Basics of Search Engine Optimization

Basic Techniques of SEO

Search Engine Optimization is the only technique to increase your business revenue form internet and global world. Making a website is not enough in this era of technology; million of website are building and uploading daily on the global internet world. Main objective to promote search engine optimization in India. According to an internet report over 85% of internet users, use search engines to find related websites like yours? Millions of people each day turn to the major search engines to find products, services and information. With over one billion web sites listed with search engines, how will your customers ever find you among the competition? Search Engine Optimization is the solution.

SEO technical definition

SEO is short of Search Engine Optimization. The term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken.

Why SEO is important today

Today, internet marketing turning point on how popular your site is. Optimizing your site for Search Engine Marketing can result in a large hit rate to your site. This happens only if your site is to show whenever somebody searches for the keywords of your site. If your site is in the top of Search Engine Rankings, you need to take recourse only to search engine promotion. This is the only way you can possibly reach all those people who are really searching for your service or product. Internet Marketing today is dependent only on search engine optimization. It matters little that your website has the most beautiful graphics or the most attractive words.

Internet marketing is now gradually increasing in India , as we are very late in this field so Indian websites are behind in many keywords and in generic keywords. It doesn’t means that we can not reach SEO on generic keywords but it takes a lot of continuous effort to compete the generic keywords. Most important thing in SEO is that how often a website is updated and how much popular website is.

The only way to measure the success of a Natural Search Engine Optimization Campaign is to know where you rank on the Internet’s most important search engines for the keyphrases/ keywords which are relevant to your company, business.

Out of million’s of website on a single keyword (example: trading) only 10 websites comes on the first page of search engine result. 20 percent peoples open second page of the search engine result and 5 percent of the peoples go to the 3rd page, it means that only those websites/pages which are in top 30 results of the search engine will derive traffic to their websites from internet.

Basic Techniques of SEO

Optimizing a website for Search Engines is neither as difficult nor or complicated job as we think. We just need to know what practices to be done and how to do it. You can optimize your own pages yourself and receive excellent ranking in a matter of few months.

As, number of factors are important when optimizing a website, including the content and structure of the website’s copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process.

Below is a list of items which are important in SEO. Each item are factors that search engines look for when crawling your website in my next coming articles I will discuss each item separately to improve your website in terms of each of the following factor:

Your Keywords
• Selecting your keywords
• Prioritize your keywords

Domain name / Filename
• Domain Registration
• Keyword in domain name
• Keyword in filename
• Length of Website Address

Keyword Placement
• Keyword in title tag
• Keyword in Description Meta-tag
• Keyword in Keyword Meta-tag
• Keyword in Content
• H1, H2 and H3 (Heading)
• Keyword Font Styles

Internal Links
• Keyword in links to internal site pages
• Valid internal links
• Efficient linking

External / Outgoing Links
• Quality Links
• Inspecting your Links
• Title and Description
• Limit number of links on a page

Incoming Links (backlinks)
• Quality of Referrer
• Trend of link popularity
• Anchor Text
• Age of Link
• Number of Outgoing Links on Referrer Page
• Position of Link
• Trusted Websites
• JavaScript/Flash Links

On-Page Factors
• Home Page
• Over optimization penalty (OOP)
• Getting Reported
• File Size
• Freshness of Pages
• Frequency of Updates
• Site Age
• Dynamic Pages
• Texts inside Images
• Excess JavaScript
• Inline Frames and Frames
• Hidden links / texts
• Cloaking
• Duplicate content
• Understandable Content

Off-Page Factors
• Traffic Buying / Link Schemes
• A minimum of one backlink
• Buying Links
• Server IP Address
• Links from bad websites
• Server Reliability and Uptime
User Activity
• Search Engine Traffic
• Click through Rate (CTR)
• Time spent on page
• Monitoring Bookmarks
• Leaving the Website

Gathering Links
• Collecting Links
• Unique Content
• Articles
• Press Release
• Forums / Guest books / Blogs
• Sponsoring
• Directories
• Link Exchange

On top of the factors above, I have used a term crawling there. I would like to give a brief introduction to crawling

Crawling, or web crawling is the method search engines use to create an index of the web. Pages are downloaded by an automated service, called a robot or a spider, and processed by the search engine to allow fast centralized searching. When a search engine downloads a page it generally looks at the hyperlinks on that page and processes them based on a set of policies.

Conclusion
In this article I have given an overview of SEO to you, we can achieve top ranking on search engines with continuous efforts and improving our website contents, layout and related material. I have listed all the techniques you can adopt these techniques to optimize your website and getting top ranked. I will describe each topic in detail in my coming articles.

