Articles are usually considered to be more informative and accurate where details are concerned. Blogs have arrived as a means to get your message across in a personal way. From a search engine perspective, both are a great source of information. But which one to rank better?

First, let’s look at the value each one brings:

Articles:

Informative, Authorative, detailed, marketing driven.

Blogs:

Timely, personal, have “inside point of view” usually updated on a frequent basis

From a freshness perspective, Blogs clearly win out over the articles.

Exposure:

Unless your blog is highly ranked, the articles will get more exposure, since there are more chances of your article being seen by more people. There are many sources on the internet that you can submit your articles too.

From a business perspective, I can say that articles help re-enforce what you are selling. By writing an article instead of a blog, there is a perception that more care is taken to writing an article, therefore the information contained within is worth more.

People know that a blog will have a personal spin to it, whether the author is blasting a company, or promoting something that they have a personal or professional interest in.

From my own trials, no one has made any purchases for any product being pushed in a blog, but instead there has a distinguishable influx of sales that can be directly traced back to an article.

So what does this mean to you?

If you have a product or service you want to promote, use an article. If you need to get something off your chest, create a blog. While both are thought of very well by the search engines, you’re ultimate goal is to convert the user, not confuse the search engines.

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Many times while entering phrases or keywords into Search Engines, I find a lot of somewhat related sites, but hardly ever anything exact. So why to bother on getting these supposedly un-searched terms?

Because there is a perception that having your site in the #1 spot in Search Engines means that your site is an authority on that particular subject. As any experienced user knows, this is most often not the case, but perception is reality.

Granted, some of the phrases that you can get ranked on may not be very popular, but you never know what a user is going to enter into the search box, or do we ever know at what point of information gathering they are at.

One of the most common traits of searching is that when a user firsts begins a search, they use a broad term, but as they get further along into their search, the phrases become more precise as they themselves filter out the un-related sites.

This is the same concept of which a successful PPC campaign can be run. While it may be great to get tons of traffic for the keyword “shoes”, if a user is really looking for “Nike running shoes”, the site has wasted money on that search.

Another curious stat that web analytics reveal is that a consumer that comes to a site through PPC is not a life-time customer. They are usually interested in the quick fix, or easy solution. Compared to a user who arrives through organic search engine optimization, they are more likely to be lifetime consumers since they tend to trust a company that has “earned” it’s way to the top of the rankings.

By the time a user has a four to five keyword phrase entered in for their search query, chances are that they have already eliminated the “noise” and are focused on the “signal” i.e. the product or service that your site is offering.

One final item to remember is that if you have an exact phrase that is not common to a search engine query, once it gets indexed, it will most like appear in the number one position since the search engines always try to find an exact match when other factors aren’t available.

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Search Engine: A machine which is “tuned” by humans to index web pages. For instance, Excite.

Algorithm: The way in which the search engine is “tuned”. An algorithm is the way the search engine will determine ranks – it is the way the search engine is programmed to determine ranks. An algorithm may take only certain things into account – like keywords in the title or link popularity. Some engines use cyclical algorithms – meaning they may change algorithms from week to week.

Directory: A list of sites compiled by humans. For instance, Yahoo!

Spider: A spider goes to your site and finds your pages. It then stores those pages in a database for future retrieval by the search engine.

Indexing: When the search engine takes the pages from the database that the spider has created and places them in an order based on the algorithms of that engine. All search engines have a different indexing process – due to different algorithms – that’s why you get different results in different engines.

Query: The keywords that a person types into a search box. A person is “querying” the search engine. Crawling: When the spider follows the links from the page you submit – the spider is “crawling” your site.

Automatic Update: When the spider returns to your pages at periodic intervals to check to see if you’ve made any changes. Optimizing: You can optimize, tune or configure your web pages for a specific search engine. This means that you are employing specific strategies for specific engines.

Spam:
• Using the same keyword more than three times in your keywords tag.
• Putting keywords into your tags that have nothing to do with your actual page content.
• Using text, spacers, or borders the same color as the background.
• Using tiny text with keywords in an attempt to increase ranks.

B. Search Engines v. Directories

There is a difference between a search engine and a directory. A search engine is a machine – or a “robot”. A human may program algorithms for a search engine, but a human will have nothing to do with your site when the spider is visiting your site or the engine is indexing your pages. A directory can be compiled by a robot, but more often than not, it is compiled by humans. Yahoo! is a prime example of a directory. When you submit your site to Yahoo! a human will review your site for consideration in their index.

