Web Business Resource

For a long time, internet business gurus have recommended submitting to directories as a way to promote a site. The main advantage of submitting to directories is SEO (search engine optimization). The main way that major search engines rank a site in their listings is by link popularity.

As the search engines, name Google, improve their algorithms, they are becoming better at deciphering organic links from unnatural links. Paid links and directory links are losing value in the search engines. Nonetheless, it seems they still do help.

However, if you submit too many links too quickly, you will set off spam filters in the search engines. If you do that, the search engines might discount the links or penalize your site in the rankings.

For that reason, you will maximize your time and effort if you only submit to a few directories at a time. I would suggest to submit to only a few per day at most.

Additionally, you want to vary your anchor text. If each of your links has the same exact anchor text, then the search engines will see that as unnatural.

What do you think?

Search engine optimization is the process of designing and promoting your website in such a way that it gets good rankings in search engines for its keywords and key phrases. Search engine optimization is usually a big part of any online marketing program. The reason is that most website traffic originates from search engines. That’s why I am happy to tell you about SEM Worldwide (www.semworldwide.com).

SEM Worldwide sells professional services throughout the world to help businesses and webmasters optimize their websites for search engines. They say they can customize their services to almost any business or industry, but they do specialize in a few specific industries.

They provide real estate search engine optimization to businesses in the real estate industry. Customers and clients in real estate usually do not think of their needs until it comes up. Often times these people will use a search engine such as Google to find a real estate agent, company, or property. SEM Worldwide can help real estate companies and agents find new customers and clients with search engine traffic. As a closely related industry, SEM Worldwide can help with mortgage search engine optimization for companies in the mortgage and financing industries.

In the same way real estate companies can find new clients using SEO, lawyers can also greatly benefit from search engine optimization for lawyers. The legal industry can be very profitable if you can attain customers and clients. You can get these potential customers and clients to find you by optimizing your website for search engines.

One great thing I notice about SEM Worldwide’s website is that it has published free information about SEO. They explain SEO, search engine marketing, and related topics on their website. Additionally, their website has a professional design, and it prominently displays their address and phone number.

Of course, always think carefully before making any large purchases. Research what you are considering purchasing and read the fine print before agreeing to anything.

Today I want to tell you about submit2please.com. It’s a great directory submission website that will manually submit your website to hundreds of directories.

Having submit2please.com submit your website to directories has many benefits. It increases your website’s traffic, search engine rankings, and PR.

They have a nice website which can be used to order their services. It’s straight-forward and explains the process and benefits of their service.

Also, submit2please.com gives clients a detailed report, so you can verify the submissions.

by Jinger Jarrett

If you’re a writer optimizing your site for the search engines, you have more considerations than just optimizing for the search engines.

The first thing you need to do is decide if you’re selling yourself, an author driven website, or selling expertise, a topic driven website.

Once you’ve made your decision, you’ll need to do your keyword research on your topic. If you’re creating an author driven website, you’ll want to make sure that you include your name in your keywords.

Here are the strategies you need to implement:

1. Optimize your website.
You’ll need to optimize each page individually, so if you have a large list of keywords, then you can optimize each page for a different keyword phrase.

When you’ve finished optimizing your site, you’ll need to implement your search engine strategy.

2. Submit your site to the major search engines.
Although the major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN are more or less true search engines because they spider sites, if you’re not linked to any other sites, these search engines won’t find you.

You can have other sites link to you, but the problem here is that it may take awhile for the search engines to find your site and spider it even if you are linked.

You can significantly speed up the process simply by submitting to the major search engines manually. If you use a sitemap, you can submit your sitemap to both Google and Yahoo and have your site spidered within a few days.

It may take a few months to get your site completely spidered, especially if it’s a large site, but again, a sitemap can help you with this process.

3. Build backlinks to your website.
Find writing directories and other places where writers, and readers, hang out and post a link back to your site. The more links you have pointing back to your website from other relevant resources, the higher your rankings will be, and your Google page rank will be higher.

You can also find general directories to submit your website. General directories can help you with building higher page rank for your site.

4. Write articles.
Although some writers disagree with using articles as a promotion technique, claiming that you should only write articles for pay, I disagree.

When you write articles, you are giving readers a taste of your writing. You are offering value.

Articles can also help you build tons of one way backlinks to your website through article directories, as well as build a following for your writing.

