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Follow the moneyBy John Leyden

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) must be considered a process and over time you can build your ranking and traffic.

Remember, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

This article provides 10 SEO tips that will build your search engine rank.

1. Title

The Title is (usually) the hyperlink provided in the search results so make sure it’s people friendly. Put the most important keyword first, followed by the 2nd…If you need to have your Company name there (branding), put it at the end.

2. Meta descriptions

Use the keywords once or twice in your Meta description. It can be the text that shows up in the description area of the search engine results.

3. H Tags (and proper use)

Have your keywords in an H1 tag at the top of your page embedded in a good description. Not only will it help your rankings but many times the search engines will actually display it in their results.

4. Keyword positioning (on the page)

Have your main keywords high up in the page (the higher the better). The most valuable real estate on a web page is top left corner – people (& engines) read left to right starting from the top.

5. Number and Quality of inbound links

Each link from another web site acts like a vote of confidence – A link implies that the site believes your site has value.

However, all links are not equal. You must get links from sites that have a similar theme to yours ONLY! Anything else may actually hurt your page rank.

6. Linking Text/Description

When building a link campaign, make sure to use keywords in the link. For example, a link with “click here” doesn’t help you with search engines. A link such as “Internet Marketing” is much more effective (if that’s your keyword).

Also, don’t forget to use keywords in your linking description as well.

For the most thorough ebook on developing a strong linking campaign read Jack Humphrey’s “Power Linking 2: Evolution!” (http://www.money-teacher.com/PL2.htm)

7. Content is “King”

Not only is quality content what people are looking for, but content is also what the search engines are looking for. Content is basically “food” for the search engines.

IMPORTANT: DO NOT try to “trick” search engines with useless content. Not only won’t this work, but it will bother potential customers. Also, while you want to mention your keyword, DO NOT “keyword stuff”. A too high word density will penalize you – make it natural.

8. File size

Keep file size as small as possible. It will make for faster loading pages, happier visitors and the search engines like them.

9. Bold & Italic

It’s good practice to highlight your keywords in your copy a few times, but don’t overdo it.

10. Alt tags in image links

Search engines can read text but they can’t see a pictures. Putting in Alt text for a graphic tells the search engine what it is about and also helps people who have their graphics turned off. Make sure to put your keywords in your Alt tags.

Here is an example: < IMG SRC=”graphic1.jpg ALT=”text/keywords go here”>

Once your site is optimized for the search engines, you can then start submitting your site.  Practice these tips and over time you will see your search engine rank increase.

Adam Waxler owns and operates The Money Teacher web site and publishes The Money Teacher’s Home Business Tips Newsletter teaching others how to reach online success. To get your free newsletter subscription send a blank email to: newsletter@money-teacher.com or visit our web site at http://www.money-teacher.com

In my last newsletter I wrote about how your websites Alexa rating is not actually that important to the success of your online business. In this issue, I want to look at another popular statistic - Google Page Rank - and ask a similar question - is it that important?

First a quick overview as to what the Google Page Rank actually is…

Google Page Rank (or PR as it is often referred to as) is simply an indication of the number of websites that link to a specific website. It also attempts to indicate the quality of those links. PR ranges from 0 to 10 (with 10 being the ‘best’ PR and 0 being the ‘worst’). The vast majority of small business websites will usually find they have a PR of between 0 and 5.

To calculate a particular sites PR, Google uses a fairly complicated algorithm based on the number of web links that it is aware of that link to the site in question. This algorithm will also take into account the PR of the page that is providing the link, thus a link from a web page that has a PR of 7 will be considered more valuable than a link from a page with a PR of 4.

Because of the way in which links from higher PR-ranked sites are considered more important, many people are choosing to buy links from websites with high PR’s just so that they can increase their own PR. I have seen sites selling a simple text link on their home page for over $700 a month purely based on the fact that they have a PR of 7 or above. This may seem like a lot of money but when you consider that the website owners that are buying these links often have websites that are in no way relevant to the content of the site linking to them, it is absolutely ridiculous.

Take this example, let’s say you have a website about health and fitness and you buy a link for $500 a month from a random website because it has a PR of 7. This random website has no relevance to your health and fitness site so what is going to happen? Well, your own PR may increase as a result of the link. You may get a bit of extra traffic but probably not much since people don’t click on links that that they are not interested in. You will definitely be $500 poorer at the end of the month!

