Five Tips for Search Engine Optimization


Search engine optimization sounds so daunting for most young companies. Who has time for dealing with metatags and keyword density when you're trying to get a company off the ground? Below is a simple list of five things you can easily do to improve your visibility on search engines.

1. You can afford free. Index your site with the Open Directory Project. It's free! The Open Directory Project powers core directory services for Google, Lycos, AOL Search, Netscape Search, and lots more.

2. Know thyself through thy customers' eyes. Remember that the words you use to describe your company are not necessarily the same ones that a prospect might use. Sometimes you need to go with the masses when it comes to keywords. Review your keyword list (if you have one), and see if your prospects would even think to search for them. You might even want to (gasp!) ask your customers about what keywords they use.

3. Stay on the up-and-up. Don't cram your keyword tag with dozens of keywords or repeating keywords. It doesn't work. Use 10 to 12 good, applicable keywords.

4. Put it in the Flash can. Don't let your web designer talk you into a Flash intro. Not only will everyone skip it because it's annoying and doesn't provide much in terms of information, it will stop the search engine spiders that crawl your site dead in their tracks.

5. Be more than a welcome mat. Develop unique titles for each of your pages. These titles appear at the top of the web browser window when your prospects or potential investors check out your site. So please, don't use, "Welcome to XYZ Company." This tells them nothing of value, except maybe that you have manners. Use the title to tell what you do, what problem you solve, and/or what the particular page is about. We're only talking about a handful of words per page (10 max), so it's not as painful as it might sound.

Jennifer Guinan, president of Sage Strategic Marketing, offers 19 years of experience in marketing, communications, Internet and search engine marketing, and PR for companies and organizations large and small. Guinan's background includes national and international marketing and communications executive management and strategy, PR and media relations, and consulting. Her experience spans multiple industries from financial, healthcare, and life sciences to technology segments including software, networking, telecommunications, embedded systems, and wireless. She has developed M&A communications strategies, executed crisis management campaigns, successfully launched a number of startup companies, and strategized and implemented company repositioning, product launches, and issues campaigns. Contact us: http://www.sagestrat.com | [email protected]

Advertise Locally Using Search Engines


While search engine advertising has been a great advertising medium for businesses capable of or interested in marketing their products and services to a national or international audience, the effectiveness of this type of advertising was limited for businesses interested in advertising to a local market until very recently.

For example, a realtor with a web site in Minneapolis is likely interested in advertising on search terms such as "homes for sale" and "sell my home." The only problem was the realtor would have to advertise to everyone in the country who happened to type those terms into search engines. This was wasteful and ineffective because the vast majority of visitors clicking through to the site would not be qualified visitors since they lived outside the realtor's regional market.

At that time, the only work around to this was to include a regional qualifying term next to each search phrase, so instead of advertising on the term "homes for sale" the realtor would have to advertise on "Minneapolis homes for sale."

What about the prospective clients who live in Minneapolis, but only type in "homes for sale?" They're likely just as qualified for the realtor, but it there wasn't a way to target this type of searcher. The gap between forcing advertisers to use regional qualifying terms or advertising to a national market was finally closed this spring by Google.

Local Targeting

Targeting a known geographic location of searchers became a reality earlier this spring when Google launched their local targeting program. So now the realtor in Minneapolis can advertise on the more general terms, then specifying a geographic area they'd like the ads to appear within.

The options for this include picking specific cities, metropolitan areas, or even a distance radius from a specific point. For example, maybe the realtor only wants to generate leads from within 30 miles of their home.

Does this work?

Yes, it works very well. There are very few types of advertising online or offline where you have such detailed control over who you are advertising to. Basically it's pretty hard to beat advertising to people who are searching for what you sell and happen to live close to your business. And, since this is pay per click advertising, you are only charged when searchers click through to your web site.

Local Advertising Tips

Promote Your Location - You'll definitely see better conversion rates for your local advertising if you include your physical address on your web site. We recommend including this in the footer of every page of your site to reinforce that you're local to the prospects.

Track Performance - When you use local advertising you will still have to compete against businesses willing to advertise nationally on the same search phrases. This means search terms can get expensive but your conversion rates should support this. However, as with any form of advertising, it's important to track what's working.

Ed Kohler is the president and founder of Haystack In A Needle - http://www.haystackinaneedle.com/ - a full service web marketing and search engine positioning firm based in Minneapolis, MN.

Submit Your WebSite: Add Your URL to Web Directories & Search Engines


Why get into Search engines and directories?

Increase backlinks of your webiste. If your website is listed in Directories then your website can get traffic from directries and search engines counting that backlinks for ranking of your website.

Search engines continusly finding websites through "Bots" follow links on the internet, as they find new links, they updates those pages to their database. if someone linking to your website or If you submit your website in search engines then only they can list your site.

You can submit your website into various Directories. Every Subject Related Search Engines and Directories are Available today.

You can find folloing B2B trade leads Directories, Trade events, resources to submit your website and Increase backlinks for your website.

Industries Specific Business Directories, Agriculture and Food Related Industries Directories, Automotive And Other Vehicle Directories, Chemical Related Industries, Computer, Telecommunications and Electronics Directories, Construction Materials and Cement, Consumer Goods Directories, Energy Directories, Environmental Industries Directories, Medical Related Industries Directories, Metal Industries Directories, Mining Directories, Packaging Industry Directories, Scientific Products Directories, Textiles and Apparel Directories, Tool & Machinery Directories, Toys & Sporting Goods, Wood, Pulp and Paper Industries Directories

Nowdays you can find Countrywise Search Engines and Directories also.If you are promoting products and Services in overseas Marketthen you need to submit your website into Countrywide Search Engines also.

You can find more than 10,000 search engines from more than 200 countriesat http://www.smartoffice.org website. here you can find list of all types of Directries also.

here you can find top 300 search engines and Directories all over the world. mostly 80% Internet Traffic coming from these Search Engines and Directories.

