Holistic Search Engine Optimization

We all have heard that search engines are the number one resource for consumers to research and buy products or services online. In fact, marketing studies have shown that over 70% of web surfers use search engines to locate online merchants. The ramification of this statistic is simple: if you want to reach the members of your target market you need to make sure that your business web site appears in popular search engines.

Search engine optimization (SEO) can help you achieve this. SEO is a crucial online marketing technique. It helps you to get your web site to appear in search engine result pages (SERPs) for keywords that that are relevant to your business. For example, if you are a business coach, and someone is searching for "business coach", it would be great for your business if your web site appears in the first 10 results.

So what exactly is search engine optimization? SEO includes selecting the best keywords for the body of the page as well as other page elements (the title tag, keyword and description meta tags, etc.) Carefully chosen keywords provide "hints" that search engines use to classify your site and to determine whether your site should appear for certain search keywords. On-page keyword optimization by itself will help your rankings. However, holistic search engine optimization is required to achieve optimal results. For the best placement, focus on SEO as a whole, rather than concentrate on a particular technique.

Here are a few important elements of holistic search engine optimization:

- Have good content. After all, content is king (or queen, whichever the case may be). Without content there isn't much of a site. The content must walk a fine line between providing useful content and including sufficient and relevant keywords for search engines.

Often it is difficult to optimize your product or service pages for search engines, since the main goal of these items is to showcase the benefits of your offer. On the other hand, it is easier to optimize blog posts and articles. In fact, you can create entire articles and blog posts around keywords that are popular with your target market.

- Have consistent navigation. Both your web site visitors and search engine spiders navigate your web site through links that connect different pages. Consistent navigation ensures that your visitors can reach every page on your web site from every other page. On top of that, you will you get the most out of your search engine optimization efforts.

- Get links to your site. Links to your web site play a very important role in holistic search engine optimization. Many popular search engines evaluate your web site's popularity based on counting the number of links that point to your site. The more popular your web site is, the better rankings it gets on search engines. The best links are links from reputable, quality web site that have complimentary or related content.

You can get links to your web site by using a variety of techniques, such as writing articles, participating in link exchanges, and participating in online networking.

Take a holistic approach to web site optimization. Apply SEO to your web site as a whole, and always evaluate the overall impact of your marketing efforts.

How Content Can Really Increase Your Sales

Search engines don't buy products and services. People do. To sell your products and services online, you need targeted traffic. Search engines will send you targeted traffic, and a lot of it, if you take certain steps. The first step in your search engine marketing campaign isn't search engine optimization. Your first step is to understand the internet and how to effectively use it to promote your products and services. The internet is a content driven medium. Searchers are looking for information. They don't want to be sold to. They want value. You can provide this value through the content you write for your website, as well as content you write for your promotions. Therefore, you need to develop a complete, content management strategy. Your content management strategy needs to be customer focused, content driven, and optimized for the search engines. Your content management strategy should consider on page and off page optimization factors. On page factors include optimizing your page for keywords relevant to your page, titles, and descriptions. Off page factors include link exchanges and backlinks. Once you've chosen the topic for your site, you need to develop your website. Decide what content you will write. Your content should include articles, press releases, and product reviews. You can also create free ebooks, reports, and white papers provided the information you include will be useful to your site visitor. Before developing your content, you need to do your research. Find out what your readers are searching for. There are plenty of free tools and software on the internet to help you accomplish this task. Simply search for a keyword phrase like "keyword suggestion tools". When you're ready to write your content, choose two to three keywords and/or keyword phrases in the text for your page. Write your content and then optimize your page for these keywords. You can use free software like Web CEO. Although on page optimization will help you if you don't have a lot of competition for your keyword phrases, it is not enough if you are targeting high competition words. To raise your rankings, you will need to link to high traffic sites with high page rank. Building backlinks from other websites will also help you raise your rankings. Do a search in your favorite search engine to find sites you can link to. Study these sites. Check to see what keywords they use to optimize their pages. Find out if they exchange links and request a link exchange. The key to success in search engine marketing is to do your homework BEFORE you create your website. The bottom line is that no matter how many links you have pointing back to your site, or how well you optimize your page for the search engines, you won't rank high for keywords that are too competitive. If you still insist on building a website on a highly competitive topic, then I would recommend you use other techniques to promote your site. Article writing, forum posting, press releases, pay per click ads, and offline classifieds. The bottom line is you won't succeed in any business you aren't passionate about. Choose a topic you like that has a market and then build a content rich search engine friendly market. Get your name out there and keep branding yourself. You will succeed.

