Super Simple Ways To Optimize Your Site For Search Engines

While serious search engine optimization remains a difficult and often daunting task for your average website owner, there are many simple things you can do to optimize your site for the search engines. These simple tasks are relatively easy to perform and can be very beneficial to any search engine optimization campaign.

Page Titles

One of the most important aspects of on page optimization is to optimize all your page titles. Very few homemade websites and even those made by far more costly amateur and even professional web designers forget, or just don't know, that you should place your most important keyword phrase or two in your page title. If your #1 most important keyword is "orange cat figurines", then your page title should look something like this:

Company Name - Orange Cat Figurines

Simple as that! As long as you don't repeat one word more than several times in the title, you can place more than one phrase in the title, like this:

Company Name - Orange Cat Figurines, Feline Figurine Store

Notice we didn't repeat a single word more than once, fit in 2 important keyword phrases and also fit in the official company name? This is a good title. You can also move the company name to the end of the title to place greater importance on your phrases, like this:

Orange Cat Figurines and Feline Figurines at Company Name

All three formats make good page titles for just about any website.

Body Text

Next, we have the body text of the site. So often, you see sites that have very little or no text on their sites at all. Your main page especially, needs to have some good descriptive text that incorporates the purpose of the website and your most important keyword phrases. Flash sites, sites with splash or entrance pages and sites that are graphics heavy, too often miss this important step.

Your text should read naturally and explain what your site offers and can even include a summary of your products, services, direct links to important pages on the site and contact information.

Page File Names

The file names of each page of your site are also important and can be optimized. Here are some examples of appropriate optimization of page file names:

orange-cats.htm
orange-cat-figurine.htm
cat-figurines.htm
blackcatfigurines.htm

It's quite simple, name the pages that you have these products on with the most important keyword phrase for those products. Avoid using too many words here, just 1 short keyword phrase works best. There's still an argument as to whether the hyphenated version or the non hyphenated version is best. You can also use underscores as well. If your site is already built, you may not be able to change the filenames easily, but if you add additional pages, you can certainly use optimized file names like above.

Heading Tag

This is the very simple H1 tag that makes the text look very large on the page. When the heading tag is used in a page, the search engines tend to think that the phrase contained inside it is very important. The heading tag should be used at the top of a page to highlight one important keyword phrase that is describing the content of the page.

Alternate Image Text

While some search engines don't bother to read this text, some major ones still do. You can optimize the alternate image text to describe an image, but don't stuff it with keywords. Here are some examples of good alternate image text that incorporates keywords:

Orange Cat Figurine (to describe an orange cat figurine) Cat Store Logo (for the logo) Cat Figurine Catalog (for button linking to the main catalog page showing cat figurines)

The alternate text names of each image will also show up when you hover your mouse over an image or for people who are on low speed connections and whose images don't load or take a long time to load.

There you are, 5 very simple and easy ways to optimize your site for search engines.

Lydia Quinn writes for SearchTheWebLive!, an up and coming search engine portal. Visit us at: http://www.searchtheweblive.com/

Link Bait - What is it?

The internet marketing world prides itself on its own language and set of unique terminology that only someone used to surfing the wild and wooly world of SEO blogs would understand. While this makes for a nice code amongst those in the know, oftentimes I find new clients totally in the dark with the jargon, and afraid to ask for an explanation for fear of looking foolish! With the explosion of blogs and other social media, the term du jour for many web professionals is "link bait". While it might sound a little bit high tech and mysterious, it is actually neither! Let's take a quick, closer look.

Link bait simply refers to creating content that is designed to attract readers from around the web. I like to call it "strategic content" as it's written with a surreptitious goal in mind: To have other bloggers and social networks comment or refer to it in their own respective sites and communities as a "must read" piece of content. Of course, you are probably thinking that this is should be your goal for EVERY post you make, right? And this is true...but the fact of the matter is that is often tough to break through the noise online, and to REALLY attract readers like wildfire to a particular post or item on your site, you need to be a bit more pre-meditated in your planning than a normal post. I have a short list of 7 "C's" that I refer to when I NEED a big burst of readers, and need to ruffle some feathers or take special care to get them. Here they are:

1) Confrontation

2) Compilation

3) Comedy

4) Compliment

5) Controversy

6) Charity

7) Creativity

Any one (or combination) of these elements in a good post should attract a bevy of new readers! My personal favorite is Confrontation, just because it is so darn effective..:-) People occasionally need to be disrupted from their daily thought patterns to take a closer look at what you have to say, and if you challenge enough people, or a popular enough public conception, you are sure to get a backload of new backsides to your blog (or website!)

