2010 | Indian SEO Expert | SEO Services

Marketing for a Commercial Website

To "Market" something means: "To offer it for sale".

"Marketing", for our purpose here, means to offer one's product (or service) for sale in the particular marketplace called the World Wide Web. Marketing on the web has its own rules, procedures and methods.

Make the distinction that you aren't actually marketing your WEBSITE, you are marketing your PRODUCTS or SERVICES, using your website and other online avenues to do so.

For a more in-depth introduction to this subject, click here.

In the course of marketing products and services since 1996 for our clients, through their websites and other online methods, we have learned what works and what doesn't work in "marketing a website". This is what we do for (and teach) our clients; these are our recommendations for marketing products or services through any commercial website:
Wring Every Sale from
Your Existing Traffic

In our analysis of websites that come to us to help them get more traffic, the first thing we look at is how the website actually handles the people that do make it to the site. Does the website drive away the traffic it is currently getting?

After all, what good will it do to drive more traffic to the site if those people don't buy anything either?

* Look at your website as if it were a continual advertisement for your service or product. Because that is what it IS! How effective is your website as an advertisement?

* How easy is it to buy what you're selling on your website?

* Take a look at the five points customers want to see before they'll buy. Does your site cover these five points well?

* Take a look at the other points involved in how to design a commercial website so that it actually sells.

All this analysis is essential to establish a foundation for further marketing of your products or services online. What you discover from doing these analyses will almost certainly suggest some re-design of the site so that it maximizes sales from the traffic it currently gets. In our experience, you can usually improve almost ANY website so it sells to a higher percentage of the visitors resulting in some immediate income from those extra sales.

For a fee, we will provide that analysis and perform the re-design of your website, or you are welcome to do it yourself using the information provided on our website. Here's how to contact us.

Here is an article about writing copy that sells from Site-Reference.com.

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Search Engine Optimizing

The most basic step to take in actually bringing your website to the market that is the World Wide Web is to capitalize on the extra traffic you will get by being able to be found in the search engines. Statistically speaking, that's where people go to do their searching when they are trying to find what you sell. Surveys have determined with certainty that people arrive at websites primarily after finding them in the search engines. Which means that you can get an astounding increase in traffic just from being easily found in the search engines and directories. That's how things are found on the web. There isn't any other magic way to find things on the web.

Optimizing your site for the search engines is the online equivalent to the basic steps of taking out an advertisement in the Yellow Pages and putting a big sign outside your shop, letting people know what you do or what you are selling. If you fail to do this step, you won't be able to be found because you won't show up properly in the search engines.

Although Search Engine Optimizing can be considered a passive activity--because customers have to be looking for whatever you provide before they will find you--it can still be very effective because there are so many people looking for things on the web. Monthly searches from unique visitors at Yahoo! alone are about 65,000,000. Some of those people are looking for exactly what you sell.

Simply put, the people who are looking for your product or service are EXACTLY the people you want to find your website! So help them find you by optimizing your site.

We have created a Search Engine Optimizing page that lists the many things that need to be done to a website to optimize it for the search engines. We give you plenty of instruction so you can do these things yourself, or you can contact us and we can do the Search Engine Optimizing for you--it's our specialty in website re-design and has been our niche for several years.
Search Engine Registration

Search engine registration is not terribly difficult but is often done very poorly or simply skipped. In our experience with clients, we have seen many professionally designed websites whose owners thought that their website had been registered with the search engines because someone told them that it was registered, or because someone bought a software program for $49.95 that says it registers your website with 5,000 search engines. (Reality check: There aren't that many. There are only about 50 that need your submission.)

The acid test is to take ten minutes and go do a search, yourself, at some of the top major search engines and directories, and look for the product or service you are selling. Try:
Google

Windows Live (previously MSN)

Yahoo!

and Ask.com

These search engines make the results pages behind the vast majority of the search queries currently done on the internet, even at search sites that are not theirs like AOL, About.com, Altavista, Hotbot and iWon.

If your website sells Western Saddles and Tack, do a search for "western saddles". Do another one for "tack". Does your site come up on the first page or two of the search results on all of them? If it does, good for you! You've been doing things right.

If your site doesn't come up near the top of the search results you get when looking for your products at the major search engines, you'll know that people can't find your website, even though they are looking for what you are selling. In which case it should be obvious that your website needs to be optimized for the search engines and it may need to be re-submitted to the search engines and directories. Even if they have come through your site and indexed it, they don't "like" what they've found and don't consider it relevant to your main key words.

For more practical advice on what you can do to register your site yourself, and how we might help you, click here.

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E-zines and Newsgroups

E-zines and Newsgroups are both areas where it can be worthwhile to market your website.

For practical advice in how to market in both areas, click here.

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Advertisements in E-Zines

One of the most cost-effective means of advertising on the internet is sponsoring an E-zine. Ads in E-zines usually cost less than $100, sometimes as little as $10. They are often unbelievably cheap when you consider the highly targeted nature of the E-zine subscribers. Top E-zine Ads is a resource for finding ezines to advertise in. We are not affiliated with them in any way.

Wherever possible, we recommend that the website owner do this research because the knowledge gained this way can be incredibly valuable in marketing the average commercial website. Be certain you don't try to advertise in anything that is actually unsolicited email, as it can backfire on you in the long term.

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Opt-In Email Mailings

There are basically two valid sources for opt-in email addresses:

1. Your own list. These are the email addresses you gather on your own website by letting people opt-in to your own mailing list. For practical advice on how to gather these names and what to do with them, click here.

2. The opt-in email lists you can rent from the companies that provide opt-in email lists (like YesMail). For more information and advice on how to go about finding and renting these lists, click here.

Click this link for a listing of about 50 companies from which you can rent opt-in email lists. Please make sure you do not rent anything except opt-in email lists - anything else is SPAM.

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Article Marketing

We've been using for the last year the services of an article marketing service to get articles written and sent out to various places online that will publish them. This has proven very successful for our clients. Note: that's an affiliate link above -- I used them for a year before becoming an affiliate and would recommend them even if they didn't offer an affiliate program.

You can also write articles about your area of expertise (mentioning, of course, your website or your company) for publication in targeted E-zines and elsewhere is one of the most effective ways to market a site online. A mention of your website in an article in a popular newsletter can cause a huge jump in visitors to the site. Just getting a mention of your site in Randy Casingham's "This is True" newsletter or the Windows Secrets newsletter can cause a huge jump in traffic - in fact it has been known to crash the servers due to the huge increase in traffic.

Being mentioned in an article in a printed magazine is very helpful, too, and there are Public Relations (PR) companies, such as PowerPR who specialize in getting articles about your company written and published.

For example: a site selling skin care products retains a dermatologist who endorses their products. Ask the doctor to write an article about a particular skin ailment, mentioning the website and the product. Don't make this a blatant sales pitch, just note that the product helps prevent or handle a particular skin ailment. People who are interested will find the article, come to the site and buy the product.

If you own a Western Saddle and Tack shop -- write an article about the care and maintenance of old saddles, or about the benefits and liabilities of different kinds of girth straps for saddles, and mention your website.

If you can't write, find someone who can, and talk to them about what you want. Get it ghost-written by someone who CAN write. There are a million writers out there struggling to make ends meet. Pay one of them to help you. You can even hire Words in a Row's premiere writing services.

Where you get these articles published is a matter of research, communication, persistence and luck.

Here's an example, an article from Mark Daoust with tips about "Writing for Traffic - Getting Published" -- his advice is to soften your article so it doesn't come across as a blatant sales pitch; he advises you to mention your website at the end of the article. Those who are interested will visit your site. My advice will always be to be more direct and to let people know who you are and why you are an expert in the field you are writing about, either in the article or in an accompanying blurb about you and your service or product. Don't hide your connections and don't be afraid to ask people to do something in your article. Why? Because after reading Mark's article, I couldn't tell you why he is supposed to be an expert in the area he wrote about, and I have no idea what his website affiliations are. Whatever his reason for writing the article, it didn't pull me to his website or brand his product or service for me.

Here is an article by Jason DeVelvis with advice about what to do with your article once written and how to get it out there.

This article about PR Articles sums up the possibilities open to those who can write and get articles distributed online. It can be an excellent method for promoting your website.

You can find and post articles on these websites to name a few:

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MakingProfit.com
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Article Announcer
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Idea Marketers.com
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Zongoo

Subscribe to these email lists to submit or request articles:

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Publish In Yours
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Article Announce
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Free-Content

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Press Releases

Press releases can be very effective. They can also be a complete waste of time. If a newsworthy event occurs, by all means send out a press release. If you are trying to make something quite ordinary sound like news in a press release, re-think it and come up with something that IS news, or you're probably just wasting your time and the time of those who will receive it.

There are software packages like Media Magnet Pro which can automate the whole process for you. Media Magnet has a list of 12,000 people who have signed up to get press releases, broken down into categories. If you need to send out press releases, use this program or one like it to cut way down on your investment of time.

Another good resource for press releases is this one: Virtual Press Room.

Just be aware that what seems like news to you may not be of any interest to the people who get these press releases -- and the vast majority of press releases they receive will be trashed. Be very selective in the categories to which you send the press release.

News can be created. Did your company just sign a contract with the US Government to put diagnostic software into every one of their PCs? What newsworthy problem did this solve? What problems does it create? What controversy is involved? (Newsmen are taught to like controversy.) It does not hurt to point out that a press release is a great opportunity for your highly creative marketing person to BE highly creative.

Do a search at a search engine that specializes in sentence-structured queries Ask.com or Subjex for "How do I write a press release?" and you will get plenty more instruction on how to write press releases.

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Get Good Links to Your Site

We had so much information about links that we moved it to it's own page. So, here is a our advice about link resources and how to get links.

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Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are basically an arrangement with other websites that refer people to your site, in exchange for a commission on any sales those people make at your site.

For practical advice on setting up an affiliate program to increase sales on your site, click here.

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Banner Ads

You see banner ads everywhere you go on the web. Nowadays most of them are displayed as part of an Affiliate Program.

As with any advertisement -- if it is displayed in the right place and says the right things, you can make a bunch of sales from it. (Yet another reason to read David Ogilvy's books!) But if it costs too much money to display your banner ad where it will do the most good, even if does make you a bunch of sales -- you can still lose money.

The effectiveness of Banner Ads has been dropping steadily over the last three or four years. When they first came on the scene they were incredibly effective, but the newness has worn off long ago and the average click-through rate on banner ads is way, way down. Way less than one percent of the people who view them actually click on them. One clickthrough per thousand impressions would be a very good clickthrough rate. We have all taught ourselves not to look at them -- to ignore them. So they are for the most part ignored.

Will banner ads work to drive people to your website? It depends on what your offer is, what you say about it, and where you place the banner ads. Banner ads were once one of the best of the tried-and-true internet marketing techniques to get traffic to visit your site, but they aren't what they used to be.

You have to decide if you can cram a message that will actually drive people to your website into a tiny box that they will probably ignore, which they will see someplace they don't expect it. And then you need to locate that place to put that ad and pay only enough to make it worth your while. You can buy advertising space at Yahoo! -- but the last time I checked their minimum advertising purchase was $5000 for so many impressions, with no guarantee that it will put any paying customers onto your website.

Banner ads are best used as part of an affiliate program but if you want to pay for instant exposure somewhere that makes sense - contact the owner of the website where you want to display the banner ad and find out what it will cost, for how long, and how many impressions it will receive.

Don't bet the family farm on banner ads. But if you can get a great deal on advertising space somewhere, on a busy website whose visitors might be interested in your product or service, go ahead and try out a banner ad.

