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!

The first part of gaining profits through website promotion is to have an excellent website design. You cannot expect to gain any profits through a website that is designed poorly or that is difficult to navigate. Make it easy for visitors to your website to find what they need and make a purchase. This will gain you fast profits.

The second thing you should do to gain profits is to use search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO has been widely used to put people’s websites at the top of a search engine’s list. It is found that most people that use a search engine only visit the website that is listed at the top of the list. This is why you need to use SEO to help with your website promotion. With the proper SEO, you can attract more visitors to your website. More visitors means more profits for you.

Next, to gain more profits you can use email marketing. Be sure that when you use email marketing to gain profits that you are not using spam. Use an opt in list instead. Have an opt in list posted on your website. An opt in list is when people request to receive email material from your website. It has been shown that opt in lists give a 40% increase in response. This means that you will again have more profits.

In order to gain profits through website promotion, you must be sure that you go after your target audience. Be sure that your website design attracts the type of people that would be interested in your product or service. Also, be sure that your email marketing sends out emails and ezines to people that will actually read it and have an interest in it. If you don’t, you cannot expect to gain profits.

Lastly, you can incorporate the use of affiliate programs to help with your website promotion. Have links to your affiliates on your website. Your affiliates will also do the same. With you and your affiliates working together to promote your website, you will start to see more website traffic and more profits.

Website promotion is the only sure way to gain profits for your business. Without it, you can easily find yourself in a hole that is hard to dig your way out of. Be sure to utilize all of these methods so that you can attain more profits.

The Internet is a constantly changing environment, and growing every day. My small little website was no match for the competition, and I had to do something to bring more traffic to my site.

I began looking at different marketing techniques. Things like buying ad space on larger websites that had more traffic. I also looked at such things as sponsorships, and even email campaigns. The results of my investigations into Internet marketing were just not in my favor. I was just a small business, and to place ads on large websites is very expensive. Sponsorships were also expensive, and email campaigns showed very little potential, as they are usually thought of as spam and discarded. I had to do something else, and it had to be something that a small business like mine could reasonably afford.

I discovered search engine optimization. It was a means of making changes to my website that would better suit the desires of large search engines. Since it is free for people to find a website in a search engine, and free for me to be there, this seemed to be my best alternative.

I began my research into search engine optimization (SEO), and discovered that I had much to learn. It was going to take some time for me to do everything that I needed to do, but it was certainly better than losing all that I had invested so far.

I started by adjusting my website to fit the known standards of most search engines, and then began a link campaign. I distributed hundreds of free links, as well as purchased a few for a fair price. I wrote articles and newsletters. I even joined SEO discussion forums, and participated in topics about search engine optimization. In the end, my efforts started to pay off. Traffic started to flow in, and I began to get a few sales.

All of this started to make me think. What if there was no such thing as a search engine? Could small businesses like mine even compete with large companies? For most of us, it would be entirely too expensive to even attempt. Big corporations would have far more money to use on advertising, and ?Internet real estate? would be far more expensive, as it would be the only real means of advertising. My conclusion is that search engines sort of level the playing field between small businesses and large companies. They give a small business the ability to have a chance at competing for traffic on the Internet.

Most of us start out with a dislike for search engines. We get discouraged because so many other websites rank higher than ours. However, there is a way for us to compete with those websites, and it means taking a little time in optimizing website content and links for search engines. With a lot of education, and some good SEO techniques, small businesses can compete, and they can bring in traffic.

In order to learn how to do it properly, we need to take a look at others who are already doing it, and winning the never ending game of promotion.

Never ending is a bit of an understatement if you consider the vast opportunity you have presented to you through promoting your business online. Millions and millions of people log on every day, but what you don’t consider is that millions more have yet to log on for the very 1st time. If you’ve ever questioned the fact about whether or not there is an opportunity for yourself online, this small but powerful paragraph should end that doubt.

To make it big online, you have to think big. The internet is no different than real life… what you put forth, so shall you receive. There isn’t any greater statement than that.

So what does it really take to make it big?

Create something bigger than yourself! Bottom line. Creating something bigger could be accomplished in a few different ways. I know there are some of you who are thinking, I don’t have the money to create a massive website! Who ever said you’re “something big” has to be owned by you?

