Archive for ◊ June, 2009 ◊

Author: Leif
• Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Everyone can make their website achieve better in searches if they are just ready to put some effort in.

There are quite a lot of necessary things everyone should do to ensure their website’s success.

1. Make sure it is well written
Avoid needless code, utilize style sheets, make sure you check your coding with W3C, include alt text for every image and make sure every link uses appropriate descriptions ie a good keyword description that describes where the link is going NO “click here”s.

2. What are keywords? Use them.
Work out your keywords then make sure you use them in everything…. Your meta tags, alt tags, link text and consistently in the textual content of your pages. Every page has unlike keywords – use them well.

3. A flat, non-dynamic structure.
Do not include surplus Flash or dynamic menus unless there is a full HTML equivalent available, or else the search engines will not read anything and you will not be indexed and your search result position will go through. Plus if potential customers or search engines have to dig too far they will “bounce” away to a clearer and easier to navigate site.

Some other actions you must consider are;

1. Submit Your Site
Don’t just expect that Google and the other search engines locate you … make them!! Submit your website to the most important search engines, there are lots of sites where you can do this for free.

2. Do Not Ignore Sitemaps
You would not know how to stumble on a strange place without a map so don’t wait for a search engine to do it! With Google Webmaster Tools you can submit the sitemap for your website. Make it simple for the search engines to find your pages, facilitate them with a sitemap.

3. Have one of your keywords, at least, within your domain name
An easy way but so frequently unnoticed but one of the most important things.

4. Meta tags-title
Lots of people say to overlook meta tags – it is a questionable point – but one thing is for sure, confirm that the keywords for your page are included within each page’s title, this is one of the most important SEO tips.

5. “Site under construction
Never PUT this! Would you click all the way through a website that listed this under their title in the search results? NO, so don’t ever put this, even though your site IS under construction. Put on the first page some keyword rich description as to who you are plus a method of contacting you.

6. Don’t ignore the Meta Description
This is what is occasionally written under your website’s page title when it is listed in search results. If you do not describe this within your meta tags then the search engine will choose anything it feels suitable out of your entire page. But this possibly will not represent you as you choose, it may not entice people to click through to your website, think it through carefully – put in your meta tag description just what you want the search engines to list in the results.

7. Change your content!
Websites that stay the same do not get indexed as much by the search engines. Google etc feel affection for excellent changing content. Add a news page, a blog, even a trial offer item, anything! If your web designer does not provide that move to one who does.  These services are easily implemented now and you should not require to wait quite a few months for your web designer to update your site – this should be within your hands and your control.

8. FAQs
Who would have thought that such a basic part of websites would become so essential? Though there has been an increase in people asking questions of search engines as opposed to them just entering key words, so if your website has the saying that someone may enter into a search engine you stand a far improved possibility of coming up higher on the search results.  Have an FAQ page and phrase the questions in the way searchers would put into Google.

9. BAD SEO
Do not ever fall for the “buy ……… and we will give you so many unbelievable links”. The search engines are wise to this and it will now only work against you.  Organic, ie honestly earned, links must be the only ones that matter to you if you do not want to fall out of the index.

Author: Leif
• Monday, June 29th, 2009

toptips1 Tips For Launching A New WebsiteIt doesn’t matter if you are hosting an online magazine, an ecommerce store, an informational site or a promotional website for your company, here are some beneficial tips for the beginners. Atleast one of these strategies may be useful for you in your business.

Create a mailing list amongst your friends, family and professional connections. This is an old school method but it never hurts to try. You wish for all the traffic you can get at this point in time.

• Make use of web tracker statistics. These statistics can provide progress reports. It helps to review the trends with your management team to help plan new directions.

Submit articles to article directories. If you are a professional in any subject (and you should be, bearing in mind that you’re selling something) then it’s time to share your knowledge with the world by posting at an article directory site. At the very least, you get an bonus link which will help your search rankings.

• Have a look at social media sites. This is the signal of the future and traffic reporter sites advise this is where nearly your entire customer base is. Travel to them and take an interest in their lives before you try and sell them anything.