We have designed, created and placed banner ads for clients. If you need help on this, contact us.

To have an expert at making the actual banner ads themselves create one for you, contact Sailcat Graphics.

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Blogs

Blogging is practically a lifestyle for many. There are lots of other places where you can get polished up marketing babble about blogs - we dig into them a bit more for technical data, how you can tweak your code, and data that we couldn't easily find elsewhere about "Why?" and "How?". We have a lot to say about this recent addition to your marketing arsenal. So much that we moved the blog information to its own pages.

We answer the questions:

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What is a blog?
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How do I (SEO) optimize a blog?
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How do I register my blog with the search engines?

Commercial blogs are commonly used to display pay-per-click ads or affiliate links. They can then generate extra money for their owners in addition to their own marketing value - but only if your blog is updated often enough and remains fresh and interesting enough to continue to draw visitors.

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Viral Marketing

"Viral marketing" is a term coined for spreading news about a website by word of mouth, through the web. If you have something really "cool" or "outrageous", and a few people tell a few friends about it, and those friends tell more friends -- you've hooked into the phenomenon known as viral marketing. It works the same way as a cold virus -- you catch it (hear about it) from your friends and relatives.

An example of this, not too long ago, was a parody of the Elian Gonzales video showing the SWAT team breaking into Elian's home and carting him away, in which everyone involved was saying "Whazzup?". It was so outrageous that millions of people tried to download that video on the first day it was posted on the web--crashing the servers of the website that put it up.

More practically for your purposes, you can ASK people to tell a friend about your website. You can provide incentives for doing so. What you should not do is ask them to give you email addresses so you can send out an email (which would be spam if it came from you, unsolicited, to their friends). Instead ask them to tell their friends about your site. Put up a form allowing them to do that. Or ask them to put up a link to your website from theirs. Make it easy to do that by putting the code and any image necessary on a page so they can just cut and paste it. Or give something away to those who send you a certain quantity of visitors.

Following our own advice -- feel free to tell a friend about our website with all these tips you are reading. Here's our URL:

http://www.wordsinarow.com/marketing.html

Cut and paste it into your email. There must be someone you know who ought to be told about the valuable information you have found here!

You can set up a program on your site so someone can win something of value for referring a friend to your site. We've seen websites where you can earn a version of "online bucks" for referring a friend to the site, or for doing something else that they would like you to do (fill out a survey or whatever). That "online cash", of course, is only redeemable at that one website, which requires the people who get the "online cash" to come back there in order to buy anything with it.

The original success of hotmail as a way to get a free email address is entirely due to the viral marketing effect created by a link at the bottom of every email sent through HotMail, saying "click here to set up your own free HotMail account." That's another form of viral marketing. According to them, it was an unintended effect. They were swamped with requests and had a major problem keeping up with demand.

Google used a completely closed viral marketing plan to start up gmail, Google's free email service. It would not let you in unless you were invited by another gmail user - viral marketing. This was very successful for gmail. Viral marketing works well if used correctly.

A good viral marketing campaign requires some cleverness--some real thought. Look at the service or product you are selling and come up with a way to get people to tell their friends about it, and you will be on your way to starting a viral marketing campaign for your website.

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Offline Marketing

Having a website does NOT mean you can drop out of real world marketing. A good yellow pages ad is still going to be an important marketing tool for most small companies. Have you been sending out letters? Placing ads in the right magazines? Would a cheap radio commercial work for you? Those can be had fairly inexpensively, and can flood the phones with incoming calls.

While offline marketing is beyond the scope of this website, I can tell you that I routinely advise my marketing clients to send out postcards, and refer them to this site for info on how to do it right: Bob Leduc's Build your Business with Postcard Marketing is terrific and worth studying and applying; if you want to use old-school techniques in real world marketing then study and learn from this master of postcard marketing. I've been doing postcard marketing since about 1970, and I thought I knew it all, but Bob's info was really eye-opening. The first barrier to learning is thinking you know it all already; don't fall into that trap. Even old dogs (like me!) can learn new tricks.

Postcards can get website sales going, or pop them into a new range. Don't turn up your nose at postcards just because they are old fashioned.

The best places we know of to get post cards printed are Post Card Mania, Uprinting and EMS Marketing.

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Things Not to Do

Don't send out spam.

Don't do "nothing". "Nothing" is almost always the wrong thing to do.

Every little bit you do to market your website helps. It can be a struggle to make a website sell and it can seem impossible, especially at first, to get people to visit your website and buy what you're selling.

Be smart, realize it will take some time, relax and have fun at this. Don't bet the farm on making money from your website from the day it goes online. Keep at it, doing a little bit every day. Like life, marketing your website is a game you can win. And aren't games supposed to be fun?

Why Domain Names Are So Important

On a basic level, domain names are important because the Internet's addressing scheme is not very effective without them.

Each computer on the Internet has an Internet protocol (IP) address: a unique string of four numbers separated by periods, such as 165.166.0.2. Since remembering the IP addresses of all of your favorite Web sites would be nearly impossible, a group of computer scientists created the domain name system to assign a unique name to each numeric IP address.

But domain names are much more than just a technical shortcut. A short, memorable domain name can make the difference between creating a successful Web presence and getting lost in cyberspace.

A domain name adds credibility to your small business. Having your own domain name makes your company look professional. If you publish your site through an ISP or a free Web hosting site, you'll end up with a URL such as www.yourisp.com/-yourbusiness. This generic address does not inspire confidence in a customer like a www.yourcompany.com domain name does. And since many people don't yet trust the Internet and e-commerce, you'll want to do what you can to prove that your small business deserves their money. If you're not willing to pay the money to register an appropriate domain name, why would consumers think you'd put any effort into creating valuable products or services?

A domain name says you're forward-thinking. Having your own domain name indicates you're part of the Digital Revolution, and it implies that you're up-to-date on emerging technologies. Whether this is true or not, having your own domain name might just put you ahead of your competitors.

A domain name adds mobility to your Internet presence. Owning your own domain name lets you take that name with you if you transfer Web hosts or switch to your own in-house server. If you don't own your domain name, you'll have to take a new URL, which will destroy the branding that you built up with your first address.

The right domain name can attract walk-in business. If you decide to register a domain name that matches the concept of your business (instead of your exact business name), you might draw Web surfers in search of that topic. For instance, a hardware store that registered Hammers.com might get visitors looking for hammers on the Internet. Also, although search engine results are hard to predict, Hammers.com could show up more frequently in search results when someone searches for information about hammers.

A domain name builds your brand. More than anything else, a domain name can increase awareness of your brand. If your domain name matches your company name, it reinforces your brand, making it easier for customers to remember and return. It will also be easier to win business via word of mouth because customers will remember your name and pass it along to friends.

Off Page Factors

Obtaining external links to your site (backlinks) is most important way of ranking your site in tops search engines like Google, Yahoo and Msn. Obtaining backlinks is referred to as an off-page optimization factor. Nowadays, backlinks are the biggest factors that affect your site’s capability to rank in search engine listings.

Important Factors of Off Page Optimization:

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While there are ways to gain a lot of inbound links.
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Exchange the link with relevant we page.
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A backlink from authority blog in the niche will boost your ranking.
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The number of inbound links to your site can make a difference; there are more factors to consider.
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PageRank is one of the important factors that determine the authority of a page.
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Search engines to determine the relevance of the linked page to the keyword in the anchor text.
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Anchor text is important, that help because not everyone links to a page using the exact keyword.
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Topical Relevance of Linking Page.
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Authority of the Linking Site.
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Authority of the Site in the Niche.
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Age of the Link.
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Internal Link Popularity of the Linking Page.
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Domains with .edu and .gov are move valuable because they often have a lot of trusted links pointed to their pages.

Off Page Optimization, Off Page SEO, Off Page Factors, Methods of Off Page Optimization

Off page SEO or search engine optimization is doing things off site to improve your sites search engine rankings. Off page optimization essentially consists of all of the ranking factors that are not situated on your webpage, which the search engines look at when ranking a website.

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Which websites link to you
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The number of websites linking to you
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The Google of the website linking to you
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The page title of the website linking to you
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The anchor text used in the link linking to you
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The number and type of links linking to the website that's linking to you.
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The number of outbound links on the website that is linking to you
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The total number of links on the website that is linking to you
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Whether or not the websites linking to you are deemed by Google as an authority website.
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The IP Address of the websites linking to you.
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Plus some other things that we'll get to later...

In off page method is useful to increase your website rankings by exchanging the links with your competitor’s website. More quality links will generally lead to better Google PageRank and better search engine rankings.
When you are trying to get additional links you need to think about worth. The best types of links that you can get are from trusted sources such as universities, newspapers and even some of the top notch directories such as dmoz and Yahoo.
How to get good links and Off Page Factors:

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Is this site or page relevant to what I do?
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Is this site linking out to any low quality off topic sites?
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Is this site or page going to send the right sort of traffic?
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Is this site or page ranking well in the search engines?
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Does this site have a lot of links from other websites?

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Does sites using the rel=nofollow tag to link to you or sites that use a redirect to link to you will not help you,

Methods of Off Page Optimization:

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Press releases
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Article distribution
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Social networking via sites like Digg and Slashdot
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Link campaigns, such as asking complementary businesses to provide links
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Directory listings
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Link exchanges
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Three-way linking
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One-way linking
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Blogging
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Forum posting

One Way Link Exchange, Natural Link Exchange

One way Link Exchange, Define One way link, Natural Link Exchange, Non-Reciprocal Link Exchange, One way link Exchange Image and Exmaple.

One way links means that a web site links to your web site, but you don’t link back to that web site. One way links are also known as non-reciprocal links.

One way links are more important than reciprocal links in terms and helps to boost your web site’s nothing but link popularity. If you have more one way links to your web site then, higher your web sites link popularity.

One way links are more valuable and more important as they know as more “natural” way of linking between web sites.

One way Link Exchange Example:

If you find a relevant website for your web site then you will link to that relevant website, however, that web site doesn’t link back to you, most likely because they don’t know you’re linking to them.

Getting one way links are much more difficult than reciprocal links. With the help of triangular link exchange we can get one way links, however this is often difficult and you would require at least 2 web sites to do so. “Triangular” link exchanges are when your web site A links to your partner’s web site, and your partner’s web site links to your web site B.

One Way Link Exchange Image:

Two Way Link Building

Two Way Link Building, Reciprocal link building, Bilateral Links

Two way link building is one type of link building. Two way link building is also know as Reciprocal link building. Reciprocal links are also known as bilateral links. Reciprocal links are a very cost effective way to get links and visitors to your web site.

Reciprocal links are thought to be bringing down by search engines. Better to work on non-reciprocal, or one way links, which can be achieved quickly. Link exchanges for reciprocal links are still an important aspect in building your web site’s link popularity.

Two way link building is useful for page ranking, rank high in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Msn and increases the traffic for your web site. In two way link building, we will exchange a link from other website and give a back link from your website. Nothing but link exchange between two web sites.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Reciprocal Links:
Advantages and Disadvantages of Reciprocal Links
Advantages of reciprocal links

* It’s free

Disadvantages of reciprocal links

* Time consuming
* Tedious
* Your site gives away PageRank
* Slow to get many links to your web site

Reciprocal link building Image:

Three Link Building, Non-Reciprocal Link Building

Three Link Building, Non-Reciprocal Link Building

In 3 way link building you can exchange a link from a website having good page rank and relevant content and place there link in other related website or directory. This process enables to have even more one way (inbound) links on our main website. This is one of the latest link building processes being followed.
Three Way Link Building Strategies:

* Check the websites are relevant to your web site or not.
* Posted the link to another website that’s related to your keyword and categories.
* First add other website link in your website and than ask them to add your link.
* Provide them the exact html code of your website related to particular category.
* Use the target keywords title as anchor text in the code that is related to your web site and information.
* Try to contact others on by calling them this much effective than email.
* After getting conformation on link then check back the web site and make sure they located your link according to your requisite.
* Mail them to change and if they are not responding to your mail then without wasting your time move on to the next.
* After week check that the placed link is indexed in Yahoo or Google or not.

