Optimize Your Website…and They Will Come

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Optimize Your Website…and They Will Come

What’s the big deal about search engine optimization? Isn’t it enough that you’ve put up a website, purchased some Google AdWords, and sent out an email to everyone you know announcing your site? In short, no. There is an art and science to search engine optimization (SEO), and it is critical for web-based businesses to know, understand and utilize if they want to drive quality traffic to their website via the Internet.

Where do you begin, though? How can you possibly know whom to trust or what to do first with so much information out there on SEO? Do you buy links or not? Pay per click or go organic? And what about those SEO companies who are aggressively promising #1 rankings? When it comes to search engine ranking, there are a lot of rumors and myths about what will increase your rankings and what won’t.

Debunking Some Popular Search Engine Ranking Myths

- Pay per click (PPC) ads will either help or hurt organic rankings. (Organic simply means the process by which web users find websites having unpaid search engine listings.)

Debunked: PPC is categorized differently than organic listings. There is no effect, one way or the other, on ranking.

- Websites are banned if they ignore Google guidelines.

Debunked: While it’s a good idea to read Google Webmaster Guidelines or Google 101: How Google Crawls, Indexes and Serves the Web, you are not banned if you ignore their guidelines.

- Websites are banned if they buy links.

Debunked: Sites are not banned. The links just aren’t counted.

- Copy must be a certain number of words, use a specific keyword density, and contain bold or italicized keywords.

Debunked: It used to be thought that there was a magic number of words used or certain times a keyword or keyword phrase should be repeated. Not so. Same with bolding and italicizing. They don’t do anything for ranking.

- Duplicate content will get your website penalized.

Debunked: It will just get filtered out and not counted.

- Reciprocal links won’t count.

Debunked: Every link counts, to a certain extent.

- SEO companies can increase your rankings without doing any on-page work.

Debunked: Run if an SEO company tells you this.

According to SEO expert Jill Whalen, SEO isn’t magic and isn’t a crap-shoot. “SEO is about making your website the best it can be for your site visitors and the search engines.” Want to help the right kind of people find your website? Then you need to design your site so search engines can find, crawl and index your pages.

Seven Ways to Get Your Website Crawled

- It’s better to have one main website with numerous domains pointing to the main domain, than to have mini-sites or multiple sites with similar content. Mini-sites and multiple sites with similar content do not increase search engine listings and are frequently viewed by search engines as SPAM.

- If you do have several stand-alone websites, make sure each serves a different target audience and has unique content with different domain or sub-domain URLs.

- Search engines need to be able to follow internal links. To make that happen, use tags, text links, image links, and CSS menus. Spiders have difficulty with JavaScript menus, pop-up windows, drop-down menus, and flash navigation.

- Choose keyword phrases that are most relevant and specific to what your web page is about. Think from the perspective of someone searching for what you are offering on your site. Ask, as if you were they: What would I search for if I am looking for something on your page?

- Validate your keyword phrases through either paid or free services, such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, or Google AdWords.

- Check for keyword competitiveness. Take into consideration the size of your business. In this case, size does matter. If you are a major player with a major brand, you can play in a larger competitive pond than a smaller company just starting out. Know what size pond is right for you, and check
for competitiveness by putting: allintitle: “keyword phrase” in your browser and check the number count.

- Once you have your keyword phrases validated and checked for competitiveness, use them in anchor texts, clickable image alt tags, headlines, body text copy, title tags, and meta descriptions. Meta tags aren’t all that important for crawling.

SEO can be both intimidating and exhilarating. Intimidating because it seems as if just about everyone has an opinion on what it takes to get a high ranking in Google, so it’s hard to know what to believe. Exhilarating because, once you understand the method behind the madness of SEO, you see the art and science of it. Then it becomes fun and easy to come up with a strategic plan about where to place keyword phrases, how to write copy, and what size pond is best for your company to compete in. Optimize your website, and they will come.

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Google Sitemaps – How important are they?

admin    Google     Google, Important, Sitemaps, They

There is no denying that Google is the king of the hill when it comes to search engines. A fairly decent page ranking in Google is worth so much more than a better showing in other less prominent search engines. The reason for this is the overwhelming popularity of Google. A vast majority of internet users use Google’s services in looking for quality content on the internet. With the large number of people using it, a high page rank acts a great advertising opportunity for your website.

Because of the astounding amount of websites that submit their web pages to Google, the think tanks at Google decided to come out with Google Sitemaps. This service, which was started in June 2005, makes web page submissions to Google much easier but with the added bonus of getting detailed reports regarding the submitted page’s visibility in Google. With Google Sitemaps webmasters can continually inform Google about their web pages as well as any changes that they make to help improve their standing in Google. This program serves as complementary service to Google’s regular crawl, although it is considered that using Google Sitemaps can do a better job than the regular crawl.