For instance Authors a.k.a Writers / a.k.a Bloggers / a.k.a Columnists are taking the internet by storm and for a good reason… This type of promotion REALLY works.
With the vast amount of websites out there that accept articles, you’re practically guaranteed to create a resourceful website of your own. You don’t need to be the best web designer in the world to figure out how to buy a domain name, create a blog or two (that is programmed by someone else) and link to your articles that way. You can even talk about your products and services within your blog, you have every right.

Go to http://www.blogger.com to create a blog.

That is the easiest way in. Let’s also take a look at why you should have a website and promote it through your knowledge, we can only do this by taking a look at other peoples success. In this next small section, I am going to randomly pick out a couple of authors that consistently write articles and measure out their “visible” level of success.

Halstatt Pires (www.marketingtitan.com): We consistently see this author write articles and submit them to us. Halstatt is a good writer who talks about a wide range of topics including web design & SEO.

If we take a look in Google/Yahoo/MSN to see how many times we can find “Halsatt Pires”, the numbers would look like this…

There are over 45,300 web pages listed within Google with the name “Halsatt Pires”.
There are over 18,500 pages listing in Yahoo
There are over 7,500 pages listed in MSN

Wouldn’t you like to have over 71,300 pages online with your name on them? I certainly would. Even if your articles get read a 10% of the time every day or every month for that matter, it would mean on average over 6,200 people could possibly read your articles every single day.

MarketingTitan.com has an alexa.com ranking of: 171,746 best ranked website out of millions of other websites.

Let’s now take a look at another author.. (all random)

Joy H Gendusa (www.postcardmania.com) Writes a great deal about postcard campaigns, direct mail campaigns and is quite good at it as well.

If we take a look in Google/Yahoo/MSN to see how many times we can find “Joy H Gendusa”, the numbers would look like this…

There are over 13,800 web pages listed within Google with the name “Joy Gendusa”.
There are over 24,000 pages listing in Yahoo
There are over 4,800 pages listed in MSN

In only 3 search engines, “Joy Gendusa” is found 42,600 times!

PostcardMania.com has an alexa.com ranking of: 76,065 best ranked website out of millions of other websites.

Again, it begs the questions, wouldn’t you like it if that was your name at the bottom of those articles with your website right beside it?

You DO NOT have to be a professional writer to start writing. In fact, when I started writing, my grammar was so bad, people would actually call me to guide me through my articles and point out the mistakes within them. The point is, people still called. Now thanks to my editors, my writing skills are improving a great deal.

Don’t be shy. Just start somewhere and don’t stop. Before you know it, you’ll be writing 2-5 articles a week and won’t be able to stop. That is when the true power of your promotion will start kicking in.

Just for people who want to know…

Let’s take a look at my success as a writer. If you were to search for my name within quotations like so “Martin Lemieux”, here are the results you would find. (In quotes to narrow down to an exact match)

There are over 65,600 web pages listed within Google with the name “Martin Lemieux”.
There are over 32,300 pages listing in Yahoo
There are over 17,600 pages listed in MSN

That is over 115,500 “registered pages” online that have my name on them. Just remember as well, I haven’t submitted an article in over 2 months due to illness. Only a fraction of those aren’t me, they are someone else. Again, I ask the question… Wouldn’t it be nice if that was your name and your website was right beside those tens of thousands of pages?

Just for curiosity, if you do a search for Martin Lemieux without the quotes within Google, you will get around 1,040,000 pages found. When I started out, those search results weren’t even close to that, maybe even 10% of 1,040,000 because of “Claude Lemieux” & “Mario Lemieux” two famous hockey players.

Does something like this happen over night? Absolutely not. In the last 4 years, I’ve been able to write around 70-80 articles in total! That’s it. There are writers out there that have personally written over 1000 articles in a matter of years.

What else can you do to increase your popularity? Accept articles from other authors of course! Why not share your success with others. Doing so will only increase your credibility online and increase your visitors a great deal. Not only will authors talk about you, your website will increase every time you list another authors article.

Why do you think that many of the article directories world wide get the most traffic on average beyond the Gorillas like Google, Yahoo, Ebay, etc? They all have one thing in common, they’re creating a community of people writing their hearts out and exposing their business further online.

