Linkedin Traffic - Drive Traffic to Your Blog With LinkedIn

The social media has exploded in 2008, and the number of folks participating in multiple social media channels is growing fast. Linkedin is the number one social networking site for business professionals. While communities such as Facebook and Twitter do get some attention from business professionals, Linkedin is specifically designed to give the business pros the opportunity to network with others and build relationship.
Bloggers can use LinkedIn to drive traffic to their blogs and get some exposure. It has many features available for bloggers to allow them to share value and build relationships. The best way to start with Linkedin is by adding your blog(s) to your profile. Building a solid profile is the first step you need to take if you want to get some exposure in that community.

You should also try to build up your network. You should try adding former colleagues, friends, and folks that you know from the past. As you add value and participate in the community, you are going to get more friend requests.
You can also use Linkedin groups to get more exposure in the community. There are hundreds of business groups available on Linkedin that you can join and start participating in. Your goal should be to truly add something to your group. Linkedin nation is very sophisticated and you won't get away with just plugging your blog.
Linkedin's Q&A feature is very powerful as it can help establish you as an expert in your niche. You can ask question and also answer questions. You should try to ask meaningful questions about the developments in your blogging niche. You should also try to provide the best answers possible to the members' questions. Communications on Linkedin are very much similar to real life communications. In essence, when you ask a question and folks take time to answer your question, you should try to get back to all the participants and thank them for their time. You can also engage them to try to add them to your connections later on.
Linkedin applications are a great way to share you blog RSS with your connections. You can add these applications to your sidebar and your feed will be available for folks to see.
Linkedin is more formal than Facebook and Twitter, and it should be treated as such. While it can drive you significant traffic, you should avoid looking unprofessional. So it is safe to be polite and thoughtful on Linkedin.

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What is SEO vs SEM

SEM: Search Engine Marketing - using search engines to market/promote the website (e.g. Google Adwords, sponsored linked, etc). You pay to have your site listed on search engines through their various promotions, and you may have to pay for each user the search engines send your way.

If SEO is working as intended, then there may not be a need for a SEM campaign; where as you will still need an SEO strategy even if SEM is working for you.

SEM has a higher running cost and the cost is directly proportional to the number of users sent or the position of your ad.

SEO and SEM are usually best serviced by the same provider because they have already performed the research, have extensive consultation with you, and know which strategy is best for the task at hand.

SEM, in most cases, can be implemented in real time and results are immediate. Hence, if traffic is essential to your web site and you’re still waiting for the SEO results, a short term SEM campaign m ay provide you with the traffic while waiting for your SEO to come through.


GLOSSARY:
ALGORITHM The search engine’ s mathematical formula used to determine how a web page will be placed/ran ked in the search results pages.

ALT TEXT “Alternate Text” – use to de scribe the image (for users/browsers that do no t support i mage display). This text appears when you hover your mouse over an image.

ANCHOR TEXT aka Link Text, the clickable text of a hyperlink – text used to describe the link.

BELOW THE FOLD Content of a web page that is not seen by the user unless the user scrolls down.

BLIND TRAFFIC Low quality traffic gene rated by misleading banners or SPAM.

CLUSTERING – In search engine search results pages, clustering is limiting each represented website to one or two listings.

CPA Cost Per Action.

CPC Cost Per Click.

CPM Cost per 1,000 impressions.

CSS Cascading Style Sheets.

CTR Click Through Ratio.

DOORWAY PAGE A web page designed to draw in Internet traffic from search engines, and t hen direct this traffic to another page or website.

EPV Earnings Per Visitor.

HIT A single access request made to the server. A web page can register multiple hits due to the number of graphics and/or scripts making u p the page. Not an accurate measurement of traffic.

IBL Inbound Link. A l ink fro m another site to your site.

OUTBOUND LINK A link from your site to another site.

PAGE VIEW S The number of times a we b page is served/viewed. More accurate measurement of traffic than “HI TS”.

PPC Pay Per Click.

QUERY The execution of a search on a search engine.

ROI Return on Investment.

SE Search engine.

SEM Search Engine Marketing.

SEO Search Engine Optimization.

SEP Search Engine Placement.

SERP Search Engine (Search) Results Page.

STEMMING Variations to a particular word. E.g. if one was to query the search engine for "design ", the search engine (that supports stemming) may return results that includes "designs ", "designer" and “designing”.

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What are some SEO secrets?

Keyword Research

This is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Knowing what consumers are typing into a search engine to find your product or service is essential. There are many tools to help you discover which keywords are profitable and help you decide which terms to optimise your website for.
Most SEO firms will guide you in determining the correct keyword terms. One of the best ways to find out is to ask a user when they ring your company.

“How did you find us?” If they say Google, ask them what words they were putting into the search engine. Another way to identify keywords is to type your product or service into a search engine as if you were a consumer and analyse the websites that are listed in the top ten. Alternatively, you can choose to use tools such as Google AdW ords’ Suggestion Tool or Overture. Just remember, what would your customer type into a search engine to find your product? If you are not listed under that keyword term then you may want to consider SEO.

Linking Strategies
A major contributing factor to higher search engine results is links to your website. Do not be fooled into thinking quantity is king here, quality is far better for rankings than volume.
For example, if you sell lounge chairs and a webpage that is ranked number one in Google for “lounge chairs” links to your site, this will be much better than 100 websites linking to your site that have nothing to do with lounge chairs.
Likewise a site that uses the wording 'lounge chairs' in a link to your website will be superior than using just your domain name. Another way to build links to your website is to create unique content that is valued by readers. One of the methods to do this is to provide regularly updated content, online newsletters, blogs and podcasts. If you create information that is helpful, informative or a valuable resource, other site owners may link to it therefore increasing your rankings. Most SEO firms will make recommendations about the types of site you should approach for linking purposes.

Page Titles, Meta Data and Content
Another aspect to consider when analysing your website is the page titles and meta data that is played on your pages. Page titles are the names of the pages on your website like Home and About Us. If your company was to sell teapots in London, it would be more beneficial for your homepage to be named ‘Teapots for sale London” as opposed to “Home”.
Meta data are keywords that are added to the code of a webpage. Internet browsers do not display this information but search engine spiders use this data to learn more about the page it is crawling. Using keyword-rich meta data can assist in achieving higher rankings however, make sure extensive keyword research is conducted to find the keywords of most value. These are some of the basic aspects of search engine optimisation that can have a positive effect on search engine rankings. Content is extremely important considering many search engines are starting to bring Latent Semantic Indexing into the mix. LSI means that search engines will hold more weight to pages that have related terms in the content than one term repeated many times. Relevant, timely and unique content naturally gets linked to as well, you will find if you provide this type of content on your website, you may not have to chase links as much as you would if your content is a re-hash of other info on the net. Ultimately search engine optimisation is an ongoing process. Rankings rise and fall with the ebb and flow of the Internet. Competitors will change content and optimise their own website; search engines will change the algorithms that drive their results.

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Which Links to Focus On

After submitting your site to the OPD, Yahoo, and any other specialized search directory and portal in your industry, the next order of business is to start asking for links on other websites. The majority of links that point to your site should be from other business websites similar to yours. If you provide interesting, useful, and timely content on your site, others will be compelled to link to your site.

Your ongoing objective is to obtain the highest number of “high-quality” links as possible from other sites. Just remember to exchange links with sites that offer related or complementary products and services to your own.

Best Practices and Tips
Although the blanket statement of “get as many links as possible” applies in general, here are some tips and best practices for prioritizing your link exchange efforts:

• Only exchange links with sites that are relevant to, similar to, or are in the same or a complementary customer market as your own business.

• Start by looking at other sites that are listed in the OPD and in Yahoo under the same category as your site. These make great sites to start focusing on.

• Do a search in Google and see what the top 30 sites are for your top keyword phrases. These are either your competition or prominent complementary sites to your own. Brainstorm other products or services that your customers may also find useful.

