Search Engine Optimization nowadays has a lot to do with building inbound links to your website. Building inbound links is a cumbersome tasks and webmasters have always been looking for shortcuts to do this. Webmasters buy links (as advertising as an example) or contact other webmasters to exchange links with them. The need for inbound links has created a new business opportunity in the search engine optimization industry. The outsourcing of link building emerged from the fact that many inbound links mean a high search engine ranking and/or a high Google PageRank.

There are many different ways of building inbound links. Outsourcing this tasks can save the webmaster a lot of time but it comes with a price tag. Businesses offering to take over the link building process often maintain and operate a large network of domains and websites and just add 'your' link to their sites. These sites are often referred to as link farms.

Others buy links on 3rd party websites for you. They often have build up a portfolio of websites/webmasters they work with. The quality of these links is often questionable and a long-term benefit does not exist. It either continues to cost the webmaster money to keep the links alive or his website might get punished by Google and other search engines if the linking websites are recognized as part of commercial search engine spamming. Punished means that either the link to a site does not have any value at all or depending on the situation the site linked to gets removed from the search engine index (worse case scenario) if other factors are involved that lead to the conclusion that search engine spamming is going on.

Outsourcing of link building also takes away the control of who is linking to a website from the webmaster. The webmaster usually just pays for X number of links but there is no option to have industry related websites link to his site (= increased value of a link). It is also difficult to verify how many links to a website have really been established from the service provider. Another difficulty is to verify how long the established links are staying in place. The danger of being over-charged is very high.

Since link building has become a profitable business opportunity search engines are aware of what is going on and are putting countermeasures in place. These are not things visible to the webmaster or explained on the search engines website. These are factors that are worked into the algorithm. Search engines use the human control factor more and more often to increase the value of the search index. Chances are that if a webmaster uses an outsourced link building strategy that at one point the campaign value goes south (turns sour).

Inbound link building should be an organic process that shows a slowly increasing number of links pointing to a certain website. Getting a high number of inbound links within a very short period will raise a warning flag at search engines. Honest webmasters will stay away from these tactics to avoid putting the success of a website at risk when there are better ways of building inbound links.

About the Author

Christoph Puetz is a successful entrepreneur and international book author. Examples of his search engine optimization work can be found at Small Business Blog, Highlands Ranch, Colorado and at Vitamin C.

The article can be published by anyone as long as the resource box (About the Author) is posted on the website including the links. These links must be clickable.

Meta tags are an absolute must from a search engine optimisation perspective, there are many mistakes that can be made by not including these or even trying to 'spam' the SE's using them so heres a quick summary of the three main ones:

Meta Page Title Tag

The title tag is supported by all search engines and should be considered as the most important element in your optimisation process. Why is this you may ask? Well the page title is the first thing search engine spiders and human visitors will see. Your title appears at the top of the page in the browser and the title also becomes the clickable link in the search engine listings and should therefore be concise, accurate and include your keywords.

Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag is supported by most of the search engines, it is not as important as the Title Tag because the web page viewer will not see it but the description is sometimes used in the search listings under the title tag and as such should be an accurate and keyword driven description of what the page value is. Google usually uses an abstract of the page content and will use the description tag only if it cannot find enough on page content to form a page description.

Meta Keywords Tag

Due to massive abuse this tag is very rarely useful but in my opinion should still be used. Include your main keywords in here but do not go crazy, 4 or 5 is more than enough usually. It is far better to include your keywords in the on page copy and will hold better weight with the SE's as such. Please remember however that it still has to read well to the human eye.

The Meta Tags should be placed between the HEAD> and /HEAD> tags of your web page and should follow the following format:

Page Title

Mike - Webmaster and eBay Power Seller at Online Auction Trader

We offer free templates, information and product sourcing to enable you to develop your online auctions into a sustainable, long term income stream.

We also operate a Traders Forum where any advice can be sought on any aspect of Online Trading.

MLM has been around way before the Internet. It is a few steps above a chain letter. Well, maybe more then a few steps. MLM has paved the way for people to have their own business. It can start out as side money and flourish into a very profitable business.

Now, you are probably saying to yourself "Joe, what do you know about MLM?" Well, folks in the early days I did MLM. Yes, I am a not proud of it. Not because it's MLM but, because I wasn't any good at it. Thank goodness though. I may not have found my calling in SEO if I did. What I am trying to say is...MLM is hard. Nowadays, they try to make it easier by offering you a cookie cutter site. What? A cookie cutter site? Isn't that bad SEO? YES! MLM in their attempt to help their down-line are actually making it harder. You want to spend more time promoting your site by:

Writing content
Testimonials
Recommendations
Providing tips about the items or products
..and so on.

