Everyone Has Heard of SEO But Do You Know What it Really Means?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a modern answer to older methods of advertising. In the past, people relied on radio, magazines, television, and newspapers to get their names or businesses out there. With the Internet, people everywhere are clamoring for traffic, which is usually just another way of saying "money." The reason traffic equals money is because, when people visit your website, they click on advertisements, buy your product or service, or buy a product or service of your affiliates (who then give you a commission).

So, with SEO being so important for your website's success and the thickness of your wallet, it's also important to thoroughly understand how it works. This is a very broad topic that could fill several large books, but there are a few general areas you can focus on to dramatically improve your page ranking on the search engine results pages.

Multiple Ways to Get a Web Page Ranked...
First of all, you can try having content on your website with certain keywords and key phrases that people who are looking for your product or service might type in. For example, if you are selling toy cars, you would try to include various pages on your website that repeat the phrase "toy cars" enough times that a search engine would notice, but not consider it to be spam. This is a delicate balance, and it takes time and research to figure out the right amount.

Another way is by article marketing. With article marketing, your SEO strategy involves using links in article depositories to be counted as incoming links to your website. When people find your articles there, they might want to learn more about the author and check out your website. However, there's another advantage to incoming links, and that is search engine rankings.

It's a relatively simple concept: Search engines reward websites that have a lot of incoming links because those links show that people who are interested in certain keywords or key phrases appreciate that particular website. Going back to the "toy cars" example, if you had a number of professional toy companies linking to your website because of how good your articles on toy cars are, you have proven that your content has value, and search engines will respond accordingly.

Going Deep...
Even better than having incoming links to your home page are the incoming links to your deep pages. Those are called deep links, and they work like this: You have pages on your website, and someone who wants to learn about toy cars might stumble upon your articles through a search engine or from direct links. Either way, the more deep links you have pointing to your site, the more likely it is that you will have a lot of highly ranked pages, and the more people will come because they happened to click on those links.

These are some basic examples of SEO techniques. If you want to maximize your usage of deep link building, there's a service called NextGenLinks that helps you build up a number of deep links to your website. It's a great way to help your website out if you aren't as high on the search engines as you'd like to be, or you feel like you're not experiencing the growth you are hoping to get.

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Microsoft/Yahoo partnership will have little UK impact

The proposed Microsoft/Yahoo tie-up is likely to have less impact internationally than in the US, according to one SEO expert.

Warren Cowan, CEO of search specialist ageny Greenlight, says: “The idea that a Yahoo/Bing merger will create a search player with close to 30% market share might be accurate for the US, where Google’s share is approximately 65% but across the rest of the world and in the UK, where Google holds nearer to 90% market share, a possible deal will have less of an impact, as even Bing and Yahoo combined won’t dent Google’s dominance in Western Europe.

“A deal may shake up the industry in the US but as for the UK, it would probably have little or no impact at all – at least not in the short term.”

Speculation suggests that the deal will see Yahoo sell search ads under Microsoft’s Bing brand

Cowan is also scathing about the rumours of a full blown merger and says that at this stage it sounds like more of an agreement to share each other’s real estate and technologies.

He adds: “Furthermore, the suggestion that a potential deal would lead to anti-trust issues seems largely hypocritical as Google has already been allowed to take 65% market share in the US and around 90% in the UK and rest of Western Europe.”

Cowan also feels such a deal could backfire in that while it provides one competitor for Google in the search market, it precludes the emergence of “a third strong player” in the market.

“Although this deal may give Google a run for its money, it doesn’t actually foster competition as any third player would be so small that they will be unable to compete with Google and Yahoo/Bing. It would have been better if Yahoo had become a stronger player on its own, but it was never capable of achieving that.

“A deal won’t change things massively for the ordinary consumer as it doesn’t make Bing or Yahoo more attractive as an engine. Whether it’s a good deal in the long run remains to be seen.

He points out that the partnership will not actually give the Bing brand any great exposure: “Google has massive media ownership. At the moment, unlike Google, not everyone goes to Bing or Yahoo. Bing powering Yahoo doesn’t mean that everyone will use Bing, it just means that those using Yahoo are seeing stuff powered by Bing, but probably won’t even know its Bing. What Bing needs is a big property and good distribution with partners. It needs a solid base in both camps and this doesn’t really strengthen its base in either camp.

“There’s no brand building effort here for Microsoft that’s going to make Bing a leading brand, which is what it needs if it’s going to steal market share from Google. It needs brand power, not just white labelled back door distribution. on the Yahoo – Microsoft Search deal.
http://www.mad.co.uk/Main/News/Articlex/ed0477c85e0b4644bd0f4a3217e0082c/
MicrosoftYahoo-partnership-will-have-little-UK-impact.html

The top 5 SEO no-no’s

As a SEO professional the majority of my time is spent correcting the SEO errors and mistakes made by my customers. The art of effective SEO optimization is convoluted with many variables, and although you can Google SEO optimization and find literally thousands of results on the subject with tips, tricks, and strategies; until you remove all unfriendly SEO code your site is doomed in gaining prominent placement on the SERPs.

