AdSense and SEO resource

First of all, Google and most other search engines do NOT look at the META keyword tag. Many people say not to bother with it, but I use the META keyword tag and I place my keyword phrases in it. Here's why. I use this tag to help me remember what keyword phrases I am optimizing the page for. You'll find this to be a big help later when you have a lot of pages and have forgotten what keyword phrases you were trying to optimize the page for in the first place.

For the META description tag, keep your most important keyword phrase near the beginning of the sentence and make this tag a full sentence.

Do NOT use bold or italic keyword phrases in the first sentence on the page, but DO use your most important keyword phrase in the first sentence, but not the first word.

By all means, use your keyword phrases in your headings, (H1, H2 and H3).

Start putting keyword phrases in bold in the second paragraph.

Put your keywords or keyword phrases in italics a few times AFTER the first usage of the keyword. Never let the first usage of your keyword phrases be in Italics.

Use keywords in ALT tags.

It's very important to get other sites to use your most important keyword phase for your page in any inbound links. Of course, you are not in control of how other sites link to you, but work hard to get them to use your keyword phrase. Most sites will link to your home page, so give them the most important keyword phrase you are optimizing your home page for.

When you are linking from any page back to your home page, use your most important keyword phrase in the link. When your home page is linking to any other page, use the keyword phrase in that link that the other page is being optimized for.

Don't plan on getting much (if any) help by putting keywords or keyword phrases in your left Nav panel. Google likes keywords in full sentences. Putting the sentence in a paragraph is even better. By the way, a sentence according to Google is three or more words starting with a capital letter and ending with a period or other punctuation. Stop words such as:

"I," "a," "the," and "of" do NOT count as one of your three words.

Follow these rules and your Web site will make a big jump in its relevancy for your keyword phrases. Following these rules will NOT boost your PageRank.

To be #1 or even in the top 10 on the search engines your relevance for a given keyword phrase is much more important than your PageRank.

For example, you could have a PageRank of 10 and still not show up in the top 100 sites when someone is searching for "peanut butter sandwiches" unless of course, your page is optimized for (and has a high relevance for) the phrase "peanut butter sandwiches."

One final point: Use your keyword phrase in an H1, H2 or H3 headline followed by a keyword-rich paragraph and then repeat this with another H1, H2 or H3 headline and another keyword-rich paragraph. And of course repeat this again.

Use this format in addition following the 10 rules above and you will have a page with a high relevance for your keyword phrases.

Don't try to optimize a page for more that two or three keyword phrases and always optimize for keyword phrases and NOT keywords. After all, the keyword is included within the keyword phrase. Most people don't search for just one word any more anyway.

I have seen pages rank #1 with keyword densities form 1% to 20%, but I usually try to have a keyword phrase density of between 2% to 6%. Sometimes I go up to 10%.

Craige Stacey has been studying search engines optimization as a hobby and has achieved some very good search engine positions in the past for membership website software.

If you've been feeling like Tom Cruise climbing up the side of some remote jagged mountain in the blazing hot sun and concerned you're facing "mission impossible", chances are you own a web site.

Adding to the intense thrill of web site ownership are keyword comparisons and bidding for good keyword positions in search engines. You might hire a search engine optimization specialist who can track elusive algorithm clues and is unfazed by page rank drama. Your programmers and designers insist they get along. The marketing department actually believes deadlines are met. The new bank account is waiting for fresh revenue. And oh yes, it's assumed someone will come looking for your web site and wants to use it.

You did build it for them, right?

For every search result, there is the possibility that:

a. The engine will display a description that makes sense. Or not.

b. The page the search engine refers to does what the description said it would do and is about what the search engine said it would cover. Or not.

Your SEO/SEM, if you hired a good one, helped you write your title tag statement and Meta page description and structured it so it makes sense in SERPs (search engine results pages).

Your Usability professional, if you hired one, evaluated the page to make sure it would meet customer expectations and convince visitors there are other hot pages inside the web site to look at too. Without call to action prompts, well displayed, logically labeled navigation links and credible content, the chance of someone remaining on that page is pretty slim.

Says Gordon Hotchkiss, President and CEO of Enquiro Search Solutions, Inc., in a recent Search Day article written by Shari Thurow, called Creating Compelling Search Engine Ads and Landing Pages, "Once searchers arrive on your landing pages, you have 13.2 seconds to convince visitors that they are on the right site."

Impossible Mission?