MLM companies force you to throw more of your hard earn money into advertising. If you know the name of a well established MLM company type it into Google. What you get is dozens of sites. Many of them are the same exact site dominating over the others. It is usually the companies own site. Generating leads that YOU will have to pay to get. While your cookie cutter site fights for spots on Google adwords. Which by the way YOUR MLM has the top 3 positions. So, how do you win?

Create your own web site. Find keywords related to what you sell and not the company name. If you cannot do that then create a blog. Place tips, recommendations, and testimonials and so on in your blog. Do your own Google campaign. Find message boards, blogs and websites that have interests in what you sell. You can even do a link exchange with other blogs.

Until MLM companies' see how valuable SEO is to the success of their business and yours you can never be successful. They will always tell you about the successes and never the failures. It is true it takes money to make money. But, if the main company corners the market on leads how can you ever make it ahead? Go door to door?

Take matters into your own hands. Or, better yet. Demand your up-line provide you with a better way to achieve your goals. They are profiting from all your hard work. So, let them help you as much as possible. If that doesn't work take matters into your own hands. The worst you can do is make things better.

Read more articles http://mr-seo.blogspot.com/ To learn more about Joe's services visit http://www.mr-seo.com If you are interested in the latest SEO news read his blog http://mrseonewz.blogspot.com/

The Why

But what is the reality of reaching a number 1 position on any of the big three search engines ? Google, Yahoo, and MSN ? and staying there? Somewhere between a remote possibility to impossible.

Why? Because there are well over 16 million websites battling for the number 1 position on "any" given day. Talk about too much competition for one, unique goal. You'd have more luck betting on the lottery, a game of blackjack, or a horse race.

It's true, my opinion runs against the tide of SEO advocates ? but let your own experience speak for itself. Are you number one on any of the big three? Do you understand the Google sandbox? Most people don't. It is absolutely a waste of your online time to get caught up in this mania when there are sane alternatives available.

"So Gary, what's the solution"? I am glad you asked. Let's take a look at some "realistic" and doable activities that will bring you increased web traffic.

The How

You can...

1) Develop or buy a valuable, high demand product to sell (Ex: Microsoft Windows software)

2) Write great, useful news content for your readers (CNN.com and USA Today.com)

3) Create a web tool with great content that people need (Yahoo.com)

4) Devise a unique business model for an old market concept (auctions on ebay.com)

5) Get a cutting edge product or service that has an absolute or near monopoly and has mass-market appeal.

6) Write content-rich articles in an area in which you are the expert and submit them to related websites.

7) Write a weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly newsletter related to your interests.

Ask other webmasters to exchange their website addresses with yours.

9) Submit a free ebook that you have written to other websites with your website address and contact information included in the ebook.

10) Provide a free service to your niche market and submit ads to other websites.

11) Sell hard-to-find products at an attractive price.

12) Advertise on other websites, like Dollarsforever.com

These dozen ideas are only a handful of traffic attracting solutions for your website. Choose as many as you like. The end result should be more visitors to your website who are interested in what YOU have to offer.

Good luck and success!

2005 Dollarsforever.com -- All rights reserved worldwide

Gary Cain is a business teacher and Internet marketer. He is the author of Stop the Grammar! as well as Internet Self Defense the only Internet book of its kind designed to help fight spam, fraud, information theft, and clone web sites.

Both of these books can be found at http://www.dollarsforever.comSubscribe to Gary's straight forward, easy-to-understand Dollarsforever Ezine Tutorials for Home-Based Internet Businesses.

***Webmasters: You may post this information on your web site, but you must keep this -ownership- box and the information contained herein unchanged.

In a perfect world, everyone would be honest.

In a perfect world, no one would violate search engine policies to try get a better listing.

They'd respect the terms set out by the search engines. It's not a perfect world. And especially not when it comes to the highly competitive search engine optimization industry. Prime example;

1) Here is a quote taken from a "search engine optimization" website;

      "Sophisticated doorway pages (those that contain unique optimized text) are still an excellent way to rank with the search engines."

2) Here is a quote taken from Google's Webmaster Guide;

      "Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site... The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant..."

When I was in the sandbox (and I don't mean the Google Sandbox) my mother taught me to be sure my information comesfrom the horse's mouth. That's still good advice today.

Which are lies and which are misconceptions?

Who knows? Did the SEO (search engine optimizer) actually read Google's Guidelines? Is it old advice that hasn't been updated for years?

