What to Consider When Looking for SEO Specialist

Writen by Patrick Spencer

Did you know that search engine and directory searches account for 80% of Internet traffic? A study conducted by Booz-Allen, a leading strategic management and consulting firm, revealed that less than 10% of websites are found using search engines or directory searches. How confident are you that your site is being found in the major search engines and directories?

An increasing number of businesses are incorporating Search Engine Optimization (SEO) into their marketing strategy to ensure that the site, into which they invested a significant amount of money, receives high ranking in search engines and is prominently visible to potential customers.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving your site’s ranking in search engines by incorporating key components. These critical elements must be readable by the search engine in order for the site to be included in their database, and must be relevant to your website in order to achieve a high ranking. When planning for SEO, it is critical to find an ethical SEO specialist who does not use blacklisted techniques that could result in your site being banned from major search engines.

Here are several points that you should consider when selecting a SEO provider:

Experience & Knowledge:

Optimizing a website is an on-going process and not a one-time solution. Accordingly, a reputable SEO provider will have an on-going strategy, establish matrixes to measure success, and have a commitment to your website. It is important to look for an SEO provider that is experienced in optimizing sites across various industries and is up-to-date with SEO strategies and industry changes.

Your SEO company of choice should not work for your competition, so be sure to ask about their other clients and get references.

Accomplished SEO specialists have an in-depth knowledge of how search engine spiders index HTML, and will spend a great deal of time on keyword research. The keyword research should be shared with you for your review, and the provider should work with you to incorporate the keywords into the page context and not just add the words in the metatags section. In addition, the specialist should hold frequent update meetings with you to review your site’s current ranking and provide recommendations to increase your site’s ranking.

Strategies:

Reputable providers will educate you on the difference between search engines (ex. Google) and directories (ex. Yahoo). If an SEO provider describes Yahoo as a search engine, keep looking for someone else. In addition, the SEO provider should have two separate promotion strategies for each: one for the search engines and one for the directories.

Until relatively recently, title tags and metatags with relevant keywords gave decent rankings. However, after years of tag misuse, search engines now attach more importance to:

Website Traffic, Whom Would You Trust ?

Writen by Gagandeep Dhaliwal

Getting traffic from Search Engines is not as easy these days as it used to be 2 years back. Lot of companies have come up and make claim to get your website on top rankings for your required keywords. Then, Google started contextual advertising for which one has to pay per click.

Now, as getting traffic from Search Engines is getting more and more difficult, what strategy one should adopt in order to get good rankings?

There are a few ways to do this.

1. You go to forums on SEO and dig information about best SEO Techniques. There are a few forums which are having lot of professionals and novice user base. But that needs lot of digging into the forums to find something you are looking for.

2. Believe some SEO professional and give him huge money to get good rankings.

3. Visit blogs and other informative websites that provide articles on various concepts related to SEO. But even then, who can be trusted for the information.

Not everyone has knowledge of SEO techniques and they believe what they are told by those who claim to be experts. I won’t say that I am an expert in this, or I will share some very special secret, but I will put together some good concepts about SEO.

I have an answer to this situation.

I am having some knowledge of SEO and have worked on more than 500 websites and can share some ideas. I will also provide insight on many SEO techniques and will also warn you against some myths that people have created for their benefit.

While I will do the hard work here to find the new techniques of marketing your website and its content, you can just sit back and enjoy and come to read the new concepts on this website regularly. In the days to come, I will talk on various important aspects for the benefit of Webmasters and SEO community.

I would like a little favor from everyone who reads and benefits from this website. Please link back to our website so that we could create a platform for tried and tested SEO techniques and reduce the confusion in mind of webmasters about various SEO techniques.

We will also feature articles from other marketing Gurus in near future, but be rest assured that only those things will be published here, which are tried and tested.

The author owns a website Do Not Confuse SEO on which he shares concepts about Search Engine Optimization. You can check his website for latest tips on http://www.dncseo.com

A Practical Guide to Meta Tags – Name or HTTP-Equiv?

Writen by Andrei Smith

META tags are a way for you to define your web page and web site to the outside world. You can declare the keywords and description, which help your placement in search engines. In addition, you can specify who owns the copyright, how often the page is to be visited by search engines and many other useful pieces of information.