• Use ample of original pictures. Products are only as attractive to the public as they appear online. Don’t make use of stock photography if you have a camera and can take a attractive picture of a product that’s ready to sell.

• Offer a free something as an incentive. This free product can be anything from a free download to free advice or even a free give away. Everyone loves free stuff right? Hence, why you’re reading this free article rather than subscribing to ten high priced news magazines.

Brand your company whenever possible. Think about letterheads, logos, clipart, promotional giveaways, catchy slogans and punchy nicknames. You’re not selling yourself literally, as in an ordinary guy…you’re selling a company and idea that’s larger than life.

• Look into joining an affiliate network. Even if you can try and catch the attention of your own advertisers, it also makes sense to join an affiliate network and earn income from a entire network of traffic.

• Blog your heart out. Blogging is what keeps people interested in your business. If you don’t feel like blogging then simply add search-friendly articles to your website on a regular basis. Maintain fresh information rolling in!

Author: Leif
• Saturday, June 27th, 2009

search engine logos main How Do Search Engines Work?Basically there are two types of search engines. The first one is robots which are called crawlers or spiders. Search Engines is making use of spiders to index websites. As soon as you submit your website pages to a search engine by implementing their necessary submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program specifically run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites too. Some spiders will simply index a specific number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will frequently come back to the sites to test out for any information that has changed. The rate of recurrence with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is nearly like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may possibly index up to a million pages a day.

Example:  Google, Excite, Lycos and AltaVista

How Do Search Engines Work? Web Crawlers

At the time when you ask a search engine to find information, it is essentially searching throughout the index which it has created and not truly searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings for the reason that not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the index.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the occurrence and position of keywords on a web page, but it can moreover identify artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By glance how pages link to each other, an engine can both verify what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are related to the keywords on the original page.

Author: Leif
• Friday, June 26th, 2009

Web AnalyticsSearch engine optimization and marketing give powers to companies to present their website information in a additional user-friendly and spider-friendly method, accordingly helps in leading to better site visibility and, as a result, improved online business and sales.

Web Analytics is an important feature of SEM.  Analytics enables companies to efficiently calculate the advertising and marketing Campaigns and tactics employed to boost online business.  Analytics invariably involves at least two most important considerations:  what sort of activity is happening on the site and how well are existing marketing strategies faring?

The Web Analytics involvement classifies web analytics as “the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and marketing initiatives”.    Web Analytics empowers companies increasing their site business to better comprehend site visitors and how they react with that site, trends in site traffic, marketing campaigns, and conversion dynamics, along with other important factors.

Web Analytics allows companies to resolve the factors preventing site visitors from following through on their conversion objectives.   It enables companies to recognize different types of site visitors, in order that they can notice who their most excellent customers are and which markets are most profitable.  Web Analytics allows companies to detect how the site operates, and to specifically target most favorable search marketing campaigns and/or strategies (i.e. Pay-For-Calls and Pay-Per-Click Advertising, SEO).   Constant upgrading in site performance must be a central objective of Analytics; this important information should be shared with relevant company personnel (i.e. Sales and Marketing) so that Website and Marketing Campaigns can be adjusted.

Understanding Web Analytics outcome is considerably improved when a company sets up an constant Improvement Program based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  KPIs must be rooted in a company’s prime business goals and the website’s role in meeting those goals.  KPIs must be company-specific, simply measurable, in line with long-term objectives, and agreed upon by all relevant personnel, specifically management.  Two important KPIs worth measuring, for example, are cost per action and come back on advertising spending.

Quite a lot of very good analytics solution packages currently available on the market can be employed to measure KPIs (i.e. Coremetrics, Omniture, WebSide Story, WebTrends).   Advanced analytics thought is also moving towards people, process and organization; as such, analytics is starting to embrace the whole marketing approach practiced by companies, in order that the next step is towards developing a science of holistic analytics, not just web analytics.

Effective web analytics, then, involves in excess of just excellent reporting and measuring and marketing predictions; it entails making a company’s online marketing efforts accountable and dumping the hopeless strategies while embracing the effective ones.  Effective web analytics involves taking important action sooner rather than latter.  Finally, effective web analytics aspires to be part of a greater whole, and to evaluate a company’s marketing efforts as a whole and take action from there.

