However, this understanding is rarely transferred when a business decides to ‘go online’. Perhaps the initial setup is so daunting that little thought is spared for anything beyond the layout and content of a website. The internet, however is still a marketplace, and one that is growing exponentially. Those same business skills need to be put to use here too.

If you want to learn from the success of your competitors you first need to think like a search engine. By mimicking popular keywords and phrases you can benefit from traffic that would otherwise be directed to your competitors sites.

Keywords are contained in what are called ‘Meta Tags’. These are tags that are found in the source code at the top of a webpage and include descriptions, titles and key words. Search engines use this information (in addition to content) to rank your page for different search strings. You can access this information by viewing the source of any website, just simply select ‘View’, and ‘Source’ from the toolbar.

If after looking at this code you fear it resembles some alien language, do not despair! There are many programs available that will search competitors’ sites for this information and provide a full report: in plain English. Just look for anything about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it is one of the new hot topics; and you will be swamped with products. The danger is to believe too much of the hype, don’t pay for promises; search engines are not as easily tricked as we are!

Another key ingredient is links. Your page will be ranked favorably if it is viewed by the search engines as being an authority on a given subject. Links work a bit like votes, if someone links to your site they are effectively ‘casting a vote’ of approval. However the weight of this vote is affected by how many other sites they link to, so beware of ‘link farms’ (pages contained entirely of links) because they will not help improve your site’s positioning. The easiest way to obtain links is through online directories – although people may not visit your site directly through these links, it will help with overall search engine positioning.

Returning to the competition; you can discover who is linking to other sites by using an online link popularity checker. This way you can try and get these sites to link to you also. Remember, directed traffic is the best, so aim for links from sites which contain similar content to yours. If you are a business selling stamps, your best links would be from stamp appreciation pages – obvious really.

The internet has been established for a while now. It is no longer an unknown jungle. As a new business entering this arena you can learn from other people’s successes as well as their mistakes!

Today every self-respecting company understands the advantages and power of the internet and runs one or several web sites advertising its products or services online. We all want to be recognized worldwide and invest a lion’s share of our budget in off line international marketing. At the same time we often forget about the advantages of international internet marketing. All that we can think of is creating another .com website in English, adding the word ?international? to its title. Why do we forget that one third of all internet users do not speak English, and thus our ?international? site is passing by all this mass of potential clients (business partners)? With constantly growing quantity and quality of non-English material on the Net they are more likely to surf in their own language. Today a multilingual website is becoming a necessity for international business due to a number of convincing reasons:

SEO Marketing.

Multilingual web sites allow you to enter new markets. Local language search engines will index your site and give you new links from within this market area. In most non-English speaking countries, regional search engines in their native language play much greater role than English-speaking Google, Yahoo and MSN. Hence, you gain better positions, more new visitors to your site (i.e. more potential customers) and more sales.

Company Image.

Multilingual sites create an image of a serious and respectable international business, and will win over visitors from companies who have not made this effort.

Customer-centric approach.

It allows your visitors to surf quickly and efficiently in their own language. This gives your company and products an advantage over your less prepared competitors.

Now you clearly understand that website translation can be a great help in attracting foreign public to your business. However it has to be done in such a way that people will end up buying your product.

To have a website translated means much more than get mere text translation. There are numerous factors that have to be taken into consideration. Actually, it is more correctly to speak about website localization, when you want the site successfully working in the market of your target countries.

Localization is defined as modifying a product to make it usable and suitable to a target market. First of all, it implies culture-centric translation. Perfect culture-centric translation makes the reader feel as if the content was not translated, but originally written in the target language. It takes into consideration the culture, style and language of the target audience. Using electronic translations for this purpose is not a good idea. The decision to have your site translated by a human being, preferably a native speaker, familiar with the culture, terminology and sayings of the target language, is an ideal one. Then, website localization takes into account the appearance of your web pages. Are there pictures, colors or images that would cause offense? A good website translation company will analyze your site and offer you a cultural applicability consultation. Further more, decent website translators will offer an after-care service that assists in helping you with the small changes in future. Some translation companies will even provide you with internet marketing services to help your site achieve high visibility in the target country. If you are serious about promoting your business among foreign internet users it is best to trust your website translation to proven professionals. The leading UK translation company, Lingo24 can supply your company with these services.

Professional website localization and culture-centric translation can become a very promising perspective for your business.

Then, the ‘link placing industry’ appeared, text link ads began to be bought and sold, but this was not what Google was planning. So the search engines started to filter the sites, trying to separate the ones with paid text links from the ones which ‘earned’ them

It is, of course, much easier to give a high ranking to your site (the number of links pointing to one site determines that site’s page ranking, which is very important for the search engines) with paid text link ads, then to do search engine optimization. Text links are very popular these days, because they raise a web site’s page rankings, but the fact that text link ads are becoming an industry spoils the results. Text link brokerage appeared, and if one wants to place text link ads pointing to his site, he can contact one of these brokers, or talk to the site owners.

Text links successfully blend the content ’story’ of a site with advertisements, mixing the text with the ads, unlike the too common “click here” banners. Every word in an article from a web page can become an ad now, a link to a web site. Some of these text links can be dangerous, because they can hijack the page you are looking at, when you click on them, or they can say that they take you to a site, but in fact they take you to a totally different one…

It is very hard to tell if bought text link ads are a good or a bad thing, because they have both advantages and disadvantages, maybe the will disappear, because the search engines filters are becoming more and more thorough, but for now the are really important in boosting a web site’s rankings

You can call this a marketing article, although link building forms a very important part from marketing. Groshan Fabiola is writing different articles with many various themes from marketing, link building, even agriculture or finance. If you want to find out more about text link ads , please click this link.

