Why? - Page Rank

What is Page Rank ? In short Page Rank is a "vote", by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there's no link there's no support (but it's an abstention from voting rather than a vote against the page). How is Page Rank Used? Page Rank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page's relevance or importance. It is only one part of the story when it comes to the Google listing, but the other aspects are discussed elsewhere (and are ever changing) and Page Rank is interesting enough to deserve a paper of its own. Page Rank is also displayed on the toolbar of your browser if you've installed the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/). But the Toolbar Page Rank only goes from 0 - 10 and seems to be something like a logarithmic scale: Toolbar Page Rank: (log base 10) Real Page Rank 0 0 - 10 1 100 - 1,000 2 1,000 - 10,000 3 10,000 - 100,000 4 and so on... We can't know the exact details of the scale because, as we'll see later, the maximum PR of all pages on the web changes every month when Google does its re-indexing! If we presume the scale is logarithmic (although there is only anecdotal evidence for this at the time of writing) then Google could simply give the highest actual PR page a toolbar PR of 10 and scale the rest appropriately. Also the toolbar sometimes guesses! The toolbar often shows me a Toolbar PR for pages I've only just uploaded and cannot possibly be in the index yet! What seems to be happening is that the toolbar looks at the URL of the page the browser is displaying and strips off everything down the last "/" (i.e. it goes to the "parent" page in URL terms). If Google has a Toolbar PR for that parent then it subtracts 1 and shows that as the Toolbar PR for this page. If there's no PR for the parent it goes to the parent's page, but subtracting 2, and so on all the way up to the root of your site. If it can't find a Toolbar PR to display in this way, that is if it doesn't find a page with a real calculated PR, then the bar is greyed out. Note that if the Toolbar is guessing in this way, the Actual PR of the page is 0 - though its PR will be calculated shortly after the Google spider first sees it. PageRank says nothing about the content or size of a page, the language it's written in, or the text used in the anchor of a link! Definitions I've started to use some technical terms and shorthand in this paper. Now's as good a time as any to define all the terms I'll use: PR: Shorthand for PageRank: the actual, real, page rank for each page as calculated by Google. As we'll see later this can range from 0.15 to billions. Toolbar PR: The PageRank displayed in the Google toolbar in your browser. This ranges from 0 to 10. Backlink: If page A links out to page B, then page B is said to have a "backlink" from page A. Visit us: http://www.halfvalue.com/top-articles/seo-resources.html

Google is quickly changing

With the big buzz of Novembers fall within Google comes a newly indexed data-base... Did Google do something bad to our great placements? No I don't think so and here's why. While people are screaming for help and wondering what went wrong, I've noticed a MASSIVE shift in page ranking. If you look at top placements at the moment, according to Scroogle, most of the ecommerce search terms got hit really hard. A lot of the top 100 placements were vanishing and quickly. Now on the other hand, less impressive and especially smaller ranking sites have been bumped up top. I firmly believe this is all because of Google's "refreshing" their memory and possibly starting to take on web site ID's with 5 characters plus. What I mean by that is the ability for Google to index more than 3.2 Billion web sites. Adding another character to the already large 4Id's dedicated to each site indexed will allow Google to add a whole other list of sites within their data-base. Now I could be wrong on that one but here's another phenomenon going on. I've been talking to other ecommerce web sites and helping them gain better rankings. It's been a while since they've had their Page Rank change within their site. Working real hard as I instructed, they have followed all the rules and attempted to boost their page ranks. Up until now, nothing has changed and people are loosing their ranks within Google since Novembers algorithm change. Around a week ago I've been getting calls left right and center about page ranks boosting like I’ve never seen. The previous scare before this November change went something like this. Google stopped indexing more than 3 levels within your site. Ex. www.yoursite.com/level1/level2/level3 I affirm to you this: its pure baloney, more sites now have better PR ratings within their entire site than ever before. I believe that Google is rewarding most great resources online before taking on more listings within their index. As towards se placements, I also took a major hit for my better search engine placements but a couple of days ago that started to all change. It almost seems as though Google wanted to take out the top placement companies in order to thoroughly crawl through all their information before letting them get back in the game. I say this because one of my top placements was sitting at #1 for a long time. Since this November change, it immediately dropped to #181 and didn't move one single number for over 3 weeks. To my knowledge, that's a little strange. All of a sudden, my site stats recorded Google browsing through all my 600+ pages and presto, my site is back in the game, just like that. In Conclusion: It seems to me that we're all just lined up to sign an application for better search engine placements. The question isn't if your site will get back in shape, it's a question of when your number will be called. Have a little faith and a little patience and you too will rise again! Just keep doing what you've been doing all along and don't worry about falling down. The ones who get back up are always the ones on top in the end. Best of luck to you! Read more of Martins articles online here: http://www.smartads.info/newsletter

What is SEO and why is it so important?