7 Ways To Drive Laser Targeted Traffic to Your Site

Whether you’re an affiliate marketer, sell your own products and services, or MLM, there are certain internet marketing techniques that you can use to get more traffic to your site.

It’s not that internet marketing techniques that vary from industry to industry that make a difference, but how you apply them to marketing your business.

The most important element of internet marketing is to go where your customers are. Just as you wouldn’t promote gambling on a gardening site, don’t promote products and services, your own or someone else’s, or MLM where it’s not welcome.

What I’m saying is, don’t just throw your product up anywhere. That’s not targeted traffic. To get targeted traffic, you have to promote where others are looking for what you are offering. Targeted traffic is the key to higher website conversion and more sales.

Regardless of what you are promoting, these techniques will help you get more traffic to your site, and building site is crucial to your success no matter what industry you are in.

Here are seven techniques I use to get more traffic to my sites:

1. Search engines.

Search engines are the easiest way I know of to be found online because just about everyone uses the search engines. Although I don’t recommend that you rely solely on search engines as a way for potential customers to find you, you should at least get your site indexed. People can’t find you if you aren’t there.

2. Link exchanges.

Although linking isn’t as valuable as it once was, it’s still an effective way to promote your site. By contacting website owners who have websites that complement your own, and then exchanging links with them, you’ll build referral traffic because linking is still considered to be an endorsement of your site.

3. Affiliate programs.

An affiliate program is where you allow others to promote your website for a percentage of the profits of each sale. Although there are other ways to pay affiliates like per lead, pay per sale is the most common.

With an affiliate program, you give others an incentive for promoting your website, and this can also make it easier to get links back to your site.

4. Writing articles.

Of all the internet marketing techniques I’ve tried, I’ve found this one to be the most effective. I’m sure it has something to with the fact that I like to write, and maybe it’s easier for me.

What articles will do for you is help you build backlinks to your site, establish you as an expert, and offer more value to your business. You are offering your potential customers something up front.

If the thought of writing articles makes you cringe, try writing tip sheets, lists, or a how to. People love these types of articles because they’re so easy to read.

5. Joint ventures.

Done correctly, a joint venture can be your ticket to fast cash in your business. By seeking out others who have complementary websites, and offering them incentives to sell your products, you can quickly increase your bottom line.

6. List building.

Although list building isn’t an internet marketing technique per se, it is an important part of building your business. List building allows you to recycle your traffic, build relationships, and increase your conversion to make more sales.

7. Know your market.

By knowing your market, you’ll know what kind of products and services potential customers are looking for. Although it won’t help you raise visibility for your site, it will help you increase your conversions, and you can more easily get to know your market by visiting forums on your topic, posting polls on your site, and studying other sites on your topic.

The most important thing to remember is to show your potential customers respect. Don’t spam them with offers. Build a relationship, and you’ll build traffic and make more sales.

Search Engine Marketing – What It Is and How Your Can Business Benefit From It

Simply put, Search Engine Marketing or SEM is the fastest, most powerful, highly-targeted, most dynamic, highly-measurable and most cost-effective marketing strategy that can give your business the power to reach potential customers anywhere in the world anytime for a little as USD $0.05 cost per customer acquisition or even for free!

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is about making sure that your Web site appears on the top 20 of search results every time potential customers search for whatever products and/or services that you offer on any of the major Search Engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN which collectively accounts for over 90% of all Search Engine originating traffic.

How Popular Are Search Engines?

A study last November 2005 finds that the number of people who use Internet Search Engines to find information has jumped over the last year, claiming a solid No. 2 spot behind e-mail as the most popular activity online. In the year 2003, 250 million searches were made daily on Google alone!

How Does It Work?

On the Internet, whenever somebody wants to find something, they use Search Engines. As spam continues to lessen the effectiveness of email as a marketing tool, Search Engine Marketing is fast becoming the marketing strategy of choice for companies who want to reach a global audience 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, either for free or for as little as USD $0.05 per visitor. As the Internet becomes more and more a part of our everyday lives, the greater their role becomes in helping businesses connect with their customers at that crucial point in their buying decision process (when they are searching for it).

Right now, there are probably people… potential customers who are looking for whatever products or services you are offering on any or all of the major Search Engines. When potential customers type in the keywords that they are searching for and press that “Search” button, do they find you or your competitors instead?

How can you get your business to appear on Search Engines?

