The Jeffrey And Tracey Info Emporium

Google SEO is several things, it’s an art and it is a science. Search Engine Optimization is creative and it’s technical. It’s logical, parasitic and opportunistic.

The aim of Search Engine Optimization is to maximise targeted types of valuable traffic to a web site from search engines by improving the visibility of said website in Google organic or unpaid search engine results pages.

Traditionally, this has meant aiming for no1, or top ten positions in Google but SEO has evolved and now a SEO needs to be more of a marketer than just a tech geek. A seo wants to be involved, not simply with high positions in Google for relevant keyphrases, but with analysing competition, traffic and analytics, and changing traffic to leads and sales.

I wish to draw a line between SEO and link-building. One (SEO) is on-page (on-site), the opposite, off-site (Linkbuilding). A quick preface to SEO by the experts at Hobo…..

1. Continually Think about Google’s Guidelines 2. Google Rule change on occasion - keep up to date with them! 3. Onsite, be squeaky clean with SEO! There are a number of seo techniques to avoid! 4. Don’t hide text or links, do not keyword stuff 5. Do not look to ‘fool’ Google - why not provide Google what it needs? Don’t think your smarter than the geeks at Google HQ ;). 7. Remember each algorithm was an plan 1st 8. Suppose sort of a Google engineer, what are they making an attempt to achieve? And why? 9. Google Recommendations can be interpreted differently however ignore search engine SEO pointers at your own peril 10. Obtaining free placement in Google is straightforward - you do not want any reasonably software 11. All you need could be a link from another website to your website.

12. Google wants to understand it is a full link to include you in it’s database (index) of internet sites 13. You’ll be able to submit your site to Google, however I assume it’s pointless - I’ve got never used this technique 14. Some seo experts charge for ’submission’ to Google and different search engines - I would not hassle 15. Be wary - SEO can be a mysterious business - guarantee you do not get scammed by unethical seo corporations 16. Domain authority is among the foremost vital ranking factors in SEO 17. To rank in Google for a keyword your website desires to own online business or domain authority 18. The key of excellent rankings is getting alternative, additional trusted sites, sites to link to you. 19. You cannot pretend authority, but you’ll be able to grow Google authority over time 20. W3C for example could rank in the high ten for anything - a brand new site cannot! 21.

Becoming an authority in your niche is what it’s all about. Hobo is a Scottish SEO specialist. A builder of Joomla and Wordpress content websites and with a specialist team focused on Google search engine optimisation.

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

What is search engine optimization?

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

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

The SEO industry

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

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

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

SEO tools compared

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

Internet Business Promoter (IBP)

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

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

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

3. Results tracking
• Verify search engine positions automatically

Price: $179.95 or $349.95.

LinksManager

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

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

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

Price: $19.95 a month.

SEO Administrator

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

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

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

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

SEO Elite

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

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

Concerning link partners and search engines, SEO Elite can:

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

Price: $167.

SEOToolset

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

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

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

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

Price: $90.00 per quarter per site.

Web CEO

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

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

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

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

WebPosition

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

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

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

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

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

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

Price: $149 or $349.

How to hire an SEO firm

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

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

• Webmaster Guidelines
href=”http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

• Search Engine Optimizers
href=”http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

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

Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for http://www.websitesource.com and http://www.lowpricedomains.com with experience in the website hosting industry.

Keyword optimization involves vital keyword selection and placement strategy depends on successfully identifying your industry related important keywords and then where you can place those keyword for maximum effectiveness.

Effective use of keywords optimization and Phrases on your website

Key to successful web optimization begins with effective use of keywords selection and placement. When researching keywords to use on our website we need to understand how customers really search. As web visitors get more and more internet savvy, they have started searching for two or three words phrases instead of a single word. As study suggest people are using more than a keyword for searching on the net.

By fine-tuning your keyword selection, you’re targeting traffic that is looking for your particular web page. You’ll stand a much greater chance at getting top rankings under the particular keyword phrase. Once you’ve achieved this, move on and look for another competitive keyword phrase. This will get leads for your website.

Ask your customers for advice what they think when surf the net. As a family member, a close friend, or your next door neighbor how he or she might try to find your site on the web. Get different opinions.

Consider keyword phrases that are distantly related to your industry and the competitive are on the web. Web is full of bad spellers, and they’re certainly to use this misspelled keywords, take advantage of that by including these misspelled version as on of your keywords.

