Is Your Domain Name SEO Friendly?

When you first start an Internet business one of the first items on the list, after you've written your business model, is getting a domain name. In years past it wasn't as difficult to find a decent name for your site. Today however, it's not as easy to get your dot com name. The process of registering a name has improved substantially but the availability for descriptive names is far more difficult. Why is this a problem you may ask? It's more of a problem for small and home business sites than it is for larger companies. The reason is simple and I can sum it up in one word: money. Larger companies, especially public companies have the funding to advertise their new sites, therefore they don't really need to have names that reflect the type of business they are in. I can site a perfect example, Go Daddy.com, has absolutely nothing to do with the type of business Go Daddy is in. But being the largest register of domain names, GoDaddy can advertise on all media levels to get business including buying advertising time on the Super Bowl! If you are starting a home based business on the Internet, I'll bet that you won't be buying time on television not to mention next year's Super Bowl. Okay, where am I going with all of this? You are on a limited budget when you start your business and you must rely on free traffic to your site, because without traffic you have no business. This is what I described in my article on organic traffic a few weeks ago. In order to get substantial traffic to your site you'll need to have an optimized site. This all has to do with keywords and something called keyword density. You achieve this by having your most important keywords dispersed throughout your website and your domain name. (See I did come to the point of this article.) Most SEO, search engine optimization, programs first look at the domain name and your major keywords. They look to see if your domain name and site title have any commonality. If they do your site receives extra points in the SEO algorithm, (a logical step-by-step procedure for solving a mathematical problem in a finite number of steps, often involving repetition of the same basic operation.) I hope that I haven't lost you here because all of this is very important, especially to home based Internet business owners. Most SEO programs will constantly refer back to the domain name and those words which match the dominate keyword phrases that you have chosen. When your site is optimized, search engines will pick up your scent, so to speak, and you will have great placement and positioning on searches that have your keywords. All of this amounts to substantial traffic. I'm not an expert on SEO and I don't pretend to be but I've spent my share of time in attempting to understand it and how it effects my site. I can recommend two areas of my site that I think are beneficial to you: Web Site Design and Search Engine Optimization at http://www.homebusinessresearch.com There are a lot of submission services as well. Some of them are good and some of them are not so good. Try to optimize first.

Google Ranking WITHOUT submitting to Google

A while back, I read an article that explained how to get a good google rating without ever submitting your site to their submission forms. Like you, I was kind of shocked by this statement so I decided to give it a try. In the beginning, I used to submit my site all the time to Google but soon realized the magnitude of my failure. Of course, it's a known fact that Google relies solely on your link popularity and content. Link Popularity? What that means is the amount of links (yousite.com) listed on other sites that are related to yours! The more sites that link to you, the greater your popularity! So again, Google depends on your link popularity! If you don't have a google rating (In other words, is your link found on google?) some sites WILL NOT link to yours. There are many sites that have a great google rating and have specific regulations to whom they will accept within their resource sections. They will specify that your site must be listed within Google and if they type in your site in the google search bar, your site should be listed within the top 5 sites. Here's The Theory: Of course you want all sites to link to you, especially the ones who already have a great google rating because that means that your site will be picked up by google. Some people only try to get links from those sites but just remember, we all had to start somewhere. My suggestion is to do as many link exchanges as possible and especially make sure that each site is specifically categorized by their content. You will get penalized for having one page full of links to sites that do not relate to each other. Another little "Timbit", try to keep your pages to 1-20 links within each page. Once you have 20 links, add a button to a (PAGE 2) and continue your resources that way. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Here's an example of our "Resource Section" http://www.smartads.info/resources You'll notice how each category has specific sites that get listed within them. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Ok, so I went a little off topic with respect to this article but you'll see how everything is connected together. Once google starts ranking your site, you don't want to leave any stone left un-turned. So back to getting a google rank without submitting your site. Once you start performing link exchanges with other sites, just keep on going and going and I promise that eventually, Google will start picking up some of your links on other sites. Once this starts to happen you're google rank will rise. So just keep doing what you're doing and let Google do it's own thing. When your ready and you're link popularity grows, then you can submit your site to Google and reap the rewards. So many companies do this process backwards and wonder why they don't get listed in Google. Or like what happened to me, Google lists your site right away but then in a couple of weeks, presto, your site is gone from their listing and your left confused as to why!

Re-Use The Links You Have When Revising Your Site!

