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Thursday, January 5, 2012

Search Engine Optimization And Why You Gotta Use It

E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites.  For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let’s just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.

So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site’s content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.

You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

Act now and see the benefits garner with Search Engine Optimization. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Must Have Features Your Web Site

Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles
The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, Search Engine Optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the  information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your website give enough contact information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Free Website Promotion...Why Not?

Can you ever avail of free website promotion? Is that even feasible?

Of course yes! Nowadays, your baby website can amass huge traffic in no time thanks to free website promotion.

How does this free website promotion go anyway? What are things to be done?

1. Enlist your website.

Look for the hottest Internet directories and enlist your site there. This is the easiest and most effective free website promotion tactic. Start with this step and the rest of the good things will follow.

Just don't forget to prep your website and make it all spruced up for a higher chance to get accepted in your directory of choice.

2. Know your forums.

One reason why forums are created is for free website promotion for everyone. Log in, post actively, let them know about your site in every post and you attract instant visitors right there.

3. Write a press release.

Release your writing prowess and start up a press release that advertises your site! This is a free website promotion tactic that you can do anytime. Type a brief paragraph or two and email it to your friends, colleagues, internet e-zines, newspapers and other media and massive traffic will come to you pronto!

4. Be friendly online.
Free website promotion means you need to be friendly to other webmasters. Why, you ask? So they can link you immediately! Establish contacts and never tire of link requests and exchanges.

5. Write an article.
Say, your website is about your travel agency. Write an article about the perks of traveling or the hottest travel spots in the world. On the concluding paragraph, mention your website in passing. This article works as an advertorial and doubles as a free website promotion approach.

6. Just let the whole world know about your site.

What is free website promotion without the word of mouth? Insert your website, its URL and features in daily conversations and let the good news spread from one mouth to another!

7. Make a banner ad.

Make a banner ad for your site and ask another webmaster to do the same for his site. Then swap!

8. Take up a free website promotion course online.

Yes, there are free website promotion tutorials. But don't you know that you can actually take a free website promotion course that can help you out further? Part of the free website promotion program is signing up for newsletters.

When you make a website, you need not pay anything to promote it. You just read it -- there is such a thing as free website promotion!

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Learn How Google Sites Rank - Promotion Tips

If you run a business, usually seen in forums that it is important to know how Google ranks websites. No doubt, Google is one of the major search engines worldwide and the number of users is large. Every day there are many people with this search engine to find the information you need.

Therefore, achieving a high ranking in the Google results page dedication of the corporate website for Internet users. But Google really consider many things into the ranking of a website, and the factors that can change frequently. Therefore, it is difficult to trace through the algorithm. But we can make some basic things about how Google handles the research and how the ranks of web sites.

To the search service more efficient for users who connect huge search engine query, the server and Web servers to the index of the query. This index server is to specialize in the search database. They will try to get all sides of the query terms. The message is sent from the server documentation for required documentation. Page descriptions and generates search results so that users can see what they need.

The process sounds complicated, but the second time really is. This is also why I use the search engine to everyday problems and the reason why more and more people want to manage using search engines.

The search engine service will be useful to help entrepreneurs to spread the news about the websites. If you want to increase the visibility of your website, try to exchange links with several other locations. If your website address can be found in many other prestigious sites such as Facebook, will increase the reliability of your Web site, the search engine and try to make your site rank higher in search results.

Another thing, the search engine is probably the frequency of search terms. Of course it is also relevant. But one should keep in mind that the keyword density is too high bad. Some people think they have a high keyword density is always good to repeat the keywords in the article several times. Thus, the search engine will think that the article is loaded with keywords and will not be published on the results page.

This means that you have to work a balance between promotion and information. Some business owners think it is really difficult. If you're one of them, you can go for article writers are looking only for you. These authors can write articles without problems on your site.

However, it is difficult to know exactly what Google thinks of websites ranking. However, you can still have a rough idea of ​​the way. And you can follow this idea to work outside their own website.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

6 Tips To Harness The Power Of Blogging To Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

If you really want to succeed in internet marketing and increase your online profits through blogging, then you need to follow these tips that will help you to make your blogging a success.

