Free search engine optimization sounds like bologna right? It’s not. Six years ago when I first started running website business ventures, I was under the impression that search engine optimization was an expensive process only available to businesses with big budgets. I foolishly decided instead of pursuing search engine optimization, I would market my online business offline. It was a complete flop. Here’s the reason why, the great thing and major purpose of marketing a website online is to convert prospects to your website easier, faster, and with a higher conversion rate. It’s very difficult to get people to remember your website when advertising offline. Not to mention, most people don’t walk around with a computer on them so they can’t go to your website immediately.
I babbled on about that experience to hopefully inspire you to have confidence in free search engine optimization. If you want to optimize your website for free, article marketing is the best way to go. Article marketing has proven itself to be quite effective. It’s effective for me personally as well as for my clients. Article marketing is not exactly a close kept secret of mine. Many internet marketers use article marketing to get immediate traffic to their website, get, maintain, and keep one-way anchor texted backlinks, and optimize their website for the search engines.
Article marketing requires three small steps to success and they are as follows:
Step 1: Find Keywords
Keywords are the most important step in any search engine optimization campaign or strategy. You will need to find keywords that you would like your website to appear in search engines for. I use seobook.com. They have a free keyword tool that allows you to type a broad keyword phrase and it gives you 100 narrowed keywords.
Step 2: Write Articles
Now that you have your keywords, you need to begin writing your articles. There are some very important things to keep in mind when writing articles. When writing articles be sure you are not rambling on about your product, service, or site. This is irritating for the reader and article directories will reject the article and ban you from their directory. When writing articles make sure you provide value and give people information they otherwise may not have known. Quality is key. If you need an example just look at the style and format of this article you are reading now. I’m not outright soliciting my site. I’m providing you with what I believe to be important and beneficial information. (at least I think it is)
Category : Blog &Marketing &Search Engine Ranking
Cheow Yu Yuan – March 27, 2009
If your website is not indexed by search engines, it will not appear on the search engine listings. Therefore, when your website is live, the first thing you must do is to let the search engines notice your website and index it. In this article, let me share with you 5 ways to get your site indexed by today:
1. Submitting a XML sitemap to search engines. The xml sitemap includes links to every page of your website. It is a file that you can submit to search engines to get your pages indexed. By submitting your xml sitemap, you will notify the search engines about your website and index every page of it. You can upload your sitemap to Google by creating a free Google Webmaster account.
2. Create a HTML sitemap page on your website. A HTML sitemap is very different from a xml sitemap file. A HTML sitemap is a page on your website that is visible to your visitors. It will list down all the links to every page of your site. This allows visitors to navigate your site easily and allow search engine spiders to follow the links and discover all pages.
3. Place HTML text links on your website. Search engine spiders follow HTML text links to discover other pages of your website. Therefore, you must ensure that you use HTML text links for simple navigation menu so that search engine spiders can follow. Also, you should hyperlink keywords within your content and point them to other pages of your site. This is a good way to tell search engines what pages are important.
4. Directory submission. Submit your website URL to a list of SEO-friendly directories. DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and BOTW are important directories that you must submit your website to. It is, however, not all directory submission is free. Some may require you to pay a small fee for your website submission.
Category : Blog &search engine optimization &Search Engine Ranking &SEO
Keyword research determines which keywords you should be targeting with the SEO. Most people think that they know which keywords they should target. Instinct can be a great resource, but it can also be misleading and is almost always not enough. For example, “search engine optimization” gets an estimated 16,000 searches a day while “search engine marketing” gets an estimated 8,800 searches a day. If your gut tells you to target “search engine marketing”, you may get great rankings, but it would only get you half of the traffic that you could have had if you had targeted and ranked well for “search engine optimization”. There are also keywords that you may not be able to rank well for without a lot of time and significant amount of link building regardless of how well you optimize your site. In addition, there are keywords that other people will use to search for what your site offers that you would never even think of. So, in addition to letting you know which keywords are more popular, the research can also provide new keywords to target.
Drawing on the analogy in our search marketing parable (found on the Church Marketing Online blog), optimizing your website without first doing keyword research is like trying to pick apples from a tree without first checking to see if there are any apples on it or if the apples are within your reach. You could end up putting in a lot of effort but going home with little fruit from your labor. So it’s a key component of search engine optimization.
What Do I Research?
