Search Engine Optimization: Ten Golden Rules For Beginners

The following are the ten simple ways to optimize and increase traffic to your website. The guide is meant for those who intend to or are just starting out in Search Engine Optimization. It shows you all the basic things you need to know and what do to improve your rankings with the search engines and increase traffic to your website. No geek speak. No technical jargons. Just practical, easy to follow tips.

Directory Submission:
Submit your site to online web directories. There are several directories you can list your site with. There are free ones as well as paid services. Directory registration can be a time-consuming elbow grease so the temptation is to go for a paid service whereby you pay a company or any other concern to help submit your site to all relevant directories. However you do not really need to shell out to get listed in the right directories with decent traffic and pagerank. The search engines have their own directory services and is a great place to start. Yahoo has its directory service www.dir.yahoo.com. Visit the site and submit your URL and feed in the category that matches the kind of website you run and / or your kind of business. It might take a while but your site will be listed. Getting listed in a directory like that offers all the exposure and presence a major player like Yahoo has to offer. Another directory to aim for is the Open Directory Project (dmoz). It does take some effort to get listed here but given the fact that this directory is highly valued by most of the big search engines, then it must be worth every effort. It can be found at www.dmoz.org.

Search Engine Registration:
Register with the search engines. Registering with the search engines is introducing your website to them, inviting them to visit the site and help announce your existence to the world wide web. This can be explained simply without getting into geek mode. Forget about algorithms, spiders, crawlers and all that. In plain terms, the search engines on being registered with, will visit your website and index it. Hopefully they like what they see and they keep coming back and once someone searches for the contents they have found on your site, they point that person towards your site. So a sure way of being noticed by the search engines is simply to register with them. Of course Google should be your number one target here. Other prominent search engines you should register with include Alexa, Entireweb, Scrub The Web, Jayde, Info Tiger, Exactseek, Lookseek and Lifetips.

Article Submission:
Submit articles to online article publishing and syndicating websites. When you do this, put a link to your website at the end of the article or any other appropriate place depending on the website you are submitting to. Be aware that this does not correlate to just a blatant plugging of your site. The article should be well written, informative and most preferably relevant to what your line of business or website is about.

Build Links:
Link building is perhaps the most important and influential factor to consider when looking to increase your standing with the search engines and increase traffic to your website. Basically link building can be seen in two broad terms: Viral and Organic. Viral links are from websites who belong to a link building group or association of websites all exchanging links for the basic purpose of having as many links as possible irrespective of any other considerations. In other words people join certain websites where all the members are there for the sole express reason of populating their link list. This is deemed as cheating by the search engines and is frowned upon. Some of the sites could have been blacklisted or penalised by the search engines. Some may have no relevance to your website. So you want to avoid this kind of link building like the plague. If your website gets blacklisted by Google for instance, it takes up to the better part of six months to get back in their good books. Organic link building is the way to go. These are links that that you acquire naturally. Examples are websites that link to your website due to its relevance or quality. Organic link building can be attained by various ways. See below for some of these.

Join online Groups and Forums:
By joining a group or a forum you can network with people with the same interest as you thus it follows that these people will visit your site. Not only that your group members will visit your site, they might mention your websites on their own sites thereby giving you more exposure. Since most of you in the group are members because you share a common interest then this can also serve as a source of quality links for your website thus improving your pagerank. Remember that the relevance of links to your website is considered by the search engines in ranking your site. You increase your exposure by posting on forums that relate to your website. A lot of people read forum postings even without being members and i even know people who use forums as a search method. Yahoo Group is one of the earliest and is my choice. However there are now a plethora of groups and forums that will deliver just as well.

Closely related to these two is Yahoo Answers. Here you can establish yourself as a source of reliable information regarding the subject matter of your website or the business you are in. Put a link to your website when you post an answer to a question. If people find your answers useful and relevant of course the tendency is that they will visit your website.

Advertise:
Paid advertising is a more direct strategy in increasing or improving your web traffic. A very effective strategy it must be said. The best idea is to go for a Pay Per Click deal. Google Adwords is the one to target here. Basically, a banner of your website is displayed on Google search results and if the banner is clicked the person is automatically directed to your website. You can find more information on Google Adwords and how to start at http://adwords.google.com

Use Web 2.0 and Social Media:
Open accounts with sites like MSN Windows Live,Yahoo 360, Blogger and Wordpad. Register with sites like Technorati, Flickr, Stumbleupon, Ryze and Facebook. They all afford you to maintain a presence on the web. You can reach a wide audience or potential customers through these pages. Even big business concerns have realised the power of Social Media and are making use of it to maintain a competitive edge. Also you need to register with pinging websites. These are sites that work for you while you sleep so to speak. All they ask is you let them know once you have new contents on your site and they will bellow it to the whole world wide web. My pick here is pingoat.You can join pingoat at www.pingoat.com.

