Press Release SEO - Media Kit Linking Campaigns Search Engine Optimization requires strategizing as well as optimizing for SEO firms seeking online visibility for their clients. Last month a client of our firm sought counsel on their web strategy for an already optimized site. We had tightened up their keywords, focused their content and appropriately titled each well crafted page.
The only thing lacking was a linking campaign and extra keyword focused content beyond their product-centered, but limited text. What more could we do for them?
The single line item NOT accepted from among a list of recommendations made was a link campaign, early in the SEO sales process. We had discovered later in the beginning phase of optimization that the CEO believed a linking campaign meant begging industry web sites for a link. He had refused that concept without discussion due to a preconcieved notion of link-building as panhandling.
Once discovered, the panhandling concern was easily overcome with a simple request made of the CEO.
SEO Press Kit May we have a copy of your press kit?
Press releases very often contain important industry buzz words, highly relevant, keyword-rich text and an ideal word count for optimized web page content. Press releases are tightly focused on single themes and can be easily plugged into themed sections. Ideal for SEO.
We had discovered that the client had a media kit that was widely distributed at trade shows. This kit offered press releases which trumpeted a stellar Fortune 500 client list. Curiously, the slickly printed, beautiful media kit listed an access URL for a password protected area of their web site where members of the press could download Word.doc and PDF files of this same press kit.
Essentially our client was hiding this content from the public due to concerns that the in-house PR staff would be inundated with emails and phone calls from NON-media types and-[gasp!]-customers abusing published contact information from press releases. Maybe, but they were also hiding valuable content, customer testimonials, and that stellar client list from everyone but very determined media professionals willing to request site access passwords to download hidden offline documents.
The Complete Solution That press kit held the complete solution to our link popularity conundrum. By posting those documents online in HTML format and carefully structuring the page title and headline of each page, then linking those press releases to relevant sections of the company website, we dramatically improved search engine visibility for this client by putting it all in publicly accessible pages. The search engines indexed it all quickly while expanding the content and increasing site relevance.
Their Fortune 500 clients have now linked to a vendor that they had no reason to link to before because the releases were posted on those client sites with live links back to their site. Links from well respected and visible companies increases pagerank dramatically.
Press releases emphasizing business relationships with product-centered events featuring small businesses and larger corporations can focus on news hooks that will attract search engine visitors. Visitors that would not have otherwise known about the business relationship or products offered may suddenly find themselves customers.
Small Companies Small companies doing business with larger corporations should widely distribute their press releases announcing marketing partnerships and sales to those companies. The big players will often find ways to make news with public relations involving smaller partners and will sometimes use those press releases on their own site for publicity.
With innovative PR professionals working in concert with small businesses, they may even get the corporate client to use their much greater resources to distribute those press releases through giant corporate distribution channels (far beyond the miniscule reach of small businesses). This will gain them press coverage and help establish their brand while linking them to the image of larger corporate clients in the mind of their customers.
A word to the wise though, make your press releases professional and concise with complete contact info and links to relevant data. Include short, single sentence “About Us” company information and DON’T FORGET A URL! That web address included at the foot of all releases is your key to link popularity. Link from your release to the corporate client site you reference in partner- ship announcements and choose headlines that contain keywords relevant to your site and your business.
PR Tutorial For an excellent tutorial on creating an online press room and case studies on effective online PR strategies, visit the newsletter of PR Diva, BL Ochman at:
http://www.whatsnextonline.com/wno/newsletter28.html
She recommends that companies replace that paper press kit with a CD containing all those documents for that trade show distribution, but the kit belongs online too.
Search Engine Optimization professionals recognize the value of online press rooms as exceptional opportunities to present highly relevant, keyword focused content that encourages linking from well known corporations while exposing that existing content to the search engines. If those press releases also gain media coverage for your business as intended, your linking campaign has struck gold.
Author Bio: Mike Banks Valentine is a Search Engine Optimization specialist practicing ethical small business SEO Search Engine Placement, Optimization, Marketing.
Understanding The WWW. I came to the web with an itch to build content, and I needed to understand the technology utilized to build the Internet.
Early on, I confronted the question about whether it was necessary to use the www. in my website URL. It really began to be a concern to me when I began to advertise my domain and I was limited to a certain number of lines and characters in my advertising. Although the www. only comprised four characters, those four characters sometimes made a significant difference in allowing me to have enough space to say what I wanted to say.
Most every website on the planet advertises their website with the www. included in the URL. I wondered if dropping the www. would create a problem with people finding my site. The answer is that it depends on your web server configuration.
What Makes A Web Server Different From Your PC. Putting it in simple terms, a web server is put together in the same fashion as your own computer. Both have a set of directories, subdirectories and files which let you remain somewhat organized. The only difference between your computer and a webserver is the type of software that is loaded onto the webserver.
The Purpose Of The WWW_ Designation In Folder Names A webserver simply consists of software designed to allow external users to access the computer through a specific doorway in the system called a *port*.
The webserver software handles all requests coming into the computer for information.
All folders that represent different domains on the webserver are generally marked off with the www_ in the name of the folder. This reminds the system administrator that the folder is directly accessible from the Internet.
The www_ designation is not needed by the webserver — it is needed by the human operators.