Author: Leif
• Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Firefox Add-on PluginsPresently, Firefox is the highly developed web browser available for download. The user-interface, password management, bookmarking and variety of customization puts it in a league of its own. From the time when I downloaded Firefox, I haven’t used anything else and the Firefox team has not let me look behind.

My most preferred feature of the Firefox browser is the facility to add and have valuable feature tools into my custom-made browser. Lots of the top web 2.0 sites have Firefox add-ons, which allow the user to simply manage all of the web 2.0 tools they may have. If you are similar to most business professionals and entrepreneurs, web 2.0 is being included to a greater extent into your daily schedule. If this is the case, it is important to be as time-effective as possible. Without Firefox and its add-on plugins, I would be unable to stay on top of all my online networks and web tools.

If you are in search of a way to save time, the five Firefox add-ons i am using on a daily basis to manage and improve my web presence are mentioned below.

TwitterFox

TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ tweets on Twitter. This extension adds a tiny icon on the status bar which notifies you when your friends update their tweets. Also it has a small text input field to update your tweets. You can store multiple twitter accounts in this add-on and access all of them without having to visit the Twitter homepage and login. You simply click on the Twitter icon and a small screen pops up, which allows you to tweet from any website/view recent tweets and direct messages.

twitterfox Screenshot

StumbleUpon

With StumbleUpon you will be able to connect with friends and share your discoveries, meet people that have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering. The toolbar allows you to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to the site you are currently viewing.

stumble How to Manage Web 2.0 Tools by using Firefox

Facebook Toolbar

Integrate your Facebook life into your browser. Search Facebook from anywhere: The Search Box allows you to easily search Facebook no matter where you are. Select a friend from the dropdown to go directly to their profile, or hit “enter” to see the search results.

Get Notified: Icons on the toolbar tell you how many new pokes, friend requests, and messages you have. A pop-up will notify you when your friends update their statuses, write a new note or interact with you on Facebook.

Connect with Friends: Click the icon to open the Facebook friends sidebar. You can sort your friends by name or status and easily interact with them and their profiles.

Share Content: The share button lets you share the page that you are currently browsing by sending it to friends or posting it to your profile.

Facebook Toolbar
Digg Toolbar

When you’re browsing the web, the toolbar will let you know if a story has already been submitted to Digg and, if it has, how many Diggs and comments it got. If the page you’re viewing isn’t already on Digg, the toolbar will display a submit button, which will help you easily submit the story to Digg and share it with the entire Digg community. It’s even easy to hide the toolbar; if you don’t want to see it, simply click on the Digg guy in the navigation bar, and it will be hidden.

Latest Popular Content: The toolbar will alert you when new stories become popular on Digg by showing the story details in a small notification window at the bottom of the browser. And don’t worry; you can control whether to see all recently popular stories or just those from the topics and media types you care about.

Follow Your Friends: A great way to discover the best content is to see what your friends are doing on Digg. Enter your Digg username in the settings window to receive notifications when you friends Digg, submit, or comment on stories. To go back and look at earlier notifications, click the Digg icon at the status bar at the bottom of the browser. All notifications can also be snoozed if you want to temporarily turn them off.

Customize: In addition to setting topics for notifications of popular stories and your Digg username for notifications of friends’ activity, you can customize the placement of the notification window, how long it displays, and how links should be opened.

Digg Toolbar
Delicious Bookmarks

This extension integrates your browser with Delicious (http://delicious.com), the leading social bookmarking service on the Web. It does this by augmenting the bookmarking functionality in Firefox with an enhanced experience that offers the following advantages:

• Search and browse your Delicious bookmarks
• Keep up to date on your Network and Links For You
• Access your bookmarks from any computer at any time
• Keep your bookmarks organized using tags
• Share your bookmarks with friends or anyone on the Web
• Import your existing Firefox bookmarks

Addon Button

Author: Leif
• Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

TwitterNearly all online marketers appear to have a problem with all these existing programs that “guarantees” to make you big bucks. Most of them will forever go on failing, not for the reason that the techniques don’t work but since they can not at all get quality traffic to their website.

