measure the number and nature of inbound links (or IBLs) into a site from other websites. It appears, however, that Yahoo places a lesser emphasis on these links than other major engines. The most important off page factor appears to be inclusion in the Yahoo directory. However this costs $299.
Simply Clicks is a Yahoo and MSN optimisation specialist. If you would like further information about Simply Clicks' Google optimisation services please e-mail using the link on the right.
Simply Clicks has been involved in over 30 SEO projects for a number of multinational and UK based companies. If you have a specific SEO need or would like further information about Simply Clicks search engine optimisation services, please e-mail your requirements.

Labels: seo article, seo tips

Not anchor text. Don’t overdo the anchor text. You don’t want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation - something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, “Gumbo Pudding Pop” occasionally, “Get gumbo pudding pops” as well, “Gumbo-flavored pudding pops” some other times, etc.

Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site.

Become a foreigner. Canada and the UK have many directories for websites of companies based in those countries. Can you get a business address in one of those countries?

Newsletters. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives.

Multiple domains. If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops?

First come, first served. If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won’t follow additional links to the same page. You can see this in action at the link to the home page on this

Article exchanges. You’ve heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else’s article on the history of pudding pops with a link back to their site. They publish your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links. (More on high quality links in other tips.)

Titles for links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.

Labels: seo tips

Unique content is King. Search engines love new, unique and updated content. If you produce new content at a rate of just one reasonably sized page per day and tied in with the other advice throughout the site, I can almost guarantee you will get good listings. Remember though, write for the visitors but cater for the search engines. If your field of expertise fits into a niche in the market, all the better for you but you must get unique content all you will fall behind. Page Structure. Search engine bots can sometimes get confused with poorly coded html, javascript and other web languages. If the bot has to wait too long or cannot decipher the web language then it will just abandon your site and move on to the next, even if it manages to get through the code it usually leads to poor search engine indexing of your website. You should also keep to widely used file extensions like .htm, .html, .php, .asp for your pages. Loading Speed. The loading speed of your website should be kept to a minimum, if it takes long than 5 seconds on 256kb+ connections then you lose visitors - both real and search engine bots. There are a variety of reasons why pages can load slowly, it may either be your web server, poorly coded server side code like php or client side code like javascript which can slow or even stop your page from loading. Visitor Navigation. This is more an aesthetic feature of your website focused at real visitors but you need to have some sort of standard navigation that is the same throughout your whole site. People can be put off and leave your website if they find it difficult to browse easily, search engine bots may also miss links if they can only be found deep within your site. Try to make as many internal links as possible available on each page. Site Hierarchy. Site hierachy can be great for adding keyword density to your web site. An example of site hierachy working effectively would be this page, seo-advice.php. The full link contains SEO twice - www.seoassistance.com/seo-advice.php which is very beneficial in the way search engines determine your sites relevance to a particular subject. Use your domain, folders and file names to your advantage. Avoid Blackhat SEO. Blackhat SEO is a vast topic that commands little respect from real webmasters as it means using underhand methods to gain search engine rankings, although the site is usually banned quickly. Blackhat SEO includes using link farms, search engine spamming, hidden or disguised text, fake meta tag data, using duplicate content and using doorway pages. I would recommend you stay away from tactics like this as you will end up losing out in the long run. Targeted Linkswaps. Link swaps are great but you must make them work for you. It does little good for you when your going for top search engine positions when your link swaps are untargeted. You should choose some specific keywords for both the link text and the link title text then make sure before you link swap that the other webmaster adds those specific keywords with the link. About the author:Article by www.SEOAssistance.comSearch Engine Optimization Advice & Tactics, www.SEOAssistance.com

Labels: seo article, seo tips

I look at a lot of sites on a daily basis. There are a lot of common problems I see on sites. Some people may have tags set-up improperly or use tags that have no real purpose. I have compiled a list of the 5 top do-it-yourself SEO errors. It's safe to say that many do-it-yourselfers may have at least one of these errors on their sites. These should help you omit these often costly mistakes and pull you up in the ranks.