If your services are region specific then concentrate on the keywords and phrases that are relevant to that particular region, it may be a country, city, or area of that particular city. People in different area express words differently capitalize on this to get maximum advantage of your keywords and phrases.

Stop using “Stop Words” these are the common words that are often totally ignored by the search engines. Don’t use inappropriate keywords. If you have a particular keyword or phrase in your met tag or web page which is not relevant to content of your website, certain search engines could find yourself banned for those engines altogether.

This article was written by Thomson Joseph a freelance website designer and website promotion expert websites -http://www.website-promoiton-expert.com , http://www.digitallabz.com
digitallabzinfo@yahoo.com

We know that each and every website page is assigned a Google Page rank, based upon a mathematical algorithm. Pages rank on a scale of 0 (zero) the lowest, and 10 (ten) the highest. Linking between websites both internally and externally pass a value or Page Rank.

If site A links to site B, a percentage of Site A’s Page Rank is passed or credited to site B. Nothing is lost from site A in terms of Page Rank unless the link is to a banned area, or bad neighborhood.

The amount of Page Rank Site A passes is determined by the amount of Outbound links of site A’s page. The more Outbound links, the smaller percentage of Page Rank is passed. Pages with large amounts of outgoing links pass very little Page Rank and in some cases may cause more harm than good. Try to avoid linking to pages that have large amount of outgoing links, Like Link Farms etc.

A real life true example. Site A had a Page Rank of 4, there were only 2 outbound links on Site A. One of those outbound Links was to brand new Site B. Brand new Site B had 3 out going links, and NO other Incoming Links, besides the one from Site A. Google awarded Site B a new Page Rank of 4.

From this real life example, we see that the fewer outbound links per page, the more Page Rank is passed.

If Site A in the example above had a large number of outbound links on the page, then a smaller percentage of Page Rank would have been passed and New Site B would have received a lower rank then the equal rank that was passed.

Higher Page rank sites linking to your site to pass PR is consider valuable, but normally the higher Page Rank sites have a tremendous amount of existing outbound links so the true Page Rank Passes is normally minimal. It is also hard at times to get a quality higher Page Rank page to link to your site. Lower Page Rank sites are very important in Passing Page Ranks and link exchanges. Their Page Rank usually grows with age and has more inbound links than outbound links, creating a higher Page Rank, which in turn passes to your site via it’s outbound link.

In general terms, an individual page’s Page Rank is determined by the amount of links going out of that page (outbound) and the amount of links coming to that page (Inbound). A general rule of thumb: you want to have more inbound links than outbound links.

Definite things to avoid.

When doing reciprocal linking, make sure you check the amount of outbound links that not only the page has but the overall site as well. Search engines such as Google doesn’t like Link Farms ( 1000’s of links on the site), gambling sites and pornography. Unless that is your business, don’t link to any of those types of sites.

You can lose Page Rank and Search Engine Results by Linking to sites that are considered Banned, or Bad Neighborhoods. Be aware and check before linking. Even if you aren’t “punished”, you will gain no benefit and the PR leached away from your site is not worth it.

Be aware to whom your site is linking to via outbound links. Periodically check your outbound links making sure that they are:

1) Still an active website

2) Still a resource for the reason you linked to them in the first place

3) They have not changed theme formats and are still a quality site.

Page Rank grows over time. Google updates visible Page Rank infrequently, like every 4-8 months or so. The best SEO strategy is to link to and link exchange with like themed sites or quality sites.

Article by Ed Charkow - Ed is the webmaster at http://www.seoengine.info and http://www.nichesitespecial.com . Reprint rights are granted with live hyperlinks and resource box intact.

If you are one to pay attention to what happens within the Google realm, you might find yourself thrown for a loop these days. As Google updates their results, it seems like they are having some issues dealing with so many new websites popping up.

Indexing 8 billion websites is quite an accomplishment for Google. As they are reluctant to increase this number, they are faced with many challenges in trying to keep some sites within these 8 billion pages while losing some others, after each update they do to their database.

So how do you determine which listings to lose?

We’ve all heard of the “sandbox theory”! (New sites are added to a group of other new sites until a certain amount of time has passed and you’ve proven your worth. Once you’ve proven your site is valuable, Google releases it within its regular search results).

It seems to me that if you don’t own a large network of websites that can easily increase the websites link popularity overnight, your newly created website won’t get hit as hard and is added to the sandbox for only a certain period of time.