In Conclusion:

If you’ve ever doubted why people write articles, think again. The internet favors the bold, the ones who are not afraid to speak their mind and put their thoughts in digital format get rewarded. More and more authors who have written actual books are now writing for the internet to get more sales for their books. It’s a proven fact that unique content is king and so are your thoughts.

Your website is now ready. It’s now the time to promote your website and spread awareness about your website and get visitors to come and view your web pages. Tips to get your website get going.

1. Page Title

Write a descriptive title for each page of 5 to 8 words. Remove as many “filler” words from the title, such as “the,” “and,” etc. Mention appropriate keywords relevant to your website content. Remember search engines give this a lot of emphasis.

2. Meta Tags

Meta tags always go in the section of the document. META NAME tags include descriptions and keywords. This HTML code helps some search engines classify and rank a web page. META HTTP-EQUIV tags can indicate to the web browser how to display the page.

Write a descriptive META Tags. Many search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title. This sentence should describe the contents of the body text of the webpage, using the main keywords and key phrases used on this page. If you include keywords that aren’t used on the webpage content you could hurt the prospect of being listed in the search engine.

3. Linking Strategy

Link popularity is basically the number of links that point to your web site. Besides the optimization of your web pages for meta tags and search engine marketing and readiness, link popularity is considered as being a major factor for your ranking in the search engines. A large number of links that point to your web site will therefore improve your ranking significantly. Besides that, well placed links are an excellent source of consistent traffic to your web site.

Some of the important search Engines that consider link popularity as a factor for relevancy are Google, Excite, Lycos, Webcrawler & Altavista.

Linking strategies are an essential type of site promotion. The more links pointing to your site, the more traffic you’ll experience (and the greater perceived “popularity” will rank you higher in the search engines). To get someone to link to your site, you need to ask. The simplest way is to find complementary sites, link to them on a linking page, and ask them to link to you. The key, of course, is for your site to have content that so good that it’s worth linking to. Ask for links on sites that cover your industry, as well as from associations your business belongs to.

What is to be avoided here is link harvesting or just creating link database on your website of sites that have no relevance to your topic. Search engines have a negative rating for this.

4. Search Engine Submission

Now it’s time to submit your website to search engines. It is recommended never use automated tools, your website might end up never being spidered by the search engine. The best way is to manually goto the major search engines listed below and manually submit.

Google.com and Yahoo.com – A definite must. Over 90% of smaller search engines take their fodder from here.

Others to submit are Lycos.com, Altavista.com, Excite.com, Askjeeves.com, Wisenut.com, Toema.com & Overture.com

5. Viral Marketing

Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

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Amongst the best forms of viral marketing are

Affiliate Programs

You signup and earn a commission per sale or referral. So you refer your friends and peers. When your peers signup their friends and peers you get an incentive for them too. What an excellent and automated way of publicity at extremely low costs.

Refer your friends

You just finished reading an article and suddenly remembered your friend for whom the article might be a valuable resource, so you simply email the article to them by using the “Refer-a-friend” link. An excellent and automated way of free publicity.

E-mail signature

Don’t underestimate the power of a innocuous email signature. You never know who and where it reaches. It doesn’t cost you a dime and gives your website free publicity.

6. Ezines

Write articles for others to use in their Newsletters. You can dramatically increase your visibility when you write articles in your area of expertise and distribute them to editors as free content for their e-mail newsletters. Just ask that a link to your website and a one-line description of what you offer be included with the article. This is an effective “viral” approach that can produce hundreds of links to your site over time.

7. URL on Stationery

This is a no-brainer that’s sometimes overlooked. Make sure that all reprints of cards, stationery, brochures, and literature contain your company’s URL.

Beware of these promotion blunders

1. Spam

Spam or unsolicited e-mails don’t generate customers. They generate bad publicity and legal tangles. No website has ever made it big with Spam. Spam is like the scum in the gutter blocking precious Internet bandwidth, which brings absolutely nothing but abuses for their senders.

2. Abuse e-communities

While the former one is mass abuse, this one is direct abuse. Ecommunities are available on the Internet on probably every topic under the sun and e-marketers feel it’s a good place to deliver the promotional message. Right no doubt, but there is a Net etiquette for delivering such a message. Maybe in the form of a signature or participating in that community not sending stupid promotional messages which get nothing but bad publicity for the website.