Which had you rather do: get paid $25 for an article and only be paid once, or earn money every month, over and over for the same article by using it to drive traffic to your website?

5. Participate in forums and communities.
I know. This is a tough one. Many writers are introverts, or they’re not interested in marketing.

If you want to sell your writing, you have to market. Although search engines can get you in front of your readers, search engines don’t buy. Readers do.

Want to know all of the strategies for marketing your business on the internet for free? Get a free ebook copy of Jinger Jarrett’s “Internet Marketing for Free, The GUIDE“. Want to grab $3,780 in free resources for writers? Visit Marketing for Writers.

by Richard Burckhardt

The first step is to brainstorm and make a list of, say, 25 of what you think might be keywords and phrases a web searcher would use to find your page. Come up with both single words and phrases. We’ll use some neat tools to narrow these down and even discover some nuggets you might not have thought of.

As a rule, optimizing for a single word is a lesson in frustration. For instance, can you imagine how many pages on the web would be competing for a single word like cars? Millions!

However, using a single keyword to search for those hidden nuggets is, well, priceless!

Keyword Research Tools Next, you will need some tools to help you find those perfect keyword phrases for your site. Although there are tons of commercial tools on the market, I am going to concentrate on some freely available tools that I have found of particular value. These will help you find out how popular your keyword phrases are (how many times they are searched for in a given time period) and how much competition you will have with your phrase. And, because this article is targeted to the newbie SEO, these free tools give you a chance to kick the tires before you buy the top of the line model. My favorite is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. What? You say you are not running any AdWords pay per click campaigns! Why would you use this tool?

The answer is that it is free for anyone to use. You do NOT have to be running any AdWords PPC campaigns and the tool gives valuable keyword research information in a graphical, easy to understand format, perfect for the newbie!

And, yes, this tool is based on AdWords, so the search volume reflects PPC search and competition, but these estimates will apply to organic search as well.

Here’s a perfect example of how what you think you want to rank for might be in opposition to reality.

I live in Palm Springs, California and have done web design for real estate agents in the past. We must have 10,000 real estate agents in the desert and each and every one of them has a web site and each and every one of them would like to rank #1 for the keyword phrase palm springs real estate.

To demonstrate how difficult and impractical a task that would be based on the competion, take a look at the screen shot I took after running the Keyword Variations tool of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (be sure to check the Use synonyms box for a more comprehensive list).

The trick here is to find more green in the Search Volume bar and less green in the Competition bar. In this example, you’ll see 100% competition for a moderate search volume for the phrase palm springs real estate. This tells me that optimizing for that phrase is probably not worth the effort. It would be better to try to target other phrases with less competition for the search volume.

For instance, the Palm Springs area has a large gay population and there’s no competition (no green bar) for palm springs gay real estate which has a moderate amount of search volume. If this is a community that you’d like to target, then this is the kind of search phrase you want to look for - search volume with little or no competition. Look around. You never know what targeted keyword phrases you will discover.

See how you can think you know what to target as far as keywords and how easy it is to be way off?

Try running your single keyword ideas through this tool and you are likely to find good keyword phrases with little or no competition for you to target as well. And, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool makes downloading the keyword lists you generate a snap for offline use.

Then, select the keyword phrases that look like they might work for you and run each of them through the tool again to create a list of even more highly targeted keywords.

Another free, non-graphical tool you might want to try is the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from WordTracker. WordTracker also offers a good paid version, but the free tool is enough to get you started.

Unlike the Adwords Keyword Tool, this tool takes data from DogPile.com and Metacrawler.com, so the results are more organic in nature, but, as you will see, somewhat similar.

Using the same test phrase palm springs real estate, we get the following results - screen shot.

As you can see, you get a list of keyword phrases and the volume of searches for them in the past 90 days. This gives you a great place to start looking, but it does not give you any idea of the competition as the Adwords tool does. My suggestion is that you use both tools, comparing the lists to see what you might have missed on one or the other.

This should get you started in your keyword research. This article is intended as a companion piece to SEO 101 which can be found on my blog. I go into more detail in my SEO 101 workshop, offered to web site owners and small businesses. Check my blog for more information or contact me to set up a custom workshop for your business group of five or more people in the Palm Springs area of Southern California. Travel is possible for large groups.