As nearly all internet marketers or anyone who owns a website knows, with zero traffic you have nothing. It is the deal breaker online, and you’re most likely reading this to find out how to pull more traffic to your site.

One more serious problem is there are so many online businesses that will “Sell” you traffic to your site, and it’s factual that you do get the traffic you paid for. Although, this traffic is not targeted traffic and as a result you are still not making any money and back to where you started. This is very common with those have tried to use traffic exchange websites just to discover that these people are also there for traffic, and probably not your target market.

Now to the serious matter, let us observe a major website that is on the rise and can truly help to drive the targeted traffic you are looking for to your website. Twitter, yes Twitter when used appropriately can bring in hoards of traffic to your website and that is truly assured. Let me discuss three most important steps that will help you out to get started and get you additional traffic.

  • You should have a blog. This blog must be on the subject of your product or service, or no matter what your site is about. When you create a twitter account, ensure that the name closely matches with the blog or business name.
  • Twitter Search – Utilize It. Use Twitters search option to come across targeted people that may be of interest and use it regularly. Start to follow as many people as you can from the search results as you can which will quickly generate more followers to you.
  • Send “tweets” to your followers. These tweets must be information specifically on topic to what is on your blog. In any case, do not constantly send links which will actually start to make you lose followers. This lets them know that your connection is cleanly based on sending them to your website. Excuse yourself from any form of sales pitch as well, another no on twitter or any other social networking website.

These three steps are very important, but don’t create things harder than they are, it’s a basic procedure that will assist you drive more traffic, targeted traffic that is. In addition, don’t forget that using deceiving or domain names that don’t look related to your market will make things harder for your twitter followers. If Twitter Logoyou have to, get a new domain that is appealing or cleanly easy to keep in mind, that technique is priceless in the long run. Just think of every major website today, their names mirror simplicity. Keep in mind the importance of the last step, for the reason that if you do not follow the proper way of going about “tweeting” you will loose many followers in a very short amount of time.

Author: Leif
• Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Google vs. BingFrom the time when Microsoft launched its Bing search engine, it has drawn a great number of attention (and gossip) from the SEO community. On one hand, this is pretty logical for the reason that Bing is planned to be an additional strong player and it is likely to cut some share from Google search engine. On the other hand, this is almost the first time a new strong player comes to the ring, so possibly the expectations that Bing will put an end to Google’s monopoly are baseless. At rest, Bing is quite special (in a optimistic way) from the other search engines and this is its most important strength.

What’s different with bing?

The first feeling you find when you go to Bing.com is that it is special – the background makes it attractive but in no doubt, there have been a lot of other cases of search engines with plenty of graphical add-ons to mask their irrelevant search algorithms. Though, when you type a search query, the results you get are a pleasant surprise because they are relevant.

It is this relevance of search results that fears SEO experts. The results you get when you search with Bing are relevant, yet they are extremely different from Google’s. In fact, no issue if you search with Google or with Bing (or if you go to Bing, you can compare the result sets side by side), you search out relevant results and the two sets are very different from one another.

One of the most essential things SEO experts are interested to know about Bing is its algorithm. Obviously, Bing’s algorithm is dissimilar from Google’s for the reason that when the search term is the same but the set of results is different, a difference in the algorithm is the clear answer. In fact, the question is closely what is different between the two algorithms and if the difference is so drastic that it makes it compulsory to reoptimize a site for Bing.

What to do for now?

Wait. This is the initial thing you have to do. At present it is too early to say what steps (if any) are necessary in turn to optimize your site for Bing.

Moreover, despite of how hopeful Bing looks, it is still untimely to predict if it will turn into a real competitor to Google or if it will become one more unsuccessful attempt to triumph over Google. Let’s see how users respond – will they start Binging more or will they support Google. When it becomes clear that Bing will be able to make it, then it will make sense to optimize for it as well. So for now the best you can do is wait.