Of course, you first must have a Web site. If you don’t have one, get one designed by someone who has a decent understanding of Search Engine Optimization. I’ve come across business Web sites that are so badly designed from an SEM perspective that you can’t even find it even if you search for the company name or business name itself! Even worse, their sites are designed in a way that prevents instead of facilitates their visitors to transact with them.

There are basically 2 ways for you to get your Web site to appear on Search Engines. You either get it listed on the “organic” or natural search results by doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or you launch a Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign for the keywords you want your Web site to appear for. Ideally, you should be doing both because a PPC campaign can start driving highly-qualified traffic to your Web site almost instantly while you wait for your SEO campaign to gain momentum and get your Web site within the top 20 of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), otherwise known as “organic” or “natural” search results, which can take months to happen.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

To get your Web site to appear on the SERPs you need to launch an SEO campaign. The main problem with SEO is that it can be very difficult and take anywhere from several months to over 1 year before you can achieve good rankings and appear within the top 20 rankings or top 2 pages of the organic search results which is all the results that most people are willing to see before they make a decision and choose what Web site to ultimately visit and do business with. Getting your Web site listed in the top 20 results is going to be a constant battle, especially if you are in a highly competitive industry and your competitors are also actively doing the same thing.

How your Web site is designed determines in great part how well its Search Engine rankings will be. Do you adore that lovely Flash animation on your home page? Loose it! Search Engines can’t see that Flash animation and they rely almost exclusively on text to determine the relevance and consequently, the ranking of every Web page.

What Is A Pay Per Click Campaign?

Pay Per Click or PPC campaigns are basically ads (Sponsored Links) that appear alongside the organic search results whenever someone uses a Search Engine to search for anything that he’s interested in. The reason why it’s called Pay Per Click is because you spend only when somebody actually “clicks” on your PPC ad and not every time somebody sees it. These ads are controlled and are made to appear only every time specific “keywords” are searched for. The level of control an advertiser has over his PPC campaign is so high that he can control exactly how and who gets to see his PPC ads and most importantly, how much he spends for it. For as little as USD $0.05 per click on Google and USD $0.10 on Yahoo and MSN, you can start driving highly-qualified visitors to your Web site.

What Are Its Advantages Over Traditional Marketing Mediums?

While you may get an increase in sales when you put out an ad on TV, radio or print, it is almost impossible to track how well your sales were influenced “directly” by your ads. With Search Engine Marketing, you would know exactly how much you are spending and how much actual revenue you are getting for each cent that you spend for it. You can even know where your customers are coming from using Web Analytics such as the popular and free Google Analytics.

The ability to control your marketing expenditure, track your campaign’s performance, identify and target your market, a truly global reach, measurable results and being able to make changes to your campaign on the fly makes Search Engine Marketing far superior to traditional marketing medium.

How Effective Is Search Engine Marketing?

It is not impossible to convert 50% of your Search Engine originating traffic. The real beauty of Search Engine Marketing is that it allows your customers to find you instead of you trying to find them.

How much does it cost?

The cost of any Search Engine Marketing campaign depends greatly on the scope and extent of it. The more keywords and the broader the audience you want to target, the more it’s going to cost but the greater the benefit would be. Maybe the more important question is… “How much is it costing your business by not doing Search Engine Marketing?”

Search Engine Optimisation – The significance

From a small local business in a town to a big industry playing on an international platform, marketing has been a prime tool for any company or business to succeed. People started with using tools like write-ups, references, pamphlets and much more to convey their means or advertise themselves among a group. But now is a time where everything happens just on the click of your finger. And in this time is required marketing at the speed of light, marketing with niche concepts that are applied even before a common man would think.

With the time we are moving from a physical world to a virtual world. Companies started building up their websites to have a presence in the virtual world. But likewise there are billions of websites. What would be your identity then? In this age of Internet and Technology, getting your business visible to your customer segment is more important and this is where the Search Engine Optimization comes into picture.

Building up a website is like making a saw and optimizing your website is like sharpening that saw to use. And it is quite logical that you cannot take optimum use of your saw without sharpening it.

Search Engines are a system through which one gets the information the later wants. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines through search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. In simple words, Search engine optimization (SEO) just means your site is as accessible as possible to the search engines to improve the chances that they will serve it up when your potential customers type in specific search terms (called keywords). The more easily search engines find your site, the higher up it appears on their results pages.

In this world, SEO is definitely a smart move for any business.

