Search Engine Optimization or SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is big business. If you rely on search engines to bring visitors to your business website, you need to rely on more than luck. Your business will lag far short of its potential unless your site is optimized and re-optimized for search engine results.

What is search engine optimization?

SEO is optimizing your website for search engines, acquiring inbound links, and monitoring your traffic and referring links to use them optimally. SEO is also studying and monitoring your competitors’ techniques.

The goal of SEO is to bring in targeted traffic that is organic, i.e., from search results. When people type in a keyword or phrase that you’ve optimized your site for, you want your site to appear on the first page, preferably high on that page. Good SEO results in increased traffic without the cost and time spent on advertising.

The SEO industry

Where there’s a need, there’s an industry ready to help you spend money on that need. SEO firms charge from a few hundred dollars up to six-figure amounts to optimize your site for search engines.

If paying thousands of dollars to an SEO firm isn’t in your budget, consider using SEO packages to optimize your site yourself.

A combination of SEO tools is needed to get the best results. The SEO packages described below offer a variety of tools to help you optimize your site for search engines.

SEO tools compared

While we’ve listed numerous features of each SEO tool, these comparisons are summaries only.

Internet Business Promoter (IBP)

Known for their link popularity tool ARELIS, IBP also produces a three-step suite of tools to help you promote your website:

1. Page optimization

* Generate, analyze, and edit keywords

* Optimize for the top 10 search engine rankings

* Optimize the title, link texts, and other parts of the web page

* Validate the HTML

* View the site via a spider simulator

2. Page promotion

* Submit your site to search engines and directories

* Search for sites that might add a link to your site

3. Results tracking

* Verify search engine positions automatically

Price: $179.95 or $349.95.

LinksManager

Links Manager is designed to help users manage reciprocal linking. It doesn’t require any software downloads, and current links pages can be imported into it. Some of its features:

Link organization and formatting

* Organize your links into multiple categories, subcategories, and “most popular links” lists

* Store the links on your own server

* Highlight newly added and featured links

Link management and tracking

* Remove dead links temporarily via a dead link checker

* Check whether or not reciprocal links at other sites exist

* Rotate links automatically

* Deny link submissions according to the criteria you set via a blacklist

* View the most popular keywords on your links pages

Price: $19.95 a month.

SEO Administrator

SEO Administrator automates website promotion with tools that can do these tasks:

Keywords and site visitors

* Track your site’s position for your keywords in over 30 search engines

* Report on the keyword weight and density of your site as well as of competitors’ sites

* Suggest keywords that are relevant to each page

* Analyze your site logs to find out about site visitors, keywords used, referrers, and more

Search engines and directories

* Check which pages at your site have been indexed by various search engines

* Check Google PR, the number of inbound links, and whether or not the site is listed in the DMOZ and Yahoo directories

* Show the automated descriptions that search engines display for your pages

Price: from $70 to $150, depending on the version.

SEO Elite

With SEO Elite, you can find out exactly what your competitors are doing and copy their strategies. You can find out about your competitors’ web pages:

* Keyword density and prominence

* Their h1 and h2 headings

* Their meta keywords

* Whether their site is listed in the Yahoo directory

* Which websites your competitors are advertising on

Concerning link partners and search engines, SEO Elite can:

* Find thousands of possible link partners

* Track details about pages with inbound links

* Check whether or not reciprocal links at other sites exist

* Indicate which of your pages search engines have indexed

* Keep a record of where your site is ranked for search terms

Price: $167.

SEOToolset

The focus of SEOToolset is to provide data to help with website promotion. The toolset includes:

Your website

* Keyword density analyzer

* Keyword selection tool

* Reports on rankings for keywords, page names, and indexed page counts

* Link partner finder

Search engines and directories

* Engine-specific keyword research

* Traffic checker for keywords

* DMOZ category selector

* Search engine submission tool

* Search engine ranking monitor

Your competition

* Keyword research summary

* Link analysis of inbound links to competitors’ websites

Price: $90.00 per quarter per site.

Web CEO

The 10 tools in the Web CEO package are designed to help you promote and maintain your website, improve search engine results, and analyze site visitors. A summary of these tools:

At your website

* Keyword research

* Website optimization

* Inbound link tracking

* WYSIWYG website editing and file uploading

* Link checking

* Website monitoring

* Stats analysis to track visitors, ad campaigns, transactions, and more

Search engines and competition

* URL submission to search engines

* Search engine rank checking

* Tracking who links to the competition

Price: $295 for one person. A free version is also available.