Google decided to come out with the Google Sitemaps program as a way for the search engine to offer better search results to its users. With the current limitations of web crawling, usually not all pages are discovered. It is also difficult to determine if a page has changed. With so many uncontrollable variables, crawlers sometimes just make guesses. With Google Sitemaps it becomes easier to get a better picture of all the possible URLs in a website as well as the frequency of the changes that are made. Knowing these variables makes searching in Google a more robust and fruitful experience because users are assured that they always get a fresh index of web pages.

To take advantage of the Google Sitemap program, webmasters only need to download a free open-source tool called Sitemap Generator that helps in creating a Sitemap using the Sitemap protocol. Google hopes that webservers will eventually support the protocol so that webmasters will not take any other extra steps to in order to join the program.

Google Sitemaps also freely accepts codes taken from or generated by third party providers and even lists down all of the available third party software within the Google Sitemap pages.

XML-Sitemaps.com is one such provider that provides a free Google sitemaps generator for webmasters which will also produce a HTML site map.

Google’s software and service developers are continually tweaking and improving the Google Sitemap program to better address the needs of webmasters. Because of this, new features are continually added to the Sitemap program.

Some of the new features that have been incorporated now revolve around the reporting aspect of Google Sitemap.

When a site has been verified, Google can show webmasters the statistics and errors about the website as well as the web pages. Among the information that would be included are:

The URLs that Google had trouble crawling including the reason why. Also included are the top queries that resulted in returns from their websites as well as those that brought traffic to their sites.

The web page’s PageRank distribution

The common text in external anchors that other websites used to link to their websites.

These new features, as well as others that are still being developed, brings tremendous advantages for webmasters because it makes the task of running a website so much easier. It also simplifies certain tasks that webmasters need to do to better manage their website’s page ranking. Ultimately, it gives their websites better exposure as well as the inclusion of more of their web pages in Google’s index.

Five Ways to Promote Your Business Online — Part V: Sitemaps & How They Can Improve Your Website Rank

admin    Google     business, Five, improve, Online, Part, Promote, Rank, Sitemaps, They, Ways, Website

What Is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is a page or group of pages that maps your site for users and “search engine spiders,” or “robots.” A sitemap is a list of internal links to user-accesible pages on a website. Think of it as a roadmap for your visitors. Sitemaps increase you site’s usability by clarifying its navigation structure. An XML or ROR version of a website’s sitemap is often kept in the root directory of the site for submission to search engines.

How Can a Sitemap Help Your Website’s Page Rank?

As stated above, and XML or ROR version of your web’s sitemap is kept in the root directory. Search engines use your sitemap.xml or sitemap.ror to quickly index the pages on your site. (You can customize the sitemap so that certain pages are not indexed.)

A sitemap does several things to help make your website noticeable to search engines:

A sitemap tells search engine spiders what pages of your site to index.

A sitemap tells search engine spiders how often to check your website for changes.

A sitemap makes your page more “search engine friendly,” which can help to improve your site’s page rank.

Web design tools like Adobe Dreamweaver can help you create a sitemap. Another alternative is to use  a free tool like XML-Sitemaps.com. This site creates a an XML, ROR and HTML sitemap that is Google friendly. All you need to do is enter your website’s URL and press the start button. It crawls your site and generates your sitemap. All that is left is for you to download the sitemaps it generates and upload them to your website’s root directory for the search engine to find. One thing to note is that the XML or ROR version of your sitemap is designed for search engines. For human visitors, use the HTML sitemap.

Remember, you want your site to attract attention to your business. Don’t let poor navigation and the lack of a good sitemap detract from your customer’s experience.

SEO and Sem – are They Same?

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An internet marketing campaign is used to increase the traffic of a website and to convert genuine and prospective viewers to clients and buyers. However, if you want to go a step forward to ensure your revenues then you must have a thorough knowledge of what exactly the visitors are searching for. This brings us into the arena of SEO and SEM.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a technique that is related with researching, locating and presenting a website within search engines that has a fantastic return on investment.
Unlike traditional advertisements it has a higher hit rate at a lower cost thereby increasing the popularity of internet marketing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of constructing a website so that it becomes evident to the various search engines.

Search Engine Marketing is rather used in a much broader sense. People rely on them just as the sailors of the past used to rely on the pole star. An interesting fact is that this dependency has made the market of search engines soar higher than before. There are many SEO UK companies that cater to such needs. It is all about generating the right traffic in the right direction. Making some extra effort can always help you gain the largest possible customers. It may appear to some people that both SEM and SEO is just the same thing. But it is not so. We may say that SEO is the subset of SEM.