Had enough of web page abandonment? Are those cost per click fees putting you further in credit card debt and not producing any bang for your buck? Which part of "understand your web site visitor" didn't make it to the drawing board?

I know this is hard. You're not a mind reader. Unless you have access to costly studies and data about who to build your web site for and their computer usage habits, chances are you simply wanted a web site and hoped people would find it and use it. By incorporating the skills and expertise of an SEO/SEM along with a user centered design specialist, you will not be wastefully tossing your web site off the search engine cliff. Rather, your adoring fans will clamor up the cliff to get to it.

Sometimes a web designer is also trained in these fields or is partnered with people who are. This is something to consider when shopping around for web site assistance.

Here are some things to keep in mind when studying your web site. You can also ask your team to consider these points.

1. What happens after your site reaches top rank? It's lonely up there, if nobody notices your page or understands the page description. How effective is high rank? Do people really click on "sponsored" pages vs. natural results?

2. Pay attention to inside "landing" pages. Optimize them for easy indexing and point visitors to your homepage, sale products or free stuff.

3. Be wise about what you invest. Every cost per click must be productive. If not, a usability web site review can locate roadblocks.

4. It's about the user experience. Really. It's a common habit for web site owners to create the site for themselves based on what they like and want. When you receive a complaint, consider it a favor. Yes, some people are mean and critical. But, enhancements are improvements that sometimes benefit a lot of people, and you too, in the long run.

5. Don't settle for minimum effort. One of your goals is to reach potential customers and readers. Your optimized pages reach people looking for them. Your user centered pages reach people wanting to use them and will refer them to friends.

6. Your competition does it better. Not by packing hidden keywords and buying links, but by carefully targeting keywords, providing cleverly written content and delivering user centered design.

7. Think sustainability. If you plan on your web site being around for a while, make this a checkpoint for every future decision related to your site. If someone has an idea that won't impact the long-term sustainability of the site, the site may disappear out of sheer user boredom. And search do engines notice.

8. Understanding your visitors and customers allows for more creative keyword combinations. Put a feedback form on your web site. Ask them how they found your web site. Ask them what keywords they used. Ask them why they came or what they wanted to find. Ask them if they found what they were looking for and if not, provide room for comments so they can explain what happened. This information is a gold mine for you.

9. Never mislead your visitors. Be accurate with what you say a site or page is about. Search results relevancy establishes trust from the start.

10. The elegance of action. The act of landing on a relevant, accurate, persuasive, interesting page leads to the fluid, unencumbered desire to know more and click deeper. Aim for this.

Do not drop your web site over the search engine cliff without considering the usability effect. Design it to be productive and user centered. This will pay off in many ways. Remember your original requirements and goals and trace back every dollar you spend to meeting them. Marketing efforts are strengthened when you make your visitors feel welcome, informed and productive once they arrive at your web site.

Usability Consultant, Kimberly Krause Berg, is the owner of http://www.UsabilityEffect.com, http://www.Cre8pc.com & http://www.Cre8asiteForums.com Her background in organic search engine optimization, combined with web site usability consulting, offers unique insight into web site development.

Copyright 2004 Cre8pc.com

There are many different approaches and techniques required when optimising a website for a high ranking in your chosen search engine. In most cases loads of informative, relevant content is required as well as plenty of outgoing links to separate you from the cat like competition.

But one of the most important factors that the search engines consider when reviewing your site is the amount of other webmasters (the owner of a website) linking to your website. The reason that this is considered vital is because it is an off the page factor, meaning that it is not directly under your control. Therefore it will be an indication of your sites popularity when another site links to you via their web page. However it is not enough to submit your site to any webmaster in the hope they incorporate a link to you in their site.

The search engines look for links from websites of relevance to yours, popularity of that linking site and keywords relating to your site included in the link text. Google is unique in terms of how it evaluates a page. It uses a process called page rank which will give a website a rating of between 0 -10 in accordance with its popularity.

To find out the page rank of a website all you have to do is download the google toolbar and it will display on a green bar what the websites page rank is. This is an important factor but it is not an indication as to where a page will rank as google will analyse many other factors including the title tag, content, prominence etc.

The best way to increase you page ranking is to either add further content or find others to link to your site, both of which I will explain further down. To identify your link popularity visit addme.com and click on popularity. This tool will display all the sites that link to your or your competitor's website, all you have to do is type in your web address. If you are finding it difficult to find websites to link to then visit linkpartners.com or type your competitors address into the link popularity tool and this will display all those that have linked to your competitors.