Three Way Link Building Image:Three Way Link Building

Link Building, Types of Link Building Activities

Link Building Means

Link building is a technique to promote a web site by exchanging links to other related websites. Link building is not only useful for increases visibility of a website on internet but also helps to get or occupy the higher search engine rankings. Link building is one of the important strategies in search engine marketing.

Generally link exchange process is done with relevant websites with high page rank (PR). If the website contain high page rank means we have more advantageous if we exchange a link from that website.

We can exchange a link or promoting a website by listing in e-zines, newsletters, blogs, directories and search engines.
Types of Link Building Activities:

Inbound link building: In bound link is nothing but getting a link from other website or one way link. With the help of one way link we can rank well in major search engines. Below is a diagram to show the inbound link building.
Reciprocal link building: Reciprocal link building is nothing but two way link building. In this we have to place an other website link in our website. So we have to exchange a link with only high page rank (PR) website. Below is diagram to explain reciprocal link building process.
Outbound link building: In this exchange we give link to some other website. we may need to give some out-bound links to websites. Below is a diagram to explain outbound links.
Link Building - 3 Way : In 3 way link building our aim is to have a link from a website having good page rank on our website. In return we link their website from our other related website or directory.

http://online-seo-information.blogspot.com/2009/02/link-building-types-of-link-building.html

Benefits of Article Submission and Tips

Benefits of Article Submission and TipsArticle Submission

Submit your articles manually then it would be an excellent idea to write unique articles for all of the different directories you submit to.

Avoid using same article the search engines will penalize you for duplicate content and you won’t get near as much traffic.

Depending on what you are submitting articles for manually submitting them might be the way to go.

Writing a articles to tell something to visitors about particular topic for which we want to receive a traffic. Manually submitting of article is a good way to get more traffic then you might want to look into an article submission program.

If have more article on the internet then more visitors are going to read them and the more traffic you are going to receive.

Article submission programs are especially helpful if you have a new site that you want to get listed under your keywords.

With the help of article submission, you get more back links and your web site is in the eyes of the search engines.

In a short period of time you can receive thousands of links pointing to your site if you use an article submission program. To get those links by hand you could easily spend a year writing and submitting unique articles.

If you want to use an article submission program to submit your articles for you then be sure that they are not sending the same article out to all of the directories.

You can submit unlimited articles through out the month for your subscription. The more articles you send out the more traffic you will get.

Some sites will only allow you eight submissions each month and others will charge you x amount for every ten articles they send out.

On Page Optimization Tips and Importance

On Page Optimization Tips. On Page Optimization Tips and Importance:

On page Optimization is one most important method or technique to make your website SEO friendly and to increases visibilities in top search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

On page optimizing includes the following:

* W3C Validation.
* Naming structure of files for search engines.
* Creating a page Title.
* Creating a robots.txt file.
* Creation of a sitemap.
* 404 error handling page.
* Meta tags like Description Tag, Keyword Tag
* Site navigational structure
* Using of H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6.
* Using of Alt Tag.
* Creating a Keyword rich Anchor Tag.

1.
Html Design Elements,
2.
Optimizing internal link structure,
3.
Writing good contents.

The major On-Page Factors of Search Engine optimizations are:

*
Meta Tags (some engines)
*
Keywords Words in the Title Tag
*
Keyword Density in the content
*
Keyword Density in each Page
*
Words in Headings
*
Words in Bold
*
Keywords in URL
*
Anchor text links
*
HTML Validation
*
Listings in directory
*
Beginning Words
*
Link Structure
*
"Indexability" of the page and
*
Hundreds of Other Factors

Why on page factor is that much important?

Your website has to occupy the top 10 SERP. If your site is not ranking for the targeted keywords then conversion rate of your site will be less. The main goal to run a website is to have great business and to make conversion rate of a site higher, on page factor is important. So on page optimization play a key role to generate unique visitors to you website.

Top Free Press Releases Sites

Tips to Find Directories, Websites to List/Add Your Website

These are the searches I do:

Replace "your keywords" with words that your site is targeting.

"Suggest link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest site" + "your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a site" + "your keyword(s)"
"Suggest URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add a link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add a site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add a URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit a link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit a site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit a URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"favorite links" +"your keyword(s)"
"recommended links" +"your keyword(s)"
"cool sites" +"your keyword(s)"
"cool places" +"your keyword(s)"
reciprocal +"your keyword(s)"
directory +"your keyword(s)"
directorys +"your keyword(s)"
directories +"your keyword(s)"
exchange +"your keyword(s)"
resources +"your keyword(s)"
links +"your keyword(s)"
"your location" +"add url"
"your location" +"suggest a site"
"your location" +"submit site"
"your location" +links
"your location" +"reciprocal links"
"your location" +directory

Tips to Design SEO Friendly Website

SEO TIPS for seo friendly guidelines.

If you are planning to design a search engine friendly website you need to take some important points into consideration. Designing your web site as per these SEO search engine friendly tips and Guidelines will help your site in good ranking and efficient web promotion and also provide and easy crawling for the spiders.

What is SEO friendly website: - A search engine friendly web site is a web site rank well in the search engines and can be easily found in the search engines. In simple words it should be formatted and designed in way that provides easy understanding for user and easily indexed by the search engines.

Use Div Layers instead of HTML table: - use of div layer in palace of old html table is more search engine (SEO) friendly that provides and easy crawling to web spiders and crawlers.

Researching for the keywords: - Search for those targeted keywords search by the net surfer most. But keep in mind the traffic of these keywords. First try to search out least competitive keywords that are mostly searched out.

HTML as well as XML Site map: - Submit html sitemap as well as xml site map which enables visitors and web spiders to understand the changes you have made on your web site.

Validate web site pages: - Html and CSS validation is very essential for a search engine friendly website.

Remove any broken and dead link: - Remove deal or broker link from the web site as they reduces your web site credibility. These links are not goods for search engine friendly website.

Design a site that is seo friendly is not so complicated but you need to have good communication between content developer, graphic designer and SEO analyst as at the same time you have to give a special attention to the site's architecture Hope these SEO Tips Tricks and Techniques will help you for Search Engine Optimization.

Seo tips techniques and tricks

ON PAGE SEO TIPS:

1. Meta Tags- Title and Description tags are the most important Meta tags in on page optimization. Keep your title tag short and make it meaning. Try to create title of your web site in a manner that covers most of your primary key worlds in it. Description tag should be meaning full and it should not be filled with keywords.

2. Keyword- Start key wording from most prior keywords then less.

3. Content rich web page– Google love content so it is required to have your web page with rich and unique content and keep 5 to 20 percent keyword density.

4. Page size- Try to keep your page size within 5k to 15k as spiders crawl less weight pages more easily as compare to heavy weight pages.

5. Frame- Frame should not be used as it an obstacle in easy crawling of your web site.

6. Alt Tag- This is the tag which sometimes ignored by and some time it is misused by the keyword stuffing. So use alt tag to increase the keyword density.

7. H1 Tag- Use H1 tag for effective optimization as some search engine considers it important.

8. Cross linking or Inter linking- Interlink your whole web site and remember any web page should not be far from 3 clicks from main index page.

9. Browser Testing- Test your web site with all the common browsers.

10. 301 redirection- Use tricks to solve with or without www problem which leaks page rank

OFF PAGE SEO TIPS

1. Directory Submission- Submit your site in most popular free directory only.

2. Article Submission- Submit unique articles in popular articles site like Buzzle and Ezinearticles. This is the better way to get natural links.

3. Blogs- Create blogs for increase web presence and link popularity of web site.

4. Comment- Leave your comments with site URL in google chat forum and most popular blogs.

5. RSS feeds- submit rss feeds for better web present and to get more traffic on your site.

6. Link exchange- Exchange links from other well page ranked and relevant web sites. Always believe in quality link exchange not it quantity link exchange.

7. Quality inbound links- Increase quality inbound links.

8. Press Releases- it an effective way to increase the web site traffic and leads.

Latest seo tips tricks for supplement results

latest seo tips, seo tricks, and seo techniques as per search engine guidelines for supplement results.

If your website has got supplemented you need not to worry about that. There are most powerful seo tips tricks and techniques for website supplement. Here you will find most possible reasons for site supplement and their solutions.

What is website supplement: - Supplement concept and supplement theory only exists in Google search engine. Supplement pages are “ORPHAN” pages. These are the pages which don’t have their parents and relatives. In simple words supplement pages are those pages which have less or no back links from other sites. Google marks its supplemental stamp on those pages which are considered suspicious or less trusted. Apart it there are many other reasons for supplements results.

Website Supplement Reasons and their Solutions

Content duplicity: if you have copier content from some other sites they Google will stamp your site as Supplement Results. Google loves content and it gives more important to fresh content there fore it do not tolerate content stealing or copying from other sites.

Description Tag: Google may supplement your website if more than one pages of your site have same description on each page.

Title Tag: Google give more importance to Title as compare to keywords. Same title exists on more than on page of the same website. Google will mark it supplement results.

Read More Links: You will have seen world “read more….”on main pages. It means that some content part of liked web page you are showing on that page. It means content duplicity as same content is available in two pages. It also may results in supplement results.

Archives: your site may also be supplement due to archives pages. Under stand it by an easy example of blogs. If your blog has got supplemented then write this command “site:your blog url” you will find many archives with same title and description. It results in supplement pages.

Feeds and Atoms: due to feeds and atoms, your blog posts normally stamped supplement. Use the below code in robot.txt and soon you will find your site has been come out of supplement index.
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$

A site with “www” or without www: Check your site with www and without www prefix. If site is running bot prefix it means your site has tow pages with same name one is with www and another is without www. Google consider it two different-different sites, therefore it results in supplement website and also in leakage of website page rank. Make permanent redirection by using “301 Redirect”

Unethical Seo tips and techniques: using unethical seo techniques or black hat seo techniques for website promotion may also put your site in supplemental hell. So use ethical seo tips tricks and techniques for better website promotion.

Nofollow: If you have created new url in place of old for your existing site and you have not use nofollow tag. It means duplicate content page and Google will mark new page as supplement results.

If your website is new then in its initial stage it will not have back links. So Google can supplement your site, but don’t worries as you work hard for your site and do seo work for some time on your site, you will find your site not only out of supplement results but also at good ranking position. Use these latest and new seo tips, seo techniques and seo tricks as per search engine guidelines, you will find your website out of supplemental results.

Google Analytics Features About Google Analytics

About Google Analytics: just to say the one of the best free web analytics available online. There are many more website analytics both paid and free but you will not found services and feature what Google Analytics offer you for free. Undoubtedly it is one of the most popular website analytics used by lots of individuals and companies now days.

Google Analytics Features:

Google Analytics offer several features here are the main feature and their benefits for you.
1: Visitor Tracking: Visitor tracking allows you to track visitor’s related data like visits, unique visits, pageviews, average page views, time on site, bounce rate, visitor loyalty, depth of visit, browsers, operating system, screen colors, screen resolution used by the visitors, network property etc.

2: Traffic Source: Traffic source means the source that visitor used to reach to your site. It can be search engine traffic (organic Traffic & Paid), direct traffic, Referring traffic and others (banner advertisement, other search engine CPC etc).