Please understand that META tags are just notes, little snippets of information that you chose to put into a page, for informational purposes. META tags are not necessarily recognized by search engines as vehicles for ranking, although some still do read them and use them. Also, search engines (especially Google) constantly change their views on META tags and constantly make decisions whether to even read them, or totally disregard them.

Important side note: Many make the mistake of putting the TITLE tag into the META category. Folks, the TITLE tag is not a META tag, but a crucial element of every web page. If your page does not have a title, it becomes one of the 30 million meaningless Untitled Documents.

So are there any tags that make a difference in terms of search engine placement?

The misuse of META tags was the main reason for which search engines do not rely on them so heavily any more. Unscrupulous webmasters used META tags to mislead the search, in order to artificially inflate the number of visitors. In the past, META tag optimization was the key-point in any search engine optimization strategy. Today, other factors (like link popularity) are far more important. Many SEO (Search Engine Optimization) gurus tell you not to ever again bother with META tags, totally forget they ever existed and focus on links.

My personal opinion is, if it matters only 0.05%, then why not use them, since it’s just a simple “type and forget” deal anyway and does not require that much work? Similarly to the stock market and investing strategies, a tiny 0.05% can actually help in the long run. In today’s competitive internet, where your site is just one out of billions, every bit helps.

Several Web search engines, such as InfoSeek and AltaVista, still recognize META elements with NAME values “description” and “keywords”. The words listed in a “keywords” tag might be used (and perhaps emphasized) when indexing documents. However, generally such keywords are useful only if they occur in the normal text of the document too, and in that case you can expect the keywords extracted from your page’s text to be used in indexing anyway!

This is exactly why, you will see an increasing amount of SEO community folks telling you to stop even thinking that the “keywords” tag ever existed.

I am more of a conservative nature when it comes to SEO and my philosophy is that whatever page element is not known for sure to penalize your search engine ranking, should be left, just in case things change, or even just for some smaller and less important or known search engines (the entire world seems to be concerned solely with Google today) might actually help you in the long run. Basically, all I’m saying is don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Keywords are separated by commas and may be considered case sensitive by search engines. If the same keywords are repeated too often in the META element, some search engines will not index the document. Search engines typically only process the first 1000 characters of the keywords list. So, if you use keywords, do it carefully, as this is one element that can actually get you penalized.

On the other hand, a “description” tag should be used, since many (but not all) search engines show this info as the abstract for the document when returning query results. But you should also take into account that many search engines just take the first few words of the document, so you might include a short summary into the document body right after the main heading.

To avoid being truncated (that is, cut) by search engines, the description should be brief – no more than 200 characters.

Let’s clear one more common confusion: The META tags affect the way your document is indexed when it is included into a data base of a search engine. However, it will not make a robot find the document when it searches candidates for inclusion into a data base. Therefore, if you think the document is important, and especially if there are not several links to it in other documents, consider submitting those pages to the search engines manually.

When I first started studying META tags and took a closer look, my first question was why some pages use the META NAME format, while others use META HTTP-EQUIV for the same stuff.

Here is the technical explanation of the difference between the two formats. Afterwards, I’ll try to translate this into English.

Begin technical explanation:

The difference between NAME and HTTP-EQUIV is that the latter has a special significance when documents are retrieved via HTTP, whereas the interpretation of NAME attributes is up to each particular browser or other program which processes HTML files (although some common practices may emerge and might be standardized later). HTTP servers may use the property name specified by the HTTP-EQUIV attribute to create an RFC 822 style header in the HTTP response. (RFC 822 is the electronic mail protocol used on the Internet.) The header name (which is case insensitive) is taken from the HTTP-EQUIV attribute value, and the header value is taken from the value of the content attribute.

The HTTP-EQUIV attribute may be used in place of the NAME attribute to indicate that the property is an HTTP header. Some servers will send the HTTP header specified in the META element, and browsers often recognize the header even when it is not sent by the server.

Note: While HTTP-EQUIV META tag appears to work properly with some browsers, other browsers may ignore them, and they are ignored by Web proxies, which are becoming more widespread. Use of the equivalent HTTP header, as supported by e.g. Apache server, is more reliable and is recommended wherever possible.

HTTP headers may be generated by CGI scripts, and in Apache and CERN httpd by using a side file containing metadata. Other servers may have other mechanisms to generate headers. Note that certain server-generated headers may not be overridden (such as Date), and that others are only meaningful with a non-200 status code. Using an HTTP header is preferable to using META tags, since the header will be understood by cache agents and proxies in addition to browsers, and metadata (such as PICS data) may be associated with image files, sound files, etc.