But getting your site ranked for your keywords, there are many aspects that play a key role: a proper site structure, clean coding and necessary keywords, to name a few. This requires the every page of your website to be optimized. Every page should have a proper title, genuine keywords and a perfect description that matches the page. These title, keywords and description have to be relevant for every individual page. Search engines “crawl” the Web looking for the keywords that their users enter, so putting those keywords throughout your site means your pages will be picked up during searches by the search engine. Hence you have to put your foot into your customer’s shoe to understand what keywords your customer would use to search for a particular product or service. You have to learn your customers’ mind and this will give you the best of Title and meta (Keywords and description) to optimize your website. Also, optimizing your content is equally important as that plays an important role. You may optimize your content with putting keywords in your content, giving the Heading tags to titles, giving bold effects wherever necessary, giving links (to phrases in the content) to internal pages wherever appropriate.

Also, other activities to rank up your website in search engines are submitting your website URL into more and more search engines, adding your website URL into online directories, building up links with other relevant business sites, submitting rich articles into article sites, submitting your blog pages into various blog sites, submitting Press Releases into various Press Release sites. This will both increase the traffic overall to your site and enhance your search engine rankings, since the search engines pick up on the number of times people link to and from your site and rank your website higher accordingly.

People try many techniques to boost up their website ranking in these search engines for the specific keywords. People make researches to add-on their skills to make this task easier, faster and more genuine.

There are companies that provide services for SEO to other companies. We at Semaphore Software (www.semaphore-software.com) have a dedicated team that researches on the SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) activities and undertake projects to upgrade the website ranking for our clients from different businesses.

It has become very important to move ahead with the fast pace if you wish to survive your business in this global competition.

SEO in 10 easy steps

SEO in 10 easy Tips
Having your site top-ranked for a hot keyword can effectively improve your traffic and therefore your profits as well. All you need to do is to optimise your content and create many links of different quality. But if you don’t have any money to start off, its hard but it can be done.
You may also have the money it takes for reaching a top position, but are unsure if your money will be well spent or not. It may cost you a whole lot more than you thought in the beginning.
Wether you have the money or not, considering a self made budget SEO is a wise thing to do, because it’s both free and educating. After a while, you will gradually improve your technique and you will become an SEO expert. Once you’re there, you will be able to perform as good as a paid SEO but saving the money it takes to hire one.
Here’s 10 free ways to improve your rankings

1. Directory submissions – The most effective way in getting lots of back links fast. Grab a good directory list and submit your link in every single directory. Make sure that you get a few new back links everyday to ensure long term success. The best way to do that is by viewing all new directory announcements in Digital Points forum Solicitations & Announcements section.
2. Article Submissions – Almost every single article directory on the web is free. Article directories are a good compliment to ordinary directories because it will bring you more diversity in your back link structure. Write a good article with more than 500 words and include a back link to your site and submit it to all major article directories. Hope fully, if your article is good, some webmaster will pick it and put it on their own sites, so you’re not only getting back links from the article directories themselves, you are also getting free back links from real sites, which is very valuable in search engines like Google.
3. Wikipedia.org – A good source to collect incoming links. Do you have any content that is related to any wikipedia article? In that case, you can edit the wikipedia article and input your link on the link page. Make sure that the content you are linking meets up with the standard, otherwise, your link will be removed as fast as it came up.
4. Onpage SEO – Onpage optimisation was the most important SEO technique available before 2001. Today, it does not have the same decisive factor that it once had. It is however still very useful to do some basic onpage SEO. Make sure that your targeted keywords are included in the title, the headline and the footer. Make sure that you always provide some fresh content on the pages that you specifically want to optimise. Provide it at least with an RSS feed. But most important, make sure that the onpage SEO does not overshadow the content and make your site look less useful.
5. PRWeb.com – Post a press release once you release your site. It will help you a little bit in the rankings, but most importantly, if your Press release is good, you will get some natural links generated by PRWebs users.
6. Myspace.com – Myspace has recently become one of the hottest sites on the internet. It has also became one of the most effective places to market your site. Just make a profile for your site there, then try to get as many friends as possible. Post links to your sites on other profiles, post bulletins of your site and if it’s cool enough, you will get some natural back links in return.
7. Ask for back links – Send out nice original emails to other webmasters that have similar sites. Write some sentences about what you think of their site or anything related to the subject of their site. When you get the reply, answer them, tell them something more and then ask for a reciprocal or a one-way link.
8. Forums – Forums are not only a great place to discuss things but also a good resource for generating back links, feedback and traffic. Put a link in your signature. Make a post about your site or even better, make a post about something and then make a related link to your site. Note, go for inactive forums, they tend to give more weight than the active ones and your link will be displayed over a longer time.
9. Make sattelite sites – Put up a site with some content on e.g. geocities.com and include a back link to your site somewhere, then submit the sattelite site to somewhere around 100 directories so it will be indexed in Google, and you got a high quality back link.
10. Also, SEO is an area where there are lots of paid alternatives that may help you in getting a good ranking. Some of these are paid article submission, paid onpage optimisation, paid directory submission paid link exchanges and paid links. If you are good on doing directory submissions but bad on onpage SEO, you can charge for making directory submissions for others and then hire someone to do onpage SEO for you.
    More Tips and other interesting articles with great onlinetips
    