3: Content: It tell you all about your site content like top visitors pages, landing pages, exit pages, site navigation summary etc. you can also track information about each and every individual page, and increase your ROI.

4: Event Tracking: Even tracking means tracking of objects like flash player, videos, downloadable files, music player etc.

5: Goals: Goals or we can say leads, you can set up goals with this feature and can search how many leads you got from your website and what specific area, section, traffic source etc performing well or we can say contributing more to leads. You can accordingly plan your future advertising or marketing plans.

6: Custom Reporting: Custom reporting is a good feature which is mostly used to create customized report and send to your client. Normally what people do, search for the data and place the same in excels or in ppt file and then sent it to the client. You can easily do the same with custom reporting and you will get your report in moments.

7: Advance Segment: Advance segment is very useful if you want to track the visitor behavior for a particular section of your website.

8: Filters: filters are used to purify and customize your data. You will get accurate result with the use of filters. There are two types of filters mainly customized and predefined filters. Read more about filters.

9: Add Profile Option: You can create more than one profile for new website or an already existing website. You can accordingly apply filters and set goals. As there are limited goals in one profile so if you need more goals you can set up new profiles for the same.

10: Data Export: you can exports the data in 5 different formats in PDFs, XML, CSV, CSV for Excel and TSV. You can also directly mail the reports to the clients in different formats directly from your Google Analytics a/c.

This is all about Google Analytics features in short. One of the biggest features that I have not mentioned above is “FREE of Cost”.

Why SEO Company Considers Competitor Analysis Supreme

There will surely be no two opinions when I say SEO offers unlimited things to learn. The more you go into it you will find many more new things. You can surely keep yourself updated to all these new techniques through the various online and other media. However all this would require lot of time.

SEO competition analyses

But if you ask a SEO company how to do it in the best way it would say through competitor analysis the task becomes lot easy. This is the reason why SEO company considers competitor analysis supreme. Any business is all about beating the competitor and the best way to do it is to find out what the competitor is doing and how. This process is called competitor analysis.

This becomes even more important for SEO because you have easy access to your competitor’s website and have various tools to learn what are the special things your competitor is doing to increase the ranking of a website? Once you are able to do this you will surely find some good SEO tricks and tactics which probably you are not aware of.

For example we all know that Google is no more considering Meta tag for deciding the rank of a website and so you might not be using it. But it is possible that your competitor might be using it and is able to rank good. Then maybe you can also do the same thing for your site and there are chances you might succeed.

Being a SEO you might have surely come across situations where your client’s site which was ranking 3rd suddenly ranks 10th and your competitor who was ranking 7th is ranking 2nd. In such situations if you do competitor analysis you can probably know what new has increased the ranking of your competitor site and decreased your ranking.

Some Helpful SEO Tools to Boast your Website Ranking

Any SEO company would easily agree that for the best SEO it is important to have the best keywords on hand. Keywords are the backbone of the whole SEO process and so the most crucial decision to be taken is regarding the keywords to be used. Copying others smartly can benefit the weakest of all this is a known trend for all people doing business. The same is very true for SEO as well.

SEO tools kit

You can study your competitor’s website to find the best keywords and the techniques used to increase the ranking of a website. This is actually a big task and different types of SEO tools can make it easy. Keyword Spy is an excellent tool to know what your competitor is doing to attain and retain the first position.

Both free and paid versions of the tool are available. It is suggested to go for the free trial before you actually decide to buy the tool. It is very easy to use, simply put in your competitor’s keyword and you will get the results regarding the keywords used.

For deciding the rank of a website the search engine spiders crawl through the different websites to determine the relevancy of the website content to the keyword searched for. Undoubtedly the spiders are very efficient in their job but the downside is that they are not able to read all sites especially those with lot of images, videos and flash animations.

Hence it is often said that to make a website completely crawl able by the search engine spiders you will have to get into their shoes. What more useful than the Google Webmaster Tools can be to help you get into the spiders shoes. This tool will show you which pages on your site are ranked and indexed by the search engines and also why other pages are not doing so well on the SERP.

SEO Company Reveals Website Structure is as Important as Content

The structure of a website is something that defines how the website would look and where and how all the information will be presented. This structure if properly planned can help in increasing the ranking of a website. Hence a SEO company reveals website structure is as important as content. But it is not always possible for a SEO company to have the best website structure currently we will not deal with this aspect as we do not want to be out of the topic.

best website structure

The language used for designing a website structure is important because that will make it clear how a SEO services provider can use the site structure to the best for increasing the ranking of a website. The best way is to use XHTML 1.0 or CSS 1.0 and XHTML 1.0 Strict. This will give you ample opportunity to use rel="no follow" and target="_blank" attributes.

Search engines hate long pages with lot of coding. Hence to make your coding look simple and easy use CSS to detail all the special things on your website. This will reduce your website coding by approx 40% because of which your site will get indexed quickly. Also this will make for a highly Google friendly website.

For all those who use Dreamweaver templates it is advised to support it with ASP includes, Server Side Includes or PHP Includes. This is because there are certain disadvantages of straight away using Dreamweaver templates like:

• Keyword density tool will not be able to give you the best results due to the embedded comments in the code.
• If you wish the index file to include a non standard footer then you will have to separate the index from the template. This will disturb the coding of the whole template.
• It will cost you heavily if in case you have an argument with your web designer or developer.

Which Keywords to Target? Know from a SEO Company

Keywords as we all know are the most important to determine your site relevancy with the business you do. If you are in jeopardy which keywords to target? Know from a SEO Company. When contacted a SEO company for increasing the ranking of a site it would take up this task very seriously and give you the best combination of keywords which can do wonders for your site and business.

confused about keywords

There are various tools which can aid a SEO consultant in accomplishing its tasks with the best results. Some of the tools help to find the best keywords to target, some help compare which keyword to target and lastly some help determine how it is going that is which keyword is giving you what.

When you want to rank first in your business niche you definitely want to make sure what type of words people are using to find you online and then probably you would also wish to target the same. But it is not always easy to knock down an already well ranking site. Hence you have to select less competitive keywords so that ranking good for that keyword is comparatively easy and you can soon start reaping the benefits.

This can be better explained by an example like say you are a SEO company of course the best keyword related to your industry is search engine optimization. But that would be difficult to optimize and second thing is that often people looking for search engine optimization are there only to find information related to search engine optimization. It can be assumed that if people are actually looking for SEO services then they will definitely use service anywhere in the keyword. Hence if you target keywords related to SEO with the word service then there are chances you will have higher ROI.

How to Analyze Goolge Algorithms Change?

All who are in the SEO niche are surely aware SEO is a continuous process and there is no rest time for a SEO company even after the ranking is achieved because in SEO there is no guarantee for how long you will stay at the top position. This is primarily because your competitor might have overtaken you or the Google algorithm might have changed. The question here is if the Google algorithm changes then how to analyse Goolge algorithms change?

google algorithm

How do you make sure that the Google algorithm has changed? If you are a SEO services provider who monitors the site rankings regularly then surely you might have come across a situation where there is a sudden increase or decrease in the ranking of any site. When such a thing happens it is called change in the Google algorithms. A SEO services provider would define the algorithm change as the change in the consideration of factors for ranking a website by Google.

Here we have an example where Google algorithm change affected the SEO community. There was a time in the SEO niche when reciprocal links were considered very important for increasing the ranking of a website. But suddenly they were considered less important by Google and backlinks came into existence and started gaining popularity. Similarly there are many more SEO techniques related to Google ranking which increased or decreased in importance.

Domain Age: The age of the domain name was never as important as it is today. Different SEOs have a Different approach to it. But from the Google’s angle it is viewed as a measure which can help it give more reliable results because it believes the older the site the better is its reliability. This actually helps Google filter sites which are solely made for the purpose of ranking good for particular terms using any method possible.

Statistics Analyses can Reveal Data Helpful for Higher Conversion

Wow! You have reached the first page of Google. Surely it has taken a lot of time and efforts and you wish to sit back and relax. But the tinge is, now is the time when a SEO company needs to work even harder. Many would say the main purpose of SEO is to increase the ranking of a website but the truth is first rank is just a part of SEO.

statistics analysis

What benefit that is the increase in sales or returns a company receives after the first ranking is actually the crux of SEO. When you start a website you concentrate only on increasing its visibility and not the earnings because you cannot judge how it will work. Hence this can be judged perfectly only when you are at the top position through statistic analyses. In fact Statistics analyses can reveal data helpful for higher conversion.

What exactly do you mean by statistics analyses? It is analyzing the traffic coming to the website, how much, from where and the time spent by each individual on the site. This means that if people are spending less time on your website, it is less useful to them and it also implies that you will have to work a little more so as to provide data which can give a grip to the visitors.
From where or how can you obtain all this data? You can do it manually if you have enough time on hand or else use tools.

Different tools are available in the market for this purpose. But all do not have the same ability to reveal data. Try tools which give a free trial so that you know what kind of data it gives and how it will be useful to you. Once you have the data required start the process to make changes so as to make sure you have visitors spending more time on your website and filling up enquiry forms.

Know Which SEO Tools a SEO Company Uses for the Best SEO

It is a known fact that a SEO company puts in lot of efforts to increase the ranking of a website. And these efforts would never materialize if there were no tools to measure how well their efforts are doing or what more is required to be done. Hence it is important to know which SEO tools a SEO company uses for the best SEO.

seo tools for SEO company

There are various SEO tools available in the market out of which some are paid and some unpaid. Also a SEO company prepares its own software which are used only for own websites or of clients. However it is not all that easy for a SEO services provider to find exactly which tool to select for the task. Because different tools have different usability and also there are all possible chances of getting trapped in to false hands if buying from software providers.

One of the best SEO tools as per me is the SEO Quake. It is a very easy to use tool and combines a number of results into one query. With this tool one can swiftly find the details regarding the domain backlinks, PageRank, backlinks to the particular page, indexed page numbers, domain backlinks, the site age and others of the first 10 sites on the SERP. It also makes it easy to find if a link is no follow or do follow.

SEO is more about studying other sites and trying to find what has put that site in the position it is on the SERP. SEO Quake will definitely allow you to do this but Tool Aaron is one more useful tool which has a few more features than the former one. It is a good tool for keyword analysis and link building.

SEO Link Analysis is a tool helpful to analyze the links of a site and was developed by Joost de Valk. It comes handy when you wish to study the pagerank and the backlinks of a particular site. Yes many would prefer to do this manually to be surer but this tool can be helpful for a quick glimpse.

A must have tool for all those trying to understand coding is Web Developer tool. It makes it easier to test and view the W3C compliance, table and cell information, CSS details, image and video alt and many other details of a site.

Different browsers accept sites in different formats like on internet explorer many things remain invisible which are otherwise visible on Firefox. Thus it becomes imperative to check the sites on both the browsers. The IE Tab saves you time in shuffling between firefox and IE because it has the ability to open the IE in the Firefox tab.

Six things that you should know about SEO

Most people know that being listed on Google's first result page will bring them a lot of targeted visitors and that they will get a lot of sales through that listing.

Google crown

Unfortunately, some people don't know how SEO (search engine optimization) works and what they can expect. Some webmasters still expect that their website will be listed on Google's first result page after submitting the site to Google. That might have worked eight years ago but it does not work today.

1. SEO takes time

You cannot optimize your website today and expect results tomorrow or next week. Search engine optimization takes time. Search engines have to find your new optimized pages, they have to find the new links to your website, they have to update the index, etc.