Domain Pointers Domain pointers are like shortcuts on your desktop. They are only files which point to another location on your computer. Clicking those shortcuts start new programs without your having to search for the actual program.
Most webservers are set up to utilize these pointers to allow someone to direct access another folder on the webserver.
For example, on my server I have a folder called *double-eagles* which is the home for another one of my domains. If you click the link http://double-eagles.com , that is actually a domain pointer directing your browser to open the folder http://thePhantomWriters.com/double-eagles
The same process applies to the use of subdomains, such as URL’s that utilize the www. For example, the URL http://archives.thePhantomWriters.com points to a directory on my server called http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content
If you cannot access your domain name without using the www. prefix, then you should contact your webhost to get this feature enabled. The choice of using the www. or not should be made by your visitors, not your webhosting provider.
The Advantage Of Your Web Server Recognizing Both All day long when I surf, I type in the URL name without the www. included in the URL. I am often still surprised to see top name domains from whom you cannot access the non-www. presentation of their website!
Can you imagine what would happen if someone put yourdomain.com into their browser and they received a Cannot Find Server error?
*Bye-bye visitor… Wish we could have been introduced.*
What About Search Engine Spamming Search engine spiders are known to frown upon websites who introduce the exact same content under two different domain names. The search engine administrators generally view this as an attempt to gain an unfair advantage in their results. In fact, at one time I had read on the Google website that providing mirror websites could lead to your site being banned from their database.
The common knowledge has always been that the search engines generally count only the www_ version or the non-www_ version of a website. They do not list both in their results as they understand that both versions are the same website.
So, for the last two years I have made available the www_ version for my visitors, but only advertised the non-www_ version of the site.
The Google PageRank Surprise About one week ago, I installed two new tracking tools on my system to help me to guage the success of my advertising. Those two tools are:
- Google PageRank Toolbar - http://toolbar.google.com/
- Alexa Toolbar - http://toolbar.thePhantomWriters.com
Both require using a Windows operating system and Internet Explorer 5.0 or better for a browser, but both are exceptional tools if you are a webmaster who cares about tracking your traffic results.
My Big Surprise Somehow, I managed to hit my domain with both the www_ prefix and without. The first time I did this, I simply assumed that my Google PageRank was bouncing from day to day with wide swings. The second time I had done it, I realized that Google was seeing the two URL’s as two websites!
The PageRank for the URL I advertise (non-www.) is currently a 5/10, and the PageRank for the URL I do not advertise (www.) holds a value of 2/10!
The Alexa toolbar sees both as the same page and records the data for my domain the same in both cases.
The difference between the two rankings is that the www. version has no links pointing to it. The non-www. version has 30 Google links pointing to it.
It is important to note here that under the current guidelines of Google, a website must have a PageRank of at least 4/10 in order to be listed in Google’s search results. Therefore, although there are hundreds of websites pointing to my website, only those with a PageRank of at least 4/10 will actually show up in the calculations for both Google PageRank and the Alexa results — which utilizes the Google search results in their own rating systems.
What I Have Learned From This Experience I need to make sure that I can get my URL on more sites with at least a 4/10 Google PageRank.
The number of links pointing to a website do make a significant difference in the PageRank of the website.
If my only goal is to build my own PageRank or to get better results in Google, I don’t need to submit my information to a website that does not have a PageRank of 4/10 or higher.
Putting my URL in my resource box and attaching it to a free-reprint article really can get my URL into hundreds of websites, some of whom will have a good Google PageRank.
And finally, I hope that people who use the Google toolbar who visit my website come through to the non-www. version of my website — or else they might just think that my website has no real value in the eyes of Google.
Author Bio: Bill Platt owns The Phantom Writers, a company committed to helping people to establish an Internet presence & promote their businesses through the use of Free-Reprint Articles and Press Releases. Articles are distributed to 6,000+ publishers & webmasters as part of the package. Do you write your own articles? Let us distribute them for you.
Gain Traffic, Links and Search Engine Rank! Did you realize that thousands of website operators use a simple technique to generate targeted visitors to their websites without paying a dime in advertising? It’s true.
In fact, the technique works so well that many of them don’t want you to discover how they get those thousands of website visitors and make so many sales on virtual “auto-pilot.”
Their method? Creating tightly focused articles other people publish in their ezines (online magazines and email newsletters) and post on their websites.
This method rates so powerful that some even call it “the web’s best kept traffic secret.” Now, you may ask, “Why would an ezine publisher or website owner publish my articles for their subscribers?”The answer: Content!
Over a 100,000 ezines and newsletters operate on the web (along with millions of websites) covering everything from pets and cooking to investments and real estate. Many of them need tightly focused content and they simply can’t produce all of it themselves. Look at it this way… it’s the same reason newspapers use the Associated Press. Individual newspapers often can’t afford staff writers to cover every story, so they accept articles from outside their organization.
You can do the exact same thing for various ezines and websites catering to your niche audience! You can get valuable publicity — exposure you often couldn’t even pay for if you wanted to — by providing valuable, content-rich articles in exchange for a byline and a link to your website (called a “resource box”)!The following represent only a few of the enormous benefits of writing and distributing simple articles online:
The Benefits ** Attain “Expert” Status ** Let’s face it! In the eyes of virtually everyone who reads your articles you rank as the “expert” on the subject. Just look at people who write newspaper columns. You may disagree with their viewpoints, but they still have an elevated status in your mind compared to the “average Joe” off the street.
