Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Link Exchange - Related Or Non-Related?

Should I exchange links only to those sites which are related or non related? Does it hurt if I exchange links on non related sites?
No it doesn't hurt at all, unless your link is displayed on a non ethical site that would associate your image to that site. That would be bad.
You should also keep in mind that the main goal of link exchange is that users from other sites follow your link. The SEO (search engine optimization) considerations should come after this. In fact, I believe the rules of link exchange are exactly the same as in traditional marketing and common sense should be used.
Targeting your audience
You should try to advertise on sites that are related to yours, or complementary. For instance, exchanging your link with a site that sell vases if you sell flowers, would be a nice idea, because people looking for vases, have high chances to look for flowers too. On the contrary, if you sell flowers, and your link is displayed on a car site, I'm not sure that the interest will be shared, and your link followed.
Quality of links
When you propose to exchange a link with someone, or you participate in a link exchange program, the most probable is that he will put your link in his site but in a place where no one will ever go, with hundreds of other links (and maybe not even linked to the other pages). If that happens, your link will probably never be followed, and be useful only for SEO statistic purposes. You should try to raise the quality of the place where your link is put. Try to exchange first page links to site that are related to your business. Obviously, since you won't be able to place hundred of links on your first page (it is also not recommended to have many links per page), you must choose them well.
SEO considerations (search engine optimization)
With SEO comes the contradiction. It seems that number is more important than quality. If you are using firefox, you will be able to install some SEO addons that even if you don't understand much will show statistics about the site you are visiting. Some of these indicators are related to the number of links identified by main Search Engines. These indicators are valuable to many common users, but if the audience is not properly targeted, they would mean nothing, but for many users it seems to be important to have many links.
Google has also introduced a new parameter. Google robots, when crawling the web to determine what will be the PageRank for your site, will "note" the related links they find, giving a better note to back link than to reciprocal link. In that sense, it would be useful to build a page linked to your mainpage, that proposes to add your image and your link to the visitor's site. To raise your number of backlink, you should also try to participate in forums related to your activity, adding your site URL on your signature. It is also a good way to be known and respected in your area.
Also don't forget that Google is not the only Search Engine. Yahoo (according to Alexa) is still the most visited site. It is good to have a Google friendly site, but only if this doesn't prejudice your appearance on other Search Engines.

How Long For Google Indexing With a Link From PR5 Site?

Besides the fact that no one can predict when a site will be spidered or indexed, you have to ask if your link on the PR5 site is able to be indexed?
Check and make sure that something wasn't done that prevents the link from being indexed.
Here are a few things to look for:
1. a straight href link info
This is the preferred way to have a link, there are others, but this is the most common. Javascript or hidden links can't be spidered.
I set up a link exchange with a site recently. As always I check my links here and there, but the link exchange wasn't showing up to my benefit. So I went to the page where my link appeared and started checking things out.
After the original exchange (which was done with a standard link), the owner of the other site changed it to a link (commonly referred to as a hidden or dynamic link) which is not indexable. So I removed their link.
2. Does the page your link is on have a robots meta tag that says "noindex" or "nofollow?"
If it does this is bad. The first one prevents the page from being spidered, the second one may prevent your link from being picked up for future indexing on that site.
3. Does the site exclude the page from indexing with the robots.txt or .htaccess files? (This can be harder to figure out).
One easy way is to check and see if the other links on that page are showing as backlinks to that site.
You can also check with the SE's and see if your link is showing as a backlink. Obviously Google isn't, but what about Altavista, Alltheweb, and others? If the link is showing as a backlink there, it will eventually with Google, you just have to give it time.

How Long Do You Take to Get at Least 500 Visitor Per Day?

500 visitors a day? There really no one way of doing it. But I am not the guy who will spend months just to optimize a site for SEO traffic. It happens that SE changes their algorithm and filter frequently that normally lead to unpredictable search engine results. And of course your ranking!
Anyway, if you keep up to date to all this SEO stuff, you can maintain your ranking for sure. Ok, instead of showing you how to get >500 visitors a day, here's somethings you must avoid doing. I call them the time-wasters.
1) auto surf - you'll only get hits, not real visitors to your site.
2) safe list mailing - it doesn't work anymore. People joining safe list are more interested in posting offers than to really read their mailbox.
3) traffic exchange - it depends on how you use this. If you use traffic exchange site to promote your site directly, it looks like you're missing the key to real traffic from these network.
Don't promote your site first, recruit down lines instead. And...
4) put url signature link in various forums.
5) post comments on other blogs.
6) write high quality unique content.
7) create blogs.
8) create videos for Youtube.
9) have a correctly designed and planned user friendly site.
10) use well written title and description tags.
But of course, don't promote traffic swarm. Swap promote others traffic exchange sites like HitMagic etc. Once you recruited an army of down lines, then only you promote your site.
It's the same formula that Ewen expounded recently at his latest autopilot traffic machine.