2. You must change your web pages

If you want to get high rankings for certain keywords, then these keywords must appear on your web pages. It is possible to get high rankings for a keyword that is not listed on your website if lots of other websites link to your website with that keyword. That's the exception, though.

In general, the keywords for which you want to be found must appear on your web pages and they must appear in the right elements on your web pages. For that reason, you have to change the HTML code of your web pages to make it as easy as possible for search engine spiders to parse your site.

3. You need links and you need the right links

Good backlinks are the key to high rankings on Google. Automatically created backlinks usually won't help your rankings and they even might get you banned from Google's index.

As a general rule, the easier it is to get a link, the less is its influence on the position of your website on Google. The links to your website should be from related websites and they should contain your keywords in the link text.

The more attractive your website is, the easier it will be to get good links. Your website should offer linkworthy content that other people can talk about.

4. It's crucial to choose the right keywords

If you optimize the website of a rock band than you might think that it would be cool if their site was found for the keyword "mp3". That might be cool but it does not make sense.

People searching for "mp3" can be interested in anything: mp3 players, mp3 decoders, the latest Justin Bieber song, general information about the file format, etc. If these people come to your rock band website, they won't find the information they are looking for.

Optimize your website for keywords that attract the right kind of people. For example "unsigned rock band" or "rock band london".

5. You must be realistic

Getting on the first result page for a highly competitive keyword such as "mp3" is possible but your competitors will be old and established websites with a lot of backlinks. It is very difficult to outrank these pages.

If you have a website with just a few pages and your competitors have large websites with forums, communities, blogs, etc. then you must improve your website if you want to compete. Search engines want to show the best sites on the result pages.

If you absolutely want to get high rankings for a term such as "mp3", start with less competitive keywords and then proceed to the more competitive terms. Search engines must trust your website before they give you high rankings for very competitive keywords.

6. You must set the right goals

Search engine optimization is not about getting a high Google PageRank (the green bar in Google's toolbar). It is about getting high listings for the right keywords so that the right people will come to your website. The goal of search engine optimization is to increase your sales.

You don't have to be listed for any possible keyword even if they are related to your business. You have to be listed for keywords that will bring buyers to your site. It usually takes some time to find the best keywords for your website. Running PPC ads and tracking their conversions will help you to find the best keywords.

Google Dance

What is the Google Dance?

Whenever we are at trade shows, run seminars, or speak at symposiums we get asked the question "what is the Google dance?" We've heard a few different things referred to as "the Google Dance", but only one is really correct. It's the period when Google is rebuilding its rankings,During the month, Google sends out robots (spiders) to crawl the web and archive every website it finds and results fluctuate widely for a 3 to 5 day period.

How Often Does The Google Dance Happen?

The name "Google Dance" was in the past used to describe the period that a major index update of the Google search engine are being implemented. These major Google index update occured on average every 36 days or 10 times per year. It was easiest be identified by significant changes in search results, and by an updating of Google's cache of all indexed pages. These changes would be evident from one minute to the next. But the update did not proceed as a switch from one index to another like the flip of a switch. In fact, it took several days to finish the complete update of the index.

Because Google, like every other search engine, depends on their customers knowing that they deliver authoritative reliable results 24 hours of the day, seven days a week, updates pose a serious issue. They can not shut down for maintenance and they cannot afford to go offline for even one minute. Hence, we had the Dance. Every search engine goes through it, some more or less often than Google. However, it is only because of Google's reach that we pay attention to its rebuild more than that of any other engine.

Since August 2003, the famous / infamous Google Dance is no more. Or rather it has become less dramatic. Google now performs updates every week, with most movement occuring on Mondays. These ongoing updates feature mostly minor algorithm and index updates.

So, during any month there will be minor changes in rankings. This is because Google's bot or spider is always running and finding new material. It also happens because the bot may have detected that a website no longer exists, and needs to be deleted from the index. During the Dance, the Googlebot will revisit every website, figure out how many sites link to it, and how many it links out to, and how valuable these links are.

Because Google is constantly crawling and updated selected pages, their search results will vary slightly over the course of the month. However, it is only during the Google Dance that these results can swing wildly. You also need to consider that Google has multiple data centers, sharing more than 10,000 servers. Somehow, the updates to the index that occur during the month, and outside of the Google Dance have to get transferred throughout. It's a constant process for Google, and every other search engine. These ongoing, incremental updates only affect parts of the index at any one time.

Checking The Google Dance

Until January 2004, Google had 12 main www servers online, which were as follows:

* www-ex.google.com - (where you get when you type www.google.com)
* www-sj.google.com - (which can also be accessed at www2.google.com)
* www-va.google.com - (which can also be accessed at www3.google.com)
* www-dc.google.com
* www-ab.google.com
* www-in.google.com
* www-zu.google.com
* www-cw.google.com
* www-fi.google.com - found in May 2003.
* www-gv.google.com - found in August 2003.
* www-gv2.google.com - found in September 2003.
* www-kr.google.com - found in October 2003.

At some point in January, these servers stopped accepting connections, and the only servers easy to connect to were:

* www.google.com
* www2.google.com
* www3.google.com

As well as the numeric address databases - which people keep discovering, and kindly help us keep abreast of.

* 216.239.37.99
* 216.239.39.99
* 216.239.41.99
* 216.239.51.99
* 216.239.37.104
* 216.239.41.104
* 216.239.37.147
* 64.233.161.98
* 64.233.161.99
* 64.233.161.104
* 64.233.161.105

At any time during an index update you can check the Google servers, and they will display sometime wildly differing results, thus they are said to be "dancing", and hence the name "Google Dance".

In the past, the easiest way to check if the Google Dance was happening was to go to www.google.com, and do a search. Look at the blue bar at the top of the page. It would have the words "Results 1 - 10 of about 626,000. Search took 0.48 seconds" Then check the same search on www2.google.com, and www3.google.com. If you were seeing a different number of total pages for the same search, then the Google Dance was on. You could also check all the variations above. www2 is really www-sj, and www3 is www-va. We have found that all the others need their full www-extension.google.com in the url if you want to test them properly. Once the numbers, and the order of results on all 10 www's are the same, you knew the dance is over.
Importance Of The Google Dance

For most people, this event in and of itself was not important. However for anyone in the search engine optimization industry it was a period of note. Pages got temporarily dropped. Sometimes it lasted a day. People panicked. Then they are re-added, and they are better placed than before, and things calmed down. It's interesting to see how overpoweringly important this one engine is. For more information on about this search engine, or any other

Know SEO

1. Introduction
One of the buzz-words of the latest 10 years in internet marketing is SEO. Everyone talks about SEO, everyone tries to apply it more or less successfully. If you are experienced in this theme you may skip the first chapters, otherwise read along to learn the very basics.

1.1. What is SEO
The term "SEO" is the abbreviation to "Search Engine Optimization". This is not about optimizing search engines, though. It is about optimizing websites for search engines. But why one needs to optimize a website? To answer this question we need to understand what a search engine is.

Search engines as the way to find an info on the web appeared in the middle of 90's. They crawled websites and indexed them in their own databases marking them as having one or another keyword in its content. Thus, when someone put some query in the searchbox of that search engine, it quickly searched its database and found which indexed pages corresponded to that query.

So, the more keywords of a query a website had, the higher it was shown in the results of a search. We don't know who was the first guy realized that he can make some changes to the pages of his website to make it rank higher, but he was truly a diamond!

So, SEO is something that helps your site rank better in search engines. There are a number of ways and methods of SEO, some of them are legitimate, while others are restricted and considered as "blackhat" techniques. Search engines don't like blackhat SEO and the effect of its usage may be disastrous for your website. Anyways, we'll thoroughly cover this material later in this SEO FAQ.

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1.2. Do I need SEO?
Well, the answer "Yes" is the first thing that comes to mind, does it? But let's think a bit more. Does SEO help... well.. umm.. say some oil-extracting company to sell their product? Does it help to promote a small local grocery in the neighbourhood of your home owned by an old chinese? Does it help Obama to rule his bureaucrats? Well, I guess you've got the idea. SEO is effective mostly for Internet businesses. Do you have one? Then you need SEO. Otherwise, SEO is only one of the possible channels to spread the word out about your product or service. And not necessarily the best one.

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1.3. Should I hire someone or make it all myself?
One of the most frequent unspoken questions is: should I hire a SEO professional or save few bucks and do it myself? There is no one universal answer for all situations, so here are some pros and cons:

Pros Cons
Hired SEO

1. You don't have to waste your time;
2. You don't have to learn SEO yourself;
3. SEO Pro's can be quite effective.

1. You still need to control a hired SEO yourself;
2. SEOs usually don't give any guarantees and actually you must be very cautious while choosing a SEO to hire;
3. Hired guy may be a SEO professional, but he is not necessarily a proffesional in your theme;
4. Finally, you have to pay this guy.

Do it yourself

1. If you want it done right - do it yourself. You are the one who performs all the show, so you know best what is right and what is wrong about it;
2. You really saving some bucks out there;
3. You can constantly monitor the trends and apply changes in your SEO strategy on the fly.

1. You will need to spend some time reading SEO FAQs and tutorials like this one, posting stupid questions on forums and doing other things nubies always do. It doesn't kill, but still takes some time;
2. You can get very little SEO benefits for all of your efforts and time spent. After all, you are not a guru, right?

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2. Basic concepts

2.1. Search engines
Before we start talking about search engine optimization we need to understand how search engines work. Basically, each search engine consists of 3 parts:

1. The Crawler (or the spider). This part of a search engine is a simple robot that downloads pages of a website and crawls them for links. Then, it opens and downloads each of those links to crawl (spider) them too. The crawler visits websites periodically to find the changes in their content and modify their rankings accordingly. Depending on the quality of a website and the frequency of its content updates this may happen from say once per month up to several times a day for a high popularity news sites.

The crawler does not rank websites itself. Instead, it simply passes all crawled websites to another search engine module called the indexer.

2. The Indexer. This module stores all the pages crawled by the spider in a large database called the index. Think of it as the index in a paper book: you find a word and see which pages mention this word. The index is not static, it updates every time the crawler finds a new page or re-crawls the one already presented in the index. Since the volume of the index is very large it often takes time to commit all the changes into the database. So one may say that a website has been crawled, but not yet indexed.

Once the website with all its content is added to the index, the third part of the search engine begins to work.

3. The ranker (or search engine software). This part interacts with user and asks for a search query. Then it sifts millions of indexed pages and finds all of them that are relevant to that query. The results get sorted by relevance and finally are shown to a user.

What is relevance and how would one determine if a page is more or less relevant to a query? Here comes the tricky part - the ranking factors...

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2.2. Terminology
Here are the basic terms you need to know. All others will be explained along the way.

Anchor text
This is simply a text of a link. Let suppose you have a link like that:

a href="seo-faq-tutorial.htm"The essentials of SEO - a complete guidea>
The link would be looking as follows:
The essentials of SEO - a complete guide

The text "The essentials of SEO - a complete guide" - is the anchor text in this case. The anchor text is the key parameter in a link building strategy. You should always make sure that the anchor text of a link meets the theme of that page. If your page is about dogs, do not link to it with the "cats" anchor text. Obviously, you cannot control all and every link on the web, but at least you should make all links within your own website have an appropriate anchor text.

Inbound link
...or backlink is a link that points to your site. The more you have - the better. But in particular there are many exclusions from this rule, so read the Off-Page optimization section to learn more.

Keyword
One or more words describing the theme of a website or page. In fact, we should distinguish keyWORDS and keyPHRASES, but in SEO practice they all called keywords. For instance, the keywords for this page are: SEO FAQ, SEO tutorial, etc.