Yogesh Ahire is eMarketing Consultant from India and also Author of ebook Discovery of e-Marketing URL: http://www.e-guru.org and http://www.superbrand.co.in

10 Ways to Tackle Keyword Research and Selection


You need to be extremely careful with keyword research so that you don't miss excellent opportunities or aim so broadly that you target phrases that will never rank well. Here are 10 strategies to guide you along the way:

1. Know your potential customers.
We can't tell you how many businesses we've met who simply pick keywords out of thin air. They don't talk to customers or hot prospects in order to determine what might be a useful set of keywords.

2. Start with core words.
A core set of keywords - even if too broad - can stimulate creative thinking.

3. Look at the industry.
Examine industry trade group web sites and related newsletters to find potential keywords.

4. Study competitors.
Some companies make a bigger deal of competitors' keywords than they should, but it's still a useful strategy. Invariably, a competitor will be using a strong keyword or phrase you don't want to miss. Often, however, they load their web sites with single keywords that aren't appropriate. If internet users are seeking cookware, their search terms shouldn't be laundry-based words. Yet we came across that very example. Be careful which words you use.

5. Be specific - add other words to your primary phrases.
If you sell metal, try metal stamping or metal stampers. Or, how about metal stamping companies? Words like services, companies, products, accessories, and many others can really pay off. Ok, everyone wants to rank #1 for terms like "toys" and "sports." It would take more time and budget than you may have to land such terms (through META updates, content adjustments and links).

6. Visit Wordtracker.
It's a great tool even if it only collects a sampling of actual searches (more than 300 million). You'll get a good sense of how frequently someone may search. Here is their URL: http://www.wordtracker.com

7. Use your intuition.
Don't hesitate to try some ideas; Wordtracker and other sources can confirm whether you have a search term people might or might not use.

8. Limit your selection.
Come up with a list of words - 10, 20, 30, maybe 50 or more. But don't get so many that you can't manage them all.

9. Tie keywords to site planning.
Pick keywords you can work with over time. Make sure you don't plan to drop a page from the web site or change it so often that your target keywords may be knocked off or irrelevant every 30 days.

10. Study your log files.
Web analytics is a great tool if you want to see how your visitors are searching. Study the results and you will come up with a revised set of keywords.

Michael Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, a Cleveland, Ohio-based search engine marketing (SEM) firm. A member of Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), he also authored the white paper, "Search Engine Marketing: Get in the Game."

[email protected]

Can Google Really Deliver Country Specific Searching?


This is a serious matter, can Google really deliver top quality search results for other countries? The answer so far is "sort of". In this article I will use Canada as an example of the quality or lack of thereof, that is delivered by Google's search results.

Let's take a look at Canadian search results by Google.ca:

When you highlight "Canada" through Google search results and then start searching, you may be surprised at the amount of companies that aren't really Canadian. All of this also applies for the UK and other major markets as well...

In fact, many of the "paid results" come from American companies. Now some would argue that this is to be expected, coming from American companies with large budgets but I would disagree because a lot of the bulk of the "Canadian specific" results are also American companies.

It is quite evident that this is a growing concern with business owners residing in different countries.

As an owner not from the US, I would rather compete with companies that are more local than not, simply because the results would then be relevant. Irrelevant results equal to poor results and less people take the search results seriously when they keep sifting through poor quality results online.

For example; If you highlight "search in Canada" and search for "web design", the top 2 results seem not to be from Canada. This is a serious issue. What if people click on "I'm feeling lucky", they are redirected to a company outside of Canada. The average person won't know what to think about that and may disregard searching through Canadian results any further.

The more content specific the results are, the more people will search through those results. The more people will tell their friends & peers to search through those results. See, as web marketers, we do have the power to create a search term that people get familiar with. Just look at "Blogging". A couple of years ago, if you asked people to search online for "blogging" sites, you would have had a lot of confused faces staring at you. Nowadays, if you search for blogging, there are more than 900,000 results found in Google and to top that off, there is more than enough paid advertisers as well.

What do we see changing in Google?

The #1 thing we are now seeing more and more is search results listing websites with country specific domain name extensions. Here's what I mean by that....

If you were Google and you wanted to deliver better search results for Canada, how would you go about doing that?

I would look at 2 things:

1) Does the domain name end with .ca? (Ex. www.canada.ca)

2) Does the "contact" information about the company match the country - Street, City, Province/State, Country. Are all of these factors listed within the contact page?

These are very important factors, evidenced to the fact that, I see Google weighing your "contact" page higher than anything else within your website other than your front page. So the moral is, make sure to list EXACTLY where it is that you do business within your contact page. Your website will rank higher for local searching when this technique is utilized.

Second, make sure to buy a domain name(s) that is country specific. If you live in Canada, buy a domain with the extension (.ca). If you live in the United Kingdom, make sure to buy a domain name with the extension (.uk). If you live in the US, make sure to buy a domain name with the extension (.us).

You may be asking, what if I don't want to concentrate on just local searching? Create a separate website to target different areas. There is nothing with .com, in fact most people automatically type in .com but, if you truly want to target locally, you have to play locally.

The future of search engines is local searching! We are seeing an increasing amount of evidence to sustain this claim. Targeting locally is a great start and will ultimately help you to target internationally later on!

I hope this article helps you out!

About The Author:

Martin Lemieux is the owner of the Smartads Advertising Network (http://www.smartads.info). Smartads helps companies to promote their business online and offline through time tested marketing strategies & design.

Read weekly internet marketing tips by Martin Lemieux:http://www.smartads.info/newsletter

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How To Get Listed in Yahoo!


Getting listed in Yahoo! (The Very Top Search Engine/Index) is a lot like getting a date with the most beautiful girl in high school - often all you have to do is ask PROPERLY. I can make that statement because I have NEVER submitted a site to Yahoo! that wasn't listed. I've read a lot about how difficult it is getting listed, and how frustrating it is - so maybe I am just very lucky. Then again, if you follow the same steps that have ALWAYS worked for me, there is no reason to believe that they won't work for you too. So I wanted to share with you in four short steps how to get listed.