There are two main aspects to keyword research. The first is popularity, how often are keywords actually searched for. Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo, and MSN don’t share the actual number of searches for specific keywords; however, there are a few tools online which are generally thought to be pretty accurate and Google does offer a free tool that gives the “approximate” number of searches for some keywords. The keyword popularity tools (other than Google’s) use the search data from a number of other smaller search engines along with a few algorithms to predict how many searches are being made for specific keywords. It’s not perfect, but it gives you an idea of which keywords are most popular. Since Google’s figures come from…well…Google, they are probably the most accurate, but even their figures are only estimates and I’ve found that many keywords return a “Not enough data” result. You may wish to use both Google and another keyword popularity tool.
The second aspect to keyword research is competition research. Competition research starts with analyzing your web pages to determine how competitive your site is both in general and for specific keywords. This is sometimes referred to as page strength. I should note that there are really two aspects to page strength, the general strength of a site and the specific strength of a page within the site. For the sake of simplicity, in this article I will use “web page” for both. The next step is to examine the keywords themselves to see how competitive they are. This is sometimes called keyword difficulty. Determining keyword difficulty is done partially by examining how competitive the pages are that rank well for this keyword, though other methods can be helpful as well. This can be tricky for two reasons.
Category : Blog &Marketing &search engine optimization &Search Engine Ranking &SEO
Steve Waganer – March 28, 2009
In this global market, online access is the prime medium for the globalization. Information and commerce are mingling with each other in order to open doors for the people who are interested in this communication process. Organic search engine marketing is such a marketing process through which one can promote business or the product and can have the full update about the business world.
The new comers are promoting their own sites in order to be acquainted with the market. A computer with the online service is enough to reach out to the enthusiasts. Organic search engine marketing is the helping hand to provide all kinds of assistance to create a site which can be discovered by the searching engines. (more…)
Category : Magazines
Search engine placement optimization requires you have a detailed strategy outlined. The detailed strategy should include three parts. It should include keywords, meta information, and a marketing plan.
Below I will briefly discuss the importance of keywords, meta information, and a marketing plan and how they are affected for search engine placement optimization.
Keywords: Before you even begin creating a website you should have several hundred keywords pre-established to determine exactly what keywords you want the search engines to index your website for. If you have already created your website and have not established keywords yet, it is ok because you can still do so now. In order to gain a healthy amount of keywords, you need to use a keyword tool. There are many keyword tools out there that charge outrageous fees to provide monthly search volumes in search engines, and they are all 100% false. Do not get scammed. Search engines do not release their search volumes. For the ones that used to such as Yahoo, they have reported that their search volumes are extensively inaccurate so how in the world could a keyword tool provide accurate search volumes of the search engines themselves can not figure this out? Get it now? Ok. Good. There is a free keyword tool called seobook. Google seo book keyword tool, and the exact link will pop up. Seobook gives you up to 100 keywords and estimated search volumes for free. I use them and I love them, and most importantly I don’t pay a dime.
After you’ve gathered your keywords you need to ensure your meta information on your website is written appropriately.
Category : Marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a fairly hot topic these days. Every business wants to know how to get found online.
Anita Campbell from Small Business Trends is running a short information-packed webinar entitled:
Getting Found in Search Engines, for Beginners
These two bullet points jumped out at me, since I have clients who are trying to navigate this new frontier:
- Simple techniques you can do yourself to improve your website so you can get found by potential customers in the search engines more easily
- When and how to hire SEO professionals — over the years I have hired a number of search optimization and marketing experts and I will share some tips for what to look for
I’m planning to listen in and tweet about it. Please join in, if your schedule allows. If not, you can check the Twitter feed using the hashtag #SMBTOOLS. I’m a fan of TweetChat.com for these sorts of events, so you can use the hash tag to enter the room, as they call it.
Category : Advertising &Blog &Business &search engine optimization &SEO
I think this is a really informative article, especially if you are trying like everyone else to get your site listed higher in the search engines. It is small things like this that always takes you over your competitors.
In great news, Google, Yahoo and MSN have agreed upon a XML sitemap standard.
What’s this mean to you? Well, you just need to create one XML sitemap and you can submit it to all three engines. I’ve been doing that for a while and didn’t seem to have any problem but now it’s official.
Category : Advertising &Blog &Business &Business Cards &Marketing &search engine optimization &Search Engine Ranking &SEO &Sitemaps
In the cutthroat world of search engine optimization, site owners, designers, and webmasters are looking for every advantage to improve their search engine rankings. Their efforts have even extended to adding keywords to the lowly ALT tag. Does it work? Yes and no.
