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!

But easy does not always mean simple.

Google makes it easy to sign up, generate an ad and put it on your site, however, it’s not always so simple designing your site for interest, finding high paying keywords and placing your ads so that they attract maximum clicks.

Here are a few surefire tips that will help draw interest to your site and your ads while helping you get the clicks that will make you money.

1. Build content rich sites

Content rich sites do several things for you. They keep viewers on your site because you are providing information of interest. It’s also important to keep the information refreshed periodically with up-to-date and current content. This is not only useful for your viewers, the search engines like it as well.

Sites containing useful content will also help establish you as an expert in your field allowing viewers to respect your opinions and suggestions. But most importantly, good content will keep your viewers coming back to your site. They will bookmark your site more often and notify their friends a lot more.

2. Research and use higher paying keywords.

Develop site pages using topics that contain high paying keywords while keeping the keywords relevant to your topic.

The Overture website has a free ‘keywords bid tool’ that is excellent for showing you what advertisers are paying for keywords.

For example, using this tool I can see that the keyword ‘pet medication’ has a maximum bid of $1.51 while the keyword ‘pet name’ has a maximum bid of $.11. If I were looking for informational pages to add to my pet site, the clear choice here would be to develop a page about pet medications and optimize that page for the keyword ‘pet medication’.

3. Place your ads in the upper left hand quarter of your website.

Studies show that people almost always scan your site from the top left working down. Placing a vertical skyscraper ad in that section can help increase your click through rate from 2% to as much as 30% or higher.

4. Don’t use horizontal banners or ads.

Google recommends that you use vertical as opposed to horizontal ads. Web surfers see lots of horizontal banners and ads and they almost instantaneously avoid them.

According to Google, wider ad formats such as the large rectangle and inline rectangle also tend to perform quite well. This is probably due to the fact that they are more reader friendly allowing you to read more text at a glance without having to skip a line and return to the left margin every few words.

My experience is that positioning these ads just before or just after your main content can increase your clickthrough rate substantially.

5. Avoid the Dead Zones

Google research has shown that there are zones within your site that won’t generate clicks. These areas are the top right of your site, the bottom right-hand corner and the very bottom. Ads in these areas are often ignored. Keep your ads to the upper left and center or just above or below your primary content.

6. Coordinate the ad colors to match your site colors.

Google adsense offers an array of colors that you can use to display your ads. Choose the two main colors of your site and use those colors for your ad. Keep the URL link of the ad in blue since this is the link color that most viewers are used to. The idea is to blend your ads with your site content so as to invite more clicks.

7. Follow the adsense program policies to the letter.

Google keeps a close eye on how their ads are displayed and they will cancel you immediately if you break the rules. Google adsense is an excellent way to bring in some extra revenue so don’t risk losing a good thing.

Let’s say you have a website, and no matter what you do, you just cannot seem to get high search engine rankings. You have performed all of the proper SEO techniques, yet you hardly find your website in a search engine even just by typing in the URL, leave alone keywords. Have you ever stopped to think that your host may have some involvement in it? Well, it is quite possible that your host has you on a server that has had its IP address banned or Blacklisted.

When a hosting company is careless enough to allow its clients to use unethical tactics at search engine optimization, some search engines will ban, block, or blacklist that IP address. One of the most popular reasons that this may happen is the use of certain spam tactics. This may not always be clients fault. Some websites do get attacked by hackers that use that sites email forms for spam However, regardless of whether the hosting client was to blame, or an attacker, the IP is still banned and it may be rough road to recovery.

There are things that can be done to prevent such occurrences. Things like prohibiting some types of email forms, and setting limits on emails that are sent. Things like educating clients on proper techniques, or by providing education for them are good ways to help clients. A good hosting company can stay in touch with its clients through newsletters, and a good support system.

The responsibility lies on the hosting company, and the client. It is up to the hosting company to provide the means and standards, and it is up to the client to abide by them. Finding a good hosting company is a difficult task these days. There are many out there, but knowing which ones will serve you the best is the challenge. Before purchasing from a hosting company, try checking out their support forums. You can learn a lot from their client’s forum posts, as well as see how well the company responds to support requests. If the clients seem to be unhappy, or if there are many complaints, it might be an indication that you should look elsewhere.