Site Submission Software

Many webmasters want to get more visitors ("traffic") to their web site. There is a simple reason for this - web sites that get more visitors, generally speaking, for the most part, earn more money that web sites that get fewer visitors. It's also a fact that it can be very disheartening to hear about (perhaps on message boards or discussion boards) other web sites that get many thousands of visitors per day, when your own site only gets a relative trickle of visitors.
One perception that many webmasters have is that their site is not getting sufficient visitors from search engines. In some cases, this perception may be true - established web sites (which you may have heard or read about) do frequently get more search engine visitors than new web sites. The question that then arises is how to catch up?
One assumption that some webmasters make is that this is because they simply haven't submitted their own site to search engines, or enough search engines. In fact, this is rarely, if ever, the reason for insufficient search engine traffic. The fact is that it is possible to achieve lots of traffic from just a few major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask, etc.) - but you do need good rankings (to come near the top of the results for popular searches) inorder to achieve this.
That is not to say the submission software is unnecessary. However, what I'm saying is that you don't need to submit to major search engines directly. Instead what you need to do is to submit elsewhere, in order to create more incoming links ("backlinks") leading to your web site - since these can contribute towards higher search engine rankings.
There are three types of submission software to consider:
1. Directory Submission Software - Programs that will submit your site to Internet directories. There are over 1,000 Internet directories, and submitting your site to them is an easy way to gain lots of backlinks.
2. Article Submission Software - Programs that will allow you to submit your own original articles (of course you have to write these) to article directories. There are several hundred article directories that you could submit your articles too, and since you will be allowed to include a resource box with a backlink to your site in each article, this provides another method of gaining backlinks. The best part about article submission is that there is no upper limit to the number of articles that you can write (other than your time) - and thus you can get more backlinks whenever you want.
3. Link Exchange Tools - Programs that facilitate link exchanges with other sites, by finding pages that you can submit your link to, by helping you submit your own link, and by assisting you to manage your own links page. Some programs with these types of functions (check each one for exact details) include OutRankSmart, SEO Elite and SEO Equalizer.

How to Get Massive Traffic For Free With Long Tail Keyword Optimization

Most people think the only way to get lots of search engine traffic for free is if you optimize your website and build those large quantity of back links all of which must of high quality etc... Well, that certainly works but do you realize how difficult this is for competitive keywords? Also do you realize there is no guarantee you will make it to the top 4 of your targeted keyword phrase. Imagine spending hundreds of hours and a few thousand dollars is Search Engine Optimization or what not only to realize you are still not anywhere in the top 5 Search Results for your targeted phrase. Personally, I don`t like to gamble neither with my time nor my money.
I understand one must take some risk but I prefer e more calculated small risk with everything I do. So my conclusion is this is a high risk business strategy especially if you rely on a return within say 3 months in order to stay afloat. What most people don`t realize is that getting to that top position for 1 or 2 highly competitive term that gets say 1000 daily searches is not your only option to getting high volume traffic. The secret most web entrepreneurs don`t exploit is called long tail keyword targeting. Long tail keyword phrase simply means keyword phrases with minimum 5 keywords. For example, "golf clubs" without the quotes is a very competitive phrase that gets 3000 daily seaches in google but "how to fit golf clubs" gets only 20 searches daily. To rank in top 5 for "golf clubs" you may need 2000 one way backlinks from quality sites but "how to fit golf clubs" maybe only 1 or maybe none.
That`s great you say but what I am gonna do with 20 searches per day? Well first off all let me state a rule of fact that is almost always true with long tail keywords. Long tail keyword phrases are always more targeted therefore you can expect a higher visitor to conversion ratio. That means those 3000 "golf club" visitors will convert at 1:100 while the "how to fit golf clubs" may be 1:30. And the second trick is this. If you can target 1 long tail keyword for the niche golf clubs, why can`t you target 200 or 500 all pointing to a different targeted page on your site. Do you see what I`m getting at? Let`s say you use a keyword tool to generate related keyword phrases and you find 200 that are long tail(at least 4 words lets say).
Then lets say you run each one that you think will bring you at least 5 searches per day but no more then 10 to minimize competition and ease of ranking. (you can confirm this with wordtracker or overture search suggestion tool) You take these 200 keywords phrases and you build your site with 200 pages making sure each one of these page is optimized for each of these keyword phrases. Since your keywords are such low low competition it will be a breeze to rank each one of these pages in Google in top 3. So what have we done? We now have a total of min 5 x 200 = 1000 daily search volume for more laser targeted keywords(long tail always is). If we compare this to our broad keywords "golf clubs" which was getting 3000 daily searches we esentially will make the same amount of sales or conversions with only 1000 daily searches because they are 3 x more likely to convert to a sale.
But the biggest advantage of this stragety is that it is virtually guaranteed to work. All you need to do is do the hard word with keyword research and building the 200 pages. If gawk at the though of building 200 pages all manually source the work out. There are people who create sites like this for even $500 or less. Just do your due diligence. You wan`t as original content as possible because it matters with google. Good luck.