• Focus first on getting links from sites with a PageRank (PR) of 4 or higher. Links from sites with a PR = 3 or less won’t influence your ranking negatively, but you probably won’t be getting an appreciable boost from Google unless you have a large number (more than 100 or so) of these.

• However, don’t discount the power of even low PR sites directing traffic to your site over time. Today's PR = 3 site could be tomorrow's PR = 6 site, and vice versa. Don’t fret over the PR of the site, remember this is a long-term continual effort on your part to get more links!

• Your best links will be from sites that have a large number of incoming links themselves and that also have a relatively small number of outgoing links (such sites are called authorities). Just make sure these sites are relevant to your theme or keywords.

• Always try to get your keywords included in the text of your links. Have “Link to Us” code to make it easy for others to simply copy the exact link code you want used.

• Try to get your link on a page that is as close to their home page as possible. A link is less important (has less PR) if it is buried several levels deep. For example a link on, http://www.acme-house-plans.com/links.htm is better than a link on http://www.acme-house-plans.com/Links/SectionA/links.htm.

• Always include a link to your site in your email “signature” line when posting on forums, blogs, newsgroups or discussion groups, when submitting articles to online publications, or when sending out newsletters. Content that you write and send out has a way of being posted on a web server somewhere.

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Measuring a Blog Success

If you are building a blog to earn money directly, or if you are hoping to make sales from your blog, then money is your obvious metric to determine how well you are doing toward your goal. What if direct income or sales leads are not part of your plan—how can you measure the success of your blog then?
Every blogger you speak to seems to have a unique preference for what determines a successful blog. For some it could be about traffic, others willprioritize subscribers, and there are bloggers who count comments as the best measure. Each metric means different things to different people. Here are a few measures of success that different bloggers use to evaluate how their blogs are going. Some will be more or less relevant for different blogs and will depend upon the goals and objectives of the blogger.

Traffic
The most common ways that bloggers seem to evaluate a blog are the different measures of traffic. Different bloggers seem to have their own preferences for different aspects of traffic, plus each tool you use to measure traffic will givea different result due to the differing methodology. It is very rare to find two different tools that agree on any one result, so when measuring traffic it is best to stick to your favorite service and use it to show progress rather than obsessing over the actual numbers.

Unique Visitors
The idea of unique visitors is to count the number of people who visit your blog. The problem in determining this accurately is there is no way to actually know who is visiting with any confidence unless you get each person to log in every time they read.
To get a rough guide of how many unique people visit a blog, techniques such as counting each unique IP address (a number given to each device connected to the Internet) or recording “cookies” (small text entries saved by your web browser for later retrieval) can be used. All methods have propo nents and problems. For example, your IP address today might be different tomorrow, or many different computers could be simultaneously surfing under one number due to differences in how networks can be organized. Cookies have a lot of fans, but, increasingly, they can not be relied upon because so many people delete them manually or automatically via security and privacy software.
A further complication is that if you have readers who choose to take your content in feed form rather than view your blog in their web browser, your audience is actually larger than this statistic represents.
Advertisers, especially, like to know how many unique visitors your blog attracts in a given month, and if you are ever going to sell your blog, this metric will be extremely important also.

Visits
An individual visitor could make several visits to a blog. Visits are more reliably measured than unique visitors, but to compare results you have to agree on what constitutes a visit. Visits are also sometimes termed “visitor sessions.” Depending on who you listen to and which software you use to measure, a session could be calculated in several ways. One popular way to determine a session is an unbroken stream of page views after a certain period of inactivity. If someone visits two pages ten minutes apart, is that two page views in one session or two visits? Many website owners take note of average session length as a way to deter mine how long people spend on their site. As websites become less about downloading pages and more interactivity within a page, session length is gaining attraction. The longer visitors spend looking at your content the bet ter, because it means they were more engaged and according to media-types, gaining more affinity with your brand.

Page Views
Page views are the total number of pages read in a web browser. Most bloggers like to know how many page views they attract both on a daily and a monthly basis. As well as the total page views, you also should monitor ratio of pages viewed per visitor. It is best to have both a high number of pages viewed and for the average visitor to read more than one page. Each article you write will receive its own page views, and by comparing individual page counts you can work out which articles are gaining the most attention, giving you an idea what content your audience finds most interesting.

Hits
Hits count the number of requests sent for a file to the server. This is a dated and largely unhelpful metric because every request for any file is counted. Though it sounds useful, in actual fact it gives you little information that is actionable. If you have a page containing four images, one request for that page is counted as five hits. To increase your hits you could just add an image to the page! Due to the misleading nature of the metric few people use it seriously, and the phrase “hits” is often erroneously used in conversation and the media when what they actually mean is to describe traffic in general, or specifically visits or page views.

Subscribers
Bloggers can vary from indifferent about subscriber counts through to subscriber-obsessed. Why are subscribers so important? Counting a blog’s subscribers gives a good indication of how popular it really is because these are the people who want to read your content long term and have signed up to receive updates so they never miss one. These are your loyal readers, the people you can hopefully count on to come back again and again. Whereas the metrics mentioned before are important, and they are traditional measures for any website, subscribers are critical to blogs. A visit could be a person arriving, not finding what they need, and going away never to return. A subscriber has made a small commitment to you and demonstrates you are providing something a little more useful and compelling. Subscribers are usually split into RSS subscribers and email subscribers, though as I will explain, the lines are blurring.

RSS Subscribers
RSS subscribers are the people who use your feed to read articles. They use a feed reader (service or software application) to pull down updates to your feed and might never actually visit your blog at all. The most popular feed-measurement service is FeedBurner.com, and because of this most bloggers rely on that service to compare progress against each other. Both Bloglines and Google provide a count of readers using their feed-reader services, but only FeedBurner provides a count across all of them. Even though nearly all bloggers rely on FeedBurner, even the company would admit that counting feed readers is not an exact science. Numbers fluctuate every day, and glitches can make it seem like you have lost or gained readers almost randomly. The best idea is to use the count as a progress guide and not an exact count of individuals.

Email Subscribers
In addition to RSS readers, many bloggers publish their content over email. There are services available to allow you to take your RSS feed and deliver email updates automatically, and then there are specialist email-newsletter publishing services such as AWeber.com that allow you to create messages or import your content. An advantage that email lists have over RSS is that when a visitor subscribes you get his email address. Valuable on its own, a list of email addresses is also a far more reliable indicator of how many individuals you have subscribed.

Comments, Feedback, and Interaction
Much as we all want readers, when a blog is truly engaging you will hopefully attract comments. Comments show that your visitors want to interact with you. They allow you to build a sense of community, further encouraging readers to return time and again.

Comments
You can begin by counting the number of comments you receive after remov ing junk and spam comments. If on average each article attracts ten comments, you know you have made an improvement over when your blog gained only one or two.
There are two types of posts you might particularly want to receive: good feedback and considered posts. If the only comment you ever receive is, “You suck,” you might not be quite as happy about those ten comments as back when you received two “nice post” comments per article!
Many bloggers also judge quality equally as important as quantity because it is so easy to just post any old rubbish into the comment area, and people do just to get a mention of their own website, but when someone takes time and care to craft a thoughtful comment it can be much more satisfying.

Feedback
Obviously, as well as comments, people will use your contact form and email to get in touch with you. Many of my best articles have been inspired by reader questions, and it is important to all of us to receive feedback, good and bad, so we know where we are going wrong and what we are doing right.

Interaction
There are many ways that readers can participate on a blog that go beyond comments and emails. Taking part in your blog might include responses to polls, competition entries, and other calls to action. In general, if people do in large numbers what you ask, then you have an engaged audience!

Links
Links are the currency of the World Wide Web. The levels of incoming links to your blog can be an indicator of how well you are engaging other bloggers. Incoming links are good for a blog in most cases because of the incoming traffic that follows them, but also because they are a major factor in climbing the rankings in search engines. They can be monitored in a number of ways.