Content is king:
This fact is a dog eared expression in Search Engine Optimisation these day. So much so it is fast attaining the status of a cliche. I am not one easily caught dropping cliches but if it is a crime to do so then i plead guilty on this instance and will gladly do my time. Your site`s content should be well written. No grammatical errors or spelling howlers. Such errors make a bad impression on visitors to the site. Keep your sentences short and compact. Aim for clarity and try to make the site as easy to understand as possible. Again it is paramount that the content of your website should be relevant to it`s title or your business. This is important for two main reasons: If the site contents and site description do not tally, your standing with the search engines might be adversely affected or worst still they might suspect you of being a spamming or other dubious site. And you do not want that. The other reasons is that visitors might be disappointed and discouraged from re visiting a website they thought was about fishing but found out, on visiting the site that it was about computing. Sure you can have some computing talk on a fishing oriented website but your main focus should be on fishing. As implied in your website`s name or description. Update your website with new contents regularly. The search engines love new contents. The search engines periodically scan the net for new contents. As i mentioned earlier, they send out feelers (robots, spiders or crawlers in geek speak) to see what is there in cyberspace. If time after time your website is visited they have something new to report back then they will always come back. The result of which is that your pages are constantly updated. This improves your standing in their search queries for a keyword related to your website

Use your e-mail as a campaign tool: You can do this by using the url of your website as a signature. So every mail you send carries a clickable link to your site. This is quite easy enough to do. Most e-mail clients have this facility. For example if you use hotmail go to Options> Preference >Signature and insert the full address of your website.

Create a sitemap:
A sitemap outlines the structure of your website. It arranges your website into sections. This makes the website easy to navigate by search engine robots and spiders. This of course makes the indexing of your site easier. To learn more about sitemaps go to www.xml-sitemaps.com.

by: Leo Jackson

Black Hat SEO Meets Web 2.0

I’m here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Today (actually yesterday now that it’s after midnight) I sat in on the SEO Workshop being presented by Todd Friesen (”The Oilman”) and Greg Boser (”WebGuerrilla”).

This session turned out to be a lot of fun. It was reminiscent of their “SEO Rock Stars” radio show on Webmaster Radio. I cracked up when Todd plugged their show and explained the name of the show by saying: “Yes, we really are that arrogant.”
Much more of the session than I was expecting turned to “black hat” or “gray hat” SEO tactics — things that are outside the search engine guidelines. Both Todd and Greg believe in being pragmatic about SEO. Greg analogized SEO to speeding: nobody goes the speed limit; just don’t drive recklessly swerving in and out of traffic so you get in a wreck. He “hates the guidelines” and longs for the good ol’ days when the engines didn’t have such idealistic guidelines and if you went too far, you were simply “torched forever and you’re gone.” Greg’s guiding principle: “I don’t want to upset my mother” — i.e. he gauges whether he’s gone too far based on whether she’d be unhappy with the search results because they’re useless. They say the search engine guidelines are simply that: guidelines.
Hmm. I’m not sure I’d take that tack with an audience of webheads from Web 2.0 startups. An audience of SEOs at SES (Search Engine Strategies) is one thing, because they can be discerning about how far to take various bits of advice. But Web 2.0 geeks? That aren’t savvy enough about SEO to know when they are playing with fire.
Greg and Todd made compelling arguments for playing with conditional redirects (serving different destination URLs to Googlebot than to humans). But the 4 major engines had specifically warned against doing that in the session “Search Engine Q&A on Links” last Friday at Search Engine Strategies in NYC. So you’d better REALLY know what you’re doing if you’re going to play with that stuff!
Todd and Greg also testified to the benefits of cloaking. One of their client’s sites was cloaked for 3 years — a new ecommerce platform was purchased and launched by the client, but the old HTML-based site was served up selectively to the bots because it ranked so well. I’m sure that was worth a pile of money to his client. But boy if you get that wrong (like not keeping up to date with all the ever-changing list of IP addresses associated with Googlebot), things could go very badly.
Todd made the point that if you are a big brand or company, you’re not going to get kicked out of Google. Or at worst, maybe it’ll be for a day. He cited eBay and the NY Times as examples of sites that won’t get banned despite operating outside the Google Guidelines by serving millions of “related search” results and/or cloaking. Todd also cited Yahoo’s new spam-reporting feature within Yahoo Site Explorer as evidence that the engines (and Yahoo in particular) aren’t very good at webspam detection: “they’re asking you to report the spam because they can’t find it themselves.” I was ROFLMAO when I heard that one. I doubt Yahoo would find that as funny though.
Speaking of Yahoo… Greg told the audience that he has consulted for Yahoo. Wow! That surprised me; impressed me too. Nice one, Greg!
Speaking of Yahoo again… Todd loves Yahoo’s paid inclusion program (Search Submit Pro). That’s because with it, Yahoo “gives you a complete pass on the off-page factors”. Yahoo tells everyone publicly that Search Submit Pro doesn’t improve your rankings, but it’s not true according to Todd. Although you shouldn’t expect a rankings lift with big money terms like “credit report” or “data recovery,” it will lift your rankings on most non-ultracompetitive search terms. Nonetheless, I’d exercise caution with this one. That’s because, as Todd admits, when you stop paying all your listings in the SERPs “will mysteriously vanish and it’s really hard to get them back in for free.” A bit of evil advice from Todd (I think he was only half-serious! … “Submit your competitor and then turn it off”. I was again rolling on the floor laughing at that one! I’ve heard of “Google bowling” your competitors into “Supplemental hell”, but now I guess you might call this one “Yahoo bowling!”
Attendees got a little dose of conspiracy theory. Todd and Greg don’t trust Google and their “don’t be evil” mantra — and they weren’t afraid to spread a little hysteria into the audience. Google Analytics is one service they are very suspect of. They go far as to advise you don’t use it: “giving your ROI data to the company you’re buying your ads from — that’s just assinine.” Personally, I trust Google. So much so that I’m on their waiting list for the Google Implant (beta).
Greg weighed in about the Open Directory, referring to it as “a dilapidated piece of crap.” And the ODP editors? — “they take bribes all the time.” I’d love to know who the editors are that I can bribe and how much it’ll cost!
Their recommended SEO tools were useful. For example: TouchGraph. They gave a very cool little demo of the tool in action. Todd said: “It’s like Diggswarm, but actually useful. Is Kevin Rose in the room? He’s going to kick my ass.” LOL!
Some of the other free link research tools recommended:
* Yahoo’s Site Explorer