Short-tail and long-tail keywords
Easy one. Short-tail keywords are some general, common words and phrases like "rent a car", "seo", "buy a toy", "personal loan" and so on. Long-tail on the opposite precisely describe a theme: "rent bmw new york", "seo in florida", "buy a plush teddy bear" etc. The more precise a keyword is, the less it is popular, the less people type this exact query in the search box. But! The other side of the coin is: since each query is highly targeted, then once a visitor comes to your website from a search engine query and finds what he is looking for - it is very likely that such visitor will soon become a customer. This part is very important! Long-tail queries are not very popular, but the conversion rate for such queries is much much greater than for short-tail ones.

SERPs
You may heard this term, but didn't understand what is it. SERP means "Search Engine Result Page". If a user types some query and hit Enter he is redirected then to a SERP. Then he can click one of the results to open that website. Obviously, the results shown in the first positions get much more visitors than the ones from page #2-3 and lower. This is the purpose of SEO, actually: make a website move higher in SERPs.

Snippet
This is a short description shown by a search engine in the SERP listings. The snippet is often taken from a Meta Description tag, or it can be created by a search engine automatically basing on the content of a page.

Landing page
Landing page is a page opened when a visitor comes to the site clicking to a SERP. Here is an example query:

Free Monitor for Google

In this case, the page www.cleverstat.com/en/google-monitor-query.htm is a landing page for the "google monitor" query.

Link juice
This funny term means the value that passes from one page to another by means of a link between them. To be precise: the linked page (acceptor) gets a link juice from the linking page (donor). The more link juice flows into a page, the higher it is ranked. Let's imagine a page that is worth $10 - this is the value of that page. If a page has 2 links, each one costs $5 then - that is the amount of link juice passed to the linked page. If the first page has 5 links, then each one only passes $2 of the initial link juice. Here is a simple picture to illustrate this concept:

Link juice explanation. $5 value links.
Each link passes $5 value

Link juice explanation. $2 value links.
Each link passes only $2 value

This means, the more links a Page A has, the less value each linked Page B gains from that Page A. Obviously, the real link juice value is not measured in dollars.

Nofollow links
Nofollow link is a link that a search engine should not follow. To make a link nofollow you need the below code:

Some anchor text

Google does not follow nofollow links and does not transfer the link juice across such links. You can read more about nofollow links here.

Link popularity
This term designates the amount of inbound links pointing to a site. Popular sites have more links. However, the number of inbound links is only a half of a pie. Read the off-page optimization section below to learn more.

Keyword stuffing
When you put a long list of keywords in a tag - this is keyword stuffing. For instance, a title tag for this page could look like: TITLE>SEO guide, SEO FAQ, SEO tutorial, best seo faq, seo techniques, seo strategy guide/TITLE> and so on. This would be the keyword stuffing. Instead, the current title of this page (the one you're reading now) looks quite natural and adequately describes its contents. Do not use the keyword stuffing as a) it does not work; b) it is a bad practice that can hurt your rankings.

Robots.txt
robots.txt is a file intended to tell search engine spiders whether or not they are allowed to crawl the content of the site. It is a simple txt file placed in the root folder of your website. Here are some examples:

This one blocks the entire site for GoogleBot:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

This one blocks all files withing a single folder except myfile.html for all crawlers:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder1/
Allow: /folder1/myfile.html

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3. Ranking factors
In general, there are only two groups of them: on-page and off-page ranking factors. It's been argued which one is the most important, but we'll answer that question later in this FAQ. At this time you should understand that both are crucial and both need the proper attention.

3.1. On-Page ranking factors
There are many on-page ranking factors and even more has been spoken of since the first days of SEO. Some of them are really important, while others are said to be crucial for SEO, but actually are useless or even hurt your rankings. You know, search engines are evolving, they change their algos, and something that used to work in 2003 now has become a piece of useless garbage. So, here is the list of on-page ranking factors sorted by their importance and SEO value.

3.1.1. Important stuff

1. Title
This one seems to be one the most important on-page factors. You should pay a close attention to the title tag. Here are some tips on writing a good title:
a) Keep it precise and short enough. There is a popular myth saying that the title tag must be short, because Google (and others too) does not read it past first 60-70 symbols. That's not true (the proof link). Google will read nearly all that you offer to it in your title tag, but the weight of each keyword in the title would be much less in that case. It seems that only first 10-12 words get the benefit from being in the title, so keep it short. Also, a long and spammy title tag is hard to read by human visitors.
b) Do not stuff it with keywords, instead write in a normal human-oriented style. Instead of "Big gadgets, small gadgets, cheap gadgets, gadgets for sale" use more natural "Cheap gadgets of all sizes for sale". Hope you got the idea.
c) Use a unique title for each page of your website. Each title should accurately reflect the contents of the entitled page. Do not use the same title all over the website.
d) Make your title eye-catching! It is title that a visitor first see when screening the results of a search. It is the first step towards the sale - don't ignore it.

2. Content
The next important factor is the content of a page which seems pretty naive at the first glance, right? Wrong! Content is the king, as SEOs like to repeat. The quality content not only describes your product or service, it also converts your visitors to your customers and customers to returning customers. The quality content increases your ranking in search engines as they like a quality content. Moreover, the quality content even helps you get more inbound links to your website (see off-page ranking factors below)!

Basic tips for content are:
a) Write for humans, not for search engines! Remember: you offer you products for humans. It is human who reads the texts on your website and decides whether or not he is going to purchase the stuff from you. Yeah, technically speaking, search engines read your site too, but I never heard of a search engine that would buy something.
So you should create a content that is interesting and useful for your human visitors at the first place!
b) Suggest something valuable. A text merely describing your product is dull and useless. I don't want to know what features a product has. I want to know what is in it for me! Consider that when preparing the content of your website.
c) Share your experience. Write of something that is interesting to you. Share your experience. Offer some articles or reviews of related products or services (do not borrow them from article sites though - write your own instead). You know - content is the king - so if your site is interesting to your visitors they will link to it on their own.
d) The first 3 wasn't too SEOish, right? Here is a bit more technical one: keep the text on a page within one theme. Search engines are more about themes now, rather than about keywords as they used to be. So you should think the same way: in terms of themes, not keywords. For each page of your site choose ONE theme related to your business and fill that page with the content relevant to that theme. Focusing your efforts within one-theme-per-page strategy makes it much easier to create landing pages for long-tail queries and also make the whole website more structurized and easy to read.

3. Navigation and internal linking
Again an important ranking factor. It seems obvious to create a proper navigation so the search engine crawler could follow all the links on a website and indexed all of its pages then. However, this factor is still being highly underestimated. Creating a clear and easy plain-text navigation helps both search engines and human visitors.

Avoid using JavaScript or Flash links since they are hard to read by search engines. Always provide an alternative way to open any page at your website with simple text links. Do have a sitemap of your website available from any other page with one click.

Also keep in mind that quality internal linking spreads the link juice across the pages of your website, and this strongly helps your landing pages rank better in SERP for long-tail keywords. Use this wisely, though. Link only to pages that really need to be linked to.

Let's suppose you have two pages: one generates you $10 income for every visitor, while other one does only $0.1. Which one whould you link first? Think of it that way and link to the most important and valuable pages of your website, using a relevant anchor text for each link.

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3.1.2. Helpful stuff
The below factors and techniques are not as crucial as the ones described above, but still they help a bit in gaining a higher rank in SERPs.

1. Headings
Once upon a time search engines paid a close attention to the heading tags (H1 through H6), but now those days are gone. Heading tags are easily manipulated, so their value is not very high nowadays. Nevertheless, you still want to use headings to mark the beginning of a text, to split an article into parts, to organize sections and sub-sections within your document. In other words, despite headers provide merely a small SEO value, they are still crucial for making your texts easiliy readable by human visitors.

Use the H1 tag for the main heading of the page, then the H2 for the article headings and the H3 to split the different parts of an article with sub-headers. That would be pretty good practice and is enough to make your site readable by humans. It also adds some SEO points which you should not neglect too.

2. Bold/Strong and Italic/Emphasized text
Both are nearly useless, but still have some SEO value (very little though). As with headers, you better use them for the benefit of your human visitors, emphasizing the key parts of the text. But do not put every 5th keyword in a bold text as it looks ugly while not giving any significant boost to your rankings anyway. Moreover, such page would be very hard to read.

3. Keyword placement
The value of keywords in a text depends on their placement across the page. Keywords placed near the top of the document get higher value than ones residing near the bottom. Important: when I say top or bottom I mean the source of the HTML document, not its visual appearance. That is why you want to put your navigation and supplemental texts near the bottom of the source file and all important and relevant content - near the top.

This rule also works in more specific cases: keywords placed in the beginning of the title tag are more important than ones placed 4th or 5th. Keywords placed in the beginning of the anchor text are more important and get more value too.

4. Keywords in filenames and domain name
An old trick with putting your target keywords into a filename or having them in a domain name. Still works, but don't expect too much boost from this one.
a) Keywords in a domain name do help a little, but it is much better to have a short, easy to remember domain name than something like www.all-of-my-target-keywords-i-so-much-want-to-rank-for.com
b) Keywords in a file or a folder name also help a bit and since you still want to name your documents, why not give them appropriate names? Though as I said before, do not expect any significant ranking boost. For a competitive query it won't help you much anyway. Also, if your page is written in other language than default English (or some other european language), it won't help you at all.

5. Image Alt attribute
This one was very popular in 2003, but now keyword stuffing of the Alt attribute does not give any SEO value to a page. The better use of the Alt attribute would be something like this: accurate description of some pic

Write a natural description for each image and make sure it reads well. This helps you in two ways: a) your site ranks better in the image search; b) Google often takes the Alt text to create a snippet for the SERP.

6. Meta Description
One of the most popular and steady myths (alongside with keyword density) is the Meta Description tag. They say it helps you rank better. They say it is crucial to have it filled with the apropriate description of a page content. They say you must have it on each page of your website. All of these is not true. Nowadays, the only way the Meta Description is used by search engines is taking its content to create a snippet for the SERP. That is all! You don't get any other benefits of using the Meta D on your page, neither do you fall upon any penalty for not using it.

There is an opposite opinion suggesting not to use the Meta D at all, since a search engine anyway creates a snippet basing on the content of a page and you can't make this work better than a search engine. So why waste your time doing that? Personally, I would not agree with this point, since according to Google guidelines the Meta Description tag is still the preferred source of the info for a snippet. Though it is up to you decide whether you want it on your page or not, since as stated above it doesn't give any additional SEO impact, neither positive, nor negative.

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3.1.3. Useless stuff (no pain, but no gain as well)

1. Meta Keywords
Long time ago the meta name="keywords" content=""> tag was intended to tell search engine the keywords relevant to this particular page. In modern SEO history search engines download websites and extract relevant keywords from their content, so the Meta K tag is not used for web ranking anymore. Simply forget it, it is useless for SEO.

2. Keyword Density
One of the most overestimated web ranking factors is the keyword density. What is keyword density and why this myth lives so long? The keyword density of each particular word on a page is calculated as follows:

KD = Word_Count / Total_Words * 100%

That is, if a page has 150 words and the word "SEO" is mentioned 24 times on that page, its keyword density would be: 24 / 150 * 100% = 16%

But why this value is useless? Because search engines has evolved and does not count on keyword density anymore, since it is very easily manipulated. There are thousands of factors that search engines consider when calculating the page rank, so why would they need such simple (not to say primitive) way to rank pages as to count the number of times a word appears in the page text? You may hear the keyword density of 6% is the best rate, or keep it within 7% to 10%, or search engines like kw density within 3% to 7% and other bullshit. The truth is...