Trackbacks
If another blogger links to your article you can be notified using a special comment called a Trackback, which appears linking back to the original blogger with a small quote of the text used. Though some bloggers hate them due to spammers taking advantage of the free link back, blogs utilize them to further conversations and as notification of what others are writing about you.

Search Engines
To find out who is linking to you, type link:domainname into Google. You can get a good quick picture of the incoming links that that search engine has indexed for your blog. There are also browser plugins and easy-to-use web services that will show you the same thing.

Technorati
Another popular service that has become a bit of a competition among bloggers is the Technorati ranking. Technorati counts how many references to your blog have been made by other bloggers; currently they call this “authority.” The more authority you get in any six-month period, the higher your ranking. Technorati’s Top 100 List has become the defacto A-list, the holy grail of blogging for many.

Referral Stats
Most statistics packages offer the ability to track where your readers come from to get to your blog. This shows you the things they are searching search engines for but, also the sites that are linking up.

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Make Money Blogging More Traffic, More Leads, More Money!

Start any new business with a blog. It's much easier to start a blog than creating a website from scratch.
What blog platform should you use?
I've achieved top rankings for many of my keywords with my blogger blog. When your visitors and subscribers read your blog, something magic happens. Who wants to learn how to blog for money?

Step #1: Set up one primary blog around that features your BEST content, and your strongest affiliate offers.

Step #2: Create categories on your primary blog around the keyphrases above

Step #3: Point the primary phrase link in each blog, lens, hub and social profile at the appropriate category page on your blog

Step #4: Rewrite the content above about 30% or so, and post on your primary blog.
A lot of work? Yes....it is - about 2 weeks per blog to get GREAT traffic to ONE "thick" affiliate blog that converts like crazy for a long time to come on ONE primary offer.

Most folks are either starting a blog or have already done it. It's true that most folks start with a personal blog. But there is money to be earned in the blogging world. Some folks go for the money right from the start. The right way to make money from a blog is by providing real value that keeps folks coming back for more. A few top bloggers recommend not using any ads on a new blog until proper trust has been earned. There are many affiliate marketing and CPA networks that you can use to search for proper offers for your blog.
Writing search engine friendly posts can also help you receive free-targeted traffic from search engines.

Drive Traffic to Your Blog With LinkedIn

Linkedin is the number one social networking site for business professionals. Bloggers can use LinkedIn to drive traffic to their blogs and get some exposure. The best way to start with Linkedin is by adding your blog(s) to your profile. Linkedin nation is very sophisticated and you won't get away with just plugging your blog.
You can ask question and also answer questions. You should try to ask meaningful questions about the developments in your blogging niche. Linkedin applications are a great way to share you blog RSS with your connections.

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Getting Traffic To Your Web Site

One of the most frequent questions I am asked is “Will your ebook teach me how to get more traffic to my web site?” Lots of people have written books — and series of books — on generating traffic. The focus of this article is to show you how to maximize the traffic that you already have. And while tips for building pages through forums and free content are excellent ideas, they are no replacement for a solid course on how to get more people to visit your site. Because this question is so common though, I will address it briefly in this chapter. I’l l give you the basics, describe some unusual ideas that some people are using and tell you where you can get all the i nformation you need. In the next chapter, you’ll also find a quick run-through of search engine optimization.

1. Advertising

Let’s start with the obvious: buying advertising. We’ve already talked about AdWords/AdSense arbitrage but exactly the same principle applies to buying your traffic from other sources too.

For example, the minimum pri ce for advertising at Overture is ten cents per click and you must spend at least $20 each month. If you can see that the ads being served on your site are generating less than ten cents per click then you’re never going to make a profit.

Exactly the same is true of any other pay-per-click advertising campaign.

One of the advantages of following your AdSense stats is that you can estimate how much th e clicks on your ads are worth. That can tell you how much you can afford to pay for clicks from other sites when you buy advertising.

It mi ght well pay to advertise, but before you buy make sure it pays a profit.

2. Recipro cal Linking

Many people focus on linking in order to improve their search engine rankings. That’s important but don’t forget that the links themselves can be one of your biggest sources of traffic!

Probably the easiest way to invite links (apart from searchi ng out related sites and writing to each one) is to add a “link” section to your pages where webmasters can choose a banner, button or text link to place on their site. On the same page, they can also submit their own site for linking. That should help you swap links without being swamped by sites looking for free placement.

The most critical factor when requesting a link though is where the site places it. Links on the home page alw ays do better than a link buried on one of the internal pages and a good banner or graphic link on a site with content related to yours will usually get more clicks than a text link.

If you find that your links aren’t appearing on the pages you want, there are a couple of simple remedi es that you can use.

The first is to ask for a better position! If you have a good relationship with
the webmaster or if it’s a small site, there’s a good chance that they’ll agree.
It certainly won’t hurt to ask.

Not everyone is so generous though, and another option is to offer something in return. A link in a simil ar position on your own si te can make a good deal if your sites are of similar size but you can also offer content or even a special page for that site’s users.

If you have a si te about furniture for example, and you want a link at a top directory for home furnishings then you could create a special welcome page for users of that site to draw them deeper into yours and deliver targeted ads. You might even want to go as far as creating a sort of co-branded version of your site for their users to click into. As long as you’re getting paid when the users click on the ads, what do you care whose design they’re looking at?

3. Send A Friend

There’s nothing like viral marketing to promote your site! It’s free, it comes with trusted recommendations and it gives you great CTR.

Each of your content pages should have a link marked “Send a friend” which opens a form so that the user can send your URL onwards. Until Google allows ads in email, there’s little point in AdSense members sending actual content but there’s no reason why you (or your users) can’t send links to pages with ads.

4. RSS Feeds

One of the challenges of keeping your user base is that readers can be pretty forgetful. Adding an RSS feed to your site is a great way to let people know that a new post has gone up and that they should stop by and take a look You’ll want to make sure that your headlin es are attractive and inviting. Many users don’t look past them, so if they don’t do the job, the post won’t be opened or read, and the user won’t click to your site. Images can also help you r feeds to stand out.

It’s rarely a good i dea to send more than RSS post to a subscriber each day.
The most common reason that users unsubscribe isn’t poor content or too much advertising, but too many posts.

One good strategy then is to divide your RSS feeds by theme and let subscribers only receive posts on the topics that interest them most. If you’re writing about a range of different themes, that should already help to keep the deliveries down to a manageable level.

The only other choice you’ll have to make is whether to include the whole
post in your feed or just a teaser to bring people to your site. When the goal
of the feed is to get people back to your site to click the ads, you might think
that there’s little point in giving them the whole article in their feed reader.
But readers will often unsubscribe if they can ’t see the whole article. That would reduce your subscriber base. You might be better off givin g them the whole article and inviting them back to your site to add and see comments. Test both options and see which works best for you.

5. Of fline Marketing

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they build an Internet business is to forget that there’s a world outside the Internet! Just because you make money out of traffic doesn’t mean you h ave to source all of that traffic online.

You should make sure that your U RL is listed on all of your marketing material: your business cards, Yellow Pages ads, flyers, envelopes, freebies and just about anything else you can think of.

You should certainly have your site address in your email signatures.

6. Promo ting Yo ur B log

I’ve tal ked quite a bit about blogging in thi s book, mostly because I know
from experience that it’s possible to make a very nice income from a good blog but also becau se a lot of people aren’t making the most of the blogs they have.

If you’ ve got AdSense on your blog, there’s a whole range of different things
that you can easily do to increase your traffic and earn extra cash.

The first thing you should do is make sure that your blog is set to ping rpc.pingomatic. com as soon as you’ve updated. Pingomatic.com offers a free all-i n-one pinging service that covers all the large blog directories and search engines. On Blogger.com, you can find this in your settings; other blog tools, such as Movable Type and Wordpress have a similar option.

