May 2008 Archives

The never ending race to top search engines has become one of the talked about battles in the IT world. Where millions of website's battle it out to be listed as one of the premier site in the World Wide Web. Being listed in top pages of search engines will really pay good dividend for a company especially to the ones that used the web as their place to do business. Customers will now be trouble-free in finding your website.

Competitions have always been tough when in comes to topping search engines, this has been a dream of all webmasters. Vigorous work should be put up for a website to be rank good in search engines. 

To top search engines you need to formulate a good targeted keywords that would be competitive enough to the online market, even if you have formulated a good one, you still have to consider your competitors that are also using the same keywords as of yours.

Now! For you to successfully surpass your competitors, you'll need to do some analyzing, focus on how your competitors make it to top pages of search engines. At this time you can leave behind the pressure of topping search engines, focus more on how you'll be able to surpass the rank of your competitors, by the time you successfully reach your goal you can now go back to your first goal and that is to be listed in the top pages. 

Competitor analysis will surely make you ahead from them, the best way to know your competitor is to know the keywords they actually uses. There are two ways on how you will find your competitors keyword. First: Go to their site and analyze their web pages by looking at their META and TITLE TAGS. Second: You can used some tools for analyzing competitor keywords such as: Google Adwords, SEO Digger. The benefit of this is that you will come to understand your competitor better.  

Bringing traffic and links without the cost of much time and effort is made possible through link baiting. It was one among several strategies that black hat search optimizers do. Originally, its sole purpose is to drive more inbound links organically by a fabricated story or article that portrays unusual subject, event or place. Well, weirdness is easily invented so the activity is a no-sweat for unethical link baiters.

It was not until Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, agreed to adapt link baiting as one of white hat SEO strategies. As long as the material that serves as the hook presents only facts, then you're on your way to a successful white hat link baiter. Matt redefines link baiting from being a tool of fooling people into a tool that presents facts stuffed with interesting flavor through writing style. Writing style has something to do with word play or perhaps catchy title or headline which should be justified in the content of the article. Most of the time, link baiters attract traffic and links through headlines that are actually opposite when the entire article is read. However, such tactic works only once. The rest of your hooks must work on the facts of the content that are interestingly written. If you lack the craft of arranging ideas to make it more interesting, then try working on the subject. Researching helps a lot in order for you to have ideas needed in creating an article that evokes human interest. There are lots of factual articles that appear only as boring reportage. A skill in writing is really important to convert a boring reportage into a worth-reading piece. And then, make it a hook. No one will link to an article, of course, if it is not worth reading. Worth-reading means worth-linking.

Recently, link baiting has become a necessary craft that SE optimizers should learn much as the bloggers do. There are only two things to consider with regards to the content of a hook. It must either be funny or controversial. Controversial may either provoke or arouse curiosity to the readers. A hook, in other words, must itself be entertaining or else, it will just be a useless junk. With regards to the technical aspects, a hook must have quality content and capacity to bring in traffic and links. Rather than exhausting yourself in mining links, link baiting is, so far, the easier way of gaining links and traffic produced organically.

Directory Submission is one of the most important methods of  link building because it assures a solid one way link back or backlink to your desired domain or sub domain. Automated services make search engine submission a snap, but directory submission is more difficult, and takes longer.

Human editors review each submission for quality content before

accepting it into the directory. The volume of new site submissions is so huge that they can afford to be selective. Increase the chances they'll choose you by submitting a first-rate site and following submission guidelines meticulously.

There are a lot of directories in the web, but the biggest directory project is the Open Directory Project (ODP), and/or called as the "Google Director".

 Most directories in the web have human editors and frown severely on multiple submissions, but if you have a big site with multiple categories, you can place your categories as sub domains and submit in different sections of the directory.

Directories offer a service, if a directory is good at listing, it creates traffic but if it's bad, it doesn't. Of course, directories need relevant listings from relevant websites. This is why some people find it hard to get listed. A lot of sites try to get listed on unpaid directories without being relevant. This will definitely make directory submission hard.

 

When to submit?

First thing to do before submitting your site is make sure your site is complete, links should be fully functioning, and most importantly,  all pages should have content. The content of the site should be "relevant" to the section you are listing for. Double check it if you can't find a category that explicitly describes your site, and go with the nearest descriptive terms.

If you submit your site, you should submit it to a directory site with good and relevant services. The more directories your site is linked to, the better for you. Most SEO consultants submit to hundreds of directories, and there are free resources that can help you (in a semi automated fashion) submit to thousands of websites. 