Your website is probably intended to be a source of revenue, or just a place for fun and entertainment. In either case, wouldn’t it be nice if people could find it? Don’t hurt your chances of hitting it big in the search engines even before you start. Find a good hosting company and you will at least have a fighting chance.

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.

If you want your site listed on search engines then make sure that you have correct HTML code. Many search engines cannot properly catalog or index a site that has HTML errors. This can greatly reduce the amount of traffic your web site receives from search engines.

The lowest form of “browser” out there is the search engine. The search engine is about the equivalent of a version 2 browser. It can’t read flash, DHTML, JavaScript, dynamic pages, – even having trouble at times with frames. Search engines may have difficulty crawling, indexing, and extracting the content of your site if you have broken HTML.

Search engines score a page by looking for relevant terms in key HTML components in specific places within a document. These key components are titles, descriptions, visible text, alt image tags etc. If they don’t find them because of typos or other mistakes, the spiders may leave without reading the content of the page.

Poor document structure like a META tag placed in the BODY section of the page instead of the HEAD section – can cause the spider to ignore the tag and cost you a good ranking.

What if you were tired and under deadline to get a new page up, (Not at my job!) you might type TILTE instead of TITLE for your TITLE tag. TITLE tags are very important to search engines. If you made this one little error the search engine will ignore all of the content of the title tag.

If you create the page properly and have content that contains your keywords it “should” get read and picked up by the search engines. (off page factors like inbound links excluded) However if you have a simple error like an open tag

Internet Explorer is very forgiving of mistakes in code. By building only for IE you are creating for the most error forgiving browser ever. Thinking that a search engine will "browse" your site like Internet Explorer 6 is a dream. If the site won't display right in Netscape, Firefox, Opera or an old version of IE chances are good the search engines can't read it either.

So next time you get frustrated with having to design for Netscape, Firefox, Opera and IE, just bust out your favorite HTML editor and settle in for a long night of code checking.

Your marketing department will thank you!

Written by Terry Mickelson, President of PageViews, Inc. Search Engine Marketing and Optimization Company based in metro Phoenix. For a free report to see where your site ranks in the search engines go to http://www.pageviews.com/freeanalysis.html PageViews can be reached at 480-556-9752 or terrymickelson@pageviews.com

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

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

A page with too much text is bad for the ranking of your website, I would of thought this would have been good for the search engine spider, this must be good spider food. If you think about it more then you can see why this is bad, if you have one long page of text then will a visitor really read all that text.

So this brings me to why links count yes the power of links, search engines love them, the spider will look all over the page and then go to your links and do the same all over again. This will also get more of your pages listed plus give you more points for your ranking. So if you have a page of text why can’t you break it down into pages, the art is how to guide your visitor through the site.

The other thing you want to remember is the link title and the page name it links too, this gives you a lot of brownie points but why? Well first the page it links too is relevant to the title and the page title is relevant to the page content, so this is good for the search engines plus its more spider food.

So to some up, Link name and page title must be relevant to each other and the page title must be relevant to the content. More pages will get indexed by the search engines so search engine saturation is good. Your pages will be easier to read and follow.

Warning: You must not let your links lead to dead pages the 404 errors or thing like this, as this will have the opposite response. If you are linking to other websites you will need to keep a close eye on them, use a program or a web service to monitor this for you. I hope this is of help to you and wish you well

Brian Hart

www.gettothetop.info
www.powerwebtalk.com
www.espana-por-favor.com
Brian Hart also known as Lazerbri has been working on the net for over 15 years, he is a Programmer in HTML, PHP and also flash.

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

To create a well written article takes time and effort. We have to get everything right: it has to be of relevance to the reader in that subject field; it has to be well researched; all spelling, punctuation and grammar must be correction; it has to be a genuine contribution to that particular area of specialization, and so interesting that the editor will jump at the chance of publishing it. And, oh yes, all the right keywords have to be there, of the right density and in the correct proportions.