** Pre-sell Website Visitors ** If your article appeals to a niche audience hungry for more information on a very focused subject, you actually pre-sell them better than any sales pitch. In their minds, you’ve already delivered content they really want so when they click over to your site you already have a “reputation” in their minds.
** Traffic Lasts Longer ** Even though the Internet changes very quickly, webmasters are usually very slow to remove content from their sites. Once you get an article posted on another person’s website, you have an excellent chance of that article staying there for weeks, months, even years.
** Increase Links To Your Site ** In a recent search I found just a dozen of my articles posted on over 813 different websites! Not only do those postings bring me traffic, but they also help my search engine positioning because of my increased “Link Popularity.”
** Builds Your Affiliate Base ** Fact: Affiliates always take the path of least resistance. If you provide excellent articles they can easily post on their sites or copy and paste into their ezines, your affiliates will promote you more often and more effectively compared to those who don’t give them tools. Plus, as you make more sales and publish articles, other people will see you providing excellent tools and will want to sign up as your affiliate so they can use them too!
** Build a Huge “Opt-In” Email List ** You can use articles to build up a huge list of subscribers by simply compiling several articles into a series and delivering them at preset intervals. Often called a “mini-course,” this technique allows you not only to prove to your subscribers that you deliver great information, but enables you to capture their name and email adress so you can send them articles and special offers in the future (with their permission).
** Requires No Special Skills ** People often think they need to be a “writer” in order to publish articles, but that’s not true! FACT: If you have a passion for a subject and can talk and explain things like you would to a friend over a cup of coffee, you can write articles people will love to read.
Summary So if you operate a website selling virtually any type of product or service (whether your own or as an affiliate), publishing and promoting with articles should rank high on your list of traffic generation strategies. No other method of generating targeted traffic to your website provides the quality, quantity and steadiness of traffic in such a simple, straightforward, and cost- effective manner.
Author Bio: Jim Edwards of TheNetReporter.com
Google Adsense The popular search engine, Google has introduced a dramatic new contextual advertising service called Adsense. This new program could mean death to affiliate programs on those web sites that qualify for the Adsense program. Why would Google advertising affect affiliate programs? Because Google is making Adsense ads available to smaller content rich sites.
Adsense dramatically simplifies the process of choosing appropriate advertising for sections of sites. Since it’s all automatic with Adsense, I’m through with searching for affiliate programs to fit my content. It just doesn’t pay enough to justify the effort in most cases. While I won’t dump existing producers, I’m dropping those affiliate programs that don’t produce like hot potatoes.
I’ve moved house often over the last few years and in that process have struggled to keep affiliate programs abreast of the latest contact and banking information. Several honest affiliate program managers have emailed me after getting my affiliate checks returned from previous snail mail addresses. Adsense will resolve this issue for me as I needn’t keep the hundreds of affiliate programs up-to-date on my latest mailing address and/or banking information - only Google Adsense. I’m dropping smaller unproductive affiliate programs.
Allan Gardyne of Associate Programs penned an interesting and insightful article on Adsense this past week where he mentions this as an issue and predicts the death of smaller or weaker affiliate programs.
I agree.
http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/search/adsense.shtml
Google Adsense simply requires the host site to paste in a few lines of HTML code on their pages where they want those ads to appear. Once Google has spidered your content pages, they can assess what those pages are about. Adsense serves a series of ads that match and compliment your page topics automatically without site owner participation!
I’ve been impressed how Adsense has performed for me in just the last week. I’ve actually enjoyed looking at my own sites to see what ads are served to match my content. WebSite101 demonstrates very well how Adsense works. If you visit the HTML tutorial, you see Adsense ads for web page editing software or web hosting. If you visit my email tutorial, you’ll see Adsense ads for email broadcasting software and targeted email list broadcasting services. If you visit the Domain Name tutorial, you’re served Adsense ads for Domain Registrars and web hosting. If you visit the Anti-Spam Tutorial, you get Adsense Ads for Spam Filtering Software.
http://www.website101.com/email_e-mail/ http://www.website101.com/HTML/ http://www.website101.com/Domain_Name http://website101.com/SpamFilter/
You get the idea.
I like not having to mess with my own ad-serving software and twiddle with the rates and I absolutely LOVE not having to do any ad sales. I’m sold and wholeheartedly recommend Adsense to anyone with sufficient content to support it.
Between my 3 main sites,
http://WebSite101.com http://SearchEngineOptimism.com http://PrivacyNotes.com
I’ve got over 1000 pages of good solid content that I’ve built over the last 6 years. I’ve struggled in vain to get that content to pay by carefully choosing affiliate programs to fit neatly into dozens of topic areas. My two biggest producers have been software sales and health insurance referrals for small businesses. Those have been sporadic producers.
My biggest complaint is that I can’t track what is producing clickthroughs. Google simply tells me clickthrough percentage, number of ad impressions per day and average earnings per clickthrough across all of my sites. That makes it very difficult to know where to concentrate my energy to produce additional revenue generating content. But it does seem to offer site owners incentive to maintain quality content and spread the ads across all content pages.