Here's 4 Quick and EASY Steps To Getting Your Website IN Through Googles 'Back Door'

Google... one of the Internets MOST powerful search engines recently announced a new FREE service that makes it easier for you to improve your websites coverage within Googles index through its NEW collaborative crawling system. On the down side though, Google does not 'Guarantee' immediate inclusion, But, is still good news for those of you who have just finished building a website and are ready to submit to the top search engines. So, what's this NEW service called that Google just released? It's called "Google Sitemaps". The real cool thing about "Google Sitemaps" IS it accepts RSS(Real Simple Syndication) and Atom feeds with the .XML extension as one of the accepted formats for submitting your websites Sitemap for inclusion in Googles index. This is just one of the four formats Google accepts and is the one that I'm going to use for the rest of this article to show you how to generate your own .XML sitemap of your website for inclusion in Google. It's real easy to do so don't worry about it being to complicated. So, with that said, lets go to Step #1. Step #1. Sign up for "Google Sitemaps". This step is easy, simply follow the link provide below and sign up for a Free account. It should only take you a few minutes to do, then once your done, come back here and go to Step #2. Go to: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login Step #2. Generate your .XML sitemap. In this step your going to generate a .XML sitemap for your website using a Free online sitemap generator. This Free online generator will build you a sitemap up to 500 pages. If you have a larger website with thousands of webpages you'll have to use a paid service and/or software to generate yours. Go to: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com Enter your required information on the form provided. Step #3. Upload your generated .XML sitemap to your server. Once your generated sitemap is finished(your generated .XML file should be called site.xml.gz) it's now time to upload it to your server using your FTP(File Transfer Protocol) program. This is very important that you do this before submitting it to Google Sitemaps for inclusion. Step #4. Submit your NEW .XML sitemap to "Google Sitemaps". Now that you have generated your "Sitemap" for your website and uploaded it to your server all you have to do now is to go to "Google Sitemaps" and submit your sitemap URL. (ex. http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.gz) That's it. Now, depending on Google, your sitemap should get downloaded within the next 24 hours, so be sure to check and see that it did and that there wasn't any problems or errors. Also, your going to want to be able to track your indexed webpages within the search engines, especially Google, so you can see how things are going, so I'll leave you with one last resource that will do this for you. Go to: http://www.uptimebot.com All you have to do is enter your URL and click "GO". The results page will list the results from Google and 9 other popular search engines. Well, there you have it... "4 Quick and EASY Steps To Getting Your Website IN Through Googles 'Back Door'".

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.

How to get a Website Indexed Fast

Get Indexed Fast What does getting indexed mean? The search engines keep a cache of every web page in their index. In English, this means: The search engines make a copy of every web page they visit and put in their records… ummm, I think that’s what I mean. When you use a search engine the results list relevant pages to your search, usually ten results per page. Each result includes a live “link” to the page, and a “cache” or “snap-shot” of the page, recorded the last time the spider visited that page, at some time in the past. If you wish to get a website indexed, first you must have a website… preferably a real one that you own, not a “free” website a’ la Geocities etc. It only costs about $8 to register a domain name, and about $5 a month for cheap hosting, while $10 a month will get you very good quality hosting. To get indexed fast, I recommend you start a blog on your site. This can be with any blog software, but I think that WordPress is the best… If you get good quality hosting, it will include cPanel and Fantastico scripts. In fantastico scripts are about 50 scripts you can automatically install on your server with one click… and WordPress is one of them. The alternative is to manually install wordpress yourself. Once you have built the basic barebones website (Main page, ½ a dozen content pages, and a sitemap linking them together, it’s time to get indexed in the search engines. You can “submit” your site to the search engines if you wish, but that is too slow. Here’s where the blog comes into play… post articles or messages to your blog on a daily basis, and don’t miss a day for the first few weeks at least. The posts must be interesting, and relevant to your site. Configure your blog to automaticlly “ping” the blog directories every time you publish a new post. Here’s what happens… Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other search engines are always looking for fresh content to serve up to their search visitors or clients, and one place they look for fresh content is in blogs. Search engines absolutely love blogs, because they are dynamic — updated on a regular basis by their owners – as apposed to normal website pages which largely remain static – unchanged for months on end. If you update your blog every day by adding fresh articles or other content, the search engines will notice, and they will soon be visiting your blog every day like clockwork. I include a link to my regular website pages by adding a link to either my homepage or sitemap, in the sidebar (menu) of my blog. The second best thing Search Engines love after fresh content is “links”… they will literally die for links, and if they find a link anywhere that they’ve not seen before, they make a record of it, then follow to to where ever it may lead… and if the link they find is on your blog, youbetter make sure it leads to the sitemap of your website. Double check that it does, by clicking on it after you make it. Yahoo and MSN will list your website pages as soon as they visit them, and will usually index them within a few days. As soon as they are indexed, people can find them in search results. And that’s how easy it is to get indexed fast.