The truth is, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that you need to know the guidelines becauseyou will be the one to pay the price for anything done on your behalf. They are publicly posted for that reason. You should read these two;

http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and

http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

I am not an "SEO" - I do not offer SEO services. I'm a website designer that believes designersshould understand search engines since they're creating the pages that search engines will be indexing. I know that if a search engine optimizer promises you good ranking and violates search engine policies to get them, it's your site that will be removed from Google. Not theirs. You need to know that, too.

Learn from 10 years of experience. Get free help at WebsiteVoodoo.com

Google Sitemaps is a new tool for website owners and publishers, released by Google themselves. It allows you to submit a sitemap (a document that contains links to every page of your site) from your own homepage in .XML or in plain .TXT format that will help Google to spider your pages. This again should result in a faster indexing process of your site and could therefore even result in better search engine placements. You can learn more about the program and sign up for a free account here.

Create A Sitemap For WordPress Blogs

If your site or weblog is published with WordPress you are very lucky because it didn't take long until the first Google Sitemaps plugin for it was released. The tool, that you can find on the website of the creator, Arne Brachhold, does not only create your xml sitemap totally automatically and update it every time you add new content to your site but does then also ping Google directly to tell them that there are new pages to spider.

Create A Sitemap For Every Other Site

Don't worry now if your website does not use WordPress because this doesn't change the fact that it's very easy to create the sitemap. You could for example use the free program "Google Sitemap Generator" that is programmed in Java (so you need the Java plugin for your browser) and can be found here. It will automatically spider your website and index up to 50000 different links. When it's finished creating the sitemap you can assign each found link a priority and update frequency value and then save it either in .xml or .txt format.

Do I Need A Google Sitemap?

Thats a good question. If your website is already well indexed in Google and gets spidered frequently a Google Sitemap will probably not help you much but especially for newer sites or sites that get updates very often I would recommend to make use of them. It is not a big hassle anyway.

Thomas Höfter is the webmaster and publisher of the Metal Music Portal Metally.net and the Smartphone Software Directory Smartphony. You can find more of his articles and tips at his personal website Lunatic Studios.

You may republish this article as long as the above message stays intact.

You can rank number one (Or at least in the top ten) for just about any search phrase by just buying text link ads, even if the web site isn't related to the search phrase in anyway, it can still rank in the top ten of the search results. Some web site owners see this as the only true way to the top ten. So, should you buy your way to the top? Or should you play it safe?

Some say it's better to be safe than sorry. While others say if you play it safe and never make it to the top ten of the search results, your losing anyway. So, it must be much better not to play by the rules and get a top ten ranking and make a little money before you get banned from the search engines. Well, it's not that easy and you can see the cons and pros in both ways.

First let's look at the pros of playing it safe. The first one is obvious and it's that you have a lot less chance of getting banned and much safer. At the same time you can peacefully sleep at night without worrying whether you'll be banned the next day you wake up. It also allows you to save money and spend it else where, such as PPC (Pay Per Click) search engines, banner advertisement, mailing list and offline advertising.

You can also rank number one without buying text link ads if you provide good content because many other webmasters will link to you just because you have good content and it provides their users with valuable information. You could also exchange links with other web sites. If you correctly SEO (Search Engine Optimization) your web site you can get a fairly good search engine ranking.

There are also several cons of playing it safe. Besides the fact that text link ads help improve your search engine ranking, they also bring in a good amount of traffic. In order to get a good amount traffic from links you would need more than just a few backlinks, but since you won't be buying them, you will not being getting that many web sites linking to you and most of them are from web sites that are not popular among internet users.

All the major search engines see backlinks from quality sites as a vote for the web site being linked to, by playing it safe it will take much longer to get a top ten ranking because of the lack of backlinks. It can take years before you will rank for any popular search term because you will only be getting links the natural way. Without many backlinks you'll also have a hard time getting in the search engines.

Now the pros of buying text link ads. Buying text links ads will help improve your search engine ranking, which can bring more traffic than from a link from any web site because. Each link acts as a vote your web site in the search engine's eye, so the more you buy, the higher you'll rank. If you buy an enough text link ads your web site can rank number one for just about any search term.

Text link ads can also send a fair amount of visitors that's targeted. Resulting in more and new customers. Getting a link from a web site that's trusted and well known can help build your web site's brand and increase your credibility because visitors will see the link as a recommendation to your web site. Which will also help bring in new customers because they trust you more than they did before.

The cons of buying text link ads make many people think twice about buying text link ads. It will cost a lot of money to buy text link ads. You need to pay for your link to stay on a web site for at least two months before you will see any major boost in your search engine ranking. You may never get your money back because there's so many things that can go wrong.