What will help you out to be in the best position on bing?

As you probably guess, the proper algorithm of Bing is not openly available and because of that there is a lot of gossip about what weighs more for Bing (in comparison to Google) and what weighs less. A lot of SEO experts test different search queries, analyze the results, and based on that try to understand what of the known SEO strategy works with Bing.

Some SEO experts still believe that Bing is actually Live Search in new clothes (i.e. user interface), although others say that there are visible differences between Live Search and Bing. But there is no doubt that for now Bing is a considerable improvement over Live Search in terms of relevance of search results.

Bing is hardly the first time when there is no agreement in the SEO community about the details of the algorithm but if we can review, here are some factors, which are (or at least are strongly believed to be) of importance when Bing optimization is concerned:

Value of backlinks doesn’t matter: If you judge against the first 10 results in Bing and Google, it is clear that all equal, the winners in Bing have less backlinks than the winners in Google. It is unclear if nofollow matters with Bing.
Anchor text matters more: The amount of value inbound links may be of less importance for Bing but the anchor text surely matters more. In fact, since anchor text is one of the measurements of the quality of inbound links, it isn’t greatly different. Get quality anchor text and you will do well in both Bing and Google.
Could’t helped out with link spaming: Seeing as the quantity of backinks (even if they are of ultimate quality) seems to be of less importance to Bing, link spamming will be even less helpful than with Google.
Onpage factors are more important: This is one of the most controversial points. Lots of SEO experts disagree but many also think that onpage factors matter more with Bing than with Google:  At rest, it has nothing to do with the 90s, when onpage factors were tentative.
Right matters: If this is correct, this is bad news for bloggers and small sites for the reason that it means that search results are unclear in favor of older sites and/or sites of trustworthy organizations. Age of domain is also very essential with Bing – even more than with Google.
Page rank is less important: When you do a search for a competitive keyword and you see a couple of PR2 or even PR1 sites among the top 10 results, this may make you wonder. On Google this is barely possible but on Bing it looks quite normal.
Content is less important: Bing looks a little conservative – or possibly it just can’t index sites that quickly – but it seems that fresh content is not as vital as with Google. This is associated with the age of domain specifics and accordingly you will see ancient pages rank high (but these olden pages are relevant to the search query).
Binging is Flash-friendly: Optimizing a Flash site for Google is somewhat a nightmare for SEO experts. It is too soon to say but it looks like Bing is more Flash-friendly, which is excellent news to all sites where Flash is (still) heavily employed. Websites with very high page rank doesn’t matter a lot to the bing what does in reality matters now for bing is quality of the page.

For the time being it is too early to say which factors are of primary importance with Bing. But the truth that their search results are relevant means that their algorithm is really particular. Well, possibly the relevant results in Bing are because of the fact that web masters were taken by surprise and they haven’t had the time to optimize for Bing. Therefore, the content is genuine; there are no SEO gimmicks and artificial pumping. We’ll see if this will continue with the same in future, when web masters learn how to optimize for Bing additionally!!!

Author: Leif
• Saturday, June 20th, 2009

web hostingFor those who are just starting up on their very own website – for their small business or personal purposes, it is suggested that you prefer an affordable or cheap host that can offer exceptional and very reliable services. Cheap does not necessarily signify that you have to negotiate in quality. There are a reasonable number of web hosting companies that can provide good features and quality services for a price you can simply afford. This is mostly useful to those who are just staring to build their online business of personal website. It is a practical way to get started.

A cheap host does not necessarily mean poor quality of service. These days, the rivalry between web hosting companies is very obvious due to their rising demand. Therefore, they only feature to consumers the best of their services including unlimited disk space, 24/7 technical support, unlimited data transfer, free domain, free templates, free set up among many others. Depending on what specific features you require for your website, there is certainly one host that is more than willing to do the job at a very reasonable price. This means that you do not only get value for your money but you can also expect more for less.