Many times I've seen a web site undergo a revision and everything is brand new, even brand new links! You've worked so hard to get those great page ranks for all your pages and then you get rid of them? NO NO NO.

Many times I've seen a web site undergo a revision and everything is brand new, even brand new links!

You've worked so hard to get those great page ranks for all your pages and then you get rid of them? NO NO NO. It's the same reason why people buy "expired domains". Simply because before search engines, directories & web sites have a chance to notice there is no web site anymore, someone simply changes the site to fit their needs and utilizes the traffic coming in!

Let's say that you've made up your mind and you want to change the entire layout of your site. Before you do so, go through all your links and record the page rank that your pages have right now.

Ex.

Page 1 (PR 3/10)
Link: www.yoursite.com/page1

Page 2 (4/10)
www.yoursite.com/page2

Page 3 (2/10)
www.yoursite.com/directory/page3

Now I would look at those pages and utilize the pages that have a rank of (4/10) for my most important information when I consider the new layout. Doing so will automatically get my page listed under the new information within Google.

Typically, I don't usually re-use pages that have a rank of 2/10, 1/10, 0/10. Anything higher will be strongly considered.

This will help search engines to recognize, a) Yes the site has changed, b) we are familiar with the pages they are re-using.

People BOOKMARK pages all the time!

What if you deleted all your old pages and created some new ones what will happen to your visitors that have a bookmark for those old pages??? They are now left feeling like your site is down, deleted or doesn't exist anymore.

If you're going to discard some old links, try adding a "Page no longer exist" message to let your users know that you know about the problem and you are sorry for the inconvenience.

So when re-designing your entire site, don't be afraid to re-use those high ranking links you already have for your site.

Searching For All Your Pages Online:

If you're like me, and you have well over 500 pages listed in google, you'll want to go through google to see if you've missed any pages while performing changes on your site.

type in "www.yousite.com" in Google so that you get your main link. Don't forget the brackets.

You should see underneath your listing a link that states: "[ More results from www.smartads.info ]"

This will show you all the pages listed within Google. Take a moment to go through all the links found within Google and make sure that you've caught all your old, outdated pages and correct the problem accordingly.

Good luck with all your changes!

The Benefits of SEO

SEO stand for Search Engine Optimization. It's a fancy term that means a website is user friendly to search engines bots. When you use SEO on a site you fix the site's meta tags, title, discription, and even the body of the index page, among other things to give the bots the best possible idea what your page is about and how relevant the content is to everything else on the page.
Most search engines have a submission form making it easy to get you listed from a few days to a week and often a site with SEO techniques on it won't matter at all for them. You won't be at the top of the rankings, but that's the price you'll pay for doing it for free and with a 2nd tier or lower search engine. Even Yahoo has submission forms, and now multiple of them depending on the purpose of the site. Google however, has surpassed Yahoo in usage, making it the current #1 search engine in the world, so it's really them you want to be listed in.

Google's search engine bot is automated. There are no more manual submissions put into the Google index anymore. It's been said using their submission form could take a week to years to getting listed to not even at all. It's bot crawls the internet looking for websites to index according to their relevancy. As it combs through your pages it looks for words that tell it how your site should be indexed and if the words it finds really are what your page is about. InBound and OutBound links need to be relevant to your page as well. If your site is not relevant, or not relevant enough, it may move on and not list you at all. So, basically, Google is at the top of the mountain and you want your site Google bot friendly.

On my first site, I thought I had done this correctly, but to this day it's not listed in Google. After having some inspiration for anotehr website I openned a new page. I was picky with sites linking back to me and careful keeping each page slightly different in subject matter, but just enough to hit other keywords the Google bot may like when seeing if it was relevant. It was already preset with SEO as a habit so when the bot came along, everything it found through the SEO, it would find onsite. Sure enough, I was listed very, very quickly. Especially when you compare it to the zero listings of my first site in a much longer period of time.

It's really amazing how quick the bots add you when it's done correctly. The extra time it takes to make sure everything is just right more than makes up for the extra time it'll take to get it listed and indexed the hard way.

Three Simple Things To Do To Get Traffic

When I first set out to quit my job and make money online it seemed like a very big task. Everything out there tells you how easy it is. They tell you how much money you can make in a month, or a week, or even a day depending on what you're looking at.