Where to place your link

There are many different ways that you can publicise your site on the internet, but below I have included 2 of the more popular methods.

Reciprocal Link

This involves you literally trading links with another webmaster and therefore increasing both web sites' popularity. It is important that you target the correct web site, as a site that is not listed within google will not increase your popularity and will only consume more of your time, therefore it is best to target sites that have a page rank of 4 or above. This does not mean that you must reject all below this ranking it just means that you will have most success in increasing your popularity if you aim for sites with a page rank of 4 or above as these sites are already considered as popular sites by google. Treat your outgoing links like precious gems as you do not wish to be spotted linking to irrelevant sites. If your site has a low page rank then do not take it into consideration as most people are not aware of the page rank system, so you only need to inform webmasters if your site has a good page rank.

Approaching Webmasters

Once you have identified a relevant, popular site you will need to approach the webmaster. This is the most important part of your link campaign as it will determine whether or not you site is accepted. When approaching webmasters you should include the following:

• Your web address in the subject line

• Inform the webmaster that you particularly enjoyed reading a certain article or that you enjoyed browsing through the user-friendly forum or anything else that indicates to the webmaster that you have actually visited their site. This will show the webmaster that you are not just spamming masses of sites in the hope that your link will appear.

• Tell the webmaster why he or she should link to your site. Make sure that you state similarities between the two sites and other important information that will help sway his or her opinion.

• If possible include the webmasters name

• Inform the webmaster that you have placed a link to their site on your home page in a prominent position (do this before you approach the webmaster).

Promote your articles

If you enjoy creating content then you may consider writing an article and distributing it so that others can include it on their site. When the article is included on someone else's site then it will include your link, therefore you receive another link to your site. You may want to set restrictions on the distribution of the article, such as:

• The article must include your name and link at the bottom of the page

• It must not be modified

• It can only be used on sites that have a page rank of 4 or above

• You retain copyright of the article

This will prevent un-suitable websites from displaying your article.

About The Author

Article copryright allfreehomebusinessdirectory.com and written by Gareth Mailer. Please visit for further, more comprehensive articles.

garethbusiness@yahoo.co.uk

One of the most popular ways to generate free traffic to your website these days is to use a free traffic exchange service.

A traffic exchange is website service that enables you to view someone's website, and others in turn view yours. You earn credits when you view someone's site, and you use those credits to have others view your site. Internet marketers would like to know how to bring traffic to their websites quickly, without spending any money.

Traffic exchanges can accomplish this. The greatest benefit comes in when you sign up others and receive traffic from their efforts. The different types of exchanges are start page exchanges, manual surf, and auto surf.

The key is to join more than one exchange, it could be start page, manual or auto surf exchange, and promote them to get referrals.

Go to any search engine such as yahoo or excite, and search for traffic exchanges.

There are hundreds, with new ones being established everyday. With all the traffic exchanges you find from the search engines, if you join them, you will increase your traffic greatly.

Tariq Giaziri head developer http://www.iamtq.com

Have you spent a lot of money on advertising with the expectation that you would get many sales from the 1000s of web site visitors that read your ad?

Have you poured money into driving traffic to your web site, only to have no one buying your product?

Maybe you have seen the ads, "Get 10,000 visitors to your site, for only $20" . Wow, you think, that's a great bargain, I'll go for it. The result - 10 people visiting your site and no one buying. What's the problem? You have not effectively targeted your customers. Your field of customers is too large. Most of them are not interested in your product. You need to zero in on the person that wants, needs and thirsts for your product.

How do I find my targeted customers?

1. Place yourself in your customers shoes. There's an Indian saying that goes something like:

"You must walk a mile in my shoes, before you can understand me".

For example, if I am selling a weight loss product, I would not be targeting skinny people, but targeting those that are overweight.

2. Make a thumb nail sketch of this person

Who is your customer? What are her wants, needs and desires?

Try to understand how they think. Understanding what problems they have, will give you a clearer idea of what to offer them.

For example, let's make a sketch of a typical overweight person:

30-50 years old
Out of shape
Probably married with children
Under a lot of pressure, tight for time, stressed
Looking for ways to improve health and wealth
Lack of self esteem

3. Develop a product that addresses one or more of their needs. Always refer back to your thumbnail sketch as you write for your site. Elaborate on the points that fit your product and what it delivers. As you start writing, new ideas will naturally emerge, but always keep them focused on your targeted customer so you won't go off the track of what your customer wants.