Labels: seo article, seo tips

Labels: seo article, seo tips

Labels: seo article, seo tips

Labels: seo tips

Labels: seo tips

In my opinion, Google has introduced new ranking scores that operate mostly on whole sites (domains) and lowered the weight of some of the older page-based scores. Some sites get high rankings for almost anything (amazon). I have noticed that the rankings to all my pages within a site jump/fall uniformly. Basically these new scores tell Google how reputable/trusted/quality is a whole site and these factors influence the rankings of all pages of a site.
When your site (not page) gets a higher overall domain score, you get more traffic/rankings to all your pages and vice versa. These new domain based scores are connected with the infamous SandBox effect. To me, a sandboxed site is a site with a low general domain score.

How did Google change the weight of the older factors (PageRank, anchor text)?
1. Google de-emphasized the weight of anchor text keywords. Why? Because that makes it harder to rank internal pages. Webmasters tend to link more to sites than to internal pages. Giving too much weight on the anchor text of links pushes up the rankings of home pages. Webmasters countered this over-emphasis of anchor text with two strategies:

textual keyword-rich internal navigationbuying / swapping keyword-rich links that pointed to internal pages
In Google's eyes, when a site has thousands of natural incoming links to the home page and internal pages, this site must be of very high-quality and even the internal pages with zero incoming links deserve to rank high. That can be achieved by lowering the weight of anchor text and introducing domain based quality scores. I also think that Google spreads the anchor text value of links to all related pages on a site. What does it mean? If you have 3 pages about widgets, an external link to one of the widget pages with anchor text "widgets" may also help the other two widget pages.

2. Google in my opinion has changed the way they calculate PageRank. I believe the toolbar PageRank does not reflect the real way they calculate PageRank at all.
Consider this fact: when you get a high PageRank with site-wide incoming links, your rankings don't get the same boost, as when you get the very same high PageRank with links from a lot of unique domains. The toolbar PageRank is useless.
Link popularity is still important, but we don't know what modified version of calculating PageRank Google uses.
What are the major new domain based factors that Google introduced?
Google seems to be going in the direction of their "Information Retrieval Based On Historical Data" and follow-up patent(s).
Domain Age
That has become too obvious. Newer sites are less trusted than older sites. This is a factor you cannot control.
Freshness/Staleness
Google factors in how fresh or stale your site is.
Your site is considered fresh when:You have recently updated it (changed content or added new pages). The site acquired new incoming links recently. Most of the sites that link to the site are fresh (recently updated, got linked to).
Your site becomes stale (outdated) when:You have not updated it recently. You have no new incoming links. The sites that link to you have not been updated and linked to.
Content Updates/Changes
Have you updated your site recently? If all your competitors constantly update their sites but you don't, your rankings may go down.
User Behavior
Your pages get ranked high for some keywords. Do the searchers actually click on your pages? If they don't it may get your rankings lowered. When searchers frequently click on your ranked pages that is a good thing in the eyes of Google.
Query Based (In my opinion, Content is King factors)
Every time one of your pages gets ranked high (top 30) for some keywords that tells Google that you have good content. Before you get ranked high for competitive keywords, you need to get ranked high for non-competitive ones. When you have a lot of unique content, there is no way your pages will not get ranked high for at least some non-competitive keywords. The more content you have the more times you get pages ranked high for non-competitive keywords, which helps in the future rankings of more competitive keyphrases.
Google may influence the rankings of certain queries, by looking into the rankings of their related keyphrases. When you rank high for some keyphrases this helps ranking high for related queries. Content is King. Don't over-optimize but use a variety of related words. That helps better in the long-term.
User Maintained Data, Traffic etc.
Do your visitors bookmark your site? Do they stay long at your site? Do they come back?
Focus on the visitors and Google will find it out and boost your rankings.
Linkage of Independent Peers
How many unique domains link to your site? The more usually the better unless the links grow too fast.
Anti-Spam Factors
Google tries to detect when you do aggressive link building. Again, don't overdo it. Focus on content. Over-optimizing content also does not help too much because it lowers your chances to rank well for related/synonymous keyphrases.
In a nutshell, how do I get top Google rankings?
1. Add new content frequently (at least once a week).
2. Write long in-depth content instead of short pages. Longer pages will always outperform shorter ones.
3. Don't over-optimize. Think about making your navigation readable, your text readable and include more keywords only if you think it is appropriate to your users. Write naturally and include related terms, synonyms etc.
4. Don't be over-aggressive with link building.
5. Link out to other good sites/pages in your articles.
6. Cross-reference your content by putting links within your content to other pages on your site.
7. Use long descriptive anchor text. Keyword density in content/links is a myth.
8. Publish unique content. Forget about duplicate content. It does not work on Google.
9. Have some patience. Let your site age and don't stop working on any factor (content, links).
10. It is better to lay off link building than adding fresh unique high-quality content.
11. Content is King.
When you do all of these above, you will get a very high domain based score and you will easily outrank the over-optimized competition.