The first step is ensuring your site is READY. The staff at Yahoo! is very busy. A person has to physically look over your site and decide if it's appropriate for the category submitted and if it's worth listing. They get thousands of submissions to review. So begin by putting yourself in the reviewer's shoes; if you would be unimpressed by reviewing your site, then the reviewer probably will be too. If that's the case, fix the problems with your site before submitting it. The reviewers are humans - with all the quirks that humans are subject to, and you must account for that.

Site readiness means two major thing to me: (1) It contains sufficient content worth listing and (2) It is complete enough that it contains absolutely no dead links, and it can be easily navigated. Every site should be under constant update - so that's not a real problem - just leave off leave the unnecessary "under construction" gifs.

Most people who visit the internet are looking for free information on some topic - furnish this information and your site fills a need and is therefore worth listing. My main site is a perfect example of this. It contains articles on internet marketing by a variety of diverse, experienced authors. A surfer gets a lot of very useful CONTENT from visiting and therefore my site is "worth" listing. I am constantly adding to this storehouse, so it is never really complete, but it was ready for listing when first submitted. Every link led to some real resource, and not a disappointing "file not found."

After you know that your site is ready, step two is simply submitting it properly. Using the Yahoo! search box, find sites similar to yours. Click on the "suggest a site" icon and suggest your site in the same category. Fill in all of the fields completely and accurately. You're not going to fool the reviewer and if you submit to the wrong category you annoy a very busy reviewer - and guarantee that you won't be listed.

Step three is probably the hardest - you wait. While some search engines list your site within days, Yahoo! may take months. So after you know that you have properly submitted your content rich, submission ready site in the proper categories, you display a little patience.

But not too much patience; step 4 is resubmitting. If your site isn't listed in about 6 weeks, resubmit. Keep resubmitting until it is listed! That's partly how I can honestly say that I have never submitted a site that wasn't listed - I am very, very persistent. In marketing, whether on or offline, persistence is the key. Sort of like asking that pretty girl out again - eventually she would probably say "why not." While my main site at http://www.williecrawford.com was listed the very first time it was submitted, and shows up under "INTERNET MARKETING 101" (with quotation marks) as the first listing, I have client sites listed in Yahoo that I did have to submit several times - but they all got listed.

It all boils down to realizing that of all the search engines and indexes, Yahoo! generates the most hits. So it's definitely worth the effort! You will not get listed if you don't submit your site, and you probably won't get listed if you don't submit properly. Do it right the first time and profit from this most cherished of listings.

About The Author

Willie Crawford is a marketing consultant, promotion specialist and popular writer. His website contains over 180 articles on internet marketing as well as a very active discussion forum. Visit today and begin learning what really DOES work in building your business http://www.williecrawford.com

Google Rankings -- Achieve Top 10 Rankings with Free Tools


In order to get a top 10 google ranking it is imperative to not only know how to use the resources that are available to us, but to also know what to do with them. The key is always to find out what tools are the ones to use. In my experience, there are two tools I use almost daily to help my sites achieve top 10 rankings.

1. GoogleRankings.com is an incredible tool that every webmaster should consult. Now, because Google rankings fluctuate multiple times a day, the site is sometimes a couple hours delayed, however it provides a great resource in quickly finding how your competitors stack up against your website. Not only that but you can use different key words in conjunction with a website to see how they rank. Incredibly useful in determining which key words should be used in your content and advertising.As an example, if you were to decide on using a specific keyword phrase. Type in that key word into GoogleRankings.com, along with your competitor's website, and you will see how they rank in regards to that specific phrase and/or word in Google. This will allow you to specifically pinpoint which phrases and/or keywords your competitors rank low in, which you will in turn begin to focus your attention on.

2. Google Suggest is used to determine the frequency of various key word searches.http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=enAs discussed before, not only is it important to find out how your competitors rank for a certain term in Google, but it is also perhaps even more important to find out how many times that specific phrase has been searched for. Google Suggest Beta is the perfect answer for this problem. Just type in a few words and it will immediately display multiple results for that specific term, and variations of it.

***Hint*** Remember, it is not always necessary to have a top 10 listing for the most popular searched phrase. Just imagine the potential of having 5 top listings for keywords that are not quite as popular. Not only will it be easier to achieve a top 10 listing, but while all your competitors fight over 1-3 key words, you are capitalizing on all the others. In the end this will mean a literal financial windfall depending on your product, etc.

Darren H. currently owns and is involved with various online marketing and management companies. He is the author of "How to Get Listed in Google within 72 Hours." and prides himself on helping many individuals and business customers achieve top 10 rankings within Google in an extremely short time frame. To learn more and get started today please visit: http://www.top10googlerankings.com

Search Engine Ranking... Oh, the Mystery!


Rankings, Rankings, Rankings!

How do you get your website ranked well by the search engines? Well, it isn't as hard as you think, but it may not be as simple either. It takes patience and an ongoing commitment to making search-engine ranking a long-term investment in your website. You will need to give it time and energy ? it isn't a quick fix.

One caveat before I dive into this: If you are a company that is working on attracting local customers, there are many other incredibly effective offline marketing tools to DRIVE people to your website. So, what if you really want to work on search-engine ranking for your site?

Keep these points in mind:

1. Search engines often change their ranking formula.

2. Each search engine has its own algorithm (formula) to determine site ranking.

3. META tag keywords are not a magic bullet to improve your ranking.

4. Search engines can take many months to index new information, so patience?patience.

5. Be cautious with graphics-rich websites if search-engine ranking is important.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Let's start at the beginning. When you type a query into a search engine, what happens? Some people think that each time a search is entered into a search engine like Google, that the program hunts through the entire Internet to produce the answer. This is NOT what occurs.

Let's say I type in the words "dog obedience" into Yahoo. Yahoo then takes these keywords and searches through its own unique database of indexed websites to find matches. To add to and update their databases, search engines have programs called "spiders" that crawl through pages on the Internet looking for pages and sites to index. However, they do NOT locate sites on their own. They find sites if someone has purposely entered a website into a search engine's "Add URL" form. They are also able to find a website if another site in its database has links to it.