Marketing products and services online is becoming an easy thing to do. The internet has become an indispensable technology and marketing platform for business owners. This then promotes access to higher traffic and surge in potential customers that eventually turn into business processes. Business owners have the option to choose from countless ways that promote their website - some of which are free while some are not.

 

Online marketing allows maximum exposure of your site. Pay per click site such as Google Adwords is often an option. This makes way for easy and close monitoring and tweaking of ads or keywords to improve your site if you figured it is not performing well.

Web blogging on popular blog sites such as Blogger and Wordpress are also helpful in increasing your ranking on the search engine. This can be done by content writing experts who know exactly how to create press releases and articles that are later submitted to online publishers such as Article Marketer, raking in more chances of being noticed online.

More than anything else, a good brand is your marketing reputation. This can be strengthened by having a good site people can always visit. Your customers always want to know your products and how efficient they are. Testimonials are important as positive product reviews. Remember that your website is the façade of your online business. Keep it easy to navigate, attractive to look and fast to download.

The intention of building website is not simply put up something and just leaves it plain and simple. Website has its different purposes and one of those is to advertise something to the world by means of World Wide Web. But building a site is merely the beginning of a long and winding process to top in search engines. One method of improving a site in terms of gaining traffic is by doing the process Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Indeed SEO has become a webmasters best friend. Below are advantages if you tend to do search engine optimization.

Traffic, Traffic, Traffic 

No one creates a website with the intentions for it to sit unnoticed; one of the advantages SEO offers is to generate traffic. The chances in attracting high numbers of visitors to your website depend on how SEO places your website in top pages of search engines. Web users usually get information thru the internet and often choose from the selections that appear in the first 10-20 results. The higher you rank in search engines the easier visitors can find your site.

Affordable 

Not all website owners have enough income to support a site for a long time, By means of SEO, no matter how lengthy you rely on this marketing scheme, it is an affordable approach that lasts for many years.

Enhance Business

Website is either used for personal or business purposes; if yours lands under business purposes then SEO would be best for you. In endorsing or promoting a company or its services, SEO can lend a hand to develop a site's ability to sell more. If a company offers outsourcing services, then the SEO approach is to write BLOGS or articles that could somehow give an idea of the advantages if they acquire your services.

Search engine has been evolving from time to time. So, webmasters go gaga to do staffs just to have the desired rank. Search engine recently prefer to have more inbound links in the website. They love backlinks in your site. The lin

ks show the points that other website has given you because links imply that your website is something interesting that needs to have a feedback from other website. And this creates a good impression of your website.

Link exchange has been now used by the webmasters to improve

in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Link exchange is not only linking to other website and vice versa it creates a partnership in both websites. A partnership with other company which belongs to the industry you are in.
 

Link exchange definitely increases link popularity. The quality and number of websites that links to your website is one of the most important factors to determine your site's relevance.
 

Its Benefits... 

* Link exchange increases your search engine ranking.

* Helps you get a link to your site on similar sites.

 
Thus, having a friendly atmosphere in your website with other website will surely give your site a boost in the search engines.

We know for a fact that content writing is the most important method in developing a website for your business company If the site's content is relevant and of good quality, chances are, you will meet the needs of your customers/ visitors; and eventually it will increase the traffic to your website in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Content writing of a website is also the art of delicate balancing of targeted web content that can be helpful in the overall enhancement of the web business. After you develop a website for your company, we should develop it to have the proper content development which will aim to establish the firms' relation between the targeted web content and the equal increase in web business.

In an immediate context, a website's content writing has a direct relevance with the central theme of the website. It defines the space between the edges of loosely-focused content and the one that is too tightly focused. Since feasibilities' ultimate test of web business rests on 2 main supports, namely attracting traffic and conversion to sale, it is therefore necessary that a proper content writing should effectively address at least one of the two; but it is preferably both depending on the type of web business.

I have a sample of a travel-related site to better understand the concept of elegance in content writing. The website is of a travel agency whose business is to sell tour packages to interested travelers. The travel agency's web site pictorially describes all places where it arranges tour packages. It also narrates the important landmarks to visit in each destination, dealing briefly on historical events associated with each.

While at it, the travel agency's web site focuses on facilities and attractiveness of its tour packages, stressing on benefits in terms of cost and service vis-à-vis other agencies. The main goal of the web site is to convert its online viewers to willing customers, because that is how the travel agency will earn money in running its web business. In this case therfore, content writing is more twisted towards conversion to sale while attempting to attract traffic.