You should also set up an RSS feed to l et people know w hen you update. Apart from the fact that you can now place ads on your feeds, it will also keep your regu lar users coming back to see more ads (and to see your latest posts).

Instead of linking to the previous month’s or the previous week’s posts, each page should also have its own link. Sounds obvious, right? And yet how many blogs have you seen with one l ink to about twenty different entries?
One link per entry means more pages for ads, better links from external sites
and higher search engine rankings.

You should certainly comment on other peopl e’s blogs, especial ly those that write about the same sort of things as your site, but ultimately the best way to get traffic to your blog is to make it good. If your writing is dull or difficult to read, it doesn’t matter how hard you push it, no one will want to read it — and those who do stay won’t stick around to cli ck the ads.

7. Public Relations And Publicity

Just about all of the methods that you use to bring people to your site will
cost you money. You’ll have to pay for ads on other sites, you’ll have to give up valuable real estate on your site to li sts of links and you’ll have to decide how much you want to pay for an AdWords campaign or to get yourself promoted through Overture.

Publicity can be free.

It doesn’t have to be of course. You can pay a PR expert to publicize your site for you and place articles in the press on your behalf... bu t it’s not necessary and they can be too expensive for most sites, especially at the beginning.

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How Google Works

This explains those elements of the Google ranking process that will matter most to you. It is not meant however to be an exhaustive inside look of how Google works – only a handful of persons at Google know this.

Google, like other search engines, uses automated software to read, analyze, compare, and rank your web pages. So you need to know what elements and factors Google cares about, and how important these factors are in relation to each other.

Because this is an important concept, it will be repeated: Google uses automated software to analyze your website – not human beings. Which means that visual elements of your website that may matter to you – like layout, color, animation, Flash, and other graphics are ignored by Google. The Google search engine is like a blind person reading a book in Braille – anything that is graphical, spatial, or visual in nature is simply not seen.

As such, you need to start thinking like the Google search engine.

So What Is a Ranking?

As stated previously, a ranking on a search engine is a web page’s listing and relative placement on a results page (also known as a SERP) for a certain search query. As an example, if you type “house plans” into the search box at Google, you will get those listings displayed (10 listings per page by default) that Google deems most relevant to the search phrase house plans, sorted in order of relative importance.


The most relevant and most important web pages are listed in descending order. For Google, page relevancy is dependent on how well a web page “matches” a specific word search. Page importance on the other hand is dependent on the quality and quantity of links that point to your web page from other web pages (particularly from web pages on websites other than your own). The concept of link quality is important and will be discussed in a later chapter.

If your site does not appear in the top 30 for your most important category or subject, you might as well forget getting much traffic from Google or from any other search engine. Because many people never go past the first page for a search result, you really need to be in the top 10.

It can be debated how much more traffic a #1 gets compared to say, a #3 or a #10 ranking. Studies indicate that those listings “above the fold” on a results page (which means anything higher than a #4 or #3 depending on your monitor size, resolution, and other factors) do better than those below the fold as a certain percentage of people do not scroll. Above the fold is anything displayed on the page before you have to start scrolling.

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+ 6 SEO Strategy for beginner

1. Strategic objectives
• Maximise visibility and awareness of the OU brand and offer relative to our competitors within key international search engines
• Maximise the OU’s share of search within the education category compared to competitors (institutions and other providers)
• Maximise quality of website visitors from search engines, attract those that convert to the outcomes the OU requires when they visit the website
• Maximise the lifetime value of visitors from search engines

2. Visibility and awareness
• Ensure that OU brand is visible and appropriately represented within search engine results pages (SERP’s)
– Search/IA mapping to create keyword hierarchy for OU site
– Identify and optimise keyword entry points/information pathways
– Gap analysis between OU website and potential search terms
– Balance of SEO vs PPC
– On/off page optimisation

3. On/off page optimisation
• Integration of SEO with IA
– Off-Page Factors: domain name, directory structure, filename, URL
• Integration of key SEO factors within style guides and standards and the production process via optimised layout mark-up (OLM)
– On-Page Factors: title tag, meta tags, page content, copy relevancy, text formatting, frequency/density/prominence of phrases
– Off-Page Factors: internal link structure, external link structure
• Link building strategy
– Directory Listings, JISC XCRI CAP project
– Anchor text of inbound links
– Page quality of inbound links

4. Share of search
• Ensure that OU brand is visible against key competitor institution/providers within search engine results pages (SERP’s)
– Identify and monitor search behaviour of competitor institutions/providers websites
– Search term gap analysis between OU and competitor websites
– On/off page optimisation
• Suggested target
– Appear within 2 rankings + same SERP as primary competitor
– Higher frequency of rankings than competitor institution/provider within 1-3 SERP’s

5. Quality & value of visitors
• Ensure that visitors from search engines are those who convert to the outcomes the OU requires when they visit the website and
subsequently engage in an ongoing relationship with The OU
– Identify and optimise best performing keyword conversion/information pathways
– Profiling of search engine visitors
– Profiling of enquirers/students driven by search engines
– On page optimisation, particularly copy relevancy
• Suggested targets
– Reduction in single visit visitors generated by search (Feb 06, 30% of SVV)
– Increase in VVR,PRR & RCR for search (May 07, 1.4, 1.2%,0.6%)

6. Work in progress
• SEO review of primary portals within “Open Portals” information architecture
• Target keyword mapping to “Open Portals” architecture
– Brand (OU Home/About)
– Core/Generic (About/New/Study/Research/Five)
– Specific (Study/Research/Five)
• Integration of SEO requirements within Style Guides and Standards

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AdSense — Making The Money!

Once you’ve done all this, you’ll be ready to start using — and profiting from — AdSense. I’m going to talk you right through the process of signing up to AdSense from reaching Google to being ready to place your first ad.

If you’ ve been putting off signing up until you get time to figure out how to do it, you’ve just run out of excuses!

What Is AdSense?

Before signing up to AdSense, it’s important to understand what you’re signin g up to. Many of the principles and strategies th at I describe in this book make the most of th e way that AdSense works. If you can understand where AdSense are getting their ads, how they assign those ads to Web pages and how they fix the prices for clicks on those ads or for ad appearances on those pages, you’ll be in a great position to manipulate AdSense in a way that gives you maximum revenues.

Unfortunately, I can’t really do that.

Much of the way that Google runs the AdSense program is kept under wraps.
I know a few things — and enough to do a great deal with our AdSense ads. But I don’t know it all. N o one outside Google does. And for good reason. If it was clear how Google figured out the content of each website and which ads suit that site best, there’s a good chance that the Web would be fi lled with sites created specially to bring in the h igh est paying ads instead of sites built to bring in and inform users.

People do try to build sites for ads not content, but they tend to make less money than high quality sites that attract loyal users who click on ads.

The fact is, w e can make the most of both AdSense and our own ad space without knowing the algorithms that Google uses to assign ads and pay sites.

That’s because AdSense is pretty simple. At the most basic level, AdSense is a service run by Google that places ads on websites. When you sign up to AdSense, you agree to take the ads that Google gives you and recei ve a fee each time a user clicks on that ad (or for each thousand ad appearances the ad receives on your site, depending on the type of ad).

The ads themselves come from another Google servi ce: AdWords.

If you want to understand AdSense, you will need to understand AdWords.

Adverti sers submit their ads to Google using the AdWords program. They write a headline and a short piece of text — and here’s where it gets interesting — they choose how much they want to pay.

Adverti sers decide on the size of their advertising budgets and the amount they’re prepared to pay for each click they receive. Google then decides where to put those ads.

The company’s owner might then say that he’s prepared to pay $1000 a month for his adverti sing budget but not more than $1 for a click. He can be certain now of getting at least a thousand leads a month.

