5 Simple Steps to Great Search Engine Rankings
June 30, 2009
Having your website rank well in the major search engines is crucial to a successful Internet business. However, the information on doing so, which abounds on the Internet, can be perceived as complex and contradictive. Many website owners end up overwhelmed by all the data and simply quit and move on to other areas of promotion. By following the handful of steps presented in this article you will be well on your way to solid rankings.
Primer
Each webpage is its own unit, which has its own title and theme. A theme is most commonly referred to as keywords or a keyword phrase. The theme should be based on the most dominant data for that webpage. Therefore, if you have a webpage that lists ten types of coffee cups, "coffee cups" would be the likely choice for the theme. However, if the theme is too general then you should work to compact it as there will be far too many results in the search engine to contend with. Perhaps your webpage lists ten types of coffee cups which all have American symbols on them. Two of the various possible themes would then be "American coffee cups" and "patriotic coffee cups".
HTML Title Tags Dictate Your Rankings
June 23, 2009
There are a lot of things in Search Engine Optimization when done to your site that can increase you rankings. But one aspect that always comes up and that always affects your rankings in a huge way is altering the title tag.
The title tag is perhaps the most important tag out of all your html tags that can make or break your optimization process.
The reason why this is so is because the title tag is seen and always present in the search engine results pages.
The search engines always take the contents out of the tag and inserts them into the contents of the result pages in the search engines. And this is why the title tag should compile the contents or summarize the contents of your website to a “T”.
It is this summarization of your site with the title tag that can take you into the top rankings, (along with some other aspects of course) or leave you in the bottom rankings.
With the title tag, each search engine looks at it and uses it primarily the same way, to summarize and compile the websites contents for its search engine users. It is primarily the HOW and WHERE the keywords are placed within the tag thats most crucial.
How To Make Your Website More Successful? (Part II)
June 18, 2009
In part I of our series of how to make your website more successful we already showed you some important tricks to build a more successful website. This time we are going to expand the scope a little to further improve your website and to make it work harder for you on the Internet.
A) Outbound links: Search engines love to see outbound links every once in a while. It proves to a search engine that your website is related to a certain topic and industry. Make sure you use a keyword for the link and not just the plain URL. Linking to http://www.webhostingresourcekit.com is less valuable than linking to the same site as “Web Hosting Help” (with the same link underneath of course). The keywords here are “Web Hosting Help”.
B) Insite Cross Links: We’re not done with linking to other places yet. Insite Cross inks (links from one page of your website to another web page of your website) will be an important part of the future of your website. Imagine article “A” getting high feedback and many external people linking to it. This article page will receive a higher page rank than other pages of your website. This cross link will now share the page rank out to other web pages of your website and therefore eventually boosting the page rank of the page linked to.
Finding The True PR Of A Page?
June 12, 2009
I had an email “conversation” this last week which I feel others may benefit from “listening in” on. Here it is in summary:
“Andy
Why is it that xxxxxxx ranks so well on Google for the phrase xxxxxx xxxxxx when it has a PR of 0. The other top results have PRs of 5 and 6. Is Page Rank becoming less important?
Graham”
My answer to Graham was to go back and read a previous newsletter where I discussed just this. In issue 48 I discussed anomalies in PR and backlinks. You can read it online here:
http://ez-search-engine-optimization.com/issue48
In reply, Graham wrote back:
“Andy
If Google are not telling us the real PR values, how can we find out the PR of a site? This is making link exchanges much more difficult. How are we supposed to know whether a link partner is good if we don’t know their true PR?
Graham”
and my reply went something like this:
“Graham,
Google released backlinks and Page Rank data to the webmaster community. However, in doing so, they unleashed a monster.
Why Search Engine Marketing Has A Passion for Web Site Usability
June 5, 2009
Watching a recent football game, I imagined two very different teams: one called â??The Hordersâ?? and the other, â??The Huntersâ??. In the game, it takes planning and skill to carry a football a few yards. Thereâ??s interference and distractions. Scantily clad dancing girls are screaming cheers nearby.
How different, I wonder, is this from finding something in search engines? You have ads on the sidelines and pages to push through while trying to get to your goal. If you happen to find something that looks like what you want, you click on it and race down the field in a blaze of glory, until you realize youâ??re lost. Worse, you were just sacked by a web page piled high with gobs of stuff and tiny text soldiers are jumping on your head.
Itâ??s Not the Search Enginesâ?? Fault
Believe it or not, search engines and user centered web design have a common goal. They want to provide the best experience for their web site visitor. Even better, they want that experience to be productive, satisfying and memorable.
For their part, search engine technology changes often as they find ways to better understand the subject of each web page. Not only that, they have a keen interest in how you think and how you search for things.