The well-crafted article must satisfy both the reader and the bot; both the aesthetics of the eye and the strictures of the code. So those of us who try and be at least a little bit serious about things know that a second draft is always necessary, and then a third. Then it’s best to sleep on it. Even after that, we know that we have to forget about it for a few days until we are able to come back to it again with a freshly critical mind. You prune it and nurture it. You take off the sharp edges and you tighten it up. If necessary you know when you have to tear it up and start over again.

Only after we have got it absolutely right – and then after spending many hours submitting to directories, editors of ezines, article announcement sites and individual webmasters – are we rewarded, perhaps, with those hard-won non-reciprocal inbound live hyperlinks.

But wait. There seems to be a problem. It appears that an increasing number of people are quite happy to simply copy and paste our work onto their own sites without a link back. Or they don’t bother to check if the link is ‘live’. That would be bad enough. But there are other people who print our articles and then don’t even bother to name the person who wrote it.

But there’s far worse: those people who print our article and then announce to the world that they wrote it themselves! Some of those even have the temerity to add the copyright sign next to their name!

I may be being a bit too harsh. Perhaps these people don’t realize that they’re doing anything wrong. After all, the Internet was originally conceived as ownerless and based upon free and open source information. And I can think of nothing more Public Domain, in fact or in spirit, than the World Wide Web.

Yet just consider what it is these people are doing. They are stealing other peoples’ work and passing it off as their own. They are effectively also stealing the web traffic that goes with it, the traffic that our labours should be rewarding our websites with, and diverting it to their own. This is blatant plagiarism. It just should not happen. Theft is theft, in whatever medium.

I wrote an article a few months ago on Internet marketing for small businesses. A search for the title of that article on Google now returns 10,800 pages, so at least the title itself has been reproduced that number of times and in that number of different places. A search for a chunk of text from the middle of the article returns 536 pages, which suggests that the article text has been published in its entirety no fewer than 536 times. Great! So now I have 536 inbound links from that one article! Wrong.

I looked at individual entries of the article and in a surprising number of cases there were no backlinks at all. Also surprising – and somewhat sickening – was the number of individuals who wantonly attached their own names to my work.

I recently posted the same article to a fresh source of publishers. I was astonished at the response of one editor of a well-known directory who had rejected the article on the grounds that it was not mine! She had seen the same piece on many other websites under different names, she said, and it was not her policy to publish work that had been produced using “cookie cutter” techniques. I wrote back saying that it really was my own work, citing the URL of SitePro News where it originally aired as that day’s headline feature. She apologized and was even good enough to supply me with a list of names of people and sites who had published it as their own. I’m so tempted to publish their names here (perhaps I will on my blog; so watch out!) but have decided that discretion should rule. For the moment, at least.

But I think there is a clear message here. The fashion for article writing and publishing for content and backlinks is going through the roof at the moment. It’s like a mini Internet boom all of its own. And like any other boom it has attracted its own inevitable pack of rat-racers, chancers, charlatans and cheats; shysters who go for the shortcuts every time, while remaining quite happy for other people to do their work for them.

For the record, the convention is this: distribute and publish the article freely by all means. But it must be published in its entirety and unedited, and MUST include the resource box with a live hyperlink back to the author’s site (or wherever the author wants, for that matter).

Hey, now even my lawyer understands!

Next time I will publish their names gleefully, and be damned.

Gordon Goodfellow is an Internet marketing practitioner who lives and works in London, UK. He finds his efforts taken in spreading the word have been hugely reduced by the use of this helpful article publishing tool.

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

Actually, the on-page optimization is easy. Just place your search terms in all the right places. Of course, it is not quite that simple

For instance, German nouns like to merge into incredible conglomerates. An example of where I ran into this was at this Netzwerk überwachung website. Two major search terms were Netzwerküberwachung and Netzwerk überwachung. The first, conglomerate word is actually correct, but people search in funny ways, and the search engines don’t generally recognize partial words. In English, a reference to “website monitoring service” would count as a reference for the search term “website monitoring”. But the German equivalent, Überwachungsservice für Webseiten, would read literally in English as “monitoringservice for websites”.