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimizing and refers to a set of good practices that teach you how to improve your website so that it would be easily tracked, indexed and ranked by search engines. Getting your site indexed by Google and other major search engines will help you attract visitors and increase traffic. It is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine. Basic SEO Tips: 1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. 2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better. 3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page. 4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed. 5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. 6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods. A good rule of thumb is if your pages do not contain any words that reflect the content of the site you are linking to, do not link to it. 7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. 8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images. 9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers. 10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned. So in this way Search Engine Optimization, is important, and helps to bring more visitors and Link Exchanging, is important because it can drive more visitors then search engines, once established. Directories ad valuable content for your customers/visitors, and this it improves your SEO. Visit us: http://www.halfvalue.com/top-articles/seo-resources.html

Reasons Why The Best Things In Advertising Are Free

With small businesses, you can’t help but wonder how you can market your enterprise without having to use up your entire budget. As much as you want to stop thinking about it, the fact remains that most of the advertising tools are just too costly for your taste.

Take for example tv and radio commercials. You know for a fact that such medium can cost an arm and a leg that’s why these two are definitely out of the list.

But not all advertising methods are expensive. In fact, some of the most cost effective tools are being used often by most business owners and marketers alike. And these include print ads such as your brochure printing materials, which showcase all the products and services in your list.

As they say, most of the time, the best things in life are free. In advertising, the same adage is true. Many business owners in fact, even the big ones, utilize these marketing tactics because they believe that there are such things that can actually do the job without having to pay so much.

Here are some of the reasons why the best things in advertising are most often free:

- Print ads such as your flyers and brochures can be made without having to hire a professional brochure printing company to do it for you. Lessen the costs; reduce the hassle.

- It never fails to spread out the good word regarding your product or service – word of mouth that is. Having your clients to put in a good word for you to their relatives and friends are the best free advertising there ever is. And remember, a good word can build your reputation steadily; but one bad comment and it’ll spread like wildfire.

- Preparing a special gift for some of your most popular clients can go a long way in endearing you to them. Bring your business cards with you so you can provide them with your contact information while you’re being appreciated.

- Exchanging links with other websites are basically free and you don’t even need to do extra effort in looking for most searched sites.

- Posting your print ads at your local bulletin board helps reduce your costs of posting it by mail.
- When giving tips at a restaurant, include your business cards or brochures. Nowadays, it’s very common to see glass bowls in the cashier area for putting your business cards.

- Press releases in your local newspaper and newsletter can help you advertise your business without having to spend a penny on your advertising campaign.

Lastly, give out free samples or promotional products to your target audience and they’ll definitely gobble up your promo. It may be the one thing that you’ll surely spend your money on but the outcome produces great rewards.


For more information, you can visit this page on Brochure Printing

SEO: For Search Engines or Humans

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is something that many webmasters are now obsessing over. Many web site owners are spending countless hours tweaking and modifying their web sites, adding keyword rich content, and spending hours obtaining back links, so that their site will rank higher in search engines. It is true that over 90% of all web surfers use search engines to visit sites on a regular basis, but should web masters and web site designers build and tweak sites for search engines, or for their visitors? The answer to this question is that when you build a web site, you are not targeting web search engine crawlers, you are targeting people and human visitors. Hence, you should build a web site for humans, not search engines. The whole purpose to create a web site is so that you can get traffic. Without traffic, a web site is worthless. No matter how many features and how functional your site is, without traffic, your design and functionality do not matter. Although search engines can help bring in traffic, web sites that are designed for search engines, are often not designed for human visitors and all the traffic that your web site gets will be worthless. Visitors will visit and then soon leave your web site and not return again. Return visitors are critical for the success of any web site. One good example of optimizing for search engines purely is some webmasters tend to stuff tons of keywords into the Meta-Tags; this is a very bad practice and will get the site blacklisted. Moreover, this black hat technique does not benefit the users. Hence, when building a web site, one should build it for human visitors. If you have articles that are too keyword dense, the quality of the writing will not be as high as it should, and quite frankly, many of your visitors will be annoyed if you keep using words such as “mesothelioma” or “home insurance loan” to get your web site high in the search rankings for these terms. They will leave your web site and most likely not return. If you create a web site where content is created for people to read and is well written, chances are you will get many return visitors who like the quality of the content you provide and come back frequently to read any new content you may have added. The more people that visit and link to your web site, the more popular it well become and naturally, it will be ranked higher in search engines. Also, rather than spending hours building links for SEO purposes, that time could be better spent on adding features to your web site which would prompt more people to return to your site and stay at your web site for a longer period of time. In conclusion, although spending lot of time on SEO and increasing your search engine rankings in the short run, the visitors you get from your SEO efforts will not be valuable as chances are they will not visit again. If you build your web sites for people, your traffic will grow and search engine rankings will rise naturally. Hence, the best way to build a successful web site is to build for people and allow your web site to naturally move up search engine rankings.

