Part IV - Getting Your Site Indexed in MSN

Althoug MSN is lagging behind both Yahoo and Google when it comes to the ways you can get your site indexed, it is still one of the top three search engines, and it should not be ignored. MSN offers you two different ways to get your site indexed, and you should submit to both. However, before you do that, make sure that you have optimized your website first. You can get more information on optimizing your site for MSN, as well as tips on search engine optimization, here: http://www.submit-it.com/subopt.htm The tips that you will find here basically apply to optimizing your site for any search engine, but they are definitely worth the read so that you focus your search engine optimization efforts in a way that will get your site indexed. As I mentioned before, there are two ways to get indexed by MSN. The first involves submitting to the Intomi index. The Intomi index actually powers the MSN search. Inktomi is now also part of Yahoo. However, you should still submit your site here. This will allow you to get indexed by hundreds of sites if your site is accepted. http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm You will need to use a valid email address for your site. Make sure that you use an email account that you actually use so that if there is a problem, you can promptly fix it. You may also need to confirm your submission. Keep in mind that there are no guarantees on turnaround, and there are also no guarantees that your site will be accepted. The second part of submitting to MSN is actually submitting to the MSN spider. Rob Benwell, of "Blogging to the Bank" fame, said that he used MSN for his searches when looking for niches, because MSN updates more quickly than either Yahoo or Google, and this was why he used MSN to test his results. This may be good advice. However, I believe that you should submit manually to MSN for the following reason: this is the number two website on the internet. It gets an enormous amount of traffic, and the traffic that this site brings you can help you with both your rankings, as well as being found by searchers. ComScore Networworks reports that 48 percent of MSN searchers are more likely to buy, whereas Google searchers are 42 percent likely to buy. Yahoo users are 41 percent more likely to buy. Although these statistics were released in 2005, you can get more information from this site on demographic buying habits of searchers: http://www.comscore.com/ Now, you can use the link below to submit directly to the MSN spider: http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx A word of caution here: when submitting to MSN, make sure that you understand the characters in the verification image on this page. You must type them exactly as you see them, or your site won't get submitted. If your submission is successful, you will see a message that tells you your submission is successful and will ask you if you want to submit another site. Once you have MSN crawling your site, you shouldn't have to resubmit. If you follow these steps carefully, you should have no trouble getting your site accepted. Create great content, build links back to your site, and target the correct keywords, and you can get very high rankings.

Optimizing with Firefox

One piece of software any optimizer should love is Firefox. Now some may say "Why Firefox, it's only a browser?" Yes, it's a browser, but one that supports a big variety of plugins, some of them very useful for search engine optimization. So let's see what those plugins are:

1. SEOpen ( https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/570/ ): this is one of the best and most used Firefox seo plugins, and has many tools that make it a favorite of mine. So let's see what it can do:

* in Google it can check for: backlinks, indexed pages, related pages, cache and PageRank.
* in Yahoo and MSN: backlinks and indexed pages.
* for Alexa: overview, traffic details, backlinks and related sites.
* keyword density of the most used words on the page.
* DMOZ checker: see if the site is included in the directory.
* check for robots.txt.
* validator to check your page for errors (it uses the validator from www.w3.org).

There are other things, but these are the most important.

2. SEO Links ( http://www.webmasterbrain.com/seo-tools/firefox-extensions/seo-links/ ) is another extension I use everyday. When the extension si active and you hover over a link a tooltip will appear that will show you Yahoo, MSN, and Google link popularity and ranking data for the URL and anchor text pair. When you're simply browsing this can be annoying, but you can simply deactivate it with a right-click!

This could be very easily used to check your search engine rankings for a certain page, and here is how: write up a list with all the keywords and keyphrases that you want to rank for, and then link those words or phrases to the web pages associated with them!