Instead, why not spend the $500 on pay-per-click advertising and benefit from some quality, targeted traffic?

Of course, there is a bit more to it than that and the reason that most people want to increase their PR is because Google takes this statistic into account when determining where a website will be displayed in their search results. Many people assume that a high PR automatically equals a high search engine placement for their chosen keywords. Not so….

PR is just one of over 100 different factors that Google takes into account when deciding where your website will feature (and these factors and the main algorithm change on a very regular basis). It is perfectly possible for a website with a PR of 5 to get a higher ranking than a PR 7 site if it has better content or is more relevant for the search term in question.

Remember that relevance is all important with Google and a link from a website that is not relevant to your own site will be considered far less important than a relevant one (which makes buying links from random sites purely because they have a high PR even more crazy).

I have read several rumours lately that Google haven’t updated PR’s for a couple of months and they are considering phasing PR out or modifying it in some way. This is pure speculation but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. PR is easily manipulated (for example by purchasing links as described above) and Google doesn’t like to have their calculations or search results manipulated. It stands to reason that they will be looking at ways of preventing this.

So, in summary, is Google Page Rank important to your business?

Well, it is a good indicator of how many other sites link to yours and how important Google considers your site to be BUT I personally don’t place too much importance on this statistic and I certainly won’t be paying out for a link from a website just because it has a high PR.

As I said above, Google changes it’s rules on a regular basis and I see little point in chasing a particular PR on the basis that it might get you higher search engine rankings. If Google do decide to do away with PR, all your work will have been for nothing.

Instead, concentrate on building quality, relevant links from sites that are connected in some way to your own site content. This will ensure that any traffic you receive via these links will at least have an interest in your site. Building links on this basis will automatically increase your PR over time (without the need to pay out for overpriced, irrelevant links). If you do things this way and Google does scrap the PR indicator, it shouldn’t affect you in any way and the links you have in place will continue to benefit you.

Remember, in the same way that a low Alexa rating doesn’t guarantee traffic or sales, neither does a high PR. Sure a high PR is a ‘nice to have’ but lots of traffic and high sales is even nicer :-)

Richard Grady has been helping people earn online since 1998. Find out more about Richard at: http://www.thetraderonline.com Free wholesale search engines: UK- http://www.wholesale118.co.uk and US http://www.thewholesaletrader.com

As keyword marketing becomes more and more expensive and competitive, it has become essential when building your lists to focus on the maximum number of phrases and their variations that a surfer might enter into the search engines.

Why?

Because according to Amit Singhal, principal scientist at Google, a guy who really should know what he’s talking about, over 50% of the 200 million searches performed a day have never been searched before. He also said: “When performing a search most surfers give a 2-4 word query”.

So here are my top 18 recommended ways to build massive keyword lists:

1. Visit your competitor’s web pages and look in the title and meta tags.

2. Search for brand names in Google’s Sandbox. This will return additional keywords that searchers entered when using the brand name. You can also enter regular keyword phrases and get related keyword phrases that have been searched on Google.
Link: http://www.megastep.com/buzz/GSB.php

3. Look over your past customer testimonials, and see if there are any keywords you can use. This strategy lets you get inside your customer’s mind to produce more market centric keywords.

4. Consider synonyms. A synonym is a word having the same or nearly the same meaning as another word or other words in the language. Enter your keywords into Roget’s Theasaurus for a list of related synonyms. Also visit LexFN.
Links: http://www.megastep.com/buzz/RT.php & http://www.megastep.com/buzz/LFN.php.

5. Think of singular and plurals keywords.

6. What about verbs? Example: Ride, rode, ridden, ridding, rides.

7. Use hyphenation and variations. Example: off-shore, offshore, off shore

8. Consider domain names. Many people enter domain names into the search engines rather than their browser address bar. Example: cnn.com. In July 2004 cnn.com was searched 633677 times on Overture.