Obviously, content writing differs with each different central theme of a web site as well as the nature of the web business. In addition to the above scenario, a third possibility could be where the local crafts are being sold on the web site. It is a merchant website. And so after the web site has concisely described the place, the people who lives in it and their lives; it will need to branch out to showcase the crafts on sale which is its main activity.

The craft web site will have to maintain focus on converting visits to sales, because that is how it will run its web business. As can be seen, in this case, the central theme changes though the broad subject remains almost the same. It is unnecessary to say that, content writing for each web site will change in keeping with the central theme.

Search engine optimization is not just about getting a website; it primarily exists to set websites and online businesses to higher ranks in the search engine results pages. SEO do this by using identified keywords and phrases that most people are likely to search for. This is called keyword optimization and link building - SEO processes used by practically all successful website and online business owners. Link building is a search engine optimization tactic to increase number of incoming links to a specific website or page on the site.

Keyword Optimization Tips

1. Find the heavy keyword phrases in your niche or industry using keyword suggesting tools.

2. Avoid using general or one-word keywords or keyword phrases that may make it hard for your site or online business to achieve high rankings the search engines. However, avoid using keyword phrases that aren't being searched by people. In the search engines, it is often better that you be a "big fish in a small pond" than be a "little fish in a big pond" because your site or online business is unlikely to rise to the top of the search engine results if you're the latter.

3. Use keyword phrases throughout your web pages, particularly in titles, subheadings and near the beginning of texts.


Building Incoming Links

If you want to improve your website's search engine rankings, you also need to work on increasing the number of websites linking to your site. This SEO work is referred to as link building. Be aware that search engines also factor in the number of sites linking to your site (incoming links) to determine how highly in the search results your website or page ranks. The incoming links to your website tell the search engines that it is of high quality and can be recommended to visitors.

Link building, however, can be manipulated in several ways such as buying banner ads or text link ads in other websites. Because of this, search engines also look at the incoming links to your website and consider some to be more valuable than the others.


Link Building Tips

1. Work towards increasing one-way incoming links instead of reciprocal links. Search engines consider one-way incoming links as "honest votes" than reciprocal links.

2. Aim to get relevant websites (those that are in your same niche, topic or market) to link to your website. Avoid generic link farms.

3. Aim to get "authority" sites linking to your website. Authority sites are those that are popular and are known to have high quality content.

4. If you are purchasing online advertising, go with one-page, content-based text ad links instead of banner ads. To search engines, text ad links in specific content pages appear to be a natural way of linking.

5. If you want a specific content page on your site to have a good search engine ranking, work on building links to that specific page instead of your site's main page.

 

Amassing quality traffic through search engine optimization requires a couple of prime considerations in order to fully optimize a business website. One of which is creating an SEO-friendly web design. Without this, all other SEO efforts will be seemingly useless, and therefore, provide no contributions to boost sales performance to its optimum. How is this so?

Consider sites designed on Flash and Javascript, optimization won't actually take place as search engines can't crawl on the content of these sites. These sites are evaluated as having "no content", and it would not be feasible for them to be accorded with good rankings. Hence, they won't appear in search engine result pages (SERPs).

    A web page with those applications has a URL in this usual format: "yourdomain/products.asp?productid=16″. URLs having some of the characters in the example  signify a dynamic page. Sadly though, web crawlers disregard the rest of the text after "?". For this reason, only "yourdomain/products.asp" is read and this won't show anything. Hence, if your site is built on the above-mentioned platforms, they should be replaced before all other SEO techniques are applied. In adding interactivity to a site, instead of entirely building it on Flash, use Flash Banner as this won't sacrifice a site's performance in SERP visibility.

          Another consideration in lined with SEO-friendly web design is sitemap planning. When planning for the overall structure of the site, make sure that every product has its own web page as this will make every product's page vulnerable to the evaluation of web crawlers. To do so, place the product name in the Title, Meta tags, and keep it mentioned in the content of the page. This practice makes the page highly relevant in search engines especially when an online shopper search for products of the same name and description.

       Great SEO performance stems from a great web designing technique. If the overall architecture of a web site is SEO-friendly, then, it is easier to optimize it in search engines. Therefore, before applying the varied SEO techniques, these web designing considerations must be taken into account so that all efforts harmoniously contribute to the success of the site in bridging one's business to its potential clients. Else, all efforts might be exhausted for nothing!