The money won't just fall into your lap, but I can tell you what you can do to make the steps to getting there much, much easier. I'll skip the part of long hours, time put in, how you seem to think about it even when you'd think yourself "off work" and the like, as you probably are already familiar with that stuff before you even thought of trying an online business.

First, KNOW exactly what you want to sell and/or what service you want to do. This will save you lots of time just in trying to make your website or sales page correct. The rest of your website will make sense around it as well and your web page will look and feel complete. You need to know as specifically as possible what goods or services you're offering. A subject that is too broad will not only make your site hard to find, but hard to update and keep track of as well.

Second, is get familiar with Search Engine Optimization(SEO), even with a finished site and a product ready to go, if noone can find your site you won't sell anything or get no visitors. You don't need to know it in the expert sense, but you should know what aspects search engines look for and adjust your website accordingly. Research the keywords and phrases common to your website's topic to find what people are searching for to properly optimize your page for the right traffic you want to go to your website.

Third, promote your site in as many different ways that you can think of. While it's not normally recommended to directly submit your website to the biggest search engines, taking out a few seconds to do it can't hurt. You can do so many things to promote a webiste, and as you work with one way, you'll often discover another way to get the word of your site around. From posting on forums to email advertising to Google Adwords, try and do as much as you can. Not every person surfing online will use the one or two ways you started promoting your site and may not see it. Get your hands dirty and experiment with as many as you can to give your site it's best chance of being seen.

This will hopefully help tweak and refine your site so when you follow the steps after it visitors will see what they were looking for and keep coming back or buy from you.

You've Got A Site -- Now What?

So you've got a website ready to go and you want to get the word out to either make money on it or promote it so it's the most popular page of it's kind. Now what?

Well, the first thing you should do is double check to make sure the site is as search engine friendly as possible. Go ahead. I'll wait. Done? Perfect. So, now it's easy for the search engines to find and categorize it once they do find it. Time to get that website where it can be seen.

One of the most common ways to get a site's pressence known in through Pay-Per-Click campaigns. They will assure you that the most qualified and targetted visitors come to your website. Keep your keyword and phrases as relevant as possible. If you keep your bids low it can be a profitable campaign when it targets the right audience. Keep track of the keywords people are clicking on to go to your site as well. This can tell you if you're targeting the right people or if you need to change your ad approach. Yahoo and Google are two very popular websites to do PPC campaigns on. There's numerous articles on the benefits and banes of PPC, and though it's not the focus on this one, it's usefulness to site promotion can't be simply disregarded.

Posting on forums is another way to promote your site. Do it specifically on forums with a topic relevant to your website. Check the TOS and make sure you can do it there first though. Simply placing our web address in your signature can create clicks through the forum, as well as create backlinks for your site. If the forum has a high Page Rank in Google it will work out even better for you. The main benefit of this is the backlinks your posts create which some search engine "spiders" deem gradually more important as they find your site linked more and more in different places on the internet.

On the idea of linking, reciprocal linking is another way to promote your website. This just means trading links with someone by putting a link on your website to them and they put a link on their website to you. Websites like Link Market and SEO Link Exchange are designed for just this purpose. As long as you keep the sites linking to you and from you relevant to your own site it should be just a matter of time before the search engine spiders find your site. The old fashioned way of emailing the webmaster of the site's can do it for you as well, but web services like the aformentioned ones, get rid of smaller steps that might make it harder to get linked using simple "Accept"/"Reject" buttons.

I hope this helps get your site to the top of the search engines.

Tips to get your FREE website promotion!

You’ve put loads of effort in designing a site. You’ve added eye catchers and promotions to grab your visitor’s attention. And now you’re waiting... waiting for those visitors to come.

There are many ways to attract visitors to your site. You could of course spend a lot of money buying advertisements and promotion tools... Why not try it the FREE way first? You have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain!
First thing first: when promoting your site, always keep these tips in mind:

TIP 1: Persist
Keep your site promotion constant – if you promote your site with persistence, it will catch your audience’s attention.

TIP 2: Be patient!
As you know, Rome wasn’t build in one day, neither is a continuous traffic stream... Try each method to decide what (combination) works best for your site.

TIP 3:
Never put all your efforts into only one kind of advertising – you don’t want to reach the same potential visitors over and over again.

There are numerous ways to get your web site seen around the net without spending a dime. Listing them all would probably take hours. I’ve narrowed it down to the ones I think are the most important:

* Get your site listed in search engines en directories. Make sure to check your web site’s ranking to know whether or not this type of free promotion is right for you.