3. Automated submission

Unless you want your Website to be blacklisted or removed from the database of the search engines don’t ever attempt it. Incidentally, the best and the biggest directory is human edited. Dmoz.org is the name; the same directory used by google.com, aol.com and other search engines. Manual submission to major search engines takes not more than a few hours and is fairly sufficient for meeting your e-business goals.

Unfortunately, hiring an SEO expert can be quite expensive. For those who want to do it themselves, here are the steps.

Bookmark these tools! you WILL need them!

The first step in website optimization is to make sure you have well-formatted HTML. I would encourage you to use the following tool to check this: http://validator.w3.org/ Do your best to get your website as close to conformance as possible.

If you use CSS, then use a CSS validator at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator-uri.html There is rarely an excuse for not having it validate here.

If you follow most of the suggestions for having valid HTML code your web pages will be more digestible for the search engines, as well as being much more cross-browser compliant. You should also do this after any significant edit of the web page – to ensure that it is still compliant.

The second step in website optimization is to work on the Meta tags and the title tag for each page in your site. These are in the header of your web page document and need to be tailored to attract users who type in one of a select group of keywords. If you need a tool to help generate these, use this meta tag generator tool here (http://www.spiderweblogic.com/HTML-Meta-Tag-Generator.aspx) that I built.

The title tag:

The title tag is, of the three, the most important for the major search engines. Don’t make this too long – normally no more than 6 words. But have your most important keywords here. Some SEO specialists advise that even the order of the text here is significant. They suggest that if you place your company name in the title, that it should be placed last so the other keywords are being considered with greater weight.

The meta-keywords tag:

This is now of lesser importance than before, due to abuse by webmasters to achieve high rankings. However, it is still important and is required by many of the smaller search engines. Make sure that you don’t repeat any keyword or keyword phrase more than three times. That would be considered Spam (bad SEO tactics) by the search engines. Remember, your visitors will see the title of the web page. Make it useful to them as well.

The meta-description tag:

This is of higher importance than the keywords tag. Several search engines use it when they show your listing. It needs to encourage your potential visitors to visit your website. Of course, having keywords in here is important. But keep the primary purpose in mind as you write it. Here too, you should make sure that you don’t repeat any keyword or keyword phrase more than three times.

Each page in your website needs its own tailored title, meta-description, and meta-keywords tag. These need to be focused on the keywords you are trying for. (These are the words or phrases you want to be found at when people are doing searches.) These shouldn’t normally be the same on every page. They should be customized to the content that is on that page. You should also keep your visitors in mind as you write them.

The third step is to work on your content – especially on your home page. Ideally you would have between 800 – 1200 words of text. It should have your most important keywords at the top, middle and the bottom of the text. If possible, use an “h1″ tag at the top for your title – and have your most important keyword embedded in it. Also, have some of your keywords in a sentence or phrase that is bolded. Keep it natural for your visitors to read. If it doesn’t look natural, you will loose any visitors you have attracted.

The fourth step in website optimization is to edit your links and your images to make full use of the “title” and “alt” attributes.

Text links can have a “title” attribute. The content is to more fully describe your link. When you put your mouse over the link, the content of the “title” attribute is displayed. I would encourage you to tailor the description so that it contains at least one of your keywords – but keep it accurate – that it really does describe the link. It must make sense to the common user.

Images HTML tags can have an “alt” attribute. It is used to describe an image when you put a mouse over it. It is also used for different devices for seeing impaired. Also, it is used when the user decides not to show images with the web site. They will see this text instead. (It is the “Alternate Text” for the image.) Try to incorporate some keywords here too – but keep with the spirit of being the “alternate text” for the image.

If you are using tables, you may even include a table “summary” attribute. The purpose of this attribute is to assist for those with disabilities to understand the contents and structure of a table. Keep all summary comments within that purpose – and add keywords only where appropriate. Note that these summary attributes may cause your web page validator to spit up an error – but this is newer item that is encouraged.

The fifth step is to have a good menu system or a site map. Search engines follow links to find the different pages in your site. If your navigation is one of those JavaScript drop-down menus or Flash menus, the search engines may not find all of your pages unless you have an alternative non-JavaScript link path that they can follow. If you use the fancy JavaScript links, you should have a hard link to a site map on every page. The site map should have a real non-JavaScript list of links that the search engines can follow to map out your whole site. As a standard policy I tend to avoid the JavaScript links in the menus.