1. Avoid the use of flash, DHTML, and internal java script. These coding practices offer slick visual enhancements, but are some of the biggest SEO killers. Search engine spiders see flash objects as big chunks of empty web space because there isn’t an effective SEO method to tag them to be crawled by the spiders. If you are using flash for photo slideshows then convert them into pop-up pages and reinforce them with keyword rich content and anchor text.

DHTML and link roll over effects bloat the html coding of your website and remove the important “alt” and image “title” tags which help to further weaken your SEO ranking potential. The best menu linking method is “text” based links with keyword rich anchor text. The same goes for internal java scripting this coding just pushes your relevant content down further into your code and slows the search engine spiders crawling your site. Convert your internal scripts into external .js applets and drop them in a folder in your site.

2. Non-unique, duplicate, or non-relevant content. Your websites content should be fresh and always match and relate to your sites niche. If you are selling party supplies then it would be a bad idea to have pages or content about bowling balls. Duplicate or redundant content is a big no-no as well; part of the Google PR algorithm is based on fresh relevant content.

3. Keyword stuffing and hidden text. Google and the other major search engines view these practices as spamming and can get your sites sandboxed (dropped so low on the SERPs that no one will ever find it!) or banned altogether. Keep your keyword density to no more than 5%, and never use hidden text.

4. Poor Meta data. Your Meta data is the information that tells the search engine spiders what each page of your site is about and how it relates to your content. Research your keywords and phrases and always a unique keyword rich tile for each page, avoiding stop words like “and, or, the, if, it, were”. Keep you title to 57 characters or less. Your description tag should be short and no longer than a sentence or two. Your keyword tag should always have your primary keyword first, and that keyword should also be in the first sentence on your page content. Don’t bloat this tag with dozens of keywords; this will only hurt your ranking potential. Use no more than 10-12 per page and build landing or gateway pages to promote additional keywords.

5. Always use “alt”, link, and header (H1, H2, Etc) tags. Each image and hyperlink on your site is meaning less to the search engine spiders if it isn’t tagged with relevant keyword descriptive phrases. When tagging your menu links never use tags like “click here” etc. always be descriptive. Your content needs to be user-friendly first then SEO friendly. Avoid long paragraphs. Use bullets and numbering to summarize and break up long text. This will make your key points stand out to your web visitors and to the search engine spiders as well. Always use header tags to highlight important information. A trick I always us is I start of using the H2 tag at the top of my pages and use the H1 tag further down. It seems that almost every SEO tech starts off with the H1 tag and this has caused the major search engines to give less weight to the H1 tag as a result. This doesn’t mean it is useless, but when used second or third I have noticed better results.

There are so many important strategies in achieving top ranking on Google and the other search engines, but by getting back to basics and making your site SEO and user friendly, you will have a clean web pallet to work with and build upon.

Keep your site filled with fresh relevant content, avoid “Black Hat” and deceptive practices and keep your pages easy to navigate and informative and you site will gain higher SERPs long before those who disregard or do not follow SEO best practices!
http://www.examiner.com/x-13995-Detroit-Internet-Marketing-Examiner~y2009m7d17-The-top-5-SEO-nonos

SEO Secrets For Outranking Competition

In a video interview with Laura Lippay, director of technical marketing at Yahoo, Mike McDonald confirms it takes more than title tags to outrank competitors. The strategy also requires social media, creating buzz, getting links and more.

McDonald writes that SEO is a competitive game, and staying on top requires more than standard best practices. Social media, for example, can help smaller businesses focus on what people say about their products and services, as well as how competitors "might be flailing," Lippay says.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=107432

The Basic Principles of SEO

SEO is a fairly contentious issue and one that virtually every internet marketer seems to have an opinion on which would be fine, except in my experience, they are all different. I have, in my travels, picked up some hints and tips that I think most sensible people can agree with.

The first thing to know is that most search engines, especially the all mighty Google, hate SEO. It makes sense really, the whole reason that we need SEO is because the people who are involved with these search engines want to be the ones to dictate what ranks high in their lists, SEO is often times our way of attempting to 'trick' the search engines into seeing us as the best site to fit their criteria. So, my first piece of advice is a simply one, use SEO but use it thoughtfully and don't over do it. Being too obvious about it will often result in a penalty rather than the increase in traffic you were hoping for.