On the other hand, if you do own a large network of websites and increase the amount of websites you have, your newly built website(s) will get hit harder and may take a lot more time and promotional effort to get good search rankings results within Google.

Let’s take a look at why this may be true:

1st) It has been long speculated that Google searches through the “WHOIS” data base regularly (”WHOIS” - Contact record of who owns a specific domain name). By doing this Google can now see who owns what and how many domain names they own. By doing this Google can now determine that “Company A” owns 25 websites. This collection of 25 websites can now all be crawled to look for content copying, ghost pages, mimic pages, irrelevant link directories, etc. By knowing that you own 25 websites, Google can quickly determine their worth and rank them accordingly.

2nd) With this knowledge provided by the “WHOIS” data base, Google can also see how many years you’ve registered each domain name for. For instance, if you register all your domain names for only 1 year, there is a possibility that you don’t plan on using these domain names for the long term. Instead, you may be using these new domain
names simply to keep up with new changes on the internet and new standards in search engine optimization.

On the other hand, if you register all of your new domain names for the next 5 years, it is more likely that you are going to use these domain names in the future. This now gives more relevance to each domain name you register for more than 1 year.

I am now recommending to all my clients not only to make sure to register a domain name related to their country (i.e. Canada = .ca), but to also make sure that they register their domain name for 5 years. If you are truly serious about increasing your business online, why would you risk missing your domain name renewals every year and possibly loose your domain name?

Google may also look at how long you’ve owned this website for!

It may be true that by adding your new website to the “sandbox”, Google may also add your website to a “history report”. This history report can give their database detailed information about how old your website is. These days, I believe that it takes about 6-8 months before Google updates your “history report”. By updating, I mean possibly releasing your website further within search results.

See, this combination of “who owns the domain”, “how long will you own the domain name”, and “how old is the website”, can provide a more accurate report to Google as to whether or not this website will survive, stay the course, or provide great content. Through this “history report” and “sandbox report”, your website will go through an “exam” after 6-8 months in order to determine whether or not you are ready to play with the big boys online or whether or not your website has what it takes to succeed online.

Until Google increases the amount of websites it will index within its results, we are all going to have to battle to stay on top. Internet marketing in general is becoming increasingly tougher with every month that passes. It has finally caught up to us and we are now starting to fight a hard battle.

One more thing you may notice:

Google’s cache (Snapshot image of your website when it crawls through) is becoming a little wonky lately. One day Google will have an updated cache, the next day it won’t have a cache at all, and the following day it will have a cache of your website from 2 weeks ago.

What does this all mean?

When Google crawls a certain page, it looks at everything. Let’s take one specific internal page in your website. This specific page may be ranked 10 different times within the search results for 10 different key searches depending on the content within that certain page.

As Google increasingly fights to keep certain pages, its cache may be having a tough time keeping up and delivering the most relevant cache to date. More times than not, the front page of a website doesn’t have a cache at all anymore! This is very interesting. It may mean that your front page may not be the “key” anymore since more and more people are trying to cram everything under the sun within their front page.

It is possible that your “Main Sub-Categories” are weighing higher in Google’s eyes for the quality and relevance of your internal content.

What you want to do is to provide a clean map to all your internal pages. Your front page was the best solution for providing a map to all of your pages. Maybe these days, your front page should be used only to link to your main “sub-categories” and also to show your most recent posted content!

I will leave you with this. If you are new online or even an experienced marketer online, buying many new domain names may not be the key to increase your success right now. Buying new domains should be a long term investment. Try increasing the popularity of your already established websites in order to gain more exposure for your business. Owning more domains increases the amount of time and effort you need to promote each one. Like I’ve mentioned many times before, owning a network of websites is not enough! You need to expand your horizons online, increase your content and create more business partnerships every chance you have.

For more of Martins articles, go here: http://www.smartads.info/newsletter

About The Author:

Martin Lemieux is the president of the Smartads Advertising Network. Smartads is here to help your business grow online and offline. Visit us today!

International: http://www.smartads.info
Smartads Canada: http://www.smartads.ca

Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article within your website or newsletter as long as the entire article remains the same as well as the resource box. Please make sure to activate at least one link.

If you would like to know when your site was last indexed by Google, you can find out easily by using the Google cache command. By typing “cache:www.logcabinrustics.com” into the Google search engine, I learned that my site was last indexed yesterday. The Google cache also displays the web page at the time of indexing, so you can see the latest version of your page that was indexed by Google.