In the cutthroat world of search engine optimization, site owners, designers, and webmasters are looking for every advantage to improve their search engine rankings. Their efforts have even extended to adding keywords to the lowly ALT tag. Does it work? Yes and no.
The ALT tag is used to provide extra information about images. By putting an ALT attribute in your image tags, you can use text to describe the image. This is helpful in a number of scenarios:
* Users on slow connections will see the ALT text until the image downloads.
* If the image fails to load in the user’s browser, the ALT text appears.
* People using text browsers or browsers with images turned off will see ALT text instead.
* Vision-impaired people using audio browsers will hear your description of the image.
But search engines also read ALT information. Because search engine “robots” — the applications that crawl the Web and compile information about its contents — can’t “see” the images, they depend on the ALT tag for information. The search engines compile ALT tag information with all the other elements of the page, including meta tags, keywords, file names, and myriad other factors, to determine the content of every page of the Web.
This has led some site owners to “spam” their ALT tags, or load them with keywords. While this practice may have worked to briefly improve the search engine ranking of the site in question, search engine technologists quickly caught on. They lowered the weight of ALT tags in their ranking schemes and developed ways to discern between “good” ALT information and spammed ALT tags. The moral of this story? The techs are never more than a step behind the people who seek to exploit the shortcomings of search engine technology.
So what should you do with your ALT tags?
Do: use ALT attributes to accurately describe your images, for all the reason listed above. They may even help your search engine rankings, and they certainly can’t hurt it.
Do not: spam your ALT tags. Search engines are way too sophisticated to fall for that — and abusing the ALT attribute may even get you labeled a spammer and lower your search engine ranking.
As with any aspect of Web design, the goal should always be to make your site easy for users to navigate. This will help ensure that users find what they’re looking for and complete whatever transaction you want them to, be it to register, purchase, or just return to your site later. Judicious and proper use of ALT tags can contribute to a good overall site experience, which will help keep your users happy. Source
Category : ALT Tags &Blog &Search Engine Ranking
The more you focus on SEO strategy, the more you might begin to think you can outsmart Google. But Dharmesh Shah argues in an article at MarketingProfs.com that gaming the system with sneaky SEO techniques is, in the long run, a losing proposition: “It’s safe to assume that if you try to exploit a hole in the algorithm today, your advantage is going to be temporary,” he says. “More importantly, you carry a significant risk of having your Web site penalized or banned.”
According to Shah, some slight-of-hand tricks you should avoid include:
Link farms. Most SEO professionals agree that the number of inbound links plays a critical role in search rankings. Some less scrupulous practitioners, therefore, create a group of dummy Web sites for the sole purpose of linking to the actual Web site.
Keyword stuffing. Once upon a time, the constant repetition of certain keywords might have manipulated rankings. But no more–search engines got wise to this practice, and it’s now a wasted effort.
Hidden text. Placing white text on a white background–visible to spiders, but not to humans–is a seemingly invisible way to load a page with rank-improving content. But, he notes, “Regardless of how sophisticated the approach, it is still going to be detected at some point.”
The Po!nt: “An Internet strategy that is predicated on outsmarting Google is not a smart strategy,” says Shah. “Working with search engines instead of trying to exploit them is the only approach that works in the long term.”
Category : Advertising &Blog &Business &Design &E-mail &Internet &Marketing &SEO &Websites
So, what are keywords and how do they help to increase traffic to your website? Keywords are words that depict for the search engine what your website is all about, this will then cause search engine to rank you so that surfers can find what they are looking for. Truthfully speaking, I am a good example for improperly choosing keywords in the past, I’ve setup sites with keywords that I thought were good and relevant to my website and the thing is, they were. The question is though, does the users associate this keyword with the niche of your products and services.
Do your research! Properly choosing the right keywords for your website can be very helpful in increasing your websites ranking in the search engine. Well, a lot of companies have an idea about what keywords are relevant for their products or services for their company, but these keywords may not be what users are searching for in the search engines. Doing your homework, and research to find what your potential clients associate with you products and services can be very helpful in increasing traffic to your site.
If your website is optimized for the keywords or keyword phrases that people are actually using to find solutions that your company offer, you will increase traffic to your site and in turn lead to increasing sales.
Here you can find out more about choosing keywords and search engine optimization.
If you have questions or comments, don’t hesitate to post them below. I will do my best in responding and answering them.
Category : Advertising &Blog &Internet &SEO &Websites