The thing search engines love the most is content. Fresh, original content is the key to getting in with the big guys. The search engines are, basically, indexers of content so the more of it you have for them to index the better. But again I have to sound a warning, the content must also be relevant and entertaining, it must be quality. The search engines may not be able to tell the difference but the people who arrive at your site sure will be able to.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the search engines will look for an idea of topic in the heading and sub headings of your articles so decide on your keywords and try to have them appear in these areas as often as you can without giving a spammy feel to your content.

Keyword density in general is probably the most hotly debated element of SEO. As I said last week, I do not claim to be a leading expert on these matters but with the use of a bit of common sense I have arrived at what I think is a sensible solution. I try to include a few keywords in my content when possible but I keep one overriding principle in mind; I am writing for people not search engines.

Some use of keywords can help to bring people to your site and clearly that is a good thing but as I mentioned last week, you actually want them to stick around for awhile. Get to know you and hopefully buy your product or service. They are not going to do that if all they find on your site is spam type articles stuffed to the gills with key words.

In conclusion I would say by all means use SEO but while doing so always keep in mind the old adage that less is often more. I have certainly found that to be true with SEO.

http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Basic-Principles-of-SEO&id=2346646

Easy SEO

Hey fellow SEO's

How easy seo is for you, completely depends on you. SEO is not hard at all, most of all the most valuable SEO is when it's natural.

It's obvious that Google is against artificial backlink building. Artificial backlink building is something when you try to rank high your own website. Google is based on the one simple thing: website popularity which is supposed to be evaluated by other webmasters not you. So, when I say "natural SEO" I mean that backlinks coming to your website are like "votes" from other webmasters who consider your website being useful and something that they like. That is the reason why they link to you.

Basically all the SEO made for your website by yourself is considered as an artificial one. You make a website (sometimes of a controversial quality) and start building backlinks to your website yourself. For Google structure it's not acceptable at all. With this kind of SEO the whole idea and structure of this search engine is corrupted.

So what is the natural way of getting a lot of quality backlinks to your website? One of the best and hard ones in the same time is content. Good, quality content which makes other webmasters linking to your website with the kind of respect. Everyone understands that this way to get to the top of Google is close to impossible unless you are content-developing ninja.

What can we do about it? Actually it's a simple process. We want to build backlinks to our website as naturally as we can. For example: contributing on the relevant forums with the signature to your site. Or even, submitting articles. There are a lot of disputes about the effectiveness of article-submitting-way SEO but it's still one of the best.

Most of SEO's really underestimate the power of related forums at that field. Despite of that I consider his technique to be one of the most effective ones. And it looks absolutely natural to Google - this is the main point. You just find some forums which are highly relevant to your main keyword and niche, just make an account and start contributing intensive there. As easy - as that.

If you want to know more about
Easy SEO you can visit our website and find alot of useful information on the blog subdomain of this website.

I wish you Good Luck in your SEO ventures.

Seo is easy, look naturally!

Thanks

http://www.bestsyndication.com/?q=node/28398

SEO - 5 Ways to Get High Google Rankings

Getting your website to rank high on Google organic search result listings is like getting free advertising for your website. The organic listings cannot be bought and your website can only appear on it through proper optimization (SEO). SEO is the bed rock for online marketing and all webmasters should optimize their websites right from the beginning.

By getting high Google rankings, it will bring you more visitors and probably new customers too. In this article, let me share with you 5 ways to get high Google rankings:

1. Develop the right keyword list. Targeting the right keyword is the key to SEO success. If you optimize the wrong keyword, there will be no conversion.

2. Use unique Title and Meta Description for every page of your website. The keywords that you place in your Title and Meta tags should be relevant to the content of the page. The Title tag is like a book title; it tells the search engines what the page is about. Therefore, it is extremely important for you to use relevant titles for every page of your website.

3. Write good content and place it on your website. Content is king in SEO. Good content can be in the form of words, videos, audio, widgets, etc. Your objective is to provide value to your visitors and turn your website into a link bait. With good content, other webmasters will start linking to you and this will increase your website link popularity. Link popularity is one of the key factors for SEO success, so do not overlook it.

4. Good SEO copywriting. Adding keywords in the right place will help increase the visibility of the keywords. But, you need to be careful with this approach. Stuffing too many keywords within the content will make Google thinks that you are spamming them. So no matter what, always consider the human element. Write for human to read instead of Google.

5. Build more back links. Link building increases your website link popularity which will help it to get higher rankings on Google. You can build links through article marketing, press release submission, link exchange with other webmasters, directory submission and social book marking.

These are some of the things that you should do to get high Google rankings. SEO takes time, especially link building. You need to work on it consistently to see results. Develop your link building strategy plan and work on it religiously. Good luck!

http://ezinearticles.com/?SEO---5-Ways-to-Get-High-Google-Rankings&id=2192158