Linking Your Way To The Top Of The Search Engines

One of the most important things you can do to raise your search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your site is to convince other websites to link to yours. It's free, of course, and very easy, but doing it properly does take some time and effort. I recommend a couple of ways to find websites which might be willing to link to you. One way is to do a simple search to find websites with information about the same subject as your site, or closely related information. If you have a website about flowers, for instance, you can use search terms such as "gardens", "gardening", "flowers", "plants", and "seedlings" to find sites which may be interested in linking to yours. Or, you can take another route. Just identify a related site which is already highly popular, and find the websites which link to it. You can do that with a search in Google or http://alltheweb.com for "link:" (without the quotation marks) and the complete URL of the website. For example, link: http://www.college-scholarships.com (and don’t forget the colon after the word "link"). Once you've identified the websites most likely to link to yours, visit them, obtain the email addresses of their webmasters, and send an email requesting a link. To be effective, your email must: 1. be brief, well written, and polite. Always use "please" and "thank you". 2. describe your site in no more than 25-30 words. The description of your site must be interesting and explain why the webmaster's visitors will find it helpful or enjoyable. The less hype the better. 3. offer the webmaster something in return. For example: a. a link on your site. b. information about how to submit their website to 300,000+ search engines, directories, and links pages for free. When they agree to link to you, send them to: http://www.college-scholarships.com/free_search_engine_submission.htm. Contact an average of at least ten webmasters a day, more if you have the time. With just a ten percent success rate, that will net you a minimum of thirty new links a month. If you follow this advice, you should experience an almost immediate, albeit modest, increase in visitors to your website. However, the biggest benefit of a good linking campaign, higher search engine rankings, will take a bit longer. There is no magic formula, and there are lots of variables, but your search engine ranking could improve in as little as a few weeks, and should continue to improve as time goes on and more sites link to you as both a direct result of your efforts and webmasters seeing your links on other sites. Keep at it and, all things being equal, you can obtain the kind of search engine rankings that can transform your website from a hobby (as my wife originally referred to my first site) to a site which can pay your children’s full college costs and more, as that same site now does for us.

Getting Indexed, A Little Patience?

