Improve Search Rankings With Sertainty

There are many misunderstandings about how to get high rankings on search engines. I’ve heard some very strange ones such as "put a counter on your home page."

These myths — downright bad advice — can cause you to focus on useless, time-wasting efforts leading to confusion, frustration and, of course, poor results.

When making decisions about what to do to improve your rankings, let me give you a rule of thumb, and call it SERT – the Search Engine Rule of Thumb.

SERT is derived from simple logic based on motivation.

Here’s how it goes …

Your motivation – you want high rankings.

You want high rankings so that visitors will come to your site, subscribe to your newsletter, buy your products and hire you as their coach.

Ok, great. But guess what? Search engines control your rankings! So, in order to get high rankings, you need to do the things that search engines consider important. You need to appeal to the search engine motivation.

Search engine motivation – to have lots of people use the search engine.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo want a lot of people to utilize their services so search engines can make money. So, they need searchers. But, in order to attract searchers, they need to appeal to the searchers’ motivation.

Searchers’ motivation – relevant results, fast.

Searchers are on a quest for something when they go to a search engine – information, product, fun, whatever. They want answers fast too. Waiting even five extra seconds for a page to load will result in people giving up, and moving on.

So what does this tell us?

That in order for you to get high rankings, you need to create a website that appeals to the motivation of searchers. That is, a website that provides highly relevant results and can do it quickly.

And that’s the rule of thumb: In order to get high rankings, you need to do things that help people get relevant results fast.

Let’s go a little deeper to give you some specifics to focus on.

How do search engines determine if a website is able to provide good results quickly?

Three of the most important things to keep in mind are: Content, Popularity and Accessibility.
• Websites with good content, easy-to-access content, and large amounts of content get higher search rankings than websites with less, poor or hard-to-find content.
• Websites with lots of links to it are more valuable than a similar website with fewer links to it. And links from relevant websites that also have high rankings results in more popularity.
• Websites that are easy for people to get to, load up fast, and are easy-to-use are better than ones that are inaccessible, slow and confusing.
So, back to the example mentioned earlier. Can you now see why adding a counter to your website won’t do much for your rankings? It’s because a counter on your home page doesn’t provide good content, doesn’t increase popularity, and doesn’t make your site easier to access. It just counts!

When you eliminate the confusion, and stop wasting time on ineffective methods, you begin to identify and focus your efforts on things that will help your website improve its rankings on search engines.

Use the SERT rule of thumb to be sertain you are on the right path to higher rankings.

Tools For Webmasters

One of the best webmaster tools available for free on the web is certainly provided by Google. Google provides many fantastic tools of which most webmasters are unaware. Worse still, some webmasters realize the tools exist but haven’t investigated them. The ones who don’t make the most of these Google webmaster tools are at a considerable disadvantage to those who do use them. The first step is to register for an account with Google. Once you’ve done that you need to open one of their Adwords accounts. You’ll need the Adwords account in order to access the most powerful Google tools, so you should open one even if you don’t foresee that you’ll need to place any Adwords advertisements.

Most people are aware that Google offers a free keyword suggestion tool that can help you find keywords that are relevant to your business. Keyword research is fundamental to almost every aspect of internet business. If you fail to pay attention to this very basic aspect of internet marketing then you are almost certain to struggle in your business. The keyword suggestion tool can be found easily by doing a search for ‘Google keyword suggestion’ and going to the google page at the top of the search results.
Also next is their site analytics software that is a very powerful tool. You can track visitors to your site with this amazing tool; however you need an Adwords account for this. Data such as how they found you and whether they are turning into customers and/or prospective leads on your site can be gathered with this tool. The same kind of software from others can cost you hundreds of dollars and they are not half as user friendly and powerful. For any serious webmaster, this software is an absolute must.
Last, but by no means least, is their suite of tools appropriately call webmaster tools. This is a collection of tools to allow you to find out many things such as how many pages you have in their index, any problems with your pages, and most importantly a very detailed list of the pages on the internet that link to you. This list is the heart of understanding why you do, or do not, rank for search terms of interest to you. In my opinion this is the most valuable tool that Google could have ever created and is a relatively recent addition to their offerings. Simply said, it rocks!