The lines between search engines and directories are becoming blurred. This is because each major “search engine” is associated with a “directory.” For instance, we used to call AltaVista a search engine. However, we have to be careful with that terminology. When you go to AltaVista and you type in a search – you are definitely getting results from the “engine” part of AltaVista. But when you search down through the “categories” – you haven’t typed anything into the “search box” – you are now getting results from a directory (these results come from two directories – Open Directory Project and LookSmart.)

There is a relationship between search results in the “engine” and the directory or directories that are associated with a particular search engine. It appears that many search engine’s algorithms have been set to include results based on the directory. Therefore, it is imperative that you are listed in the directory associated with each search engine.

C. What happens when I submit my site to a search engine?

First, the search engine’s spider will visit your site immediately, and schedule your site for inclusion in the search engine’s index. Second, usually within a few weeks, the engine will place your site in their index. Third, the spider will revisit your site, to include any updates. Once you are included in the index, the spider will usually revisit every two weeks. The spider will also begin to “crawl” your site by following the links off of the page that you submitted. This process is also called “automatic update”. With Excite – these new updates seem to be automatically included once the spider has visited the site. However, if you are dealing with the Inktomi spider – slurp – which gathers data for Hotbot, Snap, Yahoo! and others, this information may not be included in each particular engine’s index for several weeks. Fourth, when someone uses a search engine, they type “keywords” into the search box. They are submitting a query to a search engine. The search engine, depending on how it has been tuned, will pull up all of the relevant sites which pertain to that query.

D. Variables That Affect Ranks
When you are optimizing your web pages for certain engines, you must always keep in mind that keyword frequency in text and location of your keywords, is the most important part of how the engine will rank your pages. ALL search engines rank pages based on frequency and location of keywords.

© 2001 by Renee Kennedy
A. Terms

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SEO is an growing business industry, and increasing numbers of companies are becoming interested in hiring SEO firms. Unfortunately, many of these companies become interested in SEO for the wrong reasons, and many also have unrealistic expectations.

Have a strong business case for SEO.

Normally, companies decide to hire a SEO firm simply because they want to see themselves listed on search engines. This is also an reason that they want to hire a SEO firm because their site does not get expected traffic. Again, this may be an indication that SEO is something to investigate, but is not enough evidence to support launching an immediate campaign. Following are the three questions to ask yourself when considering hiring a SEO firm:

Are my customers searching for my products and/or services online?
The answer to this question is usually yes. Especially in highly specialized fields with low average dollar sales, research will sometimes indicate that the scant number of people searching for terms related to your business would probably not be worth the necessary investment in SEO. There are some Software which are free for use, which is the great place to see how often people are searching for your products or services online.

Are my competitors showing up for the terms I want to target?

Although this by itself does not make a compelling argument for hiring a SEO firm, discovering that many of your competitors have undertaken search engine initiatives of their own may indicate that they have found it to be a good investment.
What effect would an increase in targeted traffic to my website have on my business?

If your site receives steady traffic but has never helped you to land a sale, an increase in traffic will not necessarily improve your results (even if the traffic is more targeted). On the other hand, if your website currently helps you to generate sales every week, an increase in traffic should improve your website results in a more or less predictable fashion. It is important to make sure that your website is acting as an effective sales conversion tool prior to hiring a SEO firm.

Educate Yourself.

There are many respected sites on the web devoted to search engine optimization, including Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Guide, and SEO Today. Taking the time to learn about SEO before hiring a search engine

optimization firm can be beneficial in several areas. If you decide to do SEO, you will hire a better firm.

Unfortunately, there is no official code of ethics for SEO firms. Even a brief visit to one of the sites listed above will help you to eliminate a large percentage of firms that use risky tactics, antiquated software, or simply don’t get results.

You will better understand the recommendations that your SEO firm makes.

A better understanding of the SEO process can help you to evaluate the recommendations that your SEO firm makes. This can be useful when you are trying to balance the needs of your visitors against your need for increased traffic.

You will be able to participate in the process.

While a good SEO firm will take the time to understand your business as best they can, they do not know your business or your customers as well as you do. If you take some time to learn about SEO and involve yourself in the process, the coordinated effort will almost always yield better results than a SEO firm working on its own.