There you have it! Link bait explained. And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask! Go ruffle some feathers and have some fun..:-)

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Article Marketing Don't Mean a Thing If It Don't Get Published

You probably know the benefits of article marketing already.

a. More web traffic
b. Backlinks to your site thereby growing your link popularity
c. A built in marketing viral campaign
d. Establishing yourself as a expert.

And countless others. Even with all the new tools like video and bookmark social, article marketing remains one of the best and most cost effective ways to reach people online and profit your internet business. But it don't mean a thing if you don't get published.

True different article directories have different criteria and some for whatever reason are pickier than others. The point is there are things within your control that can increase the chances of your articles being accepted and published on a regular basis.

1. Check it and then check it again.

All of us would love to turn out the perfect article the first time every time but writing is rewriting. Not just throwing out what you don't need but also proofreading for any spelling and grammatical errors. Even if you happen to get published, the refusal to check your own work makes you look unprofessional in the eyes of your readers. That is very detrimental since one of the perks of article marketing is to be recognized as an expert. Read the article out loud or let someone else read it. Using any type of word processor can help considerably.

2. They don't want a sales page

Article marketing is an incredible form of free advertisement. The mistake comes when some writers confuse providing useful quality content with a sales page. If you want a guaranteed rejection email from an article publisher then write a sales letter masquerading as an article. Leave the advertising to your resource box. If you have given the reader quality information than it stands the reason they will want to find out more by clicking the link in your byline. Most publishers allow a 4 to 5 line resource box. It may not seem like much but a well crafted byline can be a very powerful advertising tool. Keep it brief while still urging your readers to take action.

3. So what are you saying?

If you are writing on a topic and you have five major points you want to make then write five different articles. When writing for an online article directory each article should have one theme presented in a clear, simple and direct manner. Even if your article is free of spelling and grammatical errors or blatant advertising, publishers can reject it on the grounds that they don't have a clue as to what you are talking about. Don't kid yourself. Many of the best directories have very strict standards that are enforced by people who actually read the articles. Try also to avoid making references that only a select few would appreciate but have the rest of us including the publishers scratching our heads. Remember you want as many people as possible to read (and understand) your article so: keep it simple, make it clear, and talk direct.

The goal is to build your own article marketing system that can turn out good content on a regular basis. Article publishers know exactly what they are looking for so stay focused on the 3 things we discussed. Keep publishers as well as your target audience happy and you are well on your way to more web site traffic and extra profits in your account.

Daryl Campbell is an online business owner and affiliate marketer. Get more free information including, tips, tools, video, step by step coaching and up to the minute news to prosper your internet business at Internet Marketing Guide

Search Engine Optimisation Explained

Just what is Search Engine optimisation or SEO? Why does it appear so valuable to so many webmasters and others with internet commerce sites? The definition of this term is simple. It is the process of ranking a site high in the pages of search engine results in order to get more visitors. The concept behind Search Engine optimisation is if your site appears on the first page of a Google or Yahoo search query result then there is a high likelihood that you will have a greater number of visitors. More visitors usually results in more business.

The definition is simple but the process is much more involved. The entity that will do the ranking of your page is not a person but a software process known as a Searchbot that finds your site, classifies it, and determines how popular it is. If it determines that a site is very popular, it ranks it higher than the others. Companies hire Search Engine optimisation consultants to analyze your web site and implement methodologies so that searchbots will be able to easily find and rank your site.

One of the first steps implemented in Search Engine optimisation is finding popular keywords for your site and then making sure that keyword appears on the top or home page frequently allowing the searchbot to classify it. For example, if the products you sell from your site are related to snow skis then you want the words snow skis to appear at several places on especially the home page. The searchbot will traverse the web, find your site, analyze the text, and determine that your site is a one selling snow skis and related products.