Source: http://www.365articles.com

1.) Keyword relevant copy and content.

Whatever the keywords you want to get found under, be sure that you have enough copy and content about those specific word. Which would give Google a reason to rank you in the first place.

For example, one of you priority keyword is “computer training software”. Create a separate page or section for this keyword (at least a few paragraphs) using the keyword in the headline, the first sentence, the last sentence as well as wherever it makes logical sense in order to achieve the keyword frequency and “density” that search engines are looking for.

Additionally, by including on this specific keyword page either articles, pdf files or news items about your keyword, will help you improve your chances of a better ranking. Give google a reason to rank you at the top. He with the most relevant copy wins so make it rich and deep.

2.) Can the search engines read and “crawl” all the pages and content on your site?

Probably the biggest surprise to most marketers is that the search engines are unable to either navigate or read most of the content on their website. If they can’t read your copy, then it’s not surprising
that you’re not getting the rankings or traffic to your website that you aspire to. As search engines basically read html, sites which are either “dynamic”, or created in other formats such as cold fusion, asp or php often can’t be read by the search engines. Even if they can read the content on your site, they often can’t navigate it properly or just bounce “off the walls” as there are no specific links or site map on the site to tell the proper sequence or where to go next.

Want to see what Google is indexing on your website? Go to http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go and type in your website name to see how many of your pages are being seen by Google.

3.) Links… why they are so important?

Link popularity is one of the most important factors search engines use in determining where you will place in the search engine for your keywords, and phrases, as it helps them to determine how important or popular your site is.

In essence the search engines are saying” we’re going to give top ranking to sites that have a lot of other important and relevant sites linking to them

Link Building is the process of finding related/relevant websites and placing a link to those websites on yours then asking them to link back to you, i.e. link building is done through link exchanges or reciprocal links; the process by where both websites link to each other and bring mutual benefit to each site.

How many links do you need to have? It depends on the individual product category you compete in and how many links your major competitors with the top rankings have. At a minimum, you will at least need 25-30 relevant links.

Linking is critical not only with your search engine placement but it helps stabilize you positions in the search engines and delivers traffic directly from the sites that link to you.

In Summary, successfully implementing the above 3 strategies either through your own efforts or through employing search engine promotion specialists will deliver the “triple punch” and the knockout punch you need to get top rankings on Google and the other search engines as well.
Article by Mark Klein, VP Sales Pageviews.com, one of the foremost search engine promotion companies specializing in search engine optimization and linking programs. For further information as well as a free ranking report, contact Mark Klein at 480-703-6850 or send an email to mark@pageviews.com

Source: http://www.365articles.com

While that change caused many sites to be dropped from search results, many came back in a few months – prompting a never ending stream of conspiracy theories and chicken little warnings about an impending change – my site is falling!

But – I digress. According to Google PageRank is more than alive and kicking – in their own words “PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools”. Techies may want to read some whitepapers on the topic – Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brins stanford paper is a good place to start.

So understanding Pagerank and monitoring your sites PR ranking is a good idea. How do you find your rank? Best way is from the google toolbar – install it in your browser and accept the advanced functions version (different terms for firefox and internet explorer users – but you get the picture). Once pagerank is installed, surf to a popular page (anonymous surfing online perhaps?) and look at the bar. As I write this, netcloak.com has a PageRank of 5 – which could change as time progresses. Yahoo.com has a PageRank of 9 and a lot more traffic than netcloak – so it ranks higher.

There are other browser toolbars that report pagerank – Quirk has a firefox extension that reports PageRank and Alexa rank – another site popularity ranking system. Alexa has come under fire of privacy / spyware advocates – but it does provide another useful view of the surfing cosmos. Quirk has a anonymous mode that uses anonymizer.net – but there is a slight delay in retrieving the ranks and if anonymizer is overtaxed / offline no ranking is reported. Another nit – the pagerank results in quirk are sometimes different than the pagerank results from the google bar – in one situation, quirk incorrectly reported a site as unranked (meaning that the site was removed from google) while google reported otherwise. So if you’re trading pagerank stories, make sure that your using the same source – otherwise, you may be in for a shock [no more chicken little links ] . Quirk is at version 1.11 right now, so one can’t be too critical of the tool just yet – besides, it provides a lot of other good info in a small amount of screen space.

Does Pagerank matter? It seems to matter to Google – perhaps less than before flordia, but important nevertheless. PageRank may not be the end all metric, but it is one to watch – and its better to have some information that nothing at all.

The size I’m referring to is pagecount.

Been working on the google rankings and noticed some interesting trends. You can work hard to create compelling content, optimize the page for a keyword, and then get pushed down the rank when someone creates a page (or buys a page) on a site that has lots of pre-existing pages. Example? take a look at my page about anonymous surfing tip Pretty good page, but it gets trumped by an ad site by a person who just created one ad page. The site has 403,000 pages – way too many for me to generate! – so I’ll have to work a little harder.

Ultimately, the ad will drop, but the cache will remain – leaving me to fight against a ghost.

So – while many tout that content is king, besides links, pagesize seems to be the ruler in the low end game.

Yes, it does take time to get listed – but the site has been through several google dances now & still remains off the radar. Since it was banned prior to my ownership, all the advice surrounding how to get relisted is related to finding what you did bad, asking forgiveness and waiting for the next few google refreshes.

Emails to Google give automated replies – perhaps someone will see it there (nothing yet). I’d hate to kill a good domain name based on history…