As some webmasters have learned, the Google cache feature can be particularly handy when a valuable website and its backup have been lost due to computer failures. It may be time-consuming, especially if you have hundreds of pages, but you can actually retrieve the “lost” pages from your site in the form that Google last indexed them. If this doesn’t work, you might also try the Wayback Machine at archive.org.

Forensic experts have also used the Google cache feature to their advantage—to retrieve incriminating evidence from the web. This should be an important reminder to all webmasters not to publish sensitive material online. A later decision not to publish some tantalizing tidbit, and the frantic page-pulling that ensues, may not be enough to erase those ill-said words from the Net.

Webmasters are supposed to be able to block Google from caching their site by using the “no cache” tag. However, many don’t even try this for fear of losing favor in the company’s powerful search rankings. Although Google says the “no cache” tags don’t affect web rankings, some webmasters aren’t so sure.

Other Helpful Google Operators

Other helpful search engine operators of particular value to webmasters include:

LINK: The LINK operator, when used in conjunction with your domain name, is supposed to tell you how many links are pointing to your site. The syntax for this command is “link:http://www.thevegetarianexpress.com/. By way of caution, this only shows how many links indexed by Google that are linking to you. A more inclusive option is found at the Marketleap website, where the Link Popularity Tool reports how many links are pointing to your site from other well-traveled search engines as well.

INURL: Google’s INURL operator will restrict your search to one site only. For example, typing “inurl:www.logcabinrustics.com log beds” will bring up the log beds only on the Log Cabin Rustics furniture website. This is a particularly helpful option if you are looking for a specific phrase on one site.

INTITLE: The INTITLE operator is helpful if you are looking for sites with a particular keyword in their title tag. Use this phrase at Google by typing in “intitle:furniture” or whatever other search term you are looking for.

Variations of the above themes include the ALLINURL and ALLINTITLE search operators. These are particularly useful when you are looking for a string of keywords in either a title or site. For example, if you start a query with allinurl:, Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the url. For instance, [allinurl:logcabinrustics.com bunk beds] will return only documents that have both “bunk” and “beds” in the url.

Google operators can be especially helpful in analyzing the web pages of key competitors. To learn more, visit http://www.google.com/help/operators.html.

Copyright 2005 Log Cabin Rustics

Cari Haus is webmaster for http://www.logcabinrustics.com, an online retailer of quality log furniture.

Firstly, let me say that I am sure all our thoughts went out to the victims, their families and friends of these bombings, and other incidents where innocent people lose their lives. Secondly, an SEO ezine is not the place to debate the rights and wrongs of such events.

However, I would like to use the numbers involved to show you how there are patterns in everything if you have the eyes to see. Where some people hear music and see the chords, we see numbers, patterns and synchronicities. For us this is a major part of SEO work; spotting the trends, analysing how small changes affect page rankings and which keywords are being used to find our pages.

As a Maths man, I think Pythagorus may well be considered the father of Western Mathematics. Who can forget the great mantra “The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides” – they don’t write ‘em like that any more! But how many of you realise that he is also the father of Numerology (“Number is the law of the Universe”) – the science of number patterns and fate (his words, not mine).
Numerology has been discounted by the mainstream in the West as “stuff and nonsense”, but many other cultures still revere it. Sceptics, please bear with me, I am not for or against Numerology, but the number patterns I hope you will see are very interesting.

So, back to the London bombings, what time did they happen? The first reports I saw were for 3 simultaneous explosions at 8.49 in the morning rush hour. Do you see it – look again, play with the numbers – any co-incidences you can see. OK, coming ready or not! 8.49 is also 11 minutes to 9 – now where have I seen those numbers before. Interestingly, in the UK, 9/11 is actually 11/9 (we put day then month).

OK, we’ll put that down to coincidence, now do you remember the date of the bombings? Well, it was the date of our first ezine 7th July 2005. At first glance there doesn’t seem to be much there. However, in Numerology, numbers in dates with multiple digits are reduced by adding them together until a single digit is obtained. So 7th July 2005 becomes 7/7/2+0+0+5 = 777.

I am sure most of you know what 666 stands for, but what about 777? Well, just as 666 is the “sign of the beast”, 777 is the “sign of the spiritual warrior”. Pythagorus believed that by attaching events to certain numbers or dates, you could change their vibration and reduce or increase their power. Whether we believe in Numerology or not, there are obviously people around who understand, believe in and use these ideas to their perceived advantage.