Part of Search Engine optimisation is to make sure that the text on your site is actually text (like what you would type in Windows Notepad). In other words, a searchbot cannot read text in images. It can only read pure ASCII character text in order to extract the keywords. The way many sites put this text on their home page is with what are known as keyword articles. In our example of a snow ski site, the webmaster would put informative articles on the home page of the site about snow ski topics. In these articles you would find the words snow skis used quite often so that the searchbot will detect it.

The other popular methodology used in Search Engine optimisation is to have a link back to your site on some other popular site related to your product. This helps the searchbot determine that your site is popular enough to be listed on an already popular site and the result is a higher ranking. If a link to your site for snow skis appears on numerous popular ski resort sites then this is an indication of popularity and searchbots will rank your site higher.

There is a lot more to Search Engine optimisation than just the two concepts above. There are issues such as what not to do. Some are tempted to stuff their sites with hidden keywords that saturate the page but cannot be seen in the browser but will be found by the searchbot. Doing this will ban your site from ever getting classified so avoid it. There are also unrealistic claims made by so-called SEO consultants to get your site ranked quickly but the process actually takes time to adjust strategies and figure out what works and what does not work. A good SEO consultant will know this.

Thomas Sinfield is the founder of http://www.marketingpros.com.au a marketing company based in Queensland, Australia that specialises in search engine optimisation, and internet marketing.

Attracting Visitors - A How-To

Many businesses at the current time are venturing into article marketing, for the internet has lured a large host of customers that are hoping to locate unique and contemporary merchandise. When wanting to attract and keep these customers for a length of time, take care to post descriptions that have creative and unique content.

Writing articles that are effective for article marketing isn't for everyone. You not only have to be a talented wordsmith, you have to be able to take the perspective of many different people. A website receives traffic from many visitors with many goals, every day. To be successful, you have to be able to create an article that will engage many different people, from many different angles. If you can do this, you will find yourself in a very desirable position.

Unique articles are the main portion of article marketing. It's vital to verify that the articles you choose to use are brand new. You should not be able to find any of these articles anywhere else on the internet. Cut and pasting any articles from other sites will make you look bad. It will also not flag the search engines, and your rating will not be changed.

How do you write an article that brings widespread interest to your page? Such writing is not simple. Creative thinking and an excellent grasp of grammar is needed. The author of the article needs to think from many points of view to understand how to interest many types of people from a variety of backgrounds and ethnic groups.

If you are into article marketing as you well should be, exert an effort toward writing a new article daily. Keeping it interesting helps enchant consumers and potential buyers that could get bored with stale article marketing. You look more professional as well as achieve higher ratings. This type of marketing is creative fun for the marketer as well as for the customer(s) that he acquires.

While there are other types of marketing available to you and your business, article marketing is taking the net by storm. This new type of marketing is providing lots of businesses with customers who have been looking for them. By gaining search engine rank and engaging readers in the topic, articles are able to boost your sales and profits.

Article marketing is being used more and more by online entrepreneurs. Some customers find the new articles on their favorite Web sites a big part of the attraction. Those who specialize in it find that intuitiveness and unique content are the most important aspects of writing an article that people will wait for, and appreciate. Unique articles are the main portions of this marketing. It's vital to verify that the articles you choose to use are brand new. You should not be able to find any of these articles anywhere else on the Internet. Cut and pasting any articles from other sites will make you look bad.

Tips To Generate More Traffic To Your Website

A high website traffic is depending upon the number of people visiting a site in a particular day. It can help enhance your ranking in search engines and improve the chance of making regular clients who visit the site. You would get opportunity for placing first in search engine results page and here are 3 keys to get started with building traffic.

Keep it simple. By nature, most people are not looking to complicate their lives. When it comes to creating how-to guides, know that you should avoid complex issues. People are searching for that one great piece of advice that will help them solve their problems. If talking about something complex cannot be avoided, then work hard to present it in the simplest way possible. The blog entries and articles you have written and created will help to illustrate the more complex concepts.