But that’s where his control over the ad ends. Google will figure out which sites suit an ad like that an d put them where it sees fit, charging the advertiser up to a dollar a click until the advertiser’s budget runs out. (Of that dollar, how much the publisher receives is a Google secret. The New York Times has reported Google pays publishers 78.5 percent of the advertising price per click. The figure hasn’ t been confirmed but it is around what most peopl e in the industry expect that Google pays.)

That makes AdWords different to more traditional form of advertising. In the print world, an advertiser chooses where it wants to place its ads and decides if the price is worth paying.

The newspaper too decides how much it wants advertisers to pay to appear on its pages. Any advertiser that meets that price gets the slot and the publisher always knows how much his space is worth.

Neither of those things is true online.

When an advertiser signs up to AdWords, he has no idea where his ads are going to turn up. When you sign up to AdSe nse, you’ve got no idea how much you’re going to be paid for the ad space on your page.

You leave it to Google to decide whether to give you ads which could pay just a few cents per click or ads which could pay a few dollars per click.

Google says that it always assigns ads in such a way that publishers receive maximum revenues, and that adv ertisers get the best value for the ir money .

So if you have a site that talks about interior design and which mentions “homemade furn ishings” a great deal, Google will assume that your readers will be interested in the sample ad above. But that won’t be the only ad that could appear on you r page. There could be dozens of others. Google will give you the ads that it thinks wi ll give you the highest revenues.

That might not be the ad with the highest possible click price though. If a low er paying ad gives you more clicks and high er overall revenues, you should find yourself receiving that ad instead. In theory then, you could just leave it to Google to decide which ads to give you and at which price.

In my experience though, that just cuts you out of a giant opportun ity. You can influence the choice of ads that you get on your page, both in terms of content and in terms of price. You can certainly influence the number of clicks you receive on those ads. Google leaves that entirely up to you — and it’s a crucial part of the difference between earni ngs that pay for candy bars and earnings that pay for cars.

In short then, while signing up for AdSense can be both the beginning and the end of turning your site into income, if you’re serious about making serious money with your site, it needs to be the beginning. You’ll w ant to make sure you’re not getting low-paying ads, and you’ll want to make sure that you’re getting the clicks that turn those ads in to cash.

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An Introduction to Google AdSense

Many smart web entrepreneurs have discovered how to use the power of Google AdSense, but the first step is to understand just what this program is and what it has to offer web site owners.

Google AdSense is a program which serves up ads on the hosting web site, but the key is that the ads that are placed there are related to the subject of the web site on which they appear. For instance, a web site devoted to the antique car hobby might host ads for companies selling cars, promoting car shows and the like.

In fact, AdSense is part o f an advertising principle k nown as contextual marketing. Placing the ads in context, as with the old car web site, increases the chances that those ads will be seen and responded to. After all, t he general public may not be interested in buying fancy chrome wheels or hubcaps for a Model T, but owners of classic cars may be.

The possibilit ies for contextual ad vertising in general, and Google AdSense in particular, are endless. A hockey site can host ads for hockey equip ment and hockey sticks, a tennis web site could host ads for tennis balls and tickets to tennis tournaments. It is easy to see why this program has become so popular and so well respected with internet users and web site owners alike.

The good news for web site owners is that Google AdSense can be quite a lucrative endeavor, especially for high profile sites and those sites with excellent, high quality and in demand co ntent. One of the best t hings abo ut the Google AdSense program is that the ads are highly targeted and relevant to the subject of the web site. Targeting t he ads makes a great deal o f sense, since targeted ads are more likely to get the click t hroughs that generate revenue.

Google AdSense ads are text only, unobtrusive and very easy to read. Unlike banner ads and pop up ads, these ads do not get in the way of the web site visitor’s experience, and t hey are designed in such a way that they do not overwhelm or overshadow the content of the web site itself. Chances are the average web user has alread y seen hund reds, if not thousands, of Google AdSense ads.

There are not many places left where web site owners can make money directly off of their web sites, but Google AdSense is one such destination. Google AdSense allows web site owners to make an income off of every page of the web site. In addition, the algorithms used by Google to index web sites automatically select the best ads for each page of the web site, providing highly targeted and effective ads for their advertisers and lo ts of income for the owner o f t he site.

Those web site owners and designers who have been around for awhile may remember a concept known as AdWords. In essence, Google AdSense is an offshoot of the initial AdWords model. It is important to keep in mind, however that AdWords and AdSense are not the same thing.

When you do a Google search, you have probab ly noticed the small text ads which are disp layed to the right hand side of the search results. These are contextual ads, served up based on the search criteria. These targeted ads are known as AdWords, and they are used by various companies to generate revenue and drive new customers to their web sites.

Google AdWords uses the pay per click mo del to generate inco me for Google. When a user clicks on one of t he AdWords, that advertiser pays Google an agreed upon amo unt of money. This process is fully auto mated and easily trackable by all parties. The amount of money changing hands with each click varies all the time and is subject to word bidding. The placement of the ads, and the amount of revenue received for each click, is subject to market forces, just as in the brick and mortar advertising wo rld.

With Google being the predominant search engine today, the company has continued to exert its power and influence, and the ads served up by Google, both through AdWords and AdSense, can be powerful revenue generating machines. Many smart web site owners have already discovered the power of Google AdSense in generating revenue and profit ing from their web site
content, and many more web site owners are discovering this power every day.

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The Keyword Tools

At the heart of successful SEO is determining what Keyword or keywords to use when optimizing a website. The prevalence of a specific word or phrase on a webpage is critical to influencing SERP ranking. In most cases websites should be optimized for multiple keywords, and a simple way to do this is to optimize different sections or pages with different keywords. Of course, there are exceptions to this approach.

Below are some basic questions to ask when considering keywords to focus on. Once a
keyword(s) is selected it should serve as the focus of a site’s SEO efforts.

1. Does anyone search for the word on search engines?
If the site is about an eating establishment, what words would people use to search for the site? Restaurant, café, diner… Does anyone use the word “eatery”?

2. Which words does the site’s target audience use?
Regional diction complicates keyword selection if a site is aimed at a large geographical area. For example, a housing site for the English-speaking world can use “apartment” and do well in the United States, but it wouldn’t do as well in other countries like the United Kingdom where “flat” is much more commonplace.

One must consider more than just geography when selecting a keyword. There are many
factors that influence how an audience might search for a website. If the target audience of a website about a specific chemical consists of people with a science background, it would be best to focus SEO on scientific keywords that this audience is likely to use. A different website may be marketing a medical drug made up of the exact same chemical. In this case the target audience would be the general public, and it is unlikely that this audience will use scientific words or phrases when using a search engine to learn about the pharmaceutical.

3. How competitive is it to rank well with a specific keyword?
Ranking well on results pages for “restaurant” is very tough, since there are millions of sites for restaurants. While other words like “diner”, “café”, and “eatery” are still very common on websites, they are far less common than the word “restaurant.” It is therefore easier to influence the search engine rank of a restaurant website using these less-common words instead. Due to the difficulty of ranking high in search engine results for an extremely competitive keyword such as “restaurant”, SEO professionals will usually focus on more specific words or phrases. For instance, a local pizza restaurant does not want or need to appear in search engine results for everyone around the world who searches for the term “pizzeria”. If the local pizza restaurant is in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, it would make a lot more sense to focus SEO efforts on phrases such as “Washington DC pizzeria” or “Georgetown pizzeria.”

4. How does one find out words that are commonly used by a specific audience?
There are several ways to answer this question. For highly specialized sites, the SEO professional’s clients are often the best resource since they will know best what words are used in their specialized field.

One useful tool is Google Suggest (http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en).
Google Suggest lists the number of results that the search engine pr esents for a specific keyword. This can be helpful in determining the relative popularity of different keywords you think your target audience may use to find your site.