It can also hurt your search engine rankings if you don't do it correctly and safely. You should never buy a lot of text links ads all at once, some search engines can detect this and may ban your web site from the search results due to this. There are other ways the search engines can find out that the links are being sold, meaning some links on certain web sites may never count in the search engines.

The Conclusion - Now that you have seen the pros and cons you can decide for your self whether you should buy them or not.

Matt Colyer began as a SEO Specialist in 1997. He founded Superior Webmaster in 2004 as a source of articles and tutorials for Web site owners looking to improve their Web site.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is modification done in the web site design, coding, content and/or structure of a web site in an effort to achieve the higher ranking within search engines. Search Engine Optimization are done to attend the highest ranking in the search engine results for some targeted keywords or key phrases.

Search engine optimization can be enforced on the website while designing it or can be performed after a website is designed. It is a technique that can be used to develop a website, which is search engine friendly. Most of the search engine uses a software called "crawlers" or "spider". The main motive of these software are to check the website create their index (search engine index).

The method of getting search result is different for each search engines. Search engine applies many techniques to index the web pages and include into its directory. So the next time if your web page ranking high within one search engine and not in another then do not bother, it's because of different method used by these search engines. To rank higher in all the search engine you can do the things which is used by all search engines. You have to track all the changes happened in the search engine operation or method of spider software for getting search results and accordingly modify your web sites.

The process of search engine optimization includes the optimization of the following items:

Analyzing Site
Site Designing
Promotion of website and
Maintenance of website.

Important things to be remembered while Optimizing Your Web Site

A better optimized site rank high. Optimizing a website is not about tricking with the search engine, instead you should design your site both search engine friendly and human friendly. Many people spends lot's of money and uses latest technologies to achieve the target business by their website, but unluckily sometimes they fail in achieving. So it's essential to optimize your site in right way, in order to get successful online business by standing ranking-high in major search engines and able to attract lot's of clients. For optimizing a website always plan a good strategy.

Search Engine Optimization Strategy:

Research your keywords
Check rankings with search engines
URL Submission
The Title tag
Meta Description and Meta Keyword Tags
ALT Tags
Content of the page.
Link building
Search Engine Optimization Strategy

It is vital for every website that wants to stand rank-high in major search engines, to plan a strategy before developing or while optimizing an existing website. A well planed strategy can help in achieving the targets easily. A well optimized site attract targeted traffic by attaining very high positions in the search results.

Search Engine Optimization Strategy can including;

Give relevancy Title

A title is nothing but a focal point of the content written in your page. It gives the main idea of whatever written in the page. Whenever search engine searches for any topic it always checks the title and subtitle of the page first. So it becomes important to give an appropriate title and subtitle, sometimes a relevancy keyword can be useful in Title. But remember it should not be too long, at most it could be 80 character long. A short and relevancy title can help to rank higher in search engines.

Title can be defined as:

Page Title

Title always follows closing tag and written in Head tag.

http://www.roseindia.net/webpromotion/searchengineoptimization.shtml

I was recently contacted by one of my best clients who askedme what I thought of his decision to make a major change toone of his highly ranked pages. His initial concern was thatvisitor sales conversion ratio was low. At almost one percent,it was just below normal, but I'm always happy when a clientwants to improve. Conversion and rankings though, are verydifferent beasts and his concern was overly focused on theformer to the total exclusion of the latter.

As his SEO I should have realized that the top rankings ofthis already optimized page were in danger when his firstsentence referred to the existing "Dusty, tired old page, thatjust isn't getting enough sales." That page had just beenoptimized for search engines about 6 months previously, andwent from page 10 (invisible) or so of the Search EngineResults Pages (SERP's) to the top three on the first pages ofall three major search engines virtually overnight after a fewtweaks to gain traction from a popular movie reference to hisproduct.

The page had been up for several years before the movierelease without gaining substantial web sales of that sameproduct, but our optimization six months ago lead to a leap insales and consistently improving page visits after thattheatrical release. But sales plateaued over time and slowlydecreased after the movie which had mentioned his producttransitioned to DVD sales. Somehow he hadn't forseen thatdecrease and wanted to continue the level of sales he hadenjoyed while the movie mention was fresh.

To achieve the continued sales though, he wanted to completelyreplace the page text with new material he'd been given by themanufacturer of the product. As is the case with marketingmaterial provided by many companies, keyword density wasnon-existent with emphasis was on slick new photos, coveredwith stylized, graphical text. Text with keywords thatcouldn't be repeated in any page text since they had alreadybeen embedded in the image graphics several times.