Have Realistic Expectations.

While SEO is one of the most effective marketing channels available to most organizations, it is important that the expectations that you set for your campaign are realistic. Specifically:

Don’t expect to rank highly for ultra-competitive, general terms.

Studies indicate that most people now search using multiple words, but many companies ask their SEO firm to target a very general term. For example, if your company provided security consulting for large companies, you may be tempted to ask your SEO firm to target the phrase “consulting” or the phrase “security”. The problem is that these phrases are very general (and probably very competitive) and only a fraction of the people typing either of them in a search engine will be looking for your specific product. It is generally much more productive to go for less competitive phrases that bring in a higher percentage of visitors looking for your specific product or service

Be Prepared to Protect Your Investment

Companies that hire a SEO firm should also understand that it is not a one-time effort. Hiring a firm is only the beginning of a long process of improving conversion rates, monitoring results, and possibly expanding your campaign.

Improving Conversion Rates

Be prepared to track the conversion rates on your site for individual keyphrases. Software such as Clicktracks allows you to see which phrases from which engines bring you the visitors who are most likely to buy your products, fill out your online form, etc. Access to this data can help you to improve pages of your site that do not convert visitors.

Track Ranking and Traffic Data

You should also be prepared to track your traffic and ranking data on a monthly basis, whether you outsource it or do it in house. Without access to this data, you will not be able to tell whether the overall value of your campaign is trending upward or downward.

Expand Your Keyphrase List

If the campaign works for you (and if you do your homework, it should), you will probably want to expand your keyphrase list over time to drive more targeted visitors to your site and further increase the value of your campaign.
Conclusion

While hiring a SEO firm can have a tremendous impact on your company’s bottom line, you should only proceed after you have fully evaluated your current position, knowledge, and dedication. If you know exactly what you expect to get out of your campaign, have realistic expectations, and are committed to getting the most out of your investment, you are probably ready to look into hiring a SEO firm.

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If you own a website, chances are you paid someone to help you get it launched. If you did, you have three primary components under the roof of “a web site.” There is your domain name. There is your web hosting – the space you rent on a server out there somewhere, to put your web site live. And then there is your web site itself, which is a combination of HTML files and images which are uploaded to that web hosting you rent.

The most important thing is that you should have three separate providers – a domain name registrar, a web hosting company, and a web site designer. The reason behind many web experts believe this is, that if you have a problem with one, you still have control over the other two. For example, if your web hosting company causes you problems, you have your web content, and you have access to your domain, and you can easily shut off one hosting account, find another, and move your site. If your web designer fails, you can at least change access to your site, move it or provide the information to a new designer. Conversely, if you have all three components in one place, you run the risk of finding yourself without a web site, perhaps temporarily, or worst case, having to start from scratch.

Although I’m personally a believer in keeping it all separate, the majority of business people don’t think like that and a great many folks have gone for an “all in one” situation where the hosting, domain and web site are with one provider. Whatever your scenario is, there is one absolutely critical piece of information you should take from this article. You MUST have administrative control over all three components of your web presence: domain, hosting and content. You don’t have to DO anything with it – except print out the access information and stash it away. You can rely on someone to manage it all for you, like I do for most of my clients. But if you don’t have this information, you don’t really own your web site!

Even if you have a good understanding or pretty wonderful relationship with your service provider, stop and ask yourself the following:

• Do you know the name of the domain registration company?
• Do you have the username and password to access your domain account?
• Are you certain that YOU are listed as the legal owner of the domain?
• Do you know where your web site is hosted?
• Do you have the “FTP” (this stands for file transfer protocol) username and password to get to your web site on the host server?

A frightening number of new clients come to me without this information, and very often, they’ve already run into trouble and need help. In some cases, they have had to start all over with a new web site. In one situation, a client almost lost her domain name because the “all in one” company she had paid for a web site had made themselves the legal owners of the domain!

Don’t wait until you get into problem – make sure YOU own your web site, right now.

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Designing an search engine friendly website is very important for your business. When you are designing an search engine friendly website, it ranks well for important keywords on search engine and helps to increase the overall organic traffic to the website.