Web Hosting Reviews And Coupons

Are you planning to design your first website but unsure of which web host to choose? All web hosting services seem to offer a wide variety of services at varying levels of cost. It’s tough to choose a particular web host that can best satisfy your requirements. Before exploring into what each web host offers, first list out what your expectations are. For example, you wouldn’t need too much space if you’re planning to create an uncomplicated website with few downloads. So decide on what bandwidth you’ll require. Then decide on a budget for your website and settle on how much you could afford for a web host.

While looking through through the features offered by different web hosts, find out how user friendly they are, so that you’ll be able to save time and effort on creating your website. Also see if the web hosts permit more than one website to be created for each user. This feature will be useful if you need more than one website to propagate your business. Depending on your requirements, you can choose a web host that provides free web templates; so you wouldn’t have to spend money on a professional web designer. You can also opt for shared web hosting where many websites can be created in one server. This way, you cansplit the cost with other related companies.

You can even read reviews about various web hosts to see which host is preferred by a majority of users.

There are many webhosting review sites that supply information on the ratings of host companies based on their performance, quality and customer opinion. One review site that provides information about rankings of web hosts is ewebhosting.biz. The specialty of this site is, it not only gives a honest appraisal of various web hosting companies, it also gives you a picture of the cost, bandwidth offered, disk space provided by each web host. What’s more, in this website, you can get web hosting coupon codes that get you an instant discount when you open your account with some web hosting companies. For instance, use the coupon code CASTIRON-12 and get $50 off on HostICan.com. Get $9.94 off by using coupon code JURY on hostgator.com. Just copy and paste these codes when you fill up the account opening forms in the websites of these companies to benefit from the offer.

All plans listed in the review website offer at least 30 day money back guarantee. Each web hosting company has its own attractive plan to offer to customers. Other than the coupon code for a money saving of $50, HostICan offers a lifetime free domain, $50 worth free Yahoo Credits and more than 2,000 Website Templates! Hostgator offers phone support 24×7365 dayswith 99.9% uptime and plans to host any number of domains on one account.

So plan carefully before choosing your web host, go through the review website and choose the host that gives you the best deal for your money!

Exploring Various PPC Engines

When you begin doing PPC marketing, you’ll probably find yourself juggling between bidding for a high position, choosing appropriate keywords and phrases, and exploring the many different search engines that your PPC ads will appear on.

Google AdWords is one of the largest and most recognizable of all the pay per click marketing possibilities. Many site owners enjoy a noticeable increase in traffic as a result. However, since the system is rather popular, the cost-per-click can reach high prices in regards to competitive phrases. The second-best PPC system to consider for your business is called Overture (now known as Yahoo Search Marketing). A decent amount of traffic improvement has been known to take place with this system, but you should also know that the cost-per-click is rather high when using this approach.

Although Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing are the big players most website owners focus on when they begin doing pay per click advertising – don’t forget that there are many other search engine selections to consider. Here are five additional search engine choices to research and consider using:

1) Enhance

The service formerly known as ‘Ah-Ha’ has been associated with significant increases in revenue through this PPC engine, which also improves site traffic. The advertising gateway that users receive provides access to a network of hundreds of partners, which includes Excite, EarthLink, and MSN.

2) ABC Search

This suggested pay per click option offers low bidding costs starting at $0.05 per click. Although this price is deemed higher than the majority of secondary engines, consumers enjoy a higher quality of traffic when accompanied by decent click-fraud protection. Another plus associated with ABC Search is that you can take advantage of its innovative methods of eliminating the threat of click-fraud. Users should expect to enjoy the most accurate statistical data because of their program called ClickShield.

3) GoClick

For online business owners looking for a decent ROI (return on investment), GoClick is a satisfying choice. Although traffic doesn’t experience a miraculous change, this approach offers a low CPC (cost-per-click) that starts at just $0.01 per click. Overall, this PPC search engine is easy to use with a hassle-free account set-up process. It is estimated that more than 1.5 million unique visitors find their way to the site on a monthly basis.