Richard V. Burckhardt, also known as The Web Optimist, is an Internet marketer and trainer based in Palm Springs, CA with over ten years experience in web site development, optimization and marketing.

The Web Optimist blog can be viewed at http://www.weboptimist.com

by Jason Steeper

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page

For more information on Search Engines like; Some Essential Feaures Your Web Site Must Have, The Importance of Referer Logs, etc. Please visit http://www.searchengine01.com

by Alfred Aquino

Submit to Google directly

If we follow the normal procedures, most likely we’ll use this link to submit our site to Google. After you’ve submitted your blog, you’ve got to wait. But how long? It may take several weeks or even months. The worse case, for whatever reasons, you blog don’t get listed at all! According to Google,

We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the web, and we invite you to submit your URL here. We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.

From the above, we know actually there are chances that your blog will be indexed when they crawl the web. So, no doubt you can get your blog listed even without submitting it to Google. Below are some other measures that could help your blog to get listed to Google even without submitting to it.

Make use of the signature’s place

Join some famous and popular forums like Digital Point and put the URL of your blog inside the signature. Of course, just putting your URL in the signature is not enough; you’ll also need to participate in the discussion with some posts to show your URL. Remember, don’t just put your blog’s title in the signature, add a simple description to it also.

Bad: ABC’s Blog Good: ABC’s Movie Blog - Movie Review and News

By doing this, you’ll enjoy the benefit that next time when Google crawl such popular places, it will see your blog. On the other hand, other members maybe interested in your blog and offer to exchange links. What is better than killing two birds with one stone?

Link exchange with similar blogs

Besides of joining the forums, you could also ask the webmasters of similar blogs to exchange link with you. This will increase your chance of getting indexed when Google crawls those sites.

Share your articles

Remember my article of getting some free contents to fill up your blog? There are sites that provide free articles and let you to republish in your blog. This time, instead of using those articles, why don’t you submit your own articles to it? Just remember to submit the article with your resource box in it(usually placed in the end of the article). The resource box will include some information of you and most important, the URL of your blog. Next time, when Google crawls it, it will notice your blog’s link in the resource box.

Register with other search engines

Finally, always remember to register with other popular search engines like Yahoo, MSN and DMOZ also. Your blog will probably get indexed by Google if it is listed in other famous search engines.

Good luck!

Alfred Aquino is the webmaster of http://moneybloggers.net which focus on various methods to monetize a blog or website.

by Rajiv Sahadevan

What’s the basic of Search Engine Optimization? SEO is a big field and growing tremendously. Understanding SEO basics is essential for you as a web site owner. At times you can always do a bit of search engine yourself if you are a website owner. Knowing the basics of SEO is essential for it.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization, targeted at getting a top placement in search engines is a technique used to get top ranking. There are a few key considerations to keep in mind while doing your SEO.

• Your keyword
• Keyword density in your webpage
• Keyword in Title
• Keyword in Meta tag (Deprecated)
• Keywords in the end of the page
• Keyword in the Heading tag
• Keyword in Italics

Placing your keyword in prominent positions will enable you to get a good ranking in the search engines. Make sure that your pages are Static HTML pages with No errors to get a better ranking. Other considerations to keep in mind are links to your website from other sites. Often called off page optimization, it is a key factor in Search engine placement. If you have a good off page links to your site, your website is bound to have a good placement on search engines very quickly.

You can achieve this with Basic link exchange to creating great articles to your subject and redistributing them. What’s important is that you have great links to your site. How you do it is irrelevant as long as they are quality links. This is not usually an easy task but once you know how to do it, you will be on top. For more information read the e-book by Brad Callen. It can be downloaded from our website. This is a wonderful resource for to learn basic SEO. The 90 Page resources on Basic SEO is a great Head start for SEO Beginners and Intermediate Level users. You may also find other resources on this website which could be used to your advantage.

About the Author: For More information on SEO London and Internet Marketing, visit Rajiv Sahadevan’s website powerscribe.com. The information provided above is compiled based on the Trends in Web site design India and is promoted for Career in UK.

By Shawn Hickman

I have been asked many times if adding RSS feed content to your web site helps improve page rank and web site placement in the free search listings. First we have to look at RSS and if it’s right for your web site.

RSS is basically Really Simple Syndication written in XML code. It allows a script to run in a RSS Reader or on your website that allows updated content that you subscribe to automatically become up to date as soon as it is published.