In other words, you might have to make the translator dance some fancy language steps to deliver a readable message that does not interfere with your search terms. Multilingual SEO also brings the question of accents. Use them. One well-respected SEO questioned the use of accents when it turned out that more people searched for Montreal than Montréal. Don’t you believe it for a second. There simply were more English people searching without the accent, so leave the accents off your English site but keep them on your French, German, Italian or other sites.

There is one exception to the accents rule: if your market is very, um, shall we say “downscale”. I think you know what I mean. There is a certain market in English that refuses to capitalize words or use punctuation. The equivalent market in German is unlikely to use an umlaut– you might have to optimize both with and without the accent.

What about file names. Many companies keep the same filenames when they create a translated site. So http://www.rgb.com/en/Products/AudioVisual.asp becomes http://www.rgb.com/es/Products/AudioVisual.asp , a mouthful in any language, but of no SEO help in the Spanish version. On the other hand, keeping the same file name helps the webmaster keep track of what all these otherwise “unintelligible” filenames are all about, without resorting to a wall covered in file name translation tables. This is not a simple decision to make.

One question that often comes up is where to house the translated site on a separate site, in a sub-domain or in a directory on the English site. The general consensus is that it is preferable to give it its own domain with the appropriate country extension…which is easy for German or Italian, but which country do you choose for Spanish? Spain? Mexico? Argentina? The USA? And have you ever tried to apply for a .fr domain? Second best is a sub-domain, which at least carries a semblance of being a separate site and allows some directories to consider it a home page for listing purposes (and you want those directory links).

Which brings me to my final point. Don’t forget to build the links that are so important in SEO. Good quality links. Relevant links, both in terms of topics and in terms of the search terms in the language of the site. There are fewer avenues to build links in French or Dutch than in English. Fortunately, you will need fewer links to get good French or Dutch search engine rankings.

Thinking about expanding your market into Europe, Latin America or the rest of Canada? Get your site translated and get it optimized for the multilingual search engine listings

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Leonhardt is a multilingual seo marketing consultant who offers French SEO marketing services. Pick up a copy of his SEO tips ebook.

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

Surprisingly, SEO in Spanish, French, English, German…or any Roman alphabet language is not that different. In this article, we will be dealing only with Roman alphabet languages. The main thing is to be able to move around in the language…and if you are not fluent, make sure a translator cleans up any text edits without undoing the changes key to your multilingual SEO efforts.

Let’s assume the original site is in English, the translation into French, for example, is already complete and you have a list of English search terms (keywords). The first step is to identify equivalent French search terms. This might not give you the same number of search terms. For instance, if you start with the 10 search terms around the word “socks” (buy socks, buy socks online, glow-in-the-dark socks, etc.), you will most likely end up with twice as many search terms in French, as there are two common words for socks in French (“bas” and “chaussettes”). This might mean that you need to create additional landing pages for French search engine surfers.

Note: be wary of using official translations for keyword research. Your translator probably used the very best vocabulary and grammar possible, including words and conjugations that your target market might never even have heard of, let alone be searching for.

You can get ideas through free translation services – which absolutely butcher the language, so don’t use them for translation, please! – that can give you some quick ideas to work with. Two such services I use for just such a purpose are FreeTranslation.com and FreeTranslation.Paralink.com.

The next step, of course, is to find out which of the search terms are worth pursuing. Of course, you could try all of them, since it will take almost no effort to get top rankings for little searched French or Spanish terms. But you might also miss out on some related terms that are well-searched. Two pay-per-click search engines that offer search suggestion tools in a variety of languages are Overture and Miva (formerly Espotting).

The third step is to group the search terms together into natural groupings and assign each group to a page on the website, just as one would do in English, so that the terms that complement each other are grouped onto the same web page.

You see, it’s really not that different from English, but you do have to be able to move through the other language. Please note: fluency is not required, but being able to understand what you read and come up with related search terms is required.

In part 2, we will look at the on-page optimization.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Leonhardt is a multilingual web site SEO consultant who offers French SEO marketing services. Pick up a copy of his SEO strategies and tips ebook.