Get your traffic flowing. Think strategically. Be proactive. Don't wait for others to find you. Get out there by joining forums and blogs and letting the world know who you are and what you offer. People need to find your web pages easily, give them lots of ways to link to your site such as use search engines often. Send your homepages where ever you can and let users of your site share your information and spread the word of your site.

As an online business person you're lucky that the Internet is full of great tools to help you direct traffic towards your website. You will be able to generate a tremendous amount of traffic by utilizing article marketing, Search Engine Optimization, link building, and participation in social networking sites. If you understand how to put these tools to work for you, your website will eventually develop a heavy stream of traffic and become a popular website.

Sean Milea writes about Web Site Marketing Strategy and other topics for http://www.bizrave.com

The Viral Marketing Revolution

Viral marketing is the newest member of Internet marketing and it is considered by many to be a very efficient method for advertising on the web. The most influential viral marketing technique would be that of Hotmail.com, which is one of the first free web-based e-mail services. The strategy of the Hotmail.com is:

Gives away a no-cost e-mail address services

Attaches a simple tag at the bottom of every free e-mail that says "Get your private, free e-mail at http://www.hotmail.com"

Waits while people e-mail their own network of friends and associates

Reaps the benefit when friends of the original email user see the message and sign-up for their own free e-mail account

Then, the new users ultimately send the tag to an even wider group of friends who sign-up for the service as well.

Of course, some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and only a small percentage of them work as well as the Hotmail.com strategy. If a marketer wants to start a viral marketing campaign she must include the following 6 basic elements:

Give away services or products. Use the word "free," which is one of the strongest words in a marketer's vocabulary. Most of the viral marketing campaigns offer valuable products or services for free in order to attract users.

Provide an effortless transfer to others. The reason why viral marketing works very well on the Internet is because there is an instant communication among people which is not only easy but also inexpensive. From a marketing standpoint, the message must be as simple as possible that that it will be understood by everyone.

Scale easily from a small user-base to a large user-base. A clever marketer must take understand common human motivations and must design a marketing plan that is built upon the common motivations and behaviors of the target market.

Utilize existing communication networks. Just like in interpersonal life, people over the Internet develop networks of relationships. These relationships include a form of communication, such as e-mail addresses. Viral marketing programs take advantage of these networks by inserting their message into these existing online networks.

Allow other people and companies to take advantage of your resources. Let other people use your resources for their benefit. For example, authors of articles will provide content to website owners in exchange for position on their website. A basic news release can be picked up by up hundreds of periodicals.

Ryan Pitylak is the owner of http://www.viral.ryanpitylak.com where visitors can find information regarding internet marketing as well as articles about viral marketing.

Marketing Your Articles

If you want to increase the power of your article marketing then keep reading. The simple tips that follow are priceless information to anyone serious about maximizing the earning potential of their articles. These tips will guide you into ways of working smarter not harder, and that is what it is all about. The first task when beginning an article marketing program is to create your own website. The website will become your home on the web. Most everything else that you do will happen through your web pages.

Developing and deploying a comprehensive marketing program is critical to the success of marketing articles. This marketing plan should address all aspects of your business. Consultation with an expert is advisable. An experienced consultant can find gaps in your plan, or guide you through the entire process of marketing planning from beginning to end. However created, items on your marketing plan should be checked off as each is completed, serving as a tool to make certain nothing is missed, and a guide to your business's success.

Blogging is an important tool for anyone wishing to be successful in article marketing. This relatively new phenomena is providing authors with more exposure and success in placing their articles. Best of all, it is free. Freelance websites are invaluable to writers as they allow you to list your services where those who need article writers can find you. Freelance work sites function much like bulletin boards that allow you to post the services you can provide and buyers can contact you.

To exchange ideas and information with other writers, consider joining a forum for writers. Forums are particularly valuable places to post questions and receive comments concerning your own work, or the work of other writers. Not just for kids, social networking websites like Myspace.com also make great forums for marketing your articles. Because of the marketing potential of these high traffic websites, many businesses both large and small are building a presence on social networking websites.