When a search engine finds a site, it considers the text on the website to be the number one thing to extract. It places data its database categorized by information it perceives as being important. So, if you have a company that has free articles teaching people how to train their dogs, but you don't have the word "obedience" listed anywhere, your site may not be listed in the above sample search.

So then, after all of this ? how do you get a high-ranking search engine?

Your Keys to Search Engine Ranking

You must think of search engine optimization as a long-term investment in your website. It is an ongoing marketing effort that takes persistence. As you begin to implement optimization techniques, remember it can take several months before you see the results, so be patient. Here are some tips to help you improve your website rankings in the future.

1. Plan Your Content: Before you develop your site, make a list of all the possible search words and phrases you think a potential customer would use to locate your website. A research tool such as WordTracker can help you in this process. Write compelling, professional marketing content for your site that is rich with these search words and phrases, especially on your home page. Make pages about 250 words. Tip: Hire a professional web copywriter to write your site content.

2. Meta Keyword Tags Are Overrated: Contrary to what many people believe, your META keyword tags in your HTML code have very little bearing on the words a search engine uses to reference your site. What does this mean for your site? Make sure your web pages have easy-to-understand paragraphs that describe your site and contain many of your important search words. These search words should match your META keyword tags, otherwise, the spiders tend to disregard the keyword tags.

3. Title Tags Are Vital: Most search engines give a lot of weight to your title tags. These are also the phrases that appear at the top of each web page. So, take the time to create juicy and precise title tags. Use words and phrases that people would be likely to use in their search for your business. Reflect what is actually on the specific web page.

4. Meta Description Tags: This is the area where you write HTML content to describe each of your web pages. Although it is not a major factor in search engine ranking, it IS what is displayed in the search results. People searching will use this description to make a decision to visit your site or not. Use this area for marketing purposes to entice people to click on your link.

5. Design a Site That Search Engines Like: Websites that have graphic Splash pages or are designed in Flash are not as friendly to SE indexing. For the most part, search engines do not index graphics. They read text (but not graphic text). Use small amounts of Flash animation and graphics in appropriate places, along with great HTML content. Along with these graphics, use text for your image ALT tags. If you have a graphic-based navigation system, make sure you have a site map that the spider can use to find all of your site page links.

6. Create a Compelling Site: If you haven't created a website with gripping content that speaks to your visitors in plain, easy-to-understand language, you won't get good long-term search-engine visibility. Nor, will visitors ever want to come back. Make your site so good that people will want to link to it. They will want to provide their viewers with your copious amounts of useful information. You can also go to sites that offer complimentary services or products and e-mail their webmaster to ask them to add a link to your site. This will enhance your link popularity, something search engines tend to consider important.

7. Submit your URL to the Directories: Read each search engine's FAQs and follow it exactly. Mistakes in the submission process can make things extremely difficult to change down the road. Keep your website description short and sweet. Be sure to include keywords, but don't use a lot of sales jargon.

8. Balance Your Online Marketing Approach: You will get the best results if you create a website that is content rich, popular with viewers, has a credible reputation, and is programmed using a smart approach to Meta tags.

Search engine spiders can be extremely slow to index new information, so be patient! It may take months to see your changes affect your search engine ranking. Remember, a website is a dynamic marketing tool that you are building over time. Treat it well, give it a little love and attention, and your long-term rewards will be well worth your efforts!

Wendy Maynard, your friendly marketing maven, is the owner of Kinesis. Kinesis specializes in marketing, graphic and website design, and business writing. Visit http://www.kinesisinc.com/resources/articles.html for more articles and free marketing wisdom.

You can visit Wendy's marketing blog, Kinetic Ideas at: http://www.wendy.kinesisinc.com

Want to harness the power of kinetic marketing? Sign up for Kinesis Quickies, a free bi-monthly marketing e-newsletter: http://www.news.kinesisinc.com

Your Search Engine Optimization Strategy: Make Love, Not War


When it comes to search engine optimization strategy, there are basically two camps ? those who view search engines as adversaries to be conquered at any cost and those who regard search engines as partners in their online marketing efforts. Long-time readers of my articles probably already have a good idea of which camp I fall into; however, I believe both approaches can be effective optimization methods.

Adversarial Optimization Methods

Service providers who have this "adversarial" philosophy will tell their prospects that the formulation of a search engine optimization strategy is much like a high-stakes game of chess. It's an "us vs. them," "winner-take-all," and "every man for himself" mentality. It's also rooted largely in technology ? under this philosophy, success is defined as unraveling the latest search engine algorithm to find new optimization methods and exploiting its technical aspects for immediate benefit.

The underlying premise of this search engine optimization strategy is that you must use optimization methods that trick the search engines into showing a website predominantly in the results since the site isn't currently offering attributes that the search engines consider valuable. The primary benefits of this approach are that it doesn't require much work on the part of the client and that results can be realized more rapidly. These qualities both stem from the fact that there isn't a large amount of additional content needed, nor are there many wholesale changes to make to the website when using such optimization methods.

While this is not the methodology that I recommend, it is a valid ? albeit potentially volatile ? search engine optimization strategy.

Partnership Optimization Methods

Those who view search engines as partners have a very different search engine optimization strategy. These service providers embrace the idea that the attributes and optimization methods that give a website high rankings in search engines are, by and large, the same ones that make the site more valuable to website visitors and potential customers.

This theory makes sense. Every search engine needs to return results that their users find to be the most relevant and useful. If search engine R&D people operated in a vacuum, they would probably find their market share rapidly diminished while they lamented about how "people are stupid". This means that each of the major search engines spend endless research dollars to determine exactly what it is that search engine users find valuable, and each has a high stake in the results of the research. No search engine marketing or web design firm has the resources or motivation to conduct studies of this magnitude. It is, therefore, highly advantageous to use the findings of these studies, deduced from common algorithm traits of multiple search engines, to improve your search engine optimization strategy and website.

I consistently hear from companies who are puzzled as to why their expensive, cutting-edge website is perpetually outranked by a site of perceived inferior quality ? "our website is better than theirs" or "we are a much bigger company" are common remarks. Beauty is, as always, in the eye of the beholder. The sites that consistently rank highly are almost always using optimization methods that offer something of value to people who entered the search query. Search engines care as much about the size of a company or how much it spent on its website about as much as they care about what you had for breakfast this morning (I had blueberry muffins, but Google hasn't called to ask).