The great thing about this is that you can always have fresh content on your site without having to do any updating or babysitting.

Search engines have been known to eat up RSS feed content on web sites. They love to deliver new information to visitors. One thing to remember is that the feed must be displayed in HTML format. Search engine spiders do not read java script as plain text, so it is essential to better placement that HTML code be placed in your site instead.

There are several programs that do all the hard work for you. RSS Equalizer is easy to install and lets you customize your feeds to fit your particular subject content you need. It all works on your web server backend. You log in, set up the categories of feed you want, test them, and place them on your site. No need to update, it’s all automatic.

Next, does your site have an area that you can ad RSS feed content to? You can ad some to the home page. In the setup, you can set how many topics you want listed on a page.

It is only relevant to the engines if the keywords you are trying to place with also reflect in the RSS content. So the keywords must be in the title tag, keyword tag, description tag, page content, and RSS feed content for best results.

Try testing a secondary page that is not your home page. Optimize your web site for best placement, and then add the RSS content. MSN will pick it up very quickly, Yahoo, and Google will be soon to follow. If certain content doesn’t work, go back to the sites where you pulled the RSS feeds from and see if there is more keyword relevant content.

For example you can pull an SEO related feed that will have SEO in every topic. Ten topics to the feed, that’s 10 keywords added to your page content.

Keep an eye on it for the first few weeks. If it is getting you into the listings, you are doing great. You have a robotic editor keeping your site in great position.

Good luck and have fun not matter what you do.

By Shawn Hickman - Internet Marketing Manager - Web Solutions of America

by Chris Walker

Many people do anything and everything to get traffic to their website. But what are actually the best ways to get traffic to your website? Well, I decided to narrow it down to two strategies: SEO and PPC. People tend to use one or the other, but throughout this article I want to discuss the benefits of both and why you should use both methods to your advantage.

Lets kick things off with SEO…

When building the pages of your website, you must choose targeted keywords that represents your website’s theme (remember to make sure your keyword appears high on the page, preferably within the first 100 characters—the spiders love it). Search engine optimization is the way you present those keywords to all the search engines. With seo, you are basically optimizing your pages to make sure that all the search engines know what your pages are about (optimizing your pages also ensures that you will be listed as high as possible on the search results pages for your keywords). Since we want to optimize our pages so that the search engines can find our keywords easier and faster, we must write pages that include the following:

by Shana Shane

This interesting article addresses some of the key issues regarding SEO. A careful reading of this material could make a big difference in how you think about SEO.

The best time to learn about SEO is before you’re in the thick of things. Wise readers will keep reading to earn some valuable SEO experience while it’s still free.

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 websites 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 would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday.

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 maybe at least make your site income generating.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let’s just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.

So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

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 get search engine optimization. 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 optimization.

You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimization. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company.

There’s no doubt that the topic of SEO can be fascinating. If you still have unanswered questions about SEO, you may find what you’re looking for in the next article.

About The Author: Shana Shane is a Full Time Adsense Publisher and She Makes her living from Adsense. She is passionate about sharing her Adsense Knowledge: traffic.mydomainname101.com

by Wendy Mcleod

Q1. What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of guiding the development or redevelopment of a website so that it will naturally attract visitors by gaining top ranking on the major search engines for selected keyword phrases.

Q2. Why should I go in for search engine optimization?

Search engine optimization is required to gain more exposure on the Internet. This helps to drive more good quality traffic to your site. So every site needs optimization for better performance.

Q3. How long will it take me to get to the top of the search engines?

It takes around 1 month to 6 months to gain ranking. Google takes more time to spider up the websites than other major search engines

Q4. Are search engine rankings guaranteed?

A, It is not possible to guarantee top ten rankings for generic terms. Secret algorithms that are programmed by the search engines determine the rankings. No SEO firm has control over the algorithms, hence it is difficult guarantee rankings.

Q5. What are the factors on which your site rankings depend?

The below listed factors are responsible for good rankings.

o The competition for your key phrases

o Number of links pointing to your website

o How long your site has been on the web

o The magnitude of your current web presence

o How much good content is provided on your site

o The strength of your post monthly maintenance plan

o The design of your website

About The Author: Wendy Mcleod works for Internet marketing Las Vegas.