Search Engine Optimization is no rocket science

Introduction So you have completed your website, great! Now how are you going to attract visitors? If you do not let them know you're there, your visitors will never find find you. How are you going to sell products when users don't know that you exist? SEO will make your website noticeable on the internet, and this small guide will help you bring targeted visitors to your website. Optimize your website The most important part of your website is quality content. Search engines (such as google) will crawl your content and index it into a database. If your content does not match the product you are selling, you will not attract targeted visitors. It is therefore very important that you choose your (key)words very carefully. For instance, if you sell calculators on the internet, make sure you mention the words calculator, calc, math and more calculator related words on your website. However, be careful not to mention the words too often, or search engines might think your website is spam, which will result in a very low rank (search engine position) within the search results. Linkbuilding When more websites link to your site, the more attention you will get from search engines, which results in higher ranking. When you create and receive links from other websites to your website, make sure important keywords are used as anchor keywords in the hyperlink. If you sell calculators online, use a link such as; "buy calculator" instead of "click here". Target your audience Leave your link on website where your potential customers meet, for instance forums or discussion boards related to your website. Do not spam your website as this will be noticed by crawlers and will eventually result in a blacklist entry. Offline targeting Be sure to market your website offline as well. Advertise in local newspapers, tell everyone about your website, etc. Add a sitemap to your website When you want search engines to crawl your entire website, the best thing to do is adding a sitemap to your website. Make sure searchbots can read your website Searchbots can only read plain text.websites. No matter how beautiful your flash animation is, searchbots cannot read the content inside that animation. Therefore, try to avoid Flash animations on your website when there is content involved. Same story goes for JavaScript. Do NOT use frames Never use frames to design your website! Lots of search engines simply skip webpages with frames since they are a difficult to be seen apart from each other by visitors. For instance, if your framepage would consist of menu.html and content.html and your visitor would land on content.html, he would not have a menu to navigate through your website. Stay away from bad neighbourhoods and don't spam! Do not be tempted into leaving your link on abandonned guestbooks, forums or spam your link on every website you can find. Do not exchange links with spammy websites (such as pharmacy websites) either. The risk exists that google will classify your website as a spamsite and will block your website from any search results.

Could Time Warner be using Black Hat SEO to Help Search Rankings?

This is an exclusive story. Is it possible that MarkMonitor, Inc., who call themselves “a global leader in the fast-growing market for online corporate identity” has been secretly hiding links on behalf of TimeWarner? Is this being done on subdomains of timeinc.net in order to rank high in the search engines? You decide. MarkMonitor owns the domain name timeinc.net, a site with a homepage which re-directs to the main Time.com site. So it would seem they are running this site on behalf of TimeWarner. If you go to the timeinc site and view some of the source code of the pages, you will find error pages that have links below an image map at the bottom of the page, links which are hidden from viewers and added to increase the search engine ranking of other Time Warner properties. This link-hiding practice is often referred to as “Black Hat” SEO. An image map tells the browser how to display an image. That is it’s only purpose. However, some of the pages on timeinc.net have links hidden to viewers next to the image maps. If one views the source of sub domains such as img.timeinc.net or i.timeinc.net, it is apparent there are four links to other TimeWarner properties. Did MarkMonitor, Inc., a huge company and a true leader in “defending brand names” online buy this domain, redirect the traffic to Time.com and find places to hide links to other Time websites out of pure altruism? It’s possible, but hard to believe. It should be noted that there are very important subscription pages on other sub domains of timeinc. This is not a domain that was cast away and has no value for linking. If MarkMonitor purposefully hid links as it would seem, altruism towards Time seems an unlikely motive. There is an increasingly fine line with what is acceptable and what is not for search engine optimization. At ClickStream, we believe the last group that needs to employ sneaky techniques to rank high are fortune 500 companies. In essence, these companies are the ones that have whole “rings” of websites. Yet, search engines will ban individuals that create multiple sites for the purpose of linking to each other and creating a link circle. Time should be able to link in a circle with its various media companies. That may seem an unfair advantage, but they are separate entities that have the same parent company. What certainly seems unfair is for them to take further advantage of the circular linking by hiding links that only the search engines can see. The recent storm has just passed over the BMW being removed from the Google search engine pages. BMW’s German site was found using “doorway pages” to build traffic and rank for their site. Google was able to document that BMW’s German website used the search results to get a top ranking if people searched for “used car.” Searching for BMW Germany will bring no results. BMW.ge was well ranked but it dropped completely out of the Google index in a matter of 2 days.