My privacy site runs a variety of HIPAA compliance ads, GLB compliance ads, and DoNotCall List Compliance ads. It seems the money in privacy is in charging large corporations to keep them within the letter of the law so they don’t get sued for violations.
It is interesting to see my own site ads to know where the money is in PPC for each of the topic areas. Sometimes it’s just not what you expect. I’ve got an article about Google’s reverse phone lookup and how to get out of reverse phone lookup databases that is on the Privacy site and it sometimes shows ads about “low long distance rates”. Clearly the keyphrase “Phone number” is triggering ads that are quite off target on this page.
While Adsense won’t outperform my total affiliate income from the many programs spread across my sites, it WILL, if current trends continue, match my total affiliate income and therefore double advertising income!
The biggest benefit was the incentive to rebuild WebSite101, which got it’s design in 1998. I’ve needed to do that, but man is it tedious adapting all that content while maintaining page names and fitting it all back together with existing affiliate links and updating outdated stuff. Adsense gave me the incentive to do that by making my content finally pay for itself. It also gives me incentive to keep adding more relevant content.
I’m sold and wholeheartedly recommend Adsense to anyone with sufficient content to support it. While I won’t dump existing affiliate program producers, I’m dropping those that don’t produce clickthroughs and sales - fast - like hot potatoes. Get Adsense if Google approves your site. You’ll love it too. http://www.google.com/adsense.
Author Bio: Mike Banks Valentine is a Search Engine Optimization specialist practicing ethical small business SEO Search Engine Placement, Optimization, Marketin.
Introduction By now, virtually every webmaster has heard or read that the major search engines are responsible for 80% or more of the traffic received by most web sites and that most searchers never look beyond the first 20 - 50 search results. Not surprisingly, an entire industry devoted to search engine ranking and search engine optimization (SEO) has sprung up to capitalize on these well known facts.
Tens of thousands of web sites compete to achieve top ranking for their chosen keywords and keyword phrases. We’ve published numerous articles by various SEO experts on linking strategies, optimizing meta tags and page content, and relevant page content. And, undoubtedly, we’ll publish many more. Achieving a top ranking for a particular keyword or phrase is a major accomplishment, but the sad fact is that most web sites will never come close to reaching a top 10, a top 30, or even a top 100, listing in any major search engine.
Is it possible to be listed in the top 10 - 30 search results of a major search engine? Yes, possible, just not very likely for the average web site. It’s a lot like playing the lottery and with the same appeal. Get your site in the top 10 search results and the payoffs are big - you just need to knock out a few million competitors.
The Rise Of Pay-Per-Click The difficulty in achieving a top ranking for a free site listing has in recent years given rise to the pay-per-click search engine phenomena. Overture’s singular success with this model has resulted in hundreds of search engines jumping on the pay-per-click bandwagon. Pay-per-click is a great idea and taps right into the frustrated webmaster/site owner market. Many site owners simply do not want to be bothered with checking keyword density, tweaking their page content, fiddling with their meta tags and undertaking linking campaigns.
With pay-per-click, you get the site ranking you can afford. A simple, understandable concept. If money isn’t a problem, the PPC system is hard to beat.
Most experts would probably recommend combining search engine optimization with PPC for maximizing traffic. And, there you have it - the two dominant methods for driving targeted visitors to your web site. Dominant, but probably irrelevant to the vast majority of site owners and webmasters who don’t have the time to learn the ever-changing art of SEO or the budget for PPC’s and SEO firms.
What should be relevant is how to get traffic to your site without breaking the bank or having to earn a degree in SEO techniques. Where it comes from should be secondary. Don’t limit your traffic building efforts to just a few of the majors like Google, Yahoo, Inktomi and Overture. The top 8 or 10 search engines may be popular but that doesn’t mean that your site will reap the benefits.
Here Are Several Reasons Why: 1. Sometimes the numbers work against you. Another billion pages added to Google or AlltheWeb are NOT going to help the average site owner - they are just going to bury the needle - your website - deeper in the haystack. And search traffic is only important, if your website can be found.
2. The major search engines cater primarily to searchers not webmasters. Why? Because more search traffic means more revenue and there are far more searchers than webmasters.
3. Even PPC engines deliver more than top 50 search results. That means unless you’re a high bidder, your website may still not be seen by many.
From a webmaster’s perspective what you should be looking for in a search engine is the right balance of search traffic and understandable site listing/ranking options. Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask Jeeves have massive traffic, but you need to evaluate your chances for having your web site added and then ranked well. You also need to determine if a search engine is more focused on revenue generation through ads, paid inclusion and Sponsored listings than they are in catering to your concerns about where your web site appears.
More specifically, when evaluating any engine regardless of size or traffic, you should consider the following factors:
1. Free Site Listings A few years ago, you could submit your site to almost any search engine, small or large, for free. But times have changed. Today, even many second tier engines have PPC or paid inclusion programs, and free submissions, where offered, are often given little attention. This ties right into the second feature you should be looking for in a search engine.
2. Indexing Speed The usual pitch is that free listings can take a month or more to be added (with some SE’s, never is more likely), but a paid listing will be added within 48 hours to a week. Does this make sense? Most search engines don’t manually review site submissions so whether a submission is free or paid shouldn’t affect indexing speed. Slow indexing for free site submissions is most often nothing more than a deliberate ploy to get your money.