4) ePilot

To enjoy consistently high traffic, ePilot has proven beneficial in this area when compared to other secondary pay per click engines. Users will take pleasure in a keyword research tool that includes competitor’s keywords, as well as editor-suggested lists. On a side note, if you are running a health and fitness-related business or website – this engine has proven especially useful for this particular marketplace.

5) ExactSeek

Similar to a PPC campaign, ExactSeek charges a flat rate of $12 per year that allows users to select their own keywords and gain listings in the Sponsored Listings on Exactseek. The campaign also continues to include listings on about 40 or more other directories. Past users have boasted that access into these other engines and directories make the subscription quite worthwhile.

Writing Ezine Articles For Increased Website Traffic – Keyword Research

If you have owned a website for more than about ten minutes, you will have heard that writing ezine articles is the best way to increase traffic to your website. Every webmaster wants to get increased website traffic and, if that traffic is both free and targeted, it is a webmaster’s dream come true.

How, you might ask, will writing ezine articles increase traffic to your website? Writing articles works in two ways: having articles published online creates links back to your website, thereby improving your site’s placement in search engine rankings, and people who read your articles and find them interesting will visit your website.

There is a little bit of science you need to use if your ezine articles are going to successfully increase traffic to your website. The science is all about the use of keywords, and the term “keyword” includes phrases consisting of several words. You can write a brilliant article but, if you choose your keywords unwisely, that article will not achieve all it might in terms of increased website traffic. The truth is that a mediocre, or even downright badly written, article with properly used keywords will work better than a good article with poor use of keywords.

Choosing keywords requires a bit of research. What you need to find are keywords that real people use when they use search engines to look for things, but which don’t have too much competition from other articles already published online. Finding keywords people search on is easy, finding keywords with little competition is easy; finding keywords that have both attributes is a bit harder, but it has to be done.

The point of writing ezine articles is to increase traffic to your website, so there is no point in basing your article on keywords nobody (or hardly anybody) ever searches for, but if you choose a keyword that’s searched heavily, the competition will be too great. If you pick a highly popular keyword, high ranking websites will already be holding the top spots in the search engines and your article will be buried so deeply in the search results that nobody will ever see it.

Remember that “keyword” can actually mean a phrase. In fact, many of the best keywords are phrases of four words or more, and these are known as “long tail keywords”. You can easily demonstrate how this works by typing a few search terms into a free research tool (eg Overture, Wordtracker or Google’s keyword tool). Try typing in “dogs”, then “German Shepherd”, then “white German Shepherd”, then “German Shepherd Training”. You will see that the first search term “dogs” gets thousands of searches but the number of searches drops dramatically when you start searching under more specific terms.

Once you have a list of long tail keywords that are relevant to your website, the next step is to research the amount of competition for each keyword. The easiest way to do this is to use Google’s advanced search feature and type each of your keywords in turn into the exact phrase box. This will tell you how many websites are indexed for that particular keyword. It is often useful to check out the sites appearing highest in the organic search column so you can look at the competition you will be facing.

Keyword research can be quite time-consuming when you first start but, like most things, you will find you speed up with practice. It is tedious work but absolutely essential if you want to make the most of your ezine article writing. If you can find a keyword that gets a reasonable number of searches but has only a few websites listed under that term, you have a chance of getting your article listed high up in the search engines. High search engine placement means more potential visitors will see your article and you will soon notice the increased traffic to your website.

SEO Keyword Research

Keyword Density
It is usually suggested to find 1 – 3 keywords for your content, but extensive research is required to find out which keyword is most searched for, after all its no point of optimizing your website for the keywords that no-one is searching for. So make sure you do your paperwork and jot down which keywords are most searched for and with less competition. Write as many keywords you think of, don’t just limit them. You should be able to build up several phrases from them. While thinking of any keyword search think about following

1. List down the purpose of your website. You will definitely find some words here.
2. What would you type in the search engine if you want to find out your website?

You can use Overture for your keyword research. This tool not only shows you how many searches have been made for a given keyword in past month but all shows you several alternatives for that keyword. The other keyword research tool I can suggest of is WORDTRACKER. Although they require subscription, but OVERTURE is completely free. Search engines like Google also provides with good recommendation tool although it does not indicate any popularity.