Newbie's and Expert Internet Marketers all have one thing in common: Trying to get their websites indexed through the top three major search engines quickly. For larger websites the task is even more daunting, and there are a few small but effective techniques that can assist in the indexing process. Patience is a virtue and in today's internet marketing world patience and planning is a key. Smaller one or two page websites, also known as sales pages, are the easiest and quickest to get indexed in the three major search engines almost anyone can generally succeed by just manually submitting through each search engines submission process. Websites with a considerable number of pages will often only immediately get their first page indexed which therefore requires small effective planning strategies and a little bit of patience to become completely indexed. Effective Key Planning Strategies: (1) Prior to submitting your websites to the search engines or establishing link partners which will cause the search engines to start indexing in your website. Start planning out the basic website structure so that search engines robots can easily flow through your website and index each page. (a) Have an sitemap linked from you main index page that thinks through out your website. (b) If possible, ensure that each page is linked together, not just back to the main index page. This is not possible depending on what type of website you have, the number of pages, or your website design and structure. But this has been a successful technique in the past. (c) Build and submit a Google Sitemap. (2) Test your websites design and structure using Google Sitemap Software such as SOFTplus GSiteCrawler (Freeware) that will try and index your entire website. If your unsuccessful building a index of your entire website, then further planning and design changes maybe in order to index your entire website. If the software can not index your entire website, how will the search engine robots index your entire website? (3) Instead of manually submitting your websites, submit your website through directories and establish link partnerships. This will improve how often your website is crawled by the search engines and how fast your website is indexed. Also, when establishing link partnership and directories higher the Google Page Rank, the quicker your website will be indexed and how often your website is crawled. (4) Lastly, Patience. The process the search engine will go through while indexing your website is: First, the search engine will have to find your website (Hence, establishing partnerships with high Google Page Rank), then crawling through your website and absorbing all the information contained, then ranking each individual page and finally your website will appear in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

How to Make the Most Out of Automated Link Exchanges

One of the early problems of automated link exchanges was that when you joined such a website and submitted your link, you would instantly get hundreds or thousands of incoming links. This might sound great, at first, but that was not true for the search engines. Reality shows that all the major SEs want to see a lot of link towards your site, but they want to see a natural link building process. When a 1,000 links are instantly directed towards your website, Google and the other search engines will see something suspicious and your web pages will not get the expected popularity and recognition. Here are a few things that you should consider when you are using an automated link exchange website or directory: Add your website in the right category – this is very important, as webmasters are looking for websites related to their own topics. Don’t place your pet website in the “travel” section of the directory, as that will make it very difficult for other webmasters to find you and initiate link exchanges. Create a well written description for your site – this is also essential, as you want webmasters looking for link exchanges to see that your website is (or wishes to become) an authority in the field. No one will want to trade links with a short, rushed description that is full of errors. Filter out unwanted categories – your wedding related website, for example, will not benefit much from trading links with online poker websites. A great directory which allows you to filter unwanted categories of topics and only allow link exchanges with related websites is: o http://www.MyLinkMachine.com Allow the link exchange process to be gradual – this is important as the search engines want to see a natural link exchange pattern. Don’t rush to approve hundreds of link exchanges each day. Take things slowly and only deal with a few dozen link exchanges each day – in the long run, this will be extremely beneficial as Google and the other search engines will consider that you are doing a quality-based exchange campaign, not a bulk links campaign. Allow the link exchange directory to be visible – some webmasters fear that by placing their link exchange pages where their visitors can reach them they will lose traffic. Although some visitors are lost to link partners, the same number of visitors is probably gained from the links you have on other websites. So don’t hide your link exchange pages and place a link to easily access them from most areas of your site. Your link exchange partners will notice this and this will also determine how many link exchange requests you get. Be constant with your link exchange campaign – you will need at least a month or two of decent link exchanges to start seeing results in search engine placement and traffic numbers. Automated link exchange programs are the best choice for keeping a constant link exchange campaign while also investing very little time and effort.