Based on the profile I outlined above, you may sell them products that help them lose weight, improve their health, look good, spend more time with their children and get wealthy.

4. Write your copy to sell - when you write the copy for your site, always stress the benefits. Develop a theme for your site that focuses on this benefit and don't stray from it. for more indepth information on this topic, read my article:

"How to Get Listed in the Search Engines - Developing a Theme-Based Site"
(www.isitebuild.com/searchengine.htm)

5. Make sure each page sells. - each page should emphasize the benefits in the headline, to pull the reader into the contents of your page. It should ask the question:

What's in it for me?

Why should I spend my precious time reading this page?

6. Write as if you were talking to your friend - your copy should be conversational, friendly and personal, as if you are sitting next to the person. Write from the viewpoint of what your customer wants to buy, not what you want to sell.

7. Deliver the contents in a clear, crisp way - be careful not to stray from the central purpose of what you promised in the headline. Make sure your customer wants to click through to the next page or your order page. Don't be afraid of clearly stating the price of your product.

Clearly identifying your customers and writing copy tailored to solving your customers problems, places them in a buying mood. Converting these visitors into buyers should now increase the amount of sales from your web site.

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com - Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hosting. Subscribe to his "Marketing Tips" newsletter for more original articles at subscribe@isitebuild.com. You can read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles

Good keywords are frequently searched for (high demand) but not being targeted by many other websites (low competition). There are a number of tools out there that can help you find them.

Wordtracker

The best tool out there, Wordtracker is one of the most essential SEO tools. To use Wordtracker:

- Go to the Wordtracker website (http://www.wordtracker.com)and pay $7 for 24 hours' access

- Enter a keyword phrase you're thinking about targeting

- Wordtracker will suggest hundreds of related phrases - click on the ones you like

- Once you've clicked on all the phrases you like, run them through the program

- Wordtracker will compile a score for each phrase, based on the number of users searching for it and the number of websites targeting it

- The higher the score, the better the keyword phrase!

Wordtracker also offers a free service which works in the same way but only uses results generated from MSN.

Overture

Also useful, Overture's search term suggestion tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/), is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works in much the same way as Wordtracker but doesn't tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase.

Google

Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox) tell you which keyword phrases are being targeted by other websites.

Guidebeam

Guidebeam (http://www.guidebeam.com) is an interesting resource. Type in a phrase and it will suggest a large number of related searches. The numbers provided for each phrase are Guidebeam's estimation of how relevant that phrase is.

This article was written by Trenton Moss. He's crazy about web usability and accessibility - so crazy that he went and started his own web usability and accessibility consultancy ( Webcredible - http://www.webcredible.co.uk ) to help make the Internet a better place for everyone. They offer fantastic accessibility & CSS support packages, which you can read all about at http://www.webcredible.co.uk/support .

Once you have your web site complete and ready to be listed you need to take a slow step by step approach to get listed in the search engines. If you do it right the first time and then build on that formula, your profits and your site will benefit in the long run. Those willing to spend the time and put these techniques into practice are the ones that will benefit and are more likely to be successful.

1. Your first page is where search engines will start and making sure that this page is fully optimized is one of your first goals. What's optimization your ask? It's making your site as search engine friendly as possible. You will also see people refer to this in the short form of SEO.

Your first step is the TITLE TAG. This is one item that search engines look for to start getting information about what your site is about. It is also what search engines will show above a clickable line on their results page. It is also a major consideration of where you will rank when certain inquiries are made of the search engine. TITLE TAGS are one of the major things to concentrate on and to make sure that you get it right. Doing so will result in not only better placement in the search engine, but enticing descriptions will also result in more people clicking on your link and visiting your site.

Take a look at what your competition is doing in order to get some ideas for your site. To see their TITLE TAG go to their web site and in IE or Netscape click on View then Source and you will be able to see their TITLE TAG. Don't copy theirs, but let this help you get some ideas for your own site.

2. Putting keyword phrases into your pages - Finding the perfect set of keywords for your web pages and knowing the right keywords to use is very important because your site should provide people with what they are looking for. A free program to help you can be found at: http://www.goodkeywords.com Good Keywords makes use of various tools provided by search engines like Yahoo, Google, Teoma and other services like Alexa. Using Good Keywords makes it all very simple, fast and straight forward. Just remember...don't over do it or you will be penalized.