Know the differences between SEM and SEO

• If you are looking for higher returns then a SEM professional should always go for a quality landing page instead of considering the whole design. But this is not so with SEO. A SEO UK service provider may need to make some major changes regarding the design of a page in order to get the spiders crawl them more.

• In SEM it is feasible to design different landing pages based on your products or your services. It increases the ROI in SEM. This is not possible in SEO as the home page is the most powerful one and the sub pages including the product specifications may not get a higher ranking.

• With SEM campaign targeting the market becomes very easy. It may be national or international depending on the products. You have the flexibility of promoting your business according to your needs. This is not so with SEO, as preparing different target pages are impossible.

• SEM campaigns generate very fast results whereas SEO may take a longer time to respond.

• The advertiser has a full control over a PPC campaign. He has the liberty to choose the keywords and pays only when someone clicks. SEO visits are free of charges and most visitors trust the results of a search engine.

• SEM campaign can limit your business to your budget. Once the limit is reached the ad will stop displaying on the site. SEO can have a long term effect even after optimization is done.

“google Pr” How To Calculate Google Page Rank? I Am Not Looking For Formula But The Technique They Use?

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I have great confusion with my colleagues. I agree, back links from niche sites that have PR greater than the PR of our site help to raise PR. But my question is when Google calculate the PR which Page Rank they consider. The PR of the domain or the PR of the page where the link is situated?
Looking for quick and kind response
Regards…

What Do They Mean When They Say Social Media

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According to WikiPedia social media is the use of electronic and Internet tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information and experiences with other human beings. It offers a fantastic way for you to build an Internet business compared to even just a couple of years ago. Let’s take a little closer look at social media and how you can get the maximum benefit from it with your own Internet business.

The key thing with social media is how it allows interaction between you and your website visitors. I also want to say at this time I hope you have a blog set up and are utilizing it to create social media. Blogging is a fantastic platform that allows interaction in many different ways between visitors and the content you are trying to present.

For example, the way you post an article on the blog today can be totally different than creating web pages were in the past. You can integrate pictures, audio, video, and other things to make your blog seem more exciting and alive

How you create interaction with your visitor is by allowing them to post comments on your blog, participate in contests, vote on polls, or even add content directly by writing blog articles for you.

This interaction is what creates a feeling of community amongst all of the different bloggers and visitors. People can begin to share their own experiences and stories as links to the theme of your blog.

Networking is a big part of social media. In fact social networking is another term that has come out of this. The idea of networking is not new and has been around businesses and clubs for many, many years.

Network marketing is a perfect example of a business that is built totally around people helping people. In the off line world traditional businesses would get together for Rotary club meetings and various things that allowed them to network with other business owners.

Today there are feeds are available such as an RSS feed to keep subscribers up to date on what is going on in your business. Many people will subscribe to your RSS feed because they want to continue to network with you after they are getting ready to leave your blog initially.

All of this offers a tremendous opportunity for building loyalty amongst readers and repeat visitors were more sales. Social media and social networking makes this all possible for you.

Google SEO services—Are They Really What You Are Looking For

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Google SEO services make a claim that they will for sure make it happen for you. And with a name like Google it would not be difficult to believe.

We know that the internet marketing business is a hypercompetitive business and that it needs intense focus, expertise and understanding of the subject. To make it through your intensity is not all enough you need to be updated as well. And who can be more updated than Google. Google SEO services know exactly how the systems work, how search engine algorithms develop and how the robot works in total. Search Engine Optimization services are there in the market to provide the best possible service with the best possible results. Google SEO services are so confident that they are claiming too get you to the position they promise, and that position is no menial, they talk of the top 10.

Almost 85%of the web traffic is originated at and by these web search engines and they are responsible for the direction. They are well aware of the most effective and latest keywords, they have a whole database of the information on might wish to have. And this database they would employ to the upliftment of your business. If you are in the business, and not in the top most, then you are wasting your time. Google comes ahead to add value to your efforts. Google Search Engine Optimization services are the ones who know all about the search engine optimization.

And all this they offer at nominal rates. SEO services claim that they would not take the money if they are not able to get you what they promise. They ask for half of the down payment now and the half later, that is after you have achieved your business goal. They offer their services according to two plans – the performance based plan in which the customer does not have to trust much on the service. They can just pay what they get. Other is the money back plan, in which the customer believes that Google would make it for them, and believe me there has been no money back till now!