Other tools include keyword selector tools that will read the pages on a website and
suggest keywords to the SEO professional based on their prevalence and the presence of
synonyms on the site’s other pages. There are plenty of interesting tools at
www.seochat.com/seo-tools. The Keyword Cloud tool will analyze the text on a site and
produce a word cloud to show which words are used the most

A website’s traffic analytics program is a great resource for revealing what keywords people already use in search engines to locate your website.
Some other useful free keyword research tools include:

Google: Adwords' Keyword Traffic Estimator Tool and Trends Feature
Microsoft: AdCenter Keyword Forecast Tool
WordTracker: Basic Keyword Suggestion Tool
KeywordDiscovery: Basic Search Term Suggestion Tool

These tools typically give estimates and projections so you should expect varying results from each of them. Although they’re far from perfect, used collectively they can help provide a fairly good idea of what words or phrases a target audience may use to search for a specific website.

Examining a similar or competing site that ranks highly in the search engines is also a good way to help establish an SEO strategy. What keywords do they use in their title tags, throughout their content, in their pay-per-click campaigns, etc.?

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What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” The term may sound like optimizing an actual search engine such as Google, however this professional service focuses on tweaking a website to do well – to appear among the top listings on search engine results pages (SERPs). SERPs are web pages returned by search engines like Google or Yahoo! after a user performs a search. These pages contain links to web sites and documents that the search engine deems relevant to the word or phrase. These words or phrases are also known as “keywords.” Using complex and proprietary algorithms, search engines consider hundreds of factors when gauging the relevance of a certain site or webpage. Search engines are constantly changing their proprietary algorithms – sometimes significantly – in an attempt to list only the most relevant results.

Major search engines vary their results by geographic region and language. For example, Google’s German page will place more emphasis on German websites. Search engines use various pieces of information; among these is language, the physical location of a website’s server, etc. Thus, the results from Google.de may differ from the results of Google.com.

SEO is “keyword centric.” A major emphasis for professionals is to figure out what
words or phrases a website’s target audience is likely to use when searching for a site’s content. Using this information, they strive to have the website appear within the first page of search results. SEO is strongly r elated to search engine marketing (SEM), which focuses on delivering advertisements that are relevant to an executed search. It is critical to the success of any SEO or website marketing campaign to have specific keywords in mind from the onset of the project. See Figure 1 to see where text ads appear on search results pages.

A website’s search engine “rank” refers to its position in the search engine’s results. There are factors that influence the rank of a website on SERPs that website administrators can control; others they cannot. Controllable factors include page title tags, page content, the website’s architecture, and the ease at which a web “spider” can examine a site. A web spider is a website discovery program deployed by search engines that scans the Internet looking for new pages and content changes on pages it has already discovered. There is little control over what competing websites can do to increase their search engine ranking; these actions may result in the down-ranking of other sites. Furthermore, website administrators sometimes can influence which other websites will link to their own site and how they will do so. In this document we’ll focus on what website administrators can control to increase their website’s ranking in search engines. There are many other tactics that a website administrator has little control over (like how to get other sites – and which ones are most valuable – to link to his or her site) that are also important which are not discussed in this document.

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Search Engine Optimization Industry Code of Ethics

Over the past 7 years consumer confidence has fallen dramatically in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry. This is due to amateur SEO providers not meeting consumer expectations, unscrupulous business practices, false advertising and fraud. The lack of seo industry standards and regulations has created an atmosphere of mistrust and a consumer perception that search engine marketing is a “black magic art”.

Search engine optimization providers are not exempt from these problems. Many attempts have been made to educate consumers on how to protect themselves, and choose a good SEO provider. But, unfortunately, most of the education has only been surface level, and fails to address any real insight as to the honesty or competency of a prospective SE0 provider.

The Industry Standards Weren’t Strong Enough…So We Decided To Create
The Strictest SEO Code of Ethics In The Industry for Search Engine
Optimization Providers.

We have created a strict Industry Code of Ethics and Consumer Protection Enactment to guard against fraud. This Consumer Protection Enactment consists of 20 regulations that SEO providers MUST abide by if they are going to provide an overall quality job for the consumer.

Our 20 Point Industry Code of Ethics Checklist…
Does Your Search Engine Optimization Provider Comply?

Guard Yourself Against Faulty Workmanship and Fraud…Demand That Your
Search Engine Optimization Provider Complies With These 20 Industry
Standard Job Quality Regulations:

1. What is the firm’s area of expertise; do they optimize porn sites, affiliate sites, link farms or actual businesses like you and me? Request a list of clients they have done work for to verify this.

2. Are their optimization techniques a secret? Search Engine Optimization is not a secret industry though some would like you to believe it is. SEO consists of a lot of research, optimization of pages, increasing of link popularity, knowing when/where/how to get your site indexed, which indexes are important for high rankings. Ask them for an overview of how they achieve their results. It’s ok if you don’t understand the technical jargon the point is to see if they will tell you.
If they won’t give you an explanation chances are they are trying to hide the fact that they are using illegal techniques.

3. Is Pay Per Click (PPC) part of their guarantee? A good Search Engine Optimization strategy does not include PPC where you end up having to pay for the clicks generated to your website.

4. Can the firm guarantee that your site will not be penalized with removal from the search engines or directories index, or a possible Google PageRank™ penalty? If not chances are they are playing Russian roulette with their client’s websites. By using illegal techniques that may produce immediate surface level results but in the long run will end up getting the site banned or penalized by the major search engines.

5. Do they optimize more than your homepage? A good search engine optimization strategy will include all of the pages in your website. It’s more work for them but will produce the greatest results for you.

6. There is a difference between a visitor, and a targeted visitor. A targeted visitor will result in more sales and leads. Does the firm focus on more sales…or do they say: "10,000,000 visitors in 1 month"? You don’t want “junk traffic” coming from porn sites or other non English speaking countries.

7. Do they create special new pages optimized for your key phrases that redirect to another page? If the answer is yes you are probably dealing with a firm that creates “doorway” or “bridge” pages (although most companies will call them by different names). This technique violates the terms of service of most major search engines. Legitimate Search Engine Optimization providers do not need to create any doorway pages to produce results.

8. Is their guarantee unrealistic? SEO providers who say they can guarantee a specific position like number 1or 2 in a specific search engine like Google or Yahoo are not being honest. It is physically impossible to guarantee specific positions in a specific engine.

9. Are automated submission tools used or are all submissions done by hand? Automated tools can often penalize you and results in exclusion from the search engines.

10. Does the plan include the cost of all submissions and directory fees such as Yahoo, Looksmart and other directories and submissions or does it just cover optimization?

11. If the plan includes link popularity building are they using a link farm or contacting sites by hand and concentrating on link reputation more than link popularity? Soon websites linked to from these link farms will be penalized and banned from the major search engines.

12. Does their technique involve showing a different page to the visitor and a different page to the search engine? If the answer is yes then you are probably dealing with a search engine optimization provider who uses “cloaking” techniques. Many search engines specifically warn against this technique in their terms of service. Google is particularly harsh on sites that use cloaking, and is known to remove them entirely when they find them.

13. Does the firm provide an ROI analysis and a goal of more revenues from your website, or are they simply focused only on rank?

14. Does their plan incorporate the following strategies?
• Page optimization
• Title optimization
• Keyword optimization
• Description optimization
• Body optimization
• Link optimization
• Link reputation
• Existing link analysis
• Initial ranking report for your keywords
• Monthly ranking report after optimization
• Guaranteed minimum number of first page listings
• Keyword research
• Competitor analysis

15. Are the rankings guaranteed for more than 3 months? A good guarantee should cover at least 6 months.

16. Which search engines do they work with?
Make certain that the positions the search engine optimization company has achieved are for the most popular search engines, not smaller engines for which they may have a knack. For a current list of the most popular search engines, visit the Nielsen Netratings page at Search Engine Watch.