3. Writing your web page copy - Your next step is to incorporate those keywords into the copy on your web site. This is extremely important as search engines need to see these keywords on your page so they can then analyze these words and decide where your site should be listed in their categories. Write your content around the keywords and use them as many times as possible, keeping in mind though...that it is not just a search engine that is reading the copy but also your visitor.

4. META TAGS - Meta tags provide search engines with information about the content and purpose of a Web site. A Web site that uses meta tags to the best of their ability will appear more often in search results and will also be seen closer to the top on those search results. Many people feel that stuffing keywords into the meta tags will help improve their rankings. The original idea behind meta tags was to give a way to classify the web site. The problem now is that many engines don't consider meta tags to be as relevant to the ranking, therefore they give them less weight overall because of the keyword stuffing techniques used. That's not to say that you still shouldn't use meta tags, just consider to use them for what they were originally intended - that is to give your site an accurate title and description with a few keywords (3 or 4 phrases max) outlining what the page, or site is about.

5. ALT TAGS - The ALT tag or 'alternative text' is an attribute of the IMG tag. (Any graphic on your web site) An ALT tag should be included for every image within your web site. The ALT tag provides an alternate message to your viewers who can't see your graphics. Without ALT tags, images on a web site are meaningless to these users. If you will be using a graphic menu systems for navigation, these alternate messages are an especially important aid to users without the ability to see your graphics. Adding an appropriate ALT tag to every image within your web site will make a huge difference to the accessibility of your web site. Also, for those who use Yahoo and Google image searches, your ALT Tags can be very important and will help bring traffic to your site. Take for instance one of my sites - http://www.spasoftheworld.com I have loads of graphics of different resort spas and the graphics all carry the name of the resort. People looking for information on this resort may easily end up at my website because I names a picture with the name of the resort.

On the reverse side, ALT TAG stuffing, which is using the tags in an image to hide keywords will rarely help a site's position. If you can insert a key phrase into the image description then by all means do so. Remember that Alt tags do usually count towards your overall keyword density so it's better to have relevant keyword alt tags rather than something like "image01.gif".

6. Linking - with more search engines coming online every day, search engines are looking for ways to serve quality links to visitors. This is where linking to other sites and having them link to you becomes important to both you and the search engine. People who assume that the more inbound links to them will help them, are very wrong. This may have been true at one time but not today. Search engines need to give quality results. One way they have of rating your site is by the quality of inbound links to your site. Therefore sites that are closely related to your site and that link to you will help boost your popularity in search engines. With Google this is a huge issue in how you rank with them. Having a hundred links from all sorts of site may result in hurting your ranking and you may be viewed as a link farm.

7. Spiders - A search engine is a database that has been put together by spiders. Spiders scour the Internet going through pages and recording information available on web pages. Spiders then give the information to the database and the database feeds the results. Theoretically, the web site should show up in the search results the next time the engine updates. It is important that all links on your site be active. A dead link may prevent a spider from doing your entire site.

8. Robots Text file - Search engines will look in your root domain for a special file named "robots.txt" (http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt). The file tells the robot (spider) which files it may spider (download). This system is called, The Robots Exclusion Standard.

9. FLASH - This has to be one of the top mistakes a web site owner can do to hurt their search engine rangkings. Good content will win over flash every time and getting visitors to your site is what you are trying to accomplish. The only thing the search engines will be able to see when visiting a site where the first page is all flash are the title tags and links. In most cases that will not be enough. Over and over it's content rich pages that will get you the rankings you need. You may have to decide between getting a high ranking or having a "pretty" entry page. Remember that you goal is customers and sales. It might be kewl the first time you visit the site but when you have to go there over and over again it becomes very annoying not to mention that people on dialup must cringe when faced with such a page. They often give up because of the length of time it takes to load.

10. Don't expect results overnight. It takes time to get your ranking up there, even with paid inclusion. You may start out with a low ranking when you are first listed but as you continue to optimize your site and build "relevant" links you will start to see a gradual climb. As you wait for your rise to the top, concentrate on building as many relevant links as possible. Beside increasing your ranking you will be surprised at the number of referrals that you will received from those linked pages.

Jean Sutherland has successfully run her own ezine for over 6 years and has a subscriber base of 35,000. Her ezine is geared to people doing business online and beside offering free software, it also provides traffic & marketing tips, informative business articles, free ebooks and computer tips for those trying to work online. http://www.emailpromotions.net