What to do? I suggested creating an entirely NEW page with themanufacturer provided information linked within his site menulinks on each page and from the sitemap. While maintaining theold page for it's top rankings in the search engines we couldsimply use internal linking to keep the search enginescrawling that (old dusty) fully optimized page. That way wewould still rank in the top 5 for that page and it's covetedkeywords and provide the new conversion focused page to sitevisitors from the menu links.

For some reason though, the client insisted on using theexisting filename for the new content and moving the oldcontent to a NEW filename! Why? Because he wouldn't have tohave his programmer change a script which loaded a rotatingbanner to a select few highly trafficked pages. The programmercosts too much to change a few lines of code for a profitableproduct page?

This tactic meant that we would completely lose the existingrank on the next visit of the search engine crawlers after thenew page was posted. I was convinced that we could gain therank back, but only over time and with substantial extra work.The cost to the client to get a new page into the top five onSERP's was going to exceed the cost of programming updates ofbanner rotation scripts. But he insisted we use the newmanufacturer provided (image only) content on the oldfilename. OK, I relent.

The web designer wanted to use the new manufacturer providedpage in an iframe and embed the old page text in noframes tags- making it visible to search engines, but not visitors. Sillyidea and borderline spam technique that may drop our top fiverankings off the charts. I dug my heals in and refused thatidea.

The client suggested simply keeping previous metatags andtitle tag to maintain ranking. Sorry, that simply won't work.If it did, we'd return to the bad old days of simplistickeyword stuffing in those (no longer) magical metatags. Istarted to wonder ... "Am I here as an SEO only to stopdesigners from using SE spamming techniques, programmers fromhaving to write new code and clients from doing absurd keywordstuffing in metatags?"

No you actually have to use carefully crafted keyword richtext on the visible page - and NOT embedded in graphics filesas text painted across photos with photoshop and illustratorsoftware. Search engines can't read text on images and thatimage "Alt" text in the HTML is no longer useful in SEO sinceit has been so badly abused by simplistic optimizers forranking gains before the search engines began to ignore it intheir ranking algorithm.

The new page may initially see sales increases due to thepretty new photos (there is zero text on that new page) butafter a long series of email exchanges with this client and afinal phone discussion over ranking issues, he proceeded withthis change anyway. I normally don't hope for poor rankings onclient pages, but since this one runs counter to every fiberof my SEO being, I'm actually looking forward to that torpedostriking and the ranking to sink off the charts and the clientto pay attention to his SEO's advice.

The old page is still showing up in cached pages at the searchengines, so they haven't yet crawled the new version. I willdutifully point out the sinking of the venerable "SS SearchEngine Ranking" ship next week when Googlebot revisits thisclient site and finds all that text has disappeared from hispreviously #1 ranked page and suggest to him that he reviewhis WebTrends traffic reports to see that it has settled tothe bottom of the ocean.

I guess I better get busy finding a way to rank the previous(old optimized) page on the brand new shiny filename. Won't hebe surprised to learn that most of his sales come from that(newly named) "old dusty page" within a few weeks?

Copyright © September 3, 2005

Have you done anything to torpedo and sink your ship "SSSearch Engine Rankings" lately? Call me at 562-572-9702 if youneed a salvage operation to raise that venerable ship from thebottom of the vast search engine rankings ocean. http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htmMike Banks Valentine operates the article distribution sitehttp://Publish101.com and a Small Business EcommerceTutorial for Web Entreprenuers at http://WebSite101.com

We've all heard about it-it seems like all the buzz right now in the search engine marketing industry is RSS. If you're a website owner, than there are two ways your website can benefit from using RSS on your website-you can provide an RSS feed or, for the not-so-technically-inclined folks like me, you can use an RSS feed to keep your site's content fresh.

RSS is a way to syndicate website content. According to Wikipedia, "RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by (amongst other things) news websites and weblogs...the RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data." Wikipedia goes on to say that "A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled web pages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major web sites, as well as many smaller ones."

If you're a website owner, you can use RSS to your advantage in two ways: use someone else's RSS feed or produce your own RSS feed. 1. Install a script on your website-whenever a web page on your website is loaded the script automatically loads data from an RSS feed. If the RSS feed you choose to use is the latest news, then the latest news will appear on your website. This is fairly easy to set up and is good for search engine optimization purposes. I'll discuss installing an RSS feed script on your website later on in this article.

