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Optimizing Your Website
Search Engine Optimization, optimizing your website for it to be visible in the search results of a search engine's query or in a search result of a directory.
Basically, SEO is a marketing strategy for your site. To be included in the top ten search results of an impressive search engine/directory guarantees a return of investment. Search Engine Optimization can be viewed as a new form of publicity for a website which secures definite visitors and targeted traffic for your site.
There are various Search Engines in the net today. The top rated search engine is Google. It is a prestige and good practice of SEO to be included in the top ten list search result of Google.
Google and other search engines use a crawler to search for the site most relevant to a certain category or field. Google's crawler is called a spider. It is a bot designed to crawl websites for keywords and site linkings. It has developed their Googlebot to be pretty efficient and fast.
Directory and Search Engines
Directory and Search Engines are two different entities. But to the average user, the look and feel is the same. But for a website owner interested in optimizing their website, it is important to distinguish between the two.
Whereas the search engine uses bots to crawl websites, Directories are searchable databases of websites that are categorized, reviewed and ranked by humans.
Yahoo is the most popular Directory listing on the web. Another important directory is the ODP or Open Directory Project. One emerging Search Engine is the MSN Search, you can watch out for its launching soon.
Once, website submission was a good way for your site to be visible on a search results rank of a directory. But website submissions for some directory listings may require fees and does not even guarantee a high ranking in the search results. It may take them long to approve the submission and the visibility of the site in the search ranking will still be dependent upon the keywords and site links. A good marketing practice for your site is just to optimize it. Optimizing your site may require extensive research on relevant keywords to be used in your site, optimizing the content, and A site can be optimized for search engine/directory listing through many ways. It can be with the use of keywords in the title and description fields of your Meta tag and through site linking. A search engine's crawler uses these leads generated by a user's query to look for the most pertinent site related to the query. So a good practice of SEO is to custom tailor your sites's content and reflect this on the keywords visible on your site. SEO is not only dependent on the keywords your site has. The freshness of the contents also counts. It is advisable from time to time to change the look and feel of your site.
Gina Marie Capatar is the head writer for Isnare Outsourcing Services . She does freelance Content writing jobs and Technical Writing Jobs. You may see some of her sample works at the Isnare Outsourcing Services Portfolio .
Google PageRank Explained
PageRank - an exclusive technology developed by Google which can have a major impact on the success of your website. This article will attempt to explain the concept of PageRank and how your ranking can be improved without spending any money at all.How is PageRank beneficial?Google refers to the technology as a way of evaluating the usefulness, importance, and quality of a website. The PR of a webpage can mean different things for different people.For a webmaster, a high PR is a sign of accomplishment. It shows that your website is moving in the right direction and has the potential to become successful. PageRank also directly effects your Google search engine listings. Acquiring a higher PR than your competition could mean more traffic for you, and less traffic for your competitors.Visitors to your website probably won't care about the page's rank (most surfers have no idea what PageRank is). However, visitors who understand PageRank may use your PR as a sign of how credible your content is. Would you rather use the information from a website with 0 PR or a website with 5 PR and hundreds of other websites linking to it?How is PageRank determined?PageRank is basically determined by backlinks. A backlink is when another page links to your page. For every page that links to you, that page is "voting" for you. The more votes you get, the better your PageRank will be. However, it gets more complicated than that because some votes weigh more heavily than others. The weight of the vote is determined by the PageRank of the page linking to you. This means that a couple links from pages with high PR could be more beneficial than hundreds of links from pages with low PR. But it gets even more complicated - each page can only transfer so much PageRank. The set amount of PR that the page can transfer must be split up between each "vote" that the page gives out. This means that a PR 7 page could actually give out as much weight per vote as a PR 3 page if it had too many outgoing links.How can I improve my PageRank?There are many different methods to obtain quality backlinks to your website. You will find that some methods work better than others depending on the subject and popularity of your site.DirectoriesSubmitting your website to directories is one of the best ways to increase your PageRank and even get some traffic at the same time. But submitting your site to just a few directories won't be good enough. You need to sit down and spend the necessary time to submit your site to a large amount of directories. This may seem like a painstakingly long process, but you'll be glad you did it when you notice results. I have taken the time to make a large list of free directories with high PageRank which you visit here. Although directories with low PR may seem like a waste of time, you should submit your site to them too because it still helps and they could eventually become a high PR site which charges money to submit to.Link ExchangesA very common practice to improve your PageRank is a link exchange. This is simply where two people link to the other person's website. It's best that you only link exchange with someone who has at least as much PR as you and the subject of the two websites are similar. If you receive a link from a website with a subject which has nothing to do with yours, you'll find that very little if any PR will actually be transferred to you.Forum SignaturesIf you are an active user on a forum or message board, it would be wise to put a link to your website in your signature. This could help improve your PageRank if the forum has a high PR, it could help improve your traffic from the forum members seeing your signature, and your site could get spidered more often because it is linking to a forum (forums generally have a lot of new content every day and search engines love new content).Buy AdvertisingAlthough it isn't the best of choices, many webmasters will buy text link ads on websites with high PR. Although this can be effective, it can be very expensive and only a temporary thing. If you purchase text links for just a couple months, after the months are over you won't have the backlinks which were giving you the "votes" you needed to keep your PageRank. So you have now spent a large amount of money on text links, but in the end you're right back where you started.ArticlesThis is a method which not many people know about. Basically, you write articles about the subjects you know a lot about. You then let other people use these articles as long as they provide a link back to your site. If you wrote a quality article, you'll find many websites will want to use it, thus giving you plenty of backlinks. This method can work well with anything which you develope and give away for free such as scripts, web design, etc.Stay On Google's Good SideThe most important thing to remember when trying to increase your PageRank is to not cheat and to always follow the rules. The people which run Google aren't fools and they have many ways of catching cheaters. Don't even think about using any of the "link farms" or trying to hide keywords on your pages. If caught, you may not get unbanned for many months.Make A Quality WebsiteIf you have a quality website which your visitors enjoy going to, then you will receive backlinks without having to do anything. Websites will link to you with the intention of informing people of a helpful resource, or showing off a cool new website they found, or any other reason other than trying to increase your PageRank. If you build it, backlinks will come...