Search engines like pages written in a natural language. Write for humans, not for search engines! A page can have any keyword density from 0% (no keyword on a page at all) to 100% (a page consisting of only one word) and still rank high.

Well, of course you may want to control the keyword density of your pages, but please consider that there is no good value for this factor. Any value will work if your text is written with a human reader in mind. Why would one still want to check for keyword density if it is not count any more? Because it is a quick and dirty way to estimate the theme of a page. Simply do not overestimate this thing, it is merely a number, nothing more and it is useless for SEO.

Another interesting question: why this myth is still alive and why there are so many people still talking about keyword desnity as an important ranking factor? Perhaps, because keyword density is easy to understand and modify if needed. You can see it right here with your naked eye and quickly learn if your site is going good or bad. Well, it only seems as that, but not actually is - keyword density is useless, remember?

3. Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs
Beleive me or not, there is no difference. Both are of the same SEO value. The days when search engines had difficulties indexing dynamic URL websites are gone for good.

4. www.site.com vs. site.com
No difference either. If you want your site to be accessed with both ways, please add something like this into your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

5. Underscore vs. hyphen in URLs
Once again, there is no any difference from the SEO point. You can use underscore, or hyphen, or even don't use any separator at all - this neither helps, nor hurts your position in SERPs.

6. Subfolders
Is it better to have a /red-small-cheap-widget.php file rather than /widgets/red/small/cheap/index.php? Does it hurt your rank if you put the content deep into the subfolders? The answer is no, it won't hurt your rankings and actually it doesn't matter at all how deep in the folder tree a file is located. What matters is how many clicks it takes to reach that file from the homepage.

If you can reach that file in one click - it certainly is more important and would have more weight than say some other file located within 5 clicks away from the index page. The homepage usually has many link juice to share, so the pages it directly links to are obviously more important than others (well, since they receive more link juice, that is).

7. W3C validation
W3C is World Wide Web Consortium - an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. Basically speaking, they are guys who invented HTML, CSS, SOAP, XML and other web technologies.

Validation is the process of checking a page or website for its compliance with W3C standards. You can run a validation of any website for free here. Note, this validator shows not only such trivial things like unclosed quotation, undefined tags or wrong attribute values. It also checks the encoding problems, the compliance with the specified DOCTYPE, obsolete tags and attributes and many more.

Why is validation needed? A 100% valid website ensures that it will display correctly (and identically!) in all browsers that support standards. Unfortunately, in real life some browsers do not strictly follow the W3C standards, so a variety of different cross-browser problems with the number of websites are not rare thing all over the web. This doesn't belittles the importance of W3C standards, however.

From the SEO point the validation doesn't look so crucial though. Run a validation through google.com and you'll see a bunch of warnings and errors on their website. This example pretty clearly shows that Google doesn't care of W3C validation itself. At least not as much to give a strong rank boost to valid websites or penalize erroneous ones. It simply doesn't care. The recommended W3C validation strategy is: perform it to make your site working and accessible with all common browsers and don't bother doing it for the SEO purposes only, if you don't experience any cross-browser issues - it works fine as it is.

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3.1.4. Stuff that hurts your rankings

1. Keyword stuffing
Google defines that term pretty clear. Once again: write for humans. Repeating keywords across the page can trigger Google spam filter and this will result in huge loss of positions if not total ban of your website. Write naturally, optimize a bit if needed - that's the best way of using keywords nowadays.

2. Hidden text / Invisible links
At first, let's see what Google says about hidden text. Obviously, Google doesn't like it and if your site uses such technique it may be excluded from Google's index. You may ask, how would Google know if I use hidden text or not? Ok, I can set "display:none" in my external CSS file and limit the access to that CSS file with my robots.txt. Will Google be able to learn that a page has a hidden text then? Yes and no. This might work in the short term, but in the long run your disguise will fail, sooner or later. Also, it's been reported that GoogleBot not always strictly follows the robots.txt instructions, so it actually can read and parse JS and CSS without any problems and once it does - the consequences for your website and its web rankings will be disastrous.

3. Doorway pages
As bad as some SEO method could ever be. The doorway pages are special landing pages created for the only sake of obtaining good positions for some particular keyword. It doesn't have any valuable content and its only purpose is to catch the visitor from the SERP and redirect him to some other, non-doorway page which by the way is usually absolutely irrelevant to the initial visitor's query.

4. Splogs
Splogs (derivative from Spam Blogs) is the modern version of the old-evil doorways. The technique was as follows: one created thousands of blogs on some free blog service like blogspot.com, linked them between each other and obtained some backlinks via the blog comment spam and other blackhat methods (see below). Splogs itself did not contain any unique information, their content was always automatically generated articles stuffed with keywords, however due to a large number of inbound links such splogs ranked very well in SERPs dislodging many legitimate blogs. Later, Google implemented some filters to protect itself from the large amount of splogs and now any splog gets banned pretty fast.

If you own a blog - do not make it spammy. Instead focus your attention on writing good and interesting content. This works better in fact.

5. Cloaking
Not as bad in some particular cases, but still a blackhat technique. The method is based on determining whether a visitor is a human or search engine spider and then deciding which content to show. Humans then get one variant of the website while search engines get another one, stuffed with keywords.

6. Duplicate content
Being a scarecrow for many webmasters, duplicate content is not actually as dangerous as it is spoken. There are two types of content that can be called duplicate. The first case is when a website has several different ways to access the same page, for instance:

http://www.somesite.com/
http://somesite.com/
http://somesite.com/index.php
http://www.somesite.com.index.php?sessionid=4567
etc.

All four refer to the same page, but actually are treated as different pages having the same content. This type of duplicate content issue is easiliy resolved by Google itself and does not lead to any penalty from Google.

The other type is duplicate content on different domain names. A content of a website is considered duplicate if it doesn't add any value to the original content. That is if you simply copy-paste an article to your site - it is a duplicate content. If you copy-paste an article and add some comments or review it from your point of view - that's not duplicate content. The key feature here is some added value. If a site adds value to the initial information - it is not duplicate.

There are two other moments here that are worth to be mentioned. First, if someone copies your text and posts it then on another site - it is very unlikely that you will be penalized for that. Google tracks the age of each page and tends to consider the older one - and it is your website in this case - as the source of the original text. Second, you still can borrow the materials from other websites without a significant risk of being penalized for duplicate content by simply re-writing the text with your own words. There is a way to produce unique random texts using Markov chains, synonymizers and other methods, but I would not recommend using them, since the output looks too spammy and is not natural anyway, so it really can hurt your Google position. Write for humans. Write by yourself.

7. Frames
The frames technology not being a blackhat SEO by itself still can hurt your rankings, because seach engines do not like frames, since they destroy the whole concept of the web - single page for single URL. With frames, one page may load and display the content from many other URLs which makes it very hard to crawl and index. Avoid using IFRAME and other associated tags unless you really, really have to and if you do - provide an alternative way to index the contents of each frame with direct links or use the NOFRAMES tag with some backup content shown to search engines.

8. JavaScript and Flash
Google can read both JS and Flash (well, its text part of course), but it is not recommended to build your site solely basing on these two. There should always be a way for a visitor (either human or bot) to read the content of a website with the simple plain text links. Do not rely exclusively on JS or Flash navigation - this will kill your SEO perspectives as quickly as the headshot.

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3.1.5. On-page factors summary
Well, if you've read carefully the above parts you already can figure out the summary yourself. Content is the king, but only a quality one is. Do not try to trick or cheat with search engines as this only works on the short run and it is always just a matter of time when your rankings get dropped forever. Providing high-quality relevant content interesting both for you and your visitors is the key to on-page ranking success and (paradoxically!) a half of the way to the success with off-page ranking factors.

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3.2. Off-page ranking factors

3.2.1. What is it?
At the end of XX-th century search engines ranked websites basing solely on their content. The situation has changed after the Google triumph. Google's algos were based on the link popularity, not only the content of websites. So, the more inbound links a website had, the higher it was ranked by Google. The whole concept didn't change very much from those days - popular websites often get linked to, so this factor is applied for calculating web rankings alongside with the content of such websites. In present days it is possible to rank for some keyword even if a website does not contain that keyword in its text! (the proof link)

Needles to say that you should pay an attention to off-page ranking factors as much as you do for on-page optimization. This SEO tutorial describes all the things you should keep in mind while maintaining your inbound links. Read along.

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3.2.2. PageRank
In the first hand, we must separate two things: the real PageRank and the PageRank green bar shown in Google Toolbar and other online and offline PageRank tools. The Google bar PageRank (I'll be calling it the green PageRank, or gPR) is merely an indicator. The real PageRank of a website (I'll be calling it the PageRank, or PR from now) is a mathematical value reflecting the probability of a visitor randomly following the links on websites to open this particular website. The value of 1 means 100% probability, that is a visitor randomly surfing the web will always open the website. Sooner or later. On the opposite, the value of 0 means that a random visitor never comes to that particular website through a link on some other site.

I won't get deep into mathematics of the PageRank since this info can be easily found on the web. I'll only underscore the key moments of the PageRank statistical nature.

1. First of all, you must understand the following: the number of websites grows each day, while the overall PageRank value always stays the same: 1 (one). In other words, there is a 100% probability of the fact that a visitor opens SOME site on the web. But the odds of each particular website are going lower and lower every minute. If you have 3 apples and two of them are maggoty, what are your odds to take a good apple? They are 1/3 or 33%. If you have to choose one apple of 100 you only have 1% probability. That's the case with the PageRank - it lowers naturally every day.

2. Due to the pt.1 and the overall enormous number of indexed websites it is not possible to show the exact PageRank value every minute. That is why we need the green PageRank which is updated every 3 or 4 months and shows the PageRank value in a more comprehensible form: as a number from 0 to 10. This number correlates to the actual PageRank very little, it only shows the basic trends.

Also, the gPR scale is non-linear. One may think that a website with PR2 is two times more popular (or at least has two times more chances to get that random visitor we were talking about earlier) than its unlucky brother with PR1, but that is not true. In fact it is more likely to be that a PR2 website is 10 times more popular than PR1, but 10 times less popular than PR3. Something like this, but the number 10 is only an example here, since we don't know the exact formula.

3. The PageRank models a random user who is surfing the web and following random links on websites. From the practical point of view this means: the more links all over the web points to your website, the higher its PageRank is.

So, now you know that the key off-page ranking factor is the number of inbound links to a website and the green PageRank is the indirect indicator of that number. However, the PageRank mathematical mechanism considers only a quantity of links, while in fact there is also a quality factor. This is implemented via different filters and value dumping factors that Google applies to each link before including it into the PageRank calculation.

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3.2.3. Important stuff
This part describes the crucial off-page ranking factors you should always pay attention to.

1. The theme of the linking website
This one is very important since the links from a relevant website are worth much more. On your link building efforts, try searching the websites that are close or at least similar to your own site theme. Though having a link from the unrelated site is not bad by itself and even Google admits that a webmaster doesn't have a full control on who and how links to its website. Nevertheless, avoid links from unrelated websites or sites with illegal or unethical content (porn, malware etc).

2. The theme of websites you link to
On the other hand, you have a full control of the links placed on YOUR own website so if you link to some unrelated website - it is you who is responsible for that and it is your site that will be penalized. So be careful what sites you link to. Linking to some unrelated content not necessarily leads to a penalty, but anyways you should be cautious and link only to quality websites.

3. Anchor text
The anchor text of the inbound link is very important and if you can adjust it - try to squeeze all out of it. First of all, avoid using the same anchor text all over the links. Use synonyms, paraphrases, different keywords, whatever else. Second, put the important keywords in the beginning of the anchor text. Finally, do not put all of your keywords into the link. There is really no reason to use anchor text longer than 50-55 characters or 10-12 words. Keep it short.