You can get a free copy of our latest ebook by clicking here: The 7 Keys To Business Marketing Success. Sean Milea writes about Business Marketing at http://www.BizRave.com

The Truth About Meta Tags Revealed and How They Can be Used Affectedly

An important factor in SEO is the existence of Meta tags in the source code of web pages.There is many factors that affect a website's performance in the search engine. One key factor in the Search Engine Optimisation of a website is Meta tags.

Meta tags are additional pieces of code that you can add into your web pages. These used to have a lot more impact than they do today but they are still part of the overall picture. There are 3 main types to consider - the Meta Title, the Meta Description and the Meta Keyword

The Meta Title is the bit that appears in the blue bar on. This is currently the most important Meta tag in Google. This tag should reflect what the page is about, and also utilize keyphrases where appropriate.

The Meta Description - This is the bit that appears on some of the search engine result pages and should be well written. When you do a search is it always the one in first place you click on, or the one that catches your eye? You can also incorporate some keyphrases here as well.

Meta Keywords - Is where you tell the engine the keywords or keyphrases the page is about and should be the ones you want to get results for. The most common mistake is by people who know a little about SEO who tend to stuff these Metas with as much as they can. If you overdo it you can be classified as spam.

It makes sense though that if you properly target your pages to have 1 or 2 keyphrases then you have a better chance of getting results than if you try to target 50 per page.

Usually, web designers will include the meta tags and this will be the extent of their SEO process; however the inclusion of good meta tags is just a part of the overall process and that's why they fail to compete against expert SEO'rs

For great website design Edinburgh this would be a good choice and also offer online storefront software solutions.

It is important though to think about other factors as well in the keyphrases. One thing to steer away from is: a lot of businesses think it's a good idea to use their competitor's names in their tags and get traffic meant for them. You wouldn't get very far trying to open a business with their name and the same laws more or less apply online.

Author
Michael Hanna
Michael's Website: Poker Sign Up Bonus Codes

Article Marketing Online

Article marketing is an inexpensive venture and can dramatically increase your pool of leads. It can even help you increase your bottom line by adding new streams of income. Article marketing is the absolute advertising technique if you are promoting affiliate products. I bet you think that I am going to list all of the standard reasons, right? Article marketing is one of the best ways to pre-sell a product because it allows you to gain enough credibility with your reader that they are more apt to click on your resource box link to find out more.

Article marketing is one of the best traffic generating strategies and it's easily picked up by the search engines if you chose the right topic, keywords and of course the correct site to submit. I'm am just starting out after read a lots on the internet. and it seems that ezinearticles.com is the best. I would like to generating some qualified traffic to my site. Article marketing is one of the new, Hot ways to generate traffic, because you are meeting the needs of search engines and the needs of your human website visitors as well. You can distribute articles to submission websites like www.ezinearticles.com, and they will be published all over the Internet, with your contact information. Article marketing is by far the most misunderstood form of online marketing there is. It is many different things to many different people.

Article marketing is a tool whose time has come: You can write free articles about your area of expertise. Those articles are distributed across the internet, generating exposure and positive publicity about your business as they are used as free content on various websites. Article marketing is one of the best ways to build free traffic, build your link popularity, build your contact list .

Article marketing is the best content-based marketing solution in the internet today. That is why; every webmasters would like to excel in this technique to get ahead of the pack. Article marketing is a great way to promote your affiliate product or affiliate program. By writing an article that delivers value and offers a subtle mention of your affiliate product, you're well on your way to getting the proper exposure for your promotion. Article marketing is the process of writing articles and submitting them to other web sites to promote your web sites and article pages. This is often referred to as syndication.

Article marketing is a critical part of any successful internet business plan. It is an amazingly effective way to get traffic-building backlinks and a reputation as a reliable source of knowledge.

by William Roberts

I am the owner of several Blogs and websites. I live in South Georgia. I am also just getting started at writing articles.

http://bear-bay.info
2008 all rights reserved

Article Marketing - Discover 4 Persuasive Secrets to Breakthrough With Article Marketing

One of the best ways to promote your products and website these days is through article distribution. Through this, you will be able to write articles that are closely related to your business or industry where it belongs. These articles will be then distributed through different avenues like publishing sites, blogs, and ezines. Each article will contain a resource box that will point the readers to the writer's website. If your articles are all well-written and useful to readers, you will have great chances of being branded as expert on your field and you will attract more online users to your site.