17. What kind of search engine saturation can they achieve?
While it’s easy to focus on one particularly impressive position on one popular engine, it’s more important to focus on a broad range of positions achieved for one site. It’s entirely possible for a site to have one great ranking and be sorely lacking in positions for all other keyphrases. Ask your potential search engine marketing company to show you a report for an individual client that demonstrates good positions on many popular engines for many popular keyphrases. An effective search engine optimization campaign will achieve maximum exposure across a broad
range of keyphrases and engines, not one notable position on one engine.

18. Do they have direct relationships with any of the major search engines and search engine industry leaders? Reputable search engine optimization firms will most likely have industry affiliations. Fly by night operations do not because they have not been around long enough or they employ unscrupulous industry practices therefore other reputable firms will not affiliate with them.

19. Can you reach a real person to ask them these questions before you must commit your hard earned dollar? Never do business with a firm you can’t talk to.

20. Do they eat their own dog food? Ask them what key phrases they are ranked for and how effective their strategies have been for their own website.

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Web Page Format

All HTML documents (web pages) should use this basic format as the foundation on which to build the page. This format is accomplished with four sets of tags, they are:

<html> and </html>
<head> and </head>
<title> and </title>
<body> and </body>

The </html> tag tells your browser the page is an HTML document. The </html> tag should be the very first tag in your HTML document. The </html> tag is the last tag in your HTML document.
The </head> tags contain the page title tags,META tags which are the tags a search engine uses to index your page, any HTML base tags, and some javascript codes. For right now don't concern yourself with the META tags, HTML base tags, and javascript codes, we will discuss them later. You can build a web page without them, and add them later as you become comfortable with the HTML language.

The </title> tags are placed inside the </head> tags, and contain the title of the page as it appears in the status bar at the lower left-hand corner of the screen. This title does not appear on your web page. This title should be descriptive of your page, but not more than 64 characters in length.

The </body> tags are where you place all the content (text, images, and links) that you want to appear on your page. The opening body tag is where you also specify the background color, text color, link and vlink colors.

Below is an example of how they should be arranged. I have included a set of basic META tags in the head tag section, and the basic attributes within the opening body tag. You can Copy&Paste this code into a text editor when you get ready to start your page.

<html>
<head>
<title>Your Page Title Here</title>
<META name="description" content="Description of your page or site">
<META name="keywords" content="Key words related to your site go here">
<base href="http://www.yourdomainname.com/">
</head>
<body bgcolor="color" text="color" link="color" vlink="color">
All your page content goes here..!
</body>
</html>

Attributes:

Many opening HTML tags allow to to insert what are called "attributes". These attributes are another means of formatting your web page. Lets use the body tag from the code above to explain these attributes.

<body bgcolor="color" text="color" link="color" vlink="color">
If we do not use these attributes our web page would appear with the default colors. By replacing the word "color" with the name of a color, or a hexadecimal number, we can change the default colors.

<body bgcolor="black" text="white" link="gold" vlink="purple">
The above body tag will give us a page with a black background, white text, gold links, and purple visited links. Lets assume you have a pretty ivory background you would like to use, with black text, blue links, and red visited links. The background="" attribute will accomplish this. Here is how the code would look.

<body bgcolor="ivory" text="black" link="blue" vlink="red" background="http://www.yourdomainname.com/directory/ivory.gif">

Note: we still specified a bgcolor (pick one as close as possible to match your background) so the page doesn't open with the default bgcolor while your background image loads. Also, if you place the http://www.yourdomainname.com/ in the <base href=""> in the head section you can shorten the url in your background attribute to look like this.

background="directory/ivory.gif"

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About HTML

HTML is short for Hyper Text Markup Language.

This page contains a brief description of how HTML does the magic it does. All HTML tags (commands) are enclosed with < > brackets, it is these brackets that make the tag invisible when your page is viewed. Your web browser reads the command in the tags and renders that to your web page until that tag is closed.

We will refer to opening and closing tags throughout this book. The opening tag is the one that generates a command for the browser to read. For example, all the text following this tag <b>would appear bold, until a closing tag is entered into the coding. The closing tab is made by placing a / in the tag </b>.

Note: not all HTML tag tags require closing tags </>. They are very few, but they will be pointed out as we proceed through the book.

HTML tags are NOT case sensitive. So <html> is read the same as <HTML>. Although due to some changes being proposed for the future I would recommend using the lower case format. But remember, image filenames and web page urls are case sensitive. So when including them in an HTML tag be sure they are written exactly as they appear in the address bar.

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20 Tips & Tricks for Writing SEO-Friendly Press Releases

Once you have your SEO priorities in order, consider the following tactics to make your press release as search engine friendly as possible.

1. Determine the best keywords for your announcement. Depending on the news you are issuing, they may vary from previously identified terms.

2. Online keyword tools are excellent resources for determining the correct terms. If your organization does not subscribe to a paid keyword service, consider these free alternatives:
a. www.adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
b. www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
c. www.blogpulse.com/trend (to determine words most often used on blogs)

3. Once keywords are determined, you may need to associate more colloquial words with them, as company/marketing jargon isn't typically used in search.

4. Use the most popular keyword phrase in the headline, which carries the most weight with search engines, as well as in the body of the release and in hyperlinks.

5. Pick one to three relevant keywords and repeat them at least three times in the release.

6. Don’t OVER-HYPERLINK words. Optimizing releases for words that are not used often in the press release can cause irrelevant results and be considered spam by some search engines.

7. Include anchor text hyperlinks in the press release that are your keywords or similar to them. Make sure you link these words back to the appropriate page on your website. For example, if you are linking a product name, link back to the product page on your site.

8. Make sure the page you are linking back to is optimized for your chosen keywords. If the anchor text is “accounting software,” be sure that it is linked to a page containing “accounting software” in the title tag and within the text on the page.

9. Place your anchor text links in the first two paragraphs. Search Engines will pick up these words more efficiently if they are placed before the “fold” of the screen.

10. Keep press releases short and concise. Most experts agree that the “sweet spot” for an SEO- friendly press release is between 300 – 500 words.

11. Ensure there is a balanced keyword to press release word length ratio. Avoid too many keywords and hyperlinks in shorter releases, and vice versa in longer releases.

12. Include rich media content such as images and videos that will augment search engine pick up in places such as Google Images or Google Video. Be sure all media-rich content is appropriately tagged with keywords.

13. Include a link (not a hyperlink) to your website. Make sure to include the http:// of the URL.

14. If the release has a subhead, make sure it includes a keyword phrase. Search engines give more weight to bolded text (i.e. headline, subhead).

15. Optimize your boilerplate – always include links and keywords.

16. Resist the tendency to shorten terms. For example, if you are writing about your company’s branded data management software product, you’ll be inclined to make the second mention “the solution” or “the software.” However, people looking in search engines will type in “data management software.” Repeating “data management software” as a keyword phrase will help your release be found, while “the solution” will not. (But, try to keep the writing as “natural” as possible.)

17. If your company or product falls into a particular industry that is often referred to by an acronym, include both the full term and abbreviation throughout the release. For example, “Customer Relationship Management” should be referenced by its “full name,” and, “CRM.”

18. Post all releases on their own permalinked page on your website in addition to sending it out over wire services.

19. Be consistent with keyword use both in press releases and on your website. The website should have a keyword density of between 2-8%. This tool, www.keyworddensity.com, allows you to enter your URL and chosen keyword for a complete keyword density analysis.

20. Buy Adwords for those keywords that are very difficult to get in the first page of results (i.e. those that are more generic and colloquial, or common industry terms). Putting this extra cash to drive traffic to a press release could be vital to helping the impressions of the release, increasing visibility and the possibility of greater pickup.

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How To Optimize Your Blog For The Best Search Engine Results

If you are interested in trying to make money from your blog, you probably want to know how you can best optimize your blog for great search engine results. After all, most people stumble upon blogs when doing a search for something. If you use these optimization tips effectively, it may be your blog more people are drawn to. So, check these tips out and experiment with your own blog. Note what has the best results and stay with it. Change the other things around a bit until you get the results out of them that you want.