The advantages to the "partnership" search engine optimization strategy are numerous. Rather than chase the ever-changing technical attributes that can get you short-term results, you instead use optimization methods that leverage your company's knowledge of your industry to create something useful for the searcher. You can improve your website and offer the information and products that prospects are seeking, even if those prospects are in the earliest stages of the buying cycle. In general, you will not have to watch your rankings swing wildly based upon new spam filters and algorithm shifts, and thus will enjoy a higher level of predictability when it comes to your website (although with search engines, there are never any guarantees). Since you aren't constantly forced to re-address your site's search engine optimization methods, you'll have more time to focus on other online marketing areas that need attention, such as the website's conversion rate, an e-newsletter, or online PR.

Conclusion

It's a fact that websites rise and fall in the rankings all the time. The only real constant is that the sites of TRUE value, the ones that offer something relevant and important to the searcher, are generally always near the top ? even after the latest algorithm shift has sent the "adversarial" crowd into a frenzy of activity as they attempt to reformulate their search engine optimization strategy.

While it may take a little extra effort, I like to think of the relationship with search engines as a "partnership" in a real sense. We use optimization methods that apply the attributes search engines have deemed to be valuable to a website, which improves both the website and the website's search engine rankings. The search engines, in turn, send highly-targeted visitors who have shown an interest in your industry, products, or services. Sure, it may seem that we get more out of the deal, but the engines don't complain. They haven't even acknowledged our partnership.

Scott Buresh is managing partner of Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including ZDNet, WebProNews, MarketingProfs, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, SEO Today, and Search Engine Guide. He was also a contributor to the recently released Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004). Medium Blue is an Atlanta search engine optimization company with local and national clients, including Georgia-Pacific, DuPont, and Boston Scientific. To receive Scott's monthly articles, sign up for Medium Blue's e-newsletter, Out of the Blue.

What In The World Is This Google Sandbox Theory Thing? And How Do I Beat It?


Ok, so over the past month or so I've been collecting various search engine optimization questions from all of you. Today, I'm going to answer what was the most frequently asked question over the past month.

You guessed it... What is the Google Sandbox Theory and how do I escape it? When you finish reading this lesson, you'll be an expert on the good 'ole Google Sandbox Theory and you'll know how to combat its effects. So, pay close attention. This is some very important stuff.

Before I start explaining what the Google Sandbox theory is, let me make a few things clear:

The Google Sandbox theory is just that, a theory, and is without official confirmations from Google or the benefit of years of observation.

The Google Sandbox theory has been floating around since summer 2004, and has only really gained steam after February 4, 2005 , after a major Google index update (something known as the old Google dance).

Without being able to verify the existence of a Sandbox, much less its features, it becomes very hard to devise strategies to combat its effects.

Almost everything that you will read on the Internet on the Google Sandbox theory is conjecture, pieced together from individual experiences and not from a wide-scale objective controlled experiment with hundreds of websites (something that would obviously help in determining the nature of the Sandbox, but is inherently impractical given the demand on resources).

Thus, as I'll be discussing towards the end, it's important that you focus on 'good' search engine optimization techniques and not place too much emphasis on quick 'get-out-of-jail' schemes which are, after all, only going to last until the next big Google update.

What is the Google Sandbox Theory?

There are several theories that attempt explain the Google Sandbox effect. Essentially, the problem is simple. Webmasters around the world began to notice that their new websites, optimized and chock full of inbound links, were not ranking well for their selected keywords.

In fact, the most common scenario to be reported was that after being listed in the SERPS (search engine results pages) for a couple of weeks, pages were either dropped from the index or ranked extremely low for their most important keywords.

This pattern was tracked down to websites that were created (by created I mean that their domain name was purchased and the website was registered) around March 2004. All websites created around or after March 2004 were said to be suffering from the Sandbox effect.

Some outliers escaped it completely, but webmasters on a broad scale had to deal with their websites ranking poorly even for terms for which they had optimized their websites to death.

Conspiracy theories grew exponentially after the February 2005 update, codenamed 'Allegra' (how these updates are named I have no clue), when webmasters began seeing vastly fluctuating results and fortunes. Well-ranked websites were loosing their high SERPS positions, while previously low-ranking websites had gained ground to rank near the top for their keywords.

This was a major update to Google's search engine algorithm, but what was interesting was the apparent 'exodus' of websites from the Google Sandbox. This event gave the strongest evidence yet of the existence of a Google Sandbox, and allowed SEO experts to better understand what the Sandbox effect was about.

Possible explanations for the Google Sandbox effect

A common explanation offered for the Google Sandbox effect is the 'Time Delay' factor. Essentially, this theory suggests that Google releases websites from the Sandbox after a set period of time. Since many webmasters started feeling the effects of the Sandbox around March-April 2004 and a lot of those websites were 'released' in the 'Allegra' update, this 'website aging' theory has gained a lot of ground.

However, I don't find much truth in the 'Time Delay' factor because by itself, it's just an artificially imposed penalty on websites and does not improve relevancy (the Holy Grail for search engines). Since Google is the de facto leader of the search engine industry and is continuously making strides to improve relevancy in search results, tactics such as this do not fit in with what we know about Google.

Contrasting evidence from many websites has shown that some websites created before March 2004 were still not released from the Google Sandbox, whereas some websites created as late as July 2004 managed to escape the Google Sandbox effect during the 'Allegra' update. Along with shattering the 'Time Delay' theory, this also raises some interesting questions. This evidence has led some webmasters to suggest a 'link threshold' theory; once a website has accumulated a certain amount of quantity/quality inbound links, it is released from the Sandbox.

While this might be closer to the truth, this cannot be all there is to it. There has been evidence of websites who have escaped the Google Sandbox effect without massive link-building campaigns. In my opinion, link-popularity is definitely a factor in determining when a website is released from the Sandbox but there is one more caveat attached to it.