WebPosition

WebPosition, one of the oldest and most popular SEO tools, offers a five-step SEO process:

Determine your position in search engines

* Create search engine ranking reports

* Monitor your site’s placement in search engine results

Research and choose keywords

* Identify the most searched and least competitive keywords

Optimize your pages

* Compare your pages to those of top-performing sites and specific competitors

* Detect when your competitors’ pages have changed

* Be alerted to changes that could affect your site rankings

Design and submit your pages

* Use Page Builder and Upload Manager to design and maintain your site

* Submit your site to search engines with the Submitter tool

Analyze your results

* Track the correlation between search rankings and revenue

* Import top-performing keywords

Price: $149 or $349.

How to hire an SEO firm

If you’d prefer to hire an SEO firm instead, do your research. You’ll be spending a minimum of a few hundred dollars, more likely thousands of dollars for a medium-sized or larger website.

While many SEO firms are good at what they do, the field unfortunately has its share of scammers as well. They may tell you that a variety of tricks such as hidden text or cloaking will improve your site’s position in search engines. In reality, these techniques may get your site banned from search engines.

If you’re considering an SEO firm, ask how they measure success. Will your site hits be organic? Look at the sites of SEO firms’ clients and the site for the SEO firm itself. Do the sites rank well for keywords at these sites? The search engine results for relevant keywords will indicate how successful an SEO firm is.

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Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is big business. If you rely on search engines to bring visitors to your business website, you need to rely on more than luck. Your business will lag far short of its potential unless your site is optimized and re-optimized for search engine results.

What is search engine optimization?

SEO is optimizing your website for search engines, acquiring inbound links, and monitoring your traffic and referring links to use them optimally. SEO is also studying and monitoring your competitors’ techniques.

The goal of SEO is to bring in targeted traffic that is organic, i.e., from search results. When people type in a keyword or phrase that you’ve optimized your site for, you want your site to appear on the first page, preferably high on that page. Good SEO results in increased traffic without the cost and time spent on advertising.

The SEO industry

Where there’s a need, there’s an industry ready to help you spend money on that need. SEO firms charge from a few hundred dollars up to six-figure amounts to optimize your site for search engines.

If paying thousands of dollars to an SEO firm isn’t in your budget, consider using SEO packages to optimize your site yourself.

A combination of SEO tools is needed to get the best results. The SEO packages described below offer a variety of tools to help you optimize your site for search engines.

SEO tools compared

While we’ve listed numerous features of each SEO tool, these comparisons are summaries only.

Internet Business Promoter (IBP)

Known for their link popularity tool ARELIS, IBP also produces a three-step suite of tools to help you promote your website:

1. Page optimization
• Generate, analyze, and edit keywords
• Optimize for the top 10 search engine rankings
• Optimize the title, link texts, and other parts of the web page
• Validate the HTML
• View the site via a spider simulator

2. Page promotion
• Submit your site to search engines and directories
• Search for sites that might add a link to your site

3. Results tracking
• Verify search engine positions automatically

Price: $179.95 or $349.95.

LinksManager

Links Manager is designed to help users manage reciprocal linking. It doesn’t require any software downloads, and current links pages can be imported into it. Some of its features:

Link organization and formatting
• Organize your links into multiple categories, subcategories, and “most popular links” lists
• Store the links on your own server
• Highlight newly added and featured links

Link management and tracking
• Remove dead links temporarily via a dead link checker
• Check whether or not reciprocal links at other sites exist
• Rotate links automatically
• Deny link submissions according to the criteria you set via a blacklist
• View the most popular keywords on your links pages

Price: $19.95 a month.

SEO Administrator

SEO Administrator automates website promotion with tools that can do these tasks:

Keywords and site visitors
• Track your site’s position for your keywords in over 30 search engines
• Report on the keyword weight and density of your site as well as of competitors’ sites
• Suggest keywords that are relevant to each page
• Analyze your site logs to find out about site visitors, keywords used, referrers, and more

Search engines and directories
• Check which pages at your site have been indexed by various search engines
• Check Google PR, the number of inbound links, and whether or not the site is listed in the DMOZ and Yahoo directories
• Show the automated descriptions that search engines display for your pages

Price: from $70 to $150, depending on the version.

SEO Elite

With SEO Elite, you can find out exactly what your competitors are doing and copy their strategies. You can find out about your competitors’ web pages:

• Keyword density and prominence
• Their headings
• Their meta keywords
• Whether their site is listed in the Yahoo directory
• Which websites your competitors are advertising on

Concerning link partners and search engines, SEO Elite can:

• Find thousands of possible link partners
• Track details about pages with inbound links
• Check whether or not reciprocal links at other sites exist
• Indicate which of your pages search engines have indexed
• Keep a record of where your site is ranked for search terms

Price: $167.