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

Well after these several years that I’ve been on the internet I too heard the call and have followed the many internet bandwagons that have rolled into e-town touting the next ‘latest and greatest’ snakeoil software to get one traffic that they won’t believe.

You know the cry… ‘The traffic explosion your favorite web guru gets – and it’ll only cost you $795 to attend this three-day conference to learn how to play with the big boys (and girls) online.’

Sound familiar? To most owning one or several websites it will.

But after being dragged around the reciprocal linking millstone over the last several months in a valiant attempt to obtain many reciprocal link exchanges and closely monitoring all completed link requests I can truthfully say that that job in itself is a bugger to track and stay on top of.

Why?

Because for the most part one has to rely on one common denominator in that equation… people. I finally realized that this tactic of getting traffic ‘for free’ and having it prove itself as viable was indeed true. Link-exchanges do work. But they ARE work too. But with me being the type of person who writes with my eyes closed (literally), I was told by a couple of e-friends that I should pursue ‘articles’ more vehemently. I didn’t know what they meant so what I did was find out about a couple of the bigger article directories on the Net and I submitted a couple of my writings to them. And then I promptly forgot about this process because it was extremely labor intensive.

And with me being a relatively lazy fellow at times I ‘moved on’ to other tasks that seemed more to my liking. And ease of use. But after getting relatively burned out with this link-exchange stuff and dogging real live people to honor link exchange requests after I had ‘nicely’ place an unexpected link to their site on my site, I was tired of this whole process

Yes, I know there are automated processes and software out there that will do this linking stuff for one, but again, I’ve also read how the SE’s are ‘onto’ these tactics and reciprocal links aren’t as effective as they used to be. But they are still effective, that’s why I still honor the odd link exchange request I get. I just don’t spend all my time doing this anymore. But getting back on track to the actual subject of this article…

Back a couple of months ago, I somehow received an email about a new software program that would do ‘article submissions’ almost automatically. But let me first digress somewhat and tell you what ‘article submitting’ is. Article submitting may sound kind of formal and only for ‘writers’, but it isn’t.

Essentially, anytime one writes something of extended length, even a longer webpage, they’ve written an ‘article’. Think about it. If you have a website that you’ve personally written, then you have written articles related to the subject of your website. So, if your website is all about the best way to burp babies, then you have a whole bunch of ‘articles’ that you’ve written about parenting, specifically, burping babies. What you can then do is submit these articles throughout the WWW and get yourself known as a baby burping expert.

But even more importantly, you can take each of the webpages you’ve written on your website and turn it into an ‘article’ – add a link BACK to your site in the footer of the article – and voila! you have written an article and ALSO obtained a link back to your site whenever someone else uses that article. And all this without having to hassle with e-chasing that non-compliant link partner to honor their link exchange with you.

Sound cool? It is.

Now, like everything else, there is a downside to all this article writing. It takes time to do. First you have to have written YOUR OWN articles/webpages. And then you have to personally submit them to any of several hundred article directories floating around in cyberspace. And of course there is the whole idea of you having the motivation to do this submission stuff too, so let me share a little bit of motivating statistics with you.

Remember how I mentioned earlier about having piddled with submitting a couple of stories/webpages I had written to several of the major article directories? Well, that was about 14 months ago. And remember how I told you that I did this and then promptly forgot about all this article submission stuff? Well, over those 14 months since I did this, which by the way only took about one hour to do, I now have about 300 STATIC, incoming links to my site from those two articles being posted around the Internet. Yes, 300 incoming, NOT reciprocal, links.

And so what I did was after I received that email from someone touting this article submission software was to do some research on this whole article submission automation software process. What I came out of this research with was that as of now there are two main article submission software programs that allow one to automate most of the process of doing this sometimes laborious task. And since it is so repetitive and sometimes painstaking to do manual article submissions I thought that this would be one way to get me back into this process that I think is well suited for the way I like to promote my business online. With words, that is.