Optional:
If you haven’t chosen a domain name yet, you may strongly consider having your top keyword phrase in the domain name, with the words separated by dashes. This is an excellent idea, but not always feasible. Many companies already have a domain name selected, or prefer to use their company name as the domain name. This is a business decision left up to the customer.

Things not to do:
Don’t create and market mirror sites though to accomplish this trick either. Sites that are identical in content, but have a different domain name are considered SPAM (bad/taboo) by the search engines. They don’t appreciate such tricks, and the ranking of both websites will suffer for it.

Also, don’t get too crazy with stuffing keywords where they don’t belong or by repeating keywords or by having keywords in hidden layers. Search engines don’t like that and will ban your site.

SEO Software to buy:
I have used SEO Studio to do website analysis during my optimization. This has been an invaluable tool for analyzing how saturated my keywords are in a particular web page. It is reasonably priced and I have been very satisfied with the performance. It is easy to see such things as keyword density relevance for the whole web page. It also is helpful in showing where the keywords are not (and can be). Y ou will learn a lot about website optimization just by using this tool!

NOW WHAT?
After all this “Search Engine Optimization” you need to do a human review your website – is it natural/useful/helpful for the human visitor? Remember, getting website traffic is only half the game. This site needs to quickly convert them into paying customers.

Once it is “Optimized”, then you need to let the search engines know that you exist. Only after it is ready should you tell them about it. But this is a subject for another article. Do a search of different article warehouse or SEO news sources. You will find a lot of information on this.

Website optimization news sources:
Since there are new quirks in the website optimization and website promotion that come out all the time – some that apply to all search engines, and some that apply to a particular one, it is wise to keep up to date. I strongly encourage you to join a couple of relevant mailing lists!

I really like the news sources from Entireweb.com. If you submit a site through them, I would encourage you to accept their free newsletters. They have great content. http://www.entireweb.com/submit_site/

Another place to get really great articles on website optimization or promotion is http://www.SiteProNews.com They also allow you to subscribe to their articles. Do this!

If you are serious about keeping up with your website positioning, keep up with the news. You will find these resources invaluable!

Robert Fuess is a veteran website designer who specializes in making dynamic search engine optimized websites.
http://www.SpiderwebLogic.com | http://www.SchoolAndTeacher.com

Sure, the content has to be worthwhile; it has to be helpful, informative, and not just a sales spiel. And there’s no denying that a well written article can be very compelling. But if your headline doesn’t cut it, the article won’t stand a chance. The best article in the world will never see the light of day without an effective headline.

Now, more than ever, article submissions need a good headline. But it’s not just the reader you have to worry about. In fact, the reader is secondary! When it comes to reprint article headlines, your main focus should be the publisher.

You may think the requirements of a good headline haven’t changed over the years, but they have. Unlike headlines for traditional newspapers, magazines, etc., which target only the reader, online article submission headlines target first the publisher, then the reader.

So how do you write a headline for an online publisher?

Here’s a few tips…

1) State your domain

No matter what your business, you can be sure that potential publishers of your article are inundated with information every day. Imagine hypothetical ‘Publisher Pete’. He’s the webmaster of a high PR site. He receives hundreds of article submissions every day. Additionally, he farms article submission sites (aka ‘article banks’, ‘article submit sites’, ‘free-reprint sites’) for articles on a regular basis. Because so many of the article submissions he sees are spam or unrelated, Publisher Pete is quick to dismiss anything that isn’t obviously – and immediately – relevant to his website. So make sure your headline signals the general subject area of the article submission, not just the exact topic.

2) State your argument

Every website has an agenda. Whether it’s to sell, persuade, or inform, there’s always an angle. When our friend Publisher Pete looks for free reprint content for his website, he wants something that complements his agenda. If he’s selling chemical garden fertilizers, he doesn’t want an article about the evils of chemical fertilizer. Nor does he want an article espousing the virtues of organic fertilizer. He wants an article promoting the value of chemical garden fertilizer. If that’s what your article is about, make sure the headline lets him know.