3. Ranking Options Look for a search engine that offers some clues on how to improve your site ranking, short of emptying your wallet. Few engines reveal all the factors they use in ranking sites but knowing where the emphasis is (content, link popularity, meta tags, etc.) can be enough to point you in the right direction. There are also a handful of engines and directories that offer innovative listing options that give your website a much better chance of being seen.
4. Quality Searches Important to site owners and searchers alike. When quality sites are buried in a sea of second rate listings, no one benefits.
5. Traffic If you want your website seen, the traffic a search engine attracts is important, but don’t be too quick to write off smaller, up and coming engines. Not too long ago both Google and Overture were considered long shots in the search engine wars. Also, keep in mind that top ranking in an engine that receives a few million searches per month may be more important to you than no ranking in an engine that receives millions of searches per day.
6. Paid Listing Options: Look for paid listing options that offer more than fast inclusion in a database. With PPC, you get what you pay for, but with paid inclusion, you should receive more than you would with a free listing.
If you’re not familiar with any search engines other than the big players, check out FreeWebSubmission.com (http://www.freewebsubmission.com) where you can find a list of the 50 top search engines that still offer free site listings. Engines are ranked by their Alexa rating which indicates their user popularity. Here’s a list of the top 10 from FWS with current Alexa rankings:
1. Google - 5 2. Lycos - 44 3. AltaVista - 64 4. About - 86 5. Open Directory - 157 6. AlltheWeb - 215 7. ExactSeek - 1,999 8. ScrubTheWeb - 2,483 9. What U Seek - 2,868 10. SearchHippo - 2,905
Some other engines and directories worth considering in your promotion efforts are Gimpsy (http://www.gimpsy.com/), RoList (http://www.rolist.com), SitesOnDisplay (http://www.sitesondisplay.com) and National Directory (http://www.nationaldirectory.com).
Author Bio: Mel Strocen is CEO of the Jayde Online Network of websites. The Jayde network currently consists of 12 websites, including ExactSeek.com (http://www.exactseek.com) and SiteProNews.com (http://www.sitepronews.com).
Keyword Voodoo! Invisible Metatag Mumbo Jumbo Search Engine Optimization clients often ask about secret keywords as if there is some sort of Keyword Voodoo that only Search engine optimization specialists understand.
Rather than simply using keywords liberally in page text, web site owners seem to believe if they use them in those invisible meta tags, that it will improve their ranking for keywords that aren’t on the visible part of the page.
Clients attempt to use site-wide keywords that reference all the products they sell from every page on the site! This widely misunderstood tactic actually hurts ranking rather than helping it. Here’s an easy rule of thumb.
If the keyword isn’t in the page body text in the single page you are looking at, don’t use it in any meta tags. If you feel you must use the keyword in meta tags, then you must also insert it into the visible page text. Not into images or their alt tags, not in title attributes, not in directory names or image names, IN BODY TEXT. If you ignore this recommendation, you dilute relevance of any keywords that ARE in body text. Start on the page!
Clients get caught up in arcane minutia of SEO worrying over details that they don’t understand, taken out of context from articles they’ve seen or arguments they’ve read in discussion lists. A litany of questions ensues.
Am I better off with generic keywords or brand specific keywords? Do I make special landing pages with targeted keyword phrases, or better yet, keyword domains focusing only on specific keywords? Do I put my best keywords all over the page or put them at the top for more relevance? Should I use those important keyword phrases in a title tags even if they aren’t on the page? How about comment tags, alt text tags, noframes tags, and noscript tags?
If you insist on believing in keyword voodoo, I suggest that you concentrate on the no voodoo tag.
For those of you who actually want to rank well in the search engines for your important keyword phrases, and who don’t want to spend time burning candles, chanting incantations and poking keyword pins into voodoo dolls, I suggest you learn the simplest of all SEO rules.
Put your keywords in the text on your web page! If the keywords aren’t already included within the body text of your web site in sufficient density, then it won’t matter what HTML tags you use or where you put them.
Often clients react with intense surprise when I tell them that the keywords they are targeting are nowhere to be found on their home page and we need to add them.
One surprised site owner pointed to the graphic images across the top and bottom of their pages where keyword phrases loomed in giant stylized type across the page. They asked about the menu bar along the left of their site template, “You know, those that change color as you hover your mouse over them?” Sorry, those are images.
The solution is NOT in the images with words painted on them by fancy graphics programs, but in real body text.
Here’s a quick test I recommend to clients. Visit your site home page online. Go to the browser menu, choose “Edit” and then “Select All”. This highlights all text on the page. Then go again to the browser menu, again choose “Edit” then click on “Copy”, which will copy that highlighted text to your clipboard. Now open up Notepad from your Windows “Start” menu by choosing the “Programs”, then “Accessories” and finally “Notepad”.
When the blank page of Notepad text editor opens, paste the text you’ve copied from your page into it by going to the Notepad menu bar, choosing “Edit” then “Paste”. Many who don’t do their own design work are startled by how few words of text actually appear when doing this little test. This serves as a wake-up call when they experience this demonstration and begin to come to an understanding that this text is all the search engines see, or care about.