SEO Optimization For Local Businesses - Find the Customer Next Door With Google

No matter where you live there are local businesses around that are always looking for new customers. One thing many of those business owners don't realize is that they can take their business online to find new customers. For business owners that are looking for new local customers you can easily go online and use SEO optimization to get those local customers.
The first thing you need to do is to do your homework about SEO optimization. It is not as hard as most people make it seem. However, when you don't know anything about it then it can easily seem like a foreign language. So, you have to do the smart thing and take the time to learn about this marketing technique. There is a lot of free information online that will help you learn. There are also products that you will have to pay for but they will have a lot of information about how to successfully use search engine optimization for your business.
The second thing you need to do is to build a website that you can use online to promote your business. When you don't know how to do this you can take the time to learn and then build your website or you can have someone do it for you. There are many people that will build your website for you for a price. The one thing you need to be aware of is that SEO optimization starts with your website. You have to have your site optimized for the search engines such as Google, to find it. This is why it is important for you to learn about SEO optimization before you build your site or have it built for you.
You need to make sure that you do your keyword research because this is very important to SEO optimization. Without the right keywords your customers won't find you. You need to pick keywords that have to do with your local business. You can even use keywords that are about your local area or business. Be creative and come up with as many keywords as you can because you will definitely use them all over time.
SEO optimization for local businesses is a great idea but it will take time for you to do this. So, if you want to find new customers you need to get started right away. Learn all you can and then put it into action and before you know it you will have more customers than you know what to do with.
Jan Riley is the CEO and founder of LeadMastersUSA, a website marketing company founded in 2004 and based in Atlanta, Ga. Jan Riley is trained in Internet Marketing Strategies and Social Media Marketing. As a lifelong artist and business owner she understands the demands of running a business and marketing it.
Her entrepreneurial spirit and internet experience along with a talented staff has made LeadMastersUSA synonymous with converting visitors into relationships you can do business with.

Defining Organic SEO Services

How do you define organic SEO services? Organic SEO is a set of techniques that is used to beat your competition at a local level. For example, if you are a New York based business, then organic SEO techniques will revolve around the word New York and combine it with your business.
This will propel your website ahead of your competition in most search engines giving you the edge that is required to survive in this extremely competitive business environment.
However the problem is that not many companies have the expertise that is needed to tackle organic seo A lot of companies still use techniques like Meta tags, keyword stuffing, internal linking etc. While these techniques used to be an integral part of organic search engine optimization, it has now taken on an entirely new meaning.
Yes, modern organic SEO services involve techniques like customer psychology, site usability, semantics, analytics etc. It also includes interactive techniques like video and IM (Instant messaging).
Why Organic SEO?
If you are looking for long term passive flow of traffic to your website, then Organic SEO is a must.
Organic SEO is often termed to be time consuming. But when you look at the results, then it seems like a very small constraint. If executed properly, it can give you a long term and sustained flow of traffic. And the best part is that it is a one time investment. Unlike PPC which requires you to pay for each and every click that comes to your website, regardless of whether it converts to business,
Organic SEO lets customers find your website in a natural way. A survey has revealed that most customers prefer using natural results as opposed to paid listings or sponsored listings.
Choose the right company
Lastly, always ensure that you choose the right SEO Company for your organic SEO goals. Analyze the company, their previous work and the cost before you sign up for their services.