This concept is known as 'link-aging'. Basically, this theory states that websites are released from the Sandbox based on the 'age' of their inbound links. While we only have limited data to analyze, this seems to be the most likely explanation for the Google Sandbox effect.

The link-ageing concept is something that confuses people, who usually consider that it is the website that has to age. While conceptually, a link to a website can only be as old as the website itself, yet if you have don't have enough inbound links after one year, common experience has it that you will not be able to escape from the Google Sandbox. A quick hop around popular SEO forums (you do visit SEO forums, don't you?) will lead you to hundreds of threads discussing various results ? some websites were launched in July 2004 and escaped by December 2004. Others were stuck in the Sandbox even after the 'Allegra' update.

How to find out if your website is 'Sandboxed'

Finding out if your website is 'Sandboxed' is quite simple. If your website does not appear in any SERPS for your target list of keywords, or if your results are highly depressing (ranked somewhere on the 40 th page) even if you have lots of inbound links and almost-perfect on-page optimization, then your website has been Sandboxed.

Issues such as the Google Sandbox theory tend to distract webmasters from the core 'good' SEO practices and inadvertently push them towards black-hat or quick-fix techniques to exploit the search engine's weaknesses. The problem with this approach is its short-sightedness. To explain what I'm talking about, let's take a small detour and discuss search engine theory.

Understanding Search Engines

If you're looking to do some SEO, it would help if you tried to understand what search engines are trying to do. Search engines want to present the most relevant information to their users. There are two problems in this ? the inaccurate search terms that people use and the information glut that is the Internet. To counteract, search engines have developed increasingly complex algorithms to deduce relevancy of content for different search terms.

How does this help us?

Well, as long as you keep producing highly-targeted, quality content that is relevant to the subject of your website (and acquire natural inbound links from related websites), you will stand a good chance for ranking high in SERPS. It sounds ridiculously simple, and in this case, it is. As search engine algorithms evolve, they will continue to do their jobs better, thus becoming better at filtering out trash and presenting the most relevant content to their users.

While each search engine will have different methods of determining search engine placement (Google values inbound links quite a lot, while Yahoo has recently placed additional value on Title tags and domain names), in the end all search engines aim to achieve the same goal, and by aiming to fulfill that goal you will always be able to ensure that your website can achieve a good ranking.

Escaping from the Google Sandbox

Now, from our discussion about the Sandbox theory above, you know that at best, the Google Sandbox is a filter on the search engine's algorithm that has a dampening influence on websites. While most SEO experts will tell you that this effect decreases after a certain period of time, they mistakenly accord it to website aging, or basically, when the website is first spidered by Googlebot. Actually, the Sandbox does 'holds back' new websites but more importantly, the effects reduce over time not on the basis of website aging, but on link aging.

This means that the time that you spend in the Google Sandbox is directly linked to when you start acquiring quality links for your website. Thus, if you do nothing, your website may not be released from the Google Sandbox.

However, if you keep your head down and keep up with a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and keep adding inbound links to your website, you will be released from the Google Sandbox after an indeterminate period of time (but within a year, probably six months). In other words, the filter will stop having such a massive effect on your website.

As the 'Allegra' update showed, websites that were constantly being optimized during the time that they were in the Sandbox began to rank quite high for targeted keywords after the Sandbox effect ended.

This and other observations of the Sandbox phenomenon ? combined with an understanding of search engine philosophy ? have lead me to pinpoint the following strategies for minimizing your website's 'Sandboxed' time.

SEO strategies to minimize your website's 'Sandboxed' time

Despite what some SEO experts might tell you, you don't need do anything different to escape from the Google Sandbox. In fact, if you follow the 'white hat' rules of search engine optimization and work on the principles I've mentioned many times in this course, you'll not only minimize your website's Sandboxed time but you will also ensure that your website ranks in the top 10 for your target keywords. Here's a list of SEO strategies you should make sure you use when starting out a new website:

Start promoting your website the moment you create your website, not when your website is 'ready'. Don't make the mistake of waiting for your website to be 'perfect'. The motto is to get your product out on the market, as quickly as possible, and then worry about improving it. Otherwise, how will you ever start to make money?

Establish a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and follow it religiously. For example, you can set yourself a target of acquiring 20 links per week, or maybe even a target of contacting 10 link partners a day (of course, with SEO Elite, link building is a snap). This will ensure that as you build your website, you also start acquiring inbound links and those links will age properly ? so that by the time your website exits the Sandbox you would have both a high quantity of inbound links and a thriving website.

Avoid black-hat techniques such as keyword stuffing or 'cloaking'. Google's search algorithm evolves almost daily, and penalties for breaking the rules may keep you stuck in the Sandbox longer than usual.

Save your time by remembering the 20/80 rule: 80 percent of your optimization can be accomplished by just 20 percent of effort. After that, any tweaking left to be done is specific to current search engine tendencies and liable to become ineffective once a search engine updates its algorithm. Therefore don't waste your time in optimizing for each and every search engine ? just get the basics right and move on to the next page.

Remember, you should always optimize with the end-user in mind, not the search engines.

Like I mentioned earlier, search engines are continuously optimizing their algorithms in order to improve on the key criteria: relevancy. By ensuring that your website content is targeted on a particular keyword, and is judged as 'good' content based on both on-page optimization (keyword density) and off-page factors (lots of quality inbound links), you will also guarantee that your website will keep ranking highly for your search terms no matter what changes are brought into a search engine's algorithm, whether it's a dampening factor a la Sandbox or any other quirk the search engine industry throws up in the future.

Brad Callen
Search Engine Optimization Expert
Learn How To Get A Top Google Ranking In Under 28 Days With This Breakthrough New SEO Software!

The Myth of Search Engine Submission


Contrary to what most people think, it is not necessary to submit your site to the search engines. In the early days of the web, when search engine technology was still primitive and search engines' ability to crawl the web was somehow limited, it made sense to submit your site.

Today, search engines like Google, MSN or Yahoo! Search have no problem crawling billions of pages and adding them to their index every month (and sometimes even more often). Most likely, they will find your site once they find a link to your page in another website.