So, you can see that if you spend your life looking at numbers and patterns for SEO, it creeps into your whole view of life. Remember that all of the search engine companies use algorithms to calculate where a site will appear in the search results for a specific page. Our job is to understand these patterns of activity and use this knowledge to the advantage of our customers.

So, in summary, being a customer of SEO Gurus is really like doing work in the community – after all you are keeping two very sad, old guys out of the asylum!

John Fowler trained as a Mathematican and has worked in the IT industry for over 30 years, much of the time in sales related functions. He now spends his time between being a partner in SEO Gurus and as a sales and management trainer for ICT companies. John can be contacted via http://www.seogurus.co.uk

Would you like a checklist of the important steps to take in optimizing a web site? Well, here it is:

1. Use a keyword research tool to find profitable phrases (i.e. those that are actually being searched for).

2. Build each page optimized for a single keyword phrase. Also sprinkle in some secondary keywords relevant to the main keyword.

3. Link your web site together so that all pages are only a couple of clicks away from the homepage.

4. Use text links instead of fancy graphics or buttons to link to your pages.

5. When you add a link to a page where the main keyword phrase for that page is “blue widgets”, make
sure the links to that page include the phrase “blue widgets”.

6. Build a sitemap.

7. Add articles / Content to your web site and add links from these articles to your important pages.

8. Get quality link partners.

Once you have completed these 8 steps, repeat steps 7 & 8 over and over again. I would say that 80% of your time on a new site should be steps 7 and 8. Add content & find
link partners. A great way of getting links into your site is writing and publishing articles on article submission sites. When webmasters take up your article and publish it on their site, you get an incoming link to yours.

As your site climbs in the search engine rankings, you can decide when you are happy with your rankings and reduce the amount of time spent on 7 & 8.

*********************************************************
Andy Williams is author of the free, ezSEO internet marketing newsletter,
offering subscribers up-to-date information on all aspects of internet
marketing. His search engine
optimization website offers unique, no
BS information, for free.
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How Many Directory Links Are Enough? By: Rich Brunelle

If you run a business and you could place your phone listing or
Yellow Pages ad in every phone book in the country, would you?
Maybe not, if you sold a locally distributed product or service
and didn’t have any reason to want the business to grow beyond
the reach of the local phone book. But, what if . . . you sold a
product or service that you wanted people traveling through your
area to know about? What if you sold a product or service that
was easily distributable world-wide? Of course you would want to
spread your listing far and wide.

There are lots of directories out in cyberspace. There are those
that are industry specific, those that are locale specific, some
for free, and some require you pay a fee. But, they all have one
thing in common. People use them. And, as long as people use
them . . . so should you. If you want me to find your web site,
you want to place your ad or URL data everywhere I might look
for you. Why? Because you want me to buy, sell, subscribe,
contribute, or other from you instead of your competitor. While
Google and MSN would like you to believe that the whole world
searches them and them alone, they are wrong. Myself, I’ve grown
annoyed at searching major search engines and finding pages of
nothing relative to my search, or pages that are nothing but
search script generated garbage. So, I personally search a
variety of directories.

But, say you are joined at the hip with Google, MSN, or any of
the other major search engines. And being so inclined, do only
search their services. Guess where some of their collected data
comes from? That is correct, other directories! And, directories
are an excellent “relative link” for search engines to find
pointing towards your site. Now, I am not suggesting not using
the major search engines. By all means do!

There are SEO Experts that swear by page optimization your web
site gets higher ranking with search engines. Others will tell
you that writing articles gets you the best ranking. And, others
will claim text ads, classified ads, e-books, link engines, link
exchanges, and so-on and so-forth, get you a better ranking.
Myself, I think a little differently. I think you need to do all
of it, plus stand on the street corner periodically and announce
to the world who you are and what you do. That’s what is
required to promote your web site to the fullest. And, unless
you already get a million or so hits at your site daily, you
need to promote your web site as much as possible.

Here are some new directory sites for you to add your URL data
to:

Datajam’s Cool Sites Index http://www.djam-promo.com/ is a
FREE/Any Topic Directory that will start writing articles about
sites listed in its database at random. This gives Users a
potential second method of promotion.

djamSEARCH http://djamsearch.djam-promo.com/ is a FREE/Any Topic
Directory that promotes User sites by bringing multiple listings
of sites when a search category is selected.