SEOToolset

The focus of SEOToolset is to provide data to help with website promotion. The toolset includes:

Your website
• Keyword density analyzer
• Keyword selection tool
• Reports on rankings for keywords, page names, and indexed page counts
• Link partner finder

Search engines and directories
• Engine-specific keyword research
• Traffic checker for keywords
• DMOZ category selector
• Search engine submission tool
• Search engine ranking monitor

Your competition
• Keyword research summary
• Link analysis of inbound links to competitors’ websites

Price: $90.00 per quarter per site.

Web CEO

The 10 tools in the Web CEO package are designed to help you promote and maintain your website, improve search engine results, and analyze site visitors. A summary of these tools:

At your website
• Keyword research
• Website optimization
• Inbound link tracking
• WYSIWYG website editing and file uploading
• Link checking
• Website monitoring
• Stats analysis to track visitors, ad campaigns, transactions, and more

Search engines and competition
• URL submission to search engines
• Search engine rank checking
• Tracking who links to the competition

Price: $295 for one person. A free version is also available.

WebPosition

WebPosition, one of the oldest and most popular SEO tools, offers a five-step SEO process:

1. Determine your position in search engines
• Create search engine ranking reports
• Monitor your site’s placement in search engine results

2. Research and choose keywords
• Identify the most searched and least competitive keywords

3. Optimize your pages
• Compare your pages to those of top-performing sites and specific competitors
• Detect when your competitors’ pages have changed
• Be alerted to changes that could affect your site rankings

4. Design and submit your pages
• Use Page Builder and Upload Manager to design and maintain your site
• Submit your site to search engines with the Submitter tool

5. Analyze your results
• Track the correlation between search rankings and revenue
• Import top-performing keywords

Price: $149 or $349.

How to hire an SEO firm

If you’d prefer to hire an SEO firm instead, do your research. You’ll be spending a minimum of a few hundred dollars, more likely thousands of dollars for a medium-sized or larger website.

While many SEO firms are good at what they do, the field unfortunately has its share of scammers as well. They may tell you that a variety of tricks such as hidden text or cloaking will improve your site’s position in search engines. In reality, these techniques may get your site banned from search engines. More information is at these pages at Google.com:

• http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html Webmaster Guidelines
• http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html Search Engine Optimizers

If you’re considering an SEO firm, ask how they measure success. Will your site hits be organic? Look at the sites of SEO firms’ clients and the site for the SEO firm itself. Do the sites rank well for keywords at these sites? The search engine results for relevant keywords will indicate how successful an SEO firm is.

How to Use Backlinks to Climb the Page Ranking

 

By: Jonathan Haryanto

Backlinks have become one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization. Backlinks, also known as “Inbound Links,” refer to the links that are placed on other websites and that are directed towards your website. They are what tells the search engines that you have a site of interest to others who have linked to it, thus raise your ranking on the search engines.

Backlinks are important to climb the page ranking in the search engines. What other websites say about you is critical for search engine credibility. If you can control what the links say and where they link to in your site then you can influence the search engine results. Therefore, your marketing campaign for your sites has to include the effort of obtaining link popularity.

While building backlinks, you need to aim for quality instead of quantity. Search engines give more credit to a link from a site related to yours than a link from a site that is not related to yours. A site with few quality backlinks will have a higher position for its targeted keywords compared to a website with many unrelated links. Especially if you combine that with relevant content, links to important pages, meta tags, descriptions, title, h1 tags, and sitemaps. However, most search engines do not consider hyperlinks as backlinks.

There are a number of ways to build backlinks for your site. Backlinks can be bought or obtained for free. There are a number of directories available on Internet, and you can find free or paid directories for submitting your site. Your site will be listed in these directories after the editor has approved it. You need to make sure that the directory is an established one since search engines give more credit to links coming from quality sites. In bidding directories, you can place a bid and if your bid is among the highest bids then your site is displayed on the homepage. If someone outbids you then your listing is removed from the homepage.

In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. But here you must note that one way link holds more strength than a two way link. Moreover, in the last Google update, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine’s latest filter. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the outbound links still got counted, the irrelevant inbound link was ignored.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own several related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy. You will probably have heard of ‘3 way links’. There are some issues with that as well. Other than price, the most ‘popular’ system is a little clunky to use and the links are not so close to topic.