Several factors determine how powerful your blogging can be in improving your search engine position. Blogs get picked up by search engines quickly, but you need to make sure that your blog is optimized for search engines.
  1. First, your blog title and URL structure must be just right! Your URL must be search engine friendly and user friendly. Your blog URL must be short and concise. It is also important for the name of your blog URL to be related to your online business niche.
  2. Blog everyday! This is the most important tip. Powerful blogs that attract large volumes of traffic and bring results are those that are updated regularly. Search engines will pick up the new content and this will increase your ranking on search engines.
  3. Categorize the content on your blog, making sure that you use your keywords, as this will increase the search engine ranking of your blog and website. If your website blog is about starting a home business, you can have categories like “home business opportunities”, “home business tips for success”, “secrets for making money online” and “make money online examples”. Be creative and have interesting categories for your blog. Using various keywords for your niche improves your search engine ranking for all these keywords.
  4. You must tag your content. If you want your blog posts to get high visibility and exposure, it is important that you tag your content. You can do this by using pre-installed plug-ins in your blog script.  
  5. Ping every time you add new content to your site. Whenever you add new blog posts, ping your blog to alert search engines that you have added new content on your site.
  6. Submit your blog to blog directories and niche directories. This will help you to get traffic directed from these directories and also create one way links to your site from these directories. All this increase your search engine position.
Use the tips outlined above to boost the power of your blogging and improve your position on search engines.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings

Your website's ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods.Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for "spam" pages and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search engine's index.

The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the "spam" net and tossed from a search engine's index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do - and things you should be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind of misperception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links "bad neighborhoods."

You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven't linked to a bad neighborhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a "Page rank" which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.

Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.

Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the keywords but made them the same color as the background color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye - but the eye of search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page's link ranking.

Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text - splat! the page is penalized.

The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the gray text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background color of the page - ever!

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called "keyword stuffing." It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called "Key phrase Density" to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering - unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is "renters insurance," be sure you don't use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.

The final potential risk factor is known as "cloaking." To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For the rest of you?cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees is "cloaked" because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site's search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page's ranking to the top of the list.

It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as "page-jacking." This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days due to the use of "off page" elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great risk.

Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link  popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.

Monday, November 28, 2011

Google and PageRank-Search Engine Optimization's Dream Team

On September 7 1998, two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founded Google, a company they started as part of a research project in January 1996. On August 19, 2004 Google had its first public offering, the one point six-seven billion dollars it raised gave it a net worth of twenty-tree billion dollars. As of December 31, 2006 the Mountain View, California based internet search and online advertising company Google Inc. had over ten thousand full time employees. With a 50.8% market share, Google was the most used internet search engine at the end of 2006.

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin began creating Google it was based on the hypothesis that a search engine that could analyze the relationships between the different websites could get better results then the techniques that already existed. In the beginning the system used back links to estimate a websites importance causing its creators to name it Backrub.

Pleased with the results the search engine had on the Stanford University's website the two students registered the domain google.com on September 14, 1997. A year after registering the domain name Google Inc was incorporated.

Google began to sell advertisements associated with keyword searches in 2000. By using text based advertisements Google was able to maintain an uncluttered page design that encouraged maximum page loading speed. Google sold the keywords based on a combination of click through and price bids. Bidding on the keywords started at five cents a click. 

Google's simple design quickly attracted a large population of loyal internet users.

Google's success has allowed it the freedom to create tools and services such as Web applications, business solutions, and advertising networks for the general public and its expanding business environment. 

In 2000 Google launched its advertising creation, AdWords. For a monthly fee Google would both set up and then manage a companies advertising campaign. Google relies on AdWords for the bulk of its revenue. AdWords offers its clients pay-per-click advertising. AdWords provides adverting for local, national, and international distribution. AdWords is able to define several important  factors in keywords when and ad is first created to determine how much a client will pay-per-click, if the ad is eligible for ad auction, and how the ad ranks in the auction if it is eligible.

By following a set of guidelines provided by Google, webmasters can ensure that Google's web crawlers are able to find, index, and rank their websites.

Google offers a variety of webmaster tools that help provide information about add sites, updates, and sitemaps. Google's webmaster tools will provide statistics and error information about a site. The Google sitemaps will help webmasters know what mages are present on the website.

The major factor behind Google's success is its web search services. Google uses Page Rank for its  Search Engine Optimization program. Page rank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weight to every single element of a hyperlinked set of documents, like the World Wide Web. Its purpose is to measure the relative importance within the set. PageRank is a registered trademark of Google. Stanford University owns PageRank's patent.