Increase Your Google Page Rank With These Tips

The search engine is called Google and for all intents and purposes it is perceived to be the Holy Grail of all internet searches. More people "Google" something everyday than any other search engine on the internet. If you go to Google and type in any keyword to search on, in a matter of seconds hundreds of thousands of results will be returned.
How does Google do it? It is simply their page ranking and indexing algorithm. Formulated by a couple of college friends from Stanford University, they were able to devise a scheme in such a way where each website is indexed and ranked on the internet. They call this the Google page rank.
The Google page rank or "pr" for short is a system that ranks a website from 0 to 10 with 0 being the lowest. Then when someone searches certain keywords Google returns the pages that are ranked higher first. In order to keep an updated ranking of the web, Google crawls the internet about twice to three times per year and indexes each website and sends their page rank up or down based on their popularity.
So how does Google know how popular a website is? It is based on the number of quality links pointing back to it. The higher pr a website has that is pointing back to your website the more favorable it is looked upon by Google. For example, the New York Daily News has a pr of 8. If you were to receive a link from the New York Daily News back to your site that would help boost your PR (if it were lower of course), however you pointing back to the New York Daily News would not carry as much weight in the ranking system. For the Daily News it would still help them but not as much as their link back to you would help your site.
There are a couple of good ways to get good quality links back to your website. The first is to partake in conversations on blogs and other written articles where you add quality feedback and in your comment post a link back to your website. When you add comments you want them to add value to the discussion. If they seem like you are just trying to get your link in there chances are your comment will be deleted.
The second way is adding content to the world wide web. People that use the internet are hungry for valuable information. You are an expert on something and you need to write about it. What you want to do is write articles that are about 350 to 750 words in length and offer valuable content. If you are an auto mechanic write about how to properly check your tires for tread wear. If you worked as a handyman, offer some tips on how to repair small holes in drywall. You get the point. Than at the bottom of the article you are going to put in your author resource information. It would read like this, "John Doe is a 15 year experienced auto mechanic specializing in tune ups, brakes and front end alignments, you can learn more about John's work at abc.com." The resource gives you a chance to tell readers of your article that you are experienced so the advice you are giving is valid and also gives them a way to get in touch with you.
Now that you have your articles written what do you with them? You want to submit them to article directories so they can be used by others around the world. You can post them to sites like EzineArticles or ArticleDashboard. These are free sites where your articles are posted and then others looking for content for their site will go there and use your article as it is written, link and all, and post it on their site. The more articles you write and post, the more back links you will get.
Finally, I need to make mention of one fact that a lot of web site owners overlook when it comes the Google pr. Time is your friend and enemy. When you create your website it usually takes anywhere from 2 to 4 months before Google will even take a look it. That is because most websites get removed within the first couple of months. So do not get discouraged if you write a hundred articles in the first two months and your PR is still zero. It will jump up once Google puts your site into its rotation.
Now once you are in Google's indexing rotation, the older your website is the more favorable Google looks at it. A website that has been around for 10 years will look better than a website that has been around for 10 days. So as long as your website is active and you are building those back links with article content, Google will automatically start increasing your pr.
In the world of SEO development, a pr 10 is like reaching the top of Mount Everest. Stick with these tips, stay focused and you will reach the top.

Tips For Improved Search Engine Ranking - Your Website Can Rank on the First Page of Google