Now every time you want to check your ranks activate the SEO Links extension and hover over the links -- you will see where your pages are in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

3. Don't waste anymore of your precious screen real estate just to find out what your PageRank and AlexaRank is! SearchStatus ( https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/321/ ) can sit anywhere you want (I keep it in the status bar) and you'll receive the precious info at a glance. But this little tool can do a lot more than that:

* it shows what metatags a site has
* checks for backlinks and indexed pages in Google, Yahoo and MSN
* it shows the robots.txt file
* keyword density report function
* and best of all: the highlight "nofollow" links will show you what links will be followed by search engine spiders -- very useful when you want to submit your site to a directory and don't know if it will matter from a seo perspective.

So in case you're not using Firefox, go get it! It could be your best friend when it comes to search engine optimization!

Florin Costache writes on a daily seo blog for Romanian webmasters, called Optimizare pentru motoarele de cautare (a.k.a. search engine optimization for those who don't speak Romanian).

Importance of Genuine SEO Techniques

There are some methods of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) you should follow for your website. SEO is very important for all websites out there in the WWW. Without SEO techniques, which are genuine, you cannot get your website to be known, and get any profit from it.

1. Content is King: Every search engine, Google included, looks for only the content. Content is the most important thing to rank high in search engines. Without content, your site is just another site, without much importance. So create good genuine content.
2. Build links: Building links is utmost important just as content. For this, there are several methods. One such method is writing to the related Webmasters and letting them know of your site’s existence. If they believe that your site has some content, which is linkable, they will definitely link to your content. Maybe some reciprocal linking is required. In that case, you can negotiate with the webmaster and ask them about the reciprocal.
3. No one can guarantee number one in search engines: Google is the most important search engine out there, and even Google top employees cannot guarantee your number one position in Google search. It is the result of your hard work and genuine SEO link building that will position you at the top of the search results. Otherwise, you cannot just get to the top of any search engines.
4. Link building yourself is better than consulting: You may promote your blog with genuine SEO, and that will rank your site higher than any SEO firm can do. So, it is extremely important that you do it yourself. Set apart some time in your daily schedule to build links with any niche blogs you know of. Also, ask your friends who have blogs themselves in the same subject to link into your site.
5. Do not trust blackhat SEO firms: Blackhat SEO techniques are those, which do not do genuine SEO but go by such methods as doorway pages, invisible text, keyword stuffing, etc. SEO should be done through Whitehat methods only. Otherwise, you may be permanently banned by search engines.
6. Do not do reckless link buildings: if your blog is two days old and has 1200 incoming links, then Google will ban you on the third day. So, reckless link building is equal to link spamming. Do not do that.

These and more of the techniques to do good SEO are available in the resources mentioned below. SEO is a very important technique to get your site to the top of search engines, thereby building your brand, getting sales, and profit. So, genuine natural SEO technique is extremely important for the success of a website.

Search Engine Wars: Google Thumps Yahoo, MSN

Well the score is in: Google has resoundingly thumped Yahoo and MSN in the ongoing search engine wars. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t read it myself; Google continues to grow in size and popularity while Yahoo and MSN continue to firm up their “also ran” positions. What does this mean for you? Plenty, especially if you are wasting your time with the other search engines.

Yes, I am surprised. My previous statistics were evidently a bit outdated as I had the search engine war between the Big 3 Providers -- Google, Yahoo, and MSN -- running a tight 1-2-3. Indeed, it must have been early in 2005 the last time I bothered to look at the statistics, but at that time my stats showed that Google controlled 36% while Yahoo and MSN were running at 33% and 32% respectively. Yes, the statistics total to more than 100% since they include those people who use more than one search engine [in this case they are counted twice].

According to the Neilsen//NetRatings and as republished in the October 20, 2005, issue of USAToday, Google’s share is as follows:

Google is the Internet's most-used search engine, with a 45.1% share of searches in September, according to market tracker Nielsen/NetRatings. Yahoo (YHOO) had 23.3% and MSN 11.7%, says Nielsen.

To put it bluntly, only Yahoo is in the game and MSN is quickly fading to irrelevancy. How can I say this? Because when I do searches of key words that I frequently check up on including, Corporate Flight Attendant Community, I find some vastly different results.

