SEO is the process in which your website undergoes redevelopment to more effectively communicate your keywords to search engines. Optimizing your website enables it to rank higher on major search engines.

Search engines rank websites based on two major factors:

• unique content that contains pertinent keywords,
• and link popularity – the number of quality incoming links to your website.

Other important factors that determine your ranking with search engines are the architecture of the site, the visibility of your content, its underlying code and how natural your site appears to the engines. Oftentimes, sites may have duplicate content, session ID numbers, flash content, dynamic content and other such problems which prevent webpages from being indexed.

The development of incoming links from well-established websites is one of the major variables in attaining high search engine rankings. Link development is absolutely essential to your website’s success and is a major part of the optimization. A high quantity of quality links can be developed through a variety of means, including:

• One-way links from directories and other related sites
• Reciprocal link exchanges with related sites
• Fee-based directory submissions
• Article writing and submission to article directories

Major search engines often provide information and guidelines to help with site optimization. Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Yahoo! Site Explorer provides a way for webmasters to submit URLs, determine how many pages are in the Yahoo! index and view link information.

The leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click.

One of the most efficient SEO tools on the internet is the Backlink checker which checks how many Backlinks point to one specific link. Another popular tool is the Pagerank checker which checks the Google Page Rank of a webpage.

PageRank is an exclusive technology of Google which evaluates the popularity of your website’s pages by a note between 0 and 10. However, in order to know this rank, you have to download and to install the Google Toolbar. PageRanker is FREE and very easy to use. You only need copy & paste the HTML code in your website to show your visitors a image with PageRank & Alexa Rank values.

Also, you can compare the profiles of two domains to determine its relative importance and popularity. This tool is specially useful for webmasters to compare website info.

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. Backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your website. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a website (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another website. Backlinks are also called incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links (backlinks) to that site. More backlinks to your website, higher your search engine result position.

Remember, increased search engine referrals does not guarantee increased sales. SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator’s goals.

Source by Kathy Sanders

Whether developing a brand new website or replacing an existing one, businesses have to put a lot of time, effort and money into increasing their online visibility. Building organic traffic and improving SEO rankings can take several weeks, or even months; yet one bad decision can destroy everything in a matter of hours. Prevent this from happening to you by minimizing your risks, and maintaining healthy rankings by following the next set of simple guidelines.

Sustain existing linking structure and URLs

Websites that have been around for a while probably already have built value through internal and inbound links. Web users, as well as search engines, are familiar with the URLs of the site and changing them would diminish their value. Therefore, if possible, maintain your linking structure and search-engine-friendly URLs when designing the pages of your new website.

Do not forget to redirect old URLs

It would be ideal if you could keep all of your old URLs, but that is quite often not possible. For instance, some pages from your old website may no longer exist in the new copy. If that is the case, you can still use those old familiar pages to your advantage, by setting up a 301 redirect using, for example, an htaccess file on a Linux server. By using this feature, users visiting the old URLs will automatically be redirected to similar URLs on the new site. If there is no corresponding site, redirect traffic to your homepage.

Search engines will pick up on 301 redirects. They will record them so they can send web users trying to access the old pages, straight to the new URL. Pay attention to your Google Analytics

Web designers often make the mistake of launching a new website without transferring their Google Analytics. Without the transfer, they take the chance of losing valuable analytics data, and will also not be able to review how the new website is performing right away.

Update to your conversion tracking software

Because they want to change their conversion targets, new websites will quite often have new or updated actions added to their pages. This can be quite beneficial, as long as they also add new goals in their tracking software, and update the goal tracking URL once the new site is launched.

Optimize Meta and title tags

It speaks to reason that, when you frequently optimize an old website for SEO, you would do the same for your new site’s Meta and title tags. Use targeted keywords, make sure all your links are working, and verify that your website design is search engine friendly. Replace non-productive Meta and title tags, but keep the ones that are already ranking high.

Stick to one homepage

Having multiple versions of your homepage is not a good SEO practice. Webmasters should ensure that a homepage is only accessible through one URL only and that any pages linking to the homepage use this particular URL in the link. This rule also counts for the navigation menu, header and footer links, the logo, etc. The best way to handle multiple homepage versions is by setting up a 301 redirects as soon as a preferred format has been selected. This format can be with or without the ‘www’ in the URL.