3) Don’t make empty promises

Sensationalized headlines may work in traditional media, but they’re not so effective in online article submissions. Few things frustrate an online publisher more than being lured in by a promising headline which turns out to be nothing more than hot air. For publishers who take the time to carefully filter content before publishing, empty headlines are nothing more than time-wasters. For publishers who are a little less meticulous, empty headlines result in a site which is characterized by disjointed, contradictory, low-quality content. Either way, the publisher isn’t impressed, so make sure the headline of your article is relevant to (and validated by) the body of your article.

4) Put yourself in the publisher’s shoes

Always think about ways to make the publisher’s job easier. It’s as simple as that. Brainstorm 5, 10, 20 headlines, then put yourself in the publisher’s position and ask which one you’d choose. That’s the best headline for your article submission.

5) Think about your publisher’s readers

Publishers want articles that readers will open. But remember, your publisher’s website may cater to an entirely different type of reader to your website. Whenever you find yourself thinking about your secondary audience (the reader), make sure you’re thinking about the publisher’s readers – not your own. That settled, you can go on to focus on regular audience-headline considerations such as making the headline attention-getting, targeted, and benefit driven.

Conclusion

With the emergence of article submission as a great way to generate a high search engine ranking, and the associated proliferation of article submission spam, the right headline is more important than ever. The important thing to remember is that you’re faced with a gatekeeper, and you need to address their needs first.

By following all the publisher-focused tips above, you’ll not only see your article published many more times, you’ll also see it published on more relevant websites. This will help both your ranking (because links from relevant sites are always the best) and your click-thru traffic (because the audience will be more relevant).

Happy headlining!
* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter, advertising copywriter, and Article Submission Specialist. He is a director of article submission alternative, PublishHub, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com or http://www.publishhub.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to purchase his e-book, SEO Secrets.

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

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

The answer is: Yes, you can! The basics of search engine optimisation in applied web marketing are simple. It’s all to do with the keyword content of your text copy, and can be summarized in seven points.

1. Register a good domain name which reflects what your site is about. Even if you are an established business, don’t register www.FredJones.com if you make widgets. Rather, you want to register something like www.BestWidgets.com because that would inspire confidence in people looking for quality widgets who would not necessarily have heard of Fred Jones the widget-maker.

2. Name your page URLs based on reasons similar to the above for your web promotion, except now you can be more specific. Search engines like to know what your page is about. Name a page after a product (BigYellowWidgets.htm) or a service or action (Buy-Widgets-by-Post.htm) on one of the sales pages.

3. The text in the title tag is crucial in letting search engines know what each page is about. Put your important keywords in your title tags, using both the singular and plural versions (people will search for both) and make these tags different and specific for each page. For example, “Widgets and After Sales Widget Services”. Whatever you do, don’t call the home page “Index”, but treat it almost as a mini-description.

4. The other tags (at the top of the html page) between the two “HEAD” tags are not as important as the title tag, but the description tag is still used by some search engines in displaying what you would like web users to see when they scroll down a page of search results. Some search engines don’t use the description tag at all; others, like Google, sometimes use part of it together with part of the main body text surrounding prominent keywords on your page. So you may as well treat the description tag seriously; make it brief (about 25 to 30 words) and as comprehensive as possible in the short space allowed. Make sure you have your popular keywords included within your description tag. The ALT tag is used for a very short description of an image or graphic file, and is what is displayed if you allow your mouse pointer to hover above a graphic. These days it is not considered important for search engines. The COMMENT tag is never displayed on the body page, and is used by coders and designers as an instruction or reminder to themselves about what that section of html coding should be doing; in the past, some webmasters in their quest for website promotion and search engine ranking used to stuff keywords in the comments tags, but now it is generally acknowledged that the main search engines pay little or no attention to these.

5. Keyword density. Each search engine has its own preference as to how many times a keyword phrase appears on the page in order to signify the relevance of that keyword phrase (in other words, in order to help the search engine understand what the page is about). Around 5 to 8 per cent is a rough guide as to the optimal level. Don’t overdo it, otherwise it will be seen as spam or keyword-stuffing. Also use your keywords in the headings tags H1 and H2. There is an H3 tag as well, but it is doubtful whether search engines bother with that, as it is perceived as less prominent on the page, therefore less relevant to what the page is about.