End of technical explanation.

Ok, if you read the above and got it, then you should be building rocket ships or playing with nanobots and not be reading silly articles! For the rest of us, here is a very basic translation:

The HTTP-EQUIV is for headers sent to your browser by the server after a request for a page/file has been made. In plain English, this information may direct/control how your page will be displayed in a browser.

The NAME attribute is there to provide additional information about the document (such as keywords, description, author information, copyright information and so on).

There is still a disagreement between many people about with which attribute the keywords and the description should go.

My personal advice is to use both! Be careful, because if you use a design tool, it will generate the tags only in one format. In that case, I would just copy the generated block of info, duplicate it on the page (do it just after the original, so you don’t mess up the page’s coding), then change NAME to HTTP-EQUIV on the duplicates if the originals were NAME, or HTTP-EQUIV to META, if the originals were HTTP-EQUIV. Again, you don’t get penalized for doing this, and until the world comes to an agreement, you are covered both ways!

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Andrei co-owns Bsleek – a company that specializes in web design, hosting, promotional items, printing, tradeshow displays, logos, CD presentations, SEO and more. Andrei has amassed an extensive technical knowledge and experience through his career as the CIO for a major travel management company and through his past careers in military research, data acquisition and airspace engineering. He also consults for Trinity Investigations, a New York based PI firm.

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Bsleek – Redefining cheap web hosting

Linking Your Way to #1 in Google

Writen by Mark Dietzel

Four years ago with very little experience and a lot of time on my hands I was able to put four baby sites and two gift sites on page one of the SERP’s for their main keywords. And you know what? It wasn’t all that hard, after some very basic on page optimization I started getting link’s, mostly reciprocal links and all I had to do to get in the top three of my category was put my main keyword phrase in the link text.

That was it, it was so simple!

Then things changed a little the competition figured it out too, everybody knew just put your keyword in your links and presto good rankings. The reciprocal link exchange boom was on. Services sprung up to help get more links faster with less work, automated link software was released etc etc. I needed another edge so I started buying links, mostly run of site links. I would have the same exact link on 500 or more pages. I would do this with one or two sites and presto I would be right back in the top three. It was great! I could put almost any site I wanted in a top position on Google for a paltry investment of $50 – $100 a month, life was good, especially when you consider that a lot of my competitors were spending that much per day with AdWords for a fraction of the traffic I was getting.

And again the masses found out and the rush was on, site owners would look at their competitors back links and then buy enough run of site links to outdo them. It is inevitable that when that many people find out about something so powerful there’s going to be abuse, which attracts attention, especially that of the search engines and when that happens the party is usually over.

So I looked at top ranking site’s for terms like shoes, clothes, gifts etc. And I found they all had one thing in common, non-reciprocal link’s from content pages. Now I am really excited because all I have to do is get one way links to my site’s from relevant content pages. But how am I going to get lots of people to give me a one-way link from a relevant content page?

Then it hit me, create a triangle of sites linking to each other, A would link to B, B would link to C and C would link to A, of course this will solve all my problems. How hard could it be?

VERY HARD!

What a joke. First problem after sending hundreds of e-mails and finally lining up two other relevant sites they wanted to put my link on an overcrowded links page four levels deep. Second problem site owners who insisted that two of their site’s be in the triangle but both sites have same IP, what’s the point it’s just going to look reciprocal to the engines. And then there are the webmasters who have their main domain and a second domain that they have set up just for the purpose of triangle linking, usually the second domain is a “junk domain” meaning they have given it just enough links to show some page rank so that you think your getting a quality exchange.

Man what a headache just trying to get one link for one site no way I could do this for all my site’s. Just shoot me now and put me out of misery. After feeling sorry for myself I started looking for either software or a service that could help. After a lot of searching forums, Googling and talking to SEO’s I have found there are a handful of services out there involved in one way or three way linking, some good, some bad and some very bad. If your going use a service to help you build one way inbound links use the check list below to weed out the bad ones

It should be able to

* Bring relevant sites together for a 3-way link exchange

* Make sure all sites are on different IP’s and that each page linking to you is unique

* Check daily to make sure everyone’s links are still up and working

* Check all links regularly for trickery like Java, css or nofollow tags and ban any offenders

* Make sure everyone has 10 or less outbound links per page

* Make the links pages look like content pages

* Not leave any footprints, complete stealth is a must

* Do all this for a fair and reasonable price

Follow these guidelines and you should be able to find a service that can help you get quality inbound links that will boost your search engine rankings.