How to Increase Alexa Ranking of Your Website
May 30, 2009
Alexa toolbar also useful to Browse expired websites database. Many times when we visit any website we got error message that website is not available. We have to simply click The Wayback Machine button on Alexa toolbar and we can see the old data of that website.
How to Increase Alexa Ranking of your website?
Alexa Toolbar using millions of users. Alexa Gives Ranking by Analysing the web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar Users. Alexa Sorting Millions of websites thru Alexa Toolbar and giving numerical rank for each website browsed by Alexa Toolbar.
First Step of increasing your websites Alexa Rank is Download Alexa Toolbar and start browsing your website regularly.
When you completed downloading of Alexa Toolbar, then you can see your websites Alexa Rank on Alexa Toolbar. May be if you dont have Alexa Rank it will Display “No Data” rank. Dont worry after couple of days your website will get Alexa Rank in number.
Keep browsing thru Alexa Toolbar within couple of months period your website will get good Alexa Ranking. Suggest & encourage your friends, relatives, your Company employees to download Alexa Toolbar in their computers. You will see the miracle your compnay websites will get very nice alexa rank.
Is New MSN Search More Precise? Just Ask Google
May 24, 2009
MSN finally unleashed its new search technology to the world on Monday. The official announcement coming from Bill Gates introduced the New MSN Search engine, ending with a personal invitation to visit www.msn.com and â??type in your question.â??
Here at WebAdvantage.net, we consider ourselves to be veteran internet searchers, often able to easily find the information we’re after. Considering we spend all day every day online, we should be. Even so, we rarely venture to type search queries in the form of questions on search engines, except for the handful of times we visit AskJeeves.
The thought of being invited to type in a question at MSN’s new search engine intrigued us. We decided to follow the trail of links to learn more about what they were offering. We were, at first, impressed with the pages singing the praises of the new “more precise, more powerful” MSN Search service. We were impressed, that is, until around page five of the “learn more” series of MSN’s site pages. That’s when we started to get tired of clicking “next.”
Turns out there were ten pages devoted to learning more about what MSN Search offers (which perhaps could have been explained less painfully). But at WebAdvantage.net, we’re dedicated online marketing professionals, so we hung in there.
An Ethical Alternative to Doorway Pages
May 18, 2009
Definition: A doorway page is content created specifically for the purpose of garnering high placements in the search engines.
Issue: Google makes the following specific recommendation: Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content (http://www.google.com/intl/az/webmasters/guidelines.html).
This article addresses the issue of doorway pages, proposes an acceptable alternative and offers some insights into the basic principles of search engine optimization.
To frame the issue of doorway pages it is important to understand why content is so critical to search engine optimization. In order to do this we need to step back and take a look at the search engines themselves:
? Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all other search engines want to provide the same thing: A prioritized list of links that point to most relevant web sites satisfying the users search criteria.
? Relevance is defined as the "best content" with the "best fit" to the user’s search. That’s a search engine’s value ? providing efficient access to the information a user wants when they want it.
? The search engine that does the best job of delivering the largest quantity of the most relevant results attracts the most users.
How To Find Good Keywords
May 12, 2009
Good keywords are frequently searched for (high demand) but not being targeted by many other websites (low competition). There are a number of tools out there that can help you find them.
Wordtracker
The best tool out there, Wordtracker is one of the most essential SEO tools. To use Wordtracker:
- Go to the Wordtracker website (http://www.wordtracker.com)and pay $7 for 24 hours’ access
- Enter a keyword phrase you’re thinking about targeting
- Wordtracker will suggest hundreds of related phrases - click on the ones you like
- Once you’ve clicked on all the phrases you like, run them through the program
- Wordtracker will compile a score for each phrase, based on the number of users searching for it and the number of websites targeting it
- The higher the score, the better the keyword phrase!
Wordtracker also offers a free service which works in the same way but only uses results generated from MSN.
Overture
Also useful, Overture’s search term suggestion tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/), is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works in much the same way as Wordtracker but doesn’t tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase.
The Secret Benefit Of Search Engine Optimisation: Increased Usability
May 5, 2009
A higher search ranking is what many website owners dream of. What they don’t realise is that by optimising their site for the search engines, if done correctly, they can also optimise it for their site visitors.
Ultimately this means more people finding your website and increased sales and lead generation. But are search engine optimisation and usability compatible? Aren’t there trade-offs that need to be made between giving search engines what they want and giving people what they want? Read on and find out (although I’m sure you can guess the answer!)…
1. Keyword research carried out
Before you even begin building your website, you should carry out keyword research to identify which keyword phrases your site should target. Using publicly available tools such as Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com), you can discover which keywords are searched for the most frequently and then specifically target those phrases.
Doing keyword research is also crucial for your site’s usability. By using the same keywords in your website that web users are searching for in search engines, you’ll literally be speaking the same language as your site visitors.