SEO Hints and Tips and Free SEO Tools
Do you realize that if you manage your website, SEO tools, and pay-per-click tools, you can literally have as many leads as you want from your website? I assume that a website should convert approximately 5% of the viewers to doers, taking some kind of action that you want them to take. So, all we have to do is make sure the website does convert viewers to doers, and then we make sure we've got the right amount of traffic arriving at the website. All quite manageable. Today, we're mainly talking about how to get the traffic to your website through Search Engine Optimization, SEO.
What Constitutes a Complete and Effective SEO Campaign?
Unfortunately, not many Search Engine Optimization companies know what this involves. You may see a "one size fits all" package, link popularity development in the form of submitting to link farms, or even the dreaded "Submit Your Site to 1000's of Search Engines" scam. While the basic premise of each of these ideas is true, the execution of them is extremely important.
All About Google
If you read The Search Engine Showdown, you know Google is my favourite search engine. Why? Google always offers the most results for any given search (they currently have over 8 billion pages indexed), it's faster than the Audi Quattro we test drove this morning, and 9 times out of ten, in my experience, all the front page results are relevant to my search. In fact, I usually find what I'm looking for within the first few sites listed. I also really respect the fact that two college kids started it (kinda like Abalone Designs!) and that those two college kids seem not to have forgotten where they came from. If you check out the images at Google's press center (http:// www.google.com/press/images.html) and scroll down to the Everyday Life Inside Google section, you'll get a feeling that life at Google is fun.
A Link From An Ugly Duckling Website With A PR=1 Could Give You 10 to 80 Times More PageRank
Whether you want to start a business and sell on the Internet or you're an old pro and want more Internet sales, here's the easy way to do it.
How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate? Part 2
Question 1
How to Avoid the Google Duplicate Content Filter?
More and more webmasters are building websites with publicly available content (data feeds, news feeds, articles). This results in websites with duplicate content on the Internet. In cases of websites build on news feeds or data feeds you can even find websites that match each other 100% (except for the design). Several copies of the same content in a search engine does not really do any good and so Google apparently decided to weed out some of this duplicate content to be able to deliver cleaner and better search results.
Five Short Quick Tips on Web Page Titles
By Catherine Franz
The Great Search Engine War, Where Content is King
When search engines first appeared, they were simple affairs consisting of a relatively basic database containing small amounts of information about websites. The search engine database allowed web-surfers to search for specific words or phrases. The search engine would then provide a list of hyperlinks to websites containing those words or phrases in several Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). The basic concepts of a search engine are still the same, but much has changed since those innocent days.
The Power of Topic Specific Search
What are Topical Search Engines?
7 Search Engine Optimization Mistakes and Solutions
To many websites, webmasters discover that major sources of website traffic come from search engines. Therefore, they are all keen on gaining top search engine placements through search engine optimization.
Make The Search Engines Love Your Site
Most webmasters have no idea on how to make a search engine friendly web site. If you are one of them this will all change by following these steps below.
Learn about the Google Search Engine Tools
Think you know everything about searching with Google? Think again. Believe it or not, there are many tools and features available on Google that can be useful for marketing research as well as wasting time. Learn more below about Google's coolest features.
Keyword Targeting Strategy In Your Site
Once the keywords have been decided for the site one has to come up with a strategy to target those keywords across the site. Here is a primer on that.
Increase Your Link Popularity for Free
Among the many things you need to worry about for high search engine rankings,link popularity is among the most important. Link popularity refers the how many other websites on the internet link back to your website. The more websites link back to yours, the more popular your website will be with search engines. Let's explore a great free method of increasing your link popularity.
Google Is Taking Descriptions From Alexa!
In a recent study looking at the "descriptions" of website search engine listings, we have noticed that your main SERP listing is being manipulated by Alexa.com.
Torpedo and Sink the Ship SS Search Engine Ranking
I was recently contacted by one of my best clients who asked me what I thought of his decision to make a major change to one of his highly ranked pages. His initial concern was that visitor sales conversion ratio was low. At almost one percent, it was just below normal, but I'm always happy when a client wants to improve. Conversion and rankings though, are very different beasts and his concern was overly focused on the former to the total exclusion of the latter.
Your Online Home-Based Business Can Lead To Search Engine Stress
As a member of several search engine optimization forums, I have recently noticed (especially since Yahoo recently decided to try their hand at competing with Google) that the stress level of many webmasters has gone way up. This applies not only to webmasters involved in Internet-based home businesses, but to webmasters in general.
Even More Tips For Getting A Top 10 Search Engine Ranking!
I have spent some time discussing the 5 different options you have for getting your web site listed in the search engines. Just to make sure that we're all on the same page, let's quickly review?
Attack Smaller Searches To Get The Big Ones!
Searching online can not only be fun, but you sometimes need to be downright inventive.