Improve your footer links

No SEO strategy is complete without internal link optimization. Internal links are vital to any web design’s success as they allow search engines to easily locate all the sections on a website. Through the keyword-rich anchor text in the footer links, search engines can determine the topics of the web pages; these links also assist search engines in finding content throughout a website, indexing internal pages, and identifying content on individual internal pages.

Send Google a new sitemap

Inform Google about your new website by submitting a new XML sitemap to them as soon as the new site has been launched. Simply upload your sitemap to the root folder of your site, and enter the file into the sitemaps section of Google’s webmaster tools feature. In addition, use the innovative Google’s webmaster tools to see how the search engine crawls and indexes your site, to find out if you have diagnostic problems, and to keep track of your link and query traffic.

Despite all the careful planning, technical problems and a drop in rankings can always arise when launching a new website. If you experience such problems, use the diagnostic section of Google webmaster tool to identify the issues and repair them.

The Diagnostics section of Google Webmaster Tools offers a range of options to identify and repair these issues. Areas of concern are web crawler errors and Meta tag and title tag mistakes. Screen these areas frequently and thoroughly, and initiate repairs as soon as problems arise. Add a targeted SEO strategy, and before you know it, your new website will reach rankings better than you could have ever imagined.

Source by Mia Cusack

A common problem is that most webmasters think it is going to be too difficult or they give up quickly. Like anything else, you need to accumulate knowledge and experience, to improve your SEO skills.

Do not give up if you struggle a bit at first and understand that it is very common. With everything you do, you cannot get something perfect at once. But you need to commit to the idea of getting one keyword in the number one spot on Google. If you jump from one traffic generation method to another, you always find the same thing. No method gives you instant traffic. Every and each method requires some time to at least get used to it.

A good idea is to focus on SEO for an entire month and you should then see some results. At least if your website is brand new you should see some rankings starting from MSN, then Yahoo and finally Google. The older your site gets and the more backlinks it accumulates the faster it will rank.

Do not commit SEO suicide.

Pagerank does not give you any significant meaning of your progress. Simple because all websites pagerank are updated by the search engines every couple months. You might already have some pagerank, but you can only see how much pagerank you have when search engines do a pagerank update. So do not give up just because you have no pagerank.

On the other hand, you can see where you rank instantly. Whenever someone searches for a keyword in a search engine, the spiders put up the results with the best optimized websites at the very top. This is done each time someone searches something. That is obviously good news, there is no such thing as ranking update. If you merit the number one position, you are going to be there now.

There are several reasons why these thing work like this. But it is technical things that are not very important for us to know.

Checking how many backlinks you have is also something which many webmasters do the wrong way. First of all never use Google, because they do not show all backlinks a website has. It is recommended to use Yahoo or other search engines.

If you got a thousand links the past month, it does not mean you are going to see a thousand backlinks when you check how many backlinks you have.

For example, if you got backlinks from webpages that are not yet indexed, they will not show up. There is nothing to worry about here, but simple do not judge your progress by the number of backlinks you have.

You judge your progress by checking where your website ranks for your particular keyword. That is the ultimate method.

The motto is, have fun while doing SEO. It is worth doing, so why not have a happy attitude, it makes thing better. Getting the first keyword on page one or two in Google for the first time is very exiting. Probably once you master SEO you feel less exited when you get rankings. This is like making money online. Your first twenty dollars or the first sale is the most exiting.

Source by Karl Sultana

Often one can see a trend in which search engine optimization personnel develop tactics that are adversarial to the search engines, as if you have to struggle against them or trick them in order to achieve good rankings.

This is, in fact, untrue. The reason is because the livelihood of a search engine depends on its ability to deliver relevant content. If you have valid, useful, and relevant content on your site, the search engines actually want you to reach the top.

To this end, Google has posted a number of webmaster guidelines to help companies get their SEO processes on track. But despite the inclusion of these guidelines, many companies either miss them or gamble on the idea that trying to fool Google will be effective.