2. Provide an RSS feed of your website's content so others can use it. By providing an RSS feed of your website's content, you're essentially allowing people to use the content on their website or through their feed reader. In either case, you're also providing links back to your website, which is good for search engine optimization purposes-it will also get visitors to visit your website. Providing an RSS feed of your site's content can be tricky to set up-or it may not be appropriate if you don't have a lot of content on your website. I'll discuss your options later on in this article.

If you're a website owner, then chances are you want to keep your website's content fresh. By updating the content on a regular basis, the search engine spiders will take notice-they'll visit your website more often and index the new content and new web pages-which can ultimately bring more visitors to your website. For example, if your website is about real estate, you might consider including the latest real estate news on your website. Users typically search for topics that are related to items in the news, so if those topics and keywords are included on your website you can typically be found in the search engines for those terms. It's like having your own real estate news staff on hand, 24 hours a day, adding the latest news on your website.

Installing an RSS Feed on Your Website

Installing an RSS feed on your website is not as difficult as it sounds. You simply install a script one time-and then anywhere you want the RSS feed to appear you simply pick a feed and copy and paste some code on your page. The first thing you need to do is figure out which script to use. If your website is using an Unix server and has PHP installed, the the easiest PHP script I've found is called CaRP. You will first want to visit the CaRP download page and download the file. CaRP has a free version that you can use on your website. They request that you link back to their website if you use it. Unzip the zip file and upload the files to your website using an FTP program. Then, run the setup file in your web browser, chmod the appropriate files, and continue with the directions given to you in the web browser. Once it's installed, the script will give you code to copy and paste wherever your want the RSS feed to be displayed on your website. You can even change the font, size, and color of the feed by specifying those attributes before the code.

There are other RSS parser scripts available, but CaRP is the one that I'm more familiar with because its ease of use and ease of installation. To find other RSS parsers, you can search Google for "rss parser script". CaRP is typically used if you have PHP installed on your website, and RSS parser scripts are available if you're running a website on a Windows server. If you're using the PHP version of CaRP then you'll want to use PHP pages on your website-or you will need to parse your html pages as PHP pages.

Finding an RSS Feed

Once you've installed the parser script, you'll want to find the appropriate RSS feed to use on your website. Keep in mind that a lot of RSS feeds are provided for "non-commercial use only", so if your website is a for-profit website you'll need to check the terms of using the RSS feed before you use it.

The best way to find an RSS feed is to search for it. Following my real estate example above, searching for "rss real estate" (without the quotes) finds several feeds. Topix.net provides a real estate rss feed. By copying that URL and pasting it into the CaRP code provided by CaRP, you can add that code to any web page on your website and the latest Real Estate News from Topix will automatically appear. Another way to find a feed is to look for a blog on your site's topic. Most blog software includes an RSS feed, so searching Google for "keyword blog rss" might also help you find a feed you can use.

Adding an RSS feed on your web page won't get you high rankings in the search engines. A while back I tested this theory a while back by making three nearly identical web pages-one static page, one with RSS feed content on it, and another with a live RSS feed on it. It turned out that after all three pages were indexed and ranked, the page with the live RSS feed actually ranks third-the static page without the RSS content on it always ranks the best. Search Google for "silly burlywood revenue" and you'll see what I mean.

Although adding an RSS feed won't get your page top rankings in Google, there are other benefits. For example, updating your web page's content on a regular basis gets the page crawled more often-and more active crawling can contribute to other benefits, such as ranking for terms that appear in the feed on your site as well as causing new web pages on your site to get indexed faster than they were before.

Providing an RSS Feed of Your Content

Depending on your website's content, providing an RSS feed of your content might be appropriate. If your website provides news or contains a blog, then publishing an RSS feed might work well. Most blog software automatically publishes an RSS feed of your blog, so you might want to find its URL and start promoting it. If you sell a lot of products on your website, you might consider making an RSS feed available-perhaps one that includes your top selling products along with their prices. Other websites might be interested in publishing that data for their users, and you would receive more visitors and links back to your website, something that will help your site's search engine rankings.

Publishing an RSS feed is a little more complicated, perhaps to lengthy a discussion for this article. However, there are many good tutorials out there, including Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch article about it, as well as the RSS tutorial at mnot.net.

Whether you use RSS to publish your own feed or you use someone else's feed on your website, both provide great benefits to website owners-and definitely will continue in the future to be used more and more.

Bill Hartzer is a successful writer and search engine marketing expert who has personally created hundreds of websites over the years. Extended bio info:

Bill created his first website back in 1996 to help promote his former database software business. It was then when he learned about the power of the search engines and web search, which helped potential customers find his business online.