That website can be a directory (a site that uses human editors to select, categorize and list websites), a site you exchange links with, or an article-posting site where you submit articles you write, complete with your resource box (a small bio about yourself with a link to your site).

The two best general directories are Yahoo! ($299/year fee) and DMOZ (free, but they may take a while to list your site). Listing your site with them will give you two of the best links you can get.

When exchanging links, make sure you do it with reputable, non-competitive sites with a topic related to yours (for example, if you're a real estate agent, you may want to trade links with a mortgage broker's site).

Writing articles and posting them in sites like Article City or Ideamarketers is not only a good way to get links, but also a great way to establish yourself as an expert. The idea is to allow other webmasters to re-print your articles for free, provided that they include your resource box (with a link to your site) at the end of the article.

In summary, don't waste time, energy and money submitting your site, or using one of those services that claim to submit your site to "thousands of search engines" (they are worthless). Instead, focus on getting high-quality inbound links. They will get your site listed faster while building your site's online reputation and popularity.

About The Author

Mario Sanchez: http://www.theinternetdigest.net.

For more search engine tips go to: http://www.accordmarketing.com/seotips/.

Are Your SEO Efforts Going To Waste?


Search engine optimization (SEO) is a long and complicated process that can be highly rewarding if done correctly. SEO is not a waste of time, but can be if your site doesn't appeal to visitors or function properly. Your potential customer will be turned off if your site lacks trustworthiness, an eye pleasing color scheme and easy to use navigation. Why lose visitors and possible sales because of a small design flaw or unappealing color scheme? Those visitors could have resulted in sales if those small imperfections were fixed.

As I arrive from your high position in the search engines looking for your product, I want to be able to trust the company I am buying from. People are very leery with making purchases on the Internet, and even more so from sites they don't know a great deal about. You want to gain trust from the visitor with guarantees, a professional design and color scheme, testimonials and by any other way. If your site doesn't boast its trustworthiness and make me feel secure, do you think I will purchase your product? No. Visitors are especially leery when they are required to give credit card information. Make them feel protected, boast about your privacy policy, encrypted servers and whatever else you have set up. Be enthusiastic about your site's security.

I need to be able to find what I want and navigate to where I need to go FAST after I arrive at your site via the search engines. Some visitors get lost and frustrated with poor navigation and will leave your site without a second thought. Do not leave your visitor with a bad taste in their mouth! Allow them to flow through your site with ease and comfort. If your navigation is confusing your potential customer will likely leave and travel to one of the other three billion web sites on the Internet. Speed is also a factor in navigation. Visitors don't want to sit there for twenty or thirty seconds while your page loads. Don't make them wait. Cut down on the size of your pages and graphics.

The colors you choose for your site also impact on whether the visitor will make a purchase. A color scheme that hurts the eye will turn visitors off which will lead to lost sales. Visitors may also question how accountable your site is. You cannot have a black background with white, yellow or neon green text. It hurts the eyes. Color schemes such as that scare visitors away. With professional colors visitors will likely feel more secure and relaxed while surfing your site, which will lead to more sales.

A top position in the search engines can provide huge amounts of sales, if your site can be trusted and appeal to visitors. With a defective design and color scheme, slow loading pages or lack of trustworthiness all of the time spent performing SEO could go to waste. So get out, fix those flaws and discover more sales!

About The Author

Derek Croote is a SEO, web design and usability enthusiast. He practices ethical search engine optimization and strives to make sites across the web better for visitors. Derek is the webmaster of the http://www.saratogalakesideacresassociation.org/, a small homeowners association. You can reach him at [email protected].

Search Engine Optimization: Site Structure and Popularity


In the Global Internet era the industry presence is undoubtedly related to the company online presence. Where is the scope of the online presence limitations and does it refer only to the search engine optimization aspect or it broadens into many related components.

Following the user experience line, it is easy to describe what the most important levels of access Internet popularity are and how it can be achieved.

Site organization

Well, the site organization is always the first after choosing a domain name that comes up as a decision in the design process. Organizing of the structure is a basic of the level of importance web promotion means. It requires following of simple and comprehensive rules that have proven results.

Home page is communication center of your site and it presumes availability of the basic structure and content implications. Good example of site navigation is PromotionWorld.com http://www.promotionworld.com/ site with well defined link structure and intersection navigation accessibility. List properly your basic content units, keeping the topic and title structure clear. Golden rule:" Simple is best" is totally applicable here and as you will see in the design. To keep simple means not to overload the home page with unuseful information and links. Structure inner index pages, where you can develop the structure and content and which will allow better search engine optimization and indexing.

The navigation should be clear and to be applied to all the pages. Generally users before going to your site have Internet experience and their expectations will follow the impression from their previous visits to other web sites. A good example of site structure is the Microsoft's http://www.microsoft.com/ design decision with areas clearly defined and structured by families and content destinations. To find out what your industry competitors do, you can perform a research by your main keywords in the search engines. The site organization for a specific industry is generally kept in well defined frames.

Design

Following the best examples will allow your site to perform better. If you are trying to change the design, you can set a survey question about the user experience within your site. Use the feedback to learn how your users feel the change and ask specific questions to reach to weak points of the new implementation. The design should keep the industry line and to be a step ahead with following the best examples. Do your search here again to find out how the best industry sites are designed. Developing of your own design concept is very important for your site success. Concept elements are: the small design elements in the headers, table formatting, and link and title styles.

The images can be kept simple and used only where appropriate. The buttons can be replaced with table structure and links where over effect can be presented through style. This will allow you to achieve a double effect: site better indexing and positioning in the search engines and fast loading of the site pages.

Keep the colors easy to perceive without teasing the eyes. The colors should follow one line and to be corresponding in saturation and color schemes. One of the best examples is the Sun's site design http://sun.com/ where the colors are used only to frame the content areas. The color choice should correspond to your industry sphere and keep the general site concept clear. Using too many effects can cause your users to abandon the site. The styling is also applicable to links and titles. The link font colors should be readable and corresponding to the basic methods of the successful internet marketing.