Part V - Getting Your Site Indexed in Exactseek

Some may disagree with me on the importance of Exactseek. After all, Google, Yahoo, and MSN are the top three sites (not in that order), and then we jump to Exactseek, which is ranked in the top 2000. However, in the search engine game, Exactseek is a major player with some pretty cool tools and some great stuff to help you market your business online. Whether you choose the free or paid version, you'll get great results, and it's easy to submit your site. Exactseek is also an excellent way to help you get into the top three because of their spiders. This site gets spidered, and it also gets a lot of traffic. These are two of the reasons for its high rankings. Although the top three provide about 80 percent of the search traffic these days, this site will help you work on grabbing the other 20 percent that might not find you because you aren't in this directory, or all of the other smaller search engines. Unlike Google, which is a true search engine because it uses spiders to gather the links of a site, Exactseek is more of a web directory. Since this is a web directory, you will only need to provide the top level domain for your site, and you should only submit your top level domain. Before submitting to Exactseek, there are a few things you need to do to make sure that your site gets accepted. First, you want to make sure that the metatags in your header for your page are complete. Unlike the top three, your metatags are very important here because this is the description of your site that will be shown. Make sure that you write a good description, and that you properly target your keywords. Not only will this help you in getting your site accepted here, when the other major search engines spider this site, you'll be correctly spidered. Also, when you submit to Exactseek, you need to provide a valid email address. The reason is that you will need to confirm your submission. If you fail to do this, you won't be accepted into the Exactseek directory. You can submit your site here: http://www.exactseek.com/add.html. If you are looking to get exposure more quickly, you will find that Exactseek offers one of the best promotion deals on the internet. For only $12 per quarter, or $36 per year, you can get a featured listing. This is a very low cost way to get the word out about affiliate programs that you may be selling, and this allows you to be featured on 200+ websites throughout the internet. Unlike pay per clicks, you pay a one time fee, and you can check for keyword availability. To find out more, visit: http://exactseek.com/featured_listings.html. You will also want to read the help section prior to submission so that you fully understand the program. Although Exactseek isn't exactly a search engine, it's still one of the best places to promote your website. Using Exactseek can help you get some of the traffic you won't get from the three major search engines.

Some ways to improve your king content

There are thousands of articles, books and forum posts which showed that content is king in search engine optimization (SEO). In this article, you can find some ways that can help you improve this king content for your web site.

* Content for people first, not for search engines - Some webmasters make a common mistake that they optimize everything for search engines but forget about web visitors. The goal of our website is not only to get high search rankings, but also to sell our service. So you should give your website visitors what they are really looking for. Make sure your content flows naturally and you're not just trying to stuff more keywords in the interest of search engines. If users don't find your content convincing they won't buy from you.

* Studying popular search terms - High search engine ranking is meaningless if your website only ranks high on terms nobody searches for. You need to ask your colleagues, vendors, competitors, clients, ... or use online tools (e.g.: wordtracker.com) to identify what keywords which potential customers would use to search your web site, then try to use them often, in titles, and throughout the body.

* Building article directory - How can you optimize the content if your web site only offers a simple service? It means there are just several pages in your whole website. So, to increase the content in quality you should write some articles, reviews which are related to your service. A site with more web pages means there are more chances of different terms that will become findable in search engines. You may consider adding free articles to your article directory. On the Internet today, one can find a lot of websites which provide articles free for republishing. Of course you must accept the policy of these web sites and authors before using these articles.

* Making a clear website organization - Build a site which is simple to navigate with a well linking structure. Every page should be accessible from at least one text link. It's better to be sparing with image links, Flash, JavaScript drop-down menus, or other codes that are not HTML based... because the search engine crawlers cannot recognize text contained in these kinds of display. In case using them is required, then make sure a text based menu or a sitemap is also included in the Web site. Last but not least, you should use meaningful words in your URLs, use as simple a web page layout and design as possible.

In conclusion, it is undeniable that content is king in the kingdom of search engines. The quality of your content is the main factor which decides the success in Internet marketing. So improving your content is very necessary.

Part III - Getting Your Site Indexed in Yahoo

Unlike Google, which allows you to use sitemaps as a way to get your site indexed and spidered, Yahoo uses several different approaches to indexing content.

It can take a little while to get indexed, but if you are persistent, you'll see your site indexed on Yahoo in no time.

First, you need to understand the different ways that Yahoo indexes content because there are both free and paid versions.

However, since Yahoo no longer uses Google for its backend results, and Yahoo Directory listings are now mixed with search results, paying $299 a year to get included in the directory may not be the way you want to go.

Of course, if you have a personal, instead of a commercial website, you can get included in the Yahoo Directory for free. This will take some time; however, it is well worth the effort.

Now, before you submit your site to Yahoo, you will need to make sure that it is properly prepared, and that you have a Yahoo account. You can sign up for free.

The easiest way, of course, to get indexed is to have an RSS feed that has been correctly formatted in XML. Then all you have to do is log into your Yahoo account, add it to your My Yahoo page, and your site will begin to get indexed almost immediately. This works especially well for blogs, as well as sites that are updated frequently.

If this isn't a viable option for you, then you can submit the traditional way.