Bill Hartzer has over 15 years of professional writing experience. He has survived stints as a writer for television, as well as a technical writer for several computer software companies in Florida and in Texas. Mr. Hartzer combines his writing and online skills to create compelling and useful websites for corporations worldwide. Mr. Hartzer focuses on the optimization in the business to business arena, but applies these optimization skills to business to consumer websites, as well.

If you have questions about whether or not the Over-Optimization Penalty (OOP) exists or not, then you obviously haven't pushed the limits enough with your own website optimization or organic SEO efforts to have experienced the joys of running into the OOP (Over-Optimization Penalty).

I'm sure you're probably thinking: "prove it". If that's what you're thinking, let me tell you about a specific example of what I call the Over-Optimization Penalty, or OOP:

Over-Optimization penalty because of too much anchor text.You decide that your site is not ranking well. So, you change the navigation on your site so that all the home page links say "keyword keyword home" instead of "home". A few days later you lose your rankings, which is a serious blow to your traffic. Since that was the only thing you changed on your site you change those links to your home page back so it says, "home" instead of "keyword keyword home". BINGO! All of your lost rankings and your lost traffic comes back a few days later.

If that's not proof of an over-optimization penalty then I don't know what is--I would call that an OOP: you do something to try to boost your rankings by over optimizing some element of your website, something that backfires and causes a loss of rankings.

I personally can name tons of other examples just like this that prove that there's an OOP.

One more thing--I think that you can over-optimize a web page or site without going as far as actually spamming. In the example above, I truly believe that having too much of the same anchor text isn't spamming, it's just over-optimization. Spamming, in my book, would be something like keyword stuffing or something like repeating a keyword over and over again. Over optimization is different than spamming.

White Hat, Gray Hat, and Black HatWhether or not you think the OOP (an over-optimization penalty) exists depends on what type of "hat" you wear.

If you're a true "white hat" SEO that won't dare test the limits then you're going to believe that the OOP doesn't exist. After all, you'll never experience any over-optimization penalties because you won't dare do anything that would possibly have a negative effect on search engine rankings.

If you're a true "grey hat" SEO then you've definitely experienced the OOP, just like I've described in a previous post. For example, you've gone a little too heavy on your anchor text so you have to "back off" on using your keywords in the anchor text. Or, you realize that your keyword density on a page is too high--OOPS! you've just experienced the over-optimization penalty (OOP).

If you're a true "black hat" SEO then you definitely know that there's a difference between an over-optimization penalty and being a spammer. If you've never had a site banned in a search engine then you're not a true "black hat" SEO. And if you've experienced rankings that have suddenly vanished because of too much over-optimization then yes, you probably believe in the OOP, just like I do.

There is a very big difference between over-optimization and spamming. Spamming will get your site banned. Over-optimization will not. The "penalty", if you will, is a loss of search engine rankings due to over-optimization. Thus, that's what gray hat and black hat Search Engine Optimization Specialists call the OOP.

Bill Hartzer is a successful writer and search engine marketing expert who has personally created hundreds of websites over the years. Bill created his first website back in 1996 to help promote his former database software business. It was then when he learned about the power of the search engines and web search, which helped potential customers find his business online.

Bill Hartzer has over 15 years of professional writing experience. He has survived stints as a writer for television, as well as a technical writer for several computer software companies in Florida and in Texas. Mr. Hartzer combines his writing and online skills to create compelling and useful websites for corporations worldwide. Mr. Hartzer focuses on the optimization in the business to business arena, but applies these optimization skills to business to consumer websites, as well. He currently is the one of the Administrators at the Search Engine Forums website.

Anchor Text (also called phrase linking) can significantly improve your web pages relevance in the search engines. Optimized or keyword rich anchor text can help your web site gain positioning in the search engines as well as help drive better targeted search traffic.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor Text is the visible hyperlinked text that you see on the page, here is an example:

To read more about search engine optimization techniques, check out my Search Engine Optimization blog.

Here the words "search engine optimization" are hyperlinked to the hidden URL of http://seogirl.blogspot.com/. The words, visible, "search engine marketing blog" is the anchor text.

Anchor text should be used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links to. If you use the example above, "Search Engine Optimization Blog" indicates to visitors that they can expect to find information pertaining to search engine optimization if they click on that link.

Why is Anchor Text Important?

Anchor text is one of the more important elements in influencing a Web site's position in search engine result pages (SERPS). Your anchor text should include important keywords.

If the anchor text technique is used properly it will enhance the relevance of the targeted page. The page containing the anchor text will also be enhanced to some degree because you will be using relative keywords.