9. Get books on your subject and use the terms in the index and glossaries to grow your keyword lists.

10. Download a free copy of Weblog Expert Lite. Then ask your web host how to download your raw stats files. Run them through the software and you will then discover every possible keyword combination that surfers have used to find your website.
Link: http://www.megastep.com/buzz/WLE.php

11. Use Wordtracker. What does Wordtracker do? “…helps you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business or service - many of which you might never have considered.” Wordtracker is an essential tool to use.
Link: http://www.megastep.com/buzz/WT.php

12. Then go to the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. Enter in a keyword and Overture returns all the prior month’s searches that include your phrase. The problem with the Overture tool is that it doesn’t give you the exact way that the search was entered. This is why it is essential to use a tool like Keyword Tumbler (see #18) to generate the maximum possible number of keyword combinations that a user might enter a search phrase into the engines.
Link: http://www.megastep.com/buzz/OST.php

13. Use abbreviations and misspellings. A good misspelling tool is Search Spell. Search Spell uses actual misspellings entered into the search engines.
Link: http://www.megastep.com/buzz/SS.php

14. Use acronyms. An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of a name. Example: due diligence becomes DD. A good acronym generator is Acronym Finder.
Link: http://www.megastep.com/buzz/ACF.php

15. Combine your keyword phrase into one word. Example:
strawbale houses => strawbalehouses.

16. Use “space” and “+” with keywords. Example:
- strawbale+houses
- strawbale +houses

17. Visit Crossword Compiler and download their demo software. Plug in your keywords and discover a multitude of additional words.
Link: http://www.megastep.com/buzz/CC.php

18. Once you have your list compiled visit Keyword Tumbler and download the free software. Put your keywords into a text file and then let Keyword Tumbler generate multiple variations of each keyword phrase you have… instantly!
Link: http://www.megastep.com/buzz/KWT.php

It does this simply by mixing the words in each phrase around. Example: “horses for sale” generates a list like this…

horses for sale
horses sale for
for horses sale
for sale horses
sale horses for
sale for horses

As Perry Marshall, author of the Definitive Guide to Google AdWords said at a recent seminar: “Every combination of keywords that somebody could conceivably type in on Google is a market.”
Link: http://www.megastep.com/buzz/PM.php

I hope you have found this advice useful? It’s the exact same procedure I use everyday when fighting the pay-per-click wars.

Rob Taylor has been marketing online since 1996. He’s sold anything from books, debit cards, security products to art prints. Take advantage of his battle tested marketing strategies that could quietly make you five figure cash profits every single month. Free newsletter at http://www.megastep.com

The coming years will be much more interesting as the business of search transits from its adolescence into adulthood. Search engine marketing has matured and is now viewed as an important component in mainstream marketing. The environment is going to change becoming more complex as new features and improved technologies create new opportunities for E-Tailers, marketers and designers. Practically all forms of communication will be digital in the coming years. As this trend continues, traditional mediums such as newsprint, paper phone directories, printed maps and commercial television will be transformed, likely absorbed by the growing digital world.

A few years ago a buzzword that used to hype the Dot-Com bubble was “convergence”. The idea that all forms of media can meld into each other over the Internet naturally leads to the idea that major media corporations should be working together to provide content and connectivity. Today, there is a quiet revolution happening in the business of Internet marketing and it is being led by the major search engines and supported by increasingly versatile technologies. I will be taking a closer look at new technologies, techniques and trends in coming issues. Here is a short overview of what I think are three major precursors for change.

Design: Flash Is Now Indexable by Google.
While FLASH movies provide an extremely rich presentation, sites designed using FLASH have traditionally frustrated search engine marketers as search engines were unable to extract information from .SWF files. Macromedia has spent a great deal of time and money to fix this problem and apparently they have.

According to an article by Robin Nobles in yesterday’s WebProNews, Google can now extract indexable information from .SWF files. Aside from the immediate effect this will have on site design and search engine optimization, the “opening” of .SWF files allows for the development of websites with each page resembling a traditional television commercial, each of which has a relatively good chance of achieving strong search engine placements.