Simple Content

Many experts say that the best way to optimize your blog is to keep everything very simple. You can choose one quality content topic and make it your base. Then from there you can use variations of the topic in order to keep everything going. This may seem like a broad and useless tip, but once you get into blogging more and more, you understand how important it is.

Put More Out There

If you are trying to get more of a presence on search engines, be sure that you have something to show. The more content you have, the more likely you are to show up on a search engine. Bigger sites always do better than smaller sites. It is simply a numbers game. Search engines will see your site in a different manner, depending on how much content you have. The more content you have, the more there is a chance there will be that someone will stumble onto your site.

Ask Search Engines for Help

Few people know that you can actually submit your site to search engines. Submit your site's URL and ask to be put into the index. This can take a while, but if they do list you in the index, you will see a larger increase in traffic. Beware however of a service that asks for money in exchange for getting your sites into search engines. These can be a little misleading at times. There are ways to do this without needing to pay anyone at all.

Keyword Pay

A great idea for optimization is to identify the most popular keywords. By doing this, you are essentially targeting the keywords that people most often search for. When you do this, you have an edge over the competition. When you know exactly what the people are looking for, you can give them just that. Once you have a list of keywords, simply create articles that use these keywords. By creating these articles, you are putting yourself out there to be found. When someone does a search for those keywords, your blog just might pop up on their screen. Be careful not to use the keyword so much that your article does not make sense however.

Daily Updates

If you really want the best optimization, you should update it daily at the least. The more you update it, the more often search engines will index your blog. Therefore, you will want to be sure your blog is always fresh. Adding new information is the best way to update your blog. The more new information you have, the better off you will be! Just be sure that when you do update, it is for a good reason. You should always remember that content can have a purpose, but it should always be quality content. If you compromise content, you are only allowing yourself to strip the creativity from your project. If you are happy with doing that, by all means go ahead. However, as a writer, you will have a certain responsibility to web surfers. Unless you want everything on the web to be useless, do your part!

Use these tips to help optimize your blog and get the most from search engines. The more you post and use these tips, the more results you will see. If you earn your living from the number of clicks your blog or your ads get, this will essentially mean more money for you. You can use all of them or some of them. Experiment with them to see what works best for you and your blog. Put these tips to use and watch your results rise today!

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6 Ways to improve your blogs

Is your blog in need of a boost? Here are 6 ways to improve your blogs performance and promote its growth.

1) Visit and comment on other blogs within your niche

As a blogger it's common to visit other blogs within your niche both for camaraderie and research. Participating actively by leaving comments, when appropriate, is an excellent opportunity to gain readers by inserting your link within your signature file.

2) Post useful and entertaining content

Remember a blog is only as good as its content. Be sure what you post is relevant to the niche you're in. Making your content entertaining and useful to the reader will also encourage them to not only return but also refer others to your site.

3) Listen to your readers

By reading and responding to comments left at your blog you can open channels of communication with your readers. This type exchange will give you a better idea of what they want and what improvements you can make to attract more visitors and maintain the readership at your blog. This will help develop a greater feeling of community amongst your readers.

4) Personalize your Blog

Learn to stand out from the crowd by being YOU. Be sure your blog has your imprint whether it's in your delivery style (attitude, humor, or intensity) or perhaps blog design. Don't be afraid to let it show since this is the single biggest factor that will differentiate you from the rest. By delivering your messages in a more natural fashion you will allow visitors to get a better sense of who you are, impressing upon them your individuality, while also making your posting much more enjoyable and less like work.

5) Use outbound Links to your advantage

Don't be afraid to defer your readers to other sites for additional information. The school of thought here is simply to provide your visitors with as much useful content as possible. By providing outbound links you are clearly indicating you have the interest of your readers in mind and they will recognize and appreciate that. It is impossible to be 'all things to all people' therefore utilize the knowledge of others, when appropriate, to enhance your site as not only a source of information but also a site with its reader's best interest at heart.

6) Blog Reviews

Here's a solid way to entice both new and old readers to your site. On a scheduled basis be it weekly or monthly do a review of the best blog posts from within your niche for that given time period. Hopefully you're already 'crawling' around your niche for educational and social benefits. Now let's put these results to further use and write about them. Here we're using the magic of outbound links as previously discussed while providing useful content for our readership.

By implementing these 6 ways to improve your blogs performance you'll not only realize an increase in traffic but also a greater appreciation of your overall subscriber base by their continual visits.

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How to make web site optimal for Search Engines (SEO)

SEO (search engine optimization) is like a booming technique for promoting online business. Advance SEO services helps in optimizing a site in order to get the high ranking and bring more search engine and people to the website. Outsourcing SEO services work hard to be cheap SEO Company which provides advance SEO services. Use the target keywords maximum times, it will attract the search engine.

- Website should be submitted to the main search engine and main directories, otherwise search engine will not have any record of this website.

- Avoid linking to irrelevant sites.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the procedure of improving the quantity and flow of traffic to our website from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and etc search results. While using SEO we could also aim for various types of searches, such as image search or local search or vertical or industry based search.

Generally SEO focus on how would the search engines work and normally which words people search on the search engines in order to divert the traffic to their own websites. SEO techniques can be divided into two broad groups, one technique is that search engines recommend as part of good design, and other techniques are which search engines do not support. The search engines effort to reduce the effect of the later. How to make web site optimal for Search Engines

Search engines are dominating the online world when "online" word is pegged as key. When everything is online and above all influenced by search engines, the search engine ranking can spell magic for your business.

The results displayed to us are picked from some related sites which are ranked high on search engines list. Why Google is leading the search engine race? The search engines allocate a page rank to all web sites ranging from zero to ten. The top search engines like those sites that have natural link popularity, meaning that your site should be linked to wide variety of sites not linking just to one keyword like blogs or technology. Avoid long elaborate URL's with extraneous characters to make URL search engine and user friendly.

For better SEO results and good traffic ranks, it is obvious that your site should be spiderable by the search engines.

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Tips on Learning How to SEO

The first and foremost tip is to understand the manner in which search engines work.

Your key phrases should also be mentioned in the URL and other related file names since search engines look in them. Your description tags will not be seen in your Website but will be featured in text form when search engine display their results.

It would also be a good idea to check your standing after conducting some dummy searches through various search engines. You should also ensure that your site's internal links are cross-linked perfectly since search engines will find it easy to latch on to the right page. Top 10 Webmaster Tools.

We know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important for any web site to achieve success.

1.ResellerGo
This is a great SEO tool that allows you to submit your site to over 2,000 directories within no time. You can try this great SEO tool free of charge by joining and selecting the "Free Plan." It also offers upgraded plans with added benefits.

2.We Build Web Pages
With the help of this SEO tool, you can compare your site against the top 10 sites listed in Google for any particular keyword.

3.Zippy
This SEO tool queries all the major engines and returns results for META search in a format most suitable for webmasters.

5.NUAH
It is another great SEO tool.

6.Widexl
This tool offers the following free SEO tools:
.Link Popularity
.Search Engine Saturation
.Meta Tag Analyzer
.Password Generator
.Geo Tracker

7.iWebTool
iWebTool has a lot of SEO tools including back links and Page Rank predictor, Google Banned Checker, Link Popularity, Keyword Suggestion etc.

8.Ezer
This tool allows you to check your Page Rank across all the data centers.

9.Link Harvester
This tool is probably the most advanced link analysis tool available in the market. It can:
.Find every single site that is linking to you within no time
.Reports the total number of pages of your web site that are indexed
.Reports the total number of links pointing to any specific page
.Reports the total number of inbound links, home page links, and deep link ratio
.And a lot more.

10. HitTail
This SEO tool exposes the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results within no time. It presents these terms to you as suggestions that when acted on can boost the natural search results of your site.

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