Labels: seo article, seo tips

Sitemaps are not a novelty. They have always been part of best Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they become even more important. However, it is necessary to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view, you can't go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! and MSN still keep to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.
One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders (for now mainly Googlebot but it is reasonable to expect that other crawlers will join the club shortly). In that relation it is necessary to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In 'Introduction to Sitemaps', Google explicitly states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalty for your site.
Why Use a Sitemap
Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don't have a sitemap.
Also, when you have a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, you rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site. Sitemaps can even help with messy internal links - for instance if you by accident have broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other way (though there is no doubt that it is much better to fix your errors than rely on a sitemap).
If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new (or recently updated pages), then using a sitemap can be vital to your success. Although you can still go without a sitemap, it is likely that soon sitemaps will become the standard way of submitting a site to search engines. Though it is certain that spiders will continue to index the Web and sitemaps will not make the standard crawling procedures obsolete, it is logical to say that the importance of sitemaps will continue to increase.
Sitemaps also help in classifying your site content, though search engines are by no means obliged to classify a page as belonging to a particular category or as matching a particular keyword only because you have told them so.
Having in mind that the sitemap programs of major search engines (and especially Google) are still in beta, using a sitemap might not generate huge advantages right away but as search engines improve their sitemap indexing algorithms, it is expected that more and more sites will be indexed fast via sitemaps.
Generating and Submitting the Sitemap
The steps you need to perform in order to have a sitemap for your site are simple. First, you need to generate it, then you upload it to your site, and finally you notify Google about it.
Depending on your technical skills, there are two ways to generate a sitemap - to download and install a sitemap generator or to use an online sitemap generation tool. The first is more difficult but you have more control over the output. You can download the Google sitemap generator from here. After you download the package, follow the installation and configuration instructions in it. This generator is a Python script, so your Web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed, in order to run it.
The second way to generate a sitemap is easier. There are many free online tools that can do the job for you. For instance, have a look at this collection of Third-party Sitemap tools. Although Google says explicitly that it has neither tested, nor verified them, this list will be useful because it includes links to online generators, downloadable sitemap generators, sitemap plugins for popular content-management systems, etc., so you will be able to find exactly what you need.
After you have created the sitemap, you need to upload it to your site (if it is not already there) and notify Google about its existence. Notifying Google includes adding the site to your Google Sitemaps account, so if you do not have an account with Google, it is high time to open one. Another detail that is useful to know in advance is that in order to add the sitemap to your account, you need to verify that you are the legitimate owner of the site.
Currently Yahoo! and MSN do not support sitemaps, or at least not in the XML format, used by Google. Yahoo! allows webmasters to submit “a text file with a list of URLs” (which can actually be a stripped-down version of a site map), while MSN does not offer even that but there are rumors that it is indexing sitemaps when they are available onsite. Most likely this situation will change in the near future and both Yahoo! and MSN will catch with Google because user-submitted site maps are just a too powerful SEO tool and cannot be ignored.

Labels: seo tips

Labels: seo article, seo tips