6. Don’t forget good linking in your website marketing. Search engines will judge the importance of your web pages to some extent on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites. Ask other webmasters with sites on similar themes to yours for a link, in exchange for a link back. These sites should not be in competition with yours, but should be similarly themed. You may occasionally be asked by other webmasters if they can link to your site. If this is so then have a look at their site; make sure that their site is relevant, that it has at least some Page Rank, and that it just “feels” good, and has no nasty surprises like redirects or unexpected popups. You don’t want to be associated with a “bad neighborhood”!

7. Make sure that important keywords are included in the anchor text within inbound links from other sites. This is crucial to search engines when they try to figure out the relevance and importance of your pages. The inbound link from the other site should take the form of something like this (I’m using normal brackets instead of angle brackets so as not to use compromising html): (A xhref=”http://www.Yoursite.com” mce_href=”http://www.Yoursite.com”) your important keywords included here(/A). You should definitely avoid something like (A xhref=”http://www.Yoursite.com” mce_href=”http://www.Yoursite.com”) click here(/A), which tells search engines nothing except that your site is about “click here”. Be careful!

Gordon Goodfellow is an Internet marketing consultant and practitioner. He lives and Works in London, UK, and has helped companies in many industry sectors with clients worldwide. To get your free search engine optimization course visit www.Applied-Web-Marketing.com , which is an introductory resource on applied web marketing for small businesses.

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

Here’s how to use the following traffic strategies to get your web pages the highest possible search engine ranking and a flood of new visitors.

Keep this one small thing in mind and you’ll be light-years ahead of the others when it comes to understanding Search Engine Optimization…

For full details go here

http://www.eatingmedialunch.net/TH/ArticalTraffic/Artical.htm

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

Very often, the people who first recognize the potential benefits of professional SEO are not the key decision makers. They are the people on the front lines of the organization – the ones who deal with prospects and customers every day. However, proposing professional SEO as a new marketing initiative to the people higher in the chain of command can be a frustrating process – very often leading to disenchantment and a general sense that the marketing decision maker doesn’t “get it”. Usually, however, the approach was more flawed than the decision maker.

Reality

Before getting into some ideas for approaching your marketing decision maker, it should be mentioned that if your company does not have a history of trying anything new, you may be better off spending your energies elsewhere. Professional SEO as an addition to your marketing mix can be a hard sell to a company that is still relying on computers that were cutting edge during the Reagan administration, no matter how convincing the argument. If your experience with your company tells you that your efforts will be in vain before you begin, you obviously don’t want to waste your time.

Speak on Their Terms

As previously mentioned, your motivation for suggesting professional SEO may not necessarily inspire your marketing decision maker to immediately add it to your company’s marketing mix. What will? Most marketing execs have a hot button issue, and they are rarely shy about sharing it. Is he or she concerned with increasing overall revenue? Is he or she always discussing cutting marketing costs? Does he or she talk about reducing the cost per lead? Does he or she always espouse the value of improving your brand recognition? For each of these scenarios (and virtually any other), there are specific studies on SEO that will support your recommendation. If you approach your marketing decision maker without keeping the issues most important to him or her in mind, you will diminish your chances for success.

Use the Competition

While different marketing decision makers can have different hot button issues, few things seem to motivate companies as much as the action (or sometimes the inaction) of the competition. With professional SEO, there are two potential scenarios – either some of your competitors have added it to the marketing mix effectively, or none of them have. If they have, it is fairly easy to demonstrate this fact by taking your marketing manager through a few keyphrase searches on any major search engine and showing him or her that your hated enemy figures prominently in the results while your company does not. This, of course, makes a compelling argument. On the other hand, if your known competitors have clearly not embraced the channel, it is just as easy to show a few searches on keyphrases demonstrating that you can have (for now) a competitive advantage. Such keyphrase searches can also turn up additional competitors – lean, forward-thinking companies that are embracing new marketing tactics. This eye-opening experience can also encourage a decision maker to act.

Use Your Potential Vendors

Talk to some established professional SEO firms before approaching your company with the suggestion that they consider adding SEO to the marketing mix. A good SEO firm has encountered all of the objections that you are likely to face and should be able to help you with your approach by compiling relevant stats and offering compelling case studies. Your time is valuable, and you needn’t spend it reinventing the wheel when you can get professional assistance for free. If a firm is unwilling, or unable, to help you to present to your marketing decision maker in a manner that will speak directly to them, perhaps you should look elsewhere. An inexperienced SEO firm might not be able to help you in this specific manner, and an overburdened firm will likely be unwilling to spend the extra time to help you customize your approach. The good news is that asking for this type of assistance can not only help you to sell to your company, it can also help you in the early stages of the all-important vendor selection process.