PromoSEARCH http://promo.glwb.info/ is a FREE/Any Topic
Directory that is very search engine friendly. It is still under
development but is accepting site data.

MGLResources http://mglconstruction.com/Resources2.asp is a new
FREE/Construction Trades Directory. It is a good place to add
your site data if you have anything to do with construction,
building materials, or are a Contractor.

WebDirectory http://djam-promo.com/WebDirectory/ is a new
FREE/California by City Directory that invites California based
sites to add their data to its database.

Feel free to visit any of the sites noted above and add your web
site information. While you are at it, feel free to register at
djam-promo.com, it is free and we would like to see some new
users join us.

In the first part of this series on ranking at the top of the search engines, we
discussed diversifying your Internet marketing efforts. We introduced several
methods including RSS feeds, Link Popularity, Article Marketing, Blogs, and
physically altering your pages to make them more target-able for select keywords.
All of these share the key of great content in order to unlock success.

Think of each method as a vehicle that carries the greatest cargo in the world. That
cargo is your business, your product, and the word you want to get out.

Now….

So you’re thinking, “show me how to set up these things and get traffic coming in!”
We’ll get to that, but imagine if you go to all the trouble of rewriting ten of your web
pages, setting up a blog, writing some articles, buying some text links, syndicating
your site over RSS, and you flip the switch and everyone hears you…

But then surprise! Your audience feels like they’re watching an old, dubbed Karate
movie… the words come in English three seconds after the guy moves his mouth…in
Chinese. Your new parade of eager visitors turns away and never comes back.

Then you’d hate me, the Internet, your old first grade teacher… and we don’t want
that! So before we start adding marketing bells and whistles to your site, lets focus
on the secret ingredient they all share, the solid foundation… super, juicy, colossal
content! And, you can start drafting that immediately.

Great Content- What Makes It?

Is there a site you visit nearly every day? Why do you go there? Do you learn
something or take back some knowledge? Guess what… the site has “good”
content.

In terms of business, you’re probably on the web researching, buying, or selling
something. The Internet is all about information exchange. In whatever vehicle it’s
delivered to you, if the information is simple to find and well packaged in easy to
understand, bite size pieces, you’re happy. And you’ll probably go back to the same
place when you need more of that information.

In your case, content is information about/promoting/creating awareness about
your business. To turn a new visitor into a new client or customer, you want to
convey that information in a genuine, honest, no strings, down and dirty package.

So then, on the surface, your packaging should be:

Let’s take this article… the layout, wording, sentence structure, and my personality
package the content. The content is the underlying message I want to share with
you– that all of the latest e-marketing techniques won’t help you one bit if you
don’t understand the ideology behind them first, how they work, and how to adapt
them to attract people to your own, unique piece of the Internet.

Great Content- How to write it

That’s going to vary depending upon your audience. So let’s start there! First, know
who your audience is. Be yourself. If you are dishonest and pretend to be
something you’re not, it will show in time and you’ll lose all the work you put in.

Which brings me to another important point. Write with confidence. If you are
confident in what you are writing and you aren’t attempting to deceive anyone (i.e.
you are not selling seeds to an audience of botanists when your only skill is brick
laying), you will earn people’s respect.

Trust goes a long way. You don’t have the luxury of delivering your content in
person. You have a very short time to convince people you are not the latest scam,
you have something to offer that will help them, and they can feel safe doing
business with you or at least willing to learn more.

That’s a pretty tall order! But you can do it. Let’s start with some guidelines for
writing your content. Remember… a web page, an RSS feed or a news article will all
share these commonalities.

Great Content- Thematic Essentials

Great Content- Mechanical Essentials

Concluding Thoughts…

Internet marketing takes time, perseverance, and practice. A ton of all three. If you
are swamped with work and honestly can’t commit, hire someone to help you or do
it for you.

You wouldn’t allow a brochure to be printed with spelling errors and bad photos.
Your online presence is no different.

Now that you’re working on writing, next time we’ll learn how to encase your
content in some of the latest Internet marketing methods. I’ll show you how they
really can increase links and get traffic flowing. In this series we’ll delve into details
about the pros and cons of each method, and how you can start using each right
away to increase traffic and links. Start writing and revise, revise, revise! See ya
soon!

John Krycek is the owner and creative director of http://www.themouseworks.ca. Learn more about search engine marketing and web design and development in easy, non-technical, up front English!