Mark Dietzel is founder of Natural Linking at http://www.naturallinking.com a service that helps get one way links.

The Write to Link Popularity

Writen by Nicholas Dixon

Incorporating writing as a means of boosting your link popularity can be a turnoff for many webmasters, when in fact it can lead to a wealth of links.

I first learnt about link popularity while researching about many different methods that I could use to market a Geocities site I had. After emailing countless webmasters and receiving some dismal results, I realized that it was hopeless to get people to exchange links with my freebie website.

Then I discovered writing. At first I was skeptical at using this concept but after trying it for some time, the results began to show. What was wonderful is that it only cost me some of my time.

With the help of article writing I was able to achieve a Pagerank of 4 for my Geocities website. The more webmasters that archived my articles the more links I had pointing to my site. As a result of my growing link popularity I began to see my site show up on the first or second page for some relatively competitive search terms.

Using writing as a marketing tool can save you thousands in advertising dollars. Imagine a website or ezine that costs hundreds to advertise in and you have the feature article which didn’t cost you a dime to produce. You can easily see which generates more profit in the long run.

Through the power of the written word you can be able to get free publicity for your business. Providing quality and profitable and sometimes inspiring information can help you to achieve that goal. Many top marketers have used writing to good effect.

Developing your own writing style is important. As there are many others doing the same thing you what to differ from them. How can you stand out in a crowd if you are just like everyone else.

Practicing and researching helped me to put pen to paper for my first articles. Some of your first creations maybe a bit tacky but as long as you keep going you can improve.

Writing can be a task at times. There are moments when I have written the first two paragraphs and just get stuck. The inevitable writer’s block can be a challenge to overcome. Taking a break and getting into the right frame of mind can be helpful.

Can anyone become a writer? Well the answer depends on how much effort you put into it. I have had some wonderful experiences since I became a writer. At times when there are criticisms and negative feedback, they can help you to better your skills if you use them the right way.

Many people don’t like writing. But sometimes it is the things that we don’t enjoy doing that are most beneficial to us. Try your hand at writing, if a guy from a Caribbean island can do it then so can you.

Copyright © Nicholas Dixon

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Nicholas Dixon is a Jamaican webmaster, writer and affiliate marketer. Find out
how you too can create an online income with our list of highly recommended
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Google Search Engine Optimization Tips: How to Improve Your Google PR

Writen by Michael A

As a webmaster, you know that it can be difficult getting your site indexed and optimized for Google searches. Doing some searching, I noticed that one of the biggest questions most people have is the length of time it takes for a new site to get indexed and start showing up in search results. I just launched a new article site and Google has still only indexed a few of my pages. From what I have researched, Google indexing of your new site can take up to 7+ months for a brand new site. This varies greatly depending on a number of factors, the main factor dealing with link popularity. If you can get some good quality links to your sites from sites with a high page rank, your chances of getting indexed quicker improve greatly.

Another tip is to submit a sitemap to Google by using the this URL: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login Use the links on the page to sign up for an account and add your sitemap. Creating sitemaps for large sites manually can become a headache. I use a free program that crawls my site and automatically creates a sitemap and uploads the sitemap file to my website. This saves a lot of work. Visit this link for the great tool: http://johannesmueller.com/gs/

As discussed above, linking is a great way to increase your chances of being indexed and gaining Google PageRank. A great way to increase your link popularity is by submitting your site to web directories or writing articles about your product or service and submitting them to article directories.

And here are a few good article directories:

http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.articlecity.com

There are also many great tools at http://www.seochat.com that can help you increase your keyword popularity. Increasing your keyword popularity will improve your chances of your site showing up when a particular keyword is searched for on Google. You want to keep the popularity of specific keywords below 5% as Google may remove your site from the index if your keywords are too popular as this may lead them to believe you are keyword spamming.

About the Author:
Michael A. enjoys hiking, camping and working with computers. Please visit http://www.informationoutlet.net/category137.html for many other great SEO tips.