When you follow these simple tips your site will climb in the search engine rankings and you will significantly increase the possibility of getting your site ranked on the first page of Google.
Review you site one page at a time, starting with the home page. Once you become familiar with these simple steps, you will be able to apply them to every page of your website and significantly increase your chance of having multiple pages rank on the first page of Google.
Find keywords relevant to your niche. Go to the Wordtracker free keyword research tool or use the Google AdWords tool to check the popularity of the keywords you are using and discover other related keywords that hadn't occurred to you.
Avoid targeting very popular keywords. You will find it much harder to get your website ranked on the first page of Google if you target very popular keywords. You are looking for keywords that are searched for enough but don't have lots of competing web pages.
Keyword research is an important key to top search engine ranking, so don't rush this step. Spend a few hours researching different keywords, and while you are researching keywords make sure you check out your competitors by doing a search using those keywords. It's important that you know how well the top ten sites are doing.
Be sure to keep a record of website addresses and related information so that you don't waste your time repeating the same searches later.
Decide which keywords you will target and make sure you put them into the Meta tags of your page. You'll find Meta tags in the head section of each web page.
If you go to any web page, right click and select View source, a notepad will open and you will see the HTML code for the the web page. The Meta Tags are near the top. The two most important meta tags are the Title Tag and Description Tag. Don't just leave them blank.
You can list your keywords,separated by a comma, in the keywords meta tag, but it isn't absolutely necessary as most search engines ignore them now because they have been abused so much.
Put you keyword phrase in your Title Tag. The text you use in the title tag appears in the title bar of the web browser and forms the first line of search results. The key to success is to create a meaningful title using your keyword phrase. Don't just list all your keywords here.
The meta description is your opportunity to sell your site. Use your main keyword phrase for the page and and include a benefit to encourage browsers to click through to your site.
The title tag and your meta description will be displayed in many search engine listings. So, take time to time to make sure these elements are keyword rich, interesting, and relevant to your site.
Use your keyword phrase in the headline for your page and make sure the headline is in a headline tag. You can also include your keyword and related keyword phrases in sub headings.
You can use bold and italics to highlight your keywords in the body text but don't overdo it. It must seem natural. It's recommended that you don't do this more than once on each page.
Use your keywords in the alt tags of images. This is text that will be displayed if the images fail to load. Get into the habit of always using alt tags for your images, The search engines like to find them here.
Encourage people who are linking to your website to use your keywords in anchor text and when you link to your own pages make sure you use variations of your keyword phrase in the anchor text.
Spend time each day building links to your site. Ideally you want a lot of links, but don't sacrifice quality for quantity. Look to get links from authority sites. You can do this by getting your site listed in quality directories, submitting articles to Ezine Articles and commenting on high page rank blogs.
If you apply these simple tips every time you write or rewrite a web page you will find that your stream of free search engine traffic will gradually increase and that your site will find its way onto the first page of search engine results.
Don't skimp on keyword research, if you spend time finding keywords that are searched for enough and don't have lots of pages dedicated to them your site will have a much better chance of getting on the first page of Google, keyword research is worth the time and effort.

How Sitemaps Help Get Higher Traffic Through Search Engines

Sitemaps have become an SEO tool these days. Search engines cannot reach many kinds of pages easily. The unreachable pages include dynamically generated pages and FLASH and AJAX pages. Sitemaps come to the rescue of Webmasters in such cases.
Using sitemaps, they could tell search engines how to reach all the important pages. E-commerce sites that generate pages on the fly from databases, for example, could use sitemaps to get many more pages indexed. And the more the pages that search engines index, the more traffic you are likely to get.
New websites, whose pages have not yet been indexed by search engines, could tell the engines about all their pages at one go.
What Are Sitemaps?
In earlier days, sitemaps were HTML files that contained a list of links to all pages of a site. It was particularly useful for content sites that discussed various issues on different pages. These sites could use sitemaps to help their visitors see all these issues at a glance and select the particular page they wanted to read. An easily noticed link to the sitemap can then be included on all pages for the benefit of visitors.
E-commerce sites, on the other hand, might have a different orientation. They might prefer their visitors to buy what they sell, instead of wandering all over the site. At the same time, they might want to get all their pages indexed by the engines. To achieve both these objectives, they might include a link to the sitemap page only on the home page, that too in small print at some less noticeable position.
Sitemaps Get Formalized
Sitemaps these days can be XML, ROR or text formatted files. While the text sitemaps are just a list of URLs, the XML and ROR sitemaps provide additional details about each of the URLs.
In the XML sitemap, you can provide information such as the priority of each URL relative to other URLs, the typical frequency of changes to a URL and the last date of its modification. ROR sitemaps allow even more information to be included.
What's Special About New Sitemaps?
An XML sitemap helps the search engines to crawl a site more intelligently. The engines can give greater weight to the more important pages, and can also schedule the crawling to synchronize with the page change frequency. Search engine crawling can thus cater better to Webmaster preferences.
Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask have adopted a standard XML sitemap protocol. You can also tell the search engines where they can find the sitemap by including a line as follows in your robots.txt file:
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Submitting Sitemaps Direct to Engines
Google and Yahoo provide facilities that enable you to submit your sitemap direct to them. You log into your Google or Yahoo account and follow the instructions for submitting the sitemaps.
The advantage of this option is that Google and Yahoo provide reports to you about your site. Indexing status, traffic statistics and keywords used to land on your pages are some of the information you could get in this way.
To submit a sitemap direct to Google or Yahoo, follow the procedure below:
1. Upload your XML sitemap to the root directory of your website
2. Go to the relevant page indicated below:
GoogleYahoo
3. Login to your Google or Yahoo account, as applicable
4. Now follow the instructions for submitting your sitemap. Both engines require you to complete a site verification or authentication procedure to check that you are the Webmaster or owner of the concerned site.
5. Once the verification or authentication is complete, they will arrange to crawl your site. Indexing might take time, however.
6. The major benefit is that you would now have access to considerable information about your site.