4. Landing pages
This factor is often ignored even by some professional SEOs and webmasters. It is not enough to simply have a link to your site! The link must be a) relevant; and b) quality. And you must be sure that both websites - the linking and the linked - qualify to these requirements. As for the theme of the linking website - see the pt.1. But the theme of your website should also be quality and relevant both to the donor website and to the anchor text of the link.

Well, it is not necessary in fact, but it helps a lot to have a properly optimized landing pages for every link you have. What this "proper optimization" includes?
* The landing page must include keywords mentioned in anchor text in its content;
* The keywords should appear in all important places like the title tag, the headings etc;
* The overall topic of the page must match to those keywords.
If a landing page qualifies to all of these - it gets significant boost to its rank, because the corresponding inbound links get much more value now.

5. PageRank
The PageRank doesn't do anything by itself and the green PageRank does even less - it is simply an EGO-meter. However, the PR of the linking website (or a candidate) gives you an approximation of what the link from this website is worth, what value it has. Also, high-PR website are considered as trusted and gets some more value from Google. See below for more trust-factors.

A single link from a PR10 website (if you somehow manage to have one, of course) will quickly boost your own website PR to 7 or even 8 giving you the comparable boost in your search positions. But this factor is the last in the list of important off-page factors, because at first hand you should find a relevant and quality website that is willing to put a link to you and then (only then!) check its PageRank. Exactly in that order. Because quality content is worth more than high PageRank.

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3.2.4. Helpful stuff

1. Reciprocal linking
1. The basic reciprocal linking is very simple: site A links to site B while site B links to site A.

Reciprocal links. Scheme A to B, B to A

There are other schemes though:
2. Cross linking. Site A links to site B from page A1, while site B links to site A from page B1.

Reciprocal links. Scheme A to B, B to A

3. Circular linking. Site A links to site B, site B links to site C,... site Z links to site A.

Reciprocal links. Circular links.

4. Three-in-a-row linking. Site A links to site B, site B links to site C. No link back from C.

Reciprocal links. Three-in-a-row links.

5. Combined.

Reciprocal links. Combined scheme.

There is a strong misbelief that reciprocal linking does not work anymore. That's not true. It does work, but the efficiency of this method is much much lower than it was in 2003. In 2009 Google greatly reduces the value of reciprocal links, especially for the schemes a and c, but the whole concept still works and really helps to gain rankings on early and middle stages of SEO promotion when literally every link counts.

Though there are some exclusions (as always however). Needless to say that you still have to choose the partners for reciprocal linking very carefully. Consider the theme of the linking website, its quality, its neighbourhood (other sites it links to), consider the page that would point to your site, pay attention to the anchor text of the link etc. You don't want to exchange links with spammy websites, or websites that use e-mail spam to suggest the partnership. You don't want a link buried 17 clicks away from the homepage.

Usually you don't want a nofollow link, but even a nofollow link from a relevant site can bring a load of target visitors to your site so it is up to you to decide whether it is only the link juice that you expect from the link exchange, or the auditory too. By the way, you also don't want a link from a page already having 50+ links on it. And the final yet still important note: do not e-mail website owners all over the web with link exchange proposal! That sucks, man, and no one answers anyway, while you will put your karma down to zero with such activity and possibly will receive a penalty from SpamCop or some other paranoid bastards. Don't do that, I tell you.

2. Web directories
One more technique that everyone tells it doesn't work anymore. Well, to be honest the efficiency of web directories never was so amazing. In fact there is only one web directory you certainly want to be included into: Google's Open Directory (or DMOZ). Google Directory is a free, human-edited web directory of high value. It is a bit tricky to get included into it, because it often takes months before your submission will be approved (if it ever will), but the game worths the candle - a link from DMOZ is a significant boost to your website value and a drop of life-giving link juice too.

If you have some free funds to spend, you may also want to be included into several paid inclusion directories, starting from Yahoo Directory which seems to be the most respectful of them. Also, here is a great article on directory submission you should definitely read. Don't miss the outstanding list of directories to submit too.

3. Social bookmarks
They used to work very well, but due to enormous amounts of spam on the social bookmarking websites the method is not as efficient as it were 2-3 years ago. Promoting a website through the social bookmarking websites has its pros and cons:
1. Pro: SB websites get crawled very frequently - every 2 or 3 hours. This means if you manage to get there you will get your piece of traffic from search engines pretty soon.
2. Pro: Social bookmarks not only help you raise your link strength, but also bring some amont of pure traffic from the bookmarking sites themselves. Depending on the popularity of the article posted on SB the traffic to your website could vary from few grains of sand to a pure avalanche.
3. Con: Unfortunately, you cannot simply bookmark a link to your website and wait for traffic. This could have worked in the first days of social bookmarking, but now it does not. First, the amount of posts (diggs, reddits, stumbles etc) per minute does not leave many chances to each particluar post to get popular. Your bookmark simply may lost between hundreds of thousands others. Second, bookmarking websites often have either moderators or some way for other users to disapprove an inappropriate post or a bookmark. So if you post a bookmark of your own website, the link is deleted and your account is banned. Too bad.

There are some workarounds for this though.
* The whitehat one. Post an article or some other valuable (do you hear me? I said valuable!) content on your website and wait until someone else links to it. Then you should bookmark that site instead. This won't increase your link popularity or PageRank, but still bring you visitors. Oh, did I forgot to tell that the other linking site could be yours too? So you may have a commercial website with the article and a non-commercial blog where you mention that commercial article. Or even you may have another blog where you mention the blog that mentions the commercial article (in the house that Jack built).
* The blackhat one. Create as many fake accounts as you need to promote your bookmark on every social bookmark site. Getting tough now since the method has been revealed ages ago and now SB websites are highly loaded with such spam already.
4. Con: One more bad thing about social bookmarks is: they tend to work for a limited period of time. They bring you a splash of traffic in the short term, but then they simply deplete and only give few visits a week. On the other hand, even few visits still's more than no visits at all.
5. Con: And the worst thing about social bookmarking is the quality of the traffic they produce. The traffic of a social bookmarking website is not targeted well, it is based on the impulse of curiosity, not on the intent. This means that you will (or will not - see above) receive a large load of traffic, but if you manage to convert merely 1% of it to customers you can congratulate yourself - you've done a good job! The conversion rate for this type of traffic is extremely low so this recipe only works well for a limited class of websites and products. Though it is still good if you want to build a community or simply need many people on your website for some reason (AdSense and so on).

4. Trust factors
A bunch of ranking factors that you only have a limited control of. Each of such factors does not add a value directly to the rank of a website. Instead, they increase its trust rating. Google (and other search engines too) prefers trusted websites and gives a boost to their ranking. Trust factors include:
1. Domain name age. Old websites seem more trustworthy than others. If the domain didn't change its owner - it gets even more trust points (though don't ask how many).
2. The number and quality of inbound links, the PageRank. If many other websites link to this one - it is considered trustworthy. The quality of links doesn't play a significant role though, since you cannot be responsible for the links pointing to your website as you got no any control on that. Otherwise it would be possible to hurt your competitors by posting links to them from some malware sites.
3. Website content. If a website uses pop-ups, pop-unders or some of the blackhat SEO methods - its trust rating gets lower.
4. Outbound links. If a website links to other trustworthy sites it gets a boost to its own trust rating.
I believe there are more, but these ones are the most important.

5. Press releases, related resources, word of mouth etc.
That's a bit off SEO theme, but still can help to obtain a couple of links. You have some exclusive info? Share it with the community on some thematic resource. Do you have some astonishing news in your industry? Tell the world about it with a press release. Are you running a special promo action or offering a discount coupon? Let others know about it.

All of these usually doesn't require a single cent from you. You can send a press release via PRWeb, you can register on some forums within your industry for free to share your thoughts, you can tell others of your promo coupons at Giveaway of the Day or RetailMeNot and other similar sites. Don't neglect the power of word of mouth!

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3.2.5. Useless stuff
These off-page ranking factors do not work any more (some - never did) or their value is neglible tiny.

1. Many links pointing to the same page
If a page has several links pointing to the same URL this won't give any additional SEO value, since Google only considers the very first link on the page. From the on-page optimization point this means you want to put your navigation menu links somewhere near the end of your HTML source. From the off-page point this means that you need only one link from one URL, because anyways only the first one counts.

Moreover, it even may hurt a bit. Let's suppose there is an external page that has 3 links in total, one of them points to your site. This would mean that one third of the overall link juice of that page flows into your website. Let's imagine then that you asked a webmaster to put one more link to your site to that page. So now it has 4 links, while two of them point to your site. So the link juice is now divided into 4 parts instead of 3, but hey! - the second inbound link from that page is not considered anyway, so in that case you are getting even less link juice than you did before!

2. Nofollow links
The SEO value of nofollow links is close to zero as they doesn't pass the PageRank and the link juice doesn't flow through them too. However, the link is always a link. Would you decline a nofollow link from the homepage of Google? This link would not give you any SEO value, but the traffic stream it would generate could smash up any dam.

3. Links in signature
Forum post signature is a popular place for links, but the SEO value of such method is extremely low. The fact is that nobody reads your signature unless you become a significant figure in that community and even then the signature links are not worth much. How many times have you opened someone's signature link yourself?

The direct SEO impact of such links is also tiny - the links are usually nofollow and even if they dofollow, they still buried in the depths of forum topics. The amount of the link juice you could obtain through them does not worth to be mentioned.

Does this mean "forget links in signature"? No. If you managed to become a part of the community and got some authority there, every spoken word of you (and your signature links as well) would attract the attention of the whole community. It needs time and efforts for sure, but there is no such thing as free lunch you know.

4. Guestbook links
The old as hell technique that never worked.

5. Blog comment links
Do not post comments to a blog for the only sake of the link. First, this is SPAM. Second, this doesn't work anyway. Third, most blogs have nofollow links in the comment so don't waste your time on something that doesn't help you, but pisses off all other people at the same time.

6. No-PR links
The amount of link juice that no-PR link has is utterly small and what is more important the trust rating it passes to the linked sites is small as well. This means that it is crucial to obtain links from high PageRank sites. Wasting your time on PR0 or no-PR sites is not worth the candles, because you need a bulk load of such links for the changes in your website rankings that you'll probably not even notice.

The PageRank by itself (as stated in the above sections) does not directly affect the position of your website, but it does affect the trust rating of other sites that link to you. Since you want links from trusted websites in the first hand, you should prefer high-PR links before all others.

7. Article submission
This one often occurs in many SEO FAQs and guides all over the web: write an article and submit it to article websites. That doesn't work. Well, ok, may be it used to work in the past, but now it doesn't. What is an article? It is a piece of useful text interesting to its readers. Now imagine a guy that is interested in reading 100.000+ very similar articles on some article website. You can't? What's the problem? The problem is: such guy never existed. Nobody wants to read an article made from the parts of another ten articles each of those in their turn was constructed from some initial article written in early 2003 with a keyword synonyms auto-replace software. Who wants to read those articles? Who wants to link to their authors? Nobody.

Surely, articles are good and you defintely want to write some. But submitting them to article websites is useless. Try applying some link bait instead.

8. Submitting your site to Google
Useless, because if you have some inbound links it crawls you anyway, and if you don't - ther's no difference whether you submitted the site to Google or not - it won't show up in SERPs. Though you may need this if your site has been excluded from the index for some reason (usually for some black hat SEO) - to include it back when you fixed the issue.

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