Therefore, if you are thinking to develop a website or you already have a website, you might consider it making search engine friendly. I know that having a beautiful website is important because you need to project a good corporate image to your clients. Search engines can’t see the visual design of your site: so if you want to rank your website well on search engines, you need to make sure that your website is well structured. Let me tell you some important tips to built an search engine friendly website:

A. Be sure that your site is not built by using flash technology. As flash technology will prevent search engines from reading the contents on your site, you loose the chance to rank well for important keywords.

B. Do not use frames to built your website.Frames prevent search engines from reading the content on your site as like flash technology do. Therefore, avoid using the frames while building your website at any cost.

C. Always place the important keywords in the Title and Meta Tags of your website. The keywords that you intend to rank well, should be placed in the title and Meta tags of your website. The title tag should be unique on every page of the website, and the keywords you choose to place in the tag of a page, should be relevant to the content of the page. You should not use auxiliary words like “a”, “the”, “and” in Title tag. Auxiliary words are too common, and search engine do not consider them. The impact of Title tag is diluted if it contains auxiliary words. So don’t use auxiliary words whenever and wherever possible.

D. Make sure that the URLs of your website are search engine friendly. Some websites are built on technology which generate pages on the fly. Although its great to get your site online quickly and easily, The URLs are not descriptive, therefore they are not search engine friendly. Even though search engines can read non friendly URL, a website with search engine URL usually perform much better when it comes on SEO.

E. Ensure that your website contains text link navigation. Some websites are using images as link navigation which prevents search engines from following the links through your website and therefore will not be able to index all the pages of your website.

Having a search engine friendly website is a necessary part of SEO. Before SEO can be implemented, you need a SEO friendly web design. Hope these tips have given you a guideline on what to look out for when you decide to revamp or create a new website for your company.

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Getting a website is essential for business. Making a mistake could cost you money as well as lost reputation. For doing this, you need to take an help of top web hosting services. This service provides you, your own space on world wide web with the help of Web Host Server. This service allows people using the Internet to visit your website and join your business activities. You can host your own website and include all the features which are required by you, but the major deterrent in this technique is that it is rather very expensive and high technical skills are required to maintain the host server. In the light of this information, many people avail the services of other Web hosts which offer the required web space and the features at lower prices. As there are innumerable hosts trying to vie for customers these days, you have to be very careful while choosing the right service provider. For better results it is highly recommended that you use the services of a reputed web host even though it might be a bit more expensive than a local one

A simple practice to find out the credentials of the web host is by comparing the information given to you in the different forms of media like e-mail, telephone and fax.
You must be sure that your current business needs a dedicated server or not, as type of service is expensive and similar work can be done over a shared hosting aswell, which is usually an option where you can save some money. You should opt for a service provider which offers a money-back policy in case you decide to pull out of a particular venture. The up-time average of your web host server must be 99.9% as a lesser rate would be detrimental to your business. The bandwidth you require for your website is also of prime importance as going in for a greater bandwidth than you actually require can prove be a simple waste of money. The control panel offered for your site must be simple to use for better visitor convenience. For an average business, a bandwidth between 500 MB to 1 GB will be more than enough. Unlimited data transfer at extremely low prices usually is accompanied with some clauses which we often tend to ignore. So you have to be careful while paying for this feature. A company providing the best web hosting will offer a 24/7 support for your site and it is a good thing to confirm it at the time of contract signing. Moreover, reading web hosting reviews will also help you in choosing the right provider so you must dedicate some time to it before finalizing your deal. If there are conflicting statements, it is best to steer away from the company.The reputation of the service provider must be carefully checked so that you don’t have to suffer later with a bad deal coming your way.

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Black Hat search engine optimization is defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include
One or more of the following characters:

* Breaking Search engine rules and regulations.
* Creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site
* Unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

We should avoid Black Hat SEO

Typical practices that a Black Hat will use, and WILL get your site banned from Google eventually are:

A. Keyword Stuffing – Literally the practice of repeating a keyword or words over and over again on a given web page. Google’s algorithms work very hard at trying to find pages that read like normal text, not like a broken record. And they are getting better at it all the time. If they suspect you are just trying to “stuff” the content of your site with keywords, there is a good chance they’ll penalize you for it.
B. Cloaking – Is a technique where a webmaster will have two versions of a given web page, one version that it shows the search engine spiders, and one version that it shows the regular web surfer. Highly frowned upon if the engines find out.
C. Invisible Text – (mentioned above) Filling a web page with text that is the same color as the background. I love this one.
D. Doorway Page – A highly optimized web page whose purpose is to direct traffic to other pages using either a redirect method or merely by being full of links that direct you to these other web pages.
E. Spam Page – Basically a doorway page that is full of ads that a webmaster makes money off of if someone clicks on them. Very annoying pages.
F. Interlinking – Setting up multiple websites about a given topic and having them all link to each other in order to increase their relevance and subsequently their rankings in the search engines.
G. Selling PageRank – If you have a high PR website, you sell links from your site to another for cash. Helping their site rank higher in Google and in turn, making your wallet fatter.
H. Buying Expired Domain – Buying expired websites that had some decent PageRank in order to try and keep the site’s inbound links.
I. Unnatural Link Building – Another popular Black hat technique where the Black Hatter will build thousands of back links to your site using various techniques, quite often this can be seen using Yahoos Link too to view the links, if a site is relatively new but has thousands of back links then there is a chance it will be a from Black Hat techniques. The link building techniques used typically are:

* Comment Spamming – The Black Hatter will spam thousands of Blogs with your link.
* Forum Spamming – As above but with forums.
* Link Farms / Link Exchange Programs – Though exchanging links is not really Black Hat some companies will install code onto websites that exchanges links with thousands of other websites, they will also generate thousands of “micro sites” which have thousands of links within them. Micro sites tend to be keyword stuffed sites used primarily for link massive link building.

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Found an cool SEO tool for “peeping” your competitor link-building strategy and how many links they have to gain higher position in SE than yours. All of the matters disclosed by this SEO tools, it spies your competitors deeply until nothing can be hides.

This SEO tool name is SEO Spy Glass, this tool will reveal all the competitors hiding strategies to rank higher than yours, through report. So you can study it and follow all the traces your competitors did to rank better.

This SEO tool is free to download, according what I red in the promotional page, all the author asks from us is our email so if there’s future update, we will be emailed and asked to upgrade it. So if you’re interested to know your competitor little secret: here’s the link: SEO Spy Glass (http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/index.html).

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The one who owns the website, will always want his/her website to be one of the most prominent sites on internet. But for that, some efforts are needed. The most effective way will be either to go for full-fledge SEO program or to use marketing strategies like Google AdSense or Pay-Per-Click. Some how, it has been found that Search Engine Optimization or SEO helps the web pages in earning the visibility/web traffic/conversion to a great extent. Breaking SEO rules can only result in a web page that is obscured from the users for whom it was intended

Advantages of SEO rules: Most important, your website becomes SEO optimized or compatible to the search engines. That means it stands a good chance of being ranked high in the search engine listings or indexing. This is turn presents a lot of benefits for your website, especially if it’s a business site and you are looking forward to making some revenue out of it.

Your website becomes more visible in the Internet. If you optimize your website, for more details visit to www.sitemap-makers.com it will remain in the top rankings of the SEO listings for a long time, may be for some months. You do not have to pay any additional amount for its publicity. Visitors will come to know about your site from the search engine listings. This will automatically promote your website and divert huge network traffic toward you. You get a good return on investment. Adhering to the rules of the search engine, you can have a competitive edge over your contemporaries. This will enable you to make good business profits in the online markets. The advantage of having a good visibility in the online community is that your company gets a global clientele. These are some of the main benefits of playing by the SEO rules.

If you use analytical tools for identifying your user types, base, geographic location, etc., you can develop keywords that will attract the prospective clients. The design of the website and the content can be prepared keeping the requirement of the search engines and these will present you huge website traffics.

Now, if you do not follow SEO rules, you will obviously miss out on the benefits that are stated above. Of course, you can publicize your website by using the Pay-Per-Click or AdSense but these services are expensive and may be a bit difficult for a startup company. Moreover, by not adhering to the SEO rules, your website can never bag a rank in the first page of the search engines, for more details visit to www.the20seotools.com which has the listing of sites that are perceived to be important. By not having a favorable PageRank your website runs a high risk of being relegated to the subsequent pages of the listings, which in turn, can lead to your website being totally ignored by the surfers or your potential clients.

On the whole, playing by the SEO is a far better option when you want your website to be highly visible in the Internet community and if you are contemplating serious business opportunities from them. This depends on the purpose for which you have designed your website. On the other hand, you may not bother about SEO rules if you are running an informational site and already having a loyal customer base to your credit.

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