Optimizing Anchor Text of Inbound/External Links

Keywords within the anchor text are equally useful from links pointing to your website from other websites. (Inbound links) If you are working on a link building campaign, it is suggested that you have several title and description options for the link pointing to your website.

If you supply a webmaster with something to copy and paste they are able to set your link up within a few minutes and you get exactly what you want as far as anchor text.

2005 NMS

Nicole St. Martin is a professional search engine optimization consultant currently working in the legal industry.

View My Blog:http://seogirl.blogspot.com

Anchor Text (also called phrase linking) can significantly improve your web pages relevance in the search engines. Optimized or keyword rich anchor text can help your web site gain positioning in the search engines as well as help drive better targeted search traffic.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor Text is the visible hyperlinked text that you see on the page, here is an example:

To read more about search engine optimization techniques, check out my Search Engine Optimization blog.

Here the words "search engine optimization" are hyperlinked to the hidden URL of http://seogirl.blogspot.com/. The words, visible, "search engine marketing blog" is the anchor text.

Anchor text should be used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links to. If you use the example above, "Search Engine Optimization Blog" indicates to visitors that they can expect to find information pertaining to search engine optimization if they click on that link.

Why is Anchor Text Important?

Anchor text is one of the more important elements in influencing a Web site's position in search engine result pages (SERPS). Your anchor text should include important keywords.

If the anchor text technique is used properly it will enhance the relevance of the targeted page. The page containing the anchor text will also be enhanced to some degree because you will be using relative keywords.

Optimizing Anchor Text of Inbound/External Links

Keywords within the anchor text are equally useful from links pointing to your website from other websites. (Inbound links) If you are working on a link building campaign, it is suggested that you have several title and description options for the link pointing to your website.

If you supply a webmaster with something to copy and paste they are able to set your link up within a few minutes and you get exactly what you want as far as anchor text.

2005 NMS

Nicole St. Martin is a professional search engine optimization consultant currently working in the legal industry.

View My Blog:http://seogirl.blogspot.com

Extra, Extra Google Now Gives you feedback. By Creating a Google Sitemap using free online tools you can get Google to crawl your site within 24 Hours. As an Added bonus after Google Crawls your site they give you feedback about any problems they encountered. To take advantage of this amazing service from yahoo just follow these 4 simple steps.

Step 1 Get a Google Site Map Account

In order to create a Google Sitemap account just cut and paste the below URL in your browser and follow the simple directions

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login)

Step 2 Create Your Site map

You can create your Sitemap either as an XML file or a TXT file. XML is the PPreferred method since you can give Google more information about your Web Site. You do not need to know XML to create a Google Sitemap. Not with this free web based tool. Simply go to the below web site type in your domain and it will automatically spider your site and create a Google Site Map for you. http://www.sitemapspal.com/

If You prefer to use a text file simply following the below direction taken directly from the Google Help File (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/other.html)

Google accepts simple text files that list URLs. As the text files contain only a list of URLs, Google prefers that you use the Sitemap protocol so you can provide additional information about your URLs. The text file must follow these guidelines:

# The text file must have one URL per line. The URLs cannot contain embedded new lines.

# You must fully specify URLs as Google attempts to crawl them exactly as provided.

# Each text file can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. If you site includes more than 50,000 URLs, you can separate the list into multiple text files and submit each one separately.

# The text file must use UTF-8 encoding. You can specify this when you save the file (for instance, in Notepad, this is listed in the Encoding menu of the Save As dialog box).

# The text file should contain no information other than the list of URLs.

# The text file should contain no header or footer information.

# You can name the text file anything you wish. Google recommends giving the file a .text extension to identify it as a text file (for instance, sitemap.txt).

# You should upload the text file to the highest-level directory you want search engines to crawl and make sure that you don't list URLs in the text file that are located in a higher-level directory.

Step 3 Upload your Site Map File To Your Web Page

Once you have created an XML or TXT Sitemap using the instructions in Step 2 you would just upload it to your web page either by FTP or by using the Cpanel from your Web Host.

Step 4 Tell Google

The last step in this process is to tell Google about your Sitemap. You simply Log In to your Google site map account and add the URL of you Site Map. Be sure and check back a few hours later to make sure it uploaded correctly. https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Now be sure and repeat the above 4 Steps whenever you change your website

Bonus Step 5

After Google has read your Sitemap and crawled your site (usually 12-24 Hours) you will see a verify link next to your Sitemap name. Click the link and Google will instruct you to create a blank file and place it on your Web Page, Once you have done that Google will tell you any problems it encountered crawling your Page

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