With MSN, the search results yielded 3117 results, with Yahoo 326, and with Google 9850. What is apparent to me is that Google is doing the best job of indexing pages while the other two are way behind. I will give MSN credit for the recent leap in the number of results for Corporate Flight Attendant Community, but several of the results were for pages I deleted months, even years ago! Overall, I believe Yahoo harnesses their popular Yahoo Groups, Hotjobs, and other key features to give them a search engine edge over MSN.

I am betting my money on Google. While it isn’t good for one search engine to dominate, when it comes to building my business I want to go with a winner. Clearly, Google has a leg up on the competition, so every page that I create is optimized for my buddy Googlebot to index!

Do you, Yahoo? I don't... now you understand why.

Conflicting SEO Expectations

SEO is undisputedly the best method for generating traffic and profits. That being said, you need to understand the inherent conflict that can arise with SEO.

Conflicting SEO Expectations

SEO is both the technical effort and art of getting your site ranked highly in search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are two competing factors in the effort, time and volume of traffic, which can lead to clients having unreasonable expectations.

The conflict giving rise to misunderstood SEO expectations deal with keywords. Obviously, an optimization program is designed to get you high in the rankings on various keywords. The problem, of course, is the more traffic a keyword produces, the higher the number of sites competing for rankings under the phrase. Inevitably, this translates to a longer period of time required to get top rankings.

Obviously, most clients want to obtain top rankings as quickly as possible. The best way to do this is identify those keywords that have decent traffic, but few sites competing for rankings. In such a campaign, clients see results relatively quickly, but they have fallen into a trap. Even if they go into the number one position across the top three search engines, they have limited the amount of traffic they can receive. This leads to frustration as revenues are effectively capped.

A proper optimization plan should focus on both short and long term rankings. When laying out the site, the home page and other centralized pages should be devoted to keywords with monstrous amounts of traffic that will require a lot of time to obtain top rankings on. To counterbalance this, additional pages should be built focusing on keywords for which there is less traffic, but for which high rankings can be acquired relatively quickly.

The exact time periods on this approach are entirely dependent on the subject matter of the site and the keywords involved. For a brand new site, one can expect to see rankings on MSN within a month, Yahoo in four to six months and Google in six to nine months. For an established site, the figures will be shorter but it is dependent upon the results of the keyword research in the specific field.

Understanding optimization is the key to having reasonable SEO expectations. A mix of short and long term goals is the best method of attack in nearly every situation.

A Blog Farm, Why You Must Have One If You Want Huge Amounts Of Traffic

Someone wrote a comment on one of my articles at EzineArticles that I had written about the need to have a Wordpress blog. The point made was that whether you have a Wordpress blog or one of the other types of blogs, you still have to have people coming to your site.

Traffic is a part of the formula that you must have for the success of your Internet venture. Without people coming to your web site you will have no sales. Without sales, you have no Internet income.

In this article I will discuss how to get links to your Wordpress blog. If you just bought a new domain and put a Wordpress blog on that domain you will not get any traffic. That is, unless you have lots of links pointing to your blog. Remember, "no links equals no visitors". Let me say it another way, you have got to get links pointing to your site or you will not succeed!

These links should be high in terms of quality. If you get twenty five links from sites that are not authority sites it will not do you much good. It would be much wiser to get five links from web sites that have good page rank and are closely matched to the overall theme of your blog.

There are basically two ways to get these types of links. First, you can research the web and find high quality web sites that are theme related to your's and email them asking for links to your site. However, why would they want to link to your new page rank zero site?

You will get better results if you build a "Blog Farm". A blog farm has one distinct advantage, it is under your complete control. Instead of having to go asking for links, you will have the ability to post a link from your blog farm to your new Wordpress blog yourself. You will have the power to add a link to "any" new blog that you build in the future.

This is what happens, the link to your new Wordpress blog draws the search engine spiders which is mandatory in order for your blog to be indexed in the major search engines, which are Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

I will go over exactly "how" to build a blog farm in my next article.