Measuring Competition for Keywords
After you are done with your and short listed all phrases it’s now time to find out the competition involved with them. The best way to analyze competition is go to any search engine and type your keyword. This will show you number of results return.

In order to make this task easier use paper-based or excel worksheet as done below:

Keyword Term: keyword research article
Date of Search: __________
Top ranked site: _____________
Search result: 46,900,000
No of searches made in OVERTURE: X numbers

Likewise repeat the same procedure for your other phrases. This will help you to do various comparisons between several key terms and select the best niche keyword.

Applying Keywords to your content
Make sure to keep 3-4% of keyword density. Use your keywords as following in the body of your webpage content:

• Title Tag: Title tag content is displayed on your browser’s title. You can use about 70 – 80 characters here. Make sure to use good combination of you keywords here separated by ‘|’. For example for our “keyword research articles” keyword we can use Keyword Research Articles | Keyword Analysis | Keyword Optimization.
• Meta Description Tag: Write meta tag description of about 200-250 words include you most relevant keywords.
• Header Tags: Always use your main keyword in h1 tag and combination of your keywords in h2 tag. h1 can be used as headings and h2 can be used as sub-headings.
• Body Tag: This is where you spread you keywords. Make sure you have at least 300 words in your body content where you use you keywords in the first 25 and last 25 words of the body tag.
• Img Alt Tag: If you are using images always provide alt attribute which shows your keywords.
• Anchor Tag: Text appearing for any link is called anchor tag. This has high relevance in any search engine.
• Webpage name: Having keyword name as part of you webpage name is also very important.

The Fundamentals of Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the most important stages of developing a website – especially if the purpose of the site is to generate money and business. Your first step is deciding exactly what you will be selling on your site – is it a product, service or information? Next is taking the steps to find out the type of things people type into the search engines when looking for your particular product or service.

The more terms people use to search, the better you can target your Internet marketing straight to them. It will also help you to better target your search engine optimization techniques. The more general your topic, the longer your keyword research will be. For instance, if you’re only selling fishing rods, your keyword list will be shorter than if you sell the whole shebang: rods, tackle, bait, etc.

The first step to keyword research is often just putting you in your target audience’s shoe and brainstorming. Put together a general list of the terms they may use to find your product or service. Then you actually conduct your keyword research. Everyone has their own way of doing me, but there are generally two schools of keyword research.

The more traditional school uses online tools and programs. Google’s Keyword Tool will generate a list of related terms and suggested terms as well as show how often people search for them. There is also software available that utilizes several online tools in one. Whichever you choose, do a bit of research to find how to best utilize it.

If the purpose of your keyword research is for your pay per click ads in Google or Yahoo, there’s a better way to conduct your research. How is that you ask? Just a bit of experimentation involving your pay per click program.

If you have a bit of extra cash to spend, you can do your keyword research in a whole different way. Take your original list of several terms and begin building a campaign around them (this works for both Google, Yahoo and other search marketing affiliates). Most search marketing programs have the option of using a “broad” keyword match – meaning whatever combination of search terms somebody types in, as long as it contains your keyword, your ad will pop up for them.

You can spend some money by running your test campaign for a week or two, and wind up actually cutting the manpower hours your keyword research takes in half. Using the analytics software most search marketing programs provide, you can track which keywords led people to click on your actual ads. Than you can add keywords and tweak your campaign as necessary, to get the most for your marketing, eventually cutting out broad match keywords for exact matches.

It’s really not rocket-science, it just means putting a little money up front. While more traditional keyword research works and definitely has value, for companies with less manpower and time, this method should help lead to higher conversion rates at lower costs. It can’t hurt to try!

Commission Hijacker Hidden Inside Your Web Page Design!

As a person almost obsessed with Web site marketing, I am often at odds with my Web site designer friends as to what is important. They know that I love them and I mean no offense so all is good.