Twitter Marketing Morals…Do They Exist?

admin    Twitter     Exist, Marketing, Morals...Do, They, Twitter

The year was 1999. It was a hot sweltering day in rural south Mississippi. I had been working 24/7 on my offbeat cartoon project and living and sleeping in an abandoned aluminum warehouse in rural Mississippi.  I believe I had 180 cartoons on the Internet. I couldn’t afford a domain so I got a free sub-domain that had as many pop-up ads as I had cartoons.

I received an email from a Dr. Vinton Cerf. I had no idea who he was.  I later discovered he had invented the Internet in 1969 while a student at Stanford University.  He was very well-spoken, kind, humble, and wanted to know if my creative group would make a particular custom cartoon for him that he could hang in his office.  We did so.

As the months went by, we spoke on the phone and I learned a great deal about the Internet; things that the so called gurus may not even know.  First of all, there are no Internet gurus, according to Dr. Cerf, who now heads the creative department at Google. He said “Especially not me”, and “If you hear someone tout themselves as one, run the other way”.  I didn’t know much about the Internet then, I know a bit more now, but he certainly turned out to be correct.

I then asked him questions like “What is the right way, and the wrong way to do business on the Internet”?  He would reply back with a question, “How are you doing business on the Internet?” I replied, “Just like I did so person to person when I worked in retail, real estate, and other sales jobs, in malls and downtown middle-America.” He added, “Then that’s how you do it on the net, if it is working for you.”

The fact is, it was and is working for me. I simply met the right people, people who it turned out I could help and they could help me, and we did business. I long ago gave up on the typical delusion that I could benefit everyone and everyone could benefit me. It had to be “a fit”; just like in person to person business. I have since opened the world’s only online shoe store which contains shoes featuring famous love quotes called ShoesThatAmuse.com.

I have opened numerous stores containing my cartoon funny gifts such as Rick London Collection.

My fiance’ and I have launched a full service web design and organic seo firm called Pen And Ink Inc.

I said, “With all the articles I am reading, there is a certain unwritten moral code we must all follow.” I could hear him chuckle. “If someone selling you on their moral superiority with regards to the Internet, run the other way.  They are not looking after you, their clients, or anyone but them.  The “holier than thou” businessperson is the Elmer Gantry of today”.

It didn’t make sense at first, but it surely did later when I was introduced to social networking.  I had returned to college as an adult (aged 46) and with Business Information Management as a major, we focused a great deal on blogging, still big at the time, and the upcoming social networking. MySpace was only a few years old, Facebook had just begun, and in the middle of my education came
Twitter. The profs all seemed to think Twitter might be best for business.  They were right.

I now had Dr. Cerf, and the top professors on the planet; many of whom worked at Google, Microsoft, Dell, HP, and other giants to teach me the “real Internet”.  I told them I understood there is no “silent moral code” on the Internet.  They concluded I was correct.  Most of them had a common thread in doing business on the Internet.  There is the same ethical code that exists in brick and mortar buildings.  But when you start spouting morals to others, you are putting your foot in your mouth.  What is moral in one country is a sin in another. What is moral in one state is considered bad manners in another. What is moral in some towns or cities in the U.S. Wouldn’t even be talked about in another.  

These wise men and women, starting with Dr. Cerf, the man who founded it all, seemed to be in total agreement.  Later, upon doing business through social networking, all the information they had purveyed rang true.  It never failed. When someone took the posture of moral leadership or “I am the one with the answer” Or “My path or you can’t play” or even “Life Coach”, there would usually be trouble and an odd sensation of someone sniffing at my bank account. Most of them start their pitch with “I do what I do from my heart. I ask for nothing in return”.  

Don’t get me wrong, I am not against charity, anything but…and promote numerous ones.  But if one is doing all their life’s work “from the heart” with no compensation, can you imagine the empathy
they would get from their landlord or mortgage holder?  These social networkers generally have a  scheme and latch on to the latest “News du Jour” to keep their own name in lights.  It’s rather transparent, and very old school. Most of us have seen it a million times.  Nothing new here.

I can only thank Dr. Cerf, and all the knowledgeable professors who forewarned me ahead of time, “If you want to find a moral clone of yourself, go to your religious congregation. If you want to find and celebrate differences in people, and do business with them anyway, using common business ethics which ring true in any country, state, or area, go for it.  If you want to slug it out with a “moral leader of the Internet”, turn the other way; there are millions more who do it there way, and if it works for them, and yours works for you, it is bound to work for everyone (and everyone can prosper and celebrate the differences).

Can Anybody Tell Me Anything And Everything They Know About The Google Nexus One.?

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I really want to know about where i buy one next year.
And how the carrier thing works.
Would i just take it up to for example AT&T and tell them I need a carrier?
Also, what would be the best carrier?