After much mental deliberation, and financial detailing, I opted to go for an article submission software that was released during the summer of 2005. Besides it being almost one-third the price of the other main player in this article submittal software e-competition going on, it also appeared to have a lot going for it with a money-back guarantee and a manual and good developer-support. So I bought it several weeks ago and have been using it everyday to promote several of my websites by submitting ‘articles’ I’ve written to the several hundred article directories included in the automatic submissions this software does for the user.

And to say the least, the results, so far, are extremely impressive.

One little statistic. Remember those two articles I submitted 14 months ago and obtained over 300 incoming links from doing so? Well, I’ve used this software to continue submitting them to other article directories included in the software program. And now that 300 incoming links number now numbers almost 700. Yes, 700 incoming links from just those two articles. An increase of approximately 400 incoming links, in just five weeks. To me, those are some GOOD results. Especially without having to chase other humans to reciprocal link with me, building link webpages, tracking linking emails, checking links, buying tracking software, and all that stuff that goes along with the reciprocal linking process.

So, if you’re tired of buying links and chasing other website owners for reciprocal link exchanges, do consider using content you’ve written as a way to get links, and eventually traffic, into your site.

Written by Andre Best
President, Ultimate Results, Inc.
http://www.ArticlesandAuthors.com – THE Premier Site for Articles AND Authors

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

Are you using this internet marketing and advertising strategy? You may be missing the opportunity of extra profits on the internet marketing table by not utilizing this effective strategy. This is one of the many reasons writing original quality content articles is now the latest marketing buzz online today. The two basics that you can combine to really power a successful website. Content and Website Back Links.

You already know that right?

You’ve heard that Content Is King right? Are you writing articles and submitting them using such services as SubmitYourArticle and Article Marketer? Many internet marketing pro’s have been writing articles for many years. They already know the value of original quality content and using the right keywords will drive targeted traffic to their websites from the search engines and article directories.

So why don’t all internet marketing business owners write and submit articles for their internet marketing strategy today? The simple answer is, that it takes time to write articles, submit them and get targeted traffic to your websites. Another reason, is that writing articles can remind us of school research papers, essays and reports that can be a deep negative anchor in the subconscious mind for many of us.

Did you really enjoy writing when you were in school? If your answer is yes, you have an advantage because about 95% of internet business owners don’t use this effective marketing strategy. Imagine how much opportunity there is for you because of this simple fact. Only about 5% of all marketers are taking advantage of this internet marketing strategy and internet advertising. Many marketers are using this strategy to make money online on the front and backend writing and submitting articles.

Why do you think many marketing sites want fresh, quality, original keyword rich content articles? The website owner can have an article with keywords that relate to their website content. This helps their websites page rank when indexed by the search engines. Think about this for a moment. Imagine taking advantage of a work at home opportunity, marketing from both sides of the sales coin with 3 simple steps.

3 Easy Steps For Writing Original Content With Keywords

1.) You write quality original content, keyword/phrase rich articles, with links to your website in the resource box.

2.) You build a website or web page with targeted keyword/phrase rich original content for the targeted traffic that originates from your articles.

3.) You have your site or sites targeted from your keyword/phrase original content articles when visitors looking for more information arrive.

A Win-Win Situation For Everyone Involved. The person looking for quality content and information. The person writing the original content articles. The person with the quality original content website. Internet marketing business owners who incorporate keywords/phrases with writing articles, can make money online if done properly with this internet marketing strategy.

An Overview Of Keyword/Phrase Research And Writing Articles.

There are 3 keys to internet marketing success writing articles and using keywords and phrases.

1.) Keyword Research. Find popular subjects and keywords/phrases, using a keyword selector and suggestion tool by Overture and 7Search.

2.) Writing Articles. Write original content with keywords from your research.

3.) Quality Content Site. Build a quality content site incorporated with the target subject and keywords/phrases of your articles and website.

Writing and submitting original articles and using keywords for your internet marketing strategy can be a very effective way to build profits over the long term.

For building long term success, there’s very little you can do that will give you near the same results online today for long term business growth. Writing and submitting articles provides an effective way to drive targeted traffic to your sites for many years to come.

Dean Shainin owns the work at home directory website located at: http://www.EndlessIncomeForLife.com – Come by and visit us today!

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

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