For all Web masters especially those who count on commissions selling other people’s products, some Web design flaws could really hurt. The following are some common and some not so common flaws that can rob you of commissions by masking your affiliate links from visitors without your knowledge, sending the visitors to wrong landing pages, lowering your Web sites search engine ranking and wasting your valuable time on maintenance and tracking.

Fixing these flaws creates a clear path to more productive Web design and higher commissions.

1- Error 404 Disease.

Test your Web site for this widespread and deadly disease that keeps sending your potential customers to the never land of server error 404. Go to your Web site home page, which in our case is http://www.askdomain.com. Then add a slash and something after the main url. For example, “emailmarketing.html”. The complete url of this example is http://www.askdomain.com/emailmarketing.html

What will you see? Our home page, right?

Now, go to your own Web site and repeat the process. Enter a url from a page on your Web site that you know does not exist. Do you see a message related to error 404? If so, your Web site is losing hard earned traffic and potential customers. Contact your Internet hosting provider to help you cure this and place a customized error message on your site. A custom error 404 message displays your sales message or redirects these lost visitors to your home page.

2- Long Affiliate Links & Ad Blockers

Long affiliate links always create problems especially when they break up in email campaigns. But now there is a more serious threat: Ad blocking. These ad blocking scripts view your affiliate links and banners as advertising, assume the client doesn’t want to see them and block them entirely from view. The dark humor in this is you’re your stats show the banners and links as displayed but the visitors do not see them. What will this do to your sales and commissions?

The most popular Internet Security and Firewall software comes with default ad blocking ON! Most if not all users will never take the time to turn it off for your sake or mine.

This blessing in disguise forces us to solve several marketing issues at the same time.The solution is fairly simple and it is done in four steps.

Step one – Create an internal directory and call it something like merchants or resources. We use “find” in one of our Web sites.

http://www.dailyfinder.com/find/

Step two – Create a page and name it after the merchant. In this case we called it “the business end of Websites.” The complete url looks like:

http://www.dailyfinder.com/find/the-business-end-of-websites–v19605.htm

Step three – Within your page, you can place a redirect url code. So instead of showing a link to :

http://www.prowebvalue.com/?hop=optiword

You show a link to:

http://www.dailyfinder.com/find/the-business-end-of-websites–v19605.htm

Of course in this example we are using a little more sophisticated system and database driven Web site and this is why you see those strange code “v19605.”

Go ahead and test both urls, you will not see any difference in destination, but Ad blockers may block the first one but not the second one. You can lose commissions using one and get paid using the other. Significant difference, don’t you agree?

This process will also help improve keyword base internal linking which we will discuss more in later articles.

3- Published Work-In-Progress

Don’t use your Web site as a filing cabinet for work-in-progress projects. Any time you place your work-in-progress page or script on your Web site, you risk having them included in search engines. Go to Google and type in:

site:www.yourwebsite.com

At risk of making it too obvious I like to mention that in the above url I mean for you to replace the term “yourwebsite” with your actual Web site.

Look at the list. Are these pages you want to have listed on the search engines? Click on a few links, do they end in error 404?

Remember that every unproductive page of your Web site may replace a productive and completed page on Google and other search engine directories. Can you see the damage this could cause? Yes, we can always recover but how long will it take?

Work-in-progress does not belong on your Web site. Complete your projects before you place them on line.

Warning – Before you remove any pages, make sure you have a back up and your customized error 404 is in place.

4- Missing robot.txt file.

Some directories and files are necessary for running your Web site but have no marketing value that you want to announce to the world. Robot.txt text file tells search engines to leave these files alone and do not index and show them to Web surfers.

For example, your image directory or your policies directory does not contain anything of value so you tell visiting search engines not to bother with them. An example of robot.txt file that excludes these directories is:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /policies/

For more details refer to http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html

Do you have a robot.txt file on your Web site?

May both Web site pages and days of your life be productive.

Amazon has a new tool for Webmasters: Context Links

Amazon.com is currently running a new program in Beta called Context Links. This looks like it is going to be an excellent tool to help webmasters increase revenue from their websites.

Context links are very similar to google adsense ads in that you place a snippet of code on your website, amazon reads the page, understands what it is about, and displays products that are relevant.