Generally the best design structure is a step ahead to improving your web presence. Using this powerful means you can achieve better web visibility and user retention.

About The Author

Milena Sotirova is Editor of DevStart, Inc. She has publications on web promotion, search engine optimization and web hosting industry news coverage and analyses. PromotionWorld.com is one of the most popular sites for web promotion and contains tutorials, tools, articles and search engine news. Subscribe for DevStart Channel http://www.promotionworld.com/informer/

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10 Quick Ways To Kick-Start Your Profit Pulling Keywords


First, you must realize that targeting the right keywords or phrases is the 'key' to making any kind of profit from your site. Choosing the 'right' keywords (the exact keyword or phrase surfers type into the search engines to find yoursite or product) can make or break your online venture.

How do you find these profitable keywords?

One simple way to do this is to just type your 'keyword' into the different search engines - then take note of the number of paid adverts listed for your keyword. If there are no paid adverts -- chances are high that your keyword is not a paying keyword.

Perhaps, a more exact way is to use Wordtracker or Overture.com, they will give you the numbers of searches made last month for that keyword, along with a whole list of variations on that keyword or phrase. Overture will also give you a list of who's bidding on the keyword and how much they're willing to pay for traffic to that keyword.

Getting a high ranking (at least on the first or second page) for a paying 'keyword' in one of the top search engines likeGoogle, Msn, or Yahoo can set up a nice revenue streamon your site. It can mean a lot to your site's bottom line.

So try these 10 quick ways to 'kick-start' your keywords:

1. PPC - Pay per click, this is the ultimate kick-start method butyou must know what you're doing! Paying for traffic or hits to your targeted keywords is probably the best and fastest way to kick-startyour keywords. Use Google adwords or programs like overture.com to bid onclicks to your keywords or keyword phrases.

In PayPerClick marketing, many marketers target 'every' keyword for the product they are selling, including misspelled words and phrases. They may then narrow down their list to only the'keywords' with a high conversion rate, how many hitsit takes to get a sale. One sale in 10 clicks and you could be oneasy street. One sale in 1000 clicks and you're probably on your way to the poorer side of town!

In other words, you could lose a ton of money if you're not careful or prudent. Do some serious research before you jump into this arena. Recommended reading would probably start withGoogle Cash by Chris Carpenter.

2. Anchor text it to death! Especially if you're targeting Google traffic, you must have your keyword or phrase placed in a many on-site and off-site 'anchor text links' that you can possibly get.

Anchor text in an url link is as follows: This is your anchor text!

Off-page factors are very important to Google which ranks sites from PR0 to PR10; the number of 'anchor text' links with your particular keyword coming from high PR sites is extremely important --the more high PR links you have, the higher the ranking for your keyword or site will be.

Some savvy marketers have found that it might be more cost effective to buy 'keyword links' on high PR Sites for your targeted keywords rather than shelling out money over and over again for the PPC campaigns. One timeor yearly purchase of certain high profit pulling keyword links that place your site or selling page at #1 on SERPs (search engine results pages). A #1 spot on Google for a high paying keyword that can keeppaying for years is worth its weight in gold. Notice the large number of 'moans and groans' whenever a major shift in Google's rankings occurs i.e. as in the Florida update.

If you're targeting Yahoo, make sure you repeat your keyword often,and at the top of your web copy page. Place it in your 'alt text' in your website's images. But be careful, don't keyword spam by repeating it hundreds of times on your web page.

3. Plug it into your existing site. Professional marketers, plug intheir keywords into their existing sites by placing links on all or numerous pages on their sites. Some use a resource table at the bottom of each page, then when a new resource (keyword) comes along, they just update and plug in this new link. Do a little homework, and check out how some major SEO sites have this column of resources (keywords) listed on all their pages -- thus, providing a large number of internal links to their keywords -- directing or tunneling PR towards their most profitable keywords.

4. Place your anchor text link in your blogs. If you're a prudentmarketer you will have already turned some of your site's normal offerings into blogs and rss feeds. Example, if you have an existing ezine or newsletter, place an online version into a blog. If you regularly do company updates, news releases -- place these into a blog and rss feed.

5. Likewise, you can start a series of blogs on your keyword or subject matter. It has meant an overall increase in traffic and rankings to my sites and perhaps more importantly the 'spider activity' has gone from almost nil to a daily infestation. Regularly 'ping' your posts by using sites like my.yahoo.com, this will get your keywords spidered and indexed more quickly.

6. Place your anchor text links on marketing forums or on forums relatedto your keyword's subject. Forums are a great way to kick-start anykeywords that you are targeting. The traffic is great and mostof these forums are spidered daily.

7. Place your anchor text keywords on a high profile site. If you canget your keyword links on some 'major players', sites which have overa million links or more, do it! I have noticed my site is spidered more frequently and by different robots after getting my links on sites like buzzle.com and addme.com, it probably won't hurt your Google PR ranking either!

8. Place your anchor text keywords on high profile blogs. Again, don'tkeyword spam but try and build strategic relationships with top bloggersin your 'keyword' subject area. Then the mutual exchanging of links willfall into the natural scheme of things.

9. Write articles around your keyword topic, and submit them to ezine directories like ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com. Many marketers suggest you NOT use your keyword in the Title or Body of your article! Place it instead in the anchor text link in your resource box. Reasoning behind this, your article may be picked up by some major sites with High PR rankings or ratings -- if you have the same article on your site -- you will lose traffic to these major competitors. So you have to be a bit sneaky and carefully funnel traffic to your keyword from the search engines.

10. Start a viral 'keyword product'. Many professional marketers alsoplace their keywords into a 'viral' product of some kind: a free brandable ebook, free reports, mini-courses, or tutorials that can be used and passed around freely.

So next time, don't just place a keyword on your site and wait for something to happen, instead, take a more pro-active role by trying these 10 methods of kick-starting your keywords and you will immediately see results. They do work and the proof is just waiting your next move...

To learn more about Google Adsense, Adwords and PayPerClick Marketing: Google Cash File

Copyright © 2005 Titus Hoskins of http://www.bizwaremagic.com

This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.