SEO Duplicate Web Content Penalty Myth Exploded

The “duplicate content penalty” myth is one of the biggest obstacles I face in getting web professionals to embrace reprint content. The myth is that search engines will penalize a site if much of its content is also on other websites.

Clarification: there is a real duplicate content penalty for content that is duplicated with minor or no variation across the pages of a single site. There is also a “mirror” penalty for a site that is more or less substantially duplicating another single site. What I’m talking about here is the reprint of pages of content individually, rather than in a mass, on multiple sites.

Another clarification: “penalty” is a loaded concept in SEO. “Penalty” means that search engines will punish a website for violations of the engine’s terms of service. The punishment can mean making it less likely that the site will appear in search results. Punishment can also mean removal from the search engine’s index of web pages (“de-indexing” or “delisting”).

How have I exploded the “duplicate content penalty” myth?

• PageRank. Many thousands of high-PageRank sites reprint content and provide content for reprint. The most obvious case is the news wires such as Reuters (PR 8) and the Associated Press (PR 9) that reprint to sites such as http://www.nytimes.com (PR 10).
• The proliferation of content reprint sites. There are now hundreds of websites devoted to reprint content because it’s a cheap, easy magnet for web traffic, especially search engine traffic.
• Experience. I’ve seen significant search engine traffic both from distributing content to be reprinted and from reprinting content on the site.

How I Doubled Search Engine Traffic with Reprint Content

When I first started distributing content for my main site, I was stunned by the highly targeted traffic I got from visitors clicking on the link at the end of the article. Search engine traffic also slowly increased both from the links and from having content on the site.

But I was even more stunned with the search engine traffic I got when I started putting reprint articles on the site in September. I had written quite a number of reprint articles for clients and accumulated a few webmaster “fans” who looked out for my articles to reprint them. I wanted to make it easier for them to find all the reprint articles I had written.

I didn’t want to draw too much attention to these articles, which had nothing to do with the main subject of the site, web content. So I secluded the articles in one section of the site.

The articles got a surprising amount of search engine traffic. The traffic was overwhelmingly from Google, and for long multiple-word search strings that just happened to be in the article word for word.

Why was I surprised with all the search engine traffic?

1. The articles had so little link popularity. The link popularity to the articles came primarily from a single link to the “reprint content” page from the homepage, which linked to category pages, which linked to the articles themselves–three clicks from the homepage. The sitemap was enormous, well over 100 links, so its PageRank contribution was minimal. Since these articles were on the site such a short time I strongly doubt they got any links from other sites.
2. The articles had so much competition. These articles had been reprinted far more widely than the average reprint article, which is lucky if it makes it into a few dedicated reprint sites. As part of my service I had done most of the legwork of reprinting my clients’ articles for them. In fact, I guarantee at least 100 reprints on Google-indexed web pages either for each article or group of articles. So that’s up to 100 web pages, sometimes more, that were competing with my web page to appear in search engine results for the search string.

Why Do Reprint Articles Get Search Engine Traffic?

You would think Google would just pick one web page with the article as the authoritative edition and send all the traffic to it.

But that’s not how Google works. All the search engines look at factors beyond just the content on the web page. They look at links. Google, at least, claims to look at 100 factors total. Many of these must relate to the content on the page, but not all of them.

The whole experience has given me great insight into what factors Google uses in addition to what we would consider the page itself, and the relative importance of each.

• Web page titles (the one in the html title tag) are extremely important as tie-breakers between two otherwise equally matched pages. Most reprinters waste the html title, using the article title as the web page title. Set yourself apart by creating unique five-to-ten-word web page titles that include target keywords.
• Content tweaks. You can also introduce the article with a unique, keyword-laden editor’s note, and finish the article off with some keyword-laced comments.
• Intra-site link popularity and anchor text (that is, for links to the article page from other web pages on the site) are also important. If you can’t link to the page from the homepage, keep it as close to the homepage as possible and weed out extraneous links (try putting all your site policies on a single page).

Reprint articles, like the search engine traffic they bring, cost nothing. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Forget the “duplicate content penalty.” Get in on content reprints and share the search engine wealth.