This text shows clearly that not everything that you can see on the page is actual text. Much of it is made up of images with stylized text painted on to them by a graphics program. What you see on that Notepad page now is your visible body text. That text that you now have in front of you is all that matters to the search engines. They don’t care about the images or invisible Voodoo meta tags.
Even then, surprised clients blurt, “We included those keywords in the invisible HTML code on the page lots of times in special (Voodoo) meta tags our developer used.”
Entrepreneurs often hire developers based on stellar client lists or personal recommendations from partners or even staff members, but search engine optimization is rarely understood to be among the skill sets needed within web design jobs. SEO is done only by specialist Keyword Voodoo practitioners that come in later to save site owners from “invisible HTML tags” haunting their keyword-less pages.
What do SEO’s do? Add the keywords to the body text - FIRST, before anything else is done. There are clearly additional things we do as well, but the path to highly ranked web pages is not in the HTML that you CAN’T see, it is right in the body text of the page in the form of visible words on the page.
Author Bio: Mike Banks Valentine is a Search Engine Optimization specialist practicing ethical small business SEO Search Engine Placement, Optimization, Marketing
Reciprocal Linking Techniques For A Successful Web Site Building a successful web site is a process that works best when done in a deliberate, logical step-by-step manner. The first step is to build a top quality web site that is packed with interesting and useful content.
Next, you need to submit your site to the major directories and begin a well thought out advertising campaign.
But the single most important step is getting a top ranking in the major search engines, most notably Google and MSN.
When ranking the sites in their index, Google places a very high importance on “link popularity”, that is the sites that have the most high-quality incoming links generally rank higher in Google. Getting links to your site from other sites is an absolute must for a top ranking in Google and the other top search engines (top 10 at a minimum).
The question that you may be asking is “How do I get these links?”. There are many ways to attain links to your web site, but it can be very difficult for new sites to get other sites to link to them.
There’s a simple way to jump-start the process however. It’s called “reciprocal linking”. This is how it works: You search for sites that are in the same general topic area as yours (but not sites that compete directly). After you find a list of suitable link exchange partners, you place a link to their site on your site. Then you email the webmasters of the other sites and ask for a link exchange.
Do not send generic copies of the same email to each webmaster however. Rather, take a few minutes to browse each site. Then write a personalized email to the webmaster explaining what you liked about the site (be specific) and why you think a link exchange would benefit both parties.
Be sure to address the webmaster by name if at all possible. Also, be sure to give him your link exchange information. This should include the title of your site, a short description, and the URL that you want his site to link to (this doesn’t have to be the home page). And be sure to include the URL of the page that already has his reciprocal link on it.
After you have sent the emails, expect a few rejections for various reasons. This is normal and expected so don’t be at all discouraged. You will also quickly get a few emails from webmasters accepting your offer. Verify that your reciprocal link is in fact on their sites and then send a “thank you” email.
A great way to find potential link partners is to do a Google search on one of your main keywords or phrases. You will most likely have many pages of sites listed in the search results.
Here is a simple way to find out which of these sites actively exchange links: Go to the bottom of the Google search results page. Click on “Search within results”. In the text box type in “Add URL”. This will return only the sites in your original search results listings that have an “Add URL” link on their web site. You can also do a search for “link exchange”.
If you aggressively pursue link exchanges on a regular basis, within a few short months you’ll have built up good rankings in the search engines with a steady flow of targeted traffic to your web site!
Author Bio: Rick Rouse is the owner of RLROUSE Webmaster Resources and the author of “Super Webmaster SEO Toolkit” which gives step by-step instructions for getting a top 10 listing in Google & Yahoo.
Google Drives 70% Of All Web Traffic! Wake Up MSN, YAHOO! A recent post in a discussion list suggested that Google is becoming the Microsoft of search (dominating web search as Microsoft dominates PC operating systems). So I decided to research a theory - one I’d developed about search engine traffic. I dug into the traffic stats on three of my own sites and those of several clients that I monitor traffic for.
While this case study is tiny and certainly NOT conclusive, I’ll wager it has strong parallels across small business web sites. The conclusions drawn are admittedly opinion, based on very limited statistics, but those are all that matter to those of us seeing tiny search engine traffic from supposedly monstrous portals.
The participating clients from this case study ALL submit their sites to paid inclusion programs from AltaVista, Inktomi and AskJeeves/Teoma. Two use LookSmart LookListings and all but one are listed in YAHOO! Directory. All are listed in the Open Directory Project and all submit to smaller industry specific directories and smaller search engines. One uses Overture PPC on a limited basis, while none use Google Adwords. All were optimized by yours truly and each represent varied industries in retail, professional services and one is an information site only, is non-commercial and sells nothing. Each of them ranks well at most search engines, but see little traffic from those good rankings.
The research I did confirmed what I’d only assumed before by backing it up with solid numbers. On my own sites and those of clients that I reviewed, Google sends over 70% of all search traffic to every one of those domains in every case. This includes Google foreign variants, Google Directory and Google image search (image search numbers are tiny). The foreign Googles send tiny numbers of visitors from non-English speaking countries, but English speaking Google traffic from the UK, Canada and Australia drives more traffic than either Yahoo or MSN according to traffic statistics of those sites reviewed for this case study.