Offer a Plan

Piquing interest from the decision maker is only the first step. You should be prepared to offer a clear project description, including the price ranges of your proposed professional SEO vendors, how long it will take to see results, and, most importantly, how success will be measured. This is another area where your potential vendors should be more than willing to help – good firms will collect extensive data at the outset to measure success, and will be able to clearly define what “success” will look like.

As many companies are discovering, professional SEO is an incredibly powerful and cost-effective addition to the existing marketing mix. It is a sure bet, however, that the marketing decision makers of many of the companies currently embracing professional SEO did not come up with the idea independently. Some underpaid visionary in their organizations brought it to their attention first!

About the Author

Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing (www.mediumblue.com). He has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, SEO Today, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue, a search engine marketing company, serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DuPont, and Georgia-Pacific. To receive internet marketing articles and search engine news in your email box each month, register for Medium Blue’s newsletter, Out of the Blue.

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

edit: seems somewhat of a sales type article, but the bullet points on what you need to learn is good advice – SEO advice

You will miss out on a goldmine of potential buyers if you do not…
You need an all-in-one kit that:

1. Allows you to be in total control of operations
2. Countermands the ever-changing search engine vagaries
3. Outstrips all other forms of web promotion
4. Constitutes the ultimate weapon in viral marketing
5. Exerts infinite influence on article exposure
6. Produces an ever-increasing stream of links
7. Builds lists of pre-qualified prospects
8. Works for any niche opportunity
9. Taps into a goldmine of browsing buyers
10. Attracts incremental sales
11. Grows your business at zero cost
12. Has the power to make you famous online

But you need more than points 1-12…
You need to learn:

• How to research the topic before you write your article
• How to use keywords and phrases to stimulate interest
• How to use magnetic verbs to trigger impulse buying
• How to command the reader’s subconscious
• How to use subheads to catch quick readers
• How to create mental movies in the prospect’s mind
• How to educate, inform, and motivate the reader
• How to address the WIIFM questions on everyone’s lips
• How to think like the people you want to influence
• Why simple words and short sentences work best
• How to develop the power of speaking with authority
• How to avoid over-egging the clichés
• How to paint word pictures that drive visitors in hoards to your website
• How to craft articles that zing like bullets shot from a bell

But even all that isn’t enough…

You also need to learn:

• How to write editorials; not ad copy
• Why you must be totally truthful in your claims
• How to start with an eye-grabbing headline
• How to fire your biggest gun in the first sentence
• Why you must fire the next biggest in the next 2 sentences
• How to roll out the remaining text on in crisp chunky paragraphs
• How to break it up with occasional subheads
• How to keep your dialogue conversational
• Why you must restrict the word count to acceptable limits
• Why your resource box is the catalyst to successful article distribution
• How to choose your core keywords
• How to prepare the ‘description’ copy
• How to become accepted as an expert article author

And when you’ve learned all this you will discover that…

1. Articles do outstrip all other forms of web promotion
2. Articles do constitute the ultimate weapon in viral marketing
3. Articles do exercise an infinite influence in product exposure
4. Articles do create an ever-growing stream of links back to your website
5. Articles do continue to work irrespective of the search engines
6. Articles do build lists of pre-qualified prospects
7. Articles work for any niche opportunity
8. Articles do tap into a goldmine of browsing buyers
9. Articles do attract incremental sales
10. Articles do grow business at zero-cost
11. Articles do have the power to make you famous online

If you would like to learn even more about the amazing power of articles, click on the link in the resource box below.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That’s what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage’s title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords – the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar, and select “source.” This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name=”keywords” content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

If you type in “free link popularity check” in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren’t many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially,this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can’t boost your rankings yourself. Don’t ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.

Karen Walker specializes in helping individuals, entrepreneurs, network marketers, and independent professionals generate substantial incomes with their own Work at Home or Home Based Business on the Internet. Visit her informational web sites: Cash Flow Quest | Work At Home Directory

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.