The guidelines laid out by Google are fairly simple to follow, and are divided into three sections. These are design/content, technical, and quality guidelines.

To begin with, you have to make sure your site is ready for your SEO measures. This means submitting it to Google (or other search engines). It’s a strange step to forget, and you can get crawled without it – as long as other sites link to you – but some people have been known to miss it. It is such a simple step, though, you just need to get it done. You should also submit a site map because this helps the search engine understand the structure and layout of your site. And this means you’ll have a better chance of making sure Google sees your whole site.

For design and content guidelines, the recommend that you create a site with a clear architecture or hierarchy that employs good text links. The content that you include should also be clear and informative. Always keep in mind the keywords your customers might use to find your product or service, and then be sure to include them in the content. If at all possible, you should use text instead of graphics of words, since Google still can’t read a picture.

Keep the mechanics well oiled. This means making sure there are no broken links, and the title tags or alt tags are useful and descriptive. There is also best practices in HTML, and you should follow them carefully.

The technical guidelines are, well, a little more technical. Make sure that you actually allow the bots to crawl your site, and allow them to do it without session IDs or arguments. You should also use the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This tells Google whether or not you’ve changed your content since the last time you were crawled. You should also make proper use of the robots.txt file, so you can keep the bots out of sections of your site that don’t really add much value.

The quality guidelines cover a lot more specific dos and don’ts. You should always build your pages for your customers first, and then employ SEO tactics for the search engines second. You should never, ever employ cloaking tricks, i.e. feeding the search engines something different than what you serve to a customer.

They go on to say that you should avoid using hidden text or hidden links, and you shouldn’t create reams of duplicate content. Don’t create pages that have malicious intent, and doorway pages that are auto generated and have no value to a visitor.

By following simple guidelines like this, and, above all, always providing valid and valuable content, your SEO practices can help you reach the top of the search engine ladder.

Source by Andy Eliason

Below is a useful guide to help you get your first clients and to get your SEO / SEM business off the ground. Before I begin, please keep in mind that “word-of-mouth” is king, get the word out, talk and mention your business to whomever, whenever and wherever. Remember, the more exposure you offer your business, the more chances you will have landing that first deal.

Search engine optimisation marketing and offline selling tips:

1. Target your market and know your customers, i.e. do some background research. It helps to initially concentrate on one industry, e.g. travel websites, and know the terms, your clients, their line of work and their competition.

2. Localise yourself, concentrate on a local area. Try not to tackle too much at first, focus and concentrate on local businesses and gain their trust. Remember “you are a local” and share similarities.

3. Meet with them, form a partnership and more personal relationships.

4. Assess your advertising options (depending on your budget), consider using the following advertising tools:

a. Local newspapers – place a catchy add.

b. T-shirts – they create great advertising on the street or wherever you go. Also, choose an eye catching slogan.

c. Business cards – choose an appealing and aesthetically pleasing design, trust me professionalism and great design go a long way.

d. Billboard and brochure advertising for those that have the financial means.

e. Taxi advertising: Taxis can be seen all over town by motorists, many of who may happen to be company executives looking to increase their online sales.

f. Radio is also not a bad way of reaching out to people, however this can be costly.

5. Join your local chamber of commerce, meet business people and discuss your SEO business. Offer them a FREE brief website analysis / proposal on their website and show them how you can increase their online traffic and sales.

6. Referrals, referrals, referrals and partnerships. Speak to web design / web development and ISP companies, form partnerships, offer them commission if they refer companies to you.

7. Last but not least: There is nothing like cold calling. Go straight to your source, bypass the marketing manager, do not collect $200, and head straight for the decision maker. Again, as in tip #5, offer a FREE SEO website analysis.

Source by Ilan Touri

Each day many more are launched. Google indexed over 1 trillion web pages. The actual number is far higher – these are just the pages that Google indexed.

For just about any important key word that you want to use, the competing pages will run into the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Add to that the fact that you are far from being the only one being interested in SEO. As a matter of fact, millions are, of who many, be it your competitors themselves be it SEO specialist, will be fishing in the same pond.