With the highest difference between compared search engine traffic of 8 percent variation between studied domains, I’ve compiled a list of average traffic delivered by search engines for those sites to which I have access to traffic logs. The Google percentages are inclusive of those portals that use Google results such as iWon.com and Yahoo web results. Direct Yahoo results are for sites listed in their directory.
Google 74% Yahoo 14% MSN 9% Ask 2% All other SE’s 1%
I’m concerned, not that Google is too big, but that the other search engines just don’t get it, don’t deliver it and don’t want to give it up. What is IT? Traffic!
I attribute this to one thing. Those search engines don’t want to give up visitors to FREE search results. They are happy to send visitors off if they gain income from that traffic in either PPC ads or advertisements of ANY sort. Knowing that those free results will lose the “eyeballs” of searchers, they struggle to deliver both PPC ads and sponsor ads that most closely approximate the search phrase entered by the searcher. Thankfully, all have dropped banner ads from the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages).
They cannot stand the idea they will lose the visitor and seek to entice them to click on something, anything that’ll earn them income. Even if it means delivering NON-relevant results to entice the searcher to use a different search phrase seeking to gain more relevant results, thereby viewing more ads and additional PPC ads the visitor may click on to deliver income to the portal.
I believe these search engine traffic percentages are a direct reflection of relevance delivered by those search engines. The more relevant the results, the more likely they’ll send a higher percentage of traffic to your site.
74% of search traffic referred: Google offers their own PPC results, offers no outside banners, Amazon links or effluvia related to the search. They deliver relevant results and visitors love that, then leave freely to return next time they want relevant results.
14% of search traffic referred: Yahoo offers Overture PPC results (which they’ll soon own), Amazon links and sponsorship links, along with that “Also search in: Yahoo! Shopping” link at the bottom of every result page, hoping you’d rather shop than to actually find what you were searching for!
9% of search traffic referred: MSN offers Overture PPC results, “Broaden your Search” (LookSmart) links, “Shopping Results on MSN” links and a sponsor text link at the bottom of every page as though you didn’t really want to find anything but their ads.
2% of search traffic referred: Ask offers more paid results than any other search property with 5 sponsor links at the top of every search result page and TEN links to further paid sponsor results in a “Related Searches” footer to every result page. Ask sponsors provide search ads. Doesn’t Ask understand that most searchers see right through this?
Relevance at each of these search engines declines further with progress down the list of traffic referred. Is it any wonder Google is the leader? They lead in relevance, therefore in search engine referred traffic. All any engine need do is provide relevant results with limited sponsors and no excessive “shopping” or multiple source PPC links and book links. If they do that, they’ll compete effectively with Google. More relevant search engines deliver the traffic to web sites, NOT to their advertisers.
I have a bold suggestion to make to MSN as they develop their new in-house search engine. Drop the ads, sponsors, book links, shopping links and resist the temptation to bring back banner ads. Searchers want to find what they are looking for and easily see through transparent attempts to sell stuff to them and keep them from leaving. Let go of searchers by delivering highly relevant search results while clearly labeling limited numbers of sponsor or PPC ads! The result will be devastating to Google by giving searchers a real alternative that they may prefer using!
YAHOO! has a huge task ahead of them - to integrate the recently acquired Inktomi, Overture (and Overture’s recent acquisitions Altavista and Fast/AlltheWeb) search technology into their search mix. Clearly they’ve plenty of technology now and won’t need Google when they add all these ingredients to the search soup they are cooking up. Yahoo will possess all the best technology and must only decide to provide relevant search results WITHOUT shopping links, excessive sponsor links, book links and other clutter to the SERP’s. I suggest that if they show only limited Overture PPC ads and clearly labeled sponsor ads along with the relevant results - that they can also threaten Google’s lead.
If the re-born, re-cooked and massively complex YAHOO! or the “new” MSN resist the temptation to send searchers to advertisers rather than sending them to relevant results, then we will have three very strong competitors in the search market. The numbers of search referrals will level off at about 30% per competitor and Google will have to fight to gain back their current dominance. If YAHOO! or MSN seek to favor advertisers over searchers, Google will maintain dominance - clear and simple.
I encourage all webmasters to do their own comparisons of traffic referrals now and then again when YAHOO! and MSN weigh in over the next year with their “new” offerings. It could get very interesting if there were some true competition in search, so referred traffic from YAHOO! and MSN starts to deliver to webmasters rather than advertisers.
5 Ways To Get Other Websites To Link To Yours In-bound links from other web sites to yours provide two avenues to success for your site.
First, the number of quality in-bound links pointing to your web site are a major factor that the search engines (including Google) use to rank web pages in their databases. Lots of high-quality in-bound links can help boost a page into the “top 10″ of a search engine’s search results page (SERP).
In addition to the search engine ranking benefits provided by in-bound links, they are also a very steady supply of referral traffic to your web site! If you are able to attain a large number of links from quality sites, you will get about as much traffic from referrals as you get from the search engines.
The big question is “How do I get other sites to link to mine?”.
There are several techniques that you can use to entice other webmasters to link to your site:
1 - Simply ask the webmaster for a link! If your site can be a valuable resource for the other site’s visitors, send the webmaster a polite, personalized email asking for a link. Tell the other webmaster why a link to your site would be beneficial to his visitors (and his site).