* Netconcepts’ Link Checker

* WeBuildPages’ Neat-o Tool

* SEO for Firefox

* Tattler
Hmm. That’s funny, this list of tools (except for the last one) looked mighty familiar. So did some of the previous slides. I couldn’t resist… I got the microphone during Q&A, and I alluded to the slides, saying “Thanks for the plug for Netconcepts on that Tools slide.” Well you won’t believe what happened next! They admitted it to the audience that they lifted one of my decks from our website and then customized it! OMG!!
They praised me for making such excellent Powerpoints available online. Umm, thanks… I think! Geez!
Actually I’m not mad. Perhaps I should be, but they fessed up and poked fun at themselves for it — in front of 300 people! — so no harm done.
Just don’t do it again, k? Or if you do, at least keep my Netconcepts logo on the slides!
What other nuggets did they share? Todd shared that Endeca can be a secret weapon for SEO when you know how to make it work for you. I concur with that statement, totally. For example, with our (Netconcepts’) client Northern Tool, we were able to blow past previous search traffic records by deploying our GravityStream technology on top of Endeca Guided Navigation. Todd said that one of their (Range’s) biggest SEO successes was with Endeca. Todd gave a word of caution though: “Out of the box, Endeca is just a piece of junk for SEO”. The good news though is that, if you know what to ask for, “they will customize.”
They also recommended Google’s “Domain Park” program if you are a domainer with a bunch of domains you want to monetize.
They also advised folks to stay out of Google’s contextual advertising space so that you don’t get your AdWords campaigns onto the domain parking pages, because it is junk traffic that doesn’t convert.
What was the most interesting revelation of the day? That Todd was a Viagra webspammer before working for Range. I knew he was a reformed black hat SEO, but I never knew what industry. Greg joked that in Todd’s space, “PPC” stood for “Pills, Porn and Casinos” rather than “Pay Per Click.” Todd regaled us with tales of “churn and burn” SEO going after Viagra rankings — he could make $10k in a week, and all it cost him was a day of his time and $7 for a domain name — then the site would get banned and he’d move on to using another domain name. “Viagra” would have to be the most competitive keyword in SEO bar none (well, with the probable exception of “sex”). Todd *must* have been a “rock star” at SEO (but on the Dark Side of the Force of course! to make such a good living from it. So the name of his Webmaster Radio show really IS fitting and merited. I highly recommend downloading some audio recordings of previous SEO Rockstars episodes; even Matt Cutts has been known to listen to their show!
Rock on!

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by Stephan Spencer is the founder and president of interactive agency Netconcepts.

Web Promotion via Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking, (along with other types of free web promotion techniques), is a very popular practice among bloggers and affiliate marketers. Adding social bookmark links to your blog or web site makes it easy for readers to save and share your content.In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are either accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly.
You must have seen “share this” or “bookmark this”after an article or a blog post. This is a common way to encourage users to social bookmark your articles. It greatly helps any website to acquire good positions in search engines for relevant keywords. Social bookmarking has more recently inspired the more successful social news movement which includes websites like Del.icio.us, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Digg and the famous Netscape portal.
These days, social bookmarking has become an indicator of any website’s popularity. There are many ways to learn how many people have bookmarked your blog or website on these social bookmarking websites. SocialMeter.com is one of them.
SocialMeter helps you measure the popularity of your website, blog or articles on various social bookmarking websites and blog search engines. Social meter scans the major social websites to analyze a webpage’s social popularity. Currently it scans Bloglines Links, Del.icio.us, Google Links, Rojo Links, Shadows Links, Technorati Links, and Yahoo! Links. The process is very simple, you just have to type your blog URL and socialmeter will fetch the details of all stories on social websites that link to your blog. So I hope you will definitely bookmark this article.

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by Daniel Russo is a successful affiliate marketer .