Article directory, a directory that maintains a large collection of articles, is one of the best ways to build links. It allows you to publish your articles along with your links in the resource box. You provide them for free with something they need content and in return they also provide you for free with something you need quality backlinks. Of course, you should make sure that the article you submit is of good quality and informative in order to get approved and published. They usually have a number of categories and you will have to find a category suitable for your website.

Posting in discussion forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. There are a number of forums and blogs that allows you to place your links in your profile and in your signature. You need to look for a forum or blog that is related to your niche and then make some quality posts or comments and add your links in the signature. Once your posts are indexed, search engines will give some credit to your website. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. In some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones.

 

Building Quality Backlinks

Building backlinks to a good extent is crucial to page rankings and hence is
a major step in search engine optimization. For those who do not know what a backlink
is – backlinks are the incoming links to a website from other similar websites, practically inter-linking each
other so that the curious netizens browsing one website can easily navigate back and forth between similar web pages by simply following the incoming/outgoing links. As simple as that!

There are many ways to build backlinks, the prominent and most effective ones

being directory submissions, article submissions, and participating in blogs and forums.

Beginning with directory submissions it is advisable to submit the web pages
in popular directories such as MSN, Dmoz, and Yahoo, and they’ll
be very much willing to accept the submissions provided the web pages contain
relevant information and favorably meets up with the rules and regulations of the respective directories. The final call on a submission, acceptance or
rejection – is usually made by manual editors, and they won?t entertain anything
that is even remotely junk or irrelevant to the given topic or category.

Article submissions is another way to boost backlinks to your website, provided
the article contains useful information and that it gets past the editor’s table It can
be submitted in some of the popular article submission directories such as
iSnare, EzineArticles, IdeaMarketers, GoArticles, PromotionWorld etc.

Blogs and forums also serve similar purposes, but owing to the fact
that public participation is quite high in these domains, it carries the bad image
of being an increasingly breeding ground for link-spamming. Hence, it is important
that for garnering quality backlinks, in blogs and forums, one need to participate
only in constructive discussions and hesitate not in turning down those backlinks
that point to poor content carrying and lesser ranked websites.

Why Should Link Building Look Organic?

Google hasn’t gotten to the top of the very lucrative and competitive web search industry by being complacent. Their engineers are constantly thwarting the hordes of webmasters attempting to illegitimately boost their site rankings in the search results. For starters, the incredibly advanced search and ranking algorithms are as top secret as the recipe for Coca-Cola. And they are constantly modified to offset the numerous search engine spam tactics.

Webmasters that attempt to artificially bolster their site rankings by creating link farms and doorway pages or by purchasing links are penalized by demotion in the search results or by having their sites blacklisted entirely. Internet spammers who use automatic content creators or site copiers are facing similar penalties. The ranking algorithm used by Google can easily detect duplicate content and other anomalies by comparing them against the norm.

The unfortunate downside is that legitimate website owners are sometimes penalized for no apparent reason. How can you improve your position in the search results while decreasing your chances of being penalized? One way is to build links to your site organically.

The number of backlinks to a new website buildup over time as the website builds its loyal base and establishes its presence. So it is natural for links to increase steadily with some minor fluctuations. It is unnatural for a new website to suddenly increase backlinks thousands at a time. This smacks of paid links, over-seo, or seach engine spamming. Google picks up on this quickly and may “sandbox” a site, penalize its ranking in the search results or ban the domain altogether.

Instead of increasing your backlinks in huge spurts using one or two link-building methods, you can mix things up so that you increase links steadily using multiple promotional methods. You can increase backlinks by participating in forums and using a signature file with active links to your site. You can buy some links in quality web directories and submit articles to free article directories. You can also leave comments on blogs and bookmark some of your site pages on Digg and Technorati.

Don’t use the same anchor text every time either. Use a few targeted keyword phrases to link to your site. You should also link to other pages besides your home page. If links to your site have really been built up organically, then it seems logical that they would be to other pages within your site in addition to the home page. You can submit “deep links” to deep link directories and within your article resource box when submitting to article directories. A good rule of thumb is to have a bare minimum of 20% of your backlinks be deep links.

It may seem like a lot at first glance, but organic link-building becomes routine over time. Most of these link-building methods are free, and don’t cost anything but your time. No one other than the Google engineers knows exactly how and why they penalize some sites and not others. But it is always better to promote your site in accordance with their webmaster guidelines and optimize your site in a way that appears completely natural. Organic link building has become a critical component of any website promotional strategy.