Paid Ads: Contextual Advertising and the Changing Face of Search
Google is in an interesting position today in that much of its revenues come from the sale and delivery of contextual advertising. This, coupled with Yahoo’s purchase of Overture last year and the rivalry between the two has prompted both to innovate the way contextual advertising is sold and delivered. Contextual advertising can be defined as paid ads that appear in search results and other Internet media when associated with purchased keyword phrases. These ads appear in traditional search results as well as in online newspapers, private and commercial websites, Blogs, and will soon appear in email delivered through Google’s GMail system. According to analysts such as U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, the contextual advertising sector is expected to grow from $300Million today to $1.4Billion in 2008.

Recently, Google has relaxed many of the rules dictating where contextual ads might appear through the AdSense program, and how many ad groups can be included on a single page. Google changed these standards in response to an increasing scarcity of ad-display space. There is simply too much interest in paying to guarantee first page placement and multi-site distribution for the number of relevant content sites using AdSense. With increasing demand for direct contextual advertising, it is safe to expect Google to continue to present paid advertisements in as many places as possible. It is also safe to assume Google is examining other avenues for presenting paid advertising, the most notable being the Localization of Search Results.

Traditional Search: Search Localization
When you need a plumber or a pizza, the most logical place to look is a local phone directory, most likely the Yellow Pages. These thick books have been a necessity for home and business for decades. Most new business owner know the importance of being listed in the Yellow Pages and most are staggered by the costs. One of the many goals shared by Google, Yahoo and MSN is the replacement of print Yellow Pages by localized search results. Consumers are turning to search engines before consulting the Yellow Pages, especially during business hours when many are already sitting in front of computers. As phone services are moving towards digital distribution, commercial listings can be accessed by cell-phones. In areas where the production of the traditional Yellow Pages has been outsourced to another business by the phone company, it might soon be cheaper to provide digital listings derived from Google or Yahoo than to access the Yellow Pages database. As far as I can tell, this arena is fair-game for savvy search engine marketers. The Yellow Pages are not going to be an A-Z listing much longer.

Another obvious target of search localization is the monies made by regional or local directories. Most cities and regions around the world have localized online directories promoting business and tourism in their communities. For the most part, their continued existence is testimony to their usefulness to their communities: But what if the information seeker was able to find relevant information by simply visiting Yahoo or Google? It is less likely a small business will pay the 3 - 4 figure fees charged by most local directories if location specific results are displayed on the major search engines for simple search queries such as “2for1 Pizza” or “Cottage Rentals”.

Conclusion
As evidenced by the intense interest expressed by many of the largest corporations in the world and the media’s recent obsession with Google’s IPO, search is more important to the Internet today than ever before. As digital media becomes the mainstay of our information and entertainment systems, the search sector will grow enormously. Opportunities for designers, advertisers and SEOs will expand but will also become far more complex and in many cases, more expensive. The Internet is about to enter another revolutionary growth period and the search engines are lining up to provide as many information sources as possible. For those who are interested, these are interesting times.

Jim Hedger is a senior editor for ISEDB.com. Also he is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing expert working for StepForth Search Engine Placement in Victoria BC. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes the opportunity to share his experience through interviews, articles and speaking engagements. Hedger can be reached at jimhedger@stepforth.com

One of the recent fads is to search for keywords and niches based on an R/S Ratio. The ‘R’ is the number of websites found with that keyword as reported by a search engine search (the supply), and the ‘S’ is the number of searches on that keyword (the demand).

Here is How This Works

In fantasy land the number of searches would be 100,000 and the number of websites would be 1 (your website), resulting in an R/S ratio of .00001.

In reality, the number of found websites is about 1,000,000 and the number of searches is 10,000, resulting in an R/S ratio of 100.

Theoretically, the lower the ratio the better, which is why numerous marketers suggest that low R/S ratios be searched for and then targeted. Keywords with high R/S ratios are immediately discarded.

Why the R/S Ratio is Meaningless

Theoretically, the ratio works, but now let us get back to the real world. If you are ignoring keywords or niches with high ratios you are missing highly profitable markets.

The number of websites reported as the ’supply’ is usually meaningless. This is why the ratio does not work if it is based on the number of computer generated results. So Google says it found 10,000,000 other websites with your keyword. Hope is not lost. You are not competing against 10 million websites. Hardly any of the websites will have anything to do with your target market.

Compare the following:

Example 1

Search results - 100,000 Searches - 10,000 R/S Ratio - 10

Example 2

Search results - 5,000,000 Searches - 100,000 R/S Ratio - 50

Which example is potentially more profitable?