This is a significant development for several reasons. First off you, as a webmaster, no longer do you have to worry about amazon products going out of stock. It can be a lot of work going over your products and replacing all the code for the products no longer in stock at amazon.com. Context ads solve this problem. It will display only up to date products.

A second big benefit is that you can very specifically gain from the massive intelligence that amazon is gathering about its customers. Do you get email from amazon? Do you log into their site often? Ever notice how the main page changes based on your browsing and shopping habits? They have gathered information from you and from millions of other shoppers and this means they know what might be of interest to you. You can leverage this intelligence by using context ads. Now when you create a content page you can let amazon figure out what products would best be sold within that page.

A third benefit is that this will actually offer your web visitor a better shopping experience. Let me explain. You are a webmaster and that means you probably have some expertise in the subject area of your website. But do you know everything? Do you know about all the most popular products in your subject? Of course you don’t. There are too many things to know and too little time in the day. But Amazon knows. And they will display these things in context ads. You leverage their intelligence to your gain (and their gain).

Extraordinary Control over what is displayed

There is one significant thing about context links that make them very attractive and better. This is that you as the webmaster are given quite a lot of control. They give you all the usual Amazon type controls that you are probably already familiar with such as size, color, look and layout. But there is one extra level of control that will have a significant impact on how well context ads do on your site. That is the ability to mark, with some simple html, exactly which portions of your page you want to be analyzed or not analyzed for the content ad placement. This is a tremendous tool for you as a webmaster. It will allow you to finely tune what you want them to place on your page.

Context Ads are currently in Beta and I am not sure how wide they are offering it to their affiliates but if you have an affiliate account log in and check to see if you have access to it. I recommend you start using and testing it right away! If you have a website and are not an affiliate of Amazon.com I highly recommend you sign up! This looks like it could be a very successful tool that will significantly impact your click through rates.

How to Rank High on Google?

To rank high on Google, your website has to be measured by
“500 million variables and 2 billion terms” of Google’s equation,
as stated on Google’s Corporate Information Technology Overview
page. Google’s ranking system is based on a democracy, and the
citizens are the links on the worldwide web that vote for
each other. Not unlike our government today, many of these
“links” are paid for, and some are of greater value. Ranking
high on Google is playing politics. Links and Keywords are the
key players in the ranking game. Google also takes into
consideration the full content of the page including HTML
codes, fonts, subdivisions and the “precise location of each
word.”

Links are votes. You must develop a link strategy. Google
likes linking things together. Create a rich network of links
with distinct quality content. Your website must have quality
links going out and coming in. Quality is the key word. Links
from reputable pages (which ironically includes .gov pages)
are given more weight than links on “link farm” pages. Linking
to a “link farm” is one of the worst things you can do and can
potentially get your deported off the web. The better the links,
the better your ranking. Google will factor in your page content
and the content of the pages you link to. Do your research.
Google has a free page rank tool on their toolbar. Use it to
find out the page ranking and visit the site.

Google also gives more weight to one-way links that lead to your
site, and less weight to reciprocal links. How do you get these?
Buy them. List yourself in a reputable directory
listing. Make sure you are listed in the Open Directory Project
(DMOZ.org). If you can’t buy links, write good content. Give
someone a reason to link to your site. Again, the keyword is
Quality. Submitting articles and press releases are also
strategies in the linking game.

Keywords are your platform. They are what you stand for. Words
count. Graphics don’t. Make sure your words are not in graphic
form and make sure you have relevant titles under your graphics.
Start with your title tag. Put everything you stand for in ten
words or less. Make your URLs short and keyword specific.
Brand yourself. If you type in soda, Mountain Dew will not show
up on the first page. If you type in Mountain Dew, it will
be on the first page. Brand yourself so users know what they
are searching for. Do not put the same words in every heading
and every tag. Be descriptive. Sell yourself. There are
multitudes of free keyword rank and suggestion tools. Use them
as a supplement to your knowledge of your company.

Think of every element in your website as words and pages
in a presentation that is going to be up for a vote. Does
everything fit? Is it all related? Are you a reputable
company with a quality product? Does it sell? Now sell it.
Google is waiting for you.

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