* Trade links with other web sites. Make your link description as attractive as possible. You’ll want people to click it! It’s a good idea to design an button and/or banner for your site to offer to your potential link partners.

* Use free classified ads: post them all around the web. They’ll attract non-targeted visitors to your site.

* Design an attention-grabbing banner and spread it all around the web. There are loads of free banner-exchange services on the net.

Like I said, listing them all would take hours, that’s why I’m not going to.
The above ones will be a good start. Just give them a try, and you’ll be amazed.
(Use an ad tracker to find out which free traffic generating system works best for you.)

And remember... the best thing in life are free!!

Blogging: one of the best Internet marketing methods that won't cost you a cent.

Blogging: the act of writing in one's weblog. To blog something is to write about something in one's weblog. This usually involves linking to something the author finds interesting on the internet.

A weblog is a public web site where users post informal journals of their thoughts, comments, and philosophies. So basically, a blog is an online journal. A blog could be set up to no cost at all, and can be used for just for the fun of it or for business reasons.

Blogging itself isn’t new at all, it’s populary is. Thousants of teenagers all around the world see blogging as an outlet for their emotions, their opinions and interests. Smart marketers however, have discovered that blogging is one of the best Internet marketing methods that won't cost you a cent.

Blogging for your Internet business is one surefire way to boost the visibility of your products and services.

Find some tips to boost your internet advertising with the help of a blog below:
* Keep your customers informed about changes to your website. Important updates, like your new products and affiliate sites, could also be announced through your blog

* Use your blog as an archive: keep track of your business objectives and plans through open writing. What could be better than searchable information that could be easily accessed by anyone browsing the web, right?

* Write reviews, give your opinion or advice on on specific services or products that are related to your business.

* Be sure to include links that will fetch back links and subsequently improve your ranking on search engines. Affiliate links in the form of advertisement banners could also be included in your blog to earn more extra income.

* Add fresh and quality content to your weblog on a regular basis: search engines like fresh content.

*Post quality content articles to your blog. Allow your visitors to reprint those articles on condition that the author by-lines remain unchanged, and the link url’s are left intact. This way, links to your website will spread around the net.

* Encourage your visitors to leave comments and feedback. It’s the best way to learn and improve your products/services.

* Exchange links with other bloggers.

In fact, when it comes to blogging, the sky is the limit. Once you’re comfortable using a weblog, it’s up to you to get creative. Add sound, video, eBooks, pictures, advertisements, ... and give your website the boost it deserves!

An Easy Promotion Tool with Big Rewards

If you operate or own a website, then you know that you have to promote both on and off the web. You have to incorporate these two factors in order to be fully successful with an E-commerce business. I have talked with a few large Internet retailers that gave me an insight into their marketing on the web. When I was told, it all made sense and I had to implement it with my clients.

We all know that Ebay is the number one auction market place on the Internet today. Millions of dollars are spent each week on this web portal and it continues to grow each day! I am not going to tell you to open up a store and start selling your whole product line to Ebay buyers because that would be costly with little to no profit.

What I am going to tell you is to put a few top sellers in an auction, either fixed or auction type. This is to gain a large amount of viewers since the product is "hot" and they will want to purchase it. The key to this ploy is to put links on your auction site that direct viewers to your site that carries your whole product line. When this happens correctly your traffic will Explode and with all targeted viewers. You might not be making much money with the Ebay items that sell, but if you do it correctly the profit you make from these targeted viewers will far outweight the small profit margins. Give it a try because their is nothing to lose and you will be happy with the results.

Great News into Link Popularity

When it comes to Link popularity and its relevance into getting better traffic, we all know that it is a necessary thing. Link popularity is one of the ways that search engines like google and yahoo give your site better rankings. You can search through different sites advertising about link popularity that say they can increase it overnight with thousands of links directing to your site.

Let me tell you something, this is a bad decision to make if you are thinking about any of these services. I have experience in this field and thousands of links are not going to help your site out any!

One of the best ways to approach link popularity is to think about the relevance of your site to one you would like to link to. It is better for you to have a small amount of links to your site than having a large amount if the relevance is high! The higher the relevance, the less links you need to have to increase your popularity. Google and Yahoo do not only look at the amount of links, but the quality of links. The better quality, the better positioning and page rank. So do yourself a favor and work on getting your links on quality relevant websites and you will reap the rewards of doing this right!