You have no way of knowing! If you automatically fail to consider Example 2 in your marketing efforts because it has a much higher ratio you may have made the wrong decision and discarded 100,000 potential customers.

You need to actually review the websites listed in the search results to see what value they hold. This is important. The ’supply’ side of the equation that needs to be evaluated is not the number of websites containing your keyword, but the number of websites that are actual competitors.

If the top websites are giving away your information for free, like government sites, then maybe it is time to find a different keyword to target.

But more likely you will see only a few, or maybe a few dozen websites that actually provide meaningful content or products that compete against you. Instead of a theoretical 5,000,000 websites, in reality there may only be 50 - or less.

The R/S ratio analysis is also primarily only important for natural search engine results. Through pay-per-click programs you can jump your website to the top of the search engine results page, and your competition for PPC keywords will be even less. Sometimes it will be nonexistent.

You also need to remember that a high R/S ratio in Google may not be high in Yahoo, 7Search, or another search engine. Similarly, keywords for which bidding competition is fierce on Google may be wide-open in Overture.

As a result, do not be quick to disregard an entire keyword market due to your initial evaluation that the keyword has a terrible supply and demand ratio. Dig a little. Review the actual search engine results and act as a potential customer to better assess what the real competition is. Compare different search engines, and evaluate different PPC programs. This extra effort will often unveil profitable markets that your competitors, using a flawed analysis, will neglect.

Brian Kindsvater has been marketing online since 1994. Brian shares research about niche products, free and useful marketing resources, and valuable articles at the exclusive membership site http://nichex.com. Brian Kindsvater’s legal articles can be found at http://lawzilla.com

Do you want more search engine traffic? Are you having trouble getting it? You’re not alone. You could have the most highly optimized web site possible and still fail to achieve a top ten, or for that matter, even a top 20 ranking in an engine like Google.

Why?

It’s quite simple: content rules over keywords. Think for a minute about the sheer number of web pages out there today.

Here is the number of pages Google claims to index currently: 4,285,199,774. For the math challenged, that’s Four billion-two-hundred-eighty-five-million-one-hundred-ninety-nine-thousand-sev en-hundred-and-seventy-four!

Now, while it’s still generally a good idea to at least optimize your keywords to stand out from that crowd, it’s not sufficient. Let’s say that 52% of all those pages were designed by a professional search engine consultant. Each one is set up perfectly to feed the engine what it wants. Who gets to the top then? Newsflash: It WILL NOT be the site that only has a couple of pages of information.

The top ranking sites in that scenario are the ones with hundreds of pages of content. In other words, if this was your site, you would have a theme and build on that theme with articles and other tidbits. I know of one marketer who doesn’t optimize his pages at all, but he has vast amounts of information on his website and the search engines LOVE it. He gets all the traffic he needs. It seems counter-intuitive at first until you remember that search engines care much more about quality and content than they do about keywords and meta tags. The plain fact of the matter is: the more pages you have on your site, the more important your site “looks” to the search engine.

This may at first sound disheartening to some of you. What happens to the person with a one page sales site? How much work do you have to do to build a site that gets free traffic? Fear not! There’s actually some very good news in all of this.

Working from our premise that search engine traffic often comes down to dumb luck, we can clear away every conflicting piece of advice about traffic generation and boil the process down to 2 steps:

1. Small website: Invest your time in building relationships with your target market. This means finding ezine and web site owners to promote, review and otherwise link to your product. Send out press releases. Advertise in your local newspaper. It also means saving that $30 you might have spent on another hyped up ebook and investing it instead on some pay-per-click traffic and advertising.

2. Large website: If you want free traffic, then you’ll need: a topic you love, a large amount of content (in the form of articles you write or articles you reprint from other sources), and a daily action plan. You can still use all of the methods outlined for small websites, but the key will be adding content each and every day. Even one article a day will make a difference.

Conclusion: Don’t waste any more energy looking for that magic bullet. Invest your time and your money wisely. Those two currencies are your key to success.

John Calder is the owner/editor of The Ezine Dot Net. Subscribe Today and get real information YOU can use to help build your online business today! http://www.TheEzine.Net