Searching for the cheap host may be pretty difficult more than ever if you are unfamiliar with the top names in the industry. With the numeral companies that offer web hosting services, it is very simple to get lost amidst the many unfamiliar names. Though, it is suggested that you read web hosting reviews first in order to keep away from being lured by companies that offer substandard services or those whose purpose is to simply earn huge money. These “unreliable” companies are gaining in number as the web hosting industry skyrockets. Hence, it is important that you think twice for them. A good way to start is by reading web hosting reviews to familiarize your self with the most trustworthy companies that offer affordable and quality services and those who had already established their name in the business over the years. In this way, you are guaranteed to land only on a good and trustworthy web hosting provider.

If you search online, there are countless names that lead in the field of web hosting. Every one offers something unique in addition many other features that can attract customers. A few offer cheap web hosting though there are some that offer dedicated web hosing services and many others in between. These serious companies generally offer good prices. This means that you should not have much difficulty at all finding a cheap host only if you know where to go, where to get on track and just as long as you know which companies to trust.

Author: Leif
• Friday, June 19th, 2009

BingLast week, Microsoft provided insight to webmasters and SEO mavens, giving them a quick look behind the curtain at Bing. The new Decision Engine is captivating a new direct approach to how users are viewing page rank results, in addition to a tighter fist on content scraping than Google presently clinches.

At a quick look, Bing’s user crossing point is much more appealing and efficient, when compared straightforwardly to Google’s SERPs for the similar search terms. It also appears that Bing is utilizing eye-tracking data and heat map results to make themselves more valuable. Now that Google has some solid competition, there may also be variations in how SEO is executed with the purpose of rank well in Bing.

At present, there is a trend at Google to dig out search results scraps from the content of the result, rather than from description metatags. This does provide more considerable snippets that are more relevant for the user, but some sites aren’t optimized in a way that advocates this new tactic. This is general with product-based, content-light sites with lists of products. These types of sites are having a very hard time with this new change by Google.

Microsoft is taking an aggressive approach to scraping sites for content. Sites that are disappointed that search engines are presenting their users with the most excellent content will not be any happier with Bing. In general, content-rich websites would out-convert minimal-content websites because they appear to more completely address and answer the problem or question the user may have had. Bing and Google have both changed their search to more reflect this, which has a number of SEO mavens very aggressive towards their coffee mugs.

Microsoft’s Bing Team has given no insight into how their search ranks understand optimization and are decided: number of search, amount of backlinks, anchor texts? Much of the algorithms and spiders are basically the same from MSN, but nothing has been released to simplify these details. This leads many to consider that Bing was mainly a rebranding move, rather than a totally new and evolved approach to search. It is also said that Bing is moving at their own speed, and not trying to automate at hyper speed.

Author: Leif
• Thursday, June 18th, 2009

The value of Inbound LinksWhen you use search engine such like google, and type in a search keywords, for example “article submission services”. The most relevant search keyword will come up. How do you search out those spots?

A number of people will argue with me here the single most essential factor is the incoming links. There are only some types of different incoming links. I individually have had 3 websites rank on number 1 for google.

a)–One way links: One way links are just that. You have a website giving you a one way link to your website. These are appreciated the highest of all the links coming in. How would you go on the subject of getting these types of links? There are websites out there that recommend that. Go to google and type in “one way links” You’ll find ample of results. It never hurts to do a small research on the sites before accepting their terms.

b)–Reciprical links: These are links that would exchange with someone, and the most general type of link. How would you go in relation to getting these? Simple, you just inquire. Send them an email with your name your website, telling them you wants to link. Place the link on your site first, and let the webmaster know where it is. If they don’t reply contact for a second time in a week. Still no answer, delete the link.

c)–3 Way Links: They are 3 different websites all 1 way linking to each other. For example: Site A,B,C… Site A Links to B Site B Links to C Site C links to A. If this is puzzling, draw it out on a piece of paper in a triangle shape, and you will see A–B B–C C–A.

One more important thing to keep in mind is to link to websites that have the similar theme as yours. Incoming links can’t harm you, but your out going links can. If you have a website about computers, you don’t want links coming in from Debt Companies, get it?

Obviously there are only some other things that contribute to getting a high ranking page, but I’ll discuss that at a different time.