I do not want to sound demotivating. The contrary is true, for any successful campaign (in just about anything) we always have the age old adagium: know your enemy.

If you think about starting with SEO, make sure you are very, very serious about it.

Because those that are not, that just try out basic or standard levels, or stick to half hearted attempts (or order ’standard SEO advice’ for that matter) will not get anywhere.

As said, there are only so many top positions, only 10 on the first page of every search engines, and 10 more on the second page. Like there are only 3 medals in the Olympics… and this is an Olympics.

My advice is always: be enthused, passionate, fully focus, make that you like the game as much as you like… your most favourite game.

Because if you don’t, there is no doubt about it that there will be 50, or 100 others that will snatch those medals.

It used to be a day on the beach. You ordered a SEO advice report, or did a little linking, a little social networking, and that was that. These days are gone.

The very good news is: if you have that passion, you will get there.

Because then you will have something very precious, something that no other, not even the largest SEO Marketing Company charging thousands per month has.

After all, they work with staff. That work from 9 to 5. That can only gather so much interest in the client of the day…

Passion.

Passion sells, passion enthuses, passion attracts the attention.

And you yourself are the best possible person in the world to sell your own product or service with passion.

Source by Bernardus  Geurts

Offering SEO article writing service is one of the most lucrative ways to make money online these days. This is because content and better page ranking are pre-requisites for any internet marketer to make decent sales.

Here’s how you can start your SEO article writing service:

1. Learn the trade. Before you take the leap, understand the ropes of this endeavor first. Read relevant online resources that were written by expert SEO article writers. These include blogs, ebooks, ezines, and articles. It will also help if you attend seminars and training programs where you can definitely get useful tips and techniques.

2. Build your own website. Make it hassle-free for your potential clients to find you online by building your very own website. Get a memorable domain name and.com extension. Fill it up with great content that will speak volumes about your writing skills and make sure that you secure a good page ranking. You can do this through search engine optimization and by aggressively promoting your website using all internet marketing tools.

3. Build a good online reputation. It’s important that you make yourself known as someone who’s talented, dependable, and trustworthy. Go to great lengths to impress each of your clients. Give them more than their money’s worth. If you do this, your clients will surely get the word out in no time. As you know, word-of-mouth advertising can definitely bring wonders to your sales and profits.

Source by Sean R Mize

Being able to have your small business show up in the search engines is essential for driving commerce to your store. Many companies are being lost in the rat race of trying to get their website to show up while their competitors are pushing them to page sixty or seventy in the search engines. So with everybody optimizing his or her websites and online stores for SEO, how is a small business supposed to compete? The answer isn’t as hard as one may think.

There are several things that you can do to grow your business and SEO can help you do that. To dive into SEO without a strategy is like writing an article without an outline. Some of the experts out there can do it, but having the outline or strategy is what separates the good from the best. The first step in this strategy thing is to decide on your niche. If you’re running a plumbing company in Alabama, you are going to need to optimize your website to fit that niche. If you don’t tailor your website to fit that specific niche, you’ll be competing with every plumbing company in the nation or even in the world.

SEO is another marketing vehicle. However, what makes SEO so powerful and effective is that it is not a seasonal form of marketing. When I say seasonal marketing, I’m talking about those forms of marketing in which you spend more money based on the season. For example, Starbucks produces red holiday cups for their drinks, companies spend millions of dollars cutting costs for sales and print media, and other companies pay the tv stations ridiculous amounts of money to show their commercials during the Superbowl. Unless you have an unlimited budget for marketing, a smart CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) will not allow the marketing team to spend so much money all year long. Even if your marketing efforts were effective in driving the traffic in, the average consumer cannot always afford to be buying from you. SEO allows you to position your company to be available to the consumer when they are ready to buy.

Building your website to cater to your locale is essential for gaining new customers. The theory behind small business SEO is that your website needs to rank well in the search engines so that your local customers can find you easily and quickly when they would like to take you up on your service.

For small businesses especially, time is money. Having your website optimized for SEO is a great way to get new customers to your business. A website that relays information to customers in your local area will not only bring you new business, but will show that you’re professional and easy to get a hold of when the time comes for your service.