For example: Your site sells books about web site promotion. Your web site would probably be of value to the visitors of a site that features web authoring books or tutorials. And since your site compliments (but doesn’t compete with) his site, he may well be happy to give you a link!
2 - Offer the other webmaster a freebie in exchange for a link. You could offer a free software download, a free service (such as search engine optimization for his site), or a testimonial for his site (with your link in it of course).
3 - Write articles about a topic in your field of expertise. Offer to let other webmasters use the article on their websites or in their newsletters. At the end of the article will be a “resource box” that provides information about you and a link to your web site. Writing free articles is a major traffic-builder!
4 - Produce and distribute free ebooks about topics in your field of expertise. Give (or better yet sell) other webmasters the right to distribute your ebook via their web sites or newsletters. Of course, each ebook will have information about your web site as well as a link to it!
5 - Exchange links with other web sites that compliment (but don’t compete) with yours. Do a Google search on one of your target keywords. Contact each webmaster with a personalized email explaining why a link exchange would benefit both sites (be very specific). Then ask to exchange links. It helps to already have his “reciprocal” link in place before you contact him with the URL of the page on your site with his link on it.
There are numerous other techniques that you can use to get in-bound links to your site. Simply use your imagination. If you devise a well-thought out plan for your link campaign and apply it with diligence, you can watch your search engine rankings and web site traffic steadily climb to ever new heights!
How To Reach All The Search Engines Hi Jill,
I don’t know if you will recollect, but we have communicated several times and your feedback is always so helpful. Hope you can give me a little assistance here.
I am using WPG’s page critic. It is quickly apparent that what works for one search engine is frequently quite different on another. What is the answer?
I could use a robot.txt file and create a different version of each index page but is this a smart approach? Does this look to be like spamming? How do you handle these differences?
Thanks in advance.
Jerry
~~~Jill’s Reply~~~
Hi Jerry,
Nice to hear from you!
The answer to your problem is to simply not use PageCritic. It’s totally wrong, from my perspective. Pages can and do rank highly on all the search engines. There’s never a need to design a page for any particular engine at the exclusion of others.
Make your pages the best they can be for your users and search engines in general, and your site will do great!
Jill
[Apparently my reply didn't quite answer Jerry's concerns, so he wrote me back with additional questions. See below...as the Q&A continues... J]
Jerry’s Response Hi Jill,
The thing that drives me crazy is how well all of my sites do on Google and how poorly they do on MSN (why, btw, do all of MSN’s results come from LookSmart?). So, knowing what needs to be done to the page to move up in MSN is important. Do I simply rely on Searchenginewatch or others for that insight?
I’m surprised to hear your response. I know better than to use the [WebPositionGold] submitter or the page generator but I thought their knowledge base and page critic were good tools for getting general insights on a page vs. search engine.
Do you mind telling me how you determine what to do on a page when faced with a similar dilemma?
What is about WPG that you believe makes it an invaluable SEO tool?
Again, thanks for your help and feedback.
The thing that drives me crazy is how well all of my sites do on Google and how poorly they do on MSN (why, btw, do all of MSN’s results come from LookSmart?).
MSN is all about the money. If you care about doing well with them, you probably should pony up to LookSmart and pay for every click to your site. Unfortunately, the Inktomi listings only show up *after* the LookSmart listings. Of course, even Inktomi wants some of your cash these days. If you absolutely need to be doing well in MSN, you can use paid Inktomi inclusion and tweak your pages to your heart’s content. You’ll be spidered every 48 hours and can see what works and doesn’t. You’ll need to shoot for the phrases that have no LookSmart listings, though, as there’s no way to beat them with Inktomi “natural” results.
So, knowing what needs to be done to the page to move up in MSN is important. Do I simply rely on Searchenginewatch or others for that insight?
All of the search engines want the same thing — to show the pages that are the most relevant to the search query. Keep working on your pages so that they are the most relevant in all respects, and you’ll eventually get lots of highly targeted traffic and sales.
I’m surprised to hear your response. I know better than to use the submitter or the page generator but I thought their knowledge base and page critic were good tools for getting general insights on a page vs. search engine.
If you like numbers, I suppose PageCritic can be interesting. But years ago when I ran some high-ranking sites through the PageCritic and it told me that they needed to be changed, I decided never to look at it again. It only works for the algorithm du jour. If you want to chase whatever algorithm is up to bat on any given day, more power to you.
I prefer a long-term approach, which blankets all the engines with lots of keyword phrases that are relevant to my sites. This way when some phrases are ranking highly in some engines, and others are ranking highly in other engines, I still have good representation across the board. Rankings do change. They can change on any given day. Up and down, down and up. That’s life in the SEO game. The trick is not to look at the minutiae, and see the big picture instead. Forget about rankings even. Are you being found in the engines for relevant phrases, and are you converting that traffic into sales? That’s what matters.
It’s really not an invaluable tool to me anymore. Five years ago, when we had many competing search engines and it was important to be ranked highly in all of them, WPG as an easy way to check positions. Today, there are only 2 or 3 search databases that anyone cares about, making it easy enough to do some spot checking by hand. Or even better — to simply check server logs. That’s the best indication of how you’re doing.
Hope this helps!
Author Bio: Jill Whalen of High Rankings is an internationally recognized search engine marketing consultant and editor of the free weekly email newsletter, the High Rankings Advisor.