Here are the 4 persuasive secret to breakthrough with article marketing:

1. Widely distribute your articles. Aside for article submission sites, you can also post your articles on your blog, on your Squidoo lenses, and even on your website. Just find a way on how you can tell your readers that your articles are designed to be syndicated. You can also compile your articles to create your own eBook. Offer this eBook to your readers and make it your viral marketing tool by letting your readers share your book to their friends and family members.

2. Make sure that your articles are original. Never copy somebody else's work if you don't want to get penalized by major search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo! To make sure that you don't have a duplicate content, run your articles against anti-plagiarism websites like copyscape.com and articlechecker.com.

3. Make your articles useful and informative. If you want your articles to be reprinted and widely distributed, make sure that they offer readers information that they are looking for. Sometimes, you will need to spill your trade secrets to make your articles worth syndicating.

4. Submit articles on a regular basis. Make your readers feel that you have so much information to offer them by writing and submitting quality articles on a regular basis. This will not only help you generate more traffic to your site but it can also convince your readers that you are indeed an expert on your chosen field.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, 'Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide'

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 1574 articles in print and 11 published ebooks.

SEO - The Benefits Of Implementing White Hat or Ethical Methods

In the art of search engine optimization (SEO), the rules of the game vary, and there are rules that legitimate operators follow, and ones which unscrupulous or scamming individuals follow.

Ethical, or white hat SEO, is seen as the legitimate and proper way of increasing traffic and widening the profit margins, of your Web site. Generally, white-hat SEO is concerned with the general techniques and methods of the trade.

In practicing this technique, one should always be careful about the methods used in optimizing a Web site, because practicing illegitimate means increases the chances of the search engines black-listing your client's Web site, and lowering the credibility of your business. It is generally mandatory that an ethical SEO expert or firm needs to have valid and legal reasons for their search engine strategies, and even the support data offered by them has to be coherent and appropriate as well.

White-Hat SEO's Goal Is To Improve Links

The main goals of the SEO industry, is to improve the links of an online site or firm, on the search engines. It is also concerned with designing the most efficient and potent strategies to attract a larger base of customers through search engine links.

The major advantage of practicing ethical methods, is that it can give an reliable rank and placement to your client's Web site in the search engines. This is done, because this ethical practice will not include any illegitimate methods of advertising the Web site. Moreover, it needs to be emphasized that ethical methods always pays more than fair returns in the long run, while unethical methods can help to blacklist your clients, and your business as well.

Good SEO Methods Put Emphasis On Improving Your Content

One of the most vital aspects of ethical SEO practice, is the type of content present in your site. It's a fact that content always decides the number, as well as the type of visitors that will gain access to your Web site. A Web site's content needs to be fresh, interesting, highly informative and catchy so that online visitors will be able to attain complete information about a product or service.

However, one should think that content as it should, must not look like a school essay. Generally, the site's content aims to enhance the popularity of a Web site. Another aspect to take note, is that the matter of content should be saleable, and this means that that it should give adequate and appropriate information about the products and services, so that online visitors can be turned into actual purchasers.

Practicing good or ethical search engine optimization requires a lot of diligence and perseverance. It's not like an unethical practice that can make a Web site be easily seen on the search engines within just a few minutes, and basically reap nothing for you. An ethical SEO technique may take some time to develop, and each and every possible strategy to get implemented is done a permanent way.

The execution of ethical strategies should be expected to bring a larger amount of targeted traffic to your online business, and in addition, practicing ethical methods ill give you the legitimacy you long for, and get you the respect you deserve.

Regardless of the reasons, you need to regularly check your site's rankings and plan your SEO strategy in an honest and legitimate way, to let your Web site evolve as needed to meet the more pressing challenges or changes in this particularly competitive online environment.

http://7seo.com - 7 SEO

Vanessa A. Doctor from Jump2Top - SEO Company