You will need to log into your Yahoo account to get started (it's free), and then you can visit the submission page:

http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

There are two ways to submit your site: you can submit your site feed, or you can submit your main url for your website. When you use this form, you will be submitting your site directly to the crawler, which is free.

This is no guarantee that you site will be accepted. If you don't get indexed the first time, add more content to your site, as well as optimize it, and resubmit.

The real secret to doing well on the search engines is to offer real value to your site visitors. Offer real value to your site visitors, and you won't have any trouble getting indexed in the search engines.

There are also other ways to get indexed by Yahoo depending on the type of content you offer and how newsworthy your site is. Google also offers several other paid ways to get indexed like Product Search, as well as travel and sponsored search.

To see a complete list, start here: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

Although Yahoo isn't the largest, or the highest ranking search engine on the internet, it is still one of the most important, and if you want use search engine optimization and promotion as a main technique in your marketing arsenal, you definitely need to get listed here.

How To Trick The Search Engines

How to Trick the Search Engines
In a Zen sort of Way

Everybody is looking for the magic formula that will get their site listed on the first page of Google. Because of this, the internet is full of search engine optimization experts that are willing to take your money once they sell you on their new theory of Google’s algorithm. You have your choice of SEO Consultant to full fledged SEO Corporations all willing to take your money and optimize your site. None of them will promise specific results.

That’s because Google is a very sophisticated search engine and their algorithm changes constantly. Google’s algorithm has one primary goal and that is to deliver relevant content. All of this effort is to identify good websites with quality content and to weed out the sites that are "optimized" to trick the algorithm. Therefore… if you have a good website with quality content then “optimizing” your site may be counter-productive if there's even a slight chance that Google would think you’re using tricks.

That’s right, let Google’s algorithm smell your website optimization techniques and your status as a good website with quality content may be in jeopardy. Google is looking for websites whose webmasters are putting their time and energy in to building and maintaining a good website with quality content not spending their time and energy trying to trick the algorithm. So, the best thing you can do is to put your time and energy in to the reason you built your website in the first place. Whatever that reason may be, it probably was not to learn and practice SEO techniques.

Be organic. Be yourself, even be one with your website. Google likes sites that are organic and built by people with a clear purpose. Understand and embrace the algorithm. Do not fear it and try to trick it. It is there to do good.

As I’ve said before, don’t lose sleep over search engine optimization, lose sleep over conversion rate. Spend your time maximizing your site for your visitors. A good site with quality content will get top rankings naturally.

So, the trick to tricking the search engines is to have no trick at all. How much easier can that be?

If search engine optimization was a major player in your marketing plan, here’s a great site to learn about other website marketing methods: http://www.wilsonweb.com/a/go.to/Ogre

- JD

Top 10 Search Engine Listing and Ranking Tips

There are many companies offering ‘first page ranking’ services guaranteeing top page listing in the major Search Engines for as little as £199, within 3,5,7 days.

The problem is the search terms that gain these results are unlikely to allow prospective customers to find your website.

For the website www.davidcouplandaccounts.co.uk first page ranking can easily be achieved for the search terms, ’davidcoupland’, ’couplandaccounts’, ‘davidcouplandaccounts’ and ‘www.davidcouplandaccounts.co.uk‘. Technically this has completed the ranking companies side of the agreement, but no one looking for an accountant is likely to find the site.

The ranking company will tell you they will ‘work towards gaining top ranking’ for your preferred keywords and terms, but ‘it will take time’ and will cost you more.

So why not try and do it yourself?

How do you actually getting top ranking? Unfortunately the reality is that it will take time but there are several extremely effective techniques that are invaluable and will speed up the listing and ranking process:

Submitting your site monthly to the major Search Engines using a guaranteed inclusion service such as http://www.premiumsubmission.com. Submitting monthly will increase the value of your website in the eyes of the search engines.

Change your site content and Meta Tags before each submission. This will over time enabling multiple listings for a single URL.

Incoming links from highly ranked sites. Try contacting sites similar to yours though not direct competition, and request mutual or ideally exclusive links